Bubble, furrows again

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We live in reclusion, the bubble is our prison cell. We all live in bubbles. Our bubbles keep out the intruders. Other people bubbles may be highly populated. Ours are like monk’s cells.
The bubble is the relevant universe. The relevant universe is defined differently for different people. The relevant universe of a tennis player is made of rackets, balls, victories on the court, in some case sponsors and money in other cases the more urbane environment of amateurish play.
For Dick Cheney the relevant universe is made of riches, power, advisors, branches of the army, intelligence agencies, news of the world.

For a professor of philosophy the bubble is made of books, colleagues, students, reviews. Kant’s and Kierkegaard universes were socially very restricted, the inputs were made of abstract ideas. That is, reality was extremely mediated by discourse and intellectual manipulation.

For me, for many of us, what is relevant are the chances of continual reorganization of the bubble, or furrow in which we live and where social nourishment must be carefully filtrated.

We all are social animals and we need social nourishment. But the ways we can obtain this vital food are very different. I don’t tolerate instrumental relationship. So sometimes non instrumental relationship are possible for us only with animals. Human relationships are lost in instrumentality.

bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

yes, i live in a bubble too. it's ok to only have pets as friends, that's how it is for a lot of people with disabilties. i have a limited life, but i enjoy it - my pets have a great life! I'd like to be one of my pets.

I have hazy ideas about the real nature of the bubble. So I’ll try to sort them out and clarify them little by little.

It’s obvious that there are very different gradations in the acceptance of the world “as it is” or its rejection. Monks, mystics, writers, poets (as distinguished from frauds, quacks and admen) all try to put some distance between them and the world, to put frames around it, like the frames of a picture which separates it from the wall.

All otherworldly attitudes are motivated by a need to neutralize the evil aspects of reality “as it is”, to put flowers on a bier, to put fences (possibly of blooming bushes) between us and ugly reality. I think that this need lies equally behind hallucinations, paranoiac interpretations of facts and intellectual constructions. So behind the poetry of Emily Dickinson and behind the world of an “idiot savant” there is something in common.

St. John of the Cross is considered one of greatest poets of Spanish language. He struggled to affirm a certain idea of monastic life and collided with the ecclesiastical establishment. They arrested him, put him in a minuscule cold cell (where he stayed nine months until he fled) without any human contact except for a weekly vigorous lashing. He had no books, paper or pens and was nourished with bread and water. Here he produced much of his poetry, memorizing it and writing it down later. Was not this (his poetry) his bubble? His safety raft?

well, you learn to love your prison. i lke the ascetics, they're interesting.

some people have described AS as like being behind glass. separated from the 'world' by a glass wall, that sort of thing, able to see it and hear it but unable to participate.

Anothe kind of bubble giving relief is play. Play is possible only if strict rules of relevance about reality are respected. Again play is like a protective frame. Morover play is traspecific. Playing with animals the rule of relevance are respected. Playng with a dog obliges to stay in the cosmos of play, while playing with your principal is easily flooded by considerations about the hyerarchic relationship and problems of the job.