Leveraged Intelligence

Hands

Part of the continuing Blogger’s Consortium series with simultaneous posts on the topic being done by Ashok, Grannymar, Magpie 11, Marianna and Ramana – in alphabetical order.   And, if you are like me, being presented with today’s topic would kind of leave you dumbfounded.  Brutal, Magpie!  Hands…

If I had asked you the definition of HAND, I’m certain you would have readily given me the first definition found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

the terminal part of the vertebrate forelimb when modified (as in humans) as a grasping organ

Right?  But, to read further, it is much more than just a “grasping organ”, although I kind of  think I’ll refer to it that way from this point forward.  You know, like in traffic:

Hey, buddy, can you read the single raised terminating member of my forelimb terminating grasping organ!??  Oh, yeah?!?  Well, the female who begat you as an offspring, too!!!

No, much more than just a grasping organ, the hand is one of the finest communication tools ever invented by nature.  I type this to you right now using my two hands.  Tie the hands of a Greek or an Italian and they can hardly speak!  There is a reason sign language isn’t done with the feet.  You are even reading something conveyed by DIGITAL transmission – and we know the digits they are referring to, don’t we?  The same ten out on the terminus of our grasping organs, the same ten that led to base-ten math.

Speaking of communication, hands are the voice of love!  You can kiss a hand.  Or, you can be bawdy and actually use them to TOUCH the other person!  Or take possession of what they have, “Hand it over!”  You can make an off-hand remark that digs a hole as surely as if you had a shovel.  You can endear yourself by being handy.  And, if you hand-le a relationship well, when burdened you can hand-off part of the responsibility to the other so they can keep the situation well in hand!  Of course, all of this is helped if you happen to be hand-some!

I have to admit to you that when I launch into a piece like this, the left hand often doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.  On the one hand, I would like to be serious.  But, on the other hand, Magpie asked for humor.  So, I am trying to take an even handed approach.  I could use some helping hands in the comments that will ensue, much as Mae West provided one of the best lines at hand on the internet:

Good sex is like good bridge.  If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.

And, speaking of good – or, bad in this case – hands, any poker player knows the hand held by the most famous Marshall from my home town, aces and eights, the dead man’s hand!  I don’t know if fate had a hand in Hickok’s demise, but those cards will be forever tied to that awful day when he fell at the hand of a gunslinger.  I wonder if he could have avoided it if someone had read his palm that morning and warned him to stay away from poker!  Or, had the lifeline on the inner surface of that terminal grasping organ just run out?

Yes, the hands can build bridges – oh, those opposable thumbs! – or they can commit crimes and be used for violence.  In fact, we used to call fighting “throwing hands” when I was in college – back before people brought weapons into so much play on the streets.  Our soldiers on the fronts often engage in hand-to-hand combat and we called one our most famous pugilists, Roberto Duran, “Manos de Piedra – Hands of Stone!”

On the more genteel side of human experience, the hands are also essential to so much of our best music.  Ask old Slow Hand himself, Eric Clapton.  What else are you going to use to play a guitar or a piano or a set of drums?  And art.  Try to sculpt or paint – or do needlework with Grannymar! – without using hands.  Far as that goes, you can even use them to help you with prayer in case you find the need to send a little knee-mail since you received a sinners’ handbill from the Church.

Now, as you read this, you may be thinking I have too much time on my hands.  But, actually, I think the time to wrap up is at hand.  I have to hand it to you, Magpie!  Helluva topic.  I found it to really be a handful.  Put your hands together and give Magpie a round of applause!

Ambition!

Part of the continuing Blogger’s Consortium series with simultaneous posts on the topic being done by Ashok, Grannymar and Ramana – in alphabetical order.

God’s creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling -

Ambition, Definition 1: Desire for exertion or activity; energy!

Lucifer from Dante’s Inferno –

Ambition, Definition 2: An eager or strong desire to achieve something, such as fame or power..

If you look at these two famous figures from the Judeo-Christian firmament, you are looking at two faces of ambition!  God, overflowing with limitless divine energy passing the spark of life to Adam.  And, as is typical of humans – and, I suspect of Michelangelo’s subtle sense of humor – Adam doesn’t really look like he is working at it very hard, now does he?  Look at his left hand.  He looks like he’s been smoking the plants in Eden for an afternoon!  But, God on the other hand, is into it.  He really wants this to work and all the angels and cherubim want to see his work literally get off the ground!

Lucifer on the other hand, is plotting, “There has to be a way to wrest control of this ship.  I know He’s BIG, but I think He’s naive.  Not street smart, you know?  I think it’s possible…”

And so it goes.  I always felt bad for Job, essentially a sacrifice to a bet by Satan that God pretty much took up on a dare.  I mean, if you read the story, they took players off the board to see how Job would react.  Bad for Job, to put it mildly, but REALLY rough on the family members.  But, Satan thought he saw an opening, you know.

Then, he tries to offer every sell-it-out prize he could think up to God’s Son, so that He would come to the Dark Side.  None of this has worked so far, but we are reminded that Satan is always looking for an opening.

I have always taken these tales as a projection of the human inner struggle, an effort to make sense of a world that neither seems fair nor safe.  But as projections of that inner conflict, isn’t it interesting how they represent two faces of ambition, one creative, one destructive?  And humans needing to choose sides.

Now, PBS and Bill Moyers have done a marvelous show on “The Evolution of God” and those interested can see the video and read the transcript here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07172009/watch2.html

Lest you think me too flippant above, what I am really aiming at is an understanding referred to here in the piece:

BILL MOYERS: So, did god begin as a figment of the human imagination?

ROBERT WRIGHT: I would say so. Now, I don’t think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about god have evolved people have moved closer to something that may be the truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning.

I don’t go quite the same direction as Wright on this.  I don’t believe God to be merely a figment of the imagination, but I think it pretty fruitless to argue the point.  You would see me somewhat lethargic on the issue of trying to convince another one way or the other, somewhat like our Adam above.  It is my personal belief that there is a definite super-real essence there, but that any of our efforts to define it are merely our projections onto something indefinable.  Whether you share this belief or not is immaterial to me as long as your path is leading you toward a truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning.

I think our understanding of the positive and negative nature of ambition is just one of our Western evolutionary steps.  I think the Eastern path to be quite different.  And, however you conceive it – I think it is just part of our return to the Divine!

But, along the way back, humans, of course, put their own indelible stamp on ambition.  To wit, this ambitious attempt at gainful employment:

Attempted robbery ends with torn genitals, Viagra hangover

By staff writers

NEWS.com.au

July 22, 2009 01:33pm

THE attempted armed robbery of a Russian hairdresser became a three-day sex ordeal for the would-be thief, leaving him with torn genitals and a Viagra hangover.

IT website The Register reports the man, known as Viktor, tried to rob the hairdresser in the town of Meshchovsk.

The owner, 28-year-old Olga, agreed to hand over the takings but as she was giving him the money, used her karate skills to knock him to the ground and tie him up with a hairdryer cord. She then locked him in the storeroom and told colleagues she’d call the police. 

However, she instead stripped him and cuffed him to a heater with a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs. She then fed him Viagra and raped him several times over the next four days.

When finally released, Viktor went first to hospital for treatment for his torn frenulum, and then reported Olga to the police. When she was arrested, Olga reported him for robbery.

“What a b**tard,” she complained.

“Yes, we had sex a couple of times. But I’ve bought him new jeans, gave him food and even gave him 1000 rubles when he left.”

Viktor admitted she had fed him well.

Both graphics from Wikipedia Commons and have expired copyrights.

Creativity: Assertion, Denial … and Filing

We live with certain dogmatic assumptions every day.  Creativity is a good thing … and denial is a bad thing!

Well, maybe, but what we are describing above is emotional domestication, the taming of instinct.  Creation is actually a destructive process and ALWAYS involves denial.  Every entrepreneur knows this, every artist knows this.  To create is to deny what IS in favor of what can be, to destroy the status quo; to forgo the comforts of conformity in favor of vision and passion.

Seth Godin made one of the best observations on creativity that I’ve ever seen:

Creativity loves a problem, but it hates a lousy audience.

Creativity is an assertive thing and demands something to oppose, something to overcome, something on which to sharpen its teeth or test its backbone!  Creativity shuts out distraction, a feral impulse acted out in the wilds of the psyche.  Time is suspended, petty concerns are banished.  It travels with joy and abandon, diminished only by giving in to fear.  It demands focus, yet ignores bounds.  Its own justification, creativity is still stoked by appreciation.

Other than overheating prose, it has at least one other downside.  Creative people are lousy at maintaining files.  Every time they try to file something, they can think of about 13 categories for it.  And, when they want to retrieve it – they think up the 14th … and wonder what they were thinking when they did the filing!

In so many ways, filing is a metaphor for a significant aspect of the creator’s life.  Creators really need keepers, to be honest.  I’m figuring that either the angels are organizational wizards – or Heaven is a mess!

The Start of the Blogging Consortium!

Grannymar, Ramana, Ashok and I are launching into an experiment tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM PDT – and hopefully each Friday thereafter through eternity. Or, until we get tired of doing it, which might be tomorrow at 10:00 AM PDT.

It will work like this: each week, one of us will share a broad topic idea with each of the others.  That Friday at 9:00 AM PDT, we will simultaneously post some take on that topic.  We have no idea what might be written, what differences or similarities there might be, and we fully expect to become cannon fodder for you guys.

See you tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM in California.  Or 9:30 PM in India.  Or 5:00 PM in Ireland.  This should be a hoot!

Bloggers as Culture Vultures

How does a blogger pick a topic?  Sometimes it is through a positive, disciplined system of thought like Ellen Weber or Robyn McMaster do.  Some are business geniuses like GL Hoffman.  Some are just brilliant, like Seth Godin.  Some find themselves in parts of the world in turmoil, like Ramana Rajgopaul and are honestly trying to make sense out of it.  And some have ready, agile minds like Marianna Paulson or that improvisational, literate mom, Eva, where creativity just seems to flow from some inner fountain.

But, sometimes, any of us are tempted to just go where the world is omitting a foul smell, because we know we’ll find some easy pickings.  We become Culture Vultures, looking for dying meat, an easy meal.  We become tabloid mavens, because you can always get something from a politician or a celebrity.  We hunt disasters.  We seek miscues.  We hunger for a mistake, any mistake.

Why?  We like to be read.  There are metrics applied to our blogs.  Status becomes something that can be measured, something that can be competed for.  They give us page ranks and traffic counts.  Other bloggers link to us.  We are on stage and it is exhilarating.  It is hard to not apply that metric to self worth.

We also exhibit predatory instincts.  One of my favorite cartoons that I was searching for shows two vultures on a limb, kind of like our three buddies up above, and one says to the other, “Patience be damned.  I’m going to kill something!”  We go on Twitter and say provocative things.  We try to build a following.  We are, to some extent, entertainers.

While this is to some extent a confessional piece, I have at my core some better instincts than that.  We all do.  Candor about life as it presents itself to us must become a calling, honesty without regard to results an ethical mantra.  Writing something well must become reward enough.  How many great pieces are being written out there that we never see because it wasn’t promoted?  How many great pieces out there are great because the person wasn’t a promoter, but first and foremost a writer?

So, folks, who have you discovered out there that has some fine insights but little promotional concern?  What great blogs do you know of that you can bring to the table, vital blogs, exciting blogs written by modest people?  I’d really like to know.

Picture: from blogs.mysanantonio.com

A Good Source for Information on India

There are certain places in the world really deserving attention as we humans follow our sometimes difficult growth path.  One of those places is India and its conflict with Pakistan.

I encourage you to check out Ramana’s Musings from the ground over there at http://rummuser.com/.  What I like about Ramana Rajgopaul’s writings is his maturity and his willingness to reconsider each of his views.  I do not believe him to be an ideologue.