Is liberty intrinsically or only instrumentally valuable?

Two definitions of freedom will be examined in relation to the above question. Firstly, it may be loosely defined as a freedom from x to do y, where x is defined as external obstructions to fulfilment of a given intention. Second, it is defined as the state of a position which one is in, determined by the number and desirability of the choices he is given. A major part of this essay will attempt to clarify the role of intention in according value to the abovementioned state of freedom.

Here, two preliminary observations are in order. It is immediately clear that the presence of choice is taken to be valuable in itself. For example, most students in this University would not even consider the possibility of choosing to be dropouts; nevertheless, the freedom to leave the University if one chooses would be considered a right valuable in itself (which, if suspended, would create protests of greater violence than those at present). (The problem of prudentiality will be addressed later.) A more general form of the above example is, doing a while one could do b, but knowing that one would have chosen a anyway, is better than not having the option of b at all. In other words, the presence of intention is not a necessary ingredient in the valuation of the choice; potentiality of intention is sufficient. The perceived value accruing the individual therefore cannot derive solely from the positive consequences of a. Second, agency is an insufficient ground for which to cite an intrinsic value for liberty. Consider an example: a random number generator. While the number generator is able to choose numbers, and potentially other numbers than the ones it has chosen, we do not value the presence of choice in the same way; that is, we do not attach to its freedom a moral value as we would to that of a living creature. Therefore the inclination to choose must contain certain characteristics before value can be accorded to its fulfilment.

Now we ask ourselves: what is the model through which one can understand the value of the presence of choice (liberty)? Three models are possible. The first one is: because the actions we are compelled to do, or the options we are given, never correspond ideally to the best possible desired outcome, a range in the quality and quantity of choices naturally means an increased probability in reaching a satisfaction-maximising point. Any value in the presence of choice is derived solely from the consequence of the best choice, that is, choice understood as a means to that end.

A second model: the value of the presence of choice accrues to the prudential accommodation of the possibility of changing needs. For example, person A is allergic to oranges while B is not. While B may choose to buy apples on a specific occasion, he values the choice that the seller provides him to get oranges in the future in a way that A does not. Of course A may value that fact of choice in recognition of different subjective preferences; the point is that the valuation of choice is a prudential means of recognizing difference over time and in individual preferences, therefore it remains an instrumental means to an end, the fulfilment of intentions which are inherently subject-determined.

The third model locates the value of choice in its being an actualization of the free will to select the preferences by which ends are deemed as good or not so good. This means that the expression of intention is deemed as good in itself. Is this a tenable claim? Why should we value the expression of free will for its own sake if free will does not generate a priori intentions towards its own satisfaction; if it does not exist as need?

A possible reply is that one requires free will to determine one’s own ends before these ends are found to have value; it is precisely through the act of choosing ends that they acquire value, which, by definition, is a conscious-realmed addendum to the primary mode of desiring an object. Therefore the crucial characteristic that distinguishes the human being from the number generator is the free will; we value liberty intrinsically because it is a prerequisite of value.

Unfortunately, this reply does not necessarily entail that liberty is valuable in itself; the defence merely claims that liberty as a state is a pre-condition of value, what is really valued is the intention, and the consequence (and perhaps, the moral faculty) that is enabled by liberty.

Therefore the definition of liberty as a relational concept remains; however, it is an error to suppose that our moral values align themselves to logical necessities. It is reasonable to claim that we value liberty for its own sake alongside the view that, factually speaking, it exists only as a condition for consequences also valued in themselves.

Sigh 3

Where lies the pad on which truth scrawls? Search in the desert; for there I will begin.

So, the crane kid said: you are nothing, not even a drop, or a cliff edge that holds summer grass and sheds love-moistened tears as it falls, scratching the terrain of my thoughts, its jagged pinnacles of anxiety, in its gullied descent into despair, its furtive snowlike hope. What?

So, having to interrupt myself, as all do, to discover who I am, I lurch forward like a detuned automaton, uttering robot sounds, cremating life in an echoing auditorium without projectors, or worse, eyeballs.

Of course, a couple of mad scientists enter. They stare hard at their invention, the reincarnated Frankenstein, who pleats his hair into complexity, into Afro.

“I told you to decommission him”, the first scientist said, “look what he has done to our reputation, especially among the bioresonance researchers in the Academy of the Arts and Sciences.”

“The president has lost faith in our latest project”, the second added.

“Yes, that’s likely”, the third scientist said, “but we have use for another nightmare tester."

Somehow I felt myself tumbling off the stage.

Sigh 2

I was full of good cheer but the situation was not to be. Favourable as truth is
to the brave, it rewards men according to their ability to take the path that violates
it in a show of impenetrable strength. How one overcomes the massive arbitrary necessity
without a need for a single whimper as if one's brain ran on something else so dependable as food or petrol...
it is indeed an academician's silo,
to live in a book and to
look at an unpaged world of grimy delight
where the lights were somehow realer so you did not have to follow them as you bathe your worldly skin in its juicy poison.

British Riots

To argue with a history student.

Yes. The nature of a narrative as an ordering of significance of variables to create intertemporal and intervariable interpretations, based on causal and systemic analysis.

Does it therefore, by definition, require a ground up assessment of the means by which systems of intercausal effects interact with contingent agential causes?

Will the determination of the event be best served by judgement of the immediate, critical contingentialities interacting?

Events as a poor indicator of the state of society.

Or do we wish to create a probabilistic time-scale in which critical causes are clearly identifiable, while causes which act on conditions are themselves ascertained by larger social indicators that flesh out the 'state of normalcy'.

Differing causal interpretations find their common ground in their assessment of this state. This dynamic state is to be seen as a foci of future potentialities, given probabilistic representation through the impacts of individual and social interaction and of established constants with novel effects of disruptive social forces.

A problem of social science is to establish a framework in which to characterise the general issues that arise in any such state which can adequately address both the nature of the present as an effect and conversely, as construct, and to recreate the probabilistic modeling based on any change in variables. Psychology and perspective of the agents must be included in the calculation, if only to support normal distribution type events.

Oh yes. Judging, as always, through intuition, I doubt if the riots are an isolated event. It just confirms my view that there is a strong thuggish, almost facist, undercurrent in Britain. Its buried under civilisational mud, but, like radioactive waste, its there.

Mothman

Vacancies.
The tiled stairways seemed to survey their cooped delirium again, as he shuffled up its tunneling damp. This apartment. A strange impossibility made real by the uneven paved cement under his feet, and the smell of urine. It was surreal, to think that all this, these alleys, these shuddering lifts, existed, alongside that sheltered contruct through which he had strung great hopes, or seizured illusions, carried as it were, by the luck of circumstance in a great enabling machine that had now ceased to run, to pour its great lubricant syrup over the cog of days. Of course, he could trace the boundaries of the protective circles of his mind, like so many impenetrably arbitrary things. But a moth flew from the ceiling, and latched to the doorway. Who lives there? Perhaps some waitress, remembering salvation through strange forgettable bedfellows, like modern day priests? Perhaps some avuncular man, that hangs, and in age, reminds one of jolly life juxtaposed with a death-truth that sweeps one over deserting present, a kind of embalmed archetype, condemned to sincerity? The mothman stared, for it shouldered his wrists. Its eyes looked; wingtips brushing the tips of his armhairs. He kissed it, and it latched to his face, fluttering, trembling, shuddering across his face.

Movie Impressions 2

Having spent many hours travelling on Emirates, I enjoyed the Oscar contenders for 2011 from the enlarged, newly minted flightscreens of an A380, lofted above Dubai deserts, and floating in and out of sleep.

The Social Network
A docu-fictionalization of Zuckerburg's overgrown startup from the lens of a screenplay that essentializes and amplifies the overwhelming, yet emotionally hollow, intersection of parties, of entitlement, of authority, of impossible girls that characterizes the brew of college culture and beyond - this movie, like its subject matter, flips and darts across space, across individuals and times, as each progressively alienates and becomes alienating, each, accounted for, registered and then discarded, as quickly and surely as modern life itself, moored between the emptiness of an evening office space and the dreamlife of a keyboard that fails to play and to express adolescent truth any longer. It drives forward, still repressed, and finally hangs nowhere. No; craft is salvation. I slept till the motion sickness pills wore off.

The King's Speech

This movie is well made. Its crucial opposition, among many others, to the Social Network, lay in its created representation of the moment as an infinite carrier of emotional significance, thereby universalizing the particular in a manner reversed to the Social Network, which found its universal subject in an easily referenced contemporaneity and therefore particularized accordingly; which effect is to primarily engage us in different ways, and to arouse different sets of responses, namely, envy as against pity.

Here, one is enfurled into the arms of a more comforting tradition, and of real relationships, unconditional and genuine - clearly, it is institutions that corrupt human natures. Emotional turmoil is nested in the security of moral certainties: an affair is a great violation where responsibilities are largely ceremonial. This fantastically comforting portrayal is justified by the customary right of historical event-based movies to appeal to antiquarian romanticisms. We are never made uncomfortable throughout this slightly patronizing, and thoroughly bourgeosie entertainment: quiet satisfaction, supported by a beautiful consistency, reigns.

Never Let Me Go

The main complaint against The Social Network is its antipoetical substitution of images with scripted wit. The main complaint against Never Let Me Go is its sentimental insistence on the pain and suffering of life through distorted images and cardboard characters. The obvious intent of creating a mood piece that culminates in the twin ejaculations of simple anger and a wash of tears; that is, moods as intense yet trivial as the perpetual scowl of Ruth, unanchors the script from a believable potrayal of the interiority of its characters as the point of departure from which to create depth, or dilemma, or any serious invitation to the viewer to address himself to the themes which Ishiguro sought to uncover. This movie, like the sense of barren waste it often evokes, feels like a letdown. One was led to suspect that the original was written by Jodi Picoult.

Carey Mulligan played Kathy H wonderfully, given her unfortunate script. The brilliant yearning eyes projecting from a sensously melancholic face conveyed less of the agility of technique than of the naturalism of self-expression.

True Grit review here.

Release

How does one attain richness in acts?
In living differently,
or in turning away, to glance clearly
at life, its golden statutes
bled into words, flesh, thing.
In the wish of a still embalmed second
like the imprinted mesh of a recognized glance,
that remains, that frames into a moving picture.
Each sore-faced man, or the still-eyed burn,
or a memory, like an unearthed golden urn,
lays out beachlike, shored against the tidal seconds,
orbed within each raindrop
each dissipation trampling softly onto umbrellas
as we tread across the rich rose gardens.

Hmm

Cold ruffles and bed tossings,
in the rotting temporary prison,
stayed a week or a day,
quilted from loneliness
by Dickens; or a childhood souvenir.
Stepping into weedsprung alleys,
peopleless in the architectural trunks,
cobbled and lost in history:
the sounds of stories, meaningful and meaningless.
Staring, laced by the draped windows of empty streets,
into the faces of revellers,
a kind of liquid consequence dawns,
shadowed by pigeons herding, flocking.

Wallowage 1

If one pursues liberty to its limits like a hollow madman, or lets all beliefs fall away, or all attachments cease, then, one leaps into the abyss of days, into the rush of hollow mocking air, the exhilaration of suffering a kind of salvation balm for unsated pain, a palindromic schema that reverses the sight of staggering into absurdity, clownhood.

Moot 7

Faith like a dram of frothing beer seams over the nottinghill of hopes. Purdy, its undirected pies still drag the table over the gravelled pub floor. Cramming the ground with tabled garlands, or filling the balconies with sunbathers better attuned to the polar skin of winter, as the bumblebees crowd around honey plates, full of the summer of attraction and forgetting youth, spilling into the future like an ancient river. What? Can this balcony to the machinery of soul, I mean the consistency that swears better than it manueveurs, like a revision vehicle, actually breathe the continuity of sunshine without inner stagnation, in the way one enters the ownership of an overfamiliar thing like someone awaking from nothing to find himself a person again, loafed in a dungeon of present that reverses, as it were, into the future like a retreating rear view mirror of emotive occurences? Yes? I read that Merlin once fled to the forest in escape of irrational human fear, as the couch in the hidden Carribean balcony bends, but found the woods too enchanted for his dreams, too full of the criterias which determine the tightropes, the plans, the trapeze-tension, of the circus that amuse the nonexistent Muses that watch them. In that case, one might reason that spell-frames, or a toothbrush that cleanses more than material dirt, or even shelter that has reached further than the commanding hands of nature, will continue to pierce the air that fills the torched, uncrested running of highways that seem to bridge the strange crevasse that divides heaven and hell, or man and man, or past and future, or stairways and the sky, or clouds and candy, or fire and the vast sinking sea.

So. This strange landfill that holds up the attic of the earth on pencilled beams. Wallow my friend. For home is here, at least, in the strange choking motions of a concentrated second. For it is but gone, like a illusion that mimiked itself, prating in the garments of truth a second ago, exposed to its vanity and the stranger wind, deprived of the mirror of necessity which breaks and cracks with each passing second, only to rise again in an elevator of transcending hope, flapping its winged frame over the drowning forces that trembles and overwhelms. No, not a predictive instrument, a breakable, sure orb, or a telescope, to watch and to severe, lost in observation but saved, even recovered in an identity compass......

Incoherent 2

The heart beats like footsteps over endless dirt,
trodding where circumstance has etched out a path.
Lost in the cluster of darkwood pines,
where rotting logs ply the inheritance of human wealth.
Like a lining of pictures against the wall
of friends, of wishes petering into memory,
like a sewer, a blanketed sky, that curtains
the future from a weary gaze. Or that ladle of rewards,
that plate of contentment that breeds the automobile rhythms of happiness,
that extends the cliff of suspended days,
diving like seabirds into the waves, these frothing days.
Thronging with sounds,
spilling into ears like a mapped echo, but dissipating like the richest scents of flowers into the spring-duned air, trembling over
meads and brooks, with that withdrawing trickle,
unsated and content,
would this river be a doorway
to the depth-drowning sea.

Bathroom Soliloquay

This frozen white light, on the endless shore of the shower room. Witness the piped workings of the veins of industrial earth, while the docile toilet roll awaits its message, cast as the loyal scribe of our lives; its progress of days.

Moot 6

I am stoked to the bedframe, lilting on the unforgettable scent of English air. Evening falls away from the echoed yellow painting the sunlight makes on the windblown leaves. This glow of spring that has crowned the earth with its bluest garlands, now descends, like a retreating cloak of childhood furling away from a windowless sky, its purest reflected blue crafting a pathway in which to lose the world in, as we now tunnel into hopes in search of the lamps of truth.

Such is the regret of the present, that we preserve clarity and bad conscience for a later date.

Waltz

Agency as the contingency that deconditionalizes everything.

Incoherent 1

Opening, we tread into gateways of the future that descend to where no-one remembers to have gone, to have tried nor wanted, for they are tied like strings into a knot of normalcy, used to but a little trembling through the devil's torch itself. But to unravel, or to bring the knife to one's mind, to sever the conscious kitchen from necessity, from the streamlined factory of linear time, of constant order itself, like a man who left the faith of the church grounds to descend the cliff walls into the gully of his soul, where reflexivity - that curse that has yet to unravel itself, would pioneer the method of mad truth, turning to its gravity substance as he tumbles out of the nighmarish bed into the centre of everything, where no encirclement of time awaits, only a slow accumulation of wounds, covered cleverly with metaphysical masks, or a scepter, or a wand, or beauty.

Moot 5

One has to expect less with a smaller field of brain, if consciousness were a harvester of unplanted wheat, thronging, as it were, within nature's general perfume, lasting the breadth and intensity of noontime, before swiftly departing as night decks out its silent staggered arrays, seeped into the accumulated security of homes, pictures, as it were, framed by mold-breeding brick against the north north west wind.

Dream-surfing

A Koppaberg spirit catches the eye in the supermarket where mediocrity melts into boundless space. Can this strange bottle, filled with the hemlock of my old fading life, resurface some kind of genuine hope? It basks in the steady, overbright lights: drink me, it says, wordlessly, as my lips tiptoe to its frothing nothingness, promising sunlight in an unlamped room.

Dreamt:

Scene: I was in Oxford.
Friend: Everything is so business-like, as if it was made-to-order.
I looked out of the shop we were in. It seemed a half-Canley, half-Malaysian small town, with touches of course, but it certainly wasn't Oxford-Oxford.
I was somehow half-naked. There was a broken down bus across the street. I scanned the windows to see if anyone cared to look at me before the bus restarted and drove away. No one did.
I was in an online forum, and was impressed by Barnett's writings.

Scene: Bungalow
My dad had me wait for an hour in a large house as he ran on an errand to pass a friend a $75 handphone handset. I suppose we drove there, for the errand involved walking through a forest fronting the house. He appeared tired as he returned, and it seemed nonsensical to walk, when one could have taken a bus, or a cab. He was fully enthused and occupied in the fact that it was a $75 handset, even when my mother was there and expected more.

--

I sit in the maze of books.
One needs no compass here,
for she lies beyond the unstirred page,
approaching on a narrative tide,
smoothing a crease she ran across,
in the richness of her ocean-satin dress.

Moot 3

The loveliest feature of a laptop rests in its ability to transform the contextual limitations of your agency, turning one into the object that responds to the vast universe of facts hovering above the ground of a footed existence. The relations remain encumbered within the algebra of life, but for once, you succeed in self-expression, for you control the meaning through which the conditions of communication must be understood.

The Warwick boy beckons;
he places his shoulder on my lap.
I caress him, for he yawns,
and is bored, and wants life.
He gazes at the trade that tests the sturdiness of his knees.
Or the madness of vineyards.
But he rests on my bench,
hashed beneath a wintry bridge,
on which people cross, to a mythic, fading shore.

These eyes plague the darkness,
they sift the lighted windows,
piercing through the blinds that mask
the privacies concealed to oneself,
to stain the tablecloths,
that hid the devil's trademark.

Moot 2

this shanked pretension still lives on in the remains of single words and lines.
the keyboard grows dark, as the fingers that play over them move invisible.
the void of which my books have been a consolation, of which my thoughts have been proud scaffoldings upon, descends.
To rebuild, when memories lurk fresh, and guilt remains.

You see, its a strange thing to look at yourself. One has never had the steel for happiness, for water flows downwards. To perceive yourself in decline, however many pretentious cloaks one adopts in the process, still makes one feel the intimate waste of life. Yes, however lacking, my silences are more able than my actions.

What is it like to be aware of emptiness, to flow with innate fervour along the shallow river of the seconds? The earth is something which one still forgets constantly.

I feel the pang of excitability around me, in this oddly infertile environment.
Loneliness and freedom mix to an etheral cocktail.
Is it excitement or is it insecurity?
Is it fun or is it anaesthesia?
Is it hope or is it fear?
Is it love or is it loneliness?
Is it Zen or is it death?

10:10

Why does one have no sense of humour?
One is married to security as a sewer to its pipe.
Or a ghost to its whitish form, a wasp to its only sting.
What, this paranoia? Liquid hands, they shaft at keyholes that give no light.
This craft of acting, a fear of pretending, and yet seeming not so.
Display, reactivity as the form that almost solidified into false hope, limitation, that, gasping from the edges of its conscious perimeters, admires, loosely, idiotically, wedged on the field like a daytime cricket.
These flats again loom, the church of robot-men.

Moot

My emotional life is as a boat on the sea of your feelings, churning and swaying.
Where is land?
Where is the solidity of the hermit that lives in the cave-quilt of his playground autonomy?
That soppy misdirection, that thankless furrowing, unsated, a mockery of free will.
Childishness as expression:
all that follows, that is, life as failure.

Updates

I met an aspiring musician today, who wrote some songs for a pretty famous band. He complained about doing math in the library.

I am hardworking and responsible for the first fifteen minutes. I grind my way through the weird squiggly symbols that fill the page with the most boring words imaginable.
My mind fills with the locular voices of Rebecca Black as the pop music begins to play.
It whirls: these thudding beats throb with an unheard future of my songs, infecting boys and girls with the brilliance of my creativity, inevitably associated with the genius of my name.
Let me be the next
composer of the next
four-chord wonder,
the song that thrills the failing radio of our social lives, steeped in the refined garbage of a university environment, these prating fingers of boys and girls that curled their lips to a yet unforgotten song.

"I'm just too...creative";
he bounced on his heels as he pronounced this fair judgement:
as they say,
fame and money and
Jesse James coolness be damned,
I'm still cutting myself away from the steadiest rocks.


Sigh

Lighted doormen pass in dull stoned alleys, but the echo of festive morning wafts.
I don't understand what you are writing.
Do I understand what I am writing?
For once, I look at the scribe of meaning, meaning as act that is unnoticeable, unfanthomable, throwing its light upon the surface colour of words - not accounts, but deeds. Its life is not the finished product of the material past, but a combulation of acts, rising to the surface from the bottom of the heightless nothing.

Aargh 3

If i could perfect sadness and mis-strategy into a line,
if i could distill unhinged meaning into salvation truths,
if i could re-justify this barren sunlight,
these worthless trembling hands,
these unworn, rotting clothes,
into dream-frocked material, for a misjudged play,
padded within the starlit-night of the train-station isled in the prarie darkness,
an image-mongering tramp calling out to noone
for reciprocation, half-simulated, alcohol-mad,
as the rich train of forgetting experiences,
of lighted eaten dinners and speeding laughter
laps into the scenery of prescient, unduly life,
as it pours like sugar trucks into dessert that
spoils the tastebuds of grinning faces,
justified, growing, schooled in railways
and bustling interchanges, these pinpoints of fleeting life,
a hub of bulbed men, of plant life, of station pebbles, what then,
of this prating significance?

Filled in this broken otherworldly tower,
craning at the stars, and speaking,
the way wolves and moths did before man was invented,
where life still fell into the darkness of pines,
or the shell-shocked fingers of the heart still felt the movement of rivers,
where natures infinite tombs lay overgrown with life,
when trumpets still sounded as each morning arose casting the neck of woods,
where these carpets laced with salt once framed the floor of the sea,
oh i would grow like the prudent flower anticipating the flush of spring,
as the cycles lose their spirit, eroding.

II

Thirty trumpets girding the mead of
sighing rivers,
callousing the routed veins of
spring-drawn utopia.

The melting glaciers
expose large crags in the
dented rocks, slight against the sun,
gesturing with stillness,
yarned like twigs aginst the noon,
sharpened to the breath of winter evening.

This industrial sooth,
like a touristperson,
grading images for length and breadth
of intensity, that barren holdout
of the transparent, colourless soul,
the nonexistent scarecrow,
the binned up brooms,
the yore-flecked wavering of
disappearing lines.

Sand and sealife,
they burrow against the vast sweeping of the sea,
feeding with alacrity
on the melancholy dunes.
The wrecks of rusted ships
sit on the coarse pebbly sand,
like a hornless Poseidon,
reduced, reduced, reduced.

I am in my room again,
with the translucent curtains that pour
deceiving sunlight into the refuted
present. The wind still breathes its
tragedy tune, with the soreness of
codas, a chronicle of lavatory existences,
and incomplete plastic walls
as we face mirrors, defacating.

The statue of Liberty,
a kind of green embodied hope,
a disappearing miasma,
choked up Athens,
a ceilingless St Pauls,
that crumpled before everything, and nothing,
the captured sunlight of a certain skillful kind,
resovoirs of men,
fish-hope, like the promise of an edible breakfast of life.
And so the morning lasts,
the softness of time left untouched
or unheard by the throbbing madness
that seams at stilting, violated, happy glasswalls.

The pizza cooks in the oven.
The flatmates speak of studying as a means
to truer things.
The shutting out of avenues that pulse tar-stroked
thoughts that usher the sights and crows,
the lights, of unbottled time.
Disbarred. My cap. My cap.

Images 2

I

I do not live in the real world. I only exist in relation to it by means of distorting words and gestures.

II

I stood on the groupside,
wading the footsteps of voices
that drew deeper tides with every breath,
skimming the light of the sun,
unbeached in the fresh shallows of the sea.

It was the tuneless drum of spring or
the tremor of branched hands reaching
an unhidden face, as it called in pregnant tones,
to the deathless hearing.

What growth, like an expanding shrine,
uncreeked these pastured boundaries,
ploughing untilled forests of thought?
What life, ungiven,
yet praying, brought heart to fruition,
through the unripening present?

Fluting, the treeglade yearns for morning,
its shadows spilling into memories
of deep-set innocence, as the finger
leaves the empty pipe.

III

From my window, I can see the trashbins.
Enormous plastic tubs, they
squat in a curved row,
missionary brothers awaiting
gulps of empty bottles,
shattering in recycling bowels,
like digestive guardians of
nature's wasting laws.

The bottle says:
A gateway leads to an opening,
to which we travel through.
A tunnel-visioned version,
carved with cold statues.
Stairways shuffle the darkness,
full of karmic stench,
feeding the fruitbats overhead,
depleting the insects and the ratmen.

IV

I feel lyrical in the mornings, when the force of memories have yet to flood the sandbanks of my dreams.

The mind still contorts with self-appreciating delight, as it skips deftly across cloudy waters.

Lily-like, they spring, infusing solitude with intoxication of poppies.

No slumbering crocodiles here, or fear of bad weather, or mismatched circumstance,
just the pure delight of a slow-filling river,
draining away as I lap at its shores.

V

Am I happy with myself,
for suprising myself so?
What lovely satisfaction,
to live in a mirror.

VI: A seminar postscript

Fighting the urge to
breathe liberation in choking
suitcases packed into a room,
I observed those
keyboard lips parting with
wholesome words, from the
crochet of teeth, stained with tobacco
and wine, and filled with pomegranates of the brain:
they scatter, these blithe, yellow seeds,
as we pick them up, like birds,
as love scatters, fiery love.

To witness that desirable
Tory male, harting forth with rugby confidence,
all-consuming in the full possibility,
within the scope of his strong-armed body.
And theres that
supersensitive white-skinned boy,
who trembles with affectation,
the moment one speaks, as if
my life, my world, insulted his.

Yes, these irrepressible grand coats,
lent to the cloakroom,
these chess-pieced girls, streaming
smoothly down to all-consummation:
I watched, slumping chairlessly.

VII: Work

Work is a kind of anticipation,
the stair-steps with hollows
in between, in some flowing church
we happen to find ourselves.

An imposition, we
mount the spiral of days, impervious
to the windowless night,
wreathed in loads of labour.

What attends the imageless vision,
as legs smooth ancient marble carpets?
What greater promise keeps,
to poor eyes that suck at light?

Only sunlight,
uncaved by heavens,
or the silent stars,
loving, communicating.
Or the rhythmic breathing
of crisp garden evenings,
as you peer hopefully,
into nothing.

Lets see if this works

I have not been working, not remotely.
Resolution: to pursue active strategies to remain focused and to concentrate as far as possible for a chance to pass the upcoming exams.

Another note to self

If one instinctively projected one's dependencies not on the individuality, within time and space, of the organism, or the metaphysically significant fact of free will, or whatever, but on someone else, or a communal hope, or some kind of outward-searching tradeoff-sustaining equilibrium, then of course it becomes extremely uncomfortable to sustain any form of independent agency.

Practical reason MUST be directed inwards-out, not the other way round.

How one justifies the absurdity of one's agency - not in phenomenal terms, but in practical ones, within a kind of social vacuum, where only feelings prevail -
for all definitions, when undependent, uninvested, fail -
how then, to celebrate one own's particularity at every moment in terms both universal and inevitable (isn't ethics about inevitability?) -
THAT is the question.
Philosophy as the ethics of ideas.

II

Transferable loneliness.
Strange. You finally desire only what you can't get,
but still desire.
All want something greater than their ability to achieve,
even though, of course, it dosen't exist.

Question

Sometimes I wonder if the only way to live is to enmesh yourself in the modality of perceiving all things outward-in, and to burst forth in the grey matter of unhindered disagency.

Movie Impressions

A set of vague impressions on the movies I have remembered watching this year:

True Grit

The Coen Brothers wield the tools of cinematic narrative with understated and quirkily felt virtuosity. This movie again demonstrates a Coen-signature rhythmic command in the integration of the narrative canvas with the life of the characters. Self-audiencehood, or "keenly anticipating detachment", is crucial to the directorial charisma which draws the viewer into the story. Here, the detachment flowers into warmth - we are made to identify finally with the emotions of the characters, the situations, and the myths of the genre. Great acting from Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld temper down the potential risk of disunity when directors whose styles are wedded to unconventionality attempt a straight on genre-remake. There is slight dissastisfaction therefore in the abrasion of storyline and vision, but the sheer skill of all involved lifts the movie into a highly convincing revisit.


Le Notti Bianche

After finishing the movie, I had to look up Visconti. I think it shows a great director at the height of his powers. I cannot recall a more powerful command of the moment in any movie. This was the most fun I had watching the movies in a long time. It is ardent, ardently made, and full of unspeakable things, like all truly great movies. I love Visconti's visual style, a sort of grey area between neorealism and Fellini-esque projection that in a surrealist way, seeks to arrest one into the lived life of the characters. It is full with balance and the impossibility of balance, full of beauty and sadness, and is a kind of emotional statement about duality itself. Brilliant acting, complemented by a soundtrack by Nino Rota, seals this as an all-time favourite. For an example of Viscontian brilliance that sends many directors back to film school, watch the mini-climax in the opera-approach scene. One feels more in that one minute climax alone than one usually does in whole 2 hour movies.


The Silence

What a strange movie! It is a kind of Bergmanesque labyrinth, impossible to approach, and it masks precisely where it reveals. Two sisters, and the son of one, are on a trip, and the story surrounds their taking up lodgings in a hotel in Germany. The landscape is vaguely prewar, but it is impossible to tell. As one expects something along the lines of Winter Light, one gets confused quickly - nevertheless, all becomes clear in recognizing that the two sisters represent two portions of Bergman's psyche - the rational and the sensual, with Bergman as perhaps the boy himself, albeit a strangely silent, impenetrable, opaque one. This movie trades in dualities, and represents the death of "the rational one". But does it? A role reversal, and that of our sympathies certainly takes place - and the death of the over-rational mother brings about an even greater coldness in the dominance of the sensual, as if the sensual existed now only through the judging distance of the camera, a camera that itself rattles away from its previous balances, the debris of its confrontations with the sensual within itself, leaving the scruffy, unrevealed boy behind.

Aargh 2

Pleated footsteps drift
into furrowed corners,
pruned, with the showering
dryads, the lapping locus
of my limited time, its livelihood.
Yet unattained, sore from sated
greetings, unencumbered still.

You would shrift the seconds,
rend the curtains that
have broken my life,
its cotton prison. Yet,
unfleetingly, the seconds
gaze towards my troubled
tapping fingers,
for they grasp at air, still.

What crudeness lines the skin
of driftinghood, its tidal
morass, a pound of
empty salt living without
worth, breathing its
decomposed dryness?


He would storm
the rock of
mountains to
sink in caves.
Or task the
dreamer to sleep
better in the
garden of illusions,
to run, push, those
breathed up
hormones,
better.


Yet it drew,
like an artist,
rich in the whore-daemon
of its tar-stroked thoughts,
travelling the pavements
of insight, and
watching the silent eyes
of passersby, lovers
it never knew.


Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still untaken.
Still bursting, still breathing,
still hoping, still re-filling,
this gas-tank of
my Being.

Unprovided, these thoughts rush
like little children, through
the twilight of my life,
oblivious to the
autumn, to the
staring trees, against the
deep blue sea-salt
broken sky.


These calculators! What freshness these numbers have brought to us. Like a strange inexhaustible crossword, it shines like luminous rocks, loving our embrace of the impossible labyrinth.

What a pusillanimous existence! To collapse into a garden bench, where benches have grown into tired men like gold-masks, hidden in the distractions, like soil, for example.


Yes, this bleeding of
grownup soles.
You'd thought they'd cracked,
by now. I tried to sever
my legs from my soul,
or at least,
to twist them out of
shape, so one
moved forwards,
instead. Yet the pen-strokes,
like the Satan-cane,
or that bloody
birthday cake, or
smiling and unpretending friends,
they still form, like
a landscape painting,
a noose,
a life I breathe,
suffocating.


I love being a hypocrite.
I love being a pretentious,
self-whistleblowing
scarecrow to my conscience.
But our acts are
the cleverest ravens.

- Terrible joke/lie.

The page is filled.
These lines-
they cut into life,
quartering it into dungeons.
God is always,
above all, a jailer by profession.

Aargh

How the hell does one defeat one's own brain?

Gibberish

Let us express some inexpressible thought,
bursting through the unrhythms of words and silences!
Disastrously banal, these seconds,
as they tear across the earth-drawn curtains
bound to the de-energized root of
my agential deanatomy!

Pouring fine-billed audiences out of
velvet cushioned halls in that darkest era
of man. A croaking sigh that wanes into the unnoticing
beach fair, tearing at teapot-quivering anticipations,
and a butterflies warmth, as it flutters over
into the lungs of pneumonic breathed men.

What poorly caught drift tempered the bawdy eyelids
or the cusp smoked silverware tunes, or the yarns, unspinnable
in a neuronic knot, as it tugs and pulls, tugs and pulls.
Wowee, the purple king chokes with delight
at the hideous, horrendous sight. Well, someone
had to go, if not dragged and kicking,
then stabbed, and thrown off the windows,
for gravity to lend a windy embrace.

How quickly time rots!
Yesterday's giftwrap has been turned to waste!
Recycled souls still ponder over trashbins,
Full of stale smell. They
love the smell and taste of urine.
Like connoisseurs.

Scotland

Scotland Images

In the Hostel

What loneliness, how it breeches!
The ear freezes from
this counterfactual screaming,
but the ear
listens, and cries.

See how it pokes this
Decoy, voyeurish, unmanly
Heart. Vanishing in this hearth
Of words, like firewood licked
Away by time, by words.

Deeper and deeper you
Dream away poverty.
For there attains the greatest
Purity, wealth, truth.

So the deepest soil conceals the darkest springs to seed the plant of life, for life is but soil in which the vineyards of fulfillment grow, above us, towards the sun.


In the twilight lowland highways

William Wallace
And Americanism as frothy pies.
“How turgid and disgusting!”
Hamlet heads cried.

As prating, syncopated dawn arrives,
And flushes towards needless noon.
It hangs its head in evening fog,
Evening – wounded and hollow,
Like life across an empty spoon.


Scotland in a paragraph

One begins travelling with several expectations: this is the starting point of a trip one takes when one travels, and its consummation with fact brings the conceptions of agent alongside the sensations of the aesthete, enhancing the novelty of the experience. I justifiably expected little from any landmass within a three hour train ride from England, and had the pleasure of having them smashed by landscapes comparable in muscular scale and sublime beauty to bolder alpine ranges, and a Moorish, otherworldly uniqueness that spoke of lower England expressing itself through someone else, perhaps - its unconscious.


Mounting Arthur's seat

This hill overlooking Edinburgh is indeed natural Scotland in miniature, a display of robust wildness that is well-tempered in the shade of its self-recognition, tussocked against the unclarity of its marine winds, expressing itself in a tone continuosly dry and fascinating, like a desert in possession of an unwilling inheritance of volcanic wealth, and rebelling in the inevitability of its nature. It overlooks Edinburgh, the city of intimate voyeurs, where display is meaningful still, still untainted in the purity of the rural-inflected heart. And what of the clamborous travellers, rich with the winds that continue against the hills in the sunshine bright? Our stares ascend to the endless air, but the life of the city, and its momentous history, wafts.

Aphorisms/Platitudes

Vision is always directed outwards: especially when one introspects.

Our lives are full of error: correction comes in the memory.

Ranting 2

Jarbrook

The stopped up muse reads:
The hidden hand, the gravestone
we struggle to read, to interpret into words. To translate
into the rhythms of the long slide.

I am lost in the confines of that spurious freedom
so charged with its unnatural gait,
dragging souls like sacks, on the wound-tilled floor.
Of that workshop, which remains when the dust has settled.

I see the dirt that lies before us. That sick playground,
when hopes are dead, and lies are spun.
Or was it desire alone that could breach all meaning?
Either way, its incredible.

Ranting 1

Turnstiles stilled into reaping stoneware. Crowds of sandfly men descend on God's failed infant vision. Despondent, we pace the pools of unflapping, irreplaceable clouds, arching fierce backs against endless valleys carved by the brazen mountains.
Heaps of sharpened clonkers fill the clog-wheels of deripening eyelids. We flash blind. No crowd in the cruel souls, or the seeming drum-cries. Tarpulin sails, I stand and sit and nowhere sit still.

Purblind, unfolding the courage-canvas of harpooned minds, fighting the prurient tide, but dearthy of creeper's dry, baked yore. Pounding at the prison shaft, at the draking foundling lane of lights, that hide, swiftly, concealing more curtains , dream after dream, forking truth in overcooked cries. Dreamt spiels in Devil's kitchen, pouring blood with no slime or grain of soundless trust. Petering forth sunlight, powerless in baptism, dream-frozen, streaking, sparking, across black skies, inexhaustible as Lethe bound truth.

Pertaining, referring, still sicker beyond chasms of time, chasms ground into brick-belief rock, that fall, from the flushing heights, in heightless, terrifying descent into the dead schools, into the schools of the dead, that breathing time of gushed up lungs.

Pie-like, we slice at youth, each content with his crusty, meatless share. But as midnight springs, the stroke of unopened truths, of unspoken circes, line the floorboards to darkness, while the red cloth will blindfold decoloured eyes.

Every future is inflamed with the violation of anticipation as every past is stained in the mudground of truth. One extinguishes in the deed or perishes in the noxiousness of its unfilled waste - to be frozen and rethawed like a self-regenerating birthday cake.

Another one

The ground is alive, and full of call
for the knees embrace, the flowering eyes.
Ineffable, as the earth-thrilling root,
or the time-spilling river,
it tills the purple-plumed evenings,
where the glancing of wind's soft face,
turns silence into shudders
at what was lost, lungly.

Receding shadows,
the rock-strewn marshes.
Green plaited pathways on which
harried footsteps turn, discern, the breadth
of life, the contemptuous
sole, inexhaustible crest. That awaits,
past the Coventried cries,
or the plainness of the autonomy
of solitude pain,
storing truths like a lie,
for winters that never come.

Coffee Induced Spiel

We do not dream of sanity
but we peer towards its
icy depths, its pools of
partied, encrockeried
fish, upturned, gaping towards that
emblazened sun, which
scorches us, duneless nomads.

I danced on the glass ceiling,
or the paved underground
but the taxies in their sliding
smiles, unthreaded, unwoundable,
would reverberate like plaintive
echoes into the glass ceiling
that cracks from above in
impossible hope, hopeless and
happiest where
there lay no hope but in the present.

So the Brooklyn tread,
or the Coventry constable,
would line in pillored graveyards,
to the ragged tunes of nursery
rhymes, pealing from the bells,
like music, tolling between our lives
to still the truths of silence.

Mind-Whirl

Tied, sherman clouds wander with leaf framed eyes
stealing apples from caterpillar's dunes and stately pies.

Dearthful, or rare, with crop coloured tourettes.
Dreamy, like arch-blithed angels, deheavened.

Spin, like a cocktail merry go round,
Trouble, in a secret town.

Purpose, a shining sword,
Bleeds air, makes cowboys clowns.

Turpentine, like Mark Twain's feuds,
leap like serpents into Loch Ness's hood.

Evenings, like overdrawn hues,
Extracts beetlejuice, like brewer's droop.

Sydney Shoemaker, the philosopher's don
eats mad men in Alcatron.

Wasted ink, like bating breath,
Peters out, as years undress.

Untitled

The four "horsemen" chatter in their teasets, roomed by ornate furnishings. One breathes an androgenous sigh lifted on a nasal tone, against the soft cackling of firelight in the background. He is the gangleader, the man with the soft white hardboiled hair, and the dogmatic eyes, fierce and knowing, like a robeless priest clutching to the scroll that refuses to unfurl.

One imagines that he must have stalked Conquest to boredom, or dimmed the tide of Death that foams around us as abandoned shells, through the use of a device at once hollow and useful and dependable and helpless. Of course, only the accursed nature of the present - that is the latent idea, the innate joke, that finds twisted celebration in the fact. Tough-mindedness - like a turtle that parades its scarred shell, to no less than children, weaned on demanding lies, and still captivated, as always, by the nature of the sick exhibition.

So the sordid gang crept along the pathways of its reptile truths, knocking, as it were, at the door of hermits, begging for assistance, and receiving none. It was as if yore responded to yore and found them merely sensate and severly lacking, as if they were repacked into ideas that lept into unkempt mailboxes, but fell out through the ages.

So, what of this impossibility then? We speak of inevitabilities here, such as the wingless crow, or the dirtface Ron. Well, believe it or not, it clatters like a wheelbarrow over diminished cobblestones, carrying earth, that unknown entity, too numerous to handle, yet convincingly amorphous, like water.

Coffee Coloured Moon

Blown dried teardrops lace the speedless ascent of the sun. Prithee, typing weeds still sprout like confections from burnt bakers hands. The intimate grimace of delights unfurling into diverging tracks, and the strange tremors as the boarded up railhouses collapse. Men pour out like wine on desert sand, escaping the inescapable dunes, but the Clint Eastwood figure already treads away with ghostly imminence on the magical beige-maned horse.

Turning to greater trivialities, and the profound mansion that lives off its moss and its cackling rough stone, we dance like jolly goblins around the rainforest grass, stretching over undefined heads and the ripping heat.

The moon is the remain of the coffee coloured stains, and still, and stark, like the ancient stone that could not turn to green cheese and lies in Merlin's suspension,
lifeless yet cratered, orbiting yet encaged, marbled yet uncooked, admired yet nonexistent, romanticized yet misundestood, feared yet dominated, appetizing yet uneaten, tide giving yet tide spurning.

The way it is

Every desperately independent thinker wishes to capture the spirit of the age, or rather, the spirit of the life of the society in which he hovers below, around, and above in an assuredly simplistic, graspable formula, that merely satisfies the need for self-justification, or a feeble self-satisfaction, in the attempt at his truth, at a digestible present.

Here is such a modest attempt, caused by a mania, induced as always, by reading the economics textbooks. Its an exaggeration, and a projection, but it nevertheless aims at truth. It is associated in my mind with "Born to Run" by Springsteen.

Bleed for the sun, suck from a fungal fountain.
Material Institutions!
Gyrating for the transcendental in the alcohol tunnel.
Life does not exist, raping, scrubbing the future.

The age of narratives.
The great man wedded to the great system,
like life to philosophy, love to smelters' waists,
where dreams are dissected to spill industrial broth.
And sin is the social reject boiling under a stately flame.

One will cry out for a transcendental public life - for Napoleon.
He is dead, but we will resurrect the dead, with the unborn youth as the unhappy audience of our various magic tricks.

Nothing

On the triumph of gleaming eyebeams
like soaked stains, grinding chills,
behold, a green tomb,
lies leafy and shrouded in mist.

Truth! What is this faery?
The faint lifeless fingers of this soft hand.
She leads me to this garden;
it shimmers like early spring.
The mist grows heavy here,
but the sounds seep into
twitching, enraptured ears.

The lifeless path is strewn.
Most drearily, the air is moist,
and sight cannot seize the roses,
it gazes forward, backwards,
at my own hands
in this strange wilderness.

Where is the goal?
Truth as the shining steed,
Where the footsteps slow and crouch
and the knees bend, and the heart beats content,
unturned by the gyre of scattering seeds.
I hear the fountain,
it replays, memory like, crisp and sore,
but it spouts, gurgling at its gargolyle lips.

What ancient lives
the house enshrined, what deaths
have planted this steady house
to the soil of a deepening past,
one cannot say,
for all questions and all answers,
unlike men and lusts,
live elsewhere.

Random Constructs

Visions

Light as impurity
schools the breams of closet tyrants.
Like prating elfin flowers
caught among the reeds groaning
alongside the roar of an impossible rapid.
Trellises.
A lesson for young children, still gearless,
still undetermined and inevitable.

Childhood Scenes

The fan windows, and the balcony
on which settled the sooty dirt,
the sand of an hourglass,
skin-like with perpetual grime.

Silence. The air is heavy;
it presses.
And the sunlight shafts and bends,
the golden morning turns to yellow,
and strides for the intensity
and the scorch of noontime.
Where the dread of noise begins,
and life unfolds its deep-rosed curtains
to the whispers of yearning,
through the wounds of words
for the untold seconds, the death-bound hours.

Images

Vesuvius

God erupted semen at Vesuvius.
The superheated steam
rushed over tangled olive plantations
enriching even the unfeminine earth.

Homer

I imagined Homer as that pretty schoolboy
in the black and white photograph.
His glance into the camera
reveals a sensitivity
but a sexuality of a sexuality
that doesn't recognize itself.

He plays football, that one.
He plays for the school team.
He lives like a normal idiot,
totally unaware.

There is a trash bin,
in the corner of the intersection where he lives.
It reminds him of his closeness to home,
every day as he walks past it.

Mountains

I will thank you gratefully, one day.
I am sorry for the distance.
Like the looming mountains in the distance
I will take a last long look at you
before the lonely highway of my life turns away.

Dog Food

My dog ate the textbook of life,
for it made good dog food.
I am left with human books
But the Bible is inedible.

God said...

God said:
I have a metaphor for love or attachment.
It is called Truth.

He said:
I have a metaphor for Truth.
It is called ethics.

He said:
I have a metaphor for ethics.
It is called social life.

He said:
I have a metaphor for social life.
It is called the individual.

He said:
I have a metaphor for the individual.
It is, of course, myself.

?

Eureka Moments

Gloves affixed to hands that once
trembled as it approached the breast of life.
Colours on mirrors until they reflect
the view of high windows
peering down with Merlin eyes
at disembodied puppets
that flay with happy barking dogs
affirming kinship and the soul of real life.

What is that leap upwards into the dull stoned tower or the bungeeless jump to meet the odour of the ground and to be a witness to one's own martyrdom?

Why, it is the trick of an unconscious ingenuity,
a harmonization of truths,
but not all truths,
that are heard by rhythms:
a realigning of the psychic cosmos
when two forces play together
to the tune of an idea.
One needs stupidity or lies: either will do.

London

Were you waiting,
You cross-legged creature
in the post-mortem hall
after the image of embarrassment
crowding the roaring currents
of the sickness of vodka,
art in hand?

You see,
in London,
in a dead-cushioned couch.
Geekly staring forth,
into a bottomless screen.
Expressionless but happily flushed.

The lighted hallways resound as
the bottle scrapes the floor.
The party is over, but the crowd lingers,
like the Turners on the wall.
The vast silence grows louder,
as the bottle breathes its last alcohol breath
and the spotlights darken
against the darkening sky.

Poorly formed confessions part 4

I

I miss you terribly.
I miss the excitement you bring as you enter into
the alleyways of dimmed lights.
I love the uncertain footsteps,
tinged with the pace of slight
anticipation, slight, but appealing.
Ungrounded in peaceless bridging,
like tense thread strung over Fates.
I love the spark of unclaimed, unspoken feeling,
your pauses , your silences,
enriching like dew-drenched hay, to stay the rotten beetle
of slant-eyed seeming.

Memories as dried fruits.
Life as syrups that cling to hoarse lips.
Groans stifled as ulcers are cut.
By steel of deathless truth.

II

The stars have bled
like prune eyed souls that with poor hands grasping
Strayed into narrow boroughs.
Splayed with the stench of truths
like overripe fruit that clung to trees like disease.
Dripping twisted grins like pressured slime
tracing the rivulets of sceptered cracks
in the streams of conscious cries.
The cheeks, the lips, the collapsing bones,
that weathered and hardened and reveried no more.
If peace could dream up paintbrushes,
and with a heavy heart, stake a claim and draw,
turn the cross beams of the heavens
into unspoken Jesuses and jigsaws
so would the nut and bolts of truth
collapse into music, like a crown.

III

Remember? I was standing on the
skeletal porch of the millennial church.
It was morning, and the potted plants
spoke with the conviction of absolute truth.
The busload of sinful souls rumbled past,
on a pedestal of frustrations and proofs.
It turned back,
like a coastal tide.
And swearing, good-naturedly, I mounted that stairway.
I loved the chill,
the life-sown cold that traveled as we stumbled
over dead sea-shells, amid a cold drizzle.
Finally, anticipation,
the false glance of salvation:
that would guide me, and all men,
to love, joy, hope, happiness,
and divine truth.

Philosophic Musing in the Continental Style

How to extend the rhythmic immediacy of emotion.

To transcend an academic style that is wedded to one's throat like a swelling tonsil that sings stable sounds, deceptively true, confident, as if it could stretch out pure like life in mornings of sunshine.

Of course, the pillaging of one's need for nature is the easiest and earliest undistilled mode of extension - the arrow that slices through air. But how single-minded, how Singaporean, an arrow is! It merely becomes its owner, and its truth is but its target, sole and lonely, and as bound to accusations as it surely deserves it.

So, what is therefore the prognosis of this disease - the Tantalus-yearning-melancholy for the content of unity? The representable, and therefore, far off unity? A separation wrought by the hidden hand of disintegrating conditions?

To speak in uneven tones, to collapse and to be reborn in another form with another step, to sense all and to yield nothing, without the love of suffering self-disgust: that is the given, the economic tradeoff of the untold life, and its mere statement the siren of sadness that is morally wrong, that should never be heard.

Not Well Read

At times, deprivation is the best form of nourishment.

I don't even want redemption.
I think its better to suffer the pain of guilt and exult
in the self-reverence
of one's emotions.

I think I'll have a plate of choicelessness, please.
From a menu of illusions, of course.
Noise. Noise. Noise. Will the world just shut the fuck up.

2 General Features of the Singaporean

More will be added later:

1) He does not trust his own intuitions or feelings. Eg. Defensive spontaneity of the coffeeshop uncle.

2) Success is the essence of all ethics. Eg. Failure is ethically wrong.

These 2 features have contributed greatly to Singapore's economic success.

Interesting Q&A

Here is a list of 20 questions to ask someone to get to know them.

* What is the one thing that you love the most about yourself?
* If you were to change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
* What's the first thing you notice in a person of the opposite sex?
* Any specific personality traits you would like to see in your life partner?
* What do you appreciate most about your life?
* What are the 5 important things you would include in your things-to-do list?
* Any regrets from life or past relationships?
* What do you like to do in your spare time/on weekends?
* Do you miss your childhood?
* Are you still in contact with any of your childhood friends?
* What's the worst relationship you have ever been in?
* Do you get along well with your family members and relatives?
* What's your opinion about your parents' relationship?
* Whom are you more closer to, your mom or your dad?
* Why do you think would anybody wish to get into a relationship with you?
* Do you like having children around you?
* Do you see yourself getting married in the next few years?
* When it comes to career, what do you think would be an ideal job for you?
* If you were to win $10 million, what would you do with all that money?
* If your were to get an opportunity to live anywhere in the world, which part of the world would you choose?

Interesting questions; and quite fun to answer.

1. What is the one thing that you love the most about yourself?

I like my ability to roast a philosophical problem in my mind like turkey over a slow fire. I mean my focus levels under favorable conditions.

2. If you were to change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Its hard to decide between two demands. One is the capacity to be more socially successful, two is the ability to grasp the mathematical-logical mode of thought in a more intuitive manner. I'll choose the first one, narrowly.

3. What's the first thing you notice in a person of the opposite sex?

The face, the figure, and the ability to carry off femininity in movement and poise. All three are very closely related, so it is a single effect, a single thing.

4. Any specific personality traits you would like to see in your life partner?

Gentleness, unlimited patience, kindness to perform the role of emotional crutch.

5. What do you appreciate most about your life?

That I have the privilege of an upper-middle class background in a historical moment where opportunities for individual development are at unprecedented levels. And a loving childhood.

6. What are the 5 important things you would include in your things-to-do list?

1. Get a first-class honors.
2. Get a decent job for money.
3. Quit the decent job and enter further studies.
4. Attain a sustainable position within the research industry.
5. Write a seminal philosophical text.

7. Any regrets from life or past relationships?

To have insisted on quitting the piano at an early age.

8. What do you like to do in your spare time/on weekends?

Surf the net. Listen to music.

9. Do you miss your childhood?

Yes. The primary reason is that I am not experiencing it now; the secondary reason is that one knows it is over.

10. Are you still in contact with any of your childhood friends?

Didn't have any. Oh wait i did have a few.

11. What's the worst relationship you have ever been in?

Not nice to talk about.

12. Do you get along well with your family members and relatives?

Family yes, but i do not take the initiative to talk to them when I'm busy. Relatives are like strangers, with the additional encumbrance of obligation.

13. What's your opinion about your parents' relationship?

My God, don't get me started.

14. Whom are you more closer to, your mom or your dad?

My mom.

15. Why do you think would anybody wish to get into a relationship with you?

There are masochistic people around.

16. Do you like having children around you?

No.

17. Do you see yourself getting married in the next few years?

No.

18. When it comes to career, what do you think would be an ideal job for you?

Ideal job is an oxymoron. Refer to above.

19. If you were to win $10 million, what would you do with all that money?

800 quid on audio equipment, 1000-15000 quid on musical instruments (depending on whether I really want a harpsichord), invest the rest for sustainable income without working.

20. If your were to get an opportunity to live anywhere in the world, which part of the world would you choose?

Somewhere in Northeastern US.

Poorly formed confessions part 3

Lilting soundless songs from life trapped lips. Springs of sturgeon darkness. That vileness of spool wrung present, taut as an unrelievable bow. The death of an arrow, as unfree as its owner, unsure as its aim, as broken as its bodkin tip, its sorry hopes.

"Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way."

Yeats, W.B.

Poorly formed confessions part 2

Reactionary moonglade
spill forth your beams
leafy pouts and stored stiff cries
from drunken howl-sore wells
splaying, festive, through
certain tones and pinched off June waters.
Spade a spade and enshrined bones
Sturdying stricken palpatations
Grating, scraps and flaking
Soaring into hell-dreams
Grappling burning ladders
descending, crackling with flames and
overwhelming laughter
All in descent.
All in motionless falling.
Leaping eternally. A cat yowling, and falling apart.
Into brine and bone.

Stuck! Staked!
Turpentine and flailing,
directness in stalking memory.

Violate it, like an indecent dream!
Wide-toothed and lust-soaked grinning,
Raping and pillaging peaceful memory.
As it screams, interfered in prophecy,
cracked in venerable rock and still unworn statues;
spilling forth, what -
notions, mere notions.

Multitudes of mutinied confusions.
Slipping over the observer's perch.
To return to that cliff-rope
that breathed the current of light, dead, dependably futile
breath-stops.

Tentative Muse

It just occurred to me that one is fundamentally unable to react to the fact of existence so one attempts throughout their lives to confess about this most guilty inability through things like "love", "achievement" and so on. What therefore, is sociability, and the great pantheism of this orientation in our acting lives? Why, it is the nice nicotine where the strange sufferingness in the need for an exploration for such a reaction finds its best solution. What do I mean? It submerges the problem of the itch to come to terms with the question of who i am under the wonderful intensity of fellow feeling that means that "not I" can no longer perceive "I", and more importantly, that it is therefore NOT NECESSARY and morally wrong to preach otherwise. So much for the modern institution of sociability - the modern replacement for religion (and very economically efficient too!)

What about achievement? It is again, an effective act of confession in the feeling that one has therefore suffered enough to warrant the indecency of one's allocating oneself the privilege of a description. And of course, crude as it is (beyond pragmatic need - i am speaking of pride here) everyone wants, begs for a description, even though he knows he does not deserve it unless others give it to him, that poor humble idiot, who fights for his dignity.

How terrible indeed to be a thing as well as to be!

Note that i'm talking about institutionalization that remains the post primary driving force that partially structures our understanding of our actions, and their developments into instinct. I am not developing a cynical, bitter theory of single motivations, although, then again, I might be.

Damn, this looks like psychologic dualism!

Poorly formed confessions part 1

From the comforts of dressingness
Stay and uncrease.
Savour custard and broken plates
Which find happy reuse
Like locked doors concealing precious
recyclables
i mean accidentally broken glass
which once told past in colour.
Unrelenting shivers from the closets
Closets?
Yes, a couple of broomsticks and mop-heads.
The better romance you can find.
The cleaner, the clearer.
The stare-inducing mirror, which, observe,
elicit happy mute screams of suction power.
Yawness as happiness - my new quote.

Stillness today.
The remainder of nothing new.
Still staring outward in with the blank-guard's eye.
Happy prison, watchful freedom.
Drowning in a carpet of hope
and the dust of the future.

The strange uncrackability of faith.
Like disease, it feeds on the past.
Barrel born history and a seaworthy fool.
Hell-hives. Barnacles. Plaster so stiff its emotion.
Pirates cast themselves into ponds to declare their love of ducks.
Therefore, England,
can, and should, sink.

Write about an event...

I wrote this as part of a psychology experiment. It asked me to describe a potentially life changing experience in the past three years.

"The experience I will describe is a slightly traumatic one in the sense that it threw me entirely out of my comfort zone and forced me to develop emotional independence. I am speaking of my being conscripted into the army for "national service" in my home country, after my A levels. This was about two and a half years ago and i was due to serve for two years. Certainly many of my peers disliked having their time appropriated from them by the state, but most accepted it grudgingly, presumably because it did not affect their emotional lives too deeply. My dislike for the army life stemmed from two major problems, firstly my need for copious amounts of privacy and 'alone time', and secondly my lack of affinity for the craft of soldiering.

Of course, in an environment where value is placed on specific physical competencies (eg. reflexes) and the ability to establish a camaraderie that facilitates teamwork with anyone and everyone, failure to live up to expectations, or perceived failure to do so, did affect my sense of self-worth and fed back to the habit of asking "what am I doing here?". The complete rupture from an academic environment as a student, - which to be honest, I believe I have grown too comfortable with for my own good - where conformity to an entirely different set of social expectations (eg. attitudes and values of manliness, loyalty to your platoon) made me feel terribly oppressed and disconnected. That is, the army environment not only prevented expression of individuality; it required active effort to display your conformity in terms totally contrary to my inclinations which I found extremely draining. On retrospect, I see that my sense of my disconnect from the environment, and the very unhappy states due to my complete inability to satisfy my emotional needs in relation to that environment, made me project wishes of being a free person as a sort of coping mechanism, which therefore started to elicit a habit of bitter complaining. It was certainly not the activities alone which I resented; some of them are actually remembered with a surprising amount of ambivalence. The issue was more to do with the people involved. For example, during training, being shouted at was common, but when it reaches a certain stage of frequency and intensity, for things like failing to greet your superiors, it becomes extremely exhausting. Essentially, one needs to recover after all this by a good deal of alone time, at least by my book.

Now, this is made really bad by the second problem of the total lack of emotional recovery time, of time when you can feel alone. When you stay in a 12 person bunk of your section mates, it simply means that you have zero time to just feel yourself. Why do I need such time? What does it help me do? Well, it is a form of engaging with yourself, of introspective reflection, and more importantly of feeling your own thoughts, and I require a daily dose of that for emotional health. I guess one can apply the analogy of a lover in love with myself, specifically the reflective part of myself, and without the opportunity to interact emotionally with this part, I will be pretty unhappy, and lonely.

So how did I cope with this? Well, I'm not sure that I did very well. But essentially one just goes through the training stage and then gets sent to the unit. When I got a unit role, i faked a knee injury and was sent to an administrative depot, where could leave after work, similar to an office setup. Things improved greatly after that.

What is the significance of this episode? I believe these stages very much established the mould of my emotional habits and character. That is, I became convinced of my different, and uncommon psychological needs and grew pretty cynical about the ability of others to understand me - which sounds strangely adolescent. Also, I think it was then that I began to conceive of the separation of the private and public me in absolute terms and in terms of effort did really let drop the public image. That is, I became established in the inclination to think that me, my world, matters so much more than all your worlds, and that communitarian world, that strange, interwoven ambitious world, teeming with desperate engagements (drunk in the delight of its own terrible uncertainty), full of absolute assumptions; the real world. I think alot of my adulthood would actually revolve around the development, or else the slow eroding, of these basic assumptive positions in the way I approach my life."

Reflections On Nietzsche Seminar

Self-satisfaction is the fear that has been smothered over by identity.
How does one overcome fear?
By organization; by re-representing oneself.
By creating a set of associations by which one can observe oneself.

A Post

The weight of expectations that formulate concepts of the past, present and future relative to individual agency as the moral conclusion of individual identity makes it hard to return to the timeless and becoming modality of self-identification that is the sole root of honesty and authenticity that comes from the aesthetically rewarding contemplation of life. That is the fantasy of the philosopher - the concept of truth whose wavering beams play upon the weighty bearings of existence, dissolving existence in a sea of concepts and lifting modalities of associative thought. Everyone needs truth and uses it for a reason, therefore everyone defines truth differently.

Quite Right

Let the blackening soul run through, you stupendous fool.

For once, the joy of gaining seeps like blood into skin, the starkness of knowing like the proud shutting of eyes, away from the formless echoing.

The movement of flags shutter this vastness, and grovels forth a notion that implicates, posits, implies, running like glaciers through mens' minds, bearing them away with the impetuosity of time in its barren magnetism, as if we were pins, as if they could draw truths where they carried only sadness.

I thought of yesterday, remembered the value of forgetting that drew us to our identity, force fed into validity, reduced into the tidal monotony of routine. Are our soul-seas an image of the churning, formless clouds?

Do I remember anything else? Has anyone been so desirous of freedom that he suffers from it? How could I bear to?

The sun is beaming into the recess of hidden corners again; its pointed fingers tap on the shell of consciousness, promising a relief, tremendous relief, and autonomous silence that sings, with that insolence of innocence.

A Thought Experiment

Let us begin.

The setup of personalities is configured by the equilibrium of personality drives.

Today, we will look at the neurosis in terms of its role as a connecting principle which underlies the state of being. The State of Being, in this case, is essentially a present State of existing, comprised of both phenomenological and unconsciously/consciously rational aspects, grounded in interpretive networks that apply unconscious beliefs about identity to experience.

In this model, the nature of personal response to all stimuli is conditioned by the integration of its aspects according to an underlying belief structure. This structure is in itself adopted through a process of projection - for instance, the movement of fingers, the sensation of the movement of fingers, the worldview by which the agency of the movement of fingers is inferred and given to make sense, according to metaphysical principles such as the assumption that the phenomena is innately expressive of the fact (and the fact as the overarching fuctional glue for different actual worlds), and according to psychologic principles such as we will mention.

Let us examine this by way of example - the neurosis of the spoon. The spoon is viewed as a projected identity, and the treatment of the spoon vis-a-vis worldly objects reflects linearly the treatment of the individual as regards his surroundings, and the spoon is an object that must be kept pure as against the polluting context of its existence.

In this case, the neurosis may be occasioned by the trauma attending physical discovery of the world in terms of disgust: a shocking enlightenment about one's and others' existence in the material world forced into the underlayers of unconscious identity creating belief. As the previous equilibrium is shocked into acceptance of new networks and possibly, a new frame from which to approach ideas, it may attempt to reverse the unconcious trauma situation, and attempt to fully accomodate the new structural imbalances caused by enlightenment through an immediate compensatory act that recovers the state of equilibrium, through adapting a neurosis that can:
1. respond to the nature of the perception of the disturbing phenomena, according to the principles laid out by even deeper epistemic beliefs,
2. remind one of the pre-disturbance state, which identity is associated with.
3. By linking 1) and 2), the epistemic beliefs become more secure.
Note that the machinations, if done normally, do not deny the new possibilities, but re-accomodate them in terms of previous beliefs (ideas that allow one to contain new ideas, with the containing idea becoming solidified and sanctioned as "personal belief".)

So that, beyond rational frameworks of thought, there exist psychically relevant identity-relation frameworks, which regulate the significance of ideas. Obviously neurosis and collective beliefs are mostly effective on that level.

Eating with the spoon becomes associated with the act of agency over physicalism and the sensate notions (ie, desires) - (these two may even be closely associated).

Since,

1. Agency is seen to be correlated with transcendentalism
2. Most persons' identity must immediately presuppose transcendentalism when faced with the phenomenological phenomena of existence
3. Identity must be defined such as to be relevant at every moment through its actual-terms association with those aforesaid sensate phenomena
4. This sensate phenomena will always bear the character of trauma

Therefore most agencies of a reaction-type will have to find their true psychic function as a means to recreate the effective unconscious-regulating feelings originally associated with the act of eating or sleeping or socializing or whatever.
Their first role, as trauma adaptibility instruments, now evolve according to new disturbances and potentials for equilibrium according to new epistemic and aesthetic frameworks.

On a sidenote, creation of Dionysian art is but a great intensity of phenomenological trauma that calls for

One way of defining the individual is to trace the continuity of the principles by which all these stimuli are received and responded to, or the drives interpretive and reactive

A Movie Review: Apocalypse Now

The movie begins with the plainness of unhindered experience. The quiet calm that insures our experience from the undercurrents of our inherent power and our will to power, our unseeing possession and uncontrollable control. Impossible stillness in the mind generates its own desire, despite the intimidating immensity of life; we assert our dominance over nature- and in doing so, invite nature over ourselves.

Movies aspire to explore this dynamics for artistic gain. The aesthetic capacity aroused in the act of self-contemplation- it feeds on our godlike ability to be both ourselves, immeasurably bound to bounded experience; and the product of our thoughts- a reverie of contemplation that trivialises the great external themes. This division is no mere dualism; it contains irreconcilable modes of meaning that can only be bridged by man in his act of experience, in his reactions, made in rawness and detachment, one at the same time. Impact and insight, thus, become the methods of art; they draw you in to give detached insight meaning. No movie I have seen wields such force of psychological impact, yet the beauties of tempting passion and detachment. Like life itself, it transcends it boundedness; it injects all meaning into it.

The technical brilliancy of the movie has been avouched for. Coppola himself acknowledged the ambitions of the project: it does not aspire to represent, but to be life itself. Few movies achieve the immediacy and importance of life experience; that it substitutes it completely in my viewing, and resonates in the quiet moments thereafter, is proof of the success of Coppola's execution of his first intent.

Part of its success rests in the perfection in scene after scene. They are nuanced yet exhilarating; it neither simplifies nor censors itself. Through its fidelity, it invites viewers to a truer experience. The screenplay and thematic progression achieves pacing and balance; the trail upriver is arduous, boring, frustrating, terrifying. Politics, civilization give way to jungle, jungle gives way to man. Psyche resides at the end of experience.

Of course, the inevitable descent into nature culminates in the truest discovery man has capacity to experience: that of insanity. Nature returns man into his failed state, the price and reckoning of being the nothing out of which he was born.

Nevertheless, this is arguably not the final conclusion of the film, as some critics choose to believe. Its climax lies not in man's conscious discovery of himself in all his rawness and experiential instincts and horror, for these are all subconsciously known, but in the conduct of man's totality; the synthesis of his domesticity and animalism, in the French plantation outpost, of progress.

Internal dialectics rip apart the arguments of the film. The unbearable rawness of combat unhinges breaking points, and forces men to ironic detachment. In an incomparable movie scene, LTC Bill Kilgore orders a massacre of villages and the VC played to music of Wagner. It beautifies destruction in its recoil from the horror of it, and murder becomes a matter of an aesthetic means to overcome guilt and terror. The surfboard and the crew filming death on the beach; men have snapped into their broken detached states; yet the rawness of horror consumes them. Men have no control over their fates, and they submit to death and death-making.

We condemn them, but in retrospect, they are but victims of themselves and their powerlessness in the setting of war. The primacy and invariable truth of the immoral man, who "kills without passion", absolves them. The final effect of the later arguments Col Kurtz expounded in self defence is to negate our compassion and horror at the killing- the film refutes itself in a dialectic between the first and second parts. Civilized moral outrage is made irrelevant when confronted with the inherently nihilistic construct of man; moral judgements guided by an understanding of consequence is submerged by the liquid primacy of the present. Col Kurtz's arguments achieve validity because they are raw, and rawness is truthfulness when translated from experience.

The scenes of the French stronghold, then, form the centre and climax of the film that unites the didactic elements together. Detachment and rawness, love and violence, union and hatred, come together in fleeting, fragile and romantic vision of truth. This truth isn't complete- it must lie in the edge of the realms of experience and meaning, rawness and detachment. Lovers must be vicarious, a projection of ancient yet personal desires; it must lie beyond a unspeakable curtain. The greatest insight in the film, sublimed into the truest experience, is spoken in a moment both of passion and detachment; sex is an incomplete form both of love and violence. Yet it is sustainable, good, and true. The scene is the uniquely precious counterpoint to the horror of the plot, of life. It rejects the combination of love and violence to create death, to generate possession and betrayal, to blow up the helicopter in place of a lost daughter with a grenade. It becomes a means to create life, and to realize the tragedy of man's creation as a product of opposing, incommensurable forces, that can only be dealt with by passion and understanding that knows yet asserts itself. The French scene contains references to all the other main scenes in the movie, as it contains the solutions, in a metaphoric stronghold, the final centre (to shore up our remains).

The movie closes with a final didactic; the opposition of the necessity of noble lies to the dangerous gain wrought by understanding of man's truths. This is Col Kurtz legacy: two forever competing solutions, to reconcile man's need for truth and his idea of a good life.

Meaning And Existence

Existence is a property which relates other properties not to concepts of properties, but to a universalisation of the particular, a concept to an experienced form.

Therefore, if existence is an empirically verifying/affirmative quality of meaning, then the concept of existence must rely on the conceptualization of the experentiality of existence as well as the meaning of existence; it must include existence's own mode in its description of the property of existence.

In conceptualizing the template of subjects rather than the subjects themselves, one faces the difficulty of propertifying an experience which is felt rather than thought, or, to put it more clear
ly, universal rather than comparable with others. Existence has nothing else other than non-existence to compare with; its mode is not a meaning- it is a mode unto itself.

Therefore we are stuck. The inability to deconstruct existence into concepts, and thus relate concepts with existence in a a conceptual, rather than experiential way, as well as the complete dependence of our world view on these two mental wheels - this would seem insoluble.

Where might future solutions derive from?

Euthyphro

Plato's short dialogue on piety culminates in negatives; its greatest insight is to expose the fundamental incompatibilities of two disparate cosmological propositions: that of a universally valid standard of meaning and the good, against the standards seen to derive from the caprices of the Greek pantheon. This contradiction has come to be known as the Euthyphro's dilemma.

However, the present interest lies in the fact that this incompatibility was not in itself the main focus at the point where it was raised. Socrates introduced the issue in his attempts to examine and disprove Euthyphro's assertion that the pious is that which is God-loved. For simplicity's sake, we will take that to mean that a necessary but insufficient aspect of the pious, is that it is God-loved.

Socrates's arguments run as such:

1. A thing is God-loved because God loves the thing, not because it is inherently God-loved. (The adverb sequentially succeeds the verb. Being God-loved is not a quality inherent in the thing).

2. The pious is God-loved because of its piousness. (Being God-loved is a quality inherent in the definition of piousness).

3. From 2, it follows that (all?) God-loved things are God-loved because they are inherently God-loved.

4. This in opposition to 1., therefore only one of the statements, 1 or 2, can be true; being mutually exclusive, they cannot be true at the same time.

Now, the fishy points in the argument lie in 2 and 3. It becomes apparent after some thought that in the course of the argument, Socrates must commit the implicit assumption that if piousness was pious not because of God's love (but due to some external standard), then God's love of piousness must derive not from God's act of loving, but from the implicit inherency of God's love as a quality in the thing. In other words, it assumes that the only way in which God can love the pious is if that which God-loves (namely, the pious) was, in essence the God-loved. By that score, nothing that is God-loved can be anything else but THE God-loved. Again, in other words, it assumes the truth of the bracketed statement in thread 2 of the above argument, when of course, requiring God's love by definition certainly does not mean in any way that something is God-loved in its original state. It is a complex form of the age-old straw man fallacy.

This would then trap Euthyphro in the depths of the Euthyphro dilemma which is in fact not bound up directly with the argument at hand.

Musing

If the reason of the founding of a city is the recognition that mutual benefit, materially and in terms of security, can arise, then the basis of the necessity of noble lie must lie in the belief that the established rational basis for the allocation of power within the city is precarious against human greed and striving.

By associating the citizens of the city with a higher order, the noble lie widens the range of those whom the individual identifies with as his own to include the whole city, thereby dissipating self-interest. However, this is but a preparative to Socrates's wider goal to dispel material wants completely within the perfect city. The identities of clan and self contain tacit boundaries which exclude those beyond; in such divisions lie the source and justification of private possession, both of knowledge and of goods. Socrates significantly neglects the needs of the body in attempting to reshape the way citizens expect their needs to be met in the city; he realizes that the bodily wants, of which a majority are in a nature of private goods, reconciles human greed with human selfishness; poisons the nature of identity and man's need to belong. Socrates overhauls both the impacts of identities on men's choices and the identities themselves.

The new identities Socrates propose attach themselves along the defining characteristics of vocation and their attending class. The mode of creation, rather than consumption and need, becomes the flag to which men rally by. He lends it the allure of divine fulfillment, aiding men's necessarily selfconscious tempering of his bodily wants.

At this point however, one must consider if Socrates indeed saw moderation as a virtue worthy of huge sacrifices beyond the material, or if the impetus to turn his citizens into purely political creatures reached an end in itself. For it would be surely draconian and unjustifiable to go to such lengths, indeed, breach the limits of human nature, in the name of moderation. Perhaps Socrates attempted to align human lifestyles to divinely virtue, therefore requiring religious observance in his subjects.

The necessity of the noble lie should be debated as well. Enlightenment thinkers believed in channeling of human self interest into activities that would fulfill an alternative set of moralities and result in mutual benefit. The worker and the consumer benefits. In contrast, the noble lie seeks to limit the meaning and concept of the consumer. Socrates attempts to reverse the demand and supply driven relationship between consumer and worker; in his city, the consumer exists for the worker. Such a lie is therefore necessary, it seems, if human survival and human invirtue derive from the same source, bringing forth yet another example of Platonic tragicomedy. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the replacement of self-interest with self-neglecting loyalty marks any real progress.

In certain conceptions of Enlightenment societies, the "common good" does not extend beyond the sum of individual good. Society merely acts as enforcers of laws that maximize individual good. For Plato, individual benefit is sacrificed in the name of checks and balances against injustice. Therefore it must arise out of a deep suspicion of the citizens in the city; a strong belief in their potential to be corrupted and manipulated. In proposing draconian static laws, the role of institutions are diminished into enforcers: warriors, not philosophers.

BATMAN!

Since everyone, everyone, everyone is blogging about how adverb-defyingly GOOD Batman the movie is, I would have pressured myself to differ. But, but, my blogger's honesty will not give in. Batman is a very good show. (I mean the Dark Knight.) (Spoilers ahead).

Good. Nolan is smart and savvy. Not completely, consistently so. His relative inexperience shows, I suppose, in the unnecessary audio dramaticisms in certain scenes. But there is no doubt that for someone who popularizes the dilemmas of ethics by making them an integral part of the understanding and enjoyment of the movie- from its own characters, to its implications for the audience, to the taunting means of engaging the audience itself, thereby in effect casting a mirror in its closeup shots of characters- there is little doubt that Nolan has read his canonical texts.

The movie's ethical and narrative approach is straightforward enough- we unanimously support and approve of Batman- this often in opposition to the people of Gotham City Therefore, politically placed as one of the hapless in Gotham but situationally privileged to obtain Batman's view of events, the movie can assert its points to its audience; cram out its insights in a clockwork manner.

For instance, the death of the woman as a turning point. It signals the irremediable shift from the personal to the political for Batman- he becomes the perfect political creature that the attorney Dent could never become. Dent needed a personal reward for political virtue which Batman was adept to living without. Therefore, the change in Dent. And the last straw for Batman; his 9/11 moment. Obviously, this in turn signals the shift from the focus of this superhero movie, and such movies perhaps in general, away from the personal issues of the hero to the political, and the universal, which the movie did, through the introduction of ethics, and personal/social order vs disorder.

If Batman had achieved an insight of social relevance, it could only have done so in such a fictional setting; through the beauty of superhero cinema that dispensed with the realisms of human abilities, leaving the viewer with few demands of conventional norms of human differentiation such as class. The fluidity and fragility of the upper class of Gotham is felt throughout in a way that cannot mirror the real world; this is possible due to the distortions in human ability assumed in the show. Without these fictions, the moral situations would have been difficult to imagine. The movie lends them both the weight and realism of real situations; rarely have real-world issues been made more pressing by a movie's analogies.

So. Now I suppose I know why Batman is a greater superhero than superman or spiderman.

Routine Retrospective

Of course, I need hardly state that blogging is a life buoy for the sinking flesh of my mental state. I write at the desperate moments; only at the desperate moments, or the appropriately elated ones, charged with beams of hope that burn bright but falter and cease at the first real obstructions.

Blogging contains an element of both.

When the constant pang of need, the deafening hums of hurt pride; not feelings, for they are immediately aroused, with the effect of a injection of sugar or salt- how superficial!- when the surrounding edifice encloses you within its shrinking walls, you had best falter and pretend nothing wrong existed by blogging. By blogging, trusting the truth of your words as the world folds its possibilities like a blanket under your fingers, shaped into a soothing path from the insanity that thuds the thunder of its war drums reverberating through the dark of the darkening forest.

I will wander through the protected circle of my mind, tracing the possibilities in a way that would never materialize, unconscious of the flaws; never needing to awaken to a nightmare- posing as a detached mode, the patch you land where you fall from yourself. The quiet breathed alone darkness.

................................................Why do people blog about their lives?

No.No.No. I'd rather have nothing at all. It's better than the dark.