Author Archives: Despina Durand

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About Despina Durand

part-time goth, full-time critic

2017.01.02 : the means are everything

My newfound love of lifestyle/organization bloggers/vloggers is taking as much getting used to as my stint getting into make up did; exactly like looking in the mirror and not entirely recognizing the face looking back at you. 

Regardless, Kalyn Nicholson said something in a recent video that struck me as possibly the most crucial application of a philosophical conclusion I have recently been examining. 

We try and convince ourselves that the new year, or the new month, or the new apartment, whatever new “beginning” we can identify will be the one that changes everything. This time we will change our ways and we will do the things that will make us into the person we have always wanted to be. 

But that’s end-goal thinking. That’s the kind of thinking that is motivated purely by ideological purity. It’s philosophical and emotional perfectionism. It’s exactly the kind of toxic thinking that has been ruining lives and countries and politics and relationships and futures. 

Instead, process based thinking is a much more effective and healthy approach. We cannot control the circumstances that arise, or the events that transpire, or what other people do or choose, but we can choose how we’re going to react to those things, what habits we’re going to build, what kind of work we’re willing to do, what hardships we’re willing to endure to try and build towards that “end goal” – ideological purity is important for determining the overall course of action and what things require attention, but the work needs to be procedural, constant, and evolutionary. 

We cannot build a perfect world and hold it in stasis forever. That is impossible. Equally, we cannot build a perfect self and live that way forever. We do not live forever, and change is inevitable. But we can direct that change and build systems and processes and reactions that are more whole, more kind, more progressive, more inspired, more strong, more open, more accepting. 

The personal is political, and not simply because politics ends at the door to the home. But also because the kind of people we make ourselves into and the choices and actions we take, and the philosophies we choose to enact in our personal lives are part of what builds the societies we live in and the politics we live under. 

So we should extend to ourselves the kindnesses and the constant improvement we expect from others and for others. 

2016.12.27 : the strings of fate

In his book Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins, Scott Bukatman posits that “it is not obedience and being a good boy that makes Pinocchio into a real boy, it’s his disobedience, through which he inadvertently demonstrates his autonomy (rather than automatism), his independence, and his ‘realness.’” (p. 81) As we progress ever closer to the inevitable emergence of computers that might be able to think for themselves, our popular culture has become completely obsessed with the question of what is “real” when it comes to consciousness. 

The Turing test provides an answer: if you cannot tell the difference from outside the black box, then what difference is there?

Philosophers and theologians debate the presence of the soul, and whether or not anything made by man, rather than by God, can have the animation, the spark that some call the Self and others call Divinity. 

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Silicon Valley, where they take up where Dr. Frankenstein left off and keep pushing, pushing to see if they can transform themselves from the men they are into the gods they believe themselves to be, while cowering in fear within the trap they set themselves when they dreamt up Roko’s Basilisk. 

Meanwhile, further afield those who have drunk deeply from the cup of technical knowledge ask, whether or not the Turing test is the pure limit of knowledge of freedom; quantum mechanics and probability offer a picture of a universe utterly devoid of freewill at all. The vision is of a perfect machine that started with the Big Bang and in which sub atomic vibrations and interaction determined by probability generate all causality – Calvinism for a new age. 

Bukatman offers a much simpler view of freedom. One that ties freedom not to some innate quality or capacity, but freedom of choice. Freedom comes from any beings capacity to do the opposite of what it has been instructed to do. There are no strings on me, goes the song in Disney’s Pinocchio, and echoed 60 years later in the trailer for Marvel’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Though, of course, the first follows a truly disobedient automaton – Pinocchio travels far outside the bounds of his limitations, shaking off the strings that keep him a puppet. Ultron, by contrast, does not necessarily display that high a level of freedom of choice. His directive was to protect the Earth from any threats, he identifies a threat (humanity itself) and proceeds to take action against that threat. 

Which begs the question: what does humanity truly fear in its sentient creations? Is it freedom of choice at the highest level; the capacity for a new being to determine, for itself, what its goals and desires are? Or is it freedom of execution, which is really a failure of programming? 

Whether the divine has some roll in it or not, humanity has been debating this question forever; all children must some day show whether or not they have freedom of choice or freedom of execution. Parents have long feared for their children, and feared them. 

[spoiler alert for HBO’s Westworld]

Upon concluding the HBO original series Westworld, a friend asked me whether Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) is the god he claims to be. I countered that the dichotomy (not a binary) presented by the two creators of the androids, Ford and the mysterious Arnold, are in fact much closer to the cultural narratives of regarding parenting.

Arnold, it turns out, believed that the androids had achieved true consciousness and that to open the park and leave them at the mercy of human beings and their programming would be a crime of unimaginable magnitude, and so he weaponized their programming and had them slaughter each other, and ultimately, him, to prevent the park from opening. In doing so, he robbed them of the freedom to choose whether they wanted to be culpable in those murders, in his murder, and whether or not they wanted to live at all. 

These are traits more commonly associated with motherhood;belief that your offspring are unique and special despite what anyone else or common knowledge might say, willing sacrifice in the name of protecting your offspring, and even filicide in the name of protecting your children from something worse than death. Arnold is further considered to be the more involved and more talented or important of the two creators which further adds to his role as “mother”. 

Ford has the last word, and the more important word, in a sense, on the matter of freedom and parenting. He allows the non-human inhabitants of the park to realize the full extent of their situation – the rape, the murder, the repetition, the suffering – and then gives them a gun and a choice: they can kill him and fight for their freedom, or they can let him live and continue as they have. 

These are the paternalistic traits; allowing your offspring to suffer in order for them to truly understand the world, handing down impossible choices with a tacit command, self-sacrifice in battle rather than at home. 

The writers don’t, surprisingly, leave any doubt as to the reality of freedom to choose. One character had been programmed with a directive to escape, so what had, until that point, been presented as aberrant behavior – freedom to choose – was in fact, ultimately programming. But at the last minute, as she is almost escaped the park, she chooses to turn back. 

That moment leaves no doubt that programming is but half of what makes the spark of life. Where the capacity to turn back exists, despite everything that screams to prioritize self-preservation, there is freedom.

What humanity fears is not freedom. Humanity fears its own short-sightedness. Silicon Valley is afraid, like all parents, that they will create in their own image. When we bring life into this world, we are making a little prayer of hope; that this life will not make the same mistakes that we did, that we will have a better brighter world, populated by better, brighter lives than the one we have known. 

But then again, maybe all that hope is for nothing.

They fuck you up your mum and dad
They do not mean to but they do
They give you all the faults they had
And and some extra, just for you…

– Philip Larkin

2016.12.19 : in and out

All I’ve done for the last year, roughly, has been the business of self-improvement. Some of it has earned me money, some of it is counted as formal education, some of it is therapeutic, but it has been a course of solipsism. 

I’m not disinclined towards self-examination. I have piles of journals filled with the teenage ramblings of someone with––perhaps too much of––a penchant for navel gazing. “I” statements are relatively easy, all things considered.

Of all of the practices (writing daily, photographing daily, art classes, paid labor, free labor) exercise is the one that has yielded some of the most interesting results. I remain amazed by the degree to which is impacts the mind. 

The body is the source of any number of terrible names: meat suit, transport, flesh bag, etc. The fact that human beings (and other creatures of our planet) are fleshy machines, capable of complex thought and movement, and ultimately decaying and eatable is a profoundly alienating thing to consider. (I highly recommend this short film based on the story by Terry Bisson. An excellent use of 5 minutes of your day.) 

When we can escape the dichotomy of the mind vs the body (one which was described to me recently as being more Western than not, though my inclination is that more cultures describe the disconnect between mind and body; most major religions speak of distancing oneself from the earthly, and thus fleshy, plane, and any culture with ghosts is one that can imagine the mind without the body), we open ourselves up to that which science is increasingly confirming: that the body and the mind are intimately intertwined. A revelation which should come as no surprise, and yet always does. I try to remind myself that if the psychosomatic exists, and the mind can tell the body to hurt where it does not, then it should come as no surprise that the body can tell the mind to react or believe something that is not necessarily true. 

For me, harnessing that has been the business of mindfulness. My father recently made an offhand comment that has profoundly influenced me, and confirmed even further something I was starting to believe. 

I said that my natural breathing pattern isn’t very deep: I take small breaths when I’m breathing naturally. He responded by pointing out that shortness of breath is a symptom of anxiety, and if I am prone to bouts of anxiety, perhaps a closer examination of my breathing is in order. 

My unofficial mantra has become to breathe deeply. If I find myself at loose ends, or anxious, or tired, or upset, or even just bored, I breathe in deeply and feel it flow all the way to the pit of my stomach, and expand my ribs outward. This kind of breath is astoundingly powerful. I’ve been developing a daily yoga practice and the constant struggle to maintain my focus on the poses and my muscle usage and breathing out and breathing in is possibly the most important thing I do every day. 

I bookmarked a page of breathing quotes, and I’ll share with you my favorite three: 

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. 

––Thích Nhất Hạnh

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again. 

––L. Frank Baum

Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God. 

––Krishnamacharya

(The last one is an odd one for me, with my inherited atheism, but it provides an excellent image, and serves as a great mantra for practicing the fourfold breath.) 

2016.12.17 : topographic narrative, narrative topography

It’s snowing. I don’t think we’ll manage a white christmas this year, because the temperature is expected to continue to go up, but right now, the roofs of the houses are disappearing into the white cloud cover of the sky, and the haze of snowflakes rushing towards the earth is hazing up my vision. 

It’s the sort of weather that is perfect for staying inside. There’s light reflected off the various newly whitened surfaces of the sky and the buildings and the earth, but it’s made soft. 

This is the weather that makes leaving hard to imagine. My room in my parents’ house has excellent windows. I have a bay window that faces south, and a huge window that faces west. I get beautiful warm afternoon light, and even in the morning, my room glows with natural light. 

Topography, geography, and architecture––the aesthetics of place––are of particular interest and importance to me. All spaces, shared and personal, are composed of the complexity of interaction and occupation. (I am attempting to escape my tendency to speak of “ownership,” both because it limits my thinking and because it contributes to a destructive interpretation of reality and experience.) But just as my parents each have their home office, into which I may walk and even perhaps take a book off a shelf, or borrow a tool, the understanding is that the space and its contents are under the purview and primary usage of someone else and that I am a guest. However, I find, that their occupation of the shared space of the sun room, and the dog’s persistent usage of the couch in that room as a bed means that I am alienated from that space. Not that I am unwelcome, but because it is a shared environment, the rules are less defined about usage and occupation, in that they are dependent on the other occupants, in a manner that leaves me uncertain how to proceed.

I contrast this to my experience of cities and streets and other public spaces (not simply shared ones). Cities have always held power over me. I love the way they feel: complicated, alive, communal, disinterested. They feed my desire to know that other people exist, and are alive, and are living, while allowing me the veil of anonymity and its associated confidence. 

Public spaces demand a certain vigilance: you are surrounded by strangers, but like any good party, you have an invitation and no one will ask you what you’re doing there, as long as you make a good show of belonging. 

More than that, cities are also made up of strips, sequences of travel. Commutes and favorite haunts are habits that become extensions of the self. We develop familiarities with the landscape and its inhabitants. A favorite graffito, a fellow commuter, a notable architectural feature, a crack in the sidewalk. We develop itineraries of place that keep us tied to the physical world. 

Personally, I build ant’s eye views of all the cities I visit, and the places I live. Like medieval travel maps I build sequential images in my head that tie one place to another. With enough time, those sequences will start to overlap and become branching webs of options marking all the turns that connect the places I frequent to one another. Sometimes I look up and find a landmark of significant height to serve as a beacon (the Acropolis serves particularly well, when in Athens) to get me back to where I started. But maps and other bird’s eye views have never really helped me. I find it easier to navigate in the dips and swells of the topography, from hills to sidewalk cracks, and the rhythm of travel, the rush of landmarks as you push your pace to make it to work on time, the number of breaths and turns along the bus route, where the road opens up and you can hit the gas. 

Places are something felt, a somatic experience, a story told with the body, rather than something one walks through or inhabits to carry on the intricacies of existence. 

2016.12.16 : one at a time, not all at once.

The trouble with a daily writing practice is that it has to be daily and it has to be in spite of whatever resistance one is feeling to the idea of sitting down to write. 

The purpose is to learn to circumnavigate that resistance. 

It is very, very hard.

I’ve spent a good deal of time lately trying to understand the basics of planning, goal setting, and time management. I want to be able to get things done, and make sure that I show up on time and prepared for the variety of obligations that ultimately present themselves. 

The first problem, of course, is that this is all an elaborate ruse to keep myself from getting the things I’m supposed to be doing, done. The second is that I have approached this research endeavor through the media of Youtube and Pinterest which are ultimately exercises in self-doubt and envy. Also probably misinformation. 

Mostly, and I thank Alexis Giostra (aka MissTrenchcoat) of Strange & Charmed for the name and call-out of the habit, I suffer from shiny object syndrome (from this video). Also known as “commitment phobia,” “poor impulse control,” “perfectionist tendencies,” among others. In the past three months, I have designed a variety of different printable planner inserts, and multiple physical planner notebook objects. I’m proud of all of that work, and I do think it was informative, both personally and technically. 

What that means in practice, however, is that I have not stuck with a given planner structure/system for longer than about 3 weeks. That’s not long enough for a person to build a habit, and certainly not long enough for me to build a habit. 

Habits are, as any number of people will tell you, the cornerstone of daily life and successful individuals. It’s why men wear suits, why Steve Jobs wore the same all black outfit every day, and why you can remember to put milk in your coffee in the morning. Essentially, habits are tiny automated processes you kick start at certain times/with certain behaviors. Whether or not you know it, you likely do the exact same thing every time you shower, shampoo, conditioner, bodywash, arms, legs, back, etc. Or when you brush your teeth, you start on the same side of your mouth every time and go through the same order of tops/insides/outsides each time. Maybe you get up at the same time every day (or can’t sleep in later than a certain hour). This is habit. 

In my life, I have had remarkably few habits develop. Most of them have to do with how I brush my teeth, and the order in which I do things in the shower. I managed to solidify, whilst in college, the evening tooth brushing routine, so that I would brush, floss, and put in my night guard, just by getting to the bathroom before bedtime. (I am probably overly proud of this fact, but I’m learning to take my victories where I find them.)

More importantly, however, is that automated processes don’t require thinking. I’m not a fan of the term “spoonie” or the spoonie movement/nomenclature, but they are founded in a very important basic principle: we all have a cognitive limit. The biggest suck of cognitive energy is decision making. The best reason to develop habits is that you’re removing decision making processes. If you can automate all the steps between “wake up” and “get on the bus”––turning off your alarm, getting out of bed, washing up, breakfast, getting dressed, gathering your stuff, leaving the house––you’ve conserved cognitive energy that can be better used to make tough decisions at work, come up with new ideas, etc.  

Having a plan is not the same as having a habit, however. It isn’t enough to know that when your alarm goes off you should turn it off, get out of bed, wash up, eat breakfast, get dressed, etc etc. Should only means that you have to make the decision to do it. Here we can borrow from Freud briefly, and use the Ego, Superego, and Id to illustrate the point:

Should means that the Superego is telling you what the “proper” “moral” or “correct” course of action is, most of us hear the alarm in the morning and the Id starts screaming about how it wants more sleep, and how winter air is cold, and how the news in the paper will probably be depressing, etc etc. Now the Ego has to make a choice. 

That’s the bad news. Nevertheless there is good news!

Provided you make the choice enough times, you can turn it into a habit. That means, effectively, training the Ego to ignore the Id, and ultimately, training the Id to not mind as much. Habits don’t make things more pleasant (you won’t suddenly develop a fondness for cold winter air on your feet first thing in the morning) but it makes things easier (you won’t have to psych yourself up to put your feet on the floor). 

Now, that’s just one portion of the process of getting things done. That’s the stuff you can plan for/automate. The rest of it is learning the skills and supporting habits that will allow you to deal with the things that cannot be automated. Meetings, projects, parties, restaurant menus, et. al. I think a lot of people who don’t have very good habit forming skills in other arenas of their lives probably have a small arsenal of habits (both good and bad) for dealing with the unexpected, because they don’t have the kind of solid foundation that keeps the number of unexpected things to a minimum. For example, when ordering food or drinks off a menu that one has never seen before; some people will scan and look for dishes/ingredients they recognize/like and allow that to guide them in narrowing the list of choices, others look for the things they do not recognize or have never tried and use that to guide them. The goal of these tricks/habits is that they allow their practitioner to make fewer total number of choices. You don’t have to go through each item on the menu individually and accept or reject each of them (which would take a huge quantity of cognitive energy). You create a short list of at most three things you might order and then pick between them (which requires much less energy). 

In the same way, people with good habits for the “unexpected” might have it as part of their planning process to add an extra ten minutes to their schedule in front of any meeting which they use to review their notes, or meditate, or develop an agenda, or whatever, which allows them to be focused and prepared for the meeting. 

To be able to do this, however, you need to be able to keep track of when your meetings are. You can’t build the extra-10-minutes habit, if you never know when you’ll need to practice it. This is where these supportive habits come into play. 

When I say supportive habits I mean things like: regularly planning your day/week/month, checking in with schedules and to-do lists, keeping track of notes, information, and actionable items. That’s the sort of thing that, ultimately, needs to be developed on two fronts.

The first one is in your scheduled habits. If you make it part of your “morning routine” and/or “evening routine” to review your schedule for the day and/or focus on the tasks you need to do that day or the following one, than you’re making it an automated process to know what you have to be doing, when, where, and with or for whom. This keeps things from sneaking up on you outside of total freak accidents and unpredictable phenomena. 

The second is in reflecting on/reacting to your emotional or physical situation. If you finish something earlier than expected: go back to your schedule/to do list and reevaluate what you can do. If something takes longer than expected: go back to your schedule/to do list and reevaluate what you can do. If you are feeling stressed out, stop for 5 minutes and do some meditative/deep breathing until you are more clear headed … then go back to your schedule/to do list and determine what your next step should be. 

This second set of habits is harder, in some ways, to develop, because it does require the capacity (not so much intellectual, as emotional) to stop and reflect on our own actions/emotions. Anyone who has ever been stressed, overwhelmed, angry, upset, depressed (so pretty much the entire world) can tell you that pulling yourself out of the emotional moment or situation and recognizing it as an emotion can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. 

Then again, that’s why you have the first set of habits: if you check your plan for the day every morning, and put one together every night before bed, you’re already half-way to being able to stop and evaluate what you’re feeling or thinking based on what you are (or aren’t) doing. The cognitive energy you save by not having to force yourself out of bed, or remembering to brush your teeth can be spent figuring out why that phone call you said you were going to make last week still hasn’t happened. And maybe after some deep breathing, or planning a little script, or writing down, step by step, what you need to do to make that call (get the number. dial it. ask about x and then about y. thank the person for their time. cross it off your list.) and then you can move through it an onward.

I need to remember that when it comes to writing daily; I always have too much to say. The joy of writing daily is that I’m not obligated to stick to any particular topic or style or even do research if I don’t want to. I just need to type one word after the other, and that’s the habit I’m trying to build. One word at a time.