Mixed Blessings Bakery

This idea of templates, ready-made patterns that we talk and think with. Instinctive reactions, almost stereotypes but not as annoying, less noticeable than cliches - conventionalities employed by many (or few, or maybe just one person). These templates help us organise the world without giving it too much thought. We look at a thing and we place it in a category. This book is a classic, that one a crime novel. This girl is a girl who broke up with her boyfriend (we enter Sex and the City mode). Things like that. Makes sense?

So, life (at least my life as I have experienced it) can be seen as a continuous series of alternating moods, states of being - or rather, directions of being. First, there is a desire to learn the templates in order to make life easier, enhance your effectiveness in communication and generally further you along in the world. Oh, this man talks to himself. He is mad, must be avoided. Oh, this conversation is about the world of finance. Must make a comment about Occupy. There is, less obviously, a related desire to develop perfect templates for personal use: templates that explain particular situations and enable you to approach them correctly. You go through life looking for these perfect correct attitudes, thinking that your worth and survival depend on them. (Most certainly that is the case.) A search for the meaning of life is such a project, the meaning of life being the ultimate template that explains it all.

Side by side with these tendencies, there exists an intense desire to be free from language (using critical theory tropes now, reluctantly.). This desire is accompanied by a hatred of templates, an inability to stand them, whether used by yourself or others. It's the desire for liberation, for change: desire to float in an ocean of meanings, objects, events (the ocean of being - here's a New Age trope, for a change). In an attempt to escape templates, you laugh and scream and roll on the ground. You stop in the middle of the city, you talk to bizarre, potentially crazy people you don't know. You want to go mad, at least a little bit, and are secretly afraid that language will follow you even into madness.

Here is the irresolvable conflict that I made up and outlined. And here is a ready made solution for all irresolvable conflicts - a Jungian trope now: live with the opposition. You have no other choice, really, so live as though this is the most natural state of all. Try at all times to remain cheerful and creative.

This week, Myrthel came up from Belgium, and we exhaust ourselves by walking, walking, walking, and I am on holiday in London again. I find that being very tired makes you a bit freer; templates fear tiredness. 

clichés run wild