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All posts for the month February, 2012

What U.G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) said over and over in his books already made a lot of sense before my surgery.

Now, would anyone be able to hear what he said, it would save a lot of my efforts in explaining the particular distance I started describing in my earlier posts (Brecht, Herzog…).

If you are willing to enter his realm – not a matter of arguing with him – there are many texts/sites that could challenge your self.
U.G.
The two main sites:

U.G.Krishnamurti.org
&
U.G.Krishnamurti.Net

And books (composed primarily of interviews):

My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody.
–U.G.


We’re not in Kansas anymore…

The weeks spent in I.C.U. were like an eternity in hell (more in another entry).
Later in rehab I was shown “Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog’s masterpiece. To my amazement, it was as if someone was describing the universe I had barely escaped from.
Just like those divers going through massive layers of ice with only one hole to come back to the surface,

while it had been all about life or death, there had been absolutely no road map.

I had been submerged too and was still gasping for air.

APPEARANCES
Because I can speak and interact normally*, most people assume that I have made a complete recovery… but the exhaustion endures (hands or knees shake at times) and very often there is a fog to be pierced through to interact with others.
The best way to express this is to say that my eyeballs don’t feel completely aligned with my eye sockets. I can look but am I looking, am I seeing?
Taking a warm shower or sitting in a hot-tub seem to help this discomfort – this simple trick provided my first sense of relief from feeling utterly “out of it.”
Similarly, if I move my head upward/downward or sideways too fast, everything spins around me. Doctors and rehab personnel have called this symptom a vestibular issue and tried in vain to manipulate my inner ear crystals.

DISTANCE
Earlier I have brought up my sense that much of life seem to be populated by “stuff” (as if I were floating in the intergalatic space described in the classic film “The Powers of Ten” [a link]).
There is also my persistent way of being disconnected from the (mundane) busyness of regular life.
As a doctor remarked astutely:

just to be there, present interacting with eyes, ears and one’s body and mind, IS a lot of work.

Normal sound and visual stimulation, even in their more quiet forms, are plenty to process. Handling the intensity of  a sunny day with the wind bristling through the leaves, or an excited crowd, is too much.

I used to value the distanciation/alienation (“Verfremdung” in German) that Brecht had advised for his epic theater. I had looked for it in theater, film and art.
Now I live with this distance on a daily basis. Even if I decried fluff in past writing, now fluff surrounds me everywhere (cf. Resnais’s film mentioned earlier).

And so, the small, the quiet, are much more appealing… I am reminded of this “Auto-Interview” by Primo Levi which I had always appreciated:

… we must be cautious about delegating to others our judgment and our will. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion. It is better to renounce revealed truths, even if they exalt us by their simplicity and their splendor, or if we find them convenient because we can acquire them gratis.

It is better to content oneself with other more modest and less exciting truths, those one acquires painfully, little by little and without shortcuts, with study, discussion and reasoning, those that can be verified and demonstrated.

*more about that later

The introduction, and the link to the text…

La vie est âpre, mais belle/Life is harsh, but beautiful. A.K. (a friend)

It seems that most humans are still very much excited to exchange thrills with each other (the best translation for the French “frisson”?). Is that enough to keep us going further, from image to image, or artwork to artwork? Could all cultural production stand at a standstill, just for a while? Maybe only then will we, as Cocteau pleaded for mirrors to do, finally have a chance for a little reflection?

The following short text – which characteristically seems to inspire no response – was written after my brain surgery and the loss of my mother, both of which are not mentioned in the text and totally irrelevant to it. To pay attention to this would be a reductionist way to avoid the content of the text. Life is not digestible, so why lie through writing and why lie to each other?

Yes indeed, the text may appear nihilistic, but as all die, that perspective is neither positive nor negative, just a form of realism…

More to the point, tabula rasa was something I grew up with: I was born a Jew in post-war Europe. My non-existent grandparents had not survived the Shoah. Whether praising peace or culture, all speeches seemed greatly farcical. My father who had fought in a Communist Resistance unit in France (cf. “L’Affiche Rouge”) died around May 68. Most of those who remember that period recall a celebration of freedom, but for me it was also the shock of witnessing the unfurled violence of the status quo – comparable to the military apparatus displayed around any presidential debate in the US.
Fortunately, I was not alone in perceiving most of the pretense around me. I was reading A.S. Neill, Reich and Artaud, Daumal, Michaux, Debord. Later Beckett, Porchia, and U. G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one) verified my perception of the surrounding vacuum.

Can insights be transmitted? Probably another delusion like the one that, through some kind of social pressure, has me explain myself and alert others.
I distrust words, I would have preferred not to speak, and a movie like L’Amour à Mort/Love Unto Death by Alain Resnais would point in the right direction.
For those who won’t find that film easily, I have to resort to the text below.

When asked to contribute to a 2010 conference on Media Literacy, I decided to address the topic of Cultural Literacy…

Stuff – Les Trucs Machins

Such a life-changing experience leaves traces. Most concepts become just “stuff.”
Reminds me of the joke about those five Jews:
Everything is one (Abraham). Everything is love (Jesus-Christ). Everything is economics (Karl Marx). Everything is sex (Sigmund Freud).
Everything is relative (Albert Einstein)

Un branle-bas de cette nature change tout et laisse des traces. La plupart des concepts apparaissent comme des “trucs machins.”
Ça me rappelle la blague des cinq Juifs:
Tout es un (Abraham). Tout est amour (Jésus-Christ). Tout est économique (Karl Marx). Tout est sexuel (Sigmund Freud). Tout est relatif (Albert Einstein).

2011

Common Era/Safety, Faith and Hope in Numbers ©Marton 2011

2012

Creative Juices 2012 ©Marton 2012

Illness, sickness, being “out” has
NO REDEEMING VALUE.

Trying to “be positive” about it
(to hide one’s fear?)
represents an indoctrination like any other.
– life is the way it is –

While one does know certain things because one has been punched by life – often by just plain stupidity – that knowledge amounts to being able to say:

“one can be punched hard by life or by stupidity.”

Christopher Hitchens’s take on the famous saying goes this way:

“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

“Oh, really?” says Hitchens, “Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t.”
… it ends with “one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.”

Visitors, well-wishers, friends (so many disappear… ) overall do not know how to be with a sick person. It seems as if THEY would like to be taken care of because THEY cannot handle the stress of being with you…

I remember a friend from those days having a hard time accepting that “No, things were not better” and this was not changing fast enough… but a sick person cannot be teaching a healthy person how to be (with a sick person).

From my point of view, besides the good tips below,

just BE with the other person, NO need to fill in the gaps.
Presence is 100 percent of life.

=================================================================
An excerpt from the NYTimes article by Bruce Feiler:

The NEVERs:

1. WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP? Most patients I know grow to hate this ubiquitous, if heartfelt question because it puts the burden back on them.

2. MY THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU. In my experience, some people think about you, which is nice.

3. DID YOU TRY THAT MANGO COLONIC I RECOMMENDED? I was stunned by the number of friends and strangers alike who inundated me with tips for miracle tonics.

4. EVERYTHING WILL BE O.K. Unsure what to say, many well-wishers fall back on chirpy feel-goodisms.

5. HOW ARE WE TODAY? Every adult patient I know complains about being infantilized.

6. YOU LOOK GREAT. Nice try, but patients can see right through this chestnut.

I speak of this elsewhere, but it was clear from the ICU on that what was considered normal was a complete aberration. Being surrounded in rehab by many brain surgery survivors who could only mutter vague sounds to express themselves, regular activities like speaking, holding a pen or defecating have to be considered miracles, amazing victories!

Nothing can be taken for granted.

We are born disabled, and most of our lives are probably disabled in one way or another (but deny it)… and we will most likely die disabled.

Another one of those “beams in the eye” – so prevalent it is one more omnipresent blind spot.