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Not Being There

May 24th, 2009 | benjamin

A few thoughts I wanted to share. Please do not crucify me upon them.

I always understood the following phrases metaphorically: ‘I didn’t really feel like I was there.’ ‘I felt like someone else was inside my body.’ ‘I didn’t feel like I was alive.’

That is, I understood them to reflect a state of being, a being-blase kind of thing. But in my moments of recent epiphany, when the world floods my sensations with such rich impressions, I wondered if these statements had a literal truth.

Is it possible that in those moments where for whatever reason, perhaps because of a trauma, perhaps because we have become habituated to everyday life, perhaps because of a sensory overload from life in the metropolis, we really are in a state of non-being.

Does this imply a dualism? Because if the body is still functioning, and yet the mind feels as though it doesn’t really exist, surely this would only be possible if there was a separation between mind and body.

Maybe this is the case only if we choose a less nuanced concept of being. Having read Heidegger, and understood a little, we might be able to see parallels between the feeling of not being there and the state of being that he called ‘thrown’, I forget the German term. This is a kind of being in which we are not attendant to our own possibilities for being, but rather to those of the ‘crowd’ around us, we measure ourselves according to the standards of the faceless ‘them’ and live our lives accordingly.

I like this concept, except that I feel it might be a tad too action-oriented, that it implies that to really be we need to go out and satisfy our possibilities for being through doing something.

Even when we are completely passive we are still attending to our most basic needs. If we fail to breathe, after twenty seconds, thirty seconds, the air in our lungs expires and we very quickly learn a basic fact about our being in this world.

Does being ‘thrown’ also lie in not attending to the world at all of which we are a part. Are we not ‘thrown’ when we experience the world as a grey homogeneity, when we do not experience the world much at all.

Perhaps then, nichtdasein, the feeling or state of non-being, occurs when the self is disconnected from its own embodied nature and the fact that this self and body exists in a physical world.

Notes on a friend lost, lost notes on a friend, notes on a lost friend, a lost friend on notes, a friend lost on notes

December 18th, 2008 | benjamin

Part I: The Encounter

‘You’re here to pity me,’ he says.

The following inferences occur: the maladjusted person is a patient, the patient is sick, the sick is drawn to pity like a fly to cloying treacle. The patient is the fly, overcome, overwhelmed, suffocating, sinking in the noble concern of others.

The patient catches hold of this insight, even as the flux of images and representations engulfs his limbs and regards suspiciously those who come to visit.

I, the friend, say that there is no such thing, as far as I am concerned, that we are Nietzscheans in this regard.

The maladjusted person relaxes.

But in defending myself against this claim of pity, I am only plausible if I have an alternative explanation to our time spent together.

When the adjusted person encounters the maladjusted person there is the perpetual question, overhanging and fluttering like a curtain: ‘Why are you here?’ It is is the question of time spent. It demands an answer.

Someone for whom normal or should I say consensus meaning has broken down is both fascinating and terrifying.

While the connections that this person makes between things, concepts, and senses are not our own, they possess an undeniable logic. This logic reveals our own to be, while surely practicable, also disturbingly provisional.

Meaning and sense becomes a matter of stitching, of finding the peg that fits the hole, the number in the sequence, the missing letter that looms underneath the hanged man.

The same child-like game is played by both the adjusted and the maladjusted, but the latter play with a different set of rules that yield interconnections of an undeniable profundity.

Those of us with insight know that our own logic of meaning, while it allows us to be sane, also facilitates our adjusting to, and complicity with an established social order that in our analytical modes, but not in our everyday existence, we know to be unethical, nonviable, destructive and banal.

Whereas we the sane find ourselves not courageous enough to do so, the maladjusted person with her or his alternative logic of meaning wholly rejects this social world.

At the same time, the logic of the maladjusted person lacks the means through which any social order would be possible at all. Reciprocity is gone, much of the external world is hostile, the very universe itself is malevolent.

For sure, the hypocrisies of our own everyday existence are obliterated by this searing insight, but so too is everything else.

Consciousness becomes an apocalyptic force which does not allow for hope, or a resourcefulness to change the world, for all things in existence are touched by the decay of a malevolent social and psychic order.

This awareness does not permit friendship, mutual concern, or basic reciprocity.

It is here, I think, that we find the beginnings of a plausible answer to the question of time spent between two people at this exceptional moment in their lives.

In place of the ‘visit’, that the pitying do-gooder pays to the ailing patient, I would like to promote the ‘encounter’ between two friends.

With the benefits and shortcomings of both psychic states in mind it becomes possible to see the encounter as one of mutual benefit and ultimately of creative power.

To take but a small example:

The fabric of his pants was of a peculiar jarring contrast that words cannot evoke. My friend was able to express this experience in guttural sound. As such, we shared an experience of the visual that would not otherwise have been possible were it not for his synesthesia.

At other moments, in evoking his beautiful alter ego, and in discussing how her potential has been sadly denied, he showed me, as well as any novel or film, the compromises to banality demanded by the everyday.

And I think that, in return, I brought him back to social reciprocity in some degree. I revealed that not all parts of the world are hostile, that fixations are only attachments to chimera, that the real takes place in the social world of give and take.

It is this give and take that rescues the visit and transforms it into an encounter.

The well-intentioned friend is not there to dispense pity and the insight of sanity, but seeks to learn from the divine poetry of this other person who sees the world differently, while at the same time inviting this person into a world of others.

This other person is no longer psychically sealed from the world of others while being subjected to the authority of its doctors, nurses, police officers, and so on. This maladjusted person subjects their insights to this world of others and in so doing, become a participant in it.

For sure, the encounter can only happen gradually, over time, and always imperfectly. But the thing which draws two friends together is not pity, but that which makes the social world beautiful.

Together, in the encounter, we gather the elements necessary to turn insight into practice – the first delicate charge of revolution – and we are both changed by the experience.