I am not interested in belief.
I am. Perhaps, but perhaps there is no I, only the suggestion of it, the self referential me choosing to assert myself as I, the god of self-proclaimnent, the hubristic announcer of an inviolate belief in my self as a Self, as a whole and distinct person, a person with a seperate and unique personhood. It seems to me that I can offer no empirical evidence of the absolute individuality of me as myself, and yet I persist in using personal pronouns. I have spent some time as a youth chasing after myself, attempting to know me, and in that knowing, to eventually assert, finally, that I was. Of course, I failed, and in failing, I quit the endeavor as unsolvable and ultimately disastrous. As a result, I have an unsure notion of who I am. I rely on others to tell me, to contextualize my experiences in a way that makes them meaningful, relevant, valid. I am not entirely sure of who I am, but I am confident that I am; I have fallen victim to the cheapest verb set of all, I am a martyr to the idea of BE..
I am not. This idea seems unlikely, but I understand so little in this world that the metaphysical presupposition of my own existience seems especially spurious. I, or at least I as an idea, am a dragon in the garage. I offer myself up as evidence of myself; I demand recognition because it seems true; I am anecdotal evidence. This being said, there is a case to be made for my non-being. If I assume that I am, I have to assume that there is an I which is, above all else, separate from all other I’s. This seems impossible to prove, let alone entirely grasp. What defines me? How can I be decontextualized, removed, and still whole and complete? If there is no perfect I, no complete I, how can I be said to be? My arm is not an Arm, it is only an arm, a part of a larger body, a functionary fulfilling a role for a short time, then ceasing to be useful and evenutually rotting away, so lost and inconsequential as not to be mourned. There never was a funeral procession for a part, so why for me, or even Me? How can I know who I am outside of this context? And if I cannot determine who I am, how in the hell am I sure that I am? Perhaps, I am not.
I am not interested. Finally, something I can work with. To be interested requires only interest, compounded moment by moment and eventually paying dividends of knowlege, wisdom, or madness. Interest, it seems, is something I can own, something I can sink my teeth into. But what of being interested? Is this the same as having as interest? And if I am not interested, then am I not interesting? I tend to think that bored people are most likely boring, and that interested people are, most probably, interesting. We are the present tense of our past you know.
I am not interested in. Well now this hardly seems fair. Its not even a sentence after all, but I shall give it a try. To say that I am not interested in automatically asserts to the audience that there is an I, an I who has been interested, who is not now interested, but who recognizes the existence of something whose level of interest is, at the very least, worth addressing.
I am not interested in belief. Belief! Now we are cooking. To believe is the foundation of understanding, of conviction, of morality, of self. Without belief, we cannot move, we could not trust our feet to hold our bodies up, or our minds to propel us forward. Belief forms us as it is formed, from our very beginnings we learn that if A then B, and the resultant solution to that selfsame equation is the foundational structure that we begin to build ouselves on, wrapping our mental skins around the idea of more and more experiences and the subsequent results of those experiences. Belief is the powderkeg of our humanity, and to assume that I am uninterested in it is not only frankly impossible, but a reducionist betrayal of my own humanity.
As a child I have wept, and my dog whined, licking at my face as I sobbed. I know that he only liked the salty taste of my tears, but I believe that he loved me.
