Of course, it's only a movie.

Trawling through the 200 odd pages of movies I came across one called genius and, it kinda stands to reason, something like that is going to interest me, I've had that thrown at me often enough, not for a while thank God, but enough in the past I've found it intriguing.
And the movie had quite a low IMDB rating, which was interesting given the cast, and was about a writer, one I'm not familiar with but that's not surprising as I'm not only not well read, in the sense of understanding these things, but I'm also incredibly forgetful of any ideas about what rates in society and what doesn't, I have my own way of looking at things... which, tinkle, tinkle, you might already sense where I'm going with this.

Yesterday I had a dose of what's unmistakable for me though just washes off. Had a look from someone, they had a feeling of recognition, started out as something else but in coming up through them was, as usual, directed without much cognisance, once it surfaced, well, perturbed by the imbalances most feel as a kind of fear between intellect and emotion... nothing I can do about that, at all, so, as I said, just washes off. This leads quite nicely into Thomas Wolfe but I still have to widen it out.

Later I'm coming home and remember that big ol' tree that's still there on the edge of the water between Otahuhu and Mangere. Normally it's just big and massive, doing it's own thing, but this time i'd somehow managed to notice these other biggies leading up to it, spaced out across and through which was my ol' stomping ground, that curiously wild place where I grew up and every so often go gliding on through.

So this big ol' tree had been hit by a car, a car I'd been following way, way back when I was maybe 16 or so, maybe a little older, and coming the other way, meaning coming from Otahuhu, most probably a early winter night as it was dark and I wasn't. at that age, out too late, and so I'm following this car, we're just going past Pacific Steel, and I can feel a dread from it, maybe mounting maybe sudden but I start to back off, give it some room. It's a Mark 3 Zephyr, not straight but a bit hoony, bit of a hot rod, South Auckland styles of those days, and the distance between us lengthens and I start to feel comfortable again, kinda have room to feel whatever it was in a sense of it being clarity though I'm still decades away from even knowing what that is, and it's not quite mournful and not quite angry as there's a crazy edge to it, a scattered and frenetic jarring cacophony but there's a distance now so it's almost like I can be curious but then, of a sudden, it just ramps up, this, I'd suppose, psychic phenomena and with that whomever floors the accelerator, a rush of blat from the exhaust and then the big metal is aimed across the road and, within milliseconds, has smashed into the tree and part of me, feeling the whole thing as violent and dangerous, just goes 'you fucker, how dare you even begin to make me a part of this' which, and here I'm kind of assuming, but not too much as I've always had this, has me throttling up myself and getting home to ring the powers that be.

I mean I'm only 16 and completely uninterested in knowing what a sense of responsibility is at least in the sense of being societal and only really curious about how what I feel fit's in and I just felt bully, like this selfish fucker had taken a swing at me, minding my own business and this 'out of the blue' aggravation just isn't worth any effort.

And It's South Auckland, not that that's an excuse, but when you're a skinny white boy there's certain things you learn, certain way's of being that aren't just about being in the wrong place but if the wrong place finds you there is a quite certain way to respond, despite what hurt might be, which needs to be understood.

Why I say that is because I got home and rang the 111 and said what I'd seen and was almost immediately told off, like why didn't you stop and see what you could do to which, and here we're getting into details and who the fuck knows what I replied but somehow I seem to remember saying something or other that got me off the hook and put him on the line back on his own.

So early years having what might be termed psychic sewage thrown at me but this wise ol' deep voice that reckons towards having to wade through it and see what my validity is against drawing up the terms of engagement and so yesterday I get this feeling, a by now quite obvious refrain, from this woman standing in line at the flash place to buy food and know exactly what it is but too, there's the responsibility, which both is and isn't, that if she's gotten this old, late thirties early forties, and still doesn't know then not only is there nothing I can do but doing anything, given it's taken this long, will just dig the naivety deeper.

Ah, but no... jump on out. What I do, what anyone is, feelings go back in, not to be suppressed but the simplicity of just allowing, say from my end, that's part of it. A little of how I am potentially adds itself to what she is feeling as it does what it all does.

Back then to Thomas Wolfe and the movie called Genius and maybe why that isn't a statement and might be a question?

An interesting part of the movie is when Tom and the editor start cutting all that is seen as not to the point, discussed as overly flowery, even ostentatious, so the point can be made. And that's kinda interesting and maybe it's about the fine line if there even is a line. 'Cause when one does the work, gets attuned as it were, and eventually as it's not an easy commitment then it often isn't about getting to the point so much as allowing moments to be so wide and so full that even knowing there might be a point needs forgotten.





 

Karma?

I think that starting a post and calling it karma, about karma, might be wrong simply because the same reason people might misrepresent karma, and indeed have others then misunderstand it, is actually, within what karma is, exactly why it is misunderstood.

Mainly in the west it is understood as cause and effect which is quite good except the way in which we come to our sense of how things work, through Christianity and an all powerful God, has so permeated all cultural 'action', with even those whom might call themselves atheists being so inclined, that how a Buddhist might understand karma simply cannot easily be understood by a westerner.

But there is hope and especially within the science of psychology and most determinately within the study of trauma which, in it's simplest form, states that traumatic experiences reconfigure both the neural cortex and nervous system to the extent that action in the world is from this default status.

Though to even give psychology a context we have to go back to the age of enlightenment and even, perhaps, a little further into the beginnings of liberalism and the reformation and not for the advances it gave us as regards progress so much as what we brought with us without regard as to the underlying perceptual framework in which we saw the world.

This is to say that even as more people learned to read, which essentially was the reformed church and the printing of bibles which allowed anyone with extra currency, and that in itself is a telling story which needs some expansion but I'll leave it for now, to have their own copy of that book and study it beyond the system of Catholicism which determined how it was understood from the pulpit yet that determination of authority, the pyramidal structure of leaders at the top, was ceded into even as information and ideas worth discussing started to move alongside currency and trading of commodity which interestingly, as scientific exploration began to make it's mark, it too was unquestioned as to the pyramidal structure of what authority is.

And then if we, and it isn't really much of a jump, apply the same set of principles of trauma that psychologists are advancing as to how trauma resets the neural pathways and nervous system it isn't at all difficult to apply the same sense of the resulting liberalism which created the age of reasoning, the birth of science called the age of enlightenment, was quite basically a societal reaction to the trauma inducing action of the authoritarianism of Catholicism and it's modelling of the human psyche of God as all knowing.

This though allows us, somewhat, to blame the church, have them as responsible, though what was it, what is it, within this dialectic of the singular and the group which keeps what is essentially the power of decision going upwards, a passing of the buck as it were, that responsibility, and even what that is becomes a trickle down effect?

So this is principally why something like karma is misunderstood in the west simply because how we see our ability to effect change and view consequence is always mostly about determination beyond us. Because authority is always beyond us and our sense of action is always little more than a allocation of what is allowed, a reflection of ultimate authority determined by our own sense of what we can and cannot authorise, then we are only able to see cause and affect at the level of the physical which, within the modern world, is compounded by the nature of consumerism to the extent that cause and effect is yet again mirrored outside of ourselves as choice commitment to our ability to acquire.

But what happens now is that we'd actually have to go further back, possibly look at how the Christians came, as it were, to found the Roman Catholic Empire as a building consensus within what could have been the dissolution of the Roman empire, keep going back to some original experience of the western human family but what is really happening is that I'm am being authoritive and telling whom might be reading what I believe is this or that. I am essentially creating a fabric of potential, a construction designed to be stable, to take all the various pieces and lay out a table of contents which can be understood within an already relative set of intellectually understood as useful frameworks and added or subtracted, as needed, to the overall construction of human understanding.

I am basically bargaining what I have constructed, my not necessarily original set of fabrications, as a depiction of what my authority might be. Now, within our understanding of this consuming, we all have the given right to pick and choose what we add or subtract to our own sense of what reality is, but often completely unquestioned is that we all do it, we all keep looking for the authority, the authoritative, and this, in essence, still completely and utterly is the building of pyramidal structures of what power is and can be.

And then what modern psychology might be getting around to telling us, if and when we get around to provisioning the singular as the group and vice versa, is that this is our ongoing trauma, that this always alluding to what authority is, always being told and acquiring the told at our discretion is merely recreation of the trauma creating our world in reflection. Therein not the fault of authority itself so much as how we view what authority even is.

Which brings us right back to karma which, in eastern philosophy realises, as psychologists are beginning to give much more credence to, that the principal cause, which creates effects, is subconscious and that all practise to understand consciousness is to render that which is subconscious and unconscious of conscious awareness.

And then too it isn't authority within the modern western or our lack or own authority so much, as the authority is merely a polarisation, but that other pole of the subconscious, both singular and at levels of what group is, potentially needs us all reckoning of the pivot on which it all swings.