Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

Just read Jose Luis Borges’ The Immortal, from his short story collection The Aleph and Other Stories.  It tells the tale of a Roman tribune from Thebes who embarks on a quest to find the Immortal City, somwhere in the western part of the Sahara desert.  Eventually, he discovers the meaning behind the concept of immortality, how it is an existence that is without existence, how there is a everything that occurs is balanced out by an antithetical occurance that sums in zero meaning. 

It’s an interesting concept, one which ties into an idea of how everyday life really is full of shit, and how meaning is the substance that the shit of life is made of.  Now, I don’t want to disregard meaning.  After all, I’m not immortal, and I don’t have that luxury.  To a transient existence, every moment is "irrecoverable and contingent." In doing so, we inject meaning in order to experience it.  However, my point about equating meaning with shit is the amount of value we place on individuated meaning. 

Because sometimes, we place so much value on individuated meaning that it loses sight of context.  Then we fall into the trap of self-absorption and, in more colloquial wording, the state of being "emo".  We lose sight of the larger context that surrounds our individual experiences, and suddenly the things that are actually very small in not really important become magnified in our little worlds.  Magnified and distorted out of proportion. 

What was really just ire over insensitive rudeness suddenly, in the eyes of the other, is an overreaction brought about by hidden emotions and ulterior motives. 

It’s the sort of negative behaviour that we attach to children who know very little about the context of their existence.  It’s actually quite easy to dissect.  However, adults often engage in the same sort of distortion.  It’s even worse because we think we’re justified in doing so, and we bend context to match our indivudated meaning.  It’s almost funny.

It’s difficult to deal with such narrow-minded people who live, not in their heads, but in their unpredictable and fickle hearts.  It’s even worse because they hide away their emotions under so many pretenses that it ends up being dishonest.   

But you know, to a person who knows the context, shit happens and that’s about it.  There’s only so much you can do when life takes a turn for the worse.  Most of the time, for the sake of health and development, you take your option to move on, because life doesn’t revolve around a single moment or a single person.  It’s a lot bigger than that. 

Look at this blog.  It’s not very popular, most of the people who read it are people I know personally.  But it wouldn’t be very difficult to make it go "mainstream":  all it takes is for me to re-name it with a few searchable keywords, strategically narrow my posts to something with a characterisable niche, and then comment on other people’s blogs.  Maybe add a bit of multi-media content to attract the ADHD crowds of the web world.  Then the blog becomes a true form of mass media.

We live in a world where mass media in it’s traditional forms is simply not sexy anymore.  "Sexy" isn’t a superficial qualification, by the way, not in our generation.  Noel kept telling me about how looking good is so important, sometimes even more important than actually being good.  I can’t disregard that anymore, the evidence is overwhelming.  However, in my mind, you can’t cross the line of ethics.  But I’m digressing from my point.  Traditional forms of media are not sexy in that they are no longer streamlined and attractive to today’s generation.  Chuck Palanhiuk, author of Fight Club talked about our attitude towards television on a lecture on YouTube (spot the wit He said that we are so sick of reality shows, especially those damn house-switch decor things that seem to be on every channel.  Two hundred channels on cable television and we can’t find anything to watch, because the simple truth is that we’ve seen it all. 

Aside: I’m liking "Heroes" because it’s unpredictable and the characters the interesting and blended right.  Who would anticipate String Theory, a guy who can paint the future, and… don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen any of the episodes yet.

Communication, information, ideas.  Entertainment, self-realization, education, socialization… the core processes by which the human mind develops are undergoing a rapid and fundamental change.  I say I live in my head, don’t we all?  Because if you really think (hehe) about it, our perceptions are our realities.  We live in worlds constructed in our minds.  Those worlds come about through the information we imbibe as we develop.  This idea is an unholy alliance of Kant and Dev Psych.  Ain’t it cool?

So what is so drastic in the difference between a kid who grew up watching television, radio and comics– and a kid who grew up with Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Friendster, YM and BitTorrent?  The difference is in the fundamentals of communication. 

The older paradigm is a one-way process, a single channel of some big institution (like the government or a media company) generating content and communicating it to a mass audience.   The biggest restricition of this sort of communication is the peculiar way that information becomes dumber the wider you spread it.  A television program can only be 30mins long, interjected by a mess of 10-30 second commercials.  Another set-back is that you can’t customise content.  It’s very capitalist, all these companies screaming at you trying to get your attention to look at them.  But you can only get whatever they give you.

The new paradigm changes this.  I can search online for content that I want; if it’s not there, I can generate it myself.  Think TIME magazine’s person of the year for 2006: YOU.  It’s about the individual.  It’s not about plugging a faceless audience to a profit-driven company; it’s about connecting one individual to another.  Everyone has their own space, their own personality.  Just look at those Friendster profiles.  When you deal with people online, it’s not a mass; its a friend network.  When people comment on YouTube, you see their faces, you know their tags.  It’s a different society, and suddenly, information is liberated and placed at the fingertips of the users. 

If you want a glimpse into society, human organization and politics of the future, I suggest you look at the blogsphere.   This collection of online geeks are the future.

So there.

The blade was a familiar weight in his hand.  Seven years, and finally, the memories meant nothing anymore.  Seven years, and now he was free.  The fire that had once consumed him, burning bright like a sun, had long died, replaced by something darker.  For it was only in the shadows that the faint light left within could be seen clearly.  His eyes turned to the tavern’s flames as he took a sip from his glass.  There was work to be done.

Razael rose from his chair with a bit of regret.  Why go into the ice and snow when there was a perfectly good tavern? Because, he thought to himself as he paid the tab, there was the devil to pay.  He slipped the knife back into the sheath in the small of his back. It would be there when he needed it. 

Winding his way through the narrow streets without being seen was easy enough.  The snow was falling heavily, obscuring every figure, every shape into an unidentifiable mass looming in the dark.  Razael enjoyed his work.  Soon, he came to the wall that seperated him from his target.  Twenty-feet high, and slick with ice.  Above, the man could see the flickering of torches, the patrols manning the parapets.  He waited as they passed, and with a swift motion, threw a grapple.  Almost as soon as the metal bit, the nimble shadow leapt up the rope, over the wall, and into the darkness of the castle beyond. 

"They wouldn’t have caught Fiddle if you hadn’t interfered," Kai spoke with barely concealed vehemence.  While another man would have withered beneath her voice, Lord Balthus had never been one easy to intimidate.  To tell the truth, he was faintly amused by the assassin’s quick temper.  "I did what had to be done, Kai," he spoke with measured words, "because you were sloppy."

Kai’s eyes widened and then narrowed.  She didn’t agree with him, but she wouldn’t let it show.  Balthus (curse his hide) may have not seemed much of a warrior, but she had seen enough of his magic to know not to press and issue.  She forced herself to calm down, and adopted a cordial stance, all the while entertaining thoughts of Balthus’ head and her daggers. 

"But don’t worry about Fiddle any longer, he’s no longer the assignment."

Her eyebrow almost went up, but she checked herself.  She had been tracking Fiddle Two-Fingers for the better part of three years, all at the obsessive behest of Lord Balthus.  And now, she was done.  It was almost unreal.

"There is a place not far from here, I’m sure you’ve heard of it," Balthus explained, as he poured himself a glass of dirty-brown rum, "called the Crow’s Forest."

"Your point?"

"I need you to get something from one of the graves."

Now her eyebrow really went up.  She was a trained assassin, a master of the dark arts of combat, and now she was going to be relegated to grave-robbing detail!  Kai had half the mind to tell Balthus to go screw himself…

"You misunderstand," Balthus quickly explained, seeing the shadow pass over the woman’s face, "What you seek lies within the Tomb of Greyfoll. An artifact," he paused, "a broken medallion."

Neither Kai nor Lord Balthus had noticed Razael enter the room.  The skilled hunter had left not a trace, except the slight swaying of the curtains.  He crouched in the shadows playing at the edge, knowing he had not been seen.  What concerned him more was what he was hearing.  How could Balthus know about the medallion?

1.) There will always be someone better than you at air hockey.

2.) The arcade tickets are very rarely enough to get what you want.

3.) Commenting on how nice a girl looks when she moves her hips can make her move her hips some more.

4.) The music may suck, but you’ll keep watching just to watch the girl with the nice hips (nice legs too).

5.) Sometimes, it pays to live a little.

6.) Obvious remarks will never help.

7.) No matter how loud or obnoxious the music was at the bar, "Eyes" by Rogue Wave will be playing in your head when you get home.

8.) Don’t look at girls for too long if you don’t have a cool pad to ask them over.

9.) If the other guy is taking things to seriously, go for it.  What the hell.

10.) A pretty girl smiling because you like her hips is priceless.

A friend of mine sent me the following text message:

"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world in order to set up a shadow world of meanings." - Susan Sontag

I was informed (after a bombardment of text-message ire) that the context of the Sontag’s remark was in reference to historical interpretation.  However, one will find that said context has little bearing upon the core idea contained in the statement: the idea that interpretation removes the essence of whatever it is we are interpreting.  In Sontag’s case, the "essence" of history is that history should be taken as history in itself, not convoluted by the various pedagogies of historical theory.

First of all, let me narrow my eyes and fume about this statement.  However, it’s not fair to Sontag to simply end it at that. I did a bit of online reading to get her side, and I find that there IS a deeper context to her remark; I’ll explain a bit more about Sontag’s actual idea.

But first, the craziness of that quote.  Sontag was never a fan of Kant.

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine
ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon
the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

• Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag

It was Immanuel Kant who articulated the idea of interpretation as the way a human thinks.  In A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant talks about how things have an intrinsic nature as the "thing-in-itself".  However, he goes on to say that the "thing-in-itself" can never be known, because in the process of a human knowing about the thing, we perceive it through our own senses and translate it into our own understanding, which is no longer the "thing-in-itself" but now a "thing-as-we-know-it" (he didn’t really use that term, he called it a posteriori knowledge, but then, he wasn’t the most gifted of communicators, right?).  To further clarify, let me illustrate: a box, sitting on the floor, has its own intrinsic characteristics and value.  A person seeing the box perceives it as a box, but the perception of the box is not really everything that the box is.  A better example is when we meet a person.  A person has her own construction of who she is in her mind, and although we say "I know so-and-so" we only know what we have perceived and not the person herself. 

At the end of it all, what we know as our reality is simply the product of our perceptions, our bias, our subjective reasoning that creates conjectures to make sense of the world around us.

My point against Sontag follows from that idea.  Everything around us, from globalization to the towel hanging in the bathroom, are subject to my interpretation of what they are.  My reality is the result of my existence (essence follows from existence– jean-paul sartre).  A person cannot remove themselves from interpretation because it is through interpretation that our consciousness exists. 

Which leads me to my critique against the empiricist’s, that strange breed of positivist intellectual that narrows the world down to what can be physically experienced and explained.  If we were to somehow attempt to divest ourselves from interpretation, then the closest we could get would be to come up with a system of knowledge that is based purely on analytic reason and empirical fact.   Very easy to understand a world where everything is exactly as it is, rather than what we make it out to be.  Some of my friends are like this ("If there is a God, and He asks me why I didn’t believe in Him, my answer will be ‘Not enough proof, God, not enough proof,’") and I respect their views.  But I find that sort of thinking a bit thin, and a bit elementary, because it disregards the complexity of human knowledge.  It sets up a tautological answer to the profound question of "How do we know what we know?"  A positivist answer would be somewhere along the lines of "Because it’s there to be known."  Mga pilosopo.

Interpreting the world around us is the channel for our knowledge.  Our personal beliefs create a personal reality.  There is no "over-all" interpretation that is singularly more valid than anything else. There is only the set of beliefs that we have in ourselves. 

But really, my tirade above was out of the context of Sontag’s bigger idea.  A little bit of google-magick reveals that Sontag’s main concern against interpretation was, not so much with historical theory, but with the New Criticism movement in the 60’s and 70’s.  She rebelled against this then-new form of literary theory that viewed art as an exercise of form, rather than an exercise of spirit.  In so doing, she isn’t so much as against interpretation as she is against a particular form of interpretation, which is formalism.  She has her own thoughts on formalism, just read her essays Against Interpretation to get her side of it. 

But formalism isn’t an evil, it’s just another form of interpretation, another mode of thought that helps us understand a something.  It’s got its upsendowns, just like any other mode of thought.

When it comes to criticism, I’ll be honest and say that most of my schpiel is rooted in post-structuralism, post-modernism, existentialism and idealism (not being ideal, but being rooted on ideas to form knowledge).  But to be healthy about it, I try to be open and use (i mean, PLAY) with other forms of interpretation out there, without locking out any single possibility. 

"The default scientific position IS skepticism." -Mohinder Suresh, "Heroes"

But remember that that is only one intellectual position.

Okay, I’m done.