Wednesday, 12 May 2010
I met Chris tonight.
He was shaking like a leaf so I bought him a coke; he’s staying tonight in the same hostel as me but tomorrow is uncertain as he does not have a penny to his name. This was a man genuinely wracked with anguish the like of which I have seldom seen, he has had a business for ten years and has just done a months’ work worth twenty-eight thousand pounds only to find the bigger business he was working for has gone into voluntary liquidation leaving him, a man of thirty something from Ed Balls constituency, with literally nothing.
This is what homeless people are made of, this happens.
It is a human tragedy and yet on so small a scale that almost no-one will ever know about it, let alone care, yet to Chris the scale is monumental.
He was shaking because he had just had an epileptic fit and his recent diet of noodles and stress no doubt exacerbated the situation. All I could do was buy him a coke to provide him with some sugar to hopefully help in the short term, no help tomorrow when he has nowhere to sleep however.
I feel guilty for being a bit down this week through pressures of my own, they are nothing like this. The owner of the liquidated company screwed him over because he could, they had spoken today, and the owner took his call from Marbella.
I really hope and pray that Chris has a support net to catch him, I really hope he does not end up on the street, I wish I could have helped more. Life is many things from tragic to wonderful but it is seldom fair.
L
He was shaking like a leaf so I bought him a coke; he’s staying tonight in the same hostel as me but tomorrow is uncertain as he does not have a penny to his name. This was a man genuinely wracked with anguish the like of which I have seldom seen, he has had a business for ten years and has just done a months’ work worth twenty-eight thousand pounds only to find the bigger business he was working for has gone into voluntary liquidation leaving him, a man of thirty something from Ed Balls constituency, with literally nothing.
This is what homeless people are made of, this happens.
It is a human tragedy and yet on so small a scale that almost no-one will ever know about it, let alone care, yet to Chris the scale is monumental.
He was shaking because he had just had an epileptic fit and his recent diet of noodles and stress no doubt exacerbated the situation. All I could do was buy him a coke to provide him with some sugar to hopefully help in the short term, no help tomorrow when he has nowhere to sleep however.
I feel guilty for being a bit down this week through pressures of my own, they are nothing like this. The owner of the liquidated company screwed him over because he could, they had spoken today, and the owner took his call from Marbella.
I really hope and pray that Chris has a support net to catch him, I really hope he does not end up on the street, I wish I could have helped more. Life is many things from tragic to wonderful but it is seldom fair.
L
In a previous post I mentioned reality.
How very blasé of me; what is reality.
Everything we experience is so intensely subjective that one single answer for that surely cannot be possible. I can watch something unfold before me and yet when I discuss this with the person by my side they have experienced it in a different way than I have despite the event being reality happening in front of us both. So many other factors affect the event and how it is translated from the eyes to the brain and it is of course our brain which defines how the entire world around us is experienced. Even here our brains simply define what can be experienced of the world around us, how much we can take in and understand. If we were to ask a dog how the world looked it would be in black and white but we would be unable to put into words much of the extra sensory information such as smells which we can never experience and so do not form a part of our reality.
Our minds are a limiting system.
Our minds limit what we can see, feel and sense in this world. What most people experience, I believe, is far from the full gamut of our world.
Have you ever wondered how certain artists can paint pictures with such vivacity and passion of a scene which to our eyes contains none of the elements the artist sees, an example would be starry night by van Gogh. I believe that certain people constantly experience the world as in a painting by van Gogh, this is how they relate to what is around us all. We mere mortals who are destined to see the world as our minds limit it can reach briefly up to the heights lived in by these artists using such mind expanding drugs as LSD. Maybe this is why many artists are slightly unhinged in our more conservative view of the world.
“All vasentlig konst kommer ifran nagonstans gemensamt, utanfor oss alla som vi all kan har tillgang till.” Ockie Nidsjo
How can we be anything but conservative? We simply don’t see in the colours they do.
L
How very blasé of me; what is reality.
Everything we experience is so intensely subjective that one single answer for that surely cannot be possible. I can watch something unfold before me and yet when I discuss this with the person by my side they have experienced it in a different way than I have despite the event being reality happening in front of us both. So many other factors affect the event and how it is translated from the eyes to the brain and it is of course our brain which defines how the entire world around us is experienced. Even here our brains simply define what can be experienced of the world around us, how much we can take in and understand. If we were to ask a dog how the world looked it would be in black and white but we would be unable to put into words much of the extra sensory information such as smells which we can never experience and so do not form a part of our reality.
Our minds are a limiting system.
Our minds limit what we can see, feel and sense in this world. What most people experience, I believe, is far from the full gamut of our world.
Have you ever wondered how certain artists can paint pictures with such vivacity and passion of a scene which to our eyes contains none of the elements the artist sees, an example would be starry night by van Gogh. I believe that certain people constantly experience the world as in a painting by van Gogh, this is how they relate to what is around us all. We mere mortals who are destined to see the world as our minds limit it can reach briefly up to the heights lived in by these artists using such mind expanding drugs as LSD. Maybe this is why many artists are slightly unhinged in our more conservative view of the world.
“All vasentlig konst kommer ifran nagonstans gemensamt, utanfor oss alla som vi all kan har tillgang till.” Ockie Nidsjo
How can we be anything but conservative? We simply don’t see in the colours they do.
L
Monday, 10 May 2010
Tempus omnia sed memorias privat (Time deprives all but memories)
Time is a strange concept really, I gave it bit of thought quite a few years ago then left it alone. What I came to is probably not original but I think it can be thought about anyway.
You see I know there are both cyclical and linear theories of time but I was thinking about it in a slightly different way, I was thinking of time as a great big sphere, the surface of the sphere would be what is called the “fabric of time”. This would allow for the theory of time to be both cyclic and linear depending upon the factors which rolled the sphere along the surface of reality.
Here of course comes the idea that there is no history or future, history exists only in the memories of the people who experienced it or in the imaginations of those who hear or read about it and in both cases these second hand, subjective experiences bear no relation to what actually occurred, if anything did actually occur.
The future is nothing but fantasy, or in the best case scenario, one of an almost infinite number of possibilities dependent upon how the sphere rolls and where the subject is on the surface of reality. (Reality is a concept to be dealt with in another post)
The phrase I used to be able to quantify this concept was “a constantly evolving present”, this being in reality unquantifiable in terms of how long this present lasted simply because the only methods we have of quantifying the passing of our lives is the totally human created concept of, you guessed it, time.
The method we have, the only method we have, of quantifying and thereby limiting our lives is the passing of the arbitrary minutes, seconds, hours and years. We have created a concept without which the entire fabric of western society would fall apart and our western lives would become worthless, and yet I have no memory of taking a part in this creation, yet we define ourselves and in some degree our usefulness to society by this very concept.
They do believe I am a thief
Because I take my time,
My time,
The time I give them from my time
becomes their time.
My time is running out,
I shout,
I need more time
Show me a sign,
Show me the way
To seize the day
Because I must make a stand
or die today.
Once we accept that this very chalice of a concept is used to control and limit us in our everyday lives then we can find an answer.
John Paul Sartre had an answer.
He talked about perfect moments when everything comes together so perfectly that the world in unison around us for just one moment and the perfect life is to strive for a series of these perfect moments leading from one to the other throughout our existences.
I am less ambitious. I simply recognise the amount of time we spend doing the kind of things we either hate doing or possibly even more insidious, simply find boring and tedious. I would call this Grey Time and I would like to try and eliminate as much of this as possible from my own life, Grey Time is time wasted in the most heinous fashion, because we are convinced we need to have this time, we are fooled by proverbs like “something good to those who wait” and “ the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Micheal Ende wrote in Momo about the men in grey, the time thieves. These men are invisible to us and yet they gradually coerce and convince us to save more and more time, but save it for what for the more we save the less chance we will ever have of using it. We are not saving time; they are stealing time from us.
The men in grey are real.
Strive to make your time red, orange or even yellow but at all costs avoid spending Grey Time and if you must save time, make sure you use what you have saved, they have enough already.
L
You see I know there are both cyclical and linear theories of time but I was thinking about it in a slightly different way, I was thinking of time as a great big sphere, the surface of the sphere would be what is called the “fabric of time”. This would allow for the theory of time to be both cyclic and linear depending upon the factors which rolled the sphere along the surface of reality.
Here of course comes the idea that there is no history or future, history exists only in the memories of the people who experienced it or in the imaginations of those who hear or read about it and in both cases these second hand, subjective experiences bear no relation to what actually occurred, if anything did actually occur.
The future is nothing but fantasy, or in the best case scenario, one of an almost infinite number of possibilities dependent upon how the sphere rolls and where the subject is on the surface of reality. (Reality is a concept to be dealt with in another post)
The phrase I used to be able to quantify this concept was “a constantly evolving present”, this being in reality unquantifiable in terms of how long this present lasted simply because the only methods we have of quantifying the passing of our lives is the totally human created concept of, you guessed it, time.
The method we have, the only method we have, of quantifying and thereby limiting our lives is the passing of the arbitrary minutes, seconds, hours and years. We have created a concept without which the entire fabric of western society would fall apart and our western lives would become worthless, and yet I have no memory of taking a part in this creation, yet we define ourselves and in some degree our usefulness to society by this very concept.
They do believe I am a thief
Because I take my time,
My time,
The time I give them from my time
becomes their time.
My time is running out,
I shout,
I need more time
Show me a sign,
Show me the way
To seize the day
Because I must make a stand
or die today.
Once we accept that this very chalice of a concept is used to control and limit us in our everyday lives then we can find an answer.
John Paul Sartre had an answer.
He talked about perfect moments when everything comes together so perfectly that the world in unison around us for just one moment and the perfect life is to strive for a series of these perfect moments leading from one to the other throughout our existences.
I am less ambitious. I simply recognise the amount of time we spend doing the kind of things we either hate doing or possibly even more insidious, simply find boring and tedious. I would call this Grey Time and I would like to try and eliminate as much of this as possible from my own life, Grey Time is time wasted in the most heinous fashion, because we are convinced we need to have this time, we are fooled by proverbs like “something good to those who wait” and “ the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Micheal Ende wrote in Momo about the men in grey, the time thieves. These men are invisible to us and yet they gradually coerce and convince us to save more and more time, but save it for what for the more we save the less chance we will ever have of using it. We are not saving time; they are stealing time from us.
The men in grey are real.
Strive to make your time red, orange or even yellow but at all costs avoid spending Grey Time and if you must save time, make sure you use what you have saved, they have enough already.
L
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