Swimming Lessons In Divergent Currents and Deconstruction

Deconstruction As Resistance

One thing leads to another in the genome of associations inasmuch as the post before this posed the questioning of how we as a nation, define progress and then prior to that in reflecting on my own life in relation to the death of my mother and the valuations that only arrive by hindsight, toward her, toward the historical world, both of which at times seem to lack an anchor in balancing where the boundaries are between what we presume to be our own and what is imposed upon us in the exterior and historical world.

We seem to be book ended between simultaneous and parallel universes. Between the invisible world of consciousness which we only observe by effect, the present by it’s relationship to the past, the referential illusions of time by comparison, the material semiotics of language transposed to our stereotyping of what defines reality, other’s views of ourselves, our own distorted lack of honesty in avoiding what we are not in personal terms, etc,etc.

All of this seemingly has an architecture that requires deconstruction, which, perhaps not surprisingly ,the same deconstructive behaviors are present in anomalous subject matter where we are forced to take apart what we assume we do know and make an attempt to view all the constituent facets of it's manifestation in unique ways. The issue is also fraught with our own orientation, which then also requires deconstruction, a necessary activity that is nearly always overlooked.

The Hunter As The Prey

At times it strikes me as absolutely surreal that self defined ghost hunters in search of phantoms might be phantoms in of themselves if we fall back upon the Buddhist concept  of the most apt description of the aggregate sum of our species state is that of “hungry ghosts”

Perhaps we exist in a state wherein the state of Detroit is a metaphor of dissolution and outsized exaggerations of what defines success, as something we can drive when there is no one in the driver’s position, everyone is responsible so no one is as a further metaphor of the reality behind the idealism that we term democracy, and yet that very same illusion seems to inhabit me when I catch a glimpse of it. The imaginary me versus me. A self projection as an act of creation, and where does this lead?

I have a friend who is a psychologist who specialises in psychological profiling in forensic work addressing homicide cases as well as treating chemical dependencies who considers compulsive addictions to be a chief characteristic of the human species and in one of  our conversations, I suggested his view was not that far afield from that of the Sufi spiritual perspective who often use a the image of a tavern to anchor human psychology.

Specifically, the spiritual spectrum of that runs from the state of ecstasy to the state of sobriety.

Then there is the other variant termed a state of poverty which corresponds to that of “hungry ghosts” in that our existence is as far from being autonomous as the mind can conceive and that the very  isthmus we occupy requires that everything be provided for us, from air, to water, to food to..well, I am sure you catch the drift as did I.

In Islam, they have the twin metaphors of the pen and the tablet which infers that duality is defined as a transpersonal dynamic as much as alternating current, what Gurdjieff called the affirming, denying and reconciling forces that directly correspond to the principles of electricity, which could be taken in another light as energy=information therefore there must be a tensioning of opposing states to create anything..becoming rather than simply being.

Pushing Back When Pulled

All of the above led me to a conclusion while not written in stone that suggests to me an advocacy of swimming upstream as a way of life..pushing against the pull.

When I think about this anticipatory intent, it is a intentional tensioning of oneself which I doubt is hereditary that may explain what evolves and what does not in a human context as well as in the sense of what constitutes the intent of progress or more accurately, the possibility, however remote this might be in any verifiable manner and yet if we measured the amount of sources that are pulling from parallel directions in a societal sense and community sense, the agents that want to pull us downstream seem to be on the increase if we compare the amount of sources that, say, existed even a decade ago, which would go along way toward explaining the velocity of our natural environment’s ongoing dissolution and the roaring silence that has been the response.

So then I ask..how much have I pushed back, resisted the velocity of the river current?  

Not enough.

Self Skepticism

Ask yourself the question I posed from where I am..Is self doubt and self skepticism necessarily a bad thing?
Here in the U.S this exercise seems to be looked upon as a weakness and because of this, it seems to me, that we have a sort of institutionalized form of denial that operates on a succeed or fail duality
The again, self skepticism itself is a form of deconstruction and closing that door as a means of opportunity as led the natural world to the brink of nearly complete extinction. Yet, one could look at this topic as a footnote, whereas I look at it as the story itself as applied to nearly every aspect of life as we assume we know it, hence this post, which is about everything and nothing in particular as I wrote in the beginning, one thing leads to another in a process of associations.

Swimming Lessons

It seems at this juncture the best metaphor I can come up with as a summarily tentative conclusion is that we are born into divergent rivers and proverbial streams which desire to carry us this way or that way, and that perhaps the reason we have been thrown into the water is to learn how to swim.