Journeys And Dreams

Nostalgia

2011-12-03T13:17:00.001-08:00

Something very strange happened recently. I need to write it down since it's probably too unusual for my mind to want to keep this memory available. For a few minutes, or hours, I felt deeply sad and melancholic, and at the same time very alive. The past was coming inside the present, and felt more real than what was around me. At the same time, those fragments of memories were leaving the present with repetitive elements of sadness, so it was a constant stream of sadness. It was melancholy, nostalgia (1770, "severe homesickness" (considered as a disease) from Gk. nostos "homecoming" + algos "pain". "wistful yearning for the past" (from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=nostalgia&searchmode=none ).
But it's wrong, not a yearning, the past just imposes itself, and imposes the sadness from losing something: one is aware enough that the what-is-going-away doesn't exist anymore, so any action towards trying to retrieve it is worthless, yet one isn't aware enough that the past was not something really present to not feel the pain of losing it. A constant realization of loss with a constant "bringing up" of past things, like an unreal realization. It's a fake loss, a mind-trick, and now it has passed, and my mind is trying to tell me it was banal, benign, yet I know it was not. I couldn't express anything while it happened, and felt connected to humans better than ever.

Fake Interview on Typography

2011-10-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

Why is Typography so special ? Because letters are the visual atoms of language, and language defines us. We are language machines, and anything else, the physical world included, is only an unnessential accessory, a way-through, the organ/obstacle of our nature, which lies in language.

Why is the visual part of language more important than the audible part, phonems..etc ? I don't think it is. There is simply no art, studies, or ways to think about the audible side of letters. Phonetics and phonology touches into neurology, not yet into psychology or psychoanalysis. I just don't see how one can be excited about various "aaa" sounds, just yet.

Don't we use other senses to express ourselves? Body language isn't a well-formed language, analytically speaking. I love perfumes but they have the same problem.

Are letters that important? Isn't the content of a text so much more vital than the way the letters are drawn? I believe most people can understand the obvious principle of typography: that letter-shapes carry different mental "packages" or cultural assimilation: Stencil fonts feel strong and manly, Courier feels mechanical, Script faces feel classical..etc. But it takes a lot of imagination and sensitivity to feel how the emotions of shapes can be much more than a mental accessory.

Isn't typography just about the legibility/readbility issue? Typography is the mother of Text and its pedestal and its autel and its backlight. It is the hidden and invisible power that makes content shine.

What is the Graal, the aim, the god, the dream of typography? I see a mirage, an idea, of words on the page. I believe there can be letter-shapes that transcend their content because their shapes capture the full attention of the eye, of the brain. And the meaning of words would flow in the mind, invisibly, as in a mutual endeavour of the outside/inside. I believe and dream in the resolution of the brain/mind issue. There is a light coming out of a shape that fits its content, and we are still in the infancy of creating such shapes.

Ok... let's take a step back. Design has an influence on how we think, so isn't typography a cousin of architecture, or industrial design? Yes, but objects and walls are only doors to memories, images and sensations. Letter-shapes, and only them, are also doors to the logical mind.

So typography is the supreme Art of design? Yes.

What do you think other designers would say about that? They would not like it, but I cannot convince them. Like I said, it takes a peculiar mind to see why typography rules.

On action.

2011-10-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Most times, no rewards are given for heroic acts, no limits or warning are presented to the careless one, no suggestion is auto-generated, no guidance is given. Bad and good choices do not come with any obvious signs of their nature. Our lives' hyperstructures are invisible. Reasoning is required to present the articulation of our selves, usually through doctrinal statements, either religious or traditional or commercial.
(I'm realizing this idea follows the 2 previous posts on hyperstructures and on Times of isolation)
But doctrines are not enough to fill each present times: a doctrine is like a set of axioms and is only good when being developed into propositions, models of past and future, and factual representations at any given time. Being Christian, or Muslim, or having read "The Secret", or "How to be happy", or having been advised by a friend, or whatever happened in my past, cannot help me with the present, a hardship or act of kindness or boredom or joy, unless I translate this past culture into a model that eases the relation between this present moment and a future moment that I deem good. In other words, Life requires me to manipulate certain information that was given to me in the past in order to live the present correctly.
This all appears obvious; but there is a small epiphany, in that what what governs our lives is a manipulation of past information. As our era brings new tools and ways to manage information, what will be invented in the future to enhance our ways of dealing with the present ?
In current times, we have ways of communicating elementary information about the present: where am I, what am I doing. In the future, we'll get a better answer of what to do. Maybe we need to communicate more and more about what we do so that an intelligence emerges to advise us on what to do, from somewhere... to be continued.

Rage Against the Machine

2011-09-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

I do not believe in, think about, or feel much about death, death is too far.
Much more painful and dangerous is the terrible power, factual and immediate, of the disconnection between everything.
As I was jogging around my neighboorhood, I discovered a fantastic building: one of those factories remodeled as artists studios, containing an upscale restaurant, galleries, companies. Some cool people in it.
There was a band of musicians preparing to work a piece.
I also found nearby a gym, and a pet/bird/fish store.
Happy should I be of those discoveries, yet instead they silently but deeply reminded me of not just the relative randomness and absurdity of things ("relative" since there are, after all, good reasons for the existence and location of those buildings and people) but that, once again and increasingly every day, we live Times of Separation.
Nothing invited anyone to wander and discover those buildings or create them or make them or support them and nothing but random and absurd human relations has anything to do with those buildings and people pass by not knowing what they are doing and what they should do and people feel without saying and unemployment rage sprawls and there is no connection.
I have just finished American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (often speed-read the most horrid pages, always superfluous) and decided that this average book had the good idea to present just this, our disconnected Times.
I wonder if, if we adopt the idea of the Noosphere, before getting to the point where that Noosphere exists, mankind wouldn't go through episodes of such great disconnections.
As humans differentiate (soon, biologically) increasingly from each other, creating divides that will manifest to us more often than wars, in parrallel the need to find meaningful ways to connect might replace and supersede the need for peace.

Mornings, fan club

2011-08-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

Thoreau understood what Mornings are. Remix:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.There is something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning."

Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.

All poets and heroes are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.

That man,
who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he .. has .. yet .. profaned
has despaired of life
and is pursuing a descending and
darkening way.

Morning brings back the heroic ages.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

thoughts on sensations

2011-07-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

It is hard to describe the mechanism of sensation, the reasons why we feel: although it's an intermediary, a middleware, between brain parts and Nerve Management, there are circumstances preventing its proper functioning, such as:
- the excess of sensations, like schyzophrenia (or autism?) where one can't do anything as one is drown by common life, at that point one doesn't feel anymore.
- the absence of echo: this one is complex: due to either excess, or chaos, or triviality of sensations, then nothing happens deeper: the mind is played: expects something, there is nothing, so no echo, no vibration, no sensation.
- the brutal superiority of sinic and dictatorial Materiality over human feelings, also called the passing of sensations, dying mingled in a busy life where only materiality prevails. It's chaos over chaos, whereas misxing a thought with a memory with an emotion (the mechanism of feeling) is Magic, and Magic requires at least calm and order.
In the same category: Stress, the insidious and sneaky assassin. Horror, horror.
- the absence of mystery. We have lost secret islands to wonders of world transports, secrets now only exist in Arts and Science, not in life anymore, so we all need to be artists and scientists.
I want to write something optimistic and luminous, about Mornings.

Difference, the explosion of it on my face, and the secret inspiration of travels

2011-06-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

I moved from San Francisco to London - materialistic times require mental decompression.
I have been exploded in the face by innumerable instances of Difference. Differences here and there, of everything. In other words, the concept of differentiation has been hitting me with a symbolic violence like I'm a war victim.
An invasion has been overflowing me with the constancy of a daily rain, the constancy of a World War II bombing, a repetitive trick (I almost wrote: a mental rape) of an everyday life that refuses to resemble a far-away not-so-long-ago place and time.
The couple identity/difference and its spectrum are piercing rays through banal normality. This newly refreshed sensitivity, echoing old feelings, reminded or showed me some aspects of the conceptual echosystem of Difference: the subject and identity, the mirroring effects of difference: subject/object, sub-sub, o/o, going perhaps towards orthodox psychoanalysis.
My personal feelings are: an unknowledgeable amount of noises and mirages, a wealth of illusions, passing before my eyes, as I breathe along, all with an exclusive ordinariness. What Difference is to me: the passing of past attempts to recognize and master particular idioms, forms or being, into different ones that are so close yet so far. Going back to square one and re-discovering flavors. Yet so close. A set of modifications that impose themselves with the irrelevance of a chewing-gum flavor. Yet not just one flavor, but a million coming to all senses, beyond mere distraction.
(Thinking of explorators of the past, at least I know I'm around human beings, and I know I have means to survive, whereas past explorers doubted both crucial statements when venturing inside new territories.)
This relocation, and this feeling of being a blind victim repeatedly shot by the assassins of Habit, the Delicious Snipers Against The Same, has placed me in a situation of enjoyment. Something similar to being a tourist, although deeper, as allied with the feelings of potential citizenship, the sensation of being "one of them", the feeling that one needs to go into a process of becoming united, the feeling of needing to care for a nation.
Without having good reading material (materialistic times require mental decompression), my main best thought was about wondering why this exaltation exists. Why would a change of trees and street maps, architecture and bread shapes be enough to create and sustain such an enjoyment? At first I thought it could be like the strange excitement of watching fire or waves, but no, it's sort of the opposite, watching waves refers to the expected repetitive regeneration of a single recursive pattern, whereas travels usually (well, at least mine) point to the unexpected one-time change of myriads of either repetitive or non-repetitive singular patterns. (for instance: repetitive patterns: faces, the way each smile, or rather for London, do not smile; and singular patterns: a new ticketing method for transports, the new symbols on the coins).
So the experience is different, but I was getting somewhere.
And then there was something deeper.
My dreams changed. I had nightmares of a different kind, perhaps not fear because of fear, but because of the altogether indescribable strangeness of those dreams. The dreams had reached a very new ground, yet reminiscent of some childhood feelings, a je-ne-sais-quoi that is not small, an untitled sensation that occurred multiple times. So I realized, the secret inspiration of travels, it's just that: because we are brains with sense and muscles, the subconscious is only about that. And the change of senses is enough to excite it at core, as the practice of different games with different partners suffice to entirely refresh us, and we always are children wanting to play games.
So without regards to an existing condition of itself, the subconscious knows, without morals or any knowledge of its worth, that different outside conditions will be enough. It knows and desires it, and then I suppose some will desire it more than others, just like anything else. Travels are like milkshakes.
I remember a documentary about Sarajevo, where it said that people were dancing in the ruins. There is no escape from lightness of the heart, the elegant compositions of flickering details that compose us. Materialistic times require mental decompression.
In a way, that's all the last weeks were worth, a dubious observation of the naturalism of the subconscious.
Yet there is something deeper, to be found.

Simple observation of superstructures

2011-05-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

I need to write about some important ideas, one of which is the progressive realization I've been having through the years on the necessity of over-thinking things. A good visualization of this is the classical intelligence problem of having 9 dots and 4 lines to draw through all dots, called Thinking Outside the Box by Wikipedia. Another example that I prefer is simply found at any construction site: one can see the building being built, at least the skeleton of its structure, and more importantly the super-structure of the workers' crew around the contained in-progress new building. It's the civil engineered arrangement of ladders, cranes, containers, the whats-the-name-of-it elevated cubes that wrap the structure and transports workers and equipment to nourish the structure. That's what I mean by the necessity of over-thinking, because there is a natural tendency to disregard super-structures, when one learns something, or thinks about an issue, or tries to connect dots of any kind. About connecting dots, one can discover the nature of the mind's associative nature without looking into neurology, in other words one can recognize the need for linking elements of knowledge in order to master them (e.g. teaching a language by starting with words similar to the language familiar to students), and the inadequacy of a disparate sets of isolated elements (e.g. teaching history as a random series of dates and facts), by simply reflecting on oneself's experience. Super-structures are the places connecting the dots, whether creating them (civil engineering) or displaying them (a good teacher), they are the matrices of the Work, the hidden factor in the symbiosis creator/created, a goal of philosophy, an unattainable goal of metaphysics, the Graal and Black Matter of the Mind.

The intimacy of immediateness

2011-05-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

Towards getting into a religion that helps the self living, without the unnecessary extraneousness of past religions, only the self towards building an equilibrium of itself, giving proper attention to what can be done with and through the human body. Some meditative mediums: the attention given to small things in "Nadja" (by Andre Breton), me at a young age staring, amazed, at my own hands. We, as beings, tremendously lack the inner echo of our selves that would tell us the consequences of our actions. Blind-sided donkeys.
For a passion of righteousness: knowing with intensity what is good to do, the ethics of the muscles. The self as a two-parts invention.

the Right and Loss

2010-11-28T12:18:00.000-08:00

Developed from Harper's: idea that conservatism is the party of Loss, imaginary (most likely) or not, linked to the sentiment (2 meanings: point of view/emotional feeling) of entitlement. The feeling of being deprived, longing for daydreamt rights and properties of a fantasized past. The fat bastards feel they should reign.
Consequences: it is much easier to re-acquire (the right) than to create (revolution, the left). The left being the party of the difficult (invisible, intangible)-but-real causes: greed, illnesses, injustices,.. the right being more the party of the symptoms, immediate and short-term consequences, solving issues by quick and dirty fixes (war, nationalistic regulations..). The right being focused on the object (lost) and sensation (loss), tending towards depression, sadness - an immanent sense of injustice and deprivation. (Anger towards God, feeding Christian self-accusation).
I want to find a historical analysis of political programs (right: anti-abortion, slavery, anti-freedom.. left: civil rights, ..etc) and voters (military is right, scientists are left,..etc).

Towards keeping states of inspiration constant

2010-11-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

In past trips, I realized the easiness to be somewhere else, and hence the "multi-location" aspect of life (sensation of being somewhere and elsewhere simultaneously).
But the real deal I found in my latest trip is the non-existence of my current location: it's not that I can be somewhere else, but that I am just not really here right now. It's the deconstruction of the current self, the absolute doubt and rejection of every senses that can keep the current state of things as interesting, because finally I wouldn't be subject to the tyranny of the environment. Finally Dailiness and earthly things wouldn't win.
And maybe that's why I never got crazy, because the environment controls me so much. Things never break by themselves, so being a mirror of things is a natural defense to madness breaking in.

Maturity, experience, don't come necessarily as a surprise, they can come as the psychological realization of a truth known before, like: we are all equal - is still a surprising thought.

Apprendre a laisser tomber, laisser faire, se separer du monde meme quand il est la, tres present, apprendre a laisser les liens qui nous attachent au monde a exister par eux-memes sans essayer de les toucher. Laisser les sensations se faire et se defaire, oublier de vouloir tout controler. La respiration, y penser, mediter lentement. Redecouvrir l'eau, l'air. Laisser les sensations revenir a l'interieur, passer au travers. Ne plus etre un obstacle.
Learning to let go, to forgo (to ignore), to detach oneself from the world even when it's there, so present, learning to let our ties with the world live by themselves and not try to touch them. Let sensations link and unlink, forget to want to control everything. Breathing, thinking about it, slowly meditate. Rediscover water, air. Let sensations come back inside, go through them. To no longer be an obstacle.

Nonsense

2010-11-24T22:31:00.000-08:00

"Electric car" shouts the electric car, beep, people walking really fast both ways - Altanta airport.
What's the use of describing - wish I had the ease of writing (the pretention of having an audience, for sure, pretention of the crook).
Passing by, so many, just like any other.

I feel I touched the heart of human population, that nest
whereabout and seemingly various beings
Balance in-out, writing, reading, the way of life, searching for duality, everywhere, having a detector - A man knew of the powers around him, the forces in presence of each environment he would travel through, and he was aware of the tensions, could he shut down his sensibility?
Someone passing by for the tenth time.

Having notes, tracking the fluxes, as temporary relieve of reception? Hiding behind the activity of tracking time and movements
There is no cornerstone to duality, and no duality is specifically human, it's all already there.

L'organe-obstacle de la dualite, c'est elle-même - le reflet du reflet est lui même un reflet, il n'est pas lui-même mais lui ressemble beaucoup.
Voir, percevoir, recevoir, bientot savoir
La poesie comme liberation? Il faudrait traduire, pour les autres.
Personne ne voit, l'interstice.
Point d'interrogation, point de connaissance.
De l'interrogation comme maniere d'apprendre, technique de raisonnement comme passage vers la memoire.
le Memoire, Memory, Memory is a bubble bath. (not a quiet lake).
"Awesome", they say. the corridor is long.

Apprendre l'histoire comme le combat de l'homme sur la nature et lui-meme, mais ce ne sont que des variations, des histoires. Apprendre l'histoire parce qu'on aurait fait pareil, parce qu'on continue de conquerir, de trahir, parce que c'est beau, parce que c'est là.
La dualite de l'histoire: les monde parallelles du present (et si Charlemagne n'avait pas été couronné? et si l'edit de Nantes...? et si Ravaillac avait manqué Henri IV ?...)
Forcer l'histoire comme une story, une stoire? Pourquoi?
Ne pas voir les relations.

Ne jamais oublier que la vie agit comme la mer sur nos yeux facilement captés, attrapés, pèchés par n'importe quel mouvement comme si c'etait la vie, et l'on se projète sur n'importe quel morceau d'ajitation (c'est pourquoi la campagne, le retrait du mouvement, c'est comme la ville: moins de vent, sans bruit, les grandes villes, grands espaces de vide. pourquoi la nuit est-elle si intéressante? Le désert? Se mettre dans une chambre noire, se mettre dehors dans la nuit: même chose? Le silence nocturne envahissant, la presque-lumiere, l' "à peine" des sensations.
(Charles du Bois decrit Gide comme l'eau du verre, qui transparait toujours sans apparaitre - le trouble et le gris de Glenn Gould)
Sympathie des passants.
J'aurai pu voir certaines choses.
Keeping track of so many details.

J'aimerai que les gens soient sympathiques, il faudrait pouvoir avancer sans inquietude.
L'Homme-singe, ca n'est pas un être, c'est une duliate très présente.

Action

2010-06-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

The problem of action/decision/intention has always struck me as fascinating but without really knowing why, I just got an insight into this mystery: Who is it we are trying to please when doing something? Any action aims at a state of our world that most pleases someone, or a group of people identified with a possibly invented character. So to act best, one needs to identify who that someone is. And what if we act for ourselves but can't recognize who we are, and act for a pretensed individual that is not us? The aimed individual is often-always a representation, pleasing someone to please someone, the mirroring and projection effects are playing again.
Why is it that it often looks like we're more limited by what we can do versus what to do?

typography

2010-03-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Watched Helvetica , so now I'm exploring meanings underneath typograpy:

serif : historical, calligraphy, elegance (?) / complex, archaic
serif : historical, calligraphy, elegance (?) / complex, archaic
serif serif serif serif serif
sans-serif : simple, straight, quick, elegance (?) / brutal, simplistic
sans-serif : simple, straight, quick, elegance (?) / brutal, simplistic
sans-serif : simple, straight, quick, elegance (?) / brutal, simplistic
size matters too size matters too size matters too size matters too
So Anyway, should titles be Serifs or non-serifs? Should in-texts (texts in content bodies) be serifs or non-serifs?

Gaudi

2010-02-24T21:39:00.000-08:00

I want to explain how the works of Antonion Gaudi impacted me. Gaudi was inspired by Nature, it feels classical and to me evokes Rococo, at least compared to the surrounding minimalistic and inhuman architecture and industrial design of our times. Gaudi feels natural, to the point of obviousness, it's the feeling of the architecture and design that just fits, it's human design. I think we have lost even the desire, the classical will to reach nature back into our civilized worlds. We have forgotten this, maybe since the 70's, with the obvious failure of the hippies and associated movements, who tried to reach Nature too bluntly, too literally. We all became a little bit Republican after that, and forgot the need for humanology. Less became more, Small became beautiful, straight lines became the norm and anything else was purged out off everything. The Japanese in their genius have been trying to reinvent natural, ergonomic shapes however with not a big enough success that it would regenerate the old spirits that Gaudi shouted in my head each time I saw his works.
Gaudi means "it's OK, it's necessary to create more, to get more in touch with what feels right. It's OK and necessary to create curves and rounds and ellipsoid windows. It's OK and necessary to be fun, and it certainly is OK and necessary that it takes much, much more work to create the objects that support that fun, because that's what feels right and the fun is not only about the fun, it's also what works for humans and what is good. It's absolutely and seriously OK to experiment with decorations, until the decorative aspect of things reaches the point, the balance when it's no longer unessential." We have mired our vision with the opposite of superfluous rules, we have accepted straight cubes and flat worlds that felt wrong for the sake of a short-term efficiency which faked being durable.
I link this to the current disaffection of our school system and thereby of our intelligentsia, of our social conscience (our superego), in social sciences, what the French also call human sciences. It is the same false belief in the need for utilitarian economical viewpoints that creates for a big part the falsehood of people's perceptions.
What is terrible with such a fantastic idea is the simplicity to deny its truth, to answer "no, this is not needed" in front of Gaudi's exorbitant greatness. To say "his work does not contain anything specially human" because we cannot prove or define what feels right. It would be wrong to respect or celebrate Gaudi as a cerebral artist, to define round shapes as conceptual design. However we can complain about straight lines being inhuman, as they shout their fakeness with perhaps the same obviousness (at least to me) that Gaudi's work implies about what humans are all about.

on Information Psychology

2009-12-04T16:27:00.000-08:00

On the plane, as always have clear ideas on planes, in spite of fantastically lame 'New Yorker' magazine:
my idea of a psychological study of math concepts can be enlarged, it's about the fact that a piece of information, once in the brain, is not static and independant, it moves, transforms, connects, influences, relates, provokes, emotes, ...etc. The information contained in math have deep implications never analyzed, but as well as other information. Psychoanalysis was focusing on what the current information set of a troubled mind could tell of the trouble, my Information Psychology is focusing on the other sides of the consequence of the neurological over-linkage, subconscious over-sensitivity to its elements and its movements. (that's why we can't stop thinking, the circuit is running and doesn't stop.) Some parts of the analysis are about troubles (psychoanalysis), some parts are about education or just a better understanding of the subject-original information (my psycho math original intent), there might be other uses for such analysis.

prison

2009-10-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

Realized the hypocritical paradox of prison: we want to keep prisoners away, but physically they are inside the territory, hence imprisoned, hence hurt, but the pain is an unspoken consequence, a taboo. Prison is supposed to be a purgatory, but is a closed empty box. Not just a wall between us and them, it's supposed to have a sense.
And then there's the pain, of being imprisoned, of having nothing to do, no entertainment, training, tests and tastes of the true life. That pain which should be compared to a physical tribulation. Prisoners sometimes have the opportunity for physical exercise, wouldn't they want to exchange a few days of freedom for a few beatings? (who would dare ask that question? when?) To recognize that pain is to recognize the bad environment, the lack of support, the missing hypothetical hypocritical purgation process which prisoners are supposed to go through. It's the lobotomy that zombifiy humans and makes them acceptable to others.

nature/ideas once again

2009-10-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Ideas after Harper's Magazine, Wallace Shawn, Essays, published by Haymarket Books.

..Consciously, I'm aware that I'm a product of evolution and that I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind is still partially wandering in the early nineteenth century and doesn't know these things yet,

Wallace talks about sex, but I want to identify each movement that

..sometimes appears with such great force that it sweeps other feelings and other thoughts completely our of the way. And on a daily basis it quietly and patiently approaches the self and winds itself aroudn it and through it until no part of the self is unconnected to it.

That's what psychoanalysis is about, that force is why it gets artistic, the drama of the self-realizing-it's-not-itself, the vertigo of disillusion. Sex may be what Freud stumbled upon at first becomes it's so biological, so in-your-face, the elephant in the corridor. I feel there is a world out there of other

extraordinary meeting place[s] of reality and dream... of the meaningful and the meaningless

Fantastic discovery?

Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful

But that's only the direct consequence of the power said above to turn things inside out. And there is a reciprocity: it's not just nature appearing suddenly in our thinking thoughts, it's the ideal surprising an moment of mere living, as a perfect desert taking by surprise the eater of a cold sandwich. What is it that makes this so obvious idea so new? The parallelism of the mind/body issue being put inside the mind, the face that our mind changes, is controlled from the 2 angles, and maybe the fear of realizing the links between the 2: that yes, there is very much of nature in the highest of thoughts, and that there's idealism in pure action.

Keeping ends meet (keeping hands meat)

2009-09-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

One needs something to be taken away to feel something. The constant movement of getting/giving, waves of life. (Habits are a stop in the movement, Work often forces that absence).
--
I dreamt of a new title.
-- found:
We have no more beginnings. (I revere you, George Steiner)

The twentieth century has put in doubt the theological, the philosophical, and the political-material insurance for hope. It queries the rationale and credibility of future tenses.

Language is immeasurably saturated. Words, grammatical forms, phrases, rhetorical conventions are saturated, nearly to the level of the phoneme, by usage, by precedent, by cultural-social connotation.

There is now a fascism of vulgarity. For shorthand, I call it Berlusconism. Bright graduates hanker to fill their boots, and not their minds. There is a contempt for the life of the mind on the part of money. Money has an enormous voice. It has never spoken louder.

On findings

2009-08-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Imagine 2 parallel lines.
___________
___________
How does one define parallelism?
Intuitively, one will say "2 lines with the same orientation/angle", but that forces to define what an angle is. It is very hard to guess a cleaner demonstration, yet the best, clean, and simplest way is "2 lines that never cross.
That statement is hard to guess because the mind focuses on visible portions of the lines, and uses a pre-defined concept (the angle) as an immediate aid.
The point is to force the mind to think of the plane and the lines as being infinite. Then to think of an infinite number of lines, and to discover that given 2 lines, the likelyhood they will cross at some point is much higher than the opposite. In fact, for any given set of 2 different points, there is an infinitely higher number of sets of 2 lines that cross at some point than sets of 2 lines that never cross. Hence parallelism in that way should be considered an exception (even an aberration).
To be thought: every demonstration and their mental difficulties.

2009-08-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

I have the feeling that Seth Godin (interesting video, blog) focuses on human flaws: how people act irresponsibly, unaware, staticly, and so he ties lazyness to worlds of big dollars.
Unrelated thought: Is it OK to blog for the sake of feeling the posting sensation?

farm life dream, and protectiveness leads to egoism

2008-10-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Just saw outside of my building an interesting scene: rich parents and their daughter, next to their BMW car, parked in front of the Ritz (they don't stay there, but they chose to park there), man around 50, tired eyes of working a lot but successful, a bit authoritarian, woman blond tall, around 40, urban and classic, child in the outfit of the private catholic school nearby. The dad moving fast around the child and rolling a dust-removing tool over the child's outfit. The child, puzzled by a chinese kid passing by, says 'why is she walking alone to school?'

Thought: doesn't parental attention (focus or even obsession) create and nurish the notions of possession/individualism/egoism within the child's mind? So kids with brothers and sisters should be more sharing/communists than single children.

Meta-question: [prelude] last night I dreamt (when waking up, at the half-time where you still remember your dreams) that I was living in a farm, working 11-12 hours a day, without distractions, entertainment, and life was clear, simple. [question] What makes reflective ideas interesting? The particular flavor of intellectual ideas, how it occupies the mind (with a blue color), fills it with something that makes everything else uninteresting. And then the oblivion, when life comes back.

Some truths

2008-08-01T05:57:00.001-07:00

1) Often the act of writing itself seems stupid, so present is the idea that we wish to write. [ Souvent stupide paraît l'acte d'écrire, tant présente est l'idée que l'on souhaite écrire.]

2) To be written, an idea must be unachieved, incomplete, cold. [Pour être inscriptible, une idée doit être inachevée, incomplète, refroidie.]

Strange instant [étrange instant] (where life presents more than one single direction to take, instead offers a fork). To live, intensely.

3) The Internet is a technology offering a potential that can be defined in a few vertiginous words:
- ability to communicate (in human languages) to anyone (in the world)
- ability to publicize all visual and auditive human creation (exhibition of pieces, and orchestration of the works : not just listing/ordering of the works, the word is too weak: each page/site is dynamic: its links constitutes the movement for which the permanent communication (to/from the page, sites, links) is attached to.
Compared to the Internet/digital era, may 68, the industrial revolution, the space conquest, the crusades,... all those are like cat pee : jokes.
The Internet/digital era can be compared to the movement of religions through human history. In later times, it may appear that religions were also a joke compared to the Internet/digital era.

4) Travels are traumas. Brains forget the effects of travels, the transformations they bring upon.
Like travels, love is a trauma.

5) Every trauma has 2 essential characters:
- L'ipseité (to be checked) = uniqueness : unique if the subject is I, otherwise can be perfectly banal if the subject is someone else (cf. Vladmir Jankelevitch, Death).
- Forgetfulness, or hiding process : the brain forces details to hide, to be transformed.

6) The analytical studies of language often forget the ethnological and/or psychological(*) about why words and structure of a language are created as such.
(for instance: Paul knows vs. Paul believes, let's not forget the original purpose of words, vehicles of a message from one to another).
It's like using a mathematical theory without some of its theorems or axioms: it's useless and frustrating, it immediately looks incomplete.

(*) 3 prehistorical men would create a similar language to a million of men, as they have the same needs and conditions. Hence the importance of psychology in the creation and meaning of any language.

various

2008-07-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

Read or heard somewhere:

In totalitarian systems, it is the heads of secret services who become head of State.

Found in an old journal: "need to see mad people, prisoners"...
another great quote:

Since there is a road, there is a market.

Compassion

2008-07-05T17:04:00.001-07:00

From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being : compassion in all Latin languages is made from the prefix con = with and a suffix derived from passio = pain, so compassion means one suffers if someone else suffers, and is close to pity, where one lowers oneself to the lower state of someone else in a caring way, probably to raise the other a little bit. But compassion is a low feeling compared to love and thus isn't associated as a romantic sensation.
Whereas, in german/slavic (?) languages, compassion's closest translation are words made from the same prefix (con = with) but suffixes meaning feeling instead of pain. So compassion is an almost telepathic ability to feel any sensation along the other, it's the highest feeling - part of lofe, justifying and explaining it.
So what happens if one has a supreme compassion for the other, a sort of fantastic problem solving tool I suppose. But what happens if both have that ability - infinite mirror effect happening all along a couple's daily life, random events shared ultimately. Does it lead to a too strong coexistence? a too tight sharing of emotions, making brustle the slightest difference, the slighest lie or mistake. Would it amplify in too large proportions the differences of romantic feeling? Would it render them as passionate ultimatums? Or instead be the perfect melting pot, rendering the individuals as calm as super-intelligent telepathic aliens of sci-fi B movies?

Styles

2008-07-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

Gillez Deleuze and Guy Debord, extraordinary styles:

A la mimesis s'est substitue' le non lieu (Mimesis was supplanted by void) ?

Capitalism as what all other societies (social elements) have always been conjuring [as in conjuring demons = repelling them] was built from the inverse of all others.

reflexions on Marketing

2008-06-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

A marketing campaign is a succession (in time) of events towards a population. Like a sales cyle, it has 3 factors: the type of event, the type of population, and the point in time during the succession, or sequence.
Example: send a white paper to population A of 1,000 people selected with criteria C.
For the 90 who reply with interest, send theam an invitation to a webinar W.
For those 20 who attend the webinar, call them through telemarketing.
For those 5 who expressed interest, engage sales cycle and close 1 deal for $50k.
Each event can be modeled like a node of a tree:

1 input = preparation of the event (finding the population ("list", "target")), then the event

at least 2 outputs = positive and negative

Better, the marketing effort is to create and maintain the campaign flow and maximize positive results. The image of a flow however can't be taken directly from a standard fluid flow as the real results usually do not happen subsequently from the marketing event, the flow is more a 4D flow where the results can be spotted much later than right after the latest event the attendees went to. Moreso, the result of a campaign C1 can be found after a campaign C2, example: a person attends a webinar but doesn't understand much, then goes to a tradeshow, while watching a presentation within the show, he/she remembers everything he/she saw in the webinar and finally understands the idea of the product/company and leaves the show, having reached the final state of marketing awareness.
The marketing attendees/targets are progressive systems going from blue (no awareness) to green (full comprehension of the product/company) passing by red (wrong understandings).

Possible model for marketing: complex Markovian chain, binary and non-binary trees, state graphs and fuzzy logic,....????

2008-06-12T22:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure... I kinda want to write, maybe in french
ramblings, maybe some kind of poetry,
it's like something is trying to get away

Percer sous l'ecorce, grandir naturellement

but all is fuzzy yet - a giant fog, like San Francisco has every day