Yesterday evening I finished watching the first season of “The Bear”, which somehow lives up to all the rave reviews of the critics. It does so more on account of its presenting a situation than for its storyline – the plot for all of the first season could be summarized in two or three lines.
So we watch it because we find the characters interesting; because as humans we are interested in humans. The show’s humanity is the reason for its success. Nobody gets fired, no matter how outrageous their behavior, because they need each other; they are in it together. How great it would be if this were the case in real life.
There was a teacher at our village school – she taught the children how to make art out of garbage, recycling or reassembling materials that people would dump outside her door- like cardboard or old magazines – or which she would bring from nearby factories. Using the materials at hand was also how she would relate to human beings: it might sometimes be more convenient to replace them but, since anyway we are all flawed things, it is more sensible to learn how to work most effectively with the ones that are here with us.
The same lesson has to be internalized and applied to ourselves, with whom we are also stuck; our tally of fatal flaws, past traumas, weaknesses and fears. It’s a matter of working with all these elements and alchemizing the crap. Like shining a pair of beat-up old shoes; like cobbling together a raft to save us from the flood. Perfection is a bricolage of broken parts. Or, seen differently, imperfection is maya, illusion, and we are already perfect as we are. The effect is always present in the cause, the manifest in the unmanifest.
Mastodon vs the blog
I realized, on looking at the parameters of Mastodon, that even though I own the instance, if I wish to actually preserve what I write, I had better write here in my blog. I knew it, but hadn’t completely internalized that. The capacity of my server space on Mastohost is inevitably limited and anyway, what I write here gets a local copy. So Mastodon will be for links, reblogs or posts that I care less about, inevitably. The question is always “why blog at all” (as opposed to writing a diary)? I suppose because it imposes a certain discipline. It isn’t a question for me regarding the need to write (in itself); that’s just something I feel compelled to do; it’s the way that I process experience.