MASTERING THE MASTER

I'm good with stones. After my last day in the wilderness, before going cosmopolitan in Bergen and Kristiansand, I imagine being Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. I don't want to leave. It's a good thing that stones, sometimes, don't wait for you to ask them questions. They can also do it. So, the stone I saw today, asked me: “are your lessons done?” anticipating a priori my next visit to Norway, which will be on the 6th of August. In principle, I have no reason to cry over Norway letting me go. I'll be back in Oslo in no time already, for a Leonard Cohen concert, which is why the stone anticipates his repertoire, by way of countering my sadness. “My lessons are done,” I answer it. And think simultaneously about how odd it is that however much we may resist it, we always voice the codes of ideology that rule in the country where we live. My statement to the stone thus presupposes a role I must have assumed at some point, I tell myself. Which is to teach something. Most of all I like to think that I'm good at teaching love. At least that's what my mother used to tell me. And she was a real master.

In the Western tradition of the relation between a master and a pupil, the belief in equity rules. The prevalent idea is that the master can also learn from the pupil, and not just teach. In traditions other than the Western, the master is not interested in the pupil from whom he can learn. The master is not a master for nothing. The master is only interested in the pupil who will exceed him in time—and after the lessons are done—and not the one who will teach him something in return along the way. I like the saying “when the pupil is ready, the master will appear,” for it means that a master never entices a student on the path to enlightenment. The student must come to the master on his own. Yet a master never acts against his instinct and knowledge, taken together, when, if approached by a pupil, he feels that the pupil is not ready. Even when the pupil insists. When the master says, “you're not ready,” and the pupil goes, “try me,” the true master never acts on this challenge, because the true master knows in advance that that is not true. In traditions with well established hierarchies where this ideology of refraining from action even when it is tempting to do the opposite is still prevalent—be that in Herman Hesse's book The Glass Bead Game or Oriental contexts that have retained a rigorous and uncontaminated approach to mastery and how to achieve it—it is easy to determine who the master is and who the apprentice is. In the Western context, which is flexible in its opening to incorporating the banal at the level where transcendence of the very banal is nonetheless desired—it is more difficult to think of who is doing what, for what purpose, and why. On a more mundane level, we also have manifestations of people wanting to teach other people something, yet it always goes wrong when there is no consensus on who the master is and who the apprentice is. The domestic scenario, “this woman is trying to change me, but I resist,” never really goes anywhere.

The desire to transcend transitory things such as sex or career plunges you into a state of solitude, as you place yourself above having to answer to ethical calls or having to fulfill duties towards others who expect you to do just that. When you are above, you're above, and your act of hovering above is bound to remain in a state of the ineffable where the rest are concerned. As a general rule, people will not get it. Placing yourself in a state above signification has this function: to free you from having to make any sense. This, people will not get either, especially if they want to have a relation with you. The few who do get it, however, join the club, or the cult, and the relation is thus one of pure energy. I like this state, as it bypasses even the concern with when to begin teaching, if you are a master, when to stop, if you started too early, or when to declare it an exercise in futility, when there is no feedback. I consider myself lucky to know a few people who have the ability to step into energy. Where all this energy goes, what we use it for, and why, only time can tell. Meanwhile, let us anticipate the ko(h)en's words: when the wise man said, "follow me," he walked behind.

FUTURE

After the mountain plateau, the famous Atlantic road, and dinner in Bud, I have a look at the guest-book at the restaurant. I want to contribute my name, when I notice that 9 people in a row, all have the wrong date: the 23rd of September. I follow suit, while laughing at the site. But I'm the 10th person with insight. While I write the same, following the suggestion started by an obviously absent-minded fellow traveller which was then continued by 8 others who were even more absent-minded, I also let the ones following me 'know'. Being the 10th, however, makes me think of the Sefirot, the tree of knowledge, or revelations, which has beauty at the center. I'm having an insight into the future, and I think that it's beautiful what I see: myself in Norway, again, in September, chasing the Ohr-Ein-Sof, the infinite light of what is both possible and impossible. The crown, Keter, says: “I am that I am.” In Norway, there's no doubt about it.

FACEBOOK

Being on Facebook is like being on any of the other public channels: you're both there and not there. You're both yourself and another. You are both a secret and a mirror. I have to say that I'm amazed at how many with a Facebook profile, also among my own list of friends, regularly send out warnings against this and the potential maltreatment of personal data by this and that presumed or not so presumed big corporations. I laugh all the time. As far as I'm concerned, I ignore such warnings, and I insist on having all security on FB disabled. I don't worry about corporations using my photos for adds, and nor am I afraid that I might get fired or sued because I say something that might disagree with disagreeing parties. And why? Simply because (1) I don't presume that anyone reads anything I have to say, (2) nor do I presume that my life is so goddamned interesting that it would even remotely interest those with interests. And (3) I trust that fairly intelligent people will know better than that. Which means that they will know that there is always a filter placed on what the presumed-public-to-know must know. What idiots might think doesn't interest me. If, however, I nonetheless choose to believe that some might read my blog or the feeds on my updates, I do not do it because I presume anything, but because such a belief, or rather hope, may create an entertaining narrative, such as in this simple scenario: if I said this, which may or may not be true, what might others then think? Such invitations to speculations enhance our reflective thinking and appeal to our ludic sense, but should not be confused with what we know as a matter of fact. We don't often swear by our assumptions unless we have a very good reason for it.

On the question of privacy—as against the state of when you yourself feel the need to expose yourself as a big secret on line to compensate for the fact that you have no secrets of your own—it's really very simple. If you want to stay private, there are a few places you can still go to—try Tromsø, or a top of a mountain where you can play the hermit ascetic—or make sure that you don't appear on any websites or links that you yourself upload in cyber space. As a general rule, I actually believe that only those whose lives are even more boring than mine actually worry about someone out there always watching. I say, if that is the case, let them watch. It's not like I'm an innocent lamb, and I entice to no such watching with my presence on the internet. This being said, I'm amazed that we still need to debate what to do about our cyber selves, while using the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus that is only adequate enough for barely covering the notion of the self as we know it thus far in terms of the self's universal actions: you get born, you fuck and procreate, and then you die.

On Controversy today, people interested in communication—a writer, a rhetorician, a media researcher, and a student—talked about the benefits or the disadvantages of having a profile on Facebook. Some invoked pragmatic reasons—you want to know what others are doing, even if the info you get may not be so accurate—and others claimed that the whole thing is rather superficial. Your own info and the info provided by others is just not enough to rank among meaningful communication. The writer—a man past his prime and the oldest on the show—and the youngest, the student—didn't think that they need to either show off their bare bums in pictures or have their physical profile they already have more enhanced in virtual space.

So, the question of one's cyber identity was seen either as a whimsical position, by those against Facebook, or as a necessary and interesting engaging with new media by those pro Facebook. The only woman on the show, the rhetorician, implied that she has no time for anything else other than being on Facebook all the time. She was also an advocate for the positive way in which Facebook enhances our senses. The sixth sense was invoked, but what was said about it was mainly nonsense. The sixth sense is not the same as the sense that we might get about people through what they let us know about themselves through their writings. The writer, here, added that the problem with getting 'senses' about other people's state of mind is that the information often comes in an unmediated or unedited form. He doesn't appreciate, for instance, when people who write X-mas cards, write about every detail in their lives over a whole year. As a social forum he was against this type of communication, yet as a forum for promoting your public life as a writer and lecturer, he was more welcoming of Facebook.

The other question raised was the question of whether Facebook can be a forum for democratic debate or whether it is merely a forum for self-promotion. Why this should be any different from the other web sources where we plaster our faces all over the place, not to mention write everything about our academic life, publications, and other grand things that we have achieved, beats me. The point is that ever since old times, when people began to have access to public media, they have always been interested in exposure. It's a basic form of desire. What we need is to learn about the codes of conduct that are devised in connection with all new media, and that these codes are up for constant revision, and hence nothing to fear. Perhaps what we also need is a good spanking. We need to have someone tell us that we don't need to do anything for the sake of appearances, nor do we need to live our lives in constant dependency on this or that myth, or engage in acts that materialize as a set of ideological beliefs.

The whole point of Facebook, and one which seems to escape many, is that Facebook opens towards destabilizing the idea that knowledge of the other can be achieved if only we get to read the other like a book. Facebook plays with the ironic ineffable of the fact that insofar as more and more become more and more illiterate in our dominant visual culture, such readings of faces, according to the book, and as a book, are virtually impossible. Perhaps we can all start thinking of the implications of not being able to read people anymore, rather than yak unreflectively about being constantly under some presumed surveillance.

Here in the wilderness, I'm glad, though, that I can be sure of no hidden cameras around that would catch me with my ass over the fence to the daisy house. But then, as established previously, this is a magical place where the mirrors are not deceiving, and the reflections are really true.

AVALON

After surveying the mists of Avalon last night, while thinking of Roald Amundsen, and donning a T-shirt featuring his expedition, I found Nikolai on the porch. “How about a cruise tomorrow morning?” he asked. “We won't have sun, and there'll be other people on the boat. Disabled people,” he further said. “So what,” I said? “And if you must know, I absolutely adore cruising through Avalon,” I continued in a convincing voice. “Through what?” he asked. “Avalon,” I said. “What's Avalon?”, he wanted to know. “Have you heard of King Arthur?”, I asked. “Yes,” he said, “but that's about it.” “All right,” I said. “I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.” So, today, I was telling stories over grilled fish and cutlets at the round table with a bunch of disabled knights. Now, that was some experience. I made good friends with the ones who were functioning well enough to sustain a conversation both mentally and physically. Especially Trond took a liking to me. He is a David Helfgott type. After asking everyone whether they didn't think I was just about the sweetest thing on the planet, and getting it confirmed, he wanted to hug me every third minute. His language other than that of the body was very well adapted to my Danish too. So, in a wonderfully clear and resonating Norwegian he told me that he didn't think I looked one day older than 25. He knew exactly where Arad was. “About 20 km from the border with Hungary, isn't it?” “Precisely,” I said. “What else do you know? I asked him. “Oh,” he said, "about Romania, I know about your classical music tradition," he said, and then shifted, while getting some help: “I can't tie my shoe laces by myself, you know.” “I can see that, I said.” [...] “So, Camelia Elias from Arad via Roskilde,” he said, "are you coming back here next year? You know, Nikolai gives us a trip every summer, and you're welcome.” “Well, Trond, if you insist, how can I say no?” Knight Nikolai approached us and said that he was going to build a top luxury cabin in the place of the old Elverhøj hut so that I can stop thinking about the daisy house, and just enjoy all that he has to offer. This sounded very good to me, so I said to him that such royal treatment, now and in the future, will not be forgotten. Only in Avalon. There, we can all be knights, sweet queens, and redeemed souls. Being among so many helpless and hopeless people, I thought of what King Arthur said: “there is no worse death than the end of hope.” Trond's take on life and Nikolai's generosity made me want to hope, hope hard, and keep the faith.

SPIRITS

While driving through Åndalsnes yesterday, I said to myself: what a strange place. This place is full of strange voices. While I'm not the kind of person who hears strange voices, I like to take risks with listening to the unsaid, the unarticulated, and absent voice. Of course, the name of the place suggested it already, and perhaps it was my unconscious desire to explore the brink of breaking—sound into articulation—that made me think of strange relations. Åndalsnes, The Valley of the Spirit. One of Hunter S. Thomsen's often quoted phrases came to my mind: "when the going gets weird, the weird goes pro.” I thought of what Socrates and Plato would have made of that, what with their distrust of everything spiritual and artful. Art is no good, they both declared, because it allows for too much unconscious desire to emerge. Voice needs an origin, they further believed, and were even more distrustful of Greek drama and the oracles. Blanchot pointed to an essential aspect in his comparison of works of literature to the articulation of the sacred voices of oracles, insofar as they both have the potential to 'deceive', as it were, truth. And Socrates, for one, wanted only true discourse. No nonsense, such as listening to a tree, waters, or images. Says Blanchot in his The Infinite Conversation:

"Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognizable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. Behind the words of the written work, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the god himself is never present in his words, and it is the absence of god which then speaks."

In the Valley of the Spirit what I was hearing was an indictment that I myself pay closer attention precisely to that which evades truth, to the discourse of absence, of silence, and of mute image. These things operate not with truth, but with topos. They are there. Which is also the reason why exploring their territory involves taking risks. The risk of miscommunication, the risk of betrayal, and deceit. But this risk is also a necessary price we pay if we want to follow the oracle: know thyself. You get to know thyself by placing yourself in a state above signification. Thus you are free from having to talk or from having to make gestures. This is something that the pre-Socratics have understood. Heraclitus, for instance, believed that the oracle "neither speaks out nor conceals, but points." The oracle thus never predicts.

I like to think that what I was also listening to while in the valley of the spirit was the idea that as a consequence of knowing thyself, you can begin to trust more the people in your life; their acts, their beliefs, and their love. As you can also hope that they trust you. Within this trust, the question: 'who speaks beyond the text,' or 'whose voice is there behind the words?', becomes more nuanced as we stretch the elastic of our finitude and of what we can know about ourselves and others into realms that are vaster than the vastest.

VICTORY MARCH

If love is a gift, you can neither win it, nor lose it. By the same token, you can neither give nor withhold the satisfaction of admitting to loving that the other may want to enjoy especially when love is indirectly declared. Looking back some 100 years, such satisfactions would usually get settled in court, in church, or in duel. All 19th century novels are masters at exploiting precisely this difference between love and marriage. Where marriage contracts are concerned, yes, we are free to declare: I won him. I won her. But not in love. Where love itself is concerned, we can say that we are either fortunate enough to experience it or that we are not. This fortune is, however, not linked to the other fortune that we may experience when playing games. Thus, in love, you neither win, nor lose. And Hallelujah for that. We can all intone to Leonard Cohen's eloquent words: “Love is not a victory march.”

In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, I like it very much when Marianne cries passionately in her exchange with her sister Elinor about Willoughby's intentions towards her, now vanished into the air. When Elinor asks: But did he say it, that he loved you?, Marianne is prompt with an unambiguously affirmative answer. Yes, she says, he did. And then immediately reflects further upon the matter. Well, he didn't say it directly, he never did anything other than imply it, but I KNOW that he loves me as much as I love him. Nonetheless, Willoughby goes on to marry another. But the point is made however, and quite unambiguously, that it is clear that Willoughby does love Marianne, and that it is just too bad that he never actually says it. Or is it? If love is never declared directly, it has at least these pragmatic functions: (1) it leaves the one who wants to hear the words in a state of suspicion, and hence free to love elsewhere and (2) it leaves the one who wants to say the words but cannot free to activate a new narrative in which the unsaid love never happened. Hence, also here, there is thus the freedom to look elsewhere for some other love.

The only problem is that if life imitates fiction indeed, as many good literary folks have already established, then there is the problem with memory. Memory busts the ceiling of reason, makes a hole in it, and activates the part of knowledge that will never go away. I KNOW, Marianne, says about Willoughby's love, and yet, off she goes to also marry another. Willoughby, on the other hand, consolidates Marianne's knowledge by witnessing her marriage from afar, impotent, on the back of his horse. He then rides into the sunset forever miserable.

Indeed, where marriage is concerned, the ceremony is crucial. You have to go through with it, and say the words: 'I do.' It is also crucial precisely because it can never guarantee love. 'I do' is never the enunciation of love but the enunciation of commitment. Where love is concerned, you have to say nothing. Therefore love comes in unmeasurable degrees, some are vaster than others, and some more true than others. As they also say, true love is the most difficult because it always operates with the horizon of the crossing of aims. This horizon is also most crucial as it allows one to turn back if love gets too tough, perhaps to the initial crossing of aims, the one that gathers points articulated on completely different premises. How often do we not hear these positions assumed by lovers on a daily bases, from Austen to all romance in tabloids. He: I want sex. She: I want the soul. If “it” happens, then the aims are crossed, and both get what they want, on a simple basis. The love that grows sophisticated, however, even out of such disparate aims, has at least the advantage of always being able to revert back to the simple state. The only thing that is lost is the nuance. Some can live with that.

Now, given that this is quite so, why is it that so many of us still can't make that distinction, and thus keep confusing the gift of love with the act of marriage? Where words are concerned, we all want to hear it, sure enough. And yet, as good literary folks have also established, gestures are more powerful than words. So the question is not one of saying but one of doing. What kind of gestures can we thus make when we want to NOT declare what we nonetheless want the other to hear ever so clearly—and without the fear of getting sued for insisting? How do we bypass the ensuing suspicion that love's non-referentiality produces? How do we make sure that the doubt about the love of the other does not turn into mere cynicism, resentfulness, revenge, and restitution? —Here is your gift of love. Take it back. I want nothing from you. I'm fine.

One of my favorite critics is Gabriel Josipovici. In his brilliant book, On Trust, he makes a very apt comment on what happens when, in our desire to experience the fullness of love, or its continuos expression, we forget to think of it in terms of its finitude once death occurs. He calls this “the double vision” of the sense of life's abundance that entails the event of death, also as an abundance.

“[the] denial of the dual vision ... in the end entails a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of ourselves as embodied beings existing within that world. Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed, it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-consistent world, not simply an alternative way of looking at things but the only way there can possibly be.”

If we cannot resist suspicion, and let love touch us beyond bonds, perhaps we can all do what the wise Cinderellas do, run and regret. Here in the words of another bard, Patrick Kavanagh:

Beauty at the Beauty Ball
Lose your silver slipper where
Some man passing may recall
A virtuous woman's prudent care.
Silver slipper, symbol of
Modesty who understands
That to run is part of love
The wiser part. Men in all lands
Are searching for a princess who
Spilled the last cocktail in her shoe.

... and from another poem:

And have you felt that way too

That someone was in love with you

And was afraid to speak? The air

Vibrated with your mutual prayer ...

Without an introduction you

Are doomed to love and never woo.

CULTURE

Today I had lunch on top of the 6500 year old petroglyphs down the road from Eikesdal. There were three big stones, each depicting different cultures: hunting, fishing, and boat racing. God almighty, I thought, some things never change. Petroglyphs have always resonated with me in a very virile way. Men's assertiveness in these depictions on stone is unmistakable. Women are not present, and hence their more subtle ways of communicating are not represented. This thought stayed with me as I visited the house where Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson lived. He was the son of a vicar who battled all his life with the small community along the waters of Eikesdal for a bigger house with a better view. He won. The big house is, however, sterile, and filled with what one can sense must have been the order of the day on its premises: imposed awe.

The living chambers exude a woman's touch: the pots, the stoves, the crib, the clothes, the books, all had a soul. For some bizarre reason, while smelling the invisible presence of unacknowledged women around, I thought of the lines of another patriarch. The mediaeval philosopher Moses Maimonides. All the same, I thought to myself, from the stone age to the middle ages and on to the post-Romantic age, some philosophies are still valid. As I have a thorough distaste for all clergy, I have to say that when I entered the big preaching room of Bjørnson's pastorate, I saw Maimonides at the pulpit giving a lesson from his bible, The Guide for the Perplexed, that would have been particularly beneficial for the literalists of the 19th century, who were into preaching the word as was written: “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.” I fled the almost empty room and entered another with books in it. I took a look at Bjørnson's mother's book of Norwegian psalms and opened it randomly. This question caught my eyes: “And will I not wear my bridal attire for you?”

I ended the day at the daisy house, the one beyond time, as I tried to escape another of Maimonides's lines: “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.” The daises whispered: here you are nothing, and therefore, you can do nothing. What a relief, I have to neither assert myself, nor communicate. I can just wait for nothing to take place. My place, and that of time.