NOEMAYA

To write about nothing, with no aim or idea in mind. How would that work out? I don’t know, I don’t know anything right now. To be and to stay indeterminate, incoherent, failing to make references or incite profound meanings. It’s a chilly afternoon and I have to put on a hat to go out. I shave my head so I get cold pretty quickly and I don’t like that. It’s very uncomfortable. I also like to see the sun even if it’s cold. It’s like a ray of hope in the midst of despair. I could be in Siberia freezing to death, but as long as I have the sun I have some hope. But if you put me in the heaven where I can always wear t-shirts and shorts, where I am not cold anymore, the cold that I despise, then you better give me the sun, for even the best temperatures are useless for me without the sun.

I also like oatmeal with bananas as my late breakfast. I wake up pretty late; I like to sleep in. I love a good sleep. It’s the only place outside the waking state that I like, and not so much the dream world but rather the dreamless sleep where I find bliss. There’s total calm and serenity because there, like a turtle going into its own thing, I gather myself into my undifferentiated state. I am not best at handling differentiations. As amusing as it is to be human, sometimes it gets to me. It’s a long ass play, and I never liked plays. Oh, now that we are talking about likes and dislikes, let me tell you about how much I hate musicals, opera too. Mixing dance, music, and human singing for over 3 minutes is beyond my tolerance. And I don’t think I am alone in this. After all, isn’t that why all songs with lyrics are mostly within the 3-5 minute range! There’s gotta be a wisdom in there.

But my dislike of musicals and opera doesn’t end there. I also dislike people who like these things because somehow I feel you can’t possibly be a decent human being and at once enjoy musicals. But this is not a general rule for the things I don’t like. For example, I don’t like soup either but I don’t dislike soup people. So what’s so special about my disgust for musicals, so much that even as I am writing about it I cringe! I don’t respect musicals and lovers of musicals. I like to think of them as shallow people, and I am very well aware that my generalization has no justification. I just like to think this way because it pleases me and gives me reasons to stroke my ego and put myself above a group of people. I am definitely better than people who like musicals, not for any obvious reasons; it’s just a way of patching up deep insecurities.

Yes, musicals and musical people make me very uncomfortable even though I am better than them. It’s so comforting to think you’re better than others, especially those you don’t understand or know very well. This lack of intimate knowledge allows me to fill in the gaps with my own self-righteous intentions, to make a monster of those who represent anything that makes me cringe. And I know very well that what makes me cringe is an inner experience and not something outside of me, that after all I cringe at a part of me that’s activated without my permission. And that’s all others do: they awaken and activate what we’ve forcefully kept quiet. And I have kept quite any sort of exaggerated and dramatic expression of inner realities lest I create unwanted suspicion or attention, and I love attention by the way, I love to get as much of it as I can but I hate to lose it even more. So, I choose to keep quiet, to suppress unbridled expression because that’s the way things where when I was born and grew up. I like to live like a drone and miss all your attention. So, when I see a musical I see something that’s not supposed to be there; and when I see someone who enjoys a musical, I am seeing someone that reminds me of something I have murdered and buried within me, a lover of exaggerated expression. Not that I’ve suppressed the love of musicals and I am secretly in love with them. I have no doubt that musicals are incredibly stupid, but I have to confess that I wish I could be as free and joyous participating in exaggerated expression and speech. I wish I could be as free and stupid as a lover of a musical.

Oh man, I secretly love stupidity; probably I am pretty stupid deep down, and believe me it’s a lot of work to pretend you’re not stupid your whole life. I wish I knew how to embrace my inner stupidity and to be at peace with it. I am exhausted. I used to lament the cast of Hamilton who had to perform for months to keep the show going. Now when I think about it, I’ve been doing the same thing for decades, everyday and in every moment of waking life. To keep the show going, to hide stupidity and vulnerability, to manufacture fake sophistication and wisdom in the sweatshops of my soul, to suppress any enthusiasm and exaggeration lest I be judged or outcast.

But deep down I wish I was as dull and stupid as god. God has it better than any of us; it has nothing to do; it’s a nobody; it has no problems simply because it’s incredible stupid; there’s no trace of intelligence in god. This intelligence, the source of all problems, this evil and original sin. God has only two problems though: first, it is bored to death, and second, it loves musicals. So, all this god does is to entertain itself out of boredom, to pull up its heavenly version of Netflix and browse through our lives and watch shows and musicals, watching it through our own eyes, so that the real subject who’s seeing your life and experience is that bored-to-death, stupid god, the lover of musicals.

So what? I too am stupid! The kingdom of stupidity is within man. Let me have a stupid look on my face, to be so disinterested and disengaged with reason and consequences that I can’t even sin. Sinn, in German is to have meaning, to deploy intelligence forward and outward. Perhaps it’s the same thing: to sin is to sinn, to suppress one’s primordial and divine stupidity for the sake of a loaf of meaning; it’s to beat the innocent stupidity in the head by the hammer of intelligence and wisdom so that life finds some arbitrary and transient meaning. Man can’t tolerate meaninglessness and indeterminate being, that is, sheer stupidity. To bring things into form, into intelligible conceptions and limitations, this man elevates intelligence over and above stupidity and takes the fall and the subsequent suffering. But for the sake of what? For the sake of separative existence, for the sake of having a past and a future, to stand out, out of stupidity. Little do we know that the only way to the greatest wisdom, to home, is to become dull and stupid again, just like god. To clarify things, it’s not that god is something, some supernatural agency, that is dull and stupid. Rather, god is in essence the very dullness and stupidity that one finds in the dull and the stupid. There’s a long way there, but I am sure once I get there I might give musicals a shot, and maybe even befriend a few of those stupid people and perhaps be stupid and godly together.