fragments #1

There are things I want to tell, worlds I want to portray, people of whom their lives suppressed by judgments--of close friends, families, strangers, societies, judiciaries, governments; these are stories that I want the world to know about. At least that is what my little ambition is, as a writer (or so I thought I am), or as one who is very much awed by the littlest, often seem insignificant, encounters in everyday life.

I've always been aware of anthropology, yet I never had the courage to really delve into it. Even now. My encounters with anthropology were limited to bits and pieces, readings that I took halfheartedly just to fill in the gaps whenever I stumbled upon things that I couldn't make sense of, with my limited theoretical understanding and lack of depth on the world.

The closest I've ever been was when I dabbled, pretty much on the surface, with phenomenology, of Heidegger to be precised. But Heidegger was hard to comprehend (and still does!), and it was merely a hobby, so I left him. Another thing was because of my greed. I was not satisfied with just a theory that explains little things as what they are, theories that only attempt to explain the small scale of events, little units that very much unique thus limiting them to a particular time-space constriction. I thirsted for a grand narrative that could explain everything that is happening anywhere, anytime. In physics, it is often called a theory of everything.

For me, theories as such only hinder further understanding of our world, they distract us from our sole quest for the purest and the most authentic condition; the origin of the world. Thus my construct and how I comprehend the world lacked depth. I couldn't appreciate the smallest gesture; smiles I received, thank yous, or apologies whenever someone brushed me off on the streets. I thought of them as a given, a norm, obligations with functional basis to allow the society to operate, to maintain the social order. There is no agency, for we are all trapped in the clutch of the ideological.

I was very ambitious. Life goes on, moments drifted by, people leave. Ambition is terrifying; it fills you with impatience, and with this, comes rage.

As rage subsided, so did my ambition for a grand, unifying, all-encompassing theory of the world, of reality, of being. Perhaps, this is the closest I've ever been to the truth. I'm satisfied with these little things I'm working with, and I do hope that they would someday grow into things that matter, meaningful enough to touch the hearts of people, however unsympathetic they may be.