Mans biggest fear

What separates man from animal is that man has got an intellect.

It could also be the way that man choose to use his or her intellect against themselves.

How do you create war? You set some criteria for what matters, and then you decide that everyone who thinks differently is on the other side, and so must be killed. It doesn't really matter if it's about sharing the water of a river or having different perspectives on what happens when you die. (When it comes to having different takes on afterlife, killing others in war because of different opinions can be considered a particularly paradoxical activity, since nobody will be around to tell who won.) In this case, though, the men who make the decisions rarely fight in the war, and so their decisions do not inflict any personal damage.

On a more personal level, we have something called anxiety, angst. It comes in many forms, but is always carried out by the individual. It wasn't until having lived with severe angst through many years, that I suddenly realized the problem is not angst itself, but the capability of creating chains of thought long enough to make one feel insufficient. Some people would boil this down to having too much time to think. In that case, getting a hair cut and a job might solve the problem. But I would like to explore this further than that. What is it that drives us towards hurting ourselves with our intellect?

Decisions

I miss my grandmother. My grandmother always knew what was right. No doubt, just bam, here you go. 

Like a really fast sorting machine.

Care or Career

Once I wrote an essay about the correlation between being poor, economically or socially, during upbringing and the tendency to feel responsibility for the environment later in life. The material was in itself too poor for me to make any conclusions and the essay didn’t pass the scrutinising eye of the nature science teacher that was supposed to give me the thumbs up. But – I still thought it made a good point, namely that among the people I interviewed, there was a feeling of responsibility for the environment, that the more fortunate didn’t acknowledge. Although it’s not up to me to judge the individual hell of every person (no doubt we all have our own), let’s pretend there is a division between us for now.

So, take a closer look at these people that so fervently fight for the rights of the environment, the human rights and the generations to come. What else do they have in common?

I don’t know much about other generations; I had a job at a place where the environment was in focus, and I didn’t understand at all where they were coming from. Flying everywhere, printing papers en masse, talking behind each others backs, constantly competing for affirmation of their work and being devoted to the old fashioned phenomena of hierarchy – how they execute their business doesn’t follow my thesis at all. But, hey, they weren’t all bad and there might be loads I don’t understand about governmental institutions. Point being, I felt lost being there, because I had expected them to be different than they turned out to be. Alas, don’t take my thinking too seriously; I don’t have any scientific support for it.

There are also those who have discovered the environment coming up on the agenda as a career opportunity. You can now pursue an exam in environmental studies like you used to do with, say, economy studies. There is no need for you to like it, or put your heart in it. Complete it, be a good student, and you can get a job with a big income. Start your own firm, call it something with “green” and it doesn’t really matter how good or bad you are at what you are supposed to be doing, because all your clients will be in such a desperate need of your services, they won’t bother checking how serious you are as long as they get some kind of certificate in the end. That’s nice, provided you are not the environment, a people in great need or among the generations to come.

So, what about those who actually care, who have a fire burning within them?

No Man is an Island

In environmental debates and courses, you learn how all human activities connect us with each other, especially through the globalization. There are so many angles from which you can look at it; economical and ethical being the extremes I guess. But this time I came to think of that expression in a totally different situation.

A while back, I was on a train to Gothenburg, starting to get a bit bored, tired and hungry. The guy sitting next to me made me think evil thoughts, because he was blocking the passage way with his computer-, phone- and iPod cables. He also had a lot of coke bottles standing around and a very big coat, taking up a lot of space. Another thing about him that was drawing my evil side’s attention was his almost constant and extremely loud conversations with his girlfriend over the phone. I, having some issues with drawing too much attention to myself, sat patiently waiting for the right moment to ask him to let me pass so that I could visit the powder room. (Never going in first class before, I was actually wondering what the toilets would be like… Would they smell less? Were they cleaned more thoroughly?) But the playing and talking didn’t seem to have an end.

Funny thing about first class is that there are no families, and no pets. No small girls clutching their colourful guinea pig cages. No moms reading stories or dads taking their sons to the bathroom. It was mostly well established people and couples, having conversations about important matters. The train conductors were extra chirpy and I wonder if they even had a different outfit, although I didn’t go to second class to check, so I don’t know. In first class your legs get more space, you get free internet connection, news papers and tea or coffee. Not that I had access to any of the latter, considering the guy mentioned above. I also brought my own news paper, not having been in the first class salon before. So this is the setup. Then something else happened.

Fifteen minutes before arrival, we all heard a bump and then the train started braking hard. When I say hard, I mean that it was noticeable that the driver tried to get the train to a full stop, but I was also thinking that it was surprisingly smooth. Nobody got thrown on the floor, but I would have gotten a cup of coffee in my lap had I not been fast and alert. During the stopping distance, there was a crunching noise, like something was dragged under the train, or possibly run over. Like memories from your childhood, it’s hard to know if this was really happening though, or if it’s constructed by the brain after hearing other people saying it a lot, or in the case of childhood memories, having seen a photo.

So there we were, in the middle of nowhere and without any information on what was going on. While the train was breaking I had enough time to think that any real danger was probably already out of the picture. The bump also gave a clue. Pretty soon, sooner than you’d think considering what had just happened, the driver announced that a person had been hit. Impressive how stable his voice was, all comforting and reassuring. Instantly, all the personnel came running through the train towards the front. A lady started crying loudly and people started talking about how horrifying it all was.

In this situation, I am one of those people prone to exchange glances with other people. Assessing the situation together, silently stating how you are in this together. This time, though, I was sitting next to a guy who chose to ignore me and instead calling his girlfriend to loudly declaim how “they had wasted somebody” and that he was annoyed “like everybody else”. He actually rose from his seat to do this, but by that time I felt stunned and didn’t take the opportunity to go the bathroom. A few minutes later, I highly regretted this, when the rescue team decided to cut the power. Did I mention this was late in the evening and it was all dark out? Well, it got very dark inside the train too. 

Considering myself one of the more relaxed people in our much stressed society, it still felt odd to just sit there for three hours. You get cut off. You can’t use the internet (or even your computer if you packed the power cord in the wrong bag, like I did), you can’t read because it’s pitch black. Outside there were people searching under the train with flashlights, a number of blinking lights from police and ambulance being the only other source of light. You sit there and you know that something terrible just happened, but you can’t do anything, you are not allowed to move and in the dead silence you don’t really want to call anyone. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how asocial I can be. At this point even I would have liked some human companionship. And the things that up until then had been bothering me about my closest neighbour all got shadowed by my growing annoyance of the forced solitude in which he put me.

 To finish the story about what happened, they tried to console the crying lady with some lukewarm food and then they told us that it had been a suicide. They knew because the person had been standing still on the tracks with their back towards the train, and then slowly turned as it approached. The body was dragged along and then let go some 300 meters behind the current position of the train. Its procedure to replace the staff in these situations, which seemed reasonable considering the attendants couldn’t answer a single question without getting side tracked and losing their thought. So after the authority was done, some three hours after the incident, and the new staff was on board, the train slowly rolled in to the station in Gothenburg. From there we all had to go with buses and I ended up at my final destination a little more than four hours later than expected. No goodbyes, no exchange of relief, no nothing. Leaving the train I saw all the people from the second class carts, and I was thinking that I bet I would have felt better sitting with them.

Disclosure

Lately I've seemed to be totally unable to finish a book. I can’t get through Foucault, never get done with Eco. Not even the by comparison easily read Edelfeldt manages to prolong my attention span. A couple of days ago I started on Leviathan by Paul Auster, in the hopes of getting my reading back. Considering I’ve never really liked neither The New York Trilogy nor the Book of Illusions, this might have been a lost cause from the beginning. On the other hand, Paul Auster is a well renowned author and I thought his fluent language would be able to help me in my misery. (Well, maybe it isn’t misery in the way it could have been, but if you are used to taking to reading when you need a break from life, not being able to do so is quite disturbing.)

It took me some time to understand what was going on and the answer, my friends, is this: People are talking too much. Somewhere along the road of intellectual history, being able to express your thought in as many words as possible, has become the attribute of knowledge and aptitude. An example: when I took classes in philosophy, the people that were loudest and most talkative were considered the most brilliant. Even repeating what was just said or pointing out the obvious, gave applause from the rest of us, either being so much in awe of their confidence that we didn’t listen properly, or ourselves completely lacking the confidence to speak up, and so making this misconception persevere. Some of my comrades also thought gesticulating a lot when you talk is a sign of intelligence, but that must just be momentary confusion, yes?

Anyway, back to the talking. You know how everyone stops and listen when the wise man speaks? I’m imagining some kind of Buddha, which is quiet for a hundred years and then utters one, very mysterious, sentence. There might be something in there, you think, so I’d better listen really carefully. Or the wise Indian, who is the only one in the camp who knows anything about medicine; you’d better listen to him! (And then there is your mother, who you are supposed to listen to, but never do. A whole other story there…) Might it be the case that somewhere along the way we forgot who we are supposed to listen to, why people are talking, and that now we believe that anyone who manages to say something we don’t immediately understand, is our superior? “Say something better yourself then!” you might object. To which I will answer, that I’m not sure that I can, but I will declare that I am probably capable of saying the exact same thing, in far less words. 

Now, this might all be true, or the fact might be that I am just too lazy to read books where the letters are tiny, the sentences long and in which there is no dialogue anywhere in sight.

                                           

Architecture

How to Howl

I went to see this movie, Howl, about Allen Ginsberg’s trial after the release of his book Howl. Well, it actually wasn’t his trial, but the editor’s, who had been willing to publish his slightly controversial poem. Anyway, the problem of letting the Allen Ginsberg character read the whole thing through out the movie was solved by flowing images and background music. The images made me feel nauseous, although I can’t say for certain that this wasn’t emphasized by me sitting on the second row. Neck problems and dizziness must be quite common after sitting like that for two hours, all this time being bombarded with strong colours and fast moving objects. This movie wasn’t that long, nor was it filled to the brim with action, but in general these days it seems more important to make a film really long, than making it interesting. 

There were two things in particular that the Allen figure said during the reproduction of old interviews. He talked about poetry and how to make it; where it comes from. He described it as starting with a feeling in your stomach that moves upwards, through your throat, and then emerges from your mouth like a sound. This can be a groan, a sigh or whatever sound you connect with that certain feeling. To write poetry, you take a good look at what you have around you. What is happening, what you can see etc. Combine the words that come up with the feeling you have in your stomach and poetry drops down on the paper. So it’s as easy as that. 

Another thing he said, and also what I think is the most relevant for what I’m trying to say with this blog, was that if you want to write anything good, you have to give it the whole day and you can’t expect anything satisfying to come out of it before you’ve tried for several hours. (He didn’t mention how agonizing this can be to some of us.) To use words of Ginsberg when he had managed to write something that he felt completely satisfied with, this is true. And it reflects what I wrote earlier about permutations and finding the true name of God. Whatever you want to do, you have to go really deep into it to come out with something good. We want you to howl, to roar when you find something true. What we don’t want is for you to yap continuously, without anything real to say.

Being Pretentious

I just finished this book by Julie Buxbaum called The Opposite of Love. It’s been sitting in my bookshelf for I don’t know how long and I only started reading it because I couldn’t think clearly enough to understand any of the books in the pile by my bed.

The author is a woman in her late twenties or maybe she just had her 30^th birthday. She is a lawyer, born in New York. The book is about a woman in her late twenties, working in a law firm, in New York. The story revolves around her finding herself and thereby winning back a love that she threw away from fear of her own feelings. It’s about life and death, explained through what happens with the people this woman has close; her dad, her grandfather, her girl friends etc. This book first became my bath tub book and then, surprisingly, took over the place as my “thinking about something else than my life before I go to sleep” book. And this is troubling me. I find it most disturbing. Can you guess why?

Yes, I believe it is because I am pretentious, an aspiring writer, who also has a way of complicating things. “Write about what you know.” You hear it in movies, in classes, from encouraging friends. It’s a good idea; it seems like a good place to start. I appreciate reading about other people’s lives; I can assure you my curiosity is immeasurable when it comes to human beings and how they use the time they have on their hands. Thus, I find pleasure in reading Bodil Malmsten for instance. The way she is describing her life as a child, the environment in which she was brought up, it’s all giving me new information. She is writing about what she knows, in a pretty simple language, but still makes it interesting for someone who does not know her personally.

In The Opposite of Love, however, the author is using external factors that she knows well, like what it is like to work at a law firm, but she is also attempting to say something about life within us. The story isn’t bland enough to make me throw the book away, but is, none the less, not very interesting. The insights doesn’t offer any novelties, but the story is still engaging enough for me to relax for a minute, lost in the world of an author I do not respect, because I am pretentious. Is this what they call a Feel Good Novel, I wonder?

In any case, I’ve saved the last couple of pages for some days now, because I don’t want to be left without the security of knowing I can pick that book up at night and forget myself for a couple of minutes. Just for once.

Permutations

In the book mentioned below, the Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, they talk a lot about words and their permutations. How, for instance, the secret name of God is as long as the entire Torah, but how finding all the possible permutations of the Torah is impossible. This is because the temurah ( a method used by the Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible) says you have to include each character and not just the letters themselves in the making of new permutations. "Each letter is a letter unto itself, no matter how often it appears on other pages." I guess to find the real name of God you need to do it in the language and through the knowledge that the work itself was written. And, although very interesting, I don't know much about that.

But - What I'm thinking is, although it makes sense to do such a thing with a work that is so old and so important to so many people/peoples, you could do it with anything. Combined with the previous lecture about how to stare at something until you see the truth of it. Again, not something that everyday people have the time or energy to explore. I get exhausted just by trying to get through this book that I'm quoting.

Detours to Finding Oneself

Thinking. Loving. Living. Level. Being on the same level. Feeling levelled.

To be clear, I don't care about religion. To me, it's just an insult to the universe. A way to make your mistakes ok. A bad excuse to be an equally bad person. If you need religion to make you care about other people (not understanding why to do it, but to start doing it) you have a serious problem and you should probably see a therapist. (More like something else to do, than to find anything important, considering therapists are just people too.) Or go stand in the corner and think about what you've done.

The quote I wrote about religion came up in a discussion with a friend, who made the argument that jehovas are better than other religious people, becuase they call God by his Name. There are many faux pas in this, which I'm sure are as clear to you, my intelligent and attentive reader, as it is to me. First of all, aren't we supposed to be of equal value? Second, if there was something like a God, a force that could actually sort out your problems for you, should the uttering of the specific name really help in getting the attention? But, looking away from these somewhat upsetting matters, the argument lead me to that quote.

I actually thought that the quote, about how to explore the name of God, underlined what I had just wrote about looking beyond. And I don't think it's the only thing like that you can get from reading the Bible. I made the argument to my friend that the Book might have been intended for us to read as one of these popular self-help books. There are bound to be some answers in there for you, if you read it right. If you could just, please, look through the surface, the laws, all that is apparent. How crooked is society, when people turn to religion to excuse themselves? Considering those who are not help seeking in the way that they are reading a book, but is actually asking for help in prayer, it might work, because they are talking to themselves. Something that is usually frowned upon.

I have a great faiblesse for churches though. Maybe because they are real? Often they are beautiful, engaged a lot of handy artists in their building phase and I guess they speak of human history. The churches can stay, religion may go now.