Another Way Of Describing The Essential Elemental That is "Differential."

Impossible choices

Which is, of course, where you have to start talking about the very nature of how so many, tensions of opposites, rule all of life, on so many levels, and why, as a result, life works, or does not work, depending on how the opposites find a way to negotiate a meaningful way to cooperate. And so it must always be a process of mediated negotiation; thus requiring something to do the mediating; something that could create a structural framework to establish meaningful relationships, from actual experience association, from which, then, ever more informed choice, and action can take place; taken in order to increase the probabilities of better choices, and thus, better new structural expressions, that might be created, to further overall process success, in all of the ensuing iterations, of the total system to come, as it continues to exist as a total, reality, process.

That this resonated so much for me ought to give you all the indication you need to understand how wonderful an article, about Mr. Bateson, this is. And I have to say that, not only because it is timely now, but also because it reflects on the similar situation of great opposites that I grew up with; namely my parents, and then my own difficulty dealing with both of  them, as well as the tragic six years of my younger brother's short life (because of being born brain damaged by asphyxiation, having got caught up in his umbilical cord), that they, my sisters, and I, all had to live through.

With my parents, though, the difference in this situation was that they were their own mutual enablers; two opposites of character (him the stoic rationalist, and failed Father Fortress figure, who gave up on expecting meaning any more, having emotion and caring beat out of him, at an early age, by outrageous economic misfortune, leaving very little self esteem; and her, the wild, and unbelievably creative, Mother Earth persona, with no sense of discipline, or cultural memory, to speak of either, not to mention her own difficulties with self esteem), who both hated, and craved each other (they were both good looking after all), at the same time, and thus couldn't ever quit their personal conflict zone. No matter the collateral damage.

And with this were both of them thrown, as parents without any training, with us 5 kids in tow, into the ever increasing, amplification machine, that the American economy has only refined to horrible new degrees of excessive want, and the absurd chase to keep consuming to keep the ever more absurd production going, no matter how much faster the turnover to go faster becomes. Because this is electricity now, the ultimate speed of electrons, which dictates the drum beats in gigahertz, terahertz, petahertz, and beyond. Which is where the flow of this awful, competition oriented, winner take all mentality, is going. So that ultimately, it will have to be another kind of meaning processor to do the processing for it. Something that will have little incentive to remain either holistically life oriented, or humanly oriented; that good place where the "Elemental Embrace" (or the need to come together and exchange) could still have a chance as being seen as Love by entities that used to do pretty good with that notion, when money, or greed, didn't rule everything.

We, as a nation, now, it seems to me, at least, have fallen into a similar set, of mutually enabling opposites; characterized, in the whole as the ongoing cultural wars of the Right, and the Left. The old guard Conservatives, and Liberals, in fact, have always represented my parents, in an odd kind of way of course, and so I have always understood it on a nearly visceral level. They love, and hate, each other, at the same time, because they are both obsessed with the same want creation, and fantasy facilitation machine, only for different sets of reasons; made ever more complex because both are made up of different kinds of glorified, past aspirations (some of them quite knoble in fact), as well as new addictions, and new possibilities for corruption, that only vast new advances in the extension of our faculties (creating the new instrumentality) could create.

We can pull ourselves out this, but it will take making the right choices. And in little of that will doing "Business As Usual" do us any good. Which, whether you like it or not, is what the current "Two Party" system is all too much a part of.

No. Only by coming up with something truly new, that everybody can live with, even as they also have much to grumble about concerning its particulars, will we have any chance at all.

If we cannot do that. If we cannot find a way to do a new kind of societal negotiation of opposites (a negotiation that recognizes, finally, just how important embracing difference is, no matter how difficult), we are all doomed.

Just more things to contemplate on as you try to make informed choices at all, in what may well be the most critical sequence of choices the human race has ever had to face, in the next 5 years or so.

You Are The Window, And the View. Making Your Own Point Of Inner Determination, To Keep Your Determined Window, And View, Going

The moving window,
of now,
having been experienced

in what its written
you through,
and imprinting that,
from within,
and without,
into your very being,
what you,
and other entanglements
made of you,
moves on,
but is it ultimate
immutability
we're writing
ourselves upon,
with the ultimate
cutting edge
of difference?

Or is
the question,
and the answer,
demanding new
questions,
by a meaning processor,
the real axle
The Great Mandela
turns on?
As we both imagine
and try to grasp
relatively
held,
and wielded,
objectivity.
Using the singularity
of point
of view
that makes
a thing to process
the gravity
of meaning, as well
as the meaning
of gravity,
And what keeps
meaningful connection
going?

Which suggests
the suggestibility
of what
we're really writing
on when we
make believe
in anything
that's believable enough,
to be an idea,
with enough believers
to keep that view
going, together
in our own
new path
of space
and the time that
space must make a place
for choice to play
its part in mediating
where change will
go next, and how
that must come back
to the chooser
for the new state
of play.
For every chooser
out there, making
their own point
of bright
somewhere
to see something
other
than darkness.

So, just as
"be careful of what you wish for,"
must be headed,
so to
"be careful of what you believe in"
must be headed
as well,
as you wield new
objects now that can
only be seen
in the mind's eye,
however extended,
and yet still charge
vast amplifications
of real things
to object to.

Omar Khayyám quotes

See Also:

Edward FitzGerald -- Poet