10.24.22

 I meditated today for the first time in too long. It was like cleaning out some disgusting thing in your bathroom that was neglected too long. I had an image actually of a liquid that had pooled, it was green and poisonous and I was in it. I had an awareness that it was some kind of acid that would normally burn a person's skin off but I had grown so used to it that I could submerge my hand in it and while the pain was excruciating there was no noticeable change in appearance. A voice said "you aren't supposed to be able to stay in that" in this kind of horrified and shocked tone. 

The other night I was having a dream and just as I was waking up a voice showed up and sort of commanded the attention of everyone in the room (my head being the room I guess) and just said "are you ready to get rid of all this shit she gave you". I was in that weird middle space between the dream world and the awake world. I was aware enough of what was going on to think and remember but I did not try to disturb my unconscious. That is happening more lately. The conscious and unconscious parts of my mind (I think that's what they are anyway) are coexisting more and the result is I can remember these vivid images and dreams from deep in my psyche. I have this vision I could see flickering today like an old film strip that was damaged or something. It is this kind of globe with a belt like semi-circular pattern going around the middle of it. The colors change and there is motion and I can sense it has some deeper importance for me but I lack the ability to describe it well. I need to visit it in my meditations I suppose to see what I can find out about it. 

David used to talk about this deep fear, terror he would feel when he started a new piece. He said Allison would have to talk him down from quitting and nurse him back to sanity. I am of course but an instantly dead spark of magnesium from a fire starter to David's forrest fire but I have found myself with a similar feeling just before starting big projects lately. Today before I went to teach I was feeling so low, just a massive flow of flight response. So uneasy and awful. Meditation helped and then after I finished teaching I felt a great calm. 

Now I am tired and oddly calm. Not a full calm but a calm that is really just the residue anxiety leaves behind when your body is too exhausted to sustain any more today. 

1,117 Days

The mornings are a time of hope. For a few moments the insulation holds and I am allowed to roam undisturbed in my own mind. The outer world is not yet able to impose itself and so questions of what is possible and practical can not take hold. It is a happy time for me. For those few moments I have the space to love purely and safely. 

Then the thaw starts. It's like once I notice it (and by "it" I mean the world outside my mind) the sun shoots up like I'm watching a time lapse recording of a sunrise and the ice thaws that protects me from them. I feel more and more unlike them. I feel less and less confident in my ability to get through.  David's words have been playing in my head from his program notes to Testament: 

When I consider the darkness that we carry,
the pain we inflict – on those close to us, and on those we don’t even know,
the death we bring through rage, ignorance and indifference,
I say “Please God, help us to melt the rage into love,
And love into understanding and acceptance.

I feel so sad today. I think there is something fundamentally different about me that they can't understand. I seek to make them laugh and help them find a way through their pain and so often they see only some low resolution approximation of the most superficial layer of that. I keep seeing in my head the image of Lenny from Of Mice and Men after George tries talking with him. I am this big stupid ogre of a man trying to love people who I seem only able to hurt. 

I miss her every day. Every day some part of me that I don't show or talk about bleeds and screams in pain. I am grateful that the pain is less today but it certainly isn't anywhere near gone and it remains substantial and defiant, like her. It has been one thousand one hundred and seventeen days since she left. My best guess is we had somewhere around 6,000 days together before that day. I estimate about 5,500 of those days she didn't hate me. She didn't describe me as a predator or a rapist or abusive or having taken advantage of her. In her mind I was not yet an oppressor or a symbol of all that men have done to subjugate women the past millennia. I was her person. I was who she called when she didn't know how to go on and couldn't find words to say it. I would sit there with her hour after hour and just be with her. Never knowing how but entirely unable to do anything but try. I thought after 15 years of doing that she had come to know who I was. I even dared (stupidly) to begin to believe she did not see me as that ogre accidentally squeezing the life out of people I loved but that there was something worth living inside of me. Even at the height of this hubris I never imagined anything grand. I just began to slowly soak in the idea that there was a little sliver of something inside me she found beautiful. And I loved her so much I could not have cared if any one else ever saw it. The only thing that mattered was what she saw in me through her eyes. 

It felt so good to feel that for a short while. I suppose it must have been 900 days or so I got to feel that. For 900 days I got to try on the feeling of worthiness. It felt so good. I still close my eyes and breath it in sometimes. I can feel it on my skin like a favorite sweater until the outer world imposes itself again and that disappears. 

I was just telling someone yesterday that after she left and took all that with her, I was left with a choice. I choose (most days at least) to keep on loving her and to wrap my arms around those precious days in my mind. I don't know why my life has unfolded in a way that has been so persistently filled with suffering, nonetheless I choose to keep the good memories compartmentalized from the bad. I want to be able to look through the photo albums of beautiful memories in my mind and enjoy them, even knowing what came after. And moreover I want to be brave enough to choose to love that way again. 

The only thing I want out of whatever days remain for me is to taste again what it feels like to be loved down through to the bones. I'm not optimistic it will happen but I promise to cherish it if it does. I can sometimes imagine a life with someone and my god I would cherish it. I just don't think anyone can see that shred of me worth loving. It seems more and more likely it was never there. I want to believe that her insanity stopped her from being able to see the part of me worth loving anymore but the logician in me is making the compelling case that her insanity is what made her think she saw it in the first place. 

Teach us how to forgive; teach us how to be forgiven,
because it is not a simple business… 

Is it too much even to dream for a George to make the pain stop? Someone who at least cries while it happens.  

This IS different.

We are at a turning point in the history not juts of our country but our species. Democracy is the most recent iteration of the innate hopefulness of human beings. It is about believing we are capable of goodness and reason. It is about believing we can find ways to find common ground even when our disagreements are seemingly insurmountable. Liberals are often quick to point out the great stains on our history but America is an exceptional country because we have been living proof that it is possible to create a stable and thriving civilization built on the rule of law and unleash the power of the human spirit through political liberty.

Perhaps because our nation acquired great power of the past century we have come to take that miracle for granted. Democracy is fragile because it requires each new generation to sustain and nourish it or like a flame without fuel it simply flickers into darkness. This IS different not because of any policy or proposal but because the current President is challenging, corroding and disrespecting the foundations of democracy itself. If you find yourself already jumping to disagree or agree with that statement you must know you are part of the problem. The level of political ignorance in this country has become truly toxic for democracy and you have jumped to whatever opinion you have jumped to out of a competitive, nearly tribal allegiance. It is not about being right or the struggle towards being right anymore, too many people just plainly don't know what they're talking about. it's about winning. It's about beating the other side and then holding their face down in the mud when they're down. The problem is the challenges we are facing in this particular moment in time are genuinely existential. The continued existence of the human race has not been in greater peril since perhaps the Toba Volcanic Eruption 75,000 years ago. That is not hyperbole. We may very well make the planet uninhabitable through climate change or we may just yet see the specter of nuclear holocaust revive itself.

The problem as I see it is not so much that the problems are impossible to solve (although the longer we wait the more likely that becomes) but rather that our mechanism for solving them is broken and at the risk of sounding hypocritical here having just laid the blame on competitive/tribal/my-team-beat-your-team kind of rhetoric, I don't see any other way to say it other than to say the leaders of conservatism and the Republican party have failed the country. Now again I'm sure that provokes an immediate redline emotional reaction one way or another as you read that but let me try to make a point here. The democratic party is by no means infallible. There is plenty of sloppy thinking and wrong headed policy going on there as well. The reason why I am singling out republicans is they have abdicated their responsibility to work with and argue with the other side. Debate improves ideas. This is one of the fundamental ideas our whole political system was designed around. The republican leaders in this country have refused to work with democrats and challenge their ideas with the goal of making them better. Instead they have chosen to win at all costs to the point where they have now rallied around a man who's ideas are not in any way reconcilable with conservatism (to the extent that anything he has said can be examined as an idea).

There is a great tradition of conservative thought in this country. There is a great argument to be made but there is no one I know of on the right side of the aisle making it. The result is the left has no intellectual opposition and by that I mean liberals are arguing ideas while Trump and his party engage in nonsensical populist rhetoric while simultaneously lining up a cabinet of billionaires with no understanding of the agencies they have been tasked with running. .

The Great Recession of 2008

Derivatives, Freddie Mac, Toxic Mortgages...

Terms you've heard bantered about I'm sure. Yet no one I've heard has ever explained in clear language what happened. I mean apart from political ad hominem attacks. Here's the short version...

1. Banks made home loans to people they knew could not pay them back.
2. The banks that made these loans knew they had to get rid of them or they would lose money when they defaulted.
3. The banks bundled these bad loans together with other loans to conceal the bad loans when they tried to sell them.
4. After selling the loans, the banks then essentially placed bets that these loans would default.
5. The loans defaulted sparking a chain reaction that resulted in near destruction of the financial system, a prolonged recession that c and making a small amount of people a tremendous amount of money.

Driven by competition and low interest rates banks began making home loans to people they knew probably couldn't pay the loans back. In a well functioning financial system this would just mean that the banks that make these kinds of loans would go out of business once the loans default. However due to the complexities of our financial system that did not happen. In fact many of the banks that made these bad loans ended up profiting from them. Here's how:

The banks knew if they held onto these loans eventually they would default and they would lose money, so they had to sell the loans. There are two large government backed companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that buy these kinds of loans but the banks knew that Fannie and Freddie would not want to buy them if they knew they were  filled with these bad loans, a.k.a. "toxic mortgages". In order to be able to sell these loans they sold them in bulk by combining them with lots of other loans that were generally safe (think of a rubber band manufacturer mixing in broken rubber bands into bags filled with thousands of rubber bands, you'd never notice the broken ones).

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (along with every other financial agency) relies on ratings to determine it's financial value. "Rating Agencies" like Moody's or S&P are companies that give a rating to mortgages (among other things) and they continuously gave these toxic mortgagees the highest possible rating of AAA. They did this partially because the bundled mortgages were simply too big to fully understand, partly because they assumed the well established banks that were selling them would not sell bad mortgages and partly because they benefited directly from rating them highly. The rating agencies are financed by these very banks they rate and so it was in their interest to rate them highly.

If this had been all that happened it would have been outrageous and criminal. However it did not stop here. The banks that gave these toxic mortages and then sold them to Fannie and Freddie then proceeded to go a step further and bet that they would default. In the same way that you can buy car insurance in case something bad happens to your car these people bought a form of insurance in case something bad happened to these mortgages. The difference of course is they knowingly built the car with broken parts and sold it to someone knowing it would break down. In 2008 the cars began to break down. To make matters worse most of the banks all bought their insurance policies or "derivatives" from the same company, AIG.

Once it became clear these mortages were toxic it started a chain reaction. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were hemmoraging money, AIG owed hundreds of billions in "derivatives", banks could no longer sell their mortages or get insurance making them unwilling to lend money. This in turn threatened to completely shut down the banking system. Several large banks collapsed as a result and the remaining banks bought them making themselves even larger.

Time and Place

It’s a sunny afternoon in a busy outdoor plaza. Young professionals buzz around on their smart phones cramming every second of productivity possible into the formerly independent acts of commuting, eating and anything else possible. Standing off to the side leaning against a building is a teenaged boy scanning the crowd as if he is looking for someone. He is out of place by manner of appearance and focus. He spot who he is looking for…

Teenaged Boy:“Wait! Stop!”

Man:(under his breath) “Shit. This asshole again…(out loud) yea listen I’m really late and I’d love to talk to you but I gotta run”

TB:“fuck that you’ve been dodging me for weeks. I’ll follow your ass if I have to”

M: “I know, I’m sorry but I have to go. Let’s get together early next week. I promise I’ll make some time for you.”

TB: “Listen mother fucker. You’ve said that for a month now and I’m not buying your shit. This is how it’s gonna happen right now. Either you’re gonna talk to me or I’m gonna follow your sorry ass wherever you’re going and embarrass the shit out of you.”

The  man was defeated. He knew what a stubborn and relentless adversary his younger friend could be and in this case it was clear he had made up his mind.

M: “alright. I really am going to be late though so I have to go soon.”

TB: “What the fuck happened to you man? You used to think of things on such universal global terms. You couldn’t conceive of a life in which you had so dramatically scaled back your expectations. I don’t mean to be a dick but you are an unequivocal failure. You have not accomplished a fraction of anything worthy and you’re not on track to do so. Quite the contrary actually as it appears you are moving the wrong direction. It’s hard to even look at you. I can’t reconcile the pathetic blob of flesh in front of me with that powerful determined young man you once were. While I’m generally agreeable to Locke’s view of identity in this case I am sympathetic to Hume because there doesn’t seem to be anything the same about the person in front of me and the person I once knew.”

M: “Well listen I appreciate the pep talk. Let’s get together next week man and I’ll let you berate me all that you want. I’m late”

TB: “FUUUCK THAT!! Dude I’m not letting ou blow me off. Answer me god damnit. Whatthe fuck happened to you? Why are you such a massive failure? Or have you receded so far from what you once were that you’re no longer even able to articulate your thoughts, mediocore and uninspired such as they are? I suppose there’s some of that mixed in with some arrogance. You know something I don’t. You’vel ived longer, experienced more, survived, learned to pick your battles, all that shit you used to hate hearing from your elders. You used to say all of that was different names for the same thing: fear. So now I borrow your own diagnosis and tell you that you are just a pathetic, afraid, beaten down, useless bastard. If you’re decided on continuing on this way you might as well off yourself right now I mean seriously we could use the reduced carbon footprint. I don’t know what the fuck happ…”

M: “OK shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up. Yea there’s fear. I concede that. And I am ashamed of that. I do miss the person you speak of who was so fearless and determined. I miss him desparately. This vessel of life though, it is leaky old wooden boat. We wish it to be made of impenetrable steel but life beats down on you like a storm on a boat deep at sea. The storm of my early adulthood smashed the ship. I was left clinging on to this scrap of wood waiting for the storm to pass. You have to understand how hard it is to rebuild from that. It is true that from the wreckage you are liberated from all the nagging problems of the old vessel but now you have to rebuild a new one. And unlike most people I know I didn’t have the privilege of a dry dock. I’ve had to rebuild at sea on the fly with only my hands and whatever floating debris I can find. Then these assholes show up with their speedboats to race and even when I beat them 8 out of 10 times they can…”

TB: “woah there captain enough with the shitty boat metaphor. I get it. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to that and it’s not that you didn’t use to be either it’s just that you understood the cause and effect nature of the mind. Sure terrible things happen. We endure suffering that is horrific and unimaginable. That is what we are cursed with in this wretched human condition of ours. The question is what the hell do we do about it? Do we shy away from fighting like a beaten dog? Do we surrender our hopes and dreams to the tyrant of human experience or do we defiantly resist to the bitter fucking end? I see these assholes running around with the dreadlocks in the drum circles mooching off productive society while preaching peace and love. Then I see the so-called champions of our society, the successful businessmen, politicians, sports stars whatever and they largely are mental slaves who will spend their whole lives moving 100miles an hour not knowing where the fuck they’re going. Then there are the huddled masses simply soliciting the fear of the day, stumbling about their lives trying to make the least waves.”

M: “Listen I hear you. I actually hear you and I appreciate being reminded of what you’re talking about. I wish I was further along. I promise you I do. Every night I lay down my head and I feel the failure through to the bone. I hate myself. I can’t control myself. I can’t focus myself. I can’t accomplish even a fraction of what I once dreamed of. In all of these matters you are right. I don’t know exactly how I got here. All I know is that a powerful idea has entered into my awareness that I believe is a potential way forward. In fact it is awareness itself. I can spend the rest of my life admonishing myself for past failures or indulging in the anxious projection of possible negative futures and in both cases I will find an infinite amount of material to draw from. Everything you said is true and more. However when I do so I fail to recognize the infinite power and importance of right now, this very moment. I’ve learned also that to the extent I am able to be present in the here and now the pain, the fear, the anxiety, the self-hatred it all melts away and not ignorantly or selfishly so. The phenomenon of human suffering will not go away and for me I know it will never stop pulling on me like gravity. What living in the moment offers though is a new force to push against it. I was watching a large ship leave the harbor today and as it began moving it caused huge waves that violently rocked many smaller boats. I’m not sure which boat I am but if it’s possible to be the big boat that thrashes around human suffering a bit than I would consider my life well lived. And if I’m the small boat then I just have to stay afloat I suppose.”

TB: “Well I know you’re late. I guess I was a little rude. You know I don’t meant anything, I’m just worried about the future of you. I don’t want you to look back on your life with regret and I’m worried that’s what you’re headed towards.”

M: “I know you didn’t mean anything by it and I know where you’re coming from. Honestly I’m glad you forced me to talk, I needed to hear what you had to say. I guess all I can tell you is that when you are worried about the future or when you are looking back at the past you are not in the present. I think you can be a good influence on me and help guide me if you start living in the present right now.

Speaking of right now I’m an hour late. I have to go. Talk to you later.”

TB: “Bye”

So She says

I think a lot about the things she might say. That is to say what she ought to say if she wasn't who she was, which is an impressive degree of selfish. The woman is literally unable to see past herself, or at least she was when I so needed her not to be. "Come here" I imagine her saying, "tell me what's wrong". She would sit next to me on my bed, towering above me looking downward with a facial expression that was part playful and part inviting and radiated warmth. If I close my eyes I think I can feel the warmth coat me like liquid chocolate. I imagine it feels warm to know you are loved.

In the absence of such relief though what is left is an arctic chill which over time freezes your own warmth shut. The absence of that love is not the real damage, the real damage is found in that you never learned how to value yourself. You never learn how to look inward and like what you see. Dr. Freud tells me that that which is external becomes internalized when you are young. That your parents voice becomes your own inside your head. I wish I heard so many different things in my head than the relentless beating of the drum of self hatred.

"Son, pain is a part of life. If I could stop you from feeling any pain I swear to you I would but the truth is I can't and I guess maybe it's better that I can't. What's important for you to undersstand is that no matter how badly something feels or how much it hurts the nature of pain is that it is temporary. It will pass and you will survive. You are so smart and so strong and life may try to knock you down but it won't ever win because you are a survivor. It is who we are son. We get bruised and beat down and sweaty and wounded and tired and sometimes when things get their worst we even feel like giving up but you know what baby? We never do. We keep fighting, we keep trying, we keep on keeping on. We never lose sight of who we are even when it might be easy to do so. We treat people with kindness even when they make us mad or treat us badly. And what gives us strength to all of these things is love. Love is what keeps us going and I want you to know right now and forever that no matter what happens to you, no matter what mistakes you might make or pain you may endure, no matter what other people think of you or say about you, no matter if things are good or bad or somewhere in between, I will always be your mother, you will always be my son and I will always love you with all of my heart. Even if you tried to change that you couldn't. So take your time, be mad at me, talk to me or don't talk to me, it's up to you. When you are ready I will be here for you, I will always be here for you. I love you."

I think then I might be able to sleep.

Good Times

What do you do when you find yourself more and more becoming ordinary? As each day pushes me further and further from youth I find myself a vessel for cliche emotional cargo. The change is not really welcomed but yet I'm strangely rather tolerant of the whole thing. Strange because I've so often prided myself on being odd. I despise predictability. I guess fundamentally the idea that our behavior is so cause/effect seems to equate to meaninglessness. I can't construct that link right now but it exists on an emotional level for me. 

What is scary about moving further and further away from youth is the ever increasing limitations of realism. That by growing older you become more and more cognizant of the possible and the "real" and less and less focused on that which should be, that which you desperately want to be and that which you know down in the most vulnerable part of your soul must be. Whereas a child thinks in dreams and potential, the adult sees only the difficulties and struggle in the way of progress. I feel fundamentally like a failure. I have accomplished almost nothing worth accomplishing. This fills me with disgust and leaves me unable to even contemplate the worth of my own existence. This is tempered only by the inextinguishable impulse to search for answers to the question "why" which in this case tells me a psychological pattern is at work. Namely that my mother made her love so conditional as to condition me to believe the only way to be worthy of love was to accomplish amazing things. I think the child in me sees a need to hold myself to this insane standard of accomplishment in the hopes that...

The feeling has gotten worse. It's grown steadily since last week. I'm exhausted. I don't have energy for anything. I want only to sleep all day. 

writing this blog: an action motivated by one of four possible things

"In summary, all of the far-flung activities of the adult person are motivated by the energy of the life and death instincts. Anything that a person does is either (1) a direct expression of an instinct, in which case it would be a simple id object-choice like eating, sleeping, eliminating, and copulating, or (2) it is motivated by a combination of instincts, or (3) it represents a compromise between driving and resisting forces, or (4) it grows out of an ego defense."
- Calvin Hall, A Primer on Freudian Psychology

Quite a succinct summary of human behavior. What's funny to me is just a few pages prior to where I took that quote there is a passage in which the author is beginning his ascent to the previously quoted summary and he dismisses another possible explanation by saying it would't be economical and science likes economy. Whatever is true or not about the above statement, it is undoubtedly economical.

Unlike myself actually. My use of words has precedent only in the confederate states of america's printing of currency and there is I fear a similar phenomenon of inflation. In any case here I am again and tonight I am moved to speak about what is happening in Cairo.

I wish to preface my commentary with a brief but gratuitous explanation of how I heard the news of what's happened in Egypt myself. I've settled comfortably into my nocturnal summer routine and as I was laying down to sleep yesterday I found myself, as I often do, watching Morning Express with Robin Meade. It is something of a guilty pleasure because oh my god is she gorgeous but I rationalize it by telling myself it's news. Which it is...mostly.

Anyways so as I'm going to sleep I hear the military in Egypt told the President to step down or they would remove him. I wake up and they removed him. It's a fascinating occurrence because it is such a clear example of the conflict between idealism and pragmatism in democracy. Here you have a country which two years ago demanded democracy and thanks to the alliance of the military with the people were given a shot at it. A constitution is written, elections take place, a president is elected and a year passes. What appears to be a majority of Egyptians feel too little has been done in the way of creating democratic institutions and allowing for a broad spectrum of viewpoints. So they take to the streets again and again the military sides with them.

Certainly it's not a precedent you want if you are a fan of democracy. The military intervening on a bi-annual basis to assert its authority over the civilian government. However it appears that absent this action democracy would have also been endangered, perhaps more so. Our own history is filled with examples of authoritarian and anti-democratic actions on the part of our chief executive. Washington put down a rebellion between winning the revolutionary war and assuming the presidency. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, pushed through a conscription act, an income tax not to mention the 13th-15th amendments under dubious legislative circumstances. And yet these actions undoubtedly saved democracy in our country.

So I apologize that the analysis just given is really no better than some shitty cable news show but it is interesting to contemplate and there is not much to know about it yet. What's left is to wait and see what happens.

Good Times

Now Transmitting Directions for a Leap of Faith

"...one reason why the ego fails to develop is that too much of its energy is tied up in its defenses. This is a vicious circle. The defenses can not be given up because the ego is inadequate, and the ego remains inadequate as long as it relies upon the defenses. How can the ego break out of this cycle?"
- Calvin Hall from A Primer on Freudian Psychology

Knowledge is power they say, and it is. But it is a broad power that releases slowly over time. The conscious mind is like a large ship which turns slowly. Real change brought about by conscious will takes a massive and continuous expenditure of energy over a long period of time. When I think about this I feel simultaneously hopeful and overwhelmed.

Other powers exist though. Let me tell you for a moment about Shostakovich 7. There are an always growing number of masterpieces on my bucket list of pieces to listen to. It is comforting to me to consider the number of great works which exist on this planet which I have not yet experienced. I have purposely delayed listening to Beethoven 8 and Mahler 3 and the list goes on and on. I save them like wine in a cellar and when the occasion arrives I pop open a bottle and really listen to it. That's the thing I want to sit down and listen to something. Not listen while doing another thing but just listen. I popped open Shostakovich 7 the other night and had my first drink.

I have been particularly excited about this piece because I have heard stories about the Bernstein version with Chicago from various sources that have described it as an unbelievable performance. I remember reading a book in high school which listed it as the only true perfect performance and Bernstein himself regarded it as one of his three best recordings. So I was excited to get to know it.

It is an enormous work, roughly an hour and a half. The first movement alone is nearly a half hour. It begins with this exclamatory but sort of ordinary sounding introduction. It's almost as if it represents life before some traumatic event which when reflected back on is remembered as naive and innocent and vulnerable. This makes it hard to fully enjoy the big moments in the beginning. You feel like you're watching someone in a moment of ecstasy with the knowledge that their life is about to come crashing down on itself.

From there the first movement peels itself apart, becoming thinner and thinner until really just a single folk sounding melody remains. This melody is passed about and repeated and eventually begins to transform itself as the first dark presence of the piece is felt. There is a rhythmic stability imposed which permeates throughout the climax of the first movement and becomes at times relentless in its aiding of the agony expressed. Like an aid to the evil committed it pushes it along and props it up, gives it structure and clarity.

The totality of the agony conveyed is unapproachable by words. It is disjunct and relentless and projects a level of destruction which is difficult to absorb. While this section is not easy to talk about, it is I think the emotional heart of the piece. Everything that comes before it is leading to it and everything after an attempt to understand, heal and rebuild from it.

The remainder of the first movement again winds itself down layer by layer until only a thin texture remains. The remaining movements move through alternating stages of healing and further grief and in the triumphant moments of the final movement there even seems to be some kind of answer. With Shostakovich there is always so much beneath the surface to be considered. He was a man writing as both an artist and a survivor. He had things to say and yet was terrified to say them. He learned to conceal his true message beneath that which was necessary to keep himself and his family safe.

The power of this music is different than knowledge because it is penetrates deeply into experience. I have the sensation of being filled with it as I listen, propping me up higher and taller. It has the effect of turning the mind, conscious and unconscious, towards a new sight. It points us in a new direction or it shocks us out of an old way of thinking or it reminds us of something important, perhaps even revealing what is truly important. This is, in a limited and incomplete account, why I love music. It is a complete human experience. Two pieces have sustained me during these past few weeks of self imposed psychological demolition, Mahler 6 and Shostakovich 7. I feel immensely grateful for these courageous and talented men who were able to bottle a bit of their lives and their understanding and transmit it for the benefit of humanity. I feel a connection to these men which is strong and large and sustains me, it is a pure love. Not something which comes easy.

Good Times

to change or not to change

Here is the fundamental question I think for which we turn to psychology for an answer: Are humans capable of change? At some point in our lives we find ourselves baffled by the seeming incongruity of our actions with what we believe to be our desires. We choose partners that are no good for us, we engage in destructive behavior, we fail to accomplish the things we believe we want most in this world. Upon realizing these behaviors we then find ourselves engaged in the daunting task of #1 understanding them and then #2 setting out to change them.

The Dr. Phil/Asshole-Ignorant Reneck approach is to advise people to "just do it". Now I do believe there is tremendous power to the idea that our minds create reality. That we are the authors of our own reality and that the thoughts we think play a paramount role in shaping our lives. So consequently it follows that if we exercise strong determination in our thoughts we can have an important effect on our lives. The problem though is when this "just do it" approach fails to account for the various complexities and nuances of the mind and how it can come to be corrupted. When a person finds themself in real trouble in their lives, whether its addiction or self destructive behavior or mental illness or whatever, I believe what is largely happening is that their mind is in conflict with itself. One part of the mind wants one thing and another a different thing and these forces become engaged in mental violence against oneself. So to simply advise someone to lift themselves up by their own boot straps is to fail to account for the complex nature of the human mind. 

For Freud he believes these conflicts are the result of clashes between either the id and the ego or the ego and the superego. For Freud the id represents sort of our animal instincts towards pleasure. Things like the desire to eat food when hungry or to feel relief from pain or to have sex when aroused. The id wants these things and when we fail to choose to act on them, the id and the ego find themselves in conflict. The ego is the driver of human decision making and thus responsible for action. The ego is sort of deputized by the id according to Freud to carry out the wishes of the id through the process of identification. The ego learns through time and experience how best to achieve the goals of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and thus allows a person to become increasingly good at them. However the ego is also influenced by the superego which represents sort of a persons moral code, which Freud believed to be inherited form one's parents and environmental authority figures. So while the id may seek sexual gratification and the ego may recognize rape as a means of achieving that gratification, the ego is restrained by that impulse by the superego which instructs the ego of the punishment that will occur if that action is taken. 

So is Freud onto something here? Is internal conflict the result of the collision of these competing forces? It doesn't feel quite sufficient to me but I am not fully able to articulate why. I know from my own experience that there are forces within me that are controlling my actions which are not conscious. I do not recognize them to be mere pain/pleasure instincts but rather they feel to me to be self destructive forces. Freud might call this the death instinct, which he purposes along with the life instinct as the two main forces of human behavior. I found it fascinating that Freud found himself contemplating the same ancient time as Robert Pirsig, another author whose thoughts have impacted me deeply, in considering the earth just before life came into being on the planet. For Pirsig the context for this exercise in imagination was a recognition of the force which propelled matter in a stable inorganic state to reconstitute itself into the chaotic and instable form of life. Specifically Pirsig cited this is an example of nature violation the second law of thermodynamics which says that all energy is winding down like a clock to a stable form, or to paraphrase all life is moving towards death. Why then, Pirsig asked, would nature in such a state of stability prior to life move against itself towards a less stable form of energy? For Pirsig the answer was Dynamic Quality which is our nature. 

What's interesting is Freud sees the same process and is sort of dismissive of the phenomenon of life creation and dwells instead on the difficulty life had in coming into existence in that context of death. He said that at first it took a great amount of energy to create life and that the life which was created was very short and simple organisms. Freud postulated that the energy force creating life had to keep creating it in the beginning because the force of death would act so strongly upon it. Eventually he said, life developed the ability to create itself and evolved over time into more and more complex states allowing for much greater lengths of resistance of death. What he took from this though is that we have within us that force which wants to move towards death, towards stability and inorganic matter. 

Isn't it interesting that these two great thinkers firstly stumbled upon the same thought puzzle so to speak and secondly that they came away with such different conclusions. It is reminiscent of Yin and Yang, two opposing forces, creating and destroying. Maybe that's the real source of internal human conflict. Maybe what is fighting within us is the simultaneous forces of life and death. We are at once filled with the desire to live, which for me includes things like learning, growth, joy, love, transcendence, passion, helping other people, teaching, kindness and the impulse to create, and the desire to die, which for me includes things like anger, hate, numbness, the desire to hurt others, to destroy, to disrupt and confuse. Perhaps what prevents us from resolving these conflicts is a failure to recognize the reality of the death instinct. It is so contrary to life and what we are, that maybe we repress its existence in order to avoid the pain of confronting it. 

That too seems incomplete...

I know that for the past decade I felt like a mind divided and to paraphrase Lincoln in the corniest way possible, a mind divided against itself cannot stand. Perhaps this is what the buddhists talk about when they speak of the great deaths. The mind wages war against itself until one side is vanquished, and then from there rebuilding can occur. I have been afraid for sometime of the destruction that might be caused by my own mental war. I feel something difficult to explain and I'm sure it sounds crazy. I feel a sense of responsibility in ensuring my unconscious self remains under control. To borrow in part from Freud I feel like it is the responsibility of my ego as the arbiter of my decisions to not allow my unconscious to become free. I feel perhaps out of nothing more than infantile narcissism that my unconscious is powerful and dark and that it is capable of massive destruction. I also believe it may be capable one day of greatness but in its present form I am afraid of it. It seems angry to me. Like a volcano bubbling beneath the earth's surface. But I feel this responsibility to guard my own unconscious not out of fear of consequences or punishment but rather out of a love for people around me. A general love of people. One of the interesting dichotomies of my personality is that I have a genuine affection for people and a desire to help people both as individuals and in the collective, but I tend to regard human behavior quite sadly. We are all so propelled by these powerful unconscious forces that it mostly seems like we have no chance to change. Like we are outgunned by a factor of a million. But I have seen great change. I have embodied great change myself. Perhaps what is needed to unify the forces of a personality is not all that different from what is needed to unify the divided people of a country, an outside force to work against. Or maybe it's even possible to unify the mind in pursuit of something wholesome and pure, I believe that has been the case with music in my life at times. 

So while I am currently in the trees and consequently unable to see the forest, the plan is to keep acting as if this change is occurring and see where it takes me. 

Good Times. 

Building a Fence

I began therapy last week. I've had two sessions so far, both have been superficially uneventful but beneath the surface there is a great deal of movement. It is something I am aware of physically in the shifting patterns of my eye twitch and my panic attacks and the various physical manifestations of anxiety I experience. It is something I am aware of emotionally as I have found myself near tears twice in a week and generally I feel rather out of control in regards to my emotions. Powerful feelings seem to possess me and take command of my decision making mechanism (what Freud would call the ego, I'll get to that in a moment) leaving me with an overall mix of excitement and fear. I'm excited in that these explosions of emotion represent to me a thawing out of a part of myself which has been frozen for roughly 10 years. I'm fearful for the same reason. What is coming lose within me I see as a great potentiality. It is my true self and I find myself confronted at last, after years of putting it off with the task of figuring out what the hell I really am.

What I know is that I am different. I am strange...odd, the sort of person that people are drawn to pay attention to but aren't sure if they should smile or snarl at. One thing I understand about these feelings that are returning to me is that as they were preserved so to speak, frozen they are feelings of my younger self. As I feel them I am flooded with memories of having had them, like putting on an old familiar jacket. A familiar memory that has accompanied an equally familiar feeling is the deep wish that I wasn't different. In recent years I have taken to defending weirdness, even exalting it as a virtue. And while it is true now that I do generally find "weird" people significantly more interesting than "normal" people, and while I can make an impassioned case on behalf of us weirdos everywhere by citing case after case of people who have changed the world...I still wish deeper down that I wasn't weird. It is terribly lonely and as much as you are afraid of us I assure you it is exponentially more frightening to be staring back at the room full of puzzled and concerned faces knowing they are all united by their recognition of your oddity.

As I said before on the surface the sessions have been uneventful. I have began to recount to this recent acquaintance (my therapist) the various trials and tribulations of my life. The first session focused largely on my anxiety and its hypothesized genesis, namely having been beaten by my step father for roughly 3 years. I'm sure reading that sentence is as uncomfortable for you as it is for me writing it. In recent years I have developed the tendency to sort of hit people over the head with that detail of my life as a way of shocking them away from prying to close to me. In my current state I again find myself reverting to older feelings and in this case I feel weird and burdensome for disclosing that reality, even to you the hypothetical reader. At my near core I feel a strong desire to apologize to you all for being weird, for saying things like that out loud. The second session was even less eventful on the surface of things. It began with a discussion of the previous week and included a guided meditation.

Beneath the surface though I feel tectonic shifts in my emotional awareness. I believe these shifts to be occurring not so much as a direct result of therapeutic methods but rather as a result of some dynamics intrinsic to the act of going to therapy at all. Those being #1 I have sought help. The mere act of seeking help is an enormous one for me because I fundamentally don't believe I deserve help. Another uncomfortable thought but there it is. #2 The relationship which forms between therapist and patient is built upon massive trust. The knowledge that she is legally and ethically prohibited from revealing things is helpful but of course there is a personal relationship built. It is comforting to me to know that she has standards of conduct which act as firewalls against my general propensity to destroy relationships. #3 The act of speaking things out loud to a person is in and of itself cathartic and helpful. It is not enough but it is something. I've come to believe generally in life the more we find the courage to make ourselves vulnerable the more we grow and the closer we get to some kind of lasting happiness. I am proud I have done that a bit in my first two sessions of therapy.

So having gone that far I am presently occupied with the task of building an intellectual fence. At least that's what it feels like. The fence is made of ideas and my understanding of them which will allow me to hide from anything too uncomfortable that may arise as a result of therapy. Meaning I'm coming up with ways to call bull shit on the whole field of psychoanalysis. In my hyper-analytic mind that means voraciously consuming major works in the field of psychology, researching contemporary responses, applications and criticisms of those works as well as major movements in the field. At the present I am reading a primer of the major theories of Freud. I started to read The Interpretation of Dreams a couple years ago but I found it to be laborious. Scientists always have to defend every step they take by fortifying every inch of ground they've covered by defining terms, summarizing previous studies both supportive and at odds with their view, and then mounds of evidence. I don't mind the evidence so much, particular in dream theory but it just takes so long to make a simple point. So I've started with a primer on Freud, got another on Jung in the pipeline. I've been reading Man and His Symbols by Jung for a couple weeks, pecking away here and there. I had begun this post with the intention of talking through my understanding of Freud thus far but I've filled enough of your screen with my self-indulgent bull shit for one sitting. Perhaps I'll return to Sigmund another time. I should probably start saying something half way interesting to the rest of the world out of civility to any god forsaken readers of this drabble out there.

Then again if this therapy thing maintains its current trajectory perhaps I'll also resume the writing practices of 10 years ago. In those days I believe I was capable of intellectual stimulation delivered in an entertaining manner. Then again I was probably just trying to get laid, or as Sigmund might say my id was working to achieve a release of tension in regards to the sex instinct which result in a release of psychic energy to the ego which manifested itself as my silly little ramblings, right Dr. Freud.

Good Times.

draftback

I started this a couple weeks ago and didn't finish it. Didn't want to let it die forever in my draft folder...

My thoughts tonight have turned towards the destruction and delusion of the self. I consider this an evolution in my personal ethos born from the experience of the past several months. I think often lately about something I said in an extremely rare fit of massive over confidence; I was speaking to some friends and I blurted out with anger that I was ready to conduct professionally. I believed it at the time and in full disclosure I do experience these cycles of self confidence and self hatred which at the apex of the cycle lead me to the conclusion that I am one of the best conductors on the planet. Of course at the worst they lead me to the conclusion that my mere existence on the planet is a drag on the species and the most moral thing I could do with my life is stop living. Nonetheless the memory for me encapsulates a former version of myself which has been destroyed in the past few months.

The story as I tell it begins with the boring details of my own wallowing and bemoaning of the fact that I begged and prayed unsuccessfully for 10 years that an accomplished conductor would take an interest in me. Then suddenly beginning in mid-March of this year I had within a 3 week period of time validation from several conductors I respect highly. One of them even offered to teach me and so I made my way to him and what followed was the destruction of that previous self described previously in my memory.

This man is a marvelous musician with a powerful artistic voice which is simultaneously exhilarating, compelling, inspiring and terrifying. It makes you on the one hand want to drop to your knees and worship him while on the other hand leaves you feeling eviscerated and embarrassed. It just leaves no room for anyone else. And that's what a good conductor is supposed to do I think, to make you feel like their interpretation is the only possible correct one in the universe. What accompanied this feeling and magnified the terror aspect of it was an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft and most relevantly the score. Any score really. We talked through scores of works he was studying with his students, works he was conducting with his group, works I was planning to conduct which he had no problem reciting off hand as if he had just finished writing it. There was a breadth and depth to his knowledge that stripped my silly talent naked and then laughed at me.

But of course that way of looking at things is the problem isn't it? Rather than view it as some terrible process I should see the beauty and the purposefulness of it. Out of that destruction came a rebirth and I know that to be true. I appreciate it deeply and am grateful immensely to have experienced it. It was the first bit of genuine conducting training I've ever received and while it painfully revealed the scope of my ignorance it also left me for the first time feeling as though I know which direction to travel. What happened though is I think best described as a genuine destruction of self, or at least some part of my self. This person with confidence and a sense of being ready to conduct professionally was suddenly stopped cold and instead I became consumed with humility and awareness of the work to be done.

Then I saw a video of a man speaking about the fundamental human delusion being that of the self. Really I think he may have been speaking more about the narcissistic self which elevates our own fears, priorities, desires, opinions and values above all others.

letting my conscious mind tire itself out...

Some very rough thoughts emerging from reading Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols".

1. The starting point for consciousness is that it became necessary to ensure that we are not overloaded with information. We select the important information for conscious thought and the rest remains in the unconscious. This is an evolutionary adaptation and it is a new phenomenon. Jung describes it almost like it's a beta version of the newest software. He says it's buggy and prone to malfunction. It's new and we're still getting used to it.

2. A friend was describing a computer hard drive he bought recently which is separated into two sections. One section is a higher quality storage system which is less prone to problems and the other is a more standard hard drive with moving parts that can break. The hard drive adapts to user patterns over time and stores the most commonly accessed information in the safer higher quality portion of the hard drive in order to protect it. This seems to me to be a crude form of consciousness. The machine is processing the information and the sorting it based on importance, as determined by usage.

3. When a composer writes a great piece of music they connect with something powerful in the unconscious. When a conductor conducts a great piece greatly they connect with that same powerful force in the unconscious. Therefore it seems possible to transmit and communicate the unconscious directly. What remains is a mystery is whether all the performers of a piece are connecting to the same unconscious force and the implications of that idea. Very confusing for me to think about at this point.

4. Is it that I believe my unconscious is smaller and less powerful than others or is it that I'm afraid to find out? Is there even a such thing as "my" unconscious or is it all the same thing? If it's just one big unconscious then the concept of universal identity doesn't seem so far fetched does it. If you strip the self away are we all the same consciousness and therefore all the same being, like cells making tissue or tissue making organs? Do cells and tissue and organs have consciousness then? Is that what the buddhists mean when they say the buddha resides everywhere?

Dr. Laura

So if you have not seen the show In Treatment my god are you missing out. HBO canceled it after 3 seasons because it didn't get very good ratings but it is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. It is about a therapist named Paul and in the first season you pick up with him as he's just taken on 4 new patients (Alex, Sophie, and a couple that comes to therapy together Jake and Amy) and a year into therapy with a patient named Laura. Paul is a remarkable man, brilliant and perceptive and a great practitioner of awareness. He is insightful and cares deeply for his patients. His marriage however is falling apart and the first seasons (what I've seen so far at least) revolves around the destruction of his marriage, the corresponding difficulty in treating his patient Laura who is herself brilliant and has fallen in love with Paul, and Paul's attempt to sort it all out in his own therapy with Gina, a former supervisor with whom he has a complicated past. The show it absolutely genius and touches on so many universal themes that it positively captivates me.

One thought that has stuck with me is how deeply mindful and aware both Paul and Gina are in their sessions. The perceptiveness is so high, they are keenly aware of everything the patient does and try to expose the meaning and significance in every minute action, universally to the annoyance of the patients.  On the one hand this is impressive and admirable and I see this behavior in Paul and Gina as admirable. On the other hand I find it interesting that their awareness if always confined to express itself as analysis. The thought occurred to me that perhaps the great tradition of western thinkers has been successful at enlightenment when it has been because of its practice of deep awareness and has fallen short it when has because of it's limited engagement with the present in its narrow focus on rational thought and analysis.

Furthermore as a hyper-analytical thinker myself I was moved deeply by the scene which I have transcribed below. Here Laura and Paul are talking and Laura is absolutely refusing to concede that her feelings for Paul are anything less than real and powerful and important. She is an amazing character. Unbelievably intelligent and persistent and emotionally confident and damaged and beautiful. It's better to see the episode for yourself and the actors are unbelievable, which adds several dimensions of beauty to the art but the transcript itself I think still contains sufficient thought provoking and moving substance so as to warrant consumption:

.........

Laura: I know that as a therapist you tell yourself that it's part of therapy to find out why I'm in love with you and how that's linked to my past and all that. But isn't that always the way it works Paul? Doesn't our past always determine who we fall in love with? So what if you can trace it back to the withholding mother, the narcissistic father, the parent who's missing in action, does that make our love any less real?

Paul: But sometimes circumstances are, let's say, less than ideal...

L:I know that. I know you can delude yourself into a thing. Only I am not deluded. Not about you. Not about how I feel about you. Why I feel it, there's always gonna be an explanation but that I feel it is irrefutable. I don't know how to convince you anymore Paul... I mean you think that I've idealized you, that I've convinced myself of some fairy tale, that I've idolized you. You think this is a case of a miserable patient sitting in front of her therapist imagining that you're my superman...perfect, savior, mentor, I don't see you that way at all.

P:How do you really see me?

L:I see you the way you are. Your imperfections. You're not at ease with your body, with your profession, with who you've become. I don't know much about your life, but I imagine you're not happy at home. Something in you is restless, damaged, there is a yearning there and I know it when I see it. And I want you just the way you are. Damaged and restless. Yearning, warts and all.

P:So you can fix me.

L:God you can be such a fucking prick when you wanna be you know that...

P:(interrupting) So I can fix you then?

L:(long pause) You know um, next month I'll be thirty. And I've been thinking to myself, I've hated myself for thirty years. It's enough I don't want to anymore.

P:Why do you hate yourself?

L:You're surprised?

P: I've never heard you say it before.

L:Well I guess you save the best for last.

P:That's the best Laura? That you hate yourself?

L:I don't know Paul, I don't know. You're surprised? It's something people realize about me after an hour.

P:I didn't realize it after an hour. I didn't know it after a year. It's not easy for me to hear you say that.

L:Maybe you should try to find out why it's so hard for you. Maybe you should see someone.

P:Yea, been thinking about that. Seriously um I think the reason it's hard for me to hear it is because I know that you have so many reasons to love yourself. So many things to be really proud of yet you choose to ignore them why?

L:Haven't you ever hated yourself?

P:Yea. I guess I did. Once. When I was a kid, my mother she was in pretty bad shape and I took care of her. But uh I couldn't, I couldn't save her from herself you know. I guess I hated myself for that.

L:Was she sick?

P:She was in a difficult emotional state. I thought that I could pull her out of it. I used to cook her all these elaborate meals. She wouldn't eat them. I couldn't understand it. Like every kid I thought it was my fault. I thought it was something I had done, something I hadn't done. Maybe I could do something else.

L:But you know that's not true.

P:I know that now, yes.

L:Have you forgiven yourself.

P:I think so. It took a long time.

L:How does that feel? I mean, really I'm curious.

P:It feels like a relief to tell you the truth.To know that that burden is gone. The burden of blame. And to know deep down, that it never belonged there in the first place.

L:Hmm. Maybe that's why you became a psychologist. To help others with their burdens.

P:Yea. Maybe.

L:So you're a product of your past too. (long pause). So uh (smiling) will that be cash or check?

The Social Contract

I am a thinker. I am so apologetically and with much embarrassment, but even with the weight of that understanding I remain a thinker. I often counsel people searching for their life's purpose to pay attention to that which they do when they have nothing to do. If you find yourself singing your life needs to contain much singing, if you find yourself dancing or reading or taking care of people or telling jokes then you fill your life with that. I think...constantly, neurotically and obsessively; I think about thinking and how I feel about my thinking. I try to feel about thinking but inevitably find myself thinking about my attempt to feel about thinking and then correspondingly feel guilty having spoiled my attempt at feeling with thought. I have this whole stand up routine I deliver to friends when I am attempting to convey the intensity of my neurotic thoughts. I really should create a flowchart that begins with "Any topic of conversation", passes through several incidental intermediary stages like "Impending collision of the Andromeda galaxy with the Milky Way" and ends with "You (me speaking to me) are worthless and a failure and generally a drain on the human species".

It's funnier in person.

Just now though a thought appeared which I trust because it was accompanied by a feeling of rightness. Perhaps, the thought goes, the pervasive anxiety and epidemic of neurotic thinking I am experiencing is symptomatic of not applying my proclivity towards thought in a productive manner. You see I have made my life in the world of music which is a world deeply distrustful of analysis. I often feel like an impostor trying to evade detection by the "real" musicians. Analytic thought is truly my greatest talent. The creative lifestyle has come much more difficulty for me. I've had to learn it piece by piece. I love it though. I love it wildly and passionately and with a profound sense of purpose and meaning. Analysis mostly makes me feel dirty and whorish, like I'm selling myself. This I think is largely due to an internal dichotomy as to prospective career choices. My feeling self very much wants to continue on with music and to grow my creative powers to their full potential. My thinking self, which is nothing less than a little bastard, advocates towards a profession in the law. The choice then presents itself to me as being between happiness and material comfort.

But what if I've created a straw man here. What if the problem is not analytic thought in totality but this singular material manifestation of it in my contemplation of a career in law. After all there are plenty of miserable, unexpressive, wonderfully talented musicians out there drudging away day after day for money. That's just as terrible an existence isn't it? What if I need to be applying my reluctant talent towards more wholesome pursuits. What if by doing so my brain turned its attention away from the neurotic, obsessive and anxious and towards the love of knowledge, which is what philosophy is supposed to be.

So then we begin where I began my love affair with knowledge, in the arena of political philosophy. I first entered the minds of the great thinkers of western society at the invitation of my 11th grade AP US History teacher. An amazing man and amazing teacher. He would indulge my rebellious but intellectual tirades and challenge my thinking, which was refreshing in that it was not dismissive. He began nudging me towards this book or that and I ate them up voraciously. I was a huge consumer of enlightenment works which influenced the American founders: Locke, Montesquieu, of course Jefferson and eventually I found my way to Rousseau.

Rousseau was fascinating to me for several reasons, firstly he was a musician. I was not particularly moved by his music but knowing he lived in that world spoke to my own struggle at the time between my analytical and musical selves. Secondly he just wrote differently than most other philosophers. If you've ever had the displeasure of reading Aristotle than you understand how tedious and monotonous these people can be. Now don't get me wrong I appreciate the mental dexterity and the enlightened minds but on a fundamental level, reading philosophy is often boring as shit. Rousseau isn't though. He is brash and emotive and has a keen flair for the dramatic. Let me show you some of what I mean by taking you through just the very beginning of his Social Contract.

Watch how he begins with this odd statement of humility (rare among philosophical types):

"This little treatise is part of a larger work which I undertook many years ago without thinking of the limitations of my powers, and have long since abandoned."

...So two words in he is self deprecating, this little treatise, which he then follows with a recognition of his mortality. Continuing on...

"...Of the various fragments that might have been taken from what I wrote, this is the most considerable, and the one I think the least unworthy of being offered to the public. The rest no longer exists."

That's his introduction to his work. "Uh hey um, I wrote this stupid thing and it was part of a bigger thing but I was too stupid to finish it so this is the least shitty part of what I was trying to do before. I burned the rest". Refreshingly human I think. One of the most irritating parts of reading philosophy for me was the prevailing sense of having intellectually conquered nature or the universe or the subject of their little treatise. It always felt like a newer more pathetic manifestation of the same obsolete male impulses towards screaming and thumping one's chest at having killed something. Humility is generally lacking in philosophy but Rousseau intrigued me with this little opening. Continuing on...

"My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be."

That is a pretty god damned succinct thesis statement. My 9th grade English teacher would be proud. The efficiency of it is artistic. He is writing about political right, whether or not government is a justifiable human phenomenon on moral or utilitarian grounds and he manages to describe that subject in an incredibly efficient, plain and complete manner in just 30 words which average maybe four letters each. (It could almost be a fucking tweet!) It is beautiful and again refreshing. So much different than most philosophers. Continuing on a little ways later, the famous line...

"Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains."

Talk about a flair for the dramatic. What a gripping thing to say. It pulls you right forward doesn't it? This again is succinct and plain spoken and direct in a powerful way. It becomes the central point of the work; that man is in a sense de-volving, getting worse over time as a result of society. He'll argue everything from moral impurity to freaking prevalence of disease have increased over time as a result of man inventing societies.

I can't only praise him though. I just thought I'd begin by explaining why he is fascinating to me. He is still at his heart a westerner with an unhealthy love of the rational mode, like a stalker in a tree with binoculars. Yea it's good he is passionate about something but there's a fine line between endearing persistence and restraining order, you know what I mean? Consider the following...

"The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family; yet children remain tied to their father by nature only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ends, the natural bond is dissolved. Once the children are freed from the obedience they owe their father, and the father is freed from his responsibilities towards them, both parties equally regain their independence."

Now before dissecting this with the rational scalpel, doesn't it just feel wrong? I mean doesn't it get down in your stomach and swirl around, kicking up nauseousness and leaving you feeling uneasy? I know as a male I feel the impulse to sometimes act brutish and coldly in vulgar indulgence of the desire to procreate as often as possible before death but that feeling even in its most intense form is accompanied by a sense of wrongness or numbness, which one comes to understand as the willful ignorance of wrongness. It is natural to want to protect your children, to see them grow strong and wise and happy. It is natural to preserve the family unit and to be kind and loving. At least I feel that way.

Anyways you can see the cold blooded approach of the rational surgeon (philosophers) whereby emotion is relegated to a vastly subservient position in the hierarchy of truth seeking and silly conclusions such as the one above are suddenly and easily arrived at. It is interesting though to note that even the most rational of formulations must begin with an emotional premise and it is not irrelevant I think to consider the fact that Rousseau himself abandoned his children after being abandoned himself by his father. Perhaps this shaded his conclusion above in convincing himself to simultaneously forgive his father and absolve himself of his own sins.

Such is the game we play when we try successively to place the ideas of philosophers in the box of psychology and then vice versa. At least it seems more fun to me than the all too familiar neurotic arm wrestling in my brain. We'll see how this goes. Maybe we'll continue one with Mr. Jean-Jacques and his inquiry into the principles of political right. Maybe someone out there will engage in a substantive discussion of his flamboyant and irregular treatise. That would just hit the spot.

Good Times

You and I

If you'd have me, I'd love to take you to the cliff's edge. When the sky is dark and cloudy and the waves crash softly, in humble restraint of their power. We would study the stars, sand collecting in our hair. I would hold you close and tuck the hair behind your ear. Our lips would meet gently with our eyes closed tight and the music of the ocean leading a long overdue first unrestrained dance.

If you'd have me.

Breathe

As I breathe in I sense the anxiety beginning.

As I breathe out I embrace it.

I am writing this way and not that, which makes me feel regret and disappointment. I embrace the regret and the disappointment and turn myself to writing this way now.

I sometimes wonder if they understand the unique plight of poverty. I think in the end it’s irrelevant but it means more hurdles to pass and less margin for error. I can see that I must focus all my energies on deep awareness as any other energy is wasted. One of the profound thoughts he left me with is the simple idea of being present in the moment. Fear and anxiety he said, are anticipations of possible futures which may or may not happen. The pain and anger I carry are remnants of the past. My task is to be in the present. To prepare my body and mind to be fully engaged in the now and then to simply do it. I told him last night after he offered to share his home with me and filled me with love and acceptance; after he spoke of family and told me he was proud of me for what I had accomplished…after he said these things and told me I had everything one needed to be a powerful conductor, a musical mind, intelligence and an ability to conduct, after all that I told him that I was always struck by his ability to say to me and people I’ve seen him speak with, precisely what we are prepared to understand and to hear at any given moment. Before this trip I considered that quality to be some mystical talent possessed by a higher being. I think now that perhaps it is the result of a good deal of practice at being present in the moment. He is communicating so precisely with us because he is practicing deep awareness.

The thought that wants to surface now is an immense expression of gratitude. I am shy actually and I think I make him uncomfortable when I say it but I know he has saved my life. I find myself wanting to speak the words “how many times can a person be saved”. I love that man so very much.

I need to listen to myself more. I think that is an important step to take at this time. The suppression of my inner voice feels to be the cause of many of my problems. I must embrace these feelings and not run any longer.

As I breathe in, I sense the beginning of pain.

As I breathe out, I embrace the pain.

Thank You

snapshots of thought

I feel the gravitational pull of the law. In the past couple weeks I've had the cautiously satisfying experience of sparring with two lawyers on their home turf. I am conflicted because on the one hand I have been given a great talent for rational thought. It comes easily to me and when I indulge myself I feel a sort of lawyers high from the experience of prolonged expulsion of rational thought. I just can't decide if it's more of a runner's high kind of thing or more of a meth addict kind of thing. It often leaves me feeling dirty.

The first person was a woman I've never met, who has never met me but who by reading snippets of postings on the internet has decided I'm harming indigent children (exact language). She filed a 5 page email complaint against me to our district alleging I was "using and exploiting children" through various policies of our department. She insinuated several times that I was benefiting from fundraising and explicitly said several times that I was discriminating against and harming poor children. Luckily I believe I possess the ideal skill set for responding to such claims. I am a fanatic, dionysian musician possessed with a natural gift for the law who also happens to best express his thoughts in writing. Add to that the rhetorical skills I've refined over the years in the practice of writing and I delivered what I think was a rather effective response.

The second person is my former landlord who seems to be an overall terrible person. Lawyer, personal injury lawyer turned bankruptcy lawyer who represents banks turned foreclosure specialist who starts a debt collection agency that files thousands of law suits a year against people who owe a few hundred dollars on credit cards who then gets judgments against these people and when they can't pay he brags about his innovative foreclosure unit which takes people's houses away from them. All around class act. Trying to dick me out of my security deposit. Much less noble response to this one but I did spend a bit of time reading the california civil code and a supreme court ruling.

The movie 3:10 to Yuma also has been in my thoughts. The choice that Christan Bale's character makes at the end has had me thinking about purpose. This is a newly birthed thought and doesn't have the legs it needs yet but it really does strike me that purpose is choice. In the case of that character it was that time, that place, the series of events in his life that led him up to that moment which made his choice powerful and filled him with purpose. It at first strikes me as a silly obsolete male impulse on the surface but upon further inspection it seems to me a moving instance of genuine purpose. Maybe that thought will mature in the days to come.

The pain continues. I read two articles about anxiety today that were more illuminating than anything I've ever read about it before. Both were by people with anxiety who wished only to share their experiences. One of the articles talked about the selfish nature of a panic attack in that you are consumed with thoughts about yourself. This rang quite true for me and opened some new doors of thought that I hope to be helpful. I think I moved a bit today. I felt the loosening of rock surrounding the mind which accompanies mental movement.

I have been starving for human contact these past few weeks. Genuine interaction, conversation, understanding, revelation, spontaneity, touch, comfort, shared pain. I have been so fixated on these things that I only just realized how much I really need to make other people feel good. I liked filling the void and raising self esteem. I liked guiding people through their own journey of self discovery and sacrificing parts of myself to do it. I need it. I feel incomplete without it. These are the toughest things.

Good Times

3 quick things

In my eclectic brain three thoughts have found nourishment the last couple days.

1. The overly intellectual part of my brain is busy weighing the viability of the hypothesis that the stubbornly high unemployment rate in this country can be most adequately accounted for by Marxism.

2. The cornily sentimental part of my brain is weighing the viability of finding true love.

3. The calmer and seemingly wiser part of my brain is chewing on the idea that the pursuit of validation is among man's universal behaviors.

In the way of meta-analysis I am of course considering the odd grouping of these ideas in a single being, namely myself. How is it possible that such ideas could cohabitate the same intellectual dwelling? To be honest a fourth topic is lingering as well but in an attempt to save the world from my darker nature I omit it here. Apparently my proclivity towards dark humor makes most others feel "uncomfortable". I can't understand why....

Anyways I don't want to spend to much time here expanding on these thoughts but I'll flush them out a bit. As to #1 if you consider the true trajectory of Marxist thought, meaning not viewing it from the perspective of the ultra-nationalist propagandist or the tree hugging idealist, but if you view it instead as the inexorable progression of events Marx described then it is hugely important to look to high unemployment. Marx did not say a communist state would come into being because people would somehow wake up one morning convinced of its moral superiority, it was something that would happen gradually over time as a result of economic conditions worsening. Specifically he identified the mechanization of labor that would take place and consequently lead to higher and higher unemployment. Eventually he thought unemployment would reach a tipping point and people would rise up and start a revolution. We've only moved from a normal rate of unemployment being around 5% to 7 or 8% but still it's worth observing. Did you see the 60 minutes story last week about robots doing more and more jobs? It's worth thinking about...

#2 is embarrassing to admit such a though even exists in my brain. Talk about the path more traveled  I put myself in league with every terrible screenplay, cheezy romance novel and the entire female population of the planet in such speculation. Nonetheless it's there and lingering. Falling in love is wonderful, I hope to do it again someday. Moving right along...

#3 is the thought worth the most investment I think. I think it's the most worth pursuing of the thoughts I currently harbor but I am again embarrassed to reveal myself in terms of the originating event of this particular idea. I sort of left the channel on the Oprah network and she made a comment about how every guest on her show was searching for validation. I think she is describing a true phenomenon with a limiting word. I think validation is a massively common pursuit but I think it's more about being understood. I think we all fundamentally want to feel understood. To connect with another human being in such a way that makes us feel as if that person really gets us. Even if it's just one person I think it can be that simple knowledge of someone else out there able to understand us that keeps us going.

I did a quick explanation there. I'm going to try (almost certainly unsuccessfully) to get some sleep.

Good Times

Tar

I am worthy
of your hate.
only.
take some of mine.

Ah self destruction welcome back. It's nice to have you back on the program. We were just speaking last week with your friend. This last work of yours was elegant and moving in its efficiency. A single calculated act wreaking such destruction. It's good because she almost started to like you. Better to blow it up before it began. Save yourself the pain of dragging it on and ruining it later. Make them hate you, that's the best way. Drive them away so you can be miserable. Alone.

At least then it can end with me.