Assorted Notes

SUNDAY, 3 JULY 2005

09:32

“Convinced that his journey of self-discovery was far from over […] broke free from artistic convention […] became both sculptor and subject […] abandoned the […] style that he had become famous for […]” ~ about Ju-ming, a Taiwanese sculptor

He went to New York, was exposed to a new world of colour, medium, texture and form. He returned to Taiwan free to experiment, free to create, free from the constraints of conservative masters.

He started his career as a temple carver.

He produced two series: “Tai Qi” and “Living World”.

“[…] taking risks […] creating their own fortune […] seeing the big picture.”

11:01

I think back to summer 2000: because I was not busy on a daily basis becoming my Ideal Self – or even better, being my Ideal Self – I was, for all practical purposes, in appearance to others and to myself a prime example of a person who hated what he was doing for a living and who consistently failed to satisfy essential emotional and physical needs. In desperation I grabbed at any emergency measure that could save me from the situation. The “musician” vision was consequently pursued with feverish enthusiasm. Of course I also thought, “If only I had a million dollars …”

By making this note I am being my Ideal Self: someone who thinks about things, and who writes about what he thinks. This note is a manifestation of my Ideal Self. It is ritual as much as it is free expression of my experience of reality.

13:44

“… balancing confidence and credibility.” (China Post, 1 July 2005)

* * *

What did the Dutch government do in 1945 when their suffering under Nazi rule was over? They rallied together their troops and rushed back to Indonesia to continue their oppressive rule over the Indonesian people that had been disturbed by the Japanese.

Oppressors one day; oppressed the next; oppressors again as soon as they had the opportunity.

The history of the Second World War must be read on the same page as post-war efforts to re-establish European control over former colonial territories. This applies to all the European colonial powers of the time – Britain in Southeast Asia and Africa, France in Southeast Asia and Africa, the Netherlands in Southeast Asia, and Portugal in Angola and Mozambique.

22:13

This afternoon I purchased a whole new set of bedding – fitted sheet, duvet and two matching pillow cases. The guilt over paying what was in fact a very reasonable price, and the uncertainty about how the change in bedding would alter my view of myself kicked in before I had even reached the elevator of the department store.

A few months ago I was still adamant about my blue duvet, my other duvet with the huge arum lily, and the pillow cases that did not go with anything. I told [N.] the day I buy bedding where everything matches is the day I trample under my feet the aesthetic expression of how I see myself, and with it all it symbolises. She agreed that the value of matching bed linen was overrated; that it is indeed quite unnecessary. My bedding, so she thought, was perfectly okay. Weeks later she still reckoned there was nothing wrong with it. I, on the other hand, was suddenly convinced that it looked “common”. (In my defence, I should mention that the fitted sheet had frills hanging from it, which is not exactly my style. The only reason I started using that specific sheet was because I had put a thicker mattress on the bed and the only sheet that was big enough was one that my friend, J. had left me two and half years ago when she left Taiwan.)

Then, this afternoon, while [N.] was still on holiday in South Africa, I went out and bought that entire new set of bedding – stylish, matches the colour motif of the bedroom, no frills, nothing.

“Was I supposed to spend my entire life sleeping on old linen where nothing matches just because I fancy myself an anti-bourgeois intellectual?” I shouted at myself on the way home. “Should I hang my head in shame because I violated Rule # 17 of the Free-thinking Intellectual’s Handbook on Houseware and Bed Linen? Did I forget that no self-respecting critic of everything that is middle class should ever stoop so low as to lay two pillows with matching covers on a bed?”

Then I thought: What is the value of free thinking, of self-definition when it comes to who and what you want to be, and of free choice when I have to live for the rest of my life under the punishing regime of my own caricature of a leftist critic? If I cannot choose to blow money on stylish, matching bed linen, what other choices are there where my so-called freedom is restricted by my own idea of what my life is supposed to look like, since I labelled myself a writer with anti-middle-class opinions? Who is my master when it comes to these issues? Did Marx or Lenin’s bed sheets and pillows match? Does Michael Moore buy his bed linen at three different garage sales to prevent one sheet from inappropriately matching a duvet cover, and Great Revolutionaries forbid, to avoid buying anything that might actually be new? I thought I served my own agenda! I thought I make my own free choices! I thought what I was doing with my life, where, with whom, and how I decorate my house as an expression of my self-image and personal beliefs are all self-defined!

It is thus one hundred percent in line with my beliefs and my integrated philosophy and understanding of life when I say it is okay: you can in all credibility be progressive in your views and opinions, and criticise how other people live their lives, and at the end of a productive day cast your weary body on a bed where the fitted sheet matches the duvet cover, and where the pillow cases do not violently clash with the colour motif of your bedroom.

TUESDAY, 5 JULY 2005

Strange what positive consciousness is stimulated in the deepest parts of your being when someone who matters to you uses the pronouns “we” and “us”.

WEDNESDAY, 6 JULY 2005

Whilst reading Ayn Rand’s For The New Intellectual I am again reminded of the fact that, because I never undertook a thorough and formal study of philosophy, I do not consciously subscribe to any particular school of thought. There are however examples of direct influence: Jean Paul Sartre’s “exist, appear, confront, define”; Nietzsche’s “will a self and thou shalt become a self”; Wittgenstein’s theory of language as a factor in how the truth is understood; and Karl Marx’s “in an ideal world a man can tend sheep in the morning without ever becoming shepherd …”

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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.

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