Hunting The Muse

Taking Action

I've been asked a few times how to translate emotion into action, in the context of my War Position.

Some of it is my personal beliefs. I believe that physically expressing your emotions "until you are done" (and not just until you feel silly) is part of it, and that going through the workout can open you up to insights you might not have had before.

But on a more systematic level, I believe it's basically a matter of questioning your accepted reality until you no longer feel you are compromising yourself. If I'm asked how long I think the UN inspections should go before we're entitled to go to war, I know just from how I feel that it's a false question. So I take it a step backwards. "Who says failed inspections should lead to war?" Okay, then what should failed inspections lead to? The question still feels off, feels like answering the question on its own terms would be accepting something that I don't actually agree with. Step back. "But, the criteria for whether UN inspections are effective don't make any sense in the first place." Okay, then how would you judge whether UN inspections are effective? Still feels crappy. Step back. "How the hell do UN inspections even bring us closer to our objectives anyway? I don't believe they do." Well, then what do you think should happen to bring us closer to our objectives? Wait a second, still crappy: "What the hell are our objectives, anyway? They're not even consistent!" What do you need to feel like our objectives are consistent? And then we're getting somewhere.

See, it's a big snarl. We lose the battle because we get exhausted and give in before we untangle it.

So, how do we stop that? We stop fucking around and we work harder to stop compromising ourselves. I am not under the illusions that we all have the same points in ourselves where we feel like we are compromising ourselves. Everyone's process is different. But I firmly believe that way too many of us are being lazy in our integrity and are compromising ourselves all over the place. It's an individual battle. Our emotions give us clues and tell us when we feel like we're compromising ourselves. We need to listen to those emotions, we need to be dogged, and we need to vigilant in recognizing the various forces in life that lull us into ignoring ourselves, so we can get pissed off enough at them to battle them.

You start small, just by telling yourself to notice when you feel like you're compromising. You just challenge it one step further than you did before to isolate the parts that feel good from the parts that don't. You just promise yourself to insist on yourself a little bit more every day. That's how you do it.

They say that politics is the art of compromise. I think that's true, but it has a more insidious meaning to me than it does to most other people.

If you think about what I've been writing about Gore/Nader and the voting problem, you'll see an example of this applied. Asking "Gore or Nader?" is just a question that feels shitty to me. I'm not interested in that question existing in my world, so I work to remove it.

Posted by Curt at April 2, 2003 01:30 AM