Love perspectives or kaleidoscopes of sense - Part ...

How do you change your perspective? By moving to another place. Love is that movement to another place, to another point of view. But it has nothing to do with empathy. It is not pretending to be in the place of someone. Love is never "as if". It is there. It is real. It fills the atmosphere around so that you can dive into the "other". The impossible distance between becomes a sea to dive in. It necessarily connects you and it is just because of the fact that you are in the same waters. The invisible waters becomes palpable in love. You feel you are connected. You feel the existence in the most intense way possible.

When this atmosphere constitutes the relationship of a group of people, living becomes something kaleidoscopic. Constantly changing perspectives from one person to the other goes out into the open and becomes visible in the common place. The connection itself starts to shape people who are connected. In the palpability of love when everything touches everything in every way possible, identity understood as something inner to defend, dissolves. Identity becomes the movement style to the other, the very coreography of particular movements towards one another.

Love, therefore, changes, shapes, constitutes identity of those who are in love. Identity is not a given through which love is lived. On the contrary, identity is shaped through the invisible atmosphere of love which surrounds people. It affords certain kind of approaches and not others. You have to trust the other for example, not because you have to but because it is impossible to do otherwise if you are in love. To conceive this and act accordingly, you need to be able to recognize the "sense" which is always there, inside and outside at the same time, or better put always in the middle. Always generating itself with the movement of the relations and in multiple places simultaneously.

Love expresses sense as it is. That's why it is common but not always easy to call love an illusion when you fall out of it. When fallen out of love, you are fixated and imprisoned in just one perspective again: yours. That spontaneity, that undeniable presence of multiple could only be remembered in a dim light which makes it look blurry, vague and less detailed than it actually was. It is impossible to see the past experience as it is. The world around you changes because you lose the connection to the invisible, to the very relationality of the world. Then, treating the experience of love as an illusion is a sad preference. Nobody ever can talk of this subject without having the expression of melancholy in their face. There was something before that they don't have now. Calling love an illusion is a lie which people tell themselves without believing it. If they are to survive they have no other choice than to "hide behind the coward explanation of cause and effect" (L. Cohen). Retrospective corrections -such as finding reasons to justify the actions of love- are made to adjust after-love-life. It is never easy since one cannot easily deny her own experience. This is the reason of the obvious and mostly rigid changes in lifestyles or perspectives. You have to change yourself after losing that sensation of multiple in such a way that this new self would itself be a denial of the big truth, of the sense of universe which is always multiple. The logic is to justify the loss. Such a justification is very dangerous aside from being sad, because it creates resistance to the experience of multiple in the future too. Thus, weak souls once in love, become numb for now and forever.

But this is just a stupid option that most people choose without even knowing what it is. It is just like ignoring the reality because it looks ugly or it makes you feel bad. You can always be honest and say: "I have lost the big truth but I still have hope to gain it back anew". You can always choose to repeat your "mistakes" because it makes perfect sense. You can always try to be strong enough to be the living example of the absurdity of life like Kierkegaard says even if you cannot manage to do it like "knight of faith" does in such a natural way. (For more from Kierkegaard on this subject, check out Fear and Tremble.)

Love is a glimpse to the order of universe for human beings. To be able to love is an ontological decision without the deciding subject.

Finally, I want to say that love is THE will to grasp the world as it is.

Love is the real philosophy...

Living in an international commune - Part ! (not a typo, it is an exclamation mark)

Inbetween languages there is again language itself. As if it refers to itself and by doing so making itself understandable. Very simplistic way of understanding this would be repetition which is different in every movement of repeating. Experiencing this fact knowing what it is, is just wonderful.

On the other hand, sharing things, in other words living in a commune is tricky. I can say that having an international quality ease things for a commune a little bit. Everybody is curious about the other so they let each other be in order to observe the other and having a sense of the other's ways of doing things. That's why this could be called a "community of individuals" if we are willing to let go the strict sense of being an individual. Because here there is a very vague shape of being individual. It is the culture you represent, the place where you came from what counts as the reason of curiosity in the first place. But I am not willing to surrender the beauty of being let free just because the reason of it affirms representation.

And it is not always the case either. I'd rather think that personal differences are recognized in a very short while. You can always see two Italians who don't like each other and rather hanging out with other nationalities. It would be logically correct to say that they are giving each other space to be free by being away of each other. But they still say hi when they see each other also. This wouldn't be happening in Italy, because they would not be obligated to live in the same environment. International student complex in which they will be living at least 5 months forces them to live in peace recognizing their differences.

Nevertheless it is a community which forces itself on individuals with its architecture. But this architecture is one of proliferation. It enables recognizing differences. Curiosity of the other becomes an expression of the architecture, through the architecture. Curiosity expresses itself much more easily.

Or all of this may be too much loaded with optimisim...

(I think it is not over yet)

Living in an international commune - Part 1

I have been doing this for a while. 8 months of living in an international student complex was the best experience for me while my life is breaking apart in every way. To come here, I had to let go all that I call myself. I had to break up with my 13 year boyfriend whom I lived with almost all my life. I ended up without a roof over my head, without a job, without any financial security. In short now I was a student without the security of a family too.

When you don't have a fixed identity -this is the definition of student, being in a constant flux, processing, being the process itself- it is very easy to make friends. Like children almost. If you have an attractive toy (a possibility of having fun, a promise), somebody definetely would come to you and say "do you wanna be my friend?" That's it! Now you have a friend with whom you can play with. Now I have 5-6 people I live with and share almost everything. But what is amazing about it, is that each of them comes from a different part of the world. They bring with them their language, in other words the atmosphere of their country. Very distinct qualities, sensations, feelings, colors... and while everybody is trying to understand each other, it is not the information about the country's ways of doings given verbally that enables feeling each other. What enables making sense of each other is the inbetween misunderstandings and jokes that come afterwards when the misunderstanding is cleared enough to see there is always something else to see. Another perspective. One that could not be thought while staying the same person, in the same identity. Constant shifting of the very grounds of understanding. Surfing in sensations. And in Holland, it is easier for the obvious reasons:)

(hopefully)To be continued...

Proposition #...

Everything happens in the middle of things, not to things or even of things... The middle is between things where we see nothing but a void separating things.

So to be able to grasp reality at its most, there should be no focus in the traditional sense of the word. The right attitude begins with a rather blurry vision.

Just like the crazy man in the movie Patch Adams - running around showing his four fingers, asking how many fingers are there and getting angry when he gets the same and sane answer which is four - we have to insist on a blurry vision in order to see the complexity of happening. At the end Patch comes up with the right answer: there are eight fingers when one is not focused on them but tries to capture the whole experience including the seeing eyes. This attitude may not be appropriate for all kinds of experience but it surely applies to some better than a focused attitude. Actually the insistence should be on seeing the complexity of happening. Blurry vision is just a consequence of it. It can be clarified. Slowly. Like a digestive process.

one must adore Douglas Adams' sense of humor

The world(s) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creates is one that embraces all the differences of singularities by suspending fixed meanings and significations. These singularities join together in a ‘present’ moment, a ‘now’ that can not be represented. Guide’s humor distributes itself through the concrete sphere of meaning and any subjective position that holds meaning and representation dissolves. Egos are decentralized, disseminating in another sphere created by the realization of the absurdity of our commonsense which says our meanings as well as meaning giving mechanisms are fixed.

In Douglas Adams' work, humor becomes an accident machine. It produces the effect and even the event of a crash. In the crash there is nothing but the event/coincidence itself.

Best thing I learned from all the psychoanalysis lectures

Laplanche's theory of emergence of "me".

First there is the world and a relationality with regard to it, only in a second moment closure of “me” happens. This closure is originated from the relationality itself. “Me” is a surface that projects other surfaces (human beings) in itself and contructs itself with these projection images. So this theory of “me” promises a resolution to the problem of solipsism since relating to the other is considered fundamental way of being. This is a fundamentally afiirmative way of understanding limits of subject and it leads to questions such as “where does the other end and 'I' start?” From the point of view of Laplanche's theory, the notion of limit ceases to be negative, but affirmative and productive.

Just a humble wish

If only everybody would talk without certainty, in an awareness of the reality in which nobody gets to say the final word. This is not a movie what we are in. Even if we picture life as a movie it is certainly not a Hollywood production (at least I hope so). I wish for statements that refer to the world, in other words statements that have a respect for the variety it contains since their condition of possibility is this very variety.

Proposition 1

Variety is fundamentally good.

This means that ethical judgements must be made with regard to variety of options, while options could be anything or anyway that enriches the world by supplying variety.

Options in themselves could also be categorized by the degree of goodness, in other words by variety range they offer. The final purpose for human being is, then, to be able to cover the larger area possible in life, qualitatively as well as quantitatively but with a respect to variety.

Respecting variety is essential to understand variety itself. To accurately recognize what makes something different than other things, what constitutes its special identity, we have to pay attention to every important aspect of it and we have to submit ourselves to its logic, its mode of being. This is the first step towards doing justice to life.