Whom Besides You and What Cavemen?

When I was child, my sisters and I used to raise objections, based on historical precedent.

“Why do I have to brush my teeth? Cavemen didn’t brush their teeth.”

My mother had what she believed was the ultimate answer: “Yes, and they died at twenty.”

When you’re five, twenty seems a long way away. Also, how did my mother know the cavemen died at twenty? Did she see the death certificate?

Later I learned that, depending on what actual prehistoric group and era, “cavemen” did brush their teeth and still some died at twenty. Not sure what to make of any of it. Like life today.

People are always saying to me, “You’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” No, I haven’t lost weight that I know of. “Your face, it’s thinner. You’ve lost weight in your face.” I started saying, Yes, thanks for noticing. But actually I couldn’t figure out what these people were talking about. I’ve written about this more other places, not that anyone read it or noticed. Not like the fact my face is a balloon on a daily basis. Some of these persons I hadn’t seen in maybe two days, or even just twenty-four hours. Coworkers come up to my cubicle: “Whoa! You’ve lost a LOT of weight. What is it, about twenty pounds?” I just saw you yesterday and you’re telling me I look like I lost twenty pounds overnight? “In the face: your face is much thinner.”

I figured it out one day. I told my coworker, Like on TV, in my middle age, memory adds ten or twenty pounds to me. I’m fatter in memory. I’m just some big fat guy in all these people’s memories. “Remember K? Yeah, that fat guy. Yeah; no, you’re right: he’s the guy with the fat face that looks like he lost twenty pounds overnight. Funny how his face is so fat in my memory and every time I see him he looks like he lost all that fat in his face in just two days.”

I’m reading this book about relationships and compatibility. How’s that for pathos? Maybe we have a movie here. Guy with a fat face reading a book about relationships. Nah. Boring. So in this book the author is writing about how if you and your mate don’t have common interests and passions for things, it will be hard “in the long haul.” I like that he uses that expression, “long haul.” Marriage as truck driving. He gives as an example if the man loves golf, he better have as one of his considerations, his potential wife had better love golf, too. For himself, the man must know he loves golf; for his list of qualities in his soul mate, “Must love golf.”

How about, “understands differences” on both lists? Are people really this childish and simple nowadays, so selfish and spoiled, they make lists of nothing qualities and superficial characteristics such as a sport, and that is a determining factor in who they choose to spend their lives with? I hope there’s a chaperone on this planet for all these perpetual adolescents and narcissists.

"In WHOM they choose." I hear my mother correcting me. Did cavemen have grammar? Was it a factor in longevity?

Where are the values? The author of this match book is nominally educated and supposedly has some religious affiliation. But he recommends to his readers they consider things such as hobbies and incidental habits in the same way I would recommend a simpler procedure.

Make a list of qualities for your ideal partner, the man or woman of your dreams. Visualize that person and even try to imagine how you might meet someone like that. Have fun with it for a while. Really take the fantasy for a whirl. After you’ve got a fairly firm idea of what this ideal person should be like, ask yourself this question: What do you have to offer that ideal person? Seriously, why would your fantasy soul mate want to spend the rest of his or her life with you? Then go back and imagine the meeting again. Try to see it from the point of view of that person whose qualities and character you have itemized.

After that, focus on yourself and make yourself into someone anyone might want to spend time with – not necessarily marry. Honestly, how many of us are really worth any notice in this world? Who is that person who notices and knows how wonderful you are?

I have to thank my mom for making me brush my teeth when I was younger. Sure, they’re not as white as they used to be. But at least I didn’t die at twenty.

Anti-Intellectual Attitudes in Our Current Milieu

I started watching The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and was immediately aware of a connection between Dr. Moriarty and the common idea of the disaffected nerd. The intellectual takes interest in obscure subjects because of social ineptitude and rejection. He or she pursues solitary hobbies, or joins with other quirky types in nerdy interests. The loner intellectual in literature does not find friends. Transferring attention from social pursuits, such as friends, parties, sports, and dating, the lone nerd also develops resentment toward the world that rejected him or her. So you end up with these characters in movies and books.

The serial killer is the most extreme example in this new mythology. Because of wrongs inflicted in childhood by those who should have loved and cared most, the serial killer transfers rage and hatred onto innocent victims, who happen to trigger his angry recollections. The parallel with the evil genius is struck in the popular mind, and Dr. Lecter is born.

In the character of Sherlock Holmes, we find the balance, the good genius, the friendly nerd. Also, as a man, Holmes is capable of physical action. By the time we get to James Bond, intellect has all but flown out the window. Bond is clever, but he is not particularly interested in abstruse knowledge. He relies on Q for the finer points and only needs to know which end to point and what to do to make it kill the bad guy. A character like Batman/Bruce Wayne recoups some of Holmes’s social qualities and his intellect, but Batman is still somewhat misanthropic. More so Spider-Man/Peter Potter in the original comic books.

I was never a comic book reader. I don’t really understand the interest in them or the rush to make every bad “graphic novel” into a film. It’s already in a cartoon. Why put it on the screen with actors? If I think too much about this, I’ll probably go off fiction altogether and find no pleasure even in reading. However, comic books are filled with disaffected outcasts, geniuses and freaks, who have special abilities. That characterization, and the sensibility behind it, undoubtedly strikes a chord with the audience. The readers are presumably feeling that way in their own lives and have some “secret sorrow” no one can appreciate. They will never be loved for themselves. Again, the antisocial extraordinary identity, which finds a broad audience because of resonating feelings of disaffection, shows this conception of intellect or ability as isolating is commonly believed, held, accepted.

Where is the happy, social genius in literature? It would be nice to see a well-drawn witty hero with great intellect and depth of humanity. If there are any, I would be interested in some examples. I am not as well read in crime literature to know.

Parodies, such as Buckaroo Banzai and In Like Flint, do have these exaggerated heroes, Renaissance men who know everything and can do everything. All of them are descendants of Sherlock Holmes. The person seeking knowledge over all else comes from Faust. I don’t know enough about these icons psychologically to connect them quickly with older ideas. I’ll send my Ahab after that whale, after I finish this.

What incites me is the obvious anti-intellectual tendency in entertainment, the notion that intelligence comes at the price of normalcy and social adjustment. Only a freak or a social outcast can have an interest and aptitude for the life of the mind. Such persons, at least as characters, are always resentful and warped, and want to destroy the world or a good portion of it. They are sexually kinky or shyly frigid. To be really focused, you have to be debilitated like Rain Man or a monster like Lecter. Only someone with obvious deficiencies in his humanity can be truly intelligent. Mozart becomes Amadeus instead of the socially aware person he was as evinced by his letters. We are to believe he died young because of a heartless world and his own lack of political skill, rather than his childhood excursions all over Europe to perform for royalty, which undoubtedly weakened his constitution, or other reasonable explanations.

The universe doesn’t make exceptions for the exceptional people. That is for other people to do, since what we admire is a human thing. What bothers me is the way we misidentify and then vilify or extol others based on our false assumptions -- about ourselves and the world. Smart people are shy and uncoordinated. Athletes must be stupid. He’s popular and therefore must have something going for him.

I don’t know why it’s difficult for us to understand how talent and intelligence, true genius, can be sources of joy for the person who has them. In my more lucid moments, I am happiest. How could it not be even greater for persons whose minds persist in those rare moments most of the time?

Great athletes must find pleasure in their bodies’ ability to excel. So it is for great minds; for them, the world is always resplendent, the very air of daylight must sing, the crystal clarity of a cold night rings, with a music I can only hear with effort. Or so I imagine.

KLK

Prevalence of Anger

Anger and abusiveness are not only tolerated, but are also considered positive social qualities. Here, in this milieu, people have no compass to navigate their emotional interior or the social landscape. They believe abuse is a sign of affection, and confuse anger with edginess and energy. “He’s hot because he uses such violent language.” Interesting to me, when I use violent metaphors in my speech or writing, people are disturbed. When I express my anger appropriately, coworkers assume I am the one who will go postal. They cannot read themselves or other people. They see my incidental anger, but fail to see the simmering rage never expressed by the quiet guy, or the continual vehemence articulated by the mouthy woman.

We live in an abusive, angry time. That is, the people are angry and succeed, and they abuse others, usually in a cowardly fashion, and pretend the abuse is humor. The ethos of ordinary behavior shows the anger, held back only by fear. Almost anywhere you look, both men and women are angry: the way they drive, their faces in lines at stores; the easiness with which they move from looking anxious to being annoyed, from annoyance to indignance, indignation to rage. There are reasons in primary socialization, relationships in the family, which are influenced by economic and larger social conditions. I’ll pass over that for now and just say the social conditions influence individuals, who then go out and further influence the social conditions, and next thing you know, mediocrity is considered genius and you are abnormal if you’re not bisexual and enjoy watching others humiliated and hurt.

Entertainment has a negative edge. Comedy is rude and abusive. Characterizations are straw men to be lampooned. What a fool! Ha! Strangely the portrayals show the bad feelings supposedly creative people have about themselves and about others. When we laugh at a foolish character, we are laughing at something about ourselves. The more merrily we respond to someone putting someone else down, however good natured, we are showing our tendency toward abuse. There are a number of associated habits of feeling, thought and behavior. For instance, superiority-inferiority: I tell myself I am better than you because I feel less than anyone and not wholly appreciated. And with that comes submission-dominance: I am competing to be the paddle but I also believe I have to take my turn as the ball. There are other associated psychological states (if that’s what they are), but I am having trouble saying what I am thinking clearly.

These are old observations but I have only had to use them for myself and never tried to explain them to others who may not have similar interpretations. In fact, from what I've seen, many people are oblivious to their own hostile condition. Many people live with anger and abuse, put themselves down and put others down, are rude and obscene, barely containing their festering condition from one moment to the next. Friends insult each other and believe it is a sign of intimacy. “Only true friends tell the truth.” The truth is anyone who brings you down is not a friend worth having.

If you look around and see only stupid people, perhaps you were told or believe you are not smart, or have conflicted feelings about your self-worth based on insecurity about your own intelligence.

There’s more to be said on all of this but it will have to wait for another time and place and more thought. It is possible to criticize without hurting someone, without calling him names. “You are better than that” is a positive way to say, “That wasn’t so smart, what you did,” and far superior to “What an idiot you are!” followed by hours of abuse and constant reminders in the days ahead of the mistake. It is not merely the form, but the feeling behind it. It is also the state of mind. What kind of person dwells on the mistakes of others, and then brings them up again, even laughing at what could be very painful to the friend?

Why do people put up with abuse and negativity in their friendships and social relationships? Social contact is necessary for sanity. Like food, it is better to have poor quality than none. Also, however, we learn to like the bad. A negative relationship may be better than none, but we also make what we have experienced into something good, even when it was harmful.

I will think about this more. I encourage anyone who has read so far beyond the fold to do so also.

Mind Your Measures

Our waking experience is mostly if not wholly in the past. In waking consciousness, when I focus on my mind’s experience, only on my thoughts or imagination, there is perhaps a synchronicity of experience and the thing I am considering in the sense that the clock of my experience is not a clock outside my mind’s sense of the passage of time. If I take the clock of my now to be the experience itself as it occurs with no reference to time passing outside the experience itself I can claim synchronized coincidence of a present, a moment of now, and my experience. I may claim simultaneity of my experience of thought and the thought itself, of feeling, experiencing the feeling and the sentiment as I have it if I use as the measure of time the sequence of sentience itself. Then perhaps I can say the present is what I am experiencing without a lag in time for the senses to bring perception to me for interpretation. Is it possible in waking life for that to be truly simultaneous or is it always genuinely always a bit behind the actual moment of now? Is there always actually a sense of outside time, a lapse between the synaptic moment and what the activity of the brain and mind considers? What is the mathematical rendering, the expression in calculus of that?

What about dreams? In dream time does that outside reference, that inkling of outside time disappear or at least narrow further, bringing closer the clock of instants passing, the distance between the thing and the thought, that gap of conveyance of information to the mind from the object considered? Is the stuff of dreams perhaps closer to a simultaneous experience of now, of the present moment? If we could put a clock on our dreams solely in the mind would there still be that same lag between the mechanics of the mind and the objects generated solely in the mind? Can we claim the only valid clock of a dream is the present experience of the dream itself and therefore the dreamer experiences the lapse between brain activity and the generation of dream content and the experience of those dream things as one and the same? Or does the waking sense of time impose itself there in the dream as well? Are the same chemical transfers in the brain required in the dream as in the outside world for us to respond to dream things which are things only in the mind? The mind works only with that lag perhaps. What is our subjective impression, even in a dream? Could the lapse in a dream be an illusion carried over from waking consciousness, even though in sleep the reality the dreamer dreams and experiences, the dream itself happen simultaneously? Has the dreamer in fact caught up with now, thereby gaining rest? Is it perhaps the lag in time when we are awake which makes us tired?

In the morning I wake and try to recall the dream moments, the recollected experience of the present, an experience of a now left behind, a simultaneity in the moment, a now now lost. I am always seeking a place nearer to now, approaching the moment, falling short, perhaps only in dreams achieving that place somewhere nearer to now.

What about the experience in the womb, the dream state in the womb, and experiences not wholly asleep, not wholly waking? What is the valid clock of those moments for consciousness? The mind is only forming and at the first moment of consciousness could there be a first instance where the lapse is less or nonexistent? Just prior to that could there be a true simultaneous moment, a now we experience even as it occurs, and is that similar to the actual act of conception itself, if only as a half remembered dream?

Now I search my mind for that moment of initial conception with the firm knowledge that as I approach it, however closely, even as I touch it, it is an illusion of now, an illusion in memory dissipating in a lapsed experience of infinitesimal time I can never bridge, the atom of my first self on my own eve of being, my spark of an essence once touched never to be reached, a snowflake, a light particle escaping my effort to grasp it by the very act of experiencing, melting away in the passion to regain its infinitely remote intimacy. 

Glasses Full, Lenses Empty

We all have a mixture of qualities, aspects of ourselves we like and dislike. The things we’d prefer to change may be very small and, hopefully, do not take up any time or detract from either our pleasure or efficiency; but in quiet moments of reflection or when we’re tired, something may creep into the consciousness, the pearl from that old grain of sand. However, just take one last sip of wine before going to bed and in the morning rested, it has slipped back where it was, somewhere in the basement of our beings, that bed of oysters ignored

Likewise, when we look at other people, we see things we like and dislike, the things that make them attractive and those other things we might prefer would go away. I used to describe it as a table covered with glasses of water. Some glasses are full, others, half full or half empty, others close to empty. We always hope the glasses, the habits and such we don’t like, will get less full and those we like will fill up; but it usually goes the other way, and that annoying set of glasses run over.

Whenever we’re looking at another person, the truth is we are not seeing someone else. We are seeing our view of the world and, in a sense, are looking at ourselves. That is important to accept and to remember even as we’re looking. Not merely “projecting” but more directly as an active application of our values and of our ability to analyze what we see, we are looking with aspects of ourselves which have become the way we interpret the world. The glasses on the table are lenses, but they are also a mirror.

For some people, that’s an intolerable understanding. We may accept that we’re stuck in “a pattern” or are “in part responsible” for the problems with other people. Our analysis of ourselves and the world is like a menu in a Mexican restaurant and we always go for the combo. Easy answer: everything is a combination of factors, and we can substitute that detailed understanding. But the idea that every time we start looking around and see something wrong or something right is actually an opportunity to see what we feel, what we value, what we are; that what we like in others and dislike suggests what we understand and don’t and is not about the people we’re looking at; and that failed relationships are an indicator of something in us that has little if anything to do with those others – well, that’s just not going to work. How can we go through life second guessing…and so we get back to some pit of rationalizations and putting everything out on the world.

If when you drive your car you are continually bumping into things in parking lots or places you have to maneuver closely with obstacles or other vehicles, do you say, “What fools to put so many obstacles and have all these things in places I bump into!” At what point do you get out of the car and look at it and realize it’s a Hummer and say to yourself, I have a big car that doesn’t handle well in tight spaces; and maybe I’m not so good with a big car, and it’s a choice I made to have this car? True madness is to believe the world has it in for you; those obstacles are being placed just for you to bump into.

When we look at people and we see nothing we like, something is wrong with where we are to meet people. We need to go somewhere else. “I went to a bar last night. Everyone was so obnoxious. It was full of drunks.” How odd for a bar. If it’s everywhere or anywhere, something is definitely wrong with how we’re seeing.

However, it’s a mistake to use this insight for purposes of self-hatred. Why the tendency from one extreme to another? At a certain point, it makes sense to say, Well, I’m not this or that, I am the sum of all my parts and habits, and that’s how it is, and now I must work with that knowledge. Instead of trying to get to “good” or “great,” it’s enough to make the sum of what we are something we like, and the things we do, sources of joy. We can be the person that has enjoyment of the world and is pleasant to others, if we simply allow it in how we see it. Oh, and of course actively go about seeing what’s there for us as a large part of our identity.

Statistically, most of us are not going to be in the top percentage of anything, whatever any of that means, by whoever’s standards. Seeking to be great is a delusion. It is the cross of the unexamined life. It is the place the soul goes to die for no reason. In that place, we become attention-seeking zombies with only the will to power, will to pleasure, fear of failure, fear of pain, humiliation, punishment, wholly hollow, beginning with a bang and ending with a whimper.

I know that what I’m writing here is inchoate. I cannot expect it to appeal to anyone and only hope some who read this will find something for themselves in these, my thoughts more for myself. As inelegant as these practice steps may now be, I hope when I walk out today and tomorrow and tomorrow, I will eventually derive a measure of grace from having stretched a bit here.

KLK

12-13-14