A bit more about memory: as I get older I realize more and more how essential it is to have a bad one. If some worthwhile stuff gets chucked with the bad, so be it.

Liked that from Barker's Imagica; the wizard who can't remember anything that happened more than ten years past.

Because a single punch in the face is more remembered than 100 hugs. Also in a sense it seems more like one positive thing for every 1000 negatives. It seems that is.
----
The spurious blog is a relatively good one I guess. He's framented himself into two people, which I really think that's what characters are. I don't think they're complete and realistic people. As such just wouldn't be quite so interesting. You need symbolic people. Not real people. Not saying totally 2D, just not really real. Would usually be a little boring otherwise, I think. I'm considering doing the same here, for the heck of it. Maybe would be a somewhat useful exercise. Maybe. Part of me feels very silly doing so though.
----
Murakami's Kafka on the Shore: the title is a little annoying. I don't see the connection to Kafka. I didn't get it expecting there to be one though. In the end I continued reading just for the final battle scene, which is another thing I can't get myself to do. It's no different than:
----
Salvatore's Drizzt D'urden: He's just a decent guy who's a kick ass sword fighter. He uses that sword to fight against the evil society he's in, up to even killing the very gods of that society I think. But I couldn't quite do it. Sword fighting? Too silly. But then any fighting, any characters clearly pitted against one another I ultimately have an issue with... The 2D evil characters? I remember feeling kind of revolted by how 2D they were originally. Somehow I ended up reading 22 books of it though... (O.o) I don't know if I could stand to make them.

I did read a couple Drizzt books and years later reread at least one entire book without ever remembering having previously read it. Figured it out near the middle of the next in the series.

But I don't have to clearly pit (put) (pit?) people against one another. The bad guy can be the very structure of society. Or more wonderfully the bad guy is defeated with reason. He finally quits being a slave to his/her unconscious. He finally opens his mind.

Mr. Emphryio you have what is called the sensitive artistic temperment. In ways not true and all in all you're probably no more or less sensitive than the average person but that's just what we call it. But your issues with insomnia show it clearly. You have to mimic exercise forms such as what your ancestors have been doing for tens of thousands of years lest you'll find yourself unable to sleep and increasingly unable to stand 14 hour workdays on no rest at all. You can't do a standard strength training routine as is popular these days. The weights are too heavy. It doesn't correctly mimic what your ancestors did. Such lifting to the edge of eccentric failure sends a message to your brain that something is wrong! And your brain won't let you sleep, because something is wrong! You have to use much higher reps and keep it light. Explosive lifting is fine though and much like olympic lifters still get plenty strong without ever doing dead lifts, so you can manage to exercise without insomnia while hardly turning into a weakling.

See with lighter higher reps you immediately can sleep; you can even eat chocolate right before bed. The endless nightmares are another issue though.

It can take days to retrieve a lost thought or months or of course it can just be permanently lost and memory is a hell of a thing. I had an analogy to death about winning an all expenses paid vacation to wherever you liked with one catch: you'd have no recollection at all of the vacation as soon as it was over. Would you go? If you say no, are you really an atheist? (Of course then people just lie and so on and I don't bother ever actually asking anyone the question.) To know that you are going to forget everything you ever do or think makes bothering to do anything utterly futile and thus one must not really be an atheist.

But actually we're all constantly forgetting so much. We don't have to wait to die for that. A person could really sit down and think this through and be horrified. Right now, what you're doing: it's partially futile as you're almost certain to utterly forget this moment and this day. (Still, surviving it isn't futile.)

It's a sort of death then happening to you daily? Yes? Yes? No.

You could get video cameras and put them everywhere and record every second of your existence. Or we could develop perfect memory. And then what? All those memories are no good unless you're remembering them. But the longer you live, the more and more memories till you just sit around remembering, all the time; no longer actually living; just reliving.

So what could you do to make absolutely sure you remember this moment forever? You could do something incredible stupid and destructive. Or write an extremely detailed blog post. Or face that day after day the details just aren't important. It's the overall flavor I guess that's at least hopefully worth remembering.

...and when we remember we actually don't retrieve, we recreate the memory. I have a habit of wondering, "What if actually I did it slightly different in some very bad way?" Then, I recreate the memory in that negative way and wonder which was the way it actually happened. It's a way to put yourself constantly on trial; to persecute yourself, like K.

While you're at it, you can imagine future encounters but with negative what ifs. What if someone with power over you decides to destroy your life? Or just do this or that negative thing to you? What will you do?

Did you act corretly here? And here? What will you do if such and such happens. Etc.

You can wear yourself out. But to some extent you have to do the above. Because you have to be prepared and most of us really are on the chopping block at any given moment.

I'm almost completely unstressed at the moment. Tuesday I'll do badly on the test I didn't study for and then get a bit stressed, more or less till May/June, when hopefully I'll get a job in my new career, etc. During that time the stress will probably do bad things to me. In finding ways to counterbalance I'll probably act in ways that seem stupid here and there. I suppose because on top of it I refuse to think this the best of all possible worlds. Instead I then do the opposite and search and search for the essence of what's wrong with this one.

This blog

(Here's a long post that google lost. Badly rewritten. It was an important thought to me.)

So a blog is a sort of diary/journal. I never kept a diary. Here and there I started one but I realized that I wouldn't ever go back and read it and that gets rid of a good bit of the reason to bother. I guess not entirely but it seemed close enough. I guess now I could say that even if I don't go back and read what I previously wrote I can remember what I was thinking a little better and maybe make sense of it a little more by writing it.

But not going back and ever rereading a diary/journal seems to mostly make it a waste of time. And I knew I wouldn't do so because primarily I wouldn't be able to stand how stupid I had previously been. This is like in Kundera's The Joke he finds an old diary he wrote as a teenager and he's so horrified and disgusted by what he wrote, that he rips the diary to shreds. In the book though, and it's just as true for me in real life, actually the teenage diary writer hadn't managed/bothered to explain all of the context which made his actions not really so ridiculous and ugly as they appeared.

In the same way already I go back and read some of these entries and really wince and it is in part because I haven't explained (not even possible really to do so, mostly) all of the context which had put me in such a state of mind; all of the context that would even cause me to be thinking in a certain direction.

Damm this was an important post to have lost. Because I had a really good reason why this was different though. And google lost it. And somewhat ironically I've now forgotten it. Ironic because part of this post goes on about my bad memory and thus this blog is an essential thing and especially useful with the terms function so it's not like endlessly rifling through papers, wasting so much time looking for some thought.

And now, I've forgotten why the wince factor of reading my past stupidity is not going to overwhelm me eventually.

Fucking google will probably go out of business and delete all the blogs without warning anyway.

Now that the blog is getting big I'm also getting worried that I'm filling it up with too much crap thus making it so that it's all a waste of time to reread. So, I'm spending more time trying to decide if I should bother to write some thoughts down. Thoughts that may seem very obvious, but that I know, I'll later forget. And thus, it maybe would be good to go ahead and write them down. Because there will come a time when I want to remember them and I just can't...

Anyway, there's maybe still not really all that much to rifle through? Maybe it's just bad memory that makes it seem like a lot of time has passed when really it still hasn't.

I think that was more or less the gist. Very badly reproduced.

Another issue was that when something awful happens to me in the future it's going to be hard to go back and remember this younger me that was walking blithely right into some horror. Just his ignorance at even that may make it difficult. And there's really nothing that can be done about that. Not as big of a concern though.

..it is all about having a bad memory. And this blog serving as an extremely good aid to my memory. I know how I am. I think slow. It takes a long time to retrieve thoughts once lost. Days. I think this sort of thing can help me be a much better writer. And also, just dealing day to day with mere survival issues in my personal life. There are things to think, things to do that help me cope, help me stay relatively happy. At times I forget them and limp through weeks on end.

I need to ramble on. I need to use the terms function. This has already been worthwhile. Past stupidity is mostly torturous and seems so stupid because part of the context has been lost.

Was thinking about Van Gogh cutting off his ear and how I read articles long ago speculating he had some bizarre ear related illness, lol. On one or two occasions I've felt anguish over how some person (some women) have treated me to the extent that I happened to remember Van Gogh sending his ear to a woman and it made perfect sense to me. He was trying to get her to understand how much she was hurting him; that she was literally day by day through her indifference slowly killing him.

Now, being able to understand the action clearly in my mind, understand the symbolic meaning of it, is pretty different from actually doing such a thing. That had to hurt like hell; cutting off your ear. I've gone as far as to burn out my brain slightly with anguish. To the point that I couldn't manage to remember some computer password at work.

And then there's stalking. I wouldn't want to ever be accused of that! I've managed to to not do such a thing despite being able to understand exactly what Van Gogh was going on about. So you know, find some philosophical stoic way to not be too anguished about the infinite indifference of people.

Wrote the rough draft of a short story last night called God's Fingers about such a route, such a "solution."

Then there's Spock: Was thinking about how in real life everyone in his office place would hate his guts. I guess like Bones did but much more so and not so honestly. Everyone destroying his reputation behind his back... They'd hate him for being different. For being cold. For his stony expression. For being more intelligent, more competent. I picture Kirk coming up to him and informing him they have to "let him go." And then he's got his belongings in a box and is getting escorted off the Starship Enterprise, muttering "highly illogical."
Thinking of Spock with relation to Aspergers Syndrome.

And of both of these interesting men (obviously Van Gogh somewhere along the line had an issue) with regards to the following question: to what extent are our thoughts made invalid by some "mental illness" being attached to us? Not so much a problem as a painter, but what if you were a psychologist/philosopher? Then, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you'd better hide your "issues." Often wonder about Freud with regards to that. He said some bizarre things. I wonder if he had anything he hid about himself.

Anyone who does anything original/unique has probably ultimately got something "wrong" with them. Does that make what they've done something to be dismissed? It depends on what it is.

If they've got some massive societal critique going where they're trying to convince people to go about their lives some other way, it might.

----

I really like that song/loop I wrote. I love so much about music the idea of multiple things happening at once or very quickly in sequence at least. It's like seeing so many points of view all at once or almost at once. I think of it like reaching some greater wisdom or being "godlike." Being aware of everything in existence at once.

So... the more stuff happening in a song at once, the better. And it doesn't even have to be all that musical. Can just slap some typical pop style form on to it. With some distant strings that have a sense of order to them. But then mostly, just a ton of noises that reach our synethesia. A person crying, sighing, coughing, laughing, screaming. Endless other noises. Some which suggests magical creatures. Etc. Just throw them all together in a sequencer and sit back and let it hit you.

Ahhhh. Feels so good to me. I like that song/loop I wrote about as well as Skinny Puppy's Convulsion even though it's maybe 1/30th the work. I keep on listening to it. Maybe should have looped it longer.

It's just random unfortunately. I would like to start with lyrics and attempt to make it more logically symbolic. 'cept my voice is wrong. It's like Weird Al Yankovic trying to do industrial.

I really wanted to write music that sounded like Skinny Puppy's Too Dark Park. (Video's kind of violent.)


I haven't managed that yet. Primarily because my voice is just very difficult to work with. Also though because I've been too lazy I guess to really get a bunch of samples together. Rideflame mentioned Mixcraft. It has some nice samples all bundled together. I used it for this pretty simple loop.

...a little too much screaming.

Interesting division of women

1.1 Queen/Mother
1.2 Inquisitive Nurturing Princess (child form)
1.3 Martyr (active shadow form) (can never feel sufficiently reimbursed)
1.4 Manipulator (active shadow's child form)
1.5 Saboteur (passive shadow form) (too selfish to sacrifice thus must constantly prove that subjects aren't really worthy)
1.6 Damsel in Distress (passive shadow's child form) (clueless/helpless)

2.1 Hetaira
2.2 Electra child (child form)
2.3 Femme Fatal (active shadow form) (replaces goddess of wisdom with having personal power over the male; greatest joy found in getting him to compromise valid principles to be with her)
2.4 Seductress (active shadow's child form) (power over men)
2.5 Prostitute (passive shadow form) (power over men)
2.6 Daddy's Little Princess (passive shadow's child form) (clueless/hopeless)

3.1 Amazon (competitor)
3.2 Adventurer/Heroin (child form)
3.3 Bitch (active shadow form) (competitor who's angry at men)
3.4 Defiant Rebel (active shadow's child form) (the rules of the game are unfair)
3.5 Victim (passive shadow form) (the rules are unfair and has given up competing)
3.6 Wounded Child (passive shadow's child form) (not competing and unhappy about it)

4.1 Medial (spiritual)
4.2 Artist (child form)
4.3 Fortune Teller (active shadow form) (a seeker not a conduit, HMMMM)
4.4 The Gossip (active shadow's child form) (more "art" done the wrong way...)
4.5 The Innocent (passive shadow form) (forced into silence)
4.6 Orphan (passive shadow's child form) (same, abandons connection to inner world)

So many shadows... I hate slapping dismissive labels on people.

It has depressed me thinking how even the relatively wise/intelligent still so often cannot manage to get along with on another. I can only at the moment think of Freud/Jung and Camus/Sartre by name as examples. But then also vaguely recall the same with so many poets, writers, etc. That combined with my own experiences make me think that eventually one reaches a point where they just quit bothering trying to have meaningful relationships as it's ultimately kind of painful when you get blown off plus there can be an increasing feeling of futility at bothering to try.

It is risky being honest!
I once heard an idea somewhere (not sure who said the original idea / quote) to the effect that that writers were being unusual in that writing is basically being gut-wrenchingly honest in public .... and that explained why the relationships of writers were a mess
so that person obviously thought that being honest should have a health warning on it: can damage your relationships

Yes. To the extent one "keeps it real," such things just end up happening so very often. And it becomes a matter of to what extent do you prefer meaningless fake relationships as opposed to no relationships at all?

My relationship with my wife is real. As with my stepfather who laughs in delight at my "realness." Mostly real with my mother, but not totally as she's not openminded enough to handle complete realness. I have one brother-in-law that can almost handle total realness. But not quite. I keep it light with my sisters.

I'm real with my friend in Orkney and I think she is the same in return. Totally, utterly real. Which is so much of what I like so much about her. But I do worry it will go eventually the way it goes so often. Which would make me pretty unhappy and her even worse... which in turn gives a lot of reason to turn it fake to stop it from going that way. Yet, ultimately I desire the real so much that I go forth for such punishment all the same. I do wonder how it is with her on this issue though. With some thoughts she's expressed the possibility of a rift would be a big concern, something to avoid at all costs. But then clearly (conceited as it sounds) I'm like an angel (I mean she should see that and I think she does) so it shouldn't be a concern. I think she can see that.

Trying to be real with others, some few very impressive people.

I'm not real at work or with neighbors...

I did spend/waste a lot of time being real on the internet with assholes. The school of hard knocks.

By 'real' I think I mean the lacanian real; total honesty resulting in perfect truth... I don't totally understand the lacanian real yet; the virtual real, symbolic real, imaginary real, imaginary virtual, symbolic virtual, the real real, etc. Gets confusing, haven't quite found the time, not sure how useful all those delineations really are.

Murakami's Kafka on the Shore

If someone like Steven King put in a scene with cats being tortured I'd be really annoyed at such a crude attempt to elicit an emotional response from me. Murakami has such a scene in this book but it's interesting in how it works OK. We're seeing it from the POV of a mentally retarded character, Nakata, who can't feel anger. And the perpetrator has just begged Nakata to kill him. There is this feeling of Nakata trying to grow and become something more than what he has been. Plus the dreamy feeling of the first 144 pages of this novel. All weighed against the horror of this guy slicing up cats and eating out their hearts.

Murakami manages to not just piss me off. On an emotional level the idea of cats being tortured I think bothers me more than humans would. I wouldn't pass the Blade Runner cyborg test I guess.

Negative reinforcement or force instead of reason helps cause people to view realizing they're wrong as some very negative thing. They see 'wrong' as equaling punishment and thus want to avoid being wrong and one way to do so is avoid admitting/facing ever being wrong.

Anger and force help ensure a closeminded world.

Camus' The Plague

Didn't like this novel. Finally put it down in annoyance 30 pages short of the finish (300 pages long). Very rare that I'd read so far into something that just wasn't getting the job done. But I've always found the bubonic plague fascinating and also really like Camus' The Absurd/Myth of Sisyphus. And really wanted to give him a chance.

Yes, if it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a "hero," the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal. This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness. It will also give this chronicle its character, which is intended to be that of a narrative made with good feelings--that is to say, feelings that are neither demonstrably bad nor overcharged with emotion in the ugly manner of a stage play.

This is one of two paragraphs strangely stuck in this novel attempting to defend why he's gone about it the way he has. I can't say I'm sure of a better way but despite winning the nobel prize in literature it really didn't seem a good read.

One would think the plague itself would be a much better example of the absurd then such sidebars as this sad absurd man, a horrifically failed writer, who could have been stuck in a romantic comedy as well as he was put here.

This worry on Camus' part of being like a stage play, although I understand not wanting to be kitsch, something rings false, reminds me of this again.

After sparing us the nitty gritty for 200 plus pages he does finally describe in great detail the horrible death of a young boy. Seemed the way the novel should have been begun. The first 200 pags just cut out. Definitely a short story padded. This scene which was finally good didn't seem "overcharged". It seemed one of the few scenes that wasn't sleepwalking. As to what he means by "feelings which are demonstrably bad" but it seems like there are levels of kitsch at work here. Probably I should use another word. I'm still just using the word to mean unreal I think. Camus takes pains to avoid the unrealness of the stage play and in some ways is even way too honest while at the same time he seems to be avoiding some of what he would consider vulgar (which is to say he's selectively dishonest still).

Plus his main character is a stoic. It works for Vance, not for Camus'. Maybe if the setting was more fantastic. And the middle of a plague outbreak in full force could be fantastic. But he only vaguely tells us, he rarely ever shows us. He dilutes it so much.

No, the real plague had nothing in common with the grandiose imaginings that had haunted Rieux's mind at its outbreak. It was above all, a shrewd, unflagging adversary; a skilled organizer, doing his work thoroughly and well. That, it may be said in passing, is why, so as not to play false to the facts, and, still more, so as not to play false to himself, the narrator has aimed at objectivity. He has made hardly any changes for the sake of artistic effect, except those elementary adjustments needed to present his narrative in a more or less coherent form.

He seems so awfully earnest. But there is already plenty of nonfiction about the bubonic plague. I read about ten books in college for a paper. For fiction you have to be unreal to examine things actually worth examining. This isn't supposed to be journalism.

So "earnest," it's an awful word to me. To me it manages to express a sort of negative truthfulness, (where really the truth ought never be a negative thing...)



I really disliked this novel despite loving the idea of a novel about the plague told by the philosopher who introduced the idea of The Absurd.

Lost post...

Wanting to be famous is in part a ridiculous modern manifestation of wanting to be the tribal alpha male.

In prepubescence imagination was such a more pleasant peaceful thing.

Hit puberty and those fame dreams were overpowering. Eventually such dreams end. Either in that it's a little bit too clear that there's no chance they'll happen, or the biological drives... hormones that caused them starts easing up, or in that you manage to eventually wrestle back some control of yourself as a halfway coherent human being. And thus all hope is lost.

Then it's possible to return to a better time. But your mind is kind of tainted.

I wonder to myself how many women finished these two books. They make me think about the late sixties and early seventies when I often felt required to stroke male egos by listening endlessly with upturned face to clever, sometimes brilliant and often tedious talk; nodding my head, fluttering my lashes, giving approving smiles, marching back and forth to the toilet while consuming ever more pitchers of beer, besotted with boredom, finally giving way to exhaustion all to avoid the inadvertent insult to masculinity that flagging interest in matters of so little importance to me might have caused.
link

Some good thoughts about writing from This Space

Unfulfilled

3-29-82
Dear Marilyn,
I just wanted to let you know that Frank has divorced me. He met a 24yr old SPY, or tech last April that he decided he wanted to marry.
She is catholic and never married and didn't like that it would be his second divorce so she said goodbye. However, you know how he can fight for what he wants. Since he is going to Alaska from Korea and she is there I can only believe that perhaps she changed her mind.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know so if you ever wonder if you failed you could be assured that it is something in Frank that keeps him from being happy and making a marriage work. He has never learned to like himself and until he does he won't be happy with anyone and accept them and their faults.
He did say that he doesn't like himself very much when he thinks of Jay, because of his little contact. He also says you are not to blame for the breakup. I hope someday he can write and ask your forgivemess as he would like to do.
So, if you have any feeling left for him I ask your help in praying for him that he can learn to like himself and walk in God's way thereby accepting others and finally being fulfilled which is what he keeps searching for through new marriages.
He is working on Amerasian children and I hope God is working through them to show how he has deserted Jay and now two wives.
He has so much to be grateful for, but doesn't see it. He still feels like the poor, shy Frank growing up afraid to be called on in class and making a mistake and being laughed at.
He also worried about approaching 40 and losing out on something, never having dated much. So he says there is a black hole inside of him that is not fulfilled. Only God can give him the peace he is looking for and I hope he receives it someday.
I pray God has blessed you and Jay in your new life.

I'm that son. He's spoken to me twice in my life. Last time 15 years ago. Arranged to meet me then canceled because "(he) had to go to church." Never heard from him again. Has now been married four times. Daughter of above women (not related to me) mailed me on facebook a couple days ago. She says she believes the pain Frank caused her mom led to her eventually dying of cancer.

I think he must be a very unfulfilled person who looks to women to fill in what is missing. That 'being unfulfilled' affects a lot of people and takes different forms. It's naturally selected for so much because it happens to take the form of procreating with lots of different women.

I have plenty of unfulfillment in me. I don't really look to women to magically give my life meaning... At least not in the way good ole Frank does. I do think happiness ultimately must come from within. I do believe like the religious guru from that commune in New Mexico. Line up the men and women across from each other and you marry whoever you're across from.

Everyone is beautiful and worthy of love. I loved Don't Mess with the Zohan incidentally; really really loved him making love to all those old women at the hair salon. Same idea with Paxson in The Dark Backwards and Sutherland in Fellini's Cassanova.

Which I suppose it annoys me that such just isn't allowed actually in this world...

Anyway at the same time that most everyone is wonderful, I don't believe any one person Should be crucial to my happiness. And I think without exception I've found this easy enough to see when any given person is right in front of me.

But when the symbols get vague. When it's not someone right in front of me. Then perhaps I must start doing what Frank does a bit more. Bizarre idealisations that kind of hurt me. Really hurt at times. That simultaneously are beautiful. That I think still I'd rather get around by making them Not So Vague! If any given person is real, not vague, not idealized/symbolized, then I don't think it's an issue.

But, it's not a big deal. Maybe some vague symbols are harmless enough. Little bit annoying though at times when some given person I just can't make them not that way, in my mind. (As it does hurt a bit, here and there.) Extremely rare thing also.

And I'm the sort of person who'll make sure to not end up like a Frank.

No Exit

Supposedly the best fiction Sartre wrote. From which came the phrase, "Hell is other people." If it had been me I would have chucked it. Which isn't to say it's bad. Mostly an unfortunate comment about me.

Inez is tortured through feeling rejected by Estelle and is also jealous of Estelle and Garcin getting it on.
Garcin is tortured about whether he was a coward in his life with plenty of help from Inez.
Estelle is tortured mainly in that she can't manage to get it on with Garcin for a combination of reasons: Garcin not really thinking much at all of her, Inez doing everything she can to stop them, etc.

It's very unreal. Very kitsch. But then plays seem to always be that way. And really any fiction writing it seems that's readable to me ultimately seems kitsch, or ...unreal. That seems to be crucial. The vulgar truth is just no good. One must lie...

I was forced to act just a little in a play in high school and my god I couldn't stand it. It was literally screaming inside at the kitschness of it. The few plays I've gone to see I could barely stand to sit in the audience.

Also I can't stand to watch romantic comedies where lies pile on. I have some kind of honesty conditioning... It's like A Clockwork Orange, him being tortured/forced to watch things he can't stand anymore...

But the word kitsch. Unreal and kitsch aren't the same exact thing. Words are so annoying. Nothing I say is really true. Which, again, drives me just a little nutty. Just a little.

Camus was perhaps not as smart as Sartre, but he was much the better man.

A kind of strange example of a common republican tactic. When over and over again the opposition is clearly more intelligent, there's nothing for it but to attack intelligence itself.

There is mere survival and then there are silly games. And I suppose some things are a bit of both.

The things that interests me primarily are the ways in which humankind is not going about their interactions in the best possible manner. And I guess I would like to see the world change. Even just experimentally, potentially painful experiments to try to find better ways.

For some reason or other I want to write. Probably in part because I want to see the world change, in part because I've spent time thinking of ways in which we're really not going about things the right way. Maybe in an ever so slightly original way I think I've thought about it... Also in part because I do have such vague visions in my head which I want to come into being... Also in part for an uglier reason, that it could potentially be a fun escape; a turning away from the world...

Of course I want to write about the things which interest me. But, I cannot write with the goal of changing any damm thing at all. To do so ruins the process. Not only can in make it preachy, polemical crap, but it personally makes it sheer stupid drudgery to bother.

A good conception of creating art is thinking in terms of finding meaning within chaos. Scattering the tea leaves or whatever. Starting with some randomness and then shaping it. Finding meaning/order within it. And ending up with something which is better than the person who created it; something which is actually beyond the ...working ...wisdom/knowledge of the person who created it.

No matter how intelligent the starting point. No matter how solid the foundation, no matter how systematic the steps, there is always a randomness in art; always a chaos at the beginning.

What I seem to primarily find enjoyable in "messing around" with music is finding meaning within chaos.

Although with writing the symbols and/or the ideas must be the ones which happen to interest me, (like obsolete evolutionary traits), I absolutely cannot write as if I want to see anything in the real world change at all as a result despite the fact that I also do really happen to want exactly that. I say this not even really in the sense of worrying about it being decently good writing. But simply in the sense of finding it enjoyable to do. And finding it enjoyable is crucial. It is everything.

Looking for meaning within chaos. And I think I'm saying utterly ignore any audience but myself. (Which would I guess go against normal thinking, if that is what I actually mean, which I don't actually know.) But then, I think for art to be most valid, it has to be something which is successful even if no one but the artist ever sees or hears it. That is the correct way to make it in my opinion... it would seem. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary of known artists.

So I have to strangely not care about exactly what it is I most care about, while not ending up destroying what I care about...

I laid in bed beside my wife with this playing and found myself transfixed by the miracle that she is. How could such a wonderful creature exist?

It must be an OK enough bit of music then.

"Aesthetic concepts only began to interest me when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts: people simple or refined, intelligent or stupid, are regularly faced in life with the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comical, the tragic, the lyrical, the dramatic, with action, peripeteia, cathersis, or, to speak of less philosophical concepts, with agelasty or kitsch or vulgarity; all these concepts are tracks leading to various aspects of existence that are inaccessible by any other means."

Milan Kundera, The Curtain

peripeteia-reversal of circumstances

Agelasty-a neologism Rabelais coined from Greek to describe people incapable of laughing.

Kitsch-exaggerated sentimentality; exaggerated anything really, but mainly of the fake smile

Vulgarity-the opposite of kitsch; keeping it real

Evolution

-Those who are too unfulfilled with mere survival and silly games want time for artistic hobbies. In a harsh world of endless long work hours they don't prosper. A different sort prospers...

-But being unfulfilled in the first place can manifest itself in more ways than creativity. For most it means wanting to sleep around. Which is a very good quality for successfully spreading your genes far and wide.

-There is an edge in general where intelligence starts going against "prospering." Where a person understands very well Camus' The Myth of Sisphus, the absurdity, the futility of life and starts having less interest in mere survival. And thus doesn't prosper as well.

-Perhaps they can... or at least could go even further. Into rejecting the illogic of emotions and sex and thus "prospering" even less. Of course anything outside the norm doesn't do well as long as the situation is normal.

-Anger was a beneficial mutation in the far past solely because it increased the chance that violence would be successful. Not as useful today although better than indifference still...

-Evolved coldness in men so they could better kill while women evolved some opposites to keep life bearable.

-Evolved jealousy in women which can manifest in many ways but ultimately was to stop men from sleeping around.

-evolved mindless conformity

-gossiping brings us back to the tribes always against one another. The enemy of our enemy is our friend...

-the peaceful tribes didn't prosper

-the slave mentality does

-those highly interested in sex prosper, right up to the edge of rape, pedophilia, etc.

-those who fall in love hard prosper, right up to the edge of killing themselves when the other doesn't feel the same

Good post summarizing the stuff I've been thinking about lately

Etc.
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Started trying to actually write fiction yesterday. Descended into deep depression for my troubles, ended up thinking of the levels of suicide. I don't have any normal go-kill-myself-suicide in me. I defeated that I think permanently about 18 years ago. But there is stuff like driving down the road and wishing you might wreck the car and die. (I don't wish that.) There is kind of wishing you'd just get some disease and get the pointless boring absurdity over with. Or, working at a hospital, here and there in the past having wished I was a patient, I have done those a few times. Some kind of creeping suicide. I'm in a good mood at the moment as it's morning. Takes a long day of contemplation (futilely trying to write fiction for example) to reach the point of thinking enough, compiling enough of the pointlessness, etc of it all.

But I won't ever do such a thing. No worries there if anyone happens to be reading this blog (which was essentially meant as a private matter exactly so I wouldn't have to worry about such misunderstandings. Endless misunderstandings possible through reading all this.)

But the blog was ultimately a vague experiment and it can go where it may.

For the hell of it I made a few final changes and tried to connect the cheap laptop again and what the heck, it worked. I kind of wish it would quit occasionally working so I could just get a new laptop...

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The Godfathers (Birth, School, Work, Death)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2SLs7EWyIk
Heard just the last minute of this on the radio (internet radio, regular monopoly radio wouldn't play this) and I liked it. Hearing the whole song lessens it. I think it would sound better to just repeat the chorus over and over again. Maybe a guitar solo and that's it. Just get rid of the verses. I wish I could forget I'd heard the rest and instead vaguely imagine the rest of the song sounding the way I wish it did. Also could do without the images...

People make too big a deal about repetition being some kind of negative thing in music. In real life our moods don't change 8 times in 3 minutes. Simplistic loops are underrated. Being nonrepetitious just for the sake of not being repetitious is just no good. Even on the rare occasion you do successfully find something that actually really works, there's still the knowledge that the process was wrong.

This isn't to say I only like repetitious music. I have an ideal of something more which I've barely attempted yet. An ideal of being very symbolic instead of the "duh, it sounds good" usual process of music writing. What's held me back is first off, you can't manage it using presets. I'm about there now where I don't need them. About time to make a better effort I guess.

Then there is this:

I'm reminded of Brian Eno talking about recording some traffic noise and how even that, if you listen to it over and over again, your mind starts to wait for that jake brake, etc and it has a musical quality in that sense.

And so something like this on a single listen just seems entirely random. But you listen to it over and over again and it starts sounding pretty good.

...I wonder though if it's a trick. That I can just get the exact same effect with a 10 second repeating loop just by doing a good job at forgetting...

I wonder if there's some self deception going on with writing such music...? That on an initial listen it seems so random. Must one pretend otherwise to bother writing such a thing while waiting till like the jake brake it starts making some weird kind of ritual sense...?

It can be done though symbolically. Helped along by having good samples and knowing how to make sounds with some good synths. Although I think the symbols must be kind of crude and must still end up relying on some randomness. Not sure how far it can be taken. Simplistic mood loops might still win out.

Looks like my used $200 laptop is finished. Just won't connect to the wireless internet anymore. No rhyme or reason. ...I had some good favorites saved on it. Better than this desktop.
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I played Quake 4 some finally. Think my video card isn't quite good enough. A little choppy exactly when it needs to not be.

I wonder if that fear is good (Quake induced fear). Keeps a person young maybe? I suspect though that fear does things like make the body direct more energy to reproducing, etc which in turn causes a person to live a shorter life... but also a more alive life probably.
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''If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.'' Albert Einstein

Someone thought that Machiavellian. Of course Einstein wasn't but I guess it can look that way. I said, "His goal wasn't to gain power, but to bring about positive change to the world; instead of being consumed with trying to impress people/get people to like him."

But it does matter, making people like us. If no one does, then how can you be happy? You'd have to be like a machine. Not human. To live as if you didn't care if anyone ever liked you is to live like an abomination.

One should care. But that doesn't mean trying to impress people. Just treating them well.

... but you should try to treat them well no matter what...

I can't think of any action really that should be tied to wanting people to like you. (Even though you should want people to like you.) (Every action should be done totally aside from that concern.) Which is why it seemed maybe that's living like I don't care if people like me... Like an abomination, like a machine.

I've caught a cold. First since I became a vegan 5 years ago. The jogging in the cold didn't help I'm sure. Oh well. Also pink eye which I've never had before. This right after bad food poisoning. Of course as soon as I get some time off to relax and have fun this is what would happen.
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An existential nihilist who believes carefully making some good self deceptions is the way to go... It's no good to turn solely to rational thought because one can only claim 100% rational thought is a good thing if they aren't actually living it.

We are not entirely rational creatures as we have a subconscious. We have emotions. I don't think we could survive if we effectively eradicated either. Also we aren't going to exist forever. We cannot actually live rationally in the light of that knowledge. Thus the most rational thing to do actually is to abandon rationality when it comes to that. And I think probably, maybe, the same with the former somehow, in some way...

But how to only make good, nonharmful self deceptions without opening a pandora's box?

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=707
This process is called “optimization.” It leads to a “blessed clarity that filled my being,” the narrator says; or, more objectively, it leads to an “absolute clarity of thought, even during emergencies. Freedom from prejudice and superstition. Freedom from the tyranny of emotion.” Instead, when you are optimized you have access to “information” that previously you had “ignored or repressed.”.....

Optimization makes for perfect corporate employees. I would think, as well, that it makes for the sort of “bright,” rational, and illusion-free personality type so desired by rationalist crusaders like Richard Dawkins. Indeed, one of the effects of optimization is that it leads almost immediately to the rejection of any prior religious beliefs: their delusive, compensatory quality simply becomes too obvious, and is no longer required....

The narrator of “Wild Minds,” however, is a reactionary and an ironist; he chooses not to be optimized, and he fervently embraces the illusions and consolations of religion. He clings to Catholicism’s sense of guilt, repentance, and possible redemption. “The thought,” he says, “that a silicon-dosed biochip could make me accept [the murder he committed] as an unfortunate accident of neurochemistry and nothing more, turns my stomach.” He clings to his sense of guilt precisely because he knows that after optimization he would no longer feel this way; that doing what turns his stomach would insure that it would no longer turn his stomach. He accepts that “being human” is no longer “essential”; yet he “cling[s] to the human condition anyway, out of nostalgia perhaps but also, possibly, because it contains something of genuine value.”

Ecce Homo

Chapters titled Why I Am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever. Mostly dismissed as evidence he was already crazy.

The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare? -these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice... Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self.

I mostly agree. Not entirely sure of his usage of the word 'ideal'. I wonder how relevant this is to him going insane the very next year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Mental_breakdown_and_death_.281889.E2.80.931900.29

The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

The truth seeker must love the truth more than friendships. But from the intro by Ludovici:
...and the fact that he endured such long years of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible hardship...

And what a misanthrope he was. How he hated Germany. But then look what Germany then went and did later...

It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter, is more goodnatured, more straightforward, than silence.

Hate is better than indifference and of course bothering to try to communicate ought to be better than silence.

To the sick man resentment ought to be more strictly forbidden than anything else --it is his special danger: unfortunately, however, it is also his most natural propensity. This was fully grasped by that profound physiologist Buddha. His "religion," which it would be better to call a system of hygience, in order to avoid confounding it with a creed so wretched as Christianity, depended for its effect upon the triumph over resentment: to make the soul free therefrom was considered the first step towards recovery. "Not through hostility is hostility put to flight; through friendship does hostility end": this stands at the beginning of Buddha's teaching--this is not a precept of morality, but of physiology. Resentment born of weakness is not more deleterious to anybody than it is to the weak man himself--conversely, in the case of that man whose nature is fundamentally a rich one, resentment is a superfluous feeling, a feeling to remain master of which is almost a proof of riches. Those of my readers who know the earnestness with which my philosophy wages war against the feelings of revenge and rancour... will understand why I wish to focus attention upon my own personal attitude and the certainty of my practical instincts precisely in this matter.

Resentment, revenge... just other words for anger.

The loathing of mankind, of the rabble, was always my greatest danger...

Can one really blame him knowing what his people later did?

I am gifted with a sense of cleanliness the keenness of which is phenomenal; so much so, that I can ascertain physiologically--that is to say, smell--the proximity, nay, the inmost core, the "entrails" of every human soul... This sensitiveness of mine is furnished with psychological antennae, wherewith I feel and grasp every secret: the quality of concealed filth lying at the base of many a human character which may be the inevitable outcome of base blood, and which education may have veneered, is revealed to me at the first glance.

The sort of thing I might think here and there but would avoid saying. Well mostly try to avoid anyway.

What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he condescended to the Germans--that he became a German Imperialist... Wherever Germany spreads, she ruins culture.

....

Another form of prudence and self-defence consists in trying to react as seldom as possible, and to keep one's self aloof from those circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned, as it were, to suspend one's "liberty" and one's initiative, and become a mere reacting medium. As an example of this I point to the intercourse with books. The scholoar who, in sooth, does little else than handle books--with the philogist of average attainments their number may amount to two hundred a day--ultimately forgets entirely and completely the capacity of thinking for himself. When he has not a book between his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read),--finally all he does is to react. The scholoar exhausts his whole strength in saying either "yes" or "no" to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticising it--he is no longer capable of thought on his own account... In him the instinct of self defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar is a decadent. With my own eyes I have seen gifted, richly endowed, and free-spirited natures already "read to ruins" at thirty, and mere was vestas that have to be rubbed before they can give off any sparks--or "thoughts." To set to early in the morning, at the break of day, in all the fulness and dawn of one's strength, and to read a book--this I call positively vicious!

Yes. (Ironically) Well partially yes. The thing is to manage to keep thinking critically while reading them... Not be overwhelmed... This ends up meaning a lot less reading. A paragraph and then think about it for ten minutes, etc. And then you can't back up your criticisms with as much reading as the person who ate it all up.

Protohuman tribe with alpha male social arrangement, from the POV of a younger male. Expressing number of important points with regards to sex, assimilation, and war/violence. Would need to be like White Fang or something in that direction. The rugged individualist, but unfortunately the goal isn't remotely to champion what the main character is about. So how to pull it off? Have him commit suicide like in Martin Eder? Neither is it to laugh at him. No room for humor at all... Soothing is more important than interesting... What other way forward? A protohuman wouldn't be very intelligent anyway thus wouldn't be as interesting or at least would be difficult to make him interesting. Gormenghast was boring at first as the characters (except Steerpike) weren't very intelligent/interesting. Barely limped along with gothic setting. This would not have an interesting setting. A bare bones one.