How to be me

[I don't really feel confident that I have bottomed out all my arguments here, particularly around gender and sex. But I am sharing this in the hope that comments, either public or private, will help me do so.] Early in my post-2020 reading of BLM literature I came across how whites use "divide and rule" to maintain systems that provide whites with material benefits while denying those benefits to non-whites. I bristled at this, thinking "I am white and I don't use divide and rule". Since then I have learnt much that enables me to examine divide and rule without bristling. And now I see it in operation all around me - not necessarily dividing whites and non-whites but generally dividing people who have more in common than these externally imposed divisions allow. I think part of my bristling may have come from thinking that even where the consequence of some action might be to divide and rule, that was maybe not the consequence intended by the (usually white

 The BLM group I belong to discussed That Great British Documentary yesterday.  Opinions on it were more divided than we generally find when we discuss a topic. For me this is a clue that the film touches on something that is seldom discussed or thought about in our society. So, what was the film about? After a few days' reflection I've decided that it is about three things, all of which are signposted by the film's title. Who gets to decide what is and what is not great? Who gets to decide what is and what is not British? Who gets to decide what is and what is not a documentary? Throughout, the film maker, JoanJoan, refers to her film as Bafta award winning. Of course, it is no such thing. Her point is: nobody will ever consider it for a Bafta. But why not? Our group discussed the often chaotic way that the film was shot and edited. Some felt that this undermined the message of the film, while others felt that this was an important part of the story that it was telling; t

September 2018 I want to face my death with stoic equanimity. These are the things I currently know about my death. The most important thing to remember is that my death is a worse event for those who love me than it is for me. This is for two related reasons. The first reason is that I will never have to endure life in a world without me in it. That's not so for the people who love me, unless they predecease me. I started to learn this in a rather shameful way. Jo and I were buying a house together for the first time. It would involve a large mortgage that needed both of our salaries to service. Jo had death in service life cover as part of her employee contract; I was self-employed and had no employee contract and not the slightest inclination to spend any of my income on life insurance.  I actually remember saying "Why on earth do I need life insurance? Why pay each month for the promise of a big sum of money that only arrives when I'm dead and gone?" The shame is

Why is this important to me? I have this suspicion that ever since the first glimmers of my consciousness started to flicker into life in my mother's womb, I have been trying to solve the puzzle of what it is to exist. Of course, this is the job of every newborn. And like the vast majority of newborns, before the age of two I'd performed that everyday miracle of making sense of what initially must have seemed random sensory inputs and turned myself into a being who could successfully communicate with the other beings who had summoned me into the world.  I hesitate to write about the small minority of newborns who fail this task. Is it possible that, for some of them at least, they have made a different sense entirely of the information streams they received, one that bears no relation to the sense their parents made but nonetheless is a making of sense, alien to us beyond our imagining? I suspect this is a romantic notion that any expert would rapidly debunk and any parent of s

Draw a dot on a piece of paper. That dot is you, right here, right now. Are you okay with that? This is the first act of imagination I am asking you to perform. There will be more, of increasing levels of outrageousness. If you find yourself struggling, the trick is to just go with it. Pretend. Like when you were a small child and the toy farm animals and train set were real animals, real trains. Of course they were not real, you knew that back then, but what if they were? What happens when the cows and sheep climb aboard the train and the train flies off into space? Back to that dot that is you. Draw a very long line on either side of the dot. This is your timeline. To the left the line plunges back into your past, to the right it disappears into your future. A little way to the left of your dot is the day you were born, a tiny way before that the day you were conceived. The line goes an awful long way further back than that. And travel a little way along the line to your right, and s

This is an attempt to construct a map of my beliefs. I know they are inside my brain, some for almost all my lifetime, others more recently formed. Yet, unlike memories, which accumulate with each daily experience, a belief is my mind's attempt to make sense of experience: experiences create memories, reflection upon memories creates beliefs. So, are my beliefs simply an accumulation of reflections upon memories of countless experiences, or do they have a greater coherence?  It is more accurate to say that each new belief is formed from reflection upon memories of both experiences and memories of previously formed beliefs. For our beliefs are no different from memories in their susceptibility to decay. Just as we can find ourselves asking of a memory "did that really happen? To me, or to someone else?" so too we can find ourselves asking "Why do I believe this?" and falling short of an answer. Over the course of these reflections I will be asking that second que