Welcome to my blog which I am hoping will not disappear into the lethargy and lack of focus that has consumed my past week that, post-London and the inspiration of the Southbank Festival, could have expected some forward motioning. I did spend a couple of days writing a mini-talk to give to a guinea-pig but it turned out she had other things on her mind so the words remain unspoken.
A part of the misdirection of energy has come about as a result of experimenting with an Internet Chat site. I stuck up a picture and a bit of blurb and waited to see what happened. First, and mostly, I received emails from Ghana from young Christian women looking for an honest older man to have a long-term relationship (and visa) with. I assume they are involved in some sort of scam because as often as not their profiles have been deleted a couple of days later.
The next handful came the older women, from the Philippines, the USA, Lithuania, Russia, Australia, even England, perforce looking through a bad crop of even older men.
In terms of my contacting other people, I did very little except to comment on art work that impressed me or to say hello to some of the Persian and Arab women who seemed so much more accomplished, in terms of education, than their British counterparts that I felt compelled to offer friendship and respect and to assure them that not all British people supported our government’s appalling sabre rattling and interference.
Three communications have, however, been a little more demanding.
A Ugandan peasant woman with two children contacted me from her local internet café. She sent me some pictures of where she lived and her kids. We discussed her tribe, their Christianity and the awful poverty of her existence in what appears to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. Soon after Christmas I sent her twenty dollars and she wrote back a delighted email saying exactly what she had bought. Since I did that all her emails have contained a line about how sad her daughter is because she can’t go to school without the uniform which would cost...well, fuck all. Now I feel no freedom and delight in the communicative exchange, just moral obligation.
A woman called Ayeesha has contacted me from Libya. She said she was in hiding with her kids from people trying to kill her. After a succession of emails and explanations and my saying I was on no-one’s side and also was totally disgusted by Britain’s, Cameron’s, vainglorious plunder, murder and grandstanding, Ayeesha appears to be saying that she’s hiding from the NTC because they suspect she has access to her late husband’s wealth which she says he earned under Gadaffi and they say belongs to them. Fortunately I haven’t given this woman my real name for now she is becoming increasingly frantic because I won’t agree to have this money either delivered to, or transferred to, me. Whether this is some adaption of the traditional Nigerian fraud or is a genuine plea for help, I’ve no idea. I’m assuming it is the former but even if it were true, I can hardly assist with the removal of this money from Libya without expecting some sort of consequence or trouble. Hence I won’t, can’t, do it.
Another woman to message me was a 47 year old from Minnesota. Her first comment was, ‘You should write my biography.’ I asked why; she said because it would make millions. She went on to mention tales of shootings and drugs and prison life, saying that at the age of 13 her mother told her she could not go to school as long as she stayed at home, took speed and did the cleaning before allowing the 21 year old boyfriend into the house at lunchtime. Although I’ve no experience of writing biography, and no time in my busy mind, I was curious and responded with questions. Six or seven emails later she was declaring her love for me and claiming to be obsessed by me. I don’t really know how this happened. She then put a message up on my public wall on the chat site saying, ‘humiliate me’. The upshot of all this is that I have now gracefully, well as gracefully as a bolting coward can manage, closed this leakage of my sense and energy; no more chatting for me.
I could try and blame my useless publisher for my self-puncturing because on Monday he sent me an email advertising a book that he was ‘proud and excited’ to be publishing. Why tell me? Why would I care? What am I supposed to do, feel good for them both? Bah!
For no particular reason other than I’ll lose the paper I wrote this on, I’ll put this quote in (from where I can’t remember now.)
Devotion is not necessarily emotion. Devotion is the capacity to identify oneself with an object and recognize one’s basis unity with that object.
When you tell people, when I tell people, I was once devoted to a guru, they look at me askance. I’m not even sure now what that could have felt like, though I know there was something about his physical body which was very lustrous and fascinating to study. (The same being true for me with David Bowie.) An essential teaching of yoga is that the mind becomes what it meditates on, that you absorb the qualities, the qualia, of the object. Maybe it’d be a good idea if the global TV population stopped watching Wayne Rooney and the English football team.
In fact I’m not sure that I’d agree that it devotion wasn’t emotional but I suppose we’re talking here about strong emotion, one that flavours the perception or is a reaction to it. From my point of view emotion, like cognition, is inherent in existence and indeed is an aspect of cognition, and visa versa. It was Candace Pert who wrote about the 'molecule of emotion', that molecules are emotional and this is probably a key to realising that cognition and emotion are aspects of the same thing.
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