Have You Seen Dignity?

 

Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve

Somebody said dignity was the first to leave

 

During the middle of the 1980s Bob Dylan was suffering from a crisis. It had been a few years since the latest time he had revolutionised and changed popular music (look at a timeline of popular music since 1960 and you’ll generally see at the beginning of every shift a Dylan album surrounded by a lot of negativity from fans and the press) and been vilified for it. Indeed, it was such a dark time for Dylan that he considered going into business, something he quickly rejected seeing how the business world operates. The experience, however, gave birth to a new collection of songs which, combining for the first time with the producer Daniel Lanois, gave birth to the album (one of my favourites) Oh Mercy with lyrics such as:

 

We live in a political world

Love don’t have any place

 

One of the things which people find curious (and express rather forcefully) about Dylan is that a lot of the songs that he discards from his albums are brilliant songs which should be on the albums. The reason why they are discarded is obvious, because Dylan makes albums and not just collections of songs, however, this does not diminish their quality. One such ‘outtake’ from the said album found the light of day in the 1995 Dylan MTV Unplugged album, a song named Dignity.

The brilliance of the song is that it is the narration of a nameless person who is travelling around looking for someone called Dignity and, in every situation, the narrator finds, o, they just missed Dignity:

 

Searchin’ high, searchin’ low

Searchin’ everywhere I know

Askin’ the cops wherever I go

Have you seen dignity?

 

Yet it is not just the narrator who is looking for Dignity, it seems many people are regardless of their station in life:

 

Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel

Thin man lookin’ at his last meal

Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield

Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass

Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass

Poor man lookin’ through painted glass

Sick man lookin’ for the doctor’s cure

Lookin’ at his hands for the lines that were

And into every masterpiece of literature

Blind man breakin’ out of a trance

Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance

Hopin’ to find one circumstance

Of dignity

 

However, as with all secrets there are those who don’t know and those who know (within the mortal plane, that is, for as Leonard Cohen wrote about higher matters: ‘If something won’t open\Don’t mean there’s a key\Don’t mean there’s a secret\They’re keeping from me’), for what else makes a secret worth knowing yet those who do know seem to fear the truth of what they know:

 

I went to the wedding of Mary Lou

She said, “I don’t want nobody see me talkin’ to you”

Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew

About dignity

 

Yet if one continues on one’s quest one will find people who truly know and want to tell the world yet, as with all truths, unless you know the truth you cannot understand the truth:

 

Tryin’ to read a note somebody wrote

About dignity

 

Yet, finally one finds the truth, and that is the truth is the beginning of the journey, for even if one is shown the truth and understands the truth there is still a long way to go. And what is this truth? Well,

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed

Dignity never been photographed

 

Now, I can’t speak for Mr Dylan and what he means but it is possible that the picture the narrator is shown is a mirror and with this the narrator laughs at the truth of the divine comedy, that Dignity is not someone scampering around ever just out of reach and out of sight, rather Dignity is someone who resides within us all and, instead of looking at the world and cursing and complaining, we should look at our selves and seek the Dignity within us, especially at this time of year when we give thanks, over indulge and then make vague promises to be better, maybe we should enjoy the season but in the next year or so resolve to seek Dignity not in others or the world but rather in ourselves. It won’t be easy, but surely that is the point of the season? The quiet Dignity of the donkey carrying Mary, the quiet Dignity of Mary carrying the child, all of which were prefaces to the life of one who lived with a simple message, everyone wants to be treated with Dignity, everyone deserves Dignity even if

 

So many roads, so much at stake

So many dead ends, I’m at the edge of the lake

Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take

To find dignity

 

 

Merry Christmas

 

‘till next time

Context, Meaning and Truth

 

Two thoughts which have existed within my head for a while have finally met each other. In hindsight it was obvious that they would meet but the meeting only happened recently. The two thoughts were:

 

• All meaning derives from context.

 

• It is not possible for an individual to know the ‘truth’ of something objectively as all thought is subjective as we cannot separate our perception from ourselves.

 

We often here that there are ‘two sides to every story’, I have long maintained that this is erroneous and there are an almost infinite number of sides to each story for each person, depending on the person’s context within that moment. What do I mean by that? Well, if someone recounts and experience in a moment of anger then it will be perceived and told differently if it has just happened and the wound is fresh than it will be if the moment of anger and recounting happens years later, once reflection has happened or, if not that, at least some time has passed and the wound is less raw, even if retelling the story opens up the wound again.

 

We, humans, live in the delusion that we alone know the truth and that this truth comes from context. However, as I finally pieced the two together (I didn’t even realise they were related, more fool me) I realised that context itself is wholly subjective, so instead of saying that all truth comes from context, one must say that one’s own truth of the situation comes from one’s own context, thus rendering the truth that all meaning derives from context false as the truth cannot be known and thusly meaning, which is not inherent in truth, cannot be found or be accurate.

 

This is not a shocking or stunning revelation. Martin Heidegger writes in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that things must disclose themselves to be in a genuine state of being and, ‘the Greeks saw this character of truth…but covered it over with theories’.

 

In this we can draw a direct parallel with Plato’s notion of the world of ideas, in which the perfect forms reside, and what we see are only shadows of the forms on a cave wall. However, the problem still remains. Even if something was to fully reveal itself, that is to say, to be in a genuine state of being, we would still be perceiving it subjectively, so no matter how open it is, how much it resembles its own truth, we would still be only viewing shadows on a cave wall or viewing, as is written in the Judeo-Christian bible  ‘(seeing) through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ (1 Corinthians 13:12) and as the quote goes on to say, it is only when something is viewed away from the inherent biases of perception can we see its truth, even if then its context and meaning lie far beyond our ability to perceive let alone know, comprehend and understand.

 

‘till next time     

How To Conquer Problems: Becoming A Master

 

One theory which I had drummed into me whilst in Academia was that philosophers, and indeed all walks of life, encounter problems, theories and, as with Jacob and the Angel, one must wrestle with the problem and defeat it. I was also told that every revolution can only happen with bloodshed and an act of violence. Coming from people sat in comfortable offices who taught that which they had been taught themselves this seemed rather peculiar for if they were really philosophers, as they claimed, why were they sat in comfortable offices on good money exporting someone else’s ideas without personal experiential evidence.

 

It seems, undeniable, that some form of violence must come into the dealing of problems but the thought that this just take the form of a violent and bloody overthrow seems misguided. Most problems that one encounters are within or are external problems dealt with from without. Often when dealing with changes of the status quo it is some internal struggle which gives rise to it, it can be as banal as Rosa Parks, a black lady sit in the wrong part of a segregated bus, simply being too tired to be arsed with moving or it can be as dramatic as a revolutionary coming forth and preaching that the old way is the wrong way to thousands of people. Yet the real battle does not come from society but rather comes from within each person. The thought that there is a profound snapping moment is absurd as such things rarely, if ever, happen. Rather change is incremental. One gets part of a notion and mulls it around, consciously or unconsciously. Eventually the increments build up and then the ‘snapping point’ comes and what seems like a massive seismic shift is actually the straw which breaks the camel’s back, that is to say the final stage of a series of incidental moments.

 

From this we can deduce that one does not fight with one’s problems, rather one immerses one’s self in the problems, one swims in it and, depending on the person, some try to go down as deep as they can whereas others happily tread water on the surface.

 

To become a master of one’s problems, to obtain full mastery, it seems that one must try to go down to the very depths of the said problems and only then can one understand the problem and understand the nuance, thus can start to obtain the wisdom to become the master of the problem. The fact that few are willing, and/or able to do so, gives a good indication of how a status quo can be crated and maintained and how, any revolution no matter how bloody, can only create the same situation which created it itself as those who lead the revolution are content to stay on the surface  rather than delving into the depths, running the risk of full consumption and/or drowning, to obtain mastery of both the problem and, more importantly, themselves.

 

‘till next time

The Small Things

 

We live in a day and age of hyper hype. As I have maintained in these pages before it is completely wrong to blame Social Media for the state of the world and society, they are just tools (be it Facebook, Twitter or even WordPress where you are reading this) and as with all tools they depend wholly on the user. One thing which Social Media may bear some responsibility for, although the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves, is the hyper focus on one issue at a time. Issues rise in society and one sees much concerted effort being channelled into the one issue and then the new flavour of the month, the new hype, comes along and what came before lies forgotten. The saddest, well one of, aspects of this is that the issues which arise are not new. In the last year or so we have been witness to  a movement called #MeToo where women and men, yes men too, nothing is made in isolation and both men and women have been making concerted efforts against sexual assault even if that is not reflected in the media and the notion of ‘all men are bad, they all generalise’ (umm), came forward to say that sexual assault is wrong. When #MeToo broke two things were rather surprising to me. 1) when an actress came forward and said ‘Harvey Weinstein broke into my boat at Cannes and when I woke up was standing next to me masturbating’ the response she got at breakfast was ‘that’s just Harvey’ showing that such knowledge was well known prior, leading to Plato’s noting that ‘your silence is your consent’ (more in which later) and 2) even though one of the highest profile cases which got the proverbial ball rolling was a male actor speaking out about the sexual assault he suffered as a minor from the actor Kevin Spacey the male role as the victim was quickly forgotten as it became a women’s crusade, supported by men. This showed, quite clearly, one thing, our perception of things is subjective, and we view the entirety of creation from the perspective of us like opera singers penning our memoirs ‘Me Me Meeeeee’.

 

One of the big issues this month (Nov/early Dec) is domestic abuse. A staggering number of people (women and men) suffer from or have suffered from domestic abuse. This can be psychological, sexual, physical and so on and so forth, each as evil as the last no matter how innocuous it may seem. That this is being brought to the public attention, even if just for this ‘news cycle’, is a good thing, no doubt, but here is the wider context. Many who are shocked, repulsed and completely against domestic abuse happily watched the 2018 football word cup in Russia. Sporting events are a wonderful source of soft power. A nation/people can do terrible things but as soon as a mass escapism event comes it is all forgotten. Brazil had its slums painted to be attractive to football tourists and is now in an economic slump (and has just elected a President from the far right who wants to cut down the Amazon rainforest) after having spent most of its money on football stadiums miles away from where they could be useful, China’s human rights violations were overlooked for the Olympics and the next world cup is in the footballing legacy giant…Qatar. During the year of the World Cup, the Russian government repealed laws protecting women/men from domestic abuse. Now if your partner decides to play a round of golf with your face…meh, yet all of the people who always or are now shouting #MeToo or that domestic abuse is bad took a break from their moral outrage to go ‘yay, go sports even though I don’t like it normally, did you see Neymar dive, not that I know what a Neymar is…’.

 

It seems, as illustrated above, that our ability to care is directly in proportion to how it effect/affects us personally and if it is something which effects/affects others then as long as my own interests (even ones as asinine as film and sport (note: I’m a big fan of both)) are not impacted I may pay attention to it.

 

Genocide is something which is hard to define or show or prove etc. but I would argue that many people dying for a not particularly good reason constitutes in genocide.  Over nine million people die each year from starvation (that’s 9,000,000 you or me’s) in a world which has too much of everything. If nine million people died each year from a single war/person/group this would be called genocide but as it is a small thing which does not capture the public imagination (except every 20/30 years or so with rock concerts) most people neither know or care and as it does not effect ‘me’ personally then, well, meh, the same people who get upset when a historical document says ‘a man can’t live by bread alone’ (focusing on the word ‘man’ and not on the notion of sustenance).

 

Millions of people are dying each year due to the indifference of the you’s and me’s so just to leave you with a quick question, if millions of people are dying from starvation, and we are throwing away food, are we complicit in genocide?

 

‘till next time

Thank You