Passerby

Sometimes, life demands that I pull out of my flow, wait, and watch for a bit. At these moments, I feel compelled to observe where other people are going. I wonder to myself, can I go now? This place is not altogether pleasant. 

Where I am is just outside my well worn path, where I can see people going in all directions. Moreover, I can feel them passing by. Some of these left turn lanes are too narrow.

As I watch people approach from the front, I wonder whether they will collide with me. Most people stray into the neighboring lane to give me a wide berth, but sometimes there are so many people passing by that this is impractical. By coincidence then, some people come close enough that the force of their passing rocks me. They rock my car, I mean. 

In a moment, my way is clear. The tremors have subsided, but I remember that feeling. Out of control and uncertain, yet constantly awaiting.

Night and Day

Night and Day

Is there any difference more stark than that between night and day? 

Roads quite familiar bathed in light, become foreign and a touch foreboding. 

Innocent footsteps become a powerful stimulus.

Pleasant shade becomes a secretive shadow. 

Is it any wonder our mothers tell us to stay in at night?

Night is a blanket of mystery to one such as I. 

Highways are lit by floating spirits who guide the way.

The canvas of sky exchanges hands.

Light becomes an oasis - rare and coveted.

Even the bit of light on the ceiling as I lie in bed is captivating.

Perhaps it's not so surprising then that dreams come at night.
For it is in the cover of shadow that solitude comes naturally.
In my brief respite from the pressures of society,
I forget for a while what I think is real or possible.
Am I allowed that much at least?

Rambling Criticism

One of my pain points has always been a fear of criticism. A particular form of criticism stands out to me as nearly ubiquitous: "that's unoriginal."

In my high school English classes, I learned about archetypes, tropes, cliches, and other such literary devices. Stories tend to follow an arc and have certain elements in them. I wish I had really absorbed those concepts then, but they didn't really make much of an impression on me then. These concepts describe a pattern that we see over and over again, much to the chagrin of (I imagine) many would-be creatives. The existence of these patterns on the one hand provide foundations for good storytelling, but on the other hand fuel a fearful sense of inadequacy. On a deeper level, the preponderance of patterns suggests that there is something to the saying "there is nothing new under the sun."

Last weekend I had the pleasure of watching a short sci-fi romantic comedy anime. Afterwards, I wanted to learn more about the anime and hear what others had to say so I looked on an anime review site for comments. Sure enough, I found scornful criticisms based on lack of originality amidst thoughtful comments.

What I interpret as underlying that scorn is a desire to move forward. To these reviewers, the repetition of particular kinds of stories can be seen as meaningless or even harmful because they take it to be unproductive. "I've seen this before." "I know what's going to happen next." Perhaps it can best be summed up as saying "I understand, and therefore I don't need to hear it."  Sometimes I've caught myself with the same sort of feeling and I can safely say that I usually don't know what would satisfy me. Perhaps that's the key: the only way to satisfy such a critic is to catch him off guard with something he has never imagined.

What initially drew me to this anime was its moving presentation of a grandmother struggling to come to terms with her imminent separation from someone she loved like a grandchild. The main characters of the show interact with such individuals to help them accept their situations. Really, their jobs are to retrieve intelligent androids that are essentially indistinguishable from humans after 9 years of operation, which is when they begin to malfunction dangerously. In this world, there is no way to transfer the memories or personality of an android to a new android. Retrieval is essentially death for androids.

A complaint that multiple reviewers voiced was that the anime, which had a grand total of 13 episodes, did not live up to its potential because it was a romantic comedy. The work of the main characters was, in the end, a setting for two individuals to fall in love rather than an avenue to imagine society permeated with short-lived androids as children, workers, lovers, parents, etc. While I do agree that the anime could have gone in many interesting directions, I appreciated the story and the questions that the characters grappled with. I felt that, like the characters in the story, I could live life more vigorously in response to my own wishes and challenges.

Ultimately, my wariness of criticisms based on lack of originality comes from my perception that such a critique is sure to produce dissatisfaction. It is a voice that rails against tradition and demands new creative efforts. However, wherever the creative medium goes, it will still address human struggle and the circumstances that lead to it. Any new method of storytelling will be a way to communicate similar ideas to different audiences. I suppose the key to making peace with such a critic is to acknowledge this common ground and look forward to the wild ideas he comes up with.

Avert Your Eyes

I'm going to tell you a story. I feel kind of ridiculous about it, but I figure talking will help me deal with it. 

You see, there's an activity that I engage in most days on a regular schedule. Most of the time, I can sort of cruise along. I look around me and listen to pleasant sounds from the radio. I'm on autopilot. 

The people around me do pretty much the same. We're all headed in the same direction at a similar pace. 

I can sense on the horizon something approaching. My fellows respond in different ways: some accelerate, most are outwardly placid. Myself, I don't know what to do. I tense in spite of myself. I am still as things around me whirl past.

That something on the horizon casts its gaze upon us all. It is perfectly at ease in this place, high above us. It bears no malice, though sometimes I imagine it. In reality, most of its kind don't consider us at all. 

I've tried to meet its gaze, but I never can for long. I swear it will react to me. I avert my eyes.

And it does. React. My heart seizes and I make a quick decision. This is one of the most acute sources of distress in my day-to-day.

...

...

I stop before the yellow traffic light. 

Searching for Something Every Now and Then

The only story I've ever read by Tolstoy features the relationship between a young woman and a man roughly twice her age. They are in love with one another but he holds back because of the tragic outcomes that he foresees if they act upon their love. He resolves to leave her, but she convinces him that he is mistaken and, rather than doing her and himself a favor by leaving, he will merely cause unnecessary heartbreak. They marry and, sadly, they suffered greatly in each other's company.

In Family Happiness, the source of suffering is once described as a desire for "movement and not a calm course of existence... excitement and the chance to sacrifice [for] love." The young woman yearned for such an opportunity despite her explicit statement that she wished for a quiet life with him in their countryside home. They took a trip to the city and he introduced her to the social life at dances with the upper echelons of society. She was enamored and their relationship began to deteriorate.

This feeling of restlessness and discontent is very familiar. What has never made sense to me is that it focuses on something which is essentially unknown. As a comparison, imagine someone who is suffering from a disease which has not been diagnosed. Without knowing why he suffers, how can he make himself better? At best, his short-term efforts can only be palliative measures. He may try various treatments, but each treatment is a sort of guess. Similarly, the restless lover who desires to sacrifice for love is confused about how to find satisfaction. I don't think it is possible to truly want to sacrifice, ever. That's because the object of desire is not the act of sacrifice, but the end for which one sacrifices. Although love prepares us to sacrifice, conceiving of a desire to sacrifice as a necessary component of love is a dangerous romanticism. Just imagine the suffering that could come from expecting that a lover must sacrifice as proof of love, especially if he thinks "I would do it for you". In any case, when considering sacrifice the question is not whether one wants to sacrifice, but whether one is willing to sacrifice when the time comes.

I take the desire to sacrifice for love as coming not from love of someone, but from a desire for a kind of glory. I find parallels to this dissatisfaction at work. I am often dissatisfied with the results that I produce as an analyst. I feel as if I'm searching for something profound which the models I build either are not or cannot tell me. I wonder whether more advanced techniques would produce a more conclusive understanding of the population I study. I do all this, often without giving enough consideration to the impact that my work already could have on the business. My aim, as evinced by my attention, is not solely the improvement of the business, but a combination of improving the business and a desire for something greater. Similarly, the desire to sacrifice for love is evidence of a desire for glory as separate from desiring the good of one's love because love does not involve a wish to harm oneself or one's lover. The desire to sacrifice for love seems only to make sense to me as a way to create evidence for the self-contented thought, "my love is great."

A striking scene, toward the end of the story, was that of the man responding calmly to the woman lamenting the state of their relationship and asking him about why he hadn't done more to avert their situation. Why hadn't he sacrificed more of his time and his emotion for the relationship rather than his money? In the past, he might have been hurt or defensive. It was through this shift in his attitude that he was able to talk things over with his wife at the moment when she came to him and help her change her understanding of their relationship. The story ends with the prospect of familial happiness on the horizon.

Lost in Thought

They come to you effortlessly as you gaze at nothing in particular, forgetting to blink or breathe. Your mind is like a wildfire, blazing across the landscape of ideas with a joyous sense of freedom. The many directions you travel reward you with insights, wisdom you think to record as a means of sharing it with others. But perhaps more important, you wish to record these thoughts for yourself in the future because it is you, after all, who explores these expanses with such joy. And so you try.

You search your room for a pen and paper to write upon. You settle for a pencil and the measly white space on a glossy magazine you've never read before. You write quickly, knowing that time is of the essence, that your thoughts may soon escape you. Your focus is intense. And soon you are finished outlining one particular train of thought - on motivation - and you turn around on that great landscape to record others. But alas! You have scorched your path backwards in your fervor.

And so you are left at a loss, your mind focused on nothing in particular (having finished the outline), as you quietly resume your chores.

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I once overheard a conversation about motivation. As a person seeking change, one speaker proclaimed, you may have two different kinds of reasons. You either desire some improved state of affairs or you seek to escape a current source of misery. The latter of the two he called desperation. The former, I suppose, is hope. This classification cleaved the world neatly in a way that seemed perfectly natural to me at the time.

It seems intuitive that hope is preferable over desperation as a source of action. It's not, however, because desperation implies misery and hope doesn't. Hope is most salient when things are at their worst. Its existence is a bastion of strength and a moving message. Desperation in times of misery is understandable. It's tempting to say desperation is self-defeating as well, but desperation is not the same as the various reactions we have to desperation such as escapism, denial, and recklessness.

Not mentioned by the speaker is a third option for the person seeking change: he can distance himself from his desires and accept his current situation. If desperation seemed intuitively something to be avoided, it is important to consider that hope, containing within it desire and vulnerability, is also something which people sometimes avoid.

One might be tempted to understand distancing oneself from desire as an ideal - Buddhism comes to mind for me - but there are certainly improper ways to implement this ideal also. What happens if you distance yourself from desire by denying these aspects of yourself? If the existence of selfish feeling becomes a source of shame? Then there comes into existence an inescapable contradiction. You desire to do good, to be compassionate for example, for others but you realize that this is largely acting in the interests of others. Interests, never mind what they are, which you denied yourself as shameful because of your ideal. You lose authority over yourself as you are unwilling to use the most basic justification, or perhaps you blind yourself to the fact that it even counts as a justification, for your actions: you want something.

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If you imagine human knowledge as a circle, what does an individual's knowledge amount to within that circle? I imagined something like an amoeba. The amoeba grows as it consumes "experiences" as food. It comes to recognize particular experiences as desirable and others as undesirable. It displays curiosity by seeking out novel experiences, some of which cause it to grow rapidly and others which contribute little or even cause harm. The amoeba can only grow so large, however. It will always be dwarfed by the landscape in which it finds itself. I bet amoebas get lost sometimes too.

Imaginary Signposts

Define simple.

- easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty.
- used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something.
- composed of a single element; not compound.
- of or characteristic of low rank or status; humble and unpretentious.
- of low or abnormally low intelligence.
(Definitions taken from a Google search)

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I was once posed a question similar to the following: "Would you prefer to be simple but happy, or intelligent but miserable?" Being intelligent is usually thought of as a blessing. Your capabilities are greater. You grasp complex ideas more easily, more quickly. You struggle less and people tell you you'll do well in the future. The comparison group, implicitly defined by opposition, takes on the opposite talents and prospects. Strange then, to be asked to consider happiness as the price of intelligence.

I was once asked whether it is better to be calculating or to be genuine. More precisely, the question was whether recognizing how one's choices benefit oneself, even after the fact, is an indicator of selfishness. In this question I heard a familiar confusion and fear of criticism. Can friendship or any other close relationship marked by trust coexist with calculation? The alternative, to be unaware of one's own interests, seems on the one hand to be a recipe for personal disaster. On the other hand, it presents a method to express the purest sort of care.

But what about when simplicity just doesn't work? What if you act with the best of intentions, not fully understanding what it is you are doing? Because that could happen if you convince yourself that veiling your eyes and merely suppressing your faults as best you can will leave you blameless...

Some form of intelligence then - emotional intelligence, self-awareness, calculation, what have you - might turn out to be really useful. These are methods to understand ourselves and others, methods which can be practiced and improved on. To reject these tools, recognizing their manipulative nature, in favor of simplicity is mistaken.

I don't think there is any way to completely escape being a potential target of criticism. However, happiness shouldn't depend on escaping from such a danger. This perceived connection merely provides reasons for individuals to turn away from the complexity inherent to the world and toward the alluring ideal, and defense, of purity.

And, with a little mental gymnastics, embracing the tools to deal with complexity could, in the end, be just another form of purity.