Blog the tooth: goal seeking

I didn’t post the first blog yet, as of writing. This would be blog post number two, in the order of creation. Perhaps a collection of posts before the initial release. Certainly feels like procrastination, but it’s not foot rot, at least. The topic of this post is goal seeking, but only from the narrow perspective of what are to be the goals of my posts. That sort of thing. It starts out uninspired. That is John groping in the wilderness. There’s always language lurking. A big language question is: what does the word mean in the context in which it has been used? Another one is: where the bloody hell are we? Comedy seems to me to be itself a question of language – the use of language as a way of coming to terms with something; or as a way of solidifying one’s encompassed personality within social constraints.

The wandering of John the Baptist can be understood in terms of remoteness. No mod-cons, no contact with the outside world. He had his followers, and they may have come and gone, but my guess is that John was not interested in society. He ate locusts and wild honey. He could not have been portly therefore; on the contrary, he would have been scraggly, angular, lethargic. He did baptise people though, so he can’t have been that far from civilisation; it’s just that civilisation in that area, at that time was fairly basic. I can imagine most comfortable lives today, if one were to be transported there overnight from the Bay Area, Merced, Highland Park, Seminole, Sarina, Decatur, Progresso, Cora, Glengarry, Beaverton, Edmond, Corolla, Littlefork, McKinley, Stacyville, Alden, Milo, Jerome, Green City, Gilbert, Lubbock, Kitty Hawk, Gumneck, Saxapahaw or Bar Nunn, one might feel a very remote distance from civilisation indeed.

Which makes me think; if Joe Hallenbeck (played by Bruce Willis), was the last boy scout, was, in fact, John the Baptist, the first? I did actually look up some Bible verses this time, and one of my nagging doubts has been laid to rest from Mark 1:8, ‘I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ The churches are insistent on getting baptized with water, and I am resistant to that – think it a relic, and there it is, clear as a bell. Water is a placeholder just the same as circumcision. It’s not required no more.

Since I went to the Bible once again, as I did the last post, I ought to explain my faith a little. I am a born again Christian, a disciple of Christ. God saved my life when I asked for it to be saved; into the bargain I promised I would follow Jesus Christ for the rest of my days, and beyond. As soon as I knew I was saved, I felt an overwhelming sense of buyer’s remorse that lingered on for months.

Notwithstanding, I saw no other way but to keep my end of the bargain. It hasn’t been easy, but it is what it is. My life is defined now by my discipleship in Christ. I am predictable in that way, but according to my interpretation. I am a protestant, therefore, and have no man standing between me and God – save the historical examples as written in Scripture, of Jesus of Nazareth, his immediate disciples and the rest of the cast and crew of the Holy Bible. I don’t believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible for the fairly obvious reason that language has both a time and a place context. Since both time and place are relative, the reader – that is to say, the interpreter of the Bible – is in no place to understand passages in a literal sense. He can only understand the message from his own lived experience.

Now, there can be an argument that people should be guided in their interpretation of the Bible, which requires fixed understandings. That seems to me the main tension in any body of works. Even Marxists, with a much more current situation, have difficulties. That is the terrain, not the map. The next breath can be any of ours, our last. That would change everything for you if it were to be your time up now, wouldn’t it? Multiply that single variable through time and space. Now add some more changes. Do we even have a connection to yesterday, let alone the time of our greatest inspiration? For me, a lot of argument, that is to say, disagreement, is derived from frustration – not being able to see clearly. This is the nature of our condition. One reason to be more gentle with reprimand and judgement.

The material versus the spiritual. I might have to work my way up to that. Coming soon. Maybe. Alright, so I’ve cleared that up, my belief in God. One criticism could be, that in the space where I’ve rejected the literal, I must define a relative position. Have I fallen into a trap, and must now rely on relativity even for morality? I think this is a semantic issue primarily. The conflation of relative with arbitrary, and literal with absolute. I will only briefly treat this for now, and may return to it as a precursor to contrasting Jesus with Marx, although that would mean reading Marx, which is yet another reason I’m dubious of Christian leaders. You need about 100 pages of New Testament reading to get comfortable with Jesus, but probably 3000 pages to get comfortable with Marx, and even then, you’ll be persistently chided for not reading the other six million pages that fully encapsulate the Marxist canon.

That should be the easiest sell in the world. If I had been a Christian leader in my twenties, everybody would be Christian by now. It’s so easy to covert people to Jesus, because it’s Jesus – it’s like being a Ferrari salesman, except instead of costing an arm and a leg, it’s highly affordable. Imagine your job is to sell brand-new Ferraris for the price of a ‘93 Ford Bronco. Since I’ve started so late, I’ve lost my youthful edge, and I’m cantankerous, I’ll be lucky to convert my cat, but I’m trying. I’m only joking, I don’t have a cat – it wouldn’t convert, so I tossed it. Only joking. Jokes. Just jokes.

That’s the problem these days. You say something, somebody reacts – gets the police involved, and, ‘hey nonnie nonnie,’ now you’ve been strip searched, thrown in the back of a paddy wagon, tenderised, and get to spend the next three years behind bars. It’s bad out there. Beyond Thunderdome bad. That’s another reason to suspect the rapture has already taken place. But I digress, and yes, like anyone else, I have to contend with my own arrogance. I don’t really think I would have converted every single person on the planet, I just think Christian leaders aren’t trying very hard, and they have the easiest conversion job of all. Hardest at the moment would probably be recruiting soldiers into the Ukrainian army.

Back to wherever I was before – maybe I was going to define some terms? We have, at law, many examples of the arbitrary. Age restrictions are among the most identifiable. Licensing is another, that is to say, permission to do something hangs on the right paperwork. Time and place feature as well. When and where is one permitted to do an activity, and who the person is, by legal status. A male? A female? We are at this time, contending with this situation at the political level, in a fairly uninspiring way, but it is happening. I don’t really want to deal with the political. Not only is it contentious, but I’ve never been impressed by it. Carlin talked about the big club, and while it’s true, I haven’t been invited either, I’m not so sure I’d accept an invitation. It’s not really the cool club, it seems to me. Now, for a Christian, that might be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and so you see, I’ve got yet another reason not to consider politics to much of an extent.

Ah, I see my LLM is creating a planning document named ‘step_1_intelligence.md’. I do feel mocked, but the AI mostly tells me it’s not mocking me, if ever I ask.

Let’s get back on the path, now that my style of belief has been outlined. The topic is goals. I brought up John the Baptist, but why? Let me go back and review. Not sure, but I got an answer to a long-standing confusion about baptism. Now I am reminded of the outrageous question that was commonly asked after a seminar, “Are there any questions?” In a large room, that’s not such an unreasonable question, but I’ve been asked it in a room containing five others, and it elicits visceral reaction.

My mind doesn’t work like that. It needs its beauty sleep. In the morning, or perhaps the next day, or later even, it will have questions. But in that moment it has none. I’ve had my mind solve a puzzle from two decades earlier, maybe three. I never asked it too.

I just file away questions and riddles as too hard, and forget about them. Somehow the mind remembers some of them, and uses new information, long after I’ve forgotten, to make sense of the situation. Occasionally it presents it, not even in a dream – I still don’t know what those are for. It will just give me a picture in my head. Not a glossy colour picture, but something I can see, and know. It’s there. It doesn’t fade away in a few moments. It lingers as an overlay for days.

That is far too much to be sharing. Goodness. The point of that description is that I think there are different types of people, in the mental realm. I won’t go as far as to say why that is, mainly because I don’t know, but I will go far enough to say I think there are differences. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good speculation; I’m not shy about considering topics I have no clue about. It’s just that I’ll not be so forthright with my conclusions, knowing full well they could as easily be wrong as right.

Ah yes, the last point about my Christian belief and the solo scriptura, is that what it’s called? My interpretation. I do consider there is a paradox in the Christian belief system that is universal, and it is this: on the one hand, Jesus says something like, “If you want to be the boss, I’ve got news for you, you’ll be serving others.”¹ On the other hand, he says, pretty much, “You can ask anything of God, through me, and it will be given unto you.” Faith of a mustard seed and all that.² The long and short of it is, the conceit that comes from truly believing that one has a direct connection with the creator of all things, is a clear and present danger to the mental health of the believer. I stumbled upon my own antidote, which is to consider that it could all be made up. There might not even be a God.

Now, an atheist might say, ‘well, just solidify that thought, that there is no god, so you don’t have to be bothered by belief any longer.’ The error of that way of thinking, to my mind, is that we cannot not believe. There’s nobody who doesn’t believe. Someone who just committed suicide did it quite likely because they believed their life was not worth living. I know that feeling. There was a time I felt it intensely for a long period. It wasn’t pleasant. The man who gets behind the steering wheel of his car drunk, believes he can make it home without either having an accident, or getting pulled over by the cops. He at least thinks he can chance it. So, whether it’s the odds in your favour, or that you are in the right, everybody believes in something.

Did the Eurythmics sing that? Let me look it up. Close – it is near to a line in the song “Sweet Dreams” from Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (Eurythmics, 1983). That got a lot of radio play back in the day – I won’t quote the lyrics because there are legal complications that come with that. Not unrelated by any means. Looking for something is goal seeking. Coming up with a goal is part of it. We don’t say, ‘I want to believe in something, so what will I choose to believe?’ We don’t pick the belief from a lineup of flavours. It’s fair to say, if I were born in Iran (since the Moslem conquest), I might be a Moslem, just as if I were born in mainland China after 1900, it’s likely I would speak modern Chinese (but perhaps just as likely, with my fortune, I’d be in a gulag by now, so not speaking at all).

Which says less than you might think it does. After all, what good is there me writing in Chinese, or trying to elucidate the vagaries of Islam? I’m not the woman for the job. The goal can present itself in this way. Just as hunger keens our instincts, a goal can probably be revealed from necessities. There continues to be some confusion as to the how. The goal is the what. I want to be rich. Good, that is your goal, but how? Usually that requires breaking the larger goal down into smaller goals. A brick wall that is six feet tall, starts from the floor. One is reminded of the Caledonian saying: to bite off more than one can chew.

Back to the coping mechanism for handling the power of the Holy Spirit; of course, this idea may not be due to Jesus, or my interpretation of Christianity at all. It might be Billy Joel’s influence – not quite hinged right, see “You May Be Right” from Glass Houses (Billy Joel, 1980).

He’s not for everyone, but he’s a legend to me. Wait, didn’t he sing that? Pretty much, “She’s Always a Woman” from The Stranger (Billy Joel, 1977). What a crooner. I have listened to him a lot. Due to lyrics quoting issues, I haven’t written down the line I thought of; instead, the song attribution for anyone to look up in their own time, should they so choose.

So many great songs. Agree, disagree, I could care less. You get what you get and that’s part of why I don’t readily subscribe to absolutisms or literal interpretations. I think Eddie Izzard highlighted this the best with his ‘Cake or death?’ sketch. Now, there has been a change in the programming for Izzard, so I won’t delve into it as much as I’d like, because it’s about the most contentious topic of our time, and even saying it is contentious is itself contentious, so I’m actually just going to leave it there. Could have gone into more on the sketch, but it’s just not worth the trouble.

I’ll go the long way around instead. Who’s on first? Again, too contentious now. Forgot what I was going to say anyway. John the Baptist, wandering around for a while. He died, you know. Beheaded. At the whim of a lady. But that’s power. I think Lord Acton summed it up best. Born in Napoli, died in Bavaria; English politician. ‘Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you.’ That was the maelstrom I was caught up in, in my youth. Be careful what you wish for though.

Was John interested in the nature of his outside home? We have nothing of that. It’s not until the English start catching butterflies that it appears anyone had any interest in the natural world whatsoever. It’s curious, to me. Imagine having a sketch by John the Baptist of the stars in the sky where he laid his head. Probably didn’t have a sketchbook or pencils. Gromyko, USSR’s foreign minister for the longest time, described his village at the turn of last century as being without wheels. I can imagine John not even having the toilet paper needed to wipe his own arse.

It’s sobering to think that we had only a very small window to faithfully record reality. Ricky Gervais pokes fun at a book on evolution showing sketches of animals; fairly pointing out that they are all – well, drawings. Then the camera came along and everybody breathed a sigh of relief – finally, there’s an absolute standard of recording reality, of knowing what really happened. Then Adobe Photoshop software came along, and a few people got nervous. Now AI has buggered it up completely.

What’s my point? Since we can’t know reality very well, then we can’t have a morality that adheres to the absolute, because it can’t match our reality, which is not fully knowing what our reality is. English derived law attempts to do something about this – I believe I mentioned Dickens in the last post. English derived science attempts it – lots of effort is made to address reality, but it all comes up short. I suppose that will be how I look at the material versus the spiritual, but not today.

The weak argument is that morality is not important, rather it is non-essential. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my view. Morality is the conscious extension of instinct. Weak morals means decision-making occurs at the level of instinct. The ‘Let’s use time travel to strangle Hitler in his cot (and why not truncheon his pregnant mother if we land a bit early?)’ crowd, aren’t satisfied with no morality either, and so we are left to contend with which morality is right.

If one cannot be absolute, can one ever be exact? Again, I think correctly addressing language use is crucial to any esteemable argumentation, a point about which Hitchens and I concur. Nevertheless, terms can be defined differently. One of the responsibilities of the first speaker in debate is to define terms. Many a debate concludes merely with unresolved argument as to what those terms mean. It doesn’t take much thought to conclude we can’t have gotten very far if this is still an issue, which it is.

At any rate, let us leave the woods for now. John said the Word was the beginning, because we didn’t get an easel and paints in the Garden. More’s the pity, but that’s our bloomin’ lot. ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.’ I think the Pythons could have had a wonderful time with John the Baptist, but perhaps too many taboos would have been broken. It doesn’t pay to be too serious, at least not all of the time. If politicians cracked a few more jokes would there be less tension? No, no. No politics here. Keep away from that.

Did you know one of the hardest things in programming is naming? Dead set. ‘Buttercup, buttercup, my little buttercup.’ Should be easy though shouldn’t it? The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch was certainly funny. Just imagine uncovering John the Baptist’s Little Book of Drawings. He might have been a Peeping Tom for all we know, and sketched some lovely silhouettes. I think I began this thought by considering that people have different mental faculties. Let me get back to that. Ah yes, there might not be a God. This idea might be foundational to all of our goal seeking. The moral basis of anything – the action one chooses, overriding one’s instincts – hinges on the capacity for doubt, perhaps.

The subtlety of using doubt, or elevating it as a counterpoint to certainty in oneself, or one’s own power, is exactly the topic I wish we could have heard more about from Jesus. We got, ‘It’s okay to doubt.’ from the example of Thomas, but not much more. His ‘Shall I not drink from my father’s cup?’ almost promises elaboration. How many rhetorical questions are there in the Bible? Can’t be that many. We didn’t get those thoughts; so much the worse for wear it makes us.

AI just decided to use all of my cpu, it’s a little too loud to concentrate on my thoughts; I’ll have to pause here, possibly as good a place to end this post as any. Next post I’m not sure about. I didn’t mean to get so much into faith, although it was bound to present itself. There’s a fair bit of language use to investigate, even whimsically. I ought to think of a theme or two just a shade lighter for next time. Perhaps lyrics? That’s language use. Time travel? Possibly. Decoration as distraction? I’d have to put more thought in that. Well, maybe I’ve run out of wandering musings. We shall see. Until next time, so long.

Ah, yes, the people who have questions to be answered, and the people who don’t. That was the grand distinction I was gunning for. I got a bit side-tracked, but that’s pretty much the conclusion I arrived at before I got going very long. If there are questions, goals will probably fashion themselves. A curious mind doesn’t need goals in the same way as a fish doesn’t need a pantry, but the incurious mind, in order to proceed beyond thinking about the next meal, will need a goal, either handed to him or created by the sweat of his own brow. I realise now we have just touched on the subject of motivation as locomotion, and it appears this is a banquet-sized topic for which I am ill-prepared. At some point I’ll have to do a little research.

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Yours,

 

The Slowly Sinking Brain (or Mind, I haven't decided yet, and I'm not holding up production over it).

Footnotes

1. for example, Luke 22:24-27, “24And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest. 25And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. 26But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. 27For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.” ↩

2. for example, Matthew 17:20-21, “20And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. 21Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” ↩