Tuesday, 16 April 2013
re frag ments of a vul gar script _ Revisions and Reviews _ or more schizoid scatter
17_08_2004
Revisions and Reviews.
Plato/Socrates: 'We are concerned with the most important of issues: the choice between a good and a bad life.'
Leonardo: 'Miserable mortals: open your eyes!'
Dante: 'You were not born to be brutes.'
Picasso: 'Art is a vital part of the struggle against brutality and darkness.'
Back-track.
Ref: Sartre. 'Hell is other people.'
Not absolutely, because isolation is worse, but it can be hellish to be overwhelmed by other people's clutter - physical and mental.
Alt. Ref: Beckett, Play.
The clutter of global consumerism.
Ref: Leonardo, Deluge of Objects.
Alt Ref: Leonardo, Deluge drawings.
Alt Ref: Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000. 'NO SPACE'. 'Two faces of branded comfort. Top: Anut Jemima from Quaker Oats's earler packaging, humanizes production fro a population fearful of industrialization. Bottom: Martha Stewart, one of the new breed of branded humans.'
No space.
No escape from cluttering intrusions on one's consciousness.
Alt Ref: Swift, Gulliver's Travels. 'The horrible howling of the Yahoos.'
Alt Ref: 'Yahoo is an advertizing supported service.'
Kittiwake Colony Bedlam.
'Kitti-wake!' 'Kitti-wake!'
'Listen to me!' 'Listen to me!'
'Here, kitty, kitty!' 'Here, kitty, kitty!'
Alternatives ...
... include extreme austerity - but to hell with that!
Alt Ref: Beckett, Endgame.
'What's happening?! What's happening?!'
'Something is taking its course.'
Things running out/down ... one ... by ... one ...
'There are no more ...'
Alt Ref: Auster, In the Country of the Last Things.
Entropy.
Things Fall Apart.
Goldilocks Variations.
Too much. Not enough. More or less sufficient for today.
Possible World Theory: The Basics.
Over the full course of time everthing is indeed possible - and so all Possible Worlds become Actual Worlds ... eventually ...
But ... 'the full course of time' is a very long time indeed - 'eternity', in fact.
In the everyday actual world of the 'here and now', a problem is often how to get from the 'here and now' Actual World to some desired potentially better Possible World of 'there and then'.
'Nirvana-hunters', and other kinds of 'instant-gratifiers', are over-inclined towards rash 'leaps of faith' - and usually end up dead, or otherwise burnt-out, and/or - and even worse - others die or otherwise suffer greatly as a consequence.
Moving more slowly ...
Each fresh instant of being is a new Possible World 'junction'.
The networks of possibility spreading from each 'junction' are infinitely variable, but the chances of reaching any given future Possible World depend on the extent of its variation from the present Actual World.
Some possibilities are more possible than others, in other words.
A great 'leap of faith' might occasionally result in a highly unlikely - but remotely possible - instantaneous huge change for the better - but probably will not ... and so, the 'leap of faith' becomes a 'slip into error' at best, a 'tumble into disaster' at worst.
Regular small steps through broadly similar possible worlds - with the occasional change of pace and larger stride ... and quirk of creative irregularity - are more likely to have more favourable outcomes for all ... long term ...
Stray thoughts.
One is often struck by the 'banality' of some/many people's 'visions' of 'heaven'. I cannot avoid wodering sometimes when listening to many/some people's 'heavenly visions': 'Is that the best you can come up with? and would you really want to be doing THAT ... for the rest of eternity?'
It makes you wonder ...
Some of the kids manipulated into turning themselves into suicide-bombers activity by the shitbags behind 'al Qaeda', etc, were fed really shabby male-adolescent fantasies [... an eternal supply of 'willing virgins' and all that ... ] as 'heavenly visions' ...
All very sad and sickening really ...
Slight diversions.
I am often puzzzled by why social factors in 'medicalized' conditions and other 'trends' are played down.
For example, if you swallow whole an essentially anti-social 'autistic' ideology such as Thatherite 'possessive individualism' [Lest we forget: for Thatcher and allies there was 'no such thing as society, only individuals and family'], then you should not be surprized by a rise in greed, self-obession, anti-social behaviour, and even in 'autistic' [for me, an adjective describing behaviour patterns, not a noun signifying a medical condition] people.
Also for example ... dense networks of 'frames of reference' are built up early in each individual life, we navigate our way through the swirl of the common world through fixed points in these 'frames of reference' ... but the fixed points change with time, and sometimes are removed entirely ... internal changes in patterning systems cannot always keep track with changes in the external 'common world' ... almost everyone experiences confusion and some sense of 'dislocation' as they grow older ... in the 'permanent revolution' of 'hype-it-then-junk-it' consumer capitalist state the process is exacerbated ... increasing mental confusion among some older people should come as no surprize really ... nor should the desire to retreat into simpler, less confusing places ...
By the way ...
In my 'heaven vision' [sort of] there is no 'hell' ... because I could not be in a state of 'eternal bliss' myself while others were suffering ... nor be fully sure that their suffering was not, in fact, partly of my making ...
[There is something sickeningly distasteful and self-righteous in many/most of the 'damned'/'saved' dialectic 'day-of-judgement[-style] visions' ... because ... given that eveyone acts in a relative/subjective state of 'ignorance', no one really 'fully deserves' damnation - 'eternal' or otherwise.]
Returning to Classical Formalities - for the sake of stability.
Ref: Aristotle, Poetics.
Creativity might be regarded as a form of elegantly variated imitation [mimesis].
Most vital - for humans - form of mimesis: representations of people doing things.
Alt Ref: Feynman, Lectures on Physics.
Humans can attain a sort of 'humility' and achieve a sort of 'transcendence' by being less self-referential and absorbing themselves in wider universal considerations. Though this can reduce humanity when too coldly rational.
Stray thoughts.
'Bobby' Miliband perhaps knows no better than statistical manipulations / 'viritual reality'.
Anyway ...
... just because you say 'it is so' time and time again does not mean 'it really is so' ...
... and ...
... there are too many - even on the 'liberl centre left' - who in action, if not intent, follow the essentially Nazi 'will to power' philosophy ... seemingly indifferent/oblivious to emperical reality ...
Truly 'Modernist' Mentors [mistaken, by some, as 'reactionaries'].
Ref: T.S. Eliot.
In the absence of other truly positive and uplfiting 'harmonizers', the 'inclusive consciousness' holds things together ... as best it can ... for the time being ...
To raise serious doubts about the effects of hyper-speed communications techology, the destabilizing hype-it-and-junk-it 'permanment revolutions' of throw-away consumer-capitalism, 'cloning' experiences, and other dubiously 'beneficial' elements of the 'brave new world' [the 'wonders' of which, might not turn out to be so wonderful] is not to be a 'reactionary luddite' - though the cheap-shotters will, of course, make the suggestion anyway.
Understanding Limits.
White-noise bedlam of formless fluid Babel ... everyone in noisy restless motion shouting, no one taking much in ... and everyone becoming more and more essentially self-referential ... and in the over-dense 'now-ness' memory becoming ... now what was 'memory' now? please re-mind me?...
Black-noise ... of silence ... and stasis ...
But ... stablizing moderating 'norms' between extremes can get boring though ... can't they?
Sometimes One Despairs.
Such as ... when senses how both the 'respectable authorities' and the 'outlaw gangsters' one way or another abuse and manipulate and mislead the local kids in unscrupulous command-and-control 'games', which serve only the interests of 'the few' and serve no 'higher purpose' really.
And then there are to be observed ... as a matter of fact ... global power 'elites', private corporate empire bosses, etc, etc, behaving worse than the local 'gangsters' - who are relatively powerless really, and almost seem like virtuous philanthropists in contrast ...
Nil desperandum! ['scuse my language!]
Never give up completely - better alternatives are always possible.
Peripatetic Philosophy.
Aristotle was known, amongst other labels, as 'The Peripatetic' simply because he walked about while he did and taught the complex subject of philosophy.
Mimesis: representation of people doing things - amongst other things.
It should be more widely understood that philosophy is an activity - something that people do. Thinking is not a form of idleness. This is physiological proof of this in the fact that the brain is the most energy dependent of organs. In other words: a great deal of energy goes into 'mere' thinking, and all food [= energy] is 'food for thought'.
Apparent digressions: of course we do not entirely think with our brains - all thinking involves feeling, just as all feeling involves thinking, and, in a very real sense, all consciousness is 'whole body' consciousness.
And, by the way, philosophy is not a cold unemotional mental activity. Literally speaking, 'philosophy' is 'phile' [= love] + 'sophe' [= wisdom] {'scuse my language}. It is a passionate activity - all about LOVE, in a word.
Habits determine a lot, when one thinks/feels about them carefully.
Walking, for example, is a relatively slow form of motion.
Writing/Reading written/read words is a relatively slow method of communication.
So ... when one has the habits of walking and reading and writing one also has certain other 'habits of mind'
And walking and reading and writing do give time for carefully considered thought-feeling/feeling-thought - and they have inbuilt 'safety modes': in 'slow motion' rapid reaction times are usually not so necessary, there are fairly wide 'margins of error', and there is usually time for 'corrections'.
Sometimes It Seems One Cannot Win.
I make conscious efforts to slow down from time to time, and to keep my mouth shut, and people accuse me of going too slow, and being 'unassertive' - and 'boring' even.
So it goes.
Let us play 'follow-my-leader'.
You leave the decision-making to an 'authority' figure, then blame him/her when things go wrong - when really, with a little more general consideration, and good faith, and magnanimity, by all, a better course could have been found.
Repetition is a Form of Change.
Sometimes It Seems One Cannot Win.
I speak more directly and openly than most/many, and I am accused of being 'cryptic'.
I show more self-restraint than many/most, and I am accused of being 'secretive'.
When, occasionally, some natural-enough passion overwhelms my normally quiet and relatively easy-going manner, I am accused of being 'not myself' - and even 'sick' and 'mad'.
'Needs' and 'Wants' are not the same things.
Love is the greatest of 'needs' ... and too many, like myself, are lacking in love ...
There is more than a little food for thought in all this, I rather think-feel/feel-think ...
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Mary's May Song - August Variations.
Prosaic Preamble.
The melancholic mood of Mary's colour blue has been much discussed in theoretical writings on aesthetics, metaphysics, and even theology. But it is a more complex colour than most discussions in such sources suggest, and it certainly does not only denote subdued melancholic states. It can carry a passionate charge, sometimes with violent over-tones - 'going up in a blue light', etc, sometimes erotic - otherwise why 'blue movies'? There is, of course, a somewhat sad tinge to much 'blue' eroticism, possively suggestive of the bitter-sweet disappointments of intense physical sex corresponding enduring love - they come togethe, then the separate. Rhythm and Blues music makes much play on such themes. Blue is by no means exclusively linked with physicality, however. On the contrary, it is a colour much associated with the ethereal and the spiritual. It is, for example, sky colour as perceived by the earth-bound ... suggesting infinite upwards and outwards spread ... and, in its night-sky, shades particularly is much linked to the 'mysterious', sometimes darkly so, sometimes lightly. Romantics of the 19th century, following a suggestion by Goethe, made blue a dominant colour of the 'transcendental', even in its secular aspects. A longer tradion of Christian iconography made it the colour of 'Mother Mary'. Modern creatives have tended to blend the variable suggestivenesses of blue shades. Picasso, for example, in his The Visit [1901], synthesized traditional Christian and secular realist blue signifiers into a fresh mix - earth-bound seeming, but in fact profoundly transcendental. The 'visit' directly represented in the painting is to a woman's prison - a dismal place full of women resigned to destitution, which Picasso actually visited himself during his own 'Blue Period' in the first few years of the 20th century. The scene is 'realist' in a starkly reduced style of representation, but the attitudes and gestures of the women depicted are straight from traditional Christian iconography. The 'fallen' women wear the 'colour of Mary' and the whole scene is shrouded in her colour. The painting is challenging to conventional Christian notions and signifiers, but by no means irreligious.
... On-Going-Blue-Stream-Of-Consciousness ...
... and sometimes she did not seem to recognize the full spread of her chosen colour which was infinitely variable and so when we walked between the violets and reds in her colour talking of the long and the short of it she narrowed the focus too much sometimes and while we were walking and talking others were talking and walking as we walked and talked in similar but different ways and the short and the long of it was that the human family had one kind of mouth but no two mouths were the same and between them they were limitlessly variable in ways of speaking and singing and otherwise expressing what it was like to be here and there and in other places being human and over there in her colour were the years of other lives walking between the lives we might have lived but did not quite achieve and over there talking of long-lost timely matters and restoring under-lived moments were lives walking into blended sea-and-sky-scapes of ever-changing blues which were streaming conscious spreads between reds and violets and they walk and talk of us sometimes just as we walk and talk of them sometimes and between us we put together common worlds even if we quite never meet to perceive them together in exactly the same way and so we walk our separate ways and recognize colours we would both recognize as blues but whether your blues are quite like my blues or vice versa we could never sense for sure but then ecognizing colours properly for what they really are is to recognize their essential fluid variability and that they are not fixed to this or that reference but ever-changing in their relationships and in their hues and eye colour for example does not reduce down to a single monochrome primary shade nor to any fixed genetic code and no one really has really blue eyes and if you can glimpse the significance of that at least you are on the way towards a wider understanding of real human complexity and moving away from narrowing notions of genetic purity and other reductives which diminish the colour variations as well as humanity and you might then begin to recognize the full spread of ...
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29_08_2004
'O' course', off course, mixed up, Dear Lizanny Tattykitted 'opeless'n'omeless O'Kelly the O'limp'yearn champ tramp smiler got it more o' less write when she wrote the one line of 'oetry she nu wel enuf to quote from mem'ry:
'I am a part of all I have met'
[Ref. Penisan, Uliseas]
O' coarse - apolostrophically, thou' not quite perhaps supertallyfragmentallyespeciallyapocolipticdoshit, and certainly not apologetically ['cos that was too much to expect], her egotism blinded her wonky co'k eyes to the wider counterpointing implications, viz:
'All that I have met are parts of me.'
All of witch weird seeming stuff is not mere out-of-mind word-play - and you have to know the conventions well enough [and that takes a lot of time and effort and apparently furitless labour] before you can deviate from them in reasonably good faith.
Anyway ... as I review and set up correspondences between the parts of me that were-and-are met others, I cannot help noticing - albeit sometimes contrived devil's advocatistically - that their words and deeds strongly suggest that they do not entirely believe in what they were once 'supposed' to believe in ...
'Supposition' is no real substitute for real knowledge of course, but sometimes it is all you have to go on.
Go on ... go on ...
'And I have moved on ...' said Catty O'Splatty rather carelessly really, just cliche repeating without much thought-and-feeling, so it seemed ... and it was as if we had wasted all those too short-'n'-long nights-and-days we had spent together discussing the ways cliches stifled thoughts and feelings ... and trying in good faith to teach each other to be more thoughtful-and-feelingful in our actions and utterances ... and ...
But then ... in another 'guise she had left the 'hypothetical life' behind ...
But then ... no time spent on good faith pursuits was/is really wasted ...
Anyway ... look or otherwise sense your ways around your worlds pretty babies ... are they even remotely as you would want them to be? ...
As I grope around my world, I am much struck by, amongst other things ... the grossly disrespectful disregards for the well-beings - including peaces-of-mind - of others ... and by the systematically wasted talents ...
In other words ... 'Olympians' are hard to find ...
Anyway ... if you corrupt your own supposed ideals, then you should not be surprized when your kids grow up behaving badly ... and if you celebrate instant self-gratification, then you should not be surprized that your kids grow up without wider-spreading value systems ... and ... by the way ... never neglect 'boredom' as a motive for bad behaviour ...
Anyway ... free-will?-or-not? remains a troubling issue ... and I cannot stop myself, it seems, from irregularly returning to the thorny-seeming topic of taxis ...
Witch gets me back to where I started really, 'cos the cath.o'ho'licks have this notion of willing-sin and redemption through confession, which seems to get them off the hook for a lot o' stuff ... but does not really when you think-and-feel about it more widely and other-wise-considerately ...
+++++
30_08_2004
Re-fragmenting ...
... and one is reluctant to mention this sort of thing, because it does invite ridicule, or even diagnoses, professional and amateur, of psychosis, or whatever, but it is commonplace enough, actually, and anyway, it is a fact, in fact, that I never forget the first glimpses of the really significant others, and ...
...
... other ways of putting it might include that I feel I fell in love with C. when I first saw her in 1981, and with M. when I first saw her in 1984, and with A. when I first saw her in 1986, and with Z. when I first saw her in 1989, and with A. when I first saw her in 2001 [... and there is notably a large gap between Z. in the first instance and A. in the second (who is not in fact the same A. as the other A.) ... something had died in me in between] ... but anyway ...
... none of which says much anyway ... because ...
... words don't say much really ...
... and ...
... anyway ...
... so it flows ...
... I am reluctant to reduce all this down to hormonal drifts in the body of the male gazer, or other such biochemical determinants, though they were elements of them in it, almost without doubt, ...
... anyway, I am inclined to say that love is best regarded as a fluidly dynamic 'force', and I am fairly confident in saying, though the labelling expression, as ever it is with labelling expressions, is imprecise, but when you feel it, you recognize it, and the labelling always seems too reductive, anyway, for what are quite extraordinary realities, when you properly consider them ...
... and re-consider ... with reference to others ...
Ref. Dante, La Vita Nuova, 25
It might be objected here that I have spoken of love as if it were a thing outward and visible, not an emotion inward and invisible.
But it does seem a fact that love is excited by bodily substance, even though it might be, in absolute truth, a fallacy to take it entirely as a physical thing.
To put it in somewhat Aristotelian terms, love is not of itself a substance, but an accident of substance.
That is one way of putting it anyway, but with love being so variable, there are apparently infinite other ways of putting it too.
As a human it seems I cannot avoid regarding love in human terms, and applying it primarily to other human beings - which almost certainly diminishes love, which almost certainly is not exclusive to humanity.
What more can I say?
Firstly, I can say that I have perceived love coming towards me as something more than physical, and, since 'to come' suggests powers of locomotion, and, since philosophy teaches that corporeal substance has locomotion, it seems almost justifiable to speak of love as a corporeal sustance.
Secondly, I can say that, after coming towards me, love smiled.
This risible faculty of smiling appears to make love very human, and it is perhaps a fancy to suggest that love in the abstract could smile - it might be added however that 'love in the abstract' is entirely a fancy, and that love requires agents, including humanity, for its proper expression.
...
Revisions and Reviews.
Laughter, and other comical manifestations, can bring surprizing and abrupt changes.
From the riduculous to ...
... the sublime ...
It can happen ...
The intentions of the comedian are just as essentially serious as those of the tragedian.
... and both are aware that you have to make some allowances for the 'irrational' in any scheme of things, because the universe is not entirely rational ... and so ... to rational schemes are just ... too rational ...
Meanwhile, given the interconnexion of all things, comical digressions, properly considered, are never as digressive as they might, at first appearance, might seem to be.
That Divine Comedy sure is weirdly comical sometimes.
The Brazilian runner Number 1234 [name much recorded elsewhere] had re-composed himself after his great mid-race solo effort, which had established what seemed quite likely to be a winning lead in the Olympic marathon, and he was running along nicely with only a few miles to go, and achieving a gold medal seemed highly possible for him ...
... all he had to do was endure for a while longer ...
... go on ... go on ...
... when suddenly ...
... go on ... go on ...
... just when it might be least expected ...
... out from the cheering crowd of mostly orthodox Greek Athenian onlookers ...
... popped a eccentric defrocked drunken [apparently] Irish Catholic priest, dressed in an absurd travesty of an Irish national costume ... who - apparently to signal a 'second coming' - felt compelled to wrestle the leading Olympic marathon runner to the ground ... and into the crowd ... for an unruly scrum ... lasting only a few seconds ... and including a bicycle riding Greek police officer whose job it was to protect the runners from such inconvenient disruptions to forward motion ... and then ... the runner extracted himself from the undignified melee ...
... and continued on his way ...
... and, as it turned out, he lost the gold medal he might otherwise have won without the surreal diversion ...
... so ... he did not come first, nor was he the second-comer, but he was at least the third ... and won the bronze medal, and seemed pleased enough with that ... and he won other things too, which were perhaps more important, including the good common human fellow-feeling of many millions of others ...
... and no one was really significantly hurt by the whole course of events ...
...
... 1234 ... a punk intro. ...
... or ... Italian first [gold medal] ... American second [silver medal] ... Brazilian third [bronze medal] ... Briton fourth [no medal] ...
...
... all had reasons to be cheerful though ...
...
And ... it is funny how things turn out ...
... sometimes in extreme depressive states, one experiences a sort of living death ... and relives, sort of, the first glimpses of the really significant others ... but inexplicably [call it 'psychosis' if you like] the events occur in reverse, as it were ... parting from A. in 2001 ... from Z. in 1989 ... from A. in 1986 ... from M. in 1984 ... from C. in 1981 ... etc ...
... which is all very odd ...
...
... 'in the beginnings are the ends' ... 'and first shall be last and last shall be first' ... and all that ...
...
... all of which is not to say much, and certainly not that I am expecting a 'second coming'/'resurrection' ... I am not, as it happens ... but all can be more 'uplifted', surely ... and laughter helps ...
...
p.s. Mentions in dispatches:
Paul Chaudry ... who gamely 'died in the act' while attempting a valiant stand-up comedy routine at the Newcastle Mela, Monday, 30 August 2004.
Funnily enough, generally dis-respectful non-PC black comedy did not go down well at the mostly worthy multicultural event - and Paul must surely have been risking arrest by humourless PC Ploddies for the particularly suss-spect one about planning to join the al Qaeda network because the other mobile-phone connextion networks were so crap [of course, the cops might well have arrested him anyway under New Labour suss laws - given that he has a dark skin and is under 30 and is male].
More upliftingly, and somewhat surprizingly, scantily-clad female dancing divas did not seem to offend greatly the more covered-up parts of the audience - and Honey and her campy dancing troopers were sweet eye-treats for otherwise down-cast gazers like I.
A taste of Honey was indeed better than ... Paul's joke about ...
...
Carry on the dancing ... one and all ... on and on ...
+++++
31_08_2004
Re-frag-ment-ing ... into depressive states, etc ...
... there is no cure for it, most likely ...
... and one is reluctant to mention this sort of thing, because it does invite ridicule, or even diagnoses, professional and amateur, of psychosis, or whatever, but it is commonplace enough, actually, and, anyway, it is a fact, in fact, to digress a bit, that I never forget the first glimpses of the really significant others, and ...
... 'love at first sight' is such a corny cliche though, isn't it? ...a
... other ways of putting it might include that I feel I fell in love with C. when I first saw her in 1981, and with M. when I first saw her in 1984, and with A. when I first saw her in 1986, and with Z. when I first saw her in 1989, and with A. when I first saw her in 2001 [... and there is notably a large gap between Z. in the first instance and A. in the second (who is not in fact the same A. as the other A.) ... something had died in me in between ...] ... but anyway ...
... never stopped loving any of them really ... though the character of the love changes with time, other motions of the scheme of things, personal states, physical distance, etc, etc ... it is not a fixed thing, in other words ...
... call it mostly platonic these days ...
... and I am just not up to anything thing else really ...
... this is just another tedious depressive lament really ...
... and though most of it is true enough, none of it says much really ...
... because ...
... words don't say much really ...
... and ...
... the representation at best barely approximates the reality ...
... anyway ...
... so it flows ...
... Call me a romantic dreamer, if you like, but I am reluctant to reduce love down to hormonal drifts, etc, in the body of sad male gazers - or otherwise - or to other such biochemical determinants ... though there are biochemical elements to love, almost without doubt, ...
... anyway, I am inclined to say that love exists independently, and is best regarded, perhaps, as a fluidly dynamic 'force', and I am fairly confident in saying that, though the labelling expression, as ever it is with labelling expressions, is imprecise ...
... but when you feel it, you recognize it for what it is, even though you cannot find a label for it ... and the labelling always seems too reductive, anyway, for what are quite extraordinary realities, when you properly consider them ...
... and re-consider ... with reference to others ...
Ref. Dante, La Vita Nuova, 25
It might be objected here that I have spoken of love as if it were a thing outward and visible, not an emotion inward and invisible.
But it does seem a fact that love is excited by bodily substance, even though it might be, in absolute truth, a fallacy to take it entirely as a physical thing.
To put it in somewhat Aristotelian terms, love is not of itself a substance, but an accident of substance.
That is one way of putting it anyway, but with love being so variable, there are apparently infinite other ways of putting it too.
As a human it seems I cannot avoid regarding love in human terms, and applying it primarily to other human beings - which almost certainly diminishes love, which almost certainly is not exclusive to humanity.
What more can I say?
Firstly, I can say that I have perceived love coming towards me as something more than physical, and, since 'to come' suggests powers of locomotion, and, since philosophy teaches that corporeal substance has locomotion, it seems almost justifiable to speak of love as a corporeal sustance.
Secondly, I can say that, after coming towards me, love smiled.
This risible faculty of smiling appears to make love very human, and it is perhaps a fancy to suggest that love in the abstract could smile - it might be added however that 'love in the abstract' is entirely a fancy, and that love requires agents, including humanity, for its proper expression. In other words, when a loving human smiles, love smiles.
...
Revisions and Reviews.
Laughter, and other comical manifestations, can bring surprizing and abrupt changes.
From the riduculous to ... the sublime ...
It can happen ...
The intentions of the comedian are just as essentially serious as those of the tragedian.
... and both are aware that you have to make some allowances for the 'irrational' in any scheme of things, because the grand scheme of things that is the universe, which is to say 'unified everything', is evidently not entirely rational ... and so ... too rational schemes are just that: too rational ...
Meanwhile, given the interconnexion of all things, comical digressions, properly considered, are never as digressive as they might, at first appearance, might seem to be.
That Divine Comedy sure is weirdly comical sometimes.
The Brazilian runner Number 1234 [has fully human name has been much recorded elsewhere - and I am not inclined to name names today] had re-composed himself after his great mid-race solo effort, which had established what seemed quite likely to be a winning lead in the Olympic marathon, and he was running along nicely, with a fairly steady rhythm, with only a few miles to go, and achieving a gold medal seemed highly possible for him ...
... all he had to do was endure for a while longer ...
... go on ... go on ...
... when suddenly ...
... go on ... go on ...
... just when it might be least expected ...
... out from the cheering crowd of mostly orthodox Greek Athenian onlookers ...
... popped a eccentric defrocked drunken [apparently] Irish catholic priest, dressed in an absurd travesty of an Irish national costume ... who - apparently to signal an immanent 'second coming' - felt compelled to wrestle the leading Olympic marathon runner to the ground ... and into the crowd ... for what turned out to be a very unruly scrum ... lasting only a few seconds though ... and including himself in the scrum was a bicycle-riding Greek police officer whose job it was to protect the runners from inconvenient disruptions to forward motion ... such as the one he had conspicuously failed to prevent ... and then ...
... the runner extracted himself from the undignified melee ... and continued on his way ...
... and, as it turned out, he lost the gold medal he might otherwise have won had he not been diverted ...
... so ... runner number 1234 did not come first, nor was he the second-comer, but he was at least the third ... and won the bronze medal, and seemed pleased enough with that ... and he won other things too, which were perhaps more important, including the good common human fellow-feeling of many millions of others ...
... and no one was really significantly hurt by the whole course of events ...
...
... 1234 ... suggestive of a punk intro. ...
... or ... Italian first [gold medal] ... American second [silver medal] ... Brazilian third [bronze medal] ... Briton fourth [no medal] ...
...
... all had reasons to be cheerful enough it seems ...
... but ...
... mere numbers games can be frustrating ...
... without love ...
... and ...
... it is funny how things turn out ... sometimes ...
... in extreme depressive states, one experiences a sort of living death ... and relives, sort of, the first glimpses of the really significant others ... but inexplicably [call it 'psychosis' if you like] the events occur in reverse, as it were ... parting from A. in 2001 ... from Z. in 1989 ... from A. in 1986 ... from M. in 1984 ... from C. in 1981 ... etc ...
... this is only a play of memory and imagination of course ...
... it is odd though ...
...
... 'in the beginnings are the ends' ... 'and first shall be last and last shall be first' ... and so on ...
...
... all of which is not to say much, and certainly not that I am expecting a 'second coming'/'resurrection' myself ... I am not ...
... but all can be more 'uplifted', surely ... and laughter helps ...
...
p.s. Mentions in dispatches:
Paul Chaudry ... who gamely 'died in the act' while attempting a valiant stand-up comedy routine at the Newcastle Mela, Monday, 30 August 2004.
Funnily enough, generally dis-respectful non-PC black comedy did not go down well at the mostly worthy multicultural event - and Paul must surely have been risking arrest by humourless PC Ploddies present for the particularly suss-spect one about planning to join the al Qaeda network because the other mobile-phone connextion networks were so crap [of course, the cops might well have arrested him any-way under New Labour suss laws - given that he has a dark skin and is under 30 and is male].
More upliftingly, and somewhat surprizingly, scantily-clad female dancing divas did not seem to offend greatly the more covered-up parts of the audience - and Honey and her dancing troopers were sweet eye-treats for otherwise down-cast gazers like I.
...
A taste of Honey was indeed better than ... Paul's joke about ...
...
Carry on the dancing ... one and all ... on and on ...
Revisions and Reviews.
Plato/Socrates: 'We are concerned with the most important of issues: the choice between a good and a bad life.'
Leonardo: 'Miserable mortals: open your eyes!'
Dante: 'You were not born to be brutes.'
Picasso: 'Art is a vital part of the struggle against brutality and darkness.'
Back-track.
Ref: Sartre. 'Hell is other people.'
Not absolutely, because isolation is worse, but it can be hellish to be overwhelmed by other people's clutter - physical and mental.
Alt. Ref: Beckett, Play.
The clutter of global consumerism.
Ref: Leonardo, Deluge of Objects.
Alt Ref: Leonardo, Deluge drawings.
Alt Ref: Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000. 'NO SPACE'. 'Two faces of branded comfort. Top: Anut Jemima from Quaker Oats's earler packaging, humanizes production fro a population fearful of industrialization. Bottom: Martha Stewart, one of the new breed of branded humans.'
No space.
No escape from cluttering intrusions on one's consciousness.
Alt Ref: Swift, Gulliver's Travels. 'The horrible howling of the Yahoos.'
Alt Ref: 'Yahoo is an advertizing supported service.'
Kittiwake Colony Bedlam.
'Kitti-wake!' 'Kitti-wake!'
'Listen to me!' 'Listen to me!'
'Here, kitty, kitty!' 'Here, kitty, kitty!'
Alternatives ...
... include extreme austerity - but to hell with that!
Alt Ref: Beckett, Endgame.
'What's happening?! What's happening?!'
'Something is taking its course.'
Things running out/down ... one ... by ... one ...
'There are no more ...'
Alt Ref: Auster, In the Country of the Last Things.
Entropy.
Things Fall Apart.
Goldilocks Variations.
Too much. Not enough. More or less sufficient for today.
Possible World Theory: The Basics.
Over the full course of time everthing is indeed possible - and so all Possible Worlds become Actual Worlds ... eventually ...
But ... 'the full course of time' is a very long time indeed - 'eternity', in fact.
In the everyday actual world of the 'here and now', a problem is often how to get from the 'here and now' Actual World to some desired potentially better Possible World of 'there and then'.
'Nirvana-hunters', and other kinds of 'instant-gratifiers', are over-inclined towards rash 'leaps of faith' - and usually end up dead, or otherwise burnt-out, and/or - and even worse - others die or otherwise suffer greatly as a consequence.
Moving more slowly ...
Each fresh instant of being is a new Possible World 'junction'.
The networks of possibility spreading from each 'junction' are infinitely variable, but the chances of reaching any given future Possible World depend on the extent of its variation from the present Actual World.
Some possibilities are more possible than others, in other words.
A great 'leap of faith' might occasionally result in a highly unlikely - but remotely possible - instantaneous huge change for the better - but probably will not ... and so, the 'leap of faith' becomes a 'slip into error' at best, a 'tumble into disaster' at worst.
Regular small steps through broadly similar possible worlds - with the occasional change of pace and larger stride ... and quirk of creative irregularity - are more likely to have more favourable outcomes for all ... long term ...
Stray thoughts.
One is often struck by the 'banality' of some/many people's 'visions' of 'heaven'. I cannot avoid wodering sometimes when listening to many/some people's 'heavenly visions': 'Is that the best you can come up with? and would you really want to be doing THAT ... for the rest of eternity?'
It makes you wonder ...
Some of the kids manipulated into turning themselves into suicide-bombers activity by the shitbags behind 'al Qaeda', etc, were fed really shabby male-adolescent fantasies [... an eternal supply of 'willing virgins' and all that ... ] as 'heavenly visions' ...
All very sad and sickening really ...
Slight diversions.
I am often puzzzled by why social factors in 'medicalized' conditions and other 'trends' are played down.
For example, if you swallow whole an essentially anti-social 'autistic' ideology such as Thatherite 'possessive individualism' [Lest we forget: for Thatcher and allies there was 'no such thing as society, only individuals and family'], then you should not be surprized by a rise in greed, self-obession, anti-social behaviour, and even in 'autistic' [for me, an adjective describing behaviour patterns, not a noun signifying a medical condition] people.
Also for example ... dense networks of 'frames of reference' are built up early in each individual life, we navigate our way through the swirl of the common world through fixed points in these 'frames of reference' ... but the fixed points change with time, and sometimes are removed entirely ... internal changes in patterning systems cannot always keep track with changes in the external 'common world' ... almost everyone experiences confusion and some sense of 'dislocation' as they grow older ... in the 'permanent revolution' of 'hype-it-then-junk-it' consumer capitalist state the process is exacerbated ... increasing mental confusion among some older people should come as no surprize really ... nor should the desire to retreat into simpler, less confusing places ...
By the way ...
In my 'heaven vision' [sort of] there is no 'hell' ... because I could not be in a state of 'eternal bliss' myself while others were suffering ... nor be fully sure that their suffering was not, in fact, partly of my making ...
[There is something sickeningly distasteful and self-righteous in many/most of the 'damned'/'saved' dialectic 'day-of-judgement[-style] visions' ... because ... given that eveyone acts in a relative/subjective state of 'ignorance', no one really 'fully deserves' damnation - 'eternal' or otherwise.]
Returning to Classical Formalities - for the sake of stability.
Ref: Aristotle, Poetics.
Creativity might be regarded as a form of elegantly variated imitation [mimesis].
Most vital - for humans - form of mimesis: representations of people doing things.
Alt Ref: Feynman, Lectures on Physics.
Humans can attain a sort of 'humility' and achieve a sort of 'transcendence' by being less self-referential and absorbing themselves in wider universal considerations. Though this can reduce humanity when too coldly rational.
Stray thoughts.
'Bobby' Miliband perhaps knows no better than statistical manipulations / 'viritual reality'.
Anyway ...
... just because you say 'it is so' time and time again does not mean 'it really is so' ...
... and ...
... there are too many - even on the 'liberl centre left' - who in action, if not intent, follow the essentially Nazi 'will to power' philosophy ... seemingly indifferent/oblivious to emperical reality ...
Truly 'Modernist' Mentors [mistaken, by some, as 'reactionaries'].
Ref: T.S. Eliot.
In the absence of other truly positive and uplfiting 'harmonizers', the 'inclusive consciousness' holds things together ... as best it can ... for the time being ...
To raise serious doubts about the effects of hyper-speed communications techology, the destabilizing hype-it-and-junk-it 'permanment revolutions' of throw-away consumer-capitalism, 'cloning' experiences, and other dubiously 'beneficial' elements of the 'brave new world' [the 'wonders' of which, might not turn out to be so wonderful] is not to be a 'reactionary luddite' - though the cheap-shotters will, of course, make the suggestion anyway.
Understanding Limits.
White-noise bedlam of formless fluid Babel ... everyone in noisy restless motion shouting, no one taking much in ... and everyone becoming more and more essentially self-referential ... and in the over-dense 'now-ness' memory becoming ... now what was 'memory' now? please re-mind me?...
Black-noise ... of silence ... and stasis ...
But ... stablizing moderating 'norms' between extremes can get boring though ... can't they?
Sometimes One Despairs.
Such as ... when senses how both the 'respectable authorities' and the 'outlaw gangsters' one way or another abuse and manipulate and mislead the local kids in unscrupulous command-and-control 'games', which serve only the interests of 'the few' and serve no 'higher purpose' really.
And then there are to be observed ... as a matter of fact ... global power 'elites', private corporate empire bosses, etc, etc, behaving worse than the local 'gangsters' - who are relatively powerless really, and almost seem like virtuous philanthropists in contrast ...
Nil desperandum! ['scuse my language!]
Never give up completely - better alternatives are always possible.
Peripatetic Philosophy.
Aristotle was known, amongst other labels, as 'The Peripatetic' simply because he walked about while he did and taught the complex subject of philosophy.
Mimesis: representation of people doing things - amongst other things.
It should be more widely understood that philosophy is an activity - something that people do. Thinking is not a form of idleness. This is physiological proof of this in the fact that the brain is the most energy dependent of organs. In other words: a great deal of energy goes into 'mere' thinking, and all food [= energy] is 'food for thought'.
Apparent digressions: of course we do not entirely think with our brains - all thinking involves feeling, just as all feeling involves thinking, and, in a very real sense, all consciousness is 'whole body' consciousness.
And, by the way, philosophy is not a cold unemotional mental activity. Literally speaking, 'philosophy' is 'phile' [= love] + 'sophe' [= wisdom] {'scuse my language}. It is a passionate activity - all about LOVE, in a word.
Habits determine a lot, when one thinks/feels about them carefully.
Walking, for example, is a relatively slow form of motion.
Writing/Reading written/read words is a relatively slow method of communication.
So ... when one has the habits of walking and reading and writing one also has certain other 'habits of mind'
And walking and reading and writing do give time for carefully considered thought-feeling/feeling-thought - and they have inbuilt 'safety modes': in 'slow motion' rapid reaction times are usually not so necessary, there are fairly wide 'margins of error', and there is usually time for 'corrections'.
Sometimes It Seems One Cannot Win.
I make conscious efforts to slow down from time to time, and to keep my mouth shut, and people accuse me of going too slow, and being 'unassertive' - and 'boring' even.
So it goes.
Let us play 'follow-my-leader'.
You leave the decision-making to an 'authority' figure, then blame him/her when things go wrong - when really, with a little more general consideration, and good faith, and magnanimity, by all, a better course could have been found.
Repetition is a Form of Change.
Sometimes It Seems One Cannot Win.
I speak more directly and openly than most/many, and I am accused of being 'cryptic'.
I show more self-restraint than many/most, and I am accused of being 'secretive'.
When, occasionally, some natural-enough passion overwhelms my normally quiet and relatively easy-going manner, I am accused of being 'not myself' - and even 'sick' and 'mad'.
'Needs' and 'Wants' are not the same things.
Love is the greatest of 'needs' ... and too many, like myself, are lacking in love ...
There is more than a little food for thought in all this, I rather think-feel/feel-think ...
+++++
Mary's May Song - August Variations.
Prosaic Preamble.
The melancholic mood of Mary's colour blue has been much discussed in theoretical writings on aesthetics, metaphysics, and even theology. But it is a more complex colour than most discussions in such sources suggest, and it certainly does not only denote subdued melancholic states. It can carry a passionate charge, sometimes with violent over-tones - 'going up in a blue light', etc, sometimes erotic - otherwise why 'blue movies'? There is, of course, a somewhat sad tinge to much 'blue' eroticism, possively suggestive of the bitter-sweet disappointments of intense physical sex corresponding enduring love - they come togethe, then the separate. Rhythm and Blues music makes much play on such themes. Blue is by no means exclusively linked with physicality, however. On the contrary, it is a colour much associated with the ethereal and the spiritual. It is, for example, sky colour as perceived by the earth-bound ... suggesting infinite upwards and outwards spread ... and, in its night-sky, shades particularly is much linked to the 'mysterious', sometimes darkly so, sometimes lightly. Romantics of the 19th century, following a suggestion by Goethe, made blue a dominant colour of the 'transcendental', even in its secular aspects. A longer tradion of Christian iconography made it the colour of 'Mother Mary'. Modern creatives have tended to blend the variable suggestivenesses of blue shades. Picasso, for example, in his The Visit [1901], synthesized traditional Christian and secular realist blue signifiers into a fresh mix - earth-bound seeming, but in fact profoundly transcendental. The 'visit' directly represented in the painting is to a woman's prison - a dismal place full of women resigned to destitution, which Picasso actually visited himself during his own 'Blue Period' in the first few years of the 20th century. The scene is 'realist' in a starkly reduced style of representation, but the attitudes and gestures of the women depicted are straight from traditional Christian iconography. The 'fallen' women wear the 'colour of Mary' and the whole scene is shrouded in her colour. The painting is challenging to conventional Christian notions and signifiers, but by no means irreligious.
... On-Going-Blue-Stream-Of-Consciousness ...
... and sometimes she did not seem to recognize the full spread of her chosen colour which was infinitely variable and so when we walked between the violets and reds in her colour talking of the long and the short of it she narrowed the focus too much sometimes and while we were walking and talking others were talking and walking as we walked and talked in similar but different ways and the short and the long of it was that the human family had one kind of mouth but no two mouths were the same and between them they were limitlessly variable in ways of speaking and singing and otherwise expressing what it was like to be here and there and in other places being human and over there in her colour were the years of other lives walking between the lives we might have lived but did not quite achieve and over there talking of long-lost timely matters and restoring under-lived moments were lives walking into blended sea-and-sky-scapes of ever-changing blues which were streaming conscious spreads between reds and violets and they walk and talk of us sometimes just as we walk and talk of them sometimes and between us we put together common worlds even if we quite never meet to perceive them together in exactly the same way and so we walk our separate ways and recognize colours we would both recognize as blues but whether your blues are quite like my blues or vice versa we could never sense for sure but then ecognizing colours properly for what they really are is to recognize their essential fluid variability and that they are not fixed to this or that reference but ever-changing in their relationships and in their hues and eye colour for example does not reduce down to a single monochrome primary shade nor to any fixed genetic code and no one really has really blue eyes and if you can glimpse the significance of that at least you are on the way towards a wider understanding of real human complexity and moving away from narrowing notions of genetic purity and other reductives which diminish the colour variations as well as humanity and you might then begin to recognize the full spread of ...
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29_08_2004
'O' course', off course, mixed up, Dear Lizanny Tattykitted 'opeless'n'omeless O'Kelly the O'limp'yearn champ tramp smiler got it more o' less write when she wrote the one line of 'oetry she nu wel enuf to quote from mem'ry:
'I am a part of all I have met'
[Ref. Penisan, Uliseas]
O' coarse - apolostrophically, thou' not quite perhaps supertallyfragmentallyespeciallyapocolipticdoshit, and certainly not apologetically ['cos that was too much to expect], her egotism blinded her wonky co'k eyes to the wider counterpointing implications, viz:
'All that I have met are parts of me.'
All of witch weird seeming stuff is not mere out-of-mind word-play - and you have to know the conventions well enough [and that takes a lot of time and effort and apparently furitless labour] before you can deviate from them in reasonably good faith.
Anyway ... as I review and set up correspondences between the parts of me that were-and-are met others, I cannot help noticing - albeit sometimes contrived devil's advocatistically - that their words and deeds strongly suggest that they do not entirely believe in what they were once 'supposed' to believe in ...
'Supposition' is no real substitute for real knowledge of course, but sometimes it is all you have to go on.
Go on ... go on ...
'And I have moved on ...' said Catty O'Splatty rather carelessly really, just cliche repeating without much thought-and-feeling, so it seemed ... and it was as if we had wasted all those too short-'n'-long nights-and-days we had spent together discussing the ways cliches stifled thoughts and feelings ... and trying in good faith to teach each other to be more thoughtful-and-feelingful in our actions and utterances ... and ...
But then ... in another 'guise she had left the 'hypothetical life' behind ...
But then ... no time spent on good faith pursuits was/is really wasted ...
Anyway ... look or otherwise sense your ways around your worlds pretty babies ... are they even remotely as you would want them to be? ...
As I grope around my world, I am much struck by, amongst other things ... the grossly disrespectful disregards for the well-beings - including peaces-of-mind - of others ... and by the systematically wasted talents ...
In other words ... 'Olympians' are hard to find ...
Anyway ... if you corrupt your own supposed ideals, then you should not be surprized when your kids grow up behaving badly ... and if you celebrate instant self-gratification, then you should not be surprized that your kids grow up without wider-spreading value systems ... and ... by the way ... never neglect 'boredom' as a motive for bad behaviour ...
Anyway ... free-will?-or-not? remains a troubling issue ... and I cannot stop myself, it seems, from irregularly returning to the thorny-seeming topic of taxis ...
Witch gets me back to where I started really, 'cos the cath.o'ho'licks have this notion of willing-sin and redemption through confession, which seems to get them off the hook for a lot o' stuff ... but does not really when you think-and-feel about it more widely and other-wise-considerately ...
+++++
30_08_2004
Re-fragmenting ...
... and one is reluctant to mention this sort of thing, because it does invite ridicule, or even diagnoses, professional and amateur, of psychosis, or whatever, but it is commonplace enough, actually, and anyway, it is a fact, in fact, that I never forget the first glimpses of the really significant others, and ...
...
... other ways of putting it might include that I feel I fell in love with C. when I first saw her in 1981, and with M. when I first saw her in 1984, and with A. when I first saw her in 1986, and with Z. when I first saw her in 1989, and with A. when I first saw her in 2001 [... and there is notably a large gap between Z. in the first instance and A. in the second (who is not in fact the same A. as the other A.) ... something had died in me in between] ... but anyway ...
... none of which says much anyway ... because ...
... words don't say much really ...
... and ...
... anyway ...
... so it flows ...
... I am reluctant to reduce all this down to hormonal drifts in the body of the male gazer, or other such biochemical determinants, though they were elements of them in it, almost without doubt, ...
... anyway, I am inclined to say that love is best regarded as a fluidly dynamic 'force', and I am fairly confident in saying, though the labelling expression, as ever it is with labelling expressions, is imprecise, but when you feel it, you recognize it, and the labelling always seems too reductive, anyway, for what are quite extraordinary realities, when you properly consider them ...
... and re-consider ... with reference to others ...
Ref. Dante, La Vita Nuova, 25
It might be objected here that I have spoken of love as if it were a thing outward and visible, not an emotion inward and invisible.
But it does seem a fact that love is excited by bodily substance, even though it might be, in absolute truth, a fallacy to take it entirely as a physical thing.
To put it in somewhat Aristotelian terms, love is not of itself a substance, but an accident of substance.
That is one way of putting it anyway, but with love being so variable, there are apparently infinite other ways of putting it too.
As a human it seems I cannot avoid regarding love in human terms, and applying it primarily to other human beings - which almost certainly diminishes love, which almost certainly is not exclusive to humanity.
What more can I say?
Firstly, I can say that I have perceived love coming towards me as something more than physical, and, since 'to come' suggests powers of locomotion, and, since philosophy teaches that corporeal substance has locomotion, it seems almost justifiable to speak of love as a corporeal sustance.
Secondly, I can say that, after coming towards me, love smiled.
This risible faculty of smiling appears to make love very human, and it is perhaps a fancy to suggest that love in the abstract could smile - it might be added however that 'love in the abstract' is entirely a fancy, and that love requires agents, including humanity, for its proper expression.
...
Revisions and Reviews.
Laughter, and other comical manifestations, can bring surprizing and abrupt changes.
From the riduculous to ...
... the sublime ...
It can happen ...
The intentions of the comedian are just as essentially serious as those of the tragedian.
... and both are aware that you have to make some allowances for the 'irrational' in any scheme of things, because the universe is not entirely rational ... and so ... to rational schemes are just ... too rational ...
Meanwhile, given the interconnexion of all things, comical digressions, properly considered, are never as digressive as they might, at first appearance, might seem to be.
That Divine Comedy sure is weirdly comical sometimes.
The Brazilian runner Number 1234 [name much recorded elsewhere] had re-composed himself after his great mid-race solo effort, which had established what seemed quite likely to be a winning lead in the Olympic marathon, and he was running along nicely with only a few miles to go, and achieving a gold medal seemed highly possible for him ...
... all he had to do was endure for a while longer ...
... go on ... go on ...
... when suddenly ...
... go on ... go on ...
... just when it might be least expected ...
... out from the cheering crowd of mostly orthodox Greek Athenian onlookers ...
... popped a eccentric defrocked drunken [apparently] Irish Catholic priest, dressed in an absurd travesty of an Irish national costume ... who - apparently to signal a 'second coming' - felt compelled to wrestle the leading Olympic marathon runner to the ground ... and into the crowd ... for an unruly scrum ... lasting only a few seconds ... and including a bicycle riding Greek police officer whose job it was to protect the runners from such inconvenient disruptions to forward motion ... and then ... the runner extracted himself from the undignified melee ...
... and continued on his way ...
... and, as it turned out, he lost the gold medal he might otherwise have won without the surreal diversion ...
... so ... he did not come first, nor was he the second-comer, but he was at least the third ... and won the bronze medal, and seemed pleased enough with that ... and he won other things too, which were perhaps more important, including the good common human fellow-feeling of many millions of others ...
... and no one was really significantly hurt by the whole course of events ...
...
... 1234 ... a punk intro. ...
... or ... Italian first [gold medal] ... American second [silver medal] ... Brazilian third [bronze medal] ... Briton fourth [no medal] ...
...
... all had reasons to be cheerful though ...
...
And ... it is funny how things turn out ...
... sometimes in extreme depressive states, one experiences a sort of living death ... and relives, sort of, the first glimpses of the really significant others ... but inexplicably [call it 'psychosis' if you like] the events occur in reverse, as it were ... parting from A. in 2001 ... from Z. in 1989 ... from A. in 1986 ... from M. in 1984 ... from C. in 1981 ... etc ...
... which is all very odd ...
...
... 'in the beginnings are the ends' ... 'and first shall be last and last shall be first' ... and all that ...
...
... all of which is not to say much, and certainly not that I am expecting a 'second coming'/'resurrection' ... I am not, as it happens ... but all can be more 'uplifted', surely ... and laughter helps ...
...
p.s. Mentions in dispatches:
Paul Chaudry ... who gamely 'died in the act' while attempting a valiant stand-up comedy routine at the Newcastle Mela, Monday, 30 August 2004.
Funnily enough, generally dis-respectful non-PC black comedy did not go down well at the mostly worthy multicultural event - and Paul must surely have been risking arrest by humourless PC Ploddies for the particularly suss-spect one about planning to join the al Qaeda network because the other mobile-phone connextion networks were so crap [of course, the cops might well have arrested him anyway under New Labour suss laws - given that he has a dark skin and is under 30 and is male].
More upliftingly, and somewhat surprizingly, scantily-clad female dancing divas did not seem to offend greatly the more covered-up parts of the audience - and Honey and her campy dancing troopers were sweet eye-treats for otherwise down-cast gazers like I.
A taste of Honey was indeed better than ... Paul's joke about ...
...
Carry on the dancing ... one and all ... on and on ...
+++++
31_08_2004
Re-frag-ment-ing ... into depressive states, etc ...
... there is no cure for it, most likely ...
... and one is reluctant to mention this sort of thing, because it does invite ridicule, or even diagnoses, professional and amateur, of psychosis, or whatever, but it is commonplace enough, actually, and, anyway, it is a fact, in fact, to digress a bit, that I never forget the first glimpses of the really significant others, and ...
... 'love at first sight' is such a corny cliche though, isn't it? ...a
... other ways of putting it might include that I feel I fell in love with C. when I first saw her in 1981, and with M. when I first saw her in 1984, and with A. when I first saw her in 1986, and with Z. when I first saw her in 1989, and with A. when I first saw her in 2001 [... and there is notably a large gap between Z. in the first instance and A. in the second (who is not in fact the same A. as the other A.) ... something had died in me in between ...] ... but anyway ...
... never stopped loving any of them really ... though the character of the love changes with time, other motions of the scheme of things, personal states, physical distance, etc, etc ... it is not a fixed thing, in other words ...
... call it mostly platonic these days ...
... and I am just not up to anything thing else really ...
... this is just another tedious depressive lament really ...
... and though most of it is true enough, none of it says much really ...
... because ...
... words don't say much really ...
... and ...
... the representation at best barely approximates the reality ...
... anyway ...
... so it flows ...
... Call me a romantic dreamer, if you like, but I am reluctant to reduce love down to hormonal drifts, etc, in the body of sad male gazers - or otherwise - or to other such biochemical determinants ... though there are biochemical elements to love, almost without doubt, ...
... anyway, I am inclined to say that love exists independently, and is best regarded, perhaps, as a fluidly dynamic 'force', and I am fairly confident in saying that, though the labelling expression, as ever it is with labelling expressions, is imprecise ...
... but when you feel it, you recognize it for what it is, even though you cannot find a label for it ... and the labelling always seems too reductive, anyway, for what are quite extraordinary realities, when you properly consider them ...
... and re-consider ... with reference to others ...
Ref. Dante, La Vita Nuova, 25
It might be objected here that I have spoken of love as if it were a thing outward and visible, not an emotion inward and invisible.
But it does seem a fact that love is excited by bodily substance, even though it might be, in absolute truth, a fallacy to take it entirely as a physical thing.
To put it in somewhat Aristotelian terms, love is not of itself a substance, but an accident of substance.
That is one way of putting it anyway, but with love being so variable, there are apparently infinite other ways of putting it too.
As a human it seems I cannot avoid regarding love in human terms, and applying it primarily to other human beings - which almost certainly diminishes love, which almost certainly is not exclusive to humanity.
What more can I say?
Firstly, I can say that I have perceived love coming towards me as something more than physical, and, since 'to come' suggests powers of locomotion, and, since philosophy teaches that corporeal substance has locomotion, it seems almost justifiable to speak of love as a corporeal sustance.
Secondly, I can say that, after coming towards me, love smiled.
This risible faculty of smiling appears to make love very human, and it is perhaps a fancy to suggest that love in the abstract could smile - it might be added however that 'love in the abstract' is entirely a fancy, and that love requires agents, including humanity, for its proper expression. In other words, when a loving human smiles, love smiles.
...
Revisions and Reviews.
Laughter, and other comical manifestations, can bring surprizing and abrupt changes.
From the riduculous to ... the sublime ...
It can happen ...
The intentions of the comedian are just as essentially serious as those of the tragedian.
... and both are aware that you have to make some allowances for the 'irrational' in any scheme of things, because the grand scheme of things that is the universe, which is to say 'unified everything', is evidently not entirely rational ... and so ... too rational schemes are just that: too rational ...
Meanwhile, given the interconnexion of all things, comical digressions, properly considered, are never as digressive as they might, at first appearance, might seem to be.
That Divine Comedy sure is weirdly comical sometimes.
The Brazilian runner Number 1234 [has fully human name has been much recorded elsewhere - and I am not inclined to name names today] had re-composed himself after his great mid-race solo effort, which had established what seemed quite likely to be a winning lead in the Olympic marathon, and he was running along nicely, with a fairly steady rhythm, with only a few miles to go, and achieving a gold medal seemed highly possible for him ...
... all he had to do was endure for a while longer ...
... go on ... go on ...
... when suddenly ...
... go on ... go on ...
... just when it might be least expected ...
... out from the cheering crowd of mostly orthodox Greek Athenian onlookers ...
... popped a eccentric defrocked drunken [apparently] Irish catholic priest, dressed in an absurd travesty of an Irish national costume ... who - apparently to signal an immanent 'second coming' - felt compelled to wrestle the leading Olympic marathon runner to the ground ... and into the crowd ... for what turned out to be a very unruly scrum ... lasting only a few seconds though ... and including himself in the scrum was a bicycle-riding Greek police officer whose job it was to protect the runners from inconvenient disruptions to forward motion ... such as the one he had conspicuously failed to prevent ... and then ...
... the runner extracted himself from the undignified melee ... and continued on his way ...
... and, as it turned out, he lost the gold medal he might otherwise have won had he not been diverted ...
... so ... runner number 1234 did not come first, nor was he the second-comer, but he was at least the third ... and won the bronze medal, and seemed pleased enough with that ... and he won other things too, which were perhaps more important, including the good common human fellow-feeling of many millions of others ...
... and no one was really significantly hurt by the whole course of events ...
...
... 1234 ... suggestive of a punk intro. ...
... or ... Italian first [gold medal] ... American second [silver medal] ... Brazilian third [bronze medal] ... Briton fourth [no medal] ...
...
... all had reasons to be cheerful enough it seems ...
... but ...
... mere numbers games can be frustrating ...
... without love ...
... and ...
... it is funny how things turn out ... sometimes ...
... in extreme depressive states, one experiences a sort of living death ... and relives, sort of, the first glimpses of the really significant others ... but inexplicably [call it 'psychosis' if you like] the events occur in reverse, as it were ... parting from A. in 2001 ... from Z. in 1989 ... from A. in 1986 ... from M. in 1984 ... from C. in 1981 ... etc ...
... this is only a play of memory and imagination of course ...
... it is odd though ...
...
... 'in the beginnings are the ends' ... 'and first shall be last and last shall be first' ... and so on ...
...
... all of which is not to say much, and certainly not that I am expecting a 'second coming'/'resurrection' myself ... I am not ...
... but all can be more 'uplifted', surely ... and laughter helps ...
...
p.s. Mentions in dispatches:
Paul Chaudry ... who gamely 'died in the act' while attempting a valiant stand-up comedy routine at the Newcastle Mela, Monday, 30 August 2004.
Funnily enough, generally dis-respectful non-PC black comedy did not go down well at the mostly worthy multicultural event - and Paul must surely have been risking arrest by humourless PC Ploddies present for the particularly suss-spect one about planning to join the al Qaeda network because the other mobile-phone connextion networks were so crap [of course, the cops might well have arrested him any-way under New Labour suss laws - given that he has a dark skin and is under 30 and is male].
More upliftingly, and somewhat surprizingly, scantily-clad female dancing divas did not seem to offend greatly the more covered-up parts of the audience - and Honey and her dancing troopers were sweet eye-treats for otherwise down-cast gazers like I.
...
A taste of Honey was indeed better than ... Paul's joke about ...
...
Carry on the dancing ... one and all ... on and on ...
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