I’ve always been slightly suspicious about the Freudian tendency to read meaning into everything. You see hidden meanings and get paid for it and you’re an analyst, you do it for free and you’re psychotic.I suspect this is why there’s so little psychoanalytic work on psychosis, the infinite regress of hidden meanings would probably cause a dimensional rift and the universe would collapse.
Vaughan Bell on Mindhacks.com
I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven’t got words for. For instance, the word “paranoia.” It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don’t think that he is. But we haven’t got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.
RD Laing
On this bridge, Lorca warns: Life is not a dream, beware, and beware, and beware. And so many think because then happened, now isn’t. But didn’t I mention? The ongoing WOW is happening right NOW. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns… An assumption developed that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely, which is to say, I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember, because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting: Lorca, in that same poem, said that the Iguana will bite those who do not dream, and as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream… that is self-awareness!
Timothy ‘Speed’ Levich in Waking Life
There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?
Louis Mackey, in the same
www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/ is now live:
“Reed Elsevier is a publishing company with an arms trade problem. While the bulk of their business is in scientific, medical and educational publishing, they also organise arms fairs around the world. The aim of this website is to mobilise the academic community that writes and reads Reed Elsevier’s journals to persuade them to stop organising arms fairs.”
More details and petition here: http://www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/petition.php
Please pass the message on to academics, researchers and postgraduates
I met Matthew Watkins in a field in Somerset, where he was sitting beneath a sign saying “Free Maths Information”. He’s a musicomathematical nomad (or is that a mathemusical itinerant?) with some interesting ideas about the connection between the distribution of prime numbers and fundamental physics. Maths pages here (includes many interesting side notes, such as this essay by Philip K Dick). Music pages here and here (and make sure you check this out). More Big Green pictures here.
It is a grave but not important error that I happen to be a woman … I would really have been a very something man, and as a woman I am truly only a nuisance, only a problem … I am going to make the most of it and not let this biological accident hamper me any more than is necessary. I can resign myself to anything on earth except dullness.
Martha Gellhorn – quoted in a review of her collected letters