Recession

Never just give anything away in a relationship. With the growth of any relationship, but particularly as concerns the more intimate variety, there is inevitably an economy of trust and control, the former being traded for the latter back and forth across various contexts. Indeed this is what it means for a relationship to grow: for our expectations of, and allowances for, one another to grow into a stable system of mutual influence. This is the potentially frightening aspect of a growing relationship, for as it grows all reservations must eventually be lost when that special someone whispers in your ear. Such reservations need not be cast off begrudgingly, however, nor without gain; concessions to intimacy and control are valuable, after all, and may be traded like any commodity. Indeed, the skill at making such trades responsibly determines much of what there will be of mutual respect within the relationship.

Canvas

Reality is ephemeral; it is only our ideas of it that have any solidity to them.

I've always enjoyed unfinished paintings.

My first was a portrait of George Washington that only came down to the tops of his shoulders; if you ever see the full canvas the painting is on, you can see that there was room left to include his whole body, likely seated. I used to pass the time in class imagining what might be there; what sort of chair, or sometimes bicycle, he'd be sitting on; various outfits and poses; several ancient pencil sketches of our first president surfing were born of such musings, I admit. And yet anything like the truth of the image was long since lost to its artist's death; the blank of the canvas can host any picture an onlooker might see fit to imagine there, as indeed may the scene beyond the frame and on to the whole of post-revolutionary America. To be sure, there would be little value in pictures beyond the aesthetic if it were not for our capacity to see past them.

Such is my sense for the "realness" of reality, and of thought. The myriad images which might decorate an unmarred canvas, these I call the truths of the natural world; as there is a bounded infinity of pictures one may display with a particular paint and canvas, so there are a range of logically justifiable "truths" or interpretations of the natural world. In painting, however, and however carefully, we find ourselves backing into a corner.

Relation

Hate and love are both personal; both ways of relating ourselves to others, of explaining them. Hate for those who cannot be known like we know ourselves, those we hesitate to call people and from whom we would withhold basic human rights(rapists, racists, haters); love for those we know, trust, believe in, who share our values and participate in our culture(family, people, in-group).

Hate blinds me, distances me, wrestles me into foolishness and dismissive judgment; I fight it where possible as a means of paying attention, of continuing to learn and gather the benefits of knowledge.

But love blinds as well, and so much more destructively: the conclusion that others are like yourself opens you to being defined by them. To losing yourself in who they claim to be, to showing more than you are shown and being known better than you know yourself. We are imaginary, remember, so being known better or worse amounts to being imagined more or less concretely and predictably; being modeled or framed more usefully, being more malleable. This, I think, is what we all fear from overtures of trust or intimacy, and what we value in them as well: the opportunity to engage in a contest of souls. Hatred may cause battlefields, but only because this loss of identity is so much more fundamentally terrifying than simply being killed; because love is the battlefield we were born in.

I would not hate, would not be blinded to the patterns of...whatever I have left to call other humans at this point. But neither would I have the form of my identity dictated to me, limit myself to the paltry selection of preformed social roles and conventions that lesser mortals would impose upon me to confirm their own self-image. The potentials of the mind, this system of cognition-through-identity, continue both to excite and frighten me, and I am not yet ready to pack it in & start on building my credit score.

So I call myself Philosopher, but little else, for I don't want to bias myself. I learn to love when I am curious, and to hate when my curiosity is threatened; but with little I can admit about myself but curiosity, such threats come very easily.

Cloud

When I see us, what I see first is just apes.

But then I'm as much a visual sort as the rest of us, so it isn't surprising that the form of our bodies would grab my attention first. Much in the way that the grey wolf was stretched and stunted by selective adaptation into all sorts of distinctly similar perversions, so do I see the modern human as a shaved and straightened cousin to the fuzzier lot still climbing trees in Africa. And so, much as some behaviors of the modern dog can only be understood in the context of the needs of wild pack hunters, I am little surprised when I can find explanations for human behavior that are similarly reliant on the needs of our highly self-involved tree-dwelling cousins.

This perspective has limits to its usefulness, however, as all do, for as a human I can tell myself that the experience of love is a biological imperative to promote monogamous coupling and secure resource access for offspring during our characteristically extended childhoods, but nothing about that experience feels much like it's driving me to buy Cheerios for a five year old. To understand ourselves as people will require a perspective cast in the distinctly human cognitive framework, described as myths and metaphors and characters and relationships; the biological truths of our species are necessary as a guiding framework for this perspective, but are inadequate on their own to provide us with a useful description of our society.

I've learned to see something else, above and beyond the limited human frame. Call it our culture, or our tradition, or the collective unconscious; it is the accumulation of our creative capacities over time, transcending any particular human and most people, and a human raised without it will hardly act like anything you'd call a person. It spreads as dramatically as a demagogue spouting visions for the future, and as subtly as using a word someone's never heard before in context so they can figure out what it means. This is the complex of memes that we all participate in and maintain, that cloud of evolving ideas which has become so much more relevant with the growth of networking technology, and it is the only place anything like our moral codes or social values can be said to objectively exist.

I think this is an important perspective to reference when considering the right and wrong of human and social behavior; important, because it is our choice of perspective that determines what course of action our values will dictate, and understanding ourselves primarily as participants in the evolution of a body of knowledge will naturally impel us to choices which promote our ability to so participate: choices to be open, and curious.