Debt Rattle February 1 2023
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The “official narrative” is coming unstuck, and with that several minds are coming unstuck as well. Glad I never bought in to the “official narrative.” Glad I found TAE.
Yes, I did post ideas of Derrick Jensen on TAE a while ago. That does not make me a Jensenite any more than posting the work of emeritus professor Albert Bartlett makes me a Bartlettite.
I know that some people like to apply silly labels to people -‘left’ and ‘right’ being amongst the most stupid, notwithstanding describing totalitarian fascists as ‘communists’ or ‘socialists’.
It you have to label me, I am happy with truth-seeker, truth-teller, scientist, artist, musician, carpenter, metal-worker, inventor, designer, permaculturalist, dancer, bridge-player, writer, organiser, activist, human being……
I will remind people in the Northern Hemisphere that this time of the year (midsummer) people who are in touch with reality in the Southern Hemisphere are very busy -in my case predawn to post dusk- tending to gardens, harvesting and processing fruit, building community relationships, and making final preparations for the economic meltdown which is underway and gathering pace.
DBS said
From what I’ve experienced so far (and I really am just getting started) God is right there accessible to you at all times to help you along the way. He’s is always listening. He will always answer every question you ask, truthfully, and in terms you are readily able to understand.
You are refering to aspects of your culture, which provides you with a way of viewing and reconciling your place and actions in the universe. I live in China, they do not have the same culture so do not view the world using your framework of God and religion (religion in the true sense rather than acceptance of moral directives, such as Confucius). What is culture and what is absolute?
Interesting story about the IVM
We were curious to see your French cycling route for this summer.
We are hoping to break free from New Zealand this year and get back to Europe, and
are planning to cycle the Eurovelo route 6 from Nantes across France to Alsace, but your route looks enticing and would give us a longer ride. Hoping to start from Plymouth and follow the Atlantic route down the east coast of France. Thanks for the link, you’ve inspired us to make it happen. We have a bit of reading up to do…aspnaz, I don’t disagree with your view on comment sections. I like your take, and I see how you practice what you preach. The evangelicals around me liked to quote the line “As iron sharpens iron,” as a way to talk about how folks can argue towards a mutual benefit. I do broadly mean love, where within a community it might take on something like camaraderie as well as philoxenia. The idea of having a soul-bound mate, as my girlfriend had with her dog, influenced a lot of my thinking about what might wrench someone out of the walls we gradually build around us. Obviously, I like good arguments, I like challenging my thinking and others’, and I take very much to heart what Col. John Boyd teaches in his little manuals for warfighters and his eight-page summation of so much contemporary philosophy in “Destruction and Creation” (Part IV of A Discourse on Winning and Losing).
D Benton Smith, thank you for your encouragement.
John Day, boscohorowitz’s story reminded me very much of the future landscape Peter Watts writes about, with its own different take on what the natural has to do with the Supernatural. I read it during my work breaks today. Your point comparing Dad’s choice and the confined polylife regarding containment of one’s life is interesting. When I attempt to look outside the ego tunnel, that which is ‘I’ is not there to observe, so I cannot observe what is outside of myself without myself, so climbing out of the containment is not the point, so much as what it means to strive to escape the limitations of a life. Maybe one point about augmentation is that opening those limitations does something to the striving —trying to relive one’s youth, make new decisions, make different choices and enjoy pleasures one sought to deny for one’s self (or for others!), only lasted for a while before inevitable loneliness setled in, unless someone had the endlessness of a genuine lover to endure the deflation boredom brings along after the pleasures. The long perspective: maybe having attained diverse pleasures of an embodied life, even one extended through reconfiguring consciousness across new bodies, new extensions, new viewpoints, one becomes all the more intensely aware of that tunnel, that strange confinement so narrowly highlighted by such a thing as a singular letter, for me that flat English letter ‘I‘. My ordinary, everyday experience every day brings me such an expanse and a vista and an abyss in every direction, any orientation, available for exploration, that it is all too easy for me to forget that I will never see the back of my head with my own head’s eyes, never really notice how I’m not ever outside this self, how all of my universe I’m living within fits inside my ego tunnel.
What at first comes across as transcendence of self through expansion of the mind across multiple bodies leads to loneliness from finding all the more how much subjectivity already is confining. The polylife has to do something more than be intelligent to showcase what it is to have a subjective viewpoint, something more than try to reach out past the border, something more than act logically or emotionally or curiously. Raúl ended the Rattle with a Tweet for the opening montage of Up, and in a little more than two minutes, you see a story your life experiences help to expand into a long lifetime spent admiring from outside two lovers who grow old together, ending with a gift: Mon Livre D’Aventure. A Mad Scientist trying to prove subjectivity —when a philosopher such as Thomas Metzinger shows how a self is our compelling myth— is trying to give adventurous life to what he has created. The montage suggests something about sharing adversity that is critical; boscohorowitz suggests sharing adventure is far more rewarding than seeking out one’s own pleasures as an escape from the inevitability of death, the closure of experiencing altogether. So, maybe there’s something here: it is somewhat circular, but the proof for the existence of another mind, another subjectivity, is how one shares and gives and spices the life of another, a gift of, say, a fine story worth contemplating. Worth sharing onward, in word, towards others who word.
Also, your comment reminded me of this scene from a movie from my childhood:
“Sharing adventure” seems so conditional. How about simply “sharing”. It encompasses joys and sorrows.
Thank you, Doc Robinson. I can see that I didn’t make it too clear. I write that adversity was critical to the montage of the husband and wife as they age in Up, and each time they suffer, they also share their sacrifice to recover. It’s hard to not feel something in seeing the one lose the other just as he was about to give her that trip to a far-away place, but she gives him a memento: their life together was the adventure, the suffering and the recovery. Well, hard for me not to feel something. I then write that a provisional proof (“So … :”) is sharing (and giving and spicing) the life of another, tout court. Maybe the conjunctions there are too strong, and maybe we can just use disjunctions. But, yeah, life includes joy and sorrow and mundane things. The narrator in boscohorowitz’s story also talks about her (Did I just assume its gender?) relationship with Ed (I am on my phone and can’t check for accuracy on his name 😕) in this way, where his trauma of memory floods is also a source for her deepening love with him: they share in the overcoming, or just the getting-through, of adversity. Sorrow becomes entangled with joy and the everyday; one’s instrument for analyzing a piece apart from the whole changes its appearing, but the other sides are still there.
So, I come to the same conclusion you are. I’m still also thinking about what I write about earlier when it comes to losing that beloved, as that’s also what that montage is about (the entire movie afterwards is about getting out from the grief of losing such a love, such a shared life, right?).
Which is also good to think about in the context of the larger discussions: it’s just being here, engaging with other community members, taking part in the sorrows or criticisms as well as the agreement or the shrugs, that’s also how we find proof that we are not alone. I guess? Either way, thank you for pointing that out.
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