Sullen girls

The women change but it never becomes easier to be beloved: http://gollyg.blogspot.com.au/2005/05/tired-of-you.html

If only we could agree that I will be a mystery to you and that your revealing yourself to me will not mean that I am in turn revealed to you, because you are not asking, are not interested, do not want to know and never have.

I wonder sometimes, when I look at the sullen girls on the bus, what they are dreaming. They frown at their books, their ipods, their kindles, and you wonder what petty spites, what triumphs, what trials entertain them.

Sometimes I think, would there even be anything to say? If we spoke, I would say nothing much. I don't do small talk. I do big talk or no talk at all. With men, I am useless, because I can only talk about football and politics, and they are boring. With women, I am useless, because we cannot talk about anything that means anything to us, because they have a story behind the story, and that is what I want to know, not the story they are telling me.

Mostly they are telling me I am old, ugly and useless, and I want to say I am not, but I hate to lie. Well, I say that but I'll lie. Sometimes because the truth will hurt; sometimes because the truth will not serve me. There, I admit it. Sometimes we all lie because telling the truth will not get what we want.

I have always believed though that if we all told the truth and were unafraid of it, we would all get what we wanted. Because be honest with me, we are getting plenty of what we don't want.

And I still think that if you and I were not afraid... but we are, aren't we? And I fear most of all that the sullen girls on the bus are afraid most of all of what they fear, themselves, their own golden children captured inside their hearts, corralled and they hope tamed, wrapped in iron, caught in a spiral that will never let them feel the happiness they could feel, frowning into kindles because that is easier than saying, I want you to reach inside and find me. 

And what I want, all I want, ultimately all I want, is not to be wrapped in iron, to be golden, and girls, I know, I fear it too, that underneath the iron is rust, not gold, and never has been.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:19 pm 1 comments

More about gods. With added bonobo.

I was watching The Devil's Mistress last night, which is a spot of historical fun based in the Civil War (our one, not the war against slavery), and that led me to rummage around a bit on the interwebnetz. I was led to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which expressed what the Presbyterians who were effectively running England believed (and what the Church of Scotland still believes).

It's interesting to me that a person can write:

he is the alone foundation of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom, are all things ... his knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature; so as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain

yet believe that God not only allows us to sin but can punish it.

As with all Christians, these Calvinists created a god who is too powerful, but were able to see some of the consequences of that power. (Chapter III shows that they were aware, in a way many Christians refuse to be, that an all-knowing god must necessarily know which beings he has created to save, and which to damn. They seem entirely unconcerned, however, by any notion that this also necessarily excludes free will.) However, they were not able, or not willing, to recognise that they had conflated two beings: one that is the fount of all living things, endowed with perfect knowledge of his creation, incapable of error (unless he chooses to make one) and so on; the other a sort of daddy figure who cares whether you bang your neighbour's wife.

Either one is credible and my main problem with Christianity, bar the practicalities of Christians' influence on our societies, is that they want both: a beautiful, inspiring all-encompassing creator and a jealous tribal god who really likes sacrifices. Recast God as an unapproachable, ineffable spirit, and Jesus as a teacher with a bent towards self-negation, and we dispense immediately with the burnings, the hatred, the fear. Of course, it leaves less space for the priests, ministers and gang of other charlatans who profit from religion, whether directly as interpreters of God's will or indirectly as predators on the credulity of believers, but they could always keep their horrible thunder god and punish themselves for being human in his name.

Would I believe in the eternal unknowable figure? Of course not, but it would at least be meaningless to believe in him, rather than unreasonable. Seriously, I recall how painful it was for Bella that anyone could believe that she had evolved from something like an ape and that her life had only that meaning she herself created. Science made her angry. If you had offered her a world without reason, in which faith ruled, she would have been content. If you think the Taliban impose themselves on the people, you do not know the people. You don't hear from the faithful in your documentaries or on their blogs, because their story is not palatable to us and gets no airtime. We like to read what middle-class dissenters, people somewhat like us, however much the minority they are where they live, have to say, not least because it lets us believe that religion is a fraud perpetrated on ordinary people, not something they share and take part in.

I often think about this when I read about how the Taliban do not like music and are somehow stopping the people from dancing in the streets, or that Ahmedinajad is some kind of dictator who forces Iranians not to be modern. Do you really think Ahmedinajad is running a con on the Iranian man in the street? No. He is expressing what they believe in a voice they would echo.

The people who wrote the Westminster Confession did not like music much either, and certainly felt that dancing was sinful. It's saddening that people should think such a natural expression of humanity so hateful but the notion in their religion that we are disgusting beings who must watch ourselves constantly is common. We are full of impulses that make us uncomfortable.

***

Sometimes, when I think about us, I think about how we ought to live. I do not mean how we should order ourselves in the world we now inhabit, but how we should live in accordance with our nature.

Our closest relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos. Should we be like them somehow? Bonobos are matriarchal, open and friendly with each other, do not pair bond and use sex as a social tool. However, when kept in captivity, they can be spiteful to each other and start bullying. I think we are like them somewhat. Perhaps we are more like chimpanzees. They do not pair bond for life, but may have temporary consortships. They form elaborate social structures, often with a linear hierarchy among males, which lower-ranking males destabilise by encouraging power struggles and switching support from one alpha to another, which prevents the alphas from the dominance over females that they seek. Females may mate with many males when in season, or choose one, whatever works for them. The males have to scrap it out to get their attention.

Why do we do what we do? Like all animals, we seek to pass on our genes. You might not think that's what you're doing, but it is behind everything, lurking. We could have tried different methods (and who knows, we may well have done "in the wild"). We could simply have fucked anything that moved, and allowed our sperm to fight it out. We could have formed harems. We could have formed small, stable groups, sharing women and providing supportive networks for them so they could have plenty of children and we could have variety, which would increase our chances of fit descendants.

We chose what is on the whole a poor strategy. We invented ownership of women so that we could have one to ourselves. In this way, we seek to diminish competition between our sperm and others', but we have to rely on our own resources to raise children. Men are tied to children, which I do not think really suits us (although you'll find few men willing to admit it), and to a single woman, which definitely does not. We are not good at it, and women do not like it either. Has it ever occurred to you that the reason a woman who has been with you even for a reasonably short while wants to change you is in part because what she wants is a different father for her children, someone with different characteristics, so that she too can have babies that are genetically varied and have more chance of winning the selection lottery?

Some animals do pair bond, and we think them superior for it, but we are not penguins; more to the point, penguins have reasons for it that do not apply to us.

When I read people talking about "traditional marriage", I wonder why any woman would want to support it. We invented it so that we could formalise our exclusive access to them, so that they would remain our property and no one else's. Part of the tradition has been to stigmatise female sexuality. They are chattels, after all, not sexual beings, and we fear enormously that they might choose someone else, given the choice. This is the basis of the Muslim seclusion of women (which is by no means restricted to Muslims, of course). Women are seen as dangerous, not simply because men, who make the rules, know perfectly well that other men will sneakily fuck them if we can, but also because women do not want other women to be allowed to choose from a wide range of men, because that allows the choosing women a better shot at producing fit offspring. (In this sense, women are like gorillas, who, unless related through their mother, may fight over males.)

Of course Bella did not want to be an ape! Accepting you are an ape doesn't just make you not special, not chosen by your god, it also means you're doing it wrong. I think the likeliest is that like chimps, we belong in fission-fusion societies, members of a broader group who form smaller groups. We feel comfortable in families and we yearn, do we not, for the bigger grouping; yet we find it hard, on the whole, to relate ourselves to large entities. Our lack of community hurts us, and replacing it with nations has tended to alienate us further. Because we are quite bad at raising children in pairs, I think we might be better served in larger groups, where women could more easily share childrearing. I think also that women do tend to have more facility for sharing with each other, an ability to bond in ways  that are satisfying to them that men tend to lack. They are competitive still, bitchy, willing to undermine each other, particularly when men are involved, so it's not all roses, but they can be comforting for each other. And are you not, ladies, miserable when you feel isolated, with only that prick of a man to try, and all too often fail, to understand, let alone meet, your emotional needs?

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:08 pm 0 comments

Some thoughts on a deist god and the universe he creates

The notion that God does not exist because he is not visible in the universe is ridiculous. God is not bound to be immanent. Indeed, many Christians have believed, and still believe, that God is wholly transcendent. Gnostics in particular tended to believe that God could not personally create the world because he is not immanent, and needed a demiurge to do the actual work. Some believed that Satan was the creator of the world (and has dominion over it). This is clearly the belief behind the temptation of Christ, where he is offered dominion over the Earth and rejects it because he will not surrender a greater spiritual award.

Some believe that Jesus is God Immanent, that he mediates between us and God precisely because becoming incarnate allowed God to exist in a way he did not as a transcendent God. Of course, when I went to Sunday school, we were taught that God was everywhere, because a hazy panentheism is quite standard for Anglicans and nonconformists both.

My understanding, although I'm sketchy on Muslim theology, is that Islam believes Allah to be transcendent, not capable of immanence, although he encompasses all things, and has had a longstanding philosophical problem with explaining how the world came into being.

I find the idea of immanence difficult anyway, because I think it leads inexorably to panentheism, because if God is anywhere, he has to be everywhere (Muslims are surely correct that Allah cannot be encompassed, because this would imply he has limits, which he does not). This leads in turn to difficulties in believing that God has any meaning. If he is everything, then he is nothing because he is not separable. He can have a will, and he can direct what he chooses, of course, but he is always and everywhere

I am content though that God can exist if he is transcendent. I'm yet to be convinced by the arguments, no matter how strident, and man, they can be strident, that are set forward against his existence (particularly those of Richard Carrier, who argues from a multiverse without ever seeming to allow that a multiverse is not a physical reality but an interpretation of mathematics, a human invention), although I'd agree that the theist Christian God is impossible and entirely indefensible on various grounds. In this post, I am discussing a deist God.


How do I think it is possible?

An idea some have of the form of the universe is that it is a three-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional reality. In fact, it is a four-dimensional projection because of course it changes over time. However, time as we understand it is an artefact of perception--nothing says that the projection changes at the rate apparent to us, quite the opposite; time is a dimension of spacetime, not something spaces moves through. It should be true to say that the 2D image that is projected is projected into four dimensions, one of which we interpret as a change in the other three. I couldn't say what this means spacetime is "really" like because we can only conceive of it in terms of what we can perceive. We look at it through the tools available to us: directly, our senses; indirectly, mathematics.

In this conception of the universe, it should be apparent that things that are far apart in the projection need not be in the projected reality. However hard it is to imagine what spacetime is "really" like in the projection, it's infinitely harder to imagine what the projected reality is like. Perhaps it is something simply impossible for us to conceive.

But I do think a 2D universe makes a lot of sense if God is to be transcendent. It seems clear to me that to a deity that is outside space and time, the universe must exist as a block--in fact, I don't think a 4D universe makes sense unless it is conceivable as a block. By this I mean all events, past, present and future coexist. Perhaps in the 2D reality, everything is inscribed?

The projection of a 4D reality from two dimensions does not require a projector, of course. We are not suggesting here that anything illuminates it. It is holographic in a sense, not necessarily in the same way a 3D holograph is.

But isn't it conceptually attractive that God should have created a 2D reality that projects into four dimensions? It makes transcendence readily understandable. I think that it becomes clear that in this case, God creates every event at once, as it has always seemed to me that a transcendent God must. (Surely this anyway is the notion that Muslims have, that everything is willed by Allah, and cannot be resisted?) It clearly makes a lot of sense to believe this for a transcendent deity, and it makes close to none to believe in a deity that is at once transcendent and interventionist.

Of course, one must suppose it is senseless to pray to this god. From his point of view, the events you are praying for him to make happen have "already" happened. They are already written in accordance in his will, because from his point of view, there is no difference between what will come and what has been. It is not that he could not alter events if he chose. It is simply that it is meaningless to ask him to. I think that it is hard for Christians to understand that this is an outcome of being transcendent. They want God to be hobbled by time. But whereas we must perceive time as a flow, our universe as a stream of 3D states that move from one to the other, he surely does not. He sees the universe as it really is (whether it is 4D really or 2D really). They believe their god comprehends the universe. He did not create something without knowing what he had made. That belief notwithstanding, it's perfectly reasonable that he might have programmed something whose outcome he did not know: he is not any less a god if he surprises himself, as some believe he does. As an aside, doesn't this god fit quite well with those in the East who believe that God dances the universe into being: couldn't the 2D reality simply be the impression of his being on a canvas, moving in a way we cannot understand or imagine? Perhaps that god is uninterested that there will be beings who will interpret the patterns his feet make in the dust in one way or another, but simply enjoys dancing, whatever "enjoy" means for a being on that scale?

This god, I think, is the deist god. My understanding of deists is that they believe in a god that created the universe and set it in motion, but is not part of it, and does not interfere in it. He is apparent in his creation, but cannot be approached. It should go without saying that the god I am discussing cannot be approached because approaching involves not being near, then being near. From his point of view, the nearness and farness occur together, there is no transition between them.

You could worship this god if you chose to, but it wouldn't make any difference. It seems to me to make sense to be thankful, if you feel thankful (and understanding that in any case, he made your thankfulness just as he did everything else) but not much use singing hymns at him, except that it's enjoyable to gather and sing.

Can this god love you? The problem I have with ascribing anything like our emotions to him is that we are cosmically tiny. We believed, in our infancy, that humans were central to the universe because we are humans, and we did not know how insignificant a thing that is. Once you know that the sun does not revolve around the Earth, there really isn't much way to defend the notion that we are special creations (although you can take comfort, if you like, that we believe all parts of the universe to be equally its centre, and I suppose there is no reason God could not have created special beings and put them anywhere he chose).

Does it make sense to say he has a plan for you? Yes, it does. If we distinguish a god who controlled the process of creation from one who simply danced, then yes, he may have a plan (plan is of course not the right word, because it implies a notion of change, motion from the time of planning to the time planned, that is not appropriate; however, it's readily understandable what we mean by it here). But how could you begin to comprehend it? How can the "plan" of a deity who has created a 2D universe that you perceive in four dimensions be comprehensible to you when you are yourself part of the projection, entirely unable to perceive "reality"? When you tell me what you plan, I understand what you are planning because I might make a plan like yours, or at least, it is the product of a mind like mine. I cannot understand what a being that made a 2D universe wanted. It's hard to believe that he has any notion of process, of motion, of achievement, of anything bound, anything limited.

What I am saying is that here we have been thinking about what and to a lesser extent how. Why is entirely unapproachable? You can no more approach that than you can know what it's like to be a bat.

Does this God exist? Here's the thing. He's entirely outside the universe. It looks the same whether he does it doesn't. (I mean, on one level that's the case; on another, he necessarily exists because there can be no universe without he created because he created it, but that's immaterial--the universe looks the same in case he does and in case he doesn't exist.) If I haven't lost you in a maze of bad philosophy, it should be apparent that it doesn't matter. Believe he exists, nothing changes. You are almost at Chinese odds of being right because we have two identical states from our point of view and you could equally choose either with nothing affected.

You might ask, why would I believe in a pointless god? And I'd answer, simply, why wouldn't you?

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:53 pm 4 comments

Human rights

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

This is my political philosophy. It is the wellspring of every belief I have about society and our place in it.

Liberty, equality, fraternity. I strongly believe we should build our world on those three words: axioms for a decent world that we can be proud we live in.

Each is meaningless without the other two. It is no use to tell us that each has the same freedom and the same restriction: there's a deep truth in the old joke that both lord and tramp are equally barred from sleeping under bridges. It is no use to tell us that we are all equals when we insist that some perform labour that is worth more than others', when there is no connection between the value produced and the work done, and even were it clear, it is not clear that we measure value in the right way. It is no use saying we are brothers, fellow beloved, if we have no care for each other, and cannot tolerate each other's difference. It is no use to say you must be a person exactly like me before I will allow you fraternity: where then is the liberty I promised you?

I do not want free markets that are not fair. I do not want free markets that are not open to all but prefer some over others. I do want exchange that creates value for all, that enriches all, that ensures that I am not warmed while my brother is left out in the cold.

I do not want equality that means slavery. I do not want a government that thinks that it best defends me by becoming a stern father. I do want an association of brothers and sisters. I do want you to be safe, to be nurtured.

I do not want meaningless platitudes, talk of brotherhood with no intention to make it real. I do not care that it is Human Rights Day. I care that we strive, in whatever way we can, to make this truth our reality:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:55 pm 1 comments

The way it is

You know, there is a serious contradiction between creating transactional models of how other people relate to you and each other, which I'm compelled to do because I lack empathy but have a surfeit of sympathy, and believe you me, that's a combination that is guaranteed to bring you a world of pain, and ultimately just not caring what other people think or do. I am simply not able ever to say "that's how it is". I must always ask "why". That's bad enough generally, but it's even worse when you either don't care about what it is or you want it to be some other way. (I'm suddenly reminded of this video:

 

.)

What I mean is, there is so little value in thinking "why is she like this to me?" when you simply want her to be a different way. Learning why helps you not at all. It's not as though you can comprehend the transaction, change some parameter, and make it what you want. Instead, what you get is frustration, bitter frustration, because you understand but the person you understand not only does not understand but denies your understanding is real.

I am not talking about anything in particular, so the people who read this and think "well, but..." can chill out. It's not about you in particular. The thing is, us autistic boys feel this shit a lot, so it's about you but also about some other person, heaps of people, everybody.

Did you ever think about those scientists who learn about, I don't know, nematodes? And not because they are trying to fill in some bigger picture, just because there are nematodes to learn about. They enumerate nematodes; they find out what there is to know about them, what they do, where they live, how they live.

For no reason but to know.

Well, for me, lots of the world is like that. I know it's pointless but that's not the point. I suppose the world divides somewhat into people who think everything has to have a point and people who don't.

You can be each kind of person on different days.

I cannot describe an anatomy of love. I cannot delve into it, I've tried. I cannot know you, understand you, unravel you. I can enumerate you, like a nematode, but knowing what you do, how you live, where you go, even if I understood what compelled or impelled every piece of that, what would I know?

Nothing. We believe, I believe, in the spirit because we cannot understand the world by knowing its motions. I have examined the person I am, the things I've done, the smallest piece and still, I have not found the answer to even the simplest question. Today. Tomorrow I may know more.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:03 am 2 comments

Graduation

Zenella graduated from primary school tonight.

Throughout the ceremony, I could not stop thinking of all the ways I have failed her. I have allowed myself to be one of those people who use words seemingly in the belief that the form of words is as meaningful as the substance. How can I say I have loved her when I have not loved her enough?

It is a central fact in her life that she has a broken home. I do not know in what ways that has affected her; I mean, in what ways that are not visible to me. Sometimes she deals with emotional upset by sitting and cuddling her teddy bear. She was presented by him when she went to grief counselling, after I left Mrs Zen. I do not know what he means to her, what he symbolises, because I do not have any way to elicit the symbols. I can ask, but she will shrug and likely will not say anything at all.

I can say I want everything for her, but I have to remind myself that I have not given everything. I did not maintain my marriage. The price, it seemed to me, was too high, but I cannot help feeling it was not too high for the sake of my children. All I needed to do was surrender to Mrs Zen, to allow her the fiction that she was entitled to take without giving, to allow her to believe that her fairy tale could be real, that there even is a world in which it could be real, that you can be loved without being at all loveable, that you deserve it just because... well, I don't even know, just because you are you? But I am not, all said and done, Mrs Zen's father, and having a fourth child that I must love unconditionally was too much to ask. Relationships are, they must be, transactional.

Mustn't they?

Should I have simply abandoned all my insight into relationships, my understanding of how we are together, for the sake of my children, for my hope of a life that could bring me happiness? But how would it bring me happiness? That was, it seemed to me, the crux of it. I could not know that I would come to believe that I should have been strong enough not only to bear unhappiness, but to be able to hide it. Now I could. The tragedy for me is that now I am again strong enough, but then I was not.

I do not have anything to give Zenella, because I am morally such a poor example. All I can do is love her hopelessly and still hope that will be enough. But it doesn't seem to be. She is so complex and difficult to read that engaging with her emotionally is like setting out onto the ocean without a map, without a compass, without a sextant, so that all you can do is disappear into a wide blue without direction or hope of figuring out where in it you are.

She was such a happy child. She was a funster, a trickster, but sunny, not mean spirited, not seeking advantage. That burned away. A year of neglect from her mother, whose love she wanted more than mine, I think because mine never faded, burned it away; she retreated, became dependent on her own small resources, and consequently shrank the boundaries of her emotional world.

But she thought better of me, didn't she? She thought I could give her what she wanted: a family, a home, the world of love she had had when she was younger. Instead, she had to live like a child orphaned by war, a refugee from an emotional landscape she could not understand, perhaps felt she had no place in. I know she did not blame me when I was all she had, but afterwards, I feel she knows as well as I do that I failed her.

She says she loves me and I do not feel she does.

Some part of it must be that Zenita loves me so much, and even Naughtyman, who has blossomed into someone with much broader emotional needs than he had previously, has discovered that he wants me to love him and love me in return; I do not know.

This is almost forbidden to think, let alone write, but I think it: it seems to me that she first knew that Mrs Zen did not merit her love because she did not try; then came to believe that I did not merit it either because I was not worth trying for.

If you say, Are you happy? she will say, yes. If you say, Is there anything that makes you unhappy? all she will ever tell you is some trivial thing that showed that Zenita didn't love her enough, or Naughtyman slighted her, or L had something she didn't, or M wouldn't let her do something with him she wanted. Never anything beyond the ephemeral, the easily resolved, the meaningless unless she really does find meaning moment to moment. And perhaps she does. Perhaps the way she has chosen to deal with how her life has been is to cut it finer, and deal with it in small portions. I do not know because there is no way to ask her.

I am left with the feeling that there is more I could do, but I don't know what it is. I don't know where even to start thinking about what it is. I am only who and what I am. I have only the resources I have at this point. I cannot, however much I want to, be more in any meaningful way. In so many ways, I accept, or have tried to accept, that I am limited, that even where I feel I can breach those limits, it is not something that I can do overnight, or that it would be wise to try to.

Maybe I have the wrong idea of wisdom, and it is simply a way to make cowardice seem noble. I have no doubt I am a coward.

I want to tell you something fundamentally wrong with me. I say, and I do, I do, I believe in love, I believe it is worthwhile, that it is all that is worthwhile in an absurd world, that it is our salvation if you must, yet I would not sacrifice enough to give it to someone when it was all they wanted. Sometimes I say to myself, well, she does not even care, does not have any remorse for her part in it, does not even have any conception that she did anything wrong -- and it is infuriating because she is so quick to feel bad about doing wrong to others, even if in fact she never rectifies any of it; it is infuriating because were we to weigh our lives with a balance of payments, she owes me far more than she was ever willing to pay me, and can only think she doesn't by heavily discounting how much I paid for her; it is infuriating because I have above all else a sense of justice and justice has not been served: I have reaped so much pain and unhappiness that she could easily have resolved at very little cost -- after all, she needed only to live in the UK, to spend her time with my sisters, who love her, rather than hers, who don't love anyone at all but themselves -- well, I say that to myself, yet I am left, when honest with myself, with the bottom line: you could have lied.

I could have, but what is fundamentally wrong with me is that I am afflicted with pride. It is absurd: I know the world is meaningless, rather that its meaning exists in diminishing amounts in concentric circles, because we live, essentially, within ourselves, then within a world that is as small as the house we live in, our family, the day to day, diminishing rapidly as we move away from ourselves. Yet I am proud, and why, I have nothing to be proud of.  Whatever material I consist in, I have done nothing much with it. I could not even be successful at marriage and I am not successful at fatherhood either. I am not successful at anything.

It is pride, only pride, that drives me to believe that I will one day wake up and become a man. It is absurd, yet it could be tomorrow. Truly, it could. I know it is only pride talking, but I cannot stop believing that it could be tomorrow that I will wake up and be the man that finally Zenella can love because I know that that pride is all I consist in, there is no more to me, however unmerited, yet here's the thing, that man would not be proud.

Have you ever felt a fear like I feel? That to become the thing that your pride tells you you are is to surrender that pride? That you might decide, yes, I can cast off my self and become renewed and shout, love me, without any guarantee that there will be anything loveable about you at all?

You have not. You believe you are loveable. You believe you should be loved just for who you are. You believe you are someone. You have not tried not being anyone at all. I have. I am. It is bewildering. I cannot ask you to join me. I cannot ask Zenella to join me.

And I have tears streaming down my face when I watch Zenella, dead centre in the crowd of her school year, that shy child, that child who would sit on the edge of every group, that has no clique, no gang, and never will, yet she is in the centre, she believes she is someone. And she is someone. She is the person I love the most in this world. Now how can I make that be something?

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:32 pm 2 comments

Gillard 1 Libs 0

Fairfax just won't give up its line that Gillard has had political damage from the AWU scandal (nothing to do with Rinehart buying a holding in Fairfax, oh no) but what I saw was the prime minister kicking Tony Abbott's arse all over parliament.

This article is typical of the nonsense commentators write here. Gillard has been honest and fairly forthright throughout, and where she hasn't answered questions, they've been of the "how long have you been beating your wife?" type.

The opposition has worked very hard to bring Gillard down. It thought it had something it could create enough sleaze and smear around to do her damage (it's juicy: she helped set up an association that was used as a slush fund for a union, and the official that ran it embezzled tons of money from it, and even better, one of the guys involved was at the time her boyfriend) but Gillard has not been, as they hoped, buried under a mountain of bullshit. She has been helped by having the truth on her side, but she's a canny, fierce politician, more than a match for Abbott and his henchwoman, Julie Bishop.

You might ask whether the opposition would have been better off creating the policies that they will put before us next year, but they are all too aware that their policies will not be any more popular than Labor's, and their plan is clearly to run on a platform of "We're not Labor".

Abbott himself horrifies the left (and much of the centre too). He's a womanhating schmuck, who aims at being a typical Aussie bloke, and sadly hits the mark all too well. He's all that's wrong with Australia, and it's a great sadness that this country is so full of hatred and fear that he actually resonates with so many people here.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:47 am 0 comments

Giving thanks

We don't have Thanksgiving and I don't have a god to give thanks to, but I am thankful. Mostly, I am thankful that I have people I love and who love me. That is the foundation of life. They tell you it's money that makes the world go round but money won't give you a cuddle when you're down. (Yeah okay, you could probably pay someone to do that but they cuddles are better when they come with feeling, don't you think?)

I am thankful that in the dark times that I've had, I had people who showed me love. I was lonely but I was not entirely alone. I have been loved by people who must sometimes have felt they had little in return (and some made it clear that that was true, and vanished; I can hardly blame them for that: I'm not exactly conventional in how I show love, I know).

I am thankful that A has never abandoned me. You could not wish for a better friend. When she has had more than enough of her own shit to deal with, she has still had time for mine. When I allow myself dreams, I include in them that I will one day "reward" her by releasing her from the grind, paying for her to spend her days as she would love to, painting and learning. It would not begin to repay her if I could spare her a million bucks.

I am thankful too for other distant friends, who have a regard for me I cannot think is merited, but is a source of strength to me. You could not wish to know better people than L, P and even D, even if they are Americans. Indeed, I am thankful to know that not all of America consists of crazed haters. I am thankful for the people I have not met, yet know well, thankful that we live in an age where it's possible to say that and it's only a little weird.

I am thankful for the hours P has mystified and frustrated me, and I her. She has always tried to give me something, even if I didn't want it. I don't know whether she ever got any part of what she wanted from me.

I am thankful that M nurtured me when I split up from Mrs Zen. He is a good man, who never made me feel discomfort for the imposition. How lucky I have been to know him. I am thankful too for other friends who come and go, some near, some distant, particularly for C, who when I turn up at her door, it is like I was just there the day before, so comfortable is it to know each other.

I am thankful to have known Bella and two As, because they made me feel I had not ceased to be someone a woman could want to know, even if one was a crazy fundie who didn't actually like me much, and the other two I have no idea what they wanted or want, one I think confused me for someone I am not, the other felt she had no right to ask anything, or at least it seems that way.

I am even thankful for the woman who fucked me hard one night and pretended to have a family crisis so that it would just be a one-night stand. Not because I care about my "score" but because I felt so low that what was to come was all the more uplifting. I am thankful too that R spent a night with me despite herself because I am vain enough to want to feel desirable and she made me feel desired.

I am thankful to have known S because she inspired me and sustained me when I was entirely unmoored. I doubt she sees it the way I do and I know that it makes little sense to anyone outside it that I should be so happy to have something fragrant yet untouchable. But I was.

I am thankful that I could know E again. I am even thankful that she cannot change, and will never change, because I would not change her. I have never understood why people can say they love each other, yet feel that the beloved should be someone different. We are wholes, not mere collections of pieces, and you must love the whole if you are to love at all.

I am thankful for my family, my beautiful mum and my dad, who I believe has tried to love me as best he can, and what else can you even want from someone? I am thankful for my sisters, who are the finest women I know, yet still the little girls whose room I would creep into at night and pretend to be my imaginary friend to make them smile. I forgive them for liking the imaginary friend more than they liked me. They are still my companions of the heart, as they were my companions when we played by the loch at Aultbea, when we swam in the pool in Hayle, sharing our tray of chips, when we ran on the beach and across the towans, happy children, wrapped in each other's love.

I am thankful for my children. I am thankful that they are well, that they are smart, funny people who have big hearts and can in turn show love, that being from a broken home has not broken them, that they reward me in a thousand different ways for my love for them, however incompetent it is. I am thankful to Mrs Zen, if for nothing else, for the love she has for them, and too, for having loved me in her fashion.

I am thankful for B. I am thankful when she is vibrant, funny and charming, when she has self-belief, when she is kind, and she is very kind. I am thankful for her crooked smile, for everything she gives me, and it is a lot, for her generosity of spirit, for her intelligence and forbearance. I am thankful that she needs me, that she has use for me, that she loves me. I am thankful above all to be loved, however hard being loved can be, because nothing else is worth as much, is as complex or as simple.

I am thankful that I am well, employed, never hungry, richly entertained, white, straight and male. I am thankful, believe me I am, that when I start to give thanks, I find I have a lot to be thankful for.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:43 pm 4 comments

History lessens

One of the problems of historical fiction is that there is going to be some dude who knows more than you do. There'll be some guy who knows that your pirate has the wrong pistol, the wrong bandanna, the wrong rigging, the wrong haircut; you have to know all this just to pass on the basics.

So when my hero is in the streets of some Caribbean town, it's which island? Say Jamaica. So Port Royal! But no. Port Royal was destroyed in an earthquake in 1692 and didn't become again anywhere important. So maybe Spanish Town? But it was inland, why would he be there? Why would she?

So I know I need to know more about Spanish Town.

And maybe it's Kingston, but this is a transitional period, and I'm not sure it was yet the kind of place he could meet a lieutenant's wife in.

So I need to read a history of Jamaica.

No big deal. I've done a lot of reading. Not the kind of nitpicky research some writers claim to do, which seems to me the sign of someone who has taken "that guy" too much to heart, and has decided to become his rival. Just enough to know enough, and to keep it fun to think about.

I know it seems to take forever but the actual writing will be easy, and since I've been back from the UK, the real work of writing has been going on. Ideas have been coalescing, a better plot slowly forming, the characters becoming clearer to me as I thought some things through.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:21 pm 0 comments

In the box

So I have been reading about the holographic principle and now I'm confused whether I am part of a fourdimensional shadow of a deeper, many-dimensioned universe or a threedimensional reflection of the twodimensional quantum flickerings at the universe's horizon.

The holographic idea (the second of those two if it's not clear) grew out of thinking about information at the horizon of a black hole, and from the Aspect experiment that showed nonlocal effects in subatomic particles (particles moved in ways that would imply communication faster than the speed of light, which is forbidden by Einstein's theory -- it's a small annoyance that the common parlance takes "theoretical limit" to imply there is no limit, whereas a theoretical limit is one that's well established). One notion is that particles that are not apparently connected in our "reality" are in fact more closely bound at the universe's horizon.

Which implies a level of interconnectedness that's axiomatic in eastern philosophy: it's an open question, I believe, why the west pursued reductionism, concentrating on understanding the world's constituents seen as individual entities, while the east pursued holism, concentrating on understanding the world as a whole thing, and things in it having no meaning in themselves but gaining it when consider in relationship with the whole.

And I get to thinking, I've always seen us as distinct, but not different. But couldn't either idea be wrong? I remember someone telling me that her belief was that there was one consciousness and we were just pieces of that -- avatars of that, I suppose you could say. And that seems to me similar to the Hindu idea, that there is a unified soul that we partake in.

For the second, sometimes I look at a person and think, what if we truly are different? It is all beetle in the box. I don't know that a person thinks like I do, feels like I do. You imagine, don't you, that other people do not have feelings you don't have, thoughts that you couldn't think. By which I mean you don't necessarily feel what someone else feels, but you know what something else like it might feel like: you might not lust for the same body as them, but you know lust; you might not want what they want, but the feeling of wanting is the same.

And one day I might say, they are just shades of being human; even those you think are evil have motivations that feel right to them. We learnt, starkly, in the Second World War that ordinary men can deal in horror, but each of them can feel he is doing the right thing. Each, were he asked to define evil, would not include any thing he himself had done. Because these were ordinary men, not psychopaths who could know evil yet still want to do it.

And another, I might think instead that I just cannot fathom why a person has done what they've done, or if I know why, I cannot understand how the reward for it motivates them. Particularly when they are prideful, because I don't imagine they can be proud in the way I am, which is more like a cry for help than a boast.

Then I think, yeahbut I cannot fathom why I've done some of the things I've done. I could explain them, but the explanations would be my best guesses.

***

The idea of interconnectedness has always appealed some because I have felt, for as long as I remember, as though I don't have roots, and can't help wondering whether it's because of never belonging anywhere or because of something in me's not wanting to. But I like people. Probably as much as I like dogs.

Not being able to find that thing that connects you is painful, if you like people. And feeling it dwindle to the point where you can allow disregard to reign again is more painful still.

But sometimes when a person speaks, it becomes so clear that Wittgenstein had it right: the words of our shared language do not refer to anything real; if they were coins that we traded, I would see my head when I looked at them, you would see yours. It becomes so clear that you have no idea whether what they are describing is what you would be describing if you used the same words, that in fact it is as though you spoke entirely different languages and were communicating through a third language, which neither of you spoke all that well. And you know that even for yourself, the same word can describe very different things. I say "laugh" when I mean a belly laugh, an I can't stop but I'm afraid I will literally piss myself laugh, or when I mean a snicker over some small joke, or the dry thing you do when you are laughing "socially" -- your boss told a joke that wasn't funny or a workmate is telling a humorous story about their partner. I say "love" when I talk about how I feel about my mum, my daughter, my partner, but each has a different meaning.

As an aside, Zenita told me she loved me the most of anyone in the world, and I was thinking, did I build that? (I told you you could not match me for pride.) Did I do kindness enough for her to think that (or to think it worth saying, at least)? Did I spend love and now gain it back because I did?

What does it feel like to her? I loved my dad when I was eight. Would it feel like that? (Not that I can remember, but by the same application of empathy we were discussing earlier, I can imagine what would be possible and what would not, because whatever I felt then would not feel that much different now.) Would it be something that I could not even experience? (And of course I do understand that we must in some way be constrained by what our transmitters can transmit, how we are set up chemically and physically -- but we cannot be very different because natural selection would, given time, favour one setup over the other if they diverged enough to allow it.)

I do not imagine small girls do analyse why they feel what they feel. They just feel it. When you inspect their feelings, they are often opaque. (Do you like your teacher? Yes. Why do you like her? Shrug. Is she nice? I guess. What does she do that's nice? Stuff.)

Actually, that wasn't an aside. Turns out it's what I have been thinking about. The imprecision of our terms only matters at all when understanding is truly important.

But sometimes it feels like there are five in the conversation: what you feel, the way you understand it, the third language, what they feel, the way they understand it. And maybe everything is lost in translation.

***

The many-dimensioned thing is not as much fun. I mean, it's deep. Try to imagine what motions can even be like in those other dimensions, if we are reflections of them. You almost feel like you need to drop a tab before you can even start to think about it. But because we exist entirely within the reflections, and have no means to delve into the deeper reality (and one imagines, never will), it is purely metaphysical and has no application to our lives, except that we're curious what it's all built of, and if there's a way it's really like, well, we really want to know that.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:58 pm 0 comments

Blah blah debt blah blah demand blah blah

So it's interesting to read this article in Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2012/10/19/no-the-united-states-will-not-go-into-a-debt-crisis-not-now-not-ever/

which
 is completely correct. There is no debt crisis in the US and never will
 be unless politicians create one out of thin air.

But so depressing to read the comments. I suppose many people like to
think they think seriously about economics and politics, and just can't
accept that the premises they are working under are entirely incorrect.
And that includes economists! Famously Krugman was schooled by Steve
Keen on the money multiplier (its nonexistence can be proved empirically
 but poor Krugman just can't accept it because it's central to orthodox
post-Keynesianism) but he still pounds away at the same
gold-standard-based model.

This stuff is actually quite simple, and awesomely intuitive when you
"get" it. If you stop thinking of money as a commodity (which it is not
outside forex trades), and think of it instead as points that we use to
score transactions of real resources, it becomes swiftly apparent that
there is no crisis because the government cannot run out of points. Once
 you grasp that spending is income, you see that it follows that if the
government runs a surplus, the private sector must run a deficit (quick
explanation: if the government spends $100 into the economy, but taxes
back $110 so that it runs a $10 surplus, that $10 must come from
somewhere: consequently, to pay the taxes, you must destroy financial
assets); so if the private sector wishes to save -- and we believe it is
 virtuous for it to do so -- the government not only should, but must,
run a deficit (otherwise, there is nothing for us to save); furthermore,
 of course it is true that if you run a current account deficit, this is
 equivalent to the private sector saving (money is withdrawn from the
economy), so your deficit must also cover the current account deficit.

Furthermore, intuitively Keynes was correct when he said that demand
creates its own supply (which events have shown is the case), whereas it
 simply isn't true that supply creates demand, as the right claims (in
effect, the notion that if you give the rich ever more money, they will
invest it and create jobs, is equivalent to saying that we should
apportion more of our financial resources to the supply side -- it
doesn't work; you can make as many cars as you wish, but if no one wants
 to buy them, they're going to sit rusting in your showrooms). But the
notion runs deeper than that. Think. If you have money, what do you do
with it? You spend it, right? And if you had more money, you'd spend
that too. Think more though. You're aware, I'm sure, that when people
become richer, they buy "higher value" goods. Some of which, curiously,
are not higher value in any intrinsic sense, but are branded as "luxury"
 or "prestige" goods. Tastes change even. It's not that we are all
striving to buy luxury goods; it's that we start to think we want them
when we have the money that they cost. Even at a low level this happens.
 Don't lie; if you have the money, you buy JD, but when you don't, you
buy the cheap bourbon. So that's a quality difference, but are you sure
you can tell the difference between one shirt and another, one pair of
jeans and another, one car and another?

Which is to say, if you cash people up, other people will formulate ways
 to remove that money from them, one way or another. It's almost
immaterial what the goods being produced are. If there's money, people
will invent things to sell to you for it.

So we're saying that the bold entrepreneur does not create jobs. You can
 have a brilliant idea but if there's no money, you are left with trying
 to cannibalise others in the niche you want to enter (or similar
niches), so each job you create will snuff out another job, as you
entice people to buy your product and not another. What creates jobs is
increased demand: people wanting something. With enough demand,
your product can soak up some of the money swilling around, without
impinging on others' market, and jobs can genuinely be created, rather
than merely being shifted around.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:44 pm 0 comments

Why we have a crisis

A fairly simple explanation why we need to tax capital more and income less: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=277 This is real, not the fantasy talk of economics you get in the papers. We are in the shit because we allowed the wage share of national income to fall. If people do not have money to buy things, the economy cannot grow. What neoliberals pretend isn't true is that you can't sell things if people have no money to buy them. But this intuitively obvious thing is an economic fact: no demand, no growth. The outcome has been that people have taken on huge amounts of debt to compensate for their lack of growth of real income. This has allowed economies to stagger on with low growth for the past 30 years but eventually we get to the point where no one can borrow any more: in effect this is what happened in 2007 -- we had indebted everyone who could become indebted and had begun to indebt people who simply could not service any debt whatsoever. The correct solutions to our woes are not palatable because they are framed in terms of ordinary people suffering a loss on their pensions. But the truth is, we need to correct the imbalance between the profit share and the wage share, or we will simply stagger from crisis to crisis. Also, it should go without saying that what we do not need right now is austerity. Are policymakers blind? Can they just not see the outcome of the policies they propose in Europe? As Europe repeats the dose over and over, and gets the same result, how is it so difficult to see that it's the wrong medicine? What is needed, here in Australia, in the US and even more so in Europe, is not to pretend we have a debt problem, or to focus on diminishing government at a time when its spending is needed just to keep us afloat. It's to run huge deficits so that households can pay down debt and businesses can have the demand that they need. This post shows clearly what actually happens in our economy, and how government spending is needed for saving, and the dire outcome of too little government spending. Now, does that mean governments must be huge? No. Decisions about what the government does or doesn't provide are quite separate from how they are "funded". But whether they are bigger or smaller at any given point is important. Right now, we need governments to spend more until we restructure our economies. But until we put more money into the pockets of workers, we just cannot diminish the size of government without the outcome simply being more unemployment and great suffering for workers. In any case, how much the government spends is not really correlated with how intrusive the government is. You can agree that the government has too broad a scope without feeling that it should control less of the national economy.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:00 pm 0 comments

1987

It was raining as we walked in the park. I don't remember what we said. It seems like as you get older everything just joins the mush, and you're left with impressions, echoes of long ago felt emotions, perhaps reflections of how you did feel, perhaps only simulacra resembling how you wish you had felt. Some like to have photos to remind them how it was; I prefer the mush. So we kissed, the smell of the wet earth and our breath steam in the air. Brighton hasn't changed. I was there a few weeks ago. It's still like a pair of old, comfortable shoes: scruffy but not broken or hard. England hasn't changed. It is still beautiful where it's beautiful, and the worst place on Earth where it's bad. It strikes me that it's real, when we say that somewhere is our fatherland (or our motherland, if you like), that's real. You cannot lose it, can't shake it off. I could no sooner take another nation than I could take another dad. *** Which is a strange thing to think when you think that I am another dad. *** I remember her labia were very pink. All I can remember is seeing them. I mean, I can just about recall her face and wouldn't forget how she did her hair. But I can't recall her doing or saying anything. I think I listened to the Pixies. I remember having the record; I can see myself putting it on a turntable. But I can't recall hearing it; I can't recall a moment of loving it. Not even mush. Things I relinquished. Everything slips away but a pair of pink lips. Most everything. Today on the bus I saw a woman who looked very much like Bella, so much like her that for some time I thought it was her. Could she blank me? That is what I was vain enough to think. I was thinking, what kind of conversation would we have anyway? I have nothing to say past how are ya. How are you? How's the kids? How's your job? How's the car? Do you miss me? But I was thinking, she could. It's a contract we tacitly draw up sometimes. A person blanks you, and you know they're doing, and they know you know. You can decide. You can force it out into the open by doing a huge fake "is that you? It's been so long" smile and oh gimme a hug. Or you can sign the contract: I will pretend I didn't see you either. I couldn't tell you anything about her labia. Memory is strange that way. It was strange though because of course I knew it wasn't her as soon as I took a second look. But I still got to thinking. The way people come and go, take something they want or need and pass on, sometimes flare, sometimes just flicker, then fade away until they are dead to you; some cannot -- you will grab the last straw of memory of them and hold it firm, but most are faces one day, silhouettes the next, until they are just names, then names you think you heard once, but now, who remembers? *** I remember her name too, and the town she came from. I remember more than I remember before I start remembering. I remember a journey we took together, a serious talk we had in the library, a letter, her legs, her shoulders, what she was studying, that she thought she might become a teacher. I remember that we held hands in the park and it was that kind of rain, it's not falling so much as just there, fine and slow and deep, and cold enough for a scarf. Evening. I don't know whether there is besides us another soul in the park; it is dark enough not to know. That is all. What else could there be?

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:23 pm 0 comments

Nice kid

I was a nice kid with the sun in my eyes; I was a nice kid with tousled hair.

I was a nice kid whatever you believe.

I was a good man when I knew the song you loved in three notes; I was a good man with a kind heart.

I was a good man whatever you believe.

I've had love, I know I'm capable
of love and being loved.

If you heard me singing in the car, then you'd say, there's a man who can still love the world. But only if you did not realise, I am only singing the sad ones. And it breaks the stone I call a heart that never is there anyone to sing them with me.

Here's a world that loves a hustler, where goodness is a doormat. Here's a world where you are weighed in money, and I have none.

Tomorrow I have to confess to the sosh that I have no value. For 200 bucks a week, the government gives itself a licence to tell me I'm worth nothing. I wish I could be free but I have nothing anyone wants to buy, and no talent to make anything of.

People say, oh just write a book. But it's hard when you know no one will want it. It's not a world for nice boys with good hearts. It's a world for hustlers, men who see you as rungs on a ladder, women who use you to get where they want to be, then wipe you off their shoe.

***

I have always had a problem that I don't want to play the game. I know what you're supposed to do but I don't want to. I should have been a lawyer or a doctor, but somehow I preferred being a free spirit. In any case my dad would not support me in college if I didn't give up smoking. I lost three stones in defying him. One evening I fainted in the campus chipshop because I finally had five pounds to buy a chilliburger with.

I know I should lie and cheat. I know I should care nothing about people, just use them for whatever I need. I know I should value them purely for what they can give me, and if they ever need something in return, I should drop them like a stone.

I wanted to be different, but the problem with being different is that everyone else is the same.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:48 pm 11 comments

Forward

Incredible article about how abortion was before Roe v. Wade and why it's important never to let a thorough shit like Paul Ryan make decisions about women's bodies:  The Way It Was | Mother Jones

This is why we have to go forward. Yes, there are plenty of scary unpleasant things about the modern world, but we have to try to improve it, not try to drag it back to the horrors of the past.

People like Ryan will tell any lie they can think of to acquire the power to hurt us. We should be vigilant that whatever we can do to prevent that from happening, we do it.

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:16 pm 0 comments

In other news

This comment on this article, which I repeat in full, says it all about why Mitt RMoney should never be elected to any public office, let alone president.

wacobloke

17 August 2012 12:04AM

Since this whole unnecessary kerfuffle began, I have been reminded over and over again of the moment I (as a somewhat ambivalent US person, since I had--to my eternal regret--voted for him in his race for election originally) knew without a scintilla of doubt that Richard Nixon, as President of the US, was toast. I didn't "know" at that moment how it was going to play out, exactly, but I knew in my bones that he would not be finishing his second term.

It was the night that he took to the US TV air with and alongside stacks and stacks of nicely bound books, the sum total of contents of which--according to him--contained the relevant and (necessary)--but admittedly "edited" transcripts of the tapes of conversations occurring in the Oval office.

It wasn't that I hated or despised him, but, I knew in that moment that if our President really believed that the US voting public would accept an edited and self -affirming "version" of something like that (as an end-all and be-all)--something that otherwise would show real-world, accurate, "reality" if simply printed out verbatim, that we had a bigger "problem" on our hands than I had ever imagined up to that moment.

There comes a moment when the persistence of a belief (and continued action upon that belief) that others (err, the US voters) can't handle the truth, is a demonstration of a basic and profound unfitness to hold public elected office in the US.

CEO's of companies can choose to be be private and/or secretive and tell employees and others any edited versions of reality that they might want to tell at any given moment, and, by dint of the power of control over continued employment of the company's "employees", or by dint of "internal" voting power within "equity" ownership of the company (err, person), escape the otherwise human reactions and results. But, in a representative democracy, that just isn't likely to "fly".

President Nixon apparently couldn't stand or abide the idea of the US citizenry knowing and independently judging reality, and I fear we are now seeing the same thing with a presumptive candidate of the US Republican party for the office once held by US Republican President Nixon.

It's not the "tax" "laws" or ant particular "details" in your tax returns that are the problem, Willard, any more than it was the details and "bad language" of the "Nixon Tapes"--it's the overt avoidance of the obvious and the utter contempt shown for the intelligence and determinative capacity of the US citizenry.

If you don't have faith in the US voting citizenry sufficient to trust their reaction to actual reality, then you don't deserve the office of the President.

Give the public the returns and then spin the Hell out of them, if you wish. But, don't presume to tell the US citizenry that your summary of actual reality is sufficient for them.


Our ancestors fought and won a revolution to get away from that kind of regal set of privileges, and that kind of distribution of human (and citizens') rights.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:37 am 0 comments

Soon I'll fade

In the morning, my heart is racing. I don't know why. Was I dreaming something that left me breathless?

It happens often. I have premonitions that I will not live long. I keep thinking, this time next year, I will be gone. I cannot shake them. I feel like my wasted life will soon just be a footnote.

Should I write my children a letter? I don't have anything to say. I feel unmotivated. What will it matter? They can think what they think. Soon I'll fade.

I don't even think I've been a bad person, but no one gives a fuck about me. I got shafted hard by the person I should have been able to trust. But that's the world, isn't it? Six billion selfish arseholes who pretend they are doing anything but satisfying themselves.

None of us matter much. We are here for a brief moment, a glimmer, then we are done. Soon we'll fade, and just our names will be known, until, later, those too are forgotten.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:26 pm 7 comments

All day

All day long I read about people who are good at things. They just find what they are good at and pursue it and life just opens up its arms and allows them.

I am not good at anything. Just okay at some things. But none of those things is anything anyone wants.

All day long I read about people who are rewarded by life. It just showers its fruits on them. I read Jim Carrey saying "people think fame and money will resolve everything but they don't", and I think, try me. It's easy to say that success doesn't resolve anything when you're successful. I'd rather be failing to resolve anything with a million in the bank than be stuck on welfare, being punished for someone else's theory of how the economy works, humiliated, broke and broken.

I know my life has some rewards but in many ways it is so poor. I don't just mean I lack money. I am always lonely, and the lonelier I get the more I shun people. I start believing it's all me, no one wants to know me and why should they? I am not worth anything.

Some days I just want to close the world out, to close my eyes and pretend I am back home, that all I have to do is open my eyes and walk out of the door and this will not be real.

But I am in hell. I am responsible. I sent myself here. I believed love and a desire to do the right thing were enough. But I was wrong. I wasn't worth loving and no one else in my life has any interest in doing the right thing.

It is hard to live when no one in it, bar perhaps your children, cares whether you are happy, or if they do, they only care about how your feelings affect them.

Some Christians say that God does not send you to hell; you send yourself. I believe that too. I don't believe it is the absence of God; it is the absence of hope. I try to remind myself of the Myth of Sisyphus, that you can accept a horrible fate and defy it with a smile.

Then I think, yeah, that's okay for Camus to say from his study in Bordeaux. Try living it.

Some days I think why am I bothering? Why am I pushing a stone up a hill when I know I will be crushed? Why bother with a life that thinks you have no value? Yet again, the only answer I have is that the right thing for my children is to try to live and live cheerfully. Yet again I cannot make a choice for myself. That, right there, that is hell.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:12 am 3 comments

Whispering

I am sitting with Zenita and she says, where do we go when we die?
And I say, we don't go anywhere, we just die, this is all there is.
What about my soul? she says.
You don't have a soul, I say.

You only have this one life. You have to try to make the best of it because it is all we have. Some people think you have another life waiting for you, but you don't. You get this. You have to try to be happy and enjoy it as best you can.
I am happy, she says.
Good, I say, all you have to do is enjoy your life and work hard at school, because that will help you build a good life.
I will, she says.

And I am thinking, sometimes I wish I had more to offer, but I've never lied to them and I am not planning on starting.

Because the world is only cruel if you do not know how beautiful it is.

posted by Dr Zen @ 5:40 pm 13 comments

You, you're not a lesbian, so shut up shut up shut up

Feminist blogs are mostly a horrid waste of time and space, because really, middle-class white girlies with lib arts jobs are not really all that oppressed, even if the Patriarchy does still run the place, but occasionally you do read something good. Check this comment out for a spectacular piece of self-hate.

The post it's attached to is worthless, obviously, and if you need that explaining, you're as big a fucking idiot as the guy who wrote it, but the guy's "rules for commenting" are hilarious. Feminism is not about making a grovelling apology for being a man.

I mean, really, is "toe the line or you don't get a say" really how we achieve "social justice"? Is that the peak of evolution (seriously, read that comment and try not to wee yourself at his self-description as a "highly-evolved gay man"; you can almost feel the chinbeard)?

Fuck the lot of them though. They aren't the women who won the sex wars and they aren't the women who are still fighting for women. They are a miserable clique of no-marks looking for way to hate and exclude others. The world's full of those but each of those cliques is kidding itself if it thinks it's actually making this a better place.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:44 pm 0 comments

Cultists of a god of hate

A couple of years ago, I went out with a cultist for a few months. She was a nice enough woman, pretty after a fashion, good to talk to, but she had a problem that she couldn't overcome: she was a cultist.

I'm a tolerant person. It's part of the English psyche, socialised
into us, I think, because we live in a crowded small country. One way
we rub along is to let people believe what they want and just not
bother them too much about it. England is full of (mostly harmless)
eccentrics and we like it that way. It was more of a problem that she
was not at all tolerant of my beliefs, which run no deeper than a sort
of good-natured scepticism and an understanding that science provides
a decent, although not by any means complete, explanation of what there is.

I mean, on the whole her beliefs, although they were a bit weird,
didn't really affect the day to day. The only place they had any real
effect was inside her head, which was a quite disturbed place. She
would insist her beliefs brought her peace, but they didn't seem to.
They seemed the source of a lot of the turmoil that existed in her
life.

What did affect us were her fellow cultists. I never met any of them
but I was aware of them, because they disapproved of me. I felt this
was a little judgemental, because actually I'm a nice guy and was
decent to her. But they didn't like that I wasn't a cultist. That
alone trumped everything about me. That it didn't really have any
effect on her or our relationship, that I didn't try to bar her from
professing her beliefs, that I respected them even, although they are
by no means respectable in themselves, didn't sway them.

I'd go as far as saying they hated me. I shouldn't have been
surprised. They were cultists of a god of hate.

They didn't even need to meet me to hate me. It caused her pain
because they started to hate her too: they began to shun her, to talk
shit about her, to inform her that the god of hate would do foul
things to her if she didn't restrict herself to fellow cultists. Well,
I suppose that if you join a cult that revolves around hatred, one
thing it will be very good at breeding is hatred.

Don't ask me why anyone would want to join a cult that directs you to
hate your fellows. Certainly I wouldn't. I am not attracted by "moral"
teachings that consist of instructing you to hate the world and
everything in it, to despise your own flesh and the inclinations and
drives that make you what you are. I could never agree that we are bad
*just because* we are human. I am a humanist, after all. I believe
being a human is a good thing. Why wouldn't I? I am one. Like most
people, I'm somewhat tribal. I tend to believe that the things I am
are good.

Indeed, most of what she believed is entirely contary to my own
beliefs. She believed it was good to lie, so long as you lied about
the world and how we are to each other, and about what is possible for
humans to achieve. She lied about what is important, focusing on
things that are, in the big scheme of things, not really important.
For instance, relationships are important; but really, marriages
aren't. What I am saying is that it's important to have people to
love, to show love to, and to be loved by, and in as far as marriage
is a way of labelling and symbolising those relationships, it's
valuable. But it's the relationship that counts, not how you label it.
People often make that mistake, even to the extent that they think
it's actually important to be able to call something a marriage that
is not in fact a marriage. Can you believe it? They actually believe
it is morally more valuable to have something called a marriage that
is in reality dogshit than it is to have a respectful and loving
relationship. I have had both; and I know which one I preferred.
(Which is not to say that you cannot have both rolled into one, nor
even to say that I didn't have both at the same time.)

She believed sex was "wrong". How can it be wrong? It's just a natural
consequence of human beings' being human beings. It's just something
we do. It doesn't really even symbolise anything. It's just fucking.
We don't consider it important when dogs do it, but somehow, in our
desire to elevate ourselves above the brute animals we share the world
with, we insist we are doing something different. Not that she didn't
enjoy it. She really did. But she believed that was wrong too. Her god
of hate, she believed, would punish her for enjoying it.

Her cults, it seemed, may also have been concerned that she might be
having uninhibited sex. There's nothing they hated more. Above all
else, the cultists hate having bodies, because bodies want to be with
other bodies. They just do. You can't do much about a human body
wanting to be with other bodies because nature's like that. But
despising nature is their ritual.

Wait, I would say, why would he endow you with this wonderful thing,
which you really enjoy, which let's face it feels good (#humblebrag),
and hate you for doing it? Well, that was kind of the point. The more
he hated her humanity, the more she loved him for it. To me, that is
the definition of an abusive relationship. Why abide with someone who
hates what you are?

The prophet of this god is thought to have been celibate. In my view,
people who don't do a thing are usually poor judges of its value. Why
people listen to the pope's view on sexuality is a mystery to me,
since he has spent so much of his energy in suppressing his. He's the
last person I'd ask for advice on sex. He doesn't even like it. It's a
bit like asking a vegetarian how you should cook a steak.

That prophet's view was that we should hate this world. He said so
often. Hate the things of this world so that you can gain entry into
another, better world. Of course, there is not a better world. The
thing is, humanists understand that we can *make* a better world, and
we can make it here and now. We cannot rely on some other entity to
create it for us. Many of us consider it a fallacy even to believe
that governments, who are supposed to be collectives representing a
will, can improve the world. Strangely, many of those who think that
fallacious are also cultists of the god of hate.

It's actually hard for the rest of us to work on making this world
better when we are surrounded by cultists who hate this world and
themselves so much that they don't want it to be any better. It would
even be a diminishment of their god for us to improve this world. He
relies on the gap between what we have here and what he offers being
huge. The more suffering there is in this world, the more he likes it:
it just makes his world seem more attractive. The problem is, this
world is all we have. If you do not believe that the 80 or so years
you are spending in this world is all you are going to get, you are
just lying to yourself. You are just the emanations of a brain in a
human body. How could you be anything else?

There's worse. Can you believe it, her god hates us so much that he
believed we should sacrifice in blood to him to make up for our
deficient natures! He tells you it's in your nature to be shit.
Imagine if your parents had brought you up like that.

Worse, he endorsed racism and was willing to indulge it by killing
thousands of people and encouraging his followers to do the same. I
don't know about you, but I don't find those who urge genocide
praiseworthy. I might fear them, respect their power, but I don't sing
songs about how great they are.

I sometimes feel like I too would like to join a cult. It's a great
comfort to believe, to have fellows who want what you want, understand
what you understand. But if I am to join one, it's going to have to be
the cult of a god of love. I don't have sufficient hate in me for it
to be the motivating force in my life. Sadly, for her, it was, so we
split up. I wonder whether she is happy, worshipping her god who hates
her.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:26 pm 7 comments

Sometimes wonderful

The paint is peeling from the wood of the Guides' hut. Inside, my girls are listening to a fat woman with a shrill voice telling them about something I'm not sure what, I'm not listening. We are standing out in the cold, dutiful parents in the best place we can be: serving our children.

The hut is ageing but it will likely outlive me. I was thinking, no one will sing over me. Am I sad that there is no magic in my life, or that there is no magic in this world? It has always seemed prosaic to me; sometimes wonderful, true, but nothing beyond what there is and how that makes us feel.

But I wish love really was eternal so that I could love my golden girls forever, so that there was a little piece of remembrance of my love for them throughout time.

I was reading today that a physicist, a true hierophant of naturalism, theorises that there is no dark matter, and the unexplained pull that we know is there but cannot find its source is the echo of a deeper universe, that all we perceive is the froth on an ocean that we cannot see, touch or feel.

I like the idea. It suggests that the universe is not random, but that what we perceive of it seems random because we cannot discern the underlying pattern.

And sometimes I like to think I want to know the answers, but other times I feel it is just as satisfying to have to make your own. Sometimes I have wanted magic, and I have felt envious of those who are able to have faith that it is there. I find their god unsatisfying but that does not mean there could not be one that offered a better fit.

***

The other day, I was thinking, maybe the rightists are not wrong. Maybe it really is just a dog-eat-dog world, devil take the hindmost, and I have just been hindmost. I worry that that is why I am on the left: not that I believe in community, but that I believe in the underdog because I am one.

But, you know, they are ugly and the world they paint is ugly too. Whyever I believe what I believe, it leads me to believe in a world that can be beautiful, in the goodness of my fellows, however little they show it, in a numinous "better".

I will take aesthetics if I can find it. Without it, we have to just be angry apes in a hostile world, and really, do you want that?

***

We move through the night, the cold fogging the windows. I am thinking about the people I have loved and how clueless I am about why they just slipped away. I am just not good at it, and in thinking that, I wish I knew whether I mean, at being loved or at anything at all. It is so hard not to just be hollow, to let the currents of your life echo inside you.

I grab Zenita and hug her. I love you, she says. My every cell sings. It doesn't matter what this really is. It doesn't matter how you explain it. It exists. That is all we need.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:32 pm 1 comments

On living and dying

Brilliant article about "dwindling". I hope never to be in the

position of Wolff's mother, nor in that of Wolff, but I've seen in my

own mother how easy it is to lie to yourself about an ageing parent,

and how hard it is to accept that they are done. Seeing my granddad

beg for death has made me a staunch believer that medicine has its

priorities entirely wrong. Let's not try to keep each other alive as

though we were chunks of meat. Let's show a genuine love for who we

essentially are.



http://nymag.com/news/features/parent-health-care-2012-5/

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:07 pm 1 comments

A quick note on school subsidy

The government here subsidises private schooling quite heavily, and a

recent report urged them to stop. It won't because it's a political

hot potato, which would see it excoriated in the press.



Supporters of the subsidy say that it is fair because people who do

not send their kids to public school deserve the same spending on

education as people who do.



I have no sympathy for that view at all. What governments should be in

the business of is opportunity. They are not money pumps that simply

hand everyone $x for education. They are facilitators of opportunity

for children. So they should not be subsidising children who already

have an advantage over those whose parents could not, subsidy or

otherwise, send them to private school. They should be spending their

education money on improving public schools to equalise opportunity.



These are different ideas of equity. On one side, people who feel that

it's unfair if someone gets "something for nothing" because they have

"worked hard" for everything they have and why can't everyone else?

and on the other, people who feel that society already has plenty of

unfairness and governments can do something to rectify it. You can't

really close the divide because one of the major political parties

relies on the politics of resentment to get themselves elected.

Without it, the Liberals here would simply never acquire power,

because frankly, their policies have always been inimical to the

wellbeing of most citizens. I don't think there are enough people who

hate gays and foreigners enough to win elections based simply on

bigotry, but there are plenty of rugged individualists who don't

understand how society has made their wellbeing possible.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:48 am 0 comments

Facts just get in the way

Mitt Romney promises to end the insane spending of the Obama administration.



In fantasy unicornland, that may well be true. Here in reality:



http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-spending-binge-never-happened-2012-05-22?link=MW_popular



Why don't conservatives like Obama? He's one of the best conservative

presidents we've seen.

posted by Dr Zen @ 11:38 am 0 comments

Indebted

People say the national debt is a problem, that we can't afford

welfare because we've "borrowed" too much. The last time the national

debt was this high in the UK, they built a national health service and

expanded welfare to the current system. The outcome? A boom that only

ended when the Arabs pulled the plug in 1973.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:28 am 0 comments

A capitalist tells the truth

Nick Hanauer, an investor in Amazon among other businesses, tells the

truth. (Copy shamelessly stolen but I think he wants this idea to

spread, so I don't expect to find myself in intellectual property

court):



"It is astounding how significantly one idea can shape a society and

its policies. Consider this one.



If taxes on the rich go up, job creation will go down.



This idea is an article of faith for republicans and seldom challenged

by democrats and has shaped much of today's economic landscape.



But sometimes the ideas that we know to be true are dead wrong. For

thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of

the universe. It's not, and an astronomer who still believed that it

was, would do some lousy astronomy.



In the same way, a policy maker who believed that the rich and

businesses are "job creators" and therefore should not be taxed, would

make equally bad policy.



I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially

hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we

had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs

would have evaporated.



That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create

jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more

employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers

and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous

cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary

middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist

like me.



So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little

like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the

other way around.



Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a

capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when

increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling

ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.



That's why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a

tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates

benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens

is that the rich get richer.



Since 1980 the share of income for the richest Americans has more than

tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.



If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy

would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in

jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.



Another reason this idea is so wrong-headed is that there can never be

enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual

earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times

greater than those of the median American, but we don't buy hundreds

or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not

3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like

most American men. Like everyone else, we go out to eat with friends

and family only occasionally.



I can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions

of unemployed and underemployed Americans can't buy any new clothes or

cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing

consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely

squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or

declining wages.

Here's an incredible fact. If the typical American family still got

today the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would earn

about 25% more and have an astounding $13,000 more a year. Where would

the economy be if that were the case?



Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being

perceived as "job creators" at the center of the economic universe,

and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the

current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it

is a small step from "job creator" to "The Creator". We did not

accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that

calling oneself a "job creator" is both an assertion about how

economics works and the a claim on status and privileges.



The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital

gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35%

top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that

is hard to justify without just a touch of deification.



We've had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like

me don't create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic

feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they

thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That's why taxing

the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for

both the middle class and the rich.



So here's an idea worth spreading.



In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the

middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the

middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle

class, the poor and the rich.



Thank You.

Nick Hanauer"

posted by Dr Zen @ 2:29 pm 0 comments

Reversal of fortune

Being my passenger when I'm driving can be a bad experience. I suffer

terribly from road rage, an outcome of being in a constant state of

nervous tension, caused by the awful drivers of South-East Queensland.

Each day they try to kill me, or failing that to damage my car as

severely as they can.



Three have succeeded. One was a man who turned right in front of me so

that I couldn't avoid hitting him, writing off my beloved Lady Jane.

He was lucky I'm a cautious, defensive driver, and had slowed down

expecting insanity, because his passenger door was severely dented,

and hurt his side. Had I been doing 60 kph, the limit, he'd likely be

dead or badly injured.



Number two was a guy on his way back from holiday, who was chatting

with his wife, the way people do, turning to talk to her instead of

watching the road. He didn't see that I had stopped and rearended me,

writing off Queen Kate. I spent a lot of money getting her back on the

road, which was not quite covered by the insurance. It just didn't

seem right to have her sent to the wrecker when the damage was only to

the boot and back bar.



Number three was a woman who reversed into me outside my house. I had

reversed into the empty road, as I do every morning, and was just

coming to a stop, ready to take off down Canopus Street when bang,

from out of nowhere, a car ran into my passenger door. Luckily, she

didn't hit me very hard, so Naughtyman, who was sat next to the door,

was not hurt. She jumped out full of apologies. She had not been

looking; she was in a hurry because she was dropping off some kids or

something, and had driven into the wrong driveway. I shrugged and said

shit happens, just call your insurance and no harm is done.



So imagine my shock when her insurance finally contacted me and the

guy says, I'm calling about an accident where you were at fault.



WTF, I said, no I wasn't. Your insured reversed straight into me

without looking. She accepted liability (because what else could she

do? It was her fault after all). She was close to tears because she

was so afraid she had hurt someone. I actually felt sorry for her

because she had so clearly done the wrong thing and it had had a bad

consequence.



But you were reversing, he said.



So what? I said. I was reversing down the road, side on to her. I

didn't reverse into her. She backed into the SIDE of my car.



Yes, but you were reversing. When people are reversing, it's 50/50.



No it's not, I said. I reversed into an empty road, carefully. She

reversed without looking, straight into my car. It doesn't matter what

direction I was going in, she still caused the accident through no

fault of mine. I was barely even moving and what motion I had was away

from her, not towards her. I mean, duh, my car door was done in, and

she has a small scratch on one side of her back bumper.



B thinks there is a law that the fault is shared when everyone's

reversing, but of course there isn't. That would be stupid. (For

instance, say you drive into someone who is rolling back on a hill

start. You are always liable then even though they rolled back a bit.

Or say you were driving at 80 kph down the wrong side of the road and

hit someone who was reversing to parallel park. You'd clearly be

liable then too.) There's a convention that applies when you reverse

into someone who reverses into you in a car park, and it's difficult

for the insurance companies to sort out. What there is is a law that

you must give way to all traffic when you enter a road. I did that.

The woman didn't.



So I am adding AAMI insurance to my list of bad businesses to deal

with. What I imagine happened is the woman said that she hit someone

backing out of his drive, and she needed to fix up what she had done.

They heard "backing out" and told her they would do it knock for

knock. But I didn't back into her. There's no joint fault. I backed

into an open road. She just drove straight into me. There's no law

that says you get off the hook because I happened to be going

backwards. It's deeply frustrating that they know that I did nothing

to cause the accident and could not avoid it regardless what I did,

yet they expect my insurance (and actually, just me, because my

insurance won't cover it) to pay. I don't intend to go through my

insurance. If she doesn't make it right, I will sue her, and win. I'm

pretty sure the small claims court will not reward her for breaking

the law, whatever AAMI thinks, and I'm sure there's no law that says

that there's no liability in traffic incidents if the person you smash

into happens to be going backwards.



***



The thing is, it's just wrong and we are expected to put up with so

much that is just wrong in this life. I mean, I will be really pissed

off if I end up having to pay for the damage to my car. This woman

didn't care about other people enough even to bother to look into her

mirror before driving out into the road. She *should* pay for that. I

shouldn't be on the hook for her stupidity. And her insurance company

shouldn't abet her. Fair enough, they can tell her they won't cover

it, but ringing me and suggesting I am at fault because I happened to

be in the road when she careered out into it is just wrong.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:55 pm 5 comments