nadaism: 09/09/06

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Indian home stay cliches

There's a travellers' cliche about home stays in India, for sure. It's said it's supposed to be a very enriching and deep experience, even if nobody knows what exactly it's meant to be.

And then there was a nice village in the middle of nowhere and I really liked it and I decided to have my piece of home stay in India and for sure it was intense. HOWEVER:

- The owner of the house was a drunkard

(Well he had a broken leg in a plaster, and he was really bored, he said he needed the alcohol for digestion since he could not go to work -- ?, anyhow at the end of the day after 2 litres of a hellish artisan liquor he was quite pissed, and I had to have dinner with him and it was annoying, even worse with his limited english).

- The friends of the owner of the house also enjoyed drinking

(Even if they could and had to go to work. One evening I prepared dinner for them, and they got so drunk, and when we ate and they liked the food so much, the conversation got so bad about me being so nice to cook for them and about eternal friendship and about god in the tribal kinnauri views - and it implied me drinking the undrinkable, at least a bit, whenever they got more enthusiastic).

- And I got a marriage proposal

(Actually the 1st evening the owner asked me if I was married and then he started talking about his land and the dowry, if I liked any of his 2 daughters. And I tell you it did not feel good, not at all, I nearly felt like vomiting, even if it was a stupid reaction and I only had to say no).

- And women in India are treated like shit

(Myself trying to make the point, e.g. helping the daughters at the kitchen or bringing the plates back and forth, was stupid and hopeless. Women are nothing in India, at least in rural India, they're treated as servants).

- And there were nice and warm moments but I wonder

(I wonder what did we actually share, what was the cultural exchange. They're just supposed to treat guests as half gods, thus they make you feel good. Traditions may look nice, you might feel curiosity, but mixed with annoyance and pity about the things you don't like or that are unfair - I had lots of pity for the girls, but how honest it was?. And what are their perspectives, their possibilities, their choices? - are these people really interesting?).

- And I got some bugs as a good bye present

(Which were biting me all around, and took me 3 days to remove after nearly striping my skin, and all my body was still itchy for a couple of weeks).

As a positive note, I guess experiencing is the best antidote for naivety. And it was a perfect nadaist activity, since I did nothing in those 3 days.

Well there's travellers' cliches and so many ways of travelling and nobody seems to like being called a tourist. Maybe we should start an anonymous club and introduce ourselves to each other saying something like "my name is Lorenzo and I am a tourist". And then we could start saying the truth about the trip, since it is not always so fantastic...

the second language

The second language refers to a quite interesting proposal by Peter Sloterdijk: to try to translate more acuratelly some important words, e.g. enligtenment, in a way everybody (religious or not) could agree with.

There are new needs in the west, where everything has become so rationalistic, but there is an obvious source of misunderstanding when two people think about the same word in different ways. I'll try to find a writter or a phylosopher or a thinker that could have made a clarifying interpretation of 4 concepts: enlightenment, redemption, liberation and devotion.

differences

Is there any essential difference between a man and a woman?

Ok, there's obvious and visible differences. But let's look at it from another point of view.

If you try to live with somebody, and share most of your time, and be completely intimate, and shop furniture together, and even raise children...

do you expect it to be easy to understand and accept the human being you are sharing everything with?

are you not using the fact that your partner is a man or a women as an excuse because you don't understand anything about him/her?

These below are the differences I will accept. For the rest, I'd like to try to prove that men and women think the same way.

Body shapes. Some internal organs. Hormones. "Those days of the month". And only women get pregnant. There are some phisological differences everybody could agree with.

There's cultural differences: men and women are not educated the same way, i.e. they are repressed in different ways. For instance, men should not cry, women should always look beautiful.

There's the common vague understanding that men are somewhat more rational, (in their behaviour and decisions), while women are somehow more connected to their emotions, (i.e. women manage their emotions in a better way, and use them).

And there's the mysterious way in which women know exactly how much more they feel like eating or drinking, and in consecuense at the end of the meal they just sip your glass or cut a portion of a precise weight from your plate - it's exactly the piece they're missing.

The nadaist contract

Do you want to know if a person who passes all the time doing nothing would be able to live a normal and happy life?

The principles

- We humans continually pursue our minor objectives; when achieved, we only realise that they were not satisfactory, and then we look for a new target. A nadaist breaks the circle by not having any objective at all.

- The mind needs to be occupied, the process of thought is endless: either it may be killed (e.g. tv, music, a novel, alcohol, drugs), or given a focus (sometimes the same tv, music, a novel, also studying, investigating, playing an instrument, or other activities that require discipline). Both mechanisms are the same in essence. A perfect nadaist despises any objective, and would rather stop thinking. However thought is difficult to stop and also is sometimes useful (only sometimes; most of the time our thoughts wander aimlessly). A human nadaist is simply aware of how pointless it is either to kill or to focus thought, but uses all methods at hand when thought cannot be stopped.

- A perfect nadaist would kill thought and spend all the time alone and doing nothing. A human nadaist would amaze him/herself choicelessly with many things, would cultivate friendship, and even have a family, why not. Any nadaist knows that thought cannot kill itself by thinking, just tries to listen to his/her thinking, with no resistance.

- Nadaism requires discipline, so that there is no discipline. A nadaist is very careful with randomness, since a perfect chaos would become a pattern, which is the thing to fight against.

- A careless reader may associate nadaism with total uncertainty. But if uncertanty was to be total, then it would become a certainty. There's always room in a nadaist for a few safe places to shelter when thought is pressing up.

- The nadaist is not looking for unhappiness or misery. A nadaist just wants to live in the present, with no concerns about the past or the future, and with no patterns.

Exercises

These are practices that may help to budding nadaists, but they cannot be taken literally since they would become patterns.

- Go to bed and wake up as irregularly as possible. Go for naps at unexpected moments.

- Join courses in different subjects that you may or may not be interested in, and never finish them.

- Hire somebody to go to your home and rearrange your stuff, so that you don't know anymore where anything is.

All hobbies are allowed (reading, sports, games, whatever), but only as a pastime, carefully handled, so that there is no sense of achievement. e.g. a nadaist may go to the cinema, but will remember the least technical details, just the ones to select other movies that are not too boring, and pursuing no targets like following up a full career or a cinema current. A nadaist may also go travelling, just for the amusement. He/she will need to plan the trip to some extent, to try to get to the places that are not pointless, to avoid those in which there is not really much to do. Anyway the nadaist will for sure feel pretty much at ease wherever, will be an independent traveller, flexible, and will move around according to moods.

The contract

I'm committing to follow the nadaist principles. I will not work, I will not engage into any activity at all in the long term, not even in the medium term. I will amaze myself with methods that only try to kill or focus thought in the moment, in a short sight. In order to become a nadaist, I need YOUR MONEY for MY LIVING. If not, I would not be able to follow the principles.

- I will use the money strictly for living and for selfish purposes.

- I will carefully track all the money of each of the contributors.

- If I ever refute nadaism, I will pay 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will give the money back to the contributors proportionally, adding a 100% interest plus inflation. When the total amount has been repayed, I, the failed nadaist, will go back to live a normal life.

- In case of death, my belongings will go 100% to the nadaist fund.

- I will log my daily activity, and if anything is considered to be against the principles, any contributor may issue a complaint. I'll have the right to defend myself, to prove that I was pursuing no objectives. At the end there will be a weighted votation for all the contributors. If I'm declared a failed nadaist, I will give 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will return the money to the contributors, adding 10% interest plus inflation.

- The contributors decide when and what amounts, when to stop paying, but they cannot disengage. They can only expect their money back, with interest, in the cases above.

nadaism

Nadaism is not dead

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Indian home stay cliches

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the second language

differences

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