You can miss me with all that hopeless romantic bullshit’- Iman, Run the World

 

In a previous post titled R. Kelly: The Man, the Artist, the Art, I begin the post with a Jamie Wheal quote, ‘My default setting is hopeless romantic’. I used this quote because that has been my default setting as well… or so I thought.

 

In Episode 23 of John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he breaks down Romanticism and shows how our culture still bears the vestiges of Romanticism, much to his dismay. He says ‘You are paying a very devastating price for Romanticism. And if you think that Romanticism doesn’t exist in our culture, you are not paying attention to the fact that we use the grammar of Romanticism to talk about love and we even buy into a romantic model of how love operates. Romantic comedies are these weird metaphysical perversions in which we throw away the scientific model of things and believe that somehow love is this irrational force that brings us in contact with the course of history (at least our personal history and destiny) and that of another person. And it’s all such bullshit and it’s devastatingly bad bullshit. You are trying to make this machinery of the imagination carry all the neo-platonic weight that religion, tradition, philosophy, history carry. You try to make your romantic partner carry the role of all of that. No person can bear that. No human relationship can bear that burden. So we go into our romantic relationships with unreachable expectations of how the person is going to address everything that we’ve lost in our history and of course they can’t which of course is why many people simultaneously say that romantic relationships are the place where they look for the most meaning in their life and their romantic relationships are those things that precisely cause them the most trauma and suffering in their life.’

Following this clear, succinct and valid breakdown, I was left with the question of what did I actually mean when I professed to be a hopeless romantic? Surely, what is written above is not what I mean. Even I have a low saturation point when it comes to romantic comedies because they require me to engage in a lot of the Coleridge concept of belief suspension. So what then did I mean? I guess I meant I am optimistic, that I believe in human beings overcoming adversity and that would tie in rather neatly with romantic comedies. There are always adversities to be overcome, however unrealistic the storyline. I guess I also meant that I believe in the transformative power of love which can be seen in spades in romantic comedies. The protagonist transforms for the better. This of course is not limited to the romantic comedy genre but the hyper-focus on love (however misguided and most often times convoluted) is. I do believe in the conquering spirit of love but not in romantic love. We need only take a step outside the cinema, look around us and see the carnage that romantic love has wreaked on the people around us, ourselves included. Romantic love is just not the answer; it fails time and time again. There is an alternative however which is agape. Agape is not just an alternative but is in the most profound sense the most fitting description of transformative love. It is the 1^st Corinthians 13 type of love. The love that never fails juxtaposed with a romantic love that fails consistently. This is where I then disencumber myself for good with romanticism, all its limitations and its ‘devastation’. Besides, romantic films and days and the whole idea of romance are ways to meet ‘having needs’ as opposed to agape which is a way of meeting ‘being needs’. Agape is giving while romantic love is about taking. Even when people give in romantic love, it’s so they can take eventually. Romantic love is consumptive and agape is transformative. While romantic love increases the distance between people and reality, agape brings us ever so closer. This has been a lesson to me to be mindful of the words I use and what they mean and what message I intend to communicate by using them. But also, romance is puerile; it’s cute when little children are dressed in red and white on Valentine’s Day but it’s not so cute when adults fork out large sums of money to buy clichéd gifts and sit in over-packed restaurants. As Paul wrote in Corinthians ‘When I was a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a [wo]man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.’

 

As I have a rather tenuous, of a spider-web quality, tie with social media, I rely on social media savvy interlocutors to bring to my attention relevant hashtags so we can then proceed to hash it out (as it were). Recently one such interlocutor brought the #takemeasiam to my attention. When the words first land on the eardrums, they ring of warm, fuzzy, unconditional acceptance but upon a closer listening, you realise that just as with romantic love, there are big problems here. It’s an Outkast ‘roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh’ realization. Author of Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta, in conversation with Michael Garfield of the Future Fossil podcast in a podcast titled Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D Modernity. Yunkaporta emphasises that individual autonomy must be balanced with relationship obligations. He says: ‘You can do whatever you want; nobody can tell you what to do but you are constrained by your web of relationships. So you can’t survive as an individual without being in relation to a unique web of human and non-human entities in your community and landscape… If you don’t tend to those relationships to make show you’re in good relationship then that web falls apart and you are lost, you become nothing, you become anathema… you excommunicate yourself.’ #takemeasiam is exemplary in illustrating how people (women mostly) want to be able to exercise their autonomy whilst abdicating any obligations they have to their community or in this particular case, to the romantic relationships they are currently in. Not only will this cause the couple a lot of trauma and suffering as Vervaeke mentions but it will result with the women in question effectively excommunicating themselves. Men will just not want to be with them; they will find them too burdensome. The women who are taking part in #takemeasiam are women who do not want to be single or else they would not be hash tagging about this. These are not women who want to be let be, with whatever existential turmoil they carry. No. These women want to shoulder their existential turmoil with the help of a man; better yet who will gladly heap all of it on that man’s shoulders. At some point, these men will pull an Ayn Rand’s Atlas and shrug it all off. If you want to tip the scales so that you exercise full unadulterated autonomy then you forfeit the community or the romantic relationship. That’s just what it is. Also, Yunkaporta says ‘You can do whatever you want, no one can tell you what to do but you can at least be held accountable to your own internal logic.’ If you are a woman who desires to be in a long-term committed relationship, how is #takemeasiam going to bring you closer to this desired relationship? Internally, these two things are diametrically opposed because if anything it will take you further from one. Lastly, Yunkaporta says ‘A breakdown in relationship is when you start bossing other people around’ which is precisely what this hashtag is doing. You are demanding that people take you as you are. On what grounds? As if the world owes you something. You are imposing yourself on other people’s autonomy. Would it not be better to take yourself as you are and stay single?

 

In Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball’s Vulnerable AF, she writes about a guy whose ethos is a #takemeasiam one. Of course very few males in a society where men are valued for their productivity would actually say this out loud, but many sure do live it, and unfortunately these unfortunates will prey on a woman who has just enough insecurity to allow that to happen. The opposite is true as well. The reason why women can, without a scintilla of humility, say takemeasiam is because, like the men in the manosphere like quibbing ‘every day a sucker is born’. There are men who will roll with the #takemeasiam woman until the wheels fall off that relationship as they inevitably do. Because it’s just too much, to demand of anyone. I wrote a poem inspired by TANK addressing this very thing.

 

Sometimes

A new person steps in and

Puts up with all the things you couldn’t

That you shouldn’t have had to

And your love was put into question

As though you wanting them to be their best self

Meant you were denying their personhood

But you couldn’t stand by and watch them

Constantly undermine themselves and

Stand in their own way 

Sabotaging themselves with destructive behaviour

And putting you in collateral harm’s way

 

In this way there is a lot of destruction, toxicity and hurt. Why do we have to continue in this way when there is an alternative offered to us? Gabor Maté says children need two things: acceptance and authenticity. ‘When I was a child…’ Jordan B. Peterson that the two characteristics that yield success in the world are competence and generosity. The contrast is clear, authenticity and acceptance are things coming in from the outside which makes sense because human offspring are altricial. However, there is a shift in adulthood towards generosity and competence which are inside things moving outwards to the community. They strike the beautiful Yunkaporta balance between autonomy and relation and they also make room for agape because generosity is at its heart. In romantic love and #takemeasiam situations, people remain trapped in existential turmoil but agape inspires transformation.

Paying Attention

 

In a podcast between Jonathan Pageau and Jordan B. Peterson (The Perfect Mode of Being), Peterson asks Pageau what the first response would be if one were to believe in God. Pageau replies with an emphatic, immediate, and unequivocal: ‘Attention’. Our first response would be to give God our full attention with our entire selves. For most people, the first response would be some sort of action fuelled by guilt or shame within the purview of how they have lived their lives and how, morally, their paths have been filled with substantial immoral meanderings. People’s morality, or lack thereof, would drive their first response and most of us would bow our heads in shame riddled with guilt.

I am of the opinion that this response finds its source in the grammar we use when we speak about God. People constantly refer to ‘The Fear of God’ which doesn’t really make sense but it does explain that if we think of God as invoking of fear, we would be scared as a result of our moral failings and that would be the primary response to him; scared of the repercussions of our sin. But ‘God is love’ and ‘love casts out all fear’ therefore a fear response to love doesn’t make sense to me. Fear is an inappropriate and antithetical response. There is another response, however, and that is wonder which then becomes awe. When we sing ‘Our God is an Awesome God’ then we really are on to something.

 

John Vervaeke describes Awe as a confrontation we have with something so vast, so big, so larger than ourselves that demands us to change who we are. In order for us to accommodate or begin to wrap ourselves around the object of our attention; our rather limited finite selves need to change. We cannot remain as we are. A metanoic experience awaits us.

In his essay, A Secular Wonder, Paola Costa writes ‘In wondering the subject is absorbed by reality; without being its hostage or puppet. In this sense, the wonder-response always embodies a form of assent , ‘yea-saying’ and having no utility whatsoever, it fosters in the subject a vague of sense of joy in the very fact of being alive and of objectless gratitude that turns outward. Wonder, is an expansive response to the world’s allure that encourages respect, compassion, gentleness, humility, unpossessiveness.’ I think wonder puts us in deep contact with reality. And since God is love; then with love itself.

 

‘As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha” the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed- or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.’ Luke 10:38-42.

Mary knew the first act of worship is attention.  

 

Joe Dispenza is famously known for saying ‘Life is about the management of energy, where you place your attention, is where you place your energy.’ But it doesn’t end there, attention is at the heart of every transformative experience, but it is also at the heart of ways transformative experiences are impeded through distraction. In his YouTube video TikTok: The Worst of the Worst Thinking Ape describes how he thinks the way TikTok is setup; with short video automatically cascading into short video ad infinitum programmes us to develop short attention spans and he thinks this is particularly deleterious because in order for human beings to progress or to create something that will move the needle with regards to advancement requires long attention spans of dedicated focus; the equivalent of what Michio Kaku calls ‘Butt Power’. Cal Newport in Deep Work writes about dedicating 4 hours of your day to deep work; Robert Greene also writes about spending 4-5 hours a day on ‘your life’s task’ if you are going to achieve mastery. But I think it’s not just limited to TikTok; it’s simply how social media makes its money. More than anything our attention is currency, so fundamentally it doesn’t make a difference to FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) whether we are using their platforms constructively or not as long as we remain on them. Which is why I think attention can be used to literally block any sort of transformative experience. All of the psychotechnologies that John Vervaeke mentions in his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, for example, are depended on where and how we focus our attention. From meditation to contemplation to Tai’chi or flow states or even internalising the inner sage. Our attention is the Noble Rock; the place from which all creation begins. We come to realise that our biggest resource is not time in its generality but attention in its specificity.

 

 ‘Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “the pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course…it isn’t. The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you are not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isin’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.’ Christopher Priest in The Prestige. 

The Latin Omne trium perfectum comes to mind which is partly why those are the most memorable lines of the book and film. The pledge. The turn. The prestige. I think the machinery of transformation through wonder can also be summarised with these three parts. Surprise (The Pledge) when we are shown an ordinary physiological response. Wonder (The Turn) when ordinary surprise becomes extraordinary wonder. Awe (The Prestige). The great reveal. The Vervaekean confrontation. There is a 4^th part I would like to discuss. A part that is mentioned by Priest in passing; but I would like to linger on it. The reason it’s not given priority in the quote is because it is not directly a part of the magic trick, but rather is directly inspired by it; which is the audience clapping their hands. The audience participating and witnessing a good magic trick cannot help but clap their hands in response to one. Let’s call this 4^th part, The Impel. The audience is impelled to clap. Once we have experienced the full progression of surprise to wonder to awe then we are also impelled to transform; because Christ’s love compels or in this case impels us. And I believe that this comparison holds true because a transforming person is but a magical thing to behold.