SitRep

So, given those beautiful aspirations phrased in the previous entry (am I ever loquacious when I can't sleep, between the dark and the daylight when the shadows begin to lower, wakes the silver tongue of Tourmaline, if you're able to understand her) how did the first day back measure up?

Yes, there is the sense of the giant pile of work growing in magnitude while I neglected it in my gallivanting. Yes, there is still the smile in my eyes and the songs on my lips and my dancing feet, and I am learning how very sacred I hold my right to those. Yes, there is the sensation of peace with myself that I mean when I say that "everything is going to be all right" --- I have my standard of knowing being at ease when I feel it. I appreciate having those standards, knowing on the instant when something is a good thing, and settling for nothing less.

But, in my oh-so-lofty newly-acquired wisdom and all that, perhaps counterintuitively, I find myself also being more irritable.

That "settling for nothing less" bit just above may have something to do with that. Being away from some persons, blessedly very few, allowed me to forget their faults, and now those faults seem to grate all the more at me. It is an interesting phenomenon, since wisdom, as a concept, has associations of magnanimity, tolerance and forgiveness --- but wisdom is associated with the old, as is crotchetiness.

I am not old. Heck, I realize more and more how long my childhood had been, and how much of it I still need to deal with. When I was about seventeen, I wrote an unfinished poem that ran, in part:
I thought I was no longer thirteen, looking for a place to be,
I thought I'd found and come to terms with everything in me,
I thought I moved with ease and grace in adult reality...
But one word from you,
One look,
One thought,
And again I am thirteen,
And again I am crying and aching and laughing and hurting
In that dizzy bipolar world of absurd joy and pain,
And I am that small petty creature again
From whose pockmarked shell I thought I'd broken free ---
Just what is that power you have over me?

The person this was addressed to has long passed out of my life, unknowingly leaving me with some wise lessons, some bad poems, and a few good stories. But the "small petty creature" is not as easily dealt with; it may be that I will spend most of my life figuring her out. I wonder if it her who fuels my irritability --- or if it is a sense of injustice for her sake.

But when I stay away from the abrasives, things are good. They really are.

Of Which Reason Knows Nothing

"At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it," Peter Watts quotes G. Vince in the "Notes and References" to Blindsight. Looking at a problem for Athaira lately, I remembered this quotation. It is a problem which does not come into this story, but my analysis of it did make me think long and hard about the perils of over-intellectualizing, of thinking and thinking about a problem, backwards and forwards, raising scenario after scenario under conditions of insufficient data, until all you have is a horde of well-imagined horrors all around you, each one of them seeming equally likely under those conditions of insufficient data, and all of them so scary they reinforce your resolve not to risk, not to take the chance. After all, they seem well-based in reasoning and drawing from past situations, the ability that makes us humans so smart and so different from animals, that has made us capable of reshaping Earth and reality in the image we desire --- and that caused us misery by that very premeditated reshaping of the reality in our heads.

A few days ago, for reasons which again do not come into this story, I remembered a former aikido instructor of mine, and because he had enough influence on me to deserve a name, I'll call him Louis. That I overthought things was his chief complaint with my aikido practice, and a well-founded one it was. Not only was my background stringently academic, where I had always been rewarded for thinking thinking thinking; not only was I far from in touch with my own body, and so relied on puzzling things out and relaying conscious instructions to my limbs to achieve the tasks necessary; but I also had trust issues coming out of my ears, and still do. And it takes a lot of trust to stop thinking, to accept that your body and gut and subconscious know things better than you, faster, and to give up the helm to them. Consciousness gives the illusion of control over this world of insufficient data, the idea that if we follow things step by step, if we are aware exactly of what we are doing at every turn, then the same steps will give the same solution, and the same stimulus will get the same response.

Science is about that idea, but any working scientist will tell you that its complete achievement is an illusion: "under completely controlled conditions...the organism will do as it damn well pleases," and the beautiful curve describing the law of nature is actually a bunch of unholy regression manipulations from a chaotic scatterplot. Extracting which curve from a chaotic scatterplot is, indidentally, something that the human eye, backed by the human subconscious, still does far better than a computer, i.e conscious logical decision making. There is a firmer grasp of reality in our brains, it seems, that we cannot access through reasoning. But by trying, we can give ourselves the feeling of going crazy pretty fast.

"It is no use going mad trying to stop yourself from going mad. You might as well give in and save your sanity for later."

Sometimes you have to give in: to let go and to pick a course because it feels right and it is the path of least resistance, not because of a reasoned-out approach you lack all the data for, anyway. And then comes the hesitant, vulnerable trusting that this was the right path.

But then, hesitant, vulnerable trusting is what human society is based on, isn't it? So isn't that what makes us human?