TGU – Our situation (part 19)

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

4:05 a.m. It’s mildly frustrating, to feel each time that we have to begin again, rather than smoothly continuing. The starting-point that seemed evident yesterday – “our unknown or under-recognized strands having their rights too” – does not seem evident at this moment. But perhaps the continuity is more evident to you than to me?

Sparks, remember; not logical progression of proofs. The process itself allows a certain latitude. In fact, a generalization: Everybody’s preferred process is tailored to their own personality – that is, to what is easiest for them. Trust the process.

The thought we wish to pursue centers on reminding you that although each of you experience yourselves as being a unit, in fact you are a unit made of autonomous cooperating (and clashing) units, each of which is the same. [That is, each of which is also made of autonomous cooperating and clashing units.] As above, so below. So don’t think of any given strand within you as a unit; think of each strand as – like you at another level – a “unit” that comprises various units.

I get the idea, though I don’t think that says it. you mean, Joe Smallwood may contain strands that are naturally harmonious with certain strands in John Cotten, say, or Bertram. That is, we aren’t dealing with individual strands as strings; more like individual strands as – oh, nets, or –

Analogies break down, so look to find others. But you are on the right track: The situation is more fluid than our analogies so far suggest. Try electronics, or fluid dynamics.

Sorry, you’ve got the wrong boy for that. If I did have that kind of knowledge, I can see that it would probably furnish analogies.

Then, put it in historical or biographical terms.

Hmm. Well, I can see that might work. I’m feeling for it, and even as I do, I’m thinking, there really isn’t much difference between my end of this process and yours. Probably much of the distinction between “me” and “you” is a convenient generalization, a fiction for the sake of clarification.

Perhaps. So, your analogy.

Well, take a community. Boston, say. At any time in its life it is going to have a different composition, but let’s say in 1850, Boston is a city of WASPs primarily, and a recent influx of Irish displaced by the potato crop failure and ensuing starving of the late 1840s. Those two communities – the WASPs and the Irish – may be considered as if they were two units, two different strands of very different material. But fast-forward 150 years to 2000, and even without considering any other ethnicities in the city, referring to WASPs and Irish as if they were separate units is much more fictional than before. There has been plenty of intermarriage in 150 years, plenty of social and economic interaction and interconnection. You can still see two different communities, but there’s more overlap, more inter-mesh.

That’s right. In being forced by 3D circumstances to live together, each has affected the other and has been affected by the other. So extend the analogy in the direction you can feel us wanting to go.

Well, the analogy as drawn so far is too simple. Boston isn’t only WASP and Irish, even in 1850, and far less so in 2000. There are all those other ethnicities, in various quantities and in various degrees of cultural influence: French, Portuguese, black, etc. And in another direction, there are all the influences from the world beyond Boston – the things that happened that affected WASP and Irish without being particularly about them. Little things like several wars, and economic expansion, and technical innovation, and new schools of thought.

In short, all the affairs that the shared subjectivity offers. Yes. You can look at Boston’s life, in 1850 or 2000, as if it were an interaction of WASP and Irish – but a more careful look reveals that you are comparing abstractions quite as much as realities.

And that’s the process of crystallization, in a way.

Yes it is, in a way. Coexisting within a body, the various component psyches exchange protoplasm, so to speak.

That isn’t the right word, but I get the idea: They become actually co-dependent in the way that an arm and a leg might be said to be co-dependent, even though either the arm or the leg could continue to exist without the other.

Yes. You’ll find it easier to conceptualize if you remain with your historical analogy.

Boston without the Irish would have become a very different city in 2000, but it would still have been Boston. Boston with the Irish became a mixture of English and Irish not so possible in the old countries themselves. Not that there weren’t marriages between Irish and English in Ireland and England, but that even there the result was not at all like what happened in the melting pot that was America.

Go a little slower, though.

The shared subjectivity as it manifested in geography was itself an influence in individual psyches.

We’re smiling. You’re on the right trail, but still a good way from clarity.

Well, you do it.

No, continue, only realize that what is clearer to you is not necessarily clearer to others.

Maybe it would become clearer if we concentrated on time-based analogies, even if that also muddies the waters. Grafting an apple branch to a pear tree (if that’s even possible) would result over time –

No, that doesn’t work for me.

Stick to what you know.

Biography, then. My children are only 50% of Italian stock, though all my parentage was Italian. My grandchildren are only 25% Italian. But my grandchildren’s heritage was enlarged in possibility by the sharing of their parents’ materials. I mean, my grandchildren were only possible because their parents had united two “strands” to produce in each of them a new “unit” that is not a unit at all but what we are calling an individual-community. My grandchildren did not inherit unmixed strands, they inherited mixed, mingled, strands, and they themselves are a mixture of their parents’ mixtures.

Does that add anything? It seems on the one hand almost too simple to bother to say, and on the other hand too evanescent to capture in words.

Between us we should have accomplished the only thing needing to be done at this point, which is to loosen the analogy of separate strands co-existing as if units, and remind people that they also coexist as new units. It can be hard to keep the fluidity of it obvious. Try again.

Okay. Bearing in mind that this attempts to describe the individual by analogy:

  • Boston in 1850 is one thing. Boston in 2000 is quite another.
  • Differences include population mixes, culture, economic and social ties and divisions.
  • The entire city exists not on its own but as part of a region, a state, a country, a world, and exists within those contexts regardless of whether consciously considered in those contexts.
  • Nothing exists as a static, fixed, element. Snapshots freeze time and make it look like things are fixed, but they are not.

And a great example came to me as I was writing that last bullet.

Boston in 1850 may have featured Fitzgerald and Kennedy immigrants. They were unknown outside their own communities. Boston in 2000 was known as the city associated in people’s minds with John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his family: his ancestors, his brothers and sisters, and his and their descendants. The Boston of 2000 was essentially, not merely conceptually different from the Boston of 1850. The strands, interweaving and exchanging substance, so to speak, had created something new.

Yes, and remember the Boston of 1850 still exists, outside 3D. That is, the earlier strands are not destroyed in creating the later, just as a parent is not physically destroyed in creating a child. The original strands (the parents) continue. At the same time, the result of the interaction of strands (the children) come into existence. And if a marriage is barren, does that mean the partners who would have been parents cease to exist?

Yes, pretty clear to me. A life that doesn’t crystallize is more like a childless marriage than an early death or in fact a death at all.

And there’s your hour.

Did we actually accomplish anything?

That will vary, individual by individual. All you can say ever is, did you do your best to communicate? The results are not up to you, any more than it is a would-be parent’s responsibility for the production or non-production of a new child.

Okay, till next time, and thanks as always.

 

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