I am pretending to be who I am listening to

At the station, a young woman eats a muffin-top, obviously unawares of Elaine’s desire to profit from her, and the fact that it is best if one avoids acting out episodes from Seinfeld in you day to day existence on this planet. Anyway, this muffin top eater is stunningly beautiful in her black hot pants and liquorice leg stockings and stilettos. Half way through her treat she packs it away for later, grabs her coffee and walks off proudly to ignore my gaze. In her heart, though, I think she thinks that she is not quite beautiful enough for the world. There is no confidence in her demeanour, just false pride. She fact fears the mirror far more than she does my gaze.

Photograph from The Age

The sun shines brightly warming the air. The flowers have finally bloomed, and the women who are out and about are more lightly clad than before.

Others stand around the platform warming themselves in the gentle morning sun waiting for the train to arrive. The birds are singing in the distant trees. It is the first hot day of spring, and a gentle sea breeze has picked up already against the deep azure of the sky. It is the type of day when everything has an intensity that on any other day would not be so noticeable: The colours seem brighter, the smiles larger. A young woman feels her hair, all nice and warm in the sun, her bare arms soaking up the rays.

Once on the train, people maintain a safe distance from one another, unfolding their broadsheets to hide behind, listening cocooned with their iPods and sunglasses on, or checking the messages on their mobile phones. I often wonder whether they are actually performing the task that such a gesture would imply, or that there is a deeper meaning to what they are doing. Are they reading or hiding. Are there actually any messages on their mobile, or are they just hoping to receive one and in fact are lonely? I will never know for sure, but what my body gives me the ability to do, is to allow their body to speak to me.

This is not a particular power I alone possess, but because I notice that I do possess it, I am willing to allow other bodies in space to have a similar ability at least to do what I can do. Of course, I can also go off on flights of fantasy, and imagine that other human bodies have the same capacity, as they are recognisably similar to mine, and different from other bodies that I encounter in my life, such as dogs, cats, cows and sheep. For instance, I may recognise similar attributes in an insect, but these are not of the same order, as I would think of a human body possessing. I can deduce from their behaviour the shared and separate characteristics, and notice that human bodies can change their behaviour to mimic that of the other bodies I encounter, but that these in turn can rarely affect such mimicry in return.

In the carriage as it moves along, people have already ordered themselves into something of a class system. Men and woman in suits tend to sit together, mothers and children with older women and a quiet single woman. The more raucous gather at the end of the carriage, and in this way, harmony is maintained to a degree at least. So long as this fragile order is not disturbed by someone unwilling to maintain there place in the order, all seems to maintain an uneasy but fluid structure. People, who come and go, leave and join this structure, read from the position of the others within the carriage as they do so: by the clothes their fellows are wearing and the activities that they are pursuing; whether it be talking loudly, sitting quietly and reading or looking out the window. As they come and go, they leave gaps in this microhabitat that are filled by new passengers or a reshuffling of those already present.

This is a microcosm of society in transit, but not just any society, nor even a representative cross-section of a particular sub-section of an historical habitat. It is both at one and the same time, a cross-section of all transitory movements of human beings and of all human society up until the train left its station and of all the possible human societies in the future. It is all present in this carriage to be read, but the reading itself disturbs the equilibrium of those read, as the reader him or herself is at one and the same time separate to and a part of this transitory historical train. I am both an observer and a participant in this historical moment, and so, it exists as part of me and me of it, and there is no way that I can extricate myself from this project and still remain an observer anymore than I can fully immerse myself and continue to observe.

I cannot escape my historicalness and be outside of myself. I am always trapped by my gaze and its mirroring by other sentient beings who also gaze on me, even if they do so by gazing at their mobile phones. I am in their smell just as I smell them, and it is not necessary that this sense be above a threshold to exist in actual fact. Even if the turning of the newspaper is masked by the sound of the steel wheels rolling over the cracks in the tracks, I can still hear this sound, as too can the reader of the paper and those surrounding him or her. But as much as they or I want to escape this particular moment we cannot, as we are surrounded by a factual world of sunshine and warmth, now doubt simultaneously here as across this entire city today.

  

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Right there before my eyes, I can taste the changing times, and smell the colour of hope...

Image by subcomandanta via Flickr

If there is a world out there, and I have faith that other bodies that are recognisably like me inhabit that world along with me, then that world should be describable in a manner understandable by those other bodies. We share a space called a family, a community and a society.

Even if we don't share a global village as the half glassers would have us believe, the speed of travel and communications has reduced the distance between us; made  contact instantaneously possible across the planet, so industrial strife somewhere in the US is comunicable instantaneously to me in Melbourne, Australia; an environmental disaster is acknowledge before the nightly news has time to got to air.

I occupy a space that is social at its roots. Language comes to me from others and is only useful to me ultimately for linking across space, and time to other bodies who have a capacity to understand and to perhaps respond.

The point of all these ramblings, so far, is to establish that I am not alone in the world, that I share a world with others, and that ultimately that world is constructed and deconstructed simultaneously through communicative activity. This is the spirit world, this gift of language, which for some reason humans have as fundamental to our nature. We are not the only animal through which this gift operates, but it occurs in no other known animal to the same degree as it does in us.

The very ability to use the world us and for it to have meaning, implies a common bond. The neo-liberal chant that there is no such thing as society, only individuals belies the fact that in reality there is no such thing as individuals only society, that there is a common bond, the spirit of which is given to us through the hot air of the spoken, and the subsequent written word.

These two forms of language, spoken and symbolic, exist side by side and are in a dynamic relationship with one another. One fluid and airy in contest with the fixed and encased in grandeur. It is no mistake that the latter has a certain authority, and indeed the spoken words authority is easily increased if the speaker has the ability to write for others, such as a law maker or a priest. This ability to set words in stone adds weight to those uttered freely.

This ability to render the spoken word into symbolic form has always been at the centre of power. Those who do not have this power and yet are in a position to wield power are often open to being corrupted by those who lead them in this process. Such is a reason why nouveau riche are often rightly distrusted, being nothing but the noisy henchmen of the sectional interests who seek to control them.

This process is a common sight in the era of late capitalism that we live in, when the semi-literate are in cohorts with the anti-intellectual neo-conservative agenda. This alliance between the organised trades, financial marketeers, property developers and the intellectuals of the Western elites, has successfully sought to undermine the social liberal agenda of the post-war years in exchange for bigger television sets, a redistribution of wealth away from the creators and the poor eventually into the hands of the less and non-productive.

The cost of this to those left in the non-existent 'societies' has been enormous in terms of productive loss, social dislocation and disharmony. These controlling intellectuals and their collaborators have traded off taxation for welfare, that is, from a net loss to a positive gain, often cloaked under ideologies as diverse as Ayn Rand's anarchistic ramblings, the Dalai Lama's lame pronunciations and the hero worship of 'left wing' leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro.

To what end? Those left behind in 'society', otherwise called here the lifeworld, are left to pick up the pieces of those who threaten to fall through the 'safety net' constructed by the chameleons who write the laws who do not even believe that society exist. This is the fundamental belief of the ideology of neo-liberalism. Unions, bureaucracies, and community infrastructure has been diminished and denuded since Thatcher and Reagan began this attack on society in the late 1970s. There is no end in sight. Even the recent banking crisis was dealt with by a false Keynsianism that ignored those in the bottom half of society in favour of saving the butts of those in the upper half who do not apparently believe in society at all.

This use of language, indeed its perversion is often criticised by opposing factions of the intellectual elite, but they miss the point. Language has been co-opted and used to justify this corrupt disenfranchisement of the Lifeworld, and at the same time colonising the language of that world by simply displacing the bureaucracy onto the citizenry. The level of regulation may have decreased for those in the upper economic echelons of society but has increased substantially for those at the bottom end, at the brunt end of these social, philosophical and economic deforms.

Everyone gets an education just that some get a better education than other, or so the saying goes. While the best efforts of the political and intellectual classes has been to shelter themselves and their collaborators from the vagaries of the system their policies have created, this process has educated the those left behind in the Lifeworld to a reality that is cruel, negative and burdensome. It has shackled them with interconnected health, social and drug problems that threaten the very existence of any social and family fabric remaining. In return they are confronted with hostile texts which threatens their very existence as citizens.

Those in charge of the written word, the political, judicial and intellectual elites along with the middle class who have 'moved in on' the unsuspecting working classes, taking over their ruling bodies, come and go from the life world on a daily basis, ordering the production of new tomes, documentary propaganda and internet sites that to infiltrate the Lifeworlds consciousness. Those of us left behind are fighting back, however, and it is on the basis of language that we can do this. Language congeals our thoughts and focuses our attention before the hunt. It has always been like that.

Slowly, through the remaining available channels we are in communion with each other. Also, this connectedness is enhanced by the internet and other post-print areas of publication. It is up to those of us in a position to do so, to communicate at all levels of society to break through the ideological superstrate of the non-society by which we have come to be governed and take back control of the agenda of politics. It is my belief that the election of Barack Obama, the hung parliaments in Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia are the harbingers of this change on the ground in these modern Western democracies.

Taste is returning as the rancid smell of the fast food outlets is being pushed back, and the air smells sweet with the burgeoning hope of new times ahead, of a crisis that will force fundamental change in the way we think about economics and the environment, and of a return to the Great Society of which post-war generations dreamed, not the baby boomer crap we have been dished up with.

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Just another lazy Sunday afternoon.

Image via Wikipedia

It is a warm Sunday afternoon for this time of year. The sun has been shining all day and the wind has been progressively abating. Children can be heard playing in a back yard nearby, and the birds are preparing for the onset of evening. I sit at the computer which hums gently as I type. This scene is composed of spatial elements and social conventions much more than it is by my psychology apart from a desire to understand and communicate this understanding.

There is a world of relationships that exist beyond my body. It enters my body only as an after-image of that reality and in the form of language patterns given to me by others. It is true that as a poet I have invented the odd word and often in syncronicity shared that with others who too have invented the same or similar words and phrases in isolation. but this is, and always will remain, the exception rather than the rule. We are born into a world of concepts and relationships and are introduced to these through language and social conventions.

Sunday is not just any day. I live in a society predominately descended from the Western Judeao-christian tradition. As such, Sunday is the first day of the week through convention and traditionally a day of peace. I like this idea and so try to project that onto my world and read it in a way in accordance with the concept that I have inherited along with others. It is quieter because the week ended yesterday and the children can play and the adults relax in preparation of another week of work and learning.

The spatial relationship is also important. While the computer sits foregrounded as I seek to write another blog prompted by a Facebook friend, the children are some distance off and perceptible only through earshot. If they happened to be in my tiny flat it would not be as serene and peaceful. Indeed, if they were playing at the same distance but in the middle of a busy intersection during tomorrow morning's peak hour, I would probably be quite distressed with a feeling of responsibility for their combined safety.

The birds, too, would be problematic if they were in the room with me. Full of fear and anxiety as they tried vainly to escape the confines of my bungalow, they would know doubt fly into walls, me and my computer, making it almost impossible for me to write anything.

I can imagine all this only through prior experience, either personal or conveyed to me in linguistic blocks and phrases, which describe certain behaviours and preclude others. These social relationships that are present in language are appear always already there, to have an a priori existence and come to me in the forms of bodily feelings and postures.

At the moment I am relaxed and peaceful because of what I have described above as the scenario that exists in my immediate surroundings. If it were as I have imaginatively described my body would start to feel anxious and affect the very words and behaviours that are necessary to communicate with others.

This is not trivial. Objects in our perceptual field exist in relation to me and to each other. That relationship is inseparable except in text books that seek to isolate and focus on one object to the exclusion of others momentarily so as to seek an understanding of that object's essential characteristics. In reality, however, an object can never be fully understood in such isolation in its complexity.

Concepts and ideas, like objects, are also in such a relationship with each and the particular social milieu that they inhabit, that is, they exist defined by space and time and as such are essentially historical in nature. A table is built from already existing materials according to the fashions of the time. At times fashion itself is backward looking and so it may be a reproduction design from an earlier era. At others its design will be inspired by an imaginary future.

In either case, what is being built is a functional contemporary object whether its creators see it this way or not. As well as this, the table is built from pre-existing materials and transformed into an object which its makers recognise as an object with the functional attributes of a table. Furthermore, at some future time it will cease being a table and the materials consumed in its transformation will either be utilised for some other human purpose or return again to a static state able to be re-transformed into some other object of utility either by human, animal or some other naturally occurring force.

Ideas, concepts and memories, that is, those human constructions that exist on the Invisible rather than  Visible plane, are no different. Sure, they can be externalised in the form of the written word and transmitted via books, texts or indeed performances, yet they are still constructed in much the same way from the linguistic fragments of 'natural world' and given life through the spoken or written word, music and paintings, mathematical concepts and the body of knowledge described, recorded and experimented with in some sort of 'scientific' endeavour.

The Invisible realm is just as real as that which we can directly perceive. Indeed, as I began, this realm always seems to be already present before we even try to speak, just sitting around encapsulating the solidity of the reality we move amidst. 

'It is Sunday' seems like such a simple statement, yet is pregnant with social and historical connotations, in constant flux as an object precisely because it exists amidst the flux of ideas that we as humans continually project and receive through our various perceptual apparati. It is our failing as Image by JanetandPhil via Flickranimals that we need to isolate to understand, and so to come to a richer understanding we need to constantly remember this limitation of the way we are in the world.

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There is nothing to worry about.

It is Sunday evening and I have eaten and have the television set on. There is nothing on the box and so I thought I'd sit down and write. I couldn't think of what tow right, but remembered a lengthy online discussion that i had during the week about nothing.

Nothing is something that is mostly ignored. As humans living in modernity we are convinced that what hits our senses and is perceived directly is real, that which does not being unimportant. Seeing is believing and conversely that which cannot be sensed by our legitimate five senses is deemed illegitimate and beyond any meaningful discourse. This is in spite of the observable ad perceivable fact that the universe itself is mostly made of nothing at all.

The ancients knew this intuitively. In English we have separate words for heaven and sky but in other European languages at least this is not the case. There is one word for both heaven and sky in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Polish and Russian: ciel, Himmel, cielo, cielo, cel, niebo and небо respectively. The only other European language that uses words to differentiate the two entities is Greek, which uses παράδεισος and ουρανός. When we look up at the heavens we see nothing foregrounded by what we now know to be the bluish sheen of our planets atmosphere in interaction with the suns radiation and backgrounded by the stars, the closest of which is about four billion  billion miles away. We say this is four light years to stop this astronomical calculation overwhelming us in the almost complete nothingness that exists between us observers on earth and the closest source of light apart from our own sun.

Nothing can overwhelm us and so we have a tendency to reduce nothing to mean not being of importance. We pretend this nothing is not something to notice but is just a space. An absence rather than the overwhelming presence that it perhaps in reality is. We unwittingly perceive the foreground and background while neglecting the middle ground of nothing or next to nothing. The whole of our perceptual reality is treated similarly when I think of it. The universe is overwhelmingly composed of nothing and all we seem interested in is finding something solid. The human mind seems allergic to the idea of the abyss.

Think of a single atom. No one has directly perceived one but we believe by inference that it is made up of a nucleus of protons and neutron encircled by electrons. Other sub atomic elements are thought t exist as well and even a God particle which is being searched for at the Hadron Collider project on the French-Swiss border. These scientists are searching for something that may turn out in the end to be nothing. This is not to say that a God particle does or doesn't exist, but perhaps the God particle consists of nothing and therefore is something as part of everything that goes to make up our universe. (Other universes not with standing).

I am using nothing here in the same sense as Merleau-Ponty's concept of the Invisible. The biologist tells us that we are largely water or the chemist carbon depending on just how reductionist they happen to be at the time and what barrow they happen to be pushing. This is all part of a language game, and misses the point that the externalities of our bodies encapsulate matter which is just as much composed of nothing as it is of any particulate or matter. Remember, as matter we are both particle and light?

I do not, however, perceive myself this way. I am flesh and bone and I see the world in my image just as the ancients once saw God as a heavenly father. The world appears to me as embodied, as having a being apart from me but behaving in a way similar to the way I perceive my body to function. Once I understand the nothingness present in the universe, I begin to understand how this nothingness inhabits the world and through its existence as a flesh like substance through which I move, my very own body to be inhabited, perhaps overwhelmingly so, by nothing: That when nothing is seen as something then it and all the other somethings can be seen to construct the world around me in a way which expresses more closely the overwhelming nature of the universe we inhabit somewhere in our dark corner, lit only by our sun and the faint glow of the milky way and all the other stars off into the broad expanses.

We have the Visible or perceivable and that which is not directly perceivable and which forever remains invisible except when expressed by us humans through our day to day lives and that cultural phenomena called art, religion or spirituality. If the invisible is so overwhelming then why too is its existence denied just as vehemently as God has been by many lesser scientists and thinkers. I can no more sense nothing, than I can God. Yet, all the expressive parts of humanity are in the same basket of non-matter. Human consciousness does not exist in the same way as love does not exist. These are not particles or light, but are part of the realm of nothing that I have described. 

 

We can not sense these things from the outside but can only experience them from within. I can no more sense how much you love your cat than you can sense how sad I am that my friend forgot to ring me this evening. Because you have a body like I do, and I know through experience that we perceive the world in similar ways, I can have empathetic feelings for you and you for I. But it is not possible to cross that gap and to see my consciousness of things, because that consciousness does not exist to the senses; it is in the realm of the Invisible and nothingness. If God exists, this is the realm to look in, not for a particle but into the abyss.

So, nothing is something to worry about. If we want to gain a broad understanding of everything that goes to make our universe and the world, we need to concern ourselves with the overwhelming bulk of that universe, not discount it as meaningless. To do so is to deny one of our essential features as human beings and that is to make meaning from our perception of things and to express them in a way that makes sense of the world we inhabit.

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What is post (post) modernism?

It's been a beautiful Melbourne day. Grey skies accompanied by a fine drizzle with an occasional gentle gust of wind. Just magic. So, why considering all this, am I feeling not quite up to my usual self? Perhaps, there is not an answer to the question why? Maybe, I just need to accept that I feel as grey as the weather and the intermittent showers and breezes. The answer might only in fact be superstitious, but then an irrational answer will often suffice in the absence of a better explanation.

I plan to meet up with my peers tomorrow. We are the core group of post (post) modernists. The group consists of a semi-retired Professor from Malta, an Italian PhD student and a picaro. I'm not telling which one I am, but I the term came to both the picaro and the Professor last week. An example of Jungian synchronicity. Over a coffee or two no doubt,  I expect that post (post) modernism will again be discussed. The Professor will say that 'two negatives make a positive' and the picaro will say that we are past what in fact never existed in the first place. All of us are excited to finally find our way past this aberration of Western thought, which was only ever really a watered down version of modernism proper in the first place: (post) modernism.

Even the post-modernists always accepted the fraudulent nature of their claims. 'Post-modernism is really only exists as a subset of modernism and doesn't exist separately to it' there foremost proponents  such as Lyotard seem to argue. This was all bad enough until butterflies  in Upper Mongolia started causing bushfires in the outer suburban Sydney, and dolphins actually attained an intelligence level greater than the average human: Whales became sacrosanct. The truth was, as Holmes told Watson, that fact is stranger than fiction; Crows were found to be in the same group of intelligence as these sea-going mammals, and whats more, they didn't even need to get their feathers wet to be so.

Ah, yes! But there is no truth, they would no doubt argue. Well, that's a truth statement if I've ever heard one. That sounds like a universal claim to an absolute truth to me at least. Post (post) modernism would rather, from my point of view at least, maintain that there may very well be absolute truths, but that we as humans can not know those truths directly due to the very limitations of our mode of perception and the limitations of language, our sole method of expressing any truth with any foundational accuracy. Art, of course, with its recourse to more subliminal meaning, may express these truths, but again, only in an interpretive and not a direct way.

From one cold winter's morning to another, this idea develops with a mixture of jollity and perseverance. That is the way of the post (post) modernist intellectual.  Over a coffee or two in a cafe in Heidelberg, far from Paris' left bank <> ,  these ideas develop one day at a time into questioning the very bases of modern thought. Language does not permit an escape from the modern, and no amount of grammatical tricks will allow one to free oneself from the bondage of this idea. Just writing the present in the past tense is nothing but a cheap trick advocated by some postmodernists.

So, what is Post (post) modernism.  It is pure and simply an acceptance that human thought consists of rational and irrational components. That science and religion are equivalents just as are order and chaos. It rejects the notion that one is better than the other, accepting Maurice Merleau-Ponty's assertion that human consciousness is composed of perceptible and non-perceptible occurrences, The Visible and the Invisible being the seminal work in this area. It's basic tenet was written and described by Albert Einstein over a century ago, that matter and light are equivalents.

Furthermore, it is a proposed that human perception of the physical world is essentially dualistic, and while the physical world may or may not be so formed, it remains integral to our understanding of the world that we accept these opposing forces as a unity, St Augustine of Hippo was the first scholar of note to point this out nearly 2000 years ago.

The world at first appears Newtonian and well ordered. The deeper we look , however, he more this order seems to break up into disorder or chaos. If we go deeper still, chaos seems to give way to the extremely ordered world of the atom only to again resume its chaotic appearance at the sub-atomic level. The point being, we can never really know, because once past a certain point we are no longer directly perceiving phenomena but rely on intermediary devices.It becomes simply a matter of whatever works.

In any case, why should we expect the world to be one or the other? Since ancient times, order and chaos have been constant themes delimiting the way we see the world. Certainty and mystery  are intertwined and inseparable, and there is no escaping that. Absolute truths may or may not exist, but our limited positioning and the fact that we are confined to a body ensures that there can be no reliable omniscience in our knowledge. It can only be developed through discursive activity. There may  or may not be an omniscient view point but that view point is beyond the human realm.

The rain is pouring now. Who would have thought. The wind has ceased. Tomorrow is another day, and I expect it to arrive just the same as it did today.  The sun will inscribe its path across the sky, and the stars will go into hiding again. The wind and rain will do what they do. It will be cold because it's winter. What exactly will happen in detail is another point entirely. And of course, I am relying on my memory of the past to predict what tomorrow's present will be. That is a process that has worked for me and other bodies like me in the past, and I expect that it will work just as reliably in the morning. Who knows, I may very well be wrong.

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Looking for similarities amongst the differences.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It is an adult thing to live in a world of difference. Since childhood we have grown accustomed to differentiating objects in the world and naming them. Of course, this is a purely human occupation and part of our learning about the world we live in. In the end, though, we risk losing the ability to see things clearly for what they are, as this process of differentiation separates each object in our field of perception into individual elements.

A child perceives the world as a whole field of moving and stationary objects. There is little differentiation at first. The first foregrounding of an object is possibly its mother's smiling face followed by the teat presented as a source of oral satisfaction and food. Still, at this preverbal stage the objects are yet to be named and exist in the foreground against a background constructed to varying degrees in a way deemed suitable for the raising of a child.

   

Almost immediately the child is introduced to its mother tongue, and to  the process of the linguistic linking of objects in its sensory field with names learned both in isolation and connection with one another. This learning continues well into adulthood for many, as every more complex objects become integrated into the matrix of language which go to make up each persons vocabulary.

The integration of these words into this matrix becomes knotted with the increasing differentiation between the individual words. Also, this knotting is accentuated in when one considers the individualism prevalent in complex late-capitalist societies, where each persons vocabulary is pitted against the next persons in a battle for linguistic superiority and acceptance. This process is a dialectical one between fractured individuals living in disparate communities each jockeying for placement and meaning within a their community and each community positioning itself for access to scarce resources.

Rather than seeing this as an historically contrived evolution, post-modernists argued instead that this was in someway the natural state of affairs. That language was a process that constructed meaning through the differànce amongst words, assuming from Saussure onwards, that words are learned against each other, that an object is defined as this and not that. Words are learned as discreet units relating to discreet objects and only later against other objects. They are just as commonly related to similar objects. Post (post) modernism or the return to the future of the modernist impulse recognises this.

 

I passed onto my children language in the form making connections between words and pictures of objects as well as through reading picture books to them. Words and narrative were related to them and to a visual representation of what they signified. In going out amongst the real world, the children would spontaneously practice asking, Car? while pointing at a variety of automobiles, or Cat? while pointing at a small dog on a leash. No that's a doggie, I would say in reply, or yes! that's a car. Anyone who has parented a child knows the routine which is both rewarding and at times tiring.

 

 A similar effect can be observed through the learning of narrative. Imagine a child running out dressed as a fairy complete with a magic wand and a tiara. Here, a cluster of words go together to make a fairy. The fairy is not made against goblins or superheroes. In fact the child is likely to quiz an adult 'What do I look like, Daddy?' confirming for the child that he or she has got the cluster of meaning right. If a Superman appeared discretion would be called for if the child insisted on being a fairy. I've never seen such an occurrence but I suppose it is possible. 

 

Once the language matrix is formed, however, in all its complexity and in social competition with siblings and peer groups, a process of differentiation appears to take place with the way these words are stored. Similar objects become isolated from each other and differànce becomes an operational function of the way words are used. This is a margarine container and that is a plastic storage container. The tree outside is alive while the wooden desk is dead. The matrix has integrated differentiation within its structure and blinds the body to the similarities between the containers both being plastic and the tree and the desk as both being made out of wood.

 

When I awoke this morning I started to think of similarities between the objects in my sensory field. The sun is warm like me. It is a body that throws off heat just like my body does.  It is rises every morning and sets at night, it begins and ends just like a story, and just as my body is bound to do. When it sets it goes somewhere else just as I will when I am gone. 

 

The tree outside of my window has branches and I also have limbs. Through its limbs flow a fluid just like a fluid flows through my limbs. I recognise it through its similarity to my body. It is alive. So too is the sun which is full of fire as I am full of heat. It is irrelevant to me what the source of that heat is and how hot it is. To me the suns rays caress my skin as if they were emanating from another body close to mine. I don't care how far away it is. That is not for me. I am not a scientist.

Once out of bed I logged into my Facebook account. Somebody was full of this post-modernist difference asking me to see that men and women are different, begging me really. Well, I would have thought that was self-evident I wrote in reply. Gender hatred is based on this differentiation. So too is racism and any other form of hatred, this desire to see difference amidst overwhelming similarity. Hatred in based on this impulse to neglect the similarities in favour of differences. 

 

The knotting of words becomes a knotting of the body, a posture full of anger towards the objects of the world, with muscular energy displaced towards objects outside of itself, either towards externalities or the inner self, resulting in self-hatred and loathing. There are differences between men and women as was written, but the similarities are overwhelming, the variations slight.  We are human. Of course the differences have to recognized and tolerated because of the similarities and not in spite of them.

 

The birds were singing this morning. So, too, was I. I felt we were both singing for similar reasons. It was a beautiful sunny winter's morning. The birds were expressing there joy at a new day bodily in the same way that my body was expressing joy. They seemed less inhibited about their singing than I did perhaps, but nonetheless, we were both honouring the warmth of the sun. We were behaving similarly. I am able to think of this because they too share a body like mine, a body that moves in the world and seeks shelter in a storm and some food in the morning. There is of course one big difference of course. I only wish I could fly.

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