@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

Hands up all those who would say “Ask?”

I beg to differ. I think we have no right whatsoever to interrogate each other and expect answers, not to satisfy our curiosity and not even if we are pretending interest to get ourselves noticed. In fact if someone asks me a question I make it clear to them that they have overstepped a boundary and need my permission to get personal. Likewise, if someone is sitting in my living room and I am curious about them, I first ask if they would like to talk about whatever it is.

This may seem like a very high level of ethics to some but actually it’s the only thing that truly works. You cannot find stuff out by demanding answers. You find stuff out, if that really is your intention, by observing and noticing what you observe and looking for the spaces between the image and the reality. If there are very few space you have located an interesting person.

Some people pose questions in their “bloggs” as if they were interested in our opinions when actually all they are trying to do is get noticed, get liked and make us respect them. If I ask a daft question in a “blogg” I want you to know that I am joking, provoking and being satirical. Heaven forbid I should ever speak or write any words for any baser motice than the desire to communicate, illuminate, share experiences and learn about others.

Anything else is a tawdry insult and I will continue to hunt down such things when energy permits and throw them back in the faces of the idle manipulators who think they make clever personal branding for themselves.

If you wish to find out about things, that is different. You are asking for knowledge to be given to you and that is a totally different matter.

When “The Nice” dislike something I have said they usually reveal their true selves by coming back at me with a paternalistic/maternalistic question such as “Did you have a hard childhood, Steve?” Or some such crap. That’s when I go ballistic.

No one, no one on earth, has the right to use interrogation of any kind, even disguised as well-meaning understanding, to manipulate me or anyone else. If you are not intelligent and empathetic and insightful enough to learn by noticing then I’m afraid you will be stuck in ignorance for the rest of your life; if you want to ask me fake question to put me in my place I’m afraid you will fail every time.

Decent people feel affinity with what is true, even if they dislike kit. If they disagree they say so without resorting to sneaky attacks, most of which come as questions because that is the basic tool of the greatest menace of our time, to whit: coaches. Who abuse everyone they pretend to help with their reality-defining questions.

People rarely ask because they actually want to know. Their minds are already made up and they already know better than you. They ask because if they make you stand at attention to answer their questions they have dominated and manipulated you. Simple as that.

Death to all coaching whatsoever. And there’s no real money in it, so why the hell are they all doing it?

It’s a shame that modern parlance abuses our fine language by reducing it to grunts and ad fab exaggerations like when people describe something fairly nice as “super” or get carried away with a simple liking for something as in “I adore carrots” or even when they twist a beautiful word to enhance their idiotic blog with things like “what is your passion in business?”

I think we’ve all had quite enough of grandiose exaggerations such as “core purpose” to describe basic choices made in life but we do all this with the language of course because it flatters our aching egos and we think it sounds cool.

You aren’t to blame, really, all those of you who were brought up in the perfect storm of British education when Labour progressive teaching theory was telling your dis-empowered teachers that instead of making you learn grammar and spelling you should all be invited to draw pictures accompanied by a bit of “creative writing” – when the Conservatives came along and hamstrung those self-same teachers with their National Curriculum, causing all the good educators who lovably threw blackboard dusters at you to quit forever.

It is a shame, however, that you do not know how ignorant you are, how little sense of sociological perspective or history you have, how you think this modern world is so iPadically marvellous and have no idea that human beings like us have lived differently, thought differently, felt differently and used much more subtle language. In Sixteenth century England even common people were able to speak with almost Shakespearean complexity and inventiveness, whereas those self-same social classes today can barely grunt and swear at each other, can mostly just jeer at people they hate and cheer at nasty reality TV which they think is entertainment.

So, a huge amount of ordinary parlance amounts to a cruel abuse of the meanings of words, some of which I have mentioned above. That kind of utter exaggeration for effect is called “hyperbole” and in the hands of a great writer is a legitimate communication device. In the hands of a 21st century ignoramus, however, it becomes a means of spoiling, diluting and obscuring the real meaning of anything.

Possibly the most abused word of all is the word LOVE. We routinely deploy it these days to mean just about any state of being from slightly liking a garment in a shop window to pretending we care for the whole human race. Worst of all, we have become so cynical about it that no one laughs when someone declines to use the word at all, even to those who need their affection, their partners and their children, their lifelong friends, parents and of course, their lovers.

It may interest you to know, then, that from the ancient Greeks and Romans onwards, before we shut them down, there were many words that had the meaning of love, all differentiated as to the object of your love.

EROS was a deity that stood for naughty love, erotic, taunting, teasing. AGAPE mean a generalised love of humanity and was later colonised big-time by the Christian religion. PHILAUTIA meant self love, tending towards self-centredness and behaviour such as we see online, vying for approval and affection. LUDUS was playful love, on the borderline between friendly playfulness and physical contact and could be with either sex or inter-generational, thereby making it potentially dodgy but great if it stayed relatively innocent. PRAGMA, the source of the word pragmatic, meant sensible love or the affection between ageing partners who have learned to live together. And there were other words and concepts for very strong friendship amounting to love, for family love, for love of your class or tribe or trading partners or colleagues or comrades.

They didn’t have clichés all narrowed down to one word and one concept, as in “Love is never having to say you’re sorry…” There weren’t ten thousands uneducated, juvenile bloggers piling in to show how very nice and wise they are every time the word “Love” or any other nice word came up. There weren’t a load of smarmy gurus quoting the Dalai Sheep, Mother Tormenta, Nelson Mundelo, a cunning poem called Desiderata, Krishnamurti, St. Steve Jobs or any other saintly source to show how much they understand love and everything else that’s nice.

People used to know that life is complex, subtle and paradoxical. They used to be adults. The price you pay for abusing your rich history of language and thought is that you reduce yourself to a simplistic, childish level of dreary assertion whose chief purpose is not to explore life but to make you look good. Nothing else. Most people do not speak or write a single thing without checking that it makes them look good first.

You can see that from the emptiness of their language. All idiotic, supposedly-branding memes and clichés. God help us if there is a God, and there’s another much-abused word….

(IGNORE the word “you” is it doesn’t fit you. This polemic was aimed at the Ecademy audience of ignorant space cadets)

There is only one kind of person, and that is a person who bites back their disappointment in life as they grow older and begins to make the best of it, pretending that everything is just fine. Wilhelm Reich called this resignation and perhaps exaggerated the part that sexual repression plays in creating it, though it definitely restricts our energies.

I prefer to imagine what Prot from K-PAX would say if asked what the human condition was. He might reply that our world is totally lost: so corrupted by lies, hierarchies, religious fantasies and vicious social systems that nothing truly good can come out of it, not genuine love, or healthy self-esteem; not honest truth and certainly not friendship of any meaningful kind when there is so much competition and mistrust.

I would agree with him. The task ahead of us is to learn to be ourselves, all over again.

Desire, passion and love; it’s so easy to be glib about these things and the idealised people we project them on to as their perfection in turn allows us to feel blessed, literally blessed.

Let’s not mention repulsion for now; let’s try to stay with one side of the coin. Let’s not open up that ugly equation whereby one may only feel good by denigrating another, by bathing in the triumph of possession (of the wholesome relationship and by implication, the healthy life) – while the damned walk away distraught and alone…

One must glow in the light while the other hides ashamed in darkness. It’s the same desire. It’s the same passion. It’s the same so-called love.

Handle it skilfully, never owning up to the sordid parts and you will be rewarded by a complicit partner who is also playing the game, albeit lifelessly; handle it badly, acting out too much vulnerably – you will be mocked, rejected and reviled out of all proportion to your supposed crime.

The key thing that most people really desire is to be included and yet all social systems at all epochs in all territories have turned upon rewarding exclusivity for the select few and damning exclusion for the rest. Power, popularity, respect, wealth, beauty, love, influence – they are related and all collectible. To fail is to be cursed and we know this in our hearts.

Most of us have failed too much and need to pretend that we have not failed at all; this is sometimes called mindless optimism. Some of us are so afraid that we may have failed that we search like crazy for greater failures than ourselves; this is sometimes called gossip. They are both despicable.

Poetic truth will always be the truest truth in the room…because our lives are a series of interlocking dreams, narratives, destinies, chances, accidents and miracles – not rational transits from one plan to another goal. It cannot ultimately make sense. It is not designed or explained and cannot truly be corrected. What is lost or missed cannot be recovered. What is loved cannot be held tight, though what is hated often is..

Under normal circumstances….

The thing about the concept, the attitude, the experience, the certitude that you know the answer is that it feels wonderful.

The thing about the confusion, the delay, the complexity, the doubt of not knowing any answer is that it feels pretty awful.

This is a shame because we actually do not know many answers, yet we long to feel the elation of supposing ourselves wise.

As you will see, all day every day, just by watching.

Once in a while someone shares their genuine doubt, their uncertainty, the fact that they are lost. Not as an example of how they used to feel before they learned their new system, but truly from the heart.

This event is very rare indeed but if it does occur you may notice that it lights up the world with trust, love, decency, concern, togetherness, sharing and the strange certainty that we as people can ultimately cope with anything.

So, if you wanna be my friend, please stop telling me how great you are and let me decide for myself.

It’s about the impact of shock, any shock from a mysterious occurrence, through a friend surprising you with something they said, a loss of any kind, a bad dream, a disappointment, accumulated resignation that turns into drama, any kind of series of life changing or life threatening events, something bad happening to someone close, your cat being run over, the loss of your savings in a pension scam… Whatever.

People who know more than me have claimed that our memories contain so much shock and loss that we can never process it all before the system clogs up with more happening, that we only get some brief relief through separation.

But here is my theory for your consideration: as you have probably realised, your consciousness is not all rational, not all alert, not all even awake. Much of what takes place in the being you call home consists of daydreams, fantasies, speculations, theories, creative images, drifting responses to beauty and music, powerful desires both physical and behavioural – not to mention the third of your life you actually are asleep. I believe that this consists of enough experience to claim that all that stuff, which I shall call for now your “inner narrative”, forms a crucially important part of your life. In fact we generate narrative all the time and we live within its gripping sway most of the time, while we plane, wait, expect, examine, experiment, investigate and draw hypotheses about what is going on.

My theory is very simple: when you overload with shock your mind defaults immediately to narrative drive to protect you against unacceptable truth.

That’s why shock creates grief, madness, despair, depression – all of which are complex negative stories we impose on life. That’s why hope creates hysterical longings and great expectations, also narratives, because the infuse of hope is also a kind of shock. A stable person would feel neither loss nor impending gain; they would treat all experience as equal. We cannot be that person. We must manage our lives. And to achieve that we must manage our narrative lives. People under long term stress commonly develop odd behaviours, sometimes known as mental illnesses, in order to cope. But I’m saying we all do that to a lesser extent….

Someone responded: It would seem to me Steve, most of our inner lives are made up of these inner narratives which are positively designed to keep us asleep. To keep us from seeing ourselves as we really are. Internal lies that play all day everyday, to prevent that bubbling cauldron of ugly reality of self from being faced. So in that sense, I dare say for most people the narrative is always uncontrolled and lulling people into a false perception of themselves and life.

…I’m sitting with it all the time, waiting for things to come forward and wondering how to integrate what I know about the potential healing power of moments of truth. Perhaps sleepwalking in narrative is an imaginary friend who can hold us back in some ways, certainly it is when a person makes up life completely, like a paranoid does, losing all contact with the ability to read motivation and see rational routes to outcomes.
On the other hand there must be an intrinsic de facto narrative that begins as a young child when you differentiate yourself from others and start to realise that your own life is yours alone and has a path that is different from other lives. I think perhaps that process remains confused for a very long time in most of us. And I note that the peoples of the east often subscribe to mental disciplines intended to mesmerise themselves out of the desire, judgement and motivation that might fuel narrative, this finding a safe space in a passive and self-chosen contact with unspecified, meditative reality.

To me their results seem lifeless and I think of westerners who go that route as space cadets who think they have risen above the turbulence of life but are more correctly in denial about what’s going on.

On the other hand, trying to ride the dream world I inhabit and function effectively requires a lot of strength and would be much easier if I found more resonance in the world at large. I do note, however, that whenever I sit down with people, whatever they claim about their point of view, what they do is commence to bleed out narrative. And that it is almost impossible to get them to be congruent, here in the room, so strong is the energy of the narrative, tantamount in force to a sexual desire that they cannot control. If they flirted with me the way they tell me their lives the room would be seriously charged and for me, after a relatively brief period, listening to narrative does begin to feel like a lover who comes on strong only to push you away and then comes on stronger when you try to back off and then cries rape at the moment of truth.

I can’t tell you how many people I have taken right to that moment in my life, only to see the portcullis slam down just before the final, painful release of the lies they live in. And wham, back comes the pulsing narrative, the story, the justification of the way they have lived and the things they have done, all the mishaps that were never their fault and the malaise they suffer that just happened, without warning, over 30 years or more !!!!

The thesis is that there are aspects of our lives that we never really share with others, possibly courageous and even heroic aspects, as we toil our way through the hand that destiny dealt us, making the best of who we are and the opportunities that come along. We aren’t in charge of anything and we actually know that, but within the limitations we do pretty well.

Think of the guy who left school at fifteen yet rose to a position of authority in the corporate world. Think my my CV client from the Kabili region of Algeria, a woman who fought her way to university in France and then ran away to the UK to avoid servitude. She started as a bookkeeper in Rainham, Essex and now project manages the installation of investment bank trading floors while living in SW3 with her Danish husband and two children.

Those are the big heroics, and there are countless smaller ones: people who overcome disabling illness and pain; people who fight their way past tragic childhoods. People who deal with stammers and dyslexia. People who know they aren’t that bright but work hard enough to do very well. people who give a lot to others, even though it costs them dearly in time and personal success. In fact the world is full of minor acts of heroism.

Yet, and here is my thesis: very few of us ever receive the acknowledgement, the thanks, the respect and in some sense the justification for being themselves that these marvellous but invisible achievements actually deserve.

So we all share a kind of debilitating hunger, to be known as we truly are, to be allowed to be that person, to be celebrated for our gifts and contributions. Perhaps because a competitive society where everyone is starving for recognition (and only the stars ever get it) – perhaps because this culture will not allow it.

However, as a minor gesture of revolution against loss of person-hood, I think we should all be doing something about this issue and telling those that we care about how very much we celebrate them just as they are. This would be so much better than coaching them on becoming better, so much kinder than giving unwanted advice that makes them feel incomplete as they stand now. And especially, when they are down, when things are bad for them, when they are enduring loss or grief, that particular time in their lives would be the best time of all to see them and let them know that you see them as whole, perfect, acceptable to you and, frankly, heroic.

Don’t fix anybody; find them marvellous instead. It’ll do a lot more good to both of you.

The main reason I want to move to the seaside is that when I stand there on the beach in the bright sunshine I always feel good no matter what. The first time I ever test drove an Audi it just felt right compared with the car I thought I wanted, a Merc, which felt awful when I rented one for a week to check it out. For twenty years, since before Windows existed when DOS was a big deal, I’ve been struggling with the “wrong” feel of Microsoft blockware, which is the main reason I want to try Apple.

Some things feel right; they relax you, but with energy in hand. Some things feel wrong; they make you nervy and drain your spirit away. Like dealing with call centres and writing to the tax man. Like queuing in the rain at Hammersmith to get into a Ricky Lee Jones concert where she only sang for 45 minutes. Like making a date with the wrong girl at school but feeling you have to go through with it not to hurt her. Like being five years into the wrong career before finally understanding you have to scrap it all and start again.

In my wardrobe I have clothes  I so much love to wear that I save them for a special time and never wear them, choosing instead things that I don’t like so much because it doesn’t matter if they wear out. How stupid is that?

I mean, I know it’s supposed to be the path to wisdom to control your desires but I like my desires, very much. I like clean cotton sheets. I like machines that work first time and do exciting things. I always end up glad I had sex even when I thought I didn’t feel like it. I love my food but I don’t want that much of it these days and there’s a range of tastes that feel good to me, such as asparagus and haddock but no longer beef, which feels harsh. So why do I still eat stuff I don’t like, because of a “balanced diet”?

I think I shall put more emphasis on how things feel from now on and less on what might be the sensible thing to do. Sensible hasn’t been such a great success. It doesn’t make your skin tingle and your heart leap.