Big ideas, my personal zeitgeist and the erosive power of Ego

by DRM

harsh noiseLast night I made a start at writ­ing this down, then fal­tered when I saw how late it was, real­ized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and ques­tioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to anywhere.

This morn­ing I got out of my hotel bed after a fit­ful night of rest and thought “My mind feels like a bit-torrent stream. I’ve got to get out of the data smog.”

This hotel is part of a busi­ness traveler’s chain. The lobby has a com­mu­nal space with a lit­tle cafe. The fur­nish­ings are sturdy and  post-modern in the style of bou­tique hotels. I stopped there — am in that cafe area right now, draft­ing this — and found myself, after cof­fee and a stint with USA Today, mak­ing notes in my workbook.

I was back at the same place I had forced my mind to leave off last night.

Why aren’t you writ­ing any­thing fun and simple?

I’ve been grap­pling with a cou­ple of broad con­cepts that have got my brain tan­gled up and weighed down. When that hap­pens, all of a sud­den, I can feel my writ­ing voice seize up and get arch and weighty.  I start show­ing off words that sound like I’ve been cram­ming for the SATs. I write my way into cor­ners that get lugubri­ous and seri­ous:  no author­ity because I lack exper­tise; lit­tle authen­tic­ity because I can’t make the idea sim­ple; and no inter­est because I can’t it real.

Yikes.

There have been two ques­tions rat­tling around in my brain.

The first is about how peo­ple expe­ri­ence mean­ing and pur­pose. I’ve been tying the ques­tion to an idea that floated to the sur­face here a few months ago, that indi­vid­ual lives are enriched by hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions of sub­stance with oth­ers. So, I won­der, what is a con­ver­sa­tion of sub­stance and why is it enrich­ing? Ask­ing that ques­tion, I believe, gives you insight into what com­prises the spir­i­tual life of a per­son. But fram­ing the ques­tion and defin­ing the answers isn’t just a mat­ter of observ­ing and the­o­riz­ing. The def­i­n­i­tion of per­sonal well-being touches on neuro-chemistry, evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­ogy, behav­ioral the­ory and the cul­tural study of faith and identity.

See why I’m get­ting weighed down?  I’m not smart or well-read enough to weave the threads of image and infor­ma­tion together, but I’m just well-informed enough to be dan­ger­ous to myself.

The sec­ond big ques­tion is about the role of faith and com­mu­ni­ca­tion in human cul­ture. That gets you at a foun­da­tional under­stand­ing of what peo­ple will do when they bridge  between groups and cul­tures. I have a sense that cul­tural arti­facts of power sat­isfy an imme­di­ate impulse among social groups for safety and iden­tity, two com­po­nents of mean­ing, but that the over-arching imper­a­tive that defines human­ness is biased to large scale coop­er­a­tion. (This is not a polit­i­cal state­ment, inci­den­tally.  It is an orga­ni­za­tional state­ment. The era of mod­ern tech­nol­ogy is show­ing that the human organ­ism rec­og­nizes that inno­va­tion related to sur­vival increases in pro­por­tion to the num­ber of peo­ple who are shar­ing information.)

This is a big the­ory of every­thing that has rel­e­vance to noth­ing except the way that I order the world. This part of my brain is like the odd, sweaty, ill-groomed auto­di­dact who wan­ders deep in the stacks of the uni­ver­sity library, lucidly obsessed with a ques­tion that he is unable to lucidly articulate.

tangle

What’s inter­est­ing is how the struc­ture of a blog con­fronts these two big questions.

Here’s what I mean:

I write pur­pose­fully in sev­eral dif­fer­ent venues: one pub­lic and pro­fes­sional and the other pri­vate and per­sonal. Each of these venues is directed with a con­clu­sion in mind. The form, the sub­stance and the voice are dri­ven by the func­tion of the writing.

Still, every day other things cap­ture my atten­tion: a piece of infor­ma­tion, an image, a sound, an idea. It’s the stream of my per­sonal zeit­geist, and because it is all part of the human dis­course, my zeit­geist inter­sects with hun­dreds and thou­sands other zeitgeists.

drm­stream is a plat­form for shar­ing that part of my per­sonal zeit­geist that doesn’t fit into the struc­ture of my other activities.

What I find, though, is that even unstruc­tured Form exerts pres­sure to cre­ate Structure.

Peo­ple come by here occa­sion­ally. How do I make the expe­ri­ence con­sis­tent and rewarding?

Ideas take shape. How do I tease them out and find where they go?

Images build across a pat­tern. How do I give them a coher­ence so that they move from ran­dom­ness to aesthetic?

That wasn’t why I started drm­stream. The for­mat was meant to give me a way to release some of the ideas that were lin­ger­ing and needed room, to have a place to be cre­ative and unaccountable.

Funny, isn’t it, how chal­leng­ing the search for free­dom is, how insis­tent the inte­rior gov­er­nor can be, how seduc­tive and ero­sive our ego can be?

That’s what I wanted to remind myself: ease up and stay loose and joy­ful. And I wanted to put it here, where some­body might see it, so that I am chal­lenged to fol­low through.

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