Carl Rogers- 19 Propositions (1951)

His theory (as of 1951) was based on 19 propositions:^[12]

1. All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center.
2. The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
3. The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
4. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
5. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.
6. The organism has one basic tendency and striving - to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism.
7. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.
8. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.
9. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.
10. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.
11. As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self.
12. Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self.
13. In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be inconsistent with the structure of the self but in such instances the behavior is not "owned" by the individual.
14. Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.
15. Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension.
16. Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.
17. Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences.
18. When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals.
19. As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system - based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized - with a continuing organismic valuing process.
    
    
    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rogers

Pantograph

The ever stalking pantograph. Somewhere these thoughts are being decided by the movement of an ant's jaws through a leaf edge.

Diagnosis by Marcia Lee Anderson

We multiply diseases for delight,
invent a shameful want, a horrid doubt,
luxuriate in license, feed on night,
make inward bedlam — and will not come out

Why should we? Stripped of subtle complication,
who could regard the sun except with fear?
This is our shelter against contemplation,
our only refuge from the plain and clear.

Who would crawl out from under the obscure
to stand defenseless in the sunny air?
No terror of obliquity so sure
as the most shining terror of despair
to know how simple is our deepest need,
how sharp, and how impossible to feed.

Ваше Благородие

"I am your original autodidact."

"Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!"

 

"What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better."

 

"God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't."

"It's very interesting what you don't care about."

"When there's a war, people get married."

"I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars." 

 

 

Doris Lessing

 

 

The Samian Letter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon

"For they say that the course of human life resembles the letter Y, because every one of men, when he has reached the threshold of early youth, and has arrived at the place "where the way divides itself into two parts," is in doubt, and hesitates, and does not know to which side he should rather turn himself."- Lactantius

"Life is fired upon us point-blank."

"When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?"

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second."

"Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist."

"An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."

"Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are."

"Law is born from despair of human nature."

"In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will."

"To live is to feel oneself lost."

"Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values."

"We cannot put off living until we are ready."

"The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities."

"Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt."

"The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent."

"Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified."

"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do."

"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."

José Ortega y Gasset

"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now."

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive."

 

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."

 

"Speech is civilisation itself."

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."

"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."

"Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated."


Thomas Mann

 

Too Becker

"And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth..."

Disnial

Great article.

"First we feel. Then we fall."

“Over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow...”

Ayer Ask Her

Speared the rod and spoiled the lightning.

"Conceived by a fasting monk run delirious..."

Audio Trove

British Library sound archive. Beyond.

Ana Na Ming (Salif Keita)

Ewan MacColl

"My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking^."

"If one worried about backing a loser one would not take part in politics. Anybody who has ever been involved in political struggle, particularly in working class struggle, must accept the fact, for the major part of their life, they're going to be involved in losing battles, on the losing side in battles. If I'd have been afraid of that I'd have packed it up after I joined the YCL in 1929 and spent my time, with a lot of other people, trying to alert people to the dangers of Japanese imperialism when they entered Manchukuo, I'd have given up in 1932 when we were trying to alert people to the dangers of Hitler coming to power, I'd have given up during the Abyssinian War when Mussolini's bombers were bombing Ethiopians, I'd have given it up at every single stage of the struggle ever since. One goes on fighting because not to go on fighting is to prove that you're no longer alive. - "Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?" Granada TV Documentary 1985

A good teacher as a guide to ambiguity, not certainty.
"How to keep sane in spiral types of space."- Nabokov, Pale Fire

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” 

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”- Bertrand Russell

Dime Ethel

"The world has kept sentimentalities because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away."-G.K. Chesterton

Do They Even Know How Far I Live

Affirmative Happenings

If that chord progression leaves you hoping for more...

Straight dope from the flamenco warriors.

The Act Of Creation

"Every face is a palimpsest."

Just finished reading this book by Koestler. It is an inspiring, fine toothed examination of a slippery subject, and humorous throughout. Strikes me as a forerunner of McKenna in terms of novelty/habit balance and idea of a historical attractor somewhere in time. Brilliant critique of dry academic writing (in all fields) and 'science as a bore' as inflating the artificial margins between science, art and religion.

Notes
"The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion."- L.L Whyte

“I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.”- Bertrand Russell

"The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain, or an ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic ex- perience — given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is equally required for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar forms of art; and particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art. 

However, the absurd division of our society into 'two cultures' pro- duced the paradoxical phenomenon that the average educated person will be reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond the level of his comprehension; but he will in the same breath and with a certain pride confess his complete ignorance of the principles which make his radio work, the forces which make the stars go round, the factors which determine the heredity of his children, and the location of his own viscera and glands."

"By being  entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian."


Levy Bruhl: "The need of participation remains something more imperious and intense, even among people like ourselves, than the thirst for knowledge and the desire for conformity with the claims of reason."

"Disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility."


(On Victorian novels..) "Here, as a pre-Raphaelite painting, we find emphasis sans economy at work- a safe criterion of bad art."

"Art originates in sympathetic magic."

"There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."- G.H. Hardy

"The artist values, or overvalues, the theoretical discipline which controls his intuition."
"The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation."

The blending of the tragic and trivial planes in art and religion. Jonah and the crisis/awakening model.

"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber."- Albert Einstein

Just finished The Birth And Death Of Meaning by Ernest Becker. One of those manuals for de- and re- construction that is both liberating and damning. Reads like Joseph Campbell's comedown.

Notes
-"Mind culminates in the organism's ability to choose what it will react to."
-'Me' before 'I'. Kant, child development and identity as an object of others, before an executive subject. The child's first identity is a social product.
-"He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him."
-On the separating nature of inner worlds- "We have become victims of our own art."
-Adler and the need for affection as the lever of a child's education.
-From polymorphous perverse to polymorphous pervertible.
-A traffic in images of self worth.
- "The child's need to be somebody in the symbolic world, since physically, nature had put him into an impossible position."
-Idea of sibling rivalry like bored knights dueling for the best adventures/primacy of the stage
-"Culture is a structure of rules, customs and ideas, which serve as a vehicle for heroism." (Links a lot to Campbell's hero ideas.)
-'How are others supposed to feel about me?' As an insightful question, apparently.
-Reminded of this: Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.- Alfred North Whitehead.
- Goethe on social awareness as ' a courtesy of the heart akin to love'. The love is the control of one's self so that social life may go on. Also recommending acting as essential preparation for adult life.
-Idea of the need of autonomy in a world of manifold options.
- It matters not what you mean, but what you say. (Carnegie said something like this.)
-"Our alertness to the performance of others, therefore, is an expression of our concern over sustaining the underlying meaning of the plot." "Continual, keen scrutiny of the performance of others is the life preoccupation of an animal trained to be on stage."
- Illegitimacy implies above all that legitimacy exists.
-Forming of joking relationships at tension points in the social system (e.g. with in-laws). Carries the encounter along automatically and breaks tension.
-Paraphrased idea of marriage losing its stimulating colour as it becomes a refuge from the creative challenge of ego mastery.
-Silent musing as tacit communication of the idea that meaningful silence exists.
-On Goethe: "He provided that conviction of life's meaning that man needs."
- "A person's whole sustenance comes to be based in a power source unknown or unacknowledged to himself..."
-"..one's spouse, his Gurus or his guns."
-If one is a servant of divine powers everything one does is heroic. Religious unity as a powerful source of self esteem.
-"Our drop-out youths are the newly de-tribalised."

-"One of the most terrifying things about living in the late decades of the twentieth century is that the margin that nature has been giving to cultural fantasy is suddenly being narrowed down drastically. The consequence is that for the first time in history man, if he is to survive, has to bring down to near zero the large fictional element in his hero-systems."-"With standardisation of industrial culture, and with standardisation of medical-psychiatric perceptions we are narrowing and bureaucratising the spectrum of normality."
-"An individual who fails to put forth a self that others can value, by an oversensitivity to the performance, testifies to a primary failure in socialisation." "He has nothing to give to society, because he has nothing to put forth." "There must be actors in our play if we are to feel its meaning and not simply a stage propped with non-entities.""We want others to claim a share so that we can feel there is something worth claiming."
-Depression as a massive threat to ceremony. All playthings tired players on the bench, and idea of a guide to occasionally sitting on the bench of the cultural fiction (if not leaving the ballpark once in a while).
-Erving Goffman's definition of the mentally ill as those "least ready to project a sustainable self."
-When man evolved into consciousness he could no longer take creation for granted. "We are just not constructed to function practically in the everyday world and at the same time to be overawed at the miraculous." Idea of shamans once being able to do this with the support of the community (and a bed of self-fictions too perhaps). 
-Children abdicate their ecstasy because they have to. Individuality within finitude.
-Fromm: "The real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity." The pathology of normalcy.
-"The neurotic bungles small quotas of reality, the psychotic, large quotas."
-"Anger for most people is an alternative to fading away."
-Notion of illness and disease breaking the aesthetic of our cultural play, and upsetting our sense of justice. Resulting marginalisation of the chronically ill.
- "The necrophile takes revenge on life for what it did to him. He allies with death over life."
-Man's fate "is to live in the teeth of paradoxes."
-"Power for man, as the genius Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less."
- We can't know what is real but we can see what is false to our own lives (or at least what halts our forward momentum/unfolding).
- Frantic daily life as a defence against self-consciousness (see Jung: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”)
 - "...the undermining power of the miraculous." 
 

Groove on that.

EDIT:...Well inevitable as it was I slipped into Toubaka mode again. Breaks me every time.

"What you call personality, I call metabolism."
"What you call art, I call solace."

All Teams With Symbol

Sensibilities hardened in a visual mould.

"Joyce was not only the greatest behavioral engineer who ever lived, he was one of
the funniest men, rearranging the most common items to produce hilarity and insight:
"Where the hand of man never set foot."- Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan had it really bad for Joyce. As you may expect from an academic who took so many structural ideas from Finnegan's Wake, he is again forever within reach and forever beyond grasping.





Notes
A powerful preference for goods over leisure.
Rear view mirrorism.
"The consequences of the images will be the images of the consequences."
Pain as a form of 'macroscopic gesticulation'.
Internet as a global thermostat.
"The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present."
"When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war."
"Who gave you that numb?"- Finnegan's Wake
"Every new technology necessitates a new war."
"I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute..."
"Time is the greatest element between weight and force."
"A good joke is worth a thousand words."
"Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and political structures, which it subsumes."
The handshake as ancient ritual of war.
Le moi est haïssable.
"But wrath's the higher where those wreathe charity."- Finnegan's Wake
"War, as it were, has become the little red schoolhouse of the global village. It's a gory little schoolhouse at that."
"Radio was a disaster for goal-oriented America."
"...speared the rod and spared the lightning."- Finnegan's Wake
"In the information age, it is obviously possible to decimate populations by the dissemination of information and gimmickry."
The total field approach.
"War has always been a form of compulsory education for the other guy."
"A baser meaning has been read into these letters, the literal sense of which decency can dare but touch."- Finnegan's Wake
""The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
"Love my label like myself."- Finnegan's Wake
"The audience as participants is indispensable to most games."
"When asked what music did he like, Mozart answered: "No music." Mozart was not a consumer. No artist likes art. He makes it."
"The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance. " History As A System by Jose Ortega y Gassett.
"The first satellite ended nature in the old sense."


Lawnmower adapted from LDV's scythes to precede horse-drawn vehicles into enemy ranks.

"Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith."- Sir Thomas Browne

You'll bury me alive?
You're not alive, Thomas said, remember?
It's a hard thing to remember, said the Dead Father. I
don't want to lie down in the hole.
Few do.

The Dead Father- Roland Barthelme

Cosme Tura- St John In Patmos (Thyssen museum)

Blue Monday Repost

Just to celebrate one of the most beautiful downers around.

David

Pierian spring of solace in the dark, and a pure reminder of creative courage in the face of change. Thank you for never forgetting (to adapt) the mission.

Feel it in your heart and soul.



EDIT: Old McLuhanism: "Without a technology tending to process experience homogenously, a society cannot go far toward the control of natural forces nor even the organisation of human effort."

Leaving Omelas

Sherylee

Archive: Summer Hitching 2014

Realise this never went online so here it is as a link for any hitchwikiers. As ever, unpolished and written in haste as an email to my drivers and hosts.



Footnotes to Sunlight

“Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.”- Alfred North Whitehead

I like the idea of shrinking swathes of history into a few footnotes, and I like to adjust that quote to say that natural history is a series of footnotes to sunlight. The archetypal human obsession with the sun is good fun if you’re ever at a loose end, and spending innumerable hours by the road under the midnight sun managed to pull me through this obsession and out the other side (for now).


The road has taken me back to the UK for a week to see my family and meet my new niece. It was surreal going from 4 hours sleeping in a ditch in Reading to holding a new family member in the same day, but the last 8 weeks has been a catalogue of surreal goodness. I’ve been wanting to write some sort of summary for a while, specifically since talking about it with Lars after he picked me up ill and sleep deprived between two big storms around Toten in Norway.
Thank you again for that Lars, and thank you to everyone I’ve met, been helped by or been able to help, and before I forget- one thing I’ve learnt on this trip is mobile numbers are very useful to have when you turn up in a friend’s city by accident (emailing people at 11pm is a bit subtle) here’s mine: +34 600 70 10 39 )

I came to Oslo in June to see a close friend, meet her (solid and lovely) family and get some head space, and she said that if I was in Norway with no plan I should go to Karlsoy festival near Tromso.

So the next day, after using hitchwiki to get out of Oslo, I got a lift from a man named Hans who took me to Trondheim and told me basically everything he knew about shipping phosphorus, sailing to Japan, breeding and racing horses, running discos and destroying cold war bunkers (he was off to catch a plane to Tromso to meet his demolition team).

As soon as he dropped me I stuck my thumb out and two climbers picked me up, told me to go to a place called Paradise (in Lofoten) and then dropped me off in a town called Hell where I was stuck for a few hours. Made it to Steinkjer with a  bookseller and started the next day hopping around avoiding shitting seagulls as I tried to pack the tent up.

Got up to Mo I Rana the next evening, and on the third day the first people to stop were a couple of Swedish climbers on their way to Lofoten, so next moment (or four hours later after crossing the snowy arctic circle listening to ‘walk the line’)  I’m on a boat with them going across the sea to distant snowy peaks replete with about fifty rainbows…I began to wonder if ‘Paradise’ was some phenomenally well-funded gay club at this point but it turned out to be a climber’s paradise with great camping spots.  Climbed cliffs at midnight on the solstice and then spent a very long time in my coffin-sized tent as the weather went down to 4 degrees with sleet. Came out without knowing what day or time it was (turned out it’d been two days). In fact I rarely knew what time it was for the whole trip- no watch or phone and the sun didn’t go down.

After some cold weather indecision I hitched to Tromso where a fresh bout of snow (and indecision) had fallen, so I tried to go into Finland out of curiosity.
Wiggo the mechanics teacher took me to Kilpisjarvi, pointed out that I was unlikely to get a lift that day and said come to Lakselv so you can hitch to Nordkapp (northernmost point in mainland Europe, some claim).
Well, nothing like a long car journey so we hopped some borders to pick up cheap Snuss (tobacco you put under your top lip) in Sweden and drove back through Finland into Norway. Next day a lovely Estonian couple took me up to Nordkapp where I saw snow, tundra, reindeer, a surprising number of houses, a big edge and then nothing but sea till Svalbard. Sent a postcard and did a U turn. After standing an hour in the snow I was picked up by the same Estonian couple on their way back down. I then took the scenic route back to Tromso and when I got stuck and bought warm clothes in Alta the temperature then shot up to 24 celsius.
Ended up on Karlsoy a week before the festival and spent the days building the main stage and the evenings walking back to my tent on the beach in complete disbelief at the beauty of the place. Words won’t do it. Also let it be said that the happiest seagulls I have ever seen are those on Karlsoy. After a brilliant festival and helping take the stage down I was given a goatskin by Svein Eigil (really felt like I was in an RPG) and hitched out for Finland curiosity part 2.

So, back in Kilpisjarvi in 30 degree heat- when you come over from Tromso the scenery changes suddenly from mountains to flatland with small birches and occasional lakes. I was standing there with my thumb out at noon, glaring sun, empty road, shimmering heatwaves, tundra getting embarrassingly dry- three reindeer trot past me calmly, turn right and walk onto the porch of the house behind, where they beat their antlers on the door and then sit down. At that moment I vowed to make ‘Acid Lapland’ a music genre. Marlena from Finnmark picked me up on her way back home for a festival (lot of Norwegians ride through these roads to avoid the slightly slower coastal route on their way back to Norway). She dropped me 50km of Muonio where I finally met the famous Finnish mosquitoes. People tell you about having to clean their windscreens several times in a journey to get the dead ones off, or tell you that they thought they saw smoke from a forest fire but it was clouds of the winged bastards. I hadn’t taken this on board so ended up waiting around having to constantly fan myself with my hitching sign because repellent (strong stuff, mind) doesn’t work. In order to think straight I dropped the sign, put up my tent (eyes practically closed to keep them out and bitten every step of the way), crawled inside and passed out from the relief.


Here’s a diary excerpt:

“Finland can only get better. I’m sleep deprived, sweaty, cowering in my mosquito frame noting the ones that get through and cursing how. It’s 9pmish, sun is high. No lifts. Many men turning to stare at me through mirrored glass as they drive German automobiles past, accelerating as a gesture of ill will. Bad vibe from couple I tried to ask about camping. Doubt I’ll sleep long if at all.”

..the next morning..

“No water. No cars. Plan is to save strength then walk back, beg borrow or steal to Kilpis and back into Norway I think.

...shortly after...

"Saved by missionaries. In Kilpis now.”

Long conversation with Helsinki missionaries about working in Uganda and the meaning of life and then they dropped me in Nordkjosbotn, near Tromso.

Don’t worry, Finland round 3 is on its way when I start again. My curiosity continues to go up and lessons have been learned about mosquito repellent and listening to people’s warnings, as well as knowing about how the population of a country is dispersed (184,000 of Finland’s 5.4million people are in Lapland). Will probably start in the south next time. I still smile fondly at the thought of those cheery mosquitoes because it’s a hell of a good memory for the “I’ve waited longer in worse” mantra I occasionally play in my head whilst at the roadside. Nothing like hindsight to describe a plague of mosquitoes as a host of much-maligned and misunderstood midwives to your future patience…

So to celebrate mosquito free good weather I headed towards Helgeland on Norway’s west coast for a scenic route south, the idea being to go to Oslo a  few days after. Great times on the way down, met jazz students, marksmen, zookeepers, locksmiths, accountants- all in a great mood with weekend plans- it was hotter than Palma (in Majorca), someone said.

Got stuck around Bognes but sat about beaming for 3 hours before thinking about putting a tent up. Something said ‘5 more cars then find a place to camp’. The third car stopped, green ford estate with back windows covered by towels, far back windscreen broken, car full of stuff. A young man gets out, hurries me to the boot, jams my bag in the back and says “get in, we have to get the ferry!”.
I get in to find two children sitting in the back laughing and playing with toy pirates, and after a rushed ten minutes along the coast we find the port and sit in the queue. At this point I said I was amazed he’d picked me up given the crammed car, two children to look after and a boat to catch and his answer was that he used to hitch and I’d help him stay awake.  Drove 5 hours through the coast, windows open, hot air coming through, midnight sun glowing, listening to Pink Floyd. Passed the original maelstrom (it really spins!) and at one lake the odd sight of a gaggle of male bikers in a semi-circle getting undressed to take a dip in the fjord whilst their leader (?) who was already naked stood in the water, nodding in approval.  Scenic is scenic.

Put my tent in Marcus’s garden and continued in the morning. Small roads and long waits but I got picked up by a fishing instructor and her daughter and taken to see a glacier before being dropped at the ferry port. I asked two women the time and got talking to five friends from the south of Norway who told me they’d come up to go to Traena festival.
I’d heard of Traena from a locksmith in Tromso, and from Marcus on the way through Helgeland. In brief- it’s a festival across two islands in some of the best fishing grounds in Norway- if I really let loose about Traena here I wouldn’t stop, but basically the girls gave me a lift some of the way down and invited me to have a barbecue and a swim by the ferry port for Traena.
We sat around joking about me jumping on the ferry with them, before realising that actually had to happen. Ended up as a volunteer wrapping whale meat burritos and serving drinks in exchange for a ticket, and the rest of the festival I was free to hang out with Hanne, Marianne, Lynn, Veyni and Gina.
Brilliant coincidence. It is an astonishingly beautiful place, and the festival culminated with an impromptu rave by a chapel and an afterparty that was 8 people dancing to Herbie Hancock and Jerry Lee Lewis on a table on a boat in the harbour.There I met a great dancer and friendly hitcher from Germany called Florian. Leaving Traena the day after clean-up I met him again on the ferry back where he’d already organised a lift to Sweden and decided to give me all the Norwegian money he no longer needed. I was stunned by this.

The day I left Traena I slept in Oppdal (664km away), helped by an ice analyst debating the pros and cons of moving to Antarctica for 13 months, a retired civil engineer who used to build tunnels through mountains (they begin digging from both sides, and he said he never slept the night before the tunnels had to meet) and a late night lift at 11pm from two German wwoofers in a big VW van on their way to their next host. I went to sleep in a field enjoying the first darkness I’d seen in weeks. Woke up just before sunrise with a cold and began a very intense day down to Oslo.
First lift with another retired engineer who was on his way to meet friends for a week of walking/staying in cabins. He dropped me at a pretty difficult spot by a hairpin bend. Two hours later (after inscribing the crash barrier with some Mase lyrics) a caravan stopped and I was ushered in by a couple on holiday and invited to talk with nine year old Kevin so he could practice his English.

I was going down the E6 alongside the river, rain falling, mountains behind, sat across from a boy who bore an uncanny resemblance to Macaulay Culkin (his dad pointed this out), eating spring rolls and listening to him divulge his victorious tales of trolling people on minecraft and recording their reactions before putting them on youtube. Occasionally I tried to steer the conversation into hobbies that don’t involve the internet and made the point of ripping a drawing out of my book and giving it to him. Got dropped off and picked up again in 5 seconds by a guy I felt uncomfortable about for some reason (in brief: very lonely and very hyper), so as soon as he stopped to buy something a minute later I told him I was leaving the car and not to take it too personally. Tried to hitch for 3 hours from a gas station then turned around to find a much better spot. First lift was Magne the undertaker and by this point I was so tired and getting more ill and just fell asleep for twenty minutes, waking up as the car swerved during rain so heavy we couldn’t see a damned thing.

Magne: Ok so I can drop you at the bus stop here?
Me: We can’t see anything. Is it ok if you drop me closer to where you’re going? I don’t mind going off the E6 (but I want to live.)

So that’s the point where I end up at the bus stop just when the first storm has stopped and part two is following quickly behind. Still sleep deprived, pessimistic about any lifts on this road at this time in this weather, when a car coming from the opposite direction turns around and Lars gets out and tells me he’s going to Oslo.

On the way he said he’d driven past me and decided to turn around and pick me up. We talked a lot about music, psychedelics, agriculture and the unparalleled joy of family dynamics. After being taken to his sister’s flat in Oslo and wanting to stay a bit longer with them all, I gave into exhaustion and the desire to see my friend Ellen. Turned up practically cross-eyed from lack of sleep and recovered during the next few days of great company.

After that I decided to go into Germany and that trip began with rescued from hitching in the middle of the Norwegian motorway, picked up by two Polish evangelists and given an English bible to read aloud to them for a few km. With more phenomenal luck I made it to Bremen from outer Oslo in two lifts, one was Zwav moving his furniture back to Poland and the next was Johannes the rowing coach on his way to southern Germany via Bremen. He said he could drop me in Cologne the next day if I wanted, so the following morning we continued our conversation/setting the world to rights with regard to travel, marriage, Norwegian employment and education. In Cologne I saw Florian again, and spent three days with him and his girlfriend Lena learning about physics, containering and saunas.

The last morning in Cologne I had an email to say my sister had given birth to a girl, and with a smile on my face I took two hours (some of it getting lost as usual) to get out of town to a good garage, and stood under the shelter watching hail bounce off the roof and thinking about children. Soon picked up by a car-dealing massive techno fan on his way to train mechanics near Karlsruhe, and got lost in a sunny southern German town listening to Somewhere Over The Rainbow (ukulele version) on the radio, and then got picked up by a friend named Lea I’d made in Oslo.

She took me to a friend’s party, arranged for me to go with some friends to Freiburg two days later and then drove us home in her fire engine. Spent the next day and a half swimming in the lake, eating tempeh, washing up and all too soon I was in a car on the way to Freiburg to stay at a Wagonplatz. One of the 3 wagonplatz’s in Freiburg had been evicted several times, most recently with many of the caravans being impounded. The weekend I spent there I mostly stayed around the camp helping with chores and meeting people, but the focus of the weekend were a rally and a protest in town.

After Freiburg I had a decisional change and decided to come back early to see my niece and then go to Ireland. I’m going to shorten this story a bit or I’ll never send it but essentially I hitched back to Karlsruhe and saw Lea again, as well as two friends I’d made in Freiburg who were staying with her.
Spent a good evening laughing our heads off and avoiding the massive storm outside and the next day Kafi drove me to a great hitching spot outside Karlsruhe.
She must be good luck because that evening I was in Rotterdam following a lift from a german delivery driver named Moritz who'd recently returned from Australia, and then two dutch laser salesmen (not a joke) who drove like the wind (177km/h on the autobahn in the rain, clouds flying out the back and the driver turns round and says “I feel like….HARRY POTTER!”) and took me to a coffee shop in Arnhem the minute we crossed the border into the Netherlands.
In Rotterdam I realised I was too high to hitch so I walked until I found a campsite before starting the next day at 6am. Fits and starts to Belgium but made it and got picked up by a trucker called Stefan who took me on the Eurotunnel to Dover. In England the first thing I really noticed was the unabashed relish with which people shunned hitchhiking. People making wanking gestures out the window, swearing, screaming, putting their middle fingers up. Really surprised by it, havenn’t had anything like that anywhere else so far. Waited 5 hours in a busy garage until a Polish software engineer on his way to Newbury came by with a Jimi Hendrix blues CD (basically 12 different versions of hear my train a coming, red house and voodoo chile) and floored it to Reading. Slept in a ditch for 4 hours dreaming that I had a German sidekick named Anna who kept making brilliant jokes, then woke up and met a taxi driver heading to Bristol, and spent that afternoon changing nappies. Very weird to be back just like that, managed to surprise my brother who did the textbook eye rub of disbelief.
Heading to Ireland tomorrow and back into Germany around the middle of August- no real plans on trajectory but hope to see you all on the road.

Throwing this in here too- first heard on the radio whilst power-steering around big steep snowy roads in Tromso, learning about Sami congress from my driver and wondering where the fuck I was going to camp.

For all the wolfmen out there

"Love is the only thing you get more of by giving it away."- Exupery / A Midwinter Hitch

Written at time (25/12):
'Sheltering in Lisbon where all seagulls come to winter on dropped bacalao and uneaten sardines.No snow but a festive scene produced by the strivings of an erupted beanbag in a winding back alley. Polystyrene balls all over the shop.

Came through Extremadura in Luis's truck (cargo was bananas). Landscape like a bar billiards table dotted with oaks for toadstools. Stork nesting on a 20 ft novelty roadside tomato bid us safe passage out of Spain. Soon over the border we were greeted by cranes stepping through the fog on their hunt for food. Luis dropped me half an hour before sunset on a small road 70km from Lisbon. After when a stream of cars passed (many farm pickups stacked with hay, all with drivers shaking their heads doubtfully) I told myself to enjoy being surprised by who'll be on the road at this time. Sure enough André and Sandra soon stopped and whisked me to Lisbon whilst giving me a tour of their worlds in perfect English. Made it to the main train station to hear 'God only knows' playing on the radio.'


 Doesn't cover the untold generosity I received at the hands of two thoughtful hitchhiking buskers (Agata and Michal) who decided to rent and open an apartment to travellers for two months. I stayed here for 5 days and learnt important lessons from my hosts and other visitors about how literally vital it is to remember how to give.

The way out there was simple enough, just a metro ride to a garage on the west side of Madrid. Within 20 seconds of waiting Javier drove me 10km down the road to the next station. As I stood waiting for the sun to come up a driver noticed me shaking my hands for warmth and gave me a pair of gloves. Soon after Javier 2 drove me 20km to a station in the countryside where the grass was frosted and waiting was just enjoying the sun and quiet, till Jaime appeared and got me about 50km further to another countryside gas station in Castilla. From here I met Luis (as mentioned above).

To be honest there's not much more I can say about Lisbon asides from its sleepiness and dreamy atmosphere (and the creativity inherent in the thought of being as far west as one can go on the 'rope, and how far eurus bears you past that). The trip has raised far more questions about Portugal than answers, but I will be back to explore and meet more people there. My stay was spent more in being perplexed at how to contribute to a situation created by people who are content with relatively little. I guess the answer as usual is to find ways to pass that on. Great conversations and walks with a Dutch busker named Daan who had just come off the camino and gotten over the theft of his backpack and belongings with resounding positivity.

Left Portugal on Monday at 6am. Found the first Hitchwiki plan backfired fast and instead of an on-ramp to the bridge out of Lisbon I ended up with plan 2- two trains and a scramble around a fence to reach a motorway service station. Starting there at 8am it was two hours till Sonia took me 20km up the road on her way to work. The next wait was 5 hours. Most of it spent at the entrance addressing the stream of cars and adjacent oak tree with a smile and a sign, and then addressing myself with the memories of luck, kindness and possibility that flicker past when you're waiting.
For some reason a moment that cracked my face in a wide grin was a man with his family looking at me as his wife drove past. He didn't frown or shake his head, but watched with an anxious smile as if waiting for the finale of my roadside show, whilst practically squeezing the air with his hands for reassurance. I can't put it into words really, it just felt like he'd decided he was going to be a bystander to the whole thing and then couldn't decide if perhaps he'd made a mistake. I don't blame him but it puzzled me until just after they'd passed, when I realised I'd have to remember carefully never to make that expression to anyone asking for help. The thought filled me with laughter.

Eventually Duarte tapped me on the shoulder and got me out of there. (Lest I forget to mention it, the average English level in Portuguese is another demonstration of how effective it is to subtitle rather than dub English films and TV.) He told me about life in Luanda (Angola) and the difficulty of watching your children grow up over skype, and shared thoughts about moving to London and the reassuring sense of privacy he'd feel there in comparison to his hometown of 60,000 people. I also learnt a lot about the cork industry and the diversity of cultures and landscapes in Portugal.

Reckoning I'd do better on the national road to Spain he dropped me in the rain at the junction where this was possible. I was about ready to call it a day then but said to myself 'Ten more cars.' There were so many it was easy to slip to "Ok, after 50 cars...".
Soon taken a few more km up the road by Claudio. As soon as I got in the car the conversation turned into one about English, and then his teenage son's proficiency in it. Within minutes I was speaking to his son on speaker phone about hitching, living in Madrid, what it's like to be in a band and 'Did my dad tell you he plays sax? Not yet? Ask him!'.
The rest of this drive was spent listening to his son's rock band, interspersed with Claudio stopping the car to point out biological curiosities of the region.
As soon as he stopped I realised it was time to call it a day. Past daylight, empty garage, rain coming in, temperature drop and lettering-akimbo roadside hotel a field's hop away.
I don't know if waiting at the roadside all day and then spending a little money for a lot of comfort counts as living 'the middle way', but not wanting to repeat my usual hitching pattern of 'hitch until you can't stand and then get ill not sleeping enough in the cold' I decided to take the risk that it's not.

This morning at 6am I practically skipped down the drive to the same empty garage and stood there smiling at cars and dancing for warmth for about 5 hours again. Can't put my finger on the thought pattern, there is a happiness that returns every time I remember I put myself into this situation and a bored stupour that comes on once in a while. I wouldn't change any of it. Spent a long time thinking about Van Gogh, it was basically his scene. Big field with a row of bare elm trees in the mid distance, and on the opposite side tilled earth and tidy olive trees watched over carefully by a flock of brown sheep, each slowly jingling the bell it wore.

Well 5 hours of Van Gogh and roadside dementia can do a lot for a person's morale. I packed in my sign (España) at 11 and was making plans to hitch to the nearest train station when a pickup stopped and Luis the foreman offered me a 30km ride down the national road.

Any lift after a wait like that just wipes the slate and you're ready for the next one. Brief chat about politeness in Portugal and Spain and a bunch of location tips for my return in the spring (well that has a lot of plans to fight with but all the best to it), and a brief look at the incredible aqueduct looming out of the fog in Elvas. Throwing caution to the winds I thumbed again and instantly met Antonio who told me he would be passing through Madrid. After a brain tumour and surgical complications ushered him into early retirement he's been living up in Andorra and was returning there.
Exaltation pervades all hitch-hiking. It probably pervades most human situations but for me this is the place where you have the time and social estrangement to really take it on board. And I suppose as with everything else it depends on exposure to chaos and how good one's narrative engine is at sewing the whole story up neatly in hindsight, but jesus christ. The whole thing flips around and what was to be a slightly downbeat bus-ride to Madrid becomes a shoehorning back into the context of yet another person you wished you'd known sooner, and elation at gradually making the distance home to sleep.

10km from Madrid (as Antonio took the road off to Zaragoza) I got my final lift from a young Spanish couple about to drop off their rental car and fly home to Majorca. They dropped me in Goya and I metro-ed home on a cloud of 'did that really happen?' whenever I thought about the morning in Evora. Whole trip's still sinking in but just glad to have recharged my faith in standing at the roadside and to have re-exercised my patience.



 

Morning in Evora.

If I had a dime for every time...

Sun and forest

More Ernst.

Ici Meurent Les Cardinaux

Max Ernst- The Cardinals Die Here

Belters please

Fanta Sacko

Fariña

Reading this soon.

Pynchon On The Death Of Marilyn Monroe

"When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, 'Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere to support or make bearable whatever her private grief was, then it is that world, and not she, that is at fault.'

"I wrote that in the first few shook-up minutes after hearing the bulletin sandwiched in between Don and Phil Everly and surrounded by all manner of whoops and whistles coming out of an audio signal generator, like you are apt to hear on the provincial radio these days. But I don't think I'd take those words back.

"The world is at fault, not because it is inherently good or bad or anything but what it is, but because it doesn't prepare us in anything but body to get along with.

"Our souls it leaves to whatever obsolescenses, bigotries, theories of education workable and un, parental wisdom or lack of it, happen to get in its more or less Brownian (your phrase) pilgrimage between the cord-cutting ceremony and the time they slide you down the chute into the oven, while the guy on the Wurlitzer plays Aba Daba Honeymoon because you had once told somebody it was the nadir of all American expression; only they didn't know what nadir meant but it must be good because of the vehemence with which you expressed yourself."


EDIT: Re-reading this after Koestler's The Act Of Creation and art as the blending of the trivial and tragic planes.

 

The Temptation Of St Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."- Leonard Cohen (Beatiful Losers)

“I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.” 

-Antoine de St.-Exupery (terre de hommes/ wind, sand and stars)

 

Tankyou Tyssen

 

Paintings:

Tatiana Glebova- Prison (1927)

Emil Nolde- Marsh Bridge

William Bradford- Fishermen Off The Coast Of Labrador

Henri Le Sidaner- The Hut On The Forest Edge

Grossgmain- St Jerome

Max Beckmann- Still Life With Yellow Roses

Kirchner again

Shout out for raining gems on a daily.

Straight Up

"Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us."

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_Ernst_Ludwig_Kirchner

"When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars."
Vincent Van Gogh

EDIT:Jesus Christ, had no idea how good part 1 is. Hit this instead. Probably about this.


EDIT 2: But then maybe it's about these...

Third Man Factor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Man_factor






"Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?"

-T.S. Eliot (The Wasteland)

Albrecht Altdorfer

The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529