A part of who we are is a gift from our parents, from when we where made. It is written I our genes and besides our looks we also inherit parts of our personality. This all makes sense, we all know it, its a part of life.
Part of our roots are our parents, they pass on their genes passively to us, but the question I ask in this poem is: do they also pass on, when raising us, their interpretation of their genes?
Let me elaborate: if you inherit a gene that “stimulates” curiosity from one of your parents, but that parent was discouraged in using this genes potential in them self. Would that parent then use these experiences, or roots, to counteract that genes potential in you, while raising you?
There are obvious traits we inherit, we learn new ones when we grow up, and later when we live our life. It is true that finding the roots of all your traits is not necessary for living to the end of your life, but if you have ever looked at your parents, or even your grandparents, and you see a suppressed trait, you might want to look inside yourself, because if by chance you inherited a gene with an unknown potential, hidden out of sight, you might want to revive it.
We humans are not that great in living to our potential. We lean to far to a side where we shouldn’t lean to, or lean back and live a “half life”.
As Socrates said over 2000 years ago: “an unexamined life is not worth living”.
A chain is a welcome metaphor, for the connection you have with the past, willingly or not. The chain can pull on you directly when you just lost, or indirectly if you find a reminder of a memory, an old sweater that is not yours on the bottom of the drawer.
Chains you drag behind you, can also catch memory’s from others. Drag them long enough behind you, and they will get heavy, and weight feels reliable as in your truth.
There are also people that don’t know how, or want to, look back. If they do, they might see that their chain is caught, by for instance, an old anchor. Maybe then they notice that they have dug a hole while they believe to walk forwards.
We can also get caught by a chain, dragged by an other. This happens if you look to much, backwards.
The best thing I can do now, for the real world, is to find the equivalent, of what in this metaphor a hacksaw or grinder does to the chain.
Like other people that ask a lot of questions, I also wonder where the answers come from, specially when I get different answers, and sometimes even from different people. I am often amazed how people tell me, with full confidence, how I should handle things or behave in social situations. They don’t always tell me, I see them doing it, and then I wonder: where did they learn that? I know that you learn most things in life when you are young, and live with the tall people that feed you, and later, by copying and trial and error.
I found out early that when you copy someones behavior you might find out that it is not smart to do it that way. So why is that person still doing it? Should I copy the next person, when I am in a situation where I don’t know what to do? Am I gonna do something that I later regret, or do I do nothing out of doubt? This is in short the dilemma when you ask to many questions, you grind to a halt in a world full of contradictions mixed with confidence.
I have the confidence to go out and live my life, despite walking blindfolded on a tightrope and the feeling that my mask will be torn off any minute. I am in fact a hero…
No, when I am in a jolly mood I always ask people where they have their book with all the answers that they got when they were young, because I lost mine… just want to know why they are so sure.
Are we all hypocrites? Two thousand twenty will always be the year of Corona. You hear it everywhere, and it seems that a lot of people have a hard time with it. It is difficult for me to fully understand it because here in Norway not much happened. I lived in a little village of 3000 people before and Corona was something you hear about on the news, and we noticed that there where almost no foreign tourists in the museum where I worked. When it all started we did, and still do the 1 meter thing a hand sanitizers were placed everywhere, but their were no cases and there still aren’t to my knowledge. I moved to a bigger city in October and besides the normal precautions, life was normal. Cafe’s where and are open and we visited a lot of museums. Last week they decided that we had to where masks inside stores because here in Trondheim the people tested with Corona went up in a month time from around 1 or 2 to 30 per day, in a population of around 180 000 people. I am not the one to say that it is a little unnecessary, I guess they like to play it safe, and I have to say that it has worked, specially compared to our neighbor Sweden. I know from my family in Holland that it is a little rougher there and my girlfriend is from America and it’s a big mess over there.
I think I have read a little bit to much Noam Chomsky in the past because I have an immediate, and specific reaction when I hear people complain about lock-downs and how hard it all is. I have this reaction specially when it comes from Americans or the British. Off course it is bad that people die from this disease, specially because some of those deaths could have been prevented if people followed the rules better. It is tragic, when you think of the people that died all alone in a hospital with their families in tears behind a window.
My immediate reaction to the complaining and whining is: Iraq war 2003. A decision made by a few men in a room…boom…between 100,000 and a 1,000,000 people unnecessary died. Children, grandfathers and mothers, pregnant woman, fathers…all dead because of… I cant speak for the people that lived in Iraq under the regime of Saddam Hussein, it is not what we are used to but from what I learned, even when you live in such an oppressed society, life and family life goes on. You morn as much over the death of a loved one in prison as you do in freedom. That unnecessary war was like a diseased that hit that country, far worse then Corona will ever do. According to corona-tracker sites there are around a 1000 deaths total in Iraq as per December 2020.
Maybe I am wrong thinking like this, maybe it is only allowed to look at data like this when you are a historian a hundred years in the future.
The following poem gave me the chance to vent my frustration, that I had bottled up till now. Day 1160.
The luxury of pain
In my world
with so little
real
problems
A few quotes from Noam Chomsky. I can recommend to everyone to read some of his work if you want to see contemporary history through other lenses then the ones we usually wear in the west.
The quotes:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….”
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
“The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”
If there is one thing that bothers me…I wanted to put the next few words in quotation marks, but I will elaborate it now. I wanted to say Western society but I realize that i don’t know enough about other societies around the world to exclude them from my observation. I also think that “Western society” can be replaced by “the Hollywood society” as in the spreader of a worldview that by now is so adopted that Stalin and Mao would be jealous at their effectiveness and hypnotic power.
Ok, one more time. If there is one thing that bothers me then it is the individualism preached by the church of Hollywood. If you observe modern culture or just talk to people you notice that a lot of people see themselves as unique, one of a kind. We are of course all unique, as in the combination of molecules stacked together to form you as a person. What most people mean with that is that they can not be treated as other people. Their perceived history and qualities are so unique that they know best how to handle themselves.
I can give an example that might clarify what I mean. I’ve been around a lot of people with mental problems. One thing that often happened is that someone took their medicine for a while but then decided that not the doctors knew what was best for them but they where the ones that knew what was best. They stopped with the medicine and awhile later they are back at square one. It is the idea that our own judgment has more value than that of others, even if you know that the other know better. People don’t like authority.
I don’t think that there where better times in the past, or that other cultures do a better job raising their kids. First of all, I only know the past through stories and books and I have lived in countries with other cultures, but I didn’t “live” that culture, at the most I was an distant observer.
Before 2016 I always thought that the culture that was prevalent before world war two was the cause for that war and the death camps. In those day’s most people didn’t decide what they would do with their life, that was decided by society and your family. People where used to obey and follow, even if it was into a grave. But after Trump was elected president, and specially now in 2020, where millions of people sheepishly follow a leader I am thoroughly confused. At the one hand everybody takes it for granted that they are an individual, an individual that can decided for themselves in what to do with their life, in a stark contrast with older generations. On the other hand they all follow a leader or an idea, this time in a stark contrast with their individualism.
My complaint seems odd, I don’t like the out of control individualism but also dislike the slavishness towards leaders/trendsetters and those trends. I prefer a more skeptical society and individual. That skepticism should not only be pointed towards society, but also towards oneself. Don’t forget that most of what we like in modern society, our medicine, computers, transportation, welfare state and so on, is born out of the skeptical minds of scientists. On of the more important rules in science is that you have to try to undermine your own conclusions, and your own thoughts.
Have you had this experience: you walk on a flat surface, like a side walk, and you step on something small and hard, like a stone. The moment you feel this hard thing under your foot you buckle in a reflex, like you don’t want to get hurt. In my own experience it is not something that always happen, it happens mainly when you don’t expect to feel anything under your foot. Trough the wonders of the internet I learned that they (I guess some people call it that) call it nociceptive flexion reflex or more formal: withdrawal reflex.
Because I use this experience in a poem, based on a picture where you see a little stone on a wooden floor, you can assume that this nociceptive flexion reflex also happens when we react to a sudden disturbance in our social life, in an otherwise smooth day.
The most recognizable example that I can come up with is is the anger outburst after you’ve been patient for hours or day’s when, for example, someone is asking you for something over and over. You’ve been cool and understandable but suddenly they come around the corner, while you are occupied with something else, and you hear a sound coming out of their mouth and you flip, like you stepped on the little stone.
You probably do not “flip out” willingly, at least that is the excuse you use when the dust has settled again, but you are probably right. The interesting question, following from this example is: what other reactions or thoughts in our daily, social live are triggered by small objects we step on.
We all play different roles in our lives. According to Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher from the 20th century, are we “thrown into the world”. What this means is in short that you are born into a past, a past that determined the country, family and the body(genes) you “live” in. What you are, and what you become through your upbringing and education are factors you have little to no control over. Later in life you can “steer the ship” you are in gently. but the current, your past, will take you to where in flows.
The first line speaks for itself, we all know those people that don’t hesitate to say the first words or point to a direction for where to go. We all have played that role, some more then others, but even the shyest person one day will lead a group of children across the street, feeling all brave.
Leading a group is often a task you do alone. If you don’t know where you are going you might call yourself brave. If you know where you are going, you just do what is expected of you. You could say that people that follow a leader, specially one that doesn’t know where to go, brave, but also cowards, or loyal.
Is it always a choice to be the leader? If it is in you character to lead, and this urge is stronger then in the other people in the group that is in need of a leader, you might say that it is not a choice. If you compete with others you might actively promote yourself or assume the role without asking, that’s a choice. You don’t choose the trades you need to be a leader, you can choose to lead, but so do people that lack these trades.
It can also happen that, when the question of who’s going to take the lead comes up, the rest of the group slowly retreats in silence, and you, the naïve one, gets the task. You still get all the blame, but without the pride of a choice.
I wrote this for Day 1108. I always wonder what people mean when they say that they are destined to do this or that. Do they just mean that the circumstances of their life has put them on a road with a certain destiny? Like being born athletic, in a place where they could practice sports, and in a family that supports them. Is that a path, to a destiny?
I suspect that when people talk about destiny, soul mates or say that it is “meant to be” that they think that it is written in the stars, sometimes literally. Before the invention of the big monotheistic gods, the gods where powerful but also flawed like humans and certainly not all powerful, at least if you look at the ancient Greek world. The monotheistic Gods where in principal all powerful, and because of this they knew the destiny of every little human being on earth, then, and all of them in the future. Because religion was not something debatable till just a few decades ago, most people still feel that group pressure, mostly unconsciously I presume, that we have a destiny or that there is A destiny.
If life is not designed and made by some sentient being, but the universe is just there, than you have to conclude that there is no destiny predestined for you. Your circumstances, like in my previous example, can give you a destiny but it is only there because you are born.
Time is also one of those illusions. I don’t want to say to much about it, but if you read some book about, for instance, the middle ages you will soon realize that before the invention of timekeeping people had a whole different idea about time. For us time is the 24 hour clock and the calendar, most people in those day’s had no idea about those concepts. Time was the changing of the seasons and the rise of the sun in the morning.
There are many concepts in our modern life that we take for granted. If you look closer to where these things started you will realize that what seems obvious for us, is indeed just that, obvious for us.
I assume that the people that read my work are interested in life, as something that you could study and poke at, as to see what it does. I defiantly have that, but I sometimes wonder if the people that I know have similar interest, or do they only have it when life “pokes” at them.
Fifteen years ago I moved to Norway from the Netherlands. I have been back a couple of times to see family, but what I remember of living in and with the people over there is covered in a haze. I only remember the things that stood out, maybe not when I lived there, but they clearly do now. One of those things is that people in Holland (that’s how we call it most of the times) are more of an open book, specially compared to the people here in Norway. If you meet new people or start at a new job, you will have an easier time in Holland to find out what people think, what their hobbies are, what they do in their spare time, those kind of things. In Norway that takes longer, not always off course, I generalize, but I noticed it.
People in Norway are raised to respect each others boundaries, something they have some pride in, they tell me. It is of course easier in a country with so much space per person compared to Holland. If I tell someone in Holland that I am interested in philosophy then there is a bigger chance that they start asking question to hear me out, a conversation is born. Here in Norway that hardly ever happens, they react enthusiastic but most of the time that’s all you get.
I thought about this when I red the poem I write for Day 1100 back in marsh 2019.
The road to freedom
ends
where the horizon
begins.
I would like to talk with someone face to face about the meaning of these few lines. In Holland I would have a hard time finding people that like to talk about more abstract philosophy, here in Norway I am afraid it is impossible.
I realize that there is little meaning in this poem, specially if you just read it. But I have read many philosophy books and sometimes you need a few days to digest one aphorism or a paragraph. Words put in the right order can have a lot of magic in them, and if the philosopher or writer is not known for being a charlatan you better believe that they put some meaning in it for you to find.
I like to know which interpretation you have of this little poem or aphorism, maybe you have another idea.
A. If you reach your goal (or horizon) you are bound by that goal and lose your freedom
B. If you don’t set yourself goals for the future (at the horizon) you are free, from those goals that will steer you towards them.
Today, while looking for a new poem among the ones I have written for older posts, I came across Day 1080. I opened the word document and read the poem and started to read the other text. I was impressed and thought I was pretty smart back then. To be sure I opened my blog in the browser on that day and realized that I was reading the lyrics of the song: “I wish I knew how to be free” written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas and in this case sung by Nina Simone.
I love the text a lot and the rendition of Nina Simone to. For fun I typed in the name of the song in YouTube and apparently it is a popular song to cover. There are a lot of contemporary artist, who are mostly younger, that sing it but they lack, for the most part, the depth of someone that has “lived a life”. Luck Peterson’s version is also good but he had lived, and you can here it.
The poem goes like this:
The dark flower
all of life’s forces used
towering over
looked down on
alone
The live version that Nina Simone sing in Montreux in 1976 is the best one I could find. The studio version is also good but this version has moor in it…
I wish I knew how It would feel to be free I wish I could break All the chains holdin’ me I wish I could say All the things that I should say
Say ’em loud, say ’em clear For the whole ’round world to hear I wish I could share All the love that’s in my heart Remove all the thoughts That keep us apart
I wish you could know What it means to be me Then you’d see and agree That every man should be free
I wish I could give All I’m longin’ to give I wish I could live Like I’m longing to live I wish I could do All the things that I can do
And though I’m way over due I’d be startin’ a new Well I wish I could be Like a bird in the sky How sweet it would be If I found I could fly
I’d soar up to the sun And look down at the sea And I’d sing ’cause I know yeah
And I’d sing ’cause I know yeah And I’d sing ’cause I know I’d know how it feels I’d know how it feels to be free, yeah-yeah I-I’d know how it feels Yes, I’d know I’d know how it feels, how it feels To be free, no no no
The last sentence of the poem I wrote for Day 1067.
The mirror points in two directions.
It reflects me, my outside a stranger to me.
It lets me reflect, what I, think I see.
So, what is reflected?
Am I my own imitation?
I am not a poet. I write and talk about them everyday for the last 3 years, but I never took the time to find out what a poem is and how you should or could write one. I like juggling with the words and enjoy the minutes that it takes to make one. Because I have no deliberate structure while I write, it might happen that I sometimes make a sentence that sounds deep when I reread it. One of these sentences was the “am I my own imitation” from the poem above. I can’t recall if a started with a goal of where to go with that sentence or that I first wrote it down and then decided what the meaning could be.
Writing, and speaking to, is a strange thing if you think about it. How and where do the words you say come from, and why in that particular order? If I take speaking as an example, its a little clearer with that compared to writing. If you speak you don’t think about every word you are going to say, a lot of what you say seems to come out of your mouth automatically. You don’t make your sentences like: say hi…HI, say tree..no…how..HOW, say is…are…yes are…ARE…is it you or your?…you…YOU: you just say: Hi, how are you. This simple example hopefully shows that you most of the time speak without thinking, about speaking. This process goes automatically, probably because you use it so much in your life, but more complex sentences form also as if you had spoken them before, and only when you forgot a specific word or try to explain a complex subject you might struggle. The point what I want to make is that you speak with little thought besides the direction you want to go (and even that can be guided by your habits). With writing it is most of the time the same, the difference is that you can easier go back and change the way you want to say things.
With poetry, or art in general, there is some kind of “force” that steers the process. I think it is similar to what I wrote above, your words flow in conversation but also when you write a poem or paint or take a picture. Once the first sentences are written you can of course change words and undo what came out automatically. I think that great poets and artists know how to balance that process of “inspiration” and editing. I have the inspiration, I’ve been born with it, but I lack the editing skills and deeper knowledge of the words that I can choose from a language that is not my own.
But I like that last sentence even though the words written before it don’t really clarify it.
Are we making, in our life, a beautiful sculpture of our being here, or a Jenga tower?
If you think about your own life, can you do that detached from your preconceptions? Do you dare to ask yourself questions? Do you dare to read books that contradict what you believe or explore areas you’ve never been? Are you the kind of person that asks questions?
I think that a lot of people will feel the urge to say yes to some or all of these (kind of) questions. I also believe that most people think they are open minded and ask questions, but they do this, unknowingly, from within their little corner of the world of ideas.
It is off course impossible that one human being can understand everything that is in this “world of ideas”. But if you see all the knowledge we gathered in the world as written in a big book, than you can at least open the book and see what chapters there are. Most people live in their own chapter and know of the others trough hearsay and maybe a footnote every now and than.
Philosophy is exploring other parts of the book of life. If you see your life as a peace of art, and I think you should, than you can make a monochrome, square block that represents one page of that book or you can make a van Gogh painting where all colours come from another chapter and every stroke of the brush is an adventure.
I don’t know why this poem inspired me to write the text above, I hope it is “a beautiful crafted…why”, and indeed, it might be my illusion and obviously I don’t know the reason.
Without kidding. Whatever “artwork” someone makes out of their life, we, the onlooker, will never know what illusion, or reason the creator that lived that life had. In that sense we can all be admired even if it is not for aesthetic reasons.
We humans have some body parts that no longer have any function. You can think of the appendix, wisdom teeth and muscles in the ears we no longer can use. I guess nature has not found a reason, or the time to loose these parts or functions, while we slowly evolve. There are no big problems with these leftover parts, their main function seems to be to remind us that we once looked and functioned differently.
I did a quick search on the net and found the usual examples of “human vestigiality”, but they mentioned no part of the brain that was leftover and had no longer a function. Certain reflexes like the hiccup and some grasp reflexes are behavioral, and are partially controlled by the brain, these reflexes serve no longer any useful function. I found in my short search no mention of specific parts of the brain that are useless or can harm you if not removed.
If you look into how our brain works and is made, you will learn quickly that some parts are older, we share them with reptilians that lived millions of years ago. During the evolution new parts where attached to the older parts till we ended up with the brain we have now.
In the poem I chose for today I use the amygdala as a specific part of the brain. The amygdala plays an important role in our life but it is not our so called reptilian/primal brain or basal ganglia. This primal part of our brain is the starting point of our automatic behaviours like eating, fleeing and fighting.
You can read bookshelves filled with books about this topic but I will take some poetic freedom in giving an explanation for the poem I wrote on Day 1022.
The night, when I am gone
a visual, engulfs from amygdala
an ancient fear, felt abandoned
I think that some parts of our brain should be removed, if possible, like we do with an infected appendix. These parts wake us up at night with fears and sweat for no reason. They make you angry and fearful at the same time and why can I not decide myself when it is time to eat, I do it anyway around six in the evening.
A big part of our time we are pestered by these prehistorical drives and emotions. We spend a lot of time combating the negative side effects of these primal behaviors. We do yoga, consult psychiatrists and talk over and over with friends about the same fears we can’t explain. We are now so used to rationalize our fears and angst, our more evolved parts of the brain seem to thrive in that behavior, but it seems a little unnecessary. Fear and angst are good if they have a reason, but if they just arrive and react like a lizard reacts to a footstep by fleeing, we could do without them.
Maybe one day, far into the future, we can go to the doctor and ask for a Vulcan-nization of the brain.
Are you ever surprised by how you behave when you meet new people or enter a room with strangers. I can predict how I will behave when I meet my buddies from the Marine core or the elderly neighbor from across the street, but sometimes I open a door and surprise myself by my behavior.
A lone house, when I turn the corner
the chimney smokes, a sign of life
is it a stranger that I will meet?
or will it be me?
This is the poem that spoke to me today, it is from Day 1010.
I think that most animals that are higher on the evolutionary ladder, and display a more complicated social behavior, feel unconsciously what the structure of a new group is. With structure I mean simply: who “plays” what role. You have the alpha’s, the followers, the thinkers, the silent ones and so forth. Most groups consist of these different kind of characters. The nice thing is that someone who is silent in one group can be the alpha in an other group, your role can change depending on the group you are in.
I once did Kendo, I was a beginner and when I was in a group of more experienced players I new my place and was silent and listened. Then I moved to a tiny place in Norway where no one ever heard of Kendo. So when I taught it there I was the alpha and people listened to me.
This is what I meant in the beginning, and with the poem. We all have our place in the group, it can change within the group and if you go to another group you have to see and find out what you role is.
And when are you ever yourself, you might ask? I think your always yourself, no matter what role you play in the group. There are off course times that you or someone else forces a role upon the group, thinking that you are that “role”. Most people don’t like that kind of disharmony, a group with to many alpha’s or silent ones will dissolve eventually.
I try, even if it is impossible, to maintain my naivety. I am afraid to settle in a comfortable place in my mind, and steer my life from there. At the least, I try to feign naivety so that the world treats me like I am naive.
I still remember the times that I learned new things, and that I thought: how can I have lived before, without knowing this. The scary thing is, it doesn’t happen any more, or at least, less frequent. Why is this scary you might wonder, because there must be more things to learn. Not finding these new things to learn can mean that I have settled down in my mind, so to speak, or that I am looking at the wrong places. Like for example: the same places.
I lost, for a while now
the innocents, from just opened eyes
it fell down somewhere, maybe when I turned.
This poem is the inspiration for today, I wrote it on Day986.
I think that settling down with what you know is part of growing up and getting older. Your muscles and back are slowly getting stiffer so why would your mind be any different. And like living an active life might delay your slow decay, so does having an active mind slow down the decay of your thoughts and mind.
And like playing with the kids when your older so is playing naive when you know it, helpful to stay younger.
Sometimes you forget that other people don’t think and see the world as you do. An example: the idea that people in different times and places had a variety of viewpoints on all kind of subjects told me that they could not all be right. This taught me that if I feel that an opinion creeps into my conciseness I should ask myself where it comes from. Is it the culture I live in, that agrees with this opinion? Am I obstinate? Is it the book that I am reading? No matter where your opinion comes from, it is an “answer” on a question that stands around that particular question with all the other answers. It is your perspective on that question that determines your answer.
Perspectivism is an legitimate philosophical topic and should not be confused with relativism. We all have different perspectives towards the world, and where and how you interpret the world depends on that. It is important however to know that not all perspectives or viewpoints are equal. A child of 12 and a pilot have both an idea of how to fly an air plane, but it is obvious that one of them is more “right”.
If people say that everybody has a right to their opinion and that you shouldn’t judge them on that, then you talk about relativism. People that support this kind of relativism often say that there is no truth, or that we cannot get there. The sad thing is that we humans often don’t want to accept that other people found a (scientific) truth, but because we don’t understand it we condemn the person that knows.
I don’t like to talk about current affairs but with the Covid epidemic going on and many people rejecting science we have a real-time example of this problem. Lets take America as an example: last year millions of people have gone to the doctor, they got there medical help and subscriptions, that they took without questioning. Because of all kinds of reason, suddenly a big part of these same people shifted there perspective and started questioning there doctors and science. Often the argument is that no one knows and that’s why they are also right, but it is pretty obvious that last years obedient patient knows less about viruses then the doctors they mistrust now.
The first word obviously got me going. The perspective of the doctor in the last example is years of schooling, experience and don’t forget an oath and probably a drive to help people that are in need. Compared to the people that deny science, they have an perspective on the disease that is further away from an scientific and curious angle and closer to the perspective of the snake oil salesman from yesteryear’s.
Nochrisis 