People in a Crowd

When I read writings on Socrates I was surprised when he talked about how the many are dim witted. This seems rather conceited and arrogant to assume you are smarter than most people. I mean, even if you are, I wouldn't suggest dwelling on that fact. It would be a better use of that smart brain to do smart things instead of marvel at how smart you are.

I realize now that I was foolish. The term is not used to say that only a few people are smart and most others are dumb. It is used to describe how people act when they are in a mob. People in a crowd start thinking less and worry more about how they appear to the crowd.

I came to this realization suddenly a day after I went to a soccer match. I did not stand up during the national anthem. I did not stand to protest of anything. I did not stand because the act of standing means nothing to me. If the national anthem came on the television I would not get off the couch and stand. I would wager that this is true for many of the people at this sporting event. So why do they stand? The answer is so that other people see their standing. Once in a crowd, one must convert a lot of thinking and actions to acting like the crowd. It is very possible to be saying things you are not actually saying if you are not aware of how you are acting in a crowd and lost in yourself.

The day after the match my parents confronted me as they were upset. They conjured many reasons that I stayed seated. Of course all of this was in their head. People normally do not fantasize about why people are sitting down, but they do if everyone else is standing up. In a crowd you must do and say things that you do not mean just to keep other people from assuming you are saying something you don't mean. It seems like a silly situation and I can see why many philosophers look down at people acting in a crowd. When you behave in a crowd you are thinking about what other people are thinking about you and not about other things. It is like having a conversation with people but a conversation where you are saying something with hopes to say nothing.

Lately my paintings are things that are cultivated. They begin as faint images. I layer little by little with no concern for time. They begin to cake with layers. Each layer speaks with the space surrounding it and what lies beneath it. How each layer interacts is usually discovered much later then when it is first applied. At the surface this process seems to say that each layer is random, and I take credit in place for the randomness that creates it. I do not see this as such.

The randomness that I am possible to create is separate from the randomness anyone else is able to produce. So even if one reduces my paintings to randomness, it is at least my personal randomness and not anyone else's.

Part of the process is the passing of time. I tend to set a painting away with enough time to forget it to the point that it becomes fresh. At this point the painting process is more like me interacting with the painting. It is not so much a painting I have created. It is more like running into a stranger. Yet it does bear the mark of myself that I cannot erase clean with time. But with time, I as a person have changed. I have had more experiences and I am not the same thing. It is like talking to my past self in a way that is possible.

Then I, as do many painters, come to an impasse about when to stop painting. If I view the paintings I make to conversations to my past selves, how do I end the conversation? This conversation is also nothing of the content of a normal conversation between two people. People rarely carry a pad of paper with a pencil and give to a friend that scribbles with you back and forth. This is the conversation I am having with my past. It is a conversation that is easy to start but hard to end. I guess I would have to figure it to be a collaboration of past selves to an image. Each one has a say in what it should look like. The end comes not as a handshake good bye but as a democratic electorate ending a vote. The end comes when there runs out of people.

A democracy does not elect perfection but a majority what the electorate thinks is right. Each time I paint I do not creating know that what I do is perfect. I do what I do because I think it is what is right for the painting.

But the voters currently cannot articulate what the other voters think. I am not saying that the voters do not react to the each other, but I would say they do this with out awareness. Voters do not go out of their way to influence the thoughts of other voters. They simply put down what they think and that is that. I am uncertain whether this will be a permanent feature.

* art hijacked by intellectuals
* want to make art as symbols
* art is part symbol part aesthetic
* art can not be purely intellectual but must contain aesthetic qualities of the senses. Otherwise it would just be pure thought in a head.

*like to share but don't speak my language
* is it because I don't want to put the effort into learning another language?
* do others put in the effort to learn other people's language?
* What is the relationship between intelligence and language?

It is interesting to examine Christianity at the time it started to form, that time is roughly from anywhere from 3 a.d. to 200 a.d. and it is particularly interesting to examine Christianity of today to that of the past. In the present culture which I live in we see very strange behavior from Christians. There is still a male dominated congregation which has no foundation besides tradition. Largely this can be seen in how people first governed themselves. When a political unit consisted only of a family, it seems that the father was the leader and decision maker. There is more to this. The father's role was more than a governing role but also a religious role. He was the mediator of the dead ancestors and the living relatives.

This father figure is still seen in Christianity and I will use the Catholic sect for examples since it is the one I was brought up on and the one I know the best. Obviously what is left over from the years of change is the priest, but a priest isn't what he used to be. In religions predating Christianity the priest was, like it was said before, a father of a family. His job was to perform sacraments like feeding the ancestors, marriage, and proper burial of the dead. All of these were not taken lightly. If the body of a family member was buried improperly, the ghost of the individual would haunt the family until it was buried properly. The priest was also involved with rituals to honor the dead relatives. This involved chants that must be recited exactly every time. Even when the language of the chants changed so that the people reciting them did not understand the language they spoke, they still had to be said in the way they have been before. The

Hey there man. It's me me. Do not worry about it. I'm here because I got a call from you. I'm pretty sure you go the wrong number but you said your address in it. I get bored easily. The interesting thing is that I used to live here as well. It's been nearly four years. I moved because my dog died in that corner over there where there's that spot over there. After that I found some place cheaper and never got another pet.

I used to cook dinner. The fire alarm would always go off. My dog pissed in the kitchen every morning. I do not know what it is like to be a dog. I've never felt the need to pee anywhere else besides a toilet. The dog belonged to the person who lived here before I did. It hadn't been feed in days. I've never had a dog before so at first I didn't know how to take it. I really didn't want a dog either. But I needed to at least feed it. After I fed him that once I thought that it wasn't so bad, you know. So I kept her around. I got mail from lots of people who lived there before me. One guy kept getting a magazine about knives.

I finished a monster semester that this spring has brought. It was a combination of heavy things and a mess of smells. It was a thing that I want to forget. Yet it is too large to fit through a door, and I can not push it out towards the garbage bin. It was a turn back into a time that was much worse. It was a floor above that time, but it began to sag too much. Most importantly it is nearly over. I, a friend, and a uhaul will be the end for it.