nadaism: July 2007

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Animal death

I love dogs, when I was a child and a kid there's always been a dog around in my parents' place. (However, it's true I migh not like them so much, not enough since I've never had one myself at home, and even worse, my flatmate now has a small white hairy evil one and I'm getting tired of its barking, I think it's a dirty animal for a flat, etc.)

I'll put it in a different way: before leaving my parents' I've had quite a few dogs, and grew fond of them, felt affection (I'd say love if it wasn't such a big and important word). What I like the most it's playing with them. They're kind of simple of course, but so enthusiastic, devoted to whichever the game. They enjoy it even if it's square, they run after the carrot if needed and they like it.

And of course they die eventually, and it's tough, a couple of them went to my feet for the last breath and it hurt. However, there's another thing I've always liked about dogs, it's that they're all pretty similar; they're somehow different, smarter or sillier, fast and clumsy, fat and sharp, but essentially they're all the same, all so keen for games, for example. I quite easily end up liking my new dog as much as the dead one, even if I like it in a different way.

Some pet/dog lovers get a bit angry when I try to explain it. They tell me that I'm not being honest, that I am lying when I say I love dogs, and there's nothing I can say to change their minds.

But there's this very good friend who likes dogs as well, mostly the playing with them, as me, and he told me something I found very beautiful. He said he did not know if I was right or wrong, if there is a rightness or a wrongness applicable to what I was saying. Anyhow, he carried on, maybe it was just right, maybe it was just the right way to feel about death, and not only for animals, also for human beings. Not just about death, but the way to feel about people.

Quickly he asked me to forget about it, it was all nonsense, he said, it was around two months ago. From time to time I do remember, I spend some time thinking about rightness and wrongness, and I don't seem to quite get anywhere.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Old idea for a survey

I've been back to work and back to hospital... they took my gall bladder out, seems it is quite a useless organ, nothing to worry about. I'm at home, still resting, trying to reduce the number of painkillers I take a day. And I bought a plane ticket to Turkey for september. I'll leave if I've made enough money during these months so that I can survive without working for let's say half a year. If not, I'll leave anyway; it would be a waste to stay, the ticket is not refundable.

These days I have had a lot of time to think, even if my mind has been disarranged, chaotic, sedated, and I've remembered an old idea for a survey. It's a question to be asked to males only: do you feel different after a long time without sex? you loose control, you go nuts? you stop behaving yourself?

Take the extreme example of sexual abuses during military operations. Sometimes is taken as a "collateral" effect of a war, which is horrible anyway; maybe it is a deliberate intention for a "racial cleansing"; in some cases, like e.g. UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, it's just painful, awful, disgusting. However, no matter how terrible the abuses had been, no matter how much everybody regrets it and wants those involved to be severely punished, there's always a sort of thought that it is in some way "logical" that the military become rapist, since in their missions they're far away from women for such a long time, and men have "their needs".

Ok, the example is really extreme, but the question is not "how many months without sex would make you feel such an urge that you may rape a woman?" The question is only whether there is anything in your mind which changes at all; the point would never be to justify or discharge the rapists.

Anthropologists say sex roles are purely cultural, the result of the conflict for controlling reproduction.

Sometimes males say (although they would admit it's a cliché) they would do anything to get laid, and they claim women are able to control them through their either resistance or concessions. What happens if you don't play the game? You'll get bored? sour? crazy? just lonely?

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