Saturday, January 25, 2003

A woman recently kept telling me how mean she would have been to me in college. As if, by being nice perhaps, I would have opened myself to ridicule or worse. That's a difficult concept for me to grasp. People just generally aren't mean to me, joshing, joking, yes. But no meaness. When they are, I've never really felt much impact. They themselves become objects of compassion, not scorn, on my part, which I've always found has a profoundly disarming affect. I guess the idea, for a woman, of being mean to me, as a young woman to a young man, means taking advantage of me. But there's a profound difference between kindness and ahisma, and weakness. My compassion never compromises my dignity. Not from my center, even when I know there are things awry around me. I guess the perception is that I do not know, that I am not aware, and my perceived lack of perception makes me weak. When I perceive and simply choose not to react. To treat them with dignity, in hopes that they will conform their actions, eventually, to such standards. Or separating other people's choices from my own, not noting them as being of consequence to me. The concept is difficult for me to understand clearly, let alone explain, that my strength, and not my weakness, comes not from not knowing and acting with compassion, but in fact knowing and still choosing to act with compassion, regardless of how others perceive me or react. 3:46:46 PM

If a Machine Creates Something Beautiful, Is It an Artist?. If computers become better than humans at chess, does that mean that computers are being artistic or that chess is essentially a complicated puzzle? By Dylan Loeb Mcclain. [New York Times: Technology] I remember teaching Claire to teach chess, sophomore year of college. We sat down at the board and I talked to her about chess being a game of time, initiative, space and material, going over the philosophy in such detail that she finally flipped the board over in frustration. Mike Heiman taught her the moves later that day. The question outside the scope of this specific article is whether or not art provides answers to complicated puzzles. How often does art predict science? Tapping into the raw depth of knowledge, the wild math we all know in our beings. Presenting those patterns, those layers, before we understand what they mean.    3:24:39 PM

A couple thoughts today. One, the inceasing use of online currency incentives by merchandisers. I wonder if that will lead eventually to some significant percentage of consumer spending using buying points, for candy bars or cigarettes. Two, one of the interesting, most interesting, criteria for life being discussed is the idea of a membrane. That to be a distinct life form requires differentiation. As defined by a membrane that distinguishes a life form from another. Today, my arms aren't sore from the wrestling shenanigans. But my abs are, right in the center. Which I guess is where the strength last night came from. Yoga. Again.   2:47:27 PM

The dishwashers were challenging folks to arm wrestle tonight. I knew, before I stood at the table with them, that I would win. They are young and strong, but I am old and wise, and not in all that bad shape. I think they were surprised, with their trash talk, that I just smiled. And told them we were going to arm wrestle. That I wasn't going to wrist wrestle with any adolescent boys. That we were going to arm wrestle.  And then casually, without fanfare or grunts or jumping up and down. I took them down. I told Stanley and Brian that they were harder than my 105 pound college girlfriend. Claire would actually be tougher at times, with her strength of mind, and her tricky tongue in the ear seductions, pushing all her ballet trained weight against my one arm. But they were tough, especially when Stanley tried to use both arms. But I was unbudgeable. This night. As I'd decided I'd be. Which is worth more than high school wrestling and football and weightlifting. And I needed that. After spacing on a table for nearly half-an-hour. They were, fortunately, nice people. And tipped well. I bought them dessert. Bethany bought them a nice bottle of wine. She was pissed. I am glad I am not fired. Which was an important example of the consequences of mistaking the map for the territory. I looked at my reservations, as scheduled, not the actual tables. And that stretch of table wasn't expected until 8:30pm. The flooding, the unseasonably warm temperatures, the tornado, the fact that the cartographer was suffering from scurvy, whatever. But that table was sat at 7:15pm or so, and I didn't even notice them as mine until at least 7:30. I didn't even have any presence of mind to have any pretense. I just stumbled over my apology, and told them I didn't think their table was sat until 8:30pm. I don't know what, if anything, that meant to them, other than the fact that I was too earnest to be incompetent, or too earnest to earn their anger. They tipped well, and actually complemented me on my service, which was embarrassing, as if I'd just finished the 100 meter dash in the waiter Special Olympics in one hour twenty minutes and gotten a "special" medal. For my extra special effort. I think they need to have some emotional testing battery that includes waiting in a restaurant for service. That is when people are at their most infantile, waiting for food, basic needs, layered with social complexity. This table probably would have been hired immediately by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, or any other company that tests emotional IQ. They were so understanding. Of their extra special server, Ben. B.A. and I talked on the drive home about the lady situation. And while it's good to talk to folks, and have them weigh in on the side of "Man, you were just being you. Fuck it if she couldn't deal," - which I still don't totally agree with. I think there are ways of being uncompromisingly self without being a freaky boy. And I crossed the line. But it makes me feel better anyway. That people tell me I'm not a freaky boy. Even if it is just because I'm their extra special casanova, Ben. But it brought me back to going down to the Ozark Summer to do a workshop on men supporting women in the environmental community, at Terry's request, summer of something, maybe 1995, when my car broke down in Caledonia, 5pm, Saturday before Easter Sunday, and I sucked it up when the convenience store owners said they knew someone who could come down and "nigger rig" my car for me, folks who probably had never met a person of color in their life, and when Dex drove the 1.5 hours to get me, and I joined him and Adam two weeks later, when they went on a fishing trip, and they dropped me off to get my car, that Roger, from Irontown, had fixed on Easter Sunday, charging me extra, for a total of $50. Wow. A lot of memories there. Writing them down. I just remember Mike, who once, years later, on a hike in John Muir National Forest, upon picking up a piece of dirty licorice from the ground, pondering eating it, commented that some of the habits he picked up from living among hobos kind of both fascinated and disgusted him, who just wanted to turn the focus of the conversation from recognizing male privilige in our interactions with women, taking time to recognize that we are the dealers in gender's game of 21 Blackjack, and actively listening, more than anything, not interrupting, in space or words, and focusing on modeling that in the interaction itself with those men on that hot August day, to talking about why his girlfriend had dumped him a few months earlier. And Simon, just constantly interrupting and inserting himself and dominating the conversation, almost as a parody of male privilige. And I walk away from situations like that, like facilitating RAVEN groups, knowing that the lessons contained in the interaction, that specific set of circumstances, were so much more valuable than any curriculum I had to offer, at least for those prepared to listen, and recognize, even to the point of "relinquishing" power, to let people feel what that felt like, even if it meant a rocky ride. But what the Mike thing, in the context of the woman situation, reminded me of, is the words I would've like to have offered, which would have been, not so much get over her, as get over yourself. That's the trick, with relationships, is that failed ones are not about the other person, but about ourselves, and that's a much more fundamental and scary fact to face. That there's no enchantment that can help make it, or you, better, either before, during, or after an affair, however short, however long. There's no quick fix either way, only continuing to face yourself, alone, and be happy with that, either way. Any other is just loneliness, often magnified being with someone. One of the key points of attachment parenting, as provided by Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept, is that infants who are raised with insecurity and separation spend the rest of their lives, as children and adults, functioning under the precept that they are unloved. In search of love. I inadvertantly read the book while I was at Cave Creek, flipping through it, until I'd read the whole thing, and that concept, as Freudian and Jungian and whatever -ian as it sounds, could be right on. I had to sift through some of the naive and outright BAD ethnography, but giving babies unconditional love and respect as little human beings, capable, at an early age of making choices, just seems, instinctively, and as borne out in "primitive" cultures, to make sense. In our world, so many of the choices, even early in life, we make as parents, perpetuate a mass mediated sense of self, a longing for consumption as fulfillment, as it never is, that we all get caught up in the cycles and cycles of longing. The tricky part is finding that sense of self, fulfillment, completeness, when all we've been taught rebels against the notion of ourselves as completely loveable beings, and revels in the idea of ourselves as needing to deserve, through compliance to some outside, unloving authority, that love. It may be too late for adults, necessary for us, however imperfectly, to begin, piece by piece, to impart that to the next generation. Fulfilling, eventually, the prophecy of thunder and rain. That is a story I should name. Sometime. But not tonight. Because I need to harmonize. In my sleep. Throwing holy biscotti at demons, and drinking five times more poisonous glass cleaner than they consume at their challenge, and breathing like fire, even though a small dose killed my father, the priest, in my dream last night. But the demons shrank, literally, and ran, reduced from universal ominous forces into little stick figures, with pained on teeth, who were too laughably small and frail to tear apart, once I had them in my hands, my arms reaching into narrow miles long cavernous spaces to grab them, while I instructed the paramedics on what to do to revive my dead dear old dad.   And these were old demons, faced, but not defeated even in dreams earlier that night, just banished, not captured, not puzzled over, not defeated, not laughed at, with compassion more than malice. Beyond all the potent symbolic meaning, and I guess holy biscotti hold that as well, the thing I remember most vividly is throwing that biscotti at the demons, which made them go briefly for cover, but it was only in drinking MORE of their poison, their glass cleaner, gulping it down in gallons, at their challenge, and not dying, nor turning into them, that made them turn tail, shrink into paper mache creatures, barely cognizant, like marionettes lost their puppet masters. Even so, I'm glad the real ones, the marionettes, are tonight, at least, still out in the car. 3:10:31 AM