My memories were vague and even the rare moments that I could bring to mind seemed uncertain. They were dreamlike certainties, not more real than any memory perhaps, but I could not even be certain of my own. There was nothing to establish beyond doubt that the bike, which I had found laying in the front yard of the villa was mine. There was no indication how it had gotten there, if it was mine. I had been cycling through Limbricht on my way home around 3 in the morning one moment. The other moment I was walking through the grain fields toward Guttecoven.
There was no reason to know that the bike, which I saw standing upside down on the little field of grass, which I used to sharpen the dried clumps of clay into diamond shaped forms by pressing them against the spinning rubber of the rear wheel, was mine.
What was real, what was a distortion, what was false? What was ‘Dichtung’ and what was ‘Wahrheit’ in my life?
Not that it mattered of course, rationally, when I thought about it. The force of the impression remained as strong, regardless of the source. But still, there remained this original desire for authenticity. I believed it to matter in some way. Was the bicycle red? Green perhaps? I tried to bring back to life the colors. Against the black background of my inner eye lids, brightened by orange white flashes of light penetrating my eye’s cones and rods. It did not help, but red seemed more probable for a child’s bike. But maybe already as a child that would make it more likely for me having chosen the green bike.
As a child I had always felt different from other children already. I was a special child, unlike everyone else, there was something special about me. In third grade my teacher said my name meant ‘being famous’, although I later found out that it meant ‘black raven’ instead, but at the time i wholeheartedly believed in this proclamation of fate, a destiny that seemed obvious to. In another memory from fourth grade, my teacher Truus had mica black, long curly hair, or perhaps it had been short and wavy. I couldn’t determine if she was wearing glasses or not. She called me before class, took my hand and guided me to the open door separating our classroom from the sixth grade classroom, which she was overseeing in the ebsence of their teacher. The children, two years my seniors, were doing calculations. I was asked to finish the sum on the black board, which I did, before under the noise of a giggling class, was sent back to my desk. My brother who went to sixth grade later told me I was called in to show one of their pupils who didnt get the sum’s solution that even a fourth grader understood it. Although I now think the incident was a cruel example of an incompetent Catholic pedagogic system, at the time given the limitation of a child’s mind, I felt proud.
As an adolescent, I understood that being special was simply the effect of being loved by one’s parents as a child, but the feeling was imprinted and remained as evident as before, and proof of being special as before.
Vous avez trop d’esprit pour ne pas reconnaitre tot ou tard que la morale est dans la nature des choses.
Deliberation or premeditation I could not discover. I defend man by excuse of diminished responsibility. I stood up from my chair and started pacing down the room, pondering, preparing an impossible argument before abandoning it already, I was trying to conceive an apologee perhaps, but also abandoned this thought, then concluded nothing. We men need to listen to the heart, this is when we are alive, this is when we feel a purpose in our being, when there is reason to exist.
I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.
The suspect, Odysseus, “master of deceit (dolos)”. It is through his inventiveness (metis) that the Greeks finally take Troy. The Wooden Horse of Athena. Once we allow reason into our heart, the walls of honesty collapse. It is in the heart that we find the nature of man. It is the heart that makes our blood rush, the heart that feeds our muscles and the brain, that is the well of meaning replenishing a stream of consciousness that fills us.
Herein!
Du musst es dreimal sagen.
Herein denn!
So gefällst du mir.
There is no principle to exhonorate the man. Er ist in Grund and Bodem verdorben. He in the deepest of his being has no morals, he is a Mephisto. He is a Hoeffgen who imposes himself persistently, irrevocably to his fellow men deminished to an audience in his presence. This man creeps up to man, raids the nest of the heart, sneaks up on man in the guile of friendliness, and robs man of his innocence when he is defenseless against his imposture and guilt. Homo homini lupus est.
How can I resist to a dream, after all, for which I know no criterium for reality?
Ravished, the impression repeated, salt in the wounds of my memory, this consciousness haunts me. I am guilty of original sin a thousand times. I will with a renewed sense of rebirth seek within myself again. I have forgotten those black days of fear in which my heart was happily wrapped. My reflections repeat the words of thought in goalless reincarnations as if there is an escape in them. My guilt is abstract. The echo of my childhood urges to repent, I repent. This echo of the heart stuck to me as a syrupy fatum smeared onto my wax wings. I plan to go against the turning of the world and escape the labyrinth in which I was trapped. In my earliest youth I was free, but these priests cast a negative film over my eyes, and turned the world upside down. The justice of human suffering is just. To be expelled from the garden, the light of the gods flickers no longer in me, for it casted darkness.
Damit du, losgebunden, frei,
Erfahrest, was das Leben sei.
Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein.
Was kann die Welt mir wohl gewaehren?
Entbehren solst du! Sollst entbehren!
To exist and to be present, Dasein. I embrace this air, a wind of turbulence that surrounds my body, that whispers in my deaf ears. This life is the insight of oscillating thoughts that but fludder in my head, my capricious convictions that continuously change and alter and go in no direction, that are good nor evil, but movement, steered by the heart. In all this, I see not even the slightest possibility of foresight, not even a shadow of truth.
my fingertops wet
deeper and deeper
pressed into the moist
bend over
the grassy edge
I stare and
penetrate her glance
from her to eternity
this beauty has no ending
and ah start to cry
by endless depth I am entrapped
oh proud and unfeeling love
love, so knowinglessly
as infinite death
the sword of Ameinias
I wish it lay still in my hands
like the stranglehold of Nemesis
once a choking embrace
from which kisses flowed down
now runs like a river
of tears down her face
the pain in her squinted eyes
behold me
entranced
by a dream
this reflection in my eyes
the twinkling desire
like the dagger’s tip
stuck deep into the heart
of a daffodil
in spring
go! go-o-o
to turn it at myself
The Death of Literature Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.
The Master and Margarita - Russia TV The Master and Margarita – Russia TV
Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1
This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...
Comparative Democracy Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...
The Tree of Life The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.
Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.
Litarary Word Comparison Introduction
This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts.
Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...
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