Author Topic: Ascetic  (Read 1750 times)

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Nation of One

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Re: Ascetic
« on: June 22, 2019, 02:00:46 pm »
I like the way the documentor (of "Wagner and Schopenhauer") pronounces Arthur:  Art-HooR instead of the English-sounding ArTH-ERR.

While I will not try to extract and remove my off-the -wall ideas about studying mathematics as though it were the equivalent of injesting mind-bending narcotics, I want to be clear that this comparison makes less and less sense to me the more I think about it.    I suppose the connection between the two is in the intention for mental transformation.    As the Aborigine of the original Gortbusters used to say, "The only environment we have left to defend is the one between our ears."

Lifelong learning is something we can commit to as an independent mental creature, an aspect of our existence that is not dependent upon relationships with other people.   That is, people close to us may disappear through death or other circumstances, we might find ourselves coming to terms with Thomas Ligotti's “There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go.  There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know” or Arthur Schopenhauers, "There is nothing to be had in this world."

I suppose, at the end of the day, I am simply pointing out that a strong devotion to studying as a way of life most certainly, at least in the United States, may ironically keep one relatively "poor" and "financially insecure," which is in sharp contrast with the propaganda promoted which equates study with "career-oriented," financial prosperity.   

It's enough to make me want to puke when I read some kid write on the internet about how he is a professional programmer or "software engineer" who builds "apps" for "smart" devices, and that he has no need for mathematics whatsoever, that it's not relevant to designing the software.     I do not want to be such a professional.   I do not envy such a person.      There is no doubt in my mind that an overwhelming majority of business-software/web-development work in the world today requires very little, if any, real math, but computer science itself IS mathematics in that it is a Branch of Applied Mathematics.  Many programming languages organize computing as functions, and if you don’t know what a mathematical function is then you will miss what it means when a computing language uses this concept for seemingly non-mathematical operations.

And yet, I see that a deep interest in a language like C++, similar to a deep interest in symbolic algebra, analytic geometry, calculus, physics, and even number theory may lead to the poor house, which directly contradicts the hopes and dreams of all those parents pressuring their kids to excell in "Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics."    If their children develop a true interest, they may prefer to live on the dole and study the rest of their lives, leaving their parents to fend for themselves when it comes to paying for that sexy Volvo or cool-a-ss Volkswagon Vanagon camper.    :D

Am I making any sense?   Jebb Bush (the brother of King George II) once stated that "the truth leads to the poor house."

I do not think he intended to make a virtue of "poverty level minimalistic lifestyles," but it is sometimes the case.

I remember hearing that Kurt Gödel had died of malnutrition (starved to death), and I had initially was under the impression that this was due to poverty, until later I learned that he was just paranoid, thinking someone was trying to poison him.   And yet, it's not difficult to imagine that devotion to study, whether pure mathematics, computer sciene, or even something as "touchy feely" as "existential philosophy," might place one in the same ranks with society's other misfits and outsiders, the majority of which struggle with some kind of "diagnosable psychiatric disorder" in combination with a tendency to seek relief via chemical agents. 

When Bjarne Stroustrup publishes a 1200 page PROGRAMMING textbook to be used in universities around the globe, he seems to be addressing an audience he belives "wants to be a part of the professional community."    This is not always the case.   I kind of mistrust professional classes as one might mistrust the priestly classes of ancient or medieval times.

Paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, mathematics and computer programming are open to everybody.  I refuse to allow you to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind!   

I recall transferring some of my notes (from library readings back in 2013) to the wordpress blog.   I just had to search for "Virginia Woolf" at xhentric DOT wordpress DOT com and I found it there:

I will begin this with a quote by HL Mencken, from an entry (2013.06.22) preceeding the Woolf ones.

From an essay called “The American Religion”  :

Quote from: H.L. Mencken
In a democratic society it is more hazardous than elsewhere to show any oddity in conduct or opinion. Whoever differs from the general is held to be inferior, though it may be obvious, by any rational standard, that he is really superior. People become standardized. Their laws lay heavy penalties on any man whose taste in reading, in drinking or in any other private avocation differs from that of his neighbors. Life tends to be regimented and unpleasant, and everyone is more or less uneasy.

I think of Holden living in the world's largest democracy, and I almost know for certain that he may say Mencken could just as easily be writing about modern day India, but I also know that such a land is so diverse that it is not so clear cut.
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Anyway, these notes were originally scribbled in a notebook.  I will just transfer the typed entry from wordpress here.  The original entry in the notebook was callled Mental Insurection in a Nutshell:

2013.10.02  (2nd of October, not the 10th of February)
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From the introduction to Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill by Herminone Lee:

Quote from: Virginia Woolf
… a satire on conformity begins to make itself felt. The ill are the deserters, the refuseniks. They won’t accept the “co-operative” conventions. They blurt things out. They turn sympathizers away. They won’t go to work. They lie down. They waste time. They fantasize. They don’t go to Church or believe in Heaven. They refuse to read responsibly or make sense of what they read. They are attracted to nonsense, sensation, and rashness. On the other side of the glass is “the army of the upright,” harnessing energy, driving motor cars, going to work and to church, communicating and civilizing.

Reading in bed – like writing in bed – is, it’s suggested, a form of deviancy.

I had lied down on my back reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when I was overcome by a powerful sleepiness which I surrendered to. I felt fortunate that I was at liberty to fall back to sleep, that I am not on the other side of the glass in the army of the upright, that I am a deserter. What must be respected, if not by others, than at the very least, respected by myself, is my utter contempt and disdain for “cooperation with controlled environments.” I value the opportunity I now have for organizing and typing some of my scribbled reflections. I also value the strength of my political dissidence. <<snip>>

How deviant to refuse to seek gainful employment, to lie in bed reading, writing, and, God forbid, napping with music playing, soaking in sunbeams undisturbed while a homeless man in New York City runs amock in a park stabbing people with a broken pair of scissors. This is reality. Apartments are so expensive in that city that the poor are left to fend for themselves against the hostile elements while young urban professionals go for a little jog in the park. These two worlds often make contact. Nightmare world. Why are the masses shocked by such an event but not outraged that the dispossessed have to live like that?  (see footnote:  Eddie Barzum)

Virginia Woolf asks, "If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and pencil, is truth?"

Boswell wrote, “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest and most ignorant.”   (quite a provocative statement)

Our society is indifferent and even hostile to anything aspiring to intellectual greatness. It rewards conformity and punishes dissent. 

Quote from: Virginia Woolf
Watch in the Spring sunshine the stock brokers and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that 500 pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.

When food, clothing, and shelter are mine, not merely do labor and effort cease, but also hatred and bitterness.

I need not hate any man: he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man: he has nothing to give me. It was absurd to blame any class as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not in their control. They too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties to contend with. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harboring in their breast a vulture, forever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs – the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives.

But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.

Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind
.

So, where is truth? In the intestines. The truth is in the intestines. Do you not feel these rumble?

My species is a mad animal!

Being stranded out here in Brick, out in Ocean County, so far from Freehold, as far as public transportation goes – $80 cab fair – may not be such a bad thing. The streets of Freehold, while there may be many friendly faces and tender smiles, are also crawling with those who view me as a maverick, a bad boy, a radical anti-capitalist atheist, a dissenter, an unemployed unmarried scoundrel and scamp; hence, there is always the threat of being “chased out of town” or actually arrested for DISORDERLY CONDUCT, ERATIC BEHAVIOR, or TRESPASSING. And so, there may be great intervals between my visits to Downtown Freehold and my childhood wilderness.

In cold climates, without recourse to making fire, a human being requires a hot house at night – like an exotic plant. Where is truth? Freezing cold or wandering around like a suspicious character for the police to interrogate. Maybe people call the police when they witness a lone man wandering aimlessly.


2013.10.16

My teeth are rotten and my limbs are broke
The best I can think to do is joke and smoke


2013.10.29

I found an excerpt from Kierkegaard’s diary in the Kafka biography that insists on our own standards:

“As soon as a man comes along … who says: However the world is, I shall stay with my original nature, which I am not about to change to suit what the world regards as good. The moment this word is spoken, a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of existence.”

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FOOTNOTE:   "You look like you could use a drink."     ;)

« Last Edit: June 23, 2019, 12:08:51 am by gorticide »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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