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.

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.

                                           

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.

On religion

From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco:

"And begin by combining his name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it." Abulfia, Hayyê ha-Nefes, MS München 408, fols. 65a-65b

Well, I'm running late to a meeting, as usual, so I'd better comment this later.

On processing

A friend threatened me the other day with sending me an article about procrastination. According to him I have "all the hallmarks of a writer" and I assume he believes procrastination is one of those. I probably have a hundred never written down books in my head. Thought through and ready to be published. But I never ever write them down. Because when I am done with the process, I am no longer interested. It's like learning to knit. I once knitted a massive scarf (It's true, I have photo proof!) and so I know how to knit. I might not have the muscle memory for it, I might not know how to make those twists and turns, but I have discovered the mystery of it. Thus, I am done with it.

Establishing reality

Most people I know are all about creating the perfect life for themselves and the people they have closest. Many of them get annoyed by things and thoughts that come their way, when these things are not part of their own bubble. Which is fine. I honestly feel relieved when my friends start valuing themselves and the life they lead. But the fort we all have around our values and ways of thinking also leaves us feeling lonely sometimes.

It seems I am lingering on the other extreme, where there is a constant urge to see through the fasade, to break through and create an understanding of what is lying beyond the back drop. All my days of "thinking to much" was probably just me trying to get it. And people kept telling me there wasn't anything to get. Wasn't there though? Or is it just a strategy we are taught, to let us live without constant fear of the unknown? I know it is easier to focus on what to have for dinner and when to get kids. It's a kind of reality, one that is clear, one that we are taught to handle. That is what they call growing up.

Is there too little time for us to go beyond what is expected? Are we just lazy? What are we going to do when everything is said and done and we are about to die but have a little moment left? Sometime I feel alone with my brain. Peace out.