Thin Places

Aurora Borealis

I just finished reading a book about a Norweigan who in struggling to figure out meaning in his life took to making lists.. to figure out what he had.. and what he wanted.

I thought it was stupid but a part of me started wanting to make a list of places I would like to see before I die. I quite like the idea of travelling, wanderering.. just taking stuff in.. most of the travelling I’ve done in the past been fairly loud with crazy times with strangers in hostels. I have a clue what this life is about.. but I quite enjoy being by myself.. and being outside I dunno these moments seem more significant than the others. I read a book about the first generation of Christian Celtic monks in England who travelled and identified places like this.. holy places as ‘thin places’ the idea that the border between the seen and the unseen was thinner in that place. It was subjective.. not based on a worship of the place itself but of the objective, expansive presence of God. It could be a room, a seat on the bus, a wood or a grave.. God isn’t actually in that place but that place opens your heart to God.. and God’s spirit rests within those who accept him. The Jews before they built the temples had a tabernacle or tent which moved with the people in exodus, and after the crucifixion of the Christ it’s said that God’s spirit became tabernacled amongst the people instead caught up in a temple..

I heard about this guy called Leonard Knight. I really really would love to meet him some day, theres something else about him.. he made Salvation Mountain which is literally a pile of cement and paint made from donations which he’s used to tell people about the love of God, it’s in the middle of the desert in California but people are drawn to it from all over. It’s all he does really as far as I know, just paint and build non-stop and I think if anywhere is a thin-place it’s, for me atleast.. the concept of Salvation Mountain and Leonard Knight.. I read a story about his life somewhere, it’s pretty crazy.. but just makes me realise what a massive world we live in.

Leonard Knight

I’ve just gone off on one again but, for me atleast there seems a significance in the idea of thin places, of being reminded that God is with us, that to a measure we reflect him and that this world can remind us of that.. whether it’s in something beautiful or even in something horrible that can remind us of our need for God. I never really woke up the idea of Christianity till I had read Nietzsche and.. the world left behind by Nietzsche for me just wasn’t worth living in.. all I could say after reading about Nietzsche was somehow he didn’t live quite by his convictions, and then I read Satre and I don’t think he did either.. which just made me figure I haven’t got these moral hangups by some cruel joke; Not even that.. I just got sick of being so bloody melancholy, half happy, half sad.. and such a consistently apathetic cynic. Even when the world does try to toughen me up I know I got a heart that bleeds, thats flesh.. that might not be pretty but it’s real.

Sometimes I’ll look at the world and I’ll remember all of a sudden it’s real.

Degree Thoughts

Part of my course is the insistence that we find a spree of work out there in the big bad world over the summer. I started sending off my CV quite early and made a portfolio site to put something out there, I applied to a lot of companies and chased up a few of that number. I’m pretty chuffed with the results I got, the 3 companies I followed up to the point of interview have all accepted me. So I’m working with a group called Attic Media, in the creative department, Zonica who are a much smaller company who will teach me more about Stategy and Technical aspects and then today with Worthers in Bristol who I really just applied to because they are linked with the 24/7 prayer movement in the UK.

I’ve got 11 weeks lined up on paper so that is.. my summer holiday unfortunately but I should come back off it tight as a nut for my final year. I’m still stumped for ideas concerning my final major project and have an inkling to do with my dissertation. I was thinking something like.. you know those business survival exercises you get given for group building? Well I might work in something like that.. your ship sinks at sea and you can only take so many people all of them unique and will effect group dynamics.. you can also take a selection of items too. Your survivors then end up on the island and you then have to manage the survivors community.. resources, skills, personality types, conflicts and their general survival and decide do they make do with what they got or try and escape?

Maybe in flash or unity with a website with helpful suggestions to the simulation or information/ideas on what helps people get on well together and also you know.. what makes a community work? The use of resources and our typical priorities might be interesting to then compare with say the conditions some people have to live with in the third world or some such and through playing the simulation people would witness perhaps the conditions people would have to endure in less fortunate circumstances. I might indulge myself here and use it as a way of raising awareness about this issues and then perhaps include an area in which people can look at Charity’s who would have something to say on the issues raised in the simulation. What do you think?

I’m thinking maybe dissertation wise.. well initially how has Burma’s international relations been affected by New Media in the last 5 years.. a lot’s happened there and it might be interesting..

Or alternatively.. I mean the question which really friggin’ bugs me sometimes is the fact that we are told in the lecture “there is no truth!” and yet we get marked on how well we answer questions set to us or understand particular ideas.. thats just stupid! How are you meant to reflect how well you understand Foucault’s argument that it’s impossible to understand a text because there is no absolute meaning?? Why do university’s exist? Shouldn’t they be called multiversitys or diversitys or pluraversitys?? University’s suggest there is a unified sense in knowing to be learnt at such a place. There is no truth, you can’t understand what I’m saying! Thats right! you can’t understand what you’re reading right now!

So why can’t I write a dissertation on a question like.. whats the friggin implications of the ‘loss of truth’ the ‘death of God’ the ‘end of history’ and whether truth really, really is dead.. you know.. it’s got nothing and everything to do with my flipping subject.. theres just no point talking about anything if truth really is dead. It’s absurd to think a university dissertation is worth talking about New Media or anything if the starting premises is that communication is impossible and that life is only about the pursuit of power and exploitation of everyone but me.. if that is the case.. why am I wasting my time at uni? why would I want to write a dissertation?? And at the same time everything is fleeting and meaningless.. you either screw everyone else and exert complete control and destroy yourself in the process.. or just adopt some sort of pseudo-Buddhist annihiliationism.. whats the point in saying anything? doing anything? Theres only silence and a void. Surely if I can’t speak on such things I’m only at Uni to be brain washed and normalised into the absurdity of this screwed up world.

Crypto-fascist

Is.. according to the urban dictionary a word to describe a ‘hidden supporter’ of fascism. Fascism in turn is something which it seem’s not a lot of people can agree on.. but is what for simplicity’s sake could be called an authoritarian form of goverment (among other things). I knew a guy once who called himself a national socialist, he was pretty hard to get on with.. but I then later found that Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany had considered itself a national socialist party.

 The thing I considered strange then was I always thought Marxism and Fascism two quite distinct.. and opposed ideologies. How wrong I was! (I’m going somewhere with this, honest) Marxism is a system intended to deliver ‘justice’ to the working classes. The belief that the needs of society are put over the needs of the individual, and the individuals desire for ‘capital’ of his or her own. It is also many other things but this is what I wanted to say on it.

National Socialism by contrast then looks at ‘class’ and broadens it to the ‘nation’. The delivery of ‘justice’ and rights for those of the nation group. I found a quote by Himmler which best captures the attitude.

 ”Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need then as slaves to our culture… whether ten thousand Russian fenales fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as an anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.”

 The question I want to then pose to anyone who might be reading this is to think on some things regarding Marxism and National Socalism before continuing.

-Marxism if concerned for a concept of Justice for the oppressed working classes requires a preconcieved concept of justice. Where might this come from?

-National Socialism likewise requires a concept of justice, however this concept appears to differ in some sense. How so?

-Both definitions of justice seem to be redefined or atleast restricted to either a nation group or a class and suggest a pre-existing desire to change things.

-Both these institutions are by a result of their thinking atheistic (though some would argue this isn’t a given)

So.. I guess the thing is here is.. why should anyone concern themselves about justice unless it concerns the self.. or unless they are moved by some moral obligation? Without a infinite point of reference (something like God) how are finite expressions (like measures of justice, terror, mercy etc.) given any lasting value? If it is we then who define these from the moment when we reject God it is quickly visible why National Socialism is viewed as an authoritarian regime.. why should an individual like Hitler define what is right and wrong for a nation when his value is of insignificance anyway? and more so, his view is just as insignificant as anyone elses!

Now the fascism and the thinking behind Hitlers third reich has always been tied together with Friedrich Nietziech and his work concerning the concept of ‘The Will to Power’ . In the absence of God, we must become God’s ourselves and define our own existence, to control others and to rise over notions like pity, mercy or justice because such things no longer exist.. or did not exist ever. In short.. I’m looking out for me and me only. Yet we all feel the pull to our own ‘tribe’ be it our family or subculture (and boffins say this is something to do with our evolutionary heritage). So it’s “me and my tribe are all that matter”.

 Ever heard someone say do something for your country only to have someone reply what’s my country ever done for me? (Or words to that effect?) I think it’s the same thing. Why care about stuff which doesn’t concern you? Most politicians will be dead by the time Global Warming does it’s worst.. and I quite like my standard of living.. why should they care.. why should I? I’m only interested in now and me, me me. Damn the ‘future generations’ who gives a monkeys?

The link in with today is Nietzsche although not so often talked about now is one of the first “Post-Enlightenment” thinkers. One of the first or even ‘pre-’post-modernists. It might not be popular.. or some might not care but it isn’t a massive streach to see how the ethics which make something like Hitler so bad are so evident in our own lives.. and our own society today. Hitler simply defined what was right and good for Nazi Germany aswell as all that was bad and wrong for it too. Don’t we belong to tribes or groups which make these same claims in our ’search for meaning’. Hitler just seems bad because his notion of Good and Bad were just so different to what we now consider ‘normal’. So unless your in my tribe.. why talk to me of justice? You don’t know what it means!

But.. what if there really was truth, justice and other such things? What if there was a true truth wether we liked it or not? That we could share an understanding to then communicate and act on our communal existence beyond the confines of any one persons definitions?

Just some thoughts.. I just don’t how any of this is possible without something like God. Without him or whatever you think of him as, what is actually the point? We’re already dead we just don’t realise it yet.

 But I think with Jesus you know he showed us a way and lived like there was meaning in his life. The only person who used those shared values and didn’t say “No! Me and my tribe only” but..

“I command you to love each other the same way that I love you. And here is how to measure it- the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends. You are my friends if you obey me. I no longer call you servants, because a master doesn’t confide in his servants. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the father told me. You didn’t choose me. I choose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name. I command you to love each other”