Sympathy versus Empathy.

Bianca and I got into an argument about whether or not one could 'walk in another person's shoes'. Her problem is akin to mine, if not the same one: She can empathise, but not sympathise as well. To sympathise is to walk around in another's shoes. It is not the same as to wear another's wardrobe; that is, to sympathise is never to become another individual entirely, for that is impossible.
Regardless, if one can feel what it is to 'be someone else' for a few minutes, then one may be able to write with that person's voice. If, however, one can only empathise but maintain one's usual comfortable position, any such attempt on the writer's part would be akin to a poorly played solo by someone who just picked up the saxophone and did not bother to learn theory.


Regardless, sympathy is a dangerous thing. To open that channel may be to open a floodgate of uncontainable emotion that one is unprepared for. Empathy may be equally dangeous, although both are necessary.

dm.A.A.

Sitting on the porch.

Sitting on the porch of Peter's home was akin to feeling myself not to exist. It was as though I were trapped between two warring brain lobes.
The chickens gave me little solace, appearing perturbed behind their majestic fence.
The entire air of the back yard to Peter's trailer was one of another dimension.
It wasn't so much a departure from one's own dimension, however as, sitting in the blindingly blue invisible aura of the trees, amidst the discomforting flies, and with the trees offering little solace, one felt as though one had walked through a door and turned back to find that there was no door. In that burning Present, the world outside appeared to be a mirage, and I felt myself to be a wisp of wind in a desert.

Vivik.

Vivik

 

            I had met Vivik in my eighth grade year. I saw him again on the eve of my Sophomore Year. ‘Hey, Vivik. Do you remember me?’ I said to him with adolescent slavishness on the ramp to a restroom door.

           

His eyes widened.

            ‘I’m going to torture you!’ he exclaimed with zeal, but quickly falling into ‘No, I’m just kidding’, with a tone of reserve and clarity that, having known him in eighth grade, caught me by surprise.

 

Vivik’s mother died during a heat spell in his sophomore year.

 

            Vivik had a probing gaze that threatened to humiliate all at the first sign of miseducation on a statistical topic, usually unwittingly, although, upon realising that he could do so wittingly, he would without hesitation use it in his own favour. He would devour Carne Asada fries with a ravenous and unscrupulous absence of etiquette, and loved to emulate the delightful (to his eyes) jiggling motion of the belly of his side-kick, Robert Tagalog.

Luxuries.

Luxuries.

 

Surely, sir, you’re

Sitting at the bottle

Yet again

 

As a part of your

Crusade

You are dying

For them

In your house’s shade

 

Prying open a bottle

Of merlot

Sighing as you go

 

So they won’t have

To feel your

Pain.

 

Surely, madam, you powder

Your face

To empower those

Disgraced

 

Every hour

‘fore the mirror

makes your dire

mission dearer.

 

Surely. Young man

When you play

With girls your age

It’s only to dissuade

Their future

Children from

The horror of an

Adolescent rage.

 

Certainly, stranger

It concerns you

Very greatly

 

The state of the world

How it’s been

Doing lately.

 

All these nuances in your private plans

Comprise a great conspiracy

That alligns to serve both all of man

And to dissuade every heresy.

 

The fools will call these tools

Pretensions

But I know this to be false

And my only contension

Is that everyone exalts

 

Little things while big things loom

Yet I’ll preserve my sanity

That you seek to assuage this doom

Secretly, with vanity.

 

Dm.A.A.

Children Know Better.

Belonging to a collective ego does not render one any less narcissistic than the innocent, awe-struck and unindoctrinated child.
This prejudice is merely a reflection of the thought of one man: Voltaire, who postulated the 'Tabula Rasa' ('Blank Slate') to describe the innocent mind as a 'mere' blank, necessitating that it be written upon by society to be rendered 'mature'.
Yet his thought was merely endemic of his culture's Zeitgeist, which envisioned an objective world independent of individual subjectivity and that revered the masculine (though this is not to be mistaken for 'male') faculty of logic over the feminine principle of feeling. This, furthermore, goes back to the masculine one-sidedness characteristic of Western culture, which postulated 'Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit' (in Latin: 'Out of nothing comes nothing'). This suggests that the negative principle -- the blank slate -- Needs the positive, or masculine, conditioning to be rendered valuable. For this reason, Voltaire's contemporaries idealised the 'social contract'.
Contrast tabula rasa with the Taoist ideal of the 'Uncarved Block'.
In ancient Chinese mysticism, the mind of the child was revered, precisely For its receptive emptiness.

dm.A.A.

A confident self-assurance.

Dmitry is speculating confidently that, apart from when the tempting spectre of extraversion is concerned, he is not much worse than Huxley in regards to responding to the present in terms of the present, all though he is faced with the frightening prospect that a majority of humans are oblivious to this basic sanity.

dm.A.A.

Sampson.

Sampson

 

Sampson was set apart from other hipsters by magnitude alone. His eyes were protuberant and locked in the incessant, methodical gaze characteristic of the persona, and yet he lent it an almost alarming degree of intensity that suggested that the probe went deeper, both ways, than the confines of casual conversation.

I must have supposed, as I still do, that it was commonplace for hipsters, maybe even by definition, to mistake their mask for truth.

 

I don’t recall how, but somehow I found him sitting across a table in the Community College cafeteria that had probably been deserted when I arrived.

 

Inexplicably, I now found myself a witness of the kind of flirtation typical of a college boy and girl intent on rubbing egos before any thing could ensue.

Apparently, nothing is so effective a tool to boost one’s ego as an ego-transcending experience. He began to brag about all of the psychedelics that he had done, and there was a familiarity between the boy and girl that transcended their anonymity.

 

The girl’s eyes had a sad but assured look in them, and she smiled a rabbit smile with a timidity rivaled only by her self-assurance.

 

When she departed, I asked him about drugs.

 

‘Go straight to DMT,’ he said without blinking.