3 October

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the accepted wisdom of the day, to mollify his community by supporting the status quo. The price he paid for doing that was brutal, we can’t imagine today what a total banishment this was. To this day that community rejects him, nearly 400 years later. When I hit my 50s, I realised your life at that point can either follow the standard pattern of tip-toeing around the feelings and sensitivities of the community, all based upon the always shifting equilibrium of status in that community. Not tackling things that might upset family or friends, because lives are run by status. Like Spinoza, I decided that the only true joy and freedom is the truth of the world we live in. And that truth will always - always - be unpopular, it will put you at odds with the other people in your life. What is considered true is never about knowledge, it’s about status, the dominance of particular groups at a point in time. Following that path has cost me friends, but I actually don’t care. You get one life, and I refuse to live it as if I never left high school, constantly negotiating some position in the status hierarchy of the groups we live in. These thoughts came to me with the imminent arrival of the idiotic ‘Daylight Saving’ time again, plunging us back into dark winter mornings, in the middle of Spring. A phenomenally stupid practice, that survives because ‘people like it’ i.e. because it has status. It’s ridiculous, it harms peoples’ health, but fuck we now ‘live with viruses’, because the same unthinking status games say that’s fun. Not for me. In my life if a friendship or even love now gets in the way of obvious truths of the world, it’s bye from me. One of those truths actually is that we are all solitary, we just mostly don’t realise it.