March 04, 2008
As it happens, I was present during one delirious afternoon when the children finally did catch on to the basic principles of number - the fact that with numbers you can count anything. Released from the schoolhouse, the excited children ran hither and tither in little groups, applying their new found insight: they counted the houses, the dogs, the trees, fingers and toes, each other - and the numbers worked every time.
Account of Umeda children of Papua New Guinea learning to count numbers by Alfred Gell (cited on the Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of Mathematics)
(I'm not sure if the Umedas originally could count up to 47 using parts of the body for each number or could count up to 5 using combinations of 1's and 2's. Either way, i found the account of this sudden realization of abstraction very exciting.)
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July 10, 2007
Zizek
I had never seen Zizek in my life until last sunday. He was giving a lecture at the Ethical Society as a sort of commemoration organized by the Freud Society on the centennial of the publishing of "The sexual enlightenment of children".
I'm glad he said it himself during the lecture because I'd be too polite to mention this. Or maybe not. He said someone asked him to be that person's analyst and his reply was "Look at me! I'm a nervous person! I'm crazy!" and the person agreed and gave up. He is insane. But, or precisely because of that, strangely stimulating. He was a nervous wreck all through the lecture, scratching his eyes, ears and nose compulsively and read from a typed sheet all the way through with the occasional stop to illustrate a point. He has a funny eastern european accent that, conjugated with the enthusiasm with which he delivers his speech and matching and vehement wave of the right hand, makes you think you're at a retro communist rally.
But he is fascinating in the way he shoots theories at you like a machine gun, drawing examples from the most sophisticated of philosophers to quirky pieces of news. I'm not completely sure everything makes sense, it was such an intense experience that I'm still digesting it.
In one hour he managed to talk about: Freud (obviously), the Masturbathon, the myth of Dapnhe and Chloe, Shakespeare's All's well that ends well, Lacan, Hegel, genetically modified beans that don't cause gas, Kant, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, The Da Vinci code, Chinese translations, the Bible and the Catholic Church, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the north-american tribe that thought all dreams had sexual meanings except the dreams about sex themselves, Antigone, advertisements for sun screens, the myth in communist countries that everyone believed the secret information officers were the inventors and propagators of jokes about the government and a lot more I can't recall right away. All this to arrive, through a very tortuous journey, to a thesis - there were some collateral ones along the way - in which he states adults need sexual education even more than children because they know the mechanics but lack the knowledge that each of us must have his/her own personal fantasy on which to focus on while having sex.
Best quote of the night, while answering a question: "I have written about this on one of my books, can't remember which, there's so many of them."
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May 22, 2007
I wanted to write about...
...the centennial of Hergé and how despite being a Tintinophile I am also a contrarian. Hergé used to say that there was no place for sex or women in Tintin's male friendship world. So I started a post on Tintin porn parodies only to realize this site has a fantastic compilation of bootleg Tintin albums from the 80's and Arte channel aired a great documentary called "La vie sexuelle de Tintin". I also found a couple of bloggers or website owners who got sued (and condemned) for promoting "illegal" Tintin album versions. Which made me want to blog about copyright, civil liberties, the moustache on Mona Lisa, the power of dead people's wishes over the creativity of the living and trash Belgian law but I'm too lazy.
(Roy Lichtenstein is allowed to throw a Matisse painting on Tintin's living room)
...Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé and how if were this book edible it would leave a bitter-sweet taste on my mouth. It's a wonderful bizarre and funny novel, a chimera born of crossing Lynch with Ionesco with a german twist. Alas, the version I own seems like someone pasted the results of Babel Fish "German to English" translation into it (my book says the translation was supervised by the author). Here I am holding what could be one of my favorite novels of all times, wondering if this will be the final trigger to upgrade my current tourist babble german language level. Which made me want to blog yet again about the difficulties of translation, the wonder of learning a new language, post an hilarious excerpt of the novel when the main character tries to convince his books to go to war and faces the opposition of buddhist texts and of Schopenhauer who suddenly found the will to live, quote Walter Benjamin, add an excerpt of Saramago's Baltasar & Blimunda and show you how crappy the english translation is but I'm too lazy.
...Gilbert & George's downloadable art and how the open source paradigm should invade every corner of knowledge, cadavres exquis, the recent trends on how art can be an effective political and social integration tool, how weird that most art reviews I read are favorable and hardly ever anyone dares to say that - although Gombrich says there is no such thing as a bad work of art - that red canvas with a bit of newspaper glued to it brings nothing new and is a lame attempt at originality, the New Yorker article on Banksy and how even the most wannabe rebels give in to money and vanity despite maintaining their anonymity, the Hopper exhibition at the MFA in Boston, the underrated value of art in the developing world and Maslow's hierarchy of needs but I'm too lazy.
...my plans for the second semester of 2007, Cavafy's poems, Socrates' "know thyself", healthy doubts, status quo, Ecclesiastes, Ovid on fishing, missing oneself, the Bloomsbury group, low cost airlines, auction houses, journalism, aging, optimism, adventure, excitement and romance but that would be too personal.
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October 15, 2006
I'm jammed between Heidegger who was a boozy beggar, Nietzsche (there's nothing he couldn't teach ya about the raisin' of the wrist) and Benjamin whose name doesn't rhyme with any thing doing with drinking alcohol and therefore wasn't included in the Monty Python song. Hmmm. Maybe "Walter Benjamin would get suicidal with only a bottle of gin".
I'm pondering whether I should dip into the thick prose of "Time and Being" or just cut and dress old Martin Heidegger up.
(from the man who fell asleep)
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July 13, 2006
Stereotyping Portugueseness
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
--Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon disaster; Or an Examination of the Axiom, “All is Well”
*****
I am convinced Portugal is an island. Most times there's this claustrophobic feeling there is no way out of here, just an endless ocean in front of us, a sense of isolation. Portugal has the oldest unchanging borders in Europe. A whole identity based on myths and fictions and immobility. An old, old country that sees that the best it could have has already gone by. The sea here is much larger than anywhere else I've been. An abyss of water. On our backs there's this improbable Europe, miles and centuries away. There's also a huge country called Spain but whose inhabitants have nothing to do with us, we like to think. We cannot understand their pride and passion. There's only melancholy and nostalgia for an imagined past in the blue, cold ocean ahead. An overwhelming sense of the power of destiny that inspires lethargy and throws life in the hands of fortune.
A country of people obsessed with the meaning of being portuguese and that can't help themselves (ourselves) from writing about it.
*****
Malhoa, O Fado (1910)
*****
"E assim o génio de aventura, decaindo, transformou-se na mais completa falta de persistência. Ela aparece em todas as manifestações da nossa actividade, a cada passo interrompida ou abortada, o que a torna tristemente caricatural. Ei-la passeando o seu desânimo, pelas estradas que pararam, mortas de cansaço, a dois quilómetros do ponto de partida. E vive num belo edifício público sem telhado."
"And thus, the genius of adventure, decaying, has become an utter lack of persistence. It appears in all manifestations of our activity, at each step interrupted or aborted, which renders it as a sad caricature. There it is, showing off its lack of stamina in the roads that stopped, dying of exhaustion, a couple kilometers away from the starting point. And it lives in the beautiful roofless public building."
The Art of being Portuguese (1915) - Teixeira de Pascoaes
*****
"O já agora, e a variante popular Já que estás com a mão na massa..., significam a forma particularmente portuguesa do desejo. Os Portugueses não gostam de dizer que querem as coisas. Entre nós, querer é considerado uma violência. Por isso, quando se chega a um café, diz-se que se queria uma bica e nunca que se quer uma bica. Se alguém oferece, também, uma aguardente, diz-se: «Já agora.» Tudo se passa no pretérito, no condicional, na coincidência.(..) tudo o que sucede é absolutamente incontrolável. Por isso, a mentalidade do «já agora» traduz-se na ideia de que se deve aproveitar o acaso, já que nada mais se aproveita."
Note: "Já agora" is literally translated as "now now"; it actually means something like "As long as we are here...." or "Considering that this happened..."
"The 'Já agora' and the popular variation 'now that you're dealing with it'..., are examples of the particularly portuguese form of desire. The Portuguese don't like to say that they want something. Among us, wanting is considered an aggression. And so, when you go to a café, you say 'I could have an espresso' and never that you want an espresso. If anyone offers a brandy too, we say 'Já agora'. Everything happens in the past, in the conditional, in the coincidence.(...) anything that happens is totally uncontrollable. Therefore, the mentality of the 'já agora' gives meaning to the idea that you should take advantage of randomness, since you can't take advantage of anything else."
Explicações de Português(2001) - Miguel Esteves Cardoso
*****
Oh sea of salt, how much of your salt
Is tears of Portugal!
For us to cross you, how many mothers wept,
How many sons prayed in vain!
How many fiancees remained to be wed
In order that you be ours, oh sea!
Mensagem, Fernando Pessoa
*****
”O medo é medo do poder, mas também da impotência própria diante do poder. (...) O medo de «não estar à altura» impera, arruina as potencialidades criativas; medo que implica e arrasta outros, como o de ser avaliado, de ser julgado, de «ir a exame».”
"The fear is fear of power but also of the impotence in face of power.(...) The fear of not being up to the situation is ever present, ruining the creative potential; fear that implies and drags the others, like the fear of being evaluated, of being tried, of being examined."
Portugal today - the fear of existing (2004) - José Gil
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December 08, 2005
Depressed princesses and wizards
"The tradition of a deadened, lethargic woman aroused from her numbness by a man's call was well under way in the nineteenth century: suffice it to recall Kundry from Wagner's Parsifal who, at the begginning of Act II and Act III, is awakened from a catatonic sleep(first through Klingsor's rude summons, then Gurnemanz's kind care), or - from 'real life' - the unique figure of Jane Morris, wife of William Morris and mistress of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. The famous photo of Jane Morris from 1865 presents a depressive woman, deeply absorbed in her thoughts, who seems to await a man's stimulation to pull her out of her lethargy.
(...)
The philosophical name for this depression is absolute negativity, what Hegel calls 'The night of the world', the subject's withdrawal into itself. And the link between this depression and the indestructible life-substance is also clear: depression, withdrawal-into-self, is the primordial act of retreat, of maintaining a distance towards the indestructible life-substance, making it appear as a repulsive scintillation." - Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment
Paula Rego, "Snow White choking on the apple" - which, had I painted it and would have entitled it "where's a Heimlich manoeuvre specialist when you need one?" :-)
This also reminded me of Bruno Bettelheim's interpretation of fairy tales and how all of them seem to be directed at conditioning women's behaviour ("Waiting for Prince Charming" Syndrome, etc.)
And how I immediately associated the description of the Dementors in Harry Potter's books with the symptoms of depression:
"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself...soul-less and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life." - J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban
( maybe this is the Jane Morris photo he's talking about)
Note to self: will have to post about that annoying habit people have nowadays of saying "I'm depressed" when they're just sad.
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October 31, 2005
Memoraphilia
"Simonides was engaged to recite a poem at a banquet, given by one of his patrons, and after doing so the room fell in, burying all in its debris, and disfiguring the bodies so as to render identification impossible. Simonides, however, had noted the position each guest had occupied, and was thus able to point out the remains of each. Cicero and Quintilian both refer to his system and advocate its use; and we may add that it is the basis of most modern methods. Simonides found that to fix a number of places in the mind in a certain order was a great help to the natural faculty. His plan was to form in the mind a building which was divided and subdivided into distinct parts arranged in a certain order. The order of these parts were to be thoroughly learnt. As many words as there were parts were then symbolised by the images of living creatures, and when a number of things were to be committed to memory in certain order, mental images representing them were to be placed regularly in the several parts of the building.."
+++++++++++++
"The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci went to China in 1582 and spent the remaining 32 years of his life there.
In 1596, Ricci wrote A Treatise on Mnemonics, in Chinese, for the governor of Jiangxi Province. In it he recreated the medieval European idea of a memory palace - an edifice you build in your mind and furnish with mnemonic devices. Recollection is a process of walking through the rooms and associating information with their contents. Those contents must be distinct and dramatic."
+++++++++++++
Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memeoriae, 1533
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Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 1619
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Giulio Camillo, the Theatre of Memory
"Various accounts describe the structure as a building which would allow one or two individuals at a time within its interior. The insides were inscribed with a variety of images, figures, and ornaments. It was full of little boxes arranged in various orders and grades. Upon entering the Theater, the spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero as he stands on a stage looking out towards the auditorium where the images are placed among seven pillars or grades. Each grade representing the expanding history of divine thought. In the first grade there were the 'seven essential measures' depicted by the 'seven known planets' which were the First Causes of creation and from which all things depended. The highest grade of the Theatre was the seventh level, which was assigned to all the arts, 'both noble and vile,' and is represented by Prometheus who stole the technology of fire from the gods."
+++++++++++++
"Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious
+++++++++++++
"Memory is, therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember."
-- Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence
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"One of the things for which I am still grateful is the way in which we were taught to memorize. Most Tibetans have good memories, but we who were training to be medical monks had to know the names and exact descriptions of a very large number of herbs, as well as knowing how they could be combined and used. We had to know much about astrology, and be able to recite the whole of our sacred books. A method of memory training had been evolved throughout the centuries. We imagined that we were in a room lined with thousands and thousands of drawers. Each drawer was clearly labelled, and the writing on all the labels could be read with ease from where we stood. Every fact we were told had to be classified, and we were instructed to imagine that we opened the appropriate drawer and put the fact inside. We had to visualize it very clearly as we did it, visualize the "fact" and the exact location of the "drawer". With little practice it was amazingly easy to - in imagination - enter the room, open the correct drawer, and extract the fact required as well as all related facts."
-- Lobsang Rampa, The third eye
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"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."
-- Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
"Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth."
-- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
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October 11, 2005
Reality
I've been fascinated by this grafitti for a while; then I started reading Paul Watzlawick's "How real is real?" and there was a very similar sentence in the preface.
Campo Mártires da Pátria, Lisboa
"The worst illusion is to think there is only one reality."
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October 04, 2005
Competition
Mr. Valéry did not like to compete.
Of any competition he would say that from the first to the last, any place was a bad place to finish.
And he would wonder:
- To win a competition from others or to lose a competition for others; what's the point!?
- I prefer to be vice-last or sub-last - he said, ironically.
And explained:
- A competition is fair only if all competitors start on equal conditions. But such a situation does not exist, it's a known fact. And if all were equal, how could one be better than the other? In a competition people finish as they started - concluded Mr. Valéry.
And Mr. Valéry added:
- I would like to see a 100 meters race where each track would finish in a different point.
- Imagine four 100 meters tracks like this ... (and he would draw)
-... in this way - continued Mr. Valéry - when finishing the competition, each athlete would better understand what was waiting for him on the following day. Even if he had won the race he would end it alone, which is a small life lesson.
And after this somewhat ambiguous statement, Mr. Valéry continued his daily stroll, with his slightly crooked body, the hat stuck in his head, and alone, completely alone, as always.
"O sr. Valéry", Caminho, 2002
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Gonçalo M. Tavares is one of my favourite Portuguese contemporary writers. Highly exportabe but I doubt it if he has been published abroad.
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Portuguese version down here.
O senhor Valéry não gostava de competir.
Sobre qualquer competição ele dizia que do 1º ao último lugar todas as classificações eram más.
E interrogava-se:
- Ganhar aos outros para quê? Perder com os outros por quê?
- Prefiro ser vice-último ou sub-último - dizia ele, com ironia.
E explicava:
- Só existe justiça numa competição se todos partirem de condições iguais. Mas tal não existe, já se sabe. E se todos fossem iguais como poderia ficar um à frente do outro? Numa competição as pessoas acabam como começam - concluía o sr. Valéry.
E o senhor Valéry dizia ainda:
- O que eu gostava era de ver uma corrida de 100 metros onde cada pista terminasse num ponto diferente.
- Imaginem 4 pistas de 100 metros assim... (e ele desenhava)
-...deste modo - continuava o sr. Valéry - ao terminar a competição, cada atleta perceberia melhor o que estava à sua espera no dia seguinte. Mesmo que ganhasse acabava a corrida sozinho, o que é uma pequena lição de vida.
E depois desta afirmação algo ambígua, o senhor Valéry prosseguiu o seu passeio diário, com o corpo um pouco curvado, o chapéu enterrado na cabeça, e sozinho, completamente sozinho, como sempre.
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September 17, 2005
BS
"There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutrtive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death that we ourselves produce and that, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so intimate that we find excrement so repulsive." - Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit.
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July 29, 2005
Philemamania
Socratic kiss - a Platonic kiss, but as it is the Socratic technique it will sound more authoritative; however, compared to most strictly Platonic kisses, Socratic kisses wander around a lot more and cover more ground.
Kantian kiss - though you don't actually feel the kiss at all, you are, nonetheless, free to declare it the best kiss you've ever given or received.
Kafkaesque kiss - a kiss that starts out feeling like it's about to transform you but ends up just bugging you.
Sartrean kiss - a kiss that you worry yourself to death about even though it really doesn't matter anyway.
Marxist (Grouchoic school) kiss - a kiss given by someone who will only kiss those who would not kiss him or her.
Procrustean kiss - suffice it to say that it is a technique that, once you've experienced it, you'll never forget it, especially when applied to areas of the anatomy other than the lips.
Heisenbergian kiss - a hard-to-define kiss, the more it moves you, the less sure you are of where the kiss was; the more energy it has, the more trouble you have figuring out how long it lasted.
Taken from somewhere I can't remember but found it again here.
*****
Klimt
*****
"When one of them takes both the lips of the other between his or her own, it is called 'a clasping kiss'. A woman, however, only takes this kind of kiss from a man who has no moustache. And on the occasion of this kiss, if one of them touches the teeth, the tongue, and the palate of the other, with his or her tongue, it is called the 'fighting of the tongue'. In the same way, the pressing of the teeth of the one against the mouth of the other is to be practised."
Kama Sutra
*****
Now the amorous spirit that is in me commands me that I say that amorous kisses are given in six parts of the beloved person, and in four ways, and no more.
And what are these six parts?
They are the nostrils, the breast, the neck, the cheeks, the eyes, and the mouth.
And the ways?
The ways are these: with the tips of the lips, with moisture of the lips, with a bite, and with the tongue.
I thank you, Love, for making me able to follow this. And so I ask again for your kindness that you enrich me with your secrets. But you, Spirit in the heart of Patricio, deign to detail these things one by one.
So I shall. Of the parts, my signor Angelo, the less sweet to kiss are the hands. More sweet that these is the breast. And it is an important thing to say what I want to say now, that though the breast is softer and more delicate than the neck, nevertheless more sweetness is experienced in kissing the neck than kissing the breast. This sweetness is so great, that if it does not equal that of the cheeks, which alone in great part are the dwelling of beauty, surely it lags behind but by little.
You speak truly: the sweetness from a kiss on the neck is great, but that it is so in comparison with the cheeks, I will take your word for that, amorous Spirit, because I have not had the experience.
If you wish to do that, you will sense what I way to you is true. The kiss on the eyes is very sweet, but the kiss on the mouth is the kiss that exceeds and surpasses all other kisses, even when they are taken together.
Francesco Patrizi, Dialogue concerning the kiss (XVIth Century)
*****
Philemamania, a craving for kissing
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July 12, 2005
Adapting Pascal's Wager to your own selfish interests
"(...)whenever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything. And thus, since you are obliged to play, you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing."- Pascal, Pensées
or, for a very simplistic interpretation, if you haven't got anything to lose, go for it. Always handy to have a highbrow philosophical excuse.
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September 24, 2003
Pleasure & Pain
The greek philosopher Epicurus (342-270 BC) is commonly associated with hedonism. He believed that the greatest good was to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. It sounds really common sense, doesn't it?
According to Epicurus, what prevents us from being happy is anxiety; no matter how rich you are, if you're anxious to earn more money, you won't be happy.
The way to avoid anxiety is to "Don't fear god, don't worry about death; what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure." (Philodemus of Gadara)
It seems to me that Epicurus was the first self-help propaganda writer of all time! :-)
Which leads to things such as The Hedonic Society of America who appear to have sensible beliefs:
* Knowledge is gained through reasoned study of all available evidence.
* In the absence of conclusive evidence for a supernatural, ethics and morality must be based on our living in the natural world
* Pleasure and pain are our natural means for determining what is beneficial or harmful to life.
* Those actions are best which lead to the greatest pleasure and happiness, or the least pain and suffering, in the long term for all concerned.
* Our lives are made most happy and fulfilling by cultivating the higher pleasures of intellectual development, aesthetic appreciation and creativity, and social bonds of friendship, family and romantic love.
* Happiness is best attained in an atmosphere of freedom, tolerance, nonviolence and diversity.
Epicurus even gets his own fanclub centuries afer his death! :-)
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