I Two Am Four Something

It's interesting how the right wing often confuses ambivalence (or ambiguity) with irrationality, while the left wing often confuses ambiguity (or ambivalence) with open-mindedness.

In the first case, this is because conservatives prefer to identify fixed positions and a wary of moving positions or flexibility, whether real or imputed. In the second case, this is because liberals are inherently against fixed positions except as unattainable ideals.

But, as F Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

In the first case, it is not always irrational to consider two opposed or different positions as both being tenable. This is because social phenomena depend a lot on social context for validation. Discipline in school and discipline in banking are different (and yet the same) in many (different) ways.

In the second case, it is not always open-minded to consider two different or opposed positions as both being tenable. Sometimes it's just a mark of indifference, lack of mental rigour, or desire to not create a fixed position of any kind. Yet that too is some sort of fixed position.

The upshot of these two positions is a third non-position. People who are unhappy with both extremes are called centrists, which just muddies the waters further. Since most intelligent people hate muddiness, this forces them to be unhappy. What a mess.

A fourth non-position is the 'apolitical' tag. People who are intelligent but do not want to be unhappy just refuse to think too hard about politics in public (lest somebody label them lefty, righty, or centristy). But that too is a position, and if it avoids the left-right axis, may end up being judged on a vertical axis of 'beneath politics' to 'above politics'.

You can't win. So you might as well have fun. I stand by the fifth — the position that I'm willing to aggressively engage any position that I'm not happy with, just to make myself happy. Heh heh.

Febrile

It is a warm winter we are having of it. Strangely, there are few things more pleasant than to sit in the City of Life, in the Building of Colour, eating the food of the free and drinking the drink of the strong, with good company.

Which is what I was doing today, and glad to have been doing.

Feeling Good

In the day just ended, I felt good.

I ate a bit of chicken. And some unidentifiable leaves. And listened to some amazing stories about peculiar happenings in the boondocks of the Middle Kingdom, from my tall and elegant musician friend.

Then I buzzed off to the place named after my maternal grandfather's clan and bought reading material. And I walked back to the Edges and bought more. Thus did I use up my many 20-ducat coupons which I had farmed during Üllertid.

Next up was the small haul. A haul is divided into three parts, as Kaiser Iulius might have said.

The first part was assembling the haul. It reminded me of one of those games where you wander around collecting odd pieces of clothing. The second part was conveying the haul to a place on the edge of dangerous, barbarous lands. And the third part was waiting in a dangerous place for a beautiful young lady to collect the haul. And well, to haul it away.

In such games, this is not your lady, but someone else's. Although you do get something nice as a gift, much appreciated.

Which reminded me of an old book on the games people play. This one, if I recall correctly, is White Knight, one of the few harmless and actually beneficial games that people play. I'm quite happy to be a White Knight, although my friend Wolff might snigger a bit, having been a real one himself.

When I got back, the mail had arrived. The Aedificium of the Triune had sent me a little package. Joy! Two copies of the latest journal, to which I had contributed a short article on finger food. Well, not quite.

More leaves for dinner. But also a large and well-stuffed omelette and a large bowl of porridge, with chili and ground pepper.

I had a good day, mostly. The cat was a bit miffed, though. He felt slightly abandoned, despite the fact that he had deserted me when his supper was served. Ah well, can't win them all.

Spontaneity

When chemists think of spontaneity, if at all they do, they tend to think of this equation:

∆G = ∆H - T∆S

Sometimes, however, they think of something different. This evening, I received an email which reminded me of this incident, for which I had the Tailor to thank.

These days, I wake up on some mornings with a spring of spontaneous happiness welling up from within. Other days, it's not so spontaneous. But it is there anyway. I think that it all comes from a sense that "God's in his heaven / All's right with the world!" as Browning put it.

It is hard for humans not to think of retribution, "what goes round comes round", poetic justice, and other such tit-for-tattery. But sometimes things resolve in such a satisfactory way that spontaneous celebration seems in order.

Hillsong

I'm over the hill but fear not the valley
I'm all round the street but not up the alley

And that is the way I think of my life. I've reached another prime. My many-coloured life prisms around me, shards of gold and blue and red. I am happy because I have a little hill. I can see enough to be a watchman, but not so much that I would see only little things. Everything looks both small and large from where I am.

This year has been a good year. I have to thank the old young people who have kept in touch. The people who live nearby, the people who live a bit further away, the people who have meals with me and who have made so many of my days.

I've met with even older people, who are still in my memory yet young. They've aged well, which is to say that if they weren't to expose my agedness, they'd not expose their own. I have not many regrets, although to have none would be great.

I am a happy man. This too is the blessing of God.

Working Days

My days are very different now. I used to wake up with the sun, struggling up from the depths of the dark and into the half-light. Forced to interact, one took what pleasure one could. There was a lot of enjoyment in what I did, but it had little to do with the 10,000 steps (measured by pedometer) I walked each day, up and down the winding and baroque geometry of the old place; nor had it much to do with the random 12 hours of work, a lot of it mindless, that had to be done in every day. Badly planned, or not at all, seemed to be the order of those days.

But now, it is a lot more contingent on what I think. I have to structure my days. Generally, an early start, but not too early. A quick catching up with nutrients and the world's events. A couple of hours of work on my own projects. Lunch and time with people, or more work on my own. Then the students, miniature case-studies of cognition and despair. Dinner. Reading, perhaps a little work, rest. Relaxation.

I have a better awareness of who I am, and not how I am defined by the collective. I contain multitudes, as Whitman said. And yet, I am me.

Workday

My working day used to begin around 6 am and end around 1 am, with breaks in between. Now it begins around 8 am and ends around 7 pm, with breaks in between. Less work is getting done. I am a more relaxed person (then again, some who know me might want to know how that's even possible).

But I don't think, on reflection, that I'm that much happier. I just have fewer reasons to be melancholic about my working life.

Getting Out

Sometimes you have to stop doing serious work and go out and meet people and enjoy life a bit. So today I will be more idle than usual and do things that have no academic value at all. So there!

Lifter

There are some things which lift you when you're not feeling particularly 'up'. Tonight I was quayside with a bunch of young men I used to teach, and it was a wonderful experience, thanks to the Mongol and his cohorts.

I suppose what was endearing about this experience was that the fellows were in many ways so recognizably themselves. Cornerman was still sitting at the periphery thinking inscrutable thoughts and working out his own stuff while everything else was happening around him. Leo was still the slightly out-of-touch leader with the inability to make the accounts tally. Fortunately for him, he didn't have to pay the balance the way he used to have to.

One difference was the beer. Another difference was that these were men now, not boys. It was good. It was amazing to see who had become a teacher, who was indulging in entrepreneurship, who was working at a dockyard.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and when the Winner, now the proud father of a six-month-old girl, decided to be kind and give me a lift home, I enjoyed that too.

Happiness is Blue, Gold is Guilt?

There are two fairly large and overlapping groups of people I know. One group believes that affluence contributes towards happiness, the other group believes that affluence contributes to poverty in the spiritual realm. The overlap causes a genuine disconnect: is spiritual richness then exclusive of material happiness?

Of course, there is a large group where there is no such problem. These believe that richness in the spiritual realm creates wealth in the material realm and therefore nobody needs to be guilty about being materially affluent.

The problem, I think, is that these two realms have often been seen as mutually exclusive, even opposite to each other. What I believe is nothing new: I believe that the material realm is a lower order reflection of the spiritual realm. For those who don't believe in a spiritual realm, it's analogous to using description theory as a higher-level construct that deals with material things when it has to.

It is probably also easier to argue that the material realm proceeds from the immaterial than vice versa. But that's not the point. The point is that seeing things like beauty or niceness or happiness or anything like that requires physical apparatus. If the physical apparatus is functioning better and more healthily, so much the better.

It's not so much the sound mind in sound body thing; I don't think it's possible except in a theoretical sense to separate the two. I think that any analysis or appraisal or evaluation of the material realm is impossible without what some people call the spiritual realm and others call the abstract realm (whether correctly, usefully, consistently or not).

This is why the crest of the College of Wyverns is half in blue, for the spiritual things, and half in gold, for the material things. Yet it's not a clean division, the two are mixed in the chief of the shield, where the wyvern itself is placed as the dominant charge. What holds the two halves together are the blood-red letters, which signify in this plane that all humanity shares a common physical heritage (blood) — and in the teachings of that school, the idea that the blood of the Divine binds heaven and earth as one.

This is why you don't need to be guilty, defensive, offensive, or overly joyful about material pleasures and the material life. All that is merely the lower level output of the higher level structure. That's why some people aren't happy although enormously wealthy, while some people are. Perhaps at the highest possible level of the ineffable hierarchy, we'll finally figure it out.

But I doubt the solution will please those who in this life are purely quantitative or purely qualitative researchers. In fact, I doubt that such a solution will please anyone completely, for this is the nature of our humanity.

Month 005

Today I had just finished another tuition session (yes, sadly, that is how a teacher can really make a living in this day and age) when the Maverick reminded me that it had been five months. And what a wonderful five months it has been!

I don't know why exactly I feel this way, but the words from a song I first heard when I was ten years old came to mind. (Well, not only the words, but the riffs and harmony and all, even!) I shall reproduce the words below for those of you who (somehow) have not yet encountered the world of Freddy Mercury.

The point, however, is not one about vainglory and the rise of a hero. The point (well, a triple point, heh heh) is that settling up leads to settling down, being victorious is a state of mind, and solid is a state of matter.

We Are The Champions

I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime
And bad mistakes
I've made a few
I've had my share
Of sand kicked in my face
But I've come through

We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
'Cause we are the champions – of the world

I've taken my bows
And my curtain calls
You brought me fame and fortune
And everything that goes with it
I thank you all
But it's been no bed of roses
No pleasure cruise
I consider it a challenge
Before the whole human race
And I ain't gonna lose

We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
'Cause we are the champions – of the world

Smiling Outside

A few days ago, many people told me that they would remember how I almost always had a smile on my face. But you know what? That smile means many things, altogether and sometimes not.

Pretty often, it's a Jewish smile. Life is too short, why not get on with it, ah humans are like that, God made it this way – that kind of smile. It's a real attitude, a sign of relentlessly coping with life. As I've always said, if life sucks, you just have to suck harder.

Sometimes, it's an Italian smile. Hey, you're crazy ah! Well, I am also crazy, but at least I know it. Eh, from one nutcase to another, here's a smile. But then again, we're all mad, so it doesn't matter and you might as well smile, no?

Occasionally, it's an Iberian smile. Oh yes, we all get it sooner or later, it's the sad stuff, but what can you do? We will die heroically, with that smile and a sabre or a pistol (or both) in hand. It's all about style, the excellence of ending.

Once in a while, it's an English smile. That's the way it's going to be, is it? Very well then, you do it that way, I'll do it the way I've always done it. I'm not sure how amusing you think you're being, but one ought to give it a try anyway.

And it goes on down the list. I'm pretty sure I have an Ukrainian smile somewhere, certainly a Chinese smile (utterly terrifying), and several others.

But thinking about it, the main reason I smile (almost) all the time is that I'm not happy. That is, I'm not dependent on happenstance, on the positive balance of hap against mishap. In fact, I'm joyful and no number of funerals, partings, quarrels, disappointments, hurts, and assorted unpleasantnesses will change that. Joy, as the old song goes, is a flag flown high from the castle of my heart.

Most of the time, anyway.

Scrapbooking

Some months ago, I discovered an ancient folder with about 200 poems in it. A lot of them dated back to university days; some dated back to an even earlier time. The poem titled Hawking was first drafted on 3 October 1989. It then lay fallow for about 17 years 4 months until I resurrected it two days ago, with a full set of edits. I felt nostalgic: this poem recalled for me a better time. And then I realised that some of the young people I know were born that year, and for some unaccountable reason, I felt happy.