Living Right Now
We do not experience
the contents of our self-consciousness
as the contents of a representational process,
and we do not experience them as some sort of
causally active internal placeholder
of the system in the system’s all-inclusive model of reality,
but simply as ourselves,
living in the world right now.
— Excerpt Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
By Thomas Metzinger p. 331
Invited to participate in a poetry reading gathering last night in Mundelein at the Area Coffee Shop. It was a glorious, fulfilling, stimulating, act of resistance. To paraphrase a lyric from an Eagles song, ‘love (words) will keep us alive’. One easily becomes jaded, existentially a nihilist, collapsing into the dark pit of “nothing matters anymore.” Our federal government is increasingly in the thrall of a twitchy, nattering, impulsive egomaniac. If fortune smiles upon us, perhaps we will manage another election in November of 2020. Capitalism in it’s global expression grinds on, rigged to favor the well to do, while extracting more and more from the powerless. About that education you’ve been desiring, or the medical care that you need — chances are you can’t afford it.
To hear words offered as honest representations of experience, delivered as transparent disclosures of the life of the speaker, experiences close to the heart — was a glimpse of the dawn that we may yet see.
In Starbucks this morning, early, before the press of the morning rush, the fading ornamental grasses outside the front windows, flamed in the post- dawn light. I passed a maple tree on 3rd Street that was a delicate purple. The maples are among the first and the most brilliant of the trees to slide into Fall color. We’ve yet to have a hard frost.
Do not all (most of us that is) want to live simply as ourselves in the world right now?
