Wednesday, January 19, 2011

It is my debt to myself to understand the terms under which I seek to establish a more livable solution than the one I have worked under as a result of setting a goal for myself in college of serving the poor without regard to my own needs. This was a difficult goal from the outset and didn't have the effect on me of transforming my day to day sense of progress. As a result I made other plans than service without reward, first in economics and then in architecture, with the outcome of mental illness, perhaps because I had this conflict deep in my mind over the issue of rewards and the scale of the undertaking. The largest scale of undertaking of any I considered was this one with no consideration for reward. In a sense, it was this fact that guided my decisions over the long term and led to homelessness, in which I was forced to make do with a future utterly without reward, so why not make something of it, thus setting me up for pursuing the service goal I visualized in college. In this way, I rallied around my ambition, whose highest expression, in my case, was off scale in the world of college at Yale. And it could be said that I rallied around my ambition from the moment I reflected for the first time on service in a college setting. But still, this was motivated by self advancement, which is what ambition is all about. When one serves, he elevates everyone, and can expect this will include himself, though he must understand that this elevation takes fundamentally different directions in the case of those served and in the case of the one who serves. For those served, there is relief. This is absolutely different from the idea of the service economy. There, one works for pay, and performs service that contributes to, ultimately, what I have heard described as "the quiet enjoyment of assets." The history of the species is basically organized around this objective, and the stories of outsize servants dot the fabric here and there, but do not define the species assets. I have come to the conclusion there must be more in it than such an eccentric role for me. I want to be able to engage in the quiet enjoyment of assets, and I want to understand how this is accomplished so that I can raise my progeny up in that understanding. However, my reality is not economically strong. I produce nothing and do nothing that draws investment. What I produce is understanding. It is of the scale of my ambition. Generally, others will see no merit in it. My work is not generative of viral growth of audience.

However, there is evidence I have aroused the interest of some with a role that implies great ambition is not foreign to them. These identities will not be turned aside by the lack of ready economies in what I produce, or so I surmise, while they will still be looking to benefit. I find this picture of them attractive. Perhaps it fits. Perhaps it doesn't fit. Either way, it is wise for me to incorporate a more understanding component of my audience than any I began with when I started this blog. I knew such a component existed, but I had only a hope of seeing it respond.

With the manifestation of this component, as it occurs in spikes of large numbers of views of the blog in very short time intervals, there came a call to be cautious. A certain critical element is to be inferred. Confidence I am on the right path made it easy to operate in the spotlight of criticism. Yet it calls for something more than what I have done in the past. I must be starkly honest about my motives. This will serve my base of action.

This honesty about my motives leads me to question why I wish to seek financial comforts after having so strongly spoken of my goal to serve and to count myself among those who certainly didn't produce economic returns in proportion to their service. I have begun to enter this area of thought above. The species is centered on assets, not outsized service, which is an afterthought. My economic desolation gave me a space to inhabit of small size, but my critical skills found use in the time left to me, and I have invested in understanding, coming up with some ideas with large implications. On the strength of these ideas I determined that tool use by humans caused them to lose body hair because it made up for a loss of tactile contact with their environment.

I seem to be in a frame of mind in which I lead myself into concepts that extend in many directions none of which has the definition required for standing on to go any further. This may be out of having no conversation in the large scale of ideas, and needing to let ideas simmer for a while before it becomes obvious what the next proposition with merit will be.

That being the case, I allow that the ideas the reader may take from all this may well be earlier, and this present bit of writing is not yet as fruitful.