April 4th, short version

Old cars often smell alike. I put my bag between my legs.

From the other apartment we had a better view. But this one is so much calmer.
We need to hurry if we want to catch the sunset.

The loose car window vibrates softly.

In a way I understand it;
These guys are so busy. And since he received his Nobel price he is terribly afraid of publishing something that is wrong, something that would allow others to attack him. There are only sharks out there, he says. He fired ten people last year.

Sand gives way to my shoes.

He divorced recently. His wife wanted half of the money.

The sun disappears at the end of the ocean.
Calm rises from below.

I come here when I get too anxious.

We feel that silence. I close my jacket.

You are lucky, there are so many of them now. California poppy they call it.

Spring rain falls.

The Blue Lotus

[...] a dark wooden façade. kanji on red paper lanterns turn centuries, a gate opens in silence, and we descend into

The Blue Lotus

It’s not that I’ve been here before; I’ve been here forever. I know where to put my shoes, I know when to smile. That’s when you take my. Soundwaves, waves of men in grey. On occasion colourful women laugh to please. Just when your hard bits scream. You feel seated before you sit, you feel home before. Time, Underground, and still lower, back in taste, grey men passing. We took our usual place at the bar. Lantern fish swim. The kitchenkids working in steam, parrotpleasuregirls with trays, nothing has changed, or under and ever will. She bent down, visibly attracted by Hiro who talked about Osaka. A teasing smile she radiated at the right moment, in the right posture, nearly touched his shoulder with her graceful hand, and asked what drinks would please with suggesting eyes, deviating looks just in time. The Gods of circular wishwanting ordered beer, rather than local sake. A promising smile, gone. Hiro was left in an advanced state of exuberance, and I thought whatever the price for this evening, we won’t regret it. At least not immediately. 

From: "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven".

April 4th, 2010

The bus stops in front of a park.

From the other apartment we had a better view. But this one is so much calmer. 
We need to hurry if we want to catch the sunset.

Old cars often smell alike. I put my bag between my legs.

In a way I understand it;
These guys are so busy. And since he received his Nobel price he is terribly afraid of publishing something that is wrong, something that would allow others to attack him. There are only sharks out there, he says. He fired ten people last year.

Sand gives way to my shoes.

He divorced recently. His wife wanted half of the money.

The sun disappears at the end of the ocean.
Calm rises from below.

I come here when I get too anxious.

We feel that silence.

No, my boss is very kind. But has no money. We use the other group’s machine. And we found a way to recycle the chips. Ten percent bleach, then some water. We recycle everything. Before he was as famous as the other two. As successful. He changed completely after one of his postdocs committed suicide. I spent over six months writing twenty grants for him. Two got accepted.

I close my jacket.

You are lucky, there are so many of them now. California poppy they call it.

The loose car window vibrates softly.
Spring rain falls.

Talk To Me

We should have looked at ourselves - simply taken a step back, breathed, and looked at ourselves with a clear mind. And then corrected our course. But we never did.


So it was only after the disease had started to leave a clear mark in the statistics that we could no longer deny that something was happening. That we were changing.

We first noticed it in kids. Maybe they are more receptive, more vulnerable. Or maybe we worry more about them.

We thought our chemistry could cure them. But it couldn’t; and those kids grew older, and still had it. And soon it became clear that no one was safe.

The officials tried countermeasures. A warmly smiling face in one corner of every screen, hourly ‘Good Paroles’ and those compulsory shows for everyone to watch; ‘Positive Transmissions’, as they called it. But electronic workarounds appeared almost immediately, and then came those underground channels. And most of all, there was daily life. A repeated direct exposure turned out to be even more contagious than electronic exposure from a screen. These were mad times.

I mean, how can you avoid contamination if you can’t really tell who has it? Most of us already lived and worked in these big overcrowded cities – how could we avoid direct exposure? We couldn’t - and the additional stress made us only more vulnerable.

We couldn't leave. We depend on each other, and surviving alone without resources seemed impossible. But for me everything changed when they started looking for me; when I had do hide.

Those huge, endless cities. Without them, none of this would have happened. Small groups; that’s what we’re supposed to be in, that’s what our emotions are sized for. But the cities grew faster than our capacity to live in them. They have always produced the weakened crowd that bugs fed on, and they provided the right substance for the outbreak of this disease, too.

What a strange disease. At first, nobody believed that simple behaviour could be infectious. We knew that bacteria, viruses or even proteins could transmit diseases – but behaviour? By the time we figured that out and the officials started their countermeasures, it was probably too late.

Maybe it was a lost fight from the beginning. After all, the disease was a part of us. It was us. It grew out of our nonverbal communication system. This ancient system is used by all creatures, but in us it is drowned out by the continuous palaver of our restless brain.

Our brain, our particular intelligence, consciousness, our verbal language --our words; we thought all this was advancement, progress. In reality, it was simply a specialisation. A specialisation necessary to protect us from what had become our greatest threat: our own race, our own complex society. It was a specialisation necessary to understand ourselves.

In exchange, we lost something crucial. We became disconnected from all other life.

We took it as a sign of our superiority that no other creature learned our language. But we were the only ones to be drowned by flood waves or volcano ashes; the other creatures understood, knew what was coming, and left. But not us; we were too busy trying to understand ourselves. The others were connected, but we were alone. Why would they want to learn our words?

Yet, without words, our ancient communication system continued communicating, shaping our societies, our lives. All this unnoticed by our new consciousness. We were disconnected, even from our own body.

Our body communicated whatever was in us. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the signal. And of all creatures, we have the strongest emotions. They grew big with our brain.

Big brains, big cities. Suddenly, in some of us, this communication system started to emit much stronger than before: anger, stress, fear, frustration. Prolonged and repetitive exposure to those would make you resonant, and once you were completely tuned in, you became an emitter yourself. Neighbours to neighbours, parents to children, passengers to passengers, colleagues to colleagues. It was just a question of time that a critical mass was infected, that a stable, steadily growing reservoir for the disease was formed.

‘Balancing Food Supplements’ the officials called what would be their last resort. But in truth it was a euphemism for a population-wide psychotropic treatment. Resistances developed quickly. And, more dangerously, before long our attention dropped, fading away with media coverage shifting to a new war a new financial crisis a new scandal. And everything slowly returned to normal. A completely different ‘normal’ however. ‘Normal’ is what the majority is doing, feeling, thinking. And the majority was infected.

The disease spread and became global. Different strains affected different cultures, but the result was just the same. Transmittable aggressive and antisocial behaviour. Despite the ills it created, this new status quo slowly became accepted as the face of our modern society, the sign of progress.

We so deeply believe that we advance, that we progress. Yet in a way we only progress like algae in a pond; we grow and grow until we suffocate ourselves. But for now, out there, everywhere around you, my people still grow. They will grow until they fill the last spaces available. And soon they will be here. And they will find ... you.

The Healer

On his desk, in his office he sits
& looks through another page of a file in a folder.

He duly fills the cases with figures and text,
Of achievements to expect if funds are accorded

From others who sit at their desks and probably sight
As they look through another page of a file in a folder.

His heart beats.

‘The danger of depression is great these days’, she says, ‘protect yourself, protect yourself my children.’ And then she chants with a juvenile voice as the fire consumes another fruit, another flower. I mumble, try to follow these words I don’t understand. The smoke, my eyes I close.
How long since? My questions, my body dissolve in repetitions of vibrations I don’t understand. Her yellow face, red cloths, warm smile and too much smoke. Her simple words. A home for my thoughts, a chair for my back and aching knees. Blue skies. So close.
How long since?

Coming Home

Too many arms, too many legs, too many feet, too many directions: Clapham junction on a busy Friday afternoon. Almost impossible to get out of the incoming train - too many people, too many bags, my second bag gets squeezed. I stumble, out, against the stream of pressing new passengers, bumps, kicks, the terrifying noise of old trains stopping, the terrifying noise of metal loudspeakers over my head attacking with an unbearable and barely understandable staccato of cancellations, alterations and information about the right train on the wrong lane: Der Totale Krieg in a Jamaican accent. Down the grey stairs with all my bags, quickly, against all the up-comers with all their bags and suitcases and children and I hurry, I stumble, I proceed, finally turn left at the end, into the overcrowded corridor - the little shop, what did I need? I turn, collide, stumble, get thrown on the ground. Everything rolls over me like a massive wild wave.

I open my eyes. The passage in the middle of which I had fallen was empty. nobody. not a single noise. I get up, walk slowly to quay number 11, get up the stairs, into the calm night. It must have been snowing for already quite a while. Peaceful white snowflakes, slowly covering the lanes, the roofs, the trees. A warm yellow light - a lonely train, makes its way slowly towards my quay, halts. The wagon door in front of me opens, a dim yellow cabin invites, warm air flows towards me, embraces me. I enter, sit down, alone. The train departs. I am finally coming home.

The brown eyes in front of me move back, both hands release my ears, a smile. « Ok, phew, this time it was really difficult. ». I have been successfully rebooted.

-o0o-

work-life balance - balanced Worklife

‘Work-Life Balance’? For me this has always been something nobody really knows how to do, but should you do it wrong you inexorably face divorce, bankruptcy, cancer, a heart attack, or all of the above, and that before the age of fifty. Or even worse: the TOTAL BURNOUT, right here right now. It’s a terribly stressful concept, which I tried to avoid altogether. Until I was asked to write about it.

Since I was almost, but not exactly, sure what it meant, I looked it up.
“Work-Life Balance is a broad concept including proper prioritizing between ‘work’ (career and ambition) on one hand and ‘life’ (pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development) on the other.”

What a most depressing Wikipedia quote that was. In clear, to pay my bills, I spend most of my waking hours dedicating myself to something that is neither pleasure nor leisure, that harms my family, and transforms me into an ungodly villain.

Phew!

To save humanity from the total burnout, I came up with a new concept:

The Balanced Worklife.

It’s a fine concept; the problem is I am not yet quite sure what it actually means.
Maybe: Rather than trying to stop the wicked ‘Work’ just seconds before it crushes the jolly ‘Life’, we should attempt to have a well-balanced ‘Worklife’; an entangled harmonious One-Thing.

Fine – and how do we do that? Well I guess it’s much in the intention. If I am frustrated and angry because I need to stop work to find a birthday present for my wife, and then am even more upset because this obliges me to spend the following Sunday finishing a manuscript, then that’s reasonable Work-Life balance, but an unbalanced Worklife. If I accept to work on a Sunday as a result of having made my wife happy the other day, well, then I feel much better, even though the facts are just the same.

Along these lines: If do something for the sole purpose of being rewarded (publication, promotion, recognition, friendship, love), then this will leave me frustrated or bitter, even if I succeed. However if I am totally dedicated to what I am doing, and do it as a true gift (for my boss, my institute, my family, society, science, humanity, the janitor, my own body), then I won’t depend on a reward to be happy.

The Work-Life balance is in our calendar, and the balanced Worklife is in our mind. And so are we.