These Fragile Things

Sometimes it feels like time has run out anywhere other than via Facebook graphics for public discussions about the importance of nurturing things that are fragile, like beauty and hope and imagination and meaning-making.

These fragile things, they are things that scarily feel culturally strange and pointless. They are for hippies, scientific illiterates.  We are ambivalent - we crave those fragile things while at the same time they can make us feel a little ill, somehow, in some indefinable dark way that we don't even begin to understand.  They can make us feel prickled in our sides, pushed in our buttons.  They are things that do not feel allowable in this time. Look at how scarce money is, we say. It doesn’t stretch to encompass frivolity. Those things are frivolous fancy, we are busy and frazzled, and there is not enough money to go around for them, we say, through gurgling stomachs.

But beauty and imagination and hope and creativity are the other side of the bigger picture. We know this, when we’re not stressed and distracted off our dials. We go on holiday for these things. They are what makes life meaningful. They cannot easily be commodified, broken down into a spreadsheet, extrapolated out into data analysis. And, as truly important as left-brain analysis is, it is only one side of the story.

The bigger picture reminds us that money is a construct that we invented, as a means of energy exchange, as an easier alternative to bartering, but fast forward hundreds of years and it has been flat-packed down into a ridiculously complicated means of restriction, of gain at others' expense. On this other side of the picture, we can change how we “do” money so that it is retrieved from greed, fear and competition and restored once again to its rightful position. As will we be. And from there, beauty, imagination and hope aren’t optional extras for a people who are more than consumers, but are the beginning of something new.

These ideas seem pie in the sky, do they not?  Hopelessly naive. It’s easy to fall into black despair that maybe we are a species watching ourselves see ourselves out. But maybe the biggest part of the problem is not that it’s not possible to change, but that we think it’s not. And maybe another part of the problem is that we're trying to use the wrong kind of thinking to get there – supposing that we can estimate change, predict our future only by how economically viable it is, while considerations of how we wish to live and how that could be meaninful remain on the sidelines, slightly embarrassing and irrational. How different really are we from ages past that relied on scriptures to guide their living?  We like to rely on externals as well, like economic forecasts, missing entirely the fact that these are all just a different type of prognostication, and one that keeps us as small and sidelined as the Old Testament texts that painted God as a ravaging, nasty monster, coldly inconsiderate of the shape and size and weft of those who he'd formed.


Too much left-hemisphere thinking (unlike too much left wing politics) seems to make us smaller, less humane, and I don’t like it – not just simply because I float in dreamland and have crappy time-management skills, but because it will be to our literal destruction if we can’t rebalance.

But also because it makes us miserable.

Note I didn't say no left-hemisphere thinking but too much.  Imbalance can create havoc and I do believe that we can see the evidence of that in the destruction of the world around us.

“The [brain's] left hemisphere tells us that the quest for meaning is meaningless, because it is not equipped to deal in meaning or understanding, but manipulating and processing,” says Ian McGilchrist. Meaning, he says, “emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” The left hemisphere of our brains is biased towards seeing the parts; the right towards seeing the whole picture. It is that greater expansion of the view which we need more than anything right now.

From http://payzle.com/for-fun-hard-unilateral-visual-neglect/

A drawing better illustrates this example.  A person who has suffered a right-hemisphere stroke and who therefore is more dependent upon the left hemisphere of the brain sees and draws only the right-hand side of things – half a cat, half a house, half a tree. A person entirely dependent on the left hemisphere of the brain to make their way through the world fails to see the left-hand side of things. They have disappeared from their view as emphatically as if they weren’t there at all.

The Tao views the proper handling of life as a balanced understanding of yin and yang, of action and inaction. The inaction is hard for us and seems useless.  According to the Tao, action can be disastrous; sometimes it’s better to retreat to an inaction – which is not passive but an active inaction, a space that is empty but full at the same time. It is a silence that is full. It is a rest that we pant for but can miss realising we need. It is so hard to be balanced in such a topsy turvy place as this.

We could think of a family that may or may not have lived next door to us. When we remember them, we feel equal amounts of attraction and repulsion. They were imperfect like us, but there was a collectiveness about them. They all smelled the same, like warmth, but looked different, like themselves. They did things together that were playful. They seemed, from our baleful longing, to be somewhat naive. They did things that were a little uncool, things that were pointless and playful, and it seemed to make them happy. It made us sad, those things – some of us thought they were dumb but some felt our hackles rise and we had no idea why.  We did not understand the language of games, rituals, rites, dance.  It all looked like a cult.  How could we evaluate what these things actually were and what their point was without reference back to hard squares and boxes? Those games were like a different language and those people stupid and naive. They made us feel contemptuous and at the same time inferior, scared even. They made us feel like we were stoppered, that big wads of ourselves we didn’t even know existed were off flying in the atmosphere when they should have been here with us. They make us remember what we’ve forgotten we forgot.

So this is the time we are in – in a culture which has had a right-hemisphere stroke and it is up to us, as individual cells, to restore the balance. That probably begins with doing the things that we secretly yearn for, the things that feel too luxurious, that we don’t have time for. This breeds more of that thinking that Einstein talked about, the sort that’s different from the kind that got us into this environmental pickle in the first place.

The times call for people who have come alive, and who aren’t afraid to express and to do what’s right. No matter how naive that might seem, even to ourselves.

Leaving Facebook

So Rima Staines finally joins Facebook ...

... and I leave it.

Again.

I've done this before.  I know how it feels - the familiar jittery, "What the hell am I doing?" feeling.  The awful thought that you have removed yourself from the entire front loungeroom of the global house.  That you will probably lose touch with a whole bunch of people who if you never get on Facebook again you'll probably never talk to again.


The "What the hell am I doing?" feeling is like when you quit smoking.  It's a panic.  It's a wondering what you're going to do to fill up the space where you used to look at Facebook 30 times a day.

Which is exactly why I'm doing it.  I want more space.

I partially blame Rima's post.  Because this:

I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming.

This really speaks to me.  I haven't been writing much in recent weeks, after the latest sinus bout.  It fills up my head and makes it feel like there is not room enough both for sinus and for words.  And so I've fallen off the writing habit again for the moment.  But even if my head is relatively clear, it still feels full up with the internet.  With the mass amount of information I've taken in over one day that the majority of people in the entire history of the world would not take in over their entire lifetimes, I feel completely full, and often very overwhelmed, even when I'm rolling around inside the house all day all by myself with no work to do.  It's not very conducive to characterisation, to essay-writing, to thrumming.  And so while I can't get rid of the entire internet, I can at least get rid of Facebook.  Because it frees up space, and I know it does because it has done so before.  And I wish to fill that extra space with real-time interaction with breathing, living people, and real-time interaction with clay, with pens, and with the keyboard where I am writing stuff that sits in a document waiting to be added to tomorrow, instead of being pasted as a Facebook status update.

Rima is speaking about the internet as a whole, and I agree fulsomely that even if I quit Facebook, I still have to try to manage my internet info intake each day.  But Facebook is like the methamphetamine of the internet for me.  Even more so than Twitter, strangely.  Twitter annoys me too much for it to ever be a meth addiction.  Twitter is like a once a week bong-on sesh with your mates.  Facebook is like mainlining.  I need the space. 

I went outside before, after getting home from my Aged Care class, and sat, with my feet bare in the grass, and read a wonderful novel, and felt blissed out from the sun that had poked through the clouds on my way home and which was now heading his way in a slant over to the west.  And I made pictures out of the clouds, and thrummed in my dreaming space, and read a story set in the future generations and generations after a giant meteorite has hit the moon and flung it off its trajectory so that every seventh night it looms scarily close to the earth before moving away again in its new spheric orbit.  A story most certainly set elsewhen, further off into the future around a church of women, the Sisters of Selene, whose influence has already risen in their small periphery and, over several generations, now begins to wane.  It is a book captivating my attention, and hence I was incredibly rich sitting there, more than you could ever guess, out out on the grass, feet buried in grass, reading the words of an author who sounds like he's writing in some Icelandic country - his name is Torsten Krol, if he is indeed a he - but who apparently lives in Queensland.  There is apparently some mystery surrounding Torsten Krol, about whether he is a famous author writing under a pseudonym.  I think in some ways I like it like that - an anonymous writer.  There is sometimes something nice about not knowing who the author is, of the story just wafting to you all on its own.

But I also really like it when a piece of writing is attached to an author.  It's why I will always prefer blogs over Facebook, even as Facebook has stolen many bloggers away.  I prefer being able to go to read someone's extended thoughtfulness, where my reading is a little more longform, even if it means that I can read less, because it's more fun to spend time inside one person's mind for five minutes rather than flicking my attention between 13 different people in two.

And so my love-hate relationship with this online space, and my haggling with it over how much of an effect it gets to have on my attention span and mindspace continues.  Rima says it better:

But do you not also share my frustration and loathing for the way the internet has squirmed into our every minute, addicting us to updates, and overloading us with eons more information each second than we are naturally made to process in a lifetime? Even if we ignore the endless shite and horror that the internet contains, it is still spilling over with wonder. There are so many beautiful things out there, genuine heartfelt pieces of writing, ideas and images - too many - so we have learnt to skim, to take in only the bubbles from the top of every slowly crafted brew. And I for one feel this is not a true and considered honouring of these beautiful works, not to mention of the eyes and hearts and souls and bodies of the people who are consuming these streams of information every millisecond, utterly removed from the place and land where they sit, out in the ether somewhere, following a trail whilst their extremities get gradually colder and they forget to eat lunch.

... I speak from a concerned and somewhat frightened yet simultaneously grateful and amazed viewpoint. If we use this thing, we still need to remember the land on which we stand, remember our bodies and the faces of those we love. I think we should be frightened that all intercity trains these days are filled with blue-faced passengers, every one of them swiping their fingers across a tiny screen, oblivious of the people around them acting identically. If we use this thing, then we should use it to find other faces in the throng and go and really touch them, in real life. Arrange it so that you can look into their real eyes and hear their real stories. This amazing network can be used for proliferating inane fluff or it can be used to organize and gather for good and real reasons, and to stir souls.

Sometimes the soul you need to stir is your own.  To make more space for the daydreaming.  To not let connecting on Facebook replace connecting with people in real time.  To go cold turkey once again.  To disconnect to reconnect.  A mighty challenge for us all ~ internet newbies all as we are ~ to navigate.