philosophy before the gym

The corollary of the contingency theory, where everything matters, is that nothing does. If our direction is decided by the nudges we get careening along, then those nudges are meaningless if they all mean something at the same weight – even if they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. So the inane philosophy of “everything is everything” becomes as apt of a descriptor for this as anything else. Getting out is just as hard as staying in, except that it opens up your options for getting neck-deep in some other mess too. Either option is defined by “in.” In the same way that hating Christianity is the same as being a devout christian. Either way, your argument is defined by Christianity. As far as you go to one side, you might as well go that far to the other. At least in the negative. Not caring is the closest you can come to freeing yourself from the dialectic. 

Tangent: A quote from urban dictionary on “everything is everything” “you will deal equally with everything within your cipher, which gives birth to wisdom that is showing and proving. Everything is everything, which equals one. Equality gives birth to wisdom, and mathematics do not lie.” 

And I can’t walk myself to not caring. So fighting to get out is the same as fighting to get in, at least to the degree that both acts keep me tangled. In this way, both efforts are sides of the same coin – but the coin always defines the parameters. 

On the periphery of my thinking about this, I can almost see how his silence is at least as strong of a declarative statement of his being “in” as my talking is. At least philosophically, I can conceptualize it. Emotionally, of course, that horse won’t run. 

There is nothing I can do. I can sit, I can observe, I can make quilts as a bizarre form of lukasa (an African map to memory – usually in a board) (I just give them away). But I can’t change this into something that satisfies. I can’t will my life back in a tangible way, and there is something frustrating about the uselessness of having this thing that is a major part of me with out the physical manifestation. 

My dreams all tell me to slow down. I mean WAY down – like you can dodge bullets by simply looking at them carefully.  None of my other divinations seem to work.

Chalkin’

Verb. The act of carrying forward with an activity or situation that is quite possibly unwise, but is also a learning opportunity.

As in: chalking something up to experience. 

Used when you are going through something that doesn’t exactly make good walking-around sense, but has value nevertheless because you know that, once the experience is over, you will never have to repeat it.

Contingency Theory

I was talking to articulate matter over the weekend, and she raised a question regarding an old personal philosophy I used to call contingency theory.  She said the two words, and something happened between my ribs, something nonverbal and nearly painful.  I remember contingency theory, but I have no idea what it is or where it came from.  Articulate matter sent me to “the dictionary,” a document produced around 1996 by my bestest friend Tink, a historical repository of the things we said and what we meant at the time. 

 

Under contingency theory (and I paraphrase here, because I don’t have the dictionary with me) the definition is as follows: “everything matters.  And I mean everything.”

 

Contingency theory was shared with me by one of the customers at the frame store I worked at when I was 16, and I took the idea and created a whole construct around it which (apparently and cryptically) can be wrapped up in the simple phrase “everything matters.”

 

A google search this week produced this line: Consistently unsystematic, contingency theory welcomes stray facts, complexity, intuitions, and feelings.  And I sent this link to both tink and articulate matter: http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/04/contingency-in-natural-law-theory.html

 

Unfortunately, neither feels right.  I dreamed about it the other night – in the dream I was riding a wave towards a building and I was sure that, if I just did it right, I could arrive standing on the sidewalk in front of this building unscathed.  I also knew that if I didn’t do it right, I’d be smashed into the glass façade.  And somewhere, perched atop that wave, I remembered what contingency theory meant and I was pleased.

 

Around this time, I was hopelessly and foolishly crushing on a lanky boy named Joel who worked at a local Kemp Mill Records.  I bought Aimee Mann’s “I’m With Stupid” from him, and would travel out University Blvd on weekends to see Joel, who never asked me out.  I certainly didn’t have the courage to ask him out – chubby, awkward thing that I was at the time.   

 

Other dominant memories from that time involve wandering around tink’s rain-soaked neighborhood at midnight with no shoes.  We were convinced, in the way that teenagers are absolutely certain, that we were thinking new thoughts.  We discovered that everything would be alright in the end, and that if it wasn’t alright, then it wasn’t the end.  I had a theory about the dual nature of things, how on the surface, something didn’t matter at all, but pull back a layer and it mattered very much, but pull back another layer and it wasn’t necessary anymore, back and forth.  Joel was a prime example.  He didn’t matter, but he did, but he was kind of irrelevant.  He just provided a destination for tink and me, and that is what marked me: those drives up University Blvd and the first taste of autonomy fresh and bright in our mouths. 

 

I think when it comes down to it, contingency theory – as it was used at the time – was just a way to mark that each of these small things that we bumped into changed the things that we would bump into next.  My favorite game: if then therefore.  We were born, that was the only “necessary.”  Thereafter, it was all contingency – our choices dependent on a hundred other choices, some of which we controlled, some of which we did not.  We could do nothing but bump along, doing the best we could, and taking fierce pleasure in the absurdity of it. 

 

At least I think that’s what it meant at the time.

 

The funny thing (and I’ll probably post more on this later) the conclusions that tink and I came to as teenagers keep getting more relavant a little over a decade later.  I still think that finding fierce pleasure and unexpected joy in the absurdity of it is one of the few ways to confirm and celebrate the best parts of humanity.  And why not celebrate what there is to celebrate?  The rest of it is no picnic.  It is enough to be grateful for the unexpected beauties that show up in all of our lives.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(philosophy)