2
Chapter II
‘Can you take five ideas and describe a future
worthy of living?’ Bridget wants to know. ‘Can you sum it all up?’
‘With everyone writing and talking about the same thing in his world, it was time to connect with those who also read between the lines of society,’ Frederic opened after a long silence, long enough to break trees. Him and his longtime friends Jerry and Bridget were out camping to ‘mark the long connection to society as a particular thing of its time’. Communicating as much as he could through his art, he kept a space for his emotions to bear fruit leaving them to do their thing – with him. But since he had chosen to love his emotions together forming an ‘it’ to his life, a 1/3rd that could not be denied as playing his real self,’ he had remained thankful for it. He chatted to that point Bridget. He had been lucky to accept a random party invite about 2 years ago in a lobby of 4 players. He had basically never party chatted to that point and met his two friends on the basis of an agenda, it was all set up, to meet for years on the same day. Even though there may have very well been no reason for it… but the point was always there, right in front of them, the minute they entered the door.
Knowing it had been her turn to say this specific thing Bridget retorted: ‘Reading between the lines is seeing its agenda. It is good to have ways to make yourself feel better (or worse, but better after) but if these are not contemplated, reflected, or rooted thoroughly within this ‘it’ to your life and your love, you’re missing the whole point to being alive.’
It was one of those Thanksgiving nights, where the Turkey is tender, the wine is red, and there is tea with desert. Bridget had found her friends willing to join her on an annual get-together. She had brought her 8-year-old daughter Ebbeth along, who exclaimed, at some point during a bonfire night, ‘My God, how else would we ever see each other, if we didn’t have an agenda?’
‘That’s an observative little girl, your second one.’ Jerry said to Frederic, who got to care for two little girls in his early forties. Jerry continued: ‘But what remains of her aura that is not nothing, that can be picked up or communicated?
He slowly cleared his throat, almost inaudibly, before proceeding his rather inspiring speech.
‘The 18th century famously invented the ‘incommunicable’ or that which can’t be explained. Luhmann made this bluntly into: what cannot be apprehended fully, let alone explained, because it has more than 3 layers of abstraction. Or compare it to the aura of an apparatus whose glance takes up everything and gives nothing back, which will only lead to refraction par excellence.’ Jerry knew it was a leap of faith to speak like this, but felt that was exactly what speech was intended for.
‘Except perhaps in the blink of an eye,’ Frederic added, having read Samuel Weber’s Television, Set and Screen (12:1). ‘Not auras as such but the aura of art as a work of representation. Work was italicized in Benjamin’s original manuscript. He even wrote it slanted. Can you believe that?’
Frederic was feeling the same feelings and decided to add as much in one minute. ‘Thoughts remain the same thoughts in regard to their content. What they represent versus what they present or perform, it doesn’t matter in the end. Thoughts are linguistically represented. What is this decisive, authoritative structure of the outside world? What are your inner-mind peregrinations, are your thoughts there for your perception or for something higher?‘
‘Most of our communicative acts express the personal and the cultural, the particular and the general, the unique and the universal,’ Bridget said out of nowhere. She had decided to suddenly chip in to show she had been listening. ‘When we act and talk, we express both our subjectivity and our cultural socialization.’
All stood pretending to feel normal.
Bridget was the first to break the what-would-have-been 3-hour silence. She fidgeted to signal her intent, make it more pronounced, then launched herself into what felt like was going to be 2 minutes of talking about her favorite topic: the origin of language. Or communication for that matter. ‘Loose couplings within language construct ‘false’ on their part. Actual entities versus perception of actual multiplicity, combinations of independent elements, time (morse code) versus space (script).’
‘The refugee…,’ Frederic took off. It was his turn.
‘…is what I’ve realized I have been. Let me put it this way, and this is personal but universal at the same time, it’s been hard to feel completely safe and secure anywhere.’ Frederic needed to feel what he was going to say. He summoned his thoughts to say things with the right emotions. ‘I was always following somebody’s rule. Not too loud, not too open, not too invasive, not too shy. It was all there. And yet…I know I’m not making much sense, but… I’d stress that to now feel some kind of safety trickling back into my life, with my girls around, I feel blessed to say the least.’
‘You’re trickling everyone into feeling blissful, Fred,’ Bridget had wanted to call him Fred since twelfth grade. Now she did, and it felt liberating.
‘Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes. It is curved upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, S,s.! An honest man hardly needs to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.’
All stood perplexed. No one intended to say anything. A long pause followed (lasting an entire 2 hours) so let’s skip to the good part: ‘We’re going home, but let me explain one more thing to you I was thinking about earlier,’ Jerry said, having left the conversation but now returning. He decided to add:
‘Returning to traditional media everyone would see the same shows, but our sharp-eyed-kitten-like awareness of each others’ facial expressions would limit our ability to mince up little bits of experience for future use.’
‘Like the completely feminine little creatures we are?’ Bridget said having seen Noël Coward’s Private Lives.
‘You mean ‘you are’?’ Jerry wondered. ‘Yes, of course,’ her brief reply. But then: ‘Me and the one I fare with.’
Frederic out of the blue had something on his liver. ‘The Black Peter,’ he began, ‘is a card game as well as a card in and of itself in Germany.’
He then waited some time. The wind didn’t pick up so he waited some more.
‘Only the child,’ he continued, even though no wind was in sight, ‘is in need of something. After that it can do nothing at all. Slowly she adapts.’ For Frederic transitions were slow. He loved feeling so lonely, so left out, so horribly lost. Because if that was the worst, he had nothing to fear. But where did his inner child go? Did it transition or, instead, switch? Or a third option, did it blank out?
Luckily Bridget was able to jump in. ‘Only the writing of an arm symbolizes one’s need for a tax,’ she began, ‘meaning your body is equated with natural ‘aboutness’ or the embodied context of bodies. Signs come about through extensions of enculturated bodies into larger multi-agent, self-sustaining systems (in WST),’ she added. ‘The individual (cognition) finds himself in the collective (communication).’
It was Jerry’s turn to stand for his right. ‘Generations before me,’ he commenced his speech, ‘a guy lived that was somewhat like me, but he wouldn’t be used to living among us now. Yet I can sense him, and I can sense how at least someone in 100 years may know me pretty well.’
Frederic wanted to know what this was all about. He thought it was all about heritage. ‘You think that ancestral contact or contact with the deceased was not possible unless something fooled our reasoning capacity?’ he wondered. ‘Isn’t it true,’ he continued, ‘ that our reasoning capacity is what we really think of as deep? Like deeper than anything else, or so deep you’re not supposed to know. How are you being reduced as a generation, from youth to pensionated? Why does freedom as disengagement vis-a-vis kin as your world resonate so well?’
‘Your mystical presence is enchanting tonight,’ Frederic commented, suppressing his famous low laughter.
‘Corny, but I see where it’s coming from,’ Bridget retorted. ‘You know how I know you’re gay, right?’
Frederic thought of saying ‘How?’ but said nothing instead.
And -nothing- he said.
‘Because you’re mystical butt didn’t think to hide your real intentions, which are sex and reproduction. Or in your case, have been. That’s how,’ Bridget said resolutely.
Frederic was released from Samsara and dissatisfactory existence, to be reduced to information on forms. Can we reduce that information? Which forms are meaningful to a human?
Jerry, knowing Frederic’s thoughts, envisioned the unethical generating the ethical ‘outside’, generating a fear of the unethical, generating the ethical unethical, the knowing unethical – and perceived himself unethical.
2.Every time Jerry sits on the talking seat
Jerry has just painted his best painting yet. He’d been more seriously painting for 10 plus years now, and hadn’t made it beyond expressive nonsensical utterances. This was different. Here he had suddenly created something lasting, out of an already existing something that bore memories of many a good night.
He had been living differently, more observant, for about 3 plus years now. On his frequent runs to a variety of supermarkets within a 3-mile distance, he now acquainted people that he would otherwise never have acquainted.
Jerry felt lucky to be alone, by himself for a while. He had said his wife goodbye, wanting to be with her – it was the paradox that saved him – and he never had kids, as far as he knew. Like Frederic, he was in his early forties with a beard so wide it shocked people into bewildered gazes.
These were different times. He was talking to a guy he just met at the elevator of Whole Foods. The man had spoken to him out of curiosity, and he always felt he met yet another kindred spirit. He had met kindred spirits about 3,000 times since he had become more observant. But in the middle of this masquerade they connected on a deeper, more subtle yet more mundane level.
‘Do you have the same feeling I have?’ initiated the man whose name later turned out to be Cedric. ‘No one speaks eye to eye, face to face, and we’re the only ones, in the elevator, that have just this whimsical shot at having a genuine conversation with a genuine other person.’ They chatted for about 20 minutes, this and that. Through it all shone a light of recognition the likes of which Jerry had not witnessed before. He made a mental note, so he wouldn’t forget: ‘Go with the wind, my son, your openness can work wonders.’
Cedric continued to emphasize how our death means nothing if we don’t learn to get to know ourselves. ‘But the collective pushing itself onto you like this,’ Jerry took over while Trump-like gesturing about, ‘your private life knows shifts because you continually seek new stability. You know only so many stabilities, likely 3, but there are – astonishingly enough – a total of 8 such stabilities out there, that is, for those who are interested in what the question of society is. What is it? Do you love it, or just cope with it, do you take it for granted, do you circumvent? For many, such questions already belonged to daily inner fusses, but the lockdowns, a game played well by the ones who ‘knew’ society.‘ Jerry knew he belonged to them. He ended aloofly with: ‘creates a catapulted ‘you’ and it is now out in the open that it is more ‘you’ than you were ‘you’ before.’
Cedric couldn’t stop himself from adding what he had hoped to give away to the world the moment the time was right: ‘My stability is the joy of seeing that we care for each other until the moment of liberation, at which you realize that the person who passed away had been kind of selfish for a long time. The axis of social life and other people (aka society) versus the stuff we cannot know aka religion. This axis forms the greatest leap, for anyone alive. That’s why I chose to live it. But I have full respect for people who chose otherwise. I will never be the single-issue family-work guy. Do I seek a copout for not having those facets of life handled? Absolutely not. I am one to believe that the axis of society-religion can bear more fruit than a simple family-work life. Look at the positive side of people’s life! But there are 2 other axes, if you will, right? They are the science-politics route, and the health nut/horror film route.’
Jerry was crazed by how much attention he had for a guy he just met 20 minutes ago. He had found a ‘recognizing’ individual. He went for a take-off, basically to test their fluke. ‘But I have to go now.’ ‘Ok, bye!’ the reply came off the bat.
‘But I just wanted to add,’ Cedric returned, ‘in The Rhetoric of Excess and the Experience of Instability (Luhmann, Love as Passion), the mystery of why you write stuff down anyhow comes to bare. To show someone else what you are, do you want to ask for his name? His soul? In earlier books, I talked about light in the soul that hasn’t been crafted nor could be crafted. This light was my soul not higher in rank, but in force. If we look at the forces of people instead of their works, we find that everyone has the same shot at getting excellent scores. That is why I say: If people turn away from societal and find a need to sink themselves into themselves (sich in sich selbst versenken), a need to be reasonable and rational, that found a God saying that such was the good way to live.’
Jerry drove off. His dog Henry waved his paw through the open window. ‘Nice talking to ya.’
3.
Disenfranchising the masses by appeasing the mob (Meister Eckhart’s Ascended Masters explained)
‘Everybody has bad traits,’ Bridget thought to herself, wondering if she could write more if she would simply let go and write just a lot of words for the fun of it. That is, when she decided to just let her pen do its thing and she would be the follower of whatever happened. And more often than not, she found that after a while of ‘free writing’ she had a better grasp of what writing was all about, was better able to finish sentences properly, and plot paragraphs more coherently. But the real kicker was that she would discover a different person writing before the thought ‘Is what you’re going to write in any way adequate, correct?’. Or the thought ‘Has it been fact-checked?’, or her personal favorite, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
Bridget walked away for a second to open the dishwasher, after it had run for about an hour, in the time the children were brought to bed, and after which 5 persistent beeps called on her to make the walk to manage her industrial home.
‘And let me drive 7 hours just to see you before me. And then you’ll take me into your arms.’
But that was it. The tree leaves were falling down! The tree no longer existed the way it did before! Amazing to be happening right in front of my eyes, she thought.
Isn’t it swell that we live our lives based on what we perceive ourselves to be? That means we don’t acknowledge anything inborn: all that can be had is the development of a talent to its rightful fruition stage. And it requires some sense of how to attain any skill that talent can be used for.
How Frederic learns all skills that fall within the scope of where his talent lies, is by being a bridge to others. He sees the other, connects it on two levels with himself: first level character types (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic), second level interests, deeper fantasies, drives, financial businesses. Then proceeds to fall in the same hole the other two fall into their whole lives. Your consciousness only sometimes ‘cuts’ through another reality in which no awareness exists. At least, not an awareness of the kind that you experience it. So a different awareness, then. Death or the ultimate fall where you keep falling and stop noticing, must then be the no-longer-having any consciously completed interrupts. That idea, that consciousness needs a lay-up, needs to score a solid point, needs to solidify, manifest, materialize. That you know that the others are there with you. That many more of this kind of experience without full consciousness are possible and will be lived through. And thus you keep falling knowing that once you were conscious. But not now anymore. Even though you, you, still are.
Like a Bridget over troubled water
Bridget was a bridge over troubled water. It was her. She stretched-out, finally. Let her feet bungle. Really it was the bridge. She just pretended to be the bridge and then felt like it.
Paul was a friend of Bridget’s. They had dated before. Now they were just friends. But Bridget never dated any of her psychic friends, the ones who always thought each other’s thoughts, were in each other’s emotions, and were there when they were born or passed on.
At times, when people are older, they hold on to far younger family members, even though such hanging on can’t possibly be satisfying to any degree. Your generation is very important for who you are and establishing your identity to it would not be held against you over time.
Even two years difference in 30 years from now will seem like a gap, even to eighty-year-olds.