Flattened mates

They've started talking about the characters in sitcoms as though they are real people e.g. "wow, do you know how hard it would have been for him to say that?"

Language is the gimp of creativity

Passion is something that gets under appreciated in academic learning. I guess academia is about empiricism... But we bastardise so much. If the arts were primarily about empirical research then there wouldn't be any artworks for art conservationists and art historians to dissect. And the whole art world just would not exist.

Creativity is the soul of art making, but I feel like it gets ignored in some ways, maybe because we can't decided what it is or where it comes from.

The UNSW motto is "manu et mente", and I thought, in first year, what about "heart"? Cor means heart in Latin, and it's where we get "core" from. The tricky realm of feeling is the core of the existence of the humanities.

I'm starting to sicken at the amount of theoretical content that needs to be ingested to earn a degree in education. Because theory seems like a mirror, it gives us a pretty trustworthy reflection, but it's flat and hard and cold. What it doesn't reflect is a whole internal world of processes that are inherent to our area of study. And I feel that it is causing a schism between what we do and how we talk about what we're doing.

Our washing machine

Similar to my prior post about our cold tap, our washing machine is a function bestowed upon our humble abode that has gone unused for a long time. In fact, the whole time we've lived here.

Once, I piled my clothes inside its mouth and bespeckled them with washing powder, twisted the taps and turned around to see our neighbour, who explained that it belonged to him and that it no longer works. Retreating in neighbourly apology I took my half-slimed (why does the washing powder makes it slimy?) garments in my arms and climbed the stairs to the bathtub, the vessel where my washing has been washed ever since.

Today one of my flatmates called the real estate agent to enquire about having another cold tap installed in the communal laundry so that we can get a machine put in. She was informed that the machine there was put in by the landlord for us to use, and is not made available to the flat downstairs (inhabited by the man who had let me know "owns" the device).

Well, lovely big old universe has done it again! The neighbours door was seen being rapped upon and his face was witnessed by the real estate agent... And just like that, I can enjoy the wonderful commodity of an electronically powered washing appliance and stop spending Saturday mornings scratching the crotch of my underpants with sunshine soap.

Doing the wrong thing

Often I look at behaviour that extends beyond binary options and feel a sense of affinity, but also uneasiness. Sadly I judge plenty of choices as having right or wrong outcomes. I wish that I wasn't taught to judge things so simplistically. Life isn't really about making the right or wrong decisions. Choices can be auspicious or inauspicious, but not correct or incorrect. Life is four dimensional, it spreads out in all directions... everything you do has the capacity to be both good and bad (and everything else) at once. Kissing a person in front of someone else who once loved you ignites bitterness and sweetness in one mouthful. If you could taste the things you do, it would be quite unpalatable. You'd spit it out and wouldn't do anything ever again, because the taste would be acrimonious but sacchariferous; like vomiting honey. Confusing, distasteful, insulting to your senses and your innocent ideas about how you really act.

I'm saying that choice, by its very definition cannot be wrong or right. It's about selection of an option. Options by their definition are multifarious, irreducible to good and bad. Not simple, not easy, not fatalistic.

Why is it that we don't get told that when we talk really we shout? Speaking isn't a means to an end, it's not just the journey of a thought from brain to mouth: it keeps travelling in other peoples heads. If you think about something long enough it turns into habit, behaviour, and you can't unthink things. Certain occasions get forgotten but the general sheen or ethos of an era carries on in our values.

And it makes me sad to think that children grow up to learn that girls do girl things and boys do boy things, running ahead and crossing the road without holding hands is wrong. Those values are accepted and sometimes used to negate pain or danger, but the point is that we are told our actions are right or wrong, which ironically, is the wrong thing to do.

I don't eat bodies

This is as much to remind myself as to demonstrate to anyone else that it's possible to be a healthy, poor vegetarian.

Walnuts, boiled egg, steamed field mushroom with garlic and butter, steamed broccoli, brown rice with Greek yoghurt and honey. And orange juice.

I just ingested this. I reckon this meal probably cost less than $6, and I only ate two thirds of it so I saved the rest. Sometimes I don't eat so well, especially when I'm out at uni or just too busy to be bothered cooking properly. However I already had the rice and boiled egg cooked so this didn't take long at all, probably 15 minutes.
So I hope that this urges the capacity to remember that eating well is possible. It's also important.

That soft and sick funny little feeling

Something that needs to be acknowledged is that I do get sad.
Especially if I am going to teach, I should try and know what it is that makes me sad so as to grasp it by the feet and fling it elsewhere or otherwise hold up a shield and deal with it later.

I promise myself that I will always try and be practical about sadness, because I actually have that choice. I used to allow myself to become engulfed in emotion, but now I sort of just let myself live with it. Fighting it is exhausting and bewildering (what is the cost of losing in a fight against yourself?), ignoring it is not possible at times. Those are choices that I can make, but I know that the most sensible, life-preserving choice is to know how I feel and know that I won't always feel that way.

When it's extreme, I feel unsure of what to do. And it's bizarre because I also love that sort of low, even if it's hard and lonely and generally difficult to understand, because I can tell that when I'm not like that, I will be capable and calm and awake and generally quite good at the things that I want to do. I don't feel that my sadness is something that always defines me, only sometimes does it define my outlook.

I wish it was easier for people to talk freely about mental illness. My friend Seema is creating a space for expressing mental health problems, from my understanding offering creative non-fiction stories from other peoples lives as well as all kinds of positive support not only about depression but wider social issues and actions that we can take. She says it is hard work creating a support network like that, I don't doubt her, but I know that work isn't for nothing. Hearing other peoples stories is a supportive and constructive thing.

my God is Real!

I don't like using the word God because it means "big man" in my head. That's why I like the Hindu god Brahman who is gender neutral, not to mention the Atman (inner, personal self in all people) is recognised to be a droplet in the ocean of Brahman which I find far more pervasive and personal than a god who made us and then decides our fate.

But I am not Hindu (one has to be born Hindu to be Hindu). Without having ever written it in such definitive terms, to me god is the consciousness in all living things. I told that to my friend the other day who has an interest in biology and neuroscience and he told me that there is a little part in the back of your brain, under the nape of your neck, which if snipped renders a person unconscious.

And for the next two days I was quite sad. Because the beauty and mystery of perception was up until that point a wonderful secret of the universe that I was enjoying respecting and living through. But turns out no, it's all physiological.

However now I do not think scientific fact makes it any less miraculous or less worthy of reverence. If anything it confirms the reality of being. You must be careful not to deify something as fleeting as your life, be humble about it. Also do not reify consciousness, because then you cannot appreciate it. I believe there's a balance in which always being awake to sensory perceptions allows you to fully exist in the present.

Our cold tap

Well. Somehow (I was not in the room when it happened) the handle of the cold tap in our kitchen sink became separate from the faucet and remained that way for many, many months.

Thankfully, the good old universe fixed it for us when by chance an old friend of my flatmates came over for tea yesterday in his plumbing uniform and united the free floating handle back to its virtuous position in no time at all.

I'm such an optimist now that I can twist laziness into surrender to the universe.

Further notes on balls of hair

Thankfully nobody has choked. It was a close call for a while there, but turns out the recipient is of a sane nature and capable of understanding my experience. I could relay it but it's very difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of this love, except for its universality. It shall have to suffice to say that in a wakeful moment the underlying ubiquitous love that is in everything made itself seen in another human. I hope not to sound romantic because there is no romance in the fact. It's a truth I'd like to see more often and in all things.

Last night I learnt more about different kinds of speech as defined by advaita vedanta philosophy (four kinds: arising from the navel, heart, larynx or tongue), and my tutor said to us that speech arising from the heart holds qualities of truth, is free from impediment and occurs when the speaker is talking about something they truly love, and this kind of speech carries with it freedom. Well, this was exactly my experience. 


I had not explained this encounter with "true love" to anyone because it seemed sacred and I would have liked to leave it undisturbed. But it seemed to ferment, and I could feel delusive notions of romance binding the experience into some sort of insubstantial fictitious fantasy which was a bastardisation of the real thing. This whole reaction took quite an unconscious form for the most part, only being fully acknowledged upon my explanation of it to the person who evoked it. It was probably ignored because I did not want it to happen. And once I had described the event, even without a response my heart was liberated from my scheming mind and I felt at peace.

Who knows if that made sense. It did to me.

A hairy ball

Also, before I bash in my eyeballs for some sleep, I feel that I may soon become quite disaffected with my own growing sense of word fluidity, languid language practice, liberated locution, whatever you call this big bursting desire to write, due to an act that may, in hindsight, be considered a rash display of simplistic honesty.

Here's a little metaphor so I can shield my enfeebled conscience from having to run over the details: it may be quite dismaying to realise your cat has delivered a hairball straight from the oesophagus to the woollen turtle-neck jumper. But the cat certainly felt some relief. Without feeding it too much thought (because I do not like being distracted), I've been building up a bit of a hairball over the last two-ish months regarding love, and I mighta kinda sorta puked it up on someone. Really underneath it's no more than a breath of fresh air, but it's the anticipated reception that might transform such a sweet pure exhalation into cat vomit.

Olfactory fallacy and assessment of the academic cage

It's wonderful how addictive it is to just write what it is I feel like writing without having to type a perfectly punctuated reference, worry about my syntax or even logical fallacies. For example:
You may be, aware that the majority of people have a sense of smell. Therefore smelling is good.

But it still feels slightly wrong to write words that aren't highly structured or referencing anything in particular.
I still feel like it will be assessed at some point. And that disturbs me, because I would like to feel free to write my ideas without apprehension.

The currency of truth

We have this idea called Freedom of Speech. I like the idea but I'm not sure how much it is believed in, or practised. It means everyone is allowed to say what they think and even air ideas that aren't popular. My friends parents remember a time when politicians tried to persuade people of their position, now I get the feeling that powerful people persuade politicians of what their position should be.

I'm not that educated in national politics, but it seems to me that if the people in charge of running the country can be told what they should say, and say what they're told, it's not a very good starting point for a nation that reveres its entitlement to free speech.

I'm going to give an example of the manipulative power that authority can have over truth. Last time I visited my mother, I spent a good part of the eight hour train trip home listening to the conversation of two people behind me (they were loud, I think most people on the carriage were listening). Firstly they spoke of where they were going: one, a young woman, was returning home to Sydney after staying in Tamworth for the past fortnight. The other was taking the train to Sydney, then finding his way to the airport, catching a flight to Beijing and then another one up to Shenyang (twenty-something hours of travel).

Then they spoke about education, the devotion of Chinese parents, the one-child policy, valentines day, arranged marriages and culturally specific dating habits. Then they spoke of their careers: she had worked in politics for many years and had recently retired from that position. I now forget what her new job was. He had been a millionaire, then started a non-for-profit organisation providing white goods to unemployed Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, when that eventually ended he decided to be a teacher and now teaches conversational English at a private college in Shenyang.

Then they spoke for a long time about their personal projects: she had just been interviewing Aboriginal people in Tamworth about their heritage and the traditions still alive in their families for the past fortnight. She had come into contact with some Indigenous people through her church, and this was just a hobby she had developed. She edits the tapes she makes and gives them back to the people who she's interviewed.
He had been writing a book for the past three years about people he had met who were implicated in World War Two. It started with his neighbour who he gradually came to know through many over the fence conversations. He decided to write down the amazing things this old man was telling him. He eventually collated quite a few stories from different war vets he met, but there was one which was really going to sell the book once it was published.

The protagonist of this particular tale is the son of a ridiculously famous Hollywood actor. The details here become a little shrouded in mystery, but this actor was around and somehow negatively entangled in Nazi Germany. The son of the actor, who related his story to the man on the train, spent some of his childhood in horrific war conditions. Apparently the story is a captivating snapshot of a child's involuntary entrenchment in a political tornado and so well told that its merit lies primarily in its innocent truth, not its connection with an acting star.

The man on the train writing the book was invited to have dinner with the son in the home of his wealthy father. The man made clear his intentions to publish his book. At this the actor tried to buy him out. Because Hollywood is owned by Jewish families, an actor with such a blemish would never again find work, so this story is a big secret. The integrity of the author was such that he declined copious amounts of money, attempted to reunite father and son, and has kept his book to himself for the meantime (I'm assuming until he can accrue an iron fisted band of attorneys). But the silencing is enforced firstly (albeit inexplicitly) by the power of the Jewish Hollywood lords, secondly by the power of the actor and his money, and thirdly by the personal choices of the author.

I know that was long-winded, but I enjoyed relating it. The moral is that we do have choice, even if the choice is to keep quiet. It's not a failure to refuse to act in some situations. Gandhi's starvation strikes were non-acts, but these absences of action raised widespread awareness. It can be frustrating to remain silent, and on some occasions silence is an act of freedom of speech. And often it is infinitely more frustrating for the opposing authority... Any teacher who's had a student who refuses to communicate knows what I'm on about!

I hope my man on the train eventually publishes his book. In the meantime it's heartening to see that power and money need not always buy out the truth and there is identity in silence.

how God is like a fart

I was just taking part in some light hearted conversation between my flatmates, telling one that her girlfriend farted earlier, such a rare and special occasion that it deserves public recognition. 

Shortly thereafter we started talking about God. One of them believes that God isn't real, the other one believes that God is to believers as an imaginary friend is to the child who speaks to it.

I think that God is much like that rare fart: it is real, but ephemeral. It dissipates into the surrounding atmosphere. Only in the moment it was experienced and only for those who had the perspicacity to hear feel or smell its entrance in their lives does it hold any meaning. Also, someone had to make that fart for it to have ever been around.

Snippets and smidgens...

When you are young and you leave home you acquire some strange furniture combinations, and also adopt all sorts of unneeded objects.

For instance I remember collecting numerous colanders from my flatmates fathers bunch of things he didn't want. Why do you need more than one colander? You also learn to be quite flexible in your usage of material goods. A colander makes a very fine rat nest. We had a very old electronic organ in the kitchen that didn't work and a dishwasher in our laundry (why?). My garden grew in saucepan lids hanging from hat racks and clothes racks. I didn't pay anything for my bed, wardrobe, drawing desk or writing desk and all other furniture in my room was made from crates.

Something compels you to hoard everything because it you don't own much. But you feel that you're floating in a white cubic sea where the flotsam that gathers about you is sort of shifting and piling up. Made from chipboard and mustard coloured velvet. You do feel adrift.

I'm writing about this now because I am sleeping on a new couch that we acquired just today. We actually acquired two couches, a lounge chair and a bookshelf. We only paid for the bookshelf and the other items were given to us by my flatmates father. A lot of my things are currently piled on my bed because we shampooed the carpet and it hasn't dried, so I cannot return the things back under the bed.

It's fascinating how well you get can by just waiting. Every piece of furniture I own has been given to me, and I've eventually culled it down to a bunch of pieces that don't look to kaleidoscopic with each other. Other things I've been gifted: a bike (but it got stolen), all my bed sheets, all the cutlery/crocery I use, a great deal of my art supplies, huge majority of my books (and I think it's a cohesive collection!) not to mention a lot of my clothes. If you wait long enough these things sort of come to you, and if you wait some more, you begin to hone the skill of selective culling until you own a collection of possessions that isn't incredibly meagre, and also not too gaudy.

I do feel incredibly lucky.

Cars

I live on a main road and there is a constant hum of traffic. It doesn't vary too much, except for in the wee wee hours of the morning when I love to hear a car coming. I can't often tell which direction it's travelling in, but I just love hearing the barely audible rattle of a car going over concrete rifts and potholes a few kilometres up or down the road and then its descent into silence again.

So in the daytime when there is a consistent motorised murmur it's hard to tell where one car starts and the other ends. I hear the peak of each one as it passes directly below me, but its whistling departure is smothered by the next tailgater, and the next, and the next.
This used to annoy me when I would meditate on sound, because it was difficult to hear each sound draw out to its end. But I think now that I enjoy it. I guess I'm reminded of a spawning ground for fish. I feel like I'm always at the party, even when it's over and most people have gone home and I get to sit and listen to the last person leaving and pattering off into the distance, taking their noise pollution with them.

Even more lovely is a late Saturday night pricked with a deeply profane tune blaring from a rolled down window that's halted at the traffic lights "HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN ASS UP THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE TO FUCK, HEAD DOWN..."
It's shocking enough when it arrives but once it's departed it's blissfully ironic. All that noise about sex and then the speedy loud exit maybe accompanied with a screaming laugh or some shouting is a proclamation of existence. Well, I am here once they've moved on.

Where am I?

YOU, my friend/lover/enemy/self/anyone who's reading, are at the centre of the universe.

Here's a little tale from Sartre to help us out: A man takes a walk in the brisk morning air and enters a park, he is pleased in surveying his surroundings, perhaps he notices the way dew renders the area of leaves it sits upon silver, perhaps he is aware of the morning calls of various birds, perhaps he is relishing the crunch of the gravel under his feet. He walks for a while, observing the area. And then he notices another person enter the park and is threatened: he is no longer the centre of consciousness in the scenario. The other person is like a black hole sucking in sensory stimuli, equal and opposite to the protagonist. In fact, this other person renders our protagonist an un-protagonist, just another player vying to be in the centre.

Similarly I think there is a general fear most people harbour towards other people. We don't know what's inside their heads, we can only glean some inferences by noticing what gets sucked into the edges of that black hole and what occasionally gets spat back out. Who knows what that person thinks of you? Who knows how they really feel towards you? It's frightening, it's alienating. It renders us all equal.

I'm going to inject a bit of science in at this point. Because we live in an infinite universe, every point in the universe is the centre of the universe.
Six inches behind you head parallel to your eyes IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
That same spot behind my head IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
The tip of a rock resting in the Gobi desert IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
Some place somewhere in outer space that has no name IS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!
ALL AT ONCE!

Now I'm gonna chuck some metaphysics into my idea soup: your consciousness always inhabits a place in space, because your consciousness resides in your body. It's not often that people experience life externally from their bodies (although it has been known to happen). Wherever you go, there you are! Your consciousness is with you when you walk down the street, get on a bus and ride all over town - it moves with you. There isn't any physics that can locate exactly where in your body your consciousness resides, but it's in there. And that elusive space is ALSO the centre of the universe.

So really there isn't much need to be frightened of that impossible yet rationally true space in other people. You may not know what it looks like to be someone else looking at you, but you know what it is like being you looking at someone else (it's the same equation but inverted), so you know the processes.

Finally here is a little bit of magic to make it all stick together nicely: you need to come closer towards you own self to understand somebody else. It seems to me that if we're all parallel in our capacity to perceive and we're all simultaneously at the centre of the universe there isn't much separating the way that we function. Because we're in our own heads, it's best to try and understand who we are, and then we can know that the same thing exists in everybody else. It's our outlook that builds walls.
We can either see each other as competitors or companions... which I suppose we do already.

Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.

There's a lot said about that guy, so much that the very thought of him turns me off.
I have lost the will to develop an opinion about him. I don't want to think about him, my eyelids roll in their sockets and my neck turns at the sight of him. I am speaking of course about our saviour, Jesus Christ.

I'm not anti-Christian, I'm not a hating atheist. This isn't about religion, because it goes beyond religion. It's about what the guy said, but not about language - because I think his message merely use human language as a net for capturing human nature. "The truth will set you free."

Admit that it's true that you will most likely not develop a marital relationship with that person you met once who lives overseas, and you will be free from imagining your wedding dress. That's a positive thing, because instead of imagining your wedding dress, you could be reading an article or boiling some pumpkin or learning a song.
How is it that we can be so irrational? How do we believe the stories we cast ourselves in? Desire is an ever hungry beast and we love to feed the bastard any little scraps we find lying around: another cookie, a newer iphone, a bigger bed, a larger pay check, a deeper experience, a bit more time, a fraction more attention, a slither more of cake yet a hell lot more of an attractive body.

We can see what those things look like in our minds eye, and they look so beautiful in our lives. It will be wonderful, satisfying, ingratiating. But there will always be newer releases of iphone models and always, always more slithers of cake. So the question squeezes out, between sloppily licked fingers and embarrassing crumbs around our mouths "when do we stop?" Well, you probably won't stop. Because there are no messages for you to stop in the places where you most often rest your gaze.

We are not living in a market economy, we are living a market economy. And we're taught to live it. Unlearning societally taught ways of living is difficult if there isn't anyone new around of massive influence who is unteaching it. But there was some dude a while ago who did have some big insights. So big that they still get thrown around (from pulpits, but also in blogs now?): "The truth will set you free."

The solipsism of this statement is so beautiful I nearly leak a tear: there is so much glory, so much rhetoric, so much sacred imagery surrounding the man who said it that sometimes you don't even want to know whatever it was that he said/did... But the truth is that these constructs are merely constraints from which you need to remove yourself, so that you can be free from the heavy sickle of hundreds of years of Church indoctrination to hear the simplicity of the statement, consider it in relation to your own life, and be free to see its truth.


(title quote is Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

Flying

It is so important to let yourself be. Don't get too involved in yourself.
Don't get all up in your own business, demanding the impossible from yourself.
Don't always put yourself down; realise that you always put yourself down.

Those ideas are costumes we weave to please other people. We spend vast amounts of time sewing together different garments: church vestments for when we want to appear professional and sober, lingerie for when we want to attract other people. It's all a well-staged act for other people.

I am in the process of sewing a parachute for my mind, so that I can survey my life with a mental construct that will help me to fly instead of plummet when my life is throwing me overboard. Because those situations are about me, not pleasing other people.
Consider it like this: what good is a pair of knickers when you're falling from an aeroplane?