I've always wondered about that, as the act of verbalizing an idea or thought takes great heed, or affirmation, in comparison to our aforementioned perception of something.
But then again, my male puppy has been conspicuously intrigued by his own nipples. What affirmation of such a thought can be sustained?
Plithing ponderings.
I spent the last two days in an alcove between two semi-acutely ill patients. This is normal routine. Sit, look, watch, chart, and...repeat. Luckily and thankfully, I was by the window in the hole. Just a moment to catch a play-by-play liner of the crane man who moves the crane once before lunch and then once after. Other than that, he sits there. Maybe watching something, maybe just sitting. Probably watching, sitting, and farting...as all good humans play the part ever so well.
Where did it ever reach the point of sitting and watching another person sitting? A year ago this Betty would be in her patients' rooms-- talking, engaging with family, feeling friendly, feeling compelled that care involves persistent reiteration of one being "loved "and affirming one's presence of existence.
"If only they knew they were loved...", "If only they knew their special place here..." would be my motivators. Fear in my own heart that they wouldn't know. Which--yes, of course-- were readily progressed with the incessant conditioning of the Protestant ethic. And by no means was that a binding motivator. It was merely limited. And limited are we all!
It's different now. My care is different, as am I.
To usher in motion the very stillness within--this may be the most elusive and transient experience to inarticulately convey.
A tenderness that extols. A silence of being that evokes. A moving meditation.
I felt over these past few days all my insides stewing. Sitting there watching outside that window. Thinking how comforting it is to know someone enough to be at peace in silence, and to appreciate that words unsaid are most uncommonly felt and noteworthy.
I just reread Brave, New World, and it is one that channels new blood and oxygen to the brain. New sourness, and satirical provocation of how we are and who we are becoming.
Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty–they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
.......................................
"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability." His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.
The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning–for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.
"Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled on. "I want to know what passion is," she heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."
"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"
"Adults intellectually and during working hours," he went on. "Infants where feeling and desire are concerned."
How faint and yet toxic of a persuasion! That a means to an end-- an expedited end--whose goal of stability would transpire into an implorable and induced state of being. The obscurity! (Here, I feel similarly the bestial rage of Gibson in Braveheart...They may take our minds, but they will never take our freedom!)
And yet the thought is so instinctly engraved within? "But Betty, I know you're having a hard time. Just do what makes you happy." "Are you happy, Betty?" This advisory force is not solely and instrinsically hedonistic, but scarcely understood. It is tiresome and misguided, that indefinite and opaque term.
Like in an instance, I feel so intensely provoked to protest our very progression and evolution. Can we control it? Is their another direction apart from self-transcendence?
"A New Theory of Biology" was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." He underlined the words. "The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary." A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
