).Grimview Rock · 7:40pm May 18th, 2015
It's not in my nature to be contentious or offensive, even with myself. I'm a coward and a follower. But today I find myself going around and around in circles on life's big picture, trapped in a shortcircuit. In order to escape, I must challenge the fundamental assumptions because the thought has no end, and if I try to concentrate on it I end up back where I started with less time left to think. This is worth writing down, of that I'm certain, not because it is a discovery or a great idea, but because it is the opposite. It is a dead end, a thought trap, a prison held together by the delusions of the prisoner. Let me tell you about what I can see from Grimview Rock.
From my lofty height (or darkest depth, there's really no difference after you are far enough removed) I see the world as it is, but the world as it is from here, is not the same as the world as seen from within the world. So what I see from Grimview Rock is and isn't the world. It's more than the world in some ways and less than the world in others, but I am not privy to the exact nature of such distortions because I am held prisoner at Grimview Rock.
From Grimview Rock, the good in the world is small and fleeting, while the bad is lasting and omnipresent. And all I see everywhere I look is people who don't seem to know. I say people, but we're all ants and giants from Grimview Rock, inscrutable to the naked eye in our detail, incomprehensible to the untrained mind, and there is no such training here. These people, these alien, incomprehensible people, see the good and evil in the world as balanced, and find happiness or at least scrounge together enough to get by. I see the evil as a cloud that hangs over us all, feeds off of us, lives above us, inhabits us and I judge us for our blindness, our smallness and our ignorance, but nobody is going to listen to The Prisoner of Grimview Rock, and nobody should.
I see that people are carved up, mind, body and soul into their constituent parts which are bought and sold all their lives. I see this and I know the thoughts in my head are in fact not my own, the values and beliefs I treasure are someone else's, and that person, those people, the ones who put them there, are my shareholders. My part owners. My masters. I see that my free will is nothing of the sort, and that even if I want to veer off course just to spite the idea of it, I have a pattern of footsteps laid out in front of me by my masters, by my jailors, by the Guards of Grimview Rock, I see that every nuance, every subtelty, every variable is accounted for and my worth, fluctuate as it might dependant on the road, is in fact counted in gold and silver down to the slimmest fraction.
I see that there is nothing but a pattern, repeating block after block, cloud after cloud, generation after generation for as far as my marred eyes can see. I see as the machine sees, data points, a collection of figures ordinal, nominal or measured on a scale. I see we are those and nothing but, no matter how we lie to each other. I see no people, not even myself, for I feel as embraced by death as if I was already cold and buried. Grimview Rock is not a place for the living.
From Grimview Rock, I can see the nature of the world. And the longer I stare out my cell window, the more I want to stay the Prisoner of Grimview Rock, becausee the truth of the world does not change, no matter where you are, once you've seen the view from Grimview Rock, there is no unseeing it. There is no forgetting it, it is a prison made of glass from which the world can be seen and heard, but not felt, not experienced, apart and then apart again from all those outside.
There is one problem with Grimview Rock, an imperfection in the glass spires and walls. You cannot see happiness from Grimview Rock. You cannot see love. You cannot see the irrational, the impulsive, the chaotic and the outlier. The glass is tinted jade. You cannot see it, but you become painfully aware of the gap it leaves. Without it the pattern does not make sense. And once you realise this, once you understand once more, that the bad cloud and the machine and the code does not make sense without happiness, without the spark of entropy, you realise how much you are missing. You see, briefly, that you cannot see everything, that in fact you cannot see anything really and the view from Grimview Rock is in fact something you have painted on the inside of your cell. And you realise that there are no guards, and you wonder who has been bringing you food. But as you are about to step outside, to leave the cell, you wonder what is so terrible, what horror ourside justifies the Painted View of Grimview Rock. And as you stare at that terrible vista again for a different pattern, for one that will bring you the answers and closure, you forget, you forget the imperfections, you slowly, as you are searching for the most minute details, on the largest canvas, forget that you are in fact staring at something that is not real, but is rather something you have created to avoid reality. And once again as the memory is overwritten, and the circuit is once again completed, so I am once again the Prisoner of Grimview Rock.
So you see, it is not that I find myself thinking in circles as I stated at first that is the problem. It is that I am living in circles, that I run my hand along the left wall of the labarynth, looking for the slightest crack, when in actual fact the exit may for all I know be a ladder just above my head. That was a white lie, but one I told because in order to even start talking about this, I have to start using the right words and idea, I don't even know what I'm thinking anymore, I have to process the rest of an idea externally before the capstone materialises, it's rather inconvenient for an introvert really, losing the ability to think internally may just ruin me. I wish I had some kind of sweeping, aha moment grand conclusion, but perhaps this inconsequential petering out is the more fitting conclusion, it seems I've once again become distracted by the things I can see from Grimview Rock.
I remember Grimview Rock. I thought it was such a perfect fortress. So cold and rational, no? So secure in its 'truth', so clean in its logic.
But all of that is a lie. It is a very convincing lie, because all of the lie is true. There is darkness and hate and greed and evil. There's a lot of it, and it's all over the place. People who assume they will fail are almost always correct. The jade-colored glasses don't let in any light that wasn't there before: they do not create reality in the world.
What they do is hide those facts that aren't the right color.
Lie of Grimview Rock #1: This is what the world really looks like. Bullshit; no one can see the worlds as it truly is because you have eyes: and eyes send signals to the brain and the brain interprets those signals to try to figure out what the world is doing. But that interpretation is always distorted because that's what brains do. The world is always, ALWAYS, slightly different from what you think your eyes are telling you. This is why science exists: it is nothing more than a long and convoluted way to filter out our biases to suss out the actual truth as it is. You don't see the world as it is from Grimview Rock; you only see the side of the world that happens to be facing Grimview Rock.
Lie of Grimview Rock #2: The world has more evil than good. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=violence+in+the+world+statistics+over+time The world is consistently getting better. There is less violence, less disease, less hate and less suffering year after year. But Grimview Rock has been putting in new windows, and aiming them where it wants you to look: it points you at the bad news, and overlooks the good time and time again. Because the jade-colored glasses don't like looking at good things, so they seek ever harder for the sickness in the world. It boards up the windows facing the goodness and kindness in the world, but look for the helpers, they are always there, hiding in the corner of the frame, blurred by the jade-colored glasses.
Lie of Grimview Rock #3: Optimism is always wrong. Optimists are wrong sometimes, but sometimes they are right. Sometimes the business will succeed, sometimes the girl says yes to the date, sometimes you find a nickle on the street, sometimes people treat you with kindness. Grimview Rock hates this, because it challenges the hegemony of failure. Grimview Rock doesn't want you to leave, but what Grimview Rock really doesn't want you to know is:
There is no cost in looking for a way out.
You want to ask that girl out? Ask her; the worst possible result is she says no and you are right where you started. Failure is a booboo, it stings for a bit but a day later the pain is gone. Success is a permanent change, the pride stays with you long after the success has faded. Rose-colored glasses aren't always accurate either, but you want to know something crazy? People wearing them are always happier than those wearing the jade-colored ones.
3079036
You understand far better than most, so you know it's never as easy as someone swooping in with a ray of light. I've viscerally struggled all day to get your message read and digested, bit by bit, piece by piece, bite by bite, but in the end I'm my own worst enemy.
Lie number one was never a part of my prison, the nuance between the perception of the truth and the truth is something that I tripped over time and time again in childhood, so like most things that trouble us in childhood I learned my way around that. It's a part of me, and not a part of the problem, which is rare. The more pertinent and highly related problem is though, the constant doubt generated by this understanding. The knowledge that the ground we walk on and the air we breathe are strictly relative does not allow a great amount of certainty in anything in life. And the first and last thing into this quagmire of doubt, question an disbelief is my knowledge of myself.
Yet... it's clear, intermittently, in flashes that disappear quickly, that this is a fallacy, a kill switch in my mental processes designed... to what end? I am kept away from thinking on it for too long. The truth is overwritten in my mind as soon as it is written. And in this case I understand, but I do not internalise. There are blocks between me and a relative truth of this situation. A large part of my self-doubt is it makes for an easy kill on any attempt to change it. It's twisted, I can parrot something, there's a real sense of struggle against the current as I try to grab onto this thought, I'm going to have let it slip for now.
Lie number 2 is unfortunately easy to fit to scale. I'm an empathic person, or at least I hope I am, so it's easy for my brain to turn right around and say "Well people are still suffering, and you can't help them, nyah nyah nyah.". In time the waves wash away even that understanding, and I come back to thinking the world is terrible, it's happened before, it'll happen again.
Lie number 3 is slightly different. I see optimism as a perfectly valid view on the world, the issue is that I "know" I can't change my ways. I worry too much.I have since I was little, I think and overthink and mentally rehearse because I am slow and cumbersome and sensitive to criticism. So the idea that I have to get things right is almost an axiom of my existence, lest I suffer criticism. Optmists don't worry, and this is why I dwell on the negative, you don't have to have a plan for when things go right, when things go right you're good to go. You have to know what to do when things go wrong, that's the trick, I think, said the broken man.
The hegemony of failure though, like the rest of it, when I feel my mind break the surface, that is spot on. The aspect to that I know you understand, but didn't mention, is the slow errosion of the sense of self. Victories are scattered by the wayside, discarded as soon as they're acquired they're forgotten and disregarded, failures are carried forever.
The rational mind knows and weighs failures and successes correctly to inform the self-concept. Mine, well, you can guess, it's a neverending repeating failure mix tape. I wish I could grab onto your words and good will like a rope and haul myself out. I wish. My particular parasitic black haze has grown fat and lazy, and clings posessively to all the ground it's gained in my mind. It's never been easy to get myself back, I'm not sure how much longer I can do this. It wants me to give up. To accept it, stagnate and then rot.
I wish it was a case of "that" girl, these days. I remember what that was like in highschool, when my heart pumped so hard my chest hurt. But those days, are gone. And I'm left with... a goal? a dream? Something decidedly more sinister. It's "that" girl, without a specific girl, the shining future that exists where I meet someone, reproduce and die having known love. It's that much harder when you're not chasing after a specific girl, because as a goal, it hinges on the existence of this person, which you can doubt or not on any given day, and then gives you all sorts of metrics to examine yourself with which you can then fail yourself on. Attractiveness, income, people skills all held against me, by me, in a way nobody else could. It's not a dream, it's a vulnerability, a trap. It is, as I'll often say when I'm not thinking about it, everything I've ever wanted, but all it does now is hurt me, this idea, and the prison tells me the dream is dead, buried and that I'll never get a chance. That much I know isn't true, but that doesn't stop this place from trying to tear me down for wanting something.
Thank you, it's nice to be able to talk about this. Although that's all I seem to write blogposts about these days, I have no idea why anybody bothers to check anymore... ouch... bad brain... but still, thank you. I... if it grants you fulfillment, know that on a good day, I know the truth of your words as they are to you, I have seen outside, I have seen the sky so blue that I cried tears of joy. And inside, I feel the echoes of the truth. But I can't see them now, and while looking for a way out is free, I've run out of places to look on my own. I'm not giving up, not ever, but for the moment, I know I've got to get help to get me out of this, and I am.
I hope all this makes it's own kind of sense. I doubt it makes actual sense, but hopefully in indells somekind of understanding. Thank you.
3080966 Oh, it makes perfect sense when you've been there.
Hint, but be warned some find it more useful that others: the healthier you are, the easier it is to fight - your brain needs a lot of energy to get around this, and if your body is wasting that energy your brain won't be able to.
That was brilliant. It deserves a narrated animation. Wonderful poetry. And an excellent name. "Grimview Rock" rolls off the tongue nicely. Well done. I'm very impressed.