Week 8. March 10
in·ter·lop·er
ˈin(t)ərˌlōpər,ˌin(t)ərˈlōpər/
noun
a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong.
Just had the craziest month of my life! Wow! That word, that word is me. I feel great, and also don’t want to leave this couch to save my life. What does this inform me about genre? Haw haw. \
I
get real tired of being so far out on my own journey sometimes. It’s
nice to stop off on people’s islands on occasion, even better to explore
together. There’s a lot of things I’m learning that nobody can teach.
My trajectory is far removed from all of yours, and it’s necessary for
me to learn the way I’m learning it right now if I’m gonna make it to my
next phase. Classes like this are becoming like white noise, background
gibberish to help me focus on my real projects. I don’t mean that in
some holier-than-thou way, I genuinely know this is the path I set for
myself in all its loopy goodness.
Mostly
I need willpower, that’s really it. That’s the only thing stopping me.
This noggin is loaded with interesting stuff I need to get done. For my
project for this class I’m trying to learn some tools on Python so I can
show you guys the awesomeness of state-of-the-art neural networks and
use it to help drive home a systems perspective of different fields and
disciplines, as well as all of life. It’s stupidly useful, like insanely
profound and I can’t stress it enough. It’s also my ticket into the
R&D world as I start building a portfolio.
Instead
I’ve been bled dry by life again, and by events so ridiculous and out
of my hands I could throw up. That’s what happens sometimes when you put
your heart into something, it explodes in your fucking face and you’re
left feeling a bit hollow. Time is all you have, so it stings to see how
much you lost in that process when you were so passionate and honest in
the moment. That passion makes it terribly hard to admit your losses,
and sometimes you don’t quit until you’ve lost a hundred-thousand more
times. Was it worth it? Did you find what you were looking for? Did all
of your questions get answered? Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but
sigh and get on with other things, only able to wonder at the intent
and meaning of it all and whether it was all just a dream. Clock’s
ticking.
RKCB - Elision
Karen O and the Kids - Hideaway (Cover by Scarlett Ketteman)
Nick Hakim - Bet She Looks Like You
Hurray for the Riff Raff - Small Town Heroes
Satellite Stories - Sirens (Slow Magic Remix)
Wolf Saga - I’ll Believe in Anything
March 11
If there's a God
I wonder what she looks like
I bet she looks like you
I bet she looks like you
Goddamn that’s a smooth lyric. From that Nick Hakim song.
True
bliss, and a true experience of eternity comes from your ability to
make connections. We have more connections we have to make today to
understand this convoluted world in a total way. And we’re constantly
told to stop growing our mindsets at certain phases, like all the
basic-bitch high school politics we’re generally talking about - stuff
that holds no water but sounds real or powerful enough to form a
‘complete’ picture and make us feel like we have a compelling and real
story to tell. It’s just a sad joke to see people flailing for meaning
this way in a socially and intellectually impoverished and manic world. A
giant waste of time! You’re just putting it in someone else’s wallet!
There’s actual suffering to worry about! There are new dreams to dream
and new structures to build!
We
have an infinite canyon in front of us just begging to be explored, yet
we’re building walls and staring into mirrors. Can we bring that Wild
West sense back to science and art? It really is the frontier. I
consider myself a frontiersman of sorts. Maybe that would inspire the
emotion-driven (energy in motion; e-motion)
anti-intellectuals out there to get educated. I could write for days on
what modern science has teased us with, like very recently published
exploratory research that would rock your world.
The
one lesson I take seriously from Buddhism is that your focus is your
trap. Education is all about expanding and empowering that focus when
it’s done right because we don’t know really about things like fields
and interdependencies when we’re young, our focus is innately narrow. It
also innately expands to form a full sense of self using whatever it
got growing up, meaning it gets programmed by the environment to respond
to the environment. That’s very hard to change. Yknow, it’s usually
about makin’ babies and plugging the reward centers in our brain with
food and flashing rectangles, often cynically too.
It
took how many billions of years and society is how young? We have a lot
to learn. The closer you work with the body and with science the faster
and better you can learn, because those are how we get our best and
self-improving approximations - and they need to be informing each other
constantly as part of the greater system of life we inhabit. That’s not
a dull picture of science at all, it plants it firmly in the realm of
art as the most genre-ey of genres that ever genre’d. It’s fractal as
fuck, too. Holy crap! Here’s a fun relevant video: Map of Mathematics
Maybe
we haven’t found signals from other planets because life destroys
itself in the pursuit of meaning, that we’re too slow and too few to
keep out the ill-intentioned suffering-causing meanings - just look at
the massive unconscious death drives we’re inhabiting to kill our planet
and each other on every level. Read up on the Thanatos, too. Freud was
pretty spot on with that, not all of his work is crackpot. Yet people
still swear we’re better than that as a collective. I certainly know far
more good people than bad, but they’re just as checked out as I am. Oh
but perhaps that checked-outness was intended by someone else? Hrm hrm
hrm!.
Your
perception of time is relative to the problem you’re solving as proven
by neuroscience. If your problem is how to give as much love in this
short life as possible, you find things start to stretch out and take a
bit more comfortable pace, and more moments last forever. Like actually
forever, not just metaphorically. Take good care of that idea. Nothing
gives a better sense of presence and permanence than being present and
permanent for others.
Now here’s a poem I wrote a while ago.
A temporal fixation, a strange sensation, a strong anomaly.
A dance, a dash, a twirl, a twist.
A squiggle, a squaggle, a fritz and a zap.
Shock my heart and take my tongue,
crack my ribs and blind me.
Feed me poison, give me hope,
then take it all away.
I'll measure every shred,
search under every rock,
find the right needle and stitch the wound.
All my days my eyes will open,
and I'll still be loving you.
A dance, a dash, a twirl, a twist.
A squiggle, a squaggle, a fritz and a zap.
Shock my heart and take my tongue,
crack my ribs and blind me.
Feed me poison, give me hope,
then take it all away.
I'll measure every shred,
search under every rock,
find the right needle and stitch the wound.
All my days my eyes will open,
and I'll still be loving you.
Did you know some artists seek out emotional pain to fuel their artsiness? I don’t, but I certainly get it. Still pretty deranged, that seems terribly destructive in the name of “art.” I’d also suspect these people of mania, but that would be a “label” according to them.
March 12
Found this neat nugget of wisdom. Taking it evolutionarily, you have to be able to feel before you can think. That’s the point of Primal therapy. It is an interesting study, and very few people practice it properly. It’s not rolling around and screaming and going into sensory deprivation tanks, it’s a lot of neuroscience mixed with psychoanalysis. The idea is psychology is only the top layer, and that you can sift through the experiential layers to eventually get down to the source of the pain as gently as possible and heal it. Actually, here’s a podcast episode, it explains a lot of the stuff I touched on above: http://shrinkrapradio.com/511-the-primal-scream-revisited-with-drs-arthur-and-france-janov/
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