Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2005

15:42

The issue of where you choose to live reminds me of something Ayn Rand wrote (my wording): because you are a free entity and your choices expressions of free will, you need to justify your choices (to yourself).

If I choose, for example, to stay in Taiwan rather than to go back to South Africa, I constantly have to justify it to myself in order for me to continue to believe that this is indeed the right choice. Sometimes this is a problem.

I am also wondering: Why do we need to justify it?

16:18

Is it not true that it would sometimes be easier if we had fewer choices – if we were less free, as it were? It would be easier to justify our choices, because we would only shrug our shoulders and say, “What do you mean? This was the best choice under the circumstances.” Or better yet: “I had no other option!”

However, if you are a free individual and your choices expressions of your free will, you have to be able to justify to yourself that they are indeed, under the circumstances, the right choices.

My question remains: Why?

20:40

A few thoughts from last week that got lost on the way to the notebook:

I. […]

II. […]

III. Saturday night at [a wedding banquet] at the Grand Hotel, I was standing outside smoking a cigarette. I was thinking about myself, in my fancy pants and my fancy shirt and my fancy tie and my polished shoes, amongst all the other fancy people.

I thought: There is a Hierarchy of Environments. On the one hand you have an environment where you are absolutely the boss, where you can say what you want, do what you want, look the way you want – your own backyard, in other words. On the other end of the spectrum you have an environment where it is dictated to you how you should look, what you should do, how you should do it and what you should say; an environment where you are for all practical purposes not exactly free. In between there are dozens of other environments.

The environment where I found myself on Saturday night was one where I was in Basic Polite Mode.

TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2005

Earlier I wondered why we need to justify our choices to ourselves. I think I now have the answer.

If you are in a position to make choices every day, you need to believe in your ability to make choices. If you do not believe in it, it is similar to a situation where you have to cycle to work every day, but every time you get on the bike you are unsure of your ability to move the bike forward and keep your balance. Or when you have to do a specific job every day but every day you fear that you are going to mess up and that you will need to suffer the consequences.

So it is with free will and choice. You have to nurture confidence in your ability to make the right choice, or the best choice under the circumstances. That is why you have to justify your choices to yourself – you need to prove to yourself that you are able to function as a free individual. By believing that you have the ability to make good choices most of the time (or the best under the circumstances), you gain the confidence to do it again the next day – to again, when faced with important decisions, make the best choice under the circumstances.

———–

[In a note on Monday, 17 October at 09:26 I mentioned that I believe that “free will is not quite as free as we would like it to be”. Nevertheless, we are usually aware of the extent to which we do have the ability to choose between two or more options. If we have to admit that we have, or that we did have, that ability, we need to justify our choices to ourselves.]

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THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2005

09:49

I am thinking of concluding this year’s notes with the following words: I have found my place in the sun – under a tree, in the shade, together.

17:42

For a moment I thought it was 21 November. Then I remembered it’s only 13 October! I got 38 days! For free! To enjoy as I like! To do as I please!

17:58

Another one: age and the uncomfortable sensations that go with it.

Calculate the role and the effect of assumptions and competition with other people your age and from your cultural background.

What would be the result if you start ignoring both – if you ignore what you reckon you’re supposed to do at age X or should already have done, and you simply lose interest in how much better or worse you are doing compared to your peers, and you truly live at your own pace and according to your own beliefs?

19:35

We always say: “If the world as we know it continues …”

But how does it work when you read in the newspapers every week of a 1918 Spanish flu type of pandemic that would “inevitably” hit within the next eighteen months or so? What does one say when they mention the possibility of up to fifty million victims? Until when do you simply take note, and when does it start affecting your thoughts about your own future?

[This note refers to bird flu, specifically the H5N1 variant. Wikipedia: “On September 29, 2005, David Nabarro, the newly appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill 5 to 150 million people.”]

FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2005

12:11

Here’s an idea: It is the moral obligation of enlightened people to use their reproductive abilities to produce the next generation so that they can become the enlightened leaders of the communities where they will live and work in the future.

Let me try again: It is my moral duty to use my reproductive abilities to make a contribution to …

19:03

“Change (or improve) the environment, and you change (or improve) the person,” sounds like so many verbs, and so many other parts of speech. Still, the idea contained in this combination of sounds was the cornerstone of Marxism.

SATURDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2005

09:26

The possibility of life after death always comes down to arguments and reasoning on the one hand, and stories on the other. Nobody can say, “Let me go and show you!”

* * *

So close to someone that you can feel her breathing on your chest, and her heart beating against yours.

* * *

We – the members of the community – agree, for the sake of civilian control, that everyone should take responsibility for his or her own actions – except if you are too young or clinically disturbed. However, free will is not quite as free as we would like it to be.

13:55

I have called “Personal Agenda” many things, but in a continued effort to crystallise the identity, as it were, of the project, I say again: the material is personal testimony to the attempts of one person – not a popular writer, famous entertainer or well-known athlete – to try to make sense of life, mostly outside the religiously approved explanations that were originally given to him.

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WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2005

10:29

I look myself in the proverbial eyes, and I see: myself, my life, my environment, all recognisable from a year ago and two years ago.

And then she appears: a story so beautiful not even children will believe it.

15:50

I am confronted with [N]’s Stellenbosch experience, and following cryptic descriptions I again fall victim to a very unpleasant sensation: disappointment, even a sense of failure.

Why?!

That dirty archenemy, that big old culprit is once again to blame! Assumptions!

Fact is, to go to university, and to go to Stellenbosch, were not original actions on my part. “University” was not a concept that I devised one afternoon in 1987. “Stellenbosch” was not a fictional town that I came up with one evening in 1989 while I was soaking in the bath. Both concepts had existed, full of colourful images and implications long before I, Brand Smit started thinking about going to Stellenbosch. And from the moment I started thinking about it – in ’88 or ’89, assumptions took shape in my head about how it would be.

I saw myself with a bookbag over the shoulder, walking with friends from the cafeteria to some class. I saw myself in a so-called student house. I saw myself with a pretty girl, and us holding hands while we take a walk along the Eerste River, or sitting under an oak tree on a bench talking. I saw myself on a bicycle – my own bicycle! – or even in a cheap car.

Those were the images, the assumptions.

In the end my Stellenbosch was filled with worries and anxiety and financial difficulties and loneliness and longing. My first room was with a family that were complete strangers to me until a few days before I moved in. After six weeks, I began to feel extremely uncomfortable sitting down to dinner, knowing that my first month’s rent had not been paid yet. After two and a half months not even the oak leaves could help me forget my overdue rent. One of the reasons why I went to the Cape was to be closer to a young woman who had made my heart stop a year earlier, and then shocked it into beating again by telling me that she liked me. Six months after I had arrived in Stellenbosch, we agreed that we should rather just be “friends”.

Friends? Lunch at the cafeteria? My own bicycle? A cheap little car? By the end of my first year I was living in a room previously reserved for a live-in servant, a room just big enough for myself and the bed. I cooked lentil soup with one potato in on a gas stove that stood in the shower. Money to take a girl out on a date? Coffee and cake in town? Ha!

So, my Stellenbosch experience was a disappointment? Can we go further and say it was a failure? Just because it was different from what I had assumed it would be? Because it was different from how it was supposed to be? What kind of person allows himself to be bullied, after how many years, by assumptions?

I say: My Stellenbosch experience was a triumphant success! I, now, was born out of that experience! Was it a painful birth? Yes. Is the adult result of that pregnancy and childbirth a failure? What is the standard? What is the expectation? Property, permanent job, marriage, children, school fees, bills, barbecues on Saturday evenings with old friends? Are these still the standards of success as an adult? If that is the case, then I am indeed bloody disappointed!

Do I want to say after all these years that I, Brand Smit, want nothing more than to climb in a time machine and travel back ten, fifteen years? Will I burn incense on the altar of the mainstream establishment, and recite poetic prayers before the gods of John and Sandy Allman, and tread mighty carefully not to accidentally experience something that does not correspond with How Things Ought to Be When You Study at Stellenbosch?

Is this the seed of self-denial that has been growing inside me all these years since my Stellenbosch experience turned south? Am I still disappointed that my student years were not filled with enough money and a nice little apartment and holding hands by the river and laughing with friends? I am what I am today because my student years were not like that!

It is time to raise my fist and declare: “Triumph!”

It is time to climb on a roof and shout: “My experience was shit, that’s true! But thank the gods for it otherwise I wouldn’t have been the person I am today!”

It is time to once again see that I have long since reached the end of the tunnel, that I have survived the birth, that I have become, and that I am now in a position to identify the source of unnecessary disappointments and say, “There! There’s the culprit!”

Life is a struggle, and as long as you remain on your feet, you win. And I, Brand Smit, have remained on my feet. Despite my assumptions.

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SUNDAY, 2 OCTOBER 2005

A question that is sometimes asked out loud, and sometimes only contemplated in silence: “How should I live?”

MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2005

Sometimes it feels like I regularly bring a new case to the court of the Lord of Misery, in an attempt to convince him to show me mercy and to grant me my freedom as one of his serfs.

Take note, I offer nothing. I just make my case every time, thinking that I will be able to convince the lord to permit me to let my sense of misery go, that I can be happy now because …

The Lord of Misery would only say: “This is the new status quo.”

I would ask what that means. No reply would come.

I will get busy with other things until I again make the same case, to which the Lord of Misery will respond: “What are you talking about? This has been your status for months! If you want mercy, bring me a new case!”

And that will be it.

This almost tempts me to say: to hell with the Lord of Misery. Who appointed him master of my life, anyway?

WEDNESDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2005

I exist. I exist as a son, a brother, a friend, a lover, a poet, a writer, a teacher, and as a Westerner in a country in North East Asia.

I did not always exist in all these capacities. In what other capacities am I yet to exist?

SATURDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2005

19:08

If you are just surviving, you do not necessarily need identity. Survival often requires only animal instinct. If you want to apply yourself to survival-plus, specific identity will prove to be extremely useful.

19:10

Every moment in a person’s life is a full circle of life data. The circle is constantly buzzing, but it is always full. Circle 081005@19:11:38 is not the same as Circle 081005@19:11:39. Similarities range from 99.99% to far less.

A person’s life is a constant flow of circles – or rather, a constant buzzing as one circle transforms into the next one.

Person X is the axis around which Person X’s circles revolve.

Differences in content of the circles become clearer the more time passes between circles. It is however important to remember that each circle is 100% full.

The more the data and the more diverse the content, the richer the life.

Risk also increases as data increases. More information can also improve chances of survival.

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SUNDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2005

Who were the leaders of successful communist revolutions? Who were the leaders of the Russian Revolution? Is it true or is it not true that the leaders were middle-class intellectuals who envied the industrialists and other members of the ruling class their political and economic power, and who saw the potential of carrying out a revolution, not in the name of and for the sake of middle-class intellectuals, but in the name of the working masses?

Did the Bolsheviks really intend to hand over control of the state to politically unsophisticated and in some cases illiterate factory workers and peasants? It was their intention to train the workers and peasants as political masters of their own state … but it would have been in the distant future. For the foreseeable future, it was (once again) the time of the middle-class intellectual …

[As I understand it, the plan was certainly not to hand over the reins of the state to workers whose hands were still stained with oil and grime from a hard day’s labour in the factory. But they did actively attempt to educate the workers in political and economic matters. There were also leaders later on, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Eastern Europe who had legitimate working-class credentials. It is also true that the Bolsheviks brutally suppressed efforts from workers, soldiers and sailors to bring to power a more democratic government, in opposition to the Bolsheviks.]

WEDNESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2005

It is like being in a shopping centre and not knowing where you are for a moment. You can describe your immediate environment, but you do not know where you are on the map of the wider area in which you find yourself. Then you see a board with the welcome indication: “You are here.”

So it is with some of my notes. I can describe my current life, but some notes are more than description: they are like a board with a map of my life, with a bold red dot and an arrow that says, “This is where you are on Wednesday, 28 September 2005.”

THURSDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2005

Ten hope that they will leave something of value behind of their lives on Earth. Six realise after X number of years as an adult that the only way they can leave something behind of their lives while playing a satisfactory role is to have children. Three eventually come to believe that they have no chance of leaving behind anything or playing any kind of significant role, or they have no motivation for the actions that will be required of them to leave something of value behind or to play a more or less valuable role.

* * *

The above is an oversimplified representation. In fact, many probably start with the process of leaving something behind, things go wrong, and their lives end stripped of all dignity and self-respect.

Other people have children in a desperate attempt to appear better to themselves and to family and friends, and then, ten years later, as a result of a confluence of circumstances they play a prominent role or make a positive contribution, in addition to raising their children, that will leave an indelible and very constructive result of their existence.

And then there are others who reckon hedonism is their happy fate and personal religion, who sometimes end up as martyrs for a good cause for which they as hedonists, years earlier, never would have pinched off a minute of their time.

FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2005

The pursuit of any goal comes down to X number of physical actions.

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