life is with people

how would you live if you were alone?

is there any difference between my answer to this question, and how I live now?

what distinguishes the occasional day where I feel interested in what clothes I put on, feel like cleaning the apartment?
I have been looking for a while for a way to say something about this, I say something about how wanting to be presentable, to have a clean home, has to do with society, civilization. feeling part of.
maybe: on those days, I feel like there are other people-
with me.
in the world.
in my world.
from whom I want something. ah. want as the ground of with.

today, most days, what do I want from anyone? and so, what interest in 'preparing a face to greet / the faces that you meet'?

Didion on self-respect: To assign unanswered letters their proper weight [yes], to free us from the expectations of others [yes], to give us back to ourselves [please] -- there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect [integrity, or what you may call my belligerence?]. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw [terror]: one runs away [yes I will - stop.] to find oneself, and finds no one at home. posted to katecutrer @ 8:26 AM 15 Nov 05

and what of the great, the singular power of desire?
having given myself back to myself, having assigned to unanswered letters and expectations of others little weight -- too little? better to have others whose opinions do very much matter, in whom to find a theatre for action?
otherwise- rest without activity, day like wide water.

-to be not engrossed, I want other people with me - 2/17 below
-hold [an mage of myself] in the mind of someone I love:"the theatre of all my actions "- 2/21 below

to separate themselves from the City of the Destruction

We can throughout American history find select and separatist groups who looked to a phrophetic individual claiming divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality.
They were marginal groups, peculiar people, people set apart from the world: the Shakers and the Ephrata community, the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs
quoted by Krakauer, page 9, Under the Banner of Heaven.

morality theatre

In fact, it is probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her, his conscience would have been much less active both in previously urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as directly and simply as he could. Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. "The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.George Eliot: Middlemarch BOOK III. WAITING FOR DEATH. 24. CHAPTER XXIV.

mode of engagement

to be not engrossed -- either as working-on-something or being-entertained, both of which I happily (properly?) can do alone, either with a book (or online) or tv -- I want other people with me. to ~peruse a book. now: The Search for Beauty in Islam -
I want a couch to sit on,
and someone else in the room, or in and out of it. around.

pursue happiness

Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris. -philip greenspun on materialism

also see Phil Greenspun on retiring young. "Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated." # (via kottke) may be also relevant for someone who works from home-

for follow up on brokerage & closure

Broker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti : "Brokerage and Closure", Ron Burt -Dec 2 2005
Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti: Ron Burt, "Brokerage and Closure", Oxford Press mid-2005 -Sept 2 2004

Visible Path - Relationship Capital - Centrality : Ronald Burt's Brokerage and Closure by Stowe Boyd

gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/ronald.burt/research/
link to pdf of introduction to book Brokerage & Closure. plus chapter outline. etc. and 12 other people marked this page on del.icio.us - from there can browse their links with related tags: social capital networks organizational analysis creativity research burt creative etc

Brokerage and Closure

I dunno, dan, about this 'book description' (by the publisher - this is on the book, right?) :
Social capital, the advantage created by location in social structure (?) is a critical(bleh) element (bleh) in business strategy. Who has it, how it works and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations and careers become more and more dependent on informal discretionary relationships. The formal organization deals with accountability; Everything else flows through the informal; advice, coordination, cooperation, friendship, gossip, knowledge, trust. Informal relations have always been with us, they have always mattered. What is new is the range of activities in which informal relations now matter, and the emerging clarity we have about how they create advantage for certain people at the expense of others. This is done by brokerage and closure.
Ronald S. Burt builds on his celebrated work in this area to explore the nature of brokerage and closure. Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who have a vision advantage of seeing and developing good ideas, an advantage which can be seen in their compensation, recognition and the responsibility they're entrusted with in comparison to their peers. Closure is the tightening of coordination on a closed network of people, and people who do this do well as a complement to brokers because of the trust and alignment they create. Brokerage and Closure explores how these elements work together to define social capital, showing how in the business world reputation has come to replace authority, pursued opportunity (has come to replace) assignment, and reward has come to be associated with achieving competitive advantage in a social order of continuous disequilibrium (that's along object-phrase).
--
why is this so poorly written? isn't it poorly written? (I underlined some of what bothers me.)
and Brokerage and Closure are probably interesting, but not as here defined. "the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who have.."

you are what you pretend to be
~ kurt vonnegut
New City 2/2/06 free will astrology - pisces

a genuine life

genuine means taking responsibility for the integrity of something.

vs [life as an invention / game /manipulation of objects ]-? --
they don't take responsibility for the integrity of anything.
they consume situations. they don't maintain them.
~don't create them.

genuine responsibility integrity maintenance

dB - I heard "thinking about throwing in the towel and living a genuine life" (which I smiled at); but did you actually say: "... throwing in the towel on living a genuine life"? oh and do by all means please write the above in your words-

origin of friendships

Do you have any friends with whom you share no institutional background? (aikido counts I think)
-apropos our talk about dates as interacting without context. -and our talk about high school. -and it goes to thinking about community...
Walking home from work tonite, I could not think of any friend I did not work with or go to school with. interesting - bcs I think of myself as tending toward one-to-one, non-context-dependent relations. and sure, some of my friendships have actually formed after the shared context is over - I've become friends with people that I did not know while at the institution. and (implicit in that anyway) with people that I did not actively share the experience with. but in every case -Every! I can't think of an exception- my friends did once work somewhere I worked or attend a school I attended.
Not a one that I met at a party or 'through mutual friends.' which, okay, it's not like I'm much for attending gatherings. butI ~picture myself as open to encounters of the 'bumping into on the street' sort. but, no, not one relationship with such a beginning.
does not bode well for forming new relationships through adulthood, does it?
So, no man is an island or something. rather: if you are an island, you are not going to know any other islands.
or in fact we are islands and it takes an ocean to make it us a world. no - not (natural) oceans but (constructed) bridges / or what do you call it when land is created where there was water. Donne really has little application here but it's what comes to mind.
the point, maybe, is that institutions are pretty important.
I can imagine that I have not found them satisfying; however, but for my schools and bookstores I would have no relationships except family. and relationships make the person, right.
p.s. will you please publish your drafts.

via

[French, from vie, life, from Old French, from Latin vīta.]

yes it means something precise for me.

x is viable if in the practice of or face of x I do/will not find myself in a state where I can't live like/with this.

smart

http://intelligence-test.net/part2/
you have to work out what the letters mean, eg: 24 D in a W.
dB, can you get these? I couldn't or didn't. after about 10 seconds I concluded that I didn't know or didn't like the activity?).
----> goes to a question about 'intelligence' and/overagainst knowledge - with special attention to facts (?) of convention.

yourself as object

I am immersed in reading and arranging words. when I stop, it is yes like emerging. then in the kitchen, I then stand drinking water from a bottle and have a moment of
'I am this person in this room' -- *alone*.
-->that moment, that viewpoint, seems relatively
unnatural ~ unuseful ~ unhealthy.
a viewpoint little green never experiences, let's posit that.
is this to do with being alone, versus together?
but you can yes spend all day alone and not have this kind of moment. not having this moment is what ~?
immersion.(oh dear "being-in-the-world". you are sensation perception thought. you are the body in motion as you walk; the sky the buildings the cars you see; the conversation of the passersby you hear; the delight you feel at two little dogs over there. you are not "me, here, walking down this street." (could you be thinking of how you are "me, here, walking down the street" and not be in a state we'd call alien? alienated from the self which, especially your own, is better not objectified.)

tvz

"There was a point when I thought, 'Man, I could do this,'" he recalls. "But it takes blowing everything off. Family. Money. Security. Everything. Poof."

interview with his son JT: The way that Townes pursued music, and the way that he kind of instilled in me to pursue it, was to almost abandon all and if you didn't leave your spot with just a guitar and your ambition to be a blues player, then you really didn't have it in you to be preaching as such.

blog post responding to tvz film: What are we more-cautious, more-sensible people to make of these talented, self-destructive artists? How to respect the real-life-practicality we all need to survive while maintaining the openness and receptivity -- and the imaginative/emotional engagement -- that an involvement with the arts requires? Is it possible to keep your head while losing it?
Townes Van Zandt didn't even try. Once he walked off the cliff he just kept right on falling.

well that is exactly how it works, falling off a cliff.

I find the blog post mostly intelligent but then as always am taken aback when the author speaks as "the rest of us" over against "the artists" (and "the crazy" too): I think that Townes and his music represent the Thing Itself, that "It" or "the divine" or whatever it is that artists go in search of and that the rest of us hope they'll come back able to pass along to us.
so his expressions from this point of view grate on me - but perhaps could be used to consider this (?) normal approach to life and this view of the artist as rather categorically different from the rest (the most) of 'us.'

that old catastrophe

shall our blood fail?
or shall it come to seem the blood of paradise?

Wallace Stevens. Sunday Morning.

gots is what you get

should have said, and I would have been better off to hear

gkc cab crash

indifference-?. (pessimism)-terror. christianity-joy.

n on pessimism

late preface birth tragedy

dancer to god

we have no problem nowadays seeing that the God-centered metaphysical universe of the religions suffered not so much an evaporation as a translocation. it was interiorized. we live in the translation, where what had been religious and centered on God is psychological and centered on an idea of the self -- albeit a self that remains a measureless if not infinite question mark.

nothing disrupted the basic arrangements. the translation was first class. an ordinary ego still has to sleep and wake with some other more or less articulate personality hidden inside it, or beneath it, who carries on, just as before, living its own outlandish life, and who turns out, in fact, to be very like the old poetic self: secularized, privatized, maybe only rarely poetic, but recognizably the same, mostly incommunicado, keeper of the dreams.

psychoanalysis redrafted the co-tenancy contract in the new language. it confirmed this other self in always possessing superior knowledge about what is happening and will happen to the creature in which it dwells; and, more important, and reintroducing with the heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, this other self represents and even contains in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all.

the most ancient and formerly divine law of psychodynamic states:
any communion with that other personality, especially when it does incorporate some form of the true self, is healing, and redeems the sufferings of life, and releases joy.

one further well-worked law concerns the inevitability with which the true self, once it is awakened, and no matter how deeply and silently buried in the bones it may be, will always try to become the conscious center of the whole being.

distress

the translation changed things for the poet by removing his susceptibility to the trance condition, the mood in which the poetic self could overpower the whole mind in a more unhindered fashion. that this susceptibility is gone is a fact. there are some obvious psychological reasons for its demise, all connected with the loss of instinctive self-subjection to the greater authority of spirit.

the pervasiveness of secular sceptiscm operates generally.

for any poet, this means acute distress. it means, in effect, that the poetic self's bid to convert the ordinary personality to its own terms, or to supplant it, or to dissolve it within itself, will be more successfully resisted. and this in turn means depression -- the unproductive poet's melancholia.

it may take the form of violent psychological or even physical breakdown, or religious crisis.

that is how his poetry comes to stand, as it seems to do, at the center of revelation in this age, and, as poetry, to stand there alone

a stealthier osmosis, in modern times, requires exceptional disciplines of monastic self-surrender (or exceptional need - all the gifts, all the needs bespallof; inconsolable - defiant, belligerent, integrity?) , evidently. Eliot is almost the only example among modern poets to suggest that this might be one possible way to complete the inner process.

he underwent both the depression and the violent collapse of ego. yes. the ordeal of partrurition, from which The Wasteland emerged, marks at least one occasion where his ordinary personality had to be forcibly displaced, before that other speech and that other life, his true speech and life, could be spoken and live,d even temporarily.

he submitted himself, in his private meditation and poetic work - 'humility is endless' - to the slow, gradual change, according to that pattern where the true self remakes the ego in its own image, till the indivual is wholly transformed, and the true self takes over as openly as may be, the activitities and satisfactions of life in the world.

false self

Prufrock is Eliot's parody of the ego who longs to be that other, even as he excuses himself from the unmanageable confrontation: the self who is, one way and another, no more than a shadow of what he dissociates himself from so regretfully.
he is a diffident John the Baptist, who deplores his own incapacity to acknowledge, let alone evangelize for the god whose death he has already in some way foresuffered.