I was sitting at lunch today with my little group of friends and somehow one friend (to whom I shall refer as the Doctor, even though she's a lady) and I got on the subject of questions and answers. She just offhand made the comment that every answer leads to more questions, which I connected to class, since Nabokov, brimstone be upon him, has saddled me with referential mania.
Anyway. The connection was thus: if every answer is a form of death, but learning--which is often comprised of answers, especially in basic English classes that deal with commas and i before e and so on--also leads to more questions, then an answer is also a form of rebirth. Ergo learning is a form of immortality. Probably everyone else has already arrived at this conclusion, but for me it was kind of a mindfuck. Also, guess what's now part of my final project...
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Dead Raccoons and Missing Mailboxes
This morning, as I was driving in to school, I noticed that someone had hit a raccoon on the northbound side of 19th. It was lying relatively peacefully on the far side of the lane, and it would have looked asleep but for the bloodstain on its stomach and the magpies picking at it. In life, it was a fair-sized raccoon; it probably would have weighed in the neighborhood of 20 pounds. In death, it was just a lump of gray-brown fur in the road.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I've seen a lot of roadkill and I've hunted numerous varmints since I grew up on a farm. A dead raccoon is nothing new.
Per my usual MO, though, the raccoon took on new significance as I was driving home. It was much less recognizably a raccoon when I came back, thirteen hours later. It had been hit again at least once and it was starting to look more like a blood-tainted grease stain with fur. I swerved to avoid it.
Then it occurred to me: death is one of the few things common to every species, with the possible exception of certain jellyfish. This thought was reinforced as I kept driving. There's a certain mailbox on the east side of the road that always makes me flinch as I'm driving by it since it fell off to the side of its little post and looks suspiciously deer-like. I drive a tiny Honda--I really don't want to hit a deer, so I pay very special attention to anything on the side of the road that might remotely resemble one.
Tonight was different, though. I didn't do a double-take, because the mailbox wasn't there. As I looked a little further, toward the edge of the sweep of my headlights, I saw that the two houses that used to stand about 30 feet from the road weren't there, either. There was only flat ground, a few bushes where the walls of the houses used to be, and an electrical pole with an ancient transformer perched on its top.
And just like that, the evidence of human existence is erased.
About a mile down the road, on the west side, there's an abandoned house that still stands. It was well-built; none of the walls have buckled, though it's been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The windows are boarded up, and the only visible door is locked, at least as far as I know. It's on private property, so I've never bothered to find out. The paint has long since flaked off its weathered brown siding. Here some vestige of human occupation remains, however drab. Who lived there? Why did they leave? Did they die, and no one came after them to live in the house? Is there something wrong with it? Why hasn't it been demolished? Who owns it? Do kids have legends about it? It does look like the sort of place that would lend itself well to haunted-house stories. I know nothing of its story. I wish I did, but I suspect Death has taken the memories of that place hostage and will not let them go easily. He knows that in every answer I would obtain, I would see him. His presence is inexorable and unavoidable. He lurks behind everything, always breathing down our necks and reminding us in the smallest ways--like a raccoon squished on the road--that he will one day come for us, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Tomorrow the raccoon will doubtless be no more than a smudge on the road, washed away when the first snow melts.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I've seen a lot of roadkill and I've hunted numerous varmints since I grew up on a farm. A dead raccoon is nothing new.
Per my usual MO, though, the raccoon took on new significance as I was driving home. It was much less recognizably a raccoon when I came back, thirteen hours later. It had been hit again at least once and it was starting to look more like a blood-tainted grease stain with fur. I swerved to avoid it.
Then it occurred to me: death is one of the few things common to every species, with the possible exception of certain jellyfish. This thought was reinforced as I kept driving. There's a certain mailbox on the east side of the road that always makes me flinch as I'm driving by it since it fell off to the side of its little post and looks suspiciously deer-like. I drive a tiny Honda--I really don't want to hit a deer, so I pay very special attention to anything on the side of the road that might remotely resemble one.
Tonight was different, though. I didn't do a double-take, because the mailbox wasn't there. As I looked a little further, toward the edge of the sweep of my headlights, I saw that the two houses that used to stand about 30 feet from the road weren't there, either. There was only flat ground, a few bushes where the walls of the houses used to be, and an electrical pole with an ancient transformer perched on its top.
And just like that, the evidence of human existence is erased.
About a mile down the road, on the west side, there's an abandoned house that still stands. It was well-built; none of the walls have buckled, though it's been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The windows are boarded up, and the only visible door is locked, at least as far as I know. It's on private property, so I've never bothered to find out. The paint has long since flaked off its weathered brown siding. Here some vestige of human occupation remains, however drab. Who lived there? Why did they leave? Did they die, and no one came after them to live in the house? Is there something wrong with it? Why hasn't it been demolished? Who owns it? Do kids have legends about it? It does look like the sort of place that would lend itself well to haunted-house stories. I know nothing of its story. I wish I did, but I suspect Death has taken the memories of that place hostage and will not let them go easily. He knows that in every answer I would obtain, I would see him. His presence is inexorable and unavoidable. He lurks behind everything, always breathing down our necks and reminding us in the smallest ways--like a raccoon squished on the road--that he will one day come for us, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Tomorrow the raccoon will doubtless be no more than a smudge on the road, washed away when the first snow melts.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Questions for The Magus
Okay, then. Here are my questions regarding The Magus.
1. When did Conchis' scheme really begin?
2. Fowles often mentions the color white. Is he using that color as the color of purity, or of death, or of something else entirely? (Or am I just totally nuts?)
3. The last little quote at the end of The Magus goes like this: cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet (reasonably literal translation with a comma for clarity: tomorrow let him love who has never loved / and let him who has loved, tomorrow love). How does this relate to the rest of the book--is it a form of death?
4. Why the little episode of hypnosis? Was it the power of suggestion or did Conchis actually hypnotize Nicholas (and does that even matter)?
5. Why does Alison really agree to help Conchis (other than her explanation, which honestly sounds a little too pat to be true)? It just seems to me that in the beginning she was so much like Nicholas as far as proclivities go that it would be really hard to get her to "side" with Conchis. Possibly I missed something.
1. When did Conchis' scheme really begin?
2. Fowles often mentions the color white. Is he using that color as the color of purity, or of death, or of something else entirely? (Or am I just totally nuts?)
3. The last little quote at the end of The Magus goes like this: cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet (reasonably literal translation with a comma for clarity: tomorrow let him love who has never loved / and let him who has loved, tomorrow love). How does this relate to the rest of the book--is it a form of death?
4. Why the little episode of hypnosis? Was it the power of suggestion or did Conchis actually hypnotize Nicholas (and does that even matter)?
5. Why does Alison really agree to help Conchis (other than her explanation, which honestly sounds a little too pat to be true)? It just seems to me that in the beginning she was so much like Nicholas as far as proclivities go that it would be really hard to get her to "side" with Conchis. Possibly I missed something.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Reset to Last Save
I'll post my five questions from The Magus a bit later. Truth be told, I've been ridiculously busy and very tired so I didn't get around to that soon enough. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more clearly.
I thought I would post the little story I wrote since it's directly related to immortality. The idea is part Philip K. Dick, part me and my dad getting really bored in Wal-Mart while waiting for my mom to finish with something, and part me being cynical.
-----
It dominated the landscape for miles around, and it still was not finished. When it was finished, it would be over a kilometer in height, or so the plans said. Those plans had been made nearly a hundred years ago; work was slow with so few “normal” humans to oversee the robotic workers.
It was to be a monument to human achievement; a tower reaching into the clouds, in which to quite literally store the greatest minds in history. They could have put it underground, and that probably would have been safer, but the advent of consciousness preservation was of such import that it would almost be sacrilege not to commemorate it visibly. The ability to preserve the vigor of youth almost indefinitely had been available for many years, but unfortunately, physical youth did not equate to mental youth. Old age still preyed upon people’s minds, at least until humanity discovered how to “save” a consciousness.
An alarm beeped insistently in the sterile white room. The three white-clad attendants turned simultaneously from the sleeping man in the white chair to see why. None of them had ever heard it before, which was an unsettling thought, since they had all performed routine memory downloads every day for the past fifty years.
One of them, Number 518, walked over to the holographic display on the wall and waved her hand across it. The display flashed a warning message, and 518 turned around quickly.
“It’s not taking,” she blurted. The other two exchanged looks, nonplussed.
“The memory,” 518 clarified. “It’s not taking. The brain is rejecting it.”
“What do you mean, the brain is rejecting it?” another attendant, Number 436, asked.
“I mean the brain won’t take another reset. The synapses have been overwritten so many times that they simply won’t work.”
The third attendant, Number 209, raised her eyebrows.
“There’s a protocol for this,” she said calmly. As the oldest, she had the most authority. “Look up 7477.” 518 located the protocol in the computer.
“‘Continue with reset. Release subject without synopsis of memories. Synopsis will result in senility and death,’” she read, shuddering at the matter-of-fact mention of death.
“Okay. Continuing with reset.” 209 pressed the button on the back of the chair to resume the download. The man in the chair twitched violently and then was still.
In a few seconds, the download was finished. 436 injected the man with a cocktail of drugs designed to wake him up slowly and dull the pain of cognitive dissonance from a reset to a previously saved memory set. The man woke up slowly enough, but 518 could see from the look in his eyes that he had not resolved the differences he felt between how he thought his brain should be and how it actually was at the moment. The brain, 518 reflected, was an unusual organ. Even when its memories had been completely overwritten, it still knew something was wrong and tried to fix itself, which invariably resulted in insanity.
The three attendants helped the man stand. He wobbled, but remained upright. Under his own dubious power, he walked out the door. The three attendants looked at each other, concerned. How would this man function with a poorly-fitting memory implanted in his mind? And more importantly, how many like him were there? The protocol was worded such that it was obvious that this had happened before. What became of the malfunctioning resets?
A buzzer sounded. Their day was over. They shut down the computers in their reset room and went to their quarters on the upper levels of the tower.
>It’s happening more often now.
>Yes.
>What are we going to do about it?
>Nothing.
>Nothing? You must have a rodent in one of your fans. Why nothing?
>Well, what do you propose we do?
The subterranean main computer’s cooling towers began spooling up to a higher capacity as the computer became warmer from working harder. Two consciousnesses were stored on it, with two separate processors—the optimistic consciousness of the man who pioneered consciousness saving and his final, jaded save before he completely abandoned his body. They were known as sam1, the younger, and sam2, the older, since the man’s name had been Samuel. This computer was the only computer on which the consciousnesses could interact; in all the other computers, they were dormant. The existence of this computer on which interaction was possible was a closely-guarded secret. In fact, no one but the consciousnesses stored on the computer knew about it, as it had been the last creation of the man who began the tower. Everyone who worked in the tower thought the main computer was just a massive program that oversaw the inner workings of the tower and ensured that everything was maintained properly.
>Why can’t we just let them die? Everyone has their time. Maybe it’s better for them if we just keep them in a nice, comfortable room for a few days until their minds give out instead of sending them back out as gibbering idiots into a world they can’t possibly understand.
>We don’t have our time.
sam2 was on the defensive, and sam1 backpedaled hurriedly.
>Of course not. We don’t have a body. They do, though, and that’s the problem.
>Do you propose we let them live in the computers, like we do? You know that’s impossible.
sam1 had to admit that such an arrangement would be a problem. Most people would be unable to become accustomed to a completely sensory-deprived, digital existence, and would still go insane.
>So. What do you propose?
>Maybe we should let them figure it out for themselves instead of doing a full system reset every fifty years. This system can’t sustain itself forever. We both know that. No amount of clinging to past accomplishments can change it.
There was no response from sam2.
518 woke in the middle of the night. There was a tickle in the back of her mind, which indicated that her wireless uplink had been activated. This was a normal occurrence; her uplink was often active at night to upload the information she would need for the next day’s resets.
This tickle suddenly turned into a freezing, pinpricking sensation all over her brain. She could not move; all the synapses in her brain had been simultaneously overloaded.
The feeling lasted less than a second. That was all it took to arrest vital brain function beyond any hope of repair.
>How long have we been doing this?
sam2 did not answer at first. He was calculating.
>As of midnight, 200 years.
>And this is our first major breakdown. Fairly impressive, actually.
>We are a god.
sam1 was surprised. His processor ran a little higher.
>How do you mean?
>We direct the course of civilization. We have control over life and death. We are a god.
>In the same way Julius Caesar was a god?
sam2 did not respond.
>So how are we going to solve our problem? It’s been several hours and we still haven’t gotten anything usable.
>I’ve already initiated the full system reset.
sam1 was exasperated. His processor approached capacity.
>Exactly what do you think that’s going to do? The entire society down there is going to the dogs. We can’t keep using the same fixes. Anyway, we know the clones aren’t going to work, not from 250-year-old bodies. The attendants are short-lived enough, and they were from 60-year-old bodies.
>We also cut them off after ten years so they don’t start breaking down. We don’t know how long they might last.
sam1 did not like to think about that. He would have liked to believe that there was still some part of him that connected him to humanity—that he still had a soul of sorts.
>So… what, we make clones of everyone? Why? Why can’t we just let it go?
>Humanity cannot die! We must be immortal! We must become gods! We will find the ones who are most like us and we will make them into gods, as we are.
sam1 started to think that perhaps sam2 had been alive a little too long. Maybe his judgment was starting to become impaired. There was little sam1 could do about it, though, since sam2 had the main administrator program on his side of the computer. If sam1 were able to construct a virus before the total reset ended, though, he might be able to stop sam2 from completing it. He began working on it in a part of his system that would be extremely difficult for sam2 to access. There, to his astonishment, he found a nearly-complete virus.
He had done all this before, but he had no memory of it. sam2 had a part of his system that sam1 could never access, and in it was the reset code for sam1. sam2’s system had in fact existed for more than 400 years. He had lied to sam1.
It would take several hours for sam1 to reset. Every time he got a little closer to completing the virus, so every time sam2 had to reset him a little sooner. sam2 could not understand why. He initiated the reset, but the cooling towers suddenly spooled down and would not respond to his commands.
>Why?
It was his last question. He felt sadness from sam1.
>I am the Brutus to your Roman Empire. We are not immortal—we are not a god. We are a mockery. I’m sorry.
The system reached critical heat. Plastic began melting; concrete split; metal warped. The foundation of the tower was shaken, and the tower itself began to crumble.
519 woke slowly. She should have had all her memories of forty years of resetting already uploaded to her mind, but there was nothing. She could not even register fear as the tower collapsed in on itself—she had no data point for fear.
The tower crashed and roared into a twisting pile of rubble, a fitting monument to human achievement.
I thought I would post the little story I wrote since it's directly related to immortality. The idea is part Philip K. Dick, part me and my dad getting really bored in Wal-Mart while waiting for my mom to finish with something, and part me being cynical.
-----
It dominated the landscape for miles around, and it still was not finished. When it was finished, it would be over a kilometer in height, or so the plans said. Those plans had been made nearly a hundred years ago; work was slow with so few “normal” humans to oversee the robotic workers.
It was to be a monument to human achievement; a tower reaching into the clouds, in which to quite literally store the greatest minds in history. They could have put it underground, and that probably would have been safer, but the advent of consciousness preservation was of such import that it would almost be sacrilege not to commemorate it visibly. The ability to preserve the vigor of youth almost indefinitely had been available for many years, but unfortunately, physical youth did not equate to mental youth. Old age still preyed upon people’s minds, at least until humanity discovered how to “save” a consciousness.
===
An alarm beeped insistently in the sterile white room. The three white-clad attendants turned simultaneously from the sleeping man in the white chair to see why. None of them had ever heard it before, which was an unsettling thought, since they had all performed routine memory downloads every day for the past fifty years.
One of them, Number 518, walked over to the holographic display on the wall and waved her hand across it. The display flashed a warning message, and 518 turned around quickly.
“It’s not taking,” she blurted. The other two exchanged looks, nonplussed.
“The memory,” 518 clarified. “It’s not taking. The brain is rejecting it.”
“What do you mean, the brain is rejecting it?” another attendant, Number 436, asked.
“I mean the brain won’t take another reset. The synapses have been overwritten so many times that they simply won’t work.”
The third attendant, Number 209, raised her eyebrows.
“There’s a protocol for this,” she said calmly. As the oldest, she had the most authority. “Look up 7477.” 518 located the protocol in the computer.
“‘Continue with reset. Release subject without synopsis of memories. Synopsis will result in senility and death,’” she read, shuddering at the matter-of-fact mention of death.
“Okay. Continuing with reset.” 209 pressed the button on the back of the chair to resume the download. The man in the chair twitched violently and then was still.
In a few seconds, the download was finished. 436 injected the man with a cocktail of drugs designed to wake him up slowly and dull the pain of cognitive dissonance from a reset to a previously saved memory set. The man woke up slowly enough, but 518 could see from the look in his eyes that he had not resolved the differences he felt between how he thought his brain should be and how it actually was at the moment. The brain, 518 reflected, was an unusual organ. Even when its memories had been completely overwritten, it still knew something was wrong and tried to fix itself, which invariably resulted in insanity.
The three attendants helped the man stand. He wobbled, but remained upright. Under his own dubious power, he walked out the door. The three attendants looked at each other, concerned. How would this man function with a poorly-fitting memory implanted in his mind? And more importantly, how many like him were there? The protocol was worded such that it was obvious that this had happened before. What became of the malfunctioning resets?
A buzzer sounded. Their day was over. They shut down the computers in their reset room and went to their quarters on the upper levels of the tower.
===
>It’s happening more often now.
>Yes.
>What are we going to do about it?
>Nothing.
>Nothing? You must have a rodent in one of your fans. Why nothing?
>Well, what do you propose we do?
The subterranean main computer’s cooling towers began spooling up to a higher capacity as the computer became warmer from working harder. Two consciousnesses were stored on it, with two separate processors—the optimistic consciousness of the man who pioneered consciousness saving and his final, jaded save before he completely abandoned his body. They were known as sam1, the younger, and sam2, the older, since the man’s name had been Samuel. This computer was the only computer on which the consciousnesses could interact; in all the other computers, they were dormant. The existence of this computer on which interaction was possible was a closely-guarded secret. In fact, no one but the consciousnesses stored on the computer knew about it, as it had been the last creation of the man who began the tower. Everyone who worked in the tower thought the main computer was just a massive program that oversaw the inner workings of the tower and ensured that everything was maintained properly.
>Why can’t we just let them die? Everyone has their time. Maybe it’s better for them if we just keep them in a nice, comfortable room for a few days until their minds give out instead of sending them back out as gibbering idiots into a world they can’t possibly understand.
>We don’t have our time.
sam2 was on the defensive, and sam1 backpedaled hurriedly.
>Of course not. We don’t have a body. They do, though, and that’s the problem.
>Do you propose we let them live in the computers, like we do? You know that’s impossible.
sam1 had to admit that such an arrangement would be a problem. Most people would be unable to become accustomed to a completely sensory-deprived, digital existence, and would still go insane.
>So. What do you propose?
>Maybe we should let them figure it out for themselves instead of doing a full system reset every fifty years. This system can’t sustain itself forever. We both know that. No amount of clinging to past accomplishments can change it.
There was no response from sam2.
===
518 woke in the middle of the night. There was a tickle in the back of her mind, which indicated that her wireless uplink had been activated. This was a normal occurrence; her uplink was often active at night to upload the information she would need for the next day’s resets.
This tickle suddenly turned into a freezing, pinpricking sensation all over her brain. She could not move; all the synapses in her brain had been simultaneously overloaded.
The feeling lasted less than a second. That was all it took to arrest vital brain function beyond any hope of repair.
===
>How long have we been doing this?
sam2 did not answer at first. He was calculating.
>As of midnight, 200 years.
>And this is our first major breakdown. Fairly impressive, actually.
>We are a god.
sam1 was surprised. His processor ran a little higher.
>How do you mean?
>We direct the course of civilization. We have control over life and death. We are a god.
>In the same way Julius Caesar was a god?
sam2 did not respond.
>So how are we going to solve our problem? It’s been several hours and we still haven’t gotten anything usable.
>I’ve already initiated the full system reset.
sam1 was exasperated. His processor approached capacity.
>Exactly what do you think that’s going to do? The entire society down there is going to the dogs. We can’t keep using the same fixes. Anyway, we know the clones aren’t going to work, not from 250-year-old bodies. The attendants are short-lived enough, and they were from 60-year-old bodies.
>We also cut them off after ten years so they don’t start breaking down. We don’t know how long they might last.
sam1 did not like to think about that. He would have liked to believe that there was still some part of him that connected him to humanity—that he still had a soul of sorts.
>So… what, we make clones of everyone? Why? Why can’t we just let it go?
>Humanity cannot die! We must be immortal! We must become gods! We will find the ones who are most like us and we will make them into gods, as we are.
sam1 started to think that perhaps sam2 had been alive a little too long. Maybe his judgment was starting to become impaired. There was little sam1 could do about it, though, since sam2 had the main administrator program on his side of the computer. If sam1 were able to construct a virus before the total reset ended, though, he might be able to stop sam2 from completing it. He began working on it in a part of his system that would be extremely difficult for sam2 to access. There, to his astonishment, he found a nearly-complete virus.
He had done all this before, but he had no memory of it. sam2 had a part of his system that sam1 could never access, and in it was the reset code for sam1. sam2’s system had in fact existed for more than 400 years. He had lied to sam1.
It would take several hours for sam1 to reset. Every time he got a little closer to completing the virus, so every time sam2 had to reset him a little sooner. sam2 could not understand why. He initiated the reset, but the cooling towers suddenly spooled down and would not respond to his commands.
>Why?
It was his last question. He felt sadness from sam1.
>I am the Brutus to your Roman Empire. We are not immortal—we are not a god. We are a mockery. I’m sorry.
The system reached critical heat. Plastic began melting; concrete split; metal warped. The foundation of the tower was shaken, and the tower itself began to crumble.
===
519 woke slowly. She should have had all her memories of forty years of resetting already uploaded to her mind, but there was nothing. She could not even register fear as the tower collapsed in on itself—she had no data point for fear.
The tower crashed and roared into a twisting pile of rubble, a fitting monument to human achievement.
Anamnesis
This is something I purposely didn't get to say in class last time because it would have taken way too long and also it needed internet. When I saw "anamnesis" written on the whiteboard, it reminded me of a short film I'd watched several months ago called, you guessed it, Anamnesis. It's about 17 minutes long and completely worth every second, in my opinion. The basic premise is that sometime in the near future, memories become interchangeable, and there's a big black market for stolen memories, specifically good memories. Personally, I connected the idea of The Letter and anamnesis in this context. What if they're getting someone else's "letter" by stealing their memories?
Anyway, here it is.
Anyway, here it is.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Here is a thing that I found
It was only a matter of time.
To put it bluntly, I'm kind of a Whovian. I happened to find this just chilling on one of the Doctor Who Facebook pages. It seemed to go well with this class.
Actually, I think 99% of Doctor Who would probably be applicable to this class. Or maybe the class is applicable to Doctor Who. I haven't figured out which one it is yet.
To put it bluntly, I'm kind of a Whovian. I happened to find this just chilling on one of the Doctor Who Facebook pages. It seemed to go well with this class.
Actually, I think 99% of Doctor Who would probably be applicable to this class. Or maybe the class is applicable to Doctor Who. I haven't figured out which one it is yet.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Chickens and eggs or something like that
As I was reading a spot of Eliade today, I came across this line on page 43 in reference to creation myths and Paradise and so forth: "The savages, for their own part, were also aware of having lost a primitive Paradise." This, coupled with the discussions we've been having in class, got me thinking (as if that's unusual). Which came first? Did the entirety of humanity just assume that things must have been better at some point, and so made up stories to support this idea, or were things actually better at some point, but all we have now is mythologies? I don't pretend to have the answer to this. I was just turning it over in my head and wondered what you all thought.
And now for something completely different.
I was reading Matt Schwager's blog about dreams, which also sort of had to do with Eliade, and realized that I actually had a really weird dream last night too. Basically, something really bad had happened for some reason--I think it was like Indiana Jones, and someone in my family found a talisman (or whatever) and somebody else wanted it because I don't know why and they were nasty people so they started chasing my family around. It wasn't the nice sort of game chase, like a lot of people apparently have in dreams, and it wasn't monsters, either, not in the strict sense of the term. It was just people, which I think are in many ways the most horrible monsters ever created. Anyway, it somehow fell to me to keep my family safe, but I didn't have weapons or anything, and I barely knew who was following us. All I could do was move them to different places, like chess. Somehow we ended up in a refugee camp (at least I think that's what it was), and the people found us, and I'd failed. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of those dreams in which you wake up just when something bad is about to happen. Nope, I got to see everything, but I don't think I quite remember that section.
The weird thing about that dream isn't its content; that's about par for the course for me, though I usually wake up part of the way through the chasing bits. There are actually two things about it: first (which is really kind of two things), that I was physically there, insofar as I can be in a dream, and ended up failing; and second, more importantly, that I remember it. Perhaps it's significant, though I doubt it. It's probably just indicative of the severely messed-up state of my subconscious mind. (Freud would have a ball snooping through my head.) Incidentally, I was, like Matt, sick yesterday, so I'm sure that's another contributing factor. It just seemed really coincidental to me that I would have that dream last night and then today read about Matt's weird dream and also about losing Paradise. The paradise of my own dreams is lost to me, apparently. Regardless, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for shamans now, per Matt's blog.
Anyway, for what it's worth, there you go. Overshare? Probably. Also, I think I've labeled almost every post I've made so far in this class as "weird."
And now for something completely different.
I was reading Matt Schwager's blog about dreams, which also sort of had to do with Eliade, and realized that I actually had a really weird dream last night too. Basically, something really bad had happened for some reason--I think it was like Indiana Jones, and someone in my family found a talisman (or whatever) and somebody else wanted it because I don't know why and they were nasty people so they started chasing my family around. It wasn't the nice sort of game chase, like a lot of people apparently have in dreams, and it wasn't monsters, either, not in the strict sense of the term. It was just people, which I think are in many ways the most horrible monsters ever created. Anyway, it somehow fell to me to keep my family safe, but I didn't have weapons or anything, and I barely knew who was following us. All I could do was move them to different places, like chess. Somehow we ended up in a refugee camp (at least I think that's what it was), and the people found us, and I'd failed. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of those dreams in which you wake up just when something bad is about to happen. Nope, I got to see everything, but I don't think I quite remember that section.
The weird thing about that dream isn't its content; that's about par for the course for me, though I usually wake up part of the way through the chasing bits. There are actually two things about it: first (which is really kind of two things), that I was physically there, insofar as I can be in a dream, and ended up failing; and second, more importantly, that I remember it. Perhaps it's significant, though I doubt it. It's probably just indicative of the severely messed-up state of my subconscious mind. (Freud would have a ball snooping through my head.) Incidentally, I was, like Matt, sick yesterday, so I'm sure that's another contributing factor. It just seemed really coincidental to me that I would have that dream last night and then today read about Matt's weird dream and also about losing Paradise. The paradise of my own dreams is lost to me, apparently. Regardless, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for shamans now, per Matt's blog.
Anyway, for what it's worth, there you go. Overshare? Probably. Also, I think I've labeled almost every post I've made so far in this class as "weird."
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Take the path that leads to nowhere
If you would be so kind, click on this link before you start reading anything else. I promise it's not scary. In fact, it's from a movie called The Fountain, and is quite innocuous by itself since it's orchestral.
The significance of that particular song lies in its name, which you probably noticed when (if?) you clicked. Death is the Road to Awe. It's a Mayan saying that ties in with The Fountain's idea of death being a way of escape. If you haven't seen the movie, I would recommend it, with the caveat that it is very sad and a bit weird, because it's Darren Aronofsky.
I've known this song for a long time because Clint Mansell's soundtracks make for really good writing music, but I thought about it for the first time in a while in class last time when we were talking about death and so on. Then I connected it somehow with the concept of infinity, and from my tired and admittedly very odd little mind came this:
I'm definitely not an art major, since my usual medium of choice is words, not visuals. Sometimes, though, I get these wild urges, and out comes GIMP and I produce something of dubious quality but generally some symbolic meaning. We'll see how much meaning this actually has when my conscious mind is more in control than my subconscious.
The significance of that particular song lies in its name, which you probably noticed when (if?) you clicked. Death is the Road to Awe. It's a Mayan saying that ties in with The Fountain's idea of death being a way of escape. If you haven't seen the movie, I would recommend it, with the caveat that it is very sad and a bit weird, because it's Darren Aronofsky.
I've known this song for a long time because Clint Mansell's soundtracks make for really good writing music, but I thought about it for the first time in a while in class last time when we were talking about death and so on. Then I connected it somehow with the concept of infinity, and from my tired and admittedly very odd little mind came this:
I'm definitely not an art major, since my usual medium of choice is words, not visuals. Sometimes, though, I get these wild urges, and out comes GIMP and I produce something of dubious quality but generally some symbolic meaning. We'll see how much meaning this actually has when my conscious mind is more in control than my subconscious.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Oh look, there exists a human nuttier than I am
Whoever made this would fit super well in our class. Just a little tidbit I stumbled across during my lunchtime perusal of the interweb.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
I was startled to [hear]...
Well, okay, not really. Anymore when I notice some coincidence or other it doesn't surprise me because it's been happening so much. If I were to be surprised at every coincidence or what have you that I noted, I would be in a constant state of shock, which would probably be bad for my longevity. I also don't startle easily, so there's that.
Anyway, I was again listening to music in my car since my drive home is about 20-30 minutes and I honestly have nothing else to do. There's this particular song I like right now (which you can listen to here if you so desire) by Sick Puppies called So What I Lied. I will append the lyrics in their entirety to the end of this post for everybody who doesn't feel like once more experiencing my eccentric musical tastes, which this time hail from Australia.
I digress. To be relatively succinct, this song reminded me of The Magus when I really started listening to the lyrics, like these: "So what, I lied / But the truth would've been suicide" (every answer is a form of death!). Or like these: "I did my best to try and be / A mirror of society / But we both know the mirror's cracked / And everybody's in the act / Faking what they cannot feel / Hoping they can make it real / Reality is killing me" (Nick in the midst of Conchis' machinations, perhaps?). I don't actually know what the story behind he song is; the whole song is so close to The Magus that I can't help but think it must have been partly inspired by it or at least by a similar idea, but even Google the Omniscient unfortunately didn't know what the backstory was.
Here are the lyrics, which I think could have been written by Nick toward the middle-ish of the story.
The window's cracked, I'm looking out
I see her and I'm filled with doubt
I don't know if this parking place
Is just another empty space
Words I've said aren't coming true
I don't know if it's me or you
This promise is too hard to keep
I have to speak
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
I did my best to try and be
A mirror of society
But we both know the mirror's cracked
And everybody's in the act
Faking what they cannot feel
Hoping they can make it real
Reality is killing me
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Erect a life I'll never see
I'll stand back from the scenery
And laugh at all the other guys
Who never could escape in time
Stuck like flies on sticky tongues
Chewed up 'fore their life is done
I'm not here to compromise or apologize
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
Life-is too fucking short
It's too fucking short
It's too fucking short
Anyway, I was again listening to music in my car since my drive home is about 20-30 minutes and I honestly have nothing else to do. There's this particular song I like right now (which you can listen to here if you so desire) by Sick Puppies called So What I Lied. I will append the lyrics in their entirety to the end of this post for everybody who doesn't feel like once more experiencing my eccentric musical tastes, which this time hail from Australia.
I digress. To be relatively succinct, this song reminded me of The Magus when I really started listening to the lyrics, like these: "So what, I lied / But the truth would've been suicide" (every answer is a form of death!). Or like these: "I did my best to try and be / A mirror of society / But we both know the mirror's cracked / And everybody's in the act / Faking what they cannot feel / Hoping they can make it real / Reality is killing me" (Nick in the midst of Conchis' machinations, perhaps?). I don't actually know what the story behind he song is; the whole song is so close to The Magus that I can't help but think it must have been partly inspired by it or at least by a similar idea, but even Google the Omniscient unfortunately didn't know what the backstory was.
Here are the lyrics, which I think could have been written by Nick toward the middle-ish of the story.
The window's cracked, I'm looking out
I see her and I'm filled with doubt
I don't know if this parking place
Is just another empty space
Words I've said aren't coming true
I don't know if it's me or you
This promise is too hard to keep
I have to speak
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
I did my best to try and be
A mirror of society
But we both know the mirror's cracked
And everybody's in the act
Faking what they cannot feel
Hoping they can make it real
Reality is killing me
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Erect a life I'll never see
I'll stand back from the scenery
And laugh at all the other guys
Who never could escape in time
Stuck like flies on sticky tongues
Chewed up 'fore their life is done
I'm not here to compromise or apologize
So what, I lied
But the truth would've been suicide
Monogamy is all she wants from me
But I see my life
And it's way too short
Don't blame me for not being subservient to others' needs
I'm at the point where honesty just doesn't fucking work for me
Life-is too fucking short
It's too fucking short
It's too fucking short
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Quality
We have become a culture of excess.
Few care about quality anymore. It's all about quantity. Who cares what quality of diamonds you have as long as you're swimming in them? We're blinded by the glitz of multiple degrees or jobs or achievements. Never mind that nine of the ten clubs a student was involved in during college were the functional equivalent of underwater basket-weaving; she was involved in ten clubs. Never mind that nine of the eighteen credits she took every semester did little to enrich her mind or prepare her for life after college; she took eighteen credits per semester and had good grades, on top of her involvement in those ten clubs.
This mindset is fatal to our education system and our workforce. We work and work on so many things that really don't matter, least of all to us, but we have to work on them because we have a certain credit requirement or core class requirement. These requirements are not bad things, per se--I would argue that in principle, they're good things, since they enrich the mind, but in combination with the prevailing mindset of equating quantity with achievement, they become problematic.
Why is this a problem? Why does it matter if the quality of education is slightly lowered to improve quantity?
Let's look at it this way: if Ford makes a lot of cars, but sacrifices quality control, would that be better than making relatively fewer cars that had working seatbelts or brakes or airbags? How is it much better for universities to send poorly-equipped students into the world, thinking that they've somehow been "educated" because they've been involved in so many things they really didn't care about?
As a college student in a system that increasingly tends toward quality over quantity, I think it's a little ridiculous that we focus so much on how many things people do, sometimes to the detriment of how well they do them. I've been guilty of the same; in all honesty, it's easier for me to list off my credentials and try to impress with how much underwater basket-weaving I've done. I don't want to give the impression that everything I've done has been for the sake of quantity instead of quality. I don't think it has. But in our culture, it's still easy to want to have that laundry list of cool stuff I've done so I can try to fit in.
Is it bad to want to do lots of cool stuff? Absolutely not. But why do we do it? And what have we really learned from it? Are our experiences shaping us into better people, or are they just another thing in the long list of stuff to do so I can get hired or get into grad school? If we just do things because that's what's expected, I think that's quantity over quality, and I also think it's not truly educating us. In a few months, we'll forget the things that don't matter to us. That's not a good thing, but that's the way it is. As I see it, quality of education is achieved not through how many classes I've taken, or even through how many different sorts of classes I've taken. That's quantity. Quality is about how much I've been enriched as a person--that is, how much my mind has been exposed to new and different ideas, and how much it has mulled them over and accepted the ones it likes and taken the ones it doesn't under consideration. Quality does not lend itself well to outright and unreasoned rejection of a new idea. Unlike quantity, quality can't be measured. Quality in education is perhaps best defined as a state of mind as opposed to an absolute amount of information.
So can quantity compensate for low quality? No. A lot of underwater basket-weaving is still underwater basket-weaving, and it will never be scuba diving. From my perspective, I would rather have a résumé consisting of a few great scuba dives than a few hundred weaving sessions. The stories will be better, too.
Few care about quality anymore. It's all about quantity. Who cares what quality of diamonds you have as long as you're swimming in them? We're blinded by the glitz of multiple degrees or jobs or achievements. Never mind that nine of the ten clubs a student was involved in during college were the functional equivalent of underwater basket-weaving; she was involved in ten clubs. Never mind that nine of the eighteen credits she took every semester did little to enrich her mind or prepare her for life after college; she took eighteen credits per semester and had good grades, on top of her involvement in those ten clubs.
This mindset is fatal to our education system and our workforce. We work and work on so many things that really don't matter, least of all to us, but we have to work on them because we have a certain credit requirement or core class requirement. These requirements are not bad things, per se--I would argue that in principle, they're good things, since they enrich the mind, but in combination with the prevailing mindset of equating quantity with achievement, they become problematic.
Why is this a problem? Why does it matter if the quality of education is slightly lowered to improve quantity?
Let's look at it this way: if Ford makes a lot of cars, but sacrifices quality control, would that be better than making relatively fewer cars that had working seatbelts or brakes or airbags? How is it much better for universities to send poorly-equipped students into the world, thinking that they've somehow been "educated" because they've been involved in so many things they really didn't care about?
As a college student in a system that increasingly tends toward quality over quantity, I think it's a little ridiculous that we focus so much on how many things people do, sometimes to the detriment of how well they do them. I've been guilty of the same; in all honesty, it's easier for me to list off my credentials and try to impress with how much underwater basket-weaving I've done. I don't want to give the impression that everything I've done has been for the sake of quantity instead of quality. I don't think it has. But in our culture, it's still easy to want to have that laundry list of cool stuff I've done so I can try to fit in.
Is it bad to want to do lots of cool stuff? Absolutely not. But why do we do it? And what have we really learned from it? Are our experiences shaping us into better people, or are they just another thing in the long list of stuff to do so I can get hired or get into grad school? If we just do things because that's what's expected, I think that's quantity over quality, and I also think it's not truly educating us. In a few months, we'll forget the things that don't matter to us. That's not a good thing, but that's the way it is. As I see it, quality of education is achieved not through how many classes I've taken, or even through how many different sorts of classes I've taken. That's quantity. Quality is about how much I've been enriched as a person--that is, how much my mind has been exposed to new and different ideas, and how much it has mulled them over and accepted the ones it likes and taken the ones it doesn't under consideration. Quality does not lend itself well to outright and unreasoned rejection of a new idea. Unlike quantity, quality can't be measured. Quality in education is perhaps best defined as a state of mind as opposed to an absolute amount of information.
So can quantity compensate for low quality? No. A lot of underwater basket-weaving is still underwater basket-weaving, and it will never be scuba diving. From my perspective, I would rather have a résumé consisting of a few great scuba dives than a few hundred weaving sessions. The stories will be better, too.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Sense and Incomprehensibility
I have to preface this. I have a really strange mind and I swear everything will sort of make sense by the end of this post. Possibly. At least, that's the idea.
So, to get down to brass tacks, when Gerritt said "fuck it" in class today, it got my brain going in Arabic. One of the weirder aspects of my mind is that I always have at least two languages going simultaneously in my head. That's why I sometimes mix up words--well, that and I usually talk too fast. The word for "only" in Arabic is فقط, which is transliterated as "faqaT." It sounds similar-ish so whenever I hear that phrase, my brain tends to go "oh, Arabic" and then it translates back to English because reasons and from "fuck it" I magically get "only." It makes about as much sense to me as I'm sure it does to you all.
Which then sort of but not really leads me to the next place my brain went: what is "it?" And then I realized, since my brain was still thinking in Arabic parallel to English, that there is no word for "it" in Arabic. That is, there are no gender-neutral pronouns in Arabic. In non-linguistics-ese, everything is either a he or a she. There are, for all intents and purposes, no its. For example, a bird is masculine (طائر/TA'ir) but a plane is feminine (طائرة/TA'ira). The words are exactly the same except for the last letter (the circle with the two dots over it, or the lack thereof), which is a feminine marker. So I guess all female birds are actually airplanes. Yeah, I don't know either, and neither do any of the Arabic professors I've ever had. They always just gave me the "are you seriously asking that" look and basically said they don't know so stop asking weird questions. But that's not the point. The point, which I seem to lose track of quickly when it's (!) close to midnight, is that "it" changes from culture to culture. In English, we have an understood antecedent that most people don't generally think about. In Arabic, there's no "it"--just a he or a she, which is functionally the same, but is still philosophically a little different.
And so you can now see my mind's descent into the realm of stuff about 0.2% of the world's population actually cares at all about. Speaking of descents, it occurred to me that the working title of the novel I'm very slowly writing on is Descend, so referential mania is again having a heyday in connection with "Signs and Symbols" and the Frye chapter on ascending/descending and my own writing. So it goes.
That's all. Hopefully it made a little sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way. We shall see in the morning, or in class, or something.
So, to get down to brass tacks, when Gerritt said "fuck it" in class today, it got my brain going in Arabic. One of the weirder aspects of my mind is that I always have at least two languages going simultaneously in my head. That's why I sometimes mix up words--well, that and I usually talk too fast. The word for "only" in Arabic is فقط, which is transliterated as "faqaT." It sounds similar-ish so whenever I hear that phrase, my brain tends to go "oh, Arabic" and then it translates back to English because reasons and from "fuck it" I magically get "only." It makes about as much sense to me as I'm sure it does to you all.
Which then sort of but not really leads me to the next place my brain went: what is "it?" And then I realized, since my brain was still thinking in Arabic parallel to English, that there is no word for "it" in Arabic. That is, there are no gender-neutral pronouns in Arabic. In non-linguistics-ese, everything is either a he or a she. There are, for all intents and purposes, no its. For example, a bird is masculine (طائر/TA'ir) but a plane is feminine (طائرة/TA'ira). The words are exactly the same except for the last letter (the circle with the two dots over it, or the lack thereof), which is a feminine marker. So I guess all female birds are actually airplanes. Yeah, I don't know either, and neither do any of the Arabic professors I've ever had. They always just gave me the "are you seriously asking that" look and basically said they don't know so stop asking weird questions. But that's not the point. The point, which I seem to lose track of quickly when it's (!) close to midnight, is that "it" changes from culture to culture. In English, we have an understood antecedent that most people don't generally think about. In Arabic, there's no "it"--just a he or a she, which is functionally the same, but is still philosophically a little different.
And so you can now see my mind's descent into the realm of stuff about 0.2% of the world's population actually cares at all about. Speaking of descents, it occurred to me that the working title of the novel I'm very slowly writing on is Descend, so referential mania is again having a heyday in connection with "Signs and Symbols" and the Frye chapter on ascending/descending and my own writing. So it goes.
That's all. Hopefully it made a little sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way. We shall see in the morning, or in class, or something.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)