A Digital Footprint is not a History

 

'But what if we are at the crossroads, as the blues singers moan, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, escape nor mere entertainment'

Phil Cousineau

 

‘To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul’ (Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage).

This is how I approach my mother’s photo albums. Neatly tucked away at the back of my cupboard, where I have to recruit the assistance of a chair, to be able to reach them. There are two of them, one burgundy and the other mahogany and they are considerably heavy as I move them from the top shelf onto my bed. I am at a crossroad, my soul weary, my bones heavy and I’ve come to these albums for answers, for direction and for healing. To go through my mom’s albums is to go on pilgrimage, is to move from a Here to a There while remaining in the confines of my room. Right before I open the first one I sigh, physiologically, and prepare myself for the challenges that the sojourn always raises within me; the evocation of ‘emotion and commotion‘ as Cousineau puts it.  These albums are sacred to me, and they pull back the curtain slightly on the life the woman who gave birth to me lived. She is beyond the veil now and yet she still speaks to me through her history. She beckons, encourages, clarifies, and guides. ‘The point of a pilgrimage’, writes Cousineau, ‘is to improve yourself by enduring and overcoming difficulties’… and I need improving, in ways only my mother can understand.

As I crack open the first album, its sheaves are stuck together. I separate them and can feel the intensity of the moment build. I’ve visited these albums before, but there is still a hesitation behind my actions, a knowing that whatever is revealed must be obeyed; that is the imperative. This is how it works with arcana; I speak to my mother through photographs, implore and wrestle with her. Carl Sagan, a resounding voice, ‘we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers’. So, I ask courageous questions and I am met with deep answers.  Each photo is a part of a larger narrative, it’s a story unfolding, revealing its essence at the deepest level. People casually and whimsically describe this as walking down memory lane. Although there is nothing whimsy about it, it is a lane that needs to be walked, to be traversed. ’Pilgrimage means following in the footsteps of somebody or something we honour to pay homage. It revitalizes our lives, reinvigorates our very souls’ (Costineau). Following these footsteps and unlocking the clarity of my own path cannot be rushed. These photo albums hold duration within them. Their assembly was a protracted affair, it was undertaken with great care and consideration and that is what each picture, in turn, requires of me. Byung Chul-Han in The Scent of Time writes, ‘The path which separates the place of departure from the place of arrival is also an interval. Like place itself, it is semantically rich. The path of a pilgrimage, for instance, is not an empty space between two places that is to be traversed as quickly as possible. Rather, it constitutes the very goal to be reached. Being- on- one’s way here is altogether meaningful. The walking means doing penance, healing, or gratefulness… it is a prayer. The pilgrim’s path is not merely a thoroughfare, but a transition to a There. In temporal terms, the pilgrim is on the way to the future, which is expected to bring salvation.’

I can’t help but contrast this rich, intense way of keeping record with todays’ electronic albums which are emaciated and weak in comparison. Modern day photos are way too easily retrievable. They can all be accessed at a swipe. There is no preparation needed either to access the pictures and they are always within arm’s reach. The voluminous number of the photos compromise any significance they may possess. The photos comprise mostly of faces without contexts; without a semblance of connection; just sameness with different backgrounds. The photos are merely a matryoshka doll reflecting ourselves back to us at the surface level as the screens through which we view the photos do. Empty and emptying in their proliferation. Han writes, ‘Electronic memories and other technological possibilities for recurrence destroy the temporal interval which is responsible for forgetting. They make what is past instantaneously retrievable and available.’ Part of being human is the ability to forget- that is the healing grace of time. There are things that we are the better for having forgotten. Yet electronic memories do not permit us to forget, and we face death by a thousand cuts constantly reliving painful and unhelpful events. Because of digital media’s ahistoricity, we have no past to speak of, everything can be conjured into the presence as fast as our thumbs allow. This is itself an unkindness. There are no spaces of introspection and growth when everything you’ve ever done is immediate. Society judges you harshly on the things you said or did at 15 and at 50 alike. There is no space for redemption. Redemption is narrative and our digital spaces lump everything together. All specificity is lost, and this is why we age, and we do not grow older. There is no distance between events and the contemplative and introspective aspects of those events. As Han writes, ‘An event is not a theme to which consciousness could relate, but a trauma which cannot be captured by consciousness, which is entirely outside its control or annuls it.’ These events become doubly traumatic because these digital spaces are intolerant of second chances. Therefore, we indiscriminately carry these things with us.

Our brains have evolved in such a way that our memories themselves aren’t concrete; they are porous and continuously reconstruct themselves. I can’t help but think this is for our ultimate good. Our brains are protecting us from things we would otherwise be unable to handle were we required to take them in directly. Our brains allow us to put things in the past; even the sting of difficult things has been devenomized. Our brains filter and dilute events into things we can swallow to ensure we can still carry on living. Our feet are buckling under the weight of our present-past. And because the digital footprint does not discern, neither does it make any concessions; our memories are cold, hard-as-stones facts. The digital space does not hold back any blows, everything is there and anyone with an internet connection can access it and a savvy-coder can hack into our clouds. Forgetting brings a lot of healing and it can also bring freedom and unburdening. The digital space is quite the nuisance at reminding, it picks scabs and it unrelentingly burdens. This process is additive, we are forced to take in and contain more and more memories without the ability of letting anything go. This compulsive remembering flagellates and offers no penance. We are abelian sandpiles and some of us won’t survive the avalanche to re-form again.  

 

My mother’s photo albums are a site, an in-heritage site for her daughters. They are movable locations where pieces of her social, political, cultural, and spiritual history have been preserved. They hold heritage value and lingering power. Electronic memories, however, are sights. ‘Sights are places one passes by. They do not permit any lingering or staying’ (Han).  You see them and move from one photo to the next as though driving fast by them. It’s the feeling evoked when listening to Daniel Caesar sing Streetcar, ‘Seems like streetlights, glowing, happen to be. Just like moments passing in front of me.’ You are persistently swiping or scrolling from one picture to another that it’s a blur. Even though, they themselves are in the photos, they seem to be having an out-of- body experience and are disconnected from the people in the photos because they can’t reconcile the evidence of photos and the lack of experience the photos allude to. The Baudrillard inspired ‘frenetic stillness’ comes to mind: the rush of historical events only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in effect, produces) a standstill. People are moving rapidly from one event to the next, but it all signifies nothing, existentially they are standing still. People’s ‘histories’ can now be reduced to a single digital footprint. The footprint is quantitatively large but it’s a single lonely footprint unaccompanied by its pair counterpart, with no sense of direction and purpose. Electronic memories don’t take strolls, they don’t take walks, they are simply standing still. ‘Solvitur ambulando’ as the Latin phrase goes, but if we are standing still, it means our lives remain unresolved, and unsaved. Our entire lives a big fat question mark?

Electronic memories do not arrest a gaze because they are mundane; they have no narrative power. Nothing distinguishes them from one another. Electronic memories are ‘atomized time’. ‘Due to the lack of narrative tension, atomized time cannot hold our attention for long. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety’ (Han).

There is a common saying in our times that ‘if it’s not on the gram, then it didn’t happen’. The irony of that is the fact that if it’s on the gram, that means it was gleaned of life through that process. A chunk of experience was sacrificed at the altar of the Instagram gods. Nowadays, when you have to stop what you are doing to take a picture, then you are not doing what you are meant to be doing anymore. The difference between the photos in my mom’s albums and Instagram is that taking a photo of an event back then was a part of the experience, it added to the experience and the picture was singular. Taking a photo for the gram interrupts the experience and diminishes it and the more this instagramming take place, the more the pictures lose their uniqueness. Kabir, the poet, puts it better when he writes, ‘If you have not experienced something for yourself, then it is not for real.’ And since taking pictures for Instagram robs the moment of its experience, and the posing and curating robs the moment of its realness. It would make more sense to draw the conclusion that if it’s on Instagram then it didn’t actually happen. Han writes, ‘A fulfilled life cannot be explained on a quantitative basis. It does not result from a plenitude of possibilities, just as recounting or listing of events does not necessarily amount to a narration or account. Rather, the latter require a special synthesis to which they owe their meaning.’ Today, we have more photos than we know what do with and because the ‘medium is the message’; following Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, human beings have become servomechanism of phones. The compulsive photo-taking serves the medium although it disguises itself behind serving the people taking the pictures. The proliferation of pictures without any sort of synthesis drains life of its meaning. ‘It is not the total number of events, but experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfilment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term, and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be’ (Han).

‘…he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself. The long, contemplative gaze trains itself in the preservation of a distance to the things, without, though losing their nearness. Its spatial formula is that of a distanced nearness.’ My mother’s photo albums are a space of contemplation. Each photo absorbs me, pulls me in and there is a losing and subsequent finding of self through the album. I, however, do not absorb the album into myself. Sacred things retain their separateness. Cell phones have become extensions of selves, the contiguity between device and person dissolved. When people cannot spend time away from their devices, it isn’t about missing important communication, its more about the fact that we’ve absorbed the devices into ourselves. The device is a material containment of parts of ourselves like horcruxes and we are as territorial of them as Voldemort was of his horcruxes. We can therefore not truly contemplate them and consequently cannot see the thing properly and since we've  assimilated the device into ourselves, even the way we see ourselves is obscured. To be able to see something, there has to be a distance between us and the object. The galleries on our smartphones, although quantitatively significant, do not offer much of substance to us; if any. And if there was something to be grasped; we would have no way of seeing it. As Cousineau puts it, ‘I don’t believe that the problem is in the sites as it is in the sighting, the way we see… we look more and more but see less and less’.

The photos in my mom’s album went through a selection process. Not the arbitrary selection of the best picture out of 100 to post on social media, but the actual event itself goes through a selection process. The camera only made cameo appearances at events that were deemed important and significant enough and there was also a meaningful order to the events themselves. Nowadays, the camera is whipped up at the least provocation: meals, gym, coffee runs, getting dressed, buying new things, pets being pets, children being children etc... everything has become an event. The wisdom of Patrick Lencioni prevails, ‘If everything is important, then nothing is’ i.e., if everything is an event then nothing is. This is why digital spaces are unable to captivate us. ‘Events are no longer linked up into stories. The narrative chain, which yields a meaning, operates by making a selection. It strictly regulates the sequence of events.’ (Han). Histories bring things together; they are narrative in structure. My mother ‘was able to collect the events around’ her as Han puts it and allowed her history to emerge and we, her descendants, are anchored and can gain purchase into the world because of it. ‘History as directed time protects time against decay, against its dispersion into a pure sequence of point-like presences.’ These ahistorical spaces that we participate daily in, disperse, dissipate and dissolve us and ultimately render us invisible. ‘The decay of the temporal continuum renders existence radically fragile. The soul is permanently exposed to the danger of death and terror of nothingness, because the event which wrests it from death lacks any duration. The intervals between events are death zones. During these eventless in-between times, the soul falls into lethargy. The joy of being mingles with a fear of death. Exaltation is followed by depression, by an ontological depression even.’ (Han). Our digital footprints are indistinct from the general sludge of the internet space which means the way we regard them is the same as the way we regard everything else in the space and since everything on the internet is scattered and pulling in different directions, it confuses us. And since we are unable to stay on things long enough to struggle through to elucidation, our confusion turns into boredom, we give up and move on to the next stimuli. Hurston Smith wrote in the foreword to The Art of Pilgrimage, ‘But by attending to [obstacles] now- openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage- you will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed.’ Which is why histories are so important. When the story unfolds and we see how those who came before us struggled through the obstacles that made them who they eventually became, we are encouraged. The tools for posterity to become ‘a hardy breed’ themselves are laid bare before them.

Pilgrimages are durable and histories are as well. Internet spaces are spaces characterized by instantaneity; they hold no duration which is also a part of the reason they are ahistorical. Han describes electronic mail as follows: ‘Electronic mail produces instantaneity by destroying the paths as spatial intervals in their entirety… Intervals structure not only perception but also life.’ When I behold my mom’s photo albums and think through the chain of mini-events that took place from the point a picture was taken to it making its way to the album, it is just a process brimming with interval spaces. From waiting for the film to be used up, to dark rooms, and archiving, there are spaces of deliberation, selection, waiting and lingering and these structure life. Its even in the descriptive languages of these processes. Traditionally, photos were developed and now they are printed. When something is printed, there are implications of replication and sameness (sludge). When a picture is developed, there is an anticipation to it; we are awaiting a transformation. Transformations are a long time in the making and are not instantaneous. Even dark rooms remind us of a time when everything wasn’t as glaringly ultra- transparent as they are now. Mystery and spaces of becoming have given room to intransmutable digital footprints.

As I return my mom’s photo albums to the place reserved for them, I feel like I have been a witness to the life of a great crocodile. I am now at a new Here equipped to return to life and live as fiercely as my mother did.

 

‘Traveler, there is no path

Paths are made by [putting our smartphones down and] walking’

 Antonio Machado with annotation

Robala ka kgotso, Kwena ya metsi

The Tyranny of the Measurable

 

‘For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfil us.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

The final pose at the end of a yoga practice is savasana (corpse pose) where a practitioner assumes a supine position; closes/softens her eyes; relaxes her mind and dissolves all the tension in her body. This pose integrates the benefits of her asana practice. It has a reputation of being ‘the hardest yoga pose’ because people have a difficult time lying still after moving through an asana practice; and overcoming the restlessness of needing to move on to the next thing. Regardless, savasana is still a part of the practice and when a practitioner skips this part of her practice, her practice is incomplete. Interestingly, in the Learn Skills Faster episode, Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast describes a neurological process that bears the verisimilitude of savasana. ‘There are also data showing that after any kind of motor movement provided, you’re not bringing a lot more additional new sensory stimuli, there’s a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly and there’s an elimination of the motor sequences that you performed incorrectly, and they are run backwards in time.’ This process differs from sleep in that in sleep the correct sequence is performed forwards in time. This process happens necessarily within the same session as the actual motor movement. It is a critical part of the learning process. It is both indispensable and unmeasurable. This is where the restlessness comes in. In a society where ‘time is money’ and productivity is valued above most if not all things; this ‘doing nothing’ can be quickly labelled as sloth. Novice practitioners can easily come up with a list of things they could be doing instead of savasana and they do, to the detriment of all the work they just put in. This brings me to the relationship between the symbolism of ‘coherence’ and ‘completion’.

 

Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World in a podcast episode titled ‘The Apple CEO, 666, and The Garden of Eden’ explicates on the relationship between the symbolism of the numbers 6 and 7. The easiest illustration is how they are connected in The Creation Myth. The work of creation was finished on the 6^th day and the 7^th day was the Sabbath, the day of rest. In Biblical symbolism, 6 is the number of coherence (the ‘consistency’ of the work week) and 7 is the number of completion. Essentially there are 6 days which are measurable in terms of productivity and then there is the 7^th day which is not. The cadence of the first 6 days is the same and it changes dramatically on the 7^th day. The 7^th day is a day set apart. Slowly, however, this day’s difference and essence has been lost to society, and the day has been changed into just another day to serve the means of production. In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han writes ‘God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine… Rest is not merely recovery from work nor is it a preparation for further work. Rather, it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work… If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today; it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.’ When we fail to set aside rest, we become beasts of burden living mundane lives, reduced to servomechanisms of production. ‘Rest is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time’(Han).

Han writes, ‘Most importantly, during the Sabbath man rests his tongue from the everyday chit-chat & learns silence and listening. The sabbath demands silence; the mouth must be closed.’ Most of the communication that takes place today is serving the means of production. There is on one hand the endless chatter of social media: posts, lives, boomerangs, comments, DMs, likes etc. which is mostly meaningless and on the other hand, businesses are becoming more and more dependent on WhatsApp for e.g., to achieve their productive ends. This, no doubt, makes it quicker to communicate but it also increases the endlessness of it all. Communication has become more about quantity than quality and we end up saying a lot about nothing or even worse, using our mental bandwidth in attempts to stay on top of unread emails or messages which themselves have an exponential life of their own. This has created a lot of dread; of missing important communication and of missing out on other important things in life. Production spills over and seeps into every crevice of our lives. And any silence from our side (unread and unanswered correspondence) is ill received and we are labelled as rude, and impolite. An app like WhatsApp has increased the accessibility of people beyond belief. For people who have had the same phone number since time immemorial; all the people they would have met over the years, in all those different seasons have access to them today, now, in this season. This hyper-accessibility may serve production, but the psyche takes a pounding. There is also a hyper-surveillance where people’s movements on the app. are tracked and timestamped. There is an expectation and entitlement, socio-normatively, that if people are online they imperatively have to acknowledge and read all the messages that come in.  

 

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, in their book Metaphors We Live By write ‘Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish- a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought of action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor.’ Communication, of the nature discussed above, is promoted and endorsed because it is highly measurable and can therefore be used productively. The content is largely insignificant because it is largely bullshit. Harry Frankfurt in Bullshit writes, ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit’. However, this communication is measurable and measured. It is the bits/s that make this communication valued and the ringing bell that makes tech companies salivate like Pavlovian dogs is data. As Lakoff & Johnson put it; we live by metaphors and they can provide perspective on how we see things and their affordances to us. In general, living in the information age, this movement of information is described as the ‘flow’ of information. When we are on the internet; we are said to be ‘surfing’ the net. We ‘stream’ when we watch or listen to something online. There are data ‘lakes’ where raw data is stored. Our language depicts how we see data in relation to ourselves. This means we metaphorically see and experience data as water, and this itself is a harbinger of things to come. As fun as surfing is, human beings can’t ride waves indefinitely. You have to, eventually, get out the water or risk drowning. With the omnipresence of information and communication, drowning presents itself as a large and looming possibility. Also, is Big Data akin to a Big Wave of the Nazará proportion?  or is it like Meta Data and it represents a Meta Cosmic Reality named The Great Deluge and its mass extinction implications? Things to think about.

I would like to colligate this with another metaphor we live by. The word ‘understand’ etymologically means ‘stand in the midst of’. When we have grasped something than we are standing in it. It’s ok to stand in water up to your knees but what happens if the data is quantitatively large (as is its nature) or moving so quickly, it knocks you off your feet? How and when does understanding take place and become knowledge. Nicholas Carr beffitingly named his book, on our inability to ‘dive deep’ to understand and know ‘The Shallows’. Han writes: ‘processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand, they only calculate… the proponents of dataism would argue that humans invented thinking because they cannot calculate fast enough, and that the age of thinking will prove to be a short historical interlude.’ Homo Sapiens’ big claim to fame is this ‘thinking’. What then to become of the thinking man in the times of calculation and algorithm? If we are still standing then we are likely, sinking.

With our limited understanding and knowledge, one would assume we would have less to say and yet the means of production, press upon us more ardently; insisting that we continue speaking and increasing the speed at which we do this. Less to say. More communication. The proliferation of Bullshit. Frankfurt writes ‘Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled- whether by their own propensities of by the demands of others- to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.’

 

‘Work, work, work, work, work, work’ Our Barbados-born princess sings in her not-so-surprisingly named song, ‘Work’. The hard work Rihanna is singing about is not traditional work but a labour for love, or rather a labour for a connection beyond sex. Dare I say a ‘relationship’. We are at least comforted that Rihanna only repeats ‘work’ 6 times and not 7. On the 7^th day, she can rest from the need to keep that particular ‘relation-ship’ afloat in these tumultuous seas that is modern day dating. Hook-up culture is one of the insidious ways which illustrate how far we’ve embraced the measurable; even in our so called private spaces. How many matches? right swipes? followers? subscribers? Frankly, How much? Interactions between people are fixated on sex. With sex off the table, the table itself ceases to exist. Sex sells now more than ever but now we are willingly pimping ourselves out productively. We have reduced one another into succubae and incubi where the sexual act and its finality is prioritized above all else. We consume each other to the point of disgust, if not physically then virtually. Han writes, ‘the sexual act in today’s porn films seems mechanical. The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body, the function of a sexual machine.’ In the spirit of performance and sensationalism, we are continuously stretching the boundaries of sex and sex which is just one dimension of existence permeates all the other dimensions. Coprophilia and Bestiality are becoming commonplace. A few weeks ago, a sex scene from The Wife went viral and it was heralded as a first of its kind in the South African context. Not only was this inevitable, the general trajectory of broadcasting lends to an increase in gratuitous salacious content to garner more views. ‘What the Immanuelle is going on here?’ commented a viewer because there was a time when sex had a time and a place, it was contained, it wasn’t broadcast when children were wide awake. The broadcasting of sex in the first place has been a very slippery slope. And now it’s everywhere. How do we call it sexual liberation when we are clearly enslaved to sexuality and can hardly move in any direction without being bombarded by it? We’ve also violently reduced each other to faces and genitals which we use and discard. And why would a phenomenon such as ‘Ghosting’ surprise us? What justification or explanation would we need to provide to a face and genitals? And besides lengthy explanations would require time that the means of productions do not encourage; it’s simply on to the next one. ’Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to… the pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It’s a too much not a too little that is making us sick’(Han).

 

In one of the Thinking Ape episodes, Stardusk speaks about an old duffel bag that was given to him by his father that lasted for more than a decade in good working order. And he laments how things are just not made to last for a long time anymore. Things have no durability. Which is precisely how a society of production would want it to be. Things are made, not mainly for the utility they provide, but to be sold. The sell is the bottom-line and there’d be just enough product substance to entice people to buy. There are times when there is insufficient product substance to warrant a purchase but once the hedonic treadmill has got people running on it like gerbil on spinning wheels; not much convincing is needed to have them spending money needlessly. We’ve fetishized the new and we are constantly upgrading and updating. We, as Han puts it, don’t use things but use them up. Even novelty is lost on us. Novelty is the new against the background of the old. When new is foregrounded against the new, it is not novel; it is just the sameness of the new; the coherence of production. Han, ‘the new quickly deteriorates into routine. It is a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again. The compulsion of production as the compulsion to seek the new, only gets us deeper into the quagmire of routine in order to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption.’ Our identities become as fickle as the ever-changing things around us. Nothing grounds us, and there is nothing to stand under (understand) either. Life is an ever-changing morass of insecurity and uncertainty. We are stabilized as every morning we wake up to new ceilings. We are unhomed, perpetually.

 

We’ve also lost the capacity to play and laugh. Play for the sake of play does not serve the means of production. It is merely unmeasurable in economic terms. It is the expenditure of energy that doesn’t translate into money. Han describes how poetry is becoming ever so rate because poetry is linguistic play. Haiku and Limerick are games with specific rules and the value of the game lies in successfully adhering to the rules of the game. On Monday afternoon at 3pm CAT, Chillers the world over gather to laugh while watching McGee, Sol Phenduka, and Ghost Lady play with language. A form of resistance against the tyranny of the measurable. Sure, the number of subscribers is a measurable metric, but that was the form that followed the function. And chillers aren’t mere spectators, they participate in following along and sharing in the laughter when Sol the PUNisher drops a pun. And there is no sophistry, no theatrics, no ‘TV personality’ paraphernalia, simple guys and girl, simply dressed, playing to their heart’s content. And it’s on productivity’s main day, Monday, during the actual workday. What was a Blue Monday?

 

Speaking of blue. There is a rhyme that goes: ‘something olde, something new, something borrowed and something blue, a sixpence in your shoe.’ This is a tradition that the bride incorporated when she married to ward off evil spirits and bring forth a good and happy marriage. Marriages themselves are falling apart quicker than they happened in the first place. There is a plethora of reasons why this is the case, (Rollo Tomassi has a comprehensive list) but my focus will be on one where productivity rears its head once again. In modern marriages, the marriage which has become an event (as opposed to a ceremony) of elaborate expenditure and consumption is disproportionality emphasized more than the everyday rituals of marriage. Even beyond the wedding, material acquisition (productivity) becomes the mainstay of the marriage or the online performance and parade of carefully curated consumption. Most of marriage is daily bread. The actual wedding is meant to be a ritualistic crossing of a threshold where a transformation takes place in the individuals who are about to start a life together. And yet this is not what takes place at weddings, the people in the advent of the marriage are the same as they were before the wedding and that marriage becomes like a house build on sand. Han, ‘The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there [or simply loses interest in it].’ Marriages are frail because the objective unifying purpose of a marriage is lost to the subjective states of individuals within the marriage; the bond was flimsy to begin with.

 

In Gabor Maté’s, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes, ‘Boredom rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.’ Tom Bilyeu says what usually gets people is boredom; it’s the taedium vitae that is part and parcel of any goal pursuit; long stretches of burden punctuated by the short excitement of a milestone reached. The measurable would want us to frame boredom in a negative light so we are compelled to seek out new stimuli. A friend of mine Katlego Letlonkane says, ‘there are no boring things; just uninterested people.’ Our relationship to the objects around us is discursive and dismissive and objects are viewed through a lens of disposability. This contemptuous ‘been there, done that’ attitude makes it very difficult to move away from our solipsism to see things as daily bread, to bear witness to them, to experience intensity and not tedium, to form relationships with the everyday things around us and the everyday duties required of us as to experience being homed and subsequently a homing. ‘Men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same desk and the same chair’(Han).

 

In a preceding paragraph I mentioned how porn as a machine of productivity has reduced people to genitals and faces. The process of legal identification has done the same thing. People are reduced to a face, a unique number and two or so more particulars. IDs, driver’s licences, student cards, employee access cards, passports etc. This is something we have generally accepted and relegated to that particular sphere of life. This process of reduction may be more pernicious than we think. Zoom, Skype and Teams are ways where only the face matters productively. Apple has Facetime because it is time with your face, only. Michael Phillip in his Third Eye Drop podcast once said that we have become heads moving way faster than our bodies and we have left our bodies behind. We live in our heads and because we live in the information age, prepositional knowledge is valued above everything else. Our bodies take up space and they are slower than our brain’s processing speed, embodiment requires time, deliberate action requires time, enacting requires time, rituals require time. But time is money. Intercourse is ignored for unrelenting discourse. As prized as prepositional knowledge is, it falls short in offering us what we need to live fulfilling lives.  Wisdom is rare while depression, alienation, formlessness and meaninglessness are rife. We are burnt out and our bodies have become landfills of pathologies. The hyper-exposure of the day denies the arcane and art, it also denies an agency that is unifying and complete. We are dispersed. We lack the situational awareness to fully participate in life because we are not situated.

 

And on the 7^th day God rested. He participated fully in his creation. He observed it. Observing the sabbath is a ritual. The disappearance of rituals has been a marker of the days where only the measurable matters and is attended to. Like all tyrants, productivity does not have limits. Its avarice requires all our lives.

And on the 7^th day God rested. He recognised his creation. He communed with it. Han writes, ‘But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which man makes himself at home in the world, to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehensions of it, and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.’ 

And on the 7^th day God rested. Productive time became transformative durable time. John Vervaeke, ‘Ritual situates us in imaginal time in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns; to enter into right relationship with our future selves; to empower our self-correction and our self-regulation and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire.’

 

 

Homo Ludens: Man, The Player

 

‘Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstraction: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play’

Johan Huizinga

 

Woman: ‘"Grown men”, why are you still playing video games?’

Man: ‘Same reason you wear makeup. Nice lil’ escape from reality.’

 

Still. So. Funny. Although there is a consensus amongst the female population that video games are a waste of time; and since most men are trying to get the female population to copulate with them; they may begrudgingly give games up or play on the DL. Mark Rober, who came up with the Super Mario Effect offers a different perspective to gaming. Many a millennial is well acquainted with the Italian plumber that is Super Mario and therefore an effect that is named after him is nostalgically well received and simply lands for many of us. The Super Mario Effect occurs when we shift our focus from falling into pits to saving the princess, in this way, we stick to the task and learn more. The effect is centred around reframing failure. When we were learning to play Super Mario, every time we ‘died’; we would try again and do things differently to how we had done them before. That’s it. We didn’t really care how we looked when we failed or anything else besides getting good at the game. This in essence is what life is about; life is a meta- game. We could leverage this effect and apply it to the rest of our lives. It seems ‘grown men’ may just be in a better position skill-wise; to deal with life. People would argue that life is different from gaming in that games are low stakes. This is what makes Rober’s point salient. We decide if something is high stakes or not and when we do that we get to decide where we place our focus; on the princess or the pits; the prospective gains or the losses. Andy Frisella says that people assess risk from the perspective of what they could lose as opposed to what they could gain. ‘You’ve built this life that you are afraid of losing as if it’s extremely valuable. When in reality, the value is way down the road, that you haven’t build yet and you are afraid to trade what you have for what you could have.’

Another factor that impacts how we characterise failure is whether we see life as an infinite game or finite game. James P. Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility differentiates between the two. He writes: ‘There are at least two kinds of games. One could be finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game adds ‘No matter how successful we are in life, when we die none of us will be declared the winner of life. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things, are journey, not events.’

The idea of life being a journey ties wonderfully with the The Hero’s Journey myth (Joseph Campbell) which players tap into through games. Edward Castronova writes in a book called Life is a Game: what game design says about the human condition, ‘People want to be heroes. They crave agency, and the ability to do something that matters. They want meaning.’ Ray Dalio of Principles co-opted The Heroes Journey and formulated a five step process people can apply to get what they want from life: 1. Pursue Audacious Goals 2. Fail 3. Learn Principles 4. Improve and 5. Pursue More Audacious Goals. Whether you are trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser or trying to be an amazing athlete or trying to live an infinite life like Sinek’s grandma, this process is applicable to all facets of life.

As hilarious as the tweets I opened this essay with are, they only scratch at the surface of the role games and makeup play in the lives of human beings. As contemptuous as the woman is towards men who play games, she doesn’t realise that she is playing as well. You only have to watch women dressing up and beating their faces to know that they derive plenty of fun from it and are essentially playing when they engrossed in cosmetics. The man dismisses the makeup play as a form of escapism, but he is only considering the aesthetic, tangible morphological aspects of makeup. Of course, there is another game at play here called the mating game where women use makeup to beguile, lure, out-compete other women to win over the affections of suitable males. The biological seriousness of mate selection is used to cover up the fact that makeup is both ploy and play. All roads lead to Rome. Even when men play video games, they are learning important skills which when applied to other contexts of life propel the species forward evolutionarily. Michael Phillip of The Third Eye Drops podcast says in an episode on Transrational Oracles and Magical Thinking in the 21^st Century with Sarah Zucker, ‘I would posit that play leads to evolution, to curiosity, to exploration, eventually to acts of creation, science and even art. I think they are all derivative of play.’ Play creates reality, it does not escape it, well at least it shouldn’t. While Icarus was instructed to fly neither too high nor too low; play, too, has a golden mean: The Divine Child archetype. If we play to distract, to wile away our time, to numb or escape reality, we miss the golden mean and spend much of our time at the extremes of the continuum of play: being Peter Pan/ Wendy Darling whose play renders them impotent or ineffectual in life or Adulting-Adults who have removed all play from their lived experience. For the most part, makeup is low-hanging fruit when it comes to playing games particularly because there aren’t really any higher-order skills that women tap into during that form of play. Jordan B. Peterson qualifies games worth playing by asking: ‘To what degree do you practice a wide range of subset of skills that would be transferable to other games while you are playing that game? I think you could make the case that if you are playing a very complex video game; that the activities that you are engaging in, which involve leadership, and cooperation, and communication and problem solving are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop, to work in the world as a complex place?’ Castronova breaks down game design into two main components: strategies and stances. He describes a stance as ‘a combination of three things: an assumption about what victory in life is, a strategy for winning, and a set of tactics for carrying out that strategy on a day-to-day basis. A stance is an attitude towards existence, when existence is understood as a game.’ I think that there are conducive stances and obstructive stances in life. It is usually obstructive stances that hamper people’s progress in life. A stance can go awry at any of the three junctures listed above: viewing failure as rigid and static losing as opposed to dynamic nuanced learning (antidotally addressed by The Super Mario Effect); having no strategy and/or doing things on a day-to-day basis that do not move you closer to your goal. Strategy is what allows us to exercise our agency effectively. Games do not only develop these skills but they also impress upon us that ‘agency [in the world] is taken, not given’ (Ryan Holiday).

Holiday shares an anecdote about General James Mattis in Courage is Calling. ‘“What keeps you up at night?” General James Mattis was once asked by a television reporter. Before the question was quite finished, he was already answering. “I keep people awake at night.”’ Mattis is a strategist. Alternatively, we can have life happen to us and be in constant reactivity mode like tacticians. Robert Greene in The 33 Strategies of War writes, ‘In war, strategy is the art of commanding the entire military operation. Tactics, on the other hand, is the skill of forming up the army for battle itself and dealing with the immediate needs of the battlefield. Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood, you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away. That makes the tactical decisions of daily life much simpler and more rational. Tactical people are heavy and stuck in the ground; strategists are light on their feet and can see far and wide.’  Strategists keep people awake at night and take the offensive in life and accomplish their overall objectives. ‘Few men of accomplishment, da Vinci noted, got there by things happening to them. No, he said, they are what has happened’ (Ryan Holiday).

‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play’ (Heraclitus). In his Ted Talk, Mark Rober illustrates that people succeed because of the way they frame failure. This is crucial because the manner in which we frame failure will predict how much more practice we put in i.e. repetitions. There is a characteristic of video games called ‘Lives’ where a player has a finite number of tries before the games ends with a game over. This has been one of the developments of gaming that have been for me, a game-changer. Andrew Huberman describes two types of motor skills: open and closed skills. Open skills are performed in a dynamic and changing environment, while closed skills take place in a predictable environment. Skill type as well as focused attention determine how readily a new skill will be acquired. Repetitions lead to errors which let us know where we need to focus our attention which increases our plasticity and improves our skill. Lives incorporate all these aspects of skill acquisition. A novice can learn quicker, and an advanced player can take more risks. All this hangs on one thing however: The reps. There’s a word in adulting-adults language, that gets a bad rep; that word is discipline. When we frame failure negatively, discipline means doing hard things that we hate but are good for us. When we frame failure like the Divine Child: we see discipline as doing something we love to do anyway; that may be hard because its good for us. Discipline is ‘the seriousness of a child at play’. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy writes ‘because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘do it again’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.’ When we play, we unwittingly say to ourselves ‘Do it again’. As we arrive at the console, court, contour etc., we say to ourselves ‘Do it again’ and we infuse play into our work, our lives. In the face of failure, error, pits; we tell ourselves ‘Do it again’. 

Castronova writes, ‘I love games and have been playing and studying them my whole life. It stands to reason that, eventually, I would start seeing life as a genuine game. It has been a way to process and accept the awful things that can happen in a life. A game perspective on life gives the awful things a place: they are part of the experience; they make the experience good in the same way that reality of unfair losses in sporting events makes the whole experiences of sport genuine, legitimate, and emotionally real. A sport without crushing losses is not good. Neither is a life without any possibility of suffering. Human suffering makes this a serious game indeed. Well worth our time, thought, and passion. Well worth playing. Worth playing well. The game of life matters; it also seems to have been incredibly well designed. The more time I spend thinking about life as a game, the more brilliant its design seems to be. The game is rich, deep, beautiful, and elegant; moving and full of pathos; exciting, exploding with possibility, rich with reward, and fraught with danger; full of vast empty timelines punctuated by heart-pounding moments whose memory lasts forever; and also, a dense web of secrets, absolutely impenetrable, yet with hints and clues lying about everywhere. The game is played both alone and with other. No human person has ever won definitely, yet playing is satisfying to everybody. The game of life is real, and it fascinates endlessly.’

Let’s play!

 

The integration of violence into society

 

A few years ago, there was an upsurge of learners physically attacking teachers in South African schools. The teachers could not retaliate because the law forbade it. There seemed to be an asymmetry (beyond the minor-adult axis) regarding the meting out of justice in these situations; a teacher would be in more trouble if he retaliated then the learner would be for assaulting the teacher in the first place. This asymmetry left teachers at the mercy of learners and learners took advantage of this. It became a rather contentious topic on 702 and I recall quite a considerable number of its listenership advocating for the reinstitution of corporal punishment. At the time I thought it was the worst idea; living in one of the most violent countries, the last thing we needed was another tributary through which more violence could flow. I felt that in order for violence to be curbed; it should be eradicated from society entirely. For me it seemed disingenuous and lazy for us to discuss ‘gender based’ violence without discussing the number of men who kill other men in South Africa, or the number of women who inflict violence on men knowing that society would not even bat an eyelid because of an unfortunate masculinity construct. There is a toxicity in femininity that relies on this and will goad, taunt and provoke men to no end knowing that he cannot in any way respond physically because the law will come down, ton of bricks, hard on him. Because, as is often the case in society, men are not really seen beyond their utility; parts of their humanity is thwarted or ignored altogether. Men are complicit in this as well. Men are not meant to have feelings, they are not meant to react in any way to provocation and when an armed burglar breaks into a man’s home at 3am, he (as a man) is meant to leave his wife in bed and confront the burglar by himself and risk his life. His life seems by virtue of being a man disposable i.e. how in The Titanic, women and children were first on the lifeboats. There are men who will read the few sentences above and see zero conflicts regarding what I’ve articulated. They internally and impulsively assent to ideas that men are supposed to protect their families, cannot show emotional displays (interpreted as weakness), and irrespective of what women do, the men can never lay hands on women. If this blog had appeared on any mainstream media, this is the part of the blog where folks stop reading, put on their virtue signalling T-shirts and cancel me. But before roll your eyes and label me as anti-women or pro-GBV, bear with me for a second. I am not in any way arguing for GBV, as a woman myself it should be obvious why this cannot be the case. What I have been arguing for is a violence-free society (think Scandinavian). As a caveat, I’d like to draw attention to the observation that South Africa’s violence is a symptom of inequality and there is no way that the violence conversation can take place before the inequality one has. Inequality aside, I saw a society where men wouldn’t raise their hands to women; women wouldn’t raise their hands to men; men wouldn’t raise their hands to women; learners wouldn’t raise their hands to teachers, vice versa and so forth. Importantly and indispensably, it is a society of mutual respect and understanding that our ability to inflict violence on one another is ever present; that we should treat each other in a way that doesn’t wittingly poke and trigger those parts. It would not be a society where violence becomes impossible but where violence becomes unnecessary. It would be a society where a man does not have to bear the yoke of protecting his family, existentially and financially, because there would be nothing potentially-violent he would need to protect his family from. While I’m lost in fantasies of this utopic non-violent society, Tyson Yunkaporta comes and drops his book Sand Talk on to my society. Like a house of cards, my society flattens at the impact. I had to begin ideating afresh on violence. The great thing is that I already had a cornerstone to begin with: the acknowledgment that the ability to respond violently is very much a part of the makeup of being human. I guess I have been Ariscratle from Ice Age 4 imploring Scrat and the rest of society, ‘No! Stop! Brother [and sister], rise above this base desire to be more than a [primate- of the chimpanzee variety].’ With this capstone and Sand Talk, I started rebuilding.

In Season 5 of The Real Housewives of Potomac, Monique Samuels assaulted another cast member, Candiace Dillard and most of the other cast members reproached Samuels and she was ostracised and Dillard herself was spared rebuke even though her actions were instigative. Consequently, Samuels is no longer a part of the show. Samuels heightened already high tensions by tweeting ‘ask and you shall receive’ post altercation. Her co-stars condemned her behaviour as morally reprehensible as the tweet showed that she lacked remorse for her actions. She subsequently kowtowed to the pressures that be. I thought her behaviour was a natural consequence of the provocation. You push people hard enough and they will push back. You go around daring people, one day someone will call your bluff. In Seriously Funny, Kevin Hart has a bid about precisely this. And of course, the hackneyed ‘a lady doesn’t behave like that’ reprimand from all other cast members. This brings me to the domestication of people.

 

 Yunkaporta has a rather interesting hypothesis regarding the mass scale domestication of people. He posits that the Prussians invented adolescence to extend the developmental period of children into adulthood. This adolescence allowed the Prussians to retard the populations’ social, emotional and intellectual maturation so that they would be easier to control; creating a permanent state of child-like compliance in adults. This domestication was exported to Nazi Germany and then to America. His hypothesis does coincide with menarche but it conflicts with the neurobiological finding that the human brain only fully develops at the age of 25 unless this finding is correlated to the retardation. I think his hypothesis is compelling and if that was the only thing I had found insightful in Sand Talk, it would have been completely worth the read. It is still something I need to mull over; the jury is still out on whether his hypothesis is poppycock or pure genius. I do however want to spend time a bit of energy on the domestication of human beings because our current human conditioning would have made us easy prey to the sabre-tooth if we were placed in those settings, that’s if we didn’t die of starvation because persistence hunting is no joke. Yunkaporta points his finger to public education but I would like to point to more nuanced techniques that I myself have fallen for, repeatedly. This particular technique is courtesy to the English and the residual culture they left in their wake when South Africa became a Republic in 1961. When I was in primary school we were often referred to as young ladies. Obviously this was the Pygmalion Effect in full force and my nine-year old self had zero fighting chance against such psychological weaponry. Whenever a teacher referred to us as ‘young ladies’, we would beam with all the pride we could muster without putting our ladyship in question with vainglory. That referral, however, was not just an acknowledgment of the self but an invitation to step further and firmer into our ladyship. The principal of the school at the time was the epitome of a lady: never raised her voice even in anger, always composed, poised, immaculate, articulate, unhurried and the entire student body adored her. To emulate her was an ambition harboured by many female learners. So there we were: tempering our loud natures, walking across the quad instead of running, having our hair tied back at all times and blunting our sharp tongues. Later, it dawned on me that this whole turn ‘girls into ladies’ thing was a restraining, a domestication. I had inadvertently zipped up my own lips; placed fetters and handcuffs on my own feet and hands. I am wild now, untamed, let loosed; resembling an older Sandy Crood, or at least attempting to.

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, in conversation with Tom Bilyeu says that the number one preoccupation people have is ‘looking good’ and showing the world that you ‘have it all together’. Woe to him who gets flustered in public. Being taught to be a lady was being trained to look good in thought, word and deed. The same thing has been done to men; a gentleman shows the outmost restraint, suffers silently under heavy constraints and is chivalrous. In societies where violence is equated with savagery; unsophistication and the efforts of desperate people who have not cultivated any other alternatives as a response to life’s provocations. This perception has also led to the damsel in distress trope. In the face of danger, a lady doesn’t raise her hands but must rely on a man facing the danger on her behalf, putting his own life in harms away. A woman must act like a lady by sitting and waiting on a man to act like a gentleman. This is some co-dependent toxic shit. Just imagine with me if you will, a lady dropping her ladyship, picking up a weapon of self-defence and pulling a Jenko & Schmidt from 22 Jump Street or a Mike and Marcus from Bad Boys, standing back to back facing the threat from all sides with the camera panning in slow motion. Impossible? No. Implausible? No! Improbable? Most definitely. Not because women can’t learn to fight but because have been weakened more and more through domestication. Women don’t fight. Most women have no agency in the face of danger. They freeze. While men have been given options in the face of danger: fight, flight or appease. Just as a lion at the lion park approaches the fence of an enclosure when it spots a human child (easy prey) on the other side of the fence. There are men who see women in the same light. They see easy prey. They are predatory because they know they’ll mostly get away with anything they do to women. In Vagabond by Lerato Mogoatlhe she shares an account of a man attempting to force himself on her and she fights back. I remember picking up her book, reading the blurb and being both excited and afraid at the same time. Here was a woman, very much like myself demographically, who travelled the continent on very little money and alone. My domestication reflex kicked in right on cue: What? No male chaperone? And my neo-cortex shows up on the scene (late as always) and I have to remind myself that she’s an adult. She should be able to go wherever she wants and do whatever she wants to do without being afraid. The domestication of women has not only been accomplished through their physical weakening but like the domestication of dogs, there has been an invisible leash placed around them that keeps them in their very well air-conditioned and artificially lit kennels. Not a lot of women would do what Mogoatlhe did. A lot of women die having not heeded the inner call to adventure or not trying new things they really want to because of safety or looking good or the other tamings of society. Lebo Mashile writes in her poem There is a me that I could be:

‘There is a me that I could be/ If I could just let her breathe outside/ A thundering song that I could sing/ If I just let her breathe outside/ There is a me who lives unseen/ She paces the corridors inside.’

Yunkaporta sums up the domestication of women in this way. ‘Everywhere civilisation goes, most women are excluded from active participation in violence and then domesticated into a twisted, soft, flouncing version of femininity… In Asia, the Middle East and Europe, in every civilization, women are forced to adopt a passive role, their bodies confined and weakened until they are at the mercy of the men around them… the subjugation of women is perpetuated by multiple means. The myth of romance is political. It is a myth about male-dominated hetero couples, where an incomplete woman is completed by her relationship with her partner. Patriarchy naturalises this sexual identity, masking the cultural construction of the feminine, thereby continually reproducing women in a subordinate position… when it was found that Neanderthal women carried much the same suite of bone injuries as men, there was a brief silence before ‘men were hunters and women gatherers’ narrative continued unchallenged… When I think of the worst public beating I ever received from a woman, resulting in three busted ribs, a knife through my hand and half my hair pulled out, I recall that the non- Aboriginal observers of that fight ignored the power of that magnificent woman and focused on my weakness as an individual who had somehow let my sex down. The onlookers, both male and female were so disgusted with my poor performance that they didn’t even bother calling an ambulance, leaving me to crawl my bloody way home.’ So again I ask: Improbable? Yes, but it doesn’t have to be.

 

Palahniuk says that his work scratches away at the gossamer of looking good; allowing people to confront their shadow selves (including people’s propensity for violence), to integrate it into themselves, and lastly celebrate it because it is a part of being human. Yunkaporta, ‘Creation started with a big bang, not a big hug: violence is part of the pattern. The damage of violence is minimised when it is distributed throughout a system rather than centralised into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions [or one gender of the population]. If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers and detonating it in areas beyond your living space. Most of the Southern hemisphere is receiving that outsourced violence to supply what you need for the clean, technological, peaceful spaces of your existence. The poor zoned into the ghettoes of your city are taking those blows for you, as are the economically marginalised who fill your prisons. The invisible privilege of your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence. Your peace- medallion bling is sparkling with blood diamonds. You carry pillaged metals in your phone from devastated African lands communities. Your notions of peaceful settlement and development are delusions peppered with bullet holes and spears. Violence exists and it must be carefully structured within rituals governed by the patterns of creation and the laws of sustainable cultures derived from those patterns. Violence employed in these highly interdependent and controlled frameworks serves to bring spirit into balance and hold in check I-am-greater-than deception… Every organism in existence does violence, and benefits from it in reciprocal relationships. Domesticated beings are stripped of this reality, and become passive recipients of violence- either its benefits or its cruel impacts. They devolve as a result.’ This shares the same sentiment with what Jordan B. Peterson once said in his Maps of Meaning series. He said that the reason why we don’t resort to our primal reptilian brain is because everything is working as it should be. If there were serious food shortages for example, we would shrug off our civility to survive. It would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. We saw a hint of this in our avaricious hording behaviour with the impact of the Corona virus. All of a sudden, shops had to interfere and restrict the amount of non-perishable food people were buying because at that point, it didn’t matter if other people got food or not.

And also, with the Scandinavian example; as ‘peaceful’ as it is, now and then violence bubbles to the surface. A few days ago, a man went on a shooting (bow and arrow) spree killing five people. We can repress violence but we run the risk of having no say in how it will erupt and how extensive the damage will be; uncontrolled violence is also gratuitous. Yunkaporta writes, ‘There is controlled violence versus uncontrolled violence, hidden violence and public violence, violence born from colonisation and dispossession. There is also an argument to be made for white systems perpetrating non-traditional violence so that members of marginalised groups remain cornered about these things and not with the decisions that are being ‘made for us’ in a wider socio-political sense.’ Violence is not just physical; violence is poverty, carnism, erasure of cultures, arbitrary hierarchies, incarceration without rehabilitation, the commodification of people and the environment etc. Erick Godsey in conversation with Michael Phillip of the Third Eye Drop podcast, says that we should take our cues from nature. Yunkaporta supports this view as well, ‘Violence is part of creation and it is distributed evenly among all agents in sustainable systems to minimise the damage it can do. We follow creation, so we must all have high levels of competence when it comes to conflict.’ Godsey takes it further and says one of the problems with modern day society is that ‘we are heads cut off from our bodies’ which is why Ian Tattersall says that ‘The only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.’ While we lived in smaller tribes, unintended consequences could be rectified and equilibrium in the system re-established. Unfortunately global village consequences are exponentially catastrophic which is how we have found ourselves in the climate change predicament, amongst other things. And because we are disembodied; we have lost the ability to recalibrate to nature’s patterns. We have lost the patience to wait and see how the changes we make on the earth affect the rest of the system before changing something else. Before we ourselves have assimilated a change into ourselves, a new one is thrust upon us by occupying powers and on each other. We have literally lost touch of reality. We have all this information and technology and our heads are spinning at the speed of 260 Mbps but our bodies are still at the beginning of the race; asking like that infamous South African ghost: ‘Waar is my kop?’ The Law of Unintended Consequences remains and the consequences will naturally follow; whether we like it or not. Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World had his house flooded in 2019 because a dyke had broken. Despite the stress of having most of his and his family’s possessions destroyed, he asked a sensible question: Where is the water supposed to go? In Nadia Owusu’s Aftershocks, she describes how all the people who die as a result of an earthquake are killed by the manmade structures around them. The earth is have said to have gone through 5 mass extinctions and I’m pretty sure they were violent affairs. Nature, will always auto-correct. With our big brains, we could have let nature set the rhythm so we could exist in tandem with it; moving along the grain; advancing with its patterns; able to anticipate and dance with it. But we’ve chosen to strong arm it as we have done with one another  and the violence of nature’s autocorrect (homeostasis) of our unintended consequences may lead to our demise which will likely be a protracted painful death; as the planet becomes even more inhospitable for and hostile to us. Yunkaporta says that violence has to be distributed among all agents to mitigate the damage, similarly Jamie Wheal’s recapturing of the rapture has to be distributed among all agents. Elon Musk is not going to save us.

 

One of the most violent occurrences that take place daily and should then reinforce the indispensability of nature’s timing in the activities of human beings; and that is childbirth. Childbirth is violent for the mother and the child. Maybe it’s modern day medical advancements (epidurals, caesareans, inductions, germ theory etc.) have made it less harrowing. Even with the hormones that flood the system of the mother to dilute the violence so that she heals well and that allows her to remember childbirth in sepia tones so that she would still want to procreate in the future; the violence still exists. There was a time in our not so distant past when childbirth was truly touch-and-go. Maternal and/or neonatal death was common and likely. Creation started with a big scream, and the hug came only after. Human beings have fully wrapped their heads and bodies around the gestation period of a human foetus. They know that they run all sorts of risks by either shortening or lengthening that period. A cautionary tale, perhaps, on not dilly-dallying with regards to climate change and all the other percolating elements that came as a result of our heads floating around without bodies. Another lesson childbirth extends to us is that violence doesn’t have to lead to trauma. I think trauma is one of the biggest threats to the survival of human beings. Systemic violence has produced trauma that has lasted generationally and psychologically crippled large populations which is really counterproductive to our existence. In summary, a good childbirth is not one without violence; it is one where violence is integrated, is shared, timely, where both mother and infant survive without trauma. Therefore, a good society is not one without violence, it is one where violence is integrated, is shared, timely, where human beings and the earth survive without trauma.

The Courage to be Ordinary

 

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, is titled after the last two words of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech. She begins the book with the quote and returns to it as she wraps the book up. Perhaps at this point your pupils are darting from one side to the other or your brow is furrowed in an attempt to reconcile daring greatly with being ordinary; intuition would put these very far apart on the continuum of being. But I see them essentially communicating the same message: That of showing up in your life in the way only you can. And that requires a lot of courage because we are inundated with a lot of things that would make showing up difficult and sometimes debilitating.

 

The title of this blog is inspired by Paul Tillich’s seminal work The Courage to Be. Tillich writes extensively of how we are in the grips of an anxiety crisis and how this anxiety threatens our ability to BE in this world. He differentiates it from fear because fear can be faced, analysed, overcome and even endured. Fear always appears as a definite object and therefore in a way makes room for you to participate in it; you have agency and while it may not be easy facing the objects of your fears; it is entirely possible through courage. Whereas, anxiety is a pernicious thing in that it permeates everything, the very air you breathe and therefore it cannot be faced as you would fear. As a result it threatens your very agency; because how do you begin to fight that which you can’t even point out or localize? Tillich writes ‘Anxiety is finitude, experiences as one’s own finitude… it is the anxiety of nonbeing, the awareness of one’s finitude as finitude… it expresses itself in loss of direction; inadequate reactions, lack of intentionality… the reason for this sometimes striking behaviour is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate. The only object is the threat itself, but not the source of the threat itself, the source of the threat itself is ‘nothingness’.’ This ‘nothingness’ is where courage is really needed. It is quite easy to be courageous in the face of things that affirm your being, perhaps courage is not even needed there but courage is necessary in the face of things that threaten your being; the nonbeing. Which is why Tillich’s writes ‘courage is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of’.’ This ‘in spite of’ comes in many different forms and Tillich elucidates on these forms which basically mark the human condition today; what the modern man is facing. ‘There are three types of anxiety according to the three directions in which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of shame, absolutely in terms of condemnation. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.’ In the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘we are hard pressed on every side’ and with depression being the leading cause of ill health and disability in the world; some of us are crushed.

 

In W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, he writes: ‘We would rather be ruined than changed/ we would rather die in our dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let our illusions die.’ One of the reasons that some of us are crushed is because we have clung to the illusions that do not work for us anymore or we refuse to face the crisis that we are in. John Vervaeke in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series defines courage in a very specific Tillich- inspired way. He says courage is not just bravery (the facing of danger) nor is it just fortitude (the enduring of difficulty); courage is facing the meaning crisis head-on and rejecting anything that responds to the crisis in any way that is not good. Courage is a virtue; it involves the wisdom to see through the illusions and the distortions of fear or distress to what is truly good and to act accordingly.

 

One of the uncourageous ways that history has responded to the meaning crisis is through the adoption or implementation of pseudo-religious ideologies such as Nazism, Fascism, Marxism, Fundamentalism etc. which tried to resuscitate religion apropos Nietzsche’s death of God. Tillich writes ‘The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external events or inner processes: one is cut from creative participation in a sphere of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately affirmed, one is driven from devotion to another to another because the meaning of each of them vanishes. The contents of the tradition, however excellent, however praised, however loved once lose their power to give content today. And present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns away from all concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to discover that it was precisely the loss of a spiritual centre which took away the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual centre cannot be produced intentionally; and the attempt to produce it only produces deeper anxiety’ or as Vervaeke puts it ‘has drenched our world in blood’. Akwaeke Emezi in Dear Senthuran: A black spirit memoir, writes ‘Illusions are the best things to burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who start them even worse’. Tillich himself courageously incinerated illusions against the Third Reich through more than 100 radio addresses that implored Germany, to recognize and reject the horrors of Hitler. Courage is always on the side of the good, and acts out against any illusions that detract from the good. The courageous dare greatly. Maya Angelou addressing Cornell University in 2008 said ‘Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without it no other can be practiced consistently, you can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally but to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.’ Angelou, Tillich, Vervaeke all have illustrated how courage is a virtue that points to other virtues, pointing to the true and the good i.e. the transcendentals. Tillich writes that courage does not eliminate anxiety, the existential nature of anxiety not allowing its removal, but courage can subsume the anxiety of nonbeing into itself. In order for this courage to be to not be threatened by nonbeing then the courage has to be powered by something that transcends both being and nonbeing. Vervaeke suggests that one of the ways you can face the meaning crisis is by moving from a horizontal teleological narrative (where you are caught in your personal history and future) into a vertical ontology where you ascend in terms of virtue; where you become more and more of yourself i.e. Platonic atonement or Aristotelean self-actualization. All these point to transcendence.

 

One of the ways the meaning crisis has reared its ugly head is in our culture’s obsession with purpose. People have been rendered catatonic by the need to live meaningfully or by the weight of feeling they are living purposeless lives. We are bombarded by cataracts of social media images and celebrities who seem to be killing this life thing and making a killing while at it; who seem to know what they are here for and meet every day with a vitality we crave and that exsanguinates the life out of us in comparison; that embroils us in the drama of the narcissism of small differences. Always trying to find the thing that makes us unique in comparison to others; that makes us believe we should be simply adored for who we are. Brown writes, ‘when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see shame-based [shame lying between relative guilt and absolute condemnation] fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong or to cultivate a sense of purpose… I see through the cultural messaging everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life… I know the yearning to believe that what I’m doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.’

 

Meister Eckhart writes, ‘People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are; for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.’ Let us not get caught up in the world’s insistence that our works should produce insta-money or insta-fame. Emezi calls this necessary work, The Spell. ‘The spell is clear: face your work. I inhale it like a meditation sometimes, to counter the panic of a life mutating too fast, when I wake up every day as a different person inside a different world. Everything else can shift however it wants, but the work will always be the work. No matter what changes, that instruction is still the same.’ We should also not buy into over-consumptive culture’s ideas about having something to show for our lives beyond actually showing up for our lives. As Phil Ford writes in his essay What was blogging?, ‘Hoping You’ll have something to show for your life is a mug’s game. What we want is something to show we’re living.’

In his book, Tillich evokes the image of a knight in full armour riding his steed through the valley with death and the devil on either side of him. ‘Fearlessly, concentrated, confident. He looks ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of the negativities of existence.’ Brown makes use of the man in the arena who stumbles, with a face marred with blood and sweat and dust. Both of these examples illustrating people showing up to the task or work at hand, in spite of. Emezi writes, ‘Even when seized by a thousand fears we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can [work] into the unknown.’

 

In light of being stared down by what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis: the interlacing of ecological, spiritual, existential, socio-economic, mental health crises of our time tied with the cultural pressures mentioned above; to be ordinary is itself a courageous act. To show up in spite of is to dare greatly. To decide for yourself what the meaning of your life will be (Viktor Frankl vibes) or to decide that life is meaningless (as Tillich says that the act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act). You can still show up in your life and in the lives of others, regardless what you choose to do with your life. Emezi writes, ‘The manual stays the same: to try until you can, to be bold and patient.’ To be excellent, to be good, to be courageous. To dare greatly with our eyes cast upwards. To say yes to life in spite of everything as Frankl’s recently released collection of essays is titled. Or as he puts it originally: Trotzdem ja zum leben sagen.