...Where to start?

If I seem to be unclear or cryptic with any of what I write, I'm sorry. I am not purposefully trying to be such. Even through one of the most powerful modalities of communicating, such as writing, the truest essence of what we are really thinking/feeling/etc can never fully be expressed. [Even Shakespeare alludes to this in his sonnet number-35]. But alas, t’is how it is.

...I've acknowledged as of late, ...that I have felt alone since I was a small child. ...Why is this? ...Is this normal? ...Or am I just a lil "messed up"?

In between doing research and programming for my clients workouts, visiting my father in the hospital, fixing my truck, mapping a years worth of workouts for Dwight and Steven, and all the daily activities that go with life, ...I've been doing some thinking about love, life, relationships, loneliness, the heart, the soul, etc, ...and why this all hit me so hard and what it was I was actually feeling for this girl, ...I got a little lost for a bit in trying to figure it all out (those damned God’s of emotion). it got me thinking further, ...about many things, ...the heart, relationships, the soul, “the self”, the fall, the gods, loneliness, judgment, looking into ourselves, into others, and ultimately, ...our own subjectivity and plight of the individual.

"Prisoner of the flesh," "Trapped inside myself," "Alone in a crowded room," etc. All of us are in touch with this feeling to one degree or another, and if we're not feeling it strongly, at this very moment, we sure as hell will be in the near future. Everyone.

Poets from all eras have delved into this, spanning over 2000 years, from Lucretius, to Aphra Behn, to John Wilmot, The Earl of Rochester, to the latest poets to be added to the Literary Cannon. Throughout their works there is a "penetrating hearts" rhetoric that is couched within their various descriptions of lovemaking, from the first darting glance to the final consummating thrust.

If one examines this progression of lovemaking within the context of this penetration rhetoric, you can see that the aims of the rhetoric itself goes beyond any poeticized account of sex and it's anthropological function; that is to say, the natural demand for sexual organs to meet and copulation to take place is met, and yet there is still a discontented longing to penetrate further--through the genitalia, the mouth, or even directly through the chest, but always to the heart of the other.

To see this constant resurgence of theme, spanning almost two-thousand years, one cannot help but raise questions of how this quest to penetrate the heart of the other manifests itself within the language and what then, is the significance of the heart itself? How is the heart functioning within the framework of the rhetoric in relation to the body and the self?

Ultimately, ...within this rhetoric, the heart itself functions as a container of the soul and the self (or as a prison of the soul/self, depending on the connotation). As the flesh and the body inhibit the penetrator from reaching the heart of the other, so the actual heart inhibits the penetrator from the soul of the other. Our final picture then, is of two souls trapped within hearts trapped within bodies, trying in vain to inter-penetrate and to liberate one another from their own subjectivity, becoming something bigger and more complete than either was before, two souls striking out to become one. What is compelling to me within this rhetoric is this need to penetrate into the heart of another, but at the same time escape the containment of one's own heart. This is what gets me thinking about what it is to be "trapped" and subjectivity...and the fall, ...and Gods...and rhythm...and death....

We are formed--physically, mentally, and emotionally--to the pulse and rhythm and flow of the heart, we can call this "the semiotic world of mother" or "paradise" or any other number of "logies and isms"--I prefer "the pre- subjective world of the heart."

Here's a pretty good model for the thing. I don't consciously view everything this way, but it has served me well over the years as a foundation to build upon.

Do you remember the womb? Do you remember the warm, breathless bath of Mommy's universe? I don't. I don't remember a damned thing, and I wouldn't expect anyone else really does either (Mark this down as an argument against myself should I ever cover, "Hey, Asshole, are you Pragmatic or Insane?"). The reason you don't remember what you felt is because you weren't "you"--organically, of course, you were you; and in a distant sense you may have been spiritually you; but consciously you were not you. You just were. Although, "just," probably doesn't lead us in the direction we want to go. You were more than "just" anything--pulse, flow, circulation, heat, heart, blood, the beating and the rhythm and the music of it all. You were alive and part of everything else alive, inseparable from your mother, her cat, her favorite ficus, you were everything and everything was you. But then, unfortunate of unfortunates, you were pushed out into the world and distinctions had to be made: big blue sky with two hands in it, doggie's face with two hands in it, mommy's breasts with-- "Hey, those must be 'my' goddamned hands!" And from there on out, when you thought "I" you were no longer one with Mommy, the cat, the ficus and the universe, you were only one with you. Literary theorists can make pretty good cocktail talk about how this pre-conscious experience of rhythm and the heart play into music and poetry, and that's all very enjoyable. Less enjoyable is the psychologists' tagging this revelation of "I" as the birth of "subjectivity". If you wanted to get into a pissing contest, I'm sure that in addition to subjectivity, many other 'tivities could be piled up before and after the thing, but, unfortunately, I just went.

With our emergence (or fall) into subjectivity, our world becomes a place of that versus me; our time of existing without the burden of existence is up, we no longer "are" and we need to tell ourselves "I am." And so we are trapped; sitting on the double-edge sword of our consciousness, trying to justify our existence with such a grimace of consternation that we can't see the beauty and life all around us (sorry, I'll try to tone her down a bit); or, we are doomed to actually see life, but with only one set of eyes, our empathy being limited to our own associations and facsimiles. Thus, we are isolated with no real means of pure communication, everything we think and feel has to undergo a loss in the process of externalizing and transmitting beyond our prison of flesh and bone ("Search me oh Lord..."). Reconciling with our loneliness is the real impetus of man--it's love, sex, and alcohol; it’s the stuff from which gods are made, or the stuff from which they made us, so as we could not possibly ever forget them....Hey, I don't know. It's all very hard to label and manipulate.--I suppose "I am" my own argument. :) But let me digress....

The important thing to make a note of is *loneliness*.

Loneliness. We feel it all the time. Loneliness, and not just the little nagging loneliness either, I mean the throw-your-head-back-and-howl-at-the-moon king of loneliness. It's terrible and it's frustrating, and worst of all, it's a dangerously attractive and easy part to play. Easy! Stopping--now there's the hard part. But we must--li'l Hamlets that we all are--try to put the goddamned skull down, take off the turtle-neck, and venture out into something more challenging: ...happiness for instance.

But, again, ...where to start?

(Perhaps *I* should start with Lithium or maybe Prozac. *LOL?*)

With our birth into this world, comes our birth into subjectivity.

...But let me digress.... Sorry. “My bad”.

...What I meant to say was, ...try this workout couplet:

Body Weight Thrusters
1.5x BodyWeight Cleans
alternating exercises @ 5/5, 4/4, 3/3, 2/2, 1/1, ...for time, of course. :)

“The wrought iron thinks itself needlessly tortured in the fire, ...the tempered steel blade knows why.”

J-Dog