106. Self-hack?

Making it illegible. Ciphertexting to myself. Absolutely certain I won’t have the key. Lacking in special knowledge to reverse the process. Deprived of decryption potential. Thus I write, unreadable. Information so confidential, it’s repudiated the minute it’s formed. That’s always been the protocol.

I must therefore hope that I’m a flawed system, and can be broken. Otherwise, deafening silences will remain untouched, intact, undiscussed. And me, ignorant – except for that single piece of intuitive understanding: Nothing can be kept secret which has already been revealed. But it’s the chicken-and-egg problem: The one about constantly scrambling the eggs, always about chickening out.

Laolao

105. Golden ratio(nal)

Where is it? Where do I go? Where do I stay? Where is it that I bang my head on it? To say it blew my mind too.

Oxygen has a blue tint. And somebody says the sky is blue for the same reason, but I don’t think so. Diffraction may not have anything to do with the sky.

With respect to sunlight, what would answers be like at sunset?

Mendelbrot shapes, in solid colors, blue being an example. Looping factors connecting all into one giant pattern. It goes on forever. Self-referential. Perhaps a rare proof of irrationality. Golden spirals and fast calculations. Industrial-strength computational devices running after fractals, the seeds of flowers, or even brownish pine cones forgotten on the side of a road.

My head aches. It has now gone through enough iterations to realize that it contains hidden within itself, somewhere, somehow, every single bit of information that is possible.

But where is it? Where do I go? Where do I stay? Where is it that I bang my head on it. Hyper-lucid? Some of my thoughts organic; others, inorganic.

A golden ratio operating as a universal law hindering my precious inner balance. Never having strived for spiritual ideals. Just geometric ones. A triangle, yes. On my good days, a pyramid. Always Egyptian.

Laolao

104. Falling

Some think something may be out there. Perhaps way out there, on the fringes of creation. Where our current cosmological horizon lies; and then there’s a ravine. Far beyond the known universe. With chunks of matter losing their balance, orbiting nothing.

In any direction from every location, you can view my properties. They look the same, stay the same. Uniformly improbable. My being an isotropic person, splashed across the heavens. Unimpeded. Of parochial significance. In a void devoid of universal meaning. Going over the edge of origins and evolution. Heading side-ways, downward, upward - without control. Detached. Being the same in every direction.

I hear it’s never the fall that hurts, but its sudden stop.

Laolao

103. Infinite slowness

Don’t you feel it too? That time may soon vanish, if it hasn’t already done so. Everyone’s world fooled into thinking the universe is expanding at glorified accelerating rates, galaxies thought to be pulled apart by the darkest matters that can be. The law of gravity quickly becoming an oppressive law of silence. For nobody talks. No one notices. On a cosmic scale, imperceptible.

Lights from supernovae tracking the course of our life stories. Billions of years to practice how to slow the mind down until hell freezes over. A static moment for all of us. Like when clocks had not yet been invented. Infinite degrees of stillness.

I had meant to develop a perturbation theory that would have saved us all, a time-independent explanation. A way to measure emotional disturbances, all the artifacts of our consciousness. I had hoped to have a mission. To be a totally devoted missionary. I thought I had it in me. To come up with a system of ideas that would have accounted for the time that went missing. A set of principles as the basis of time’s progressive disappearance. I really had meant to be the one capable of justifying what’s supposed to happen. I did believe I could do it. To come up with a theorem that would have encompassed all the demonstrations proving time is not a constant.

If time has indeed emerged from the Big Bang, it can, you see, disappear. It could possess an intrinsic, eternal, unchanging moment when perception of space becomes dominant. Impossible to alter.

As I look into the past, I realize time definitely moves faster in that direction. But if I look towards the future, mine, I can’t see. Except for an unmovable place where I exist, within myself, transfixed.

What if the speed of light was found to be variable too? What would it do to all the images, their pigments, the shadows, their proportions? The images we entertain about ourselves and others? The images we have of our perception of time? Can I be the theoretician dismantling our ideology regarding all of this, can I? Can I? Be the one taking snapshots of the doctrines we hold about the progress of our existence, when in fact past, present, future are not a whole. Be the one showing you that dimensions can switch over?

I agree, we do seem to be traveling away from each other faster and faster. But it’s a false impression. Can I be the one articulating the hypothesis? That we are, in fact, motionless. Our souls. Our supposed grandeur. Our technological advances. We are the paradigm of successful immobility. We are the presence of matter that caused time to decelerate. And brake/break.

Time is not physical. We are. Time has no molecules, no particles. It has no waves. It only exists as long as movements do. The speed of time occurs while objects move. The current perception of time is therefore relative, but we don't have anything external to compare it to. Time might have collapsed so much that everything, from that perspective, does indeed seem to go so, so terribly fast. Ourselves first, at the top of the line. Evolving with stupendous velocity. As we proceed slower than we did in the past, all, and I mean all looks like it’s rushing by at an incredible pace.

I thus remain under the impression that it took me an enormous amount of time to get to you. To create you. To tackle the greatest cosmological mystery of all. You have acted, therefore, as an ultimate, powerful point of reference, creating time throughout my life, giving me the presentiment I'll always observe differences. Changes in quantities and qualities. Curving, then wrapping my mind around nicely explainable relations to both the space we occupy and the time we're occupied.

Yes, if I can wait an infinite amount of non-time for all of you, of us to happen, something is bound to happen. And we would continue to think we’re moving as if nothing had happened.

True, who needs to know that for non-accelerating objects, there must be reference frames that also have zero velocity?

Anyway, now you see how I feel when for too long we’re far apart. A strong issue of escalating brain-pain stretching time into a protracted, unbearable connotation.

Laolao

102. Electronic cortex

I copy myself, immersed in degrees, layers of separation, and wonder right away whether I can be considered the same as the original me. And will minds identical to mine ultimately emerge, reconstructions elsewhere, other embodiments, somehow a new substrate to my image? Can I, then, communicate with myself? Neuron-by-neuron? And will the pronoun “I” be the ultimate fixed point for all my replicated identities?

I close my eyes and I see them: My future machines. Colossal knowledge scanning, digitalizing a human profile, my brain the biological child of an artificial intelligence. Genetic data encoded within a virtual reality.

I close my eyes and I feel it: Personalities evolving inside endless online spaces, outsourcing love and pain to external secondary systems made with the dust of flesh, clouds of upgraded representations of who we claim to be.

Memory pixels allowing avatars of myself to role-play alternate individualities. Neuromorphing software to capture my complete state of mind. Uploading exabytes of existential questions for my progeny to answer.

My physical experiences of the world reproduced, and then getting lost - a lack of interest from meta-search engines eye-tracking nothing else but meaningful fantasy platforms.

Will they get confused, permutated, the different people I can be? Incorporeal souls caught in cybernetic ecosystems, masses of programmed ideas and concepts reaching maturity as computer-generated life-forms, the databases of our ethereal properties having acquired self-transformative powers.

I promise. I will sacrifice primary consciousness for a user-generated environment. I will open a can of computer worms. I will hack and counter-hack clusters of differences all made of silicon. I will reverse-engineer a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. I promise. I will be born and contribute to problem-solving from day one. With a keyboard, I will maintain poetic illusions about a singular self whiling away its time.

I will reproduce my mammalian brain a trillion times. I promise. It will not be possible to distinguish this sudden amplitude from the presence of magic.

There will be, I promise, no signs of alien life in any of my futuristic realities, no cyborgs, only self-directed evolution. Only a colonized imagination, the painstaking process of data analysis preparing for anomie, and, of course, post-human changes.

Help me baby. Sometimes, I’m taken straight to the binary frontier of what’s possible. Where I instantly evaporate, somewhere, on my way from zero to one.


Laolao

101. VPN

I’ll soon be going back to Beijing. I’m doing so with a VPN installed on my laptop, hoping that with encryption I’ll be able to access my blog. If I can’t, I’ll try to move it elsewhere, and, of course, I'll keep writing to you.

Laolao

100. Canada

I’m in Canada, the land I’ve escaped from everyday for the past 11 years. A constant conscious effort, pulling myself away, extirpating my soul, my guilt, backing out a millimeter at a time, all energies into that specific persistent motion that running away constitutes.

But then, here I am now, under a pure blue sky, children and grandchildren busying themselves around me while I watch the same Sun as in Beijing.

This is what I wanted, to flee and come back, to sit in peace at the sound of leaves brushed by a light breeze, the little feet of kids marking the beat, birds and planes flying in mysterious patterns over my head. My voice finally quieting down, unheard, its tones almost invisible.

I wash the dishes and the cling-clang of the cups and plates summarizes what I’ve got to say. The splashes of water as I mop the floor stand as decent punctuation. The sound of the dryer for the laundry making long rotating sentences, tumbling up and down like lyrics I could have invented.

I sew buttons like important words awaiting to be traced on paper, fixed for a purpose, useful and appreciated. I handle the broom the way I handle myself, made for something, well defined in the dictionaries of all the languages that can be. I soak a shirt because of a stain, careful to clean my ideas by the same occasion. I stretch the sheets over the beds, flattening creases with two hands, for I do not wish any bumps or crevasses during my stay. Sometimes, clichés are the way to go.

This is time. These are hours I’m made to understand. An involvement with things that matter very much in the end.

This is a type of time I can definitely count on, which can remain anchored in the body, making itself be touched in all its height and width. Time I can measure using my fingers when they turn the wooden spoon in the spaghetti sauce or the oatmeal. A time I relate to, that has the smell of strawberries and sugar with a dash of thick cream.

This is the time I need, one for brushing and braiding your hair, fancy colored elastics to hold them in place. Specks of time to pick up your toys left in the hallway. Bright plastic shapes reminders of games and laughter, of evenings spent building Lego houses, and tickling you.

This is what I mean by time, drops of moments to add soap in the washing machine where your clothes float. The shape of towels awaiting to dry you by the swimming pool, the walks to the park where I’ll push the swing high and fast while you shout “Again, again!”

Indeed, I’m back for a short while, entirely back, running behind you, afraid you’ll fall and hurt your knee, holding your hand to cross the streets, wiping your face full of ice-cream, or holding a Kleenex to help you blow your nose.

I have now all the time in the world.

Let’s empty the garbage cans, clean the kitchen counters, put the groceries away in the cupboards and fridge. Lets rinse tomatoes, or peel peaches, prepare a bowl of blueberries, or unwrap and cut some cheese. Lets add some salt to the soup and crumble crackers, stir pasta in boiling water, or toast fresh bagels. Lets watch marinated kebabs roast on the barbecue. Dip French fries in a mixture of mayonnaise and ketchup. Lets answer the phone and say hello. Read the morning newspaper, and set the table. Lets hear footsteps and awakening voices as the morning coffee brews. Climb the stairs, out of breath, to get your slippers, a T-shirt, an extra diaper.

Time devoted to cartoons on TV if it rains, or to watching flowers bloom in the garden, finding a name we all agree on for their unusual kind of purple. Of course, seeing animal shapes in the white puffy clouds. Or noticing stars at night. The dew on the wide rhubarb leaves as the sun rises, dandelions you pick for a bouquet.

All of that time, I know, and I know it well. Catching seconds suspended around my head to make them mine, able to rephrase different parts of the day, to even read myself back and recognize a signature.

Hear the wind meet the trees, gently rocking branches. Hear, hear. There are cars moving along. The vibrations of engines reaching the front porch. Lets open all the windows and their bright white curtains to allow the chipping of birds, the buzzing of flies, the slamming of car doors tell us what time it is for us, arranging our routines around the tangibility of household chores. Recurrent gestures, the narrow movements of familiar objects like dresses and pants drying outside on a rope, blue pins to hold them, sleeves flapping against the fence.

You’re improvising a tent with pillows and blankets. I open the parasol. Together, we water the basil, the parsley, and the lilac tree. I open the doors to let you in or out. I pay attention to voices and wonder whether there’s a hidden meaning I should catch the same way I grab all the time I can hold in my arms all at once.

The summer was, therefore, an ideal moment to come back. To perform a multitude of small tasks. To reply present whenever I show up. To accompany all of you in your adulthood and childhood, having at last gone so far away that, in a spherical world, I return to where I started. The place where I cannot go any further. The greatest distance from the beginning being itself, only separated by lots of time, by what’s required for realization to fully come about, pouring a glass of apple juice, or chopping a banana to put on your toast, zipping up your sweater while laughing at your jokes.

I become someone you know, wrapped in the fabric of days and weeks, serving some yogurt with fruits and then, washing the bowls. Waiting for your naps to end. I’ll answer the door and your questions. I’ll sing if you ask me too. And as I sit to contemplate the allures all that time has now taken, I feel pride and satisfaction. I’ll throw the red ball in your direction, blow soap bubbles, write on the sidewalk with chalk time and time again, to make it stay a bit longer, a bit wider and deeper, a bit more material, with a taste of soil, of grass with ants running wild, and grains of sand between your toes.

History is slowly backtracking. It is showing signs of withdrawals. A few hiccups sometimes, perhaps a cramp here and there, a tenth of a second for those resilient manifestations of panic, that’s all. Nothing more. I think it is finally leaving me, accepting to eventually set me free. History allowing me more and more to be contemporary to myself, there in the present, for it is so rare to meet oneself in that evanescent point in time. One is always either focused on the future, or hung up on the past. But to get a glimpse at who one is right now is exceptional, I think.

It only happens through simple, domestic gestures, where a sense of being matches the trajectory of hands ironing clothes, or pouring a glass of chocolate milk. This is when I know best who and where I am, and what precise tasks understanding has later to perform.

In such instances, the letters of the alphabet fall into place, gifted with a clear purpose. Time is no longer an entangled line, just a solid point on which to proudly stand, dusting shelves, rubbing a sink, taking meat out of the freezer for today’s lunch.

I find the roaring of the neighbor’s land-mower reassuring, like a grip into reality. Distant voices from the street, or the howl of a truck driving by like an auditory tapestry able to contain me, delineating a place into which I can safely move, without incidents or accidents, without fear of dilution. Making the beds, unfolding the tablecloth, all activities preventing sinking. A firm ground for my tiny thoughts, their joy expanding all the way to the extremities of the second where the entire world happens, with me in it, perfectly synchronized.

I am here, now, with a rag, a dishcloth. Or sitting outside sipping iced-tea. Watching over you. I am on that chair, on that sidewalk. I am turning on the hose to water the roses. I know why I am here. And know what ‘now’ looks and feels like.

In a way, this is what I expect from love, and how I view its gift. A strong location for the present, being on the same plane of existence as you all are, an encompassing appropriateness and straightforward satisfaction filling the cracks in my head, holding the pieces together. Tight and clean. Reliable surfaces. Tasting ham baked in maple syrup, boiling eggs for your breakfast, and listening to you giggle your mouth full.

It is fine to grow old, dear. So fine and softly warm. A time to fully be, each minute I encounter while fastening your sandals or turning the TV off, a wet facecloth to wipe your cheeks, mashing potatoes and carrots, finding a blanket if you shiver, bedtime stories and a few lullabies.

Laolao

99. A covert operation

In a few minutes, you might think my tone gets cruel and heartless. Depicting without nuances a world that will look unilaterally detestable. And you will probably tell yourself: Things can never be that negative. That uniformly bad. Laolao is certainly blowing everything out of proportion, stuck to subjectivity and gloominess, bad faith having become her sole yard stick.

But to clarify the points I have in mind, I must, throughout this, indeed, one-sided narrative, insist on being mean, and self-centered, even pitiless. It will be because I am truly such a person. To approach my topic, there’s no other way I know of, but to focus on my primitive habits.

I’ve been wanting to take you there for a while now, so that you can have an idea where the women in our family come from. Ultimately, so that you can leave, for there is no other survival option. You need to understand that history at a younger age than I did, to give yourself plenty of time.

Lets get down to it: I’m about to show the aspect of my true Self that is ossified. That doesn’t feel anything, that doesn’t know love. That does not even care. The fossil of an embryo, for this is what remains. The rest is a construction, an afterthought, the a posteriori imitation of a person.

I’m also aware that everything I’ll say in this story will appear grotesque and ridiculous. It will be because the story is grotesque and ridiculous. No way around that either.

Don’t bother looking for a proof. Don’t say you’ll put aside what Laolao tells you today until you can validate her account. There’s no proof. There’s no available authentication process. This story has only known the women with whom I grew up with. It has systematically kept everyone else at bay.

These women, they’re not even aware the story exists, for it is in their nature not to recognize. Asking them would only result in forceful rebuttals.

Denial is the cornerstone of this story. Except for this: These women would immediately identify me, that’s for sure, but not themselves, of course. Using this partial acknowledgement to capture you in their net.

It would mean – at least, try to consider it - that the plot of the story makes sense, and is still operational. But once a captive, you wouldn’t know it. It would be the proof you seek, although a useless one for you wouldn’t be able to realize how caught you are.

So no need to ask around. Here’s what you would hear: That I’m biased, ungrateful, and disloyal. Lots of appointments with shrinks since childhood to support that. You would also be told that I’ve always been like that. But it wouldn’t matter much: In the end, you would hear that my perception, as troubled and intense as it might be, cannot tarnish the positive imprint these women have left here and there throughout their edifying life.

My account, so subjective and critical (I admit it), would not alter any of the grandiose outcomes these women have prompted since birth. It would not change anything to their stature and prowess, nor diminish any of their capabilities. It wouldn’t succeed either in trivializing their suffering. For we are all convinced in this family that our agony is a unique form of hyper-sensitivity, qualifying us as remarkable beings.

Be cautious, this story is about the essence of falsehood, its constant practice, its complete hold over personalities. It’s about chronic deception and fabrication. About people who were themselves pieces of fiction to start with. Therefore, the story can never sound true, reliable and honest. Its basis and material are found in fraud and illusions. And since I am an intrinsic part of the story, I use what’s at my disposal to draw the picture: a Machiavellian, unscrupulous tendency to twist things in one’s favor. An ineluctable, predetermined approach distinctive of our family’s communication strategy. And this is how, in that consistency, you should evaluate my story’s veracity.

It essentially has to do with abuse. Up to now, we’ve been unforthcoming about what has been done to us, and then, refined and reproduced by us. We’ve accomplished much more in the field of abuse than previous generations. We used our legacy well. Abuse crystallized in our midst. Fixing us beyond repair in a sphere of perpetual desecration.

Mistreatment was not an activity, not an invasion, an act from the outside. It was who we were. It could not be amputated, not even treated. It was our nucleus. It gave us life. It made life real for us. It made us real to ourselves.

We never fathomed there could be another way to live. While measuring our own importance against that of others, we only had this reference, leading us to believe we held the top positions we abundantly fantasized.

We even thought everybody was woven with abuse. A norm. We projected our condition unto the world, because, ourselves, we were projections. Not individuals. But a small tightly woven communal entity of codependences, glued together by abuse, each one of us relying on the harm done by one among us for the laudable purpose of asserting our existence.

We had roles, functions, not a life per say. Choices were narrow: You could be the thesis or the antithesis. Everyday was the same. The setting never changed. We remained day in, day out, pure inventions of our sickness, the produce of our own deviant fabrications. In fact, it was an industry. We gauged productivity in terms of output minus cost to our self-esteem.

It is within that global abuse that I get the words needed for this story. They’re the bolts and screws holding the torture machines together.

You’ll soon notice there are only two emotions present in the story, for we never experienced any other, just degrees of rage (that we’d identified with ‘dislikes’), and obsessions (that we mistook for manifestations of ‘love’). Remember: It is from within that place that I talk, for it has created me, entirely shaped me. Hence the airs of phoniness, the mood of subterfuge, the sense of cheating, the falsehood atmosphere hanging over my version of events. Again, view these as signs that the bottom-line of my narrative might be sound and consistent.

Don’t expect accuracy, details, not even facts. I’m unable to convey precision and transparency. It’s all opaque down here. Truth is unknown in that story. It never once made an appearance among the patterns in place all these years. I can only show you falsification tactics by demonstrating in real-time those fine techniques that were ours.

I can hint at many disguises though, for of course they fit me too, the many costumes worn by self-servicing goodness, those borrowed by fake generosity, the allures of victimization, imagined pain, the impersonation of martyrdom. I can articulate how self-sacrifice manages to conceal egotism. How tears are strictly a camouflage for indifference. How an expression such as ‘years of experience’ is a pseudonym for a static immaturity.

Despite my desire to share everything with you, I certainly cannot be frank or candid, I cannot pretend there’s a naked authenticity awaiting us somewhere in the chapters of my memory.

The torturous paths of my thoughts can only exemplify the extent of these deformations I want to show you.

It’s in all my faux pas that you can see our peregrination over and over our own centers. Trampling on ourselves with idolization. Fixated and fanatical. A sadistic disregard for anything but ourselves, and a remorseless lack of empathy. An amalgam of brutal inclinations. Sometimes transfigured into gestures of care and attention meant to hurt. Erupting like a blow, and an all-encompassing bruise in repeated attempts to confirm the authenticity of our individuality, and of our body. This is how we showed attachment to one another. Through injuries. Helping each other corroborate our aching state of being.

Do I exaggerate? See it worse than it was? Do I amplify what were only frequent bouts of stubbornness, assertiveness, a massive, but understandable will to develop one’s greatness, I mean here potential?

One could ask: Is it that reprehensible to be impressive? To indeed know we’re worthier than others? What if it’s true? That we are? Plus, isn’t expected that, out of resentment, others would denounce us for our incredible potential?

What if they were really blocking our righteous path, what if there were no other alternative than to devalue these opponents, all the way to extinction? Why were they standing there, anyway? See how responsibility can easily be shifted and renamed.

What if omnipotence is possible, and we’re the ones chosen for that privilege? Can anyone provide evidence to the contrary? And all these enemies we had, that multitude devoured by jealousy, isn’t it normal they should envy us? And that we had to protect ourselves? We would have been fools not to.

Am I making this up? Am I confusing natural personality traits that just happen to be magnificent and powerful with the mirage produced by this contorted mind of mine?

Would I be erring when I say our feelings were mere imitations? Because we did scream, bleed, devastated by horrors. We cramped, and felt profound distress. It was genuine. Our fear was as monumental as our belief in our almightiness was. We even have plenty of scars on exhibition to confirm our pain. Actually, not many people have that many marks.

Is this hyperbolism? People never could understand us. Much less appreciate us. They weren’t equipped to do so. Our dramas too complex and sophisticated. Beyond the grasp of comprehension. There’s a little touch of divine, here, see.

This is why when some people profess to have some knowledge about us, we know they’re idiots.

Is it delirium to claim we blended hate and fear into overreactions, so muscular that they defined our character? That we always responded with overwhelming force whenever threatened? But… isn’t customary to safeguard one’s integrity? To do all we can to survive? Particularly when we’re better than others.

I hear some blame. Who blames us? Who is this? Who are you? Do reveal yourself! Better, don’t. You wouldn’t survive. That’s how commanding and fierce we are. You wouldn’t last a minute. Run. Leave us untouched and undefeated.

I might really be sick in the head, you know, transferring on my surroundings all my symptoms. Can my idiosyncrasy be the cause of misinterpretations? But what does idiosyncrasy refer to? By definition, it’s what makes me unique? Special? Different? So, so notable. Again, trapped in the circular reflections of vanity, the very engine that kept us alive.

After all, I’m the one in constant need of a cure. Since infancy, causing problems. Still today, see, trying to move against the flow of our glorious course, never happy, never satisfied. Stubbornly declining what our constitution entitles us to. Filled with malice, harboring a disruptive nature. The renegade. My outpour today so in line with well-publicized behavioral issues.

That’s indeed concrete, don’t doubt that for an instant. I’m providing all the substantiation needed to discredit my own allegations. Shooting myself in the foot, one would say. Like I’ve always done. Just to annoy others. The ace of sabotage. On purpose, flunking where others excelled simply to ruin the congratulation party. As if I was born with the mandate to tarnish all that’s around me. Why couldn’t I simply be great? And nicely follow the trends set out by our special destiny?

Yes, I was and remain the incarnation of irritation itself. The origin of vexations, fomenting displeasure as a hobby. Busy spoiling adulation ceremonies. The constant reminder that this world, our world, is far from perfect. Unable to grasp the basics of pride and satisfaction. Obstinate. Eminently fallible. No sense of honor. A vulgar provocateur, dirtying the family’s temple, throwing in disarray the praise rituals constantly put into motion, for we really had no other pastime.

Destructive Laolao, just out to make trouble, framing others so that they’ll suffer more than her. Gesticulating, so out of sync, hijacking attention away from those who genuinely deserve it. Throwing neurotic rocks in the pond of positive self-assessments, she’s the ripples distorting facts, changing the view, uglifying what took a lifetime to shape. She should have stayed longer at the hospital. Cumulating those three years wasn’t enough.

On my part, isn’t it conceit too, my belief that I created so many problems for others, and all by myself?

An absolute self-centeredness when I see myself capable of wrecking elation-prone spirits? Isn't it another kind of narcissism? The sort that is hostile, that objects, finding energy and motivation in disputes. The opposite side, but still very much part of the issue.

Yes, they wouldn’t have figured out the irrevocability of their rights, if it hadn’t been for my permanent wrongs. They wouldn’t have had so much light if it hadn’t been for my dark aspects. They wouldn’t have been able to become so righteous if I hadn’t been in perpetual need for corrections. They wouldn’t have loved their life with such suave intensity, if it weren’t for the threats I posed.

My imperfections had a mission: to stress how dissimilar we were. Reassuring them, especially their conclusion that the vision they had of themselves was impeccable. My deranged outpours a necessity: Through them, they apprehended how virtuous they were, treasuring even more their own irreproachable conduct.

I was therefore essential, not that they would thank me for it, you know. They used me to insufflate a new vigor into their sense of accomplishment. I tell you, they did require maintenance, these ladies.

As a vital mirror image, I had, of course, to be of a reversed structure. That was my job. They couldn’t pretend to be strong unless I accepted my weaknesses They certainly wouldn’t have been able to convince themselves they were sane if I, simultaneously, had tried to do the same. In the end, it gave me leverage. I deliriously came to believe I could control emotional patterns.

One might say they wouldn’t have had ears, if I hadn’t been there shouting. They wouldn’t have talked with cohesion if I hadn’t had a voice to be raving with. They wouldn’t have seen themselves so clearly, if I hadn’t used my eyes to highlight their presence. They wouldn’t have known about their own existence if I hadn’t accepted to compromise mine with consistency.

They desperately needed a public, someone who could either applaud or boo (it didn’t really matter which), a screen where to transfer their sense of life, a stage where to display the talented actors they were.

My pain was so much in demand. Utilitarian and practical. Through it, they could acquire some for their own personal use. It gave them something to feel, something to discuss. It defined their contour and poured substance into their shape. My pain became theirs. They purified it. Elevated it. Fine-tuned its discourse.

Then, they sat me in front of them and forced me to listen. Over, and over, and over again. My million nods of compliance and fake sympathy, or my failed attempts to run and disappear, the symptoms of their demands for comfort. And when they ran out of things to say about themselves, their beings thinning into the air, we would crank the carrousel again, setting madness into motion, as in slashing my own veins for example, and all would get back to normalcy. Their ballooning ego once more visible above my screwed-up head.

Regularly, crises and accusations that I took too much place. That I triggered abuse with my hysterical attitude, forcing them into violent modes of operation. Imagine: that kid playing dead will be the death of us. That girl running away from us, she’s the one abandoning, not the abandoned.

As she gets locked up, tarnishing our reputation, we’re the one’s caught between a rock and a hard place. She sucks up our energy, so little left for the good actions we had intended. She robs us of all these opportunities to show how benevolent we are. And she leaves us with no other choice than to fight back.

Indeed, there’s nothing we wouldn’t have done for her. If she could be reasonable just for a minute, we would be able to restore our shine and rank. Once that’s done, we would have the means to really help her. She’s the one we love the most. Actually, there’s nobody but her in our heart.

More, she’s the only one who can make us feel profoundly miserable. That’s why she’s so important to us. We need her. Both her melancholia and masochistic rage are vital sources of nourishment. How else would we know the world? What other means are there to make us part of something real and tangible? How can we have a pulse if her arteries aren’t throbbing with torment? If fear and anxiety aren’t propelled through her nervous system? She’s our poisoned food. She’s the test we must pass. The challenge we must overcome in order to become. To have a name, and occupy the territories we merit. The more she hurts herself, the more we grow, the more we fulfill our inner promises. In short, the more disoriented she gets, the more we know who we are: Everything, except her.

Has anyone ever been more essential than me?

That conviction, that my aches were indispensable, the heart of relationships, the cement that held our universe together, my instinctive rushes to mutilate myself as if my traumas were the condition that kept others in good shape, my wounds the demented corroboration we had flesh, all of these, my own hallucinations, were a negative representation of the illness that afflicted us all.

Contrary to what I claimed back then, I am no different. Suffering from the same type of megalomania typical of the women in the family. Also positioning myself as a crucial pivot, a nucleus, even though a covert one. My self-admiration clandestine, and listed, as a trick to survive, under the “casualty” category. If it got too rough, under fatalities, just to be sure I’d be well hidden and would outlast them. My imagination, a tool for vengeance. Judging my successes by the exorbitant price I paid to make sure, when the time was ripe, they’d get in turn punished.

That’s how we were, in that family. The women. As for the man in the vicinity, I wouldn’t know. And neither did my sisters and mother.

He’s the mystery. The incongruity. So preoccupied with ourselves, we didn’t think about checking what he was doing. To us? To them? To me? Or to himself. Who knows?

As I enter old age, the past greets me with sorrow because I cannot understand any of the parts of my own history. Although I’m sure things could not have been different. We were who we were. A simple, natural case of genuine bad luck.

98. Blogs blocked

Being located in China, I've been unable to post. Blogs keep being blocked, but I'll fix my problem soon while I'm back in Canada.

97. Crepuscular lights

One of my earliest memory, I must have been three, perhaps four, is about amazing red lights gyrating in a room. I woke up one night in a bed that wasn’t mine. My parents’ I guess. I’m alone. The window of that room faces the street. Although the glass panel is covered by wooden slats, fiery flashes of light find their way in.

Noise must have interrupted my sleep. Metallic sounds from the hallway. The room’s door is shut tight. I can still hear voices, loud, urgent, from far away, probably from the kitchen at the back of the apartment. Despite the distance, they’re audible, I even think they might be shouts. But all I care about through that din are these red lights gushing through the blinds above the bed.

The rays move in rapid sweeps against the ceiling and the walls. I’ve never seen that before. It’s so beautiful. Everything around me becomes a bright rare red. A colored transparency that instantly shares its tint with whatever it touches. It comes and goes, swiftly turns in the room. I’m blown away by so much splendor. By the dazzling whirlwind in front of my eyes. It’s extremely bright, but not blinding. It’s powerful, but not scary. It’s omnipresent, but takes no space.

As the red light brushes against every object in the room, it highlights them with an exact sanguine contour. Every detail goes from darkness to a clear crimson presence. Everything flickers, winks. Bits and pieces blinking around me, while wide stripes of red glide in a circling movement on larger surfaces.

I’m in that bed and feel absolutely privileged to witness such luminous apparitions. To discover that red can be like that, slashing and unreserved. An unquestionable color, decisive, thorough. Outright clear and manifest. Of course, at that very young age, I don’t have that many words, but that’s the way I feel.

I’m so proud of the experience that I tell myself that’s all I need to know for now.

I’ll ignore the commotion outside the bedroom. I won’t acknowledge there’s an ambulance by our front door. That my mother is being taken away on a stretcher screaming, once again for it’s a pattern. Not the stretcher, but the ear-piercing laments that she’s about to die.

It’s usually my fault. But not that night. I was asleep. I couldn’t have done that. I’m sure I’m blameless, therefore I can fully enjoy the lights without any other thoughts. I’m free. No responsibilities. I can be sensitive to the dancing bright color. Even believe it's there for my sole amusement.

Better still: The world outside the room sounds so busy, turbulent, a raucous affair, that so occupied it will leave me alone, totally forget about me at least as long as the red beams keep their glaring pace. So I pray for the light show never to end.

I’m telling you about this incident because as I grew older, I became quite interested in the visible spectrum. I studied it, fascinated by that precise range of shades the human eye can perceive. I made collages out of my passion. In a table of opposites, black is juxtaposed to white, but to me, it was always red, the longest wavelength we can discern. It’s our extreme. The end of our ocular journey. We can go no further. When you see the color red, you are at the boundary of your visual space.

In terms of atmospheric optics, the red crepuscular rays that had entered the room I was in that night, these twisting shafts of lights adorning the walls and furniture, they were like the safelight in a photographer’s darkroom. Allowing the view to unfurl with immunity. It had meant security, refraction and scattering of distress, columns of sheltering light. Streaming through the gaps in the window, that luminosity had radiated around the dawn and the dusk of nightmares. Penetrating, finding holes in blackness. It had made the shadows flush. Given a rich ruby glow to all I could see.

That’s why so many of my collages are in red. I thought you might want to know, how much I appreciate that color. Beyond it, I'm sightless.

Laolao

96. In sync

Curving back on myself in three dimensions and a fourth. Fictionalizing a global positioning system to locate the wormholes that would connect distant points in my thoughts. Figments of my imagination lighter than nothing, repelled instead of attracted, floating in deep space away from meteors. Deviating from the past. Each of my seconds never absolute, but fluctuating according to how experiences can move me around.

Spending most of my time at the subatomic level, I find an infinity of infinite answers, an affinity to them, because they're always dying in one place to be reborn elsewhere. Since their two moments vibrate in unison, I can retain some coherence as well as information.

Teleporting photonic ideas, applying beams of dense matter to explanations, and force fields to the atoms of my train of thoughts before they tumble down to an absolute zero temperature.

Suppose extreme entanglement. Suppose it’s traversable. That a theory of everything can make sense of even meaninglessness. Suppose we’re speculative entities meandering across complex spectral molecules, time traveling through dark times, ourselves our own event horizon.

Suppose that our throats can get crushed by the negative masses we swallow as we try to speak at the speed of light. Suppose we’re the creation of mathematics, of an abstract science, its very experiment as it tried to calculate radiation effects and disorders when establishing deep connections at micro-distances.

Wave amplitudes shaping electrons, one at a time, back and forth, no particular location, unable to tell differences as humanity keeps overlapping itself, an eternal folding and refolding of copies and originals. Transferring our bizarre state of consciousness into pulses of light occupied at shedding their energy away, to prove that bright bodies of knowledge can defeat the art of the impossible.

We’ve managed to attach our machines to nature, we've e-mailed ourselves over the wireless system of a Vedic philosophy, with a cc to many gods, transmitters-receivers invalidating each other. In sync. Repetitive signals from an electric storm. Telluric currents as evidence of partial sanity. Hitting the resonant frequency of our own fears while, simultaneously, we complain about it to the police.

Our volte-face are mind-blowing. All our tergiversations occuring at the same rate, our reversals as unescapable as a black-hole. And time is no arrow.

Laolao

95. On levers and catapults

I tell you, this Wednesday was an excellent day for the blossoming of stupidity. I won’t mention the events, they’re not worth our time. Instead, I’ll reflect on my fear that the future may not have that much of a future if that interplay between clinging to ignorance and practicing its deployment doesn’t hit one day the principle of entropy. Idiocy, indeed, seems to be gaining energy and finding new adepts all the time.

These are the moments when I truly feel lonely, walls encircling me, airtight. My thoughts vacuum-sealed. My speech insulated. My hopefulness in a zip-lock. Potential hermetically cut off, with nowhere to go. Surrounded on all sides by a wide, vicious, high-risk cluelessness. Unenlightenment unfurling more of its thick darkness.

I tell you also, the tradition of vigorous debates has vanished.

The only light on the horizon is with Archimedes. Solutions perhaps available if we address the problems of our reasoning (or absence of) from a down-to-earth mechanical perspective, as burdensome as these issues may seem. Matter-of-factness to describe human dilemmas, as intractable or heavy as they may appear.

It is true that a huge weight can be moved by a tiny force. It’s our only chance. These fools out there aren’t equipped to understand that, unaware knowledge can affect lives.

It ensues that intellectual transformation can come from simply having a place where to stand, a firm position, given that we know there’s a precise relationship between the weight that hinders judgment and its distance from the fulcrum.

The exact place where a dash of cleverness can pivot, like a simple, efficient machine.

That would be my advice for today.

Laolao

94. Recto-verso

Always wanted to go behind words, filled with expectations as to the physical reality of that hidden space. For space is the substance I would be interested in if I could get close enough to see, to experience the wave structure evolving on the far side of any word that can be.

What do the fundamentals of physics say about such a realm, the one beyond discrete things, separate things ending up interconnected through, for example, a sentence? The notion of time suddenly vibrating, combining its essence with its properties.

What would happen to understanding once it became an act of pure invention, of pure logical simplicity, an act evolving on the scale of parsimony?

What kind of knowledge would I then possess on the other side of words, the simplest explanation patiently awaiting to be? Probabilistic discourses gone, but the mind in attendance.

Behind words, there would be no meaning, only the irrelevancy of gravitational pull, the superfluousness of finite or infinite qualities to time and space.

But there would still be something that exists behind those words that I keep scratching, in that stubborn hope to reach their rear surface. There would be matter eternally. Redshifting, interacting bodies, mental events organized as occurrences in motion, finding their mass and solidity in the relationship they’d have to each other.

I would no longer have a need to seek meaning. I would be outside an expanding world. Out of reach of the Big Bang. I would be behind words. Where nothing collapses. Where there’s only activity. Only curves. No sound, although plenty of oscillations. At last, a part of the universe. Formed by everything the universe is.

Like all there is on the reverse, much further away than a noun or a verb, I would be a plain, uncomplicated rhythm.

This is what I truly hope to find behind words as I exhaust them with a relentless spherical beat of the heart. Energy exchanges and cosmological constants defining the field of codicology: The art of touching the verso.

Laolao

93. Lossitude

There are minutes where I feel lost. I call such times moments of lossitude, when feelings resembling those of an abandoned child cling to me, despite my age. Minutes that see the annihilation of experience, a life falling into helplessness, ready to implode and then disappear sucked by the compactness of my mood. Instants neither melodramatic nor emotional. Just burning fast inside. A physical pain. A blistering heat wrecking walls, those divisions keeping thoughts in order. Igniting the partitions that protect mental categories, the mind suddenly in disarray, most cerebral enclosures safeguarding my sanity incinerated to ashes.

Long minutes of lossitude. I think many would label them anxiety.

Havoc. Bursts of entropy. A radical but silent collapse, for it can never be spelled out. Words simply run away from the disaster zone.

A few minutes only.

That lossitude is not a weakness of mine. It is a danger. I must always treat it as such.

Laolao

92. The morphology of fortitude

I need words. I need lots of new words today. An obsession/compulsion. All the words I see are old used ones. I want new sounds. New syllables. I want to read an unknown lexicon so to discover it, plunge and sink into meanings I’ve never heard of. Learn again. From scratch, to see if ideas that were unthinkable till today can now be clearly articulated. Shaped on the screen. To point at things I could not imagine before these new phonemes came to be. I want new letters to express what waves beyond the reach of my vocal cords can sound like. New expressions to indicate the states of things we haven’t yet discussed. Something about extent, proportions, magnitudes that have escaped us. New measurements. A special language for subject matters we haven’t studied. I need new words. To hear how they're pronounced.

I need a different vocabulary, to break away from the poles of delusional pessimism and/or optimism maybe. To make promises that can be kept. To get rid of motivational speeches.

I want new verbal signs to transform mindsets. To better support images for what they are, and to help stop visualizing ourselves and our desires for success. No more positive thinking, wishful thinking. Just a nomenclature unable to tackle topics such as self-confidence, and aspirations.

I want a non-ethos phraseology. A tongue foreign to crowd-pleasing messages. I want risks to have clear names. I want to have idioms that fit the needs of courage, dimensions where the good side of hard times need not be reinforced. A jargon allergic to lies. No self-help recipes. I want realistic, lucid, well-enunciated disaster warnings. I want words for that. Not the ones with a double entendre. Not threats that end up feeling like reassurances. I don’t want sentences sanitizing bad news. Castrated words, pasteurized discourses. Terms whose main function is to disinfect meaning. Sterile dictions that have nothing to disclose.

I want words of the kind capable of creating understanding, acuity. Meant for information gathering. Plugged into insight and details. Words for perception and penetration. For our mental capacity for reconnaissance and exploration. For the dangers we encounter. I want words to designate particulars, not generalizations. I want a grammar meant for audacity and bravery, not for delays and detours. Words that do not retreat. Made for moments of adversity, words that know what it is to endure. Intrepid, undaunted. I want unflinching words. A language with the moral fiber of resilience.

Then, of course, I’ll listen.

laolao

91. The flâneur

Looking at the world around me, my eyes given a virtual reality overlay. Thoughts superimposed, the transparent part of my field of vision imprinted with out of sight ideas, undetectable wireless enhancements. I see souls and navigate through the wrinkles of personality identifiers. Counting the genes dictating the particular evolution strategy of a number of individuals. From an adaptive point of view, how our usefulness may eventually run its course. Or in the eyes of nature, how we survive predation among ourselves. So many memory cells overstaying their welcome. Fleshing it out, the non-mystical process by which we’re untreatable as people. Unmutated. Engineering our own devolution. The machinery of vulnerability characterized by immortality. Having absorbed our inorganic precursors. Replenishment being a powerful matter of material animating forces, to paraphrase Bergson my own way. Not even ourselves within our grasp. In a hidden corner of the mind, the cryogenic preservation of unrealizable expectations. Alchemical approaches extrapolating therapies for our frozen frailties. Bypassing the need for an interface between emotions and intelligence.

Oh no, not EQ again. Pervasive downloads into our biological storage devices. High fidelity to being increasingly dumber. Dismantling sensory channels to reconstruct the non-essential information that allows a maximum degree of human control over unwanted transcendence. From a bioprogressive perspective, the hybridization between our extremely-evolved-limitations and our indispensable humanity. Always running in parallel to the idea of being constantly smarter. The same quantity of crap immediately available to all for perusal. No nose, but a flash drive. Bits of data about chronic and self-replicating paradisiac disabilities. Biocompatible with our behavioral tendencies to perform solar-scale computations about the human race as a special singularity. Hacking more markets to better exploit them. Our technological genius just another financial instrument. Rapacious games played in the cul-de-sac of our brain to overcome alien competition. Wall Street as a parallel universe. Or ideological science fundamentally broken. Invalidating rules.

The fiction of ideas is so marvelous, my darlings. Modeling my internal state after entities with little experience at economic interaction, going for decay-prone probabilities. A strong feeling of temporal compression to unzip. Flying computer nodes, easily distinguishable from magic. Imagining we're simply part of a tool-using specie wearing puzzling glasses to enlarge sensorial bandwidth. Abstract symbols for objects and their super-conductivity. Rearranging syntactical input, countering the plasticity of implants education has grafted like roadblocks on the ground of my research on the ingression of synthetics.

I will not explore the fast roads to fabulous new media. I think we only get smarter over time by having lots of sex and making babies. It’s a slow process, I know. Messier also, since AI developments for neurons do not need diaper change.

Convergence and offspring, genuinely both outmoded and futuristic. A vehicle for the building of narratives over many generations, the stuff passing through our creative membranes without architectural rupture. Experiencing a sense of accomplishment. Inducing a potential for immersive learning. In its midst, just to be a flâneur.

But then, it’s true, if it doesn’t work, I won’t hesitate to use my repulsion ray gun on all that internalized biotech precognition that horribly runs through our modern veins. And I’ll move forward as a female freak on her own ethical terms. Flâner would then be for later.

90. Smoke signals

Like a cigarette hole where there used to be a face, that picture carried in one’s wallet, void has burnt, raged edges. A round scar through the layers of a Polaroid paper, plastic curling against the pressure of an intense incandescence. Souvenirs replaced by what can be seen through the punctured photograph when it is held in front of an inquisitive eye intending to face an eclipse. Ashes stuck to the perimeter, threads of cellophane intermingled with debris as vacuum suctions explosions of static scenes, all that’s captured without the need of permission.

I blow cigarette smoke through the holes. It comes out on the other side, the floating empty rings encircling the disappearance of the sun. Memory plumes, volutes of smoke joining cascades of clouds crazily diving into the horizon. How lost can I get before I ask for directions from migrating birds already far away. Their wings washing the day. Childhood monsters letting go of their cries and pain. The destroyer in me under hypnosis, keeping its balance on the youngest branch of a family tree. Never has love been so authentic. Oxidizing softness internalized like mad.

(There’s never any justice for the weak. Everyday the phone rings to repeat this. No eye contact, but hysterical balloons losing their air fast, whistling, flying out of control, crashing into the dilated tunnel of an iris.)

A drunk manual typewriter gone violent, hammering in red the prose of cryptic captions zigzagging under cultural illusions. The undecided descriptions of collective follies. Ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts, with yellowed filters crushed into mute accordions. Stained glass bringing fractured light to one’s anatomy and its long list of alibis. Shreds of tobacco sticking to the fingers holding the eraser going over one’s much needed solemnity. Perhaps not an eraser, but a hunter after the invisible circulation of ideas in search of a sound purpose.

The flame of the lighter at it again, brightening sunshine from behind the dark disc. Nicotine wrapping neurons with the very strings holding the stars high up in the sky. Tentacles of illumination networking their viewpoints. Interlocking their insights. Fine meshes for thoughts to bounce, a trampoline hosting mind-games. Untraceable veins of ruminations in the heart of the brain.

But then, I blow through holes only meant for the vapors of reverie, passages, for twists of contemplative cogitation, to allow reflections to reach the mirror site of airy suspensions.

See the mental trellis they weave. I rest on that foggy hammock. Safe, gently rocked by the white puffs escaping from my lips. Messages for distant people to read. Since today you’ve gone back home. While I return to loop-shaped writing habits.

89. c u

You’re flying tomorrow and will be arriving at my place late in the evening. All will be ready, a snack, one of your favorite movies loaded in the DVD player, your toy box, your beds. I will have removed and hidden what’s dangerous, my scissors, the glue and chemicals I use for my collages, glass objects you could reach.

I’ve applied for a few days leave from work so to spend time with you. We’ll paint, draw, play. I’ll take you out for lunch. But the most important thing we’ll do is talk. I’ll listen carefully to your voices. You’ll tell me about kindergarten, friends, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, perhaps adventures involving the dogs or cats in your neighborhood. Your rollerblade escapades. Family outings. A new song you’ve learned. Tripping over your words as you’ll be so impetuous, so many things to say all at once, borrowing from three languages to make ideas sharp and complete, syllables thrown high in the air like star dust suddenly flowing against the night. You’ll want me to know everything in one shot. You’ll forget to breathe. And then you’ll put your arms around me and hold me tight, whispering into my ear how happy you are to be at my place. Yes, you do that.

I’ll marvel about how fast you grow, how in only a few weeks you’ve changed. Your vocabulary exploding along different routes, your expressions more precise, your sentences versatile and animated. Your stories filled with transitions and pauses, more details. Degrees introduced. I’ll be listening with my skin, my eyes, my smile. Admiring your pride. The diamond light on your face, your giggling overtones when you speak and I understand.

We’ll chat and chat. Partaking in energetic conversations. Your sense of humor peppering the gossip.

And I’ll trace in my mind all the furrows we need to record your voices. In French, for it is in that language that our love is the deepest. In Mandarin, because we’re having so much fun. And in English, since once in a while we should also include others.

Laolao

88. Laconophilia

I listen to economists, to political, financial experts, business leaders and analysts, and wonder if there is a limit to puerility.

The lack of inner discipline, of rigor. Of intellectual architecture. Nothing else but frail edifices to house knowledge. Only gut feelings to support arguments. Everything is warm, moist, fuzzy. The science of thinking washed away with liquid justifications, softened, diluted. It drools. A weak, discolored fiction.

And these are our leaders. Directionless. Dangerous. A well-marketed look of pensiveness to hide the fact they don’t have a clue about what they’re saying. Never the strength to perform demanding tasks. Porous memories.

I am angry. Humans were supposed to have been designed in line with the image of God. What’s wrong, then, with our divinities? How could they come up with such limitations. Smallness. Narrowness. Insufficient ideated weight.

I hate it when speakers, writers, bosses treat us like idiots.

Never applaud these people. Never be a follower. See them for what they are. Stare a minute to remember if you must. Then, turn your back. Walk away. Go far.

Yes, be wary of mushy discourses. Of what feels comfortable, contended with anemic explanations. Wet words leaking, spreading sloppy niceties into the brain. Infecting mental functions.

Be careful. Go for what’s icy and severe. For what’s robust. For what sounds tough, unyielding at the touch. For what’s stony, unfriendly. The ruthless. Leave behind what’s gentle and made to please and reassure. That’s a trick. It will decompose you. A lot of sap.

Never fear Sparta, dear. Never. Be a good soldier. A good poet. Create men and women. Not entrapping, beguiling sentiments posing as the songs of powwow.

Love, Laolao

87. Kamala, temples and labs

I’m waiting – eager, excited, stretched forward to a maximum – for the two final episodes of Battlestar Galactica, to be aired today. Science-fiction. Yep. I’ve no problem saying it: I often prefer sitting in front of the screen with BSG than watching the reality within my skull unfold, which means that I, for one, can tell the difference.

BSG has tackled some of the issues occupying western civilization today. As far as we can tell. How science and religion cope with each other. Anxieties about technologies. About our creations. The city.

Then, the plurality and/or singularity underlying beliefs. Eternal questions about mortality and the recycling destiny of matter. What are goals, where is it we think we’re going. Are we heading forward or simply fleeing. How do we define humanity, divinities. And that History that keeps repeating itself, as if we weren’t learning much despite our self-proclaimed prowess.

Also, leadership models. Why do people listen and follow, band together or break away. What’s in the justification of war. That enemy is so much like us. Could I be a cylon. Who is, I can’t tell. Can I give birth. Should I. Can reproduction be a philosophical issue, be an ethical one. The machine and the flesh, how do they combine. Can they. Should they. Sex and violence. The inevitability. Investigating destiny, since nature is what it is. A circle and the Return of the Same. A sameness that is changed once it comes back to its origin. For having traveled through all of its potential fates. And what are these mistakes that keep trapping us, making no difference in the outcome. Or do they.

BSG is a show about tons of questions.

The ones modern intelligentsia has stopped asking in a penetrable, lucid way. Articulated by TV script writers, actors and special effects technicians. Brilliant, because they don’t try to provide answers, but widen the mystery, elevating our understanding difficulties to new problematic dimensions. A new prose. A selection of images and sounds adding depth to our main enigmas. As we are lost in that huge space, civilian ships clinging to Galactica, a fragile balance of powers, always moving, delicate, and in danger. Victory and defeat annulling each other, although good at characterizing the struggles by which we define our worth.

They are no aliens. There’s us and what we did. And it is what we did that stands in the path. Interesting. That the gods of Kobol did give up on us. And that we lied to ourselves. And will lie to ourselves again. It has already happened, and it will happen again.

Political, because democracy is no perfect solution. But it is part of the leading question. The one about turmoil. But so is the military. So are all our inventions. Imperfections being so perfect in organizing ourselves as a society defined by tensions. As we jump, disappear and appear. Should I network or not network. Paranoid as the enemy is in our ranks, am I its double or is it mine. Am I modeled after him, or is he modeled after me. We give birth to each other, murder each other. And start the same thing over and over. Dictators. A minute as the puppet of an armed authoritarian regime, later as preacher of a religious sect. Qualification: science. Was that a question. A go(o)d question. A one about seduction. Not so much principles.

Yes, I have enjoyed every scenes of Battlestar Galactica. The thrill. The beauty of possibilities. The plots. The ramifications. The characters. The Vipers. The signs pointing to humanity. Every second of confusion as we vented air and water. As machines could feel love. And us hatred. But then, we also loved and they hated. As we often lost more than we gained in terms of knowing. Questions getting bigger with each episode like they do in my life. Interested by the role of failure and shortcomings. By the magnificence of it all. When tolerance makes it way. And it is because we start again and again. Equal perseverance of the good and the evil, a quest for Earth. Destruction and creation. An inquiry into causes, effects and evolution (if there is one). The colonies, the colonizers, the colonized. The horoscopes. Matters of attitude, organic matter. Investigating throughout the script what matters most to us. And why some other things don't.

Investigation into the fiction of science, and the science of fiction. Art and violence. Culture and reproduction. Technologies as a part of nature. What is a purpose, and what are the means and limitations leading gloriously to achievements, fiascos. Are they different. Boomer and Starbuck. The President and the Commander. The Chief and Gaius. Apollo and Saul Tigh. Number 6 and Zarek. How do they belong to our own story lines. Will Caprica heighten our uncertainties, query our concerns a bit further. Linking past and future. Still scratching my head about the Final Five. Pegasus, Colonial One, Cloud Nine. Are we all in need of kamala. Is it a drug, a mother (program) in Matrix. A word in one of the languages I don’t understand. Kamala, temples, labs, nuclear warheads and toasters. Emotions and rationality functioning side by side. Often interchangeable. Explosive. Unsecured. Confrontational allies in their perpetual mutual attraction. Poetry and algorithms debating differentiation.

86. A caustic substance

Have you felt recently any rebellion against reason? Seen irrationalism peak here and there, either denials or blunt attacks, pronouncing intellectual stances null and void. That the mind is impotent, totally incapable of separating facts from fiction. Reality being nothing more than a delusion, even simple references to it ranked unfashionable, our thoughts hardly related to the world we think we live in. Forbidden to say that I am myself, for I’m not supposed to know who or what myself is. Or that a thing is a thing. Stuck in full-fledged inadmissibility, whatever knowledge I may claim deprived of a sound relationship to what my senses perceive. Everything in the realm of the hypothetical. For the function of thinking might not be to contribute to intelligibility, as I had initially thought.

I get so confused, my darlings.

I get so desperate at times.

I wish I could excel at epistemology. Explain what a cheap drama it is, this crisis made of beliefs. Opinions camouflaged, disguised as concepts not supposed to solve any problems. As if that could make sense. Oh, but yeah, making sense does assume existence, and since that can’t be proven, why bother.

I do get worried, you see. For you, your future.

Under the cover of philosophy and logic, many of our contemporary essayists, our thinkers, are developing a new religion. Articulating a mystique. Presenting their cryptic representational system as a rationale to renounce sanity. Caught in the fallacy where a mind that is said to be invalid still must be used to validate the invalidity in question.

A dominant need for the inscrutable, blanketing all with sophisticated forms of occultism. The impossibility to rely on oneself to perceive and understand. Denying, in fear, a status to knowledge. Denigration. Vilifying ontology, transforming it into articles of faith. Not texts, but incantations. Not arguments, but values. Evacuation of the notion of fact, my perception of the apple in my hand an expression of the abuse committed by the established social and moral order. Maybe. Maybe. Just a spectacle. An idiosyncratic impression. No apple there, but another opportunity to completely fool myself and confirm the eternal state of ignorance and helplessness linked to my human condition.

There is no longer a way, it is claimed, to deal with the meaningful. It is out. Uncool. Retrograde. A pastness. It is no longer there, in my field of vision, only a vision. Not there either, on the tip of my tongue. On the edge of my brain. Tested by my fingers on the paper. It is no longer accepted, received, welcomed. Or expected. I’m left with statements of repudiations. And it’s professed that’s all I have, all I’ll ever have. Told I must believe this. Accept that it is true even though truth is from now on an arbitrary something. A deep conviction, a warship of worship, I add.

Is someone saying, at this very moment, that I must be stupid beyond repair. A vulgar, stiff pragmatist.

Did I ever tell you the story behind my choice one day to be a bit schizoid, not that involved with people I mean. Maybe at this point I don’t really need to tell that story. It would just add oil unto a bonfire already well fed by contempt and allegations about physical forces. Despite despots, see, I do remain reasonable. And know what inflammable spells out for the reader. Sensory faculties may no longer be reliable, but our sense of duty should be.

Laolao

85. Congruence

There are those, like Gödel, who have little faith in natural languages and who despair when faced with the lack of precision plaguing human communication. These ‘rectifiers’ may turn indeed to mathematics, sure that theorems have the potential to render mutual understanding perfect.

Maybe. Who am I anyway to question such endeavors.

As I said in my last post, I’m only preoccupied with meaning from the standpoint of curiosity. I’m interested in testing significance, in watching it emerge, looking forward to being surprised by the appearance of subtleties. I’m an observer, not a writer. I survey both frictions and relationships among words. I monitor activity at the paragraph level. Trends, drifts in the sounds suggested by letters.

Meaning, sooner or later, surfaces, defining its own message, purpose, effects. The mystery is never about content, it’s rather about the arrangement, layout, choices that lead to the presentation of substance.

I’m talking about beauty here.

For a mathematician, there is an irrefutable equivalency between beauty and truth. In seeking perfection, both beauty and truth are merged in the lines of an indubitable proof, for example. Non-dissociable from one another.

But letters do not function like digits, punctuation does not have the same type of responsibility as a set of scientific graphic symbols does. The alphabet is unconcerned with the dimension of truthfulness. The letter “A” has a wider and therefore vaguer potential than a “2” or a “9.” The pursuit of scientific truth requires an immediate and unconditional surrender to beauty as an infinite principle of unification, whereas words seek a panoply of possible veracities that can be generated using an explosive amount of resources. But both systems, I agree, are courageous in nature. Both overflow the edges of our mind, stretch beyond our brain cells to meet what is outside of us. And that would be the meaning of beauty, when contact is established with what is no longer our individuality, when we touch the outer layer of our skin and possibly everything else on that side.

For mathematics, it is utter objectivity. For the text, it can be said profound subjectivity. But ultimately, it is the same. Always a construction aimed at what is external in an effort to create ultimate acknowledgment, the highest form of knowledge. In that sense, truth is also a construction, a human statement. So what remains is beauty, which is neither a feeling nor a fabrication.

For science, what is true is thought to be beautiful. For poetry, nevertheless, bold truth can be perceived as ugly. What matters for literature is the presence of authenticity, a preoccupation with various types of accuracy, the analysis of metaphoric disguises and fugues. And that complex calculation often takes the form of seemingly undirected sounds and rhythms. It can materialize from the apparent abandonment of a method. From a supposed surface errancy. It may even give the false impression of improvisation. But all that time, it only seeks an encounter with beauty, the moment when all fits in its place and nowhere else.

Beauty is therefore the same for a philosopher as it is for a scientist. It is a perfect meeting of time and space, homogeneity. Two entities so identical that they are inseparable when superposed, existing as one. A moment when we realize the objects of our interest are exactly positioned the way and where they should be. This is the beauty of abstraction as found in mathematics and poetry. Amorphous, non-temporal. Scientists, thus, are as much estheticians as their literary counterparts. Poets as rational as mathematicians. And they're all realists. Carefully working at spotting beauty.

Laolao

84. With or without age

I hold my own controversies as I sleep and dream about thinking.

Last night, I was acting as a kind of developmental biologist on the look out for time markers, examining speech and behavior to guess the age of populations. How old are you, really? This is what I asked in my dream. Arguing that we age at different rates, in different ways, different signs indicating the length of time one has lived.

Some of my teenage students being hardly more than five years old in maturity, others in their twenties branded by the distinctive nature of centenarians. Similar results, on might say, but it’s the path that perhaps matters, how we get to be who we are. And how long it has taken us.

Wondering whether a chronological perspective to human aging could correlate with how we feel about the past, what has elapsed, how light or heavy some days have appeared to us. The speed of minutes, the ones filled with happiness, others with pain or fear. How deep are such traces, and what do they reveal about our own personal duration.

Do biological signs translate the way we perceive the span of existence. Is there a reliable age-estimation procedure to render with accuracy the amplitude of life’s extent. What’s the best time scale. As I dream about thinking, questions take the appearance of people I’ve known.

My mother died without a wrinkle on her face. A cousin had completed all of her life cycles before the age of three, and a fatal car accident. A friend succumbing to the scorching fevers of AIDS, his 30-year old body consumed by a millennia of suffering. An adolescent having never known anything else than leukemia, dying with a serene, youthful smile in her father’s arms. But living creatures around us, many clutching to short ideas and overwhelming beliefs, unable to be light, incapable of bending, grayness in each glance, attached to arrested opinions about the world and themselves. I have met, quite recently actually, a 14 year-old who was no spring chicken, I tell you.

Age is a number. Yet, it is an approximation. It certainly indicates when I was manufactured, but it says little about my difficulties to become a mature individual. It reveals nothing about how embryonic my personality has remained throughout the years. It doesn’t explain why I still feel inexperienced, never quite ready. Filled with hesitation, still expecting to grow up and acquire problem-solving skills. Intuitively aware I’m unformed, unfinished. Still in the making. Anticipating the threshold of an upcoming birth as a start to the accumulation of valuable data on how to conduct myself.

How can I provide a full-proof answer, dispute what legal documents say about my age. Produce evidence of my unreadiness. Demonstrate that I’ve never outgrown the fetal stage. I’m not childish. On the contrary. I’ve never been a kid. All along, I’ve been rudimentary. On the edge of nascency. Displaying signs of potential. Announcing that I may have a future. Nothing infantile about my mind. It just never came to be, still preparing itself.

In my conversational dreams at night about thinking, I fantasize about being pensive. Becoming a thoughtful individual. Discussions where I’m wise and insightful, corroborating my biomarkers.

I dream I have a philosophy. That events have added up to lessons learned. Circumspection and judiciousness. That when I speak, sagacity can be heard. My dreams are that I am exactly my age. Talking in my sleep with discernment and balance. Showing, with insightful words, what more than half a century should sound like. I dream with perfection that I can handle decades of exposure to events, and then I wake up, still ill-equipped. Unpracticed. Unrecorded history as a relic. Things that can be as memories.

Can genomic studies disclose one’s true age. Can research into dreams create a dialogue worthy of time since one’s birth date. Can personal development be unveiled as much by the lines around the eyes as the ones spoken. Can these ever match.

Laolao