On Cultivating Humans

It just ocurred to me that I live the ‘ifs’ with as much intensity as reality. When they have come dangerously close from becoming so, I elope towards my center. I wonder if it’s just me.

I thought about it while listening to Tears in the Rain, by Joe Satriani. This song was played to me by a dear friend of mine. He did dare to turn an idea into reality. I think I loved him because of that, but that’s way off point. That’s a thought to ponder.

It seems to me that I relate people to the things they give me, whether it be music, image or thought. Again, I wonder if it’s just me. I read life’s symbols and put two and two together to understand, people, not symbols. I’m pretty clear on symbols.

It’s probable and possible that people have nothing to do at all with the way I see them, in which case, I would be basing my assumptions on a very thin layer.

Are there any ways in which I can measure my assertions versus my misjudgments?

I believe it’s a matter of personal linguistics. The voices speaking in my head, the different voices of thought, use different terms for different things. Sometimes I think I know something using those words; sometimes I don’t need to use the words to know. I trust the latter.

A poet would say I trust silence.

A shrink would say that I have an issue with trust due to the particular aspects of my childhood. He’d probably be right, but it’s a fruitless thought once you know.

And who would go for something so prosaic?

I have the theory that human race had a before and after the concept of “mistake”. Animals make no mistakes, mishaps happen to them, like a branch braking, causing a monkey to fall while jumping from tree to tree. Mistake requires judgment. Judgment requires a preexisting sense of logic.

They say man shall be judged by his equals. It means, in discursive terms, by himself. In the same way that religions tell us that god made us in his image and likeness, and that translates into us studying the existence of god as to an important part of knowing ourselves, the divine in us; in this way a man our equal is ourselves.

Guilt is self imposed. It’s based also on our particular sense of logic. It means that, if I ever think I’m frowned upon by society when doing something, anything that society might frown upon, it’s actually a show of the superego.

I don’t pretend to go as far as assuming that society is only an expression of our unconscious. I believe reality exists because I can touch it, and because there is no other alternative (if I pull the plug on myself, the other side is blank, simply because, like god, it is completely out of my capacity).

So is society as well, so complex that it’s away from your capacity of understanding, society is also the expression of individuals in a macro level. We are not yet a globalized planet, we are only a planet the size of a country.

I have been studying about the concept of culture and the myriad of things that surround it. I can’t believe how this particular two teachers do the works. One of them is male, hard tempered. Judging (logic again) by the way he looks at me I can tell he doesn’t think much. That’s good, the other one can’t stop noticing me and that annoys me. He sees culture as a list, movies, books, paintings, architecture and such. He thinks the state must help but not interfere. Where I come from, you call that a bank. Help means money, equipment, personnel and/or permission. Artists have thrived in the places where Philanthropy has existed, in the shape of private parties or public leaders. In fewer words, if Homer hadn’t been entertained and cared for by a high member of society, the Iliad and the Odyssey would not have existed.

But that’s artists, not culture.

Culture thrives in self dependent societies, who move together in small environments. That is why we talk of urban culture and tribal culture. Things that are cultivated in the environment of cities and tribes.

That’s what culture means. I believe, and I would fight to prove, that all the other stupid socially challenged concepts for culture, which are utilitarian to the economic factors within the rising “culture market”, are a bit far off track.

In basic terms, that’s what I assume as culture.

What are the consequences of that assumption?

First, the numbers: what are the things that are cultivated in Venezuela? Chocolate, coffee, oil, (I don’t dare say women yet, that’s more profound) and small business.

I dare assume also, that artists can be cultivated too. Artists comprise music, plastic arts, words and body expression (must check if I missed out on any). So the correct policy, “cultural policy” at that, is to cultivate artists, in the same way that China has cultivated tea. How do you cultivate artists? Through education.

Sport is also a culture, if you don’t believe me, ask the Greeks. Can anyone tell me that the Olympics are not a cultural practice? How nice of them to have expanded out of their original location and settled profoundly east and west of the earth. It took money to cultivate them too.

To follow the planting paradigm, ideology injected into the cultivated area will depend on who holds control of the water tab.

There is of course the need for “diffusion”, but it’s not as if we had to spend all the money there. That is actually the cheapest part of the process. Having good content on the TV, a few websites, banners, flags, street expositions, communal museums, communal art galleries, radio shows… That’s easy.

And then there is the keyword: appropriation. It means in colloquial terms, god creates them and then they pair. You don’t really know what’s gonna happen. However, it is logical and right.

So if I ever publish this, and its read, and thought correct, I’d smile, wherever I am.

Which brings me to my next point. What should we cultivate?

Maybe Utopia is where we go when we die. We go to the world of ideas, and the ideas that exist, for me, are the ones that I know.

If a person doesn’t work into producing his ideas while he lives, he will probably feel a sense of loss when he dies. I rather feel a sense of gain.

You don’t need to read too much philosophy to understand what its conclusion has been and continues to be; the same one Socrates reached a couple of centuries ago, we know nothing, except whatever knowledge natural laws have provided for us, the rules of reality, things fall downwards.

I don’t go as far as to agree with Erich Fromm and his theory on social pathology, I believe society is not sick, but there is an artificial, unnatural, growth on it that makes her dysfunctional. Much like cancer, it can be cured or prevented by the simple principle of do not harm, and through the belief that the human body can heal itself, as well as society can. There are only so many eyes Talion can claim for himself before people stop paying tribute.

Since we are at this, I also believe that men and women may not have the same way of thinking, but they are the same being, in two different expressions which complement each other. Both have equal rights to be free, that’s why I find it stupid when someone blurts out that women should be treated equally by men, or that women should be strong and work, mind the house, mind the children and look healthy and thriving during the whole time. If you wish to, by all means do it. But if no one is out there saying that men should be strong, and that men should be excellent in bed as well as intelligent, sensitive, caring, funny and interesting and mysterious and challenging and… Breathe…

No, the answer is no. Neither men nor women should be anything other than what they wish to be. And by wish I don’t mean “I wish to be an astronaut when I grow up”. That concept is made of the silences I speak of, the fulfillment of self that needs no word to be accomplished within my person. One thing is to desire to become a person who heals animals and another one is to wish to be a veterinary, simply because bureaucracy has turned it into a nine-to-five job with paperwork and a fake sense of obligation.

When I was little I wished to be a philosopher, just for the echo it made in my head. Then I wanted to be an archeologist, because I wanted to dig and find treasures. At some point I wanted to be a journalist, because I wanted to go places and show the world what was going on there. None of these desires has anything to do with the real experience in the day to day practice. 

Maybe I think too fast? I just swallowed whole a book on philosophy; I felt the need to catch up on something. I have been meeting people from too many different places and trains of thought, my values have been questioned over and over. I needed some base.

I wanted to be a lawyer because it seemed wide enough a field for me to move around. I was proved right. It’s so wide I have no idea where to land. Maybe I don’t want to land on anything? I’m afraid that, in the process of one thing leading to another, I’ll end up believing that aliens speak to me and tell me to burn things. (They don't).

If I dare go spiritual, I must base my thoughts on Credo Quia Absurdum. If I try to understand divinity through reason I’d be shooting in the wrong direction. Divinity is personal, kudos to philosophy on teaching us that; kudos to religion for teaching us the discipline and keeping the spirit.

We must speak in order to know ourselves, but we must be careful with words, they are deceitful. Sounds, however, are not, neither are silences. They cannot be tainted by the colors of languages, however beautiful they may be.

Then there is the question of relevance. What do we talk about?

I feel guilty, for example, because I let myself go around certain feelings and emotions. But I’m only human, and human means I am subject to certain aspects of my personality. I do not wish to change it, not all of it, only the things I don’t like, and even then I tremble at the consequences. I restrain myself from listening to music or reading books, because I believe it can lead me through dangerous paths. But sometimes I just can’t help it. I’m weak when it comes to certain things, aren’t we all? I don’t believe it to be wrong, I believe it to be human.

Greek gods sprung from within the earth, for the regular people. Zeus only helped the strongest, the common citizen is not so, he is only equal to everyone in Hades, Demeter and Poseidon, in Orpheus and Persephone.

Christianity then erased the subtle differences among men, and through the middle ages people gave cult to the devil.

I believe that my random steps are being guided, they are only random to my limited understanding. I sense a bigger picture, even though I cannot see it. Sensing goes beyond the five senses and into the infinite silence that fills the universe.      

 

D.