Too Sad to Play Dodgeball

I totally would make a youtube video just for the sake of making this point, but I don't happen to have any video-editing software on me, so what you're going to get instead is a transcript of selected scenes from this probably my favourite Simpsons episode. I'm probably pretty much alone in being reduced to a gibbering mess by this rather than seeing it for the simplistic sentimentalist platitudity that it no doubt is, but hey, it's my fucking blog.

Season 1 Episode 6 - Moaning Lisa:

  Lisa:  [standing still in a gym, being knocked on the head with dodgeballs] Ow, Ooh, ow!  Ooh!

  PE Teacher: [blows whistle]  Lisa!  We are playing dodge-ball here. The object of the game is to avoid the ball, by weaving or ducking out of its path.

  Lisa:  In other words, to dodge the ball.

  PE Teacher: Listen missy, just tell me why you weren't getting out of the way of those balls.

  Lisa:  I'm too sad.

  PE Teacher: Too sad to play dodgeball?  That's ridiculous. [to the rest of the class]  Now let's see some enthusiasm.  Play Ball!

  Marge's Mother: [in a flashback, to young Marge] Wait Margey, before we go out that door, let's put our happy face on, because people know how good a mommy you have by the size of your smile.

Young Marge: [turns to her mother, wide toothy smile plastered across her face. Walks with it out of the house]

  Marge:  [driving Lisa to band practice, turns to her in the front seat] Now Lisa, listen to me, this is important.  I want you to smile today.

  Lisa:   But I don't feel like smiling.

  Marge:  Well it doesn't matter how you feel inside, you know?  It's what shows up on the surface that counts.  That's what my mother taught me.  Take all your bad feelings and push them down, all the way down, past your knees until you're almost walking on them. And then you'll fit in, and you'll be invited to parties, and boys will like you, and happiness will follow.

  Lisa:   [feeble attempt at a smile]

  Marge:  No, come on.  You can do better than that.

  Lisa:   [a much brighter smile]

  Marge:  Aww, that's my girl.  [rubs Lisa's hair]

  Lisa:   [through her teeth]  I feel more popular already. [Walks into the school grounds]  

  Boy 1:  Hey, nice smile.

  Lisa:  Thanks.

  Boy 2:  Hey, what are you talking to her for?  She's just going to say something weird.

  Lisa:  Not me!

  Boy 1:  You know, I used to think you were some sort of a brainiac, but, I guess you're okay.

  Lisa:  Uh-huh.

  Boy2:  Hey, why don't you come over to my house after practice.  You can do my homework.

  Lisa:  Okay.

  Music teacher: 5 minutes people! 5 minutes. Now, Miss Simpson, I hope we won't have a repeat of yesterday's outburst of unbridled creativity.

  Lisa: No sir!

________________________

I have never understood this. What's the big deal about being sad? It's not that bad, and it doesn't have to constitute so dramatic a statement. It's an integral part of the experience of all of us. Sometimes things make us sad. Often, in fact, and it doesn't prevent us from doing anything, beside participate in the collective pretence of being happy. Of being jovial, I should say.

Why does anybody want to play this game? What do they get out of it? Why is it ridiculous to not want to? I have heard people tell me a million times that it's best to try and put on a happy face, because nobody likes hanging around pouty people, but have never felt an aversion to anybody because they weren't happy enough. And what is this "fitting in" I keep hearing about anyway? Is it pleasant? What is everybody smoking? Why is there an expectation that you waste so much of your time and energy, on such fucking bullshit?

All being "sad" means, is that you're dissatisfied with the way things are at the moment, and you would like to make some sort of change. Are changes that bad? Is it that important for everything to always stay exactly the same? Who are the people who decide these things and on what grounds do they decide them? Somebody somewhere has declared war on personality, and they're fucking winning.

So what's the next step after not playing? I still find myself mainly identifying with the Bonnie and Clyde method, but I'm probably missing something far more sensible. What would Neil Young do?

The Man in the Moon

The Man in the Moon - by Roger McGough


On the edge of the jumping-off place I stood
Below me, the lake
Beyond that, the dark wood
And above, a night-sky that roared.


I picked a space between two stars
Held out my arms, and soared.


                  *       *       *


The journey lasted not half a minute
There is a moon reflected in the lake
You will find me in it.


_____________


What I'd really like to do, is live on the moon. I can see people hindering this, and I can see them not hindering this, and I understand that they can play an active part in enabling it, but I can't make myself see it.

People are very anxious to tell you about how you have to choose between Earth and the moon. Not many, it appears, are looking for the lakes. This makes the notion of time spent with them depressing. They could at least pick the fucking moon.

Very probably, few people actually care what place you jump off and where you arrive. I could probably live a far more comfortable fantasist's life next to many people than I imagine. But to assume and expect people's indifference feels a little like missing the point.

So what is this so-called point? It is, I believe, twofold: 1) Roger McGough rocks. 2) His rocking deserves your recognition. It deserves a whole page in a book of poetry, and your undivided attention while reading it. I can't make people do this, though possibly I would if I could, but I think I can expect it - that is to say, seek it - as a general orientation. So there.

Orthodoxy

"...Man's life is like morning dew,

A flame eating up the oil night by night.

Why should I strain my ears

Listening to the squawks of this autumn insect?

Better lay aside the book

And drink my cup of jade-white wine." - Su Shi's "Reading the Poetry of Meng Jiao"

Yeah, Chinese stuff. Forget that though. I found this amusing as well as insightful. It's the kind of issue I've been grappling with pretty much non-stop for at least the past year. You hear Meng Jiao is like a big deal (presumably), and you try to be open-minded and give him a shot, but he's a pain in the arse, and life's too short to be spent on things other people find exciting, for reasons that are more often stupid than not.

China rocks. When you put aside all the organ-harvesting protestor-shooting internet-censoring business. China rocks in a visceral, non-rational, more or less irrational way, which is the only real way for things to rock.

I'm thinking about this again mainly because I need to find another subject as awesome as China to do a degree in, but also because it represents some kind of point I keep trying to make to myself without much apparent success, which is one of those advantages you surprisingly don't get from limiting your conversation to yourself. This point has been illustrated again today (or technically last night), when I decided to return to the library my copy of the Analects of Confucius - which despite being Chinese is one of the dullest, most insipid and philosophically depressing books I have ever misguidedly begun to read - and to take out Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which has nothing to do with anything, but appears to be written by the real-life equivalent of S. Morgenstern

I have been forcing myself through Confucius in the thought that it is a good thing for a student of China with an interest in Chinese philosophy to do, especially if he has as much free time on his hands as I do, much like I have been forcing myself through countless conversations and relationships over the years in the thought that it is a good thing for a social person to do. And what I'm thinking right now is, who makes up these rules anyway? Stupid people, no doubt. Or people operating on stupid assumptions, in any case - I'm not sure you can actually define a person as stupid. I do feel pretty comfortable though defining boring shit as "squawks of autumn insects". It's not so much Meng Jiao, for me, as it is the people who tell me I have to read and admire and "appreciate" Meng Jiao, or would at least if we lived in China. I say fuck Confucius. But I wish I didn't feel so apologetic saying it.

Truly spiritually healthy people, according to a doctrine that probably has a name I don't know but that I stand behind anyway, know how to separate between that which they get a kick out of, and that which is basically irrelevant. I can tell that this sounds like some kind of call for impulsiveness, but I don't think I've said anything I can take back yet. Daoists claim you can find a way to connect to any activity; I claim there is nothing within the realms of reasonable real-life eventualities that could induce me to not hate every single second of telemarketing if I was forced to engage in it. And it's not because telemarketing is exactly bad (hey, bear with me here) in a moral or universally spiritual sense, but it does not mesh with the constellation of neuroses and timidities that is Naty Amitai. I can actually live with that, but I keep finding myself trying to fight it. Some things that don't work for me aren't as obvious as telemarketing. Confucius for instance. The Western philosophy program in the Hebrew University. It doesn't take long after the beginning to see that these things mean absolutely nothing to me (I'm looking at you, fucking Judaism), but you feel like you ought to humour the people saying it's actually really good and you just need to get used to it.

So what I'm saying is, you don't. Rules suck. Anarchy in the UK and stuff.

Violence

The End of Conflict - Avinadav Begin: 


"Chapter 34:


These thousands of years men have been legislating laws to organise society and minimise the violence in it - state laws and religious laws, international laws and commercial laws. See, for instance, the Hague Convention. It is supposed to determine what is moral and what is immoral in a time of war, through the formulation of laws. It seeks to make war more moral, more tolerable. Eminent judges in polished shoes sit in air-conditioned halls and discuss "rules of war". What nonsense man can create to justify the violence seething within him.


If I try to subordinate myself to something external, to adapt myself to the law, it will always create friction and conflict between the inside and out, always create distortion. There will always be an aspiration to become "something". This something can look wonderful, be serene, calm, spiritual, moral, wise. But there will always be a gap between what I am and what the external asks for. The inherent contradiction between the two - between what we are and what we aspire to be - is the source of violence.
Violence can end only when there is no more conflict between inside and out, when you don't aspire to become any thing, when you reject every truth you've heard, when you cease to separate yourself from the rest of humanity, from the world, from the whole universe."




To call this simplistic would be to make a dramatic understatement. The laws of war have saved hundreds of thousands - probably millions - of lives, and polished shoes do happen to clash with my set of aesthetic prejudices too, but there's certainly nothing remotely wrong with air-conditioning. The definition of violence itself is very selective here. It could also be defined as "intimidating people into doing what we want" or "the infliction of bodily and mental harm", and it is probably more these last two aspects that the various humanitarian law conventions have tried to and succeeded in mitigating.

Still, whatever Begin's actually against, what he's for is very clearly love. To talk about love is considered trite because we've spent so long prostituting the concept - paying lip-service to it without making any genuine attempt to take it to its logical conclusion - but Begin does. The main point being made, here as well as in the Tao Te Ching, is that devotion to love means, first and foremost, abstention from its opposite. Saying "This I will not be a part of, because it's thousands of years of a tradition which is shit".

The opposite of love is not hatred. And not, I think, as is often suggested, indifference. I think that violence, too, is too broad a term to suffice, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I'd go for "repression". There's a (hypothetical) mode of living that is based on and around love, and there's the alternative people adopt when they're too terrified of the emancipating opportunities and open questions involved to embrace it. Instead they embrace laws.

I'm going to randomly throw out "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" in the full knowledge that this will influence nobody to read or reread it, but one of the more dominant themes in it is the view of intellectual analysis and scientific inquiry as a "knife" that brutally dichotomises our existence into "true" and "false", bringing order but also suffocating us under a blanket of insipid and alienating homogeneity. That book was better than most such "spiritually"-oriented works at recognising the need and value we nonetheless have in the scientific and systematic pursuit of order - the laws of war are an excellent example of its utility in terms of human welfare, despite the smugly disregardful attitude most people enjoy adopting towards it - but it insisted that to continue to categorise and catalogue our existence anywhere beyond where it is very strictly necessary is to completely miss the fucking point.

A mission-based life - socially, politically, romantically - is a life based on something other than love for people and for ourselves. Specifically, it's based on distracting us. If there's a set of criteria we can constantly try and consistently fail to meet, it can easily divert our attention from the fact that we have no understanding of what we're doing and how we got here. We can make ourselves too busy to even notice we're alienated. It's as effective a way as any of wasting our every waking second, but if we ever actually decide to live we'll have no choice but to embrace the chaotic and "anarchic" reality of a life based on nothing except love. And no doubt it will also result in us being less violent for transparently stupid reasons. It will make less sense.

Fascism

I finally got around to taking out Menachem Begin's grandson's book – the one that made the news about a year ago when it came out for being leftist to an extent they're trying very hard to make it illegal to be in this country. That's kind of a dismissive way of describing it, so I'll add that his first name is Avinadav, the book is called The End of Conflict (though I don't think there's an English version), and it's actually surprisingly good.

It seems deliberately modeled after the Tao Te Ching, but maybe that's a commoner format than I think and I'm just drawing from my limited pool of literary comparison. In any case, in style as well as content it could be accused of slight pretentiousness, but I think it's worth bearing with. Whether intended or not, it does have a certain Chinese flavour to it, and it's kind of par for the course for that kind of thing to be a little over-stylised and didactic. Two of its very short "chapters" spoke very specifically to what I keep trying to talk about here, and seemed to give something of an insight as to how my separate tangents may be linked. These chapters, translated below, immediately follow one another in what seems like a seldom-made statement about the spirituality of politics. There's more than a small chance that this won't become entirely clarified from the translated text, but the important thing is that I know what I'm talking about. More or less. Begin is in italics.

"Chapter 16.

Hanukkah, Sukkot, Passover, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, Eid Al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Independence Day, Holocaust Remembrance Day , the Nakba, birthdays, brit milah, bar mitzvah, wedding, funerals. Festivals and ceremonies; national, religious, personal. Why do we need them? We repeat them compulsively, year after year, time after time. They constitute for us a rock in troubled seas. We hold on to the time markers and are afraid to let go.

The ceremonies constitute peaks within a homogeneous sequence of superficial and cold life, a great excitement for a single moment. Whole lives pass over us without direct relation to reality, to the forming and emerging existence. We try to connect to it through ceremony, trying to dredge up some depth from the shallowness consuming us. In our day-to-day routine we are indifferent to the labouring ant, to the weed waving in the wind, to the beggar lying in the street; indifferent to asylum seekers without a roof over their heads, indifferent to suffering, indifferent to love. We allow it to penetrate for a small moment when the glass is broken underneath the HUPA, when we see a couple kissing in the street or witness a car accident, but immediately we go back to our concerns, to routine, back to thinking about ourselves. Our souls swim in circles of shallow water. We have no clarity. Our empty heart is full of anger and bitterness.

The ceremonies and festivals, events and rituals are part of a conditioning mechanism meant to create a cultural person, that functions in the social arena within obtuse, mechanical conventions. Like a dog bringing back a thrown ball, we become moved when a flag is raised, a ring is worn, a birthday candle is snuffed out or the singing of the anthem is heard. We are moved at the right time by the right thing, sad on a memorial day for a friend or relative and happy on a birthday or the day of the nation's independence. Happiness and sadness by demand.

This isn't true identification with suffering or joy, this is conditioning. This is a mind carefully tamed since a young age, through promises of reward and punishment, under a steamroller of conformance to the collective, fearful of peculiarity, of judgement and criticism. A tamed mind, its horizons always narrow, will always look for an owner. Can I observe the mechanism that makes my mind a tool in the hands of others?

Can I live in a world devoid of the false mannerisms of this insanity? Can I live an existence without marking  of time, with no place for ceremony and gesticulation,with no need for the marking of territory, for declarations to the public, for declarations to the self, with no place for rehearsal, for ritual?

Chapter 17

Let us observe our mind - how it thinks, how it ties knots. Such an abundance of knots leaves it stuck in place, unable to escape its contradictions.

The observation itself, the question, the echo returning - will start unravelling knots.

Throw a stone into a lake, observe the stone, the impact on the water, watch the forming ripples, observe the throwing hand.

The act of observation has power, it will start collapsing walls.

It will expose the heart."

I'm going to get carried away and also give you the ending paragraph of chapter 19, which is also quoted on the back cover:

"It's not possible to love a country or a nation, not possible to love a land or an anthem, this isn't love but lordliness and possessiveness; it's the mind clinging to what gives it security, a promise of force and power. Force corrupts the heart, force does not discern beauty, force leads only to pain."

And all this somehow has to do with my "social life", which no longer seems cynical or superficial enough to warrant that handle and that will therefore be tentatively re-dubbed "my relationships with people that are on some level or another based on love." When you have love, you don't really need any of the other bullshit, and when you don't have love, all you're operating on is bullshit and are effectively wasting good sleeping time.

I would like to be free of ritual. Almost all of what I do, all the time, is purely obfuscation. I think I do this much more than most people but that doesn't really even matter. Everybody, in life in general, constantly has to choose between predictability & approval and conduct that isn't entirely meaningless and divorced from who they are, and most people consistently make the wrong decision. It's a question of deciding to love. It is not reconcilable with the desire to never have life surprise or disappoint you - to never feel anything. Down with Big Brother.

Pondering Ponds

So I just ran away from class and am sitting instead in the university botanical garden next to a pond. I get ponds. Vaguely dirty looking bodies of water where it seems ducks should be even if they aren't. There's a bunch of plants around with little tags informing me what they are but they're not interesting - surrounded by them is a pond. I don't know why or even how I get ponds. It's not as if they're a mathematical equation. But they make sense. They don't bewilder me.

Something is missing. I'm constructing this life around me and being a grown-up for most intents and purposes and by any sensible standard things are going really well. But it's still a substantial struggle getting up in the morning and I still come back to the dorms more exhausted than it makes any sense at all to be and stare at the ceiling for hours or go out to stare blankly at other stuff if my roommate's in. Those are my more concrete "something is missing" credentials. The actual, more pressing ones are that none of what I do with myself during the week makes anywhere near the amount of sense as does my sitting down here now next to this pond.

There's a kind of understanding that has nothing to do with intelligence or analysis or persistent investigation. At least half the time I don't understand what the fuck people are on about and why they react to things the way they do. I keep trying to make it make more sense to me, but I'm beginning to think it's pointless if not actually counterproductive. It's not a question of comprehension - it's a question of identification. Maybe you need to own your alienation. To express, even if not outright say, that you could only understand what the person is saying or doing through a kind of ad hoc mathematical formula, which you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to create. I see people doing this all the time and I feel a kind of envy I only fully (well, better) understand now.

Some things mean something and most things don't. The fortunate thing is you actually have a wide degree of choice, which it is entirely possible to not exercise stupidly. It gets more complicated, for me at least, when I try to figure out where other people fit into this. I'm thinking maybe that's a minor consideration. People will fit where you have room for them. You can't spend your time being bored out of your brain for the sake of being friendly. It's not like it's actually difficult for people to be interesting. You just need to stop being full of shit for a few seconds.

What's missing? An insistence on "this means something to me" and "this doesn't", regardless of how people wherever will react to this. It's not really something you can sweep under the carpet. I'm also annoyed with somebody or something and it'd be nice if I could blame somebody for it. Fact is I probably could and I just don't notice. This isn't supposed to be who I am. And I'm pretty sure I'm not just imagining the pressure not to play duplo on the campus grass. Maybe I need to start feeling as well as just saying that most people suck. Whatever the insecurities and anxieties that go into people's being judgemental arseholes full of ridicule, it's not actually something I can deal with or brush off right now. If I was serious about making this more than big talk I'd start giving people the opportunity and crossing names off my list - maybe it really isn't as widespread as I think. Mainly, the effort I associate with "being friendly" is actually the effort to understand what the fuck is going on and how I'm supposed to fit into it. No need.

Bonnie and Clyde and Jake

The pride that I feel - being a little behind in my studies as I am - at having further neglected them by going out tonight to the cinematheque to see this film and now by writing about it, is kind of thematically appropriate to what I'd like to talk about.

Watching this film tonight (this wasn't my first viewing) I was suddenly very forcefully reminded of Raging Bull. For one, both movies are very commonly misrepresented. They call Raging Bull a boxing film and they call Bonnie and Clyde a crime adventure. They're not. They're both individualist tragedies about bad people - or at least people who do very bad things - but who "at least ain't no liars", as Clyde says of himself at one point. These guys are real. They have no lie in them. For Jake La Motta this is possibly his one, solitary saving grace; for Bonnie and Clyde this makes them veritable heroes - it exonerates them in the eyes of the audience from the fact that they actually kill people, without having these killings glossed over.

All three of these people are, frankly, stupid, impulsive, destructive individuals. They seem about as close as you can come to being human trash without being actually evil. But they're not phonies. They're not that type of person whose very existence is exhausting and depressing to contemplate. In this film particularly, every authority figure - every representative of the "establishment", whether he's actively trying to repress them or not - is Nurse Ratched. Let them be murderers, but don't let them be so fucking fake.

I don't actually think killing people is alright. But it's a good image, especially for a tragedy. Beating up women, for instance, is less successful (or relatable) as a metaphor for breaking out of a repressive society, which is probably part of the reason it isn't. I think the place where we relate is in the reaction of people to these behaviours. Bonnie and Clyde and Jake would be good people, if they weren't so stupid and childish and irresponsible. They try to be who they are, presumably because that's the only thing they know how to be, and society reacts with disgust - a disgust mingled with a measure of primitive admiration, but still essentially disgust, with no actual respect.

And this reaction is appropriate here. Jake La Motta is a thug who abuses his wife, and Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are murderers who seriously jeopardise the rule of law. And these are historical people who actually did these things. BUT - to come to what will stand in for my point here - it is not only destructiveness such as this that is responded to in exactly the same way, under the same paradigm, with the same feeling of sanctimonious justification.

My experience of human beings is - and I'm sure many would take issue with this claim - that all expressions of eccentricity are generally met with an essentially moral condemnation - an implication and accusation of childish, untenable, dangerous recklessness. Most often this will come in the form of mockery - of casual de-legitimisation, but sometimes it will be more honest and, at least to me, more immediately ridiculous. You'll be told you're not a part of the group enough, not Jewish, Zionist, leftist, cosmopolitan, anarchist enough. Still, more often mockery. The people who have the courage to be who they are without dousing themselves in bullshit expose themselves to ridicule. They will tell the world who they are and the world will respond with a hearty condescending smugly disapproving laugh.

This is where I get stuck. I can't decide whether I want to or can have anything to do with the people who respond to things this way. There's got to be a better option than shooting at them until you are outshot. The least you can do is not take it lying down. To learn, as I keep trying to practise in this blog, to say "fuck you then".