In the middle-of-night hours of Saturday/morning Sunday, I didn’t realize I had lost a whole hour – I had somehow misled myself into thinking the time change was coming the next week. No. It was that Sunday. But I was up all night anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I just remember looking at the clock sometime in the night (around 3) thinking that that last hour sure passed quickly. Yeah, because we skipped it entirely.
In many ways we can create our own reality – but in terms of time, and the ridiculousness of daylight saving/standard time switches, we will be and are slaves, despite what the semi-New Agey psychic phenomena book I read the other day says:
“That we shape our perception is not just a statement about attitude, it also means just what it says: we construct our experience! … We create reality by the imagery we use to organize our experience. The three-dimensional world that we see is fabricated in our brain based upon an inner pattern of three-dimensional space.”
Yes, someone concocted time zones, spring-forward, fall-back and linear time itself. And somehow we all (or almost all) agreed to follow this organization of things. (Or perhaps we fell for it! We organized life itself into oblivion!)
Indeed someone has to see or organize or conceptualize things in a new way to bring about a new understanding and eventually a new reality. And be capable of imagining what has hitherto been a given (e.g. the real is flat) as something other. The book used another interesting example – the guy who finally envisioned the heart as a pump rather than as some cyclical thing, flowing like the tides. He would have to imagine things differently first to apply the new meaning or descriptor.
How shall I imagine things differently to create reality?
“It’s not easy because your heart is closed off, but yes, you must move into the future.”
Random bits – the bits that piqued my interest and kept me reading anyway – from the sort of New Age book as I finally close it up and move on to something else…
“Arrested personal growth serves industrial ‘growth’. By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs.”
“…there are two important questions in life, and it is essential not to get them in the wrong order. The first is “Where am I going?” and the second is “Who will go with me?”
“They have not learned what Alan Watts called ‘the wisdom of insecurity’– that life is a hazardous adventure (which is what makes it interesting and joyous), that an artificially secure life is a dull one, and that significant security is impossible because change is unavoidable, illness and injury are common, and death inevitable.”
“For over one hundred years, mainstream American education has been systematically tuned to produce, on the one hand, blue-collar workers, and soldiers, and on the other, white-collar scientists, technologists, military officer, business managers, and career professionals. The idea has been to ‘keep America strong’, which means more successful than other nations in competing for Earth’s limited resources, on which all human economies are grounded. This has been accomplished in the United States and other Western societies by creating a large workforce of wage slaves and soldiers and a sizable cadre of sharp and ambitious minds capable of managing that workforce and creating technological advances for the mark of military-economic ‘progress’. Consequently, we have a bifurcated educational system successfully designed to limit the options and dull the minds and aspirations of the first group while both sharpening and narrowing the minds of the second. The education emphasis for the professional class is on thinking, but thinking in rather shallow and constricted modes. Independent, critical thinking and any kind of feeling, imagining, and sensing are minimized, marginalized, or discouraged because they are deemed irrelevant or detrimental to industrial development or personal fulfillment. Another reason these innate human capacities are suppressed in Western societies (and must be) is because they easily expose the egocentric idea of ‘progress’ for the self-destructive and world-devastating fantasy that it is.”
“In our society, the late teens and early twenties are often thought of as our one chance in life to sow wild oats. This way of thinking belies an unconscious co-optation of our innate wildness — our true, abiding, and sustainable vitality. Something in us is truly wild and wants to stay that way through our entire life. It is the source of our deepest creativity and freedom. When we say about youth, ‘Let them have their day, their wildness, their fun; soon enough they’ll settle down like we all do,’ we’re betraying the fact that we’ve made our human world too small for soul. We’ve abdicated a critically important part of our human nature.
Even the phrase ‘sow wild oats’ suggests that, like oats, our wildness is doomed to domestication. Egocentric society believes these human oats (and their sowers) are not meant to remain wild. Young people might briefly be allowed their ‘freedom’, but it’s rare that they are encouraged to uncover, celebrate and claim their full wildness for a lifetime.”
“Remember that self-doubt is as self-centered as self-inflation. Your obligation is to reach as deeply as you can and offer your unique and authentic gifts as bravely and beautifully as you’re able.”
Self-doubt and struggling with a lack of sense of self are two different things – but interrelated.
I don’t feel paralyzed by strong self-doubt, and I certainly don’t feel like I lack a sense of self. But I do have those moments of doubt that stop me – maybe not the doubts that tell me I can’t do something. More that I doubt whether I have the strength to persevere through difficult things. I feel this keenly with practical things – do I have the fortitude to push through the difficulties and complexities of learning and understanding all the things I would have to learn and understand to take on X career or Y project? I never feel this doubt or self-questioning otherwise. But then, what of this obligation to reach as far, as wide, as deep as possible into your own capabilities?
Is it really an obligation? To whom? Yourself? The world? I wrote yesterday about projected expectations, and other people assuming things about you. I had a conversation with my father recently (it doesn’t happen often; he is the king of assuming things about others), and he told me something about his sudden bouts with anxiety and the nervous and constant buzz he has in his stomach; he asked if I had ever felt that way. Oh, only every day of my childhood. He was incredulous when I said this, “But why on earth would you be nervous or anxious? You were so smart.” As if being smart erases the kind of self-doubt, nervousness, shyness that shadows you every minute of your life – all it does is help you craft an identity, authentic or not, that you can use when you are out, forced to interact in the world. Does the innate ability or intelligence you possess eventually outweigh or overtake all the doubt or nervousness – or the complete misunderstanding or blindness that those, supposedly closest to you, have applied to you?
Are we obligated by having a natural gift or talent to pursue it? Sure, it seems a waste not to, but are we shirking a duty or responsibility by ignoring our “unique and authentic gifts”, or merely letting ourselves down?
Ultimately, as Julie Carr writes, “You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do”.
FORECLOSING ON THAT PERIL
–Julie Carr
I’ll keep explaining—because maybe you still don’t get it
Those children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire—
Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friend
A perverse reader, he listens to my stories as if they were TV
I mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and at the library book sale
My friend is not a banker but a prison activist
He used to be a philosopher, but like many philosophers, he’s taken a turn
that should be easy to understand
The trajectory from philosopher to activist is like the curve of a single brushstroke across a large canvas
Artists in the fifties paid attention to that
I hate flat language like this, but I’m pretty flat
sometimes. You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do
As I tell my daughters often
Emotion is a site of unraveling (JB)
I admit, gripping my T-shirt
I wish I were writing in prose an unfolding intensity that shocks history professors and prison activists equally
Later, in the grass, we’ll practice gymnastics and that way contribute our sweat
to Our Ephemeral City
And, reflecting on the doubt, and the not-entirely-accurate identities we inhabit in figuring out who we are, I realize we are like animals who shed their skin. You change identities no matter who you are, and the former you still informs, as memory and experience, but does not define, as the previous New Age tome I read wisely posited:
“To relinquish your former identity is to sacrifice the story you had been living, the one that defined you, empowered you socially – and limited you. This sacrifice captures the essence of leaving home.”
The writer also cited one of my favorite poems from Derek Walcott (here’s a piece); it half-applies:
“The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.”
Photo (c) of Mt Rainier by the late, great Paul Costanich.
The New Age book, finally completed (self-read audiobook on MP3, split up into chapter chunks), offered a few compelling thoughts and jumping-off points. I am struggling with one bit – that is, trying to respect what it commands – it’s such a pure and true passage, complemented by the poetry of David Whyte (whose work appears throughout the volume). I’d never heard of him (Irish mother/Yorkshire father; grew up in west Yorkshire before eventually moving to the Pacific Northwest of the US).
“Although true solitude — alert aloneness without diversions — can be challenging, it is often the necessary gateway to our deepest passions, and the discovery of what we must do to live them. As David Whyte writes,
…Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
The Following is the best show on television! Just kidding. April Fool’s Day!
I have written many times about TV’s worst show, The Following. It makes law enforcement look like bumbling idiots (thanks, real law enforcement does that quite enough on their own). It leads viewers to believe that the diabolical cult leaders/serial killers are geniuses – but they are not particularly smart either. They are just conscienceless and usually a step or two ahead of the law. And not even charismatic! Sometimes I ask myself if maybe I have been conditioned by too many police and legal procedurals and somehow imagine that investigations and catching bad guys is easier than it is. Maybe Kevin Bacon leading this team of FBI field operatives is exactly as murky as FBI investigations get. I don’t really know. But I know that it is not really entertainment, except for a self-torturer like myself, who watches weekly to find out what new level of stupidity and depravity the show will fall each time.
Kevin Bacon at his best…
The only remotely interesting part, which has been the case all along, is questioning how all these different people have been brainwashed to follow along with the cult of Joe Carroll – and now Carroll (the main baddie) is in prison, and the people pulling the strings … well, I don’t know where loyalty for those guys comes from. And the whole thing is scary in that you have to wonder how the world could possibly sustain this many psychopaths. The show constantly introduces new characters – hard to keep it all clear. It has taken the focus off “mastermind” Joe Carroll, who seems less crazy all the time given the cast of characters to appear since he exited the stage. (Michael Ealy is the latest, and it’s a pretty weird role for him. This is no Sleeper Cell.) There are a lot of echoes of far superior shows, such as Dexter and Hannibal, mixed in here, and even a tinge of the recent The Fall, in which Jamie Dornan is a serial murderer but also turns out to be a “normal family man”, like Ealy’s new character – but it’s like retreading old ground and treading water. Nothing remotely original here.
In light of viewing the recent HBO documentary on Scientology (Going Clear), I am not as inclined to doubt that insecurity and longing for belonging drive people into the arms of predatory cults and endow these followers with a sense of superiority (before stripping them down in the same way an abuser does with his abused). A cult around a serial killer is not really any different. Even in particularly gung-ho corporate environments, you get a lot of people who subsume their own identities and personalities and go beyond even “enthusiastic corporate cheerleader”.
I wrote earlier to a friend: “I wonder, being an antisocial non-joiner of anything myself, how people get so caught up in anything – whether it is a political party, a religious dogma, a corporation, a fraternity – whatever it is. And having this sense of self (as an antisocial, non-joiner) would I even be aware, or conscious, if I did join something? We have such powerful ideas about who we are that I wonder if we even see who we are.”
I find myself freaked out by things like crowds of people who start out applauding randomly and without any rhythm but end up clapping in a frightening group-mentality unison. It is not a big leap from there – people’s tendency toward sameness and wanting some kind of belonging and harmony – to see how people end up tethered to something insane through a combination of blind devotion and sheer lack of ability to think for themselves. Is that what compels people to watch and love The Following? That people fool themselves into thinking they are immune to brainwashing?
Forgive me in advance; this will be a sweepingly generalized observation. And it is a bit off topic, but I did think about the fact that the adults I knew as an adolescent – people like my parents and others their age (40ish middle-aged people) – always seemed to be on some kind of spiritual search. Some discovered religion, some New Age guru stuff (which hit a peak in the late 80s), some Scientology – but whatever they did or did not discover, I wonder if people of my own generation are as inclined to the midlife crisis and this hunt for greater meaning. All humans, I think, hunt for greater meaning, but I also feel there are generational components at work. The Baby Boomers seem to have invented the midlife crisis (maybe life in the western world was actually too difficult for these kinds of “identity crises” prior to the post-war generation – people were just busy with the business of surviving). My generation, the so-called Generation X, has never enjoyed a long period of success and prosperity (economically, societally), so we kind of just expect to make back-up plans for our real plans and just ride out whatever the outcome is. In that sense, as we are all in the throes of or entering middle age, we might yearn for some kind of connection, but I don’t see people en masse (and it might just be because there are fewer of us) looking for answers in an organized way.
Back to the point, though. I don’t know why The Following is popular or why it keeps being renewed. Was I poisoned by misguided expectations? My mother had been watching the first season and told me she found it “disturbing” and “chilling”. I expected to be somehow spellbound by this show, but it’s just stupid. By extension, I am stupid for continuing to watch.
When I was an insolent adolescent, my father, in a period of midlife-crisis-enlightenment-seeking, went through a New Age phase, in which he adopted a New Age guru who walked him through past life regressions, chakra balancing and, perhaps his favorite activity of all, chanting. It was an awkward and transitional time, probably for everyone involved. During this hazy period, my father decided to try to address my permanent “Oscar the Grouch” take on life:
Dad: “Erika, why are you so hateful?”
Me: (rolling eyes, sarcastic tone) “Gee, I don’t know”
Dad: (enlightened tone) “Well, your mother and I could teach you some neat things.”
Me: (rolling eyes again) “Like?”
Dad: (even more enlightened) “Like… how to chant!” RAHHHHH-OHHHHHHM!
Check it out – “Nasty Dan” from Johnny Cash visiting my dear Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street! “Say, aren’t you Johnny Trash?” “Cash. – Have a rotten day.” “Wow, there goes my kinda guy.”
So, the hateful thing goes back a ways. While I won’t go so far as to say that I seriously hate anyone or anything, I readily admit that I am easily annoyed and enjoy sarcasm and complaint a great deal. I derive joy from this kind of casual and idle hatred and dismay/disdain. It is not often that I meet kindred hating spirits in the world; that is, people with sour attitudes who find something to dislike about almost everything but who still actually are quite sweet people who find a lot of things to like and even love as well.
I don’t look at my attitude as sheer, unproductive negativity the way many do – I think of myself as a realist and sometimes a pessimist. It’s hard to live in the world and see reality without rose-colored glasses and not be a bit pessimistic at times, even if there are always rays of bright sunlight here and there. This approach and attitude has been polarizing and divisive at times and has brought about the demise of a few friendships (and I won’t pretend that that didn’t hurt).
On rare occasions I met up with people with almost as dark a view on the world, with as many complaints and who reveled in sharing complaints, with similar dark senses of humor, with similar misanthropic and impatient tendencies. But I had never quite met my match until now. My heart – be still, dear heart – has been stolen by someone who told me that he makes mental lists of all the things he hates while he is walking to work.
Sigh.
I once advised a girl who had had rather iffy relationships and made iffy relationship choices to stop accepting and settling for stale crumbs and to only accept the “the whole cake”. I knew I had my whole cake already – but when I heard about this hate list – and knew that the person behind it could also laugh about all the annoyances on the list, I knew I had the icing on the cake as well.
All this is not to say that I think real, visceral hatred and anger is healthy. I don’t like to waste energy or in-depth thought on any of it, which is why I think it’s great to make a mental list or voice the little complaints here and there – it is a means of just letting them go and moving forward. Save the real anger and hatred for bigger stuff – the major injustices in the world. The sexism, racism, abuse and all the other real travesties. I mean, yes, a group of people walking side-by-side taking up the entire width of a sidewalk is really damn annoying and virtually impossible to get around without running into road traffic, but it’s not the end of the world or particularly destructive.
It’s a pick-your-battle kind of war, really. One man in my … sphere of influence (haha – I make myself sound so mesmerizing!) complained heartily about racism and racial stereotypes, and how he is so tired of them he might just move back to Africa one day so as to not hear these things any longer. And I thought, yeah, but I suspect you will hear different stupid things in Africa and maybe get Ebola. Okay. Probably not – that’s just one of my ignorant attempts at being funny. (I had been watching the news and saw that Guinea is facing its first-ever Ebola outbreak.) My serious point was that it makes little sense to abandon an otherwise comfortable life just because you don’t want to hear things that are unpleasant to live a less comfortable life and probably just hear a different set of annoying generalizations. Of course, I don’t have to bear the weight of racist (inadvertent or otherwise) commentary all the time, and it may well feel much more powerful and daunting than just being “unpleasant” to someone exposed to it all the time.
Naturally all of this made me think once more of the elusive idea of “Africa”. Mostly because I talked to someone about African place names that sound foreign to our western ears, and for example, as children, we scarcely know that they are real places – they sound so exotic that they could be figments of someone’s phonetically rich imagination. Timbuktu came up a lot when I was a kid – and when I ask people these days what they associate with the word “Timbuktu” now, they rarely name a place, mention Africa or – heaven forbid – mention the country of which it is actually a part (Mali). Same goes for Ouagadougou (capital of Burkina Faso). When I mentioned “Burkina Faso” to my mother, she too just said, “I don’t know what that is.”
