I remember reading Genet some years ago, and thinking he was the most exquisite model I had found for a way of living inwardly. He had been introduced to me previously by some very intelligent people, whom I had much respect for, as something akin to a god. I was curious. I expected something good, but I was skeptical. When I finally got around to opening the remainder copy of The Miracle of the Rose I had gotten for probably a dollar, I was truly ensnared. I understood why Sartre made him out to be a saint.
Yet he was a common criminal.
But not just any common criminal. Every event he wrote gets transformed from its base elements into an ecstatic epiphany or ritual. The chains around him become a garland of roses, being defecated upon is wielded into a form of blessing. All the oppression of prison is transformed into a backdrop of profound significance. The symbology is richly Catholic, but in essence pagan. It represented the most sincere and successful way of changing the meaning of things in a way that was useful to the individual, no matter what the situation one found oneself in. I wanted to follow in kind.
It was around this time that I decided to stop obsessing about being authentic and to actually escape who I was. I had been in therapy for a few years, and trying to be myself, the way I saw it, wasn't really doing me much good. I wanted to leave myself behind.
I couldn't act as Genet had. He had all his years of living at the hands of the state, in homes of unwanted children, in reformatories, in prison, where he had learned to do what he had to do. Compared to him I was a very straight up and down guy from the suburbs slumming in the city, trying to make the scene, working an uncool dayjob.
I didn't need to reinvent the world the way he did. I probably needed to feel disgusted with myself, more than I needed his kind of freedom, though I thought the opposite.
But at times, and I know this must happen to everybody -- you too -- something would happen by accident, and I would find myself in what might be called "Genet Space." The world would suddenly be spun upside down, and I would see things from a completely different perspective. I'd feel radically different, and for no reason at all. And even my uncool dayjob would be changed into something else -- an opportunity to observe and live among people, find a strange reverence for their struggles with exhausted hope and their scars. And often, I would feel like a spy of sorts, gathering information that I would make use of some day, for what I don't know.
We all need a way of escaping ego, or self-definition, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, to deterritorialize, find a line of flight, exit one's familiar plane of consistency. But this often takes more than mere imaginative play. It takes something beyond fantasy, something that made my attempts at escape nothing like Genet's. It takes giving something up. But that giving something up takes a curve of a very special sort which we keep thinking we don't have or don't know how to use. It's a gift we hide from ourselves out of fear of loss.
And be honest. For those moments, you can honestly say, you were missing nothing. So you can ask why do I resist so, to liberate myself of the heaviness of daily life, from these imagined encumbrances that make me so sick of myself?
Maybe because you love it.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Revolving Themes
My wife got back the other day from visiting the public school our 4-year-old Liam may be attending next year, and was reminded how public school can in many ways be suggestive of prison. Many parallels range in areas from aesthetics (construction and decor of the buildings) to the way time and behaviors are structured. I thought back to my reading of Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose, and sure enough, the correspondences were many, everything from the minutiae of gestural communication among inmates, to the rituals of inclusion and exclusion. This made me wonder whether certain structural settings implicated particular types of interpersonal behavior, social patterns, and how, for the most part, the torture of these settings were manufactured by a group effort on the part of the participants.
I was also reminded how these same patterns are later dragged into work, since the time and space orientations are somewhat similar as well. We therefore repeat the habits we were supposed to have grown out of, though anyone belonging to a working organization -- whether a corporation, non-profit, or even educational or arts institution -- for more than a few months, will notice the same kinds of social cliques forming, and will note how very often it is NOT hard and intelligent efforts that determine how one fares, but the maneuvering of these groups like small clans staking out territory.
Hence, the greater part of what makes work what it is, as an experience to be had, to relish or disdain, is one's relationships. Let's face it, relationships are what set expectation, so much of what one actually needs to do -- those work curves, or confluences of curves -- is directly dependent on the same. Therefore, communication is a major part of everyone's toolkit.
Going back to a recent post, those of you (supposing there are people reading this blog) who may think I was kidding when I mentioned that curves are actually NECCCs (well I was sort of), could use an explanation of what I might have meant at the time.
I was also reminded how these same patterns are later dragged into work, since the time and space orientations are somewhat similar as well. We therefore repeat the habits we were supposed to have grown out of, though anyone belonging to a working organization -- whether a corporation, non-profit, or even educational or arts institution -- for more than a few months, will notice the same kinds of social cliques forming, and will note how very often it is NOT hard and intelligent efforts that determine how one fares, but the maneuvering of these groups like small clans staking out territory.
Hence, the greater part of what makes work what it is, as an experience to be had, to relish or disdain, is one's relationships. Let's face it, relationships are what set expectation, so much of what one actually needs to do -- those work curves, or confluences of curves -- is directly dependent on the same. Therefore, communication is a major part of everyone's toolkit.
Going back to a recent post, those of you (supposing there are people reading this blog) who may think I was kidding when I mentioned that curves are actually NECCCs (well I was sort of), could use an explanation of what I might have meant at the time.
- Neuro-subjective: since on one level all of our cognitive behavior takes place in neurology, that is the brain, the nervous system in general, and its relationship to the rest of the body, particularly sensory organs and nodes, and on another level we experience this phenomenon only in their results, rather than operations, we use the term to highlight and clarify experience.
- Environmental: the context within which the subject exists.
- Co-Extensive: the subject and environment are not separate, but inter-penetrable.
- Confluence: many factors coming together to shape behavior.
- Curve: you already know.
A good source of work-enhancing curves therefore might just be found in the writings of Jean Genet or Nelson Mandela, for that matter. Genet because of the reach of his imagination in painting over the obvious with something much more personally delightful, and Mandela for his ability to use the situation to his best advantage.
Another great source, of course, might be Joseph Beuys.
Monday, June 04, 2007
The Curve
Lisa Belkin, columnist for the Times, does a piece every week or so called Life's Work. Her most recent entry, entitled Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent, discusses various theories about how many hours we actually work per day, ranging anywhere from a third of our workdays, to a mere one and a half hours per day. That's good news for any of us who guilt over taking any personal time during to do anything but work, in fact some of you are going to feel somewhat vindicated by those estimates.
One of the problems with any analysis of this kind is actually defining what work is, or what can be counted as work, vs. what might not make the category of operations that lead toward satisfying the objective or task. Sometimes the task itself is so ambiguously defined that almost anything will do.
Sometimes it's not so ambiguous. For instance, I once worked at UPS loading 18 wheelers, for shipments to various ports around the Northeast. If I wasn't physically handling boxes, either stacking them in the trailer or breaking up the jams on the chutes, it would very easily be possible to say I wasn't working. When I did lawn and garden maintenance, there was the same lack of ambiguity, as well as when I was house painting. There were times, however, when I began working as my own employer, that I would stop and look at what had to be done, sometimes for a few minutes, and in a way that was work as well. I was planning, and making decisions about what to do next.
For over twenty-five years I've been working in offices, and depending on what type of job I had, just sitting and doing nothing could very well be counted as being work, because I was thinking, and as long as I was thinking about a problem I had to solve, on the job, I was still serving my employer. But who could tell if for one moment I was thinking about a system design, or politics, or poetry for that matter? It may be true that if I were only thinking about poetry for the majority of the time I sat in the office, that my performance would suffer.
That might be true and it might not. The fact is that when I did my MFA (I was still working full time), I was actually quite productive, for me. One might say that thinking about poetry as much as I was gave me an edge. It helped me see things in ways I ordinarily would not have seen them.
The thing is, the brain learns and solves problems isotropically. What that means is, that the brain might be working on several problems at the same time, some at work, some related to personal or social issues, some related to hobbies, sports activities, etc., and it will often find or form a general pattern to solve all of these issues at once. After all, in formal terms, meaning the way we process information on a cognitive level, our processes may be very similar across contexts. We create blends and blends of blends, and the source material maybe be very different in content than the context of its use. And we reuse patterns across contexts ubiquitously.
From NLP we have what is called a strategy, something I've mentioned in earlier posts. Basically, a strategy is a simplified behavioral pattern identified by a sequencing of sensory links. It is assumed that the brain, actually the entire neuro-linguistic system, utilizes its input and output channels (sensory organs) to process information. In other words, thoughts are made of visual images, sounds (including language), and feelings, either proprioceptive, tactile, or emotional, for instance. An example might be seeing a face in a crowd, comparing that face with images of faces in memory, which associates an array feelings, other memories and a name. Even NLPers admit that diagramming these events in a linear notation is an over-simplification, since there are many ways to process images and sounds, and innumerable feelings we are capable of. So they began to catalog all the various qualities each sense might have, so that one can tune a description of a strategy with more precision than three, or even five, variables allowed.
But even so, what we do with our sensory-motor equipment is difficult to track and often comprises a number of things in parallel; in fact it is rather a field-work of flows. Instead of a term like strategy, I prefer to use curve. That is because an object moving through space will travel in a single direction unless acted on by a force, either externally or internally. Something new has to come into the system. You then have a curve, rather than a straight line. Life is made up of very complex curves, or choruses of curves.
The term is actually short for Neuro-subjective/Environmental Co-extensive Confluence Curve, or NECCC.
Most important to our discussion is that a curve is the way we get things done, or resist getting things done, either at work or anywhere.
More about that at a later time.
One of the problems with any analysis of this kind is actually defining what work is, or what can be counted as work, vs. what might not make the category of operations that lead toward satisfying the objective or task. Sometimes the task itself is so ambiguously defined that almost anything will do.
Sometimes it's not so ambiguous. For instance, I once worked at UPS loading 18 wheelers, for shipments to various ports around the Northeast. If I wasn't physically handling boxes, either stacking them in the trailer or breaking up the jams on the chutes, it would very easily be possible to say I wasn't working. When I did lawn and garden maintenance, there was the same lack of ambiguity, as well as when I was house painting. There were times, however, when I began working as my own employer, that I would stop and look at what had to be done, sometimes for a few minutes, and in a way that was work as well. I was planning, and making decisions about what to do next.
For over twenty-five years I've been working in offices, and depending on what type of job I had, just sitting and doing nothing could very well be counted as being work, because I was thinking, and as long as I was thinking about a problem I had to solve, on the job, I was still serving my employer. But who could tell if for one moment I was thinking about a system design, or politics, or poetry for that matter? It may be true that if I were only thinking about poetry for the majority of the time I sat in the office, that my performance would suffer.
That might be true and it might not. The fact is that when I did my MFA (I was still working full time), I was actually quite productive, for me. One might say that thinking about poetry as much as I was gave me an edge. It helped me see things in ways I ordinarily would not have seen them.
The thing is, the brain learns and solves problems isotropically. What that means is, that the brain might be working on several problems at the same time, some at work, some related to personal or social issues, some related to hobbies, sports activities, etc., and it will often find or form a general pattern to solve all of these issues at once. After all, in formal terms, meaning the way we process information on a cognitive level, our processes may be very similar across contexts. We create blends and blends of blends, and the source material maybe be very different in content than the context of its use. And we reuse patterns across contexts ubiquitously.
From NLP we have what is called a strategy, something I've mentioned in earlier posts. Basically, a strategy is a simplified behavioral pattern identified by a sequencing of sensory links. It is assumed that the brain, actually the entire neuro-linguistic system, utilizes its input and output channels (sensory organs) to process information. In other words, thoughts are made of visual images, sounds (including language), and feelings, either proprioceptive, tactile, or emotional, for instance. An example might be seeing a face in a crowd, comparing that face with images of faces in memory, which associates an array feelings, other memories and a name. Even NLPers admit that diagramming these events in a linear notation is an over-simplification, since there are many ways to process images and sounds, and innumerable feelings we are capable of. So they began to catalog all the various qualities each sense might have, so that one can tune a description of a strategy with more precision than three, or even five, variables allowed.
But even so, what we do with our sensory-motor equipment is difficult to track and often comprises a number of things in parallel; in fact it is rather a field-work of flows. Instead of a term like strategy, I prefer to use curve. That is because an object moving through space will travel in a single direction unless acted on by a force, either externally or internally. Something new has to come into the system. You then have a curve, rather than a straight line. Life is made up of very complex curves, or choruses of curves.
The term is actually short for Neuro-subjective/Environmental Co-extensive Confluence Curve, or NECCC.
Most important to our discussion is that a curve is the way we get things done, or resist getting things done, either at work or anywhere.
More about that at a later time.
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