Torrey Orton
August 9, 2009
I’m not smart enough to figure something like this out, but I saw it, as I do, when I first started working on trust 15 years ago, and latterly out of a viscerally convulsed reaction to the happiness stuff. My psycho-colleagues have commercialised it out of the natural course of human existence by slicing and dicing (analysis, if we area speaking scientifically) so that it’s “evidence-based” but contains no more truths about being human than Plato, Aristotle and a few religious types and poet playrights have had a grip on over the last 2500 years!!
Here’s what I found in a NYTimes blog, called “Happy Days” of all things, by a cartoonist who’s also a writer quite clearly talking about the growth of his professional / vocational self:
"……
But during the time I was actually focused on drawing — whipping
out a perfect line, spontaneous but precise, or gauging the exact cant of an
eyelid to evoke an expression, or immersed in the microscopic universe of
cross-hatching — I wasn’t conscious of feeling “happy,” or of feeling anything
at all. I was in the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently
achieve by any kind of deliberate effort: the condition of absorption. My senses
were so integrated that, on those occasions when I had to re-draw something
entirely, I often found that I would spontaneously recall the same measure of
music or line of dialog I’d been listening to when I’d drawn it the first time;
the memory had become inextricably encoded in the line. It is this state that
rock-climbers and pinball players and libertines are all seeking: an absorption
in the immediate so intense and complete that the idiot chatter of your brain
shuts up for once and you temporarily lose yourself, to your relief.
I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and
hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason
we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such
a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an
aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed
to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously,
fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted
vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick
out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space
just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. … "
From Averted Vision By Tim Kreider (emphasis supplied)
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/averted-vision/?ref=opinion
It’s really great to see someone else frame my thinking so finely… and we’ve never met and he’s probably young enough to be a son if I had one. Trust, too is an outcome, as are a host of values and virtues. The irritating thing is that the commercializers add another dimension of intervening conceptual mediation between the real object – which is living – and the questions which vitalise and direct it like ‘what’s it all mean anyway?/’, ‘how would I know the meaning if I saw it?’, and ‘how would I be sure it’s me who is finding it and not some caricature or simulacra thereof??’ Cuz, don’t we have enough intervening mediations thrown up by the commercializers already in the form of primitive emotional adhesions about sex and power and visual attraction and virtual affiliation with celebrity and on and on?
And it’s part of the analytic enterprise which is driven by techno-rational interests (see Habermas), that by taking things apart they can be illuminated in a way that transforms them into short-term learnables, tradeables, eventual subjects of ROI. It is forgotten that the acquisition of things like virtues and values of substantively applicable sorts is a life-time’s enterprise not a learning task in a curriculum. This is why business ethics is a joke,…but I rant.
No, I go on because the dream of technically solved needs overwhelms the possibility of finding / resurrecting them from the spaces between conscious life and the other than conscious. What would make them resurrectable would be continuing social practices of them, sustained in social structures (family, schooling and work come to mind) which are declining at a rate parallel to the failings of late capitalism.
This is another blog’s matters.
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