Nachtgedanken 1.

(Night thoughts in the daytime.)

Jealousy.

Sometimes when I hear other people express a liking for some music that I myself am fond of then I feel a sort of jealousy. Rather like the sort of jealousy people feel in respect of their romantic partners. For example, if somebody says they really like Beethoven’s Violin Concerto I think: no! you can’t possibly like it the way I do. I could even imagine stopping liking some piece of music when I find out that other people like it too. But this isn’t exactly jealousy though is it? Because jealousy is more where you don’t want the person who likes you to like other people. What I am describing here is more like where you don’t want other people to like the thing you like.

So many people.

I see a lot of people when I am out sauntering, walking around. When I find myself in the midst of a large group of people, like in a shopping high street or leaving a train station, I find myself thinking of the line “I alone hold the key to this wild parade” (from some French poem) even though I clearly hold no such key. Or I think of the lines from TS Eliot: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet”. - The other thing I think is: “who are all these people?”. I worry that this mass of people are too “un-socialised”. By which I mean that they are disengaged from others (in particular from me) in the sense that none of them have ever actively signed up to be a member of this population that they are living amongst. Not signed up to all the rights and responsibilities that being such a member would entail. Certainly I haven’t signed up in this sense but I feel like I ought to have done. I’m guessing all these others don’t feel the same sense of there being this missing thing. They’re happy to live in this unstated unresolved limbo.

True/False.

The sentence “this sentence is false” is paradoxical. I wish I had whatever skill it is that would make me see this paradox immediately. But I don’t and so instead I have to do that thing where I think it through saying to myself: “oh, so if it’s false then it’s not true that it’s false and so it’s true but then that means it’s false which means it’s true” and so on. And even while I’m saying all this to myself it’s like I am looking at something through a narrow tube held close to the object so I can never see it all in one go. I just get a sequential view of the parts by moving where the tube is pointing to. There must be some sort of mental exercises I can do to “see the whole picture” so to speak. Like St Paul almost said: now I see it through a tube partially but then I’ll see it whole, all of it.

The Truth.

What if you came to know the Truth but couldn’t communicate it to anybody else. Wouldn’t you prefer to just not know?

Attachments.

In the 1995 movie ‘Heat’ a character quotes some advice he once got: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” But can you really live like that? If you don’t let yourself get attached to anything then you can’t love (and/or like) anything. Or can you love something without being attached to it? Can you love something and not feel disappointed and upset if it were to go. If you said you loved some thing but then didn’t feel anything negative when it was taken away from you, then I would think: you didn’t really love that thing.

Therapy and politics.

What if, in some 1950s southern US state, a black man had gone to a psychotherapist complaining about intense feelings of low self esteem and depression. Due to the way he was being treated by the white majority with their Jim Crow laws and general condescending and demeaning behaviour towards him. Would the therapist have diagnosed stress and given him some mental exercises to do? Or asked him to talk about his childhood and his relationship with his parents? Or would they have diagnosed exploitation and prescribed revolution and/or a campaign for Civil Rights?

What Marxism is.

I know hardly anything about Marxism so please don’t listen to anything I have to say about it. But, based on what little I do know, there are two things that strike me.

First: it seems to me that Marxism is a meticulously (almost lovingly) detailed factual analysis of 19th century capitalism. And not really in any sense some sort of passionate call for its demise or for some more pleasant alternative. At the most it includes a prediction that Capitalism will end but that’s not the same as saying that it ought to. All of this means that you can be a Marxist without being a socialist. You could even be a lover of capitalism and still be a Marxist.

Second: the content of the Marxist analysis is principally that all human relations are exploitative conflict relations based on class. And that (this is the important bit) any apparently cordial and friendly relations that you experience are illusory. And by this I think he means that if, for example, some mill owners improve the condition of their workers (out of the motive of wanting to be nice) this only addresses the symptom, ie the effect, of the system. It doesn’t change the thing that is causing the initial not nice behaviour, ie the behaviour that caused the workers to have poor living conditions. So, if the mill owners do behave nicely, then their motivation to do this must be selfish? Seems like the idea here is that people in a class system can’t act selflessly, that it is somehow impossible. Their motive for behaving nicely might be to prevent the workers from reacting violently. Which is a selfish motive. When we think we are acting selflessly, we aren’t.

There is some kind of reality vs illusion thing here. In reality all relations with others are selfish. If you ever think they aren’t then this is an illusion.

Devotion.

Imagine Mary says to Jack: “I love you so much Jack, I don’t think I could live without you!” Is this an adorable expression of commitment and devotion? Or is it emotional blackmail? And a display of immaturity by Mary.

Millenium.

The millennium was a pointless event because it was impossible to celebrate it. To celebrate it correctly you would have had to do whatever you do to celebrate a normal new year but to have done that 1,000 times as much. So if you normally drank a glass of wine you would have had to drink 1,000 glasses of wine (and so be dead). So it’s like there’s nothing you can do to do celebrate the millennium. But, at the same time, you feel like you ought to be doing something commensurate to the scale of the event. - A similar state of mind is caused by a bereavement. You feel like there’s something you ought to be doing to reflect the magnitude of the thing that has just happened. But there is nothing that you can do.

Games.

I see that people spend a lot of time playing games and puzzles on their smartphones and other gadgets. They like these because they exercise the brain somewhat. But, I think to myself, if you want that then why not just learn mathematics or logic. They provide the same order of intellectual stimulation as games but have the advantage that you have learnt something at the end of it as well.

Compassion.

We say to our loved ones: “I care about you”. And we manifest this by helping them when they need help. But to care about someone suggests a relation to their suffering which is more than just the willingness and ability to do something about it. Surely you also have to have compassion which means sharing in their feelings of suffering. (In Wagner’s opera this is the compassion that Parsifal learns to feel for Amfortas.) The activity of helping another has to be done from compassion. But then what if the motive of the helper is just to get rid of the horrible feeling of sympathetic suffering that they are feeling themselves? The motive would then be rather selfish!

Book conspiracy.

About those people who say they read books and understand what is written in them. What if it turned out that those people didn’t ever read books. But they understood what those books said by being told by other people. In other words what if the communication of ideas is still oral (the way it used to be ages ago) but people pretend to have got it from reading books. It is certainly easier to learn ideas from other people than from reading books. It might take me about 20 hours to read a book but I could learn the basic ideas that that book contains (and which is all I would remember in the long term even if I did spend 20 hours reading it all anyway) in a 10 minute chat with somebody who knows. ... Certainly something like the communication of Christianity seems to be like this. Because if you knew nothing about Christianity you would be none the wiser from simply reading the New Testament. So not only don’t people get their knowledge from the book, but they couldn’t! (Even if you read the Old Testament as well you still wouldn’t know.) What Christianity is has been communicated orally and not through writing.

Misanthropic.

From the Book of Proverbs in the Bible there is a proverb that says “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly”. I think this is excessively misanthropic. I mean it’s not uncommon for humans to make the same mistake twice. To compare doing that with something as horrible as a dog returning to its own vomit is a bit over the top surely!

Other people.

There’s a book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. The message of this book (sorry to oversimplify) is that the psychology of men is not the same as the psychology of women. And that a lot of the problems between those two sorts of human beans are caused by their failure to realise this difference. The conflicts can be dampened by each learning to understand the psychology of the other sort. And I was thinking actually that there is a more general point here. Because it’s not just men and women who have different psychologies that need to be understood. But this applies to people in general. People have different tastes or habits or lifestyles or ‘ways of thinking’. They all have different psychologies. Some of these differences might even be greater than the man woman difference. So the basic skill you need is not so much to be able to understand the psychology of the opposite sex but to be able to understand a different psychology of any sort. And I’m not sure that’s such an easy thing to do. I think that that skill is one of those which is less prevalent than people think it is. People think they understand someone else but really they don’t. They mistake a superficial understanding for a deeper one. So I might say: oh yes Jack likes going on long walks and I don’t but I understand it. Maybe it’s impossible to really understand a different psychology. All we do is we just imagine doing different things. But that’s just behaviour, it’s not really getting into the head of someone else is it?

Selves.

I’m not sure I like people who “keep themselves to themselves”. Why would anybody want to do that? I prefer people who are open and transparent and communicative and engaging. I like people who “want to talk about it” in the sense of being opposite to what that song says, the one that goes “I don’t want to talk about it”.

Ontology.

Let’s say it’s a principle that the only things that you can know exist are things you can have an experience of. (I use the word experience in the abstract sense of “I have had an experience of seeing a table” which means I have seen a table). But your experiences themselves are not something you can have an experience of. Therefore your experiences do not exist.

Mouthspeaking.

I don’t like it when people talk using big words and sound really clever but actually they’re just talking gibberish. The sort of thing I am talking about is the sort of thing that wins awards for bad writing (see HERE). It seems like the words have got a life of their own. Like there are no thoughts behind the words. Instead the speaker is more interested in and fascinated by the shapes their words and sentences are making. I call this ‘mouthspeaking’ because the words start and end there at the mouth. They haven’t really come out of the mind. (To quote David Byrne: these people are talking a lot but not saying anything.) ... Of course this is what poetry is. But it is forgivable in poetry because poets admit to (and are proud of) what they are doing but the other mouthspeakers insist that what they are saying makes perfect sense.

Life expectancy.

In the olden days people gave birth to more children than they do now. Lack of contraception wasn’t the only reason for this. It was mostly because people knew that most of the children they produced would die before reaching anywhere near adulthood. Infant mortality was very high. You needed to have a lot of children to be sure that you’d have at least two or three surviving to becoming (useful to you) adults. But giving birth to that many children under such circumstances is, when you think about it, tantamount to infanticide. If you give birth to 6 children knowing that 3 of them will die before they get to the age of 10 then that’s almost like murder. Doing something that you know will result in the death of someone. - The other thing this makes me think of is the calculation of life expectancy figures. Imagine a population where half the children die before they get to age 10. But after that everyone without exception lives to be 70. This means that average life expectancy is 40. But that would be a misleading statistic.

Mental drifting.

Sometimes I am thinking about something interesting X and then my mind drifts off onto other things. And then I think: wait there was something really important I was thinking about just a bit ago, what was it? And I try really hard to remember what it was. But I can’t. I sit and strain my mind trying to remember but to no avail. And I feel baffled at the nature of my exertions in this regard. What exactly am I doing when I am trying to remember. My efforts seem futile. It’s like I am on a train station platform and the thing I am trying to remember is on a train leaving the station and it is waving me goodbye from the back of the train. The train is one of those old fashioned trains that have an open area at the back. (Note I got this train analogy off someone I heard on the radio.) - The only remedy which sometimes works is I rummage around until I remember something else, call it Y, which I was thinking of earlier than thing X. Then, working on the assumption that I got from Y to X by the same mental drifting that got me off X, I try to reconstruct my drifting from Y to X. By a process of association. Sometimes this works. ... And when, after all this effort, I retrieve X, I am frequently disappointed to realise that it wasn’t that interesting after all.

The past.

What if I went back in time and played some pop/rock music to Beethoven. (Preferably before he went deaf.) What would he think I wonder? Would he be dismissive of it as a lot of the current lovers of his music are now? Or would he, as a composer, be fascinated by its differentness?

Time management.

Do children still go to school to learn? Why? Even in the pre-internet days it never seemed to add up from a time-management point of view. (And now that we have got the internet it certainly doesn’t add up.) Here are the logistics of the situation. Say I wake up and wash and have breakfast. Let’s say that gets us to time 08:10. At that point I could have just sat down and started reading a book and started learning stuff. But no. Instead I tidy myself further for going out, dress myself in my uniform. This takes ten minutes. At 08:20 I leave the house and walk to where I catch the bus. At 08:30 I get the bus and arrive at the school say 08:50. The official start time is 09:00. In the interval I am distracted by the mundane chatter of other pupils. Then I enter the classroom where register is taken and announcements made. Then we have an assembly or something like that. By now it’s 09:30 and time for the first lesson to start. I go to the lesson and sit down and the teacher takes a few minutes to calm people down: “quiet please!” they say. And then the lesson starts proper which consists of the teacher at the front saying things that I can listen to and maybe learn from. So, one and a half hours later I have caught up to where I would have been had I just stayed at home. And it gets no better. Because sometimes the things the teacher is saying are things that I understand easily. If I was at home and reading it in a book I would just skim those pages in a few seconds. Here I have to sit and wait 20 minutes for the teacher to get through it. And also if I was at home I could slow down on the pages where I need to concentrate. But in the classroom the things teacher says that I need to give extra attention to I can’t tell them to wait while I think.

Fun to imagine.

Richard Feynman said it’s fun to imagine. But you have to really do it properly. Sometimes when I’m out walking on a dark night I like to imagine alien spaceships (like the ones in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) gliding through the air not that far above my head. I mean I REALLY imagine it. I say to other people: imagine that, imagine actual alien spaceships floating above your head. And they say, yes I’ve done it. And I say, no you haven’t really imagined it. You’ve just imagined it on a superficial conceptual level. But I mean REALLY imagine it. Together with all the feelings that such a thing would evoke in you: panic, relief, exhilaration. REALLY imagine what it would be like. It’s actually a difficult thing to do. ... Other things you could imagine are people in situations other than the ones you normally find them presented. So imagine the Prime Minister smoking dope and talking funny. But it can also be sad and not fun to imagine. Imagine someone you know and love a lot talking crazy and ending up getting locked up in an institution. Go on: imagine it. I dare you to.

Ritual.

Say I lived someplace where we all regularly enacted some solemn ceremonial ritual. With costumes and chanting and walking around in a set pattern. I would be the one who would one day quizzically and casually ask: “Hey guys, I hope you don’t mind me asking but, just to clarify, why exactly are we doing this?” And the looks I would get. If looks could kill.

Communication.

I could pick up a book by some great philosopher or thinker and read all about what they think about things. I would rather just grab some average person off the street and ask them what they think about things. The reason I say this is because with the person here I can actually talk to them about what they think. Ask them questions and explore their ideas about things and then maybe berate them for their lack of cogency. The great writers and thinkers of the past might have had better quality ideas but the value of these ideas to me diminishes because I can’t interrogate the people who came up with them.

Late nineteenth century novel.

I can pick up a novel, something by Gustave Flaubert or Theodor Fontaine or some such person. And it will mean absolutely nothing to me at all. I can get no foothold on it. I have got no idea what the point of this novel is or what sort of mind might have produced such a strange thing. And it is utterly amazing that something can be so totally meaningless and yet be claimed to be so significant. When I see immigrants on the streets of the modern town where I live. People who have come from completely different places in Africa or Asia. I think to myself that they must have a relation to the world around them which is rather like the relation I have to those mysterious novels. They must be overwhelmed by the utter incomprehensibility of everything. But I can chose to ignore those novels. They have no choice but to live where they are.

Friday after work drinks.

People go out on a Friday evening after work and unwind with their work colleagues and some drinks. If, in the morning of that Friday, the boss had phoned them all and told them that they could have the day off they would be really annoyed. Because to properly enjoy the after work drinks you have to have been at work all day and also you must have felt all the annoyances and frustrations that work can produce. Most of the enjoyment of the after work is simply contrast. You can’t go for after work drinks when have you not gone to work. Nor if you have been to work and enjoyed it.

Self-awareness.

About people with mental health issues psychotherapists will use the phrase “has good self-awareness” to indicate that the person in question, despite suffering an abnormal mental state, nevertheless knows what’s going on, knows that they are in an abnormal mental state. This being a good thing with regard to their ultimate betterment. But the phrase “has good self-awareness” could be equally applied to everybody because even if your mental state is not abnormal it’s good to know about it.

Families.

Families are good I suppose but they are strange in that whatever authority or obligation its members have to each other is utterly arbitrary and unregulated. Historically the family was designed for men to have this sort of arbitrary authority over their wives and children. Things have improved in recent times but the arbitrariness is maybe more stark in the relation between parents and children. Because children don’t choose their parents. If you are a 14 year old and have a slack father you can’t leave and move in with a better one. A parent can behave in any (short of criminally) cruel way to their child and the child has no recourse. - But the obligation side of things is also a problem. Parents have the obligation to care for their children despite the fact that this might turn out to be a task which is way beyond their abilities. And if they fail to discharge their obligation as a result then this failure is severely frowned upon. Even though it’s largely a question of chance whether they are lumbered with such a situation. This is like a business hiring people and allocating them jobs at random with no formal training and then berating them when they fail due to their lack of ability at what they have been given to do.

Saying it.

In certain contexts if one person says to another: “I love you” that implies the desire for some sort of romantic physical sexual relationship. Contexts where this implication would be absent would be if it was between parent and child or between human and animal. But even where the implication is present, as in between standard heterosexual male and female, what if the person doing the saying meant “I love you” in the sense where the implication was absent. They would have to add “but not in that way”.

Funerals.

I don’t go to funerals. I’m not going to go to my own so why should I go to anybody else’s? Like Jesus said: let the dead bury the dead.

Easy to love.

There’s a song by Cole Porter “You’d be so easy to love”. Men like sexually attractive women because those sorts of women make it easier for men to get sexually aroused. (And sexual arousal is the ultimate aim of the situation.) But this is unnecessary. With a slightly greater mental exertion a less sexually attractive woman can evoke the same level of arousal in a man. Or with a greater closeness (emotional, intellectual, aesthetic) but this takes time to establish. Men are way too lazy and impatient to make these efforts. This is why they prefer obviously sexually attractive females.

The Counter-revolution.

Marc Bolan once said that you can’t fool the children of the revolution. He was right. But you CAN fool the children of the counter-revolution. I should know, I was at university with them in the late 1980s and they were a pretty disappointing bunch. Desperately concerned with their future material welfare and not much else. They were the first students to have grown up knowing nothing other than the government of Margaret Thatcher and her rather shallow mean-minded attitude to life. And she was the counter-revolution in the sense that she was the opposite of the radical left wing sort of ideas predominant before her. And she was also the opposite of the more caring One Nation Tory attitude of previous Conservatives such as Harold Macmillan.

Where you are at.

What if you had a choice between living somewhere materially wealthy but where all the people were deeply unpleasant to each other all the time. Or somewhere that was less comfortable but everyone was really nice and friendly? See HERE for more.

Friends.

Two things to be careful about here.

First: having just one friend is worse than having no friends. This is (partly) because if you have just one friend you don’t really know how much of a friend they are to you. Because you have got nothing to compare it with. (It’s like I show you a picture of a box (and nothing else in the picture) and ask you to say how big the box is.)

Second: don’t ever have a best friend where it is not the case that you also their best friend. Because in a friendship, as with all good relationships, equality is essential.

Past, present and future.

Sometimes I think about something that happened in the past. Call it X. Then I think about me long before that event. And I imagine someone coming up to me in that previous time. And saying to me: X will happen. What I mean is I am trying to imagine my oblivious past self. Oblivious to the future event. A sort of: “you don’t know what’s coming do you!” thought. - Also the fact that (and I know this is a nonsense thing to say but) X is simultaneously past and future.

Surfaces.

Jack: I’ve known you such a long time Mary, but sometimes I feel like I don’t really know you at all. It feels like I’ve barely just scratched the surface and nothing more.

Mary: Yes. And now that you’ve scratched the surface you can’t take me back to the store for a refund.

Secretions.

The ejaculation (of semen) and the weeping (of tears) are two fluid secretions that have one thing in common (a kind of equivalence) which is that both result in a massive transformation of mood in a very short period of time, mere seconds. By the way I am only talking here about acute weeping here. Where you squeeze out a few tears. I’m not talking about chronic weeping where you just cry and cry and it seems like it will never ever stop. I hate to think what the sexual equivalent of that might be.

Self-sacrifice.

Giving up things for others is considered a good thing. But what if I picked some random person of about the same economic and social standing as myself. And I proposed to them that I give all my income and money to them and to become their obedient servant. Having no time to myself except for a few basic functions such as sleep. Having no life of myself at all. Would that be a good thing to do? The other person might be pleased on initially hearing of my proposal. But I doubt any civilised sensible person would accept such an offer. They would discourage me from demeaning myself in the manner I propose. - This point applies to life and death as well. I could do a live donation and give my organs to someone so that they might live while I die. But if the life I lose was about the same level as the life they would gain then it wouldn’t be a good thing to do. What if a child gave their life so that a middle aged person could live. That would be even more wrong. Because the child would be losing more than the adult would be gaining. Similarly devoted parents are wrong to sacrifice their own pleasures to that of their children. ... All of which means I can’t agree with John 15:13 which says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Manipulation.

There is no logic to emotions. If Mary says to Jack that she loves Z because Z has characteristic P. Then Jack can’t say to Mary “but I also have characteristic P, therefore you should love me as much as you love Z”. The use of the word “therefore” does not apply. This means that (lacking the solidity of logic as it does) the process by which an emotional state, such as love, is arrived at is prone to (if not constituted entirely by) all manner of manipulations. If I gave Jack and Mary a love-potion and they got together as a consequence and then, after 30 years of them being happily married I told them what I had done. Would they cast doubt on the validity of their relationship. No. Because the term ‘validity’ does not apply. The point being that the love-potion process of getting a couple together does not significantly differ from the normal process. Both are sorts of manipulation. Jack might have hired someone to find all about Mary’s deepest likings and then deliberately affected to have an interest in them. And in that way succeeded in getting her affection. Stanislaw Lem once wrote a story (‘Being, Inc.’) in which a company specialises in contriving situations where a man can show some moral characteristic valued by the female he desires. Thus capturing her heart. For example they might arrange for her to be accosted in the street by some ruffian and the man can be there at the right time to rescue her. ... The distinction between the content of our psychology arising through external manipulation and it arising in just the normal way that our psychology happens is a bit hazy. Imagine Jack is voting in an election and he complains that Party X are forcing him to vote for them by giving him everything he wants and running the country in a successful and efficient fashion. How dare they deny him his liberty in this way.

Slavery and immigration.

You could switch these round. So in some Southern US state in the early to mid 19th century a disgruntled resident might have retorted: “bloody Africans! coming here and taking our jobs. Our 18 hours a day plantation jobs”. ... Conversely someone in Britain now might organise a movement for the emancipation of all the enslaved foreign workers who are ‘forced’ to work at cleaning, building, shop-keeping, driving taxis, serving tables. ... Because the latter might be slaves for all we know. I mean from within our experience. If you walk around the city where I live nearly all the taxi drivers are non-white. I can imagine somebody telling me that this is because we went on a marine expedition and kidnapped people from the coast of the Asian subcontinent and then brought them here and then forced to drive cabs for us.

Trying.

Sometimes when you have been trying hard to do something. Trying really hard and not getting anywhere but persisting nonetheless. But then the futility of it overwhelms you and you give in. And you get to the point where you just say: “fuck this”. And whatever unfinished inadequate thing you have managed to produce so far you smash it to bits and throw it out the window. And you get an intense satisfaction from doing so.

[November December 2014.

Last reviewed and amended 21 October 2022]