the Six masks of the Mutual
1)The Secret
To act for another, and through another is to be caught up in a problem of scope. There are never really that clear a boundary between ones action now and what they could be. On orders therefore there affairs. One knows what they want to do. And yet as they are acting in exchange with ones own point of view they appear to always anticipate – the appear to know too much of what is happening, and what might happen.. might help you, but I can in helping in exchanging become too much of you for comfort (well I would if you were the kind of thing to mind such an invasion – you do not have to be).
To enter into an exchange is therefore to impart challenge the exchanged: It s office them also to open their heart, and allow help in: A help which is more ordered and more complete than it should be. a help which appear to come from somewhere 0 that is from you (or what you might have known or could have been).
But at the same time as the mutual flows over what it should not know and manages to include it which its own embrace, it also defied its own parameter. The mutual could flow everywhere – but it did it world never be the same as it was.
Or better it works when it is not recognized in certain quarters. To Recognize the exchange is to formulize it – and drive it into being a thing. The Mutual needs to avoid this trap.
If one takes it you and rewards it too soon, then that is it. If it is known or expected, then it becomes a mere duty or an expectation: a thing demanded. It situation being the silently whizzing force that actually animates its existence, and makes things chime in the mind. It becomes merely a locus of duty or a forcing of social custom (which have of course point of exchange of their own).
The mutual as an element which operates between us, but is such a way that we cannot exactly locate that between. or now tat there is something extra, something more than meets the eye ) and yet that very invisibility is the point. It works in not being resolved or really communicated beyond what it is. If it is caught up in words or formally spoken, another graft of communication is built upon it, and drives it to be something other than it was.
Let the mutual wax nameless – needs to be the motto – for them they boom as fungus do, silently and in the dark. If you shine a light of them, they will no doubt appear the shining rose of a life, and yet thy will wither, as the light demand the jump to it and act in certain ways only (or e forced to account for their actions); The point about a good exchange is that it cannot account for what it is: is that not the point of love?
But then why limit something to that name ? One would need a million scilliates of a love to get near to all the possible here.
2)Money.
What is it to buy and to sell a life? What does one buy or sell but ones life. That is the hours that one works (or someone else has worked). Live or times within live are everything pitched into the raw market place- for exchange.
And what doe one by in that market place by little orphans of time: That is little fractures of existence, than have been wrapped up, and pitched into the market as a thing to sell.
But then what did one think one was buying? One thought something rather different- one thought one was buying something noble something proper. And yet to those who want to sell, what is being bought the fact that you are buying represents necessarily both a callous act (the very fact that would are after buying something communicates you are after them in some way) but also because you are callous in you ignorance it also offers a chance to rub you off in someway. One will therefore attempt to sell you the wrong product, or the might product as the wrong price.
Buying becomes then the oddest of battles with a wired weird folded over currency. The currency is the orphans we have worked. Hours other want to take up into their lives. Unites of time are orphaned, as so available on the market, and yet not wholly abandoned. The act of selling them or being asked to sell them makes the seller mad. More then that it gives then a last chance to own these hours. If they can they up the price or render the buying odd or difficult they might, be thought to get ask at those who are buying their lives (j someway).
Money becomes then a medium pitched between two distinct element; the hour orphaned and market and the covet need of those who sell their life’s to have address.
, and answer in those who would buy it.
I in offering you money therefore open to on your change to think about how you might get back at m – though my wallet. You will attempt therefore to force me to part with too much of my own stuff (if o life) to compensate you for your loss.
An so we enter the exchange of a whizzing market- where lives are sold and revenge taken (if it can) in the same through the same medium of exchange, and I will resist you as I can.
Money therefore become the pitching ground for weird asymmetric war; people are forced to sell echoes of their live, and seek revenge, while the buyer shove back, and want more lives that they need or a lower price the is just. Money captures the entire constellation of greed and desperation in such wars.
3) The institution.
The alternative to money, where the rules of exchange can be constantly updated and changed ( I rip you off, you rip me off), is the institution where they are utterly fixed. You know you place, I know mine, and that is that. There is no flexibility and nothing else we can o than honour our respective places. We therefore grow into our minds and our world. We cannot be anything other than that and cannot think through anything but them.
The Parish or religion or the state therefore set up what you are, an how you must behave and reciprocates which what I am and what I must do. all the rules for exchange are frozen. I Become a more act in a charity, and you become the charity giver: And that is that.
You allow me nothing else. Worse than that you assume that if I want anything else I am somehow on the make – I am breaking a hidden bond between us. I am being more than I should be, being more than I might be.
The institution therefore is the paradox of the mutual. On the one hand it can only work in the light of an exchange: we are all human and therefore ought to help one another. You will help therefore a me. Ad yet it then needs to create in this help absolute limit. The exchange delimited and defined. it is restricted, and no hope is offered bond the very limited domain of exchange. Here of course there is a real problem. the point about a good exchange is that it bugger up nice little divides. T muddies water. I am not sure which bit goes where, or where it might lead. You will change so much you see in being something to a me. The problem then wit any formal institution of exchange (beyond money, where the exchange is turned into a compel folded battle), is that the rules that hold it together actually run against the sense of the exchange upon which the entire edifice is founded in the first place.
I am therefore caught up in not being able to respond to your charity, or not as I chose And such rules, ultimately are of course arbitrary. Or better they are imposed from outside (and according to other abstract or absolute systems of exchange).
We are both therefore pitched into a weird battle. I must be held down and kept in my place, even as you are helping me. This holding down will therefore deprive me at the deepest sense of what it is to be a human – that is the capacity to reach out to others and aid them. My life is therefore systematically undermined in you help (which risks gutting me so that I become a mere husk of myself).
What is more this husking is something you need to require. That is once rules have been forced on an exchange, these rules need to suck out everything that they do not include. If they do not then that additional element, that other part of the exchanging complex human undermines the rules foundations. I this only in turning humans to the husks, defined within one limited means of exchange that the rules have value. The rule of mutuality are therefore the debasing or the devaluing of the currency of exchange: the imposed gold standard, that defines and brands the system.
4:My Lady.
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what is it to be a lady? Or a gentle fol.? It is to be at a cusp of experience. On the inside it will feel that one has such a rich life. One is surrounded therefore by possible ad options. One is caught up in being able to improve who one is and w one lives at every turn. O be a gentle person is therefore to have the ability to live many lifes. Y Move between spheres of living and in those spheres define yet others and do so as long as a life last.
The inside of the gentle person lie then in the texturing of a mind and the enriching of fantasy.
The outdid, or what that gentle fold is to another is more simple. To another one is a lad f one allows that other their point of difference, and point o move out from, and us ones presence to develop ones own life. The gentle folks are therefore those who enable others o either explore other aspects of what thy are, or else in by what they are easier. Here one needs care: The operative word is themselves. The Gentlefolk are those you respect he difference. They are not bustling into to others lives. They are not treating those others as if they were a poor helping opportunity (and a photo opportunity). To do this would of course be to echoed of the point. He real gentle folk(high are or an not made) are those who listen and allow even as they help.
The real gentle folk of the outside are therefore those who are opened on patience, and able to be aware that there were other lives, other approached than the one they thought of initially.
Between these two a complex (and odd exchange) knees to be set up.
At the most simple level there is a clear exchange of indirect help. One cannot if one is really being as a gentle person help according to ones own private fonts. I one does then the help is mere wanking. One pleasures oneself in throwing money around. One helps therefore in opening out to the other, and allowing tem to genuinely respond. Of shares one possibility with them, therefore and not merely the resolution of that possible.
Treat others either as means or yet end, but as possible as oneself is possible is the real imperative.
My wealth will allow you to find wealth also.
However in this exchange, where one loss a part of ones own dream, one does not do after all exactly what one wanted to do, and thought one would, one gins as the lady, other echoes other possible. Or better one is open to element that one did not yeti expect were there. That is one is freed from the problem of fully formed options, and allowed into a far more exciting world where exactly what possible third are themselves resolving all the time on might say they were virtual). The fact that that one reaches to another endlessly enriches ones own mind.
As a part of this process exactly what one though one was doing shifts. One thought one was finishing a job, doing a complete action, and yet on discovers that action was not fixed or one things. In its enacting the meaning of the action therefore shift and split: it becomes as many actions or parts of acting – many different nuances of a meaning, ands slivers. Those who you want to help like then only a part on ones fantasy (they should never like the whole – that is creepy), and in parting it, in splitting what felt to be fixed, one uncovers new odd ways to develop what one is.
To help another as a lady is therefore to be genuinely open to an exchange, where not only is ones own rich world of possible shifted up a gear, but also every element within that realm, very track mark of possible s open to be rethreaded, and other world allowed.
One opens to another, and allows them their ability to change ones mind: what makes one the lad is the graciousness to allow this, and the confidence that it will all be all right (or the power to ensure ultimately it is…)
5-Death
Death is a strange point: it is the point where in the end we are all equal, in front of the great leveller. How we die and what we leave matters therefore. I death one has a final change to resolve ones own life in the minds of other. Oh of course oneself will not be their to enjoy the continued exchange ( but a good exchange should never have been about oneself anyway. One was not their to life and therefore not really their in dying.
Death demands that life witnesses it, ad judged the dying according to how they met with it. In looking at how another dies, and what they left and why, one makes then a final series f judgements about them. In a very real way they start t life in the minds of those left. They become a rubric of fantasy, a life remembered and honoured:A pointer or track way in the minds of another. How one dies, how one allow other to remember, how one shuffles one mind of into their minds really mattes therefore.
If death is all about you, a noisy stroppy affair full of selfish demands then how on will life in this other-life will be different if one goes quietly or unnoticed or bravely. > how one leaves others (and what one leaves them to do and to think) matters in this exchange.
To die (whether in reality or merely in actuality) is to require others to remember, others to keep alive what one is though there own actions, and in their own minds.
Denying therefore is the most direct way many enter into the forced world of mutuality. In dying I need o rely on you, for you are going to be the one to keep my actions alive (even after what my mind was has gone): How a die and how I allow you the freedom to do this, is one of the great point of living.
If I force you to act, then of course in that exchange I blight what I was, I become a blind limited memory: uncle Arthur on the shelf, who memory is sad, but not often thought. If I dies in a way that open your life, that allows you, wit the memory to act, I of course enrich the pair of using the dying. I die not as the photo of the shelf, in rather as the ghost in the living mind that wishers extra advice. And between these two poles, these pointers in a complex enhance, man other deaths lie
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the game of dying is not to demand merely that other grief: it is to open something for those others in oneself life (and through its end): A far harder task indeed.
6- The smile
The final problem of the mutual is that problem of where and hose the smile is. You smile at me as a coquette and…elsewhere are we exactly. Is this smile a real one? Does it reflect genuine feeling? Of merely a trap.? And f if is a feeling what is it of? Friendship, amusement the? Whose smile it. It is clearly not yours as such. To you it is a mere grimace, the empty twitch of muscles. And yet it is a twitch that opens on you mind – hat must reflect something in you. But that something is of course that this in a me. I feel the sunniest of your smile and… ah t am to make of it? Where is t going.
I can of course build it immediately into a conversation, or could reflect it back o you ( I might be already doing that, one can never tell, is someone smiles, one returns unwilled). But what then – where does that get us now?
You smile meant…
And even more importantly where was it when it had that …
Was it in a me?
Was it in a you?
Was I between us – a territory for us o explore: The hidden maul f a mind. The point we know hat between and through us there is more. All the warmth of a life lies here: And yet what that will be, what that exchange might come to, is not yet known.
If I reach to your smile one way the truth will be other than if I catch it in another.
The Smile between two or more individuals therefore poses in a deep level to problem of the where.
It makes that where matter.
Ones life becomes finding different places, different nuances for that where. It home is never easy or straight forward – not are the links it makes.
For you to smile at me is always after all for you to live too much away or other to allow me to take too much in that smile. I do not know what it means, and react as I react to a smile (or even your smile). It is the memory the bubble of feeling in me, that only might be yours…and in smiling you cannot do anything but allow that bubble to burst into a me.
Your smile is then the currency of another happiness in me.
Bt then where can I take that happiness? What might it mean> Where might it drive? Which quiet effect is it having?
The problem of the smile is not merely the Deleuze what (and expression which includes the painted faced on the canvas), I is also the where (the novelist question which pursues smiles down all heir track ways and markers n the world). a where hat opens up to odd exchanges and miss thought elements: an exchange that demands world to be built for it and around or though it. An exchange to capture a love in…