All good things approach their goal crookedly. Like cats, they arch their backs, they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness: all good things laugh. --NIETZSCHE
I should confess: life is going pretty well for me now.
In the last year, I've removed from my existence those elements that didn't belong there. Perhaps life has become a little simple as a result? I don't know, for I can reach all sorts of depths of knowledge with very little effort.
I had absorbed too much that was alien to my nature. This was all part of my project toward "adaptation", which was a goal that has defined my life for the past twenty years, although I have not consciously realized it until very recently. It took letting go of that agenda to realize how much it had defined me.
The Buddhist principle that one is more likely to meet one's goals when one isn't aiming for them -- that is, in an overwrought, over-conscious way -- has much to recommend it.
You have to give up on what the apes think, too.
Nurturing that quality of indifference seems to go against the tenets of Western culture. In fact, more so in my case, because I kept berating myself that I wasn't paying close enough attention to what others thought. I demanded of myself that if only I picked up this key to success, which I was reluctant to use, I would surely open all sorts of doors. To this end, I tried very hard to develop my self-consciousness, so that I would become more aware of what others were thinking, and thus win.
Win what?
The problem was that the core of my identity is not in the advanced Capitalist mode. That is to say, I have never been interested in gaining advantage for its own sake. My own notion of success have entirely different parameters. I had to prove a point related to morale, and I was keen to prove it. Once I latch onto an idea, or an agenda, I will not let it go. I had come from far away in culture and in mannerisms and in action, and I had to land the plane. I had to set the wheels on the runway, so I was no longer up in the air.
This proved impossible. I am still flying.
Flying -- though -- is what a lot of people dream of doing. I do it effortlessly, such that my weight hasn't touched the ground: I can't seem to bring it to descend from here. This is even to the extent that when people talk about their patterns of normality, which nowadays they're keen to base on their biology, I can't make any sense of this.
Why would someone relate to the world using their physiological drives as their basis for self-consciousness? I cannot understand this. It's not that I'm inhuman: I know how to divert many of my drives along very interesting lines. I can navigate the air with vast effectiveness. I just can't understand how being reduced to my being to flesh and blood alone would make things more -- and not less -- interesting.
In some ways my skepticism about biological determinism rests on the support buffer of personal experience. Achievements that make me happy don't involve a biological construction of my identity. I'm not prone to maternal life in any way.
I don't fight for my biological rights, because I can't imagine what they are. The Men's Rights lobbyists contend for their rights to be respected on the basis that they're biologically different from women. Radical feminists likewise demand that there is something weak, as well as moving, about being a lady. (I don't distinguish the radical feminist agenda from the of the Women's Temperance Union in its goals. A 'sober and pure world' would indeed be ...'sober and pure'. I can't imagine why that would be good.
So, you can see that I still can't become grounded, due to my lack of understanding. I'm surely doomed to be up in the air, and flighty.
I promise you, however, that I do stick to my principles, which are written neither on my sleeve nor in hypotheses about the body. In all, I want what I want and "hypergamy" isn't it. Unless you are a psychoanalyst, in which case it IS it ... in which case it ISN'T. Then it IS. And it ISN'T. IS too.
2.
Why pick a metaphor of a plane that does not land...that cannot land? If only it landed, then all my family would be happy, and I would pay off my debt -- the guilt that has been handed down to me across three generations.
But it does not land; it cannot land.
If only you just land that plane, just come down to Earth, everything will be okay. But that's exactly what it cannot do. You don't accept the trauma of the husband and the father lost at sea. You think it can't be real. The plane he was in is still flying somehow. It is searching and looking for a place to land. That's all it has to do to turn portending disaster into acceptable reality. It is still up there, many years after World War 2, and we are still waiting to hear that the occupants have been found safe and well.
But it doesn't land and so the span of inter-generational trauma is extended.
This all sounds far-fetched, but we are all waiting for something, some notification that has arrived but hasn't been accepted.
It is better not to arrive if one is to arrive dead. Better to keep flying from one generation to the next. Each generation holds a candle then, and waits for the notification which one day must arrive. That is the feared day when the one who is beloved is pronounced dead -- and everything shatters.
But it will not shatter if the plane doesn't land -- and if we can keep everything up in the air, we will never hear bad news that shatters us.
So, keep everything uncertain and unclear and don't speak about what you know. We are all waiting. Our prolonged wait is to avoid hearing what you have to say. We're tired of hearing it already, so hush up.
And so the ghost plane glides through misty air, as we throughout the generations keep it buoyant.
I should confess: life is going pretty well for me now.
In the last year, I've removed from my existence those elements that didn't belong there. Perhaps life has become a little simple as a result? I don't know, for I can reach all sorts of depths of knowledge with very little effort.
I had absorbed too much that was alien to my nature. This was all part of my project toward "adaptation", which was a goal that has defined my life for the past twenty years, although I have not consciously realized it until very recently. It took letting go of that agenda to realize how much it had defined me.
The Buddhist principle that one is more likely to meet one's goals when one isn't aiming for them -- that is, in an overwrought, over-conscious way -- has much to recommend it.
You have to give up on what the apes think, too.
Nurturing that quality of indifference seems to go against the tenets of Western culture. In fact, more so in my case, because I kept berating myself that I wasn't paying close enough attention to what others thought. I demanded of myself that if only I picked up this key to success, which I was reluctant to use, I would surely open all sorts of doors. To this end, I tried very hard to develop my self-consciousness, so that I would become more aware of what others were thinking, and thus win.
Win what?
The problem was that the core of my identity is not in the advanced Capitalist mode. That is to say, I have never been interested in gaining advantage for its own sake. My own notion of success have entirely different parameters. I had to prove a point related to morale, and I was keen to prove it. Once I latch onto an idea, or an agenda, I will not let it go. I had come from far away in culture and in mannerisms and in action, and I had to land the plane. I had to set the wheels on the runway, so I was no longer up in the air.
This proved impossible. I am still flying.
Flying -- though -- is what a lot of people dream of doing. I do it effortlessly, such that my weight hasn't touched the ground: I can't seem to bring it to descend from here. This is even to the extent that when people talk about their patterns of normality, which nowadays they're keen to base on their biology, I can't make any sense of this.
Why would someone relate to the world using their physiological drives as their basis for self-consciousness? I cannot understand this. It's not that I'm inhuman: I know how to divert many of my drives along very interesting lines. I can navigate the air with vast effectiveness. I just can't understand how being reduced to my being to flesh and blood alone would make things more -- and not less -- interesting.
In some ways my skepticism about biological determinism rests on the support buffer of personal experience. Achievements that make me happy don't involve a biological construction of my identity. I'm not prone to maternal life in any way.
I don't fight for my biological rights, because I can't imagine what they are. The Men's Rights lobbyists contend for their rights to be respected on the basis that they're biologically different from women. Radical feminists likewise demand that there is something weak, as well as moving, about being a lady. (I don't distinguish the radical feminist agenda from the of the Women's Temperance Union in its goals. A 'sober and pure world' would indeed be ...'sober and pure'. I can't imagine why that would be good.
So, you can see that I still can't become grounded, due to my lack of understanding. I'm surely doomed to be up in the air, and flighty.
I promise you, however, that I do stick to my principles, which are written neither on my sleeve nor in hypotheses about the body. In all, I want what I want and "hypergamy" isn't it. Unless you are a psychoanalyst, in which case it IS it ... in which case it ISN'T. Then it IS. And it ISN'T. IS too.
2.
Why pick a metaphor of a plane that does not land...that cannot land? If only it landed, then all my family would be happy, and I would pay off my debt -- the guilt that has been handed down to me across three generations.
But it does not land; it cannot land.
If only you just land that plane, just come down to Earth, everything will be okay. But that's exactly what it cannot do. You don't accept the trauma of the husband and the father lost at sea. You think it can't be real. The plane he was in is still flying somehow. It is searching and looking for a place to land. That's all it has to do to turn portending disaster into acceptable reality. It is still up there, many years after World War 2, and we are still waiting to hear that the occupants have been found safe and well.
But it doesn't land and so the span of inter-generational trauma is extended.
This all sounds far-fetched, but we are all waiting for something, some notification that has arrived but hasn't been accepted.
It is better not to arrive if one is to arrive dead. Better to keep flying from one generation to the next. Each generation holds a candle then, and waits for the notification which one day must arrive. That is the feared day when the one who is beloved is pronounced dead -- and everything shatters.
But it will not shatter if the plane doesn't land -- and if we can keep everything up in the air, we will never hear bad news that shatters us.
So, keep everything uncertain and unclear and don't speak about what you know. We are all waiting. Our prolonged wait is to avoid hearing what you have to say. We're tired of hearing it already, so hush up.
And so the ghost plane glides through misty air, as we throughout the generations keep it buoyant.
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