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

You have an oldish but still sturdy car which is due for its MOT test and needs an oil change. The aircon is not functioning properly and you fear for the worst.

Choices:

1)          mesmerise yourself while passing dingy garage run by yobs offering a “free safety” check and recoil in panic when they discover worn shocks and offer to fit a reconditioned aircon something or other much cheaper than the main dealer; knowing nothing about cars you think it has to be done now and leave the car for three days; after hassling them on the phone twenty times, the final bill is about £700, less for cash; drive away and wonder if the aircon really is working or if they even changed the oil, let alone the front shocks

2)          opt for safety and book a luxury coffee break at the main dealer’s gorgeous showroom while a brittle woman plastered with make-up who knows nothing about cars but everything about billing patiently wears down the customer before you; glance at Daily Torygraph and National Geographic while trying not to admire the gleaming coupe next to your comfy leather armchair; speak to brittle woman for five minutes and depart in loan car for the day, desperate not to scratch it; return at teatime to see gleaming old car in parking lot and glimpse of beautiful workshop area where uniformed engineers are looking at computers; endure even longer wait for brittle woman’s assistant, hairstyle woman, who has a white Afro that surpasses description of any kind; drive away in immaculately valetted vehicle with £1, 287.67 plus VAT less in your bank account; this is fine if you have loads of money but the aircon still isn’t working like it used to

3)          learn something about cars and spend time tracking down the last real garage for miles, where Sid answers the phone after he’s crawled out from under an old Jag; book in for vague list of possible things that need doing and arrive early on appointed day to find Sid and Bill already on their bacon sandwiches after starting work at six; they don’t say much and they wave you away so you catch the bus home and hope for the best; at lunchtime Sid phones to explain something you don’t understand but it’s not that expensive so you say yes; when you turn up at closing time Sid and Bill are still at work on a treacherous Alfa, swearing at each other and obviously exhausted; your car is parked behind several others they must have done that day; you wait, wondering when they retire and why anyone would fancy Miss July 1983 for so many years; Bill arrives, because he is the communicator… explains that you are very lucky because they found a something that had worked loose from the aircon lying in the oil-pan where it could have fallen in the road and been lost, oh dear; he’s sorry but they had to change the brake pads and I didn’t answer when he rang me; apologetically hands over grimy scrawl bill culminating in the sum of £312 inc. VAT and tells you the shocks can wait another year; they don’t take credit cards but it’s OK to bring the rest of the cash tomorrow, when you can collect the MOT cert., OK?

Many years ago I remember the birth of large, out-of-town DIY stores, meaning that instead of paying what seemed like a lot to an ordinary shop where the owner had dedicated his life to becoming a helpful expert who would sell you a couple of screws and a tap washer if that’s all you needed… you could now waltz round with a shopping trolley grabbing massive buckets of magnolia matt coloured water that needed at least three coats to cover anything. An era was born. Anybody with half a brain ascended the “property ladder” because not to do so would leave you stranded for ever in poverty. Whether we liked it or not we all had to try our hand at being handy…

This evening I witnessed what must be the death throws of that business model, at a depressing warehouse where flabby women waddle and spotty youth “manages” to be as completely unhelpful as possible, knowing zero about their own stock and not even trained to say “good evening” in response to polite customers who recognise them as human beings, which is a waste of time because they are not. From the financial pages I know that this chain of sheds is on the rocks and about to go bust, but have they learned anything about customer care in thirty years, have they used their huge sourcing muscle to bring quality goods to the public at reasonable prices? Have they fuck. The retail space consists of acres of crap bath and bed room layouts, all of them nasty but few of them cheap, followed by acres of own brand shite, all of it nasty but none of it cheap, followed by acres of garden furniture, most of it nasty and some of it cheap as well as nasty. The stuff you actually want, like a halogen bulb, a decent paint brush with proper bristles, some carpet tacks, whatever… it’s all carefully hidden away so you have to ask a confused assistant who waddles around for a while before saying she’ll ask the manager, who is busy with a queue of irate consumers returning trash and arguing about special offers that didn’t scan as such when they got to the checkout.
Finally you have your stuff and in a murderous mood you join a long line for the single open till that has broken down while fat waddlers and spotty managers whine at each other and look at their watches. They’re people, you tell yourself. Say good evening and engage in sympathetic banter about what a long day it’s been. Waste of time. The best you get is a grunt, blank incomprehension when you mention the lovely evening sunlight and the interesting breeze that is blowing the bags away, no thanks for keeping them in a job so they can buy some more junk food to exacerbate the spots and improve the waddle, not even a goodbye.
Personally, I’m sad that the excellent hardware store where I could have done this in five minutes for about the same price and had a jolly amusing chat with a friendly person about how well Arsenal are doing this season – has long since closed to be replaced by yet another fucking money-grabbing optician charging a 600% mark-up. But we asked for this when we were seduced by having the spending power of proudly rising house values and were able to improve our own homes meaning that decent workmen had nowhere to go and the world filled up with last minute cowboys who rip you off and the only way to get a plumber these days is to be insured.

Ugly, greedy, slimy-suited capitalism 5, ordinary people and consumers, 0. Quality of life index, minus 30%.

The opening words of the Philosophic Thoughts are the keynote to Diderot’s character, according to editor/journalist John Morley (1838-1923) who wrote also the following translation:

“People are for ever declaiming against the passions; they set down to them all the pains that men endures, and quite forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures. It is only passion, and strong passions, that can raise the soul to great things. Sober passions produce only the commonplace. Deadened passions degrade men of extraordinary quality. Constraint annihilates the greatness and energy of nature. See that tree: ’tis to the luxury of its branches that you owe the freshness and the wide-spreading breadth of its shade, which you may enjoy till winter comes to despoil it of its leafy tresses.

An end to all excellence in poetry, in painting, in music, as soon as superstition has once wrought upon human temperament the effect of old age! It is the very climax of madness to propose to oneself the ruin of the passions. A fine design truly in your pietist, to torment himself like a convict in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing; and he would end becoming a true monster, if he were to succeed!”

Yes, that’s typical Diderot, that’s him all over…

Btw, nothing wrong with following our very strong passions, no matter what,

or is this too romantic and have we become cynics instead…

One day in 1742, when Diderot was passing time in a café, he was introduced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a young man coming from Geneva who had just arrived in town. Rousseau had moved to Paris to get rich. He had developed a complicated mathematical system that according to him could be useful for musical notation. He planned to sell it to some of the great musicians in Paris. However, nobody was interested in his ideas and Rousseau had to work in other ways for a living. He tried to do so by being a copyist of musical notation, before he became famous as a philosopher and writer.

Diderot and Rousseau liked each other. They were about the same age, around thirty. They shared several interests, for instance they both liked to play chess (although most of the games were won by Rousseau who was a much stronger player); they both loved music and mathematics. Later on Rousseau became one of the contributors to the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote a series of articles on music. The friendship lasted for fifteen years.

Gradually they drifted apart. Then Rousseau, suffering from paranoia, publicly broke off his bonds with Diderot.

The other fundamental friendship in Diderot’s life was with the German Friedrich Melchior Grimm who was ten years younger. Before Grimm arrived in Paris, coming from Regensburg, he had developed a keen interest in music and drama. He became the secretary to various aristocratic persons. Later he wrote a gazette for several royal courts in Europe. Diderot and Grimm stayed friends for many years and it is only three years before Diderot died that their relationship came to an end, because of a deep disappointment from Diderot’s side with regard to his friend’s political ambitions.   

We could say that Diderot has practised fully his ideas concerning friendship; we can see how his friendships sadly ended because of the habit forming part and when it came to interference with each other’s lives.

Apparently these are the touchy issues and not only three hundred years ago…    

“By means of the considerations that we have elaborated”, says Diderot in his article on Friendship, “we have thrown the light on a very important principle regarding friendship, to assume that friendship should find or establish equality between two people [in Latin: amicitia aut pares invenit, aut facit : friendship either finds or creates equals]. Therefore, is it possible for a Monarch to have friends? To have any, he must seek them among other Monarchs, or he must give to his un-king-like friends a character that is on an equal footing with sovereign power. This is the major significance of the principle. 

In proportion to the issues that create friendship there must be between the two friends a freedom in feeling and language large enough to make sure that neither one is superior nor the other inferior. Equality must be found on both sides in the indulgence of the amicable contact. This indulgence consists in offering to each other their thoughts, preferences, doubts and difficulties, but always within the area of the character of friendship that has been brought into being.”

It is in this atmosphere that Diderot finishes his article, equality between friends is his cherished conviction. Now you might wonder if did Diderot had such friends himself?

He had indeed… as a matter of fact, he had some very good friends. And did he practise his beliefs on Friendship with them?

Let us deepen these questions as we continue…

According to Diderot, the tokens of appreciation of a friendship extend further than we may  assume: we are obliged to maintain friendship in proportion to its level and character, which means many levels and characters, each with different duties. It’s an important reflection, meant for preventing the feeling of injustice of those who wail about having been abandoned, badly supported, or not much valued by their friends. A friend with whom we will have an other relationship than mere easy literary amusements finds it strange when we do not exert all our strength for him; friendship demands such behavior. A friend with whom we will cultivate a warm heartedness and an agreement to keep up the relationship, requires from us favours which could involve our fate; the friendship is an obligation, that demands such sacrifices.

Do you agree with Diderot, that friends are allowed to interfere with your fate…

In the last section we found Diderot’s statement that friendship does not fill the void that it has promised to fill, and he follows his observation:

“Subsequently we find the faults in each other that we were concealing; or we decline to passions that have an aversion to friendship, like gruesome illnesses cause an aversion against the sweetest pleasures.

This is why radical characters, capable of giving the strongest proofs of devotion to duty, are not the most capable persons of maintaining  steadfast friendships.  Nowhere else we find persistent friendships so scintillating and so stable as in shy and sincere spirits whose moderate soul knows what virtue is;  the gentle, calm feeling of friendship shores their hearts, relaxes their minds,  extends it, makes them more self-confident and lively, enhances their delights, their work and their mysterious pleasures: the soul of their lives as a whole.”

Friendship in relation to modesty, how is that… does it ring a bell, does it make sense…

14

For a change of mood, then, in case things are getting too heavy, let’s try conjuring up a little dream. It won’t be easy because we aren’t trying to recycle other people’s stale images and narratives within the restrictive meme and we’ve got an overbearing parental figure chiding us, demanding: “if you don’t like this system, then what would you put in it’s place?” and adding: “I never realised that you felt so little respect for me and how ungrateful you are…” As all parents do, and everyone acting like parents to control us: teachers, politicians, people at parties, friends whose internal structures you are challenging, their friends who invited you to dinner so they could see you perform and in whose company you are now trapped for three hours…

To which I respond thus: in my dream the purpose of conversation is pure, untainted by persuasive definitions, argumentation, challenges, spurious and covertly aggressive questions, patronising, ironical put-downs or the hard, cold, mortar fire of supposed facts and logics, all of which are nothing of the sort, by the way. Formal logic renders only the tautology meaningful and factoids are always superseded by better facticity next year, according to fashion and the evolution of their enclosing meme. All meaningful language is symbolic, in flux, experimental, a touch poetic and licensed. As in off the leash, almost certain to contain ambiguity and absolutely certain to include some paradox if it comes anywhere near speaking a truth, which will in itself change very soon and is not to be pinned down by the machine conversationalists of the intellectual meme group who can only ape academic method, which is all about destruction by challenge.

No, in my dream the purpose of conversation might, for example, only be to exchange useful information with no emotive content, for example. Sounds easy enough, yet it rarely happens if you listen to the voice tones. Admittedly, even in the Climate of Lie, something approaching this sometimes happens when nice people meet for the purpose of teaching and learning. So we can leave that one aside because it is common to both Step 1 and Step 2 worlds, that simple, clean, passing of information with no added manipulation, rare but possible.

Much more of a challenge to the average Mind is the truer, purer function that expresses the deepest wish of the human soul, which is to acknowledge, appreciate and rather than posses to pull alongside and make fellowship with those wonders and gifts that life notices about itself through us and for which we and maybe dolphins are the only conscious channels and celebrants… Within this experience nestle the companions of pure observation such as curiosity, exploration, appreciation, wonderment, happiness, playfulness, sensuality in all its forms, a kind of certainty that comes from feeling OK, the wonderful gifts of giving and receiving, the even more wonderful gift of having distance from your creaking Mind so that the soul may be experienced and the most wonderful gifts of all, namely love, sometimes ecstasy and even that warm, mystical, mysterious energy rising and spreading like the love of god would be if there were a god, the only existing word for which is kundalini. If you haven’t felt it, you can’t get it by trying; if you have felt it you’ll know that it’s a place you never expected to be, even for the short while it lasts and the following hours of wonderment.

Pure communication is, I believe, one possible doorway to the land where these feelings can exist in untainted form, received as a gift as you give yourself into the light with no thought of status or reward, no being wrong or being right, no attempt to influence or resist, no nagging sociological backdrop or grating emotional babble attached. It’s tough to get there but you don’t achieve it by being tough. It’s a real challenged to The Mind that’s running you, but you can’t do it by being grim and correct or chanting mantras devoid of humour. This new place is good fun, sometimes amusing in a harmless way that is not laughing at anyone else, potentially joyful, even abandoned, and the energy flow is going to be shocking when you first get there because the stress and strain and dis-ease that dog you normally are simply not going to be felt.

Oh, and since there are no lies in this garden because at that level of involvement of soul only truth telling is possible, you are finally going to know the absolute certainty that you never achieve with all your Climate of Lie attempts to manipulate life, only you won’t know it in triumph, as a success, you will only know it as a congenial twin to yourself, alongside you, where you is in a fascinating, oscillating, moment to moment migration, as by osmosis, between your conscious intellectual appreciation and your profound, poetic, bottomless and restful twin: your soul.

The Buddha famously discovered enlightenment by trying to stifle his own breath. Some people touch their soul in times of extreme pain, shock and loss. I have touched it in a time of deep grief and paralysing depression with an exhausted body, following the death of my wife from a long and painful illness. It was taking me an hour to mount the stairs and I was struggling for oxygen, not realising that my heart was under breaking strain, forced to pause and sit after every two steps and unable to remember what I did five minutes ago or even why I was stuck on the stairs. As I sat there, just about ready to die, I asked myself what was left of me with everything I used to be destroyed. No money left because I spent it all on caring for her. Hardly any friends left because they all ran away from the horror. No energy whatsoever, no appetite, no strength. No hope, no stratagems, no solutions, no methods even. And not that much sanity either, nor enough memory to complete even simply tasks. So what was left of me?

The image was of a toy gyroscope, like the one that fascinated me as a child, the one I used to spin on a small Eiffel Tower until it leaned at a crazy angle, the one that seemed to take on a life of its own once you set it spinning. That’s something like what I had left, a dynamo inside me, spinning at a dangerous tilt but still on the tower. That’s me, I realised; that is my soul and it is still alive and it can recover and it can lift me along with it, back to life.

The breakthrough we each need to make in order to recover our purity is something like that. Each person’s will be different. It may have an image like mine did or many images or it may just be a ball of bright light. We are talking about touching the unknowable and there are no rules but once you have this sense of self you will no longer be your status, your money, your work, your relationships, your faults, your perfections, your good taste, your clever jokes or what other people think of you. You will be you and it will be wonderful. And others like you or moving that way will recognise you and be drawn to your side and the differences will not matter. You will live in truth and love but there will be no religion perverting it. And you can retain your earthly foibles and tolerate yourself as you drink too much coffee, eat too much cheese, slightly overdo the wine, make slightly stupid jokes, spout daft opinions ‘cos you just can’t stop, think too much about sex and sometimes act on that in ways you don’t want to be ashamed of but have been. You’ll still be that asshole you’ve always been, in fact, but this time your soul is standing next to you and you know for certain that you are also something more than the idiot who lives at your house and walks in your shoes.

Roughly speaking, in answer to the sarcastic challenge of the sold out, this is where I would start to “put something in the place” of your lousy, meme-ridden world of lies and brutality.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here

Let’s have a look at what Diderot is saying about habit forming when we get involved in a friendship :

“It is the deficiency of our being that gives birth to friendship; next it is the deficiency of friendship itself that destroys it. When we are alone, we feel our misery; we feel that we have a need for support; we look for a protector of our preferences, a journeyman for our joys and sorrows; we want someone of whom we could confiscate their heart and thoughts. Until this very moment friendship seems the sweetest thing on earth. But then, do our feelings change when we get what we’ve wished for? 

The moment that we see something we like from a distance, at first it bonds our desires. Then, when we reach it, we perceive its void. Our soul whose sight was limited by the distance, cannot rest when she sees further down.

Thus friendship, which restricts our claims at a distance, stops restricting our claims when we come close by: friendship does not fill the void that she has promised to fill. She leaves us with the needs that guide us away and lead us to other things we like. Which means that we start neglecting ourselves, we become difficult, we soon require like an homage the kindnesses that we in the beginning received as a gift. It is in the character of men to appropriate bit by bit the favours that one have once been given to them; a long possession gets us used by nature to consider those things that we have been given by others as our own: custom convinces us that we have a natural right to the will of our friends; we would like to rule over them; on the moment that these claims are mutual, like it happens often, the love gets irritating,  there is yelling from both sides, it produces bitterness, coolness, nasty explications, and the break.” 

An interesting observation: friendship can never be for granted, it’s a gift from one person to another. So, are our ideas of friendship unrealistic, or is Diderot’s structure too pessimistic?

13

Uncertainty and anxiety are deeply connected and almost universally co-present in human interactions. Picture a feisty teen schoolroom: the teacher maintains order by keeping the students on their toes; the students vie with each other and test the limits of the teacher. Sometimes they use tricky questions; sometimes they make ambiguous remarks; sometimes they snatch moments of humour at the expense of another. No one ever gets to relax; no one can trust what’s happening; no one really knows where they stand; everyone is watching their back all day long. It’s in such an environment that we learn to be adults and for many people it carries on for the rest of their lives in ever more refined forms: the cocktail party; all day at work; the drama club; the social networking group, whatever.

But it starts much earlier than that. Even very young children soon learn that they can manipulate their parents by asking loaded questions and that parents start cooing at your early signs of intelligence and then wrapping themselves in knots to please your every whim if you dress it up in a cute question and whine slightly. Parents fight back by asking overbearing and embarrassing questions to impose discipline and morality. Pretty soon the word “why” is a cosh and every interchange is loaded with behavioural uncertainty as the kids test adult authority and parents try to establish civilisation. You don’t notice it when you’re locked into it but I’ve never seen a young family who weren’t playing many complex, interlocking variants of this game in which everyone is damaged, some terribly so and the usual results brought about: loss of trust, peace, certainty, even love. This also never ends and usually drives our adult close relationships, not to mention our own families in due course. Similar patterns, more grotesquely played out, can be observed in relationships with domestic pets.

By the time we reach independent adulthood it’s pretty much impossible not to be living in repetition compulsions relating to games you are still hoping to win and it’s extremely rare to find anyone whose behaviour is not tantamount to a set of strategies to establish their own primacy or at least protect themselves against domination by others. Entitlement culture is born and we become suspended in the climate of lie where nothing has a genuinely innocent purpose any more and except in the early stages of endless love no-one ever lets anyone relax into knowing where they are and that who they are is totally appreciated. This only lasts in the best of times until the sex runs out and you have to design a modus operandi about household routine and how to hold conversations in order to go any further. Welcome to the negotiated relationship, that everlasting, all pervasive purgatory for our souls – now cut off from any chance of heaven.

And don’t forget that in such a world your home life is supposed to be a refuge from even worse threats to emotional stability posed by the “rat race” in the “concrete jungle”… A land where your dress code, your smartarse talk, your clever politics, your blood curdling submission in the face of bullying and favouritism, your deliberate lying to make the sale and your acquiescence to the incredibly low moral standards of the marketplace – all of these things are a poison to the soul, all day, every day, until you no longer notice and may even become a champion for the whole disgusting “system”, especially if it brings you personally a measure of success as you claw your way over the hopes of others.

In such a world love is very rare, friendship is simply a joke and the chance of anyone feeling genuinely good about themselves is almost nil. The best you can get is fake bonhomie, uneasy political truce, confused ideals, negotiated relationships, a desperate need for distraction and a pile of consumer goods to reward you for selling yourself. Thank God you’re so stylish and you never make an aesthetic, ethical, ecological or political faux pas!

The special people who run things actually want all this anomie, of course; it’s an ideal divide-and-conquer strategy and they didn’t even have to think it up because it arose naturally from the ping pong game of truth and power fought in advanced societies between old moralities and social controls and the new, liberal, correct ideologues that infest our media. The soft government regulates to give kids more rights so that teachers can no longer bully them into submission; the kids take more freedom than was meant and threaten the stability of the system; so the incoming hard government imposes ridiculous new standards on the teachers forcing all the good ones to go mad or leave, bringing in mediocre people with no standards themselves who can’t even organise education, let alone make it inspiring. Result: billions spent each year to deliberately produce social chaos and letting in threats to the whole culture through violence, drugs, unwanted pregnancy and teen megalomania generally. Result two: the next generation is even crazier and huge ghettos of untouchable subhumans eating only junk food develop in all major cities, where no one else dare get out of their car.

Groovy film makers sometimes stir the pot by making the downtrodden masses look like victims who are really very nice people but they aren’t. Nor are the global billions living in filthy slums. Some of them are sometimes OK but the culture they produce from within themselves is generally cruel, brutal, selfish and even more devastating to the soul than the dead culture of Stepford suburbia. Anyone with any sense has already left town, no matter what the price, because nothing good can ever grow there. Even the people in Hollywood know this, so obvious it is, Obi Wan, yet the media liberals, hiding in their groovy inner city wholefood trattoria, somehow feel the need to deny it. This is hard to understand, but I assume it is form of denial that makes a nice clashing paradox with their apparently non-judgemental memes, such as the one where only fascists are bad and capitalism can be cool, you know…

Anyway, I don’t really care to discuss “society” because it’s an infinite debate, going nowhere forever, so many vested interests generating endless memaganda (propaganda for their memes), everyone in denial but guarding their own little privileges, even among the poorest of the low, obviously among the would-be specials, desperately among the suburban slaves and dishonestly among the city slickers. They’re all right, all the time, and you simply can’t argue with that. They right even ten years later when their views have changed. They’re so right they can smell that you’re a troublemaker from the very first sentence you speak…

No, what interests me is the ontology of all this and just for now my attention falls upon the challenging interrogative as a basic unit of inter human commerce. People could ask genuine questions, seeking information, understanding and knowledge, yet they hardly ever do. I am not opposed to all statements that could be transcribed with a question mark. Instead, my target is the false question that is intrinsically a challenge and may also express itself merely in voice tone or body language, and may hide itself in affable humour. The Mind (not the intellect, the heart or the spirit or even the brain or a collection of electrons but The Mind, the guardian of the entitled ego)… The Mind never, ever hears a pure statement of question and never reposts in purity either. It does not know how and was never designed to do so. Its purpose is to weigh all incoming and outgoing traffic for status and like a bad email filter it sometimes deletes the good stuff and sometimes lets in attacks. In fact it lives in training mode for the whole of your life, constantly trying to figure out what kind of conversation, representing what kind of status relationship, will finally make you the supreme being it wants you to be.

Someone like me can rattle virtually any Mind within a couple of minutes because I transmit strange messages on unusual frequencies, which drives The Mind immediately to escalate to red alert status. I can see it in their eyes, the questions: where is this guy coming from; what is his status; is he taking me seriously; am I being respected for all my knowledge and achievement; does he admire my beautiful personality and fabulous taste in clothes; is he making fun of me… and on it goes.

Luckily The Mind doesn’t get to meet someone like me very often so it normally has a much firmer grip on its environment and can blank unwanted intrusions without straining its ironical-putdown and raised-eyebrows-in-scorn modules. And if that’s not enough it can walk away, though it prefers to give intruders a good kicking first so they’ll never forget the day they dissed the Mighty Mind.

But all minds will meet people bigger than themselves who make them feel like small-time outsiders and all minds will begin to perish when life hits them with divorce, failed ambitions, job loss, treachery, debt, sickness, cancer, heart attack, ageing, not to mention in poor countries political upheaval, war and natural disasters. And traffic accidents, the mechanism of tragic change that is so obvious even to Hollywood scriptwriters. All minds will reach for the bottle, the pill or the meditative trance one day, either that or they blow a fuse into depression, Aspergers or Alzheimers to take themselves out. Everyone will know devastating loss and shock and depression to add to the rejection and resignation they already know and have been trying to forget.

previous parts of Touch are here

to discuss this please go here