31/10/01 – Hallowe’en News
Tony Blair goes East – an end to terrorism. Metal doors on planes. Good times coming to an end? No more dumped cars, though.
Tony Blair was not stunned in Damascus when the bombs weren’t going down well. If the smiles look uneasy, that’s not surprising. Syria doesn’t support Israel and isn’t happy. “It is difficult to come here and do anything, but let’s at least try”. The NY attacks are changing things – new relationships, one small bridge built. Tony’s odyssey. Blessed are the peacemakers – not around here they’re not. Syria is vital – it’s hard-line, an enemy of Israel. We have a common interest in peace. They all stand clapping Assad, but little really changes. Syria is linked to terrorism with infographics. Syria will stick to a removal from the occupied territories. We join our friend in Jerusalem. What will he achieve? Two messages: support for the “coalition”, stop the drama. Hoping for a historic declaration in Saudi Arabia. Remember the prize.
Warplanes keep dropping bombs – on a “stronghold of the Taliban”. The Muslims would like the war to stop for Ramadan, festive peace. Relentless bombings continue. Over the past few years, we’ve always fought during Ramadan, say the Northern Alliance. They cheer the bombs. Inflammation of public outrage. Thank you.
American people should stay calm. Bush throws a ball to represent life continuing. Ministers are losing the battle for the hearts of mind for the British people. Duncan-Smith is talking about a confusing war, confusing messages. You need to sing from the same hymn sheet. The government says thank you, but fuck off. Thank you very much. Bulletproof doors that have locked doors. A man on a plane points at the door – BA and Virgin point out the hinges. A repeat of the incidents of September 11. Richard Branson says its great, experts say it’s dangerous. Pilots are against the doors – they are a marketing device. But the airlines are convinced.
No new cases of foot and mouth. The government wants rights to kill any animal with the passing of the “Animal Health Act”. What will the government kill? Sheep farmers may have the most to worry about. Or sheep. Empty fields, ovine holocaust. A farmer speaks of vaccination, cutting vet’s wages, contractors back and forth, tourists. A cool reception.
Confidence has dropped to its lowest level. A woman in Bluewater tells us that people are pessimistic about the economy but reckon they’ll be alright. An uneven picture “They want to buy!” “People were devastated”. People have more money because they’re not going on holiday. Manufacturers are having a horrible time. 2 million letters don’t get there on time every day. Beta interferon for all. Dumped cars are big magnets for arsonists. Watch out if you’ve got a shit car. Woman in a green jacket shouting over the sound of crushing metal. Sir Peter will receive one and a half million pounds. Farmers are taking advantage of climate change. Global warming supplying the pickle industry with walnuts. Climate change. Obviously.
Party leaders have portraits. Anna Ford half-smiles. Charles Kennedy makes people laugh.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Cafe (2003)
So, the cafe seems empty, but isn’t. A few anthropomorphic shadows fill the difficult voids. I sit, with slight discomfort from attempting to ascertain my place in the room. I am customer, young, perhaps waiting. I try and break my mould by removing a book from my pocket. I have decided to be alone but my self consciousness betrays my waiting. I want to tell each individual that I am not waiting for anyone, merely passing some time, in from the cold. I look around me and the cafe still seems empty. I readjust in my seat. Try to read the first paragraph, acutely aware that it is the first page, and would feel so much more comfortable midway through. Try again, but the phrases mix with my thoughts, each time sub-consciously returning to the first words. An octopus? Return again to them.
My attention is waning for the book, my mind straying. “Hi, there.”
“Hi. Could I get a coffee. Just filter. Cheers”
“Sure.”
The exchange is forgotten. - “It was a dream. No, it wasn’t.” My mind skims the words fast, the implications faster. Style, pace, double meaning. Pretensions, translation. Again the paragraph is lost and my eyes track back to the beginning. While my vacant stare feels along the words in a mockery of myself, I feel another imaginary stare taking me in. Waiting. Tense. I am neither of these things. Now both. Again the words elude me, my focus lost. As an exercise, I read the paragraph again, taking no meaning, just a sense. A feeling from the choice of words, resenting anything more. Great beads of blood? Sweat? A sense of heaviness and penance. The octopus is a dream. No, perhaps not.
My coffee arrives and for the first time I get a real sense of outside involvement in my activity. It is only a glance, but reminds me, beyond my perception of events, I am still on this page. If anyone cares or has noticed, they know I am involved in unrelated thought or suspect me of serious study. Strangely, I am neither. Now both. Adding sugar and laughing at myself, the situation, the pettiness, I glance around at the empty cafe, nodding a vague hello at the occupant of another table. Through carelessness, through absent-mindedness, I have spilled some coffee into the saucer. It is a large cup, I notice, with too small a handle, as I mop the spillage with a tissue. Again I laugh, but more through discomfort than actual amusement, though this amuses me.
Relaxing, the book is making stabs at sense. “Everywhere the same catastrophe.” “The very air was in a fever.” I put the book back in my pocket, its sense not welcome. I arrange my hands deliberately, sipping my coffee. I look around the empty cafe, expecting too much. Then rise. I guess I don’t feel like a cup of coffee right now.
My attention is waning for the book, my mind straying. “Hi, there.”
“Hi. Could I get a coffee. Just filter. Cheers”
“Sure.”
The exchange is forgotten. - “It was a dream. No, it wasn’t.” My mind skims the words fast, the implications faster. Style, pace, double meaning. Pretensions, translation. Again the paragraph is lost and my eyes track back to the beginning. While my vacant stare feels along the words in a mockery of myself, I feel another imaginary stare taking me in. Waiting. Tense. I am neither of these things. Now both. Again the words elude me, my focus lost. As an exercise, I read the paragraph again, taking no meaning, just a sense. A feeling from the choice of words, resenting anything more. Great beads of blood? Sweat? A sense of heaviness and penance. The octopus is a dream. No, perhaps not.
My coffee arrives and for the first time I get a real sense of outside involvement in my activity. It is only a glance, but reminds me, beyond my perception of events, I am still on this page. If anyone cares or has noticed, they know I am involved in unrelated thought or suspect me of serious study. Strangely, I am neither. Now both. Adding sugar and laughing at myself, the situation, the pettiness, I glance around at the empty cafe, nodding a vague hello at the occupant of another table. Through carelessness, through absent-mindedness, I have spilled some coffee into the saucer. It is a large cup, I notice, with too small a handle, as I mop the spillage with a tissue. Again I laugh, but more through discomfort than actual amusement, though this amuses me.
Relaxing, the book is making stabs at sense. “Everywhere the same catastrophe.” “The very air was in a fever.” I put the book back in my pocket, its sense not welcome. I arrange my hands deliberately, sipping my coffee. I look around the empty cafe, expecting too much. Then rise. I guess I don’t feel like a cup of coffee right now.
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
Stay put a thousand times.
It's healthy to write. I'm sure it is. I can feel myself get into a near panic. Is it the caffeine? The procrastination or the low self-esteem? Is it stir-craziness? I respond to this state regularly with the most unhealthy of looping futile habits and distractions. I have thought recently that a great route to a more positive mental state, a more peaceful level of thought, perception and increased productivity would be to time myself - set timers for all my activity. Spend 25 minutes on this, 10 minutes on that.
Also I keep coming back to the idea of a long list on both problems and topics. Problems like - wanting to punch my own face, feeling overwhelmed. Topics like - self-esteem, self-hatred, procrastination, perspective, fearlessness. Googling these things or collecting my thoughts on them into neat categories in Evernote.
Technological solutions for organic problems. Maybe that's the problem.
There's something hugely powerful about "return to your breath". Your mind will wander a thousand times, bring yourself back to your breath a thousand times. Come back to the present. If you wander into the future or amble back into the past a thousand times, then come back to the present moment a thousand times. Once you know an impulse or a habit will keep knocking at the door, then resolve to acknowledge it and stay put. Stay put a thousand times. Then a thousand more. It's very comforting to know that each time it may well take less willpower as the benefits of refusing to answer that knocking make themselves clear.
The flurry of thoughts that hold me back and hold me down is a constant assault on peace, productivity and change. I'll try to describe the timeline of the most recent instance of such a flurry. Habits and impulses force an internal dialogue - I need the loo and literally have to consciously assess whether following that urge is a good plan. I need to drink some water, the urge to have coffee seems wrong, what with my state of almost-panic. I briefly hate myself for my seeming inability to drink enough water. While in the bathroom, I consider the tension in my back and think to myself that there is not enough time somehow to deal with that, remembering the other day writing that "things that clear your head and make you better don't take time, they make time." I think how I should organise this simple things I've learned in some new fashion in order that I might recall them when they might be useful. I think how I should move from the sofa to my desk to be in a better posture then feel fear that sitting at my desk will make my head clear enough to feel my panic, worry and critical thoughts too intensely. I am, at this point, fighting clarity.
By this stage, I've already lost track of many of my little worries, lost track of the little jabs I've had at myself. Losing track of my thoughts on how to change makes me feel insane. "There's no way", I think "no way I can affect change when this is my mental landscape." I think to Epic Win and how I seem never to complete the basic items of life that I have set out for myself. Tony Schwartz wrote, in the Harvard Business Review that "the proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you'll undertake, and then get out of the way." It seems wonderful and I have sought, over the past few months to truly understand how much of my experience is living out habits and how I might change them. It's so hard for someone so deeply pessimistic in their interpretative style as I am not to hate themselves for relenting to the unforgiving force of habit, familiarity and repetition. Associated calming releases of dopamine bring you back to the screen, the endless repetition of clicks, familiar apps and keystrokes creating your destiny as Lao Tse predicts. Destiny follows character follows habit follows action follows word follows thought. You are what you do is more accurately expressed as you will become what you think.
Each habitual urge needs a proper response. The desire to have a healthy response to an unhealthy or unproductive urge is fraught with self-criticism. I berate myself for procrastinating, then think of hitting myself in the arm, then am in the blink of an eye berating myself for not stretching more as a more healthy response to delusion, distraction and confusion.
Knowing that listening to music would help you is not the same as listening to some music. The map is not the territory.
Also I keep coming back to the idea of a long list on both problems and topics. Problems like - wanting to punch my own face, feeling overwhelmed. Topics like - self-esteem, self-hatred, procrastination, perspective, fearlessness. Googling these things or collecting my thoughts on them into neat categories in Evernote.
Technological solutions for organic problems. Maybe that's the problem.
There's something hugely powerful about "return to your breath". Your mind will wander a thousand times, bring yourself back to your breath a thousand times. Come back to the present. If you wander into the future or amble back into the past a thousand times, then come back to the present moment a thousand times. Once you know an impulse or a habit will keep knocking at the door, then resolve to acknowledge it and stay put. Stay put a thousand times. Then a thousand more. It's very comforting to know that each time it may well take less willpower as the benefits of refusing to answer that knocking make themselves clear.
The flurry of thoughts that hold me back and hold me down is a constant assault on peace, productivity and change. I'll try to describe the timeline of the most recent instance of such a flurry. Habits and impulses force an internal dialogue - I need the loo and literally have to consciously assess whether following that urge is a good plan. I need to drink some water, the urge to have coffee seems wrong, what with my state of almost-panic. I briefly hate myself for my seeming inability to drink enough water. While in the bathroom, I consider the tension in my back and think to myself that there is not enough time somehow to deal with that, remembering the other day writing that "things that clear your head and make you better don't take time, they make time." I think how I should organise this simple things I've learned in some new fashion in order that I might recall them when they might be useful. I think how I should move from the sofa to my desk to be in a better posture then feel fear that sitting at my desk will make my head clear enough to feel my panic, worry and critical thoughts too intensely. I am, at this point, fighting clarity.
By this stage, I've already lost track of many of my little worries, lost track of the little jabs I've had at myself. Losing track of my thoughts on how to change makes me feel insane. "There's no way", I think "no way I can affect change when this is my mental landscape." I think to Epic Win and how I seem never to complete the basic items of life that I have set out for myself. Tony Schwartz wrote, in the Harvard Business Review that "the proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you'll undertake, and then get out of the way." It seems wonderful and I have sought, over the past few months to truly understand how much of my experience is living out habits and how I might change them. It's so hard for someone so deeply pessimistic in their interpretative style as I am not to hate themselves for relenting to the unforgiving force of habit, familiarity and repetition. Associated calming releases of dopamine bring you back to the screen, the endless repetition of clicks, familiar apps and keystrokes creating your destiny as Lao Tse predicts. Destiny follows character follows habit follows action follows word follows thought. You are what you do is more accurately expressed as you will become what you think.
Each habitual urge needs a proper response. The desire to have a healthy response to an unhealthy or unproductive urge is fraught with self-criticism. I berate myself for procrastinating, then think of hitting myself in the arm, then am in the blink of an eye berating myself for not stretching more as a more healthy response to delusion, distraction and confusion.
Knowing that listening to music would help you is not the same as listening to some music. The map is not the territory.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
The truth of inaccuracy.
I tried the Dragon dictation app today to see how accurate it would be. The results were so jarring and so surreally poignant that I punctuated them (as well as I could) and posted them here.
---------------------
You would think that thinking was a good thing. Reason how, great friend, which made us John's Shoney, must be a good thing, to bring into Togo precious eternity. Board-game enjoying the attention, respect. Dante isn't the money, think I, think he and customary. My desk on the television, offering inspiration for two ends on my new, my festive, to the bank.
Conscience make enough to thought of a bucket. Tonic makes me feel - cannot collect that the thoughts come. Transfer them to... what's that? The suicide ligation of the NEH pot today? "At-ish to the laptop station" he said "I might be more noncommittal without having to fill the program for additional authority into squiggly redlined of correction dome. Are not to be to Kevin of sushi?" which I've never had (he has) experiencing a treat. It's called outside. My left shoulder, receiving up against the Gospel teaching, comes on the inspector's debt and spending.
I know a car. I'll call it, anymore than I'm stood, heroin addict, every thought the points toward Caesar. Reason found this against rookie memories. Black girl, I punish myself - refill Kijiji. I've had much myself, because washing up my kidney pores and often negative rumination. The codification of depressive mental activity hotline from positive psychology and he's estimate my consideration of self, more Panadol. The semi of quinine taste reminds me of finding a sucker and drinks, free and far too costly, consumed in the life committed to running, hiding. She can metaphor of assignment fair S side when watching his response to Foltz. "Would mind, just can you delineate your man?"
"I did Coke what is" my guys' Bostons, eating in Dominica, said. No reservations bring they. Can I say, readily seeing a pleasant emptiness, "Comes this ballgame, you're vacated citizen"? They've boy and I have nothing to add my thoughts. Wife also, expensive indulgence, the practice of thought to text is having its intended effect of stunning the mind. Around nothing to Linda. Meditation is a skill, bending, and by the noble monks and David Lynch, I like the CDs and apps!
That guy committed to practicing my pasta dissections... I enjoy food and have paroxysms of joy of my favorite restaurants, trying to pin down or express (compete me) the genius of the simple on the pretentious, but do I want to compare myself to practice cost and enter? Enter Christina BDP. Competitive world culinary nuts choking for price positions were gone. I love to see the well, the north glories, but do I want to be for information on Memphis toll?
Questioning my ability to perceive honestly and directly from the back of destruction bites again and my wondering sorts of like insecurities and worries, my stinks (possibly entirely misguided) tell me that I need many to follow plan policies and they will need me when I need to. Guy keeping my shape and you will come across entry points. The possible county to safety desperation and that hang around my every split second of indecision agitating reasons
power, going out to lost, well for guidance will. Am to my want it more and more?
There, too many lessons to learn of credence, strength in the face. Habit - two basic results. I find some comfort in my tendency to stuff, to the talk list. Methodically process it. Beat e-mails. File shows. A watch! Late today activity is, but the strength and weakness. I stopped my e-mails of the Boston refund friends.
Link to a half avid, yet I'm stuck by the worry that the video will not take my attention. Family leave room for self hating. Mine talk to my perch comes to me, a taxi. Fifth and semi-purge comes to its familiar obstacle without strict format, uses its effects. If I pick jeans, I would choose not to retreat and Tiki and effective habits of failing self-confidence for Dana pizzas touched you to dinner me cat for that so that the test this particular jump is pretty good. I believe this crap, this effect, extremely satisfying and I needs my faith in his assignments and differentiations. I wish I could keep talking and film. I am too diced onions.
Version comes. I wish you could apply somehow to my failings. I must pick up that book about how smart you are not. Every idea is a heaven sent, blessings. You try to put yourself into idealized picture. I'm so sure that I could race the paste, the bike tune up. A piece about state to video happiness was on as I can remember that picture myself. So far above! My man (my hope is full of talented vocalist) isn't able in my Jenna jeans, but already started - nothing fishy.
Sleep himself and on, television, on! My skills and abilities and pronunciation, so the mentalist isn't suitable for cost identity. Construct myself… It into me today so well, I cannot break down some of my best aspects that describes problems. Cognitive dissonance as reality. Corrections and sans precepts and conceptions. Okay again with the popular. To yourself as planned maintenance, teaching and fitness, forward motion with gone focus, floors thinking to access. The space has to come, so like an infinite experiencing! Every person puts it in the morning, turning every social network, connecting every other one. Is the knowledge that there is judgment (if he imagining) that pathetic?
---------------------
You would think that thinking was a good thing. Reason how, great friend, which made us John's Shoney, must be a good thing, to bring into Togo precious eternity. Board-game enjoying the attention, respect. Dante isn't the money, think I, think he and customary. My desk on the television, offering inspiration for two ends on my new, my festive, to the bank.
Conscience make enough to thought of a bucket. Tonic makes me feel - cannot collect that the thoughts come. Transfer them to... what's that? The suicide ligation of the NEH pot today? "At-ish to the laptop station" he said "I might be more noncommittal without having to fill the program for additional authority into squiggly redlined of correction dome. Are not to be to Kevin of sushi?" which I've never had (he has) experiencing a treat. It's called outside. My left shoulder, receiving up against the Gospel teaching, comes on the inspector's debt and spending.
I know a car. I'll call it, anymore than I'm stood, heroin addict, every thought the points toward Caesar. Reason found this against rookie memories. Black girl, I punish myself - refill Kijiji. I've had much myself, because washing up my kidney pores and often negative rumination. The codification of depressive mental activity hotline from positive psychology and he's estimate my consideration of self, more Panadol. The semi of quinine taste reminds me of finding a sucker and drinks, free and far too costly, consumed in the life committed to running, hiding. She can metaphor of assignment fair S side when watching his response to Foltz. "Would mind, just can you delineate your man?"
"I did Coke what is" my guys' Bostons, eating in Dominica, said. No reservations bring they. Can I say, readily seeing a pleasant emptiness, "Comes this ballgame, you're vacated citizen"? They've boy and I have nothing to add my thoughts. Wife also, expensive indulgence, the practice of thought to text is having its intended effect of stunning the mind. Around nothing to Linda. Meditation is a skill, bending, and by the noble monks and David Lynch, I like the CDs and apps!
That guy committed to practicing my pasta dissections... I enjoy food and have paroxysms of joy of my favorite restaurants, trying to pin down or express (compete me) the genius of the simple on the pretentious, but do I want to compare myself to practice cost and enter? Enter Christina BDP. Competitive world culinary nuts choking for price positions were gone. I love to see the well, the north glories, but do I want to be for information on Memphis toll?
Questioning my ability to perceive honestly and directly from the back of destruction bites again and my wondering sorts of like insecurities and worries, my stinks (possibly entirely misguided) tell me that I need many to follow plan policies and they will need me when I need to. Guy keeping my shape and you will come across entry points. The possible county to safety desperation and that hang around my every split second of indecision agitating reasons
power, going out to lost, well for guidance will. Am to my want it more and more?
There, too many lessons to learn of credence, strength in the face. Habit - two basic results. I find some comfort in my tendency to stuff, to the talk list. Methodically process it. Beat e-mails. File shows. A watch! Late today activity is, but the strength and weakness. I stopped my e-mails of the Boston refund friends.
Link to a half avid, yet I'm stuck by the worry that the video will not take my attention. Family leave room for self hating. Mine talk to my perch comes to me, a taxi. Fifth and semi-purge comes to its familiar obstacle without strict format, uses its effects. If I pick jeans, I would choose not to retreat and Tiki and effective habits of failing self-confidence for Dana pizzas touched you to dinner me cat for that so that the test this particular jump is pretty good. I believe this crap, this effect, extremely satisfying and I needs my faith in his assignments and differentiations. I wish I could keep talking and film. I am too diced onions.
Version comes. I wish you could apply somehow to my failings. I must pick up that book about how smart you are not. Every idea is a heaven sent, blessings. You try to put yourself into idealized picture. I'm so sure that I could race the paste, the bike tune up. A piece about state to video happiness was on as I can remember that picture myself. So far above! My man (my hope is full of talented vocalist) isn't able in my Jenna jeans, but already started - nothing fishy.
Sleep himself and on, television, on! My skills and abilities and pronunciation, so the mentalist isn't suitable for cost identity. Construct myself… It into me today so well, I cannot break down some of my best aspects that describes problems. Cognitive dissonance as reality. Corrections and sans precepts and conceptions. Okay again with the popular. To yourself as planned maintenance, teaching and fitness, forward motion with gone focus, floors thinking to access. The space has to come, so like an infinite experiencing! Every person puts it in the morning, turning every social network, connecting every other one. Is the knowledge that there is judgment (if he imagining) that pathetic?
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Attention, please.
People often make the point that they feel like a child and everyone else is a grown up. I feel like that all the time. In actuality, I am immature in so many ways, primarily those relating to responsibility, sense of humour and relationships. It is in the basics of life - brushing my teeth, planning meals, washing up without getting bored or letting my thoughts wander - that I feel this the most. Has everyone else been honing their skills while I've been smoking weed and watching movies? Did I miss the opportunity for quotidian proficiency while getting better at Fifa 06?
My mind escapes my control.
Csikszentmihalyi writes that the trick is controlling attention, that, if I remember correctly, consciousness itself is a point of attention and to master where our attention goes and what it does when it gets there is to become a master of consciousness. It sounds brilliant. It's so hard, when caught in the obviousness of determinism to actually believe that there is any power within to direct attention. I need to randomly believe, to have faith that there can be change, that I can enact my will upon myself, shape myself. I want to believe something that I do not. Is there a word for that or at least a popular concept I can cling to? It makes no sense to understand human beings, or at least the conscious part of them, as stories - cosmic justice, equilibrium, happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales. And yet, we glimpse magic here and there. The forces just beyond our comprehension are beguiling and become the repositories of our grandest narratives. Love! Oh, love, you are the saviour of mankind, the last words on our lips, the absolute, the meaning of life. Though we all pay lip service to the Enlightenment giants on whose shoulders we lazily recline, few can cram the wonder and enormity of love into a little box marked "an evolutionary construct useful for familial bonding and reproductive instincts". Few would want to take the soaring grandeur of their personal musical ecstasies and dissect them with science into anything more mechanical. So how to grab on to wonder while still clutching treasured reason with both hands?
Surrender. Let go. No-one taught you how to use your omnivorous teeth to eat meat by tearing with canines, cleaving with incisors and to chew and grind tough legumes with your molars. You were just hungry, so you ate. Let the mind go quiet, do not seek to put your wits about every thing that comes to your attention. Instinct will guide if you can make a meditation of these things. Guide yourself as well as you can, then check your progress once in a while. For god's sake, enjoy the journey for that is all there is. Do not seek too quickly to find joy or you will be relentlessly tripped by realisations of how fleeting it is. Ride out bad weather because it is a near certainty that summer will come.
My mind escapes my control.
Csikszentmihalyi writes that the trick is controlling attention, that, if I remember correctly, consciousness itself is a point of attention and to master where our attention goes and what it does when it gets there is to become a master of consciousness. It sounds brilliant. It's so hard, when caught in the obviousness of determinism to actually believe that there is any power within to direct attention. I need to randomly believe, to have faith that there can be change, that I can enact my will upon myself, shape myself. I want to believe something that I do not. Is there a word for that or at least a popular concept I can cling to? It makes no sense to understand human beings, or at least the conscious part of them, as stories - cosmic justice, equilibrium, happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales. And yet, we glimpse magic here and there. The forces just beyond our comprehension are beguiling and become the repositories of our grandest narratives. Love! Oh, love, you are the saviour of mankind, the last words on our lips, the absolute, the meaning of life. Though we all pay lip service to the Enlightenment giants on whose shoulders we lazily recline, few can cram the wonder and enormity of love into a little box marked "an evolutionary construct useful for familial bonding and reproductive instincts". Few would want to take the soaring grandeur of their personal musical ecstasies and dissect them with science into anything more mechanical. So how to grab on to wonder while still clutching treasured reason with both hands?
Surrender. Let go. No-one taught you how to use your omnivorous teeth to eat meat by tearing with canines, cleaving with incisors and to chew and grind tough legumes with your molars. You were just hungry, so you ate. Let the mind go quiet, do not seek to put your wits about every thing that comes to your attention. Instinct will guide if you can make a meditation of these things. Guide yourself as well as you can, then check your progress once in a while. For god's sake, enjoy the journey for that is all there is. Do not seek too quickly to find joy or you will be relentlessly tripped by realisations of how fleeting it is. Ride out bad weather because it is a near certainty that summer will come.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Input, Stephanie, input.
I begin the day in a familiar way. I scroll through my RSS feeds, alighting first at the most important categories, marked by a jutting underscore - _Files, _Games, _TV. In this way I can be up to date with all available illegal media; if it is not already in my torrent queue, then The Pirate Bay is my next port of call, replacing the recently euthanised Megaupload and Filesonic. I am satisfying an unexplained completism, a desire, born of youth spent in video shops, to have all desired media immediately available, even as time limitations shuffle the unwatched DivX ephemera onto drives, only to languish until new formats make it all as undesirable as dusty VHS stacks.
Am I trawling this information glut for inspiration? If I am, I find scant satisfaction. Stephen Fry has some new Windows phones; art galleries continue to host impenetrably described shows of one kind and another; Bing has added some new features; a friend’s video is getting blog traction; Urkel is on Dancing with the Stars; US politics continues to be absurd and difficult to comprehend; Tumblr continues a pissing contest of obscurity and elegance. I glance at the clock. Twenty minutes has passed without any information of note resonating with anything soulful, human, emotional or worthy in me. I am more informed, but one could hardly say better informed. My only victory is in chipping away at those numbers, written in bold, to the left of my screen. Art and Design - 797. Media - 413. I imagine myself as Stephen Fry did in the Fry Chronicles, as a fleshy Johnny-5, endlessly demanding and devouring Input. INPUT, Stephanie, INPUT. Blessed, however, with the wonder of the bottomless glass from the well of knowledge that Google Reader, Byline and the like provide, I find myself not flipping the pages of encyclopaediae and digitally impressing the world’s facts and figures into some military-grade solid state storage, but repeating the same hypnagogic routine of parading diverting information snippets before my glazed eyes, allowing only trickles of reality through to my conscious mind. The compulsive process of starred items, adding videos to Watch Later, pinning to Pinterest, reblogging on three Tumblrs, tweeting half an opinion and sharing the least fascinating to Google+ occupies the remaining dregs of my brain, repurposing the best of what I find into a series of self-branded feeds - creating feedback into the system to stand in for my steadily dissipating identity.
Am I trawling this information glut for inspiration? If I am, I find scant satisfaction. Stephen Fry has some new Windows phones; art galleries continue to host impenetrably described shows of one kind and another; Bing has added some new features; a friend’s video is getting blog traction; Urkel is on Dancing with the Stars; US politics continues to be absurd and difficult to comprehend; Tumblr continues a pissing contest of obscurity and elegance. I glance at the clock. Twenty minutes has passed without any information of note resonating with anything soulful, human, emotional or worthy in me. I am more informed, but one could hardly say better informed. My only victory is in chipping away at those numbers, written in bold, to the left of my screen. Art and Design - 797. Media - 413. I imagine myself as Stephen Fry did in the Fry Chronicles, as a fleshy Johnny-5, endlessly demanding and devouring Input. INPUT, Stephanie, INPUT. Blessed, however, with the wonder of the bottomless glass from the well of knowledge that Google Reader, Byline and the like provide, I find myself not flipping the pages of encyclopaediae and digitally impressing the world’s facts and figures into some military-grade solid state storage, but repeating the same hypnagogic routine of parading diverting information snippets before my glazed eyes, allowing only trickles of reality through to my conscious mind. The compulsive process of starred items, adding videos to Watch Later, pinning to Pinterest, reblogging on three Tumblrs, tweeting half an opinion and sharing the least fascinating to Google+ occupies the remaining dregs of my brain, repurposing the best of what I find into a series of self-branded feeds - creating feedback into the system to stand in for my steadily dissipating identity.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Stopping myself in my tracks.
The impulse is to do it. The obstacle is doing it well. It is so clear to me that to write every day is an important exercise; it seems that I must care about writing. When writing about a particular subject, the Google instinct is deeply ingrained. My now-15-year habit states firmly that someone must have covered this subject already exhaustively and I cannot approach it without first reading all that they have to say. I'm sure this is a common ailment of our age. There are clues, facts and insights that can only improve my perspective and there is analysis which must be studied. The mission stops there, paralysed by an infinite library. When writing more broadly, fashioning an Opinion Piece, I have a feeling that my thoughts could be more refined, better hewn by endless note-taking and restructuring. The mission draws to a close, stuck in development, fatally cursed by a sense of inadequacy.
As a result of what might be idealism, only two paths exist for me and my will to create. The first is a straight line of improvisation - automatic and instinctive, spitting my best of the moment, freestyling towards a vision of instant publication. I find it all derivative, childish even - a raw energy of motivation, pulling from wherever inspiration is found in the mind. It is a style of creation for creation's sake, music to absolve silence like words spoken to fill an awkward pause. The second is an attempt to create something wonderful, something worthy of an ethereal self-regard. It is a desire to represent some altogether imaginary true self and present it proudly to the world.
There must be a Third Way. There must be some form of creativity that straddles the divide - a way above, beyond or between these routes to, on the one hand, a sort of desperate babble and an evocation of what I once called "the unfettered democracy of the mind" and on the other, eternal research and a model of permanent creative dissatisfaction. The latter is the worse of the two, collation of content and perspectives extending the remit and pushing an end point ever further away as more ideas come in. The ambition grows with new concepts and the goal deviates toward impossibility.
Kurt Schwitters, a Dadaist and "assembler of garbage", said that "everything the artist spits is art". This stuck with me as I grew up and found all populist arguments on art stuck in the 1920s, the endless question, even at what should have been high levels of discussion, being "but, is it art?" Perhaps I gave up too quickly and resigned myself too easily to fighting with the popular paradigms of understanding. I have always found myself, from topic to topic, stuck at a point of puerile argument with the mainstream, debating the status quo. Free will? How could we base our society on it? Iraq? Why does the news report only the deaths of the paler skinned? Art? Why has its progress become so self-reflexive and contrary? How could any art be considered good or bad?
In trying to find a constructive place to think and work among all of these barriers and confusions, I have sought to disappear. In working exclusively with samples, in focusing attention away from myself and towards a screen full of manipulated video familiarities, I have lazily and expediently dissolved my self into a whitewash of culture. What better way to absolve myself of the responsibilities of expression and the commitment of ever stating anything? I used to say that to define anything was impossible, so to speak of it with more accuracy one must talk "around" the subject. The remaining negative space could then maybe give a sense of it. The idea that a word cloud of related topics and images is somehow a more accurate signifier that the name of an idea or object. That idea persists in my mind alongside the adage that "those who know don't speak and those who speak don't know". I want to yell and remain silent, argue and never make a point. I want to exist and create in the space between what is and what, by definition, can never be. I am a loathful product of mass media and postmodernism unwilling to engage, unable to mature. I long to find sincerity, expression and the long-promised post-ironic age and there and then begin the brave process of being involved, accepting truths and saying something I mean.
As a result of what might be idealism, only two paths exist for me and my will to create. The first is a straight line of improvisation - automatic and instinctive, spitting my best of the moment, freestyling towards a vision of instant publication. I find it all derivative, childish even - a raw energy of motivation, pulling from wherever inspiration is found in the mind. It is a style of creation for creation's sake, music to absolve silence like words spoken to fill an awkward pause. The second is an attempt to create something wonderful, something worthy of an ethereal self-regard. It is a desire to represent some altogether imaginary true self and present it proudly to the world.
There must be a Third Way. There must be some form of creativity that straddles the divide - a way above, beyond or between these routes to, on the one hand, a sort of desperate babble and an evocation of what I once called "the unfettered democracy of the mind" and on the other, eternal research and a model of permanent creative dissatisfaction. The latter is the worse of the two, collation of content and perspectives extending the remit and pushing an end point ever further away as more ideas come in. The ambition grows with new concepts and the goal deviates toward impossibility.
Kurt Schwitters, a Dadaist and "assembler of garbage", said that "everything the artist spits is art". This stuck with me as I grew up and found all populist arguments on art stuck in the 1920s, the endless question, even at what should have been high levels of discussion, being "but, is it art?" Perhaps I gave up too quickly and resigned myself too easily to fighting with the popular paradigms of understanding. I have always found myself, from topic to topic, stuck at a point of puerile argument with the mainstream, debating the status quo. Free will? How could we base our society on it? Iraq? Why does the news report only the deaths of the paler skinned? Art? Why has its progress become so self-reflexive and contrary? How could any art be considered good or bad?
In trying to find a constructive place to think and work among all of these barriers and confusions, I have sought to disappear. In working exclusively with samples, in focusing attention away from myself and towards a screen full of manipulated video familiarities, I have lazily and expediently dissolved my self into a whitewash of culture. What better way to absolve myself of the responsibilities of expression and the commitment of ever stating anything? I used to say that to define anything was impossible, so to speak of it with more accuracy one must talk "around" the subject. The remaining negative space could then maybe give a sense of it. The idea that a word cloud of related topics and images is somehow a more accurate signifier that the name of an idea or object. That idea persists in my mind alongside the adage that "those who know don't speak and those who speak don't know". I want to yell and remain silent, argue and never make a point. I want to exist and create in the space between what is and what, by definition, can never be. I am a loathful product of mass media and postmodernism unwilling to engage, unable to mature. I long to find sincerity, expression and the long-promised post-ironic age and there and then begin the brave process of being involved, accepting truths and saying something I mean.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Automatic writing #1
I have been following the route of grasping, methodical creativity, of sticking to mechanical tricks of creation in order to release the sluices of the generative mind. Part of this has been practicing automatic writing. Typing fluidly and fluently into Evernote as often as I remember to. Publishing these randomly to a mostly unattended blog seems like a slightly bold and intensely contemporary addition to the process. The results, close to nonsensical, sophomoric and derivative, follow.
-------------------
The bees are dying. No more beards of bees and we will have to teach children, as they come of age, of merely the birds. What have the birds to teach our young? Twittering and fluttering, flitting and flying. These are the not the cornerstones of our land-based life. No, we must teach our children of institutions, rocks and stones, steel and girders. Teach of the the makers and the made, the sellers and the sold, bringers of great peace and wagers of great war. Oceans were crossed, mountains were climbed. Learn all the names and some of the initials. History books must be torn up and all the proper nouns, state capitals and heads of state rearranged, scrambled, aligned with dates then used as kindling to start fires of imagination. Be like Plato, Alexander and Jefferson. Be like BJ, be like the Bear.
-------------------
It is the strangest fascination, to have a sense there is a list of things to read, to watch, to download and peruse, only to satisfy that urge with searching for more items to add. To feel the weight of the unwatched in your Netflix queue, then find yourself browsing further, extending your internal obligations.
-------------------
Self help sucks. Triteness and repetition will always bring the creative mind, longing for individuality, down. How do they know there are seven habits of the highly effective? How do they know how effective these people are? Might they not be abusing their kids? Why stop at 42 ways to feel better right now? Why not make yourself endlessly feel better writing the list onwards and onwards, a meta-self-help vortex of ways to feel better right now. Why feel better at all? What's in it for the cynics, progenies of Diogenes?
-------------------
To do lists are confusions. Getting on the horse feels more like getting on the cow. Every list another scrawl in a worthless journal of the damned. Is the noise getting to me? The children, needless of education, always shouting; everything is important to them. Numbers on my lists, mocking my lack of motivation. I don't want to get to number 14, I want to crawl away from number 1. The kettle is on, the tea ceremony is unlikely to live up to any sense of meditation or pageantry. I want a cigarette, but a dollar saved is a dollar earned and I need a job. Automatic writing can be pretty grim when your mind is weary. Let's see if the horse can wake me.
As soon as I commenced the list, I noticed on the bathroom floor a hairband, twisted once into a sideways figure 8. I immediately contemplated the infinite. Or rather, I immediately contemplated the contemplation of the infinite and enjoyed a benign and tiny coincident pattern.
People are eager to talk about doing things that make you uncomfortable in order that you might have a more complete, coherent and satisfying life. I sometimes shy away from even the tiniest discomfort. And a restless lonely state pervades. Humans around offer no succor. Is it a desire to coincide or one to connect? These are all real people, but their socialization pushes them away from the different. I am the same, mist of the time, but I seek the opposite; I seek the direct.
-------------------
We have to learn to let go. We grip too tightly to our presuppositions, possessions, needs and drives. Identity is a construct that we nest in; every principle we cling to a comforting addition to the nest. Believe in yourself say pundits and posters; have faith in lack of reason. Nihilism is no refuge.
-------------------
And here it goes, round and round. The days merge into each other, mimicking more fraudulent behaviour. It's at very least an anachronism, seeing what comes out, like vomit. Please, we cry, please let it be just this. Just this and nothing else. If it is more, then we are bereft, failed and wan. Go to your congressman, plead with him to limit ambition, to take away the pain. Here it comes again, an over-hyped tornado of truth, blazing a trail towards bethlehem, to die. Here it comes again, wanting to be felt as truth, not absolute truth, but a basic human truth, plaintive and embarrassed to be considered. Descartes wanted more, Plato wanted more - it's okay, kids, calm down, be still. It's all good, as they used to say. How can a phrase so well-meaning become passe so quickly? I write as I breathe, in short bursts, with the only purpose being to stay alive.
-------------------
I do love the way the words come, flowing out, grabbing the sediment of half-remembered references with them. Staccato samples of speech, movies, comic books, blending with the infinite and the ether, spewing themselves into arbitrary yet expressive shapes. I love the way they come, oodles, bundles, bushels of words, weaving and warping, subtle and unbidden.
-------------------
The bees are dying. No more beards of bees and we will have to teach children, as they come of age, of merely the birds. What have the birds to teach our young? Twittering and fluttering, flitting and flying. These are the not the cornerstones of our land-based life. No, we must teach our children of institutions, rocks and stones, steel and girders. Teach of the the makers and the made, the sellers and the sold, bringers of great peace and wagers of great war. Oceans were crossed, mountains were climbed. Learn all the names and some of the initials. History books must be torn up and all the proper nouns, state capitals and heads of state rearranged, scrambled, aligned with dates then used as kindling to start fires of imagination. Be like Plato, Alexander and Jefferson. Be like BJ, be like the Bear.
-------------------
It is the strangest fascination, to have a sense there is a list of things to read, to watch, to download and peruse, only to satisfy that urge with searching for more items to add. To feel the weight of the unwatched in your Netflix queue, then find yourself browsing further, extending your internal obligations.
-------------------
Self help sucks. Triteness and repetition will always bring the creative mind, longing for individuality, down. How do they know there are seven habits of the highly effective? How do they know how effective these people are? Might they not be abusing their kids? Why stop at 42 ways to feel better right now? Why not make yourself endlessly feel better writing the list onwards and onwards, a meta-self-help vortex of ways to feel better right now. Why feel better at all? What's in it for the cynics, progenies of Diogenes?
-------------------
To do lists are confusions. Getting on the horse feels more like getting on the cow. Every list another scrawl in a worthless journal of the damned. Is the noise getting to me? The children, needless of education, always shouting; everything is important to them. Numbers on my lists, mocking my lack of motivation. I don't want to get to number 14, I want to crawl away from number 1. The kettle is on, the tea ceremony is unlikely to live up to any sense of meditation or pageantry. I want a cigarette, but a dollar saved is a dollar earned and I need a job. Automatic writing can be pretty grim when your mind is weary. Let's see if the horse can wake me.
As soon as I commenced the list, I noticed on the bathroom floor a hairband, twisted once into a sideways figure 8. I immediately contemplated the infinite. Or rather, I immediately contemplated the contemplation of the infinite and enjoyed a benign and tiny coincident pattern.
People are eager to talk about doing things that make you uncomfortable in order that you might have a more complete, coherent and satisfying life. I sometimes shy away from even the tiniest discomfort. And a restless lonely state pervades. Humans around offer no succor. Is it a desire to coincide or one to connect? These are all real people, but their socialization pushes them away from the different. I am the same, mist of the time, but I seek the opposite; I seek the direct.
-------------------
We have to learn to let go. We grip too tightly to our presuppositions, possessions, needs and drives. Identity is a construct that we nest in; every principle we cling to a comforting addition to the nest. Believe in yourself say pundits and posters; have faith in lack of reason. Nihilism is no refuge.
-------------------
And here it goes, round and round. The days merge into each other, mimicking more fraudulent behaviour. It's at very least an anachronism, seeing what comes out, like vomit. Please, we cry, please let it be just this. Just this and nothing else. If it is more, then we are bereft, failed and wan. Go to your congressman, plead with him to limit ambition, to take away the pain. Here it comes again, an over-hyped tornado of truth, blazing a trail towards bethlehem, to die. Here it comes again, wanting to be felt as truth, not absolute truth, but a basic human truth, plaintive and embarrassed to be considered. Descartes wanted more, Plato wanted more - it's okay, kids, calm down, be still. It's all good, as they used to say. How can a phrase so well-meaning become passe so quickly? I write as I breathe, in short bursts, with the only purpose being to stay alive.
-------------------
I do love the way the words come, flowing out, grabbing the sediment of half-remembered references with them. Staccato samples of speech, movies, comic books, blending with the infinite and the ether, spewing themselves into arbitrary yet expressive shapes. I love the way they come, oodles, bundles, bushels of words, weaving and warping, subtle and unbidden.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, been chasing happiness.
I raced through The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Project, Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. Haidt was a fortuitously great first choice. He supplied the scientific, blended with a fair whack of ancient wisdom and he skillfully drew pleasing and unpatronising connections between the two. Rubin came off as a little spoilt, bless her, but gave me laughs and real insights too. In dipping into these and quitting smoking weed (something I have done almost every day for nigh on 15 years), I realised the severity of my problems. Mine was not so much a Happiness Project (a la Rubin), but a What-The-Fuck-Just-Try-To-Stay-Alive Project. Taking cues from both, I moved onto an approach that befitted my personal pathology of Severe Depression.
Vibing off the concepts of positive psychology, a reassuringly new branch of psychology referenced by both Haidt and Rubin, I picked up Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life, David D Burns' Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy and Stephen S Ilardi's The Depression Cure: The 6 Step Program to Beat Depression Without Drugs. Seligman's book was a grim read for a while, as the first two thirds consist of recognising the true extent of your life's awfulness, should you be as thoroughly brain-wrong as it turns out I am. The DSM IV's diagnostic criteria for depression, our first step in misery accountancy, have me down as "severely depressed". He lays out the excellent tests, much like familiar Cosmopolitan multiple choice quizzes, for "pessimistic explanatory style". I did not score well. My explanatory style, the filter through which I experience both positive and negative events, is not merely pessimistic, but permanently, pervasively and personally pessimistic. I reached the latter part of the book with some relief, having noticed my life becoming less bearable while stuck in the grisly-realisation section. The last third covered solutions, focusing primarily on the benefits of cognitive therapy.
I have found myself unable, so far, to finish David Burns' Feeling Good. The version I have is printed cheaply and reminds me of books I would peruse in the 1980s that felt somehow worthless and irrelevant by virtue of their printing. The book has a lowest-common-denominator style and comes across as patronising and lifeless, like a Allen Carr stop-smoking pamphlet on the matter of the human condition. It outlines the techniques of cognitive therapy, stopping negative thoughts and methodically completing written exercises for each one until you reach the unconscious competence level and no longer have to scribble down every self-hating reverie. I made it to chapter 3, though I will return to it, out of necessity rather than any enthusiasm.
Ilardi's The Depression Cure is solid and sits somewhere between the two. It outlines and advocates Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, with an emphasis on clinically proven changes one can make. It picks out light exposure, Omega-3s, exercise, engaging activity, sociable behaviour and avoidance of rumination as the keys to escaping depression. Little bits of wisdom like getting molecularly distilled EPA/DHA capsules to avoid "fishy burps" are actually really valuable. I now have a colossal tub of fish oil pills next to my Centrum multi-vitamins and have been sticking to the doses. Ilardi's empirical attitude was convincing enough for at least that. The light-box is not as religiously used, but I'm getting there.
While bouncing back from my reaction to Burns' crap writing and daunting cognitive techniques, I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It is a quick and easy read. The tone is familiar from Castaneda and I needed a hippie to help after Feeling Good's lifelessness. Ruiz channels the ancient smarts of the Toltec, referencing magic and sacredness, qualities I need to access so badly in among the cold analysis of more rational approaches. Though it seems I shouldn't try to be the perfect person while trying to fix all the broken pieces, it's good to have someone talk about values in among the necessities. He speaks of our lives as dreams and while caught in all the habits of the world, they are dreams of hell, which can be escaped by "agreeing" to new and better paradigms. Be impeccable with your word, he says, cast not black magic with your thought and speech. Take nothing personally, for it is a route to suffering. Don't make assumptions and do your best, remembering not to judge yourself and thus make yourself a victim. It's a good little book and Oprah loved it.
I have often described, in the worst depths of despair, how it seems that there is an entity, resident somewhere in my mind, that wants my demise. It's a simplification to characterise the feeling that way, but an expedient one. In response and at a loss in such moments, my other half bought How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying To Kill Me: One Person's Guide to Suicide Prevention by Susan Rose Blauner. It's a book for psychological emergencies and I sadly recognise many of the impulses, distortions and confusions that she describes. It's far from a light read and can be overwhelming, but her delineation of approaches when she is overwhelmed can be really useful. I can't seem to dip into this one as I have the others - it's very much focused on extreme trauma and it can be tough to admit that level of mental fuckedness, though I experience it daily. Having had a rougher past than even mine, she describes reveling in suicidal ideation in a way I can't really relate to. I haven't managed to get to the halfway point in Blauner's book, but I can see much value in her crisis lists, deep breaths and rational positive reappraisal in the moment.
I watched a Will Smith interview with Tavis Smiley on YouTube where he mentioned Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Despite Oprah's championing of the book and my aversion to the populist, I swallowed my cynicism and grabbed that too. So far, I am disappointed that I must have a Personal Legend in order that I might follow the guidance of the old king, the little boy and whatever else the fable might entail. Lack of a Personal Legend clearly is a barrier to success. So that gives me a task for the scary weeks ahead in my What-The-Fuck-Just-Try-To-Stay-Alive Project.
I raced through The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Project, Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. Haidt was a fortuitously great first choice. He supplied the scientific, blended with a fair whack of ancient wisdom and he skillfully drew pleasing and unpatronising connections between the two. Rubin came off as a little spoilt, bless her, but gave me laughs and real insights too. In dipping into these and quitting smoking weed (something I have done almost every day for nigh on 15 years), I realised the severity of my problems. Mine was not so much a Happiness Project (a la Rubin), but a What-The-Fuck-Just-Try-To-Stay-Alive Project. Taking cues from both, I moved onto an approach that befitted my personal pathology of Severe Depression.
Vibing off the concepts of positive psychology, a reassuringly new branch of psychology referenced by both Haidt and Rubin, I picked up Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life, David D Burns' Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy and Stephen S Ilardi's The Depression Cure: The 6 Step Program to Beat Depression Without Drugs. Seligman's book was a grim read for a while, as the first two thirds consist of recognising the true extent of your life's awfulness, should you be as thoroughly brain-wrong as it turns out I am. The DSM IV's diagnostic criteria for depression, our first step in misery accountancy, have me down as "severely depressed". He lays out the excellent tests, much like familiar Cosmopolitan multiple choice quizzes, for "pessimistic explanatory style". I did not score well. My explanatory style, the filter through which I experience both positive and negative events, is not merely pessimistic, but permanently, pervasively and personally pessimistic. I reached the latter part of the book with some relief, having noticed my life becoming less bearable while stuck in the grisly-realisation section. The last third covered solutions, focusing primarily on the benefits of cognitive therapy.
I have found myself unable, so far, to finish David Burns' Feeling Good. The version I have is printed cheaply and reminds me of books I would peruse in the 1980s that felt somehow worthless and irrelevant by virtue of their printing. The book has a lowest-common-denominator style and comes across as patronising and lifeless, like a Allen Carr stop-smoking pamphlet on the matter of the human condition. It outlines the techniques of cognitive therapy, stopping negative thoughts and methodically completing written exercises for each one until you reach the unconscious competence level and no longer have to scribble down every self-hating reverie. I made it to chapter 3, though I will return to it, out of necessity rather than any enthusiasm.
Ilardi's The Depression Cure is solid and sits somewhere between the two. It outlines and advocates Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, with an emphasis on clinically proven changes one can make. It picks out light exposure, Omega-3s, exercise, engaging activity, sociable behaviour and avoidance of rumination as the keys to escaping depression. Little bits of wisdom like getting molecularly distilled EPA/DHA capsules to avoid "fishy burps" are actually really valuable. I now have a colossal tub of fish oil pills next to my Centrum multi-vitamins and have been sticking to the doses. Ilardi's empirical attitude was convincing enough for at least that. The light-box is not as religiously used, but I'm getting there.
While bouncing back from my reaction to Burns' crap writing and daunting cognitive techniques, I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It is a quick and easy read. The tone is familiar from Castaneda and I needed a hippie to help after Feeling Good's lifelessness. Ruiz channels the ancient smarts of the Toltec, referencing magic and sacredness, qualities I need to access so badly in among the cold analysis of more rational approaches. Though it seems I shouldn't try to be the perfect person while trying to fix all the broken pieces, it's good to have someone talk about values in among the necessities. He speaks of our lives as dreams and while caught in all the habits of the world, they are dreams of hell, which can be escaped by "agreeing" to new and better paradigms. Be impeccable with your word, he says, cast not black magic with your thought and speech. Take nothing personally, for it is a route to suffering. Don't make assumptions and do your best, remembering not to judge yourself and thus make yourself a victim. It's a good little book and Oprah loved it.
I have often described, in the worst depths of despair, how it seems that there is an entity, resident somewhere in my mind, that wants my demise. It's a simplification to characterise the feeling that way, but an expedient one. In response and at a loss in such moments, my other half bought How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying To Kill Me: One Person's Guide to Suicide Prevention by Susan Rose Blauner. It's a book for psychological emergencies and I sadly recognise many of the impulses, distortions and confusions that she describes. It's far from a light read and can be overwhelming, but her delineation of approaches when she is overwhelmed can be really useful. I can't seem to dip into this one as I have the others - it's very much focused on extreme trauma and it can be tough to admit that level of mental fuckedness, though I experience it daily. Having had a rougher past than even mine, she describes reveling in suicidal ideation in a way I can't really relate to. I haven't managed to get to the halfway point in Blauner's book, but I can see much value in her crisis lists, deep breaths and rational positive reappraisal in the moment.
I watched a Will Smith interview with Tavis Smiley on YouTube where he mentioned Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Despite Oprah's championing of the book and my aversion to the populist, I swallowed my cynicism and grabbed that too. So far, I am disappointed that I must have a Personal Legend in order that I might follow the guidance of the old king, the little boy and whatever else the fable might entail. Lack of a Personal Legend clearly is a barrier to success. So that gives me a task for the scary weeks ahead in my What-The-Fuck-Just-Try-To-Stay-Alive Project.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Going back to your hometown can be the experience of a disappointed tourist. We want it to open up and reveal itself as never before, to show the magic that we believed in back when we had faith and blind hometown pride. It is not the job of a great city to convert its children back to the fold, too busy impressing everyone else. So I walk across the Thames, I marvel gently and briefly at the incongruity of Wren among the concrete, of the Eye looking down at Westminster.
I stay in an apartment just north of the Tower. It exemplifies the phrase "business traveller". Th CRT TV is 16:10 and oddly small. The doors don't fit the frames, scraping on the imitation floor. The deafening bed seems designed to give lower back pain for the duration of the conference. There is a cheap Picasso print above, mocking iconoclasm. As much as a flat can be lack personality it does.
It is a grim place, one of the dark places of the earth. Eastenders' relentless overdose of misery seems an utterly appropriate standard-bearer for the fallen faces and grey skies. Bless the fashionable, the weird and the rebellious for bringing a little light to it all - London without an edge would be a sad place indeed.
The Tories have done their Tory thing. Massive cuts blended with some PR obfuscation about owning your own society by selling it off. They call it the coalition, which might a whimsical reference to Iraq. Politics seems a younger game and I long for Healey, Benn, Foot and Heath, if only for the sense that they were taking it seriously. William Hague, who appeared to be playing the Foreign Secretary on the telly, represented the best of gravitas. That has to be a bad thing. Cameron, the ultimate result of the Mandelson plan, a being of pure spin, walked the streets of Cairo. Pretty ballsy for a man touring a fucked-up part of the world with his arms-dealer mates.
So, England. I love you. Maybe we're not compatible right now.
I stay in an apartment just north of the Tower. It exemplifies the phrase "business traveller". Th CRT TV is 16:10 and oddly small. The doors don't fit the frames, scraping on the imitation floor. The deafening bed seems designed to give lower back pain for the duration of the conference. There is a cheap Picasso print above, mocking iconoclasm. As much as a flat can be lack personality it does.
It is a grim place, one of the dark places of the earth. Eastenders' relentless overdose of misery seems an utterly appropriate standard-bearer for the fallen faces and grey skies. Bless the fashionable, the weird and the rebellious for bringing a little light to it all - London without an edge would be a sad place indeed.
The Tories have done their Tory thing. Massive cuts blended with some PR obfuscation about owning your own society by selling it off. They call it the coalition, which might a whimsical reference to Iraq. Politics seems a younger game and I long for Healey, Benn, Foot and Heath, if only for the sense that they were taking it seriously. William Hague, who appeared to be playing the Foreign Secretary on the telly, represented the best of gravitas. That has to be a bad thing. Cameron, the ultimate result of the Mandelson plan, a being of pure spin, walked the streets of Cairo. Pretty ballsy for a man touring a fucked-up part of the world with his arms-dealer mates.
So, England. I love you. Maybe we're not compatible right now.
Friday, May 14, 2010
all-embracing, assorted, broad, catholic, dilettantish, diverse, diversified, heterogeneous, inclusive, liberal, many-sided, mingled, mixed, multifarious, multiform, selective, universal, varied, wide-ranging
accomplished, adroit, agile, artful, au fait, brilliant, capable, clever, deft, dexterous, effective, effectual, efficient, equal to, experienced, expert, facile, gifted, ingenious, intelligent, keen, know backwards and forwards, know one's onions, know the ropes, learned, masterful, masterly, powerful, practiced, prepared, proficient, qualified, responsible, savvy, sharp, skilled, skillful, smart, talented, there, trained, up to it, up to snuff, up to speed, with it
Write your articles now.
accomplished, adroit, agile, artful, au fait, brilliant, capable, clever, deft, dexterous, effective, effectual, efficient, equal to, experienced, expert, facile, gifted, ingenious, intelligent, keen, know backwards and forwards, know one's onions, know the ropes, learned, masterful, masterly, powerful, practiced, prepared, proficient, qualified, responsible, savvy, sharp, skilled, skillful, smart, talented, there, trained, up to it, up to snuff, up to speed, with it
Write your articles now.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
This blog has been dead for 8 years.
Why would I want to bring it to life?
1. All my old letters, notebooks and diaries that I left in London were thrown away by my dear father's insanely emotionally careless but well meaning (and so not deserving of any animosity) new bird. Love letters, lists of daily drug intake, desperate attempts to analyse myself, shit poems, embarrassing catalogues of quite how long it took me to get over girlfriends, photocopied art friends had made. All of the notebooks I used to always keep with me when every thought seemed fleeting and precious, but able to be captured and contained in the hope it would fit into some complete picture of the world. Naive cliches.
So that hit me a bit.
2. Went through deleting blogs from an imported OPML from Google Reader recently to populate a Netvibes page. Twitter's so unspecific - everything I'm interested in all spat arbitrarily at me through my ipod - and I can't be fucked to make and check a whole load of lists on there. Reading through 500 odd blogs, I was totally overwhelmed by such piles of unabashed shitness. Tips for brands on Twitter? Engage, retweet, listen... For fucks sake. So many commentators retooling basic common sense as self-promotion and putting their smug rich face at the top as if they're proud of their pointlessness.
3. Chatroulette. An essentially horrible experience, much like going to some peak time city centre mainstream weekend drinking spot. A parade of blankness and prurience that tries to seduce you into joining in the grimness. I was struck though, as some blogger noted, by the strange boldness of it all. Stream and be damned. I like the attitude. I want to be just like that - except without getting my cock out.
4. Privacy is big right now as people and giant corporations figure out the network model on a grand scale. The BBC's Virtual Revolution episode The Cost of Free cheesily makes social networks and constant self-publishing seem so dark and irreversible. Google Buzz stumbles into existence, confusing everyone. No-one really understands or cares much about Facebook's privacy settings. I've done some soul searching on the issue and come up with "fuck it".
5. I admire the old me, who figured he must have something to say.
6. A good short URL. Had to unlock old email account, remember old passwords. Pretty much all the firstname.blogspot.com pages are awful or dead. john.blogspot.com is a prime example, but it's across the board. I hope to join in their irrelevance.
7. Twitter stats keep saying that half the people on there don't say anything or have any followers. Like people on Chatroulette who hide behind a sign that says Show Me Your Boobs. Come out. Come out and say "show me your boobs". Express yourself. I respect the close up masturbators more than you. Say anything. Shout into the darkness. Makes me think of Pump Up The Volume. That movie's cool.
7. I remembered this existed while discussing the relevance of blogs to someone who really wasn't sure how to feel about the very concept, then found that it was called Ill Logical. That's pretty poor by anyone's standards, except maybe 18-year-old jungle deejays in 1996. It's subtitled Homeopathic Mass Meta-Programming. I wonder what 23 year-old me was trying to say with that... I guess that no-ones going to read it, so it's a tiny dose of Mass Meta-Programming? And metaprogramming - writing programs that write programs. Like the people would read my bullshit would somehow infect the herd? As I say, I admire the self-importance. I'm going to leave it like that, just to honour the old me, whose scribbled self-important bullshit was recently taken to a landfill.
Why would I want to bring it to life?
1. All my old letters, notebooks and diaries that I left in London were thrown away by my dear father's insanely emotionally careless but well meaning (and so not deserving of any animosity) new bird. Love letters, lists of daily drug intake, desperate attempts to analyse myself, shit poems, embarrassing catalogues of quite how long it took me to get over girlfriends, photocopied art friends had made. All of the notebooks I used to always keep with me when every thought seemed fleeting and precious, but able to be captured and contained in the hope it would fit into some complete picture of the world. Naive cliches.
So that hit me a bit.
2. Went through deleting blogs from an imported OPML from Google Reader recently to populate a Netvibes page. Twitter's so unspecific - everything I'm interested in all spat arbitrarily at me through my ipod - and I can't be fucked to make and check a whole load of lists on there. Reading through 500 odd blogs, I was totally overwhelmed by such piles of unabashed shitness. Tips for brands on Twitter? Engage, retweet, listen... For fucks sake. So many commentators retooling basic common sense as self-promotion and putting their smug rich face at the top as if they're proud of their pointlessness.
3. Chatroulette. An essentially horrible experience, much like going to some peak time city centre mainstream weekend drinking spot. A parade of blankness and prurience that tries to seduce you into joining in the grimness. I was struck though, as some blogger noted, by the strange boldness of it all. Stream and be damned. I like the attitude. I want to be just like that - except without getting my cock out.
4. Privacy is big right now as people and giant corporations figure out the network model on a grand scale. The BBC's Virtual Revolution episode The Cost of Free cheesily makes social networks and constant self-publishing seem so dark and irreversible. Google Buzz stumbles into existence, confusing everyone. No-one really understands or cares much about Facebook's privacy settings. I've done some soul searching on the issue and come up with "fuck it".
5. I admire the old me, who figured he must have something to say.
6. A good short URL. Had to unlock old email account, remember old passwords. Pretty much all the firstname.blogspot.com pages are awful or dead. john.blogspot.com is a prime example, but it's across the board. I hope to join in their irrelevance.
7. Twitter stats keep saying that half the people on there don't say anything or have any followers. Like people on Chatroulette who hide behind a sign that says Show Me Your Boobs. Come out. Come out and say "show me your boobs". Express yourself. I respect the close up masturbators more than you. Say anything. Shout into the darkness. Makes me think of Pump Up The Volume. That movie's cool.
7. I remembered this existed while discussing the relevance of blogs to someone who really wasn't sure how to feel about the very concept, then found that it was called Ill Logical. That's pretty poor by anyone's standards, except maybe 18-year-old jungle deejays in 1996. It's subtitled Homeopathic Mass Meta-Programming. I wonder what 23 year-old me was trying to say with that... I guess that no-ones going to read it, so it's a tiny dose of Mass Meta-Programming? And metaprogramming - writing programs that write programs. Like the people would read my bullshit would somehow infect the herd? As I say, I admire the self-importance. I'm going to leave it like that, just to honour the old me, whose scribbled self-important bullshit was recently taken to a landfill.
Tuesday, January 08, 2002
Kellie Martin is colonising the late movie slot on four of the terrestrial channels. If a movie in this slot has a one word title, it has ideas above its station. Two, it is a thriller, possibly erotic. Three, a TV Movie. Four, a TV Movie based on a true story. Kellie Martin (ER) stars predominantly in the three or four word fare - Her Hidden Truth, Hidden In Silence, If Someone Had Known - and a classic six - The Face On The Milk Carton. It is mystifying that the TV Movies which deal with the disappearance of children are as popular as the deaths (often by drowning) of children in the London free paper Metro.
Sunday, November 04, 2001
DREAM: I am at a big party, where my politics are ill-received. Jane More is mocking my badly cooked Shepherd's pie. It is truly awful. Lucas draws my attention to an open skate clothing shop on what seems to be Holloway Road. I steal a few items (Hooch, Two Legs, Nike) and run away. I pass a man throwing a molotov cocktail into a kebab shop. I begin to fly to escape and, unable to follow, he lets fly with a prodigious stream of piss, which soaks me. I return to the party, which neither welcomes me nor offers me sympathy.
Friday, November 02, 2001
Monday, October 22, 2001
As I walked intensely and determinedly home, I saw a group of children – ten year old boys – stopping briefly for a man passing them. As I wondered what the interaction entailed and the man, thirtysomething, greying, walked towards me, he raised his hand as if, perhaps, to admonish me for thinking ill of him. Then, smoothly, the movement seemed to change to the quotidian sight of the wave that accompanies a nutjob’s quiet dialogue with a mute world. Just as I passed, with the brief, strange challenge that neurotic moments bring, I saw that he was bouncing the back of his hand against a suburban wall, as I had when a child. I would sometimes even run two fingers along the walls and hedges, extending out for jumps, sprinting a tiny man along privet. In this moment I saw an innocence, a freshness, a hidden place inside everyone. Hairbrush singers, biro drummers, the bizarre semi-inflation of the cheeks that accompanies absent-minded tuba impressions by impatient middle-aged men.
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
It is uncommonly silent in this city. The lights like ward lights, stillness like before rounds. Adrenaline and two sugars, bush-baby eyed, I sit with no-one whose heart beats as hard and short as mine. Shallow breaths inflate a tight chest; then deep, inspiring London's slow hot-box garage suicide: panting morse code, goodbye. The strip lights and opaque black windows cancel the familiar must-see sights of dated packaging and wasted space - now we are the view.
Wednesday, September 26, 2001
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
Some thoughts on the Celestine Prophecy's first insight:
The First Insight concerns becoming “conscious of the coincidences in our lives” and the fact that “these coincidences are happening more and more frequently”. We are instructed to take notice and act accordingly. Every individual has experienced some sort of highly improbable event that, most likely, has seemed meaningful to them and Redfield uses this ubiquity to begin the manuscript, to stimulate interest. As Poe observes as he introduces The Mystery of Marie Roget: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.”
It is indeed fascinating. The First Insight is an explanation and simplification of what Carl Jung called synchronicity. Through his experience in analysis, he found “‘coincidences’, which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure." The most famous example he gives is that of the golden scarab. As a patient detailed her dream of an unusual image, a golden scarab, there was a tapping at the window. Jung opened the window and a rose chafer, or Cetonia aureate, flew in, the beetle which could be said to be the closest to the golden scarab, Egyptian symbol of rebirth. The patient, needless to say, made great progress with her problem of excessive rationality.
Jung dubbed synchronicity “the acausal connecting principle”, dispensing quite radically with the causality paradigm, stretching reason as palpably as Redfield. In his introduction to the I Ching, referring to the moment of throwing the coins, he writes: “The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.”
“This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance. Namely, it is a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”
Koestler dealt with this in his “Roots of Coincidence”, speaking of the mind’s ability as a kind of “cosmic resonator” as did Castaneda, albeit in a Shamanistic setting, when Don Juan speaks of the world “agreeing” with him. Ken Wilber (in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, 1995) uses the term "network logic" and suggests that it is the first necessary stage in the next phase of the evolution of our species. John Lilly uses the metaphor of the Earth Coincidence Control Office, an extra-terrestrial bureau of synchronicity who have engineered much of his life, as detailed in his autobiography.
In Jung’s studies, the experience of meaningful coincidence comes at a psychological impasse and is a jolt to the psyche. As such, the numinous experiences of many, interpreting them as signs from god, visions of the sympathy of all things, are understandable. Synchronicities are part of a self-correcting mechanism, much like dreams, part of the psyche’s eternal search for equilibrium. These compensatory measures are enacted unconsciously to act as a counter balance to the dominant actions of the self. Rationality often overrides these experiences’ beneficial effects by neutering them as chance. “Since we cannot conceive how this could be possible without recourse to positively magical categories, we generally let it go at the bare impression, leading to acausal connection - acausal order and archetypes: contingencies?” (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche) Jung found that, by studying dreams, fantasies, synchronicities over a period of time that there existed, often, a meaningful pattern of unconscious compensations resulting in a path, a trajectory, specific to that individual.
The First Insight steers the willing reader towards an acceptance of these realisations and of the trajectory, an acceptance that is natural and empowering. Robert Graves, in “The White Goddess” writes of “more-than-coincidences” occurring “so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word 'supernatural'; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.” As an understanding of something which goes beyond the laws of causality, the Celestine Prophecy’s First Insight has come as a great revelation and inspiration to many of the book’s avid fans. The presentation is arbitrary, the purpose admirable. As Dr John Lilly said in a recent interview on the subject: of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that's all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, "Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation."
Do you have the patience to wait
Till the mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?
Tao Te Ching
The First Insight concerns becoming “conscious of the coincidences in our lives” and the fact that “these coincidences are happening more and more frequently”. We are instructed to take notice and act accordingly. Every individual has experienced some sort of highly improbable event that, most likely, has seemed meaningful to them and Redfield uses this ubiquity to begin the manuscript, to stimulate interest. As Poe observes as he introduces The Mystery of Marie Roget: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.”
It is indeed fascinating. The First Insight is an explanation and simplification of what Carl Jung called synchronicity. Through his experience in analysis, he found “‘coincidences’, which were connected so meaningfully that their ‘chance’ concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure." The most famous example he gives is that of the golden scarab. As a patient detailed her dream of an unusual image, a golden scarab, there was a tapping at the window. Jung opened the window and a rose chafer, or Cetonia aureate, flew in, the beetle which could be said to be the closest to the golden scarab, Egyptian symbol of rebirth. The patient, needless to say, made great progress with her problem of excessive rationality.
Jung dubbed synchronicity “the acausal connecting principle”, dispensing quite radically with the causality paradigm, stretching reason as palpably as Redfield. In his introduction to the I Ching, referring to the moment of throwing the coins, he writes: “The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.”
“This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance. Namely, it is a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”
Koestler dealt with this in his “Roots of Coincidence”, speaking of the mind’s ability as a kind of “cosmic resonator” as did Castaneda, albeit in a Shamanistic setting, when Don Juan speaks of the world “agreeing” with him. Ken Wilber (in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, 1995) uses the term "network logic" and suggests that it is the first necessary stage in the next phase of the evolution of our species. John Lilly uses the metaphor of the Earth Coincidence Control Office, an extra-terrestrial bureau of synchronicity who have engineered much of his life, as detailed in his autobiography.
In Jung’s studies, the experience of meaningful coincidence comes at a psychological impasse and is a jolt to the psyche. As such, the numinous experiences of many, interpreting them as signs from god, visions of the sympathy of all things, are understandable. Synchronicities are part of a self-correcting mechanism, much like dreams, part of the psyche’s eternal search for equilibrium. These compensatory measures are enacted unconsciously to act as a counter balance to the dominant actions of the self. Rationality often overrides these experiences’ beneficial effects by neutering them as chance. “Since we cannot conceive how this could be possible without recourse to positively magical categories, we generally let it go at the bare impression, leading to acausal connection - acausal order and archetypes: contingencies?” (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche) Jung found that, by studying dreams, fantasies, synchronicities over a period of time that there existed, often, a meaningful pattern of unconscious compensations resulting in a path, a trajectory, specific to that individual.
The First Insight steers the willing reader towards an acceptance of these realisations and of the trajectory, an acceptance that is natural and empowering. Robert Graves, in “The White Goddess” writes of “more-than-coincidences” occurring “so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word 'supernatural'; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.” As an understanding of something which goes beyond the laws of causality, the Celestine Prophecy’s First Insight has come as a great revelation and inspiration to many of the book’s avid fans. The presentation is arbitrary, the purpose admirable. As Dr John Lilly said in a recent interview on the subject: of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that's all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, "Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation."
Do you have the patience to wait
Till the mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?
Tao Te Ching
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
