He went to sleep each night never knowing whether he was going to wake up the following morning. It was childish to entertain those pubescent thoughts, he knew that already. These metaphysical quandaries were woven of the same threads that the most fantastical stories were elaborately fabricated to such extensive lengths to persuade children of ethical spinal cords constituted of fictitious beings that relay a system of perfectly rationed positive reinforcement that typically includes gumdrops and lollipops in place of any species of vindictiveness. He went to sleep each night enveloped in uncertainty--with the prospect that he may never regain consciousness. There was an inherent sense of tranquility to the idea that interwoven in everything he accepted as real, as something ascertained as factual and consistent, there was the possibility that there was nothing at all: there is nothingness in everything; nothing is everything; everything is made of nothing; everything is nothing.
He didn't need to persuade himself of this anymore. He took it to the heart like a mantra. In fact, his whole reality became not merely the rather agnostic acceptance of the idea that he didn't truly know whether he or anyone else existed, but one that depended on a sense of faith that he'd never know. His moral experiments that eventually fomented the individual he is today was premised on the assumptions that
1. Others exist
2. I am part of society
As he went about his day, at work, during the night, momentary lapses in reading, eating, fucking, he would sketch these primordial assumptions out into greater elaboration.
1.1 Others exist in a realm of physicality: anything demarcated by matter, anything that possesses materiality, are inevitably interacting with one another by sharing the same atmospheric, climatic, environmental, and physical circumstances.
1.12 The mere fact of simultaneous existence within any situational bracket enables self-reflexivity
1.121 Brackets can encompass either/or, but is not limited to, time and space
1.122 Self-reflexivity is the foremost, and singularly most important, metaphysical assumption that enables further inquiry
1.1221 Metaphysics must be separated albeit eschewed for inquiry to begin and end
1.12212 Concepts like "beginning" and "end" are meaningless words given this metaphysical sketch
2.1 I exist
2.12 Society is constructed of people who are in some way related, relatable, or relevant to myself.
2.121 Society is based on self-referentiality
2.2 I can make a difference in my society
2.21 Differences, changing others, affecting others, are possible under a scheme of social values
2.211 "Social" refers to the sentient beings interacting within a given area
2.212 "Values" are meaningless unless considered within the framework of society
2.3 Society is a linguistic tool to categorize and group together individuals, who share only the most basic similarities (cf. 1.12), for the sake of ORDER
2.31 Order is the harmonizing of conflicting wants between individual constituents in society
...and so on. These verbal-dynamics flowed through his brain until he felt like he would just ooze through the floor and never solidify again. In grocery stores, he would evaluate the morality of purchasing organic items. He would begin as most people start, with the political realm, then to a humanitarian idea, then to post-structuralism, then linguistic [failure], the social inquiry, then ethical philosophy, and finally he would go through metaphysical assumptions like a checklist stuck on a refrigerator door by a magnet for fast-food delivery.
Of course, these mental exercises of his would never lead anywhere other than dense fogs of confusion. He would walk around in a daze, lost in space, until someone jostled him out of it so that he could resume his work. He would be sitting in the subway and be completely enthralled by the beauty of a passing woman, only, soon thereafter, to be perplexed by the questions of attraction, luck, perceptibility, and solipsistic deception.
Like heavy drops of rain, his mind spiraled downward until he deduced himself into a cloud of randomly clustered particles that consequently and weight for some reason.
What did he find attractive about that woman?
Do she and I share a planar coexistence?
If not, she is an apparition, a pure figment of imagination?
If she is not real, but an apparition, then is what I desire nothing more than a wanton thought-procedure so perfected by repitition that it seems flawless?
Am I seeing what or who she really is, or is it the projections of my mind at work?
He found himself back at Purgatorio, sipping away at a drink of substantive strength at the bar, being lectured in Japanese by the bartender. As usual, he didn't know what the bartender was saying. For all he knew, he could be systematically solving everyting he ever wondered in his entire life.
Joon-suk wondered, though, even if he understood what the bartender was saying, would he understand?
