From This Side of the River

While Theoretical Man and Public Man debate each other within the intimacy of an hard-drive, I keep on hacking language. This month I took an unusual family break and jetted down to where my folks live. I had long conversations with nine persons, all of whom I have known for at least twenty years, and I picked the brains of a few strangers who happened to cross my path. I put an available single man on the spot after my mother was foolish enough to introduce him to me with all the manipulative prefaces indicating in no uncertain terms that at the age of 50, it is high time that I settle down with some reasonable fellow living next door. After all, why is it that I seem to go through men like some go through Kleenex? It amused me, it left me indifferent even if some elements of the above left me deeply saddened. I like my unsettled state. Appearances deceive. If you have not lived through something, it is not true (Kabir). So what do you do with what you observe?

I brought back quite a bit of baggage, as one usually does from such journeys. After all, you can not go back home, it is a bit like revisiting the scene of the crime. My crime is that of having been born, and to be passionate about life, headstrong, wayward and not over-socialised. When I discover that I have been seduced by compromise beaconing at me from some social neurosis that I picked up along the way, then I wake up. I go then through a process that is rather messy and that in due time I will map out. My intimate environment ends up getting a few pieces of the debris here and there, but most of the mess I sort out within my own world of fiction.

I do not like being seduced by compromise, and that is only because I resent compromise. Compromise is deceptive, and even if informed by good intentions, those are what paves the road to hell anyhow. It is one hell of an attitude for a politician working within a system of consensus, but it makes it all the more interesting. Not that I have much to do with heaven and hell beyond a concept that most can relate to or create a mental image of. I am more into ecstasy and nirvana, and neither of those are in exogenous chemical forms.

It is challenging to me to put it in simple terms accessible to all not familiar with the concept of quantum humanism, that the essence of my present scholarly work is about relationships. Given that my instrument of choice falls under the category of action research and interactive human inquiry, then it may indeed be totally confusing how on this earth I manage to bridge my world of fiction to that of scholarly work. Those who know understand, and those who don’t will wonder about my sanity. It is all legitimate, that is, it is legitimate to wonder about my sanity too. We all do at one time or another wonder about the very own sanity.

The ego absorbs society’s ideologies, neurosis and psychosis like a storage bin to sort through and reprocess as needed. Negative as it sounds, it does serve a very valuable purpose, that of informing the self of society’s environmental psyche. When people fall in love they usually fall in love with one of their ego’s neurosis. This process gets triggered instinctively and then most of you know what happens. Personally I find the process to be a pain in the ass for I end up having to do some psychological housekeeping and that is often a stinky painful mess to go through that usually absorbs all my energy night and day. Given the kinesiological nature of my interface to experience and the developmental nature of the relationship between my body and intellect, very few people can stand the sight, or bear the brunt of what I express during that process. A few can, they are the few, the brave, the fools like me. The outcomes of this process of disentanglement, disambiguation and reconnection can be very different from individual to individual. Not many tentative relationships survive this stage, those that do survive may find themselves at totally different places in the relationship manifold. To allow one to flow though this process requires a certain level of detachment that has nothing to do with individual run of the mill ways of relating and suffering. It really is not about letting go, that is the pedestrian commercialised surface of what is a much deeper process that I call transcendence. If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

LIFT06: my moment

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal gave one of those presentations that is very much to my taste. He asked the audience, he asked us, to close our laptops and do some thinking with him. Then when he was through guiding us through the elements of understanding context, he took feedback and he listened, just listened. If you could not be present for such a magnificent moment when someone just listens to you, you missed something.

The LIFT organizers billed him as someone from whom entrepreneur types would get some inspiration from. Now, I do have one hell of a time identifying myself with the entrepreneur crowd, but when you boil down what I do, it is anyhow one hell of an enterprise: writing.  You end up taking all sorts of risks, and working for months or years on end without seeing a penny or getting any praise for your labour. Not that I have much to complain about, but really, that thing called a paycheck at the end of the month can also look attractive in moments of desperation when nothing seems to make sense. I have had lots of those moments in my life, and that paycheck has seduced me enough times, only to have me give it up a few years later in a state of complete physical and emotional exhaustion.

Then, there comes this guy wearing his reboot t-shirt and a jacket over it, the picture perfect geek, and the room fills to the brim, there were people standing against the wall. He had me. Few speakers ever get my undivided attention, he did.

Augmentation, freedom, education, nature, computer, connected, individual, creation… and then he asks what human thoughts have we been having after we all laughed at his casual remark that Europe has been more connected by EasyJet than by the European Union.

All I could come up with was that it felt like walking on a tight rope without a safety net. That is what it feels like to live my life, the real one, not the one that would be expected of me. So if you do not have a passion for what you are doing, why are you doing it? Why would you want to go and work on anybody else’s passion?

Damn good question.

Somebody else’s passion has a safety net, it is called a paycheck at the end of the month.

Money covers food and shelter…

LIFT06: It does

Sex sells. The  video is in Swiss-German, but the mimic… is yours.

Madison Avenue knows this, pimps know this, and a few other people know this: sex sells. Sex is a commodity. Is it?

No. Tacit, intangible, palpable, real it is. Sex is not a commodity. It is the primal paradox from which we originate. Primal not primordial: I like absolutes, this one is one of my favorites. There is something absolute about sex. A fact long forgotten by the so-called western culture is that an orgasm can be a most fundamental spiritual experience.

For the time being, I will suppose that necessity drives sustainability. Our needs are simple: food, shelter, spirituality and connectivity. We are social animals with the power of language. This is who we are on this planet.

It is not just men that think about sex every eight minutes or so, women tend be right there with the same stats. Still I found myself at this conference not even thinking about it, even when Hugh had his blog up on the big screen displaying a matter of much controversy these days: a cartoon. A penis somehow does not get anybody bent out or shape anymore. Why is that that even the presence of such evident symbology, sex was not on my mind?