Surprise your pig

The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:20:11 GMT

This little book is truly frightening. It is an incredibly astute observation of the human thought process and our muddled psyche, and I cannot help but be shocked by the conclusions it presents.

I also feel a strong connection with the protagonist - it's like the book was written about me. His desires and his errors are not unlike mine, and in spite of great resistance I feel a strong pull towards the Gurdjieffian system, for all its flaws and weirdness.

I also have the intuition that the way it is described in the book is way the world is.

The book can be downloaded here:

http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/1431945_f61v0/P.%20D.%20Ouspensky%20-%20The%20Strange%20Life%20Of%20Ivan%20Osokin.pdf

Another link:

http://www.box.net/public/rscbgoyik0

Legal case against God dismissed

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:54:58 GMT

It is with great joy that I report the following:

A US judge has thrown out a case against God, ruling that because the defendant has no address, legal papers cannot be served.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7673591.stm

Mr Chambers sued God last year. He said God had threatened him and the people of Nebraska and had inflicted "widespread death, destruction and terrorisation of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants".

Absolutely frightening

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:29:47 GMT

The side of America one seldom gets to see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wroj0FLvzs

Penguin Knighted

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:26:52 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7562773.stm

Waiting for Schadenfreude

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:49:07 GMT

It is heartening to see that there are other people with the same beliefs and thinking as me: quoted here is an article from the NYtimes.

-------------

A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders, stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

“These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,” he said. “And now they’re earning millions and millions – in bonuses alone.”

The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s.

The feeling of injustice wasn’t just about money, though it was partly about being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills, as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his “Reflections on the Art of Going Broke” (“Who’ll Stop the Drain?”) in Harper’s in 1998.

It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.

They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular) had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the only acceptable — even viable — ones possible.

In the 1970s, even in New York, it had been financially possible for a middle class family to survive if parents — even one parent — built a professional life around something other than purely making money. In the 1980s — even in the “greed is good” (which was of course meant to be a damning phrase) 1980s — it seemed respectable, honorable and, dare I say, valuable to do things other than make a lot of money. But by the late 1990s, in New York, if you weren’t in the financial industry, it was hard to survive.

And so it went, in a more general way, throughout the country, in the whole winner-take-all-era ushered in by the boom years of the late 1990s. The model for success narrowed. The goal posts marking success grew more out of reach. For all the people who did something with their lives other than doggedly, single-mindedly — and successfully — pursuing wealth (“You mean, some people’s jobs are just about making money?” Julia once asked me in the course of one of our “What the World is About” conversations), life got harder and scarier and more confusing.

Many of us who’d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or creative, or “helping” professions, woke up to realize, once we had families, that we’d perhaps been irresponsible. We couldn’t save for college. We could barely save for retirement. If we set up a “family-friendly” lifestyle, we threw our financial futures down the drain.

So, like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we were entitled to do better than that. And if we lived in the New York area, or another similarly wealthy area where the spoils of the new Gilded Age were constantly thrust in our faces, we felt, like my friend on the train, a little something more: we knew that we were losers.

(“The Big L,” a friend, an art school grad turned design consultant, declared last week, calling me in tears after her stockbroker told her how little she cared about her modest portfolio. “Why not just brand it right on my forehead and be done with it?”)

This financial crisis is supposed to be a big moment of reckoning. “666-Mark of the Beast” and “Root of all Evil” the End-of-World Web sites are shouting, quoting prominent economists on the demise of the American banking system. “Wall Street, R.I.P.”, a headline in The Times proclaimed last weekend. “The Master of the Universe Era is over,” New York magazine chimed in.

For those of us who have hated this period — the wealth worship, the wealth gap, the elevation of everything suspiciously shiny and irrationally bubbly and stupidly ebullient, there should be some feeling of vindication. But it just isn’t coming. A great emptiness — and a gnawing kind of fear — has taken its place.

After 9/11, psychologists said that the tragedy and trauma would magnify whatever emotional state people were already experiencing. Depressed people would become much more depressed. Anxious people would become much more anxious.

The current financial crisis has, I think, proven to be a similar sort of emotional Rorschach test. People who felt impotent feel even more powerless. Those who felt lied to see new levels of conspiracy. Demagogues are engaging in even more demagoguery.

And those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we’re double-loser freelancers) SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

The very wealthiest are, as always, likely to do just fine. Real, hard-core Wall Street, as Tom Wolfe reminded us last weekend, long ago decamped for the hedge funds of Greenwich. The political leaders who allowed this mess to develop have turned into the great defenders of “Main Street.” (If I have to hear the juxtaposition of “Main Street” and “Wall Street” one more time, I will be the one drowning in a pool of vomit.). It’s a whole host of other people — vulnerable middle class homeowners and small business owners and, now, universities unable to make payroll — who are hurting.

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going on the train.

“There’s a lot of rueful chuckling. There’s a lot of talk about riding this out, about maintaining,” is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the Universe. They were curiosities then — remote, very rich, and decidedly not like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world; there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play. Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street — of cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We’re all losers now. There’s no pleasure to it.

----------------

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/waiting-for-schadenfreude/

If you get the chance, read the comments on the article too.

David Foster Wallace

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:09:28 GMT

David Foster Wallace hanged himself yesterday: he was 46. He was a writer I've read on occasion - I've found his writing frustrating and brilliant in equal parts, and I never managed to finish "Infinite Jest". But there's no doubt that he was someone who was very intent on communicating genuine experience with other people, and had examined his own psyche and patterns of behaviour like few others. I'm definitely going to pick up "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" when I get the chance. Here is the transcript of a university commencement address that I think is worth reading:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."
"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:53:28 GMT

Lol! It's like School of Athens, but unintentional?

There's sure some hilarious stuff on the BBC: who needs The Onion when you have the BBC, when real news is funnier than fake news? Take a look at this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7603530.stm

"The secret to successful flirting is letting someone know how you feel". Well well!

"Telling someone you fancy 'I really like you' could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests."

I don't know how life can go on as usual, after this momentous breakthrough in scientific understanding of human relations.

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:03:57 GMT

Suddenly, 3 Russians added me on facebook. Something must be right with the world.

Seneca

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:06:59 GMT

If these were Seneca's sentiments over two thousand years ago, I can't imagine what he would think, living in today's world.

"How long
shall we covet and oppress, enlarge our possessions,
and account that too little for one man,
which was formerly enough for a nation? and
our luxury is as insatiable as our avarice. Where
is that lake, that sea, that forest, that spot of
land, that is not ransacked to gratify our palate?
The very earth is burdened with our buildings;
not a river, nor a mountain escapes us. Oh that
there should be such boundless desires in our
little bodies! would not fewer lodgings serve us?
We lie but in one, and where we are not, that is
not properly ours. What with our hooks, snares,
nets, dogs, we are at war with all living
creatures; and nothing comes amiss, but that
which is either too cheap, or too common; and
all this to gratify a fantastical palate. Our
avarice, our ambition, our lusts, are insatiable;
we enlarge our possessions, swell our families, we
rifle sea and land for matter of ornament and
luxury. A bull contents himself with one meadow,
and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants,
but the little body of a man devours more
than all other living creatures. We do not eat
to satisfy hunger, but ambition; we are dead
while we are alive; and our houses are so much
our tombs, that a man might write our epitaphs
upon our very doors."

The great marathon fail

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:19:49 GMT

I feel terribly sorry for the guy. :(

http://mixmakers.net/other/my-first-marathon-experience/

Olympic 2012 logo

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:05:19 GMT

The british olympic 2012 logo, which cost 400,000 pounds and took 1 year to design.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/606/A23431826

I think the British take their humour too far. Surely, they can't be serious?

Buena Vista Social Club lyrics

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:08:14 GMT

I've always loved their music, but for the first time I'm paying attention to the lyrics of Buena Vista Social Club. They're almost like zen poetry - simple, mundane details told in a way that brings out not poignance and mystery (like in the case of zen poetry) but more of ache and longing buried deep within us, inside somewhere.

There is a tremendous similarity between folk lyrics from all corners of the world and also between the emotions they evoke - it's a pure, unpretentious sentiment, worked on with care and honesty by different mouths and different souls, until the song takes a life of its own and channels the spirit of the culture using the voice of an individual.

On one of my first days on Arran I went to a local pub where they were playing traditional Scottish music, and there was a girl from a village in the north sitting in the audience who was invited to sing. She sang an incredibly moving and beautiful song that would make you burst into tears if you did not find yourself in polite company - indeed, I saw a burly, tattoed man desperately wiping his tears away before his wife could see them. I knew that night that this was to be a very special trip.

I feel so awfully sad that this world of folk music is lost to us, where people used to work in the fields and sing at the same time in rhythm with their movement, and now instead we have machines and pesticides and suicidal bureaucrats who have never seen a farm in their lives. The soul is paying the price for the whims and conveniences of the body and the mind.

Anyway, here are some of my favourite lyrics from Buena Vista Social Club's first album.

---
Chan Chan

I'm going from Alto Cedro to Marcané
Then from Cueto, I'm going to Mayarí.
The love I have for you
I cannot deny
My mouth is watering
I just can't help myself.
When Juanica and Chan Chan
Sifted sand together on the beach
How her bottom shook
And Chan Chan was aroused.
Clean the dry sugar cane leaves
From the path
So I can get to that trunk
I want to sit down.

Y tu que has hecho?

On the trunk of a tree, a young girl,
Carved out her name, filled with joy
And the tree, touched to the core,
Let a flower drop down to the girl.

I am the tree, sad and deeply moved.
You are the girl who wounded my trunk
I have always guarded your beloved name,
And you, what have you done with my poor flower?

El Carretero

Along the track by my house
A cart-driver passed
With his sentimental songs
The peasant sang:
I'm going to the crossing
To unburden my load
I'm going to the crossing
To unburden my load
There I'll reach the end
Of my crushing labour.
Ride on up the mountain.
I work without rest
So I can marry
I work without rest
So I can marry
And if I can achieve that
I'll be a happy man.
Ride on up the mountain.
I am a peasant and a cart-driver
I live well off the land
Because the countryside is paradise
The most beautiful place on earth
Work the mountain, cultivate the plain
Reap the fruits of your labour.

Ay Candela

A rodent put on a dance for some great amusement
He chose a mouse as his drummer, to play for the whole day.
An elegant and amiable cat came along too,
'Good evening my friend'
He said to the drummer
'I can play too,
And you can take a rest'.
The mouse left the room half-crazy,
'Now I'll have to go and rest!'
And the cat played a lighthearted danzón in his delightful way.
The mouse got up on the palm-tree roof and announced politely:
'And now if you want to dance, find yourself another drummer!'

La Bayamesa

In her soul, the Bayamo woman carries
Sad memories of the past
Memories of green pastures
Make her passionate tears overflow
She is true, she brings only goodness
And love to mankind.

But she can hear her homeland crying out
But she can hear her homeland crying out
She has left everything, she has burnt everything
It is her life, her religion.
---

The problem is that I think very few people reach the ends of their crushing labours.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:21:28 GMT

So I just got back from India. I was born there, and have been trying to figure the place out for some time now.

Gurdjieff wrote a book titled "Life is Real, Only Then When I 'Am'", and I'm sure he meant something entirely different by it, but I Am allowed to Be and feel that my Life is Real most acutely on the streets of India. Everywhere else, life is sanitised and its daily abrasions abstracted, and man has largely conquered the vagaries of nature and its shocks and uncertainties slip through the cracks only during war and natural diasters, while in India the rules of the jungle still apply, but with modern infrastructure and implements in place of organic life. It's a short cut to mental illness for the common man, but also probably a fast track to liberation for the spiritual aspirant, simply because of the dense and intense array of experiences its streets afford.

In other news, I found out that a number of my relatives in India are walking, talking machines without souls, like most people everywhere else in the world.

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 06:40:00 GMT

"Although many of us are daunted by the thought of trying to master a new language, the average Canadian could acquire one every year in the time he now spends watching television."

The Declining Absolute

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:20:12 GMT

"There is indeed a way in which we can compare the souls of civilizations, and the different phases of one civilization. This is according to their view of the universe.

In the earlier part of this present book we tried to establish the general structure of the universe. We had to suppose a philosophical Absolute, in which swam, so to speak, infinite numbers of galaxies. Similarly within our own galaxy or Milky Way swam innumerable sum. Within our solar system swam planets. Upon the surface of our planet, the Earth, swam the world of organic life. Within this world of organic life swam individual man, within man cells, within cells molecules, within molecules electrons.

Now each world or cosmos is incommensurable with the one which contains it. It disappears in the greater one, becomes invisible in relation to it. The higher cosmos contains infinite possibilities for the lower, is god for the lower. In this sense every world may be taken as absolute or as god for the smaller scale of entity. Yet man, by his extraordinarily complex nature, is apparently endowed with the power of apprehending not only the world immediately above him -that is, the world of organic life of which he forms part -but many higher worlds, the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, and he can even philosophically suppose an Absolute of absolutes. So that man has many absolutes or gods from which to choose.

If we now consider different civilizations, and even different peoples within the same civilization, we see that in a general way man has set his absolute, that is, his conception of god, now higher and now lower in the universe.

At various times, often at the beginnings of civilizations, attempts have been made to spread the idea of an Absolute of absolutes, an abstract and formless One. But this idea is evidently impossible for ordinary use, for immediately any name or attributes are attached to it, or it is associated with a particular heaven or heavenly body, it has already descended to another level. And since no general worship or study can be carried on without names and images, this level of 'god' is completely out of range of man.

Occasionally we find a galactic absolute, like the Egyptian Khepera, creator of the gods themselves, or like Shiva in a twinkling of whose eye passes the whole life of the Solar System. But such a conception is still much too difficult for ordinary men, and never passes beyond the priesthood or brahmin caste.

Usually, at the very outset of each civilization, along with these abstract ideas, a more possible absolute is set at the level of the Sun. Men can feel the warmth and light of the Sun, understand their utter dependence on it, intellectually study its nature, and emotionally rejoice in it as the source of life, seasons, the beauty of colour, and so on. According to our study, they may even attain its nature. So that often a deification of the Sun gave men a real and living absolute, which could command their worship in a very immediate way. Ra in Egypt, Apollo in Greece, Baal in Syria, Tonatiuh in Mexico, and Indra in India were gods set at such a level.

At other times, often in a later and already rather degenerate stage of civilization, general worship began to shift to the level of the planets, or to the Earth itself. In the late Greek and Roman worlds, in the late Middle Ages, and particularly in many 17th century sects, planetary beings become the highest concept or absolute, and from the idea of the interplay of their influences, or of using or working with these influences in some way, arose the pseudo-science of magic. The prevalence of ideas of magic is nearly always connected with the polytheism inherent in taking the planets as god or absolute.

At a still further stage of degeneration, usually to be seen in the distant descendants of ancient civilizations who now exist as savages; the highest powers are associated with manifestations of nature -thunder, rain, forests, mountains, and so on -that is to say, with the world of organic life, the next above man. This is to place the absolute at a still lower level.

In this way, we have a scheme for the study of comparative religion; and we also see that the development of each civilization is usually accompanied by a degeneration of the idea of the absolute to ever lower and lower levels. On the face of it, this seems absurd, since later men could presumably look backwards and see higher conceptions revealed behind them in history. But a curious trick of human psychology makes the downward transition quite simple. These higher conceptions, seen through the distorting lens of time, appear to more degenerate man as superstition. And applying this name to them he remains entirely satisfied with his own level of understanding.

We spoke of savages who took the world of nature as absolute or god. There is, however, still another stage of degeneration, particularly prevalent in our own age. This is expressed by the acceptance of a man as absolute or god. That is, in taking ordinary undeveloped man as the highest being or power in the universe. This is of course quite distinct from the idea of saints, for saints immediately presuppose a god or much higher power for whom the saint acts as intermediary. The deification of a Roman emperor, the worship of a Hitler, absolute obedience to some party government, or on the other hand the idealization of an imaginary figure like the Common Man, when no higher power is recognized, are examples of taking man as god or absolute.

Below this lies only the nightmare of superstition -by no means unknown today when
men believe microbes, bacteria and other sub-human organisms to be stronger than man or god, that is, the final power in the universe.

All this is usually indicative of the working of the pathological or criminal process in the body of a civilization. For the characteristic of this process, as we saw much earlier when considering it in the Solar System and in man, is wrong relation between the part and the whole. A general belief in man or microbe as the highest power in the universe means that for the time being mankind has completely lost its right relation with the whole cosmic body. From such a pathological state civilizations rarely recover. And it is then time to reconstruct everything from the beginning, for a quite new civilization to be born."

- Rodney Collin, "Theory of Celestial Influence"

From Todd's Humor Archive

Sun, 13 May 2007 18:40:01 GMT

After Quasimodo passed away, the bishop of the cathedral of Notre Dame sent
word through the streets of Paris that a new bellringer was needed.

The bishop decided that he would conduct the interviews personally and went
up into the belfry to begin the screening process. After observing several
applicants demonstrate their skills, he decided to call it a day, when a
lone, armless man approached him and announced that he was there to apply
for the bellringers job.

The bishop was incredulous. "You have no arms!" "No matter," said the man,
"Observe!" He then began striking the bells with his face, producing a
beautiful melody on the carillon. The bishop listened in astonishment,
convinced that he had finally found a suitable replacement for Quasimodo.
Suddenly, rushing forward to strike a
bell, the armless man tripped, and plunged headlong out of the belfry window
to his death in the street below.

The stunned bishop rushed to his side. When he reached the street, a crowd
had gathered around the fallen figure, drawn by the beautiful music they had
heard only moments before. As they silently parted to let the bishop
through, one of them asked, "Bishop, who was this man?" "I don't know his
name," the bishop sadly replied, "but his face rings a bell."

...

The following day, despite the sadness that weighed heavily on his heart due
to the unfortunate death of the armless campanologist, the bishop continued his interviews for the bellringer of Notre Dame. The first man to approach him said, "Your excellency, I am the brother of the poor, armless wretch that fell to his death from this very
belfry yesterday. I pray that you honor his life by allowing me to replace
him in this duty."

The bishop agreed to give the man an audition, and as the armless man's
brother stooped to pick up a mallet to strike the first bell, he groaned,
clutched at his chest and died on the spot. Two monks, hearing the bishop's
cries of grief at this second tragedy, rushed up the stairs to his side.
"What has happened?", the first breathlessly asked, "Who is this man?"

"I don't know his name," sighed the distraught bishop, "but he's a dead
ringer for his brother."

Compulsive thinking

Thu, 03 May 2007 18:42:12 GMT

A very sad example of the disease that's affecting most people today:

"Jenny, 34, describes how her husband's brilliant mind was besieged by chaotic, "racing" thoughts which left him utterly exhausted. He told her it was like being on a treadmill at the gym and unable to get off. "Disconnected, fragmented thoughts rushed into his mind unbidden," she says, remembering how it exhausted them both.

"They came with such intensity, such speed, that he felt as though he had no control. They made no sense. They stole his mental peace. He felt he was being attacked and assailed by them. He kept saying, 'What if I go mad?', though he never sounded mad and he wasn't hearing voices. The lack of control really frightened him, especially as he was normally such a great orator, someone who took care over every word."

Less than a week before his death on March 20, David Brunton, 39, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a commonly misdiagnosed illness characterised by recurring bouts of depression and chaotic thoughts. He was admitted to the Priory Clinic in Roehampton and, though he was mistrustful of the diagnosis, agreed to a new mood-stabilising treatment, having had conventional anti-depressants until then."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml;jsessionid=EF2NVFIFBUC1FQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/portal/2007/05/03/nosplit/ftbrunton103.xml

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:34:54 GMT

Holy crap!

Though art school everywhere is bound to be lame, I'm glad I don't attend art school in America:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364955/board/nest/35001939

Ingmar Bergman quotes

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 04:35:51 GMT

There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; 'eternal values,' 'immortality' and 'masterpiece' were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.

The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

That I wasn't interested in politics or social matters, that's dead right. I was utterly indifferent. After the war and the discovery of the concentration camps, and with the collapse of political collaborations between the Russians and the Americans, I just contracted out. My involvement became religious. I went in for a psychological, religious line... the salvation-damnation issue, for me, was never political. It was religious. For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.

My basic view of things is — not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer... I've a strong impression that our world is about to go under. Our political systems are deeply compromised and have no further uses. Our social behavior patterns — interior and exterior — have proved a fiasco. The tragic thing is, we neither can nor want to, nor have the strength to alter course. It's too late for revolutions, and deep down inside ourselves we no longer even believe in their positive effects. Just around the corner an insect world is waiting for us — and one day it's going to roll in over our ultra-individualized existence. Otherwise I'm a respectable social democrat.

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. . . Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. . . To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. Our bureaucracy, for instance. I regard it as in high degree built up on humiliation, one of the nastiest and most dangerous of all poisons.

An interview with John McLaughlin

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:03:34 GMT

John Mclaughlin is my favourite musician of all time. Here're some excerpts from an interview:

"I feel very strongly about playing more than notes with the people, particuarly in jazz music or Indian music or any music that deals with improvisation. I have always felt that improvisation is like the most honest kind of music in the sense that if you're spontaneous then you're being yourself. Because you can only be yourself spontaneously, and you can only be spontaneous with other people. I mean, I used to run into Paul Motian in the Sufi center in the late '60s and early '70s and we'd see Hazrat Inyat Khan speaking and this guy is a very, very high person. And he would stand up in front of the 40 or 50 people there who were into him and he'd just be looking out at people in the audience without saying anything for about three or four minutes, which is a long time if you're waiting for somebody to speak. But he'd be like in the ozone but in a very special way, waiting for the words to come and being totally real and totally spontaneous with the people. And this is really beautiful to see. In fact, it's the most natural state of human beings. Anyway, that's kind of an analogy to what I feel about music, which is to say we're really ourselves most naturally when we're being spontaneous with each other, which is the best way to be in life anyways. You know, when you have a family, everybody is spontaneous with each other and sometimes a little brutally honest, but nevertheless it's spontaneous so it cannot really be bad. And that is really my philosophical foundation, if you like, about how groups should be. And maybe this is why I always want great players. I need stimulation, I need them to kick my ass, as it were, and provoke me in some way that will push me to a place that I don't know, that I've never been before. "

"Yeah, but you know...I was struggling in my 20s. I was really struggling because I couldn't find any guitar player that really spoke to me. The only people that really spoke to me were people like Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans and their drummers. And by this time, of course, it was like late '64-65...this was some period, man. I mean, don't forget when Kind of Blue came out...that was '59 and that swept me away. Of course, Milestones was before that. And then Trane came out with his thing and Miles kept doing his thing. Cannonball and Trane were both in Miles' band, then Cannonball got his band together with his brother Nat. And these guys were all killing! For me, at that time, it was just normal. It was the music that was happening at that time. But when I look back at it now I see it was like a phenomenal period for jazz and for music in general. Man, just think of all that was going on in the early '60s, and I was caught up right in the middle of it. I mean, I loved to listen to Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow, but that was the old school. What can I tell you' And I always used to wonder why Miles and Trane didn't have guitar players. Why not, you know' I used to wonder, "Why isn't there somebody out there doing it on guitar like these guys are doing it on saxophones and trumpets'" So I was trapped in this frustrating place. And you know, when you're a guitar player and you listen to Coltrane all the time and you're hearing him ripping up and down his instrument, playing those sheets of sound...and you're hearing Miles, of course, playing gorgeous melodies like always...just trying to get a conception for my own instrument that was anywhere near that level was tough. And in the meantime, I'm dropping acid and I finally figured out, "Well, I've got to find a way to alter my state of consciousness without chemicals." And that's another trip...trying to get your life together and be strong in a natural way. It was rough, it was very rough. You know, I tried lot of different things. I joined some meditation group and even before that it was the Theosophical Society in London. But you know, the only good thing about that was they had a good library and I found some good books in there that opened me up to some new ideas. Then I started doing yoga and started doing meditation and became a member of some group in London, but it just wasn't happening for me. So I just quit that right away and continued (my search). And I just kept doing yoga until I became a disciple of Sri Chinmoy. I was already in New York by that time. But by early '68, before I came over, I'd finished the whole studio scene. I just couldn't deal with it anymore and I was just back to my poverty-stricken days but at least happy about not having to go and deal with Tom Jones and Petula Clark"

"I'm looking for new forms, trying to find something new. And of course, we can go on forever looking for new forms. Fortunately in music you can go on forever. And I will die looking for new forms. But that's the way I'm made, so I just accept it like that. Maybe growing up with the background that I had...you know I'm trying to be a jazzman, I'm into Trane and Miles, I'm hearing all this great music -- A Love Supreme and Miles in Europe where he's playing all these standards. And then, of course, in my early days when I was a teenager I was so crazy about flamenco music that I wanted to be a flamenco guitar player. Meanwhile, I'm playing r&b with Georgie Fame, and that's cool because when you hear Charles Mingus that's r&b too. You take the r&b out of jazz, you don't have any jazz. And I'm also into Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whom I had the great fortune to play with in London. Rahsaan was totally jazz but he was so funky and had such a blues thing too. That's why I love Mingus and Monk, because you could feel the blues so deeply in their music. So I'm a young guitarist in love with jazz but in the meantime I'm trying to survive by playing tunes by James Brown, who I love also, I gotta tellya. I love that music. But I was being pulled every which way by all these movements, all these different kinds of music -- jazz, flamenco, r&b, blues -- so in the end I was just a big melting pot where they all kind of mix up. And you know, that's what I am. I'm just a big mix of all these cultural influences tied up with my own restlessness. Anyway, who can figure out what we are."

"My parents were divorced when I was seven. They split. And they tried to get together quite a few years later, and I was already 12 or 13 by this time and playing guitar. My mother allowed me the chance to study piano when I was about eight years old and that was really great. She was wonderful, my mother. She was just one of my greatest inspirations. What she did for me I will never be able to describe. Anyway, one day my father was back and they were trying to, like, get it together. I must've been 13. So it was just me and him in living room and one point he says to me, "So what do you want to do when you grow up'" And I said, "I'm gonna be a musician." And he said, "No, a real job." I mean, what a moron this guy is, what an idiot! I mean, he doesn't know anything. And that was a real clincher for me."

"BM: Speaking of re-education, I don't know if you know about the Pat Martino story. (Martino suffered a brain aneurysm in 1980 which robbed him of his memory, forcing him to relearn the guitar from scratch).

BM: Well, he's finally back on top of his game, but it's taken him 10 years to get there.

JM: Yeah, I heard him play recently. He's killing.

BM: Yeah, and there was a period of time when he was struggling and of course he had to relearn the instrument. He woke up from surgery and had no memory of guitar whatsoever.

JM: Unbelievable!

BM: And then he very meticulously began relearning his instrument.

JM: I know, it's phenomenal. It's like a real victory of the spirit, that's all I can say."

Testimony of the Victims of Hiroshima

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:13:11 GMT

Voice of Hibakusha

Eye-witness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima, from the video HIROSHIMA WITNESS produced by Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK

http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/

Mon, 15 May 2006 17:53:58 GMT

The Light Verse is: "God is the light of the heavens and the earth, the similitude of His light is like a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, the glass is as if it were a brilliant shimmering star kindled from a blessed tree, an olive (tree) neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil illuminates even if fire does not touch it; light upon light, God leads to His light whom He wills. And God gives parables to men (for their understanding). And God has knowledge of everything." (SAA)

The Veils Hadith is: "God has seventy veils of light and darkness. Were He to lift them, the majestic glories of His face would burn completely anyone whose eyesight perceived Him." (SRA)

Two quotes from the Koran.

What's interesting is that these are pretty much completely meaningless - even moreso after translation, no doubt - but my response to them is emotionally powerful, and for reasons I cannot ascertain. It is expression and communication taken to a level that is absent in all non-religious work - like the real meaning is understood by elements within the person not belonging to the conscious brain. Things that I used to consider primitive, superstitious, backward, tribal and nonsensical now seem to affect me in ways I barely understand.

I think that is the purpose of art. And to affect people "inexplicably", in ways they cannot understand, one needs to have a very high understanding and a real, immediate experience of the things they idealise and imagine and only hazily perceive this very yearning.

Sun, 14 May 2006 20:19:18 GMT

http://www.alibinetwork.com/index.jsp

I thought this is a joke, but apparently it is not.

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 04:49:00 GMT

My dream from last night is burned in my mind. I was in school, and sent out to take photographs for a project, with a small camera. All of us spread out, and went to different locations. It had been silent and still, but now a strong wind started to blow. The place didn't look like school at all - there were huge fields and tall fir trees, and their tops covered the land as they billowed in a quickening gale. It looked like a village in the English countryside. About six of us took the lift, and even inside we could hear the howling wind. We reached up to about the seventieth floor, and the sky was almost black. I remember very well the obese cumulo-nimbus clowds and the taste of excitement and the threat that comes with a pregnant storm.

There were many things going on, up there. People were fighting: teenage boys in black robes in two factions beating each other. They were pushing each other to the ledge, and they were all angry with the other group. I stepped around them, and so did all my friends - they didn't bother us. There were many strange things going on in the stairwells - and it was possible to see and experience the weather outside, because the stairwell was not a covered, indoor structure and only a flimsy grille stood in place of its walls. I saw Whoopi Goldberg in an exquisite Native American robe, but wearing a bandeau and a nun's veil, standing on a carton of tea bags, fighting an evil witch. They were using poisoned darts as weapons. Suddenly, all my friends were gone. I heard one complain faintly about how it was an unfair project, that it was really a useless thing to do. I remembered that the instructions for the project had been unclear. I was told by a passerby (a nun) in the stairwell that all my friends were on the 40th floor.

By now, there was heavy rain and a hurricane and it looked like armageddon outside. The building didn't seem very safe - it felt like even a 300-metre tall block of concrete could topple in these insane winds. When I got to the 40th floor, I saw that there had been a massacre. Suddenly, I saw a leg and a part of the torso sticking to the roof. I imagined the worst and pulled it down. I was the mid-section of a human being, cut-up. I was petrified with horror and fear, but again a passer-by - again a nun - told me it wasn't anyone I knew, that my friends were elsewhere. I heaved a sigh of relief, and then I looked outside, through the thin grille. I was soaked by now, and the sound of the wind was deafening and its force apocalyptic. It had completely uprooted many of the firs - I could see these 20-foot trees being swept and blown away into the sky. I was convinced that it had to be the end of the world. Here the dream ended.

How to Succeed in Corporate America

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:46:49 GMT

http://www.mollen.net/corpnazi.html