The Swamp of Human Kindness.
1-One of a my Kind; a card.
What is it to belong to a… At its most abstract level, mutual friend, Belonging if it is taken simply in itself does not require understanding or even any form of relation. On the contrary the one hand, belonging Mutual friend suggests, has two ingredients.
Firstly is some kind of initiation right. One needs to own something to do soothing or be something to proof you are one of our kind. This right is set in mutual friend on t level of property. It is by your thing we know you to be one of us – and not ultimately by your behaviour or manner. Materiality becomes therefore the great badge of belonging., and we are one of a kin as we all own together.
But here of course needs care one cannot simply own anything, the Harmony Jail was not enough to make one belong. One needs to the contrary to own a house and have a property that is akin to the other members of society, to really belong. That is one belonging when one is materially inter changeable (or at least caught up) with the set of society that calls one of its kind. As they are as you are – we belong runs the verb.
Belonging is therefore caught up in place of envy (if you belong I will not envy), an is an adjunct to conform a world in (this is our world, the world people as us live in). This world is then merely material expression. It lacks any depth or even any reality beyond that expressing. Property hides as much as it allows. It maps out a world based on drawing rooms and carriages, an never of what is held in those rooms. The citizens o just a world can then be rather diverse and f differing moods temperaments or kinds, and yet this will be simply ignored. As the belong, a s they are caught up in the same material crystal that defines a material world they will claim to be as one – an claim to eat and think tighter.
Sadly the world itself is full then not of people but cards and invitation to dine. Dining’s the paradigm for the world. as we dine we digest your world together in the situation of dining rooms. We are then together. But the us in this sense is little more than the card that invites one to such affairs. That is the presence one can being to such places, the citizens of the dining table are merely little white cards, little white citizen with names on them mapping out places and nothing more.
One is on of a kind therefore in becoming a mere card as a banquet – a person sitting in the dark and eating a world.; on an enforcing of pooled option and thought.
2- The swamp of human kindness.
How does one behave when one meet a genuinely kind mind? How can one react to some one or something that is kind and will be and? Where does one define how that kindness will impact n ones live – save in greed?
Kindness is weird. I itself it is lovely: But that self needs really to fall like a brick o a mushy world – to create maximum splash. It needs therefore to sweep people up unaware (while reflecting their needs): other are then to be caught up in help they cannot quite see or do not fully understand (and so does not reduce them to gratitude0.
Kindness though in the abstract it is a rather different affair If I know you have a reputation for kindness (started by you or others), how shall I respond? Do I hang around like a fart in a bag? Or do I act to give you your kindness moment? Do I provoke you to be kind? Or merely allow you to act in your own way?
But then keeping me strung along like that is ht kind?
My knowledge of what you are, and that you are the one to help me, lowers the barriers of what I am. I become caught up onto your kindness, and forced to react to and through it.
This relation goes a little further than my greed (although my greed is there). you helping, you warping into a me is actually rather threatening of that me I need therefore to define in my mind where I would allow you into me. Here thee are two different thought. One might define axis one will no compromise and different sorts of kindness one might accept (the stratagem of last chapter0, or one might try to control the point you belong kind at. One might the solicit a kind act, the kind of act one does not mind the kind person does One might therefore provoke them in order that their kindness will not compromise ones own identity. The came is of course to solicit and keep ones dignity – a problem that opens up on the galaxy of ingratitude that forms in minds.
The Kind person is always a risk or better a contagion: There kindness risks opening the and up to a problem of how react how to contain their kindness. That is how to hold a line of me faced in their aid.
A Problem for a Me indeed.
The mutual friend is the pitched between these two element. The bags of belonging and the menaces for money: the Boffins as one of a kind and as kind (and therefore different). The former attempts to universalize the good fortune of money. The is therefore the good life as society understand it, and claims it for its own. It is being good thought large, and as everyone can belong it and through it. The goodness of respectability belong a single glance within which the flocks of cards and endless invite become mere expressions. The Kind act is by contrast the shadow the Boffins themselves cast upon the world – a shadow which is registered in others actions and responses.
The mutual friend’s task is to short though these effect, matching the shadow of society with what the boffins themselves wood enjoy and need to do, and the their kindness with genuine actions of goodness. The Mutual friend therefore ensure exchanges actually occur in all this abstract hubbub.
3- the crocodile of the swamp: My kind
But elsewhere one might want another world, that is a world other than the one exchange allows. What if you wants this all o be about oneself and ones own mind and thought? What then? Were then? Somewhere in the past, something happens. That is somewhere in the bastion of memory a Me operates and demands that something needs to be hidden beyond all these exchanges and all this hullabaloo; a one legged man prospects for gold in the jail. That s he looks o take more than his fair share, In the place of memory. He looks to be the one and the one alone which matters. His greed, his secret an unitary longing becomes then the paradigm to catch the alternative to exchange within.
I might reject you, and so become a Silas Wegg.