Reflexões breves

Do you really know what is important in life? Life itself? Beloved Ones? Health? Wealth? Knowledge? Vanity? Self? The body itself (as Schopenhauer once [indirectly] said)? What about career (of course, a successful one [joking])?

What if … some ‘futile’ detail is, in fact, something of paramount importance to you? I couldn’t, unfortunately, explain to you exactly what I’m thinking. I have the image, but I am not able to convey it in language (at least, not easily).

Ok, that doesn’t make sense. After all, if I have a blog, it is because I think I should materialize my ideas in this tiny post, right?

Well, yes. So, here you go: to grasp what is really important, you, paradoxically, has to go beyond your own [fantastic] self. Yes, the self is pure (necessary) illusion: time within brackets. It appears to me that the only thing that really matters is the “body” [by contrast to self-as-an-imaginary-instance] and, by consequence, the ‘here-and-now’.

Yeap. Whenever we, by means of your ‘mind’ (its power), transcend the actual life we’re having, then we are losing ground, and reaching, so to speak, the helm of the imaginary, the domain of what should be important (or should have been important [as fantasy]).

Two days ago my oldest dog had a collapse. I thought she had passed away. At that very moment, I had no ideas or images in my mind, only her (supposedly) dead body. At that exact moment, that body was the only thing really important, material, to me. Everything else, all the illusions of my self, were sent to the back of my mind. All of the sudden, they stop tormenting me. Do you see? The “événement” – something like “the event”. It took my breath away. The self, in that particular, singular and irreversible moment, was nothing. Three or so minutes later, my dog “came back to life”. I had no idea she was having ‘only’ a collapse (she has an early heart failure insufficiency), and not going to die. Then, life went back to its track, but this episode led me to think about what is important in life…

Capiche?

1. Speaking English is a sign of ‘intelligence’? Don’t be an idiot. This is only a question of where you’ve born. “English native speakers” are such a regular person as you.

2. You have a body, right? Of course, you have. Ok, so let’s take a geographic perspective. The ground is the reference point, ok? Then, from bottom-up, we have, (1) shit (your stomach and so forth), and … (2) your brain.

3. Around one “smart guy” (basically, someone that has managed to deal with valuable symbolical resources, because he or she is a professional hoax), there are always a lot of other “small guys” trying to benefit or be as “smart” as their “master.” As Rorty once said: only one or two are really innovative (intellectually speaking). The rest is only trying to copy and find some justification to fill the space between their foot and their brain (I mean: that thick layer of shit).

4. What if the cynism was the best (or the only) way to deal with the nonsensical conditions of modern (and, especially, academic) life?

5. Your life would be completely different if you could listen to music, take wine and, then (and only then), was able to use what is located above the shit-deposit I’ve mentioned before (of course, doing everything at once). The “raw” life is too much tough and meaningless to support.

6. Marx, I bet, is laughing in his grave. Because we think we are free spirits walking around the world. When you come to realize that you only need to render account to those who pays your bills, your feeling of being free (or captive) would much be more realistic.

***Final remark: we speak more than we should. Have you already realized how noisily the world is? I´m doing my part…

After some time here in Denmark, I came to realize a certain Danish cultural trace (at least this is what I’m able to catch as a foreign). Walking down on the street, it is not uncommon to be surprised by someone smiling at you. Yes, people that are completely unfamiliar to you can look at you and … smile to you! It has happened to me at the supermarket, at the park, and at the street. Typically, it is a glance of a smile, but even so a smile.

First, of course, I thought that it was something addressed to me. Then I started to check out which kind of person used to do that more frequently. The result of this rough “survey” was that older woman used to smile more often that the younger ones. Well, but eventually I was also gifted by some young girl smile.

In a self-centered culture, where the face is a proxy to, obviously, the self, I think my first reaction was entirely understandable. The person somehow only exists to the other when she is seen by the other. More specifically, when their eyes meet. Social encounters – like at public spaces – are ruled out by an impersonal code according to which, if my eyes turn out to meet your eyes, immediately I’m supposed to shift them away – for instance, to the sky or the other’s shoes.

But what should I think when in addition to eyes contact, the experience comes with a smile? Both as quick as lightning? When my eyes glance off someone’s eyes as we walk past on the street, a sort of “relationship” is immediately settled. What kind of relationship? Well, you feel like beeing recognized, but not as Pedro, a particular self (even if I’d prefer the opposite), but as a person like the other. Second, you may feel some kind of reciprocity. Levinas, in a book about the Face, said that the face (not necessarily the physical or even psychological one) is a way to “face” the alterity – but, in Levinas’ account, I recognize the other’s suffering face. Here what I’m looking at is a smiling face, something quite different from a suffering face.

Over time, I finally came across with a hypothesis, an explanation for this (I guess) typical Danish behavior. Smiling is as much impersonal as swift eyes away. Here’s my guess: it is the way that the local culture found to regulate the social behavior, the borders between the intimacy/strangeness. In the social encounters, I unconsciously tell you: “Don’t be afraid, I’m a kind person, and I’ll not hurt you.” But, in return, “I hope you do the same to me.”

My question is: what happens when someone wants to demonstrate some particular “interest” in someone else, as when you are trying to get on with someone? There will be a different nuance in the way they smile, or look at one another? Could be the opposite, I mean, if I’m interested in you as a singular person, should I “ignore” you, or maybe could I have any trouble in staring at you?

Plastic is, probably, one of the most ingenious discoveries of our advanced, scientific and industrial era. We depend heavily on plastic to the well-functioning of our daily life – a toothpaste tube, a medicine bottle, all the pieces that compound the computer I’m now using to type this post, plastic bags we use to pack our stuff – there are so many applications to plastic-made objects that would be hard to sum up here. In a word: I can’t imagine our life without plastic.

But is well-known that plastic can be, at the same time, one of the worst enemies of nature. Plastic is difficult to degrade. And if we add to this characteristic the fact people are sometimes irresponsible in the way they throw out their no more useful plastic objects, then we can imagine the problem. Indeed, each year, tons of plastic debris are simply dumped into the ocean – the natural habitat of many species of seabirds.

One of these birds is the Laysan albatrosses. What a gracious creature!

These birds have a long wingspan, and they fly vast distances without flapping their wings. They can also spend years without touching land, living for more than half century. As if were not enough all the threats we human beings are causing to their environment (breaking the balance of their habitats), now they face a new menace: tons and tons of plastic that are dropped into the ocean every year. The problem? A recent study shows that this plastic is confused as their natural prey. This happens due to a chemical process that misleads these birds – the plastic debris generates a dimethyl sulfide signature that is the same trace these birds use to identify their ‘food.’ The result: they swallow this debris and then…. they die as a consequence. The photographer Chris Jordan has captured this tragic outcome in images like the next one.

I know. I know. While this is happening, you are concerned with your life. What is the value of the Albatrosses’ life? Your son is infinitely more important. The paper I’m struggling to publish right now is more important. Even what I’m going to eat next is more important. Who, in the so-called “First World” is concerned with the destiny of the plastic waste they produce? Most of the people have a shit for that. And so we in the “developing countries”.