Manifesto of the Lifestyle Experimenters

After the given materials of life begin to look themselves rather given and circumstantial, a search ensues: a search for fertile grounds, for a way of life that does not hang itself on the merely local, the merely familiar. With eyes toward this search, our hungry gaze looks out over its own history and it's species history. We earnestly sift through personal traumas and gifts, and scavenge the fruits of the intellectual generations. Here, some of us halt in our tracks, solemn, energized by the breadth of the systematic puzzles or the empirical beauties and tragedies of nature. Vitalized, they'll tell stories which back up their settlement: everything points to the solution of this problem, they say; everything follows laws which can be understood if only we would apply the correctly balanced efforts. For instance, one such settler would appraise themselves thus, "I'm lacking in assertion and my life has become a slavery because of this - and so the way out is to cultivate the powers of self-esteem." Or another would appraise that,  "The world would evolve with the advancement of education, with the eradication of this or that social hang-up." With this, a "battleground" has been facilitated. The search has revealed the fertile grounds we sought, has gone beyond the merely local and fertile.
A great majority at least nod at this approach - in fact, I would wager that all do, at minimum, nod at it. Nevertheless, a minority is not ultimately persuaded. They feel that the "battleground" is just another version of the given, the familiar, the circumstantial. Their suspicion is that the values by which the "battlegrounders" gravitate only goes skin deep: the world does not provide them, only human beings do, and only human beings within circumstantial ruts. From our minorities eyes, all values are experiments in lifestyle, can only be experiments in lifestyle. Building a life on a battle ground is fine, but the added qualification that it is the ground is, for this minority, a kind of shortsightedness or immaturity. They say to the premature settlers: "Look, you have forgotten that always and everywhere we humans are winging-it. We are organic, doing what we do with whatsoever equipment we have access to. Your problems are happenstance, your methods happenstance, and your vision happenstance. There are no ultimate, cosmos signifying obligations that demand to be responsibly met. The world issues no clues which are not first inferred and interpreted by us dying animals. Whatever values you participate in are values you have made up, or else they are values you have followed from the example or compulsion of others. Everything undertaken, however, is guesswork; in guesswork lies all the human possibilities. The approach of you, the battlegrounders, to wholeheartedly get behind some problem you deem central, then, is a strategy, particularly a strategy of coping with life. All there is can be summed up thus, unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing. Our movements, which follow, can only be experimental attempts to deal with the unaccountable."  

You drive to the Café on Main so that you can untangle and center. Its rainy dark - the lights are needed inside to read a book properly. Last night you went to the city movie theater and watched the midnight release of part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Garrett and a friend of his also come along. When you arrive the theater management is just allowing the lines of people to take their seats. There is an hour to wait until the film actually starts but finding three seats next to each other forces us to sit in the front row along the right side.

You are tired and the view is awful but the naturalness of the trio’s on screen relationship is worthy of the discomfort. The rest of the night you think of what it would feel like to be intimate with a particular girl from class: touching, holding, feeling warm, relaxed, not having to talk or entertain, someone to share concern with, someone to feel with, to talk softly with.

The splitting of the book into two parts makes way for a slowing down. From a trot those subtle things that suit film so well come through. The image is perhaps more powerful than text because it is more instantly recognizable, relatable. You in fact read stacks of papers and really come away with just one maybe two sentences that stores the point of the book for you – sometimes its just a word. Those sentences, though, are priceless images. They are yours, created from an internal dialog between you and the ‘author’. Sometimes they take the form of allowances, like you are allowed now to do certain things that you weren’t before hand (my first reading of The Catcher and the Rye did this for me: I was allowed, even urged to be suspicious of the phoniness of adults and to trust my feeling that something vital is missing in such modes of living). Film, going by in a fraction of the time often doesn’t allow for what the reading of stacks of papers do: provides the conditions for solitude. But what it does do when a skillful hand is behind it is encourage intuitive empathizing, that is, the feeling out of the character way of being. When the one to three hours or so are up you may be suddenly in-touch with yourself, more easily able to notice what is needed and what is hogwash.

The unconventionally platonic friendship of Harry and Hermione, a friendship of genuine concern and commitment divorced from the usual latent flirty romantic undertones – you have never observed anything like it in popular art, nor has such a warmth been as unforced by any art you have absorbed. The trust is profound and healthy. You like this. For you the appeal is twofold. Firstly, you do no feel allergic or sense any off notes. The relationship is one of care or I-Thou: the attachment to self springing from a compulsion to protect the self is sidestepped. Beyond shyness, it is able to be growth centered: the other speaks without worry that the friend will reject or judge; the other co-exists and mutually addresses the Self in the other. Harry and Hermione meet as their whole selves on the platform of their relationship.

Secondly, seeing this, the moviegoers may notice the superficiality and confusion in other narratives that do not profess the wholeness of the self to exist in platonic relationships and romantic relationships. What this will allow for is a suspicion of the public reality – or at least a specific part.

A lot of confusion in culture comes from immature artistic endeavors. You absorb ways of doing things, motivations, and so on, from artists even when the characters internal movements are insincerely imagined, are crafted for stylistic or plot ends, or for some other reason. And so due to poor deliverance, underdeveloped insight, and unskillful technique the artist may enact a great disservice on the public. The authenticity and worth of the Harry/Hermione type of friendship works as a medicine against the conventional reality, breaking down the expectations gleaned from bad art - those expectations, for instance that make one feel inferior, as if they have in their stupidity missed some secret and that they are alone in this mistake. For art is in its essence both the expression of the artists’ most-basic-vocabulary, and a pointing out of the ‘way’ to the admirer. Clumsy art points out the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, providing no therapeutic devices, no meaningful ‘images’.

Lately, you have been in a brewing process in regard to how to go about waking up in the morning and going to bed at night.