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nice dave: i actually provided a pretty systematic critique of the basis for the "bind" in which drews claims to be trapped and he reacted to it as you see and from there folk seem to have felt the need to post stuff that defends my position.
there is enough pain in the world--and in most of our lives--that is not self-inflicted because you adopt a stupid conceptual framework and then run the moves it imposes on you. camus already saw the basic problems of existentialism and did a quite devastating parody of them in "the fall." maybe read that and you will understand something of the contempt that may have surfaced for this particular form of self-immolation. sartre's main existentialist texts were popular just after world war 2 in france. their therapeutic function had alot to do with performing a sense of collective guilt over the fact of having-been-occupied, which generally meant having-to-accomodate fascism one way or another.
many years later, i was shown existentialism in its more adolscent form by my highschool french teacher, who was the daughter of a prefect of police in paris during the occupation and who--despite the fact that she was just a kid--nonetheless felt tremendous guilt simply because her family did not starve while others around her did and that simply because to be a prefect of police in paris under the occupation presupposed a certain--um--enthusiasm in interactions with the occupation. so that is the original sin, the sense of being-contaminated and not being able to make it stop because--well--it was the case. but it was a hard case and so displacements and rituals involving displacements apparently had an appeal. the flip of sartre's work is derived from the "existence precedes essence" claim, which translates into the idea that you can make and remake yourself--but there is no need to tie this obvious fact to the performance of some a priori guilt inflicted by way of a new version of original sin--unless that framework appeals to you somehow--and the explanation for its appeal is most likely some residual christianity--and since the op was basically a mangled rehash of a passage from pascal--it seemed reasonable to be suspicious of it.
so maybe you're right and drews just wanted someone to talk to.
but it's certainly not an unproblematic interpretation, given that there is what amounts to a conceptual machine being referenced and adopting that machinery would lead you to exactly the same kind of place as a function of the logic of the machinery itself.
so the op can be read in other ways as well.
and unless you wrote the bloody thing under another identity, you know no more than anyone else.
so it isnt really up to you to say what the post "really meant"---you dont know either.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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