Via Negativa

Got answers? Diogenes has questions.

Dear Diogenes,

Three months ago, I was a pathetic shell of a human being. Every evening around 8:30, as I sat exhausted in front of the television, I would be racked with hollow sobs as I contemplated the utter futility of my existence. Then one day a friend at work mentioned this wonderful, quirky group of people she had met online, and told me how much their virtual presence in her life made her look forward to getting out of bed each morning. She encouraged me to start my own weblog, and wow, am I ever glad I did! I had no idea how incredibly therapeutic it could be to share thoughts and feelings I never knew I had with friends I will never have to actually meet.

Hey, you should start your own blog! It would be so much more creative than just sitting there with a sign all day long. You could even put a little Paypal link in the sidebar and make some money.

Sign me –

Other Brother Darrell

Yo, Bro,

Let me ask you something. If committing mind-farts to the ether and chattering all day long with other people doing the same thing was enough to lift you out of your sad state, how can you possibly think you had it so bad? Do you have any idea how many hundreds of millions of people around the world have to work fifteen-hour days and live in apalling conditions just to make enough money to feed their families? Do you ever think of the effect that your mindless consumer lifestyle has upon the rapidly hemorrhaging global support systems on which all life depends? It seems to me that you have not solved anything, but have simply avoided asking the tough questions. How do you know that the misgivings you are trying to bury under a flood of egocentric distraction were not, in fact, based in reality – that your life really isn’t an utter wasteland?

Diogenes

***

Dear Diogenes,

I was a physical wreck: overweight, always tired, stressed out. Then one day I happened to catch an ad for Jazzercise and something clicked. I sent away for the tapes. I figured I had nothing to lose – if I wasn’t completely satisfied, I could simply return them in less than thirty days and I would owe nothing. Boy, am I glad I took that one small step – it put me on the road to self-recovery! I lost ten pounds right off the bat, and started craving healthier foods, too. I know it might sound counter-intuitive, but exercising more actually makes you feel a lot less tired! I’m full of energy now at work, too. And it’s not just a physical thing: I feel better about myself. The other day, my boss hinted that I might qualify for a promotion! Talk about a self-esteem boost! You should try getting some exercise, too.

Fit and Happy

Dear Fit-happy,

Do you care nothing for the fate of your immortal soul? What manner of a thing is this “self” you claim to have recovered? Do you have a single shred of evidence to suggest that the “work” that so dominates your waking life has anything in common with the true Work for which your destiny was shaped in the womb of beginningless time?

Just askin’.

Diogenes

***

Dear Diogenes,

O.K., I’ll admit it – I’m a whore. I have frequent, unprotected sex with crack dealers to feed my habit. I haven’t seen my child in three years, since the social workers came and put him in a foster home. He’s five, now – I’m sure he doesn’t even remember me. You’re out here on the street, too, I’m sure nothing shocks you anymore. I don’t know why I’m telling you this – I guess you seem dispassionate, and sort of wise somehow… though I gotta tell you, you could use a bath!

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I feel terrible. Here I am just trying to use you the way I use everybody else – and the way they use me in return. But that’s how it is. Everyone’s a user. The only difference between me and the assholes running the show is, they started life with a bigger chunk of the pie. Oh, and they snort powder rather than smoking rock.

I just want to tell you how glad I am that you’re here. Sometimes when things get really bad, I think about killing myself, but then I remember how you sit out here, rain or shine, sleet, snow – whatever – offering yourself up for the derision of every passerby, but still somehow managing to hold your head high. Strange as it sounds, you’re an inspiration to me. I think you should find someone to look up to, too – everyone should have a hero. All we need is love!

Dolores

Ay, Dolores!

Let’s maintain the pretense for a little longer: you are not a comic book character, and I am not a cartoon. Let’s ignore the fact that this city is filled with comic-book characters, very few of whom will ever learn to draw for themselves.

If you want a true hero – as opposed to an enabler – don’t you think you’re talking to exactly the wrong person? Shouldn’t your child be the one who inspires you? Are you prepared for the hard work and occasional heartbreak that real love entails? Or would you rather continue to wallow in the ecstasy-seeker’s empyrean of commitment-free sentimentality? Your call.

Diogenes

_________

If you have some good advice you’d like to share, drop us a line. Emails to bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com with “Advice for the Bum” in the subject line will be forwarded to Diogenes for possible interrogation in future editions of this feature. Your identity and situations are reality-optional.

In response to people who wonder why an anarchist would refuse to shoplift, I’m fond of saying that no one demonstrates greater subservience to the concept of private property than a thief. In fact, I agree with Proudhon that, in a certain sense, all property is theft – but never mind that now. I’m more interested in a parallel insight suggested by the James Frey case: that no one depends more upon the strict adherence to a literal concept of truth telling than a liar.

I know y’all are probably sick of hearing about Frey’s fiasco, but I want to call everyone’s attention to two excellent blog posts that together say just about everything that needs to be said about it. Siona writes from her perspective as a recovering addict:

I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – his path was not mine, nor could mine possibly be anyone else’s – but the fact that he so virulently rejected AA and the 12-step program in favor of ‘will-power’ seemed a little unbelievable to me. No one recovers alone, and it’s irresponsible and cruel to tell other addicts that it’s merely a lack of will-power that’s destroying them. It’s not will-power that saves, but love, and this seems so sadly absent from both Frey’s book and his situation now. It might be true that not every addict ‘finds God,’ but every addict does and must surrender to something greater than his or her own ego. Frey never does.

Patry Francis tackles the issue from the perspective of a soon-to-be-published novelist. In a masterful post entitled Why I Write Fiction, she says, in part:

For the same reason that no one would watch a show about a bunch of college kids sitting around in their underwear whining or twenty-five women competing for a limp rose on THE BACHELOR if they thought (knew?) it was scripted, no one would have been willing to hold Frey’s hand through 438 pages of vomit and bathos and teary redemption if they didn’t believe it really happened.

As a fiction writer, I’m rather proud that a book with no claims to factual accuracy is held to a higher standard. If it’s not “true,” then it damn well better be well written – and believable. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

But in another way, I think that this new hunger for an ever more elusive “truth” insults fiction. Surely, many people who are flocking to memoirs and reality TV are missing the essential secret about fiction. It’s truer than the truth.

Shakespeare may never have been a king, but he taught us more about power and betrayal than any memoirist ever could have. Why? Because he knew more than the narrow facts of his life allowed. More than most kings or scheming underlings or thwarted lovers who ever lived.

*

On an unrelated note, be sure to check out the second edition of the fledgling Progressive Faith Bloggers Carnival. The first edition of this projected weekly carnival – which I gather will shortly have a home base and rotating hosts – was here. (I guess it’s a mark of just how open-minded they are that they can make room for a “religious agnostic” like me!)

Where does power come from? According to the traditional belief-system of the Piaroa, a largely nonviolent, egalitarian people of the upper Orinoco basin in Venezuela, it could come either from the sun or the moon. But the power granted by the sun was destructive and poisonous, and had to be carefully controlled. The unrestrained life of the senses led to arrogance, competition, greed, violence, madness and tyranny. Only the moon could grant the healing power wielded by sages (ruwang) and implicated in the ideal life of the mind. “It was the clear yet moderate light of the moon, in contrast to the strong light of the sun, that was described as ‘the precious light of wizardry,'” writes anthropologist Joanna Overing (“The Aesthetics of Production: The Sense of Community Among the Cubeo and Piaroa,” Dialectical Anthropology 14:3, 159-174, 1989).

The light of the moon, its clear, fresh light without color, was the light of the words of the ruwang‘s life-giving and life-protective powers, or his productive capabilities. The moon-lit water within the crystal boxes of song and wizardry owned by the gods was clean, clear and fresh, and it was with this water that the ruwang each night cleansed and beautified the words of his chants. All of the contents of the crystal boxes of the gods remained beautiful because these ethereal beings, through a pure “life of thoughts” (ta’kwaru), continually cleansed their powers…. Beauty (a’kwakwa), thoughts (ta’kwaru) and the products of work (a’kwa) were linguistically linked….

[A]ll productive powers were potentially evil in use. The creator god of these productive forces during mythic time was physically ugly, mad, evil and foolish in action. The source of his capabilities to use and transform resources of the earth – to garden, to hunt, to cook – were the poisonous hallucinogens given to him by the supreme deity under the earth. He also used the poisonous powers of the sun to increase the force of his capabilities. The tremendous powers he created constantly poisoned his desires (his “life of the senses”)…

Mythic time was a time of rapid technological development, when the means for using the earth’s resources were created, and because of the poison of the forces that allowed for this creation, it was also a period that increasingly became characterized by the violent competition over the ownership of the new technology and the resources which it made use of. While at first the gods were more or less peacefully able to acquire such resources and the forces for productive activity through marriage and exchange, these forces became too multiple and strong for the gods to master… and slowly they poisoned the wills and desires of those who received them. As time went on, the characteristics of greed, arrogance, anger and lust made impossible the maintenance of peaceful community and intercommunity relationships. All of the creator gods began to steal and then murder for access and ownership of ever more powerful forces for transforming the resources of the earth; and then they began to murder and cannibalize for the ownership and the control of the domains themselves. All relationships developed into those of predator and prey, and… peaceful community life became impossible. This creative period of history ended when all transformational forces for production were thrown out of this world into a new and stable home in celestial space: these powers are those that are housed today in the safety of the crystal boxes of the present-day gods described above.

It is highly significant that the ethereal, celestial gods who today own these productive forces have no “life of the senses” to be so poisoned.

For more on the Piaroa, including another paper by Dr. Overing, see here.

Primates are rare among mammals in being able to see in color, as birds do. I guess it has something to do with living in trees. It’s too bad we can’t see ultraviolet light, as birds and insects do, or polarization-like patterns caused by the earth’s magnetic field, as some migratory birds apparently can.

On the other hand, having a relatively narrow range of perception can aid the hunter to find his prey. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan, who is red-green color-blind, has written (in Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry) about how his “handicap” gives folks like him a competitive advantage in some situations, for example in detecting the presence of otherwise well-camouflaged objects.

He actually tested this theory once in a search for night-blooming cereus, a cactus native to the Sonoran Desert that often grows intermingled with ironwood and creosote bush, and is therefore very hard to locate. He assembled two teams to search adjacent knolls, the first made up entirely of color-blind botanists, the second of color-normal botanists. After two hours, the first team had found over five times as many cacti as the second. Subsequent searching of both knolls by everybody together showed that they harbored roughly equal numbers of the cactus. During World War II, Nabhan notes, some color-normal fighter pilots relied upon color-blind co-pilots to spot antiaircraft guns hidden in forest vegetation below. He wonders

if those ancient human populations that remained heterogeneous in their color perception had greater chances of survival than their neighbors. Were they better able to spot cryptically colored poisonous snakes? Could they more quickly detect warriors whose faces and bodies were mottled with muds and vegetable dyes as part of a sit-and-wait-then-strike ambush strategy?

Some people claim to dream in black and white. Do they? According to one online source,

researchers agree that most dreams are in color. However, because the dream fades so quickly after we awake, our memories of the dream are often recalled in gray tones. Studies show that those who are in tune with color in waking life tend to remember more color in dreams as well. I have also noticed that those of us who grew up with black & white TV have more black and white dreams. I haven’t properly researched this yet, it’s just an observation.

When I was a kid, I heard someone talking about black & white vs color dreams. I felt bad because I recalled most of my dreams in b & w. That night I dreamt of thousands of iridescent lizards running along by my room. I was really delighted and tried to collect as many a possible, commenting the whole time about the color. This dream indicates satisfactorily to me that there is color *in* the dream and it’s not just added afterwards.

“In the United States, the rise and fall of the opinion that we dream in black and white coincided with the rise and fall of black and white film media over the course of the twentieth century,” states the abstract from a cross-cultural study of beliefs about dreaming.

The world seen by moonlight is overwhelmingly black and white, so there’s a certain poetic appeal to the suggestion that our dreams might be equally drained of color. But night belongs to the true hunters. We are daylight creatures, scavengers uniquely suited by our strange, upright manner of walking to go about in the heat of the day when our ancient predatory enemies were sleeping, or sheltering in a cave or dense patch of shade to shield their eyes from the inhospitable glare of noon.

For some really fine black-and-white photography, accompanied by highly evocative prose and poetry, be sure to visit Teju Cole’s one-month Nigerian travel blog, due to disappear at the end of January. His latest post, about visiting the National Museum in Lagos, is especially searing.