Meditation on meaning

"... intellectual arguments if "inconsistent" may cease to be intellectual arguments, but human behavior, if inconsistent, does not cease to be human behavior; and economic systems are closer to being extended and materialized forms of behavior than to being intellectual arguments. Thus to identify them as "contradictory" or "inconsistent" does not announce the alarming character of the dislocation that Marx actually attempts to convey. Similarly, to describe the departure from the model as its "falsification" would be more appropriate if the model were bodying forth the nature of "truth" rather than the nature of "fictions and made things." " (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain).

These are fragments that I shore against my ruin:
That minutes I spend on the phone with some lonely person, or hours face to face, or the share of an hour doing yoga, help someone get through their days. While I may be a replaceable part of a broader system, somebody has to be in my place. I make no claims to heal anybody only to allow healing to happen. In another culture, perhaps, I would be a priest or a shaman or a family elder. But I like being where I am.

Scarry claims that work is an organized system of pain that promotes the imaginative creation of cultural artifacts. My work is constantly creative and pain free.

Scratch that. Saying goodbye is hard. Therapists are paid in order to suffer the pain of ultimately letting go. Not for the pleasure of holding onto somebody's memories, but for the cost of erasing them.

I work in a bizarre organization where almost nobody is paid, in the midst of a culture that makes Mammon our god and expects from him the kind of truth that Marx expects. The biggest taboo in the broader culture is money. I wonder what is our biggest taboo? Perhaps I'm too close up to see it.