Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Life in Slow Motion...

.....as David Gray says, 'life in slow motion, somehow it don't feel real' - and the truth is, that's how most of us live day by day (the painfully beautiful mundane) - as if we are waiting for the moment where we might actually start for real... maybe we will one day, but I suspect that day will only occur in some far better place beyond this world, with long lost friends, where snow flakes fall, but won't turn our hands blue with cold...

Here's a scary paragraph from last Saturday's 'Guardian' by the writer Simon Gray:

'Life will trick us if it can, innocence is no guarantee against punishment. The self can't be trusted. "The thing to take in," Gray says in one unusually bold passage, "is that there are billions of subjectivities, which represent themselves to you as objectivities and which, when I'm alone in my study, as I am now, can be thought of as one massive objectivity, which we call the world. Sometimes the world is only me, at other times everything except me."'

A steak to chew on, there's no way this is milk...

Oh, by the way, the Dr had a 'beautiful' time, but then again the Dr does make the universe a brighter and better place, which reminds me, i must ask him if i can have a ride in his tardis...

4 comments:

The Meaning Weakened by the Lies said...

'We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are' - Anais Nin.
One of my favourite quotes that leads to a somewhat disappointing conclusion; no one ‘self’ can be truly objective. However, if they were, it is likely that they are simply separated from whatever situation they are being objective about and hence passionless to its cause.
We yearn for compassion, therefore subjectivity is a presence that we should favour.

The Harbour of Ourselves said...

I concur - it's impossible to be impartial, and maybe disappointments are just badly managed expectations

thanks for your comments...

The Meaning Weakened by the Lies said...

'Disappointments are badly managed expectations' hmm... Every part of me screams that that should not be true, or else where are the dreams?
President Lincoln had a failure for every success he achieved. If he had possessed different expectations he never would have pursued his dream and become one of the best loved American Presidents.
J Kilcher said 'There is a difference between dreaming and pretending.' A difference I unfortunately find hard to grasp. Never the less, your original statement belongs to that of the pretenders, the unfortunate breed of youth that take a perverse pleasure in the transpiration of their pessimism.

The Harbour of Ourselves said...

maybe....

maybe some of our dreams are just not realistic, i think we all have limitations - i mean there are some things that just ain't possible - maybe as M Scott Peck said about difficulty, once we realise that life is difficult we can actually transcend the difficulties? maybe...

my cynical moment comes from too many experiences of people of faith burned by demands that can't be reached but then being made to feel like failures because of it

'a perverse pleasure in the transpiration of their pessimism' is a remarkable statement that i will ponder on for a while... someone described me the other day as a smiling pessimist; personally I prefer to describe myself as a cynical optimist

I wonder sometimes what the social signs of generation X are – art, film, entertainment? Do the intellectual arguments lead to the change in attitude to truth? - What changes do we see in other cultural indicators, and can this be transferred into change?

Post-modernism is earthed in the French philosophical semiotic struggle.

Much of what passes for humanity does in fact result in uniform banality – most alternative visions for change are filtered out of public view. Walter Bruggemann writes,
‘After the best efforts of self indulgent existentialism, technological positivism, revolutionary Marxism, and free market ideology, we may yet discern that the covenantal discourse of the Bible, preserved as it is by (a) confessing community, is as close as we become to a genuinely public language. That discernment can happen, however, when it is unambiguously clear that the speakers and advocates of such covenantal discourse are not proselytising or serving parochial ends – and that requires a self-emptying compassion.’

Can't make up my mind whether we are disagreeing or not...