{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

I am going to read and reread what you wrote.

I have to confess.  Although I have thought about this for many years, you probably have as good a chance as I do trying to make heads or tails of it.

Sometimes I feel retarded, especially when attempting to draw vectors in 3D.   I actually struggle to draw in 3D on two dimensional paper.

I have to look at something like this or that before putting pencil to paper, and even then ... ugh ... I cut out a 30-60-90 triangle from cardboard to assist me.  It's rather pathetic.

I am looking into the isosketch from the United Kingdom.

 

It's not like I'm a frustrated artist.  I'm not an artist at all.  I'm just plain old frustrated ... I'm much more at ease studying geometry by algebraic means.   But I am forcing myself to deal with my "retardedness" when it comes to actually sketching 3D surfaces, curves, and vectors on 2D paper.

I do use the computer to represent graphs, using Sage or gnuplot, but I also force myself to draw some rough sketches by hand.  This is when I really have to be patient with myself.

You see, with arithmetic and algebra and calculus and physics and programming, you can get by with tons of determination and effort, but, when it comes to "art" or "music", I think some people are talented while others are not.  I am not a talented musician.  I beat on the drums like a chimpanzee.    Nor can I sing very well (I only sing when I'm drunk or stuck in the county lock-up walking around in circles in the little yard when it is raining and all the basketball players are glued to the TV or playing cards, so I haven't belted one out in a long time).   As far as art goes, I draw some cartoons.  I can draw a circle ...   

You want to know what else I can't do?   I can't start a fire without a lighter like the natives could.

I would most likely starve without the grocery stores.

Enough self deprecating for now.   I acknowledge that I do have some intelligence, and even some algebraic skills ... I may even have some deep insights into the tragic and absurd nature of existence ... but I struggle to draw 3D vectors on 2D paper.   I'm not going to drown myself in the ocean over it.   I just have to try to learn some new tricks ... and I'm getting old ...



... oh, and I just may be crazy, but I aint going to Alcatraz!

Herr Hentrich,
As usual, thank you for your reply. You write "you want to know what else I can't do?   I can't start a fire without a lighter like the natives could.

I would most likely starve without the grocery stores." I can´t start a fire without a lighter either. I have been told many times that instead of reading "diabollical" writers, I should do practical things. They said that in the supermarket you won´t get food with books or talking about life. Well, you may not go to Alcatraz or Saint Quentin, but have to say, you, me and others are on Planet Earth. A round penal establishment. Stay safe. Raúl   

[/b]Also, if you get into writing some code in C/C++ and Python, these toys transform into mind tools.

Still, the core concepts are accessible without the computer, of course.[/b]

I have a MacBook Pro ,it is a few  years old I think,one of my relatives gave it to me about 2 years back.
And I know next to nothing about programming/writing codes,so for example when you write python my brain sees a snake before it sees a programming language:-).I most certainly would like to learn it in order to study math.
I can calmly acknowledge that I am not comfortable sketching 3D space on a 2D plane. 

Please tell me a few things:
1.When you are trying to draw 3D space on a 2D plane,the figure which you are trying to draw from a book I assume,do you keep it right next to you in order to refer to it time and again or not?
2.If you are not keeping the figure right next to you in order to refer to it time and again,do you have an EXACT mental picture of it in your mind because you have looked at that figure scores of times?
When I say EXACT I mean is it as clear in your mind as ,say,your name?

There is a certain reason I am asking you these questions,once you respond I would tell you what that is.It may help both of us to understand math better and in a far easier way.

Mr.Gladiator,
Thank you for your comment. Let me quote, I am not sure if it´s correct., "Ave Cesar, morituri te salutant". (Hail Caesar, those who are about to die, salute you). My little addition would be Hail Caesar, those who are about to die/live salute you". My prisoner ID is five-seven-zero-one-six-five.Prison facility: Asuncion, Paraguay. Sentence: to die by anguish,boredom, flesh decay, sickness, and final extinction (food for worms). Stay safe. Raúl

I have a MacBook Pro

You should be fine with that, Holden.  It has a Unix bash shell.  I would prefer using terminal (with command-line tools).  You could use xCode, which would be like using Visual Studio, I guess.  Like I said, I prefer the command line (terminal). 

We could start a separate thread when you are into it.  I was doing a little research, looking into setting up g++ GNU GCC compiler on your machine.

This is a pretty clear explanation:  Editing And Compiling In Apple Xcode

I don't want to distract you from your path, though.

It would just be a way to compile a few small programs.   No pressure! 

Señor Nada,
Yes, It is true. we are slave to our body needs, that is , to ****, to urinate, to ma sturbate, to have sex,and so on.We have been thrown into life without our consent and without our consent we will die. Really absurd. Take care of yourself. Raúl

I am no expert on Kafka, but I would say he worked all his life because he was afraid of his father's disapproval.   

Speaking of jobs and literature, do you think that part of the appeal of Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is the shameless anti-job lifestyle of Ignatius Reilly?

His education made him comical as a "weenie vendor". 

Of course, Ignatius was fictional.  There was an absence of the father figure to threaten to punish him, just his mother asking if he might like to take a little rest at the psychiatric hospital. His reply was, “They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won’t be a robot!”

Once the pointlessness of everything becomes all too apparent, living up to parents' or grandparents' work ethics is no longer an issue.  They've got another thing coming ... or not coming.  However you want to look at it, I can appreciate the injunction to live in ambitionless peace.

Maybe all the math scribblings I am engaged in now are just the "copy books" of a modern day Ignatius Reilly, and that my entire life is just some kind of existential comedy.

How did Cioran manage to avoid jobs?   We know how Schopenhauer pulled it off.  Maybe Kafka was really trapped in the thick of it, which is what motivated him to write Metamorphosis, which is really an indictment against jobs and employers and the pressure to report to "the office".

He became a menacing creature which made him unfit for employment.

I suppose the trick is to be just menacing enough to disqualify oneself from servile subservience, but not so menacing as to require incarceration.

 

It's a razor's edge.  To live outside the world of jobs can be hazardous to one's health depending on where one's cell happens to be.   If one inhabits certain environments where anxiety levels are intense, one could easily succumb to self-destructive behavior.  Hence, my current abstinence from alcohol and avoidance of pleasure-seeking adventures.  In a sense, I have become a model prisoner in the Open Air Prison so as to enjoy a few privileges, such as access to textbooks, computers, fine coffee, and tobacco - and to be available to assist my mother ... (that's another Confederacy of Dunces connection).

Preferring to study higher mathematics rather than reporting to a supervisor is condemned, so one has to become impervious to social condemnation. 

Maybe studying things like differential equations is how I justify such a lifestyle.  I am no genius.  These subjects are difficult and impractical.  Who is to say I would be better off with job security and keys to a Volkswagen?  Myself, I am no literary genius.  I don't have it in me to write novels.  I am no artist.  There was a time in my life when I tried to be an ideal employee.  I really did try.  Now I am resolved to just study math, even if I don't make too much progress.  I am satisfied when I gain understanding of the fundamentals, just familiarizing myself with the esoteric notation.

Why did Kafka submit?  Because he could.  I cannot submit.  I suppose my personality makes employment problematic.  I'm making the most of the situation, I think.  Did Kafka "choose" to submit?   Can we say that I actually choose not to submit?   Kafka himself admitted that he was amazed with how one little event could transform one's destiny.  A series of such events have made it so today I can study differential equations in peace, and remove the mystery once and for all.

HP Lovecraft would have gladly submitted, but nobody wanted to employ him.  I might be in a similar situation.  Nobody wanted to hire me, even after I acquired more education.  In fact, for someone like me, more education seems to make matters worse.  I mean, more education made me even less satisfied with jumping through hoops for supervisors and all that monkey business; although for some, their educations have the opposite effect, making them even more manipulable for want of prestige, clout, titles, authority, etc.  They come to worship authority.

The bottom line is that I have never equated more education with helping me back into a harness.  I wonder if I could ever be harnessed again.

It's not what we make of life, but what life makes of us.  We have to deal with our own particular situations.  Then again, Kafka died fairly young, didn't he?  Perhaps, if he had lived a little longer, his predicament would have forced him into unemployment.  He did not live long enough to become an extreme failure.  I have lived that long, and then some.

And yet my drift out of the workforce was never planned or contrived.  I was simply going from one day to the next, going on emergency assistance, and generally just giving up, going with the flow.  It has been a rocky road, and now my mental health seems to be hinged on being able to continue studying mathematics at my own pace without any kind of pressure to "put it to use".

I would work even less if I were already dead.

Does every difficult pursuit have to be motivated by a desire to reach some distant goal? 

I guess, if one wants to engage in useless activities like studying applied mathematics, that one better be independently wealthy or else risk being condemned as a drain on the war economy.

At least, in my defence, I can say I haven't replicated.   I don't want to be the president of Amerika.  Learning a little more "computational science" is about as far as my ambition goes.

And you know what?   I can see that even this little goal requires me to stay focused and determined, and not to feel pressure to work in haste or to sink in despair over the seeming impossibility of making any progress whatsoever. 

So, no, I suppose I am not a good role model for those aspiring to "do something with their lives".

Thankfully my agenda does not require anyone's approval ... as long as I am not "disturbing the peace" or behaving bizarrely in public.  And, in a way, by keeping my nose in books outside the workforce, at least I am not spreading subversive ideas among the troops.

By the way, Holden, I hope that you find a way to make the scholarly part of your life the primary part.  What I mean to say is, I hope that your employer does not drain all your energy, so that your nights alone in your room can be enjoyed rather than just re-energizing ...

Take care.

____________________________________________________________________________

“By all evidence, we are here in the world to do nothing.” ~ Cioran

I am happy to consider myself an amateur.

Thank you just the same for your encouraging words. 

I think it may be hyperbole, though.  Now this Titus Beu - he may be the most learned.  Holden, you have to realize I am simply a lifelong autodidactic student.  I have learned my lessons simply from living.  As far as technical knowledge goes, like I said before, I am simply an enthusiastic amateur.   

When I was trying to read everything Schopenhauer demanded, I did read The Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics (which was nice and short!), Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason Alone, A Critique of Judgement (too rigid - I didn't care for it), and Critique of Practical Reason, none of which left a lasting impression on me.   I can live without them.   

I knew this when I was gathering belongings into suitcases preparing to get on a train to travel across the continent to be homeless in Seattle.  Kant was not coming along!  Schopenhauer and Cioran were.   Even Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms:  The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1 made it.   I still have the copies I lugged around, storing most in my nephew's little apartment ... until I found a place.

I would suggest skimming through some commentaries.   

Please do follow your own inclinations, for while I did follow Schopenhauer's instructions as far as reading Kant goes, the parts that struck me most in Kant were limited to those parts in Critique of Pure Reason that discussed the noumenon and phenomenon.  It was here that we easily recognize Schopenhauer's world as will and representation.

I once had a big fat green book with the collection of Plato's writings.  I merely nibbled at them.

I like to remember what David Abram points out in his writings about Plato and Socrates.   Socrates belongs to the oral, pre-written, pre-alphabetized tradition, and Plato is one of the first to put things in writing.  That is what makes Plato's work significant.

An excerpt from an excerpt: 

The Hebrews were the first real caretakers of this great and difficult magic – alphabetic literacy.  The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what has been lost – FORGOTTEN INTIMACY.

It seems as though the Greeks may have further objectified space and time into distinct dimensions. Time becomes inseparable from number and sequence. The thorough differentiation of “time” from “space” was impossible so long as large portions of the populace still experienced the surrounding terrain as animate and alive.

The burning of tens of thousands of women (most of them herbalists from peasant backgrounds) as “witches” during the 16th and 17th centuries may be understood as the nearly successful extermination of the last orally preserved traditions of Europe in order to clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a natural world increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set of objects. (Abram 1996)

In 1781, Immanual Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, agreed with Newton that time and space were absolute, that they were independent of any objects. However, these distinct dimensions did not belong to the surrounding world as it exists in itself, but were necessary forms of human awareness, the two forms by which the human mind structures the things it perceives.

Keep in mind when reading these excerpts that I am well aware that Abram appears to not take into account Sanskrit and what is taking place in your part of the planet.  Please forgive the "Eurocentric" perspective.  At least Eurocentricism is something Schopenhauer can never be accused of!

We do know that the Ancient Hebrews were among the first communities to make sustained use of phonetic writing – the first bearers of an alphabet.

Unlike other Semitic peoples, they did not restrict their use of the alphabet to economic and political record keeping, but used it to record ancestral stories, traditions, and laws.

They were perhaps the first nation to so thoroughly shift their sensory participation away from the forms of surrounding nature to a purely phonetic set of signs, and so to experience the profound epistemological independence from the natural environment that was made possible by this potent new technology. To actively participate with the visible forms of nature became idolatry by the ancient Hebrews; it was not the land but the written letters that now carried the ancestral wisdom. (Abram 1996)

Although the Hebrews renounced animism, they retained a participatory relationship with the wind and the breath – the relationship is inferred from the structure of the Hebrew writing system.

On the journey across the Mediteranean, on the journy to Greece, the letters of the aleph-beth left behind their ties to “the enveloping life-world.” The alpha-beth became a much more abstract set of symbols. The Greek scribes introduced vowels. The resulting alphabet was a different kind of tool from its earlier Semitic incarnation.

Text had lost its ambiguity and mystery, leaving less for creative imagination to interpret. There is one correct way to read it. Active interpretation is not invited. There is no longer any choice about which vowels to insert. By using visible characters to represent the sounded breath, the Greeks effectively DESACRALIZED the breath and the air. By giving form to the invisible, they nullified the mysteriousness of the enveloping atmosphere.

Not two centuries later, Plato and Socrates were able to co-opt the term psyche, which for Anaximenes was associated with the breath and the air. Plato used the term psyche to indicate something not just invisible but utterly intangible. The psyche was now a thoroughly abstract phenomenon enclosed within the physical body as in a prison. Plato’s transcendent realm of eternal “Ideas” was itself dependent upon the new affinity between the literate intellect and the visible letters (and words) of the alphabet. Plato’s realm of pure bodiless Ideas was incorporeal, connected to the rational psyche much as the earlier, breath-like psyche was joined to the atmosphere.

Unlike the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament was originally written primarily in the Greek alphabet. And wherever the alphabet advanced, it proceeded by dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible influences – by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic depth.

In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe, all things – animals, forests, rivers, and caves – had the power of expressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective discourse was the air.

To sum all this up, while I will not discourage you from exploring translations of Kant's and Plato's writings to your heart's content, I will simply remind you to consider the moon glaring in the night sky and allow it to cast it's spells.   Continue to listen to the language of the wind, the thunder, and your own wordless nightmares.

You have all the necessary apparatus that Kant or Plato had access to.  It is one being that we all are, right?