1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giebe-uzPFg
2. http://seedmagazine.com/slideshow/appetite_destruction/
I finished reading "Saint Glinglin" last night.
It's a fabulous book, though I think precisely
one of the chapters might have lost something
substantial in translation. Well, as I commented
on a friend's blog (the comment is awaiting
moderation), the end of the book produced a
nice "emotional release" for me.
http://robertcooksey.net/archives/104
However (as I also noted in this same as-yet
unpublished comment) there's even more
emotional release to be found, to my tastes,
in the previous comment on the same blog, to
whit:
«I always found it interesting that this artificial pain and fear of
said pain pushed him to a point where he would remember a litany and
repeat it in order to get through the "traumatic" experience. what i
mean is that obviously there was nothing in the box, the pain he felt
was merely his brain telling him that he was in pain. he anticipated
the pain, and feared the pain that everyone had told him would be
there and he would be tested on, so his mind helped create the pain
that he expected. but when the mind experiences said extreme emotions
or overflows of stimulus it tends to shut down, or recede or repeat
things that they are familiar with. aka "though i walk through the
valley of death i shall fear no evil" etc. interesting how the mind is
so "helpful"»
So, this pain is an illusion? Not really.
«Go on and put your ear to the ground
You know you'll be hearing that sound» -- Tom Waits, "Falling Down"
We're considering the possibility of (emotional) "weather of
everlasting excellence" ("Saint Glinglin", end), when, in fact,
this scene is more like the one in "The Matrix: Revolutions"
when Trinity and Neo briefly see the blue sky.
Now, it strikes me that "though I walk through the valley
of the *shadow* of death" (etc.), in fact, what's going on
is the merest manipulation of media artifacts, a Rubik's Cube
of emotion. Not the least of which are such things as spine,
belly, back muscles, eyebrows, upper lips, shoulders, and
lungs. We're a story written in flesh and bone.
Do any part of the aches and pain of existence derive from
"knowing" that we're just rag-bags of data-over-time?
Or is such knowledge always or even immediately
liberating? It's a strange (but very prevalent modern)
hypothesis that knowledge can cause pain.
«Sir, pray take your leave: this is to no end,
Twill but increase your grief and her's.» --Thomas Tomkis,
"Albumazar", 1615
Yeah, I think that's what it is -- a lack of circulation or
flow. Or (70's-style) a complete mis-match of the
technologies of our contemporary existence to the
exigencies of human life. I don't just mean technologies
like steam locomotives or typewriters; I also include
such things as Buddhism, the will to power; even
this moment. But again, is it "knowing" (a technology
is probably no different from an "embodied way of
knowing") that's the problem? What is the meaning
of a technology-exigency mismatch except a mis-knowing;
an unskillful application?
"There's a third way of knowing, though, that needs no such
justification: intuition. In fact, this way of knowing is so
foundational that justification is impossible. That's because
knowledge by intuition is not gained by following a series of facts or
a line of reasoning to a conclusion. Instead, we know intuitional
truth simply by the process of introspection and immediate awareness."
-- http://www.bethinking.org/resource.php?ID=26
The article goes on to discuss /telos/ -- goals. Without them
"There is no waste when a gifted pianist whiles away his life under a
freeway abutment." -- ibid.
Over the next few paragraphs, it's a hop skip and a jump
to God. In other words, the ultimate technology: the needle
drops on the God record, and it's all Liszt organs and Bach
woodwinds forever. Well, in my humble opinion, what's going on
is that intuition is not one way of knowing, but a whole complex,
i.e. there is a whole complex of intuitional technologies --
cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines, etc., each
with its own inherent /telos/ -- each one a complex mapping
from intent to intuition and back; in effect a "programming
apparatus", but already completely networked an flowing.
Having thus dispatched God with a stroke, it seems somewhat
likely that we'd look to Satan/Artemis/Anubis/Athena etc. for a
"cure for pain". Yes, I do sort Athena in with this lot for the
present moment -- /techne/ is often translated as "craft" or
"art"; and now perhaps you see where I'm going with this.
WE NEED A PRACTICAL SCIENCE OF REAL MAGIC. "Magic"
here is word for the unmediated aspect of life that cuts
across media, we could call it "consciousness" as well,
but magic has a more technologizable sound to it. The
weird thing here is to technologize in a trans-media
(also trans-spatial and trans-temporal) fashion.
Information loss sounds like a bad thing, but here it is a blessing.
What we are losing is noise from our original term-document matrix,
revealing similarities that were latent in the document collection.
Similar things become more similar, while dissimilar things remain
distinct. This reductive mapping is what gives LSI its seemingly
intelligent behavior of being able to correlate semantically related
terms. We are really exploiting a property of natural language, namely
that words with similar meaning tend to occur together."
-- http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/lsa_explanation.htm
That page continues with a nice tutorial on how to use SVD to make
http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/tutorial.htm
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the corresponding code
to build with the latest Ubuntu:
http://semantic-engine.googlecode.com/
Contacting the developers and other project members to bug them.
