Steampunk and Discovery

They say that fetishes are born from random childhood experiences that seem meaningless at the time, but become key moments in ones personal history once the fetish has become fully manifest in adulthood.  I do not know if this is true, or simply a case of justifying the present by exaggerating the past.  Here is my experience not of a fetish, but of an interests.

The year must have been 1978 or '79 when I went on a school trip to Disneyland.  One of the benefits of growing up in Los Angeles is that going to Disneyland is a mere field trip.  I remember going into a small room off Main Street, USA where there was a model of the park complete with future plans.  Apparently in-between Tomorrow Land and Frontier Land there was to be Discovery Land, a section of the park devoted to the Victorian Science-Fiction of Jules Verne   I learned a few years back that although this land never materialised in Disneyland, it is a part of Disneyland, Paris.  I would like to believe that the thrill that I felt seeing this model, the expectation that gripped me, played some role in my development.

It must have been 1981 when I was distracted by Indiana Jones and my interests focused on the music, culture, and literature of the 1930's.  This lasted many years.  Then it was the fringes of the LA Goth scene, and then 1988 began my long passion for things Celtic.  It was during this period that I first remember putting on waistcoat, buttoning it up,  and feeling very Victorian.  This was the start.  From there is was living in 1863 with the 79th NYSM throughout the 1990's.  This was when I began wearing my trademark pocket watch.

In 1998, I began plotting what would become my first, and only, screenplay called Thunderchild, a science fiction story set in the Victorian world involving steam powered space ships and regimental warfare against the Martians.   I was sitting in the Research Club at Glasgow University recounting the plot to someone when he said to me. "Oh, its Steampunk".  I had no idea what he was talking about.   So I went on-line and did some research from what few websites existed on the subject.

William Gibson is credited with creating Steampunk with his novel, The Difference Engine.  I prefer to believe that I invented Steampunk, but he gets all the credit only because he was an established writer with a best selling novel.

My influences were that little model in Disneyland, Jules Verne, HG Wells, the original television series The Wild Wild West, a short lived show called QED, and of course my time in re-enacting the American Civil War.  When I left the regiment to come to Scotland, it was not unlike those men who went West after the war.

I saw myself entering civilian life and I dressed as Victorian "western" gothic as my debts would allow.  Over time I was finally able to afford a black bespoke frock coat as opposed to the tattered Victorian originals I once wore.  It was something that I had wanted since I was nineteen years old.  A few years back I started wearing a black Stetson, and last month I was finally able to purchase a pair of high waisted black Victorian trousers and a new period waistcoat, complete with a collar. Over a year ago I was able to purchase a mobile phone from Nokia's retro chic L'Amour collection that could be worn on my watch chain.  Very Steampunk indeed.  Again, my only limitations are my pocketbook.

Both last year and the previous year I have appeared in two Scottish newspapers, The Herald and Scotland on Sunday, in their "street style" section.  In both cases I explained Dandyism, Steampunk and Neo-Victorianism to the reporter and in both cases I was misrepresented and misquoted to fit their impressions rather than mine.  The others who adorned their spreads were influence by pop stars and fashion rags, whereas I was influenced by an ideology exemplified by Doc Holliday and the Earps in the film Tombstone.

About six years back I began writing the book, Gothic Philosophy: The Way of the Dark Romantic.  Throughout most of the Naughties I was involved in Glasgow's Goth scene as a regular figure at most events as well a key mover in the Scottish Vampyre Society.  If you called me a Goth, I would not say no, but I always considered myself more of a Romantic or Neo-Victorian.  Even though I loved the music and the style, I always saw that as part of a deeper ideology.  This inspired me to write a book on Goth as being more than just a fashion.  I was wrong.

You see.  I don't give a shit about the boys in the band and I care even less about impressing people in my local clubs or on-line.  This is not to say that I do not like music or fashion, but I see these as the products of an ideology.  The problem here is if the group ideology is just about consuming the latest "cool" alternative cultural commodities rather than an actual belief system.

I have seen the latest wave of Goth popularity come and go. Then it was Burlesque. Now I see the new trends beginning to emerge on-line and stirring in the clubs.  Where once there was very little of Steampunk, more and more I am seeing it becoming the new Goth -- or goth in brown.  Now every girl who had wanted to be a Burlesque performer now wants to be a Steamgirl.

Despite being a major player in the Glasgow Goth scene, I always saw myself as being on the fringes of Goth, but Steampunk, well…now you're on my turf.  And yet I fear that once again I will be the lone voice screaming my ideology to those I think will understand based on how they dress, when in fact they only want to look the part to impress others.

Another reason I gave-up writing my book on Goth was that I realised that everything that gave Goth a viable ideological foundation was there by virtue of Goth being a subset of the Romantic.  Likewise, so too is Steampunk.  Which is why both are separate chapters in my current project on The Romantic.

"So what is your take on Steampunk, Logan?"  I hear you ask as I put words into your mouth.  Well, here it is for your reading pleasure.

The Victorian Era was the height of human civilization and the Victorian Era sucked.  When I say that it sucked, I do so to let you know that I know that the modern world possesses some wonderful technologies and conveniences that I for one would not want to be without.  There is no use living in the past or playing dress-up.  Why ride a horse when you have a perfectly good car?

However, in terms of ideology I believe that the Victorians far surpassed us.  I strongly believe that we as a civilization have inherited a great wealth from that period of history and each successive generation has squandered that inheritance leaving our modern age morally bankrupt.  By morally, I should clarify to my new readers that I am not referring to morality in the Christian sense but in the Aristotelian sense.

To clarify a few more terms.  Steampunk is a sub genre of science-fiction and Neo-Victorianism is the name of the fashion inspired by Steampunk, however I see the two merging into a single all-encompassing term, rather like the Gothic Romance becoming Goth.  Therefore, I prefer to see Neo-Victorianism as the ideology behind Steampunk.  Both Goth and Steampunk as a style of design and fashion are born from the Decadent belief that Life should imitate Art, as opposed to the Naturalist view that Art should imitate Life.

I see Neo-Victorianism as a means of taking modern technologies and luxuries and creating them in the Victorian aesthetic.  Among the inventions of my mind are the Steampunk desk, a Victorian roll-top desk with a computer and printer built into it complete with brass fittings.  Then there was the façade bookcase.  It was a bookcase with old, hard-bound books, but that was just a false front.  You popped it open to reveal an actual bookcase filled with your tatty books and DVD collection.  I also created the Electric Walking stick, a cattle-prod/taser built into a Victorian walking stick.  If only I had the skills and money to make my world a reality.

Likewise, I see adopting Victorian ideologies for the modern world.  No, I am not talking about stuffing kids down chimneys, but I do know a few insolent brats who could use that.  There were a lot of horrible things about the Victorian Era, but as the age progressed, things were getting better.  The middle-class expanded, child mortality plummeted, slavery was abolished, the first age of globalisation dawned, and the era ended with women's suffrage.  Whose to say what would have happened if World War I, the Rothschild banking cabal, and the Socialists hadn't screwed things up.

Victorians could buy heroin at the local chemist.  Victorians carried guns.  Victorians made money unashamedly.  Victorians envisioned a better future.  I'm all for that.  During the Nineteenth Century, I would have been called a Liberal, but today the word is Libertarian.  Yes, we are those crazy people who think people should make their own choices and suffer the consequences no matter how horrific.  This stems from the Romantic belief that we are all individuals and therefore individually responsible for the outcomes of our life.  This is the complete opposite of the widely accepted modern view that we are all part of society and that it is the responsibility of government to manage that society.

Here's another interesting observation of the Victorian mentality taken from the American West.  If you have seen the film Tombstone, then you will remember Powers Booth playing Curly Bill Brocious.  After Bill was acquitted for the murder of Marshall Fred White, he and two friends went to a Mexican dance hall in Charleston, Arizona.  The men blocked the exits, drew their gun on the crowd, and Curly Bill ordered, "Strip, every one of you." Once they had, Bill told the musicians to strike-up a tune.  The patrons danced naked at gun point for half and hour.  A local policeman passed by and saw the scene through the window.  A posse was organised and laid in ambush across the street in a corral, after a shoot-out Curly Bill and his pals escaped uninjured, but some horses in the corral were killed.  The following day Bill sent a friend to the corral to pay for damages.

So here is Curly Bill Brocious a notorious criminal and murderer, and yet he was willing to pay the owner of the livery for his lost property.  Here is a man willing to humiliate people at gunpoint for a laugh, but still respected the property rights of others.  How bizarre that is to the modern mind where many parents won't even offer to pay for merchandise that their children break in stores.

Here's another Victorian concept that seems alien to us today.  Human beings are great.  Sure there are problems, but taken on the whole we humans are pretty amazing.  This runs counter to the modern view that human are a threat, or as Agents Smith says in The Matrix, humans are a virus on this planet.  Laws are constantly being either passed or advocated by those intent on containing the human threat to the Earth, to animals, society, and to themselves.  This is in stark contrast to the idea that human progress should be allowed unfettered for the benefit of all.

Of course a three page blog is not enough to fully cover this topic.  I'll save that for the book.  However, I will close with one more point of contrast.  The concept of The Other and the Victorian Nightmare.

The Other is an idea often found in adventure stories and science-fiction.  The Other is that which is not us.  For the Victorians, The Other were usually savages driven by blind emotion.  This changed in the Twentieth Century when The Other became un-emotional aliens.

The actions of the Victorians were governed by Reason.  They were not so-much emotional as passionate.  Emotions are a response to the real or the imagined.  Passion is a specific type of emotion characterised by high-interest.  It denotes an enthusiasm for an object, therefore to live life passionately is to live in a state of high-interest, which is completely compatible with living a Rational life.  However, to live life based on emotion is to deny that emotions are a response to perception and claim that they are perception itself.  The truth is that your feelings mean nothing to anyone but yourself.  They are not reality.  What feels good to you is not necessarily good and what feels bad is not necessarily bad.  This is not to discount intuition, which is often called feelings.  Intuition has been described as reason in a hurry.  If we choose to aspire to a Victorian state of mind, then we had best learn to live rationally, passionately, and intuitively without being led astray by vain emotion and sentimentality.

The Victorian Nightmare was the end of Reason.  In the Gothic Romances the victims faced two fates, death or madness.  One was the loss of existence and the other the loss of reason.  But there was another monster, possibly the greatest of the Victorian Nightmare creatures, the Vampyre.

In the late Twentieth Century vampires became a focus of aspiration for many people, particularly in the Goth scene.  People were drawn to the elegance, power, and sexuality of the vampire, and yet for the Victorians the vampire was something to be feared.  One might speculate that it was feared out of xenophobia or sexual repression.  I am more inclined to believe that the Victorians saw the vampire as a parasite.  A creature that sucked the life's blood out of others.  For an energetic people what could be worse than to have that energy drained from you?  Or to have your will, your liberty, taken from you.   Now I'll admit that I may be reading too much into this, but I do like the fact that in the end of Dracula the cowboy, Quincy Morris, sacrifices his life to preserve the freedom of the others.  The American representing the new order of personal liberty kills the last remnants of a parasitic ancient aristocracy.  And yet today we have again parasitic governments, but rather than fight them people are scurrying around to either control or to become them.  Rather than killing the vampire, we want to become the vampire.

For me Steampunk is more than just the latest fashion.  It is more than the steam-powered dystopia envisioned by William Gibson in his novel.  It is that Discovery Land of my youth.  It is the opportunity to embrace forgotten ideologies, to rescue the Spirit of Man from the techno-feudalism that I see looming on the horizon courtesy of the Central Banks, Corporate Interests, Nanny States, and Socialists, and a return to a Romantic vision that glorifies the individual and his achievements and holds him to the highest possible standards.  More importantly, it is about true freedom, and not the empty emotionalism spoon-fed the masses by politicians who, 150 years ago, would have been horse-whipped, then tarred and feather for the lying snake oil salesmen that they are.  That's you Obama, McCain, and Gordon Brown.

Rise of the Cat People

Last week, I was trying to figure out some whimsical statement for my Myspace Friend Status. I opted for being the newly crowned "Lord of the Cat People". In the days that followed, I found myself pondering this statement and here are the results of my thoughts.

Humans have always anthropomorphised their world, attributing human qualities to non-human things, such as animals, machines, and even countries. In regards to animals, we perceive certain behaviours in the creature and then give them a human label, such as clever foxes, dumb mules, and loyal dogs. These animals may even come to symbolise the concepts attributed to them.

Cats have been with us for a very long time. A grave unearthed in 1983 in Shillourokambos, Cyprus, dating to 7500 BC, contained a human corpse and a pet cat. Just to put that date into perspective, its just 500 years after the end of the Ice Age. Cats have been a part of human civilisation since almost the very beginning. So you can imagine that a lot of anthropomorphising has been going on in relation the cat over the past 9,500 years.

One bit of information that really caught my attention when looking into this was the way humans communicate with their oldest companions – cats and dogs. Humans can intuitively read the animal's sounds and body language to determine its moods, its wants, and its needs and these animals understand the same about us. Some go even so far as to mimic human vocalisations. When you stop to think about this, the fact that such interspecies communication occurs is amazing.

Yes, I used the "D" word. Dogs. I'm not a fan of the canine. I figure that you can beat dating services to hell simply by matching cat people with cat people and dog people with dog people and never the twain shall meet.

Time to talk about Values – again. Values are the foundation for our faculty of judgement. People are drawn to those people and things that we see to manifest our values and we are apathetic towards or reject those things that do not. Of course all this is open to interpretation. Two people can see the behaviour of let's say a cat and form two different interpretations and therefore have two different value-based judgements. This says more about the person making the judgement than it does of the object being judged.

Generally speaking, depending on the animal's socialisation, dogs trust until that trust is betrayed while cats trust only when it is earned. So a dog may be perceived as being friendly and loyal while a cat is seen as aloof and skittish. The truth is that most cats bond to a single person in a family and when it does it can be a very friendly and loyal companion.

A person who is naturally extroverted may consciously or unconsciously perceive a dog as being like them, whereas a person who believes that trust should be earned, is perhaps a bit introverted, and enjoys alone time may identify more with the cat's behaviour.

This is just one example, but it demonstrates what I mean by Cat People and Dog People. To make a more specific definition, a Cat Person is someone whose values and behaviours parallel those values and behaviours commonly attributed to cats.

A brilliant example of Cat People is the character Cat from the British television series Red Dwarf. Though comical by its exaggeration, it speculates what a race of intelligent beings evolved from cats would be like. In one scene he roams the halls with a aerosol can spraying everything saying, "this is mine, and this is mine, and this is mine."

A cat snuzzling it's "owner" is commonly seen as a form of affection, and it is, but not exactly as you might think. The cat is scenting the person and essentially saying, "this is mine", just as Cat does with his spray can. The anthropomorphised cat is seen as the epitome of cool, style, grace, and individualism. The negative spin would be aloof, vain, and selfish.

A male cat is called a Tom and a female cat is called a Queen. Where Cat on Red Dwarf embodies the anthropomorphised Tom, the female of the species is quite different, more like Catwoman from Batman or Black Cat from Spider-Man. She is in a word "sultry". The slang term Tom Cat refers to a womaniser, a man who sleeps around. In contrast, the Queen is the regal seducer who draws men to her. But in both cases, the Tom and the Queen have their fun and move-on. Cats are seen as being emotionally independent, unlike their canine counterparts.

Dogs are pack animals, whereas all forms of feline, with the exception of lions, are solitary. Pet dogs see the family as their pack with the household head as the alpha male. Cats on the other hand see the mutual benefit of the arrangement and will maintain that arrangement as long as it suits them. I have heard it said that an abused dog will remain in that situation, whereas an abused cat will leave.

The differences between cats and dogs is wonderfully illustrated in the film Underworld. The film revolves around a centuries long war between vampires and werewolves. Although vampires are usually associated with bats, this is misleading. The concept of the vampire existed long before the discovery of a species of bat that fed on blood. The bat was named for the vampire and not the vampire for the bat. The behaviours of the vampires depicted in the film are definitely feline. There is even a scene where a startled female vampire leaps up to cling upside-down from the ceiling and gives a cat hiss. Not only are they suave, cool, well-dressed, lazy, and sultry, they are also driven by strong self-interest. The werewolves are loyal collectivists whereas the vampire world is one of political intrigue with each member vying for advantage.

There is a song in the Disney film The Aristocats "Everybody Wants To Be A Cat". Well, I certainly do. My first childhood introduction to the concept of "cool" was Thomas O'Malley from that film. When I look over the characteristics attributed to cats and cat people over the centuries (cool, individualistic, charming, graceful, stylish, sultry, sensual, sexy, lucky, mysterious, magical, proud, regal, self-confident, and emotionally independent) I cannot help but see the parallel characteristics also expressed in Romanticism. These same qualities also appear in relation to vampires, who all stem from Lord Byron, thus providing another link to the Romantic.

In my room, I have a giant poster of the famous advertisement for Le Chat Noir, the same image that appears on my page. This burlesque club was popular among the Decadents, Dandies, and Bohemians of the late 19^th century and named for the short story, The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, who is seen as the father of the Decadent phase of the Romantic Period. I cannot think of a more fitting symbol of the Romantic or a nobler epitome of its aspirations than the cat. Long live the Cat People.

Comfort Be Damned

The life of a Romantic is not a comfortable one. What is comfort anyway? Comfort is the flat line. It is not bad and not good, it's just okay. Comfort is that warm bed you do not want to get out of in the morning. Comfort is nice, easy, steady, predictable. Don't get me wrong, comfort is a wonderful thing. The problem is when we get too comfortable.

One of the driving forces of Romanticism is aspiration. The idea that we can become more, have more, achieve more. It is about focusing on and aspiring to our values. The opposite of Romantic is mundane, meaning routine, boring, predictable. In other words, comfortable.

I am reminded of the Lotus eaters from The Odyssey. Odysseus and his crew were swept onto an island inhabited by hippies. These people sat around in a serene narcotic state eating lotus fruits and flowers . They invited some of the crew to eat the lotus, and in doing so they no longer wanted to return home so Odysseus had to force them onto the ship for some cold-turkey drug rehab.

This is taken a step further in the film Serenity. On the terra-formed planet Miranda, the government had put a chemical called Pax into the atmosphere processors. As a result the inhabitants became so comfortable that they all laid down peacefully and died.

There is a story, which may or may not be true, that the city of Glasgow's Italian population arrived during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries when immigrants bound for New York were either left in Glasgow by untrustworthy captains or the ship stopped in Glasgow and the passengers thought, "This'll do."

In life we have dreams of going someplace, achieving something, or creating something, however there comes a point when we stop far from our destination and say, "This'll do." We settle for the comfort zone and it becomes our life. It becomes our little Miranda and eventually our soul dies. 

Perhaps this is why Romanticism is so often associated with the young. They have yet to reach that comfort zone and give-up. Next thing you know their little comfort zone fills-up with the spouse, the mortgage, the kids, and all the trials those things entail until the day comes when the kids move out, the spouse is either gone, dead, or hates you, and you look around wondering what happened to your life.

Of course it does not have to be like that. The Romantic is about the pursuit of values. If having a domestic life is your value, then you will find your happiness there. But if such a life is not chosen, but rather just happens because it is expected or comfortable, then it will suck the life out of you as surely as any opium haze.

I'm considering creating a viewing list of films, television programs, and documentaries that exemplify the way of the Romantic. One of these would be the documentary series, The Seven Wonders of the Industrialised World. For those curious, the wonders are: The London Sewer system, the Bell Rock Lighthouse, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Transcontinental Railroad, The ship The Great Eastern, the Panama Canal, and the Hoover Dam. Of these glories of the mostly Victorian/Edwardian Period, two improved the quality of life in term of sanitation and power and the other five involved transportation, but all were about the creation of something more, something better, the creation of values against impossible odds and in spite of defeats and setbacks. Sometimes I think to myself, "if Roebling can build a bridge, then I can get out of bed and get some writing done."

My regular readers will no doubt see patterns recurring over and over again in my blogs as I find myself repeating the same mantra. The way of the Romantic is like a religion in that it places demands upon your character. It tells you the kind of person you should be and constantly aspire towards in order to live the Romantic lifestyle.

To avoid the mundane life, you must be willing to live outside of your comfort zone always pressing for more -- a greater realisation of your values. This is more than just material values, but personal values as well, values of character. This requires you to live fearlessly in order to achieve more. It requires you to place your pursuit of happiness ahead of the expectations of others. You must live your life on your terms and be willing to discard anything or anyone that prevents or does not support you in this pursuit. This is easier when your adversary is a challenge or a threat, but not so easy when your foe is comfort and ease.

Oh, it is so easy to play the Romantic. The Mundanes are dazzled by any extraordinary display. What is truly difficult is to actually be a Romantic. I have read that if you are not born a gentleman, then it takes a tremendous amount of work to become one. Seeing as being a gentleman is almost synonymous with being a Romantic, the same holds true. Some people are born with a natural temperament and upbringing conducive to Romanticism, but the rest of us have to work at it. However, the work is pleasurable, fulfilling, and life enriching. I'm not saying that life should not be serene, peaceful, and yes even pleasant. Just don't get too comfortable.

The Spirit of Fear and Loathing

Over the past five years I have been exploring the Romantic and many of the concepts I've discovered I have been working through in the writing of countless notes, a few drafts of my book chapters, outlines for an e-zine, and within these blogs. All this is an attempt to truly understand the way of the Romantic and to preach that gospel. This subject goes beyond literature and popular culture. It is beyond the Gothic that attracted me to it or the films, books, and characters that have inspired me. It is about understanding a way of living one's life gloriously.

Ayn Rand wrote in The Romantic Manifesto that Romanticism was all about the pursuit of greatness and the desire to make life more interesting. Here she makes the mistake of most philosophers. They tell you what but not how. How do you achieve greatness? What is the measure of greatness, or success for that matter? How does one live a life less ordinary? My regular readers will no doubt suspect what I will write as the key concept in living such a life. Yep, it's Values.

Mathew Sweet, the author of Inventing the Victorians, wrote "Victorian culture liked to improve everything and everyone. If there was data to be analysed, you can bet someone would be analysing it." The Romantic Era, also known as the Victorian period, was a time of incredible advancements in human civilisation on every front of human endeavour. It was a time of creating values. That was the driving Spirit of the Age – or zeitgeist.

The Romantic Era ended in Europe with World War I. Words, statistics, and pictures fail to truly convey how devastating the war was to European culture. With it, the dreams of an era came crashing down and the dawning of the first age of globalisation scarcely had a chance to take a breath. The United States was not as affected by World War I, so there Romanticism persisted throughout the 1920's until the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

The long century of Romanticism was over and a new spirit came to dominate this new age. Imagine living a life of values when suddenly your entire world comes crashing down. You tell yourself that you reached too high, too far, too fast. So you retreat from your values and the pain you believe they caused. What values you have left you cling to in fear of loosing them. Welcome to the 20th century. Welcome to the zeitgeist of Fear.

After World War I, we feared the Fascists, had another world war, then we feared the Communists, had a cold war, and now we fear the terrorists. We fear international companies, we fear the government, we fear the wild youths on our streets, we fear for our souls, we fear the break-down of morals and civilisation, we fear global warming, we fear for our children, we fear the loss of our relationships, we fear technological progress, we fear an energy crisis, we fear for our safety and securities, we fear humanity, and we fear the past and the future. Ever notice that no one accuses anyone of cowardice anymore? Where the Victorians saw challenges and opportunities, we see a threat.

The thing about zeitgeist, is that it refers to the spirit of an age. It is a generalisation. The 20th century is filled with examples of men and women of courage pursuing their values, but they are the exception and not the rule.

In my last blog, I wrote about the choice we have to live our lives in pursuit of our values or to live a life motivated by fear. Remember that fear is an imagined threat to our values. It's not real. As an emotion, all fear is saying is to be careful. It pumps your body full of chemicals to prepare you to take action of either fight or flight. The danger comes when the threat is wholly imaginary and we allow our fears and insecurities to get the better of us. Brooding over our fears only fuels the fires of worry until we are consumed by what-if's and maybe's. Next thing you know, you have unconsciously brought your fears to fruition. Most people would rather be right than happy.

A word about insecurities, we feel insecure when we are faced with a challenge that we do not believe ourselves to be capable of dealing with. This is not to say that we are or are not actually capable, just that we do not have faith in our ability to cope with that which we fear. This lack of self-belief will almost always secure failure, and failure breeds more insecurity and thus creates more things to fear.

It is important to see how you frame your situation. Framing does not change or ignore the facts at hand, it just looks at them from a different perspective. Do you see opportunity where others see failure? Do you allow your past "failures" and "mistakes" to weigh you down, or are they simply part of your learning process? Do you see something to fear or a challenge to overcome and thus prove your efficacy and right to exist? Positive framing is not about self-delusion or blind optimism. It's about learning to see reality in a way that will promote your success.

What is success then? What is greatness? The measure of your success is your personal happiness. It has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth, status, fame, or love. Happiness is a response to the acquisition of your values, if you make a fortune at a job that does not enable you to achieve your values, then the money is nothing.

The other day I had a brief chat with a friend of mine. I told her that she was an inspiration to me. I met her when she was seventeen and a student at Glasgow University, but she wasn't happy there. I encouraged her to follow her dream and apply to the Glasgow School of Art. I remember how nervous she was when she did her paintings for admission. We only spoke on rare occasion in the years that followed, but she kept me up to date with events at art school. She recently graduated with accolades poured over her, including a very favourable review in the newspaper and a purchaser of one of her paintings set her up in her own studio. Last week she told me that her social life is non-existent and her relationship with her boyfriend is suffering, but she is the happiest she has ever been in her life.

What I admire about her is all the hard work she put into pursuing her values and I am happy for all the rewards she has earned from it. So many people I encounter have dreams, but they are not willing to work for them. They complain and moan that their life is not what they want or they criticise others who succeed where they fail. They blame others, or their circumstances, or their past. Anything to keep them from doing the work required to earn the happiness that they desire.

Now here's what really sucks. I started life like that. I believed that I was destined for greatness so I expected everything would just be handed to me. When it didn't come or opportunities fizzled I found myself blaming everyone and everything else. I lived life on the edge. No, not the really cool edge. The edge of becoming homeless. This formed a pattern of behaviour that has governed my existence for nearly twenty years. I clung to any shelter, any comfort zone, any shit home, any shit job, and any unproductive relationship became a dependency. I lived in an impoverished existence because of my fear.

Okay, I am well aware that I have created a body of work and that I have positively influenced the lives of others over the past twenty years. I have done remarkable things and I have had noteworthy experiences. I have grown in wisdom and understanding through these years. The problem here is what my teachers consistently said about me throughout my school years, "Daniel has so much potential, he just needs to apply himself." It's not about all the positive things I have done or accomplished, it's about achieving my values – and I haven't.

As per usual, I am not preaching to you from the mountaintop but from the factory floor. And I say that we must reject the spirit of this age. Reject fear, complacency, excuses, paranoia, and cowardice. Fear is the mind killer.

The proper Neo-Victorian gentleman is gallant. Although gallantry is defined as courtly conduct, it is also defined as bravery. The gallant man sees no situation or person as a threat to himself, which is a testament to his inate sense of self-worth. Wit and charm are his weapons of choice rather than anger or defensiveness. This is the attitude we must seek to cultivate in our daily lives. Train your mind to focus on the pursuit of happiness instead of protecting yourself from your fears. Look at possibilities and opportunities and not worries. Know that you will fail, know that you will experience set-backs, but do not allow these things to erode your confidence or determination to achieve your goal. As the saying goes, there is no failure, only feedback.

Romantics have always been viewed as rebels. How much more now than ever before when the entire world seems to be reacting to those things it fears rather than those things it wishes to achieve? The true rebel is the one willing to stand-up not for rebellion's sake or as a fashion, but to promote his values against those of the majority because he knows that he is right. Think of how unpopular the Romantic/Neo-Victorian values of individualism, capitalism, and humanism are these days. However it is through these values that the world may be saved from the shackles of its own fears.

How can Romantics change the world? By courageously pursuing and creating their personal values and thus providing inspiration to others to do the same. Those who will not be inspired be damned. This is the glorious life Romanticism offers.

Of Dreams and Fantasies

As I was growing-up there were two constant remarks that people seemed to make towards me. "Get out of your fantasy world" and "You have to learn to control you emotions". Sure, easy for them to say. I tried to take their well-intentioned advice and found myself travelling mental roads that I regret. Yes, these people, both friends and family, were looking after my interests, but they were not exactly qualified experts. Neither am I, but I have learned a thing or two about fantasy and emotions.

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

There are two types of dreamers. There are dreamers and then there are fantasists. The fantasist dreams to escape reality, but the dreamer dreams to engage and to change reality.

The fantasist in his most extreme and negative state is typified by the character of the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons. Here is a man who is fat, lazy, resentful, and arrogant, the complete antithesis of the heroes he admires. Rather like a cultural parasite consuming values but producing nothing. He resents those who create values as evident by his constant criticism as he smuggly looks-down upon those who he deems his inferiors, which is everyone. It is easy to believe yourself to be great when you hide in a fantasy and never test that supposed greatness in the world. Most fantasists are not as bad as the Comic Book Guy, but the traits are still there.

Where the fantasist pretends that life is not what it is, the dreamer creates.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

I could conjure all sorts of people to illustrate the dreamer, from inventors, to entrepreneurs, to artists, to engineers. The simple fact is that all human creation began as someone's dream. Often when a man is criticised for being a dreamer, it is because he believes that something is possible that others do not and he is working to make that dream a reality.

The difference between the dreamer and the fantasist is that the dreamer acts on his dreams and reaps the benefits of the successes and failures along the way, whereas the fantasist fears failure and so never tries. Instead he hides in his dreams fuelled by the dreams of others.

We feel as we dream. Emotions are the responses to our thoughts. It is your conscious and unconscious idea of reality that evokes your emotional responses.

Imaginative, creative, and intelligent people tend to have very powerful emotions. Their feelings are like a great wild stallion in need of training. I was never taught how to deal with my emotional responses. I was simply told not to act in a particular manner. So I tried to repress my emotions. Not because I was obedient to these voices, but because my emotions were often painful or embarrassing. Little did I realise that it was as simple as learning to use my thoughts to manage my emotional states.

There is no singular personality to us. We behave differently in different circumstances depending on our emotional state. In essence, we are many different people in one. Those with multiple personality disorder demonstrate how each persona will rise to the surface depending on the situation. It is as though the unconscious mind summons the best personality for dealing with a particular situation. We can use this to our advantage.

In the comic books, Billy Batson speaks the magic word "Shazam" to become the super-powered Captain Marvel. The word is an acronym for the names of those beings whose powers and abilities he draws upon (S for the wisdom of Solomon, H for the strength of Hercules, A for the stamina of Atlas, Z for the power of Zeus, and A for the courage of Achilles, and M for the speed of Mercury).

Bearing that in mind, there is a technique in hypnosis and NLP in which you imagine either someone you admire or the person you wish to become and then imagine either their power coming into you or imagining what it feels like to step into that person and feel intensely what it is like to be that person. This emotional state can then be anchored with a trigger (a touch or word associated with that state) so that you can enter that state instantly. It can even be a "magic word" like Shazam.

Supposing you have a lot of things to get done, but just can be bothered. I have that problem a lot. There have been times when you felt motivated, industrious, and accomplished. You know people that you admire for their ability to get things done, or people who make things happen. The thing is, your assessment of this person is all in your mind. It is your perception. It is your feeling about them, therefore the feelings evoked by thinking of them come from you. It is from your library of emotional states that you can draw upon. If you pretend to be an efficient person, then you act like an efficient person, and efficient people get things done. It all comes down to believing that you are this person.

You are and become the person that you imagine yourself to be. What you believe about yourself affects how you perceive and act in reality, and your perception of how reality responds to you affects what you believe about yourself. It's a mirror.

There is a story about two dogs in a village. One dog was very positive and the other very negative. One day the happy little dog goes into the great house on the hill and discovers the Hall of A Thousand Mirrors. As he walks in, he finds himself faced with a thousand happy dogs all wagging their tails. He told his friend about this wonderful place. The negative dog went to the house, and he found the Hall of A Thousand Mirrors, only to be confronted by a thousand dogs growling at him, so he fled determined never to return to that horrible place.

Just as time and space are linked, so too are dreams (thoughts) and emotions. Just think of how often we link the concepts of thoughts and feelings in every our day language. We even interchange their meanings, such as asking someone, "how do you feel about something?" when we mean, "what do you think about something?". There is no great divide between the heart and the head. There is no Rational vs. Emotional or Reason vs. Passion. Either there is alignment between your conscious and unconscious, or there is not.

A common mistake I made when working on my personal growth is not approaching my task on an unconscious level. This is where are patterns of behaviour are stored and this is where they are adjusted. If you want change in your life or yourself then you need to engage your imagination and your emotions.

Reason is the native language of the conscious mind, however in order to for the conscious mind to align the unconscious to itself, it must speak to the unconscious in its own language, that of imagery and emotion. Otherwise, you're just explaining a complex engineering exercise to an audience of Chinese -- they won't understand you.

I'll close this with a film reference. I watched the film Click with Adam Sandler the other night and found it most disturbing. Not the best of his films by any stretch, but the metaphor of the universal remote rung in my head. Basically, this guy's life is out of control so he is given a universal remote control -- a remote that controls the universe. He uses it to fast forward through the boring or monotonous parts of his life. While in fast forward mode, he basically switches to autopilot, completely disengaged from his world, but still functioning in it. Eventually, the remote learns his habits and switches to automatic fast forward until his entire life is gone and he missed everything and produced a life that he did not want.

The universal remote is a metaphor for our unconscious. It shuts out painful experiences, disengages from boring reality, filters our perceptions, takes us to moments in our past, or projects into the future. More importantly, it learns our habits and gives us what it thinks we want based on our habitual behaviour.

Throughout the film, Sandler's character is confronted with things that he doesn't want, but the life that manifests is the life he created and the remote facilitated. If you are not living the life that you want, then you need to reprogram your remote. The way of the Romantic is the way of a conscious active existence where you take full responsibility for the life you created and recognise that the life you live is the product of your dreams. Dreams fuel our emotions, emotions fuel our passions, passions fuel our actions, and actions create our lives.

When we use fantasy to disengage from reality, then the unconscious mind gives us more and more disengagement until it become a powerful pattern of behaviour. Rather than increasing emotional interaction with reality, it numbs us to it. Life becomes like watching TV or playing a video game and then wondering eight hours later where the day went. Imagine not a day lost to fantasy, but a lifetime. I confess that did that to a large degree in my life.

I was given good advice as a child. "Get out of your fantasy world" and "You have to learn to control you emotions". The problem was that the people giving the advice could not fully conceptualise what they were telling me or guide me on how to do it.

If I was speaking to my young self, I would say "Dreams are powerful creations. Dream the life you want, dream the person that you choose to become, and allow those dreams to manifest in reality. Learn to listen and interpret what your emotions are telling you, and then use your reason to set a course of action in the direction of your dreams."

The Currency of Existence

You leave home on a lovely day and walk into town for a bit of window shopping when suddenly you are caught in a freak shower. All that you have to keep yourself dry is a £10 note. It’s pretty useless to the task. In fact, money is pretty useless for most things. Just scraps of paper and slivers of metal. However, you can take that £10, go into a shop, and exchange it for an umbrella -- something far most useful, and therefore more valuable than a small rectangular piece of paper.

Money in and of itself is of little value. However, what it symbolises is of enormous value. Money is a symbol that represents value itself. You take your knowledge, skills, and abilities and sell those in the marketplace of values in exchange for this symbolic representation of your production. Without money, you would have to find something else of value to the shop owner to exchange for the umbrella, such as work for him a few hours or perhaps he would like your watch. Money is a tool allowing for the easy exchange of values.

They say that money makes the world go round. Not really. Again, money is merely a symbol of values. Values make the world go round. We exist within the marketplace of values, and this market is a truth that shapes our existence to be ignored at your peril.

When I told a friend that I was writing a blog on the subject of values he warned me against writing on the same topic over and over again. Perhaps. Nonetheless, values are of such critical importance and so underrated and misunderstood that I do not believe that too much can be written on the subject. This particular blog is derived from my recent discoveries on the critical importance of values and the need to live a value-driven lifestyle.

A value is defined as something you act to gain or to keep. The very first and still primary value is survival. This is expressed by the two primal questions, “Can I eat it?” and “Will it eat me?”.

“Eating it” relates to acquiring a value. When we desire something our brain releases dopamine and when we get it the feel-good chemical seratonin is released. These two brain chemicals create a constant interplay of desire and fulfilment every moment of our lives. We are hardwired as a species towards the acquisition of values. Each of our four primary emotions relates to values. Desire is the imagined acquisition of a value and happiness is the actual acquisition of a value .

One the other hand, “Will it eat me?”. If values are those things we act to gain and to keep, then the opposite would be those things we act to prevent and avoid. This is fear, it is the imagined loss of a value and sorrow is the actual loss of a value.

Now we have the positive and negative ends of the spectrum. Values are those things that make us feel good and we Fear those things that make us feel bad. Both forces motivate every action in our lives.

Ayn Rand saw living according to whim as the opposite of living by values. I disagree. A whim is an unconscious act. Seeing as the role of the unconscious mind is to keep us safe, it has created patterns of behaviour to create a safety bubble. The person living by whim may not see themselves as afraid, however if you challenge their comfort zone then the fear will emerge. Whim is the safety of inaction, routine and habit. Complacency is habitualized fear.

I could not understand why I valued things that I did not pursue. Since we as a species are hardwired towards the acquisition of values and our society is based on the creation, acquisition, and trading of values, then why do I not naturally live a value-driven lifestyle? Why did I often act to sabotage those things I valued by acting towards things that I did not value?

Imagine that you are attacked by an angry man-eating tiger and you escape by climbing into an apple tree. The tiger is circling the tree waiting for you to eventually come down. As you sit in your tree living off the apples, you notice on the ground a basket filled with all sorts of food and drink and beside the basket is a rifle capable of killing the tiger. Do you stay in your comfort zone or take a risk for something you value -- proper food and freedom?

Many people so consistently choose the safe path that it becomes a pattern of behaviour and therefore a part of their personality. Their lives are governed not by the movement towards gaining values, but by their avoidance of loss.

I read recently that the difference between rats and humans is that when a rat makes a mistake it tries something different. When a human makes a mistake it blames someone else or justifies that it worked once before. Humans have the power to rationalise their actions. It is this function that allows for the excuses people make for not pursuing their values, which over time becomes a pattern of inaction. However, that is only one aspect.

If I did what I really wanted to do, then I would be ____________.

Perhaps you see people with money as being bad people. You do not want to be a bad person and you do not want to be seen as a bad person, therefore on an unconscious level you do not want to make any more money than those around you. Meanwhile you fret and moan about not having enough money.

Our unconscious minds are filled with all sorts of preconceived notions. The danger is that if we do not address our beliefs concerning reality, then we will be limited by those beliefs against our best interests. We fear the imagine consequences of achieving our values and/or we fear how we suspect we will be judged by others should we achieve our values. Again, this attitude creates a pattern of behaviour that limits our ability to effectively pursue our values.

Another aspect of fear is insecurity. It is the fear that we are not good enough or do not deserve what we value. A good way of understanding values is to look at them as we do money. If you want something you ask yourself if you can afford it. This involves taking stock of your resources. The same applies in your dealings with other people.

Suppose you see someone that you fancy. Is this person “out of your league”? The real question is what values can this person offer you and what values can you offer in exchange? Just as a good salesman should be passionate about his product, so too should you be passionate about your product, and your product is you, the values you have on offer.

The exchange of values is all about trading something you deem to be of lesser value for something you believe to be of equal or greater value. Remember the umbrella? The umbrella is of greater value in a rain shower than a piece of paper.

Insecurity is the fear that the values you have on offer are of no value to anyone. Not only are they of no value, but they are worthy of scorn and rejection. If you do not believe in your values; if you see them as substandard, wrong, misguided, ugly, sinful, or weird; if you have no passion for them, then the best that you can hope for are the scraps of life. Insecurity is the inflation that renders your values worthless.

There is another reason for not living a value-driven life that has nothing to do with fear, well, not completely. Sometimes we do not pursue our values because we do not know our values. One of the great goals in life is discovering what we want. Life is a smorgasbord of experiences. You have the option to try everything once or stick to what you have always eaten. The only fear here is the fear of trying something new. You cannot truly know what you want until you have experienced it. If something tastes good, then have some more. If it tastes bad, then take something that you do like. Or to put it more straightforward:

Values are those things that we act to gain or to keep;
Happiness is a response to values;
The purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness;
Therefore, the purpose of life is the creation, pursuit, and keeping of values.

How does one keep a value? I think it is important that our decisions in life are based on moving towards something and not away from something. In your actions, are you motivated by moving towards your desires or escaping what you fear? Keeping a value is not accomplished by a fear of loosing it, but from a sense of gratitude for having it. We must constantly look around us and see how remarkable rich in values we already are.

Lets say that you are given a lovely china tea service for your birthday. You feel the thrill of delight at receiving such a beautiful gift. However, you do not alter your lifestyle to permit use of it on a regular basis, so the tea service quickly becomes an ornament blending in with your room until it becomes unnoticed. Over time it becomes dirty, chipped, and worn loosing value everyday from neglect. Perhaps you even forget who it was that gave it to you. You have now lost a value simply by not appreciating it. Then one day there is an accident and it falls to the ground and shatters. Only now are you sad at its loss.

I am no longer a Christian, but I believe that Christianity has many positive aspects that lead to a happy and productive life. One aspect in particular is the ritual of giving thanks. Look around and allow yourself to feel the positive emotions of gratitude. Look at whatever or whoever your “tea set” might be and allow yourself to feel once more the initial joy of attaining that value in your life. You need not thank “God”, just be thankful.

Now back to business.

Capitalism is all about the creation of values -- remember that money is just a symbolic representation of values. An entrepreneur is a visionary capable of seeing a means of creating new values in people’s lives. Look at your material, social, or personal values and imagine where they came from and all the steps that brought them into your life. This could be your computer, or the cool boyfriend/girlfriend that you met using that computer, or the great life changing concept you read on the internet. None of these values would have been possible without the conception, manufacture, and distribution of computer hardware and software.

There are three important skills in business:
1. Let them know who you are.
2. Tell them the story of what you are offering.
3. Convince them it’s worth having.

These are also known as networking, marketing, and sales. Since business is all about values and values are the currency of human existence, then these same principles apply. Here are two examples.

You are out for the night and see someone that you fancy. Introduce yourself (networking), say/demonstrate who you are (marketing your values), and see if you click (sales). Let’s say that you want a job. Let employer know about you (networking), tell them what values you can bring to their company (marketing), determine if you want them and if they want you (sales). I think you’ll find this pattern of value trading occurring in a myriad of forms everyday in your life.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to values. If I may challenge you, my dear reader, to take a moment to assess what it is that makes you truly happy. Trust and follow your emotional guidance system towards happiness instead of obsessing over those things that make you feel bad. Fear is simply your emotions telling you to be careful. There are not telling you to stop pursuing your values.

One final note for my fellow dark Romantics, happiness does not mean that you have to become little miss sunshine or prance about smiling like an idiot all time. It’s okay to be happy. It’s why you are here -- so enjoy.

The Marriage of Nature

I have been married twice. It's funny how a failed marriage taints a person. You know those little boxes that you have to tick when you are filling out some form? I have often wondered why the bank wants to know if I am divorced when I want a loan or an account. When I meet a girl for the first time, I feel as though I have to hide the fact that I have been married twice. You see, I just don't want her to get the wrong idea . When you tell someone that you have been previously married there is a kind of life-long stigma attached. You will always be someone's ex-husband. However, I have recently discovered that such a stigma is more unfair when you consider that many people have been or are married and don't even know it.

Both of my marriages lasted less than two years. When the union dissolved the girl simply packed her things and disappeared from my life forever. There were no children, no joint assets, none of the usual chaos associated with divorce. She just left. My marriages were no more than government approved and church sanctioned living together.

I have known couples who have lived together two or three times longer than I was married, and yet should they break-up and return to single life, they can still tick that box next to the word "Single" while I am meant to tick "Divorced". They have an ex-partner who will eventually fade into memory as an ex-girlfriend, while I have an ex-wife for the rest of my days. No wonder more and more couples are choosing to forego the institution of marriage. The whole idea of such a union seems to have become moot. Yet, things are not as simple as they appear.

Over the past several months I have been studying different aspects of human relationships and sexuality. This has brought me to a very interesting conclusion. People choose not to enter into marriage because of a fear of commitment, or they choose to live with their significant other out of current interest but would never want to marry them for what ever reason. However, even though the decision to live with someone as a partner may avoid the human institution of marriage, the couple have in fact become man and wife whether they know it or not.

There is a story in the Bible where Jesus psychically points out to a prostitute that she has many husbands. In the ancient Irish Brehon Law there are seven types of marriage, two of which being "marriage of visitation with parental consent" and "marriage of visitation without parental consent". In Western culture we still speak of "consummating the marriage". The wedding before the religious figure or judge does not create the marriage. Signing the document does not create the marriage. These are just the institutionalised religious or legal aspects. What creates the marriage is the sex.

I was taught in the Pentecostal church of my youth that sex was a union of souls. One admonishment against "sport sex" was this idea that when souls are being united and ripped apart over and over again, it causes deep psychological damage to a person. I have long since come to disagree with this notion, but I have recently come to discover that there is more truth to it than I had suspected.

Our understanding of the human animal continues to grow. Just as our technological advances have progressed in leaps and bounds, so too has our understanding of human psychology and biology. We have found that there is far more to sex than "Insert tab A into slot B - Repeat."

Nature cares nothing about human laws, institutions, rituals, preconceived notions, entertainment, or religious beliefs. Love and Sex comes down to one thing in the eyes of Nature -- children. This is not to say that we are bound to the letter of Nature's laws. Human technology is based on understanding Nature's laws and using them to our purposes. Nature may intend sex for procreation, but humans have made it into an art. I have no problem with that. However, this does not give license to pretend that these laws don't exist or that there won't be dire consequences if we slip-up.

Scientist have discovered that prolonged sexual partnerships, and I'm not talking about one night stands or occasional flings here, lead to the development of deep psychological bonds between couples. There are a host of chemical agents at work within the human body all designed to strengthen the pair bond for the purpose of procreating and raising children. In other words, once you start having regular sex with someone exclusively, your bodies go to work to essentially "marry" you, strengthening that bond and uniting your souls.

I'll skip over discussing some of these chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine and serotonin, and go right to the scary one. It's a group of fatty acids called copulins and they read like something out of science fiction. Men beware.

Basically it works like this. When the penis enters the vagina, the vaginal wall secretes a chemical to hold it in place, then another chemical opens the penile duct so the copulins enter through the penis. They gather in the gonads to eventually enter the blood stream and go straight to the male brain. Once there, the copulins mimic the man's natural polypeptides, the neurotransmitters linking the hypothalamus and the rest of the brain and body, and supplant the host's neurotransmitters.

Copulins make the male highly open to her suggestions to the point of "hypnosis" or "brainwashing". It is believed that the purpose of this is to encourage bonding and even the odds between the stronger male and the female making him more docile, giving, and nurturing towards her. It seems to explain why macho men become "pussy whipped" in a prolonged relationship. Also, copulins appear to be addictive. For more detailed information on copulins, here is the link…www.copulins.freeservers.com

Let's take a moment to look at a few cultural stereotypes. In the film, Top Hat, Fred Astaire sings of being "footloose and fancy free" is praise of his devout bachelorhood. In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins extols these same joys when he declares, "I will never let a woman in my life." There is this image of Man and his Freedom liked to being a bachelor. Likewise, there is the stereotype of the woman out to ensnare the man into marriage through her sexuality and turning him into the henpecked, brow-beaten, soul-destroyed husband.

Biology seems to support this. The Man is happy and solitary until his desires get the better of him and he exposes himself to the Venus Flytrap that is the walking chemical lab of Woman. The next thing he knows the jaws close in and his freedom is replaced by responsibility to wife and eventually kids.

I do not believe that we are stuck with these stereotypes. Yes, the bachelor is free to live his life as he chooses and by his own terms, but I enjoy the female touch and companionship in my life. I would prefer to have that partner without loosing my soul in the process. So perhaps it is rather like driving under the influence of alcohol. You know that your brain in full of chemicals, so compensate and pay special attention to what you are doing. You keep the course without getting in an accident in the process.

There are those psychologists who would argue that humans are hardwired for infidelity, however it seems that we are also hardwired for forming pair bonds. So it seems that Nature wants you procreate and raise offspring by any means necessary.

Once upon a time it was only socially acceptable to have sex within the institution of marriage, but then came free love and it has become increasingly freer and freer with each generation since. Now we live in a time of broken relationships. According to hypnotherapist Paul McKenna, the average relationship today lasts seven years and there is very little incentive for people to work through issues that arise within the relationship. The result is the pair bond being ripped asunder. This is more than just a heartbreak. It is suddenly going cold turkey from a chemical and behavioral addiction while at the same time adjusting to the loss of a loved one. Its like quitting heroine and smoking cigarettes on the same day that both your parents and your best friend die.

Perhaps in the light of this new understanding and current social forces, we should not take the social institution of marriage so seriously and we should begin taking the natural biology of marriage more seriously.

When you establish an on-going, exclusive, live-in sexual relationship with someone, your body takes it as its cue to begin forming the pair bond whether you consciously choose to "marry" this person or not, whether you are compatible or not, whether you share values or not, whether this person is right or good for you or not, and whether you want children with this person or not. Your head will get pumped full of all the required chemical necessary to create the state of marriage.

However, these other factors do play a part and they will begin to assert themselves when the chemistry lab calms down and the fog clears. At this point you may choose to continue the relationship or not. You may remain married or divorce.

I have been married twice, but that is not exactly true. There was another relationship that lasted roughly the same amount of time as the two marriages. We never married and I would say that I connected and bonded with her more closely than I had with my ex-wives and the separation was far more painful and damaging for me. If we see marriage as the social manifestation of human biology and not as a religious or legal institution, then you might say that I have been married three times.

I carry the stigma of divorce, and yet I have known people who have moved from marriage to marriage to marriage without ever being expected to tick the "Divorced" box. People who have lived joint lives as man and wife for one, two, four, or seven years, but have never been "married" in the eyes of Church and State. I think its high time these people were held accountable for their marriages of Nature.

And yet referring to one's ex-partner or ex-live-in lover hardly carries the same punch as saying ex-wife or ex-husband, and it probably never will. By the same token, I wonder how many people would look at their current partner and could proudly declare them to the world to be their husband or wife. Perhaps if society credited the sexual pair bond with the care, caution, status, and respect that it warrants, the union would not be taken so flippantly.

I have been married three times. So how many times have you been married?