Bringing Love Home

Posted on April 25, 2012 by ehurst

Over the past few days I’ve been exploring the art of love, but it has a point.
The character I’ve described is the same for mysticism, pacifism, agape, and a lot of other fancy terms. I don’t distinguish between them because it all points to the same inexplicable thing. The art of agape is simply an expression of it, but so is Game.
I live in close proximity to someone who is truly rotten at loving. Can you say “solipsism”? The gal is so self focused, she isn’t even aware she makes everything about herself. She has embraced American feminism in the same package with her modern Prosperity Gospel religion. There are so many like her I simply cannot begin to count just the ones I know.
You know that idiotic AT&T advertising campaign here in the US markets, with the ignoramus dad, whining about his ethernet cable, and the smart brat daughter? This gal I know honestly believes that is pretty close to reality. The vast majority of competent computer users are male, and typically the male parent in most households, but you can’t convince her of that. Most men are just useless idiots, barely good for bringing home the bucks.
Well, I’ve been teaching her husband Game. She blames me because things don’t work out the way she expects in her marriage. I’ve flatly told her the flaw is her expectations, and it simply drifts right over her head. I could read these posts outloud to her and she would say she understands and go right back to what she did before.
This is the average American female, folks.
You can blame whatever you like, but I’m pretty sure she’ll go to her grave like this. It’s not just Game; she doesn’t get love itself. And she’s raising daughters to be the same way. She has no clue what is normal behavior for them. She yells and screams at them and gets all bent out of shape if anyone else does it. She expects them to be hungry when she is, and not before. She makes them whiny and whines when they whine. She projects her desires upon them, and gets angry when it doesn’t work.
She’s scared silly of me. I’ve yelled about something perhaps one time in the past year when I thought she was doing something dangerous. I was wrong and apologized, but she only apologizes when she’s threatened. In other words, agape has no meaning to her.
I’m still using the art of agape because it’s the right thing to do, never mind how she or anyone else responds. She’s just an example of what any of us are likely to face. You can’t let them force you to change; you can’t shape your behavior to fit theirs. If you start off like this dealing with everyone, only a precious few are going to understand. Most of them will be kids, by the way, because the number one trick with kids is patience and taking them seriously. The few adults who are going to understand are the people whom you trust, your real friends.
And if you don’t already have a love for life, you’ll find her/him among those who can understand the art of love.

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Loving Cynicism

Posted on April 24, 2012 by ehurst

There is a holiness in cynicism.
The art of love expects trouble. It’s not enough a genuine loving disposition makes you seem crazy to the world, but the whole world makes it a strong habit to forget love even when you do grasp its true nature. The psychopaths ruling the world don’t really understand love, nor any other feelings that well, but they do understand how fear motivates and they prefer to work with that.
Fear is what others choose for you. Love is a choice only you can make. It’s not rational, in that it never comes out even. You’ll always sense you give more than you receive, and you should cultivate the feeling this is normal. Get used to it; learn to like it. Not in the sense of somehow being greater, thus boosting your ego with a false sense of magnanimity, but in a sense you simply don’t fear being used up. When you adopt the mystic sense this world is fake and only love is real, because it comes from some other Realm, you can afford to let fear take a hike.
This is where that aplomb comes from, that sense no one can shock you, taking it all in stride. You know you aren’t perfect, so it should hardly bother you when others fail. It isn’t going to break your schedule, but simply saves you the trouble of working out who’s going to be involved. When you truly grasp the idea accomplishment means nothing, only being faithful to yourself — your imperatives in living — you don’t worry about plans. If the world literally comes apart when something in which you are involved doesn’t work out, just consider a blessing to be there and see it all go up in flames.
The contentment of others does not depend on you, much less the continuation of the world. Don’t take this world too seriously because you won’t get out alive. Take what comes among those things you don’t control — which is just about everything outside your own head, and perhaps not a whole lot of what’s inside it.
It’s not irresponsible if you really are giving yourself in love to your mission in life.

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Agape Banking

Posted on April 23, 2012 by ehurst

So we have been discussing the art of love/agape, and I wanted to introduce a critical principle. Agape banking is preparing yourself to love, in the sense of making ready to exert yourself on behalf of the welfare of others. You know it’s coming; you can see in your own life times and places where you needed something from someone else. Be ready to give before the need presents itself. There are all sorts of ways.
For example, I pursue fitness for good reasons.
1. Having more to offer: In preparation for needs not yet seen, I push my body so I can offer strength to others. So long as the needs are light, I prepare for when they may be great. All it takes is one moment and it could be worth years of effort.
2. Living longer and stronger: Even if the bulk of what I do makes no great demands on me physically, being fully alive and for a longer time makes me more useful, more reliable.
3. Dying well: Studies indicate those who pummel themselves while they live die with less suffering, even if they die under torture. This is not a matter of resistance, per se, but overall health which makes it easier to keep your resolve and sanity under the worst circumstances.
This is part of how I keep a large agape account. The bigger the balance, the more love I can pour onto situations and people. Looking in the mirror, I have no doubt I cause trouble which places demands on others. I see the old scars in my soul of things I’ve done to harm others, in one way or another. Thus, I have no reason to expect anyone else to be better, so I save up lots of forgiveness for when the time comes.

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Peace, Love and Madness

Posted on April 22, 2012 by ehurst

Love makes you crazy.

Regular readers recall I warned cathexis is not real love. “Don’t fall in love; it sticks to your face.” That is, you’ll always come away embarrassed when you follow the siren song of infatuation. Hormones are in serious need of intelligent guidance. Cathexis will make a serious fool of you, and in the worst way.

Readers may also recall I posted a fiction series on the students running a Peace Club, where I pointed out genuine love is just another face of peace and serenity and sanity. My “sanity” category on this blog includes all of these things, and more. That sort of love/agape will make you do the craziest things.

Most people define sanity as simply being typical, under the presumption “normal” is defined as “typical.” Wrong; damned wrong. Typical is merely the standard rate of failure short of normal, and it’s the majority in almost any context. But by that badly mistaken measure of sanity, those who embrace agape will seem utterly off the wall, and we rightly revel in this.

It’s the same stuff that finds someone delighting in shaking up the standards, the system which is so typically sad. So you splash paint on your best pants. Now splash more on it in some artistic pattern so it looks like some expensive print. Some of the best art comes from accidents which shock most people. And the best agape-art seizes the moment of the unexpected and makes it an opportunity to rejoice in that mystical power which makes no sense at all.

It’s not supposed to make sense. Don’t try to steer life, just do what you know you have to do. Expect the unexpected. Be the peace and love which drives the world mad to prove the world is already pretty sick. The greatest art is making sure the sorrowful norm gets a healthy dose of joy as the counterpoint. Find in yourself the utter necessity, that passionate drive to not accept the standard answer. The world is one big lie in the first place, so chase the truth.

The highest morality is doing what you really must do, with all the finesse and artistic flair you can muster.

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Dark Days, Bright Soul — 4

Posted on April 22, 2012 by ehurst

Just once, we touched, but not with our hands.
We breached the human frame
with grace and hope. While the world still stands,
bright souls the dark days tame.

He was almost tempted to stay when the job ended. But there were too many workers already doing just that, and they would have spoiled it. There was enough half-joking insinuation of child molestation and the girl prodigy didn’t need that hanging over her head. What they thought of him hardly mattered, but she had a life in front of her.
Nor would he be returning home. News through his employer indicated half the city whence he came was in ruins. There were riots in other parts of the country, too. No, they had promised one fuel stop in some other Latin American country on the way back and that would have to do. His Spanish had gotten only slightly better because, where they had spent two months building that secret thing on the dry plateau, the locals didn’t really speak Spanish. It was something mixed from that and various primitive languages. But his ears were somewhat better attuned to the Latin lilt and rhythms.
He traded a good chunk of his pay for one of the aging laptops the contractors had been using. It was sturdy, a rough service model. Keeping his promise, he had reinstalled the OS from the recovery partition, then allowed the supervisor to check. No company data remained on his new writing machine.
He knew better than to give the girl or her family much money. The parents weren’t nearly so wise as their daughter. They weren’t stupid, and seemed of the better moral grade among the peasants trying to eke out a living there in that tourist trap village. But he had seen cash corrupt even the best people, and only his own life scars kept him honest. Instead, he explained he was offering her the best schooling possible in that part of the world — the Internet.
There was an Internet cafe there in the village, and he had tested the signal in the back alley where the girl could sit quietly, hidden in the brush. But that day he paid to sit with her in the cafe. He showed her how to use the software and keep the tiny machine in proper working order. They quickly reviewed search engines, then academic sites, and computer help sites. It took only a couple of hours, and it seemed she knew almost as much as he. She took to surfing the Net as naturally as she spoke in those long conversations they had up on the rocks.
The netbook was hers, and he dismissed from his mind any worries. There was nothing more possible for him to do. He didn’t even leave her his email address. Instead, he showed her how to find his poetry where he posted it online. While he was sure she would eventually understand, it didn’t matter. He steeled himself against her few tears; it was the first time she showed much emotion.
His time with her renewed hope in him some humanity could still rise up from the coming conflagration. He didn’t think it was time for the world to end just yet, but perhaps a lot of lives, taking with them a lot of stuff. Their time was past. The rest of the world would go on just fine without the mass of dark souls somewhere to his north.
There were at least one other bright soul he knew about, shining inextinguishable in the dark days coming.
End.

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Agape Art

Posted on April 21, 2012 by ehurst

In the minds of many, great art comes from deep passions. What if love itself is the art?
There is no pretense here of moral superiority, only an unquenchable desire to seek the moral fabric of the universe. I write of morality from passion, not from superior achievement.

love: a commitment to act in the welfare of another, or the welfare of all

It gets tiresome correcting false impressions about love, so it falls to writers to find terms with similar meaning, but perhaps more precise. Panting after flesh is lust, affection is general positive regard, and sacrifice is the highest expression. Agape is a nice Greek word borrowed by Christian theologians to label a willingness to give all for the sake of something more important than life. Then there’s cathexis and infatuation. Things we blame on love are frequently from other causes.
The primary means of identification is not even the results, since none of us is so perfectly able to do what we really would like to do all the time. So we are left regarding love as art, something which needs examination with something other than mere intellect or we’ll miss it.
I can splash pigment on a surface, but I’m not sure you would say I can draw or paint. I can tell you I sing, but you’d have to hear it. I’m actually better at leading singing than performance itself. And some seem to think I can write, because this blog does get some traffic. But it all means nothing if you don’t find in it something of the emotional warmth, the spiritual passion behind it.
One doesn’t simply be an artist, nor simply produce artwork. One does art as an expression of commitment and burning necessity. I seek the artistry of love itself.

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Dark Days, Bright Soul — 3

Posted on April 21, 2012 by ehurst

When hatred sleeps and brighter passions awake
and human differences fade to shadows,
then sanity surfs the winds to take
bright souls to worlds no one knows.

It was not exactly a routine, but predictable enough he could save up his words during the sweltering days behind the welding helmet. During the breaks he would type was much as he could, or sit and savor the meaning of something which hadn’t yet spoken its name to him. As he expected, delays in this or that part of the job gave him a chance to see the big town in daylight.
While most of his workmates wasted money on wine, women and souvenirs, he explored the places where such things weren’t found. The garish paint and impromptu murals, the anguished slogans against yet one more brutal government, and the sweet music of people just trying to make another day fed his fires. Then, in the reflected glow of the welding torch, flying sparks brought yet more words.
Every evening he ate at the buffet, and after the first three nights the hookers left him alone. Then he took a bottle and headed out on the sands. By walking down along where his feet got wet, he avoided most of the wallowing bodies in the primary trade the workmen bought in the village. Where the sand strip ended at the rocks, he had found a slender few hand and toe holds to climb the stone face. Somewhere up on a promontory there was a flat spot big enough he could lie down with room to spare.
Most of the time he simply sat and contemplated in the quiet breeze. It was as if nothing filled him, nothing sated his hunger as that quiet. It was a place where his words slept just long enough for him to take something in, instead of spilling over.
So it came almost as a shock to him when he heard the hard breathing of someone coming up the rock face after him that evening. He had only just settled for a few minutes when the sound drifted up to him. He watched, a bit worried it was some determined prostitute. What he saw was long hair, alright, but a body too small for even the tiny women around here. The last hand hold was just too far for her small hand to reach. He instinctively reached out and pulled her up.
She said in surprisingly clear English, “Thank you, sir.”
He slid back and gave her room. She sat near the edge with her legs crossed. Not very pretty, and her stained clothing matched the calluses on her bare feet. He decided to risk testing her English a bit. “To what do I owe this pleasure, miss?”
“I overheard someone calling you a poet, and I wanted to speak with you, sir.”
She couldn’t have been more than twelve, and he thought more likely nine. “It’s hard to shake a bad reputation.” He grinned. “What could be so important you would chase a poet up on some wet rocks in the dark?”
“Mostly, I just wanted to speak with someone more likely to use proper English, so I could sharpen my skill. Among all these visitors from America, most of them sound too much like the silly TV soap operas.”
He threw his head back and laughed out loud. His body shaking with mirth, he turned to her perfectly serious face and realized there had to be at least one child prodigy in every village. She slowly smiled, and waited for him to recover. In just a few minutes, he forgot he wasn’t still at college. Only her size kept him in touch with reality, as the conversation ran on into the night. Their discussion wandered over literature, philosophy, other languages. They never touched until it was time to retreat back down the rock face, when he had to help her down. She turned to wave as she strode off down the beach.
For once, he stumbled back to the tent after a late night with a girl on the beach.

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Delphi: Caught Off Guard

Posted on April 20, 2012 by ehurst

I ran across a truly talented Delphi technician the other day. You would never have expected it; I know I didn’t. He was member of a bulletin board for house churches.
So great was his mastery it took me a while to catch onto it. When he turned that garbage on me, I didn’t realize what was up. I was surprised to find I was irritated by some things he had posted. At first I thought he was missing what I said, but when I offered to correct his misapprehension, it simply continued. Oh, so subtly, he stuck the barbs into my soul, until I realized I was angry, and only half understood why.
I did catch him on what he was doing, but didn’t see the larger pattern. I had to think about it awhile. After reviewing the exchange again, I was able to pick out the pattern.
You’ll recall I listed the steps, but didn’t spend much time detailing how they worked. Step 2 is isolating and marginalizing strong opponents. One of the best tricks is to subtly anger someone, leaving yourself room for plausible denial when called on it. In several debate threads, he managed to claim he wasn’t clear, or the other person didn’t understand. Someone else observed he took a lot of heat from others over the years, and now I understand why: He provokes them intentionally.
This guy is a natural; I’m willing to bet it’s half instinct. That’s because I can’t really see any apparent purpose behind it, other than to never lose an argument. Otherwise, the only reason he could have is to keep the thing so stirred up no one will stick around. I do note a lot of names which simply stopped posting after a discussion with him. He’s not even a moderator, yet manages to run the whole thing. The only folks he hasn’t driven off are, shall we say, too far off in left or right field? I mean loopy compared to me. Nobody will take them seriously in the first place.
I’ve said it before: Secular politics can’t hold a candle to the nastiness I’ve seen in religious politics.

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Dark Days, Bright Soul — 2

Posted on April 20, 2012 by ehurst

The false warmth of rented love
splashed on the sand, washed away with the tide.
An uncaring moon leers from above,
while stars laugh at your untanned backside.

It turned out the village was a suburb, as it were, of a much larger city farther up the shore. There were buses and cabs and other eager offers to take them into the town, and some of the men went. There was no such thing as a cafe which didn’t feature a bar and various forms of entertainment. The first was too noisy, and the next had the wrong smell, and something in his intuition warned without explaining.
The third was almost completely open to the air, and he wasn’t the only one drawn by the smell of drinks heavy with the fresh tropical fruits of the land. One end was tables and a buffet of sorts. It was much easier to match his personal tastes this time, so he paid the low price and carried two loaded plates to an empty table. He sipped at his drink and ate slowly as he watched more of his workmates file into the place. An old man with a guitar showed up, and a kid with various bongos, drums, kettles and whatnot on a cart he pulled inside and parked next to a wooden platform. It was tolerable music, though completely foreign to his ears.
He spied the stall with faded symbols indicating a toilet. Deciding it was safe to leave his table for a few minutes, he made a quick visit to the facilities. As he rose to his feet and pulled up his trousers, he glanced over the top of the stall divider, between the foliage onto the sandy alleyway behind the place. A sharply dressed man led a small herd of girls and young women, with a couple of thugs bringing up the rear. The pimp stopped in the shadows, spoke quietly, yet sharply in the local dialect to the girls, then snapped his fingers and pointed to the entrance of the little open air club. The females began coming around the corner in twos and threes, a minute or so apart. He realized he was staring and finished his business.
His table was untouched, and he resumed his meal. One of the girls sidled up to him and took a seat at his table. She was cute as could be, but her profession was no temptation to him. Aside from being a little prudish in the first place, he knew prostitutes were the same all over the world, and trusted them not at all. He tolerated her snatching a few bites playfully from his plates, but when she asked him to buy a drink he shook his head no.
After swallowing the mouthful of food, “You got the wrong guy, babe. I’m not interested.”
In highly flavored English, she replied, “You prefer boys?”
“I don’t prefer anything at all. I’m not interested in sex.”
She stared at him a few minutes as he continued eating, shrugged and rose to walk away, and began stalking another man who had just walked into the place. A server came around and he asked if he could get something to drink in a take-away container. The old woman brought back a what he took for a wine cooler, paid her the full tab and strolled out the doorway. He dropped a tip in the jar next to the musicians.
It was dark now, and the evening was already a bit cooler than the sweltering daylight. He removed his sandals and tucked them under one arm as he sipped the cooler and headed for the beach.

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Dark Days, Bright Soul — 1

Posted on April 19, 2012 by ehurst

Rage will seethe in the dark without night,
The facts undeniable drown out false words.
And angry flames leave smoldering blight,
Feeding roaches, rats and birds.

He hated welding. Unfortunately, no one was buying his poetry. Poetry was why he lived, but he needed something to keep him alive for it, so he grabbed the contract offer posted in the vacant store window. Besides, visiting a foreign country would offer something different to inspire his verse. At any rate, just about any place on earth was better than where he was living.
The riots had boiled up over the space of a single hour. He smelled the fire before the first tenement went up in flames, had written about it in his poems. He fled the building with only his old netbook. His poetry book, he preferred to call it, since he rarely bothered to use it for going online. That is, until he was ready to post the next batch of poems. He kept it in a special pocket he added to his coat, a padded and shielded section over his heart.
In another pocket was the multi-source charger and a spare battery. The poems burned in him hotter than the raging fires of the riots, and he was never without the means to record the words. Hidden on the cord around his neck was the backup jump drive.
So he added a few extra pieces of natural fiber clothing — synthetics were dangerous for welding — from the charity stall at the big cathedral and an old pair of sandals, and signed up for the job in that warm tropical land far from home. He felt truly inspired when, of all things, some passing truck dropped a pair of well worn, but still usable, welding gloves. Welding helmets were always available, but gloves required cash money, and were expensive. The dumpster behind the gym yielded a small duffel, just enough for his clothing, carry-on sized.
He needn’t have feared the TSA mauling, because they were flying him and his fellow workers on a cargo charter with the welding equipment, generators, and some special fittings for the job. The ancient turbo prop aircraft kept some of them awake, but he had always carried ear plugs and headphones to shut out the noise of the world when he wrote, so it was simply a nice vibration which lulled him to sleep as their flight pierced the night.
The sign in the local language alleged this dirt airstrip was an airport. He dug into the breakfast at the cafe next to the runway, not so much because he liked the food, but it was his first meal in a couple of days. Actually, he didn’t like it much at all, but he was already beginning to have that dull aching along the sides of his head which came from doing without food too long. The trucks hired to take them to the job site with the equipment looked in desperate need of his welding skills. He took an extra liter-sized water bottle because he figured his ride would probably be the one to break down.
They made it, after a fashion, but he ended up needing the water simply because it was hot. He figured the trucks made it so well only because the whole route was downhill, but not steep enough to really fry the brakes. The moderate air of the airstrip gave way to savanna scrub, with only a tropical strip along the beach even lower yet from the table land on which the job site stood.
Tents everywhere, of all sizes and descriptions. Most of them were military surplus, of course. He recognized the purpose of most of them by sight. They were shown their bunks and he took the most isolated cot in the vestibule at the back. Then they were herded to another tent and signed the usual non-disclosure forms, and were given an advance. The lunch from a roach coach was slightly better than the breakfast. Then they were shown the drawings and plans for what they were building. It took several hours to cover everything, and they toured the entire work site. Yet another secret government project with lots of cryptic electronics involved.
Because the equipment wasn’t all in place, they were allowed to change and walk down into the village below, just in time for dinner. The last word from the supervisor was the wake-up time tomorrow.

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