Famous Seduction Line

Love is messy by Sean Moroney

“…love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything…We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people… and die”  What Ronny said to Loretta in Moonstruck to get her into bed.  It worked.

Am I Just a Bag of Chemicals?

Well?  What if I am just a bag of chemicals?  I like to think I am something more.   Something more than water and empty space sloshing around inside an elastic container responding electrically to everything.  Suppose my consciousness and identity are just that.  Rapid electric firing of neurons that fool the body into believing it is more than the sum of its parts.   I open my mouth and sound comes out – so what you understand it.   You’re just the same kind of lifeless bag of sloshing chemicals that I am that gets the noise.

Yes I can buy it on a certain level that my so called awareness identity and very strong sense of self is just the chemicals telling me so.  Then I have about as much consciousness as Marvin the Robot and almost as depressed.

I'm So Depressed

Neuro-Bio Gems from Jonah Lehrer

I give Proust was a Neuroscientist an 8 out of 10 for its ability to provoke thought in me and allow me to contemplate on my own assumptions about creativity, genius and the mind/body split.    If I ask you to visualize someone who is creative and/or brilliant what sort of person do you think about?  Special K thinks of Leonardo Da Vinci.   I think of some young mathematician.  Often I think of some young person who burns out his or her flame brilliantly and quickly – like Rimbaud, Michael Jackson, or Boy George.  Athletes often fall into this category.  Their talents are external.  They are so obviously dependent on the ability of their bodies to perform according to a range of activity that is almost never available to our aging shells.

In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks writes about a forty-two year old man who after he was struck by lightening, becomes a musical prodigy.  Sacks loves to write about people who, at various points in their lives, because of neurological changes, develop talents previously unknown to them.  In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer instead focuses on established artists who reveal neuroscience through their art.  He explores where the body ends and mind begins and vice versa.  He asks what it means to be aware and conscious as human beings.   Personally, I tend to think that we are just a random collection of protein.  And that there is no distinction between the mind and the body.  My mind is in my toes and heart as much as it is in my brain. My brain is simply where the electronics gather to interpret.    About our experience inside ourselves, Virgina Woolf said: “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself “.   And in reponse to this process, Leher is comfortable asserting that “…only the artist [is] able to describe reality as it [is] actually experienced”. Here are some of the other ways that Lehrer describes that same experience:

…the mind is not a place: it’s a process.

The self is simply…the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.

Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.

When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is its stage.

Marcel Proust

Not That It Matters to Anyone But Me

Hol-ee.   3 Months. No posts.  Sorry folks.  Is all in my head actually. A running torrent of blog posts in my mind (or is that mind/body) that never make it to a blog that no one is reading.   I just finished reading Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Leher. If you are an artist, it is a must read.  If you are a writer, it is a must read.  Later this week I will provide some of my favourite quotes from Jonah Lehrer and his book.  Stay turned.

Nobitics and Mark Bernstein

I am at Podcamp Boston this weekend and at a sermon by Mark Berstein on Nobitics. Nobitics is the art of writing for yourself (ahem) or for a small group of friends or family.  Ok and he made up the word from the latin nobis a form of the pronoun us.  It’s meant to refer to intimacy.  He calls this particular blog of mine nobitic.  He refers to me as a self-described “ninja queercaster” who he thought didn’t or perhaps wouldn’t share her name. Well that would be because I am Ninja.  I think he missed that point.  I not just a ninja – my name is Ninja.

Happiness? I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Happiness.

I left a comment on Leesa Barnes blog : http://www.leesabarnes.com/happiness-is-a-choice-not-an-emotion/#comment-5546 after she called for all of us to write about happiness.  Happiness is completely overrated.  Don’t you think?  It’s a scam – it’s something the priests and rabbis and American revolutionaries say you should pursue at all costs. Why?  Why can’t I be miserable?  I love my misery. I love my pain.

Yeah well this is what I wrote:

“Three percent of the world’s population (check snopes and wikipedia – do not trust the ninja) are naturally happy. Money or good health apparently have nothing to do with it. Just gobs and gobs of serotonin jumping from neuron to neuron I imagine. For the rest of us happiness is choice. And for everything else – of course – there’s mastercard.

Not to diminish any of the other comments, but we women are famous for believing that doing for others makes us happy – that going within and finding our inner strength and loving ourselves are the keys. The men don’t have to bother with all that because at any age, a red sports car and a looker on their arm is sufficient to make them happy. They really know how to live in the moment don’t they? (at least 3% of them anyway). I kind of like being a curmudgeon – that’s what makes me happy.

Leesa made me happy tonight because she gave me this opportunity to gush about my despair.

Who Said It’s All Supposed to Make Sense?

When my therapist said, “Life is messy,” I was a little shocked.  No. I was a lot shocked. Not withstanding it has been said before by many scholars and other philosophers, who actually admits that?  Who admits that and is able to keep their sanity?  Who in their right mind admits that?  Admittance of that reality is enough to drive anyone of any intelligence and sensitivity right off the edge.  Well the reality, I suppose, does put a lot of people off the edge.  So now that I’ve heard it with such calm and matter of factness, I spend a lot of time wondering, Now what?   Now what do I do?    It’s all messy.  None of it makes any sense. I have to live with that, but how do I live with that?

You know, it makes sense to me, and when people want to engage me in discussions about the so called reality of God and its ability to protect me from chaos and mess, my response is a very indisputable one.   I’m a ball of energy mostly made of water and poo. That stops the God believers cold in their tracks.

No One is Watching

It stands to reason then that if no one is actually reading my blog and no one is, then I can be as candid as I like and write like it really doesn’t matter.   Not that it does matter mind you.  But I am an attention junkie so this is going to damn near kill me.