The Valley Below

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Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

I do not know you. Neither do I know myself.

My desire is to be honest, and to welcome you here.

I espouse neither hatred nor violence.

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I consider my “real life” to be qualitatively different from my writing and reading life. I suspect there is no one best way to express, explain, or “argue for” this, especially in the ingrained contemporary context of social media. But here, following my own experience, I will try to tease apart the difference.

I love having conversations about books and ideas. I have always sought them out, despite being a socially anxious person. Here are a few examples. I founded a “philosophy club”, with friends, when I was in high school; I went to a unique college where classes consisted of nothing other than text-based seminar conversation; I didn’t want it to stop, so I sought out more in graduate school; as a “teacher”, sitting in a circle with my students, I imposed the same (in my opinion) heavenly practice on them; I also founded a women’s book club, and helped keep it active, until I moved away from the United States.

My personal dream of paradise involves so many conversations, with all kinds of people, over books. These take place as in a state of perpetual youth, around an otherwise quiet seminar table. The scent of springtime occasionally drifts in from an open window, or perhaps it’s fall, with the toasted crunch of fallen leaves and a hot cup of tea. (It is not my present, tropical climate.) Yes, my heart flutters up into my throat when there’s an awkward silence. Or when I’ve made a mistake in argument or expression, I think I might vomit. It doesn’t feel good to be misunderstood or ignored. Nobody carries the same baggage, we are all different, and we speak very often at cross-purposes. So it’s messy and confused. Questions are gaping, answers are rare and the whole experience can be quite terrifying.

But it is the most torturous and humbling and wonderful trial. (To write about it makes me tear up with nostalgia.) Every individual is equally anchored to this gorgeous disaster that occasionally converges in a sublime moment of realization. I love it, it has shaped and nourished me more and better than any other form of social interaction. That, and singing in a chorus, (preferably Mozart, but anything really), are my absolute favorite ways to be part of a group of human people.

In contrast, “online conversation” has always repulsed me. I remember to this day the confusion and then sort of visceral discomfort I felt when F-cebook introduced status updates, and a timeline. I could never explain why, but I could find no use for it. It seemed both too public and too mute, too casual and too leaden. There was nothing I could say that I wanted to say. Soon after, I stopped using the platform. After that, I never really participated in “social media”, until I started this blog.

“This” is not “me”. From the outset, I’ve been pretty heavy-handed (look, I wear a mask in my avatar) in expressing myself according to this, my apparently unusual intuition. But I wanted to be clear with you, and honest, and this was the only way it would work.

So I do not claim an “online identity”. It doesn’t feel healthy or right to do so. And from what I have seen, of these online “places”, it’s not healthy for anybody. To identify closely with an “online persona” isn’t conducive to learning about oneself, or the world.

One reason for this might be the multiple alienations involved in the activity of writing and reading online. These are each complicated, but just in brief. First, to express myself in writing is poetic alienation from myself, as I am, in my body and place. Then, to consume “other people” through their writing is to alienate them from their body and place. This is alienation from the (unwritten, unexpressed, personal-historical, perhaps sub- or unconscious) conditions that might help me better understand who they are, as themselves.

Then, to “read people” online is also a kind of alienation from all of the living people who do not write online, or even, write at all. I think about these people often, I am rather haunted by them. These are the people from whom I will never read, the ones I will only ever read about. The poor, the starving, the refugees, the tech-less masses who appear in news articles about natural and geopolitical disasters. But also, this includes a lot of normal, everyday people, from all over the world. There are many who have no desire to appear in such an alienated form, as is required for entry into the world of online writing.

Finally, “reading people” online is alienation from the living people who are present to me daily, in what I call my “real life”.

This present world of living people, my local and embodied community (family, friends, and neighbors), demand negotiation and compromise in a plethora of ways. It isn’t quite a seminar conversation, (and there’s usually no book involved), but it’s not altogether different. For one thing, we can’t really avoid each other. This is sometimes frustrating, disturbing, annoying, even frightening. Sometimes, we need to ask a person’s help, sometimes to help deal with somebody else. We all have our different personal histories and perspectives. Different ones of us call for different expectations, different treatment, and a different response. Sometimes I adjust my expression toward someone deliberately, in order to avoid confrontation. Sometimes I do it habitually, addressing certain people (elders, community leaders, bosses, professors, doctors) with a certain kind of respect. With friends or intimates, I might tread carefully, especially if there’s a difficult subject but I sense the potential for common ground.

As I mentioned, I’m socially anxious. I have some trouble with eye contact, and I often find myself at a loss for words, or staring off into space. But I do my best, basically because I have no other choice. I like people, for the most part. So it’s worth it to me, to put up with discomfort, although I don’t habitually seek it out. Luckily, I live in a place where people like to come over and visit. They are always very insistent that we visit them back.

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But “real life” isn’t easy. It requires adaptation, compromise, and (I believe, if you do it well), a constant effort toward reconciliation.

Like most people, I hold certain beliefs close to my heart. And I know better than to expect everybody around me to be (my belief, my opinion, or my strongly-held conviction, of what is) right and good. For example, I am a long-time (>15 years) strict vegetarian/vegan.

(Side note. I bring up veganism not to be divisive, but because it’s an obvious and accessible example of being alienated through “real life” customary practice from an ostensible community. My blog, and even this post, is chock-full of other analogous relationships.)

I believe that “to eat meat” is, more-or-less, murder. This means that I live side-by-side with murderers, in community, in many different circumstances. My family are murderers. My neighbors are murderers. Almost all of my friends are murderers. I myself was previously a murderer. It’s quite terrible to live in a world full of murderers. Even members of my supposed political cohort (which, as an academic, was leftist progressive) pretty consistently deride veganism. There is no sympathy offered to vegans, who have chosen their alternate path, and so have taken a burden on themselves. They are often invoked as the definition of “privilege”, used in the pejorative sense. Over the years, I have worked on how to deal with that. Social alienation can be soul-destroying, but ditching my (otherwise relatively easy) practice of compassion seemed far worse.

So one of the important spiritual lessons of being vegan, for me, has been the effort it takes to understand and forgive the non-vegan world (including my pre-vegan self). To live, think, and engage, without being blinded by constant anger. (To be clear. The anger is at the vast and unfathomable harm involved in modern animal agriculture, the relative ease of removing one’s support from that institution, and the flagrant embrace of “my people” of the dietary status quo.) When I first “went vegan”, I implicitly assumed everybody else would too, simply because our (U.S. American) normal eating habits were so obviously unsustainable. Well, I was obviously naive. (What can I say as an excuse, other than, it was 2008.)

To tame one’s own righteous anger is a basic need, I think, for anybody who, in “real life”, observes a minority belief. Especially so when that belief has dawned later in life, so it feels intentional, like a well-earned choice. Another relevant factor is if that belief is related to justice, or the common good. (I think those who are religious will relate to this too.) Rejecting the “real world” is not an option, but neither is grudging silence. The work is not just to compromise, but to overcome the temptation of alienation and hatred. To not, for example, become the next unibomber.

There’s an irony here. Once one takes the first simple but substantial (because active and everyday) step toward non-violence, one is suddenly presented with a heavy lesson in social alienation. One becomes, in a way, the young Mohandas Gandhi, stumbling around London. The accomplishment doesn’t make things easier. The lure of anger and violence does not dimish, but compounds. Dedication to non-violence is called upon to become measurably more deliberate and serious, as a kind of self-calibrating lesson. Not only to “turn the other cheek”, but to love.

Reconciliation, not by reversion to violence but through some hypothesis of love, becomes a perpetually humbling task.

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Writing, whereby I separate my words from my local and embodied self, sending them off into a realm of unmoored digital flux, is different.

Writing enjoys freedom from the necessities of “real life”, and many of its compromises. I can make my online writing whatever I believe it should be. It is limited only by my ingenuity and imagination. I no longer need even to submit myself to the messy and imperfect vicissitudes of a group seminar. (Not to mention, subjecting it to the demands of mainstream publication.) My writing can, if I am capable of creating it so, become its own perfect world. This is why I love writing, but also how I know to be cautious of it.

Online writing and reading can seem like a dream come true. The inconveniences of “real life” are many, compared to a written fantasy. The incentives to grapple with its necessities, beyond addressing basic needs, are few, other than a desire for social engagement. It seems that “social media” might, by re-introducing social “others” into a written world, alleviate a tendency toward narrowly-built and myopically-occupied psycheic spaces. “Others” are present as apparently spontaneous written words in the feed, and the user receives social “others” through reading words they did not themselves compose.

However, one chief function of social media has been to increase the degree of our self-curation, as readers. Social media users accept textualized (and thereby alienated) others into their field of view, but only as they choose. Others are not there by presence, accident, reason, or necessity. Even those we choose “to follow” (which really means, to summon onto our screens) have no embodied presence. They never actually go anywhere. Astounding dimensions of the other source remain invisible and excluded from the social media feed. The user fills these gaps with their imagination. Sometimes charitably, sometimes less so, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.

The result is that social media users surround themselves with figments of their own imagination. To do otherwise might not be impossible, but it requires the superhuman task of “imagining into being” other peoples' substantial otherness. That is, one must do something for which there is vanishingly little incentive. One must will into imaginative existence all the ugly, confusing, and messy realities of an in-person, non-addictive, locally intimate relationship. Rather than letting that otherness slip away into the void, along with the actual work of relationship building. (Let alone, community.) Which is to say, the easiest thing to do is to avoid the ethical and educative challenges of alienation and reconciliation.

It is not work to get along with a curated timeline. Or rather, it is only the work that the user has (with or without consideration) chosen not to ignore.

This almost necessarily lends itself to narcissistic and histrionic comportment toward others. It teaches social behavior through a simulation of social engagement that eliminates the natural obstacles of “real life”. It’s not even that individuals become tyrants (although the bigger and better-platformed “influencers” often do). But that people, identifying closely with their “online personae”, cultivate mutual and exclusive tyrannies with each other. They build these structures with written snippets of easily-affirmed (or excluded) dogma, including codified language that seems invented for this very purpose. They utilize all the reflexive responses available to the social media machine (“likes”, thumbs-up, retweets, etc.) as tools to fortify the borders. To succeed in a social media “world” is nothing other than to indulge and confirm others' and one’s own very worst neuroses.

It is unnervingly easy to sense whether or not one “belongs” in these sealed-off groups, what are often called “communities”. The lines of exclusion are clearly-enforced and absolute. You’re in, or you’re out. As for me, I’ve only ever floated by, as a silent observer, what one might call a lurker, or possibly an “NPC”. There was never any real reason to participate. Challenging perspectives are welcome only in orthodox and accepted modes. Subversion is made impossible, with alternate possibilities of engagement either unacknowledged or disallowed. It is obvious, from the outset, exactly what one is expected to say. Needless to say, I recognize nothing of my heavenly seminar conversation in this mode of social participation. To me, it is literal hell.

Most of us have experienced, recognized, and to some degree rejected this dynamic. It is mainstream social media in a nutshell, regardless of which profiteer owns the platform. And it encourages people, everywhere, (and increasingly, it seems, on purpose), to grow in catastrophic directions.

I don’t wish to cultivate those tendencies, in myself or others. I imagine you don’t either, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading my blog.

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In distinguishing the modes of “real life” versus writing and reading, I think the distinction between “play” and “serious danger” is both useful and substantial, if not cut-and-dry. Writing and reading are done in play, while seriousness is reserved for what is present, real, and historical.

(A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic in the academic field of hermeneutics, specifically by Hans-Georg Gadamer. But the idea goes all the way back to the poetic subject of my never-ending adoration/translation, Plato’s Phaedrus. Here, I briefly summarize how I experience this distinction, with regard to my habit as a writer and reader of blogs.)

Alienation endows me with this dubious privilege. That my true self is protected from you, by all these layers of separation. Each word is a half-silvered glass. I’m kind of here, but kind of not. Almost like you. I remind us of this, in all of these silly and unsubtle ways. My personal (hi)stories on here are relevant, but only as footsteps that might lead to some other thing. That other thing is not a fact or piece of information. I am not a newspaper journalist. I am a human person, and my blog is where I meet myself, in writing. Here, I engage your immateriality as a way of invoking and experimenting with my own.

In return, I do not “read you” for the purpose of judging you, in any serious way. I gave up on that endeavor (if temporarily) when I stopped “teaching”, when I stopped marching and shouting in the streets for political causes, when I moved away from the United States, when I took a break from talking to my neighbors and intimates, and started reading the internet, instead. This, here, is something other than that. I always enjoy you, and I would never shout at you, or even give you a grade (lol). The worst I would ever do is to leave you, un-read. I think you probably wouldn’t even notice that. You are in no serious danger from me. I’m really here for us to play a kind of game.

Maybe this is unusual, but I desire multitudes in the “people” I read. I have a voracious, almost unhealthy appetite for it. If there is anything that draws me into the way you express an idea, I want to read you. I’ve found this to be so, regardless of whether I agree with you, or not. Often, agreement doesn’t even apply. You can write about almost anything, from the obscure or intellectual, to the lowest-grade gossip, through “over-sharing” and adolescent “cringe”, to theological or political argument. And don’t get me started on “the boring”. The more boring you seem, the more captivated I am by any accidental glimpse of the hidden world that I know (and perhaps this is my unshakable faith?) is concealed therein.

I am a fiend! I will read you until I am exhausted. Or until I feel ill. Or until something in “real life” pulls me away.

You, to me, are the advantage of being alive right now. You are Odysseus’s oceanic world to explore. An entire internet of extant written work is literally at my fingertips, waiting for me to read and puzzle-solve (and weep with joy) and (mis)understand. Sometimes, to out-trick and escape. Always, to make the story my very own. So how could I confine myself to a textual dimension of self-curated agreement? I’m reckless too, like “the man of many turns”. I do not ask my reading to be “safe”, in fact, that would defeat my very purpose, my deepest desire. Which, as Aristotle points out at the beginning of the Metaphysics, is to see and to know, as whole, the whole of whatever there is to know.

(By the way. If you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance that I already read everything that you post on the internet. And I appreciate all of it, so thanks for expressing yourself in writing. When I write, I’m sure it reflects everything that I have read. I have most likely taken you into account. If you doubt that’s the case, and think I may not “read you”, please send a note by email or through Micro.blog. I will happily add your writing to my RSS feed. This wouldn’t be charity, to repeat, this would be you helping me satisfy my voracious appetite.)

Complementary to this, I do not consider my blog a “safe space”. I meet myself here, and as you can tell by now, I am not “safe”. However, my blogging is done in play, and not as war. In writing, I entertain danger for the sake of discovery, and not from a desire or intent to do harm. I do not pose questions from cruelty, and unless it seems very important, I would hate to hurt your feelings. By telling you, for example, that your feelings aren’t real. I do not believe that at all. I believe that your feelings are immanently real. And if anything I write is ever too painful for you, (or makes you feel ill, or heaven forbid, abused), please, look away.

Here are some examples of my repugnant beliefs, just for fun. (This is me, poking out a Cyclops' eye.) I don’t believe in free will. I don’t believe in historical progress. I don’t believe in human rights. (I do not consider myself a humanist.) I don’t believe “science is knowledge”. I don’t believe information is knowledge, either. I don’t believe all men (or all human beings) are created equal. For that matter, I don’t believe Thomas Jefferson was a genius, or particularly smart, or a good person, at all, (not just for being a serial rapist, but also for that). And I dislike the Declaration of Independence. Etc.

I do believe in other things, that are sometimes difficult to express (and less codified or quantified) in modern terms. (I read a lot of very old books, very early in life.) But these things are often intuitive from an unstudied perspective. I do, for example, believe in being kind. I believe in nature. I believe in human needs. While history may be up for grabs, I treat myself as a work in progress. And in case I haven’t yet made myself clear, above all else, I believe in Love.

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But “real life” is complicated.

“Real life” amounts to navigating situations I didn’t choose, and never would have chosen. Injustice happens, that’s “real life”. Despite a lifelong effort, there remain many things (mostly involving human people) that simply don’t make sense to me. And yet, “real life” always takes precedence over writing and reading. Sometimes it does so by force. At actually dangerous moments in my “real life”, I stay well away from the “publish” button. Complimentary to that, I hope and pray that when you are in serious danger, you have elsewhere to turn, than to read my (or any) blog.

In my “real life”, I have responded in (sometimes regrettably) absolute ways to political difference. I do not like giving my tacit approval to abhorrent political positions. I do not like sitting at the dinner table with that, or praying with that. I have cut family members out of my life, for years at a time, after finding myself unable to sway them from their support for (what I view as) very bad, and possibly evil, political actors. I’ve made my mother cry too many times. I have mixed feelings about it. I’m not sure how much “real life” good any of it has done.

“Real life” also includes decisions about how to obtain and spend money. Like most people, I try to make ethical decisions, and not to support “evil”. (As I said previously, I’m not here to judge you. I’m sure you do your best. I do too.) For me, veganism is obviously part of my attempt, as food takes up a massive portion of my family’s budget. I’m proud of the money we don’t put toward destruction and collapse acceleration. But in certain areas of “real life”, including medical care, I find that these commitments require compromise. And then, when it comes to technology (phones, tablets, computers, various digital “subscriptions” and “services”), which are all ostensibly luxury items, (and yet, somehow, not really?), matters get incredibly complicated. To avoid the stress of calculating the practically incalculable, I try simply to buy (and to pay for) as little “tech” as possible.

(Here, I arrive finally at the thorn in my side, which prompted this entire, novella-length post. It was a deluge of controversy that struck a virtually microscopic online space. This piece of writing became much longer than I expected or wanted it to be, but maybe now it fits the prompt, even better. If you’ve read this far, then surely you deserve to have my opinion on the issue, which is to say, my “real life” rough calculation.)

The amount of money I pay to my host and platform service, Micro.blog, is relatively small ($5/month). But it’s one of these exceedingly complicated “tech” expenditures. For the sake of comparison, I will probably have to buy a new phone this year, as my screen and casing have cracked for the third time, (each time having repaired it at the local shop, here in Indonesia, where authorized Apple is not-a-thing). The display is starting to malfunction in weird ways, preventing me from hanging up at the end of calls. It’s not ideal. A new phone will cost me, at the low end, $700. That’s more than 11 years’ worth of Micro.blog service. I will hand this money over to a corporation whose CEO has just openly gifted a million dollars to the U.S. American president. I don’t like to support that, not at all. But I will, probably, because the alternatives are not really any better.

I have very little idea what goes into the Micro.blog product. (I am not “a computer person”.) Much of it is invisible to me. But cancelling the service, based on a few embarrassing (and at this point, amply-shamed) posts from a contracted employee, seems patently absurd.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t know these people. I can’t read what’s in their minds, let alone in their hearts. Even or especially when they try to put these things in writing. Like most “tech guys”, they are not the best at expressing their feelings. Nor are they good at resisting the siren song of “shiny new things”. They’re not public relations experts, critical theorists, or acclaimed poets. They are, as many have pointed out, “cis het white men”. Please don’t take this the wrong way, either. But ten years ago, at most fifteen or twenty years ago, I wager you wouldn’t have used those words, or perhaps even known them. With their quick categorization according to hierarchical possibilities of personal well-being, organizing “real life” with deceptive ease, they are pretty clearly born from the hellscape of mainstream “social media”. It’s ok. I promised, I’m not here to judge you.

But dear God. Isn’t it time for a little humility?

I can’t read what’s in your heart. Mine, also, is often a mystery to me. And yet I write this blog, and expose you to my idiosyncratic observations and negations and whatever else flows from these (sometimes, apparently, deranged) fingers. The deeper the question, the weightier the responsibility. I take care to caution you regularly about my writing, because I have (to some degree) been humbled. I am not blind to my limitations, which are personal, to be sure, but also inherent in the very act of writing online. I have no way of knowing who or what is on the other end of this, and how it might influence anybody at all.

I am words in the dark, mixing with other words, in the dark. Nothing here is pure. This risk is incalculable in a whole other way.

However. I do believe that “indie blogging” is peak anti-fascist internet participation, right there alongside other things that get too complicated and dangerous for me (in “real life”) to consider (like hacking, or espionage). So by my rough calculation. Even if I’m paying a few USD a month to a closeted fascist fanboy, and his slow-to-respond, painfully naive boss, who doesn’t give anybody the exact official statement they demand, (Honestly, I don’t believe this is fundamentally who I am dealing with. I think these are just normal, well-intentioned, clumsy communicators. But as I said, there is no real way for me to know), that is still ok with me. Really ok, in “real life” fact. Because my rough calculation still holds.

Fascism, in this exchange, has gotten the raw end of the deal. This right here—me, with my un-timely and meandering response, (and you with yours, which I am pretty sure I have already read, and for which I was grateful)—This right here is the true revolution.

We win.

Speaking of which,

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From a theoretical or “philosophical” perspective. There remain open questions (OPEN QUESTIONS, I am tempted to shout, but in “real life” I know better) that current U.S. American political discourse has shut down into black-and-white demands for allegiance. “Shutting down open questions” is how many people respond to fear and uncertainty (i.e. danger, real or perceived). That’s understandable, I’ve done that too. Emergencies require reflexive, rather than circumspect, action.

But when the (federated or not) world of online writing is treated as a battlefield, it precludes thoughtful engagement and learning. (It also builds resentment and misunderstanding.) So it precludes U.S. Americans (as their online-written personae) from thoughtfully engaging with each other in open-minded ways. It also precludes thoughtful engagement between U.S. Americans and people from throughout the world, who come from vastly different traditions and cultures. (And subcultures, and marginalized minorities, not to mention individual people who are utterly unique. I want to believe. They do exist.)

A lack of thoughtful dialogue, and the decreased capacity for it, has ripped “the United States of America”, as a “real life” political entity, apart. This has subjected everybody in the world, (in the “real life” world, whether they are recognized by U.S. American discourse as “marginalized”, or not), to exponentially greater danger.

Every living thing, subject to death, becomes “marginalized” by war.

Above all, shutting down open questions precludes inquiry into the truth. (This includes inquiry concerning God, nature, the divine.) Peace, perhaps, is not just a prerequisite for such inquiry, but also its end. Rightly labelled as a “privilege”, and wrongly available to some more than others, peace, (or as it is sometimes misleadingly labeled, “leisure”), is that very thing for which we might courageously endure countless discomforts or dangers. But to shut down inquiry into open questions enacts the opposite transaction. It sacrfices all of this—-truth, God, and the potential for discovering a common cause—-in the name of making war.

War is ignorance in action. Non-violence is the only foundation for understanding. My priority here (on my blog, in my writing) will always be the latter. This isn’t because myself and my loved ones are safe from the imminent and global danger whose toxic vortex looms over the country of my birth. Nobody anywhere is safe. But I believe that the only thing that will redeem any of the “real life” destruction, that is already well underway, is to be found in and through truth and understanding.

Which means, for me and my blog, that we’re staying here. To exercise my capacity, in full view of the problematic and unsafe creature that (in “real life”) I am, to discover, envision, and enact, a life, in writing, of peace.

Thanks for reading, to anyone who got this far.

_ Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin._ 🌒

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