Stem cell

That's what I feel like: a stem cell. I'm too filled with potentialities; I play with these potentials and hold off actually becoming anything. I tried the whole wearing-my-identity-on-my-sleeve business back in high school, and it didn't really get me anywhere constructive. If only I could dispel some doubt and swallow my pride and take some basic assumptions as given. That would allow me to build my systematic scaffold into an identity, into a broad social group, into a circle of easy acquaintances, into a "scene". What is open to me? All these would not be great stretches of what can already be considered the core of my identity.

The Environmentalist: I'd have to assume inherent and not utilitarian or relative value in the natural world. My inclinations against humans make this possible. I could either leave school and travel the world on eco-battles or stay in school and use words as daggers. I'd have to grow a beard, which wouldn't be a problem, seeing as the substratum is already well established. I could outfit myself with diverse cultural trinkets. I'd become an animist. Sneakers would give way to sandals; my hair would grow wilder than it already is. Singer's ethics would not be questioned on foundational grounds. On top of this, the animism or very weak pantheism would sustain me. From these principles, the dedication would flow. (Sex acts viewed as natural. Regressing to the limbic.)

The Marxist: Assume: people are inherently good, or barring that: rational, barring that: empathic with at least an incipient altruism. Assume: we in the rich countries can do better than all previous attempts at societal betterment. Auxillary assumptions: human behaviour can be molded. Minimize biological contributions to human potentiality as "ideological". From here, the course is simple: grow a beard, stand behind a lectern. Preach that economics is the substratum of all human essence: our philosophies, our morals, our thoughts and inclinations, the paradigms through which we perceive the world. Stay in school as long as possible. Read big thick books. Let my glasses get thicker and thicker and my paycheck thinner and thinner. The ultimate goal would be to gain a professorship and "corrupt" tomorrow's young minds, to keep the thread of continuity with the great passionate past. Ah, what a life: hidden behind tenure, keeping some benighted hope alive. Arguing endlessly with young undergraduates: beating out God, beating out self-interest, beating out middle-class world-views. Alternately, end school after my earliest degree. Travel the world and stir up agitation: protests, marches, street debates, bar fights, organizing drives, agitation and propaganda, youth groups. Hug the poor and destabilize the stable. See firsthand the suffering that is behind revolutionary theory. Develop praxis to the utmost. (Sex acts: struggles for toeholds in human minds. And acts of love. No revolutionarty should ever forget that righteous anger is born out of deep love--see assumptions.)

The Grad Student: Really compatible with The Marxist and The Environmentalist, except here the emphasis is on reading books, or more generally manipulating symbol systems. I'd have to cut my hair but make it more ragged and disorganized. I'd make no money, living in quarters more heated and unaccomodating than my present set-up. I'd be a shit-in, one of those people you see on campus and know they're pretty smart but aslo on the verge of anervous breakdown: who lide won for hours on the bumpy and unaccomodating statues of wild horses, or float in fountains half-naked, or splay out on the roots of the largest park trees. (Sex: minimal and probably co-dependent.)

"Bukowski": If I alienate those I love. If I become so inner-centered that I forget about the people next to and over and under me who also breathe, who also cook and eat and shit and piss and sweat and pant just like me. If I leave school but for a few used old textbooks & some browned-out maps for phone no.s and ideas that continue to rattle in my head. If the wanderlust takes me to a bar half a meter below some street which is here there & nowhere. If my only means of atoning to dear father & mother & scattered love seeds & random anonymous drop-in centre angels is some lines long & short, descriptive or maudlin or incantatory. Poetry and literature and publishing as main concerns. The cliche of the 50s & 60s now with a quintillion times more processing power and memory. Screaming at the reasserting abyss: "da capo! Da capo!". Maybe there will be occassional recognition. There will definitely be alcohol aplenty for me and the imaginary omnisexual harem surrounding me at all times. Maybe: schizophrenia. Maybe I'll graduate to other drugs, so as to add junk-sickness to my delerium tremens. (For sex: endless bejeweled parades of Madame Deaths adorned in whisky & cigs. Loveboys and girls of brick and mortar. Cash & influence peddled like the approach of the stiffening neurological orgasm.)

The Scientist: Assumptions: the scientific project will bring into existence something new and unpredictable, something which will stand the state of affars on its head; science is the candle in the dark of the demon-haunted world (with apologies to Carl Sagan, whose thought has graced this weblog many times before). Whether in medicine or biology or evolutionary psychology, human nature or frailness unravels before me and presents the obviousness of its manageability. This is compatible with the Grad Student aspiration. I'd have to work hard to get comfortable, and after that is established, I'd take up something similar to The Marxist's project. A professorship would be wonderful. But I wouldn't preach answers, though the notion that God can be overcome will linger. To see the world in comprehensible material terms: what satisfaction! But how would I take the barbs of the intranisgent humanities people and their inflated self-importance, as if they ever brought anything new into the world. Well, they have, but in form, not in content. And their assumptions remain unquestioned.

This unofficial survey of the future has exhausted me. I forgot to add the Slacker, the Brute, the Sanguinary Friend, and of course the Suicide At 23.

Consider som Buk: "...why do we go on / with our minds and / pockets full of / dust / like a bad boy just out of / school-- / you tell / me, / you who were a hero in some / revolution / you who teach children / you who drink with calmness / you who own large homes / and walk in gardens / you who have killed a man and own a / beautiful wife / you tell me / why I am on fire like old dry / garbage."