Indifference & the Id Machine
Entry 94 in the Triarchy Press Idioticon
94. Indifference & the Id Machine
Some of the biggest troubles in leadership, ecology, organisations and relationship seem to be caused by a confusion between the general and the particular, the ocean and the water, the raw and the sentimental, the not.personal and the personal. Two different perspectives on the issue are offered by two of our authors.
In Being with Others, psychologist and Saïd Business School Fellow Nelisha Wickremasinghe writes:
“I have mentioned indifferent love several times, knowing that for most people the word indifferent means uncaring, aloof, insensitive, cold, dispassionate and detached. However, there are other ways of understanding this word and its application in our relationships.
I understand indifference in a similar way to the psychologist William James… [who first reported an experience of ‘cosmic consciousness’ after taking nitrous oxide.]
In James’s scintillating moment he experienced a deep and lasting knowing that when consciousness expands – and remember he had these moments both intoxicated and sober – division and difference begin to dissolve.
Our attachment to people, things and events, our tendency to divide, polarise and categorise our world, our fear of difference, and our entanglement with all we believe ‘should be’, in expanded moments of consciousness are revealed as unnecessary and unimportant. Instead, the feeling of indifference arises as a liberating, embracing and deeply hospitable attitude to the universe. We feel the unity, commonality and interconnectedness between all things.
Imagine bringing this kind of indifference to your relationships.”
I understand from this that our experience of personal, passionate, intense love for another (human, tree, animal, place, etc.) is, in some sense, a reduced, channelled and ‘personalised’ version of a wider, wilder, more dispassionate experience of intimacy with everything.
Then, in The Pattern, Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith write about the green lake:
“…a green lake of desirousness without the thread of desire. An id machine generator of desires without objects, a green, green id machine; pure subject and pre-socialised. Without ego or other. The bubbling green lake is that raw place, a primal soup, where we and what we desire and what desires us are indistinguishable. Part metaphor and part biomass. A collective desirousness; undifferentiated attraction to attraction. Gravity in cosmic mode.
…Some people have something like an id machine, green lakes to which they can return… The most viable human id machines are fecund places of desire without obsession or jealousy. They fill the eye and nose with wild roses, ash and hazel, mare’s tails and mosses; they don’t require meaning or theory to have their affect. … Id machines can be libraries, music, lovers lanes, a woodland, a drawing, a derelict hotel: places, actions and objects with more potential than can be individuated. Even just a memory can inspire the energy for action, making, artworks. The sea is often at work as an id machine.”
I’ve been vacillating about sending this as it’s not clear, even to me. But I’m heartened by Miranda Tufnell, who writes in Body Space Image:
“If I look at a cup I can name it, I can describe its design. I may be able to guess its value or describe its particular use. This is the everyday shorthand by which I orientate myself and make sense of the world around me.”
That would be a clear description of a cup. But…
“In another vein of thought I may look at the cup and think of breakfast - a kind of first order association by which I logically connect a cup with a process or event of which a cup is a part.
Lastly I may look and see mainly a white curving shape. It might remind me of a bath or a seagull. I suspend my habits of vision - I let the object settle in my mind as an object and allow images to well up around it.
It is in this last mode of seeing that all this work is located.”
Precisely.
Being with Others: Nelisha Wickremasinghe
Body Space Image: Notes towards improvisation and performance: Miranda Tufnell & Chris Crickmay
The Pattern – Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst
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A note to pursue ... 'a personalised version of a wider, wilder, more dispassionate experience of intimacy with everything'...