Arrows of light

Strange title. I’m not sure it means what I was thinking. However, that is exactly the point was hoping to hit on. Language as an inprecise tool.

I’m taking part in a symposium at MALS that deals mostly with the concept of prison and incarceration within the larger system of democracy. However, that doesn’t matter very much right now. What I’m concerned with is a technical aspect of how this class runs. We have to respond to or create questions involving the weekly readings online. It’s an academic version of this thing with a whole bunch of users actually. Interesting. Anyway, when you’re writing these things, there isn’t a lot of emphasis on writing the way you would for an actual paper (though we all try to write properly). What sometimes (often) happens is that we use the wrong word. All the more so when we’re trying to describe obscure aspects of raw ideas without a lot of concrete references.

It is important to note that when I talk about anything, the words themselves (unfortunately) aren’t my top concern. Any given word I use isn’t chosen out of the technical definition. Rather, I’m passing through the cloud that is the idea of the word and taking with me some aspect of it. Maybe the whole thing, maybe just the feeling the word invokes, maybe some part of it. I don’t mean to be inprecise, but at the same time I’m not going to worry about the meaning of every word so that if you didn’t know English but had a dictionary you could get my exact meaning. I’m much more quantum mechanical than that.

Final words that might help anyone having to deal with me and my ideas. Quantum, rhizome, monad. Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” and interdisciplinary thought. Gadfly.

 

Global influence | How others see you | Economist.com

Global influence | How others see you | Economist.com

How sad that America has this role. Of course, I don’t know anything about the sample, but Economist has a left slant without being obnoxious. Take it as you will.

 

beavis on Flickr – Photo Sharing

beavis on Flickr – Photo Sharing

I’ve seen this before, and it might have had something to do with Danielewski or House of Leaves research… either way, it’s very sobering and amazing. I’ll have to ask my friend Emeric (do you read this thing?) if he can find Beavis. He’d be all about it I bet.

 

Big Spanish Castle

Big Spanish Castle

This is a cool illusion I wasn’t aware of until this morning. Just a color trick with your eyes… the good thing about this link is that it works on Firefox 2. Some of the other sites don’t seem to work. Plus the image is big enough to make it really interesting.

 

Mr. Bland Goes to Washington – New York Times

Mr. Bland Goes to Washington – New York Times

I didn’t know anything about this guy until this came up on my RSS feed. Very interesting point.

 

The open mind trap

I recently had a conversation with a friend who claimed to be searching for some sort of answer. Our conversation revolved around where did we come from (because of the up front conclusion that the Bible is bunk) so the answer supposedly being sought was also involving cosmology.

What I encountered was the firm belief that this individual was operating with an open mind, and thought only closed minds accepted what they read or were taught.

I don’t think I argued this properly or clearly enough, but what I was trying to get at with her was that you can’t say you are working with an open mind and then say you won’t accept any systematized truth as being the answer. If you do this you are working with as many artificial rules and boundaries as those who seem to buy into that “false” sense of truth. The way I’m perceiving this situation – if truth presented itself, no matter the form, this open-minded person wouldn’t accept it. The “doubt everything” perspective seems to look like a genuinely inquisitive and searching point of view, but in fact it is as blind as someone following an incorrect teaching.

(messed up graphic but it works for now)

I am not arguing for any particular cosmology at the moment, but I want to argue that when one has an open mind, they cannot rule out anything until they have rigorously determined that falsehood… and even then they have to be open to the fact they might have been wrong in their estimate.

I want to know how to inoculate a mind (my own included) against the arrogant self-interest of thinking that I will know truth when I see it yet not have to analyze a thing. A simple question can be useful to test if one is convinced of their own ideas, which is fine. But if one thinks that those simple twisting questions will determine for themselves the truth, I just don’t see much success for them.

 

Wired News: The Game of Art

Wired News: The Game of Art

Just read the article and you’ll know why I like it. Well, so long as you know me to some extent.

 

Stationary travel

Always leaving. Always en route. Always arriving.

Those are the three major ways it seems we can see ourselves. Or, not *the* but rather a monad foundation for a particular perspective I enjoy using. I’ve writen about these in my little notebooks, but never on this blog.

[leaving] We can be always leaving the past behind, looking retrospectively at our entirety. We learn a lot this way, every experience is a lesson in living. The possibilities are laid out and what-if games rule the day. Yet those lessons are largely lost. If we live in the past, when will we reap the benefits of all those experiences? That’s the drawback. We won’t. You can never do something about what you don’t see coming. If we are always leaving, we are victims of the future.

[en route] Or we can be always in the now. Life is some amazing journey that is sweeping us along. Everything is fleeting and impermenent. At the same time, history is imaginary and the future will come when it comes. The current moment is all that exists and we should live it to the fullest. If we are en route, we are victims of the future.

[arriving] Here everything is always new. The world is an exciting place that carries with it a staggering sense of awe and majesty. Unfortunately, the past has no weight except that it is gone. If we are always arriving, we are victims of the future.

Perhaps you noticed. The singular use of any of these perspectives is of no direct use. All of them have the property of blinding us to taking control of our own life and making something of what we know. That is why they are all part of the same monadic set. This means that they all have to work together. I am always leaving/en route/arriving essentially. It’s a little odd, partially because it instates a liminal state always while also claiming to have a fixed position. (Odd. I’m reminded of Zeno’s paradox in some way as I go over this. That and some three faced Hindu god waving goodbye, hello, and holding a walking stick at the same time.)

 

Twisting timelines

I’m having a strange moment of visual thought, with every person as a one-dimensional thread. A past and a future but no depth beyond forward and backward. The world becomes three-dimensional as the threads weave themselves into each other… the constant interactions in our every day life. We are something not in ourselves, but in how we connect to other people.

 

Second call for ideas

In addition to ways of interaction in a city I need also topics of thought you might dwell on during the day. For example, if you think a lot about your job, throw me some concerns you have regularly. I’m looking for casual ideas. Not hard core ideas, just stuff that floats through your head as you walk in a park or drive down the road. Everyday concerns.

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m semi modeling my creative process after a portion of what Danielewski does. For Only Revolutions he posed a short questionaire on the houseofleave.com (now onlyrevolutions.com) website asking for a moment in history, a car, a flower, and an animal. The responses he received from this process he then incorporated into his latest novel.

What I intend on doing with all these answers I hope to receive is to use them as a form of social mobility of consciousness. Interaction is the key here, where convergent perspectives (particularly contradictory ones) generate movement and even reality at times.