The House on the Borderland

As I dissolve into my decrepitude with each flashing, sudden passing day, I am more and more reminded of a favourite tale of mine.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson was a favourite distraction for a number of years. I kept returning to that strange, eerie tale set in Ireland, of a house that was caught in the nexus point of space and time. It resonated with something deep inside me, like the chiming of a great bell in a cold, dark infinite landscape.

I increasingly feel as if I have created that house here, or rather this transcendent house on the borderland pulled me to to it by a form of dark energy, a gravitational force unknown to science that came into being at the moment I began reading that yellowed, dogeared paperback all those years ago.

When you're detached from the banal buzz of the workaday world, amputated from the impossibility of not speaking or communicating with another person, your body and mind inflate, you become god-like in your ability to observe and deconstruct the minutiae of your mind and physical environment.
EVERYTHING becomes significant.

I've always been rather fond of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
He pointed out in (a rather roundabout way) that when philosophers talk about the nature of existence, the 'being of the table', their own supposed ability to hammer out the 'solidity' of their perceiving consciousness...they often forget, that first of all, they are absolutely embedded into a world of experience and sensation, so subtle and so vast, that it is difficult to understand how true, rational or empirical objectivity can ever be realized.

To be conscious, is to be conscious of 'something' at all times. Even if we are cogitating on something specific in our attention, there are a thousand and one other processes occurring simultaneously - nervous system, the unconscious machinations of the psyche, sounds, smells, tactility.

These things merely get displaced and filtered out of awareness momentarily. We never see things as they are, but as how we are at a particular moment in time.
Most of the time we are unaware of our selves as we are are perpetually pulled along and manufactured by our environment and perceptions in the great cultural feedback loop.
Being alone can act as one long existential burn,the awareness that you are a being imprisoned in your unstoppable awareness of things.But alas, even this experience will always be a trifle contaminated.

The Zen people would call Heidegger's existential trigger moments 'Attention'. Indeed, I used to own a very good book on Zen by some fellow called Suzuki; he cited the phenomenology of Husserl as a good starting point for Western minds to grasp the
tenets of Zen. As you well know, Husserl was Heidegger's most profound influence.

Time for tea. Toodle pip.