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zandkorrel

but it's easy for you, she says with a crooked smile as if she's thought about it and has decided she doesn't really believe it, because your ego is the size of a grain of sand!

yes well your ego is the size of a grain of sand too but you spend your days desperately trying to inflate it which leads to an entirely different perspective on your relation to the world and almost everything in it, most especially of course, other people. if they inflate your ego by telling you how wonderful and interesting you are, you like them but if they don't pay you much attention because they're busy with their own shit or reading a book, you think they hate you and they think you're a person who is not worth talking to and that eventually everyone will come to that conclusion because you're insubstantial and your ego, which you think of as your self, is only as big as a grain of sand.

and if a bird flying overhead poops on you when you are out riding your borrowed bicycle, you curse it and interpret it as evidence that you are misunderstood and under appreciated by the world and everyone in it, and that every single one of the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions is against you.

even that damned bird is out to get me!

25-10-20

it took quite a while to get to sleep last night because i was wondering if i had a functional brain what i would think about the ethical dilemma you spoke to about. at some point during the day or evening my brain becomes so tired that any serious thinking is quite impossible. but now i am relatively fresh and i banged out a thousand words and it's a bit rambly and incoherent. sorry it is not a more concise and straightforward answer!

parrhesia

towards the end of his life a famous bald french philosopher called for parrhesia, that is, the imperative to speak up when you see something that is clearly wrong or unjust, to speak out against injustice whenever you encounter it and ethically this is a position which can hardly be faulted, if the truth is that which cannot be denied — but there is a danger inherent in this practice which he recognised, and it might be problematic. in other words speaking the truth and/or calling out injustice can be risky. he says that we have to be prepared to take that risk but i am not completely convinced that this is a position which is as good as untenable for people who are not white middle class men of a certain age.

the irony is that this same bald french philosopher was one of those responsible for the movement or school of philosophy which called into question the existence or possibility of absolute truth. he would have been appalled that several decades later this idea became popular amongst reactionary conspiracy theorists who used concepts like 'posttruth' and 'alternative facts' as euphemisms for straight out lying and denying the undeniable.

the world anno 2020 is so different to the one in which the bald french philosopher lived that it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the call for parrhesia is not even more urgent, but also more risky, than ever. and so i feel your pain. and the gnawing.

... let's call it 'speaking your mind' instead of 'speaking the truth' because there are lots of people out there who claim that something is 'their truth' and that makes it seem much more important and valid than speaking your mind, and they feel entitled to act upon it.

i cannot say what i would do if i was you because i don't know what it is to be you :) but i offer the following observations :

first : clearly your boss erhan is an arsehole of the first order. he is a narcissist and he is ruthless. he is looking after number one and that is his priority and he could justify it by saying if there is no longer a restaurant then the syrian man wouldn't have any income at all, and neither would you.

this the same argument that is mounted by almost everyone who has a business in the corrupt world of late capitalism. the people with the least power (read : money) are the most abused and they have no choice but to allow themselves to be abused.

it is a form of slavery, in effect. most forms of agriculture rely on this kind of slavery ('illegal immigrants' harvest the crops in greece, italy and spain and in the netherlands workers are imported from east european countries and live in appalling conditions for abominable wages) and on the exploitation of the earth's natural resources on an unimaginable scale.

but you knew that as well.

secondly, here is an instance of tension between allowing something to be what it is and intervening in a situation. whenever you feel moved to intervene in a situation i recommend considering the role of the ego and the superego.

i am not finished thinking about the role of the super/ego in this context but righting something that is clearly wrong is very attractive to the super/ego because if you succeed you would feel more than a little pleased with yourself. (there is a seinfeld episode on this topic!)

in terms of trusting the world and allowing things to be what they are, injustice and cruelty are part of the very fabric of the way the world is organised. it is endemic.

so what to do? this is why the work has two aspects : the work on and with the self and the work one does in the world with others to help them be in the world in a different way.

but yes so what to do in this specific situation?

one way of parrhesia here would be to speak to the syrian man and acknowledge that he is being treated unjustly, to tell him that you can see the injustice and that it must be very difficult for him and to give him the space to speak if he wants to. the effect on him will be that he feels less alone in his suffering. this is what we might call a pastoral work approach. in the hospital working with people dying of cancer this was all i could do for them. and for some of them it made a difference.

as for a more direct intervention, what you would need to consider here is the amount of risk you are prepared to take. your boss is not likely to look kindly upon anything which he would interpret as an attempt to interfere with the way he runs his business and this might have consequences, at best a further deterioration in your relationship with him and at worst losing your job altogether.

but you already knew that.

you could say to your boss that losing 20% of his income is a complete disaster for the syrian man and his family and then you've told him the truth and you've answer the call for parrhesia but i think if pushed to say what i would do if it was me (given the problem of hypotheticals in general) i would look for a way to assuage my guilt which does not involve a confrontation with the boss and choose the pastoral worker approach. maybe i would discretely slip the syrian man some of my own cash now and again when i have some spare but did you say you already tried that and he refused?

22-9-20

you said something which is actually very important and i didn't respond to it, when we were txting.

it was this :

Well, part of me is sad because that means I have to fully realize that the words I got from him weren’t the words I needed and that I am never going to get them from him...

dus bij deze :

yes the realisation that you did not get and can not get what you needed and feel you still need from the people that ought to have given it to you and that you still think could and/or should possibly give you, is big.

but it is a psychic need and if you understand how your psyche works that need falls away or at least you experience it differently and it has little effect.

because this need is caused by pain from the past that you haven't let go of, but you can and you will let go of it in time because you are doing the work.

and doing the work enables you to spread your wings and allow the world to unfold the way it is going to unfold and allow the world to give you what it has to give you.

beware though that you are not hanging on to the pain because it gives meaning. that you think the pain is your connection with the truth because it really isn't, or rather it is only one aspect of it.

our biggest and most authentic connection as humans, and you know that already, you have experienced this, is actually with the earth and the sky and the clouds and the trees and with the other animals — not with the particular humans that happened to have brought us into the world.

mind you this error of the human perspective is thousands of years old and it is kind of baked into our dna so it cannot help but influence how it makes us feel.

10-6-20

there aren't that many people who KNOW that they are broken (and that the world is broken). there are even fewer who understand HOW and in what way they are broken (and that the world is broken) and what that brokenness means. and there are very, very few who can FEEL their brokenness.

and then there are the ones who can BEAR the feeling of being broken, who experience their brokenness on a daily basis and who are not consumed by finding a way to transcend that brokenness, to do something about it.

once you see and feel and experience the brokenness of the world, which really means the brokenness of the human beings and its effect on the world, and the brokenness of the self, it makes you into an outsider.

when you remind people of the brokenness of the world, either by saying something about it and asking to talk about it — or not — you are rejected by people. most people don't want to see the brokenness of the world, or they have seen it but they try to avoid having to look at it and/or being reminded of it. kierkegaard knew this and so did nietzsche.

and this means you suffer because being rejected by people who don't want to see what you and i might (and should) call the truth, hurts. it is difficult. it is alienating. it might cause you to doubt the truth of what you have seen, felt and experienced.

you feel dejected. it is so obvious, zo vanzelfsprekend*.

*the dutch word 'vanzelfsprekend' is used in a similar way as 'self-evident' or 'obvious' but it is subtly different. it literally translates as 'it speaks for itself'. so in this sense it is not about evidence, it is not an objectivist or logical statement. it is about speaking (and listening) and about something speaking and it is speaking to you.

the way i think about it is in a way similar to kierkegaard. he writes about this in sickness unto death (in a much too complex way imho).

there is the zone of ignorance. you might call it the zero zone. here you are blissfully unaware that anything is wrong. you are like a cow in a field, ruefully regurgitating the contents of your seven stomachs and masticating.

zone one = you know or suspect something is wrong but you don't know what it is exactly or you are still working it out or thinking about how it works or perhaps it is simply doubt (twijfel) and mostly you can ignore it or you can do things to distract yourself so you don't think about it or you do so unconsciously.

and this is : zone two

welcome to the second stage! (i don't much like the idea of progress or a path — probably because it is such a cliché but it is the case that zone one is a prerequisite for entering zone two). now one of the eleven dimensions has opened up to you ha ah ha this sounds like such a bunch of new age bullshit but bear with me let's try again : a perspective has become available to you and it is dazzling, not so much or perhaps it its beauty though it is sublime but it is above all, a tragedy of immense proportions. now you can see all of humanity, not just the 7 billion that are here now but the 100 billion that came before, and what the human species has done to the world and everything in on and of the world and to each other. the cruelty the ignorance the violence the suffering.

it is overwhelming. hold on to you horses. it is so big ...

but the thing is you are not alone. i am here. for a limited time only! so make the most of it. but know that i am here for you to make use of.

#poodle

there are about another ten thousand questions i wanted to ask you last night and there are about another ten thousand things i need to tell you.

according to the dream about the obituary i have about another 24 years left in my tank.

so 10,000/24=416.66666666667 a year. that's more than one thing a day, let's say around ten per week to make it easy. so if you and i work together once a week i can tell you all the things i need to tell you and ask you all the questions i need to ask you and you will have told me the ten thousand things that you also need to tell me. don't you? because i am your witness, i have the power to forgive you, to absolve you and set you free.

are you ready?

one of the things i have to tell you is that everything has a dark side, like the dark side of the moon. unless you send out a spacecraft with a camera you never get to see it and even then ...

the point is that you cannot see the dark side of yourself with your own eyes but someone can be your spacecraft and tell you what they see and take a picture of it, and then when you see the picture you recognise something and once you recognise it you can be vigilant and look for it and what it comes you go aha! a ha ha ha. i recognise you! and i don't have to be afraid of you.

and the other thing i have to tell you about is the kismet. you know about the kismet?

A grammar of being in the world

for f.

Is it useful to speak in terms of a grammar of thinking, feeling and believing? And since these all determine behaviour, a grammar of being, a grammar of how we are in the world?

Wikipedia says about grammar :

Native speakers of a language have a set of internalized rules for using that form of speech. This rule set constitutes the grammar. The vast majority of the information in the grammar is – at least in the case of one's native language – acquired not by conscious study or instruction but by hearing other speakers. Much of this work is done during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves a greater degree of explicit instruction. Thus, grammar is the cognitive information underlying language use.

In the same way, as children we acquire a set of internalised rules about what are and are not appropriate feelings, thoughts and beliefs — and how they are ordered.

Again, we learn this at a very early age, before we are conscious of the fact that we are learning it, mostly by seeing and hearing how others express or don't express and order their feelings and what and how they think and believe, and how this becomes the way that they are being in the world. It is as if we absorb the order which we perceive in the world in which we find ourselves, we internalise it and this internal order seems 'natural' to us. We don't really question it. It is as if it is part of our cognitive system.

So the work is like learning a different language, but it is also like learning a new grammar, and unlearning the old grammar. But it is more than this and this is why it is useful to think about the work as a form of deconstruction, in the sense that Jackie used the term. Because we have to closely examine and read the very fabric, the material out of which our cognitive systems, our belief systems, the way we deal with our feelings, are constructed. It is not only what we think and feel and believe but the way we order our thoughts, feelings and beliefs and we read not only for what is present, but for what is absent. We look for irregularities, we feel for bumps, for little holes, and tears in the fabric. Where it is necessary and appropriate we repair, but in other places we unravel and disentangle, and at times we rip it to shreds and we rage and scream and cry as the full magnitude of the realisation that all that exists at the very fundaments of our being has been put there, not by a malicious or malevolent other but by a process of osmosis. And we are not guilty. We are ashamed for no good reason. We did not make ourselves. And for the most part we were not even consciously and deliberately made by others. Each one of us was formed in response and in relation to what was happening around us before we were even conscious.

In this work of deconstruction, of examining and where necessary disentangling, unravelling, unfolding the fabric of our so called selves, each one of us has to come apart quite literally at the seams and perhaps in other places as well and in this work it is useful to have the assistance of an other. It is preferable if that other is at least a little further in the work of disentanglement of themselves but nevertheless it is a collaboration because in helping others disentangle we disentangle our selves.

And it is a work of love.

#f. grammar version : 20190920-093619x
tags : the work, language, grammar
links : dropbox | write.as