taxonomy of trust?

Nothing about me is as important as I think it is.

The more solidly I internalize this concept, the less fucked up I become. And the more interesting my writing becomes. Because I have to write about stuff. No matter how neat somebody thinks I am, reading my semi-internal monologue day after day = not interesting. Not even interesting to me, after it gets a few days out and I know what I've turned that post's mental state into. The dream logs are cool because of the nifty images, and learning my own mental symbolism is good for me I think. Night before last I had a dream where I found a spring deep in the cleft of a rock that bubbled forth carbonated water. I was very excited about it and brought some home in a bucket--I don't think anyone else was as excited.

I mean, yes, I do still need to have someplace to come and bitch about how the cat kept me awake all night and oh woe is me I'm all out of money. For which a blog is appropriate and I should continue to use it as needed. But there ought to be something else as well. Aha. A project! A thing to be working on all the time in my brain, now there's a neat idea. Last fall and early winter, work was too draining on my energy, mental as well as physical, for me to consider taking something on. But now I seem to be balanced well enough to still write. Therefore I should.

Question is, what manner of project? I could always do another long poem. denizen and CONSUMER both turned out well--I think both were begun in a February if I'm not mistaken. Or one begun and one finished in February. Anyway.

Maybe it should be Anatomy of Trust time? The basic principles in that notebook have held fast. I'm no longer sure the seven "metallic" levels of trust are adequate to describe trust phenomena. But the ideas about the structures and applications of consciousness and personas still seem sound. I feel like I'm coming at the problem backwards. Is there any such thing as a default trust state? How do you reduce this dilemma: Which comes first, the decision to trust someone enough to pay attention to them as a person, or the paying of attention to a person-as-person so that you can determine the extent to which you may trust them?

I've said earlier, and elsewhere, that the seven levels of trust are like the colors of the rainbow; artificial divisions within something that naturally occurs in a discontinuous spectrum. That is wrong. What it means to be trusted by one person may be completely different from what it means to be trusted by someone else. But for any individual person, trust levels are sharply discontinuous. This is only sensible, as the higher levels grant the trusted person the power to alter significant portions of the truster's personality. What had had me stymied was that variability in characteristics from person to person. Let's say me, holding you at gold, is functionally equivalent (from your perspective, being trusted) to that guy over there, holding you at steel. Even though we hold you at totally different trust levels, the decisions we make regarding willingness to provide help, information pass-through, and willingness to commit emotional energy (affect), are exactly the same. How the hell can I come up with a taxonomy that takes into account the similarities and differences so that you (or that guy) can identify what's going on as easily as I can? The differences in a case like that would all be internal to the psyche. They'd be "observable", perhaps, through ESP (dog, what a meaningless acronym--can we call it OSP, Obscure Sensory Perception? does that even help?), but that's of no help in trying to make a science of the thing. Since the whole point of making a science of the thing is to make it navigable for those who can't, won't, or haven't yet learned to perceive it that way.

I think there needs to be a third thing in my theory. I already have a term for it: the transformations. For shits and giggles I've been kind of assuming there are twenty-two of them, because if that was one of those obscure uses of the Tarot that was lost millennia ago I would just giggle myself to death. Basically, these are experiences which one personality can go through relative to another personality which alter the nature of the trust between them. But there is an enormous amount of information I need to be able to begin defining what constitutes a transformation, let alone figuring out how to recognize or instigate one.

Maybe Anatomy of Trust can just be about personality structure, and the second thing--Ecology of Trust?--can be about transformations, what they are and how to recognize and understand them. Then Alchemy of Trust can be about how to use transformations!

I'd have to start bringing my Anatomy of Trust notebook with me to work. Everywhere. There's still empty pages at the back for which I'm sure I will have cause to be grateful. And I can make the chapters as blog posts, maybe make some sort of project code for them like I see other blogs doing. The organization of the notebook is understandably shoddy--I was groping my way towards a system and it didn't make sense to try following an outline I didn't have yet. So putting what I do have in some kind of sensible order is half the battle.