Desperate Search: (dis)Concertingly Fickle

Desperate Search: 

Disconcertingly Fickle

Part One

Below the surface lies the grocery cart. Always.
Sometimes it's a pond, a lake, a river, a neighborhood litter corner, a forgotten hill, or, in my most recent sighting, the Adriatic. Bedraggled and alone, the grocery cart is an ever present reality. It asks many questions. Who are these people that steal grocery carts, anyway? Why do they then, after going to the hassle of stealing them, leave them to be devoured by rust and algae in the nearest local waterhole? Who does these things?

Who murdered those people in cabin 28 in Keddie, California?


The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing at all. It's the world entire.

Often I skate from one philosophical obsession to the next. I've been a self-labeled Objectivist, Post-Neitzcheian, Christian Spiritualist, Modern Pelagian, Hopeless Romantic, Fiscal Conservative, Social Libertarian, Wannabe Franciscan (minus the monk part), Post-Tribulationist, Artist, International Man of Mystery, Zealot, Vague Wanderer, Desperate Believer, Doubter, Doubter with Faith, Believer with Doubt, Believer in Fear, Late-Night Radio Listener, Non-Conformist, Peer-Pressured Non-Conformist, Redactor, Bohemian, Naturalist, Carnivore, Anti-Abortionist, Anti-Death Penaltyer.... of Paul, of Apollos.

What does it matter? -The grocery cart is everything. It's nothing in and of itself, but it can be everything. It can be infinite in dimension.

I move from one topic to the next, concerned immensely with the present thought, secretly believing and caressing the hope that this one, newly seen perspective/topic/theme/reality will be the key to unlocking God.

This, my friends, is the everything.

I've been outspoken in my contempt for The Avengers, I saw in it the great nothingness of pulp without unleashed imagination's eye. I saw no grocery cart to steal.

Currently I am reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a super self-aware semi-autobiography by Dave Eggers, friend of David Foster Wallace (the one I wish deeply to extract genius in tangible form from) and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, a film I adore. In the book, Dave is a founding member of a magazine entitled Might. You know it's real because it has a wikipedia page> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_magazine

From what I gathered from the memoir was that the magazine's aspiration was to be the magazine that stood for everything -- was the fulfillment of everything the age is meant to be. From what I discerned, Might was everything the world had, was the embodiment of nineties' truth.

Generally, my passions dip and fade with as much zeal as they arrive, stamping their sudden 'game-changing' truths to the inner parts of my retinas, where my brain touches the backs of my eyeballs. In writing this (I won't rewrite or reread this, so it's only my local memory that informs me and catalogs the essence and theme of this post written thus far), I've attempted to insinuate a certain negative association with my predisposition to stumbling hopelessly romantically in love with whatever new truth theme becomes in vogue for me. Now, I can say truly to you, now I can say it; that's not how I perceive my stumblings at all. Not whatsover. Rather, I think I'm right. I'm right and I'll write about it because the grocery cart is everything.

Points of Hypothesis:

1) All truth points to God.
              a) All truth is an outpouring of God's (i) design, (ii) character,  (iii) imagination, or (iv) declaration, as no truth exists apart from God Himself.
2) God is infinite. 
3) Truth is beauty. 
4) We are finite beings given insight that the infinite is real and abounds around us (within us as well?). In this being finite, we find that we can be, in every single moment of existence, fully endowed with a perpetual state of wonder at the mystery of infinitude. 
5) This mystery, while ever being present, ever presents itself in wholly new and wholly other ways, thereby making the mystery around us appearing to ever change, wherein reality we are only ever being forced to reckon with a different aspect of the same great enigma.
6) An inherent attribute within mankind is that we are led to explore. This is exemplified in a myriad of ways by man, not many of which are redeemed. Perhaps we can call the basic idea behind it as: curiosity and wonder. 
7) Our primary function on Earth is to glorify God. 
8) Worship of the almighty God is the most exacting, radical, and profitable form of glorifying God for man. 
9) Exploring the world around us can be, and should be, a form of deep, physical, mental, and spiritual worship. 

Points of Conclusion:

Therefore 10) is:
Everything is illuminated. Everything is cloaked in mystery.


The grocery cart is everything. The grocery cart is therefore illuminated. It is illuminated as a device which we can use, compartmentalize, scrutinize forever, and see the very eye of God. The grocery cart is nothing because we will never reach our destination merely observing (even with an eye towards God worship) the thing itself. The grocery cart therefore forever remains at the bottom of that riverbed/lake/stream/Adriatic as everything and nothing all at once. And everything acts/serves precisely the same purpose as the grocery cart.

All is everything. All is nothing.

In Part Two, I will try to distill 'Next Steps' out of all this. I will try to shift the focus from the merely philosophical to the outlandishly pompous naivite of physical movement. We'll see if (and how) it works.

Until then, I conclude with this quote from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, wherein a contributor of Might Magazine focuses in on the scope life with his application to MTV's Real World. 

It reads as follows (strange grammar and syntax his):

Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due. 

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

Sincerely,

David Milton

TO BE CONTINUED.