SINCERITY IS A MUSCLE, A DISCOURSE
     When truth is combined with love, in order to generate sincerity, sincerity has capabilities.. Both love and truth would like to make changes in the world on their own, but in their raw states are so powerful as to be blinding, or to be choking, or nauseating, -or whatever…! Not to mention that their pure states are not acheivable, so the invoking of either of them is problematic.

     But when truth and love are presented together to the other person upon a continuum and a person can either present more love (listening, nurturance, support, affection) or more truth (facts, arguments of logic, testaments of experience from the self) then the other finds ways of becoming engaged. Their sincerity becomes engaged. More truth at one moment as the love is activated in the other, then more love presented to recieve the other’s truth.

Equal amounts of Truth and Love:

Truth ————————x———————- Love

More truth: this can sometimes come off as harsh, cold, unsympathetic, or perhaps it will come off as informing, enlightening, empowering to the listener.

Truth ———x————————————- Love

More love: this can be taken sometimes as condescending, paternalistic or maternalistic, choking, or nauseating or conversly it might serve to validate the other person, to activate them to present their truth to the one who loves, or to present more love to the relationship. Love can multiply love, as we know.

Truth —————————————x——- Love

So sincerity is the ability to show others that your continuum is accessible, that you can present either more truth or more love, depending on the needs or desires of the other. When people judge that you are sincere it means that they have access to your truth, and access to your love.

     For people who are committed to opposing your end goals, there are always weapons to destroy your sincerity:  For instance, whatever you have said might be not truthful enough, it might not have encapsulated enough of the real situation and thus be deficiant, it might not have been stated in a clear enough way, etc. There are always ways to criticize the use of truth in an argument. And similarly for love, as any mother and father will tell you, there is at times not enough love for the child, its not the right kind of love, it stopped too soon, -or perhaps its become suffocating. Every parent can find bonding with other parents in complaining about their children complaining about them.

     So this is why we need sincerity and naturally attempt to create this in three dimensions: truth and love on a continuum within the never ceasing forward motion of time. Sincerity is the muscle that enacts truth and love to deal with the reality that the muscle known as the mind has created. Could we say that we have two muscles, both necessary, the creator of contradictions (the mind) and the untangler of contradictions, the reweaver of a reality that has depth and resilience (sincerity). Indeed, is sincerity the environment within which hope is held?

Notes for Study

what is study and knowing in community?

where is sex?

what is precarity?

and what is intimate committed relationship?

     Part of my approach agrees w Lacan in that the Real world is difficult and near impossible to maintain direct connection with. There is a scattered and confusing relation. Such that our everyday social reality is the most difficult place to actually comprehend and integrate into our rythems of life. We are farthest from everyday life, we live in an abstract realm, constructions of emotion and ideas like ivory towers far above and with regulated flows of information about and energy with/to this “world”. This is contrary to what life appears to be, to what we are told that it is, and quite alarming! OMG we have to be responsible for this interaction that appears to be everywhere and all the time?!? What do any of my actions and intentions mean where community is defined by its lack of an outside boundary? Could cities be constructions created to answer this conundrum? Loneliness meets The Ages. Theres a moment in the movie The Hunger when David Bowie contemplates the idea of living forever as a vampire, and he appears to be quite tired of it.

     So if everyday life is where the rubber meets the road, then face to face (f2f) discourse for me is the goal and pinnacle of study and the key to the future. However it seems also to be one of the hardest places to get to, an oasis of interaction. Could f2f be more of a longer term goal, a heaven we may get to someday, with much hard work of preparation and letting go? Gospel choirs singing “Better get ready, better get ready...“

     Because when we are face to face, in everyday life, theres so much to say, theres a feeling of lostness in finding where to start to get to the main points. “How are you?” seems like a good place to start, and as well a fine place to get back to along the way - with a grounding sort of feeling occuring. But other problems with f2f are for instance 1) the fact that we can’t all speak at once; 2) everything someone says raises topics that can go off into a splintered set of directions; and 3) we don’t really have time for it, do we after all? At least not when we are “on the clock”, and feeling the pressure of production.

     I’m interested in the idea of elders in community, which after all could be people of any age. Its more the idea of f2f production over the extent of time, and the embracing of understanding about what time has to do with everyday life. Everyday life obviously has an extension into many generations of us, here in community. Time collapses as we strive to understand where we are and how to get down from the ivory tower. Perhaps that would be the first question I would ask, to start the whole f2f ball rolling. Collapsing time?

     One of my favorite places I lived at was called Killtime, as in the Killtime Warehouse. it was back in the ghost town days of the late 80’s, early 90’s when almost NOTHING was going on in Philly, it seemed. There were like 2 clubs where indie rock lived, I think a couple of early artist coops were starting then: Vox Populi being one of them, still in existence today. The name Killtime was created because of the idea of just finding something worthwhile to do: we’d put on shows with local or out of town bands, hold art openings, do performance art, concept art pieces, etc. It was a blast, altogether, and many friends of mine remember those days. But the name Killtime led to noticing a simple maxim of life: that when people are having a good time, time goes faster and yet has more meaning. But when time is going slowly, things are boring and your environs start to seem like a prison. So when people are not having any fun, time goes slowly and lasts FOREVER. There is a direct connection between joy, meaningful interaction with the world and time.

     What is madness? So-called madness? We all live here, we’re all connected. I think we can feel it within the soul of humanity - whatever it is. We can feel the experiences of others in their words and ways. But, like a photograph, often we think that there is a frame around people, perhaps the frame stops at their body, or perhaps at their words, or perhaps at the meaning of their words. We look through the frame and accept what comes through it as a single message from the person. So we believe the meanings or we don’t believe the meanings, - we might judge their character and use that appraisal to decide wether they are presenting the truth to us. But I would say that within the inflections and body language of the person, as we know from recent science, there are messages and meanings. So in some way of thinking, everything a person says has truth in it. Even if they are telling an outright lie, they are sincerely saying it, for some purpose or other. It has meaning for them, at least, even if we can’t tell. Thus, it becomes hard to say actually what is true or false, and in a sense, wether there is such a thing as truth anyways. Or perhaps more accurately, wether “truth” is the most important thing that we are after. Perhaps we are after a meeting together of whole persons and more, the untold and misunderstood part of persons as well as the understood parts of persons. Many parts, and many mysteries...

     In this way a person, when talking, might have an understanding that they are not always being understood. They strive to find out what they want to say, while speaking. They might have an understanding that when talking to others they are also talking to theirself. So being with and talking to others is a process that is good for the individual, there is a commitment to follow through that happens, just by the simple act of conversation, story telling, or philosophizing. We might be forever apart from others but we are also talking to both the other and to ourselves. We are the talker and the listener. We become, in part, the conversation, listening to both of us. No wonder the frustration and the sense of sheer weight, (pushing pushing), when there is someone who goes on and on - full of themselves! Don’t they know the conversation can’t wait for all that good garbage? Get to the point already! There has been some entity created that has a pace and a mind and that entity would like the drifting talker to wrap it up because conversations can’t proceed on partial statements. End it already! We have a commitment to sense making going on here! Or humuor making, or horror making, or tradgedy, fear making, - meaning making. Or perhaps change making. We are talking to ourselves and to our self in the community and from the community as well. So many faces going on, its overwhelming at times. The spinning sensation.

     I, myself, haven’t encountered madness as being an actual ‘thing’. I’ve encountered many unsaid things, many misunderstood things, much emotion, and much lack of emotion where it seems perhaps there should be feelings. Or perhaps this way of looking at things is ‘madness’ in itself?

     I’ve met hospitalized people, who are mute, and wondered how they got that way and what they might like to say. I’ve been with shrieking people, screaming at the top of their lungs. I know also that there are serial killers out there who stalk and invisibly dissappear others. As well this humanity has used tools of destruction that dissappeared 129 thousand people: men, women and children at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, the Earth, in two moments of soul chilling, bone melting beyond words horror. Little Boy and Fat Man, August 6th and August 9th, 1945. So, in some sense, insanity seems relative, to say the least. I would agree there is stuckness, at the individual level as well as at the societal level.

     The book “Alice in Wonderland” has been striking me pretty dramatically in recent months. None of Alice’s experiences make much sense to Alice. And quite a bit happens. She wants in a determined way, and yet gets easily distracted. What does she want in the end? How would it be possible to want anything in particular, in such a world: the Red Queen shouting “Off with their heads!” at odd moments. Indeed, the initial motivation for Alice was that her sister’s book was insistantly boring: ‘“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” She is stuck in ‘the desert of the real’, as i like to call it, and yet has enough security around her to allow her fantasy to unreel. Her imagination sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat run close by her and then say “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” and then take a look at his pocket watch. Upon realizing that something extroidinaire is going on, she leaps up and follows the rabbit, and sees it “pop down a large rabbit hole under the hedge."

     Now a hedge symbolizes the fact that this is a field, on agricultural land, domesticated, and not a forest. It is a tended place, and she is following what seems untended within that spot, or perhaps what tends to its own interests. For being late is a very important thing to the white rabbit. And thus Alice enters some kind of dream-time. She follows the talking and tardy animal down a hole into the ground.

     Later she comes upon a house, with a Frog-Footman outside of it:

     "Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.

     ‘There’s no sort of use in knocking,’ said the Footman, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no could possibly hear you.’ And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.

     ‘Please, then,’ said Alice, ‘how am I to get in?'

     ‘There might be some sense in your knocking,’ the Footman went on, without attending to her, ‘if we had the door between us. For instance, if you were inside, you might knock, and I could let you out, you know.’ He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. ‘But perhaps he can’t help it,’ she said to herself; ‘his eyes are so very nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might answer questions— How am I to get in?’ she repeated, aloud."

     And thus we all go when we’d like to investigate madness. Which side of the door are we?And would we really like to go in?

     The question for me becomes not where is madness in the individual, but why does it seem to manifest in the individual and where is it in the community? Or is it located somewhere between the individual and the community, in the language and ways of relating?

And how does the ‘real’ Alice fare? Alice at age 20:

     Poems

She thought telling me once

was enough. I love you is

a hard thing to say but the law

requires it. Penalties can be

severe, if anyone cares.

We’ll take a poll and find out!

But hello is hard too, when I've

slept badly, wrestling with babies

who are dextrous and devilish.

They must have come right out of

church, those pious bastards.

Way too cynical for me, and yet

dedicated. So, if she ever

tells me she loves me again,

then I’ll believe her.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twisting straight enough to

throw a baseball into your mitt.

Made of leather, made of grit and

softened with sweat over the years.

You must try it! To know, you

have to try it yourself,

stand up there and twist.

Chubby Checker was a pop star

rivaling Beethoven for a NY minute.

But Beethoven

plays catcher,

calls the shots,

dreams big.

You pitch one

at a time.

~~~~~~~~~~~

     Submit to the barber

look good when you go in there

or they won’t give you a good one.

You can’t be serious

you’re coming from hell

on a pogostick

down a yellow brick road

looking for red shoes.

     Nullified by uglies.

          The worker knows all

     but can’t find the right words.

Homeless now orange road

red hot coals

ashes in her heart

my heart

without words.

You’re heart-less

without words.

I like it shaggy

I say sheepishly.

Cut cut snip snip sweep sweep

pay pay ...

     He drifts and bumps into

large objects, walks silently

out into the street.