The Nothing Hour

Once upon a time I would have written a poem, but instead I simply looked at the shags - some grooming, some sleeping on the jetty in the Thames. They had a sense of time about them. The waters of the river racing along below them as the tide slipped away, the tide of people rising as the hour of the weekend approached. It was Friday.

I do not know when the shags came to rest upon their perches; I did not stay to find out when they left; it was time un-packaged, awaiting no delivery, un-stacked, not waiting. This came to call itself the "nothing hour"; I a lone traveller standing on the bank forgetting where I was going beside a flock of sea birds with nowhere to go.

This, the nothing hour, is what our lives are made from. We layer, we mould, we struggled and fuss to paint over it, draw its edges, mow its lawns, build upon it, try to befriend it with dinners and drinks, hang the fairy lights of love from its boughs but it is never amused it simply watches and wonders when we will be seated and calm.

My Greatest Work of Art + more examination of jobs

Was thinking recently my sacking from work was my greatest work of art yet... as good as anything that "my muse" inspired ... a dance performed by many people some conscious and some unconscious of the art work ... layered and ironic.

Talking to my uncle today who used to manage the maintenance of nuclear submarines it became clear where my disagreements lie (tell the truth?). People are paid according to their skill. Thus if someone from a highly skilled guild stands in for a lower skilled worker, they still get the higher wage.

Now compare this with the free market. I have discussed the distribution of wealth many times and how their is no real connection between work and pay. The best foundation of the link lies in the free market. Jobs which are easily filled have a low wage, and the converse is true. Certain trades then have to form cartels (doctors, accountants, solicitors, chartered ... etc) so that they can maintain supply and fix wages at the same time. Other types of unions achieve the same purpose. However if everyone fixed wages above the free market level the system would not work so governments are traditionally heavy handed with nurses, teachers, etc.

So there are two systems at work. There is the free market (supply/demand) determination of wage and there is the Traditional. Now to my mind only the former has any meaning. Why? Well, it is true that society has a long history and the appeal of certain jobs goes beyond what they actually do - the meaning of certain jobs like soldier is quite different from what it actually is (killing... and yes soldiers do other things but kill... but if a carpenter has a saw as his tool, what does a man with a gun as his tool do?). So in a "fictional" way there is meaning to jobs. But as is clear from the direction this blog has taken I am not interested in fictions here, only truth.

The truth is seems is that a job exists for what it does. If it makes nothing that can be sold then it cannot be paid. If it makes something that is saleable then it gets paid. That is the Law (truth). It has been obscured by history and injustice, but this is where money comes from - it does not grow on trees as the Capitalists secretly believe. What is made need not be physical obviously: a book can be sold, and idea, a lie even!

Now this is not the way things are. Jobs have become a complex cocktail of life's unexamined issues - most importantly the question of "what to do?". When we are working this problem seems solved.. but it isn't. Working is just an avoidance... unless we are working because of what we do, not doing what the job requires.

So the point of view that has become very clear recently links a whole lot from this blog. Being "in a job", and being "out of a job" are meaningless ideas. Does our life stop when we don't have a job? Does it start when we do? It might seem like this if we have no clue what our life is about, in which case a "job" is just avoidance. If we have a meaning to our life, and our actions have meaning then it makes no difference what packaging we have. The only difference is that we may be poor, or rich as a result. But if we are true then surely it follows that our actions will have value, and therefore must be saleable, or at least support us? This is the faith that we must have to be free, otherwise we live in fear and become dressed by our expectations rather than by what we do and what is meaningful.

It follows that if I have any meaning of life myself it should be present in the authenticity and truth of what I say here. The two are interestingly connected!

So its obvious really but we become a doctor because we want to help people to be free from disease. We do not become a doctor to please our parents, or have lots of money, or belong to the highly qualified class etc ... this is obvious right? It is just that the world has become very deluded over the centuries.

So put the Plays back on the stage and find our true lives seems to be the calling.

Pulp Fiction and morality

I was just watching Pulp Fiction last night - a simply superb film and one of the most rewatchable I think there is.

I was washing up during a part of it: where Marcellus gets raped (which is one of the funniest moments in cinema :-) and Butch returns to sort things out. Through the stylised posing with japanese blades it is a moment of kindness toward Marcellus. There is a good morality which runs through the film.

But while washing up I took a kitchen knife and held it to my finger to examine what this meant in reality. What if I did just decide to slice my finger off? Thoughts like this can drive you mad, and if you have OCD they can seem to get very dangerous, and if you are depressed you might just think it is a good idea to harm oneself. But with a strong enough mind to fight off the distrortions that arise it is actually a situation like oil and water. A knife belongs no where near my finger, and to cut my finger off is (while possible in the imagination) makes no more sense than rain falling upwards. There are many delusions swirling in the mind (I mentioned a few at the start of the paragraph) which cloud the issue but in reality the two simply don't fit together.

Looking again at Pulp Fiction one can see the illusions that it has created. The gangster world of people set against one another, polarised in a sequence of mexican style stand offs (the hallmark of Tarentino), the violence and style with which they interact a pantomime of carefully crafted illusions. It is believeable world, one that we enjoy being part of - the result of two centuries of American culture and before that European input.

But, in reality, it is absolute fantasy. Every single part of it could never be real. Yes people may carry guns and shoot one another - but the reality is not what we see in Pulp Fiction. This then turns to the press in the UK at the moment and moral panic about youth violence.

It is an extraordinary world we like in where filmic illusions are played out by people in reality. In true reality our relationship with all things is one of non-violence. A stone cannot commit violence against another stone, an arm cannot commit violence against another arm. It is our interpretation of the events that makes it violence or non-violence. The youths stabbing one another I doubt sees this - they have believed that worlds like Pulp Fiction or that manufactured by 2Pac (who believed it himself) are real. But looking slowly and carefully it is like crafting a ducks head onto an orange: it only works in make believe.

We criticise the kids but the politicians are equally at fault. The recent spate of wars are simply no different from youth crime: why the press sanctions one and not the other is another illusion. But, I must be careful not to let such thoughts sour my relationship with the people in the press or the politicians.

So finally I saw it clearly. Good and Evil has always been a Christian struggle for me between the nobility of the good and the temptations of the evil, yet they say that the Enlightened are beyond good and evil. Plato would agree that evil is not a struggle against temptation, so much as a struggl;e against ignorance. It is not selfish men or the tyranny of evil which beset the righteous man, but simply illusion. When we are fooled by illusion then we develop wishes and desires which have no reality, and then we commit evil. But with mind freed from mistaken seeing then reality is just that and what we do in accordance with reality is only good. That is what Goodness is, no more and no less than Reality.

This kind of fits with my analysis of Law (previous blogs). Scientific and Religious law share the common feature that you cannot break these Laws: they are Laws of reality - they represent how things are they are the truth. They are the word of God.

Legal law however is quite different. It is a measure: a ruler: It is logos. We are judged by the law to be on one side or the other. It is not that we could not break the law - it doesn't govern action like this - it simply decides where our actions have fallen according to a standard. The standard being a complex amalgam of religious, cultural and procedural rules.

In reality if I stab someone then sadly for me the consequences are already under way. Such an action doesn't happen by accident and I must have a profound cloud of illusion about me to have performed such an action, a cloud which this action will have fuelled. I can expect a life of hostility, confusion, anger, hatred, loss and pain simply from this action. The legal system is only there to catch me with its scales and to help me from spiralling further into illusion.

Its a simple understanding. Good and Evil are thoughts belonging to us the illusioned. I think this was good and that was bad as I reflect upon my confused actions in life. But what I call Good now will when I am purer and wiser become simple the natural and obvious course. Often people call this process habit, it is more: it is the seeing things truthfully and our being straightforward and honest.

I have made a big mistake - Society

I was reading some Tim Ingold essays last week. The book sort of lept out at me while I was heading toward the Buddhism section - and there is a funny thing everything I am reading at the moment from ancient history to anthropology to Buddhism to literature all seems connected. Instantly I like his reasoning, and I realised a huge mistake in my thinking so far: Society.

Society has been left left out of my bottom up approach of late. Tim Ingold argues that Society is not some expansive structure which moulds its components, nor is it the result of underlying subconscious processes either: it occurs in the everyday conscious processes of willing agents.

It occurred to me that taking part in the vast ocean of human interaction was something that I have progressively cut myself off from in a Cartesian way, beginning to doubt the wholesomeness of everything. The Iraq war was the icing on the cake. The people that surround me are ostensible idiots and this self generated proclaimation has damaged my relationship with them and society.

For Ingold the meaning of life arises out of the nexus of interaction that gives things their meaning. Culture and society are not to be seem as identical. Culture is a tool that is used by the agents of society to order their lives. Ingold goes so far as to say that consciousness IS this ocean of interaction (although I must have misread him because of the contradiction that on one hand being conscious is a precondition of taking part in society, but on the other it is also identified with society). It is also the

But this is good enough to identify my mistake. In its simplest version our meaning of life can only be sought in our relationship with others.

However like everything this only goes so far: enter the Ouroboros. Ingold is then saying that the meaning in his life has been manufactured from his intellectual relationship with readers like myself (and mine in reverse). This duplicates the hypothesis of which we talk: firstly the hypothesis in its ordinary meaning of language interaction and secondly in its social meaning of inter-personal interaction. This hypothesis is more than just a ball to be tossed about, it is proposing that it can see itself in the mirror: it talks of meaning being constructed in relationships, and in so doing it sets up a relationship: it talks of something which it actually is. Does this mean then that we can talk of a relationship in terms that are beyond actual relationship, or is actual relationship required for us to talk about it, or are they same and how would we know the difference without another relationship ad infinitum.

So the model breaks down it seems as the extreme limits like everything. But again it has been supremely useful. Arriving at the Buddhist section the next day after my Ingold distraction I realised that Buddha is saying the same thing. Our mind exists in our relationships and the spiritual path is none other than improving our relationships with people. Improving what we do, what we say and what we think.

This is the root of all human life: our relationship with people, and our striving to improve that relation. Well there is a lot of work to do and it doesn't happen all of a sudden!

My leaving work has not improved my relationship with them, but it has bought me this time to think and reorganise the army. Karmically I will be entering exactly the same abusive relationship I had with the bosses at work (they are abusive people). And, while I had been practicing Buddhism for all my time work I never managed to stop the relationship being abusive. They (the bosses) have very deep character flaws and indeed it was my duty as another human being to help them manage those. I lost it eventually and I too became flawed, the relationship broke down even more than before.

But it is good, the river flows on and we gain the experience we need to travel the next section.

So a mark in the sand here. Never step back over the re-re-realisation (for I keep getting reminded of this) that it is in human relationships alone that we find life.

p.s. at least that is stage 1. I have struggled in my webpage for a much, much greater concept of relationship: that which includes all things both animate and inanimate. (That webpage is due for an overhaul. The process which began there and runs through this blog should condense again soon into another webpage - with a focus on clarity and usability!).

Revised Principles again...

My father taught me this:

God, grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

This fits well with the "what is" principle. This is working it is very good. Before we do anything be sensitive and well aware of they way things are. Accept these as a starting point.

Certainly I'm reconsidering where I am, and rather than trying to shift the world to how it seems it should be, I realise one must start with how it is regardless how unpleasant or ridiculous this may seem. Start passive, action should grow as a seed in good soil.

Home
I for get this that the concept of home is no more than a good meal and a place to sleep. These I have found (and blogged before) are all that are needed to give the sense of home be that place to sleep in a 4-poster bed or under a tree.

Wealth Distribution

I was taught by my father that if you do not work then you do not deserve pay. It is an attractive and logical axiom - in "the state of nature" one is led to believe that mankind flourished on the work that he did. One has a wealth of belief connected with this - things like laziness, madness, criminality (a complex syndrome).

If one looks with fresh eyes it does quite work. The existence of voluntary and charity work suggest that there is lots of work that people think needs doing which does not get directly paid in the normal market structure. You have artists also like Van Gogh whose work was never recognised by the contemporary market. You have parents who do the single most important job in the community. Not so long ago well over half the population was unemployed - children, wives and the elderly. Some how the 30% or so of the population, the working men, distributed their wealth quite successfully to the rest of society.

On the other extreme you have people being paid without working for example the capital holders upon which the current system is founded. They get paid twice. Once for the work they did (or their forefathers did, or their subjects did and were taxed) and then again many times more on the capital they have accumulated. There are also lottery winners and those with inheritance who have wealth without working.

Looking again even at the micro level the distribution of work doesn't fit the pattern. We know that the concept of a salary does not correlate with a fixed amount of work - sometimes more and sometimes less.

The relationship between work and pay is almost indefinable - it is a myth upon which the current hegemony is founded. I always like the analogy with the game Monopoly - the current system for all its pomp and seriousness is no more than a huge game of Monopoly that has been championed because the winners like being"winners" - which they wouldn't be were the rules to change as they did during the switch from aristocracy to bourgeois. (Which was just a change of name because the structure remained the same.)

The question however once we accept that the economic hegemony has no foundation in reality is what exactly is "reality", or what system could we have?

Ownership...

I think the general pattern of these blogs is not that things are "wrong" but more that they are only half the story. This is in tune with the Hegelian dialectical view that for every thesis about the world there will emerge a counter view and the tension so arising is what pushes consciousness to develop a new transcandent view - the famous aufhebung if you follow German philosophy. And what is the aufehebung of that ;-)

So there is probably some truth to the notions of ownership that I have rallied against. The most convincing argument comes from Hegel... indeed a single line (which I can't find now) but it says that ownership is the physical projection of the notion of self so that we can examine it in its material form. This is a stage in the development of a spiritual consciousness, that is the best argument for the validity of ownership.

However its antithesis time in these pages and I want to ryle against it's absurdity more.

Walk down to the beach and the gathering of limpets and periwinkles off the rocks, which are good to eat, but better collect some drift wood, making a fire and eat a sumptious meal.

Now take the car to your local supermarket via the petrol station. Gather your food from the shelves, queue and pay at the check-out. Drive home and cook it.

What exactly is the difference? If you look carefully, not a lot. The supermarket won't let you take the food off the shelves, and the petrol station and gas company won't let you just take the fuel without exchanging actually precious metal (or its legally precious equivalent, money). Nature oddly will?

The argument is that the companies own the products and agree to exchange them at a price. To qualify for that exchange process we need to get some money and we have to do some "paid" work. The argument being that the products that the companies sell belongs to them because they have done some work, and we must do some work also.

But as the beach scenario shows this isn't true. There is little more work to collecting food from the beech than going to the shops and collecting it off the shelves, but the former is considered sufficient to demark ownership while the latter is insufficiant.

Nature it has always seemed to me get short changed every time. This is the real error in Mankinds thinking; past, present and probably future. Really Nature owns everything, or as the religions say, the fruits of our labours belong to God.

Once it can be shown that the qualifications for ownership are very unclear then a whole can of worms erupts, most famously the ownership of the extra productivity arising from machine labour and economy of scale. In Capitalist systems the machine owner inherits the machines productivity. Which is expanded to: the investors in a company own the companies productivity. But really this is absurd and more tradition than reason.

The tradition at work here I suspect is the one of ruling class. We accept a ruling class and they have evolved over the ages into the class which owns the industry. They don't really own it, but we accept this hegemony because it fits the pattern we are used to of a ruling class.

It is absurd that the sculpters and builders who built St Pauls cathedral in London are all subsumed by the name of Sir Christopher Wren whose own hands would have been too unskilled to do most of the work. The building - actually regarded as poor in archetectural circles - is the result of the English craft system of the 1700s, traditions going back centuries and having evolved over even longer. C. Wren on the other hand is a figure head from the ruling classes and we accept this, it is part of the tradition.

It is absurd to me that the cleaner who makes the foyer of a grand building look grand is considered "lower" than the owners of that building. Without the cleaner it won't look grand for very long, so really the cleaner is the grand one. The cleaner it is true wouldn't be able to be grand without the big house to clean, and the owners of the big house wouldn't be able to be grand without an army of servants and supporters of their lifestyle - they are inter-dependent and this is a dialectic. In this sense to the wise they are profoundly equal, but many people who think themselves Aryan (noble) are not really Aryan because they are not wise and do not see this. This is where society is collapsing and entering a darkness.

I'm signing off now for a return to the non-electronic world.