Making Dynamic Love with a Carving Knife

Love is a strange thing.

It's especially strange when you're the kind of person who cuts preferentially away from the soul using Ockham's Razor. Once you're done slicing a person up into a pile of least assumptions, all that you're left with is the physical body and the mind that is fired off within it. Even the mind can be cut away, and rightfully should be, but in the context of this argument it makes more sense to leave it whole for a while. This is because love is a verb: you love someone, you love their body, you love their mind, you might even love their soul if you believed that it existed.

Imagine that a person who has cut down to the mind and body loved someone so much that they lived with them, that they identified with them, and then one day after some kind of toxic shock, stroke, or other mental trauma their partner's personality entirely changed. Their partner was no longer the same person in all observable aspects other than their body. The mind is different, but the body is the same. Would this person still identify with their partner, would they still live with them? In the case that they did continue to live and love their partner, it seems that you could reasonably say that their relationship was rather superficial, after all it seems obvious that what our person loved wasn't their partners personality as they continued to love unabated after the mind that they were familiar with disappeared. At the same time, the moral of the story resists the nobility of leaving ones partner in a time of stress. That said, we're quite happy with the idea that someone may leave their partner if "they're not the person that they married", and conversely again we resist the idea that we'd leave someone because they became disfigured in an accident. These moral considerations of the loss of mind or body are causing a degree of havoc for those who make love with a carving knife.

Maybe the problem lies in that we haven't carved finely enough. We've allowed the mind to stick around as a separate entity too long – after all isn't the mind is a function of body? But even this doesn't solve the problem acceptably, because if our protagonist really identified with his partner and fell in love with that body, mind and soul as a single sleek object then any significant change in any of these functions would cause our subject to view their partner with a degree of criticism and loss.

All these thoughts have lead me to sleepless nights as I've stood over my sleeping partner with Ockham's carving knife in my hand observing that more that I make judgements like "a body with an eternal soul that we can not detect, measure or identify has riskier assumptions than a body without a soul that ends upon death" or "a mind being the result of the body and it's experiences is less philosophically daring than a mind being the result of itself with its own ability to generate original thoughts" the more I find myself cutting into her, watching her degrade before my eyes from a complicated holistically loved person to a pile of least assumptions each with it's own risk of change and loss. I then realised that I've got one more cut to make. "A love that is static and materially idealises a person, regardless of how many pieces they are chopped into, requires many more prepositions and complications than a love that is dynamic and is as much about being loved back than it is about loving."

I've stopped reading so much as late and I think that might be why I'm writing a lot less. I used to want to be a poet, or a writer. I used to want to be Bukowski. I've found myself thinking less and less nowadays.

I've found myself settling into the day to day effort of waking up in the morning, going to work and trying to win fictional prizes then going home. I'm going to Singapore in September where there will be five days of training, marketing advice, presentations (including a couple that I will have to run) and product releases. The brand in question has a sales target of around half a million dollars every year, and that is just one of my smaller brands. Every day, I struggle to push these products into the mindset of our sales team so they sell my products as well as the three hundred thousand other products that they've got available to them. Last year, I only hit 91% of my sales target. This year, I'm already 40% behind where I should be.

When I first arrived in my customer service role, three years ago, I wrote a poem about my co-workers, the first stanza says:

The grey single silent seconds
Has glazed the eyes of the worker many
They measure their successes by their heartbeat
If it stops, they lose

I've found that I've become so wrapped up in my fictional prizes of sales targets, inventory targets and potential wage increases that I've literally become what I hated. This is an idea that scares me.

There is a concept that I like to think about when people talk about feminism. I see the great success of feminism was that it broke women from their traditional gender roles. Women were to be born pretty, marry young and bare many children for the rest of their lives. When women broke away from this role they were able to fight for more equitable rights. I see that by doing so, they also aided men in breaking away from their own gender roles. Men were to be born strong, get a good job, and provide for the family for the rest of their lives. This has led to a stereotype-full of men living miserably - stuck in dead end jobs with dead end conclusions.

Every time I think about my new fictional prizes, every time I think about how I'm writing less, that I'm reading less, that I'm thinking less, I can't help but feel that I've got my fingers on my wrist measuring my heartbeat as I fulfil some kind of traditional gender role.

Marriage and Murders

I've been a role-player for quite a while, in fact I think its been over a decade since I first joined my brother and his friends in their dungeon clearing pseudo-murderous adventures. At the height of my efforts I was role-playing three times each week with three different groups. Each Tuesday I would play with a group that was quite open and free while still structured within a rule set; on Wednesday I'd still be playing with my brother and our friends in the same murderously efficient dungeon clearing and on Saturday I would play in a small group of three people as we basically made everything up as we went along. Each session had its own attractions, I suppose, but eventually the small Saturday game died off as other commitments over took our leisure.

At the moment, in the Wednesday game, I'm getting married. Since the beginning of the Nordic style campaign I decided that I wanted a shield maiden. I chose the local barmaid (as indeed there are very few other women that exist in these types of worlds) and then began to accrue a dowry or bridal gift. I chose to try and use the "apprentice" rule set that already exists in this game so that she might be able to gain experience and strength as I do. This meant however that I would have to wait until I'd spent over a hundred points of experience. So during these months of gaming, I gathered a treasure of not jewels or finery but rather livestock. By the time I had spent enough points I had a herd of cattle and a number of mules - a fine bride price indeed. On the Wednesday past, I finally went back to the original town and proposed to the father my intention to marry his daughter. I've decided that my character will take her surname of "Kraken Slayer" as it sounds more impressive than "Horn Blower". It was agreed and in the Wednesday coming we will travel off to the main city to have the ceremony. I'm sure there will be time for a spat of murdering.

Next year in June, in Croydon, I'm getting married. I can't help but wonder if my partner is not at least a little worried about my fantasy version of marriage. Especially when, to all apparent views, the lead up to our engagement was so different. We met online, dated, had dinner with each other’s parents, moved in together, then I proposed on a beach in New Zealand. There were no mules, no murdering, no waiting for a "100 points", and I'm pretty sure that her father was one of the last of our family to know about it. The only thing that reflects at all is that I might be taking her surname of "Weisz" over my name of "Willcocks". I think that anyone doing a deconstructionist reading on my role-playing efforts would have to be at least a little afraid at the best of times. Or maybe I'm thinking too hard about it. Maybe I’ve been role-playing for too long.

That quote doesn’t suit me as much as it previously did. It’s not so much that I’ve reached some kind of potential or that I no longer feel virginal, it’s perhaps that I’m no longer seeking for adventures to fill some hidden space.

I used to worry about my career, but now I don’t like to plan journeys that will ultimately lead to death. I now only lay plans that lead me to food and love. This has led me away from a sense of purpose and change towards a happy kind of love. I feel like I’ve lost something however, an innocent lust of direction, a holy sense of seeking.

I found some old journals that my father wrote when he was a teenager.

11/11/69

What in God’s name is an Artist doing selling Ball Bearings?

To be precise I’m not even selling them, I’m still learning what is what and where what goes. But to what purpose. To just(?) to job in a society that demands for at least modest successes and security. A Secure Artist. God, what next? A. Secure Bum. Why not a secure Artist. And why not a Secure Artist. I know from books of many Artists but none to me seem Secure. Not even Leonardo Da Vinci. And certainly not my friend Goya. Am I a Goya in New World. Or am. A. Gauguin not yet bloomed. God I wish that I only knew.

PW

THE MOON + SIXPENSE

SOMMERSET MORE

He went on to manage any number of small retail chains in a variety of industries, all the while raising his families, first one then the other. He has not yet become Goya in the New World but I wonder if doing so would have lead to a greater place, or any filled inner space.