polis

"Polis" is said to be the ancient greek word for "city". This is evident in modern words like metropolis, megalopolis, police, policy, and politics. These all refer to either the actual city place, or to a core component for the correct working of a city.

I notice also that "poli" or "poly" is known to mean "many". Polygon, polyglot, polymer, polytechnical, polyhedron, polyamorous - this root is also deeply embedded into our languages, and denotes a plurality of entities that compose a whole; a core concept in this varied reality we inhabit. So far, so good.

What strikes my interest is the concept of "city". Imagine cities do not yet exist - each of us engages with few people on a regular basis. Perhaps we live with our immediate family, or with our extended family, no larger than a small tribe, and we move with the seasons to find food and water. Or perhaps we live alone, preferring solitude and self-reliance. Then one day you notice people traveling in the same direction. Family after family passes you by, and they tell you of this place that has lots of food and water and people live comfortably. You decide to go there and see it for yourself.

When you get there, you notice several things. Some houses are large and well-built. The ground has become worn with frequent footsteps, and trails abound which mark the main paths people take. Yet what makes this place different at its core is not what has been built upon it, but all the PEOPLE who live here. Many people, more than you've ever seen before at a time. And the dynamics between them are different, too. Living so close together requires finer levels of coordination than you've known before, and their language is accordingly developed and beyond your own. Their resources are shared, their skills are shared, and this new place prospers.

Now imagine going back to your family and telling them about this place. How do you tell them? We can say it has big houses, that it has trails and a good river beside it. But the core element of this place, I gather, is All The People. So many people, living close by as you never saw before. I imagine I would describe this place as "the place with a lot of people". "Place of many people." We have several people over here, and that family by the hill has even a few more. But the place with MANY people? That's that place over there. The polis. The city.

And from this derivation I see our other words derive naturally as well. Many people living very close together are prone to encounter frictions and disagreements with their neighbors. A higher density of humans implies a lesser space per human (on average), a higher likelihood of one's expressions crossing another's perceptions and causing annoyance, irritation, anger.

Agglomeration increases the pressures of interaction upon one another, and from these often develops conflict. Conflict can damage people and values around them. How can we prevent this damage? We make some rules that we all learn, and each person is free to act and express within the given rules, which were designed to prevent people from infringing upon other people's boundaries. They are the rules that people know and follow when living in the polis. The rules of the polis, the rules intended to help the *lots of people* live together well. A policy.

And what when conflict still occurs? And what when the polis needs some taking care of - some maintenance, some upgrade, some expansion? How will this place and its people be taken care of as time progresses, decay progresses, and accidents, social and physical, threaten the stability of this place? Well, how about some of us do that with our time? We'll make sure things are working, we'll see that people are not harming each other too much, and we'll see that the policies are being followed.

Who are we? We're the ones who take care of the polis. The policia. The police.

The more connotation-loaded derivation from "polis" that I see is "politics". As I was growing up, I remember, "politics" was one of those words that I couldn't manage people to explain to me clearly, or even consistently, and I suspected most of them did not have a clear understanding of it themselves. And yet it seemed to creep into conversations of a wide variety of topics, where I noticed it often impassioned some people, it alienated others, and people seemed to gravitate to the political "teams" they aligned with, and members of different teams would raise their voices towards each other, and proceed to try to convince the others that "my team is better than your team". Never did I see anyone convince another to drop his allegiance and join one's own. They were just loud stalemates.

Yet politics is talked about. It inhabits our conversations, it covers the news headlines, and it affects the structure of our lives. The dictionary refers to it as "the activities of a governance", "the debate between parties having power", "the academic study of government", "beliefs or principles", "concerned with power and status". The core idea, nevertheless, can be traced back to our root word "polis".

A human being is complex. Beyond the pure animal, a human has expanded its awareness to a varied array of desires and preferences. Survival is not enough anymore. A human notices gradations and new perceptions within what was before merely liked or disliked. He begins to aim for comfort, for luxury, for specific emotional and social interactions, while survival, previously his main aim, he now assumes to be a "right", an inviolable part of himself. He is within himself a flow of ever-finer desires and expressions, and must find balance both internal and external for these flows.

This complexity only compounds when multiple humans interact together, especially during long periods of time. Some of my expressions may fit your wants and viceversa, but some of our wants will collide, and will drive us to fight for resources. Some of our preferences will clash, some of my being may hurt you even without intent. The possibilities and their combinations are vast... vastly complex.

For a group of many people to be in balance with itself, the inflows and outflows of its individuals must balance each other out. What I want he has, and what she needs, I offer. But the excesses and lacks that manifest in a single human being also compound in groups, and finding adequate supplies and outlets for my needs and my expressions, especially as the group grows larger and our senses grow finer, becomes infeasible. Man then turned to another idea: central coordination.

Required surely for any city, gathering the decision-making, the communication, and the intent of a population into a center can greatly speed up signalling and coordination between its members. It introduces a common star topology that can transmit any signal from any member to everyone else in one or two steps. It can align the intents of the individuals - divergent, arbitrary, unaware of each other - into common desires and intents. As a polarized ferromagnet aligns the units of its crystalline structure into a single direction, towards which it will move once it has found its aim, so the population aligned towards a common direction or intent holds a tremendous power to move towards and to achieve what it seeks. Coordination, alignment, in matters both internal and external to the polis, to the "many people", is the value that I see politics offers.

And it strikes me that the role of a person in a political position, beyond the cliché issues of selfish interest and mundane livelihood, is one of service. A human steps into this artificial role-box willingly, whose aim is to provide a reliable and common structure to the group. He offers his own body to the body of the group structure, and he becomes a fulcrum on which the designed machine can run. A government without bodies is no more solid than an idea, and a society in the physical world requires a physical structure. Each such politician contributes his body, his energy, for the sake of the group - so that the group's machine, designed to stabilize and coordinate them all, continues to function.

Whether or not this machine is actually effective at such stabilization and coordination, however, is another topic. Hardened shells must be let go if the life within is to continue to grow.

Upon noticing these details, my perception of politicians and politics changed. No longer a privileged throne of wasteful luxury and corruption, nor just a stepping stool to steal from the common treasure vaults. Nor were their tacky discourses and their mundane droning only futile exercises. They all are, consciously or not, the Life that steps into the common structure of government and coordination that we ourselves designed, and in which we, majorily, continue to depend on, to trust, and to expect.

Living and coordinating together with other humans is not effortless, and its effectiveness is not guaranteed. This was ongoing at the beginning of our species, and we ourselves have recorded countless stories of our trials, our triumphs, and our collapses via history, myth, and lore. Villages, towns, cities, nations, empires have risen, prospered, and fallen through the perpetual flux of interactions they each engage in with their neighbors. Trade, cooperation, conflict, destruction, merging, submission, diplomacy, war - all these are specific instances of the dynamic push and pull, the mixture, the cracking, the pressures they induce upon one another, as various pieces of some substance(s) grow, find each other, and learn to cohabitate, all of them morphing in the process.

As true a process occurs between human units. Between two metallic pieces being welded, and at the onset of two fluids. Between two molecules yearning to exchange electrons, between gas bubbles in a fizzy drink. In the ever-caresses of the ocean upon the coast, and between the kingdoms and empires and nations this planet has hosted for millennia, and continues to host.

web of Truth

The web of Truth is one. Our path in Life is an exploration of the one web, which we all share, and to which neither of us holds the one preferred version or perspective - we simply all explore the paths and shapes and branches of which this web is composed.

A consciousness traverses the paths via its own experience, and through it is able to taste, to feel the uniqueness of each point in the web through its own filters and understanding.

Experience alone, however, is not by itself sufficient to know a branch, to learn from it, to integrate it into the growing consciousness. Integration into one's own tree of knowledge can occur only by paying attention, by applying its awareness to the experience being felt. Awareness is the light that shines upon the truth so it may be seen clearly. It can reveal new paths til then unknown.

Awareness lights up what is true, and will also reveal the misunderstandings we had adopted in our tree of knowledge, the illusions we've had in our psyche. Like a flame it can burn fears, assumptions, and incongruencies one has adopted as one stumbled through life while distracted or unfocused. By earnest application of attention onto the moment, the book of Truth can read clear before us, and in a manner of cleansing, it can help us dispel the unclear paths, the false shortcuts, and the illusory dangers we once believed.

I surmise that one's particular tree of knowledge connects between its nodes and its branches with varying degrees of clarity, of knowledge. Well-learned paths are bright and known, while other paths are fuzzier, dimmer, or even intentionally blocked.

This leads me to think that a person's tree of knowledge is likely composed of multiple, even of a multitude of tree mostly disconnected from each other, even kept in this manner as a form of self-protection, or because the distinct concepts are believed to be incompatible with one another. Thus we perhaps reject parts of ourselves. We isolate the nodes and branches deemed unworthy, and move our awareness out of it. Still a part of us, it resides in our subconscious, rejected and alive.

And I surmise it is attention, yet again, which can avail such disconnection within ourselves. In times when we find ourselves in a rejected part of us, not wanting to be here, feeling discomfort at the pain, the shame, the rage, the fear, the jealousy, at the unworthiness that somehow resides in this section of our tree, we need not panic. We need not avoid it, we need not flee.

We can instead realize where we are, accept the discomfort being felt, and pay attention. We let attention light our surroundings, and explore exactly what is happening.

Those fiends and evils that roam this dark section, shine your light upon them. Who are they truly? Are they willing enemies who live within you, yearning to damage and destroy you, for which you isolated them in a dark cave? Keep watching them. Know them to the root. Those dark dreary corners filled with fright - are those not simply old cobwebs flourishing in neglect?

And those faces threatening you, mocking you, reminding you of your failure, of your shame, look closer. Are they not reflections of your own pain and desires, which grow in horror and grossness in line with your own fear? And those voices, stabbing directly into your pain - are they not the echoes of your own frightened cries as they bounce around in this hall of mirrors you hardly have gotten to know?

Shine then, your light, on those corners in you that hurt, that prickle like a long-stuck thorn. Uncover that dark shame, so long in hiding, who has felt your own rejection all this time. Flee not from the raging giant imprisoned by your own throat. All these monsters carry messages for us, and they are only as frightful as we believe them to be. Listen to their messages. Pay attention.

Shine your light in your dungeons. Make it shine into the swamp's mire, uncover your warts, your shames, your mistakes. And as you see the truth of each of these corners once-thought dark, you may just find you can move, in calm and grace, onto a state of peace, a section of us thought to be much less dark. Via attention we may find a connection between our dark and light sections, by which we realize they were simply a single whole part of the unending web of Truth we continue to explore.

Teddy

Teddy sat on the bed by himself.

I knew he "heard" the shouting of my sister when she came into my room,
and somehow his unmoving, unknowing eyes held an observer that could see my sadness.

I had done nothing to her,
I was only singing.
Loud and shrill, yes,
but for myself and in my room.
Yet she didn't ask me to be quieter or to stop.
She didn't ask for permission to come in.
She didn't show any sign that this was my room, or that I was happy, or that I was her brother.
She had slammed my door open, looked at me with blind fury,
and screamed at me with hatred, demanding that I shut up,
and pierced my ears with the words "you sing horrible! simply horrible!",
whose etched scars I still retain.

Teddy just looked at me.
or straight ahead, it doesn't matter.
but he was the one companion I had in the moment.
my lifeless, speechless, choiceless friend,
only with him I shared my hurt.

no opinion,
no judgement,
only cotton and eyes
against which to dry my hurt.

(Written in 2021, probably)

imbalance

A physically imbalanced person, upon receiving a physical input, e.g. a force, a push or pull, may tend to topple over easily to one side or to the other.

So also tends the emotionally imbalanced person to be easily triggered into states of depression, grief, euphoria, rage, or terror, with emotional inputs. And so tends the mentally imbalanced person to interpret a thought or a concept as an extreme version of its original perception, his understanding slid away on the askew platform of his mind.

smother

it is the growth of protection

the zeal of containment

the fear of invasion, of corruption

of the precious that which is mine

that obscures it

seals it

restricts it

closes and narrows the air vents that lead to it

that smothers the flame

that leaves it meager, slow

congeals it into its form

which it must now protect

to remain what it thinks it is

the fiery flame that seeded it

becomes reliable, predictable

a warm stone

its smothered heart latent

in this step of its being

Subconscious blame

Representing stuck flows, stuck cycles. How to describe these?

Appropriating, attaching the cause of an action I took, an event that occurred, or a choice that I took - I see I sometimes attach it to an attribute, a quality, a feature of an external entity. I wonder what is it like to practice to bring back these causes, to link them directly onto, features or attributes or sensations or preferences within myself instead?

As example, today a woman thanked me for making space for her to come out from her bus seat and deboard the bus. I chose not to respond with the usual "You're Welcome" or "Bitte". A second later, I found myself attributing my choice of not responding to her to the "disinterest"/"perfunctoriness" that I sensed coming from her thanks. I justified my nonresponse to something I perceived in *her*, not in me. And with a slight energy, the words that seem to describe this are "it was her fault that I didn't respond".

I notice both that I attribute this to not me, and that I found it somehow important to justify my nonresponse to myself.

...
[Update 4 days later]:
What I surmise is that a part of me is a constant guardian of keeping myself correct, against my own judgement and others'. 1. I do something. 2. I doubt the correctness of what I just did. 3. I seek an outlet to place the doubt, the remaining uncertainty or potential incorrectness of what I did onto.

That's the keyword. Outlet. I seek to let it out of myself because I do not accept it as part of myself. That potential incorrectness, that uncertainty - it must come from somewhere else, not from me, my image claims. And my dutiful guardian seeks where to put it, that thing it does not like, and places it there as soon as it can.

That outlet is leaky, I sense. It leaks a flow out of me which was not fully processed.

human flow

A stable object is one whose internal and external flows are in balance with one another. In sufficient balance, in any case, to maintain the form and the function ascribed to that object.

A stable human, for instance, is one whose internal flows sustain the stability of its essential parts, so that each is not congested nor malnourished, and retains its own form and exhibits its own function. It is one whose external flows, such as ingestion and excretion, respiration, and the touch of its skin membrane, are in balance with one another, and who is able to perceive changes in its environment, and adjust its own internal flows accordingly.

Note that in the human body, its own components are part of its flows, and just as it daily creates millions of cells with the use of inflowing nutrients and energy, which become the fresh new stewards of the role they are born into, so daily die millions more, becoming raw organic molecules and waste matter that move on to be recycled into other internal flows, or onto the outflow of excretion from the body, a necessary continuous cleansing for the sake of the stability of the bodily system.

The units persiste only inasmuch as they contribute to the healthy development of the whole. They rise and they die quickly, like firefly flashes, yet the group form they uphold together persists, grows, and develops across many generations of these units. So the drop to the river, the cell to the human, the human to culture, and beyond.

recipe

A recipe is the result or corollary of a process of understanding persisted onto matter, stamped as such with the intent of reproducing a desired task or goal, severed from the process of understanding that begot it.

And as a flower plucked from its plant, it too will decay with time, as the flow of life force or understanding that brought it into being is no longer able to sustain it, to help it shift and adapt as its context changes, or to help it grow further.

And still we create recipes, and we follow them. We pluck flowers and we enjoy them. Indeed, they prove useful, for they serve as messages across time and space, often easier to grasp and follow than the complete tree of understanding would be.

Furthermore, the attentive and curious recipient may also be helped in xis path to understanding. Such a person has the ability to look upon the persisted result, and to perhaps surmise the growth and branches that were traversed to come upon the recipe of interest. With sufficient willpower, xe may test xis hypotheses one by one, with xis own discernment and creativity. And with time and perseverance, xe may be able to connect xis own tree of understanding to the corollary in question. Or conversely, xe may deem it inadequate, perhaps by realizing it is incompatible with xis own tree of knowledge.

Just so can the dedicated gardener study and research the flower, know its seeds, and with time and perseverance, may be able to connect the flower's life force with his own garden. Or to knowingly reject it, if so desired after knowing it.

art installation

Today at an art installation, while opening up my backpack to get some markers out, when I opened up another zippered section unintentionally, and saw my keyboard and laptop inside, something inside me became slightly alert to the "discrepancy" I felt between my colorful/marker-related interests and my programming interests and occupation. The alert desired to prevent someone else from seeing both of these sides of me at the same time. Or perhaps to prevent others from seeing the side of me that I perceive to be less "apt", or "adequate", for the setting I am currently in: this artistic installation.