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Love and Exclusivity

"What is our love? In the midst of pain and pleasure, we know it is exclusive, personal: my wife, my children, my country, my God. We know it as a flame in the midst of smoke, we know it through jealousy, we know it through domination, we know it through posession, we know it through loss when the other is gone. So we know love as a sensation, do we not? When we say we love, we know jealous, we know fear, we know anxiety. When you say you love someone, all that is implied: envy, the desire to posess, the desire to own, to dominate, the fear of loss, and so on. All this we call love, and we do not know love without fear, without envy, without posession; we merely verbalize that state of love which is without fear; we call it impersonal, pure, divine or God knows what else, but the fact is that we are jealous, we are dominating, possessive. We shall know that state of love only when jealousy, envy, possessiveness, domination, come to an end; and as long as we possess, we shall never love."

A passage from On Love and Loneliness, a compilation of some of J. Krishnamurti's talks on the topic.

It's easy enough to say, but more difficult to truly embrace. I have been thinking a fair bit about "open" relationships lately. I'm a pretty simple, honestly closed-minded person when it comes to dating. I think it has caused a lot of problems for me, for exactly the reasons K describes. I don't fully understand a difference between open relationships and polyamory. This idea of posession as a component of relationship is a source of great conflict. It's a necessary component for easing fear of loss, though - for a general feeling of safety. That's a hard thing to let go of. I see a lot of value in getting rid of the idea of posession, but I also have a really hard time getting rid of the idea of committing to one person. Can committing be independent of posession? Is committing only another way of seeking the same security?

It goes without saying that I am overthinking this, but why not?

" So we have made of love a thing of the mind. The mind becomes the instrument of love, and the mind is only sensation. Thought is the reaction of memory to sensation. Without the symbol, the word, the image, there is no memory, there is no thought. We know the sensation of so-called love, and we cling to that, and when it fails we want some other expression of that same sensation. So the more we cultivate sensation, the more we cultivate so-called knowledge - which is merely memory - the less there is of love.
As long as we are seeking love, there must be a self-enclosing process. Love implies vulnerability, love implies communion, and there can be no communion, no vulnerability, as long as there is the self-enclosing process of thought. The very process of thought is fear, and how can there be communion with another when there is fear, when we use thought as a means for further stimulation?
There can be love only when you understand the whole process of the mind. Love is not of the mind, and you cannot think about love. When you say, 'I want love', you are thinking about it, you are longing for it, which is a sensation, a means to an end. Therefore it is not love that you want, but stimulation; you want a means through which you can fulfill yourself, whether it be a person, a job, or a particular excitement, and so on. Surely, that is not love ... Love is a state of being, and in that state, the 'me', with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions, is absent."

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Ubuntu photo frame

Digital picture frames are neat little gizmos - especially for showing pics to my parents, who are rarely, if ever, inclined to poke around flickr (or anything much beyond their email). I have had various setups for a while using an old laptop. At first, I used Windows, because the wifi drivers for Linux were either missing for my card, or inadequate (non-functional, or locked up computer frequently). I have finally gotten a card that agrees with Linux (the Intel 2200BG MiniPCI), and the computer is now up and running with Xubuntu. Many options are out there for picking particular sets, or photos by interestingness, but I wanted simply a way to download my whole photostream and allow a screensaver to meander the collection. Not all of my photos are interesting, but they have other personal value of interest to parents.

The synopsis of what I do:
- Use flickrfs to mount my photos on the drive
- rsync to copy photos from flickrfs to local drive
- cron to run photo update scripts nightly

To do this yourself,

1. Get flickrfs - on Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 and 8.10, this can be accomplished with
   apt-get install flickrfs (sudo as necessary)
2. Make 2 folders - one to mount flickrfs to, and another to store your pictures locally. Make sure you have write access to both of them (obviously)
3. Mount the flickrfs filesystem to the folder you created for it. This is as simple as the command
   flickrfs /PATH/TO/YOUR/DESIRED/MOUNTPOINT

   After running that command, a web browser will open for you to authorize flickrfs to access your account. Eventually, the command line window will spit out something about updating your sets, and tell you when it's done.

4. You should now have 2 folders in your flickrfs mount point - sets and meta
5. If you have the 2 folders, create a folder named "stream" in the flickrfs mountpoint. If you don't have the 2 folders and you create the stream directory, fuse will complain about a non-empty directory. The flickrfs mount point must be empty until it (flickrfs) puts stuff there.
6. Wait 5-10 minutes for flickrfs to populate the stream folder
7. rsync to copy files from the flickrfs/stream/ folder to your local pictures folder.

If anyone finds it useful, here's the script that I have cron run to update my local Pictures directory with the contents of my photostream. There's also a bit in there to clean up empty files. rsync seems to be not quite perfect with flickrfs, and I accumulated a few empty jpg's that confused the screensaver.

flickr-update

I display the pictures using GLslideshow, which is standard with xscreensaver. I replaced gnome-screensaver with xscreensaver, as configuration of xscreensaver is easier. To ensure that xscreensaver is always reading a fresh set of photos, I kill it and restart it nightly (cron is really useful!). I did have to tell XFCE to start xscreensaver at startup - it isn't a completely automatic drop-in replacement for gnome-screensaver. To point xscreensaver at your local pictures directory, check the advanced tab in the upper right, and change the folder where it looks for pictures.

Side note: The Perl installation for Ubuntu 8.10 has a bug with xscreensaver. It dumps yellow text onscreen, something about a constant being changed. I fixed this by adding a debian sid repository to my third party software, and using the Perl version from there, since it's more up to date. It fixed the yellow text problem for me. The older this post gets, the less likely this will be an issue for you - I imagine the Ubuntu people will update this soon.