From Yang Wan-li: The feeling passes and I laugh to myself.

From Anne Carson i learned to overcome unwanted loves:

how Sappho feigned extasis to escape jealousy, placing herself outside of love & desire, so as to watch her longing despair & then die;

how Marguerite Porete heard God ask her to love him instead of another, then asking: how would i fare if i knew that he preferred me to love another more than himself? … if he should love another more than me? … if he preferred another to love me more than he…?

how Simone Weil set about decreating herself to extract that selfish link to her own soul in every love.

It is (almost) always wrong to be cruel, as it (almost) always favors such emotions as will trip you into deeds you’ll regret.

An extended simile

A famous myrmecologist was delivering a paper on new developments in his study of leaf-cutter ants at some convention:

A few years ago, one of my good friends re-directed my attention toward large colonies of leaf-cutter ants. He had heard that at least one such colony had recently developed a new means of olfactory communication and wanted to understand exactly what purpose it served. Upon investigation, we discovered that the youngest ants, those just emerging out of larval stage, were apparently being trained by their elders to recognize certain sets of new chemicals and to produce others in return. It was, frankly, as if they were learning some kind of primitive language. But to what end?

As we started to examine this new behavior more closely, we noticed the ants were now experimenting with various new leaves which they fed to the fungi; they were also attempting new architectural forms and even modifying their social structures, etc. It appeared as if they were thinking! Of course, no individual ant was really thinking — or at least that was not the most interesting kind of thinking going on. More importantly, it seemed the colony as a whole had somehow acquired this ability.

We believe three essential ingredients made this new development possible: First, through sheer evolutionary luck the ants had developed a slightly more complex means of communication. Then they systematically inculcated this new “languaging” to their young, forcefully “injecting” the new skill into passive but receptive “brains”. And finally, each individual functioned as a simple gateway, receiving chemical communications from other ants, processing them according to basic formicine logic, and responding as that logic required.

It is important again to recognize that no ant had any control over any of these stages: each individual ant could only “think” in the “language” it had been taught, could only use the “logic” it had assimilated, and could only process whatever information other ants passed on to it. If any ant had felt it was free to think as it wished, it was profoundly mistaken: another intelligence far superior to its own was (merely) “using” this ant to think for itself — admirably and creatively so at that.

Here the scientist paused to reshuffle his papers. He then concluded his talk without further glancing at them:

It is a great pity this new myrmecine intelligence has not yet come to self-awareness. Individual human beings like us might have been able to communicate with it. What feats it could then accomplish! How much more quickly it would evolve! But such a leap would require the colony to start thinking about itself, that is, individual ants would have to become capable of “comprehending” (passively processing) the idea of an infinitely more intelligent and powerful being that nevertheless encompassed them. However, we shall simply have to wait until some few lucky individuals blindly stumble upon this very idea.

New & improved superstitions

Inauspicious days, philters and  full moons no longer worry the superstitious of our age; science does — the flood of dubious, unverified, hearsay and inevitably contradicted studies about the heath and harm of this or that object of our passing attentions.

There might be one truth, but i’d rather approach it always from two directions.

From Freud and his uncountable children i learned the abiding power of myths and just-so stories: how their newfangled tales have transformed our souls just as profoundly as their more primitive forerunners once coaxed our ur-parents out of less human natures!

Individualism and nuclear families prevent people from achieving economies of scale in housing, child rearing and consumption; and so they remain dependent on a continuous flow of income (poor).

The middle class is encouraged to waste its income on consumption (cars, vacations, etc.) and dubious investments (houses), so it never accumulates wealth and remains forever dependent (unfree).

The wisdom of butchers

Sigmund Freud fled downstairs to see his friend the butcher after yet another heated argument with his father. “How do you manage to be so benevolent towards everyone all the time?” asked the analyst.  “It’s quite easy”, replied the butcher: “Whenever someone rushes at me with a demand, i never resist head-on, but simply pivot to the side. I find the spot where our interests meet and then position myself to make the most of it.” Seeing the dumbfounded look on Sigmund’s face, the butcher continued: “It is just like carving. I never hack at the bone: that dulls my knife and sends splinters through the meat. Instead, i look for the articulation of the problem to find the easiest cut, and if i cannot make it from where i stand, i move ‘round ‘til the spot is within reach, then i slice through almost nothing, and poof!, the piece falls off of its own accord.”