Art of Flux Thinking

The room is lit with a piercing glow, whose source is the vertically affluent lamp above their TGI Fridays cubicle. It is a most unpleasant evening; cold, wintry and the raindrops batter at your skin with every step you bravely decide to take in the deluge. Dinner seemed the most convenient option for these three and their ‘lad’s night out’. The food had long been over and they were now enjoying a beer or two, and a conversation most becoming of three bachelors out on a Friday night. Jack speaks of the dates he’s been in with the recent woman in his life. Jack’s a very down-to-earth kind of fellow, quite introverted, polite, well educated and successful in his field – Accounting and Finance. Mark on the other hand, is a very energetic and extroverted man, left school very early, but made the most of his life in all areas, a live-fast kind of guy – he now works for an Estate Agency and owns a few properties here and there. Ren on the other hand is an eccentric fellow, not much is known about him. Ren is the kind of man who lurks in the shadows beaming with light to one and all – they’ve become accustomed to his peculiar ways. 

Jack: She’s 5”4, blonde and hazel eyes. We met during a conference, she works for the sales guys on the third flour. We’ve been on three dates so far, I really don’t want to mess it up.

Mark: You’ve had sex? 

Jack: No, not yet. Her idea. She says she doesn’t want to rush things and that she doesn’t sleep with guys until she’s ready. She’s had too many bad experiences in the past.

Mark: So what did you say to that?

Jack: What could I say? I accepted. I like the girl, I don’t meet many like her. She’s out of my league I tell you! Plus, I really like her, I want to be in a relationship with her.

Mark: You can’t be serious? Fuck that! I mean… yeah, fuck that! You want a relationship without sex? You’re going the right way about it. This girl is having sex with someone else while you wait, I promise you. Girls don’t want to wait, and no they’re not worried about rushing things. They’re worried that there are only two kinds of men in the world: nice guys and bad boys. They don’t believe in the in-between, so what they do is they arrange the nice-guy for one show, and the bad-boy for the other show. One is the fashion show, the other is the fuck-show. My good friend you’re headed for the fashion show, you’re heading for the husband category – the nice guy with the good job but who she knows can’t excite her, but can definitely take care of her.

Jack: What are you talking about? She’s not like that.

Mark: If you think so, she’s done her job well. Jack get it together buddy, if you want something from a woman, tell her! Don’t hold your feelings back because you don’t want to offend. Be true to yourself.

Jack: I don’t want to offend her though. You know what girls are like about these things, they don’t want to feel like hoes.

Mark: Hehehe, au contraire! They love to feel like hoes! They just don’t like to think they are hoes. Jack, I am not saying make her feel like a hoe, I’m saying don’t deny and hide yourself and your feelings in hope that it will get you score-points from her! That’s ridiculous, be true to yourself and to her – it’ll turn her on even more. Then seduce her, of course.

Jack: What? No way! Girls don’t want to be seduced, they want to be courted and complimented. You buy her dinner, treat her like a lady, be polite, nice and caring. That’s how you charm a girl.

Mark: Jack. You’ve got it all wrong. Somewhere, somehow you’ve been misled. Women love to be seduced, they love to feel desired and naughty. They love to feel alive. Forget the other bullshit. Don’t date her. Do what I do: meet her, make her laugh a little, take her for a coffee, blow her mind then blow her brains. After tell her how it’s going to be and no other way, no reasons either; she don’t like it, then she can go. What those things are are entirely up to you: marriage, relationship, friends with benefits, just friends etc.

Jack: You use women. I don’t want to be associated with that repute. I refuse to make women objects and playthings. I don’t want to take advantage of women.

Mark: There is no advantage my good friend. All is fair. Love is a game, you either play to win or play to lose – either way it is down to you. Play the game and lose, but get better, or don’t play the game and always lose forever. Every woman you will meet will play a power-game with you, there’s no avoiding it. We are hierarchical creatures, even love is a hierarchical relationship. You are either a master or a slave, a creditor or a debtor. Choose Jack.

Jack: No way, that’s bullshit. I don’t believe that, I believe in Romance.

Mark: Romance is the battlefield of love. It is where the war is settled, where you either win or lose. The more romantic you are, the worse it is, the true romantic hides his romance from the world, but blinds his woman and his woman alone with its torch. The true romantic makes a gesture that is seen by her and her alone. A gesture that the world looks upon and sees nothing, but she looks and sees the world. That is how you win Jack, by giving her what she has never had but always dreamt of and yearned, that’s how you gain power over woman – that is how you seduce her. And she wants this with every fibre, every ounce of her body and soul. Whoever lied to you about what women want, ignore them, they don’t know women. I have a feeling women themselves told you what they want, but evidently failed to tell you that what they want is what they feel, not what they think. Women are flawed in that they know when it is there, and they forget when it is gone; they cannot think their feelings, but they can feel their thoughts. This is the paradox that is woman. Understand this paradox, and you will have women at your feet.

Jack: …

Mark: Trust me about this, let’s ask Ren, he’s the thinker amongst us. Plus, you’ve been awfully quiet Ren, why so? Why not speak? I know you know all this, I know your potential, I even know your heart. It hurts you doesn’t it Ren?

Ren: You’re a fascinating guy, Mark. You are right, everything you say is absolutely right. The world and woman is as you say it is. You’re well read, and you’ve listened to me well in the past – listened and applied most affluently it seems.

Mark: If but you had the courage to practice what you know Ren, you would be unstoppable, and I know you know and can do more. Women would weep for you upon mere contact with you. Yet, for some bizarre reason, you struggle with yourself like our friend Jack here. You refuse to accept the truths you understand, and you know them for truths.

Ren: Truth is a hefty concept Mark, you know how I feel about big concepts like that, hehe. Speaking of concepts, there are two categories of concepts Mark. These two categories is why I do not speak, and why I know what you say works and is right. The last two and a half thousand years have been spent on trying to eliminate one category in favour of the other. Now, people like me, are trying our hardest to revive that category, to give it life once more. This is why I do not practice what I understand. Because although things are like what you say, it doesn’t in any way imply that they can’t be otherwise or that they should be as such. A fact is that powerless, it works only once it has passed, apart from that a fact is useless. Even facts are interpreted and brought to bear upon the person who interprets.

Mark: You’re too smart Ren, if only you stopped and lived for a second. If only you switched your head off and lived what you understand, if only you tasted that bit of life that I tasted with your help. That blonde, that brunette, that red-head…

Ren: I am not smart, not at all, I just have too much energy to burn. Too much passion. Too much heart, that it cannot be satisfied as easily as you assume and as easily as your very own heart is satisfied. 

Mark: Women love you. Every woman I’ve introduced you to always asks me about you, she always wants to know, and I never know what to say. What do you do to them? And why don’t you finish what you start? They are always disappointed by your distance and lack of involvement – disappointed and turned on, they love your mysterious ways. Yet, they always think that you are too good for them, they think that you do not fancy them. I am always bewildered, for I do not know what to tell them, for you do not speak about it to nobody.

Ren: There are two categories of concepts: concepts of reason and concepts of passion. These are things I have never spoken to you about, and these three things are precisely why you are right and also why you are wrong. Love, Faith and Self are the three concepts of passion, the only ones I can think of, that stop me from talking. In their presence I tremble and am likely to weep, sometimes with joy, sometimes with melancholy, other times just laugh or fall completely silent. These three I cannot speak of, my heart screams at their mere mention and my body is consumed by a current and I cannot control myself and the emotions arising from their mere mention or presence. These words are glitches; mere glitches in language, and I have no idea how they found their way in – for they’re furthest removed from language than anything. I cannot speak of women Mark because although what you say is true, you make one and only one assumption: that you know two of the three concepts inside out and can manipulate them to seduce. You claim to know the Self and Love. What you know is what the women you meet know but a little more, a little more that I gave to you and nobody gave to them. You will meet your match though Mark, someone will seduce you. I speak not of those three, for they are not be spoken about, they are to be lived, felt, experienced, cried over, laughed over, angered over, desired…

Mark: Why is it that what I do works to give me what I want though, and what I do is what I know; what you’ve helped me understand?

Ren: It works because we’ve spent the last two and half thousand years making sure it would work. We’ve conditioned ourselves to make it work. We’ve brought reason to passion and sold it at a cheap price. Where once Love was something people celebrated and died for, now Love is being sold to the highest bidder, sometimes to the lowest. Where Self was something respected and admired, now it likewise is being sold and made a science of. We’ve made automata of people and then wonder why these things work so mechanically. We wonder why prejudices are so consistent and why we’re in an age where if it wasn’t for drugs or alcohol, a ripple of suicides would spread from one corner of the industrial globe to the next. We see all these things, and like idiots blame the symptom, we think its the symptom’s fault, unbeknownst to us that the symptom is not the disease – it is not the source. We’ve been trying to cure symptoms for much too long, we’ve forgotten that a symptom is a sign, not the thing that does the signalling. I do not speak because I weary of this, I weary of the mediocrity. So I sit here and wait, just wait for a light, something that makes me come back out of the depths, out of the shadows, where it’s safe but lonely for people like me. Meanwhile I wait and do what I can to aid us to reach that day, where we’ve finally surpassed this painful torpor we’ve entered, this mechanic existence we’ve bestowed ourselves with. I wait.

Mark: What about the power relationship you spoke to me about, and how power is more seductive when it’s subtly taken, than when given, especially with women. That has to be something real and eternal.

Ren: That is the plant with the deepest roots into our social existence. Power is the biggest and most necessary illusion. I told you a truth that aided you to live in a time where that truth had its import, but all truths are in their context and made so by relations with other things that condition it as much as it conditions them. Power cannot play a role without people, but it does so nonetheless because people have erected it as something beyond them – as a possession. The most powerful person is the one who doesn’t understand what power is, who has forgotten the very concept and it plays no role in their life. The one who has forgotten it, by becoming it. One doesn’t give or take power, one is power. To be power is to forget all games, all war. Only he who is not powerful goes to war, and they go to war for power – because they lack it, or, which comes to the same thing, they need more of it. If you were power and power was you, why go to war? Power seduces only those who have power and those who do not. Power can’t seduce someone who is power. This is the problem Mark. I cannot seduce women. I cannot even date them like Jack does. I cannot even admire them. I can’t do any of those things. All I can do is love them, such that when I hear the word Love, or see a woman that my body desires, I am stunned, I see eternity. I see life itself and I am stunted. Unable to speak and unable to move, I am only able to be drenched in the vision, consumed by the experience. Be in utter awe, in utter love, in utter desire. And I cannot, not even for a minute, think it through, I am lost in it and right after I forget what happened.

Mark: …

Jack: … I don’t understand.

Mark: In other words, he is crazy.

Ren: Hahaha!

It was getting late, and they all had engagements in the morning. Ren was preparing a presentation. Jack has family guests over from abroad. Whilst Mark had a hot girl pass by for a coffee in the afternoon and he was always a late sleeper.