Letter to an INTP.

Letter to an INTP

                Before we take risks experimenting with Logic, we should ensure that we are in a consequence-free environment.

                I’m not saying that a ‘reasonable’ line between reality and fantasy cannot be pragmatically drawn, but I am saying that there is a way of interfacing With Reality that does not Necessitate that such a line be drawn, and by the same token it is liberating and profound.

                The presence of a discerning ‘reality’ principle is inessential to the assessment of the emotional value of a work, and it may also be stifling to the imaginative process necessary to conceive such a work. If one’s relationship to Reality and the Universe is to be intimate, one need not take a fundamental division between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ too seriously, unless it particularly befits one’s personality type and gifts. (Engineers, for instance, will require this discernment to arrive at the same place that the poet arrives at by irrational abstractions, or whatever his/her style may be.) To take this kind of discernment that says, with definition, ‘this is true; this is playful imagination’ into the intellectual realm of artistic assessment reflects merely a bias in favour of realism over romanticism. It may be conceived of as a ‘merely’ personal bias, but it stands as a bias, regardless. For many people, a fixed view of What The World Definitely Is is not necessary to a healthy life, and, for all people, it is not necessary for compassion, irrespective of differences of viewpoint and opinion, be they religious, cultural, scientific, etc.

                There are two trends of thought: The feminine and masculine. Jung, Kiersey, Myers, and Briggs postulated this dichotomy in, respectively, intuition and sensation, introversion and extraversion, feeling and thought, and perception and judgment.

                Where the Sensory (masculine, though by no means is this to be confused with ‘male’) artists sees as his/her quest the Rendering of Obvious, sensorily accessible and incontrovertible Reality, the intuitive (feminine) approaches the medium as an exploration.
  
   By virtue of the same process, an intuitive, feeling writer may write something directly from his/her imagination and feel what he/she might describe as an 'epiphany': What he/she has written is immediately recognised as True, as though by virtue of the writer's talent the Platonic screen between Ultimate Truth and the 'false realism' of habitual thought were penetrated.

   This is not to be regarded as a hallucination; it may very well be that logic and language obscure our view of a reality that is wordless, complex and irrational, and that the skilled writer is one whose mastery of words has transcended a dependency upon them and who is capable of rendering some semblance of the Unspoken and Unthought in words and thoughts.

   Where his/her view of Reality contradicts logic, that is, where the visionary sees the ocean beyond the mountains where the relatively grounded cannot, the rigorously logical may condemn his vision as a mirage, simply because words and discursive thought obscure an insight into the world's irrational processes, less flattering to the rational mind that devised the strain of thought.

   Where logic oversteps itself, it shows a bias also in favor of a particular, fixed Reality in mind toward which human beings must do their best to subordinate their views, as contrasted with the Hindu model in which the world itself may be (in certain sects of Hindu belief) an Illusion and a creative fantasy.

   To presume that we are more advanced than the ancient Hindus when our own model of logic still carries the biases and theoretical complications that could only have arisen in a Christian Culture is hubris, especially when our most contemporary and tantalising physics seems increasingly to line up with Hindu cosmology. As the Upanishads say, 'If you think you understand Brahman, you don't,' and, as a notable physicist put it, 'if you think you understand Quantum, you do not.'

   In order to practise yoga and in order to think outside of one's personal cultural confines, humility must pervade one's being entirely. But this is not to dissuade Action, for to be so sure that you do not know that you do not Act is still to be sure of oneself.

dm.A.A.

Yes, I am egotistical.

What do you mean by ‘ego’? If you are referring to the Freudian ‘Ego’, you are employing a simple and probably outdated psychological model by virtue of which no progress can be made in understanding human motivation and behaviour. Incidentally, this is the model that most people use, and it is failing. If you are referring to a particular perspective toward which you attribute the characteristics of ‘untruth’ and ignorance, then history has shown that a deviant opinion held by one individual is not nearly as dangerous as one held by many, irrespective of the originator.

            If you mean to disregard my point of view but cannot see outside of the confines of the one in which you are entrenched, who is the egotist in this scenario? After all, the ‘ego’ represents myopiea. It may not be, in itself, (whatever its actual nature) a menace, so for you to attribute such importance to it as to call my life ‘dominated by the ego’ (as though Ego were an Ontological Entity, which is open to debate) is as absurd as to say that a person does not have a Soul because he/she has freckles, without any discussion as to the existence or Nature of a Soul. For all I know, the ‘ego’, by many definitions, is a useful tool if not abused and, by many other and a few of the same definitions, is inevitable as a characteristic experience in a sane psyche.

            But if, by ‘ego’, you seek to pigeonhole an entire spectrum of ignorance, greed, malice, myopia, and violence by virtue of which one defends a superficial image of oneself and feels justified in blindly disregarding the viewpoints of Others (be they general or specific), is it really the person you are targeting who has an ego problem?

 

Dm.A.A.

Ketchup's Theory.

Ketchup had a theory. He described it as he drove me through the depths of the one-story seaside city, as it tapered into the beach and ultimately dissolved into an ocean that on a day a shade mistier would have swallowed the horizon as well.
'You know, man, I took three and a half days away from home...'
'Wait, so you left the house for three and a half days?'
'Right.'
'Yeah, that's about how long it takes.'
'Right? And I got back and everything was better, and I thought maybe that how's the Universe is. Maybe at some point it got too much, and it was like, you know, you guys, just go and do your own thing and we'll see you in a couple... oh, a couple trillion years...'
'It needed some space.'
'Exactly'.

Ketchup's theory, pt ii.

'You know, man, I took three and a half days away from home...'
'Wait, so you left the house for three and a half days?'
'Right.'
'Yeah, that's about how long it takes.'
'Right? And I got back and everything was better, and I thought maybe that how's the Universe is. Maybe at some point it got too much, and it was like, you know, you guys, just go and do your own thing and we'll see you in a couple... oh, a couple trillion years...'
'It needed some space.'
'Exactly'.

The Monster.

When I was in kindergarten, I only got in time-out a few times. Facing a red, brick wall during recess was an unluxurious kind of embarassment, so I avoided it.

Come first grade, we moved from the splinter-box to the sandbox. There was a jungle gym in the playground. We would play a kind of game wherein people climbed the outskirts of this metallic mountain and, with daring, grabbed the pole running from the dome at the top, jumped off the top rail, slid down, and, landing awkwardly on the sand, scurried, too fast for the monster to catch, to climb out from between the rails.

            I was always the monster. I chose to dwell at the bottom of the volcano, looking up at them, chasing them as they ran too fast for me. Only a few times was I clever enough to try to climb up the rails from the inside.

            One day, however, maybe in Spring, I was not the monster. I walked along the rim of the sandbox, in luxurious embarassment, looking down at them. I smiled, shyly, and told them that I did not feel like it today. Girls and boys crowded about me soon, pleading. But not today.

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Maya, continued.

I talked to Maya, again, on the phone, three years later. It had been the first time that I had spoken with her since I think shortly after my break-up with Cassie.

In her first semester of University, she had dated a drug dealer. This led to her first experience with psychedelics, embodied in the Mexican Sacred Mushroom.

Shortly thereafter, she became suicidal.

'Maya, we love you!'

She was doing better now, however. She had decided to take a semester off from college. I envied her for her freedom. She told me that she did not understand my enthusiasm for things with a kind of delighted but fundamentally Confused tone.

She was working for a magazine, and her job, something to the effect of a secretary, as I surmised a year later, entailed that she wear high heels.

I later talked to her through a webcam. Aroused by her femininity, a passion fueled by nostalgia but funnelled and side-tracked like chimney-smoke by the degree to which she began to remind me of her mother, I adequately lost face with her.

Several days later, when I sent her a message online, she wrote me this: 'Phoenix, I am homeless. I just had my first experience at a shelter.'

I replied: 'Cool! How is your experience? Several of my friends are homeless, and I've hung out with them.'

Her response was to block me from her users. Her justification was that I did not respect her.

It would be about a year before we would speak to one another again.

Maya was a free thinker now. My contact with her had been limited to a few photographs of a chance meeting with Vivik and friends on their way to a convention of sorts in Colorado. Her hair was long and her eyes were closed, a wicked but innocent grin standing in contrast to Vivik and the tempered smile of Franklin.

Finally, she added me again. She was intrigued by things that I was posting and saying online.

She had a blog again.

Unable to find it in retrospect, I decided to Google her name.

Approximately half the results on the first page were slander reports.

They were all written by a coworker from the magazine company. They began with, 'It is appropriate that Maya _. ___-_______ listed her age as eighteen, for it adequately describes the childish nature of her behaviour...', continued for four paragraphs, and described, with commendable imagination, a scene of Maya using 'language inappropriate to the workplace' to accuse a respectable employee/er of a damage to a company item for which she herself was responsible, and then storming out in two-inch heels.

She gave me her phone number. I called her.

We spoke again, this time longer.

I told her about the slander gossip. 'What?' she said with a groggy tone of surprise.

'Yeah, I'm on your side, though,' I assured her.

She took time to justify my trust.

'The guy who hired me was a pervert.'

'Oh, really? How so?'

'I don't know. He wanted me to be his--' and she half-giggled self-consciously-- 'secretary or something.'

That aside, she was fine. She was about to move into her own apartment.

'Oh, that sounds awesome,' with envy.

'No, it's not. Because I can't have sex.'

She went on to tell me, for about fourteen minutes, about a mistake she had made whilst trying to use a corrosive chemical for the first time. Not knowing it was corrosive, she spilled some on her left calf.

The doctor told her that it would clear away after a few months. Her embarassment at the fact would last that long.

'I think that women can have sex whenever they want,' she told me.

Within a few weeks, she blocked me again. I had posted my most Shakespearean poem and Greatest Poetic Accomplishment on facebook. It was a testament to my frustration with the death of chivalry, the subjugation of abstinence, and Miranda's friends. I had tagged Maya in it.

This time, the verdict was new: 'I don't like you and don't want to talk to you. Stop adding me.'

Maya, alternate.

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Maya, alternate.

Maya had been one of few girls on the Rancho Buena Vista high School Robotics team, but, with all due respect to the moral and personal Virtues of the one or two others, she was the one that men would be most likely to notice as our token 'girl'.

She had only stopped by the state of California for one year. Her family moved with inexplicable frequency.

Within a few months, Maya had built up a following of people, not necessarily confined to her age group, that would have dearly loved to see her crucified for her views and the ardour with which she would defend them.

One deep indigo night, she handed me a Q'uran. She was just recovering from the gentle and almost innocent harassment of Vivik, an old friend with probing, logical eyes juxtaposing a maniacal grin, the former only relenting with a hysterical laughter that nonetheless failed to efface the latter.

She had intimated few things to me without ever really feeling close to me. As the deep December night settled into an uncertain, terrifyingly sedated future, standing in an alleyway between a row of trailers and a wall of classrooms, she told me that she had used to live on the internet for the longest time.

I commented on some headlights we saw from the street, postulating something to the effect of them being space aliens. She faked an awkward, stifled giggle.