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

83. The onlooker

I did a small collage yesterday. Had no idea, no plan, nothing except a need to rip magazine pages, to glue these uneven pieces to a wooden board, to look at what happens if organized content laid on a sheet of paper gets submitted to rupture and hapharzardness.

Had no message. I wasn’t communicating. I wasn’t inspired. I was simply curious. That’s the whole point. Not wanting anything more. No faith whatsoever in my own central themes. I do not have a mission, I do not have any information to share. I’m simply interested in the effects shreds of colored paper generate when randomly placed next to each other. Marveling at such occurrences. And I’m satisfied.

I tend to write with a similar approach. Words are always fragments torn from past sentences. Since their beginning, they’ve all often been part of a structure, invoked by authors to convey intentions, written down as elements of a line of thought destined to be read. All of them have been used in titles, paragraphs, stories, essays. They’ve all contributed to building logical compositions. Arranged on a page so to create sense. Bricks in the edifice of knowledge.

I look at a word, aware of its huge history, and wonder what it would look like if placed near another similarly potent. What sort of phonetic protuberance would I hear. What shape, slide, surge can be designed. A “k” next to an “s” or how vowels cope with each other. Where would breathing set its movements. Would the intake of air jerk or be mellowed down by some soft resonance. What would happen if the amount of syllables changed. Why do letters clash or melt, for they do have affinities, aversions, sometimes even indifference. I have little to do with their mood.

It doesn’t always matter what they mean, because eventually words, in an autonomous fashion, will draw their own significance from the way they relate to their own presence. There’s meaning out there, it’s everywhere, in the great depth of microcosm, mixed with all the punctuation that can be. It organizes itself along guidelines that escape premeditation, over which one has little influence. I’m just supposed to let it happen. As a hand on the keyboard. I’m simply trying this or that. Enlarging possibilities. The rest is what counts. And it is a master. I cannot teach it anything. It teaches itself. And I'm pleased, I’m the content onlooker.

Laolao

82. Lack of ambition

Maybe my mind is not messier than that of others. I could be imagining my chaos, unaware the condition is shared across the board and therefore, a norm. A commonality characterizing the human specie. Our disorganized plans for fixing the universe being just that, an attribute of our typical thinking patterns.

Some would call it creative chaos, the superbness of complications: That mental untidiness, a paragon. Clutters and imagination considered good substitutes. Innovation and vision as degrees of disorder within a system. Artistry like a panic struggle against the forces of nature. Discrepancies always being the key to an idea. Incoherence inherently part of the act of designating everything under the Sun. And then losing the common thread that runs through us all.

I could have wrongly thought I was special, my muddles all over the place, stacks of unsolved and obsolete mysteries blocking the view, preventing me from looking, forging ahead. Believing I’m out of the ordinary, engulfed in chronically self-replicating pontifications seeking credibility through outrageous accumulation. The diabolical spirit of the collector surpassed by the mad amount of items to file, the breakdown spontaneously imminent. So many cross-references that the chart gets darkened beyond recognition and usability. I may have thought I was unique. A taint, a shameful expression of failure. Archiving under ‘deplorable’ the fact I always saw myself on the edges of blurry problems, never at the heart of clear solutions. Marginal and incapable of respected attainment.

Indeed, such a false perception may have been from the start the crux of the imbroglio. As I age, I see intense states of chaos often displayed around me as models of excellence. And I get more confused. In the words of many, I’m getting much better.

Improvements of the kind have never been part of my intent.

Have never belonged to my decisions, those duly recorded under menial beliefs in peace and quiet.

I will therefore decline the promotion.

laolao

81. Knots

Looking at words in an unthinking way, free from avoidance or attraction. The unappreciated importance of the blank mind. No decline, no arousal, staying away from a task-oriented focus. Absent from the imperatives of cognitive performance. Just traces of letters on the screen, their contortions, the way they bend and their loops, knotted lines like entangled strings jostling one another. Significance tied up in the midst of complexities, unaccounted for twists and turns against the white indifference of a page.

No meaning yet. Only serpentines and nodules, a swelling of long strokes, threads and their crossings running after yet to be measured probabilities.

How many times must arcs overlap, swirling vortices, before they can be decrypted, before an observed distribution of knots starts to make sense?

Angular tumbling - kinetically unlimited; words buckling under the curvature of their length; multidimensional projections of both stiffness and flexibility; the brute-force of randomized paths; the agitation of possibilities: An extreme configuration of topological variants piled up right here, under my perplexed eyes.

So, I head straight for a knot theory.

laolao