Author Topic: “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century"  (Read 1150 times)

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Holden

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Toole took the rejection of the book in his intended form as a tremendous personal blow. He eventually ceased work on Dunces and for a time left it atop an armoire in his bedroom.  He attempted to work on another novel which he titled The Conqueror Worm, a reference to death as portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe's poem of the same name, but he found little peace at home. Toole's mother persuaded him to take Dunces to Hodding Carter Jr., who was well known as a reporter and publisher for the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, and was spending a semester teaching at Tulane. Carter showed little interest in the book, but complimented him on it. The face-to-face rejection Carter dealt Toole drove him further into despair and he became angry with his mother for causing him further embarrassment.

Toole spent most of the last three years of his life at home only leaving to go to Dominican. In the winter of 1967, Kubach, who had come down to visit Toole, noticed an increased sense of paranoia on Toole's part; once when driving around New Orleans, Toole became convinced they were being followed and attempted to lose the car. The family moved to a larger rental house on Hampson Street, and Toole continued teaching, with his students noticing that his wit had become more acerbic. He continued to drink heavily, and gained a great deal of weight, causing him to have to purchase an entire new wardrobe.Toole began having frequent and intense headaches, and as aspirin was no help, he saw a doctor. The doctor's treatment was also ineffective, and he suggested Toole see a neurologist, an idea which Toole rejected.



Toole tried to maintain a sense of normalcy and enrolled in Tulane in the fall of 1968 with the hopes of acquiring a Ph.D. He took a course studying Theodore Dreiser, on whom he had lectured while at Hunter, and was particularly interested in Dreiser's close relationship with his mother and his anti-Catholic beliefs. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 added to his feelings of grief and heightened his paranoia. Several of Toole's longtime friends noticed he had an increasing sense of feelings of personal persecution. Toole went to see his friend Bob Byrne at his home in August 1968, where he again expressed sadness and humiliation that his book would not be published. Toole told Byrne that people were passing his home late in the night and honking their car horns at him, that students whispered about him behind his back, and that people were plotting against him. Byrne had a talk with him, which he felt, for the time being, calmed him down.

In the months before his suicide, Toole, who was usually extremely well groomed, "began to appear in public unshaved and uncombed, wearing unpolished shoes and wrinkled clothes, to the amazement of his friends and students in New Orleans." He also began to exhibit signs of paranoia, including telling friends that a woman who he erroneously thought had worked for Simon & Schuster was plotting to steal his book so that her husband, the novelist George Deaux, could publish it.

Toole became increasingly erratic during his lectures at Dominican, resulting in frequent student complaints, and was given to rants against church and state. Toward the end of the 1968 fall semester, he was forced to take a leave of absence and stopped attending classes at Tulane, resulting in his receiving a grade of incomplete.The Tooles spent Christmas of 1968 in disarray with Toole's father in an increasing state of dementia, and Toole searching the home for electronic mind-reading devices...
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Nation of One

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What a tragic life.  I can just imagine ...

Think about the countless souls writing so much on the Internet ... and who can really focus on anything.  It's a cruel fate. 

I don't see how anyone has the determination to write stories.  It's a rare treat to come across a novel that is really worth reading.  It seems all I can do anymore is whine and complain.  How very frustrating!

... and in the end, to be mocked by "half a dozen blockheads" ... to be tormented ...
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Its tragic alright.Wallace was the same.He wanted to write the way he wanted to write — funny and overstuffed and nonlinear and strange. The teachers were all "hardass realists." That was the first problem. Problem two was Wallace.  "I was just unteachable. I had that look - 'If there were any justice, I'd be teaching this class' - that makes you want to slap a student."  When he turned over a story to his professor, he received a chilly noise back: "I hope this isn't representative of the work you're hoping to do for us. We'd hate to lose you."When Wallace sent out The Broome of the System to
agents, he got back notes that included the line "Best of luck in your janitorial career."He worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts. "Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy.
 A bad reaction to his longtime anti-depressive of choice, Nardil, caused him to go off the drug during the summer of 2007, but that would be the beginning of the end:That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help.  By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do.  He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.Twelve bouts of electroshock therapy and an aborted return to the Nardil later, Wallace couldn't find his own level:
"He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten.  "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is, even then, he was leaving the planet...
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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I was reading a fat encyclopedic novel by Wallace back in February (along with Nabakov's Lolita) before the "disaster" ... What an accomplishment to write like that.  The thing is, as much as I appreciated his wit, I did not get far.  I got more than half way through Lolita, but I have not sought it out to see how it ends.  Superstitious, I guess. 

It must be difficult for "creative types" in a world where we are all so distracted ...

Myself, I can become very enthusiastic about something, say learning a programming environment.  I get into debugging and seeing what's going on at low levels of the code.  Then I have to be careful not to become overwhelmed by "the big picture" ... 

Writing in notebooks, the way Toole's main character, Ignatius Reilly, did ... the one who was writing the lengthy indictment against our century (that kills me) ... is not so as insane and useless as it may first appear.   First of all, it relieves a great deal of "feeling rejected by society" since it isn't for society. 

I have come to realize that we, as a species, each are concerned with our own peculiar interests.  I could spend the rest of my life, and probably will as long as I am free and have access to the technology, studying technical details of code.   Others may be obsessed and interested in tinkering with engines on motor vehicles, motorcycles ...

There is so much to study it is easy to become overwhelmed. 

I'm all for keeping a personal diary, journal, and just basic notebook.  No matter what someone's circumstances are, whether one is a janitor, a struggling math student, automobile mechanic, whatever, there are ideas going around and around in our heads all the time, and it is a cool practice to keep track of "The Thing" as though we were observing something alien to us, as observers.

And when we don't have access to pen and paper, maybe we will have developed this capacity to observe ourselves in our environments ... and we become the story itself with no need for an audience.  Toole ended his life ... out of frustration?  I can sympathize.  I don't blame anyone who does this since being alive can become overwhelming and frustrating. 

I liked something I read by Virginia Woolf, another creative writer of "streams of consciousness" - she said she wrote journals to keep track of and understand the thought processes of her own brain.

I have been writing lately about the ups and downs (mood swings) that occur while studying some difficult craft.  You understand.  We are both kind of like mathematics hobbyists, hackers, if you will.

We may have a deeper love for math (or the math underneath technical phenomena like computer codes (scripts, programs)) than actual "professionals" who do these things for a living.

By the way, that quote is one of the funniest things our verbose protagonist comes out with in that book:  “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century"

Peace.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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You were reading Infinite Jest,I think.I think when you work with codes ,think about imaginery numbers for 2-3 days at a time you go beyond time &space.I think a representational object such as a table does not correspond to a table-in-itself, but is a non-causal individuated manifestation of the thing-in-itself.While working with codes you focus on the thing-in-itself that is undifferentiated, spaceless, timeless and causeless.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be seen as a brand of what Meillassoux calls correlationism, which has it that subject and object cannot each be considered independently. We have access only to the correlation between them, and can never step outside of this relation to see how things “really” are. In introducing his argument against correlationism Meillassoux brings up ancestrality. If space, time and causality are mind-dependent, then what can it mean to say that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, before the advent of life? Before any knowing consciousness existed, what do “years” and “the Earth” refer to, and what does “formed” mean, without space, time, objects and causality?

Schopenhauer sees the problem:

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent on the first knowing being ; on the other hand, this first perceiving animal just as necessarily wholly dependent on a long chain of causes and effects which has preceded it . These two contradictory views, to each of which we are led with equal necessity, might certainly be called an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge .

His answer is that the past exists now, for us, and came to exist for the first knowing consciousness. When it made this first appearance, it already had the character of endlessness in both directions, past and future. So, oddly enough, time had a beginning but was and is inherently beginningless. The same goes for the world as representation in general. Objects of the past are objects for us just as much as present objects are. This does rather make it seem as if ancestral objects are nothing but fictions. At least with objects which exist among conscious beings in the present we can say that they are manifesting the will, but now it seems that the ancient Earth and its objects and events are nothing but convenient stories. However this is not quite right. We say that the moon is about 400,000 kilometres from the Earth, yet neither the Moon nor this distance have any reality beyond our representations. The ancient Earth, separated from us by time rather than space, is no less real than this – which is still as real as can be – though it can obviously never be an object of perception for us. It is “less real” only insofar as we ordinarily think of ancient objects as somehow less real.

Have you heard of spacetime? Well, it's a mathematical model that combines measurements of both space and time into a single continuum, with space consisting of three dimensions, and time consisting of one dimension.First off, if we can already quantify both space and time, why do we need to combine them into an entirely new measurement?We need it because we could have two 'observers' of space and time - two different types of particles, for example - and they could both disagree on how much space there is between things at any given point in time.


They could even disagree about the actual sequence of events that have occurred. But as long as their measurements are consistent, neither observer is wrong. Both particles have the correct measurements of space and time, despite coming up with completely different answers.

Put simply, this means that an event in someone's past could be in someone else's future, and there would be nothing 'wrong' about either of their realities. Any disagreement means that there is no universal division of events in the past, present, and future, which opens major philosophical cans of worms for things like free will, and our belief that we can change the future. So is everyone's experience of the Universe entirely subjective? If time and space as we usually conceive of them aren't part of objective reality, then what is?
« Last Edit: August 15, 2015, 01:32:16 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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So is everyone's experience of the Universe entirely subjective?

How many universes are there?   Suppose I am an ant.  My skeleton is on the outside protecting soft arteries, lifespan short ... universe is not the same ... Even the social hierarchies in the insect kingdom seem to have a huge determination of what one particular ant-universe could be ... whether one impregnates the Queen or has to carry f-u-ck-ing debris its entire life ...

Little Angry Any Man, you have free will ... you choose to be a worker.

Although, there have been observations of a lone wandering ants.  Perhaps it would prefer to perish alone than to live in submissive service of the Queen and her sires.

Maybe investigating this phenomenon could shed light on our own condition.

Reality is so dependent upon who and what it is that is experiencing reality.

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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I have been reading Critique of Pure Reason,Four Fold Root of the Priciple of Sufficient Reason,On Sight and Color & Introduction to Plato.I've been thinking about what happens to the brain when its engrossed in something it likes.In all natural beings we see the will expressing itself in its various objectifications. Schopenhauer identifies these objectifications with the Platonic Ideas for a number of reasons. They are outside of space and time, related to individual beings as their prototypes, and ontologically prior to the individual beings that correspond to them.

Although the laws of nature presuppose the Ideas, we cannot intuit the Ideas simply by observing the activities of nature, and this is due to the relation of the will to our representations. The will is the thing in itself, but our experience of the will, our representations, are constituted by our form of cognition, the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason produces the world of representation as a nexus of spatio-temporal, causally related entities. Therefore, Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system seems to preclude our having access to the Ideas as they are in themselves, or in a way that transcends this spatio-temporal causally related framework.

However, Schopenhauer asserts that there is a kind of knowing that is free from the principle of sufficient reason. To have knowledge that is not conditioned by our forms of cognition would be an impossibility for Kant. Schopenhauer makes such knowledge possible by distinguishing the conditions of knowing, namely, the principle of sufficient reason, from the condition for objectivity in general. To be an object for a subject is a condition of objects that is more basic than the principle of sufficient reason for Schopenhauer. Since the principle of sufficient reason allows us to experience objects as particulars existing in space and time with a causal relation to other things, to have an experience of an object solely insofar as it presents itself to a subject, apart from the principle of sufficient reason, is to experience an object that is neither spatio-temporal nor in a causal relation to other objects. Such objects are the Ideas, and the kind of cognition involved in perceiving them is aesthetic contemplation, for perception of the Ideas is the experience of the beautiful.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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However, Schopenhauer asserts that there is a kind of knowing that is free from the principle of sufficient reason.

I remember being perplexed by the ideality of time and space, how Kant insists time and space are mental functions.  We are so conditioned to spatialize time, like when we draw rows and columns of squares to represent "days" ... and there are no such objects in reality, just mental constructs.

Quote
The principle of sufficient reason produces the world of representation as a nexus of spatio-temporal, causally related entities.

One such entity, the computer I am pecking these symbols on, has got my attention - severely.

I am making little breakthroughs with little projects.  What a peculiar species we are ... how alienated we have become ... I turn the water on at a faucet and make coffee ... I press a button on a machine that runs on electricity and battery ... and I tweak the technology to where I am comfortable learning (and always seem to be trouble-shooting something, searching through documentation of what others have encountered) ... Is it that part of the intellect that is appreciating the beauty of the process of learning what Schopenhauer was referring to when he spoke of how some can enjoy hours and hours in solitude content to be enjoying their mental faculties, whereas some seek out parades, red carpets, parties, groups, churches, clubs, to escape the wretchedness of their own inner being?

Maybe they only experience the raw will with its insatiable appetite and constant demands.

The contents of their own minds might drive them to seek "entertainment" ...

I have the machines set up with a slideshow of pictures as the background that change every few minutes in random order.   Sometimes the image of Schopenhauer comes up while I am wracking my brains over some frustrating bit of technocraft where I don't understand why something is just not working.  I am sure there are logical causes behind it ... and my brain is hungry to work through obstacles ... but eventually, it is conquered by the need for sleep, and eventually the will is extinguished by death.

In the meantime, the stomach, no matter how much we feed it, growls again for more ... else the brain gets fried and frustrated.

How pathetic we must appear to celestial and biospheric entites ... I mean, as far as our total dependency on drinkable water in order to live.  And we become so obsessed with our technological devices.  So much wonder and enchantment, and yet so absurdly pathetic and fragile ...

If existence is a horror in the grand scale of things, I wonder if there is a way to transcend it through humor ... just by "catching ourselves in the act of forgetting we are Nothing".

Schopenhauer kind of flipped the script when he said that the entire Creation, with all its suns and galaxies, is dependent upon sentient life for its existence.

With the death of the creature, the entire Creation fades into the void.
« Last Edit: August 17, 2015, 09:46:54 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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With each passing day I identify more &more with the Underground Man.
The nameless narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground , often known as Underground Man, opens his rambling memoirs with a declaration: “I am a sick man … I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man.” Forty years old, he sits and stews in his tiny St Petersburg apartment, refusing treatment for his ailing liver, having left the civil service after receiving an inheritance.


“I couldn’t make myself anything … neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor a villain."

He fulminates against the values of 19th-century Russia before declaring that he doesn’t believe a single word of his (incredibly persuasive) opening monologue. He labels himself an “ineffective, irritating windbag”, but he would prefer to be this than a man of deeds: these people may set the terms for “good” and “bad” character, but they are stupid and limited, “taking immediate, but secondary, causes for primary ones, and thus they are more quickly and easily convinced than other people that they have found indisputable grounds for action.

Entering a tavern, he decides to fight whoever is there, but then stands around, unable to do anything. An officer silently grabs his shoulders and moves him out of the way. Furious at this minor humiliation, Underground Man starts to stalk the military man, who, it transpires, often walks around Petersburg’s crowded Nevsky Prospect, pushing anyone he considers inferior out of his path. Underground Man becomes obsessed with setting up a confrontation, in which he will not yield. After much deliberation, he eventually squares up to the officer. Their shoulders clash: the officer walks on. His subsequent attempts to convince himself that his gesture has made any impact are tragicomic: “He did not even glance round, and pretended he had not noticed; but he was only pretending, I am certain.”

His next encounter is more sustained, with some old classmates whom he thoroughly despises for their “triviality” and “stupidity”. He especially hates Zverkov: “I disliked him even in the lower forms, precisely because he was good-looking and lively. He did uniformly badly in lessons … but succeeded in passing his final examinations because he had influential friends”. When he bumps into the group and learns that Zverkov is leaving Petersburg, Underground Man contributes to a present and goes to the dinner, despite their attempts to dissuade him.

At the meal, things are far less clear, our judgment clouded by our immersion in his rage. He refuses to toast Zverkov and then makes a passive-aggressive speech about how he loathes people who use empty phrases or tell dirty stories, and how he values ”truth, sincerity and honesty”.

 In the final scenes, he talks to 20-year-old “prostitute” Liza, trying to “harrow her soul and crush her heart”, lecturing her about the shamefulness of her profession, purely to have power over someone. She tells him that his hectoring monologue “sounds just like a book”, and his effort to cast himself as the hero who will “rescue” her collapses. By the end, Underground Man has to admit that he doesn’t know where “real life” is lived, but he seems sure, at least, that in opting out of a society that rewards  Zverkov, he’s not a participant. At this point, an editorial voice comes in to tell us that the Notes continues – almost certainly..
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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It is rather creepy how Dostoyevsky is able to express this sense of paranoia and social persecution ... everyone he encounters seems to psychologically abuse him, almost sensing he is hyper-sensitive.

From Tyranny of Public Opinion which is a mixture of Schopenhauer and Russell:

Very few people can be happy unless their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they live. A person with given convictions may find himself an outcast in one set of people, although in another set of people this person would be accepted. Through ignorance a great deal of unnecessary misery is endured. This mental isolation is not merely a source of pain, but it also wastes a tremendous amount of energy just to maintain mental independence against hostile surroundings. This hostility will produce a certain timidity in following out ideas to logical conclusions. Some way must be found by which the tyranny of public opinion can be evaded, and by which members of the intelligent minority can come to know each other and enjoy each other’s society.

Unnecessary timidity makes the trouble worse than it need be. If you show you are afraid of the herd, you give promise of good hunting, whereas if you show indifference, they begin to doubt their own power and therefore tend to let you alone. Gradually it may become possible to acquire the position of licensed lunatic, to whom things are permitted which in another man would be thought unforgivable. Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality in a man who has enough friendliness to make it clear, even to the stupidest, that he is not engaged in criticizing them. This method of escaping censure is, however, impossible to many of those whose tastes and opinions cause them to be out of sympathy with the herd.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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I feel a lot like Rask.For one Im often feverish.For another,due to pricipal of individuation I feel like Ubermensch sometimes.I am often in the grip of a painful hysteria,nausea.

You know that police guy who keeps tormenting Rask throughout the book?Well,in my life,there isnt just one.There are many.
In the end Rask breaks down & goes to Siberia.

SIBERIA-COLD,DARK AND LONELY..
You know..being feverish ..feels so..insane.Yes,it tastes like insanity a bit.
Brain fever.

                                -----
Good God! ... can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open...that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, blood...with the axe...Good God, can it be?"

"It was dark in the corridor, they were standing near the lamp. For a minute they were looking at one another in silence. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov’s burning and intent eyes grew more penetrating every moment, piercing into his soul, into his consciousness. Suddenly Razumihin started. Something strange, as it were passed between them... Some idea, some hint as it were, slipped, something awful, hideous, and suddenly understood on both sides... Razumihin turned pale."

Crime? What crime? ... That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one! ... Killing her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor people. Was that a crime?"
« Last Edit: August 18, 2015, 02:39:29 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Once again you have motivated me to back away from "technical interests" and search through the notes I left in Dead End.

Quote

2010.05.30

I’m moving into darker waters of the psyche. Maybe darker moods are what is necessary for writing my “insane manifesto.” Feeling lower in spirits than I have since being arrested and taken into custody, I awoke just to get evening chow when I discovered that Charlie “the book man” had sneaked into my cell and placed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on my shelf. I smiled a genuine smile. The main character, Raskolnikov, is a “sensitive intellectual” driven by poverty to feel he is above moral law. He is a “former student.” Nietzsche had said that Dostoevsky is the only psychologist he has anything to learn from.

The atmosphere within maximum security pod I-1 is electrifying! Intellectual debates are now energized to a whole new pitch. Reading Dostoevsky in this environment makes apparent the depth and universality of Dostoevsky’s insights and observations. As is my manner, I am compelled to take some notes from Crime and Punishment. I was reading this section of the text out loud in the midst of “religious” and “racial” debates going on between Africoidal brothers, some Jehova Witnesses, some Muslim, others quite neutral. I stayed out of it, of course, just reading Dostoyevsky out loud to myself. This section, though, I read quite loudly with passion … another voice added to the mix.

“What do you think?” shouted Razumikhin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man, therefor I talk nonsense! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a man, in the second you’re no better than a parrot. Truth won’t escape you, but life can be fenced in and cramped.”


2010.05.31

Isn’t writing a great way to “get back at” the world represented by the media ****s, the celebrities, the professional sports industries and their collegiate counterparts – as well as all those who drool over them? Forbidden thoughts articulated via scribbling may eventually be typed and uploaded to the Internet, i.e., virtually published …

Hell, at least I finally have an opportunity not merely to continue reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but to read it in an environment where I am actually savoring every morsel of it.

Note that, as the computer with the hard-drives where the source files were stored was stolen while I was locked up in the county jail, if I had not pecked away at uploading volume one of the diary excerpts to the free message board at ????????.org when I did, those records would have been “lost.”

Now, some notes from the Introduction to Crime and Punishment:

“The ‘autobiographical spiritual journey’ consists of three stages. It begins in a condition of aversio, a turning away from God and towards things of the world, the flesh, and the devil. In a condition of aversio, one is given to misunderstanding the nature of life. Aversio, according to Augustine, is the common condition of all humanity. For the truly lost, it persists an entire lifetime; for those who obtain grace, it is the first stage in the journey to salvation.”

Some jailbirds get together to study the Bible or the Koran. Hentrich studies Dostoyevsky in solitude.


2010.06.01

To say one has 99% belief is to imply one doubts. Both Christianity and Islam are slave religions which demand submission and obedience to a monotheistic patriarch. I’ll have none of that. Why so many inmates go for these religions and their secular equivalents that are disguised as substance abuse therapies while incarcerated is most likely rooted in the conversion process itself, which is the manner in which these sects spread, namely, via proselytization. Prisoners, inmates, and other oppressed populations seek inclusion wishing to belong to the herd – for security.


2010.06.02


awake
jail cell
foul stench in mouth
have to pee
jump down from bunk
step carefully on desk so as not to slip
mental hospital socks help somewhat
**** into toilet
**** has strong odor
rub corners of mouth with fingers
smell fingers
smells like ****
actual ****
breath foul

And so I brush teeth and wash corners of mouth and beard, thinking about how I might go about turning these nasty odors into literature. Did Shakespeare or Dante write about these foul odors? I’m sure that neither was spared experiencing the disturbing unpleasantness of our carnal foulness. Why didn’t the holy medicine man, Black Elk of the Sioux, speak about ****ting in the woods or even ****ion, for that matter? Who writes or speaks about that weird smell when you press your nose down on your lip? Is it possible to unashamedly write an insanely hilarious autobiographical manifesto? Now I am getting somewhere!

Another unforgettable paragraph from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: “I just came to find out personally, once and for all – well, number one, is it true you’re insane? You see, there’s a theory current (well, there, somewhere) you’re insane, or you lean strongly in that direction. I can assure you, I’m rather strongly inclined to that theory myself; in the first place because of your stupid or rather nasty actions (which can’t be explained), and in the second place because of the way you treated your mother and sister not long ago. If a man weren’t mad he’d have to be a monster and a villian to act as you have to them. Consequently, you must be insane.”

Also, when the detective is talking to Raskolnikov: “I repeat, you are very impatient, Rodion Romanych, and sick. You are bold and proud and serious, and you have been through a great deal – I knew all that long ago. I am familiar with all these moods, and as I read it your little essay seemed quite familiar. It was thought out on sleepless nights and in a state of wild excitement, heart heaving and pounding, and with suppressed enthusiasm. It’s dangerous though – this proud, suppressed enthusiasm in a young man! I jeered at you at the time, but I’ll tell you now that I’m terribly fond – I mean as an admirer – of this first, youthful, passionate experimenting with the pen. Your essay’s absurd and fantastic, but there’s such a sincerity that keeps flashing through it, such a youthful, incorruptible pride, such desperate boldness; and it’s rather somber, your essay; well, but that’s to the good, yes. I read that essay of yours and I put it aside, and … as I put it aside I thought: ‘That man’s heading for trouble!’”

There’s another passage I want to quote in full where Raskolnikov’s mother addresses him, and I sometimes like to imagine someone addressing me this way, for imagining this helps to protect my spirit against the status quo which would have me mocked and marginalized by their chain-of-command lapdogs, knucklehead authority worshipers, and degenerates-in-charge:

“I may be stupid, Rodia, but I can tell that you will soon be one of the top people in our learned world, maybe the very top. And they dared think you were mad! You may not know it, but that’s what they really did think. Ah, the miserable worms, how could they understand what it means to have brains!”


Since I am obliged to pass this text on to yet another scholar/jailbird, a few more little excerpts that I can meditate upon at my leisure:

The policeman, Gunpowder, says to Raskolnikov, at the station when Raskolnikov is about to confess for the murder of the old pawn broker, “As for the little ornaments and appurtances of life are concerned, for you nihil est; you’re an ascetic, a monk, a hermit! … For you it’s a pen behind the ear, a book, scholarly researches – that’s what makes your soul soar!”

Expressing Raskolnikov’s inner reflections, the narrator writes, “It even struck him that they [the prisoners] valued life more in prison than they did when they were at large. How much agony some of them must have been through – the tramps, for instance. Could an odd ray of sunlight really mean so much?”

“Everybody disliked and avoided him. Finally they even came to hate him. Why? He did not know. There were some far more criminal than he, and even these held him in contempt, laughed at him, laughed at his crime.”

“‘You’re a gentleman!’ they told him. ‘You shouldn’t have been walking around with an ax – not a gentleman’s business!’ For some reason he did not understand there was a quarrel one day; they all fell on him at once in a fury. ‘You’re an atheist! You don’t believe in God!’ they shouted at him. ‘You should be killed!’”

“He had never talked to them about God or faith, yet they wanted to kill him as an atheist; he remained silent and did not contradict them. One convict flung himself on him in a real frenzy. Calmly and quietly Raskolnikov stood his ground; not an eyebrow twitched and not a face muscle quivered. A guard managed to get between him and the murderer in time, or blood would have been spilled.”

In the afterward, Robin Feuer Miller asks, “Has the immensely private act of reading made you more thoughtful or more compassionate, or has it hardened your heart?”

“How will this novel insert itself into the private recesses of your living, thinking, feeling self?”

Dostoevsky himself spent eight months in prison in Peter & Paul Fortress, sentenced to death but reprieved at the last minute … four years as a fettered convict in a prison camp and then five years as a soldier reduced to the ranks … In a footnote there is something written by Tolstoy in an essay called Why Do Men Stupify Themselves? (1889): Raskolnikov did not live his true life when he murdered the old woman or her sister … He lived his true life when he was lying on the sofa in his room … when he was doing nothing and was only thinking, when only his consciousness was active: and in that consciousness tiny, tiny altercations were taking place. It is at such times that one needs the greatest clearness to decide correctly the questions that have arisen, and it is just then that one glass of beer or one cigarette may prevent the solution of the question, may … stifle the voice of conscience … as was the case with Raskolnikov.”


I am a man, therefor I talk nonsense!

My current diary-notebook is called "The Book of Nonsense: Notebook # 8"   :-\
« Last Edit: August 18, 2015, 11:42:57 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Thanks so much for the reponse.Sorry for the late reply-Im travelling.I think S.'s metaphysics is truly remarkable,but his ethics?He did not follow it himself.
Do you think an honest S.  would put his ethics like this:
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain in constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of my self. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling.

 This confession has meant nothing.

« Last Edit: August 21, 2015, 07:31:14 am by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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My first thought:  A philosopher need not be a saint.  Schopenhauer is not Buddha.  The Buddha walked away from a palace to contemplate the life of cripples and the general suffering in "the streets" while Schopenhauer, acknowledging the horror, hostility, and danger of the "civilized jungle" only wanted to hide ... with a loaded revolver.  While I tend not to be too critical of the man and I have great respect for his determination to set his thinking down to be passed to those who may or may not exist in the future, it is best we do not romanticize our heroes.   Sure, Schopenhauer is one of my heroes ... because of his boldness.  I prefer his philosophy to that of Bertrand Russell who was critical of him ...

Having said this, though, I would like to go deeper.  I think this is why Cioran was un-systematic. 

One is influenced by another, but we each unfold the way we will. 

I remember hearing about the term "ad hominen attacks" ... Is this when, unable to attack a man's ideas or refute his thinking, people will attack the character or lifestyle of an individual thinking this somehow is a refute of his ideas? 

An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments. When used inappropriately, it is a fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized.


The British philosopher and historian Bertrand Russell deemed Schopenhauer an insincere person, because judging by his life:

    "He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. ... It is hard to find in his life evidences of any virtue except kindness to animals ... In all other respects he was completely selfish. It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice."

Bryan Magee points out that "the answer to such shallow, but not uncommon criticism" is found in a quotation from Schopenhauer:

    "It is therefore just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a great sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy."

As a teenager, Ludwig Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism. However, after his study of the philosophy of mathematics, he rejected epistemological idealism for Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein was highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately "shallow" thinker: "Schopenhauer has quite a crude mind... where real depth starts, his comes to an end"

And yet Wittgenstein was known to use corporal punishment on his students ... something Thoreau refused to do.  He held a similar job for only 3 weeks, quitting because he refused to "discipline" the children.  Was Thoreau a "saint"?  This is an interesting can of worms you have opened, Holden.  What is ethics?   Will ethical considerations influence which philosophers/mathematicians we will pay attention to? 

I had found myself never eager to read Heidegger's work, and I always seemed sympathetic to Husserl.  Was there something in my own character resistant to the image of a professional career philosopher being given the position of his teacher simply for wearing the State flag on his uniform? 

It is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.  We must never lose sight of the fact that we are primates, each and every one of us an instantiation of the class: chimpanzee.   This helps to keep things in perspective as far as the "slinging of poop" goes.   :D

By the way, Frege discovered, on his own, the fundamental ideas that have made possible the whole modern development of logic and thereby invented an entire discipline.

Frege once said, “Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher at least half a mathematician.” He kept aloof from his students and even more aloof from his colleagues.

A diary kept at the end of his life reveals, as well, a loathing of the French and of Catholics and an anti-Semitism extending to a belief that the Jews must be expelled from Germany.   :o

Shall I ask the global search engines what ethics is?  Do I need a professor of philosophy to tell me what is right or wrong?  Shall a professional mathematician teach me how to live?  Who can teach us these things?

Kant preached that the right takes priority over the good.

Nietzsche was very harsh toward the masses who perpetuated the slave morality where the strong are viewed as evil and the weak are viewed as good ... or, let us put it another way, where the rich are seen as evil and the poor are seen as good.  I have to confess that I have a bit of the slave mentality in me.  How could one escape this morality in a world where, well, I don't have to tell you ... In India, is not all the wealth concentrated into a small group of elite families?   Are they evil or just lucky?   And are they really to be envied?   Maybe the old saints (and Cioran) are on to something when they glorify the beggar.  Wasn't this the meaning of the life of Diogenes?

So, Schopenhauer preached the life of the poor beggar, but lived the life of the upper middle class ... the bourgeois ...

I take it from our conversations that we both lean in the direction of "working class hero" where we identify with what is historically termed "the peasants" ...

Must we reconcile our intellectual pursuits with our political views concerning social justice?

Maybe it is not necessary for us to do so ... maybe we can be holy fools or sacred clowns or just court jesters who point out contradictions and absurdities ...

Maybe we take life too seriously ... or not seriously enough.  I don't know.  Who really knows?

Even if we do not come to any conclusions, at least we are diving deep.  So what if we come up muddy.   :-\

My own position in my so-called "extended family" is rather ridiculous.  I mean, here I am engrossed in fairly heavy duty scholarly pursuits, and yet I am considered a kind of village idiot, whereas some of the more crude members of the tribe can afford luxury cruises and luxurious homes ... boats ... Mercedes Benz (Hell, I can barely spell Mercedes and I can't afford a Volkswagen).   My lifestyle does not allow me to even consider owning a 20 year old vehicle ... that doesn't mean I would not cherish a VW Eurovan ... I could live in it ... and after the collapse of the fossil-fuel age, maybe put it on cynder-blocks and connect to the Interwebs with a solar-powered water-proof rugged notebook computer ... ah, but who am I kidding? 

Perhaps life is a joke par excellence.

Another thing I find perplexing is how great an influence "Islamic" mathematicians had on Europe ... Roman numerals?  Where would we be without zero? 

The number system we use today is referred to as "Indo-Arabic" or even Hindu-Arabic ... It's of Indian origin but was brought to Europe by Arab mathematicians.  Myself, I prefer to use the term Indian rather than Hindu, and Arab rather than Islamic.  I have contempt for totalitarian theocracies, but this does not imply I do not appreciate the cultures that have spawned mathematical thinkers ... al-jabr !!!  Al-Khwarizmi ;D

HEADLINE:  The Indian number system. Europe discovers "Arabian numbers". <<<.>>>   :D

When was a place-value number system introduced in Europe?

The concept of zero was essential to using a place-valued number system.   Supposedly, fully developed place-value number systems existed in China since about 200 BC and in Central America since about 400 AD. The Chinese number system is still in use today; the Mayan number system was wiped out during the Spanish conquest.

How is one to evaluate another's understanding of mathematical ideas?  Would it matter if one were barefoot and living in a hut without irrigation technology?  That's one of the great insults to our humanity, that ostentatious consumption equates to high status, and along with that status comes a certain respect.  What do we respect? 

I apologize for the disordered nature of my thought processes.

Isn't it true that, with access to the Internet and a supply of nutritious food, a solitary youth might learn far more in solitude with a little guidance than were he or she shipped off for the standardized education which produces clerics and soldiers and obedient employees?  I can just imagine some little kid interested in learning mathematics getting thrown around like a rag-doll by a "hard working" father who accuses him of "playing on the computer" ... when he might be engrossed in some automated tutorial ...  ::)

You see, Holden, my thinking is chaotic.  I am all over the place, which is why I hate structured environments ... Oh, one of those "creative types" ?  I remember how restricted I felt by the role I had to play in society.  This phenomenon will become more and more common: the more we are exposed to higher learning, the more oppressed we may feel doing the grunt work of civilization ... It is inevitable that we run into contradictions and conflicts.  I want to study several things at once, and yet my body is nourished by the watermelon some oppressed migrant worker lifted from the ground ... loaded onto a truck which was driven by someone who may beat the **** out of his son for studying Calculus and "thinkin' he's so damn smart" ...   

 Now I am once again curious about the origins of certain ideas ... and my attention has been devoured by this desire to understand technologies that transform faster than I can master anything.  Right now I am exploring the uses of Python ... talk about a CAN OF WORMS ... one thing leads to another ... but it is good to pause, to reflect, to appreciate that I am standing on the shoulders of giants. 


footnote

  • The Indian number system

    When we talk about the numerals of today's decimal number system we usually refer to them as "Arabian numbers." Their origin, however, is in India, where they were first published in the Lokavibhaga on the 28th of August 458 AD. Many changes had occurred in India since the rise and decline of the Indus Civilization. For several hundred years life had returned to small villages, but a second period of urbanization had developed at about 1500 BC. Shortly before that time the Aryans, a nomadic people, had entered India from the Iranian region. They introduced cattle breeding into the fertile river valleys and established a new civilization in the Ganges River valley.

    The arrival of the Aryans coincided with the introduction of Vedic, an early form of Sanskrit and the first Indian script. The earliest examples of Indian literature, the Vedas, originate from this time, and the Ganges civilization is therefore often called the Vedic period. It lasted until about 500 BC.

    Question:  Who were these so-called Aryans?  Did they come from the Caucus mountains of Iran?  Iranians ... were they militaristic farmers who migrated into India to brutally subjugate the dark-hued intellectuals of India?  I am curious.

    When I do research into the origins of certain mathematical ideas which we take for granted today, I run across terms like Negrito, Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid ...

    Meanwhile ... another package for Wile E Coyote at the door ... it must be whole coffee beans and a grinder ...   :D

    Arabica whole beans ... and great respect for Al-Khwarizmi ... and a disdain for religion.  One of the books I could not part with was written by Muhammed Ali Mazidi and Janice Gillispie Mazidi.  It is called The 80x86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers (Volumes I & II). 

    It is about Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing.

    It mentions nothing about religion.  Religion is not an issue, you see. 

    I feel compelled to return to my "studies", but which direction will I move in today? 

    I am going through Justin Seitz's Black Hat Python, Chapter 7: Github Command and Control ... but, as you can see, I am liable to go off on a mathematical tangent.  Fortunately I do not have a boss breathing down my neck ... just a mother demanding I cut up her watermelon ...   :P

« Last Edit: August 22, 2015, 02:26:27 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Lots of food for thought.I m still travelling.I am thinking about what you said.Will come back to you soon.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.