CHOPPY...

CHOPPY.  That’s the word right now, not just in me but in the world.  Choppy.  There’s a lot going on and it feels precarious, everything is moving and shifting, some for the better, perhaps, mostly though, I don’t know what way it’s going and it seems like nobody else does either.  It’s all going on, on all the levels and it’s all interconnected, as it always is, but because its really very complicated for people right now, it feels more significant, that interconnectedness.  It feels like there’s a need to see the big picture and every acute detail simultaneously and in a new way.  We can’t judge this with the old standards.  They’re all gone, they won’t serve us going forward.  The political hierarchy appears to be clinging on to old ideas, the people are clinging on for their lives.  It all has to shift, it all needs to change, there’s a truth that we’re afraid of facing, and until we do we can’t embrace the change.  But that truth isn’t clear yet, because it’s all so complicated.

It feels like the old Ireland is over but it won’t fuck off.  We’re still talking about the banks, the church, the economic crisis that’s starting to kill our spirit.  You can feel it on the streets, you can hear it and see it in the fear on peoples faces, the dark choices that we need to start making that we haven’t had to make in a long time.  It’s not all about the money.  It’s not all about the Household tax and the bin charges and now the water meter charge, or the 30 billion plus bailout of the IBRC.  It’s the IMPACT on the people that’s the concern.  Today, the news today speaks of the setting up of a tribunal to discover the goings on of “September 29th - The Blackmail Night” when Brian Cowen, then Taoiseach made the decision to guarantee the banks, leading to the current austerity measures on the Irish people.  The ‘man on the street’ knows that the bailout was based on a series of invisible personalities with shared interests protecting themselves and what they think they have the right to at our expense.  Another tribunal, another opportunity to be lied to and for the responsibility to be shifted and dispersed.  It’s hard to believe in anything ‘official’ in Ireland right now.

It’s hard to keep the individual in mind.  The results of all that pie in the sky economic and political discourse is a lessening of the life of each person on the island.  It’s the diminishing of each persons individual right to live their own life.  The squashing of potential, the minimising of the human spirit in each one of us here and now.  The lack of care for the people on the edge, we’re all moving closer to the margins, and the margin is narrowing every day.  The individual against the state, is the state not a collection of individuals though?  Is the government not there to serve and enhance the life of each of us?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0406/1224314435691.html

Last week Dimitris Christoulas, a 77 year old Greek pensioner shot himself outside the parliament in Athens, in protest of the austerity measures.  His letter is translated as: 

“The collaborationist Tsolakoglou government has annihilated my ability for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone (without any state sponsoring) paid for 35 years.

Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamic reaction (although if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be the second after him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Piazza Loreto in Milan).”

…the young people with no future…

“The first thought of the day.  The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day.  If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.”

– ‘Man Alone with Himself’ Friedrich Nietzsche

The news today also speaks of the Catholic church silencing of Fr Tony Flannery, ordering him to ‘pray & reflect’ on his recent opinions disputing, amongst other things, the doctrine of papal infallibility, and voicing the concerns and beliefs of the vast number of parishioners that women should be ordained, priests allowed to marry etc.  He’s now been silenced by Rome, his opinions not allowed to be aired.  In a way, this seems a bit irrelevant, it feels like the Catholic Church in Ireland is over.  It’s finished.  So what concern is it that one priest has been sent off into the wilderness to reflect?  Apparently though the vast number of people in Ireland still return themselves as Catholic in the census and the churches are all still there, on nearly every street.  Doors closed and locked at night, when they could actually be used for some good purpose, when those that need shelter could put those vast open spaces to good use.  The typical hypocrisy of the church, do as I say not as I do, preaching the words of Jesus and barring those most at risk and in need in our society from a space within their walls, where some good use might be made of those austere and ostentatious relics to a time of painful oppression and coercion of the Irish people, as well as the horrific treatment of children in its care, directly in the actions of a number of priests and indirectly in the cover up and shameful treatment of those people seeking truth and justice as adults, a shame shared by our political system, and still going on, still unresolved.

‘The Murder of Our Souls’ on the hoarding on East Essex St.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/6974210625/

And yet, we’re still letting them have a major influence on how our children are educated, the most vulnerable and innocent people in our society, still being exposed to an organization that should have nothing to do with our lives, an organization which has proven on multiple occasions and continues to prove itself unfit, completely untrustworthy and incapable of caring for us.  It’s absolutely bizarre.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0328/educationfoi.html

“Fantasy of fear.  The fantasy of fear is that malevolent, apelike goblin which jumps onto man’s back just when he already has the most to bear.”

– ‘Man Alone with Himself’ Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve had the fear this week about Phase 3.  I started to have more definite conversations with people about ‘Will You Sleep Rough With Me?’ (Phase 2) and I think that’s made it all more real.  The trajectory of this project is vast.  I’m feeling that vastness right now.  I started reading Man Alone with Himself because the title attracted me this week even though it’s been sitting on my book shelf, or various book shelves since 2008.  I feel alone with myself in this.  And I will be, ultimately.  I’m looking at the streets as I walk through them, I’m passing up laneways and noticing doorways and the smell of piss in corners and the spaces with overhangs, cover, shelter.  And I’m fixated on the river for some reason, I’m watching the green algae line on the opposite bank as the bus turns onto the bridge and I’m looking at the steps and the detail on the bridges and I don’t know what that’s about except that the river has this maybe.  ‘Building bridges’ maybe features there too, whatever that means in this sense.  I went to the hospital this week to see the Dermatologist, to get my feet fixed.  I've been unable to do my usual walks lately because of the excema which the consultant has now diagnosed as dermatits and gave me a new prescription.  It only affects my hands and feet, its a weird thing to be sick with. I need to be able to walk again, the long distances I've gotten used to doing.  It's integral for my soul and for this project.  It's starting to get better, so hopefully I can start walking again soon.

“Seriousness in play.  At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells: it kept on an on, and over the noise of the back streets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out in the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy.  Then I thought of Plato’s words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously, nevertheless …”

– ‘Man Alone with Himself’ Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m having the fear about this ‘blogging’ too.  I’ve never really shared the process of making something from this point on before.  From so early on in the makings and never in this kind of detail about what I’m thinking about, what I’m feeling what I’m seeing and how it’s changing and the looseness of the connections I’m making, or how these thoughts may or may not have a part in this project rather than just in The Life…I suppose everything that’s going on for me has to be informing what I’m making.  The private is the public, the personal is the political, that’s my belief, that’s the root of almost everything I’ve made up to this point so on that level, all of this is relevant and connected to the work.  I just usually wouldn’t tell everybody, I’d usually be mulling away on all this privately and then present the work. 

It feels like I’m sharing my diary.  And I am in a way.  It’s more or less taken over from my notebook lately.

There’s reasons for this related to the project.  One of them is that this is Phase 1, I’m in it now, so be it, so I’m sharing the HERE & NOW of this phase, the research, the thoughts, the process, the various points of interest converging in my head at the moment.  It’s also a way to articulate all of this for myself, to write it down and see it on the page and then try to decipher it and figure out what it is I’m really concerned with.  I don’t need to do that publicly I suppose, but it feels like this is a big project for me and I need it to be transparent, I need it, in some way, to be public.  It’s a way to try to articulate and report back, it’s a means to figure out how I’m going to communicate as this all progresses, through the phases.  It’s a peculiar feeling, I’ve been about to share the Facebook page and blog a few times this week and then stopped myself.  I’m not sure what that’s about really.  Except fear.  It’s about ‘practicing inviting being seen’ it’s a new level to that for me.  Letting people in to what I’m thinking, how I’m putting things together in my head, what I really think and feel and how that changes in The Life.  There's something freeing in admitting to the fear, something which in stating it makes it less of a difficulty, less of a constriction.  I'm afraid, I'm feeling it, sharing it and getting on with it all anyway.  That's The Life.

http://www.jillmagid.net/EvidenceLocker.php

My friend suggested this project to me to have a look at and I’m reading, as an ‘observer’, the letters from the artist Jill Magid.  They arrive hourly, I subscribed earlier today.

http://www.evidencelocker.net/register.php

It’s a very interesting project and equally interesting for me right now is the way she is reporting, the style she is using, the format of the letters and how she describes the physical details of what she’s wearing and the streets she travels as well as weird expansive phrases that take me into another layer of her thoughts and reasoning.

“Desire for deep pain.  When it has gone, passion leaves behind a dark longing for itself, and in disappearing throws us one last seductive glance.  There must have been a kind of pleasure in having been beaten with her whip.  In contrast, the more moderate feelings appear flat; apparently we still prefer a more violent displeasure to a weak pleasure.”

– ‘Man Alone with Himself’ Friedrich Nietzsche

Thoughts walking home from Patti Smith

I've been to see Patti Smith and Sam Shepard at The Abbey tonight. It was an amazing experience to see them both on stage but Patti Smith got me crying, proper tears coming out, not without a context, but without warning, when she sang Pissin in a River. I had brief chats with people and then I left, a bit overcome by the emotions.  I walked out of the Abbey zipping up my coat, it's cold tonight.  Turned left onto the quay and looked across at the barricade, I'm barricaded from that space now, it's out of bounds.  Not that it's a particularly pleasant memory or anything, just that it's a space I occupied one night, for a few hours and it doesn't feel right not to be able to occupy it now.
Walked up and across O'Connell Bridge, looked for the moon, found a star as I walked down the south side of the quay, decided to turn at Capel Street Bridge, like when I was on the camino, I'd be told the route to take, when there were options of two treks, I'd be told in my head which way to go, and I always listened because the camino knows what she's doing. My Spanish friend tells me that the camino is masculine, caminO...I refuse to believe it!  My camino was female! I thought about locations to meet with people for the exchanges, I looked at the far side of Capel Street Bridge, walked up East Essex Street, passing the hoarding with 'The Loss of our Souls' up onto Fishambe St.  Went to Burdocks, got fish n chips, thought about what I'll eat every day.  Looked across at the railings of Christchurch, thought about the footpath round the back before the lane, thought about mapping.  Mapping something else in the locations, mapping another journey while I'm living this one.  I wondered why?  But I like the initial idea of it.  Because I can't ignore that that's all going on too in my soul right now, as I'm thinking about this work and how to make it.  On Saturday night I gave my friend a sketch so she can design my new tattoo, it's time to mark it on the body.  All of it up to this point, all the changes from the last year, all the experience, all the learning, growing up, letting go, beginning again, the potential of The Life.
Today I read about women artists walking, after my friend suggested I look at the recent work of Dee Heddon whose collaborating with Cathy Turner.  One of the artsits, Elspeth Owen slept out for the cycle of the moon, in an orbit around where she lives, spending the night with different people each time.  She had what she termed 'Docking reports' which were texted/tweeted to the site everyday giving a brief account of what happened.  I had been thinking about 'check ins' which would be texting the person on standby each night with my location and status, maybe there's a way to 'check in' publicly each day without the location though.
Tonight Patti Smith read a Yeats poem 'Easter 1916' and in it is the line I ended my camino notebook with "All changed, changed utterly" and it reminded me that every thing is changed, again, here and now, again.  I'm some where else now.
I looked at the remnants of an old doorway attached to new apartments at Christchurch, and thought it was an interesting frame to stand in front of, again I wondered why?  I'm thinking I suppose, a lot about remnants of spaces I occupied, significant spaces I've occupied, where I spoke with someone, spent time in for various reasons, and I wonder if that's important, or at least why that's important.
Why am I writing this down, and am I writing the full story?  No, I'm not. Not really.  'The Love is in the Space Between' perhaps.  Patti Smith said tonight, "Time, Time is a wonderful thing, if you live long enough you'll get to have many great adventures" then after she sang Because the Night as a bonus at the end, she said "Love, Love is the last word" and I loved that!  I'm not ready to tell the full story yet, I'm still figuring out the narrative retrospectively, and to be honest my soul is still in it.
Potential is what I'm thinking about all the time, that's the sadness and the joy, and love infuses that idea, and when The Love infuses everything in The Life the potential thrives.  I don't want to loose sight of that, ever, and particularly within this project.  It's awful, what's happening, terrible things are happening to people out there, tonight as I sit comfortably in my sisters apartment using her laptop, out there in the cold, wet this, our city, people are sleeping outside, there's nothing good about that.
If I stay with that thought though, there is no potential for me, there's no forward momentum, it negates the potential for change.  So I have to stay in The Love, in the Potential of The Life for every one, because every one deserves it. Equally.

Chaos....We Are All MAde of Stars...

Friday, 6^th April 2012

I’ve been reading about the origins of Chaos Theory in ‘Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable’ in James Gleick’s book.  I bought it in 2009 after Ruth Little’s workshop on The Next Stage and only now got to read and finish it.  I can’t understand all the mathematical equations or all the scientific jargon, but the underlying discovery by different people across different fields is fascinating.  Their individual discoveries building towards a coherent theory that changed how The Natural world and The Life is understood.  I can only read it in a philosophical way because I don’t understand the science of it, but it’s fascinating…

“…Feigenbaum used an understated, tough-guy vocabulary to rate such problems.  Such a thing is obvious, he might say, meaning that a result could be understood by any skilled physicist after appropriate contemplation and calculation.  Not obvious described work that commanded respect and Nobel prizes.  For the hardest problems, the problems that would not give way without long looks into the universe’s bowels, physicists reserved words like deep.  In 1974, though few of his colleagues knew it, Feigenbaum was working on a problem that was deep: chaos.”

I’ve started to see this, our city differently since I came home from Annaghmakerrig.  I see doorways and bridges and steps down into the water, the height of the river, I see the Luas stop at Euston Station and I give money to everyone who asks, everyone I can, if I have it to give.  Last night I left the Abbey with my mother and walked across O’Connell Bridge and a very old man was sitting on the bridge asking for money, “Sorry for beggin'’”  he said as we passed, and I gave him some change, “sorry for beggin'’” he said.

“To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.”

I’ve started to tell people what I’m planning, started to tell my family, it’ll take them a while to get used to it, so I’ve started telling them.  Both my father and mother individually have concerns.  My aunt asked, “Will you be all right doing that?”  It’s a good question!  I don’t know yet if I will because I haven’t started.  I need to start soon.  I’ve been waiting on a few factors, the first is money to buy the bits and pieces I need, like the two sleeping bags, for me and my guest.  I’m waiting on my feet to get better, the eczema is very bad at the moment, and I’m waiting on the good time to start, because I want to start with my sister and she’s busy right now.

“They believe they are looking for the whole.”

I also have concerns, the ethical considerations I mean rather than the obvious safety ones.  When I started seriously considering this my circumstances were very different.  I was unemployed for the last six months, and was really struggling to pay my bills and keep my house.  I still am.   So I felt like I was in a position where I might become homeless.  I might have become homeless.  That’s true, if my network of family and friends wasn’t so strong.  I’m blessed with the people in my life.  But I have got some freelance work now and also a grant, well, it’s on the way.  The reality of it is though that there are more people in danger of becoming homeless now, than probably in any other time since the formation of the state.  I’m not sure if that’s an actual fact. One to research, but with the decrease in available social housing, and the massive increase in people buying their own homes prior to ‘the boom’ time, the massive mortgages people were given during ‘the boom’ and now the crash, it seems obvious enough to assume that there is more potential for homelessness, among a greater percentage of the population, because there’s a greater percentage buying their own homes, having been encouraged to do so.  The ideology of ‘owning the land’ permeating the Irish psyche for generations.

“At the same time, objects of everyday experience like fluids and mechanical systems came to seem so basic and so ordinary that physicists had a natural tendency to assume they were well understood.  

 It was not so.”

The possibility to buy your council house, the current Tenant Purchase Scheme 1995, encouraged tenants to buy their rented homes, offering a 3% discount for every year of dwelling, up to a maximum of 30%.  The Housing Act, 1966 made it possible for Local Authority Tenants to buy their own homes, my Grandparents did it in Ballyfermot, lived frugally for the rest of their lives and the house has been on the market since my Grandfathers death in 2008, they lived in it, that’s all, they made it a cosy and modest home, there were no other benefits to owning it, for them or their children.  In the last five years the number of local authority tenants opting to buy their home has dropped by nearly 90%.   It makes sense, the communities where local authority tenants dwell have been hit especially hard, the suffering is starting to show in the communities, not helped by the severe cuts to the community sector.

“…you can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.”

 – Lorenz’ father told him…

And that old man is sitting on O’Connell Street bridge at 10.30pm on a cold night in the wind saying “sorry for beggin'’” and there’s a good chance that he’s been there all along, all through ‘the boom’ and how did we let that happen?  How are we letting that happen here and now?

“Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.”

And I’m still wondering about the ethics of all this, this research and ultimately this durational performance, who I am trying to be?  No one other than myself.  I’m not going to pretend I’m homeless.  That’s not the point.  I’m not homeless.  I have a home.  I’m making myself homeless for a fixed period, performing homelessness in a way, but also being homeless for that period of time.   If I do this though, how will that old man on the bridge feel?  How will it affect him if I’m wandering around this, our city, making myself homeless?   What will it do to the dynamic of my interactions with people, with my forming relationships with the people I meet who are actually homeless?  I need to be really clear in my motivations and in how I relate to every one I meet.  I have to stay with the Truth.  This is not a game.   There has to be set rules which I think through and decide on, interrogating each aspect so that I’m sure what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.  I think Phase II ‘Will You Sleep Rough with Me?’ will help, because I’ll have 12 hours at a time out with people I trust and can debate these questions and clarify them.

“And yet relation appears,

A small relation expanding like the shade

Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.”

- Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos” “

This has to be my story, because that’s the only story I have full permission to tell.  I can’t take about this issue in the abstract.  It’s not right or fair or equal to make presumptions on a life other than my own.  I only know what you tell me, you only know what I tell you.  I have to experience it myself to understand, to experience in a very small way, within limited parameters, and then maybe I can talk about it.   There’s a difference between knowledge and experience, book learning and The Life. 

“The notion of self-similarity strikes ancient chords in our culture.  An old strain in Western thought honors the idea.  Leibniz imagined that a drop of water contained a whole teeming universe, containing, in turn, water drops and new universes within.  “To see the world in a grain of sand,” Blake wrote, and often scientists were predisposed to see it.  … But self-similarity withered as a scientific principle, for a good reason.”

My Grandfather told me I was very adaptable.  “Your very adaptable” he said to me not long before he died.  I didn’t really understand what he meant when he said it, I wasn’t sure why he was saying it.  I suppose he meant that I could change, or react to change and make it positive, I can work with the circumstances as they present themselves and do what I can within them.  And I think he meant it as a compliment, I’m sure he did, and I’m glad he said it to me, because it’s stayed with me and it’s not something I would have noticed about myself, it reassures me now.  I can adapt to the circumstances outside myself and work with them.  I’m not always aware I’m doing that when it’s happening, I just react and go with it.  I don’t always find it easy either.  Change is hard, it’s tricky and confusing and sometimes I spiral into small mode, I become small in the world, less than I used to, it’s subtler now, but it still happens.  Then I notice it because it’s not comfortable for me any more and I make adjustments and get back to myself again.  I know that I’ve learned to do that over the last ten years, become self aware and gained, incrementally, the ability to develop the aspects of my character for the better.  And I suppose that’s the inside part of me that doesn’t change, that’s the core of me that’s solid, no matter what the external circumstances, and I’m wondering more and more about that.  What is it?  Can it be defined as mental health?  I think that’s reductive.  It’s an essence, a core, a solid place inside that I think every human being has, and I think that’s the part that grapples with the darkness that struggles with being alive and why we’re here.  That comes to terms pushing that rock up the hill in the society we have and are constructing. I’m not sure it’s quantifiable at all but I’m interested in investigating it.

“For now, the excitement went beyond pure science.  Scientists who saw these shapes allowed themselves to forget momentarily the rules of scientific discourse.  Ruelle, for example: “I have not spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors.  These systems of curves, these clouds of points suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies, sometimes strange and disquieting vegetal proliferations.  

 A realm lies there of firms to explore, and harmonies to discover.” “

Here & Now is happening, right now.  I’m in it.  I have to remind myself to practice that.  I have to practice here and now “I have no future, I have no past, just here and now”.  My Grandfather used to say “Yesterday’s history, Tomorrow’s a mystery, Today is a Gift, That’s Why we call it the present”.  It turned up in ‘Kungfu Panda’ after he died and I cried in the cinema in Finchley Road.  I love that.  I loved his optimism and his small joys in his life and he lived to be 92 so it was obviously a trusted philosophy for him.

“Schwenk did not believe in coincidence.  He believed in universal principles, and, more than universality, he believed in a certain spirit in nature that made his prose uncomfortably anthropomorphic.  His ‘archetypal principle’ was this: 

that flow ‘wants to realize itself, regardless of the surrounding material’.”

I met her today getting up out of a car park doorway and turning up into Wicklow Street.  She was crying and we walked in step for a while.  “I’m sick of this life” she said, “I can’t do this any more” I asked would she not call into Focus as I gave her the change I had in my pocket, “No, I’m going into a hostel” she said, “I’m not on drugs” would you not go up to the place off Thomas Street, get a sandwich even, talk to a key worker, “I can’t do this any more” she said, tears on her young face. “That’s me brother” she said and walked into the street to meet him, her sleeping bag wrapped round her waist flowing behind her.  And I realized I needed the information, and I needed not to cry myself, not in the moment, I need the information, because I’m not homeless, and I won’t be pretending I am.  I won’t be passive in this, our city, if I can take any action I will, if I can, if it’s appropriate.  And I wondered how I’ll gauge that.  I am myself, I am only myself.  So that’s how I’ll gauge it, just like I did this evening.  In the moment.  I’ll know.  When I know I’ll do, when I don’t I won’t.

I need the information.

Saturday, 7^th April 2012

“Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame-like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturization in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire.”

I dreamt last night that I was buying two tiny sleeping bags, water proof and shiny.  I was consulting with the person in the shop asking questions and looking at how small they folded up, compact.  And in the dream I knew that I wouldn’t have them for long, but I was buying them any way.  And then at some point, in another place not near the shop, I was told by some one in the dream to look down at my bare feet, and I looked down and moved my foot up and as I looked it was all perfectly clear, the skin was perfectly clear, the colour typical and I was really happy.

“The concept of entropy comes from thermodynamics, where it serves as an adjunct of the Second Law, the inexorable tendency of the universe, and any isolated system in it to slide toward a state of increasing disorder.”

My sleep pattern flipped about a month ago now.  It flipped to me being still awake at 5am, 6am in the morning looking out the window at the sky, turning over, trying to sleep, turning back on the light, reading another chapter of Chaos, turning off the light, closing my eyes, not sleeping, looking out at the sky.  Partly because of the new things happening, partly because I’ve a pain in my soul, partly because of the eczema which is hurting my feet, especially the left, for ages now.   I then miss the morning and miss part of the day sometimes.  Yesterday I thought I’d get up, after about an hours sleep and push through to regulate this.  I got up at 6am and pushed through the day, very tired.   I had lunch with a friend, went to my other friend’s gig in Tower Records, (she was amazing!) went to Project to see The Fall (Beautiful and Amazing), stayed in the bar talking to friends and then went home relatively early in the hopes of getting a proper sleep. It didn’t really work, I didn’t really sleep again last night, and got up late again today.  The feeling of being out of sync, disorientated, not in the same pattern as the societal world infuses my life right now.

“Entropy is the name for the quality of systems that increases under the Second Law – mixing, disorder, randomness.  The concept is easier to grasp intuitively than to measure in any real-life situation.”

I think its part of this.  Sleep deprivation, not sleeping comfortably, sore feet, looking out at the sky, not sleeping.

“’You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to perceive it’,

Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn.”

…..?........

“Dynamical things are generally counterintuitive, and the heart is no exception.”

The heart is no exception.  There are no exceptions, everything is fluid.  I woke up with the thought that part of the problem is trying to fix the whole.  The whole is not the reality.  The girl said, “I’m not going into a hostel, I don’t take drugs.”  The solution for the girl on the street getting up out a doorway and crying that she can’t live this life any more, is currently a hostel. Considering the whole, the whole society, it appears reasonable, there’s a dry warm bed there in a hostel staffed by key workers, she’ll be ‘safe’ there.  She doesn’t think so, she doesn’t believe that and she knows because she’s experienced it.  The solution offered to her is no solution.  For her.  It is not a solution for her last night as the temperature dropped and she cried “I’m sick of this life”.  She wasn’t more than 18 if she was even.   The solution can’t be so broad, so concerned with the whole that it misses the individual within.  This, our city, is made up of individuals, all living in the same space, all not living in the same space simultaneously.  The solutions to what’s ailing and failing us require us to see each person in the system. To look at the individual needs within the whole.  And I know that’s complicated and I know its more complex than large, the large brush strokes approach, but it has to be considered.  There has to be a focus on that young girl and her needs last night.  In some way there needs to be an attempt to view the world from the perspective of each person within it.  It’s not enough to presume the solution based on the majority and put it into action, if it doesn’t apply to each person within.  I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m thinking about it now.

I should have asked her what she needed instead of offering her solutions that I hadn’t experienced myself. 

“With all such control phenomena, a critical issue is robustness: how well can a system withstand small jolts.  Equally critical in biological systems is flexibility: how well can a system function over a range  of frequencies.  

 A locking-in to a single mode can be enslavement, preventing a system from adapting to change.”

How can the system support every individuals needs?  It doesn’t seem feasible, and yet it seems to me more reasonable than leaving that girl walking the streets last night in this, our city.  It also feels like there’s potential there to explore.   The Life is big enough for every one, there is space for every one, if we choose to see it, and make the room.  If I look from too far a distance I see the bigger picture, perhaps, but I also miss the small details, the intricacies of things, and the Truth is in the detail, the small details tell me things that the bigger picture avoids.  I am myself, I am only myself.   Becoming.  I believe every other person is too.  I’m becoming in myself, and each person is too.  I’m not moving at the same rate, in the same way, in the same direction as everyone, even if I’m in the same space.  I have my own kinesphere within that to navigate.  There’s cross-over, there’s similarity, but there’s also complete difference of experience, even within shared experience there’s the issue of perception. 

“Arnold Mandell: Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health?  

 And that mathematical health, which is predictability and differentiability of this kind of structure, is disease? 

(...) When you reach an equilibrium in biology you’re dead.”

I like that.  I like that I can be part of society and yet be an individual within it.  I can be part of my peer group, which is a kind of a ridiculous phrase actually as I write it, peer group?  Who is that?  I have a number of groups of friends that come from all different times and places in my life.  They are not a cohesive group.  There are a number of individuals that I am friends with, have shared time and experiences with.  One to one, as a group, but ultimately each friend I have remains an individual connection I’ve made in The Life.  A few years ago, I thought this was a problem, and I wanted all my friends to meet each other and become friends also, so I organised a trip to the Zoo for my birthday because a number of my friends have children now,  I thought it was a good shared activity for this experiment!   It didn’t go that well!  It was a lovely day, but I failed to reach my objective!  Some people couldn’t come at all, others came and did their own thing in their own group, and people came at different times and took different paths around the Zoo.  All perfectly reasonable, and I walked between people and had different interactions with them over the course of the day and time there.  Just like in The Life.  And I like that now.  I meet people and share time and a connection with them on an individual basis, even in a group situation. 

“Pattern born amid formlessness: that is biology’s basic beauty and it’s basic mystery.   

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.”

And still we are all connected.  We are all part of the whole, but as individuals.  Each person has their own relationship to the every other person.  Big or small, miniscule in some instances, but all are connected, there is a thread connecting all of us together in The Life.  As Moby so dynamically put it “We Are All Made of Stars” !!  And I love that.  I love that idea.   Why do I love that?  I suppose because it’s infused by energy and potential.  It’s the notion that The Life is dynamic, it is moving toward something, it’s changing and growing and moving always.  That there’s the potential for something to happen in every moment, ever second a microcosm of forever and ever, it can change on a pin.  And without rationalizing, looking back, I can usually see the why of each situation and how it moved me forward, moved me toward something better, moved me into the here and now.  And I love that. 

Potential.

We Are All Made of Stars

“Somehow, after all,  as the universe ebbs towards its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures. Thoughtful physicists concerned with the workings of thermodynamics realize how disturbing is the question of, as one put it, ‘how a purposeless flow of energy can wash life and consciousness into the world’.”