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Pushing analogies beyond reason is one of my older tricks to broaden my mind. Random musing about farfetched similes and their relations has often brought me new insight. In this tradition I might see my pursuit of freedom as a kind of jumping, a ‘suspension’ from my beliefs. The jump is an experience that only lasts an instant, up in the air away from the ground of my undisputed truth and my unquestioned assumptions.

 

Following my own method of undue analogies I can argue that if we try to mentally jump and ‘make up our minds’, we might worry about landing. If we jump we must safely land with both feet back on the ground. The jump towards freedom can thus be studied as mental acrobacy. Defining that metaphorical jump I follow a practical path translated from physical jumping to a mental lift off. If  ’freedom’ means ‘to launch off the ground’ a consequence is that I need to learn how to do launch myself by myself.

 

First I have to understand the practice of actual jumping and then translate the physical into the mental version. Wikihow.com’s online guidelines give me the following explanation: “There are many ways to jump and lots of them are simple, fun, and exciting but often they can also cause great injury to yourself, and the people around you” That would mean that freeing the mind, a joyful experience, includes risks. We might ‘fall flat on the face’ and other people might get ‘hurt’ if we land on them, and for our own safety there is a need to stand ‘firm’ on the ground before we take off.

 

I often feel feel lost in life. Maybe my mental ground resembles mud more than rock and this makes standing firm difficult. On the other hand, if the ground is a viscious that kind of soil, I figure that falling on it will not hurt too much either. I’d best just jump from a point of my psyche that is rock solid and not be afraid to fall in the mud. I tell myself that people surrounding me won’t get (mentally) hurt when I ‘jump’ as I feel I am not much of a intellectual ‘heavyweight’ to make that happen. Random jumping like an idiot is relatively safe, but still I will take a distance and jump on an open uncrowded safe location. Being a filmmaker, a film school seems an awesome playground to jump around. One could say that I started my Master of Film studies simply because I wanted to jump.

Getting ready for lift off I thought needed a resilient ‘floor’ and good ‘training’. I started to re-read some essential philosophers trying to figure out how they manage to ‘jump’. Imitation seems indispensable for physical jumping practice too. I decided to loosely copy Socrates eclenctic method of asking questions, insert some Cartesian doubt and steal some of Wittgenstein’s systematic rigor. I knew from the start I had to stay aware of my own mental limitations because unawareness of the absence of skills may be a severe handicap to the jumper in itself. Conscious of my own ignorance and safety risks, I had become eager to improve my artistry on how to hurdle, increase my vertical jump, backspin and jump onto walls.

 

The ‘floor’ that i jumped from I defined through formulating short definitions of all the key terms concerning film making.

 

post#3: The First Steps Down >>