Moderates United

Oi.  I’m tempted to say “Damn you, Kryzsztof Kieslowski”, but of course he was an honest humanitarian. His art was telling us who we are, and what our lives are like.  The world is a better place that he lived.

I just watched the first Decalogue, and as with substantially every other one, I cried.  What pain.  I had put off watching these, because I knew this would happen.  Still, I think this is how one gathers wealth, of the sort that matters.

In dealing with fear, one cannot neglect the fear of grief and loss.  And dealing with fear, dealing with grief and loss, are acquired skills, I suppose.  They are amenable to practice, and I suppose that is what this art does.  I have not lost anything.  Everything is well with me.  And no one actually lost anything in the film.  It was all make believe.  But of course, for a time, for an hour, we have long since learned to live a fictional world, which some part of our minds cannot separate easily from the real one.

There is a lesson here.  The Greeks were onto something with tragedy: it is a way of helping us all learn to make peace with the inevitability of death, decay, sorrow and loss.  It is practice.  I have never thought of it that way.

And obviously one can practice avoiding these things.  One can practice superficiality.  The most obvious way is violence.  Grief easily becomes rage, making rage an often-substitute for more real underlying feelings.  Perhaps the violence in our media is structurally necessary because we have forgotten how to mourn, how to share our pain.

I have proposed before, and forgotten until now, that the movie “Because of Winn-Dixie” would become a Christmas classic, if the world were emotionally rational.

But of course it isn’t, not generally.  I guess the best we can aspire to is to create islands of comfort and understanding in an unreasoning, and storm tossed endless sea.

I dreamed of how one would comfort this father.  There are no words, but there is a spirit.

It occurs to me to comment that all fear is rational.  It is simply the case with Stable Fear Patterns that the nervous system is reacting rationally to a threat which is no longer present, a fact which it simply lacks the capacity to learn, due to limitations in our nervous systems.  We don’t reset like zebras (who do not get ulcers).

I might comment on this score that my own health is outstanding.  Even as a large man, I have reasonably normal blood pressure.  My cholesterol was a bit high the last time it was tested, but I attribute that to my drinking.  Nothing good happens when 250 ml of hard liquor won’t get you drunk.

But I literally cannot remember the last time I had a cold.  I’ve only had the flu once in my life, during my stint at a Large American Corporation which had me having nightly anxiety dreams.  I don’t do LAC’s very well.

I just don’t get sick.  I never need to go to the doctor for anything.

I attribute this to the fact that, while I obviously have a lot of fairly severe “issues”, I am tackling them head on.  I am not suppressing or avoiding them.  I am not hoping they will go away.  I am dealing with them realistically and directly.  This is very important.  You may be crazy, but it gets worse if you pretend you are not.  As the Tao Te Ching says, those who know they are crazy are not crazy.  Words to live by.

I was listening to a thing (“Can you learn to be lucky?” which claimed that Freud claimed that all ambition is neurotic.  I would provisionally disagree.  There are grades of ambition.  I myself am highly ambitious: I want to be sane before I die, with sane being defined as a relatively high level of spiritual advancement, relative to the averages we have accustomed ourselves to gradually in the past however long.  I don’t want to be on my deathbed saying “what the fuck just happened?  That was not my beautiful wife.  That was not my large automobile (h/t to David Byrne, of course)”.

Shit the point I wanted to make before I began that circle–it’s always circles with me, interlocking, connecting, going God only knows where–was that Stable Fear Patterns (SFP’s, although I’m not going to be the sadist who starts recurring to that) underlie a large amount of behavior we see out there, and that means that much of what people do is driven.  They are not, in other words, the primary drivers.  Some part of their nervous system hits the gas, and their only choice is how to direct that nervous energy.  Many people learn to direct it very productively, and they become the elites in everything.  But take, say, Tom Brady.  It may be that he is, even now, driven by fear of failure.  In his particular case, though, I would say, as he has said, that it has become fun.  But early on that was likely a large factor.  This is true for many greats in all fields: medicine, architecture, business, etc.

Being a driver does not mean you cannot accomplish a lot.  But it means you do not NEED to, and that when a pause of some sort is needed, you can take it.  While granting I do not know much about his life, it is my understanding that in the middle of his career, while he was doing very well, Wagner just stopped for a period of years.  He wanted to be sure he was really doing what he wanted to do.  So he just stopped, and relative to his usual work output, sat on his hands for several years, maybe more.

From the outside, without more data, that would seem to be a genuinely creative personality.  There are times when the work flows into you, and you have to allow it to flow out, but in these cases, there is structure, there is content.  True, there is relief, but it not a constant driving tension, and it can be expressed, and released, creating a positive feeling.

I myself exist in an uneasy crossfire between what are most likely multiple SFP’s and a corresponding counter-reaction asking me to do nothing, to tell those SFPs to fuck themselves, because I’m getting drunk and fucking up all their plans.  But of course they don’t have plans.  All they do is give me fear, and if I had a place where fear was constructive, like the military or law enforcement, I would be able to rationalize it as necessary and appropriate.  But I don’t.

So I continue to sit back and watch these fields interacting with one another, trying to learn to massage them into more reasonable, more palatable, more constructive shapes.  This is Nye, as I understand the concept.

286, I remembered, and a third of a bottle of Aquavit.  I like Aquavit. That is not a therapeutic dose for me, so that is a sort of progress.

I slept tolerably well.  Restless, but no major traumatic emergences.  I spent some time dreaming the inner emotional reality of my marriage, and part of my time being in high school, trying to decide what to do with my life.  I could be a painter, or an engineer.  A doctor or a lawyer.  Or I could found a religion.  What? some voice inside me said.  That isn’t a thing.  That’s not one of the categories.  There’s no box for that.

Well, I said, it could be looked at as artwork.  Most art is largely useless, so if I’m wasting my time, there is a precedent.  It seemed to be OK with that.

And I spent a lot of time dealing with what I will call “emotion shapes”, things which had visible appearances and corresponding emotional tones, but which I could not name.   When you are dealing with unconscious forces they can hide behind X and Y.  You know there is a quantity/quality of some sort, but you can’t solve for it.  You can merely watch the math being done.

Overall, compared to how I imagine normal sleep for most emotionally healthy people, I’d give it a B-, which is quite good.  I’m mostly F’s.

I was looking at a woman tonight–I do actually get out pretty regularly–and I could feel she was someone who judges everyone and complains about everything.  Someone who is hard to get along with.

And the phrase “Stable Fear Structure” and “Stable Fear pattern” popped in my head.  Who is she?  Well, if I myself am judging her correctly, and finding the right things wrong with her (note to self: what WAS it that made me look at her?), then she has a stable fear structure which is present in all interactions with everyone.  It has been with her since before her memory formed and it is unlikely to ever disappear.  It defines her.

This concept, of Stable Fear Structure, as a durable personality trait, is useful.  Some analogue may exist in “the literature” somewhere, but this is my proposal for a name.

What if we chose sex partners based on our perception of their ability with respect to pillow talk?  Women, I think, may do this often, but men, we–I, historically–only think through to the orgasm, after which–ugly as it is–the woman often becomes a nuisance.  I don’t deny this is pretty awful, but I doubt there are many people, male or female, who truly have no idea what I am talking about.

For me, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, I pulled myself out of circulation a long time ago, and will not go back in until I feel I have become a better person.

What if, though, pillow talk is the best part of the whole thing?  What if we made it the focus?  I think where it is good, those people become lovers for a long time.  That moment is a good time to feel heard, deep down in your bones.

Je T’aime, Je t’aime, Je t’aime.

I am just thinking out loud.  I am realizing I am a product of our popular culture.  I was taught next to nothing by any adults in my life that was worth a damn. I inherited stubbornness from my father, and neuroticism from my mother.  They had little else to give me.

It’s so hard, in mid-life, to learn new tricks.  Far from impossible, though. As I grow, though–and I’ve said this often, I am aware, but sometimes you need to speak things over and over and over to make them feel true–I realize how much I have lost.

If I might reference Buddhism again, Duhkha is losing and not realizing you are losing, not seeing it, not seeing open paths you might have taken but could not see for blindness, want of looking, or lack of flexibility.

Growth involves feeling this pain.  But it is a good pain, a real pain, a truly redemptive pain, and one well worth the effort. This pain is being tickled with a feather, not being smashed with a hammer, or cut in a thousand places.  That is what you can leave behind.  What you are leaving behind is being an object, an object which feels, but which cannot control its destiny.

I don’t know if I am brilliant, crazy, absurdly arrogant, or some combination of the three.  It is most likely the last, though. Still, my words are my own.  My thoughts are my own.  What you do not often see here is me discussing other peoples ideas, although I do do it.

I live alone.  I live in silence.  Sometimes it is hard, but it is real.  And the world comes at me here, in silence.  It is never out there.  It was always in here.  I have simply eliminated the noise that prevented me from seeing and feeling it.

Who knows what my destiny is?  Whatever it is, I feel increasingly open to it.  If there is a purpose to life, then I am fulfilling my purpose, as well as I can at the moment, which is not well, but it truly is the best I can do, when it rains pain as often as it does.

So often we get stuck in loops, where the only goal is to make it through each day.  You make it, then reset somehow and do it again the next day.  You can cross a life like this, and learn very little.  But I feel it is very common.  Very, very common.

Spiritual teaching is teasing, perhaps pulling, people away from their petty manias.

It occurs to me a big advantage of having two parents in the picture, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and the like, is that that child emerging into adulthood has many models, and can adopt, consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter, the models that fit them best.

I was thinking of my own children. They combine, I think, the best aspects of both of us. They have my emotional intelligence, passion and curiosity, and their mothers stability. I am many things, but stable is not one of them. Self regulation, obviously, is something I am still working to master.

Conversely, if you only have one parent in the picture, I suspect the temptation to draw from mass media becomes nearly impossible to resist, and movies and music and TV are largely lies.

A richer society would be one more geographically stable. I think we all sense this. There is a time and many reasons to go see the world. But it is important to be from somewhere, and from people you can name.

I was thinking last night that the feeling I am getting as far as the Left is that it is too quiet.  In the past, I would get fought on every political post I made.  That is no longer happening.  I assume I am still blocked from HuffPo, but the feeling tone is a bit different.  I am getting the feeling most parents get when the screaming from the kids in the other room disappears, and silence takes its place.  Especially if dealing with boys, it usually means they are up to something.

These people, the core, are fanatics.  Their politics and their self image and self worth, and notions of themselves as good people, are all tied together in a quite undisentangeable way.  It’s a Gordian knot whose only continual command is “FORWARD!!”‘, whatever the fuck that means.

Where can they go?  They’ve abandoned efforts to claim the universal high ground by shouting down their opponents, or so it feels to me.

What they have left are voter fraud, certainly, and a continuation of violent censorship.  What they no doubt FEEL they need is something like a Cultural Revolution, something like large masses of kids screaming about what must be done to “save” the culture, to protect the weak and weary, and to make the world a better place, even if it takes mass murder to do it.  I suppose the stuff going on in Britain would qualify, in tone.

Murder they are not quite up for, just yet.  They are manifestly quite willing to dox people, to assault the characters of good people, and do everything they can to pollute our public dialogue with lies, anger, half truths, and noise.  They are willing to stop the flow of traffic, and disrupt tens of thousands of lives to be heard, to achieve relevance, even if in infantile ways.

Who knows if what I am feeling is accurate?  I grew up living in the shadows, but keenly aware of everything going on around me.  People like me, I think, are usually right about things like this, but all of us are sometimes wrong.

It just feels like there are schemes being hatched out there, by people for whom an open honest life has been made impossible by a long set of choices and derelictions of actual duty.  All of these people need to grow up, but none of them believe that two marshmallows are out there anywhere except in the rhetoric they internalized some time shortly after nursery school.

And I think at root they don’t even believe their own lies.  Most of them just want to see death and destruction, decay and decline.  There are no marshmallows, even in the present, so just burn it all down.

And I got inspired last night to go get a bunch of healthy food.  I’m going to make a huge portion of saag, some kale chips, and I bought a bunch of good protein, a lot of fish, some beef for beef jerky, and a bunch of apples.

Sleep.  Oh what can I say?  I’ll be doing fine, then some monster from the deep will come up and bite me.  Then I got back to sleep, and it’s mostly OK.  One or two episodes like that a night is not so bad.

I’m continuing to try new things.  When I have a magic recipe for me, I’ll post it.  I’ve gotten tired of posting all the things which COULD work.

I had a bit of an epiphany today: part of the task of feeling safe in this world is learning to how navigate people.  Not just manipulate them, but win them to your side, to your way of thinking, to be the sort of person they genuinely like.  Or conversely, be the sort of person who is genuinely interested in THEIR way of thinking, and their side. 

So much of my worldview runs through conflict, through a felt need to fight in many ways at many times on many fronts.

Think about this, though: the highest and best life is one lived in harmony and deep soul level connection with a variety of people, while doing useful, challenging and engaging work, all while growing as a person steadily across a lifetime.  This is the end aim. 

War, obviously, is a failure in this end. War is sometimes necessary, but even in war we need to look to the end state.  It has become a commonplace to speak of “the warrior spirit”, but in truth when we are only speaking of war, aggressive sociopaths with high pain tolerances arguably make the best killers. 

Warriorship, if we are to value it, must come with the arts of peace, and specifically diplomacy.  You need to know how to hold a line, but you should not be afraid to bend.  I think Donald Trump has struck an outstanding balance in this respect with Kim Jung Un.  He showed him he was not afraid of him by mocking him, but at the same time, when the timing was right, he was genuinely cordial, warm, and friendly.  At some point, I think he is going to make it easy for Kim Jung Un to enter into a permanent peace, with all the prosperity which will go with it, for him and for his people.

And it seems to me one of the most obvious principles should be that there is never any call to make unnecessary enemies.  This is the first step to preventing war.  All wars which are prevented are won, provided nothing truly important is given in exchange, and preventing the beginning of a cycle of hatred should be an important skill all warriors learn.  The connection of etiquette with Bushido is I think a good example of this.  Of course, the Japanese are also notoriously short tempered when etiquette is breached.  Americans, in contrast, rarely even realize they, or someone else, has behaved rudely.  They just say “I’m sorry brother.  Let me buy you a beer.”

Be all that as it may, I am going to dig up my Dale Carnegie and I’ve bought a book on etiquette.  I eat like a hungry caveman, all too often.  You should have seen my family at the dinner table.  My mother mildly excepted, we all did.

I had more to say, but it went wherever ideas go when they get tired of hanging out in the waiting room.  They may be out back smoking a cigarette and return momentarily.

But for me, this idea is liberating.  People are a knowable quantity.  My reaction to a variety of behaviors is under my control.  I can learn to expect better reactions if I learn to be human better.