st.valentine's,as i have written before has been reduced to yet another sales opportunity.it sells a twee saccharine version of love and affection,in which human emotion is reduced to product and commodity.just as coin and paper and cheque and other forms of money are not the thing itself but an alienated and abstract representation of it,which in turn banalises human work and creativity into something transferable and exchangeable,perhaps human affection is headed the same way.that"token"-the card,the flowers,the chocolates....are not the thing itself,although i suppose as human beings we do still manage to squeeze something of the reality in there somewhere.one of the things marriage services remnd us of is that affection and love have deeper and more difficult aspects including"in sickness and in health"-through the difficulties as well as the bad time,although i still think a lot of it is distorted and alienated in the culture,the society we live in.for me,for example it"pushes"our feelings into"boxes"that do not neccessarilly fit,and it isolates those feelings,so that in many respects we become a bulwark against the world.for too many this hides violence and abuse which goes well beyond "in sickness and in health"
i have also written about a more muscular notion of love promoted i believe by Valentinus,who may or may not have been abstracted into valentines day.that was initially in the context of human affection being expressed within a wider community.however,that community would not look like today's society,nor would it neccessarilly look like the visions of some socialists for the future,as in the writings of Alexandra Kollontai.that too,is another story i might tell another time.
meantime,i will end this piece with another account of "warm fuzzies".there are a variety of tellings of this story.my version is remembered and abreviated from an account introduced to me by my friend Robert O.,told to me then in the context of a(radical)mental health conference.
imagine,then a society of human like creatures,possibly not unlike hobbits born with or carrying something like a backpack attached.each time they meet another creature they reach into the back pack and give their friend a warm fuzzy.....until someone spreads the idea that maybe the warm fuzzies are in short supply.that"idea"spreads the notion of scarcity,and each creature becomes more circumspect in its giving.....there are all kinds of negative possibilities here....but in time,i would guess quite quickly,eache time a creature reaches into their bags they pass on something that turns from warm fuzzy into a cold prickly.
.....and that's enough said really.it seems to me to be a metaphor for what happens in the world we live in.except the warm fuzzy turns not just into a cold prickly but has very real implications for the others in the transactions...the love becomes more conditional,and more and more qualified,restricted,limited.....we give less and we give less freely.
yet all kinds of things tell me it need not be this way.i am not pessimistic about this.human beings have changed things over time,often very radically indeed.what we make,we can make again,and remake.and whilst,i do not have a"silver linings"approach to life,i do believe that because life is paradoxical and contradictory and dialectical,that often our actions and our beliefs contain the seeds of something new,and often those new things are something approaching the opposite of what was before,and if not then they are a synthesis of the contradictions.
as i write,we are indeed living in"interesting"if not difficult times.as some of us meet to talk,organise,dissent,resist,struggle,make changes-whilst we mostly do not command the whole process,other things occur in the process of the tasks we set ourselves.and one of the dimensions in those dynamics is the potential to change,and perhaps radically the social relations and relationships we have with one another.
that is so for me.at least in some of the things,the activities i engage in now,i find myself less in formalised routine in which too much,too many of my interactions are formally proscribed and limited so that what might be presented as fomal care or concern,might be backed by a less than substantial human contact,backed nly by the good will and capacity of the individuals involved.i find myself more frequently in relationships which although they might occur in the context of human distress and may be embattled,those involved and engaged,are i like to hope,more open to each other,more welcoming of each others talents,creativity,and yes falibilities and frailties,perhaps the essences of our humanity.i am not utopian about this.the wider socio-economic system creeps into everything,and yet for now-the moment is indeterminate-we have the potential for something different.without being trite,the possibility that strangers are simply friends we have not met yet,might be an increasing posibility.
reflecting as i am,on what i am engaged in now,the very limits that might impose themselves make thesemoments even more precious,and present the importance of refecting on them in order to remember and value them.i also realise that looking back on my life so far,i have had a rich experience of this so far,though perhaps i did not know it at the time.
for me,i think in the last year of so the months are littered with such experiences.some of them were almost literally moments,some are ongoing.looking further back,there have been lean times,when retreating into family and close friendships has been a bulwark against the worst of the darkness.but then that too makes the richness of other moments all the richer too.that i guess is one of the paradoxes of human life.i'm glad however,that i have a lot fo those positive experiences.and i share them more now at least as memory and stories told,not to boast but in the hope that others will realise of their own experience that what we each take as ordinary and possibly banal,in the process of seeking what we see as greater goals,gives us experience which is richer than i/we think.
life itself,like revolution is process not event.and the means are probably just as important as the ends.the means have meaning and value in itself.
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