Author: Brand Smit

SATURDAY, 9 OCTOBER 2004

“I am bored, so I need to escape from my boring life by injecting myself with a chemical concoction, or by sniffing or smoking some or other substance. This will induce an alternative consciousness which will make me forget my boring life.

This is not a healthy pursuit. It is also a very expensive and unsustainable way to deal with my boredom. But instead of dealing with it in a healthier, more sustainable and less expensive way, I choose the way that, if I don’t take severe precautions, will make me a slave to the measures I employ to make my boring life bearable.

Fortunately I have learned that using drugs is seen in popular culture as exciting, and people engaging in this kind of activity as fun people to hang around with.

I have also learned that people who frown upon this idiotic, unsustainable, ludicrously expensive way of dealing with one’s own lack of imagination and subsequent boredom are, in actual fact, boring.

I am so relieved that my so-called friends – all fun people, of course! – taught me all these useful pieces of nonsense. I really wouldn’t know how to justify being a casual drug user in any other way – and it is casual, because calling it habitual would just be inaccurate. I mean, I’m not that stupid!”

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FRIDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2004

A hungry man sits down at a table laden with the most delicious foods. There is a bit of everything: pizza, pasta, bread and cheese, salads, cold cuts, chicken pie, barbecued meat, desserts, pie, cake, junk food, healthy food …

The hungry man digs in, and he eats without taking a break for more than an hour. There is no way that he can consume all the food, so by the time he sits back, more than three-quarters of the table is still covered with plates, pots and pans full of food.

As the previously hungry man gets ready to leave the table, in walks another hungry man, which, for the sake of the point I want to make, is not allowed to sit down at the table. “How can you walk away from a table with so much good food?” asks the hungry man. “There’s so much food that you haven’t even touched!”

“I understand your distress,” says the man as he gently caresses his stomach. “But,” he sighs, “I’m full. My needs, which previously were exactly the same as yours, are now satisfied.”

Now, you can criticise the happy man, perhaps pointing out that he satisfied his appetite by just gobbling down the pizza and the junk food. But the man will still shrug and reply, “What can I say? I have had enough. I am satisfied.”

Will he stay satisfied? Most likely not, but that’s another story.

Point is this: if a need is no longer a need, it does not really matter what any prophet, poet, scholar or professional academic has to say about it, because the need … will simply no longer be a need.

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THURSDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2004

You are born with more or less no identity, except for maybe a name. Within a few months, or maybe a year or three, you start to emulate the behaviour and language of other people in your immediate environment – a simple case of monkey see, monkey do. As you get older, this emulation becomes intertwined with other measures – relevant to particular time and place – to ensure your personal safety.

When a person moves away far enough from what others imitate and regard as good enough for themselves, it happens that the label of “original” is hung around their necks. This label is of course never completely accurate, because even the so-called “original” gets their ideas from somewhere, dressed in a language that they did not invent.

The point here is degree. Some people emulate so slavishly that one can hardly detect a difference between the one who is being emulated and the monkey itself. And then of course, it is possible that even the model is a clone of someone else, who also initially slavishly emulated someone else, who, somewhere in the distant past, did something different to a significant degree from what others at that time and in that place had emulated as Models of Functional Adulthood.

Am I saying people are mechanised flesh-creatures programmed by the sometimes subtle and sometimes explicit instructions from others in the area? Hmm … not exactly. Just because I am wearing jeans doesn’t mean I call myself “Elvis”. Just because the neighbour teases her hair is not to say she knows who Dolly Parton is. My point is rather that someone – who for want of a better word we can call an “original” – decided one wonderful day to, for instance, get into the traditional workers attire of denim pants to go shopping or to go on any outing other than to the nearest factory, and the world was never the same again.

The New Human – toddler, teen or young adult – looks at others in the area for clues on how to act, what to wear, what to say when, and what sounds should be produced to achieve certain results. This is a natural process. Even that first rebel who decided to make an appearance in a pair of denims in an area other than where his hands would get dirty acted after other steps had first been taken – denim clothing had already been designed and manufactured long before that day. His adaptation of this phenomenon, on the other hand, was relatively original (that is to say, if such a mythological First Denim Rebel ever really existed).

A few other examples can be mentioned with which most readers will be familiar: the vocabulary and expressions that people use to bring themselves into other people’s favour; the ways in which arms are swung about on a dance floor; the type of automobile people purchase; the labour that people choose to offer to generate an income; the jewellery that people buy to hang from their limbs; the beliefs that people hold about religion, politics, and what a person should do with his or her life.

Is it important to not do what the proverbial everyone is doing? To not look and sound like most of your peers? To not do with your life what most of the people you know are doing with their lives? My answers to these questions are intimately intertwined with my own view of things, with my background, my own insecurities and fears, and my view of a significant percentage of my peers.

I believe there are three possibilities: 1) to follow slavishly what is prescribed by your environment for the sake of acceptance by a specific community; by forming Who You Are around the anvil of what is presented to you as the norm of time, place and community; 2) to look at what is presented to you as the norm of time, place and community, to accept some of these things and to reject others in a CRITICAL AND CREATIVE PROCESS, and to then appear to the community as a distinctive version of what is generally acceptable, and to function as such; and 3) to look for examples and clues beyond your immediate time, environment and community, and to define a model of appearance and functioning that differs to such an extent from what was originally presented to you, that you and your life will be seen as a primary example that others will consider in their search for clues and answers to questions that, shall we admit, keep everyone awake at one time or another.

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SUNDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2004

02:34

There is a hierarchy of relationships: At the top you have the soul mate. Then you get the life partner, then the companion. And then, even if someone is not your soul mate, even if you don’t even have enough in common to be companions, and then definitely not enough to be life partners, you can still have a functioning relationship as lovers.

It is also true that your soul mate can also be your life partner, your companion and your lover. Also that your companion might be your lover, but not your life partner or your soul mate. And it is also possible that your soul mate isn’t someone with whom you will ever have an intimate relationship. Your soul mate might be a friend. It may also be that a man finds his soul mate in a woman who is married to another man, who loves her husband, and is committed to her marriage.

By the way, what is a soul mate? And what is the role of a life partner … and a companion … and a lover?

11:48

There is this idea that you necessarily have to be sexually attracted to your soul mate. Why? The expected process runs as follows: a man and a woman meet (to name one example on the sexual spectrum); they are sexually attracted to each other; they find their soul mates in each other; they become life partners; they seal their relationship in a marriage, and they live happily to the end of their respected earthly existences.

But what if you have already found your soul mate in someone of the same gender as you, but neither you nor the other person is homosexual? Or what about if you find your soul mate in someone of the opposite sex, but you are not sexually attracted to that person? Do you keep looking until you find a soul mate in someone of the right gender to whom you are sexually attracted? That’s ridiculous! Are you going to live a lonely, sexless existence until you’ve found this person? It’s completely unnecessary! And it serves no purpose!

It is absurd to set such high requirements of someone you want to date, and it is ridiculous to expect that your soul mate should necessarily be an attractive, single man or woman with whom you’d like to go out on a date.

Last question: Can you love someone if he or she is just your lover, and not your soul mate? Answer: Of course.

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SATURDAY, 2 OCTOBER 2004

Purpose of existence, first comments

Every minute little thing around us serves a purpose – parts of a machine, the machine itself, organs and body parts, animals, insects, oxygen, other chemical elements, organic compounds. It would be utterly ridiculous to suggest that human beings, literally surrounded by purpose, do not serve some or other purpose themselves.

* * *

Non-human life forms as well as inanimate things serve a purpose without having to “think” about it. Some people also end up fulfilling a purpose without ever having seriously contemplated the possibility, but many others have to consciously consider their own purpose. Why? Have we as humans changed in ways that make it a challenge to discover and fulfil our purpose?

Purpose of existence, second comments

Two weeks ago I had this thought that nothing is ridiculous, if you really think about it. Things only appear ridiculous, so my note continued, if you have views and expectations about how things, or people, are supposed to be, and the reality does not match your views or expectations. What about this whole notion that human life has a purpose, then? Does the idea of an aimless existence not appear utterly ridiculous simply because I have this view, and even the expectation that human life should serve a purpose?

I reckon it is perfectly reasonable to expect that certain things are supposed to do or be X, Y or Z. If I am anticipating the arrival of a guest and my doorbell rings, I am going to expect the person to enter my apartment in a normal fashion. If they walk in on their hands, buck-naked, with their feet kicking in the air, most people won’t blame me for bursting out laughing. Why? The person’s behaviour would be ridiculous.

Now, I’m willing to admit that reactions to the naked appearance have something to do with cultural beliefs and expectations of “normal behaviour” – expectations that differ from place to place and from one historical period to the next. The walking on hands when there’s nothing wrong with your feet and legs, on the other hand, is simply not how one … and the organ goes into a higher octave, the clapping becomes rhythmic … it’s simply not how human beings are designed.

The same can be said if I come home one evening and one of the cockroaches that regularly make a nocturnal appearance in my kitchen is busy cooking dinner, with a neat little apron covering its lower body. I will laugh – or shriek in terror. It’s not what the cockroach is supposed to do. Why don’t any of the cockroaches in my kitchen do such a thing? Why does the spider not watch TV in the living room when I’m working on my computer? Why are the street cats outside not sitting on the sidewalk with a bottle of beer in one paw, and a cigarette in the other? Because it’s physically impossible. Because it’s not what their genetic code dictates they ought to do. The physiology of cats makes it possible and natural for them to keep the mice population in check. The physiology of cockroaches enable them to … do what they’re supposed to do. The physiology of bees enables them to fly around and pollinate flowers. Flowers do something else.

Do I want to imply that everything should function like a well-oiled machine? Should all forms of life know their place, play their roles, and fulfil the various purposes of their existence? I admit it is somewhat problematic. Few people, myself included, like the idea that they have to recite their rhymes every waking hour of their lives and move their arms and legs in ways that have been preordained.

It’s clearly not a black-and-white matter. Just because it isn’t simple is, however, not an excuse to not recognise what you can only ignore if you are ridiculous, namely that we are surrounded with purpose.

Purpose of existence, third comments

Almost all vultures serve the same purpose. Do human beings as a species also serve a specific purpose, or do individual members of the species serve different purposes? If the latter is the case, why is this so?

Another question: How do you argue purpose without a “creator”?

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