Category: misc/personal

Alain Badiou: At root the common consciousness also shares this conception of the rarity of happiness, even if it masks or hides it. Hence, I think, the extreme (I wouldn’t hesitate in calling it lyrical) importance of love in this matter. Love, passion, meeting someone, are thought of as exceptional moments of existence, and everyone is well aware that these moments signpost what we can truly call happiness. Clearly it’s entirely desirable not to be unhappy. But real happiness takes a lot more than just not being unhappy. Happiness can’t just be a simple negation of unhappiness: it is a present, a gift from life that goes beyond the order of satisfaction. A gift from life that we must be ready to accept, a risk that we must be ready to take. It is a major existential choice: either a life that’s only open to satisfaction, or a life that takes on the risk of happiness, including as an exception.

[…] Benjamin proposed a fibrous conception of time, according to which there are many times: there is no single, common time, but a multiplicity of tangled and sometimes contradictory temporalities. And it is clear that the time of happiness – including in a political sense – is a time that goes beyond and in a sense destroys ordinary temporality. In philosophy, the twentieth century (with the theory of relativity and Bergson) was a moment when the multiplicity of temporalities was explored. The question of happiness takes its place within this framework. The time proper to truths, be they mathematical, artistic, political or the truths of love – the time of happy subjectivation – is the time of the consequences of the event, which can’t be situated in the course of ordinary time. It is necessarily the time of a split, a rupture, an exceptional time. Accepting the consequences of this temporal exception means forging a different time. That’s what common sense ultimately means when it says that lovers are alone in the world. Alone in the world – that is, alone in the time that constitutes this couple, which does not share, or no longer shares, ordinary time. That is a general characteristic of real happiness: the same is also true of a mathematician who resolves a problem, working alone. How, then, can a collective happiness be built, in these conditions? If enthusiasm is the affect that corresponds to political happiness, it is because it marks out a new time in common. Enthusiasm denotes the moment when individuals become subjectively conscious that they can make history, and not just undergo it. So enthusiasm is the shared conviction that we can make history, that history belongs to us and, as Françoise Proust declared, that history is not over yet. It is the sharing of an intensity, of a demonstration, as we saw in the public squares of the Arab Spring. But it is also the maintenance of a state of exception, through the laborious work of what we call political activism properly speaking (interminable meetings, leaflets written at dawn); and I can tell you, political happiness is also exhausting. That has to be said. More here.

Anna Badkhen: “In the face of ‘too much’ we gradually become dry, our hearts get tired, our energies become spare,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, poet and trauma counselor. I had hoped to rarify input. On and off, for a year, I herded cattle with a family of Fulani cowboys, who spend their lives ambulating the semiarid grasslands between the Sahara and the tropics and inhabit a very modest pre-monetary and pre-modern culture. I was researching a book about transience, and I had thought that, perhaps, in the course of my work I could learn whether and how life in sparse environments helps us slow down.

Scientists say busy minds make us sad and less alert. This holds true for me. What causes my cognitive overload is probably what causes yours: deadlines, ambitions, chores, parenting worries, and how all of these often seem impossible to juggle. When my mind is crowded in this way I fail to notice the beauty that nurtures it. A cardinal’s enchanted scarlet flight on a monochrome winter run in Philadelphia. The hollow flutter of a moth wrestling out of a cage of agave. The unfathomable embrace of the universe that accommodates tigerfish teeth and the electromagnetic song of the comet 67P both. A friend’s kindness. I grow too hard-pressed to be astonished by the ineffable in the world, my well-being withers, and I become terribly blue, sometimes for days, for weeks.

[…] Part of the correlation between open space and slowing down is evolutionary: Humans were born in the savannah. Our feet are built to walk on hot, dry soil, our brains are built to endure in boundless expanses. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of calm. Research shows that people draw jagged, pointed shapes when asked to draw representations of anger, and horizontal lines to illustrate peacefulness. More here.