By: Patrick

I just finished an old biography of the theologican and philosopher Martin Buber (Encounter with Martin Buber by Aubrey Hodes). One of my friends raves about Buber, so I thought I would give this book a go. Buber really was an extraordinary man concerned with love, relationships, dialogue, peace, politics, education and much more. He was a true intellectual and it is sad to think that in our time someone like Richard Dawkins is considered one of our primary public intellectuals. Morally, Buber and Dawkins are in different leagues. Buber felt that ‘the task of the intellectual and spiritual man is to supply the necessary corrective. To do this he must have no direct interest in the holding of power. He should not seek to rule. But he should draw intelligent conclusions from his awareness of social problems and present them forcefully and courageously to the statemen who carry out policy’. Buber referred to ‘the truth of the slower tempo’. For him, ‘the authentic forces that change and shape the world are deep and under the surface. So they move slowly. Real history is the history of the slow pace’. At a time when we live such fast-paced lives, the idea of having someone like Buber in the political arena, stroking his long beard and agonizing over every moral intricacy of a policy decision, seems a bit absurd. And we are all the poorer for it. Buber wrote extensively and passionately about education. As a part-time lecturer, I found much of what he had to say revelatory. For Buber, the real struggle is not between East and West or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. In this sense, the teacher has a supreme responsibility and must ‘constantly examine his (sic) conscience’. It is sad to think of teachers, who went into their jobs with the loftiest of ideals only to have it hammered out of them through overwork, stress and bureaucracy. Same with most professions, it seems. If we were to take Buber seriously and try and (1) humanize technology rather than looking back to pre-industrial ideals and (2) try and understand each other through dialogue rather than fight with each other, then clearly the world would be very different. It is easy to believe that this sounds hopelessly naive and to snigger at the idea of it ever having an impact on global politics. Maybe so, but Buber was more a spiritual thinker than a political thinker at the end of the day, despite the two unavoidably crossing over in his life. For him, the key to changing the world is changing ourselves and how we relate to each other – transforming the in-between. Peter Sloterdijk is releasing a book later this year called You Must Change Your Life. I know very little about Sloterdijk. In fact I know nothing about him except that he has written this book. I sense that it will be nothing like what Buber has to say, but is coming at the same theme from a different angle: don’t wallow in the failures of politics, change yourself. I feel scared to change myself. To commit to a cause or a friend suddenly makes that cause or friend very real, and reality can be quite disconcerting in its permanence and fixedness. Yet to quote Fernando Pessoa: ‘One must monotonize existence in order to rid it of monotony’. Like Pessoa, Buber succeeds in making monotony sound very appealing. Maybe I too will one day consider monotony more appealing than eating a Strawberry Muller Rice.

By: Patrick

A couple of years ago in a section of this website entitled ’21′, I wrote a list of 21 things that I would like to achieve in life. I would now only put 8 of them on the list were I to re-write it (which is not to say I have actively turned against the rest (although this is the case with some of them), so much as lost interest in/de-prioritised them). Not sure what that says about me (well I have a fairly good idea but am trying to avoid facing it), but it certainly makes Soviet Russia’s 5-year plans seem a touch naive. I hope to expand upon this post and maybe re-write my list at a future point. That may help me to work out what’s gone wrong/right…

By: Patrick

I call the bingo at a local community centre every other Tuesday. Always the same people sat in the same places having the same chats and telling the same jokes. I often wonder what it would be like to break the unspoken rules, to pause for an extra few seconds at one point, to call a number that has already been called, to call a number that is not between 1 and 90. Yet I never do it. The routine is sacred and that is fine by me. The bingo is mundane. I find the mundane both comforting and repellent. We are taught to distrust the mundane. It is seen as synonymous with the mediocre. Yet at its heart, life is mundane, despite all attempts to distract us from this fact. If we spend our whole lives fleeing the mundane, have we learnt anything about life? This evening, I spent the second half of the bingo anticipating going to the new Asda to see if they stocked fresh pesto. Neither Morrisons nor Tesco Extra stock this product and I really wanted to have some. In the end, Asda did not have any, but I took it fairly stoically and bought some tomato and bacon sauce instead. Yesterday I left the house specifically to buy a Strawberry Muller Rice. I am not sure what all this says about me, but it would appear to suggest that I am bored. This seems less admirable than accepting and enjoying the mundane. The mundane seems closely linked to the spiritual and there is not much about pesto or products made by Muller that is spiritual. When purchasing food becomes the crucial predictor of my levels of happiness, or even just basic satisfaction, it is difficult not to conclude that my life is lacking something quite important.

By: Patrick

Having recently found out about the 2008 movie, Yes Man, starring Jim Carrey in which he says ‘yes’ to all propositions that come his way, I started scheming about writing the script for the sequel to this movie with a view to improving upon the original. Having not managed to watch the original due to lack of time or will, I got the jist of it from the plot synopsis on wikipedia. As a result of saying ‘yes’ to everything, Carrey’s character engages in many delightful and unpredictable activities, including taking Korean classes, joining a Persian dating website, and receiving oral sex from an elderly neighbour. Indeed, Carrey’s initially rather downbeat character appears transformed by the end of the movie through the gift of saying ‘yes’ to a lot of people. I imagine that this movie must have inspired a number of people to try and live like Carl Allen (Carrey’s character), uninhibited by the limitations and boundaries of the word ‘no’. It seems to be unlikely that this would be a useful long-term move and is perhaps one that left some people feeling slightly disappointed or in jail. While most sequels are fairly weak derivatives of the initial feature, I decided that my script would explore a different angle to the whole ‘yes’ scenario. It started with Carl Allen back on the ‘yes’ train after the breakdown of the marriage that ended the first instalment of the Yes Man franchise (it is not stated what caused the relationship breakdown and subsequent divorce, but one may assume that Allen found that marriage involved too many enforced uses of the word ‘no’, hence limiting his unfettered freedom). Back out in the world with a view to saying ‘yes’ a hell of a lot, Allen comes across a young woman sat on the pavement crying. He asks her what the matter is and she tells him that for many years she has been the sole carer for her elderly mother who has both Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. She begs him to take over the care of her mother in order to protect her sanity and give her a chance to swan off round the world for a bit. Allen reluctantly is forced to say ‘yes’ and the movie involves the development of the relationship between him and the old woman (who I named Betty) through Allen’s unavoidable duty of care that takes up most of his life to the extent that even when he has free time he is too tired to say ‘yes’ to other projects. During the course of the movie, Allen realizes that all his life he has struggled to commit to anything and that his need for unfettered freedom has come at the cost of him not developing a single meaningful relationship or carrying out a single act that may have impacted on his freedom to say ‘yes’ to anything that came his way. After much crying and soul-searching, Allen turns his back on his old ways and devotes his life to actually being something like a useful and moral citizen, who takes pride in refusing stupid or meaningless diversions from exploring the deeper truths of his existence as a human. The tone of the movie is pious and didactic. I have yet to receive an answer from Warner Brother’s Pictures, who distributed the original movie.

By: Patrick

I rarely feel strong bonds to people I have never met, especially not those who were dead before I had even heard of them. Yet the other night, I got this lovely image in my head of the late comedian Bill Hicks and the late writer David Foster Wallace sat in a bar together drinking and laughing. I found this a very comforting image. I think they would have been good friends. Both were very funny people in their different ways, both were very spiritual people in their different ways, both were profoundly courageous moral thinkers in their different ways. Slavoj Zizek wrote that film directors Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky had offices in the same building towards the end of Tarkovsky’s life. Yet he writes that: ‘Although the two directors had deep respect and supreme mutual admiration, they never met, but carefully avoided each other, as if their direct encounter would have been too painful and doomed to failure on account of the very proximity of their universes’. My feeling is that Hicks and Wallace would not have engaged in this paradoxical avoidance strategy were they to have crossed paths. They would have got on. They would have got drunk and put the world to rights in between tears of laughter. They really seemed to care about people. From their hearts. This seems to me to be so rare. I remain deeply touched by both of them. I feel something like love for them although strangely enough this is rarely motivated directly by their artistic output, so much as the details that emerge in photos, interviews, biographies. Two tormented souls struggling to find love and compassion in a cynical and inauthentic world. I feel so sad that neither are still with us. Yet the image of the two of them giggling like children over a beer in the corner of a smoky Texan bar fills me with utter joy. And sadness.

By: Patrick

It seems that as a society we do not take boredom very seriously. I recently went to a conference on the theme of boredom, and when I mentioned it to other people, most of them chuckled. “Was it boring?” was the standard response. Fair enough. For most people, boredom as a mood is of a similar status to minor moods such as frustration or awkwardness. It does not hold the same status as moods like depression or happiness, which keep academics and self-help gurus busy. And yet David Foster Wallace, referred to by many as the greatest mind of his generation, has just had his final unfinished work, The Pale King, published posthumously. It is a book about boredom. Why would such a great mind be so focused on boredom? Wallace even went so far as to say that: “To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”. This is just a preliminary piece to try and place boredom in context. I hope to expand upon this theme, looking at questions like: what can boredom teach us? Are we living in an age of boredom? Is boredom a ‘pathological’ mood? Is boredom a taboo subject? I am hoping to explore some books and movies that touch on the theme of boredom in order to try and make my own ideas clearer to myself. I hope shortly to submit a few thoughts on a book I am reading at the moment called The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It is considered a boredom classic!

By: Patrick

Written 25 April 2012

Fernando Torres broke his long-standing goal drought last night, scoring Chelsea’s winner in a crucial European match. It was interesting to hear the discussions afterwards on the radio. Apparently some psychologists had suggested that his goal drought may be ‘fatal’. It seems interesting that psychologists feel able to make such comments. Their opinions only have any authority as they are supposed to be scientific (psychology is, after all, the science of mind/behaviour), but it is difficult to work out how scientific the claim that Torres’ goal drought is ‘fatal’ can be. As irrelevant as much of what psychologists say in the media can be, there do yield plenty of power. What if Torres had heard a supposed scientific expert tell him that his goal drought may be fatal, that he may as well just give up, that it is basically all over for him? This may well have led to a self-fulfilling prophecy and only lowered his confidence levels and expectations of himself. We can see similar things in the field of mental health – professionals have often suggested that certain forms of mental health problems are chronic or incurable, in effect ‘fatal’. This must have a devastating effect on people who are told this (numerous patient narratives suggest that this is the case). Many contemporary accounts of recovery from mental health problems force us to question these rather pessimistic statements. The thing that troubles me is that statements from experts, especially scientists, have power to shape how we think about ourselves – experts increasingly have come to govern our souls, to use Nikolas Rose’s phrase. Fortunately one suspects that Torres would not take too much notice of such nonsense, but I find it troubling that such statements continue to be made by people who make claims from a supposedly scientific perspective. Psychologists, psychiatrists and other similar professions wield great power in determining how we think about ourselves and each other. Yet there is good reason to be suspicious of much that is taken to be scientific orthodoxy. Robert Whitaker’s recent book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, is an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism that exposes the corruption and deception at the heart of the modern psychiatric project. Ivan Illich suggested that we should take less notice of professionals, that we should de-school society. People may find it re-assuring to have professionals guiding their decisions from the cradle to the grave, but I find this quite depressing, especially when most it is bad science. Torres’ goal last night made a mockery of opportunistic psychologists offering their supposedly scientific perspective on the fatality of his goal drought. Yet most of the rest of us probably care a lot more about what scientists tell us about ourselves than Torres does. That’s the worrying part of it.

By: Patrick

I am thirty-one years old. I seem to have reached a stage in my life where I am struggling to find meaning in a lot of things that once seemed so important. Not all things. I do not feel depressed, but rather I am finding that in most crucial areas of my life, things just do not feel quite right. I am often bored, and if I am not bored then I am busy and distracted, which is basically the same thing. So I guess I am trying to connect/re-connect with those things that nurture and feed my soul. I like words like soul and find it (along with others that are increasingly under attack by scientific materialism) comforting and important. Lots of people and ideas nurture my soul, while others do harm to it. This blog is an attempt to explore these people and their ideas. I hope to focus on the former much more often than the latter! I also hope to explore some personal ideas and experiences so that it is not exclusively about other people and their ideas. I look forward to seeing how it shapes up and what directions it will end up going in. I feel very excited about writing it. It is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. For some reason, I am at last ready to do it.