The Fox and The Bramble

Fox: "So why did you not catch me when I was falling?"
Bramble: "You're mad to expect that from me who relies on others to support me!"

Aesopus

The Guardian's Person of Year 2013

Oh dear, even the Guardian could not resist the temptation and started yet another one of those Top 10 of... and Best of... vote inanities that journalists churn out to keep with the pressure of having to come up with something attention-grabbing (and click-generating) on a daily basis. I feel for you guys, I really do... 

Now for the vote, for me it's a tight tie between Kenye West and Andy Murray, a shockingly haywire fame-chaser and a man who hits balls for a living. Who could think of worthier candidates for mental hogwash pseudo-competitions like this?

It takes every kind to keep the economy running.

Save yourself first

I stopped watching news a long time ago: I refuse  to handle all the misery and squalor of the world (Weltschmerz) delivered straight, and these days live, nearly actual size, with Dolby Surround and in High Definition, into your living-room. I am just a human, not a Jesus Christ to save the world from its sins. 

Let's first save myself: let's breathe slowly and deeply. The Universe will do the rest.

Like they tell you in a safety drill on the airplane: put the oxygen mask first on yourself, then help others.

Distance is...

A mirror koan

How do you see yourself with your eyes closed?

閉眼自見

The hardest thing to embrace

Crisis means change, change is the only thing that is constant.

The only constant thing is change itself.

Cutting earthlings to size

Each earthling is known to be carrying up to 5 kg of excrement on them at any given time. It is fabulously amusing to keep that in mind every time an earthling tries to ride a high horse with you.

Those who don't value you are not worth you.

It takes a good taker to give

The opposite of the Polyanna principle

My wish is my command

The importance of sleeping enough

Sleep a lot, capitalism can wait!

The Superego

You get it right 90%, don't blame yourself for the rest 10%.

Picnic forks and plates

Oh, I feel so lazy to wash up the dishes, let's fight a war with a country half across the globe, take their oil, make plastic forks and plates from it, use them once and throw them away!

Just be

Don't do it. Just be.

Love is...

Answers, questions

Rest and heal

All evil in the world

Religion and sprituality

the path

The Holy Trinity, Trimurti

It's all metaphors, stupid. 

Father, Son and the Holy Ghost. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Creation, maintaining, destruction. Marx's cycles of "creative destruction", and so forth.

It's really the modernist perception of linear time and the Cartesian separation of domains of knowledge that gets in the way of holistic Verstehen.

It's still the same old you that packs your bags

Propaganda

"Propaganda always wins if you allow it." Leni Riefenstal

Intelligent food

Celebrate your celebrators

On middle-class fobias

Heart affairs

Adult psychosexual development

You need to get there to understand though. :-)

Ugly people

So what is your message?

The smartphone generation

Prayer

Is a nationless identity possible?

Fanon wrote that mixed-race people who don't break with their mixed identitites in favour of their true one are 'individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless - a race of angels'. It seems a scary perspective. But is one symbolic dependency fundamentaly better than the other?

Identities are a powerful source of self-reference and stability. As components of the Ego, they are the symbolic representation of the I in the outer world (Lacan 1936). We are completely convinced, without a slightest shade of doubt, that they are what we are. As such, they are taken very seriously. Being the single most powerful link  between the individual subjectivity and the social imaginary, they are also the hook on which we get angled by ideologies, beliefs, constructed desires and rules. They are the strings that lets whoever we, always unwittingly, let hold them, channel our vital force (ki, qi, kundalini, libido) to whatever end suits the puppet masters. True freedom can only come from realising the nature of identity (it's an imposed illusion based on an internalised misunderstanding) at the very "nexus of knowledge and power". But will then letting go of one's national identity make us, as Fanon warns, individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless - a race of angels'?

My own experience is that of escaping, first unwittingly, the stifling iron cages of bureaucratic and truth regimes. Perhaps, it has been easier for me, being a mostly invisible minority, to find myself a rather cozy heterotopia as a legal alien in the lenient anonymity and relative political freedom of London. However, that path has cost a lot of sacrifices. I've had to cast a lot of ballast, which did not seem as such at the time: the security of group identification, a family and a home of my own, a lasting romantic relationship. The gruelling effort of finding my Self has taken severing the fake, imposed parts, grown over, however, with nerves and blood vessels of my live being, sifting through the clouds of mud and silt left by my past, reconstituting my own being and what I do with it on my own terms. A complete reinvention, rediscovery of what I actually am.I don't think many would do that. I probably wouldn't have too, had I known how much pain and effort it would cost.

So, yes, it is possible to have a nationless identity, to be a free spirit, a citoyen du monde. The reward is amazing, the result is not scary as it seemed to Fanon, but profoundly liberating. However that path up the mountain gets colder and thinner air with every step. The views get ever more amazing and the horizons ever so wider, but there's hardly anyone to share them with. It is largely a solitary experience, just you and God.

 

Patience

Don't mistake a delay for a denial.

Just a game

"In my frail canoe I struggle to cross the sea of desire, and forget that I too am playing a game."
Rabindranath Tagore

This every only moment is the best

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