Monday, October 22, 2012
Re: Crisis
The world began, the world ended.
A shaggy dog story indeed.
This response comes from being unable to deal very well with the world, so withdrawing and withdrawing... A sort of crisis, but rather personal since I oscillate between caring and not caring about the world at large. Encounters with the world leave me disgusted, but from a distance I can hold compassion for it. The problem is mostly that I can't stand people. But I'm not sure alltogether if it's 'people' in themselves I despise, or the 'habitat' or whatever makes us act like idiots on steroids.
Religious solution. I was reading the evangelists recently - leave the world to the world, the dead to the dead, and so on. Peace of mind, but hardly peace on earth. What remains interesting is a notion of 'belief'. Is there any power in believing? Is this a healing power itself?
But what about the "world"? I withdraw from it as much as I can, I see no other solution. Whenever I can I escape to a solitary house where there's silence, no people, hardly internet, and no world crisis to bug me (it's enough with what goes on inside me), though there are the flies.. Should I feel guilty escaping? On the other hand, I live a life without much money, consum, or exploits, though I'm surely part of a westernized world. It wouldn't be so wrong to say I'm living a crisis though vacillating between seeking peace of mind and its disillusion. I find no foot to stand on (so I sit down).
This is a rather silly text, but why not, the world at large is much sillier still, even in its smartness. I'd rather be stupid than smart.
World, I despise you!
I, I despise me!
Is there something more? Yes!
I am here and I am alive and I am writing!
(I am about to laugh when I read this last sentence, which is a good thing at least)
The world began, the world ended.
A shaggy dog story indeed.
Sometimes I long back to an innocent childhood
Did I bring this crisis onto myself?
What crisis then?
I was born, how f***ing strange, how wonderful
When did life turn into a distressing hell?
When does it? When did you allow anybody to disturb your inner peace? ('Inner peace' sounds like a desease...)
Well, we were born with our specific bodies, made to measure, for taking upon us the world around and its f***ups.
I sure have taken you on my shoulders when rejecting you so, that's the crisis indeed, because you're the ground I walk upon, and there's no other solution than to live with you, because if I didn't live with you it wouldn't even be a solution, not even a rejection.
Don't forget that I hate you as much as I love you!
Crisis Anonymous
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ReplyDeletePerfect. This sums up my own attitudes quite well, especially caring and not caring in turn. If nobody cares, can there be a crisis? Is the crisis born from the conflict between those who care and those who don't? And when we individually vacillate, are we compounding the problem?
ReplyDeleteThe lines:
"I was born, how f***ing strange, how wonderful
When did life turn into a distressing hell?"
sums it up well. And also makes me think that art, rather than being a self-indulgent response, as another post said, CAN be a healing force, in that it reminds the viewer/reader/listener that this is a strange and wonderful world, at least sometimes.
Thanks for responding,
Deleteimho, I do think art is a 'healing' force, making whole. it doesn't mean art should be traditionally harmoneous, beautiful, or pleasing, of course - the wholeness or healing i think is rather something that acknowledges one's own states and puts them into play. in the end i think art is about freedom, and being fueled by notions of 'beauty' (which is beyond physical characteristics and more about absorption, In its absorption it can also swallow base elements, ugliness, noise, disorder, etc.) --not very well written. i see art as something more primordial of experiences, before much filtering and conception turns them into something else (but then you can play in the structure of course), but a resistance to letting go of the wholeness of your own experiences. ...
A friend of mine said recently, I don't like people; they hurt me.
DeleteCrisis is crisis from those within it, especially if physical suffering is involved; people in warzones have little or no retreat. I do think art plays a major role here; on the empyre email list, one of the contributors posted the url of a site of a work based on media related to a Palestinian refugee camp; it was eye-opening.
I do agree with you, o, about art as healing, but potentially healing; a lot of art is also about a journey through pain, not even necessarily in order to have catharsis. The institution of the art-world changes everything of course; artists, almost darwinian, struggle in a marketplace that provides impetus for new and outrageous work. On the other hand, someone like Bob Flanagan can be very inspiration through is pain. It's an incredibly complex area.
I've always felt, as an artist (etc.), that the artist is the only one who can greet the day or night with the freedom to create; nothing has to be taken for granted. And that's exhilerating!
"Religious solution. I was reading the evangelists recently - leave the world to the world, the dead to the dead, and so on. Peace of mind, but hardly peace on earth. What remains interesting is a notion of 'belief'. Is there any power in believing? Is this a healing power itself?"
ReplyDeleteLove this paragraph, because it forms connections in my brain between my own believes & prose style and those with whom I usually disagree the most. Some of my own attitudes toward religion have become unpopular with some in my peer group, because there is a large chunk of me that respects the utter, irrational faith of American evangalists. If only they weren't evangelical about it. The only thing, I believe, that is absolutely wrong and unjustified is to say, "my beliefs are more correct than those of others," and yet maybe we have something to learn, as you suggest, from the defense of the religious against reality. "Do not cling to this world," Buddha says--isn't that exactly what environmentalists are guilty of?
I have had long and painful arguments with some of my best friends about the retiring-impulse you speak of. Deleuze and Guattari say basically--I'm oversimplifying and using the wrong vocabulary--that the line of flight that is escape is more revolutionary than the revolutionary impulse, which is in the end, a reaction against a system and usually ends up reinforcing the thing it pushes against. If there were larger flows of desire that were leaking out of the sides of the container of capitalism, the system would become less able to control all of us. For the record, I am arguing against the side I usually take on this. I usually cite Krishna's Karma-yoga as my reason for continuing to fight. As Leonard Cohen said, "They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within."
Should we cling or not?
DeleteI think we're born with different personalities, (!), some are energetic by nature, others weak physically, the amount of testosteron in the body (and foetus) etc make us humans a complete palette and spectrum of freaks. Should we even try to form a common line of flight?
I don't think there is much use in changing myself, that only made me suffer more. Of course you tried, you were young and... Then decades go by, you see the basic personality is the same, it has its sensitivities that makes it freak out independent on your rational intentions, so in the end, sort of, let your nature be itself so that you might be your nature...
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Delete"there is a large chunk of me that respects the utter, irrational faith of American evangalists. If only they weren't evangelical about it." Agreed - there's something compelling about faith. I am utterly areligious, and read a lot of secular humanist lit, and what I find annoying about the new atheism is the fact that it has zero tolerance regarding belief. I don't think faith should drive social policy, but I don't feel like we have to eradicate people's personal beliefs to move forward. We all have beliefs in something - there is no one that lives their lives 100% factually.
DeleteThe line of flight of course also keeps you alive!
DeleteI'm not sure what your beef is with environmentalists, but I don't find them "guilty" of clinging - in fact Buddhist ideas underlie much of the environmental movement, unless one treats Buddhism as escapism, where suffering is formalized as alleviated through enlightenment or preaching.
I think there's something much darker in evangelism and religion, especially monotheistic religion, in general - summed up by the very idea of "belief" and "I believe in." This leads to absolutist ideas of right and wrong, inerrancy, and so forth - and collapses thinking for oneself. I follow Sam Harris on this. Religious solutions lead to things like "animals are on earth for us" - and therefore can be slaughtered (I've heard this directly, a lot). I think problematizing crisis itself isn't a bad idea...
Re: Belief - I also think that there is something I don't understand here on the neurophysiological level; I know a number of people who have ended up in states of what I can only think of as absolute belief, and it seems to me that physiology has to be involved. Or think about, on the surface, 'irrational' beliefs in everything from the burning bush to virgin birth to various ascents and descents to and from heaven, to being placed in charge of solar systems, to whatever. I understand where these beliefs come from mythologically, but I don't understand why they're believed.
A related note (i put the comment here instead)
ReplyDeleteA sense of guilt, feeling that I'm fighting guilt, and resentment. And how deep this feeling of guilt goes. But how am I guilty? Guilty of existing? Of not engaging more? Then you think about how much engagement has its basis in guilt, rather than compassion, say. Guilt is surely a motivator, negative though. I'm not sure if we -should- be moved by guilt - which is a form of slavery. And then you wonder, who or what is producing this guilt in you, mustn't there be some guilt-producing machine somewhere to keep us properly in slavery? Because if we were free from guilt then who knows what we could do. Guilt and fear, surely powerful tools to be used against you, against freedom. Guilt goes into my stomach, fear also. I don't want them at all, so I try to fight them, but freedom isn't easy, guilt and fear goes deep. So, this mechanism of guilt-production, facilitating re-action... Nietzsche's camel, carrying the world on your back... I feel I have to fight it, it will make my body sick if I took this guilt on me (I'm a great internalizer)... I throw it off, I'm not guilty! Whoever and whatever produce any crisis have no right delegating guilt of it to me. What a devilish scheme... You run off with the big money and leave me feeling guilty. I reject as much as I can, though I don't find it easy. The world of guilt. I wonder how our highly mediated world is intensifying a sense of guilt, of having the world on your shoulders... another slavery. I mean our drive shouldn't come from guilt, our reason to engage or feeling the urge to do something. Rather be moved by compassion to the world, or anyhow based on freedom. But then, how easy is it to know when guilt is part of it, when you can be driven by guilt of not feeling compassionate, or feeling guilty of not feeling guilty. If you act out of guilt you're reacting as much as acting. Find clues how to act out of freedom, avoiding guilt and fear. On the other side, there's a reaction of shame, faced with the carefree and with freedom, because how free can we be? I can't stand my freedom, maybe that's why I accept (and embrace) guilt?! Vacillating between guilt and shame, shameless freedom, because doesn't it also feel good to be guilty? A binding that at least places you somewhere, creates order - a keyword! - you figure out how guilt is structuring society... Anyway, I can't stand this guilt, I can't stand this shameless freedom, I can't stand myself, I can't stand the world. Where do we find some place to set our feet down? ...
On the light side, I remember Hawkeye, in the MASH series saying, "Whatever...", Major Burns: "What do you mean 'whatever'?", Hawkeye: "I mean that being so neurotic as I am everything you could possibly say has a decent chance of hitting guilt in me".
There could be freedom in just doing without wondering what your motivation is -- whether it's guilt; internalization of the Golden Rule/religion/values you were raised with; selfishness; selfish altruism; pure altruism; hedonism; immediate gratification; delayed gratification; id; ego; superego; nihilism; instinct; impulse; compassion; empathy; etc. And sometimes it's the other way around; you do something, and then you find out why you did it based on how you feel about it.
DeleteAbsolutely agree here, by the way.
DeleteThere's a Russian dissident logician (founded something called ultra-intuitionist logic) who wrote also on ethics, and came up with two fundamental rules of freedom within the social - 1. You have permission to do anything you want to do. 2. I have permission not to have done to me what I don't want done to me.
There are w/holes in this but it's a fascinating system anyway, placing freedom in the restraints of the Other.
I'm not at all sure guilt is bad; it's bad if it's constant no matter what you do, but it's also a great motivator; if I see someone suffering and I know that person or feel it would be easy to alleviate the problem - guilt is a driving force. I also remember years ago in anthropology learning about the guilt/shame dichotomy; now I think, though, that the world is psychologically and anthropologically much more complex than that.
ReplyDeleteThere are two other complexes often at work - trauma and depression (which are also interrelated etc.); both tend towards repetition and drawing the boundary of the world inward. The terminal point of this inwardness, I think, is catatonia and death, inertness - which suggests that as long as one can write, can create, one is alive and if not escaped from guilt or shame etc., has at least worked around them.