Category: Post Untitled, volume two

SATURDAY, 2 JULY 2005

11:35

I am watching a Kevin Bacon movie, and a specific plot line catches me offside for the umpteenth time in my adult life. Now, I know it is just a movie, but it’s not science fiction, it is a dramatised version of a life with which I am sure most viewers, who certainly count in the millions, can associate.

The story goes as follows: a young man who has ambitions to become a writer and who has a view of himself as someone who does not merely want to do the same as the proverbial everyone else marries a young woman whose character is not so clearly developed as her husband’s, but who one can assume has ambitions of a more conventional life. They buy a house in a middle-class neighbourhood. He gets a job at an advertising company and tries to write in the evenings, but does not get much done. He doesn’t really know what he wants out of life, but nonetheless works to maintain the “house” that is his life – a life he has not chosen as much as it just happened as a standard option for which he has taken the right actions at the right times like showing up for a job interview and showing up at the bank to fill out forms for a home loan. He wonders why he cannot just accept himself the way he is, and be satisfied with where he is.

As could be expected, it does not take long before pregnancy and children become part of the story. The man complains that his life is without meaning, and it is increasingly suggested that fatherhood will make a big difference.

The story thus follows a familiar plot:

– Man and woman get married.

– Man and woman are uncertain about the value of their lives in the Greater View of Things (and although it has been mentioned that we do not always live in the Greater View of Things, we also do not only live in the world of sour milk and annoying pop tunes and screaming children – all these things are part of something bigger, and most of us know this). They may even believe that they have to justify their existence. They must show the world that they too are worth something, and that they can make a worthy claim to the oxygen they breathe and the sun warming their cheeks.

– They get jobs somewhere, buy a house, and try to fill holes that doubts about the value of their existence blaze into their consciousness like an open flame would burn holes through delicate rice paper.

– They have children – the joy, the profound change in their daily lives, the happiness and the congratulations from all serve to emphasise that they have reached a good point. They are parents now, which means new roles to play as well as the additional value this gives to their lives in the Greater View of Things. The child or children are raised to initially be like their parents (language, sports preferences, religious affiliation, other loyalties), and to perhaps lead similar lives after a few decades. The whole cycle continues: have children, adulthood, have children, adulthood, have children …

What is my problem with this? I like children! My own sisters have beautiful children and I am happy for them! I may also want to have children one day! What is my problem with this most primitive, most widespread of phenomena? My problem is the type of adults that many people become. And I believe the kind of adults that people become are strongly influenced by the reason or reasons why they came into existence in the first place. [Example: Prince William of Britain: reason for coming into existence: to become king (or queen if the dice had fallen the other way).] If I look at my own case, my own parents may have had me because they had wanted more children for their own selfish reasons. I turned out okay. As an adult I make witty albeit slightly cynical comments on the lives of other adults, I pay my bills (late, but still), and I believe I make my contribution, however small, to the progress of civilisation, or at least to preserve what is good.

Is this not in the end good enough?

I think it is time that I face one of the hardest truths ever: Not everyone’s life is important in the Greater View of Things. To have one life with value that exceeds the primary needy-organism-behaviour-to-satisfy-needs model requires possibly dozens of primary models. This is a horrible truth: that my life in the Greater View of Things may be worth more than someone else’s, and that someone else’s life may be more valuable than mine – that my life can be regarded as disposable if necessary to keep someone else alive whose life is regarded as more precious and more valuable than my own. (And I am not referring to the value of my life in the sense that my life has value for my mother, and John X’s life has value for Mother X. I am talking of value where personal relationships are not a measure.)

What this means is that perhaps as many as nine out of every ten adults must produce offspring to give value to their lives and to contribute their share to fulfil the needs of the community in the decades to come (children become teachers and doctors, and road builders, and so forth). One in ten, or maybe just one in every hundred people, does more – something that will transcend their value beyond their intimate inner circle and the labour value they have for the local economy. To produce these one-out-of-ten or one-out-of-one-hundred people, MOST ADULTS SHOULD HAVE CHILDREN. That is how it is. It is time that I accept this.

(Incidentally, the movie’s name is She’s having a baby.)

23:40

Again it comes down to this: there is no universal human value. Each person has to work out his or her own value in the Greater View of Things. If he or she is not satisfied with the preliminary outcome, he or she must take action to achieve their desired value – in so far as it is within his or her ability.

What is your value if you do not work it out yourself, and if you are not among the group of people bothered with their value in the Greater View of Things? Then your value is the result of fate – time and place of birth, gender, family, socio-economic status, race, etcetera, needs of the community – X number of teachers are needed, X number of garbage removal workers, and so forth, and choices and actions you take, or have taken to satisfy your needs up until the current moment.

Great. (Possible title or subtitle for an essay: Initially about a movie.)

[Say you work out your own value – whatever that means, and you think you too can be counted among the group of people who are bothered with their value in the Greater View of Things, is this not ultimately also 100% part of your process to satisfy your own needs? One out of every hundred people who will then rise above the proverbial masses do so for the same reason a subsistence farmer plants a potato and harvest it: to satisfy their own needs.]

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE 2005

Why do I write? Why am I sitting on a train? Why do I clip my nails, eat breakfast, put bags of garbage in the corner of my kitchen, move my furniture around, hang pictures on my walls, look at the number on the scale, remind myself that I must go for a haircut later this afternoon, and try to be friendly and polite?

Because … seriously? Because? Better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier … better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier … better, prettier, thinner, richer, smarter, healthier! Cheap train, express – a track remains a track!

Boxes full of junk that can’t be discarded, wet towels, new bedding to replace torn sheets and old pillow cases, people that rush around you making a noise in your ears, eating and drinking and smiling and buying and eating and rushing around and sitting and sleeping and buying and eating and drinking and rushing around and lying and talking and eating and drinking and sleeping and buying and making a noise and rushing around and eating and sleeping and sitting and talking … Sex and death, and in between people try to convince themselves that other things are also important.

Art, entertainment, garbage, people and trains and flowers, cigarettes and vegetable soup … Oh god! Please do not let this be my final entry!

* * *

Truth and lies. Am I on the train?

(It is 15:37.) No.

Sometimes I die in the truth and am born again in the lie. Sometimes the lie is more important than the truth. Sometimes the lie has more value than the truth.

Before the word “truth” came into existence, the truth had already existed. What we call the truth is thus more or less accurate; it corresponds more or less to the real truth; it strikes the bull’s-eye more or less.

Am I on the train?

(It is 15:42.) Yes.

What is the point? My environment has changed. According to a pre-arranged plan I took an action, and my truth changed. At 15:37 the truth was that I was not on the train. At 15:42 the truth was exactly the opposite – I was on the train.

One can be smart and ask for a proper definition of “train”. Or you can debate the correct use of the preposition “on”. “On” would strictly speaking mean on top of the train, on the roof. You have after all entered the train. It is therefore more correct to say that you are “in” the train, right?

No degree of semantic mudslinging will however change the truth that my truth changed between 15:37 and 15:42.

THURSDAY, 30 JUNE 2005

Yesterday I passed a bulldozer that had been loaded on a truck. For a moment I was deeply impressed with the machine, all the tubes and arms and steel and dry mud bearing witness to a hard day’s work. I realised I did not know the person who had designed the machine. I knew absolutely nothing about him or her! The thought did not upset me too much though, because I could make the reasonable assumption that the machine had in fact been designed, and that it had been designed by a person, and that this person actually exists, or had existed at some point.

I then realised that I had no idea of the people who had built the machine …

* * *

Do I live in a time of war or peace? I myself have never been involved in a war. I have never seen war first-hand. Most of the people I know and with whom I have contact on a daily basis have also never seen or experienced war. It therefore appears to be a reasonable assumption that I live in a time of peace. Yet, I see footage of war on TV. I have also met people who had experienced war first-hand, although they had experienced it years before our paths crossed.

The point of this piece of text is neither war nor peace – it is to illustrate a phenomenon common in human communication. A question is asked, and without much hesitation we usually continue to provide the most appropriate response. But was the question a reasonable one? What assumptions were made that the person who is supposed to provide an answer would not necessarily agree with if they had to think about it for a while? Were there implications inherent to the question that the responder would not be in accord with had they realised it? For example, what is “war”? How does the interviewer define a “time of peace”? What answer would be correct? Would opinion outweigh factual accuracy in this case? What would be a reasonable opinion and what sophistry?

Questions and answers (or opinion) are ways in which we collect information about ourselves, the environment we inhabit, the time in which we live, and the people with whom we share the environment. Questions, or how the question is asked, sometimes influence the answer – or how the questions are answered.

Last sentence: information is important; information is gathered by asking questions; accurate, sensible and reasonable answers are the most common result of well-formulated, reasonable and meaningful questions.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE 2005

After years of thinking about himself and about life, a man has decided who he wants to be, where he wants to live and in what style, how much money he can be content with, and so on.

Then he meets a woman and they start a relationship. During the course of several months he spends with her, he forms an idea of what her vision looks like of a nice house. Some aspects correspond with his ideas. Other items he regards as perhaps too conspicuously “bourgeois”. He has also developed over the years an aversion to decor that seems to have been selected from a catalogue, and he is reminded of a Fight Club quote: “Flipping through catalogues, deciding which coffee table defines me the best.”

This man is comfortable making a political argument out of a coffee table. Still, he loves the woman, and her vision of a nice house … is beautiful, stylish, aesthetically pleasing and warm. His question to himself: Should he admit that her suggestions of how to turn an apartment into a home are not in conflict with his basic idea of a pleasant living space that pre-dates her presence in his life, or should he continue to defend his vision of an intellectual’s lair to the last coffee table splinter because he would die of embarrassment if any other armchair revolutionary should express the opinion that he turned bourgeois the moment he lost his heart to a woman?

What is under discussion here is identity. Who and what you are in the environment where and at the time when your existence plays out find expression in your address, your clothes, your furniture, your mode of transportation and the ornaments and wall hangings in your living room. If any of these expressions of your who-and-what changes, what does it say about who and what you are, or have become, or is becoming? (And any reader who feels that a coffee table is just a damn coffee table obviously has not contemplated the finer points of existence.)

People change, everybody knows that. One enters into a relationship with someone special, and your existence is transformed overnight (and over the course of months), from single amateur academic/writer to … amateur academic/writer in a meaningful relationship with a beautiful woman who does not like broken toilet seats and second-hand couches with piles of newspapers under a sheet to prevent anyone from falling in.

Relationships, compromise, politics, coffee tables … whatever. Let the shopping begin!

______________________

TUESDAY, 28 JUNE 2005

A phrase frequently heard around barbeque fires, on porches or balconies, next to a table in a restaurant or a counter in a bar or other places where middle class mid-twenties spend their time, is this: “I now know what is important in life. I know what I want out of life.”

I am in no position to question what is important to them or what they want from life. The temptation does however exist to ask them: What was your process? In what way did you go about working out what is important to you, or what you want? Did you lie awake nights contemplating the possibilities? Did you spend years weighing the possibilities and mulling it over? Did you spend months? Weeks, perhaps? Did it your hit you one morning on the way to work? Was it something someone said at a barbecue, or on TV or in a movie, or at the office, or on campus one day? Did you follow a thorough process of elimination where you considered a dozen, or at least half a dozen possibilities, with all the possible pluses of every possibility weighed against all the disadvantages and all the possible risks? Whose tracks did you consciously or unconsciously follow? Why those particular tracks? What needs do you hope to fulfil with your ultimate choice of what is important to you, a young adult? What goals will be fulfilled in the pursuit of what you want out of life? What is important to your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your cousins? Is there a correlation between what is important to you and what you want out of life and what they want and what is important to them? If you want to follow a different path, what are your reasons, your motivations? If you want to pursue a similar path, what do you think would be the reasons for that? And now that we are on this line of questioning, what was important to your parents, or your aunts and uncles? Did they pursue similar things to what you now want to pursue for the next forty or so years of your life? Is or were they happy with their choices? For what reasons would you think were they happy with their choices? Did they regret some things? What are these things? Are there dreams or ambitions that you have already written off as unrealistic and unrealisable? How much regret will you have in ten or twenty years about the things that you considered unattainable in your mid-twenties? What will compensate you for the dreams and ambitions that you would never pursue?

These are but a few questions for which you can pinch off an hour or so if you have the time – if you find yourself in a place where you know no one, where for the moment there will be no familiar voices to echo your own, or to talk you down, or to offer support.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2005

Several thoughts are standing in line for a piece of paper […] I find myself developing a hang-up regarding credibility. I can lay hundreds of pages of text on the table, but … until now nothing has been published! […] Something must be done!

Paper is paper; ink is ink; and as I sit here in my grey shorts and grey T-shirt on the red chair at the desk in the kitchen with the blue fan making a noise and the rain dripping outside, feelings are feelings. And as it is, one is not always successful in your attempts to try and explain to your future self, on paper, in ink, exactly how you felt at that moment.

So what I feel is frustration … no, impatience, because I can see the finish line, or the destination about which I have prophesied for so long. I see it because it is close. The problem is that I don’t run straight at it. I shuffle at a half centimetre per hour, going from left to right and right to left, then I do a somersault, walk back to the beginning before I realise I have to turn around, then I trip over my trousers, shuffle forward at one centimetre per hour for two hours, fall asleep from boredom and lose my way again … and so I keep on going.

I need, for the sake of credibility, to produce, with official verification of success.

THURSDAY, 16 JUNE 2005

Rain – continuously for five days, endless laundry, dirty dishes, credibility as a writer and an entrepreneur, and a new question: Am I a little embarrassed about the effect that an intimate relationship has on me? It affects what I say and how I say it; that I am apologetic and what I am apologetic about; and it makes me appear to someone in a way I previously only appeared to myself – meaning financial status, my status as an unpublished writer, the fact that I work on many so-called money projects … that make no money at all.

Another question (an essential one): Do I feel as good about myself in an intimate relationship as I felt on my own?

As I was writing down the question, I realised it was loaded with misunderstanding and unspoken detail. Was I always happy on my own? Did I expect to be happy in a relationship at all times? The answer to both questions is no.

Here is my advice to myself: An intimate relationship is an environment where you are once again confronted with yourself – an environment which differs in crucial ways from the one in which you were on your own. It provides you with a new mirror in which you see yourself. It is an environment where conflict, both large and small, makes a regular appearance. A relationship is also a process in which you have to again define yourself – who you are, what you are, where your place in the world is, your ideal role, your relative value as a human being (and as a possible role player), your strengths and your weaknesses, what the future may hold for you, how much money you need to not only survive but to be who you want to be and do what you want to do.

Like the environment of the Desert (celibacy and loneliness), this environment and the accompanying process are also both constructive and destructive, both positive and negative; sometimes it leads to an awareness of happiness, sometimes to frustration; sometimes it leads to a decrease in positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, sometimes it confirms your existing positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, and sometimes it is conducive to a strengthening of the latter.

An intimate relationship is a living environment where patience, love and mutual acceptance will lead to fulfilment of much more than just physical needs. In the ideal situation it will lead to a richer experience of being human. Of course, an intimate relationship can also lead to pain, disappointment and frustration. It is an environment where high value should be placed on honesty and sincerity. It is a process that must be cherished, even if you have to occasionally endure the less pleasant aspects that will be part of any situation where two people are in regular and intimate fellowship.

SUNDAY, 26 JUNE 2005

Says a Christian character in a movie to another character: “Jesus will save us.”

“I don’t believe that,” the other guy replies.

“Your beliefs have no bearing on the facts,” the Christian character responds.

MONDAY, 27 JUNE 2005

01:22

A random search through old boxes, old junk and scraps of paper that went AWOL years ago leads me to realise once more that I did not come into existence yesterday. I have come a long way.

17:58

How does one think? We speak in sounds and read visual representations of the sounds – but how do we think? What are the words in your head?

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