Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 141
Pointless Activities: The main categories, here are obviously sport
and art but considered in the widest sense and both participating in and
the enjoying of as spectator, listener, viewer. (We’re not including
tasting smelling, touching here as food – producing, eating – comes
under productive activities and we agree with Aristotle that cooking
cannot be considered an art as it is a form of pandering, though these
other senses may be involved in forms of art). However, we are
broadminded about sport so amateur as well as professional, viewed
live or on TV, snooker, cards, any leisure wasting activity that isn’t art
(walking? Ok, walking, running, strolling, sitting down doing zilch, if
you want, sort of very slow sport). Art includes stuff on TV, box sets,
video games, graffiti, certainly not just “high” art or even particularly
skilled art but also including high art. Things that are done for
themselves and not with an end in view, with the aim of getting
somewhere, the “thing” is the thing in itself not necessary for its utility.
We don’t care if things cross boundaries and are accidentally useful
e.g. pottery. They may not always be aesthetic e.g. whittling –
activities that are aimless (but not meaningless, on the contrary we
sometimes lean on them to give our lives meaning [especially if other
activities are disturbed, through bereavement, for example] and have
you ever heard football fanatics?). Some of these come close to, and
may also be, the spiritual activities outlined below. MWYWTI has its
prejudices, believe it or not, and one of them is that art is one of the
higher order activities which are essential and transformative to life,
so absolutely necessary that they arise at all levels of civilisation -
flutes discovered at Divje Babe in Slovenia dated about 43,000 years
ago; cave paintings at El Castillo in northern Spain, dated about
40,800 years ago.
Spiritual Activities: These include meditation, thinking not aimed at
producing anything in writing, mindful activities of all kinds, different
states of, levels of, consciousness - reluctant to define, but of this
world and not of this world. The sorts of thoughts, insights, revelations,
visions that arise are often institutionalised as the children of
philosophy in religion and politics. We are calling them spiritual
because they are so fundamental to human beings to the point where
people will die, or kill others, for their beliefs in both areas, the
sacrificial and murderous being flip sides of the institutionalisation of
the spiritual impulse. The non-institutionalised activities are the most
important, of course.
MWYWTI had just baked (whaddya mean, half-baked?) this