Aging is the most wonderful thing a person can do. To develop and to mature, and to embellish one's physical being with the sublime beauty of decay. The stupid becomes the wise, the unspecific specific. You too can enjoy this process!
And you will notice you are well on your way.
We are not quite in agreement when one is made, but it’s clear that at one point you are not and then you are. Maybe it’s measured in zeptoseconds, maybe it's a big whopping point of about 9 months, or somewhere in between. The mathematically inclined will say the point is infinitesimally small, and those who think in symbols say “you’re made as you pass through the portal of the birth canal”, that is - an event, rather than a point in time.
At any rate some time soon, most will agree, you will have existed screaming for a good few moments and the game will have begun.
From thereon you will not stop making yourself. You will move what we consider “forward” in time, your body builds itself and the mind trains itself. It learns to distinguish up from down, blue from yellow, and every single other thing necessary to understand what the fuck is going on. You experience your place in events as they happen, as history weaves itself around and past you.
You sit at the very tip of this screaming arrow of time, you and a thousand angels, scared of, or eager for that which is yet to come.
At the same time, in a manner of speaking, you also age backward from your moment of birth. Age is experience, and it comes at you from both ends. As your body moves forward, your mind is made to look back, at knowledge delivered to you from the past. All knowledge beyond the immediate *right here right now* is knowledge of the past. All truths are truths of the past, they were found in the past. Your moving to discover the truths of mankind is a moving into the past.
Lets hope the truths remain true, or at least useful. Pray to God the same three angles agree to make a triangle forever.
To understand the incredibly confusing ever continuing moment you are trapped in one must learn the causes and effects in the great chains of causality that bind us. To understand the principles that describe reality, and to know the histories of man which affect your current moment. The consequences of which are playing out in your current moment. You must do this because you also exist in the current moment, fleshly exposed to it, and if you don't you will not know what to expect of the next moment.
And that, my friend, is scary.
Be that as it may the result of this scramble for information is that you come to inhabit an ever wider surface area of time, of human history and knowledge. Become metaphysically swole! Be an absolute unit (of wisdom)! Describe the world to yourself with accuracy and precision. Good news - the surface area of existence grows geometrically.
When you are young you find yourself on the *knife's edge*, at the true forefront of culture, with an intuitive understanding of what is cool, now, happening. You are so good at it because the frontier of time is almost the totality of what you know, and all your capacity for thought, play and creativity goes into it. Piercing truth written on a leather jacket.
As you age and take up more space over the axis of time, a curious person will age backward more than forward. Forward one ages at the clock rate of seconds, days, seasons and years, at the rate of birthdays and events. Backward you age at the speed of curiosity, unbound by the speed of light, of causality. And soon you will find that forward you age to deteriorate in flesh, backward to mature in mind. Forward with intense personal experience, backward to access the expansive breadth of common experience.
What of this little game of language?
With a few conditional exceptions it's generally agreed - the goal of life and will is to age for as long, and as much, as possible. Get big. Gorge yourself on high caloric wisdom of the ancients. Integrate into yourself the avant garde optimism of the 20th century modernists, the flamboyant despair of the 19th century decadents, the grandeur of the 18th romantics, the self confidence of the enlightened of the 17th century. The moral rigour of the protestants before that. Maybe skip some of the witchy stuff from there on.. anyway - exercise prudence.
( PAINTING HERE - at the moment beyond capacity to execute a satisfying painting. Intriguing opportunity for later then. )
Each system of thought is a tool to understand the world with, none replaces another, the more lenses you have for your machinery of mind the better. Your third eye needs glasses.
The cultural maturing of the west is a parallel to the maturing of a western individual. You too should suffer the measles of unbridled romanticism, hopefully in your teenage years when it's safe. Do things before you suffer the senility of post-modernism, before everything gets too confusing. See yourself in maturity as the heroic agent-actor of enlightenment with the external world yours to understand and shape.
Age yourself to the stone age! Become as ancient as the sun!
Contain all the world's knowledge in your mind, an exact replica of the external world inside the internal!
Don’t live in the cage of the 21st century, of the Now. The now is the smallest part of existence, held aloft and inflated to seem important by gossip and trend. A tiny cave inside Platos cave for the truly lost. Remember, we want to be swole motherfuckers, not scrawny little shits. Become a fat fuck of the mind. The now can only be adequately comprehended by exiting the now.
For the artist of any medium the wisdom is to understand and master all that came before you. For them it was hard because they had to invent it, for you it is easy because it already exists.
And finally a word of warning:
The worst thing to do is to watch the news. If you truly want to lobotomize yourself then place yourself in the neverending sonic boom of the bullet of time, the needletip of ‘just happened’. Isolated from all into the maelstrom fury of the current event, the tragedy still happening, wrapped in emotions of worry for the state of the world and the people involved. In that moment you lose sight of all else which sits beyond the event horizon of the current moment. You infantilize yourself and become scared again like a child. CNN is the elixir of youth, but in the evil jinn kinda way. The news will make you small, and it will reach you anyway.
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With love, happy birthday!
Tallinn, february 2025
Rozzo
I recently got into the habit of reading the news. Your final warning is very apt to how I have felt. The news will reach me anyways.