Of Jellyfish, cockroaches and man

crossposted from my actual handwritten journal. Gonna post it here before I render myself unable to read my old handwriting.

it reads:

Going into it, I guess made it a bit less romantic. One has to ask for the triune of action: motive, opportunity and means. Romanticism is the least of goals, but lyricism captures and entraps you in its fallacy. There are no heavy downpours in the middle of summer to run under; there are also no means to appear at a scene and somehow exchange one or two perfect lines. Perhaps there is a reason why romanticism died in the middle ages and is survived instead by a contemporary mentality that promotes jadedness and isolation.


Jadedness does not equate to a refusal to accept or [wholeheartedly] believe. It just means that it would take a little bit more to make someone agree, believe or to be convinced. And while jadedness on its own may seem to hinder a basic appreciation of ordinariness, it is nonetheless a "necessary evolution" of the modern times. What do I mean?

This evolution can be seen (or even parallelized) in our own primordial ancestry. We used to be content with the situation of things, the environment and what it provided. We were blissfully unaware of what "evil" was. We were, to serve the parallelism, sponges and anemones (jellyfish, even) floating and living along with the tide. Eventually, though, new threats arose and new fontiers grew old, and we found ourselves unable to [merely] settle with drifting along. Cue evolution- we rushed out of the water, breathed new air and grew legs. Fast forward another several million years, and you have modern times in all (or none) of its glory.

[Going back to the stretched out metaphor,] Jadedness, for me, is like the backbone that allows us to stand upright in this harsh and desolate (ha ha) society. It allows us to stand erect, defy, and every once in a while, even choose to do more than what society would let us float through.

Conversely, I find that cynicism (axiom: a prelude to isolation) can be likened to an exoskeleton. Whereas jadedness manifests on the inside as the simple refusal to be swayed without burden of proof; cynicism is an outside shell that refuses to be fazed, and won't even let outside evils reach its squishy innards. Of course, this works just as effectively (look at the proliferation of invertebrae) as the other- man will step on bugs, and bugs will outlive men in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

So really, at the end of it all, what philosophy or anatomical evolution works? It really depends on you. We may be used to man's overbearing presence and domination (HA HA HA!), but again, I'm sure that the cockroaches too have their fringe benefits. Again, there is the temporary domination of man as the prime species and the more socially-acceptable behavior of disbelief and unfazedness (alas, the times conform to it rather than the other way around); but there is also the postulated longevity of invertebrae and flat out cynicism. And, hopefully you haven't forgotten yet, although they are nowhere near man's complexity or the cockroaches' longevity, jelly fish still do live today, as unfazed, unchanged, and unstoppable as before.

And that's the way it will go. Until the day comes that we damn ourselves with a nuclear apocalypse (born from our own tendencies to have our heads up down under), all three species and philosophies will stand on their own two feet, six feet, tentacles, or what have you.


-0-

I think I wrote that after like 30 hours of no sleep and emotional torture (as shadily referred to by the "going into it" at the start), so no, I will not apologize for the lack of coherence cohesion and that other "c" that we were taught all essays should have.

tee hee.

that said, i like the first paragraph, really. :P after that, it just gets weird :P