You can not keep creating your past, because if you do your future is the only place where you genuinely connect with your present, and by then, it has changed.
If you have the feeling that you never catch up with yourself, the thinking habit of constantly referring to the past is a sure fire way to make sure that you are utterly incapable of so doing.
For that reason sanity rests upon this simple fact - being in the present does mean being able to concentrate. It is natural when faced with difficult decisions to allow past wounds to terminate eventualities, if one is thinking about how much worse off you were back when you were being victimised or marginalised. The Nelson Mandela's of this world are celebrated in life, whereas the meglomaniac rock star is celebrated in death. When their recording of the present is no longer possible, and the conscience no longer exists (materialists and the other lot both agree, after death, the person is not there with a recording conscience) it is no longer possible to tell them off for their behaviour. All that is left is their remains, which in the case of a great artist is miles and miles of video tape and sound recordings.
The TV star persona is not the same. They surf the wave in the very present. Although the medium of TV news is almost fiction these days, it is chosen facts being served from the present rather than history being made.
You can recall the players in a great event - for example when the USSR fell - I can remember Gorbychov, Yeltsin, Breshnev (even if I can not spell their beautiful names!) but I do not remember any but perhaps the most famous and celebrated news media personae - but nothing specific comes to my mind. Of course there is a percentage of the population that would stringently disagree, the news readers themselves who live probably in a house populated by the photographs of their interview with Thatcher or moments in the crowd at a Reagan press conference. This kind of record is like thought, entirely personal.
And then along came social networking. It means that anyone's history can be shared, dredging up old ghosts and perhaps being able to laugh at them is now possible. It is not however what I see happening. On myspace I see moments of abandoned creativity - evidences of aspiration. On facebook I see social chit chat at a sort of primitive stage - nothing heavy ever occurs here as it is a real social network consisting entirely of people who confirm knowledge of you. On myspace one has thousands of friends including many fake celebrities. One's post are similarly oriented to being artistic rather than social.
On Facebook, there is a rudimentary social structure revealed by its "code window" (the view of data you are allowed to see). Because it is a public site, you do not want to put your copyright works on it or they will be stolen and promulgated. This refusal to recognise copyright and the lack of a "skin" design that is individualised is what makes it more personal.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Twitter. Seemingly random, but social in that you get links to things that are confined to a particular need. It was only the other day that I twigged - more than one Twitter account is actually a good idea, so long as one of them is linked to my website.
The concept of privacy seems removed, but it isn't. It is a place of social mediation like a show and tell party. Thus difficult to talk about subjects can not belong and if you are friends with an artist, you will be promoted to. It reflects what we are. Not what we were. Although that is there scrolling away like memory.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Loss of the parent
There is nothing more ridiculously tragic than a mother of beautiful children taking her own life. A friend's mother did this, all those years ago, two years before my own father died. Way back in the 1960s, she in Switzerland and he in London. She died due to unbearable depression it was eventually revealed. He died due to heart failure. And another death in the family, maybe suicide. They all died due to drugs, mainly medical.
We are not allowed to talk about suicide. It is too harsh to remind ourselves how fragile a fabric life really is - because our minds have evolved a failsafe - so long as we keep our wits about us, life is full of possibility. Fear of the other side and fate helps hold us back from the edge, from that potentially empty void of nothing.
As tragic as suicide is, it is more than just a moment of decision. It more likely follows much intellectual processing and when the instrument of thinking is not functional, either damaged so much there is no future without pain (P addiction and severe speed addiction cause brain damage) or shut down (addiction to barbiturates is a slippery slides into an increased risk of heart failure) there seems no solution.
The death of a parent has many side-effects. It is something that people misunderstand, and overlay their own supposed grief saying things like "you have to be so angry about that, it sucks!". You do not have to be angry. You just have to live anyway.
After many years, I have learned that Humans are indeed fragile in many ways. They survive due to an inner belief in the happy place to which the mind returns. (And good food and exercise).
It is not due to any ability to worry or be concerned. If you drop everything to be with your children, and this should normally apply to fathers too, then so be it. The world can turn without you a couple of times.
Our social order should change so it does not work against our wise evolutionary need - it is not rational to expect a parent to put others before their children. It is ugly and insane. Mental and physical health are both far more important than income and investment.
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