Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Emma & I Answer Each Other's Questions And So Write A Book Together

- Write about emotional connection. Three pages.
- You mean, a love story?
- We're not playing a game! This is serious, not a joke.
- That's the rule then? We ask each other questions but can't ask more. Alright.

No answer. I get the message. Emotional connection.

Let's start with this rule, not quesitoning the questions. This enforced break in our connection. Not a love story. No, we just met, and we like each other, so it's a kind of emotional connection too.

I'm allowed to think clearly? I know, you won't answer. I will go my own way. You asked for it!

Not completely my own way of course. I am one of those who start form the belief that emotional connection is natural, and social life interrupts it. My own idea is this: to stay natural and connected takes two things, is two separate jobs:

1. Think for yourself.
2. Act for others.

Most people don't want you to think for yourself because they prefer you to do things the tried and tested ways.

Most people won't let you act for them because their idea of what is good for them is not your idea of what is good for them.

When people won't allow you to be generous, won't allow you to think your own way, your emotional connection is broken.

If you suspect you won't be allowed to think for yourself and act for others, if the world looks like it is filled with role players and liars and conformists, with people who think with others and act for themselves, you might not even begin to form emotional connections.

Emma, you and me are starting out well. You write and think and send your answer out to me and I do the same with you. Generosity and Thought.

But the future of our connection, of our question and answer project, is not completely up to us.

Last night I was speaking with a law professor and judge. I'd wandered into a conference on the European Union, and he had said something which, when I heard it I said to myself, sometimes the world shows itself to be just what it is.

He'd explained that the constitution of the European Union includes a fixed money policy. My question was: what exactly were the words of the law? Answer: "control prices".

In practice controlling prices means not doing other things, not controlling jobs, not providing social services and protections, not creating peace. It is not a bad rule in itself, but only because it is singled out and gets applied when other rules ought to be applied and other goals aimed at.

The United States has given itself the same kind of law through Supreme Court decisions interpreting its Constitution. Corporations have been defined as people and money allowed to pass freely from them to politicians.

If you and me, Emma, see these rules openly built into the constitutions of our countries we might be afraid to make a beginning or think we can't afford to continue. All our suspicions about what people are really doing and what they really want are confirmed, and it makes us wary. Our emotional connection is under threat from the word Go.

We have to do something about it, do our two jobs: think about it and help each other with it. Then maybe our connection will last. Think for ourselves, act for others.

2 pages, not three.

My question for you: Why Is Sex Important?