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Dr Mindbender 82
14 May 2012 @ 02:29 am
When shadowed eve creeps around the light
Stretching long, long in the daylight noon
Till night at last sets the sun to rest,
- and long her fingers reach for the moon

A gentle hush at last falls fast
In the deep, deep pale of her light
-and all the world is resting at last
In that hushed gentle, of the night.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
I worked this out a little while ago, but I was playing with it on the train. It’s mainly just logical sequencing and a bit of a theory about familial structures that can develop up and out of them. I do have another theory about dominate families, or tribes, and degenerate ones, that feeds into this theory, but that's more of a theoretical structure, this one is pragmatic. One major problem with the pragmatic aspect, are the irrational members of a family, who sabotage other members for bizarre, jealous, selfish &c reasons. – I don’t know how to get around this other than removing them from the family, or from their own lives.

It’s just a theory about stages in a post industrial society, that a young man can go through, to ‘have it all’. The annoying thing is, when I figured it out, I was just that little bit too old to give it a shot.

_______________________________________

15 – 19 Leave school.
Basic Job Skills.
Learn a System of Martial Arts.
Decide on a Trade or Career.
Don’t get anyone pregnant.

Take two years off, before going, or applying for university or starting a trade, if you can. If you have a trade, start it, because it may not be there in two years when you’re ready, and you're better off with a trade, than without one.

If you don’t, perhaps try this.

In this time do three things
a) Get a ‘basics skills job’ – so that means, working in a factory, a warehouse stacking pallets, shoveling concrete somewhere, working retail. Just basic, and enough nights a week to pay for your accommodation, martial arts lessons, and a bit of partying. Also work out what you want as your trade or your career in this period. That’s what this period is for, so you don’t get half way through an accounting degree, straight out of high school, then decide that’s not what you wanted to do with your life after all.

b) Take up a form of martial arts, for at least eight months, at least once a week. Aim for sixteen months, and two nights a week if you can. Do Kick Boxing, Boxing, MMA, ya know, Parkour, or Capoeira if you want something a bit exotic. Do this now, while you’re young, to get it out of your system.

There are two things a young man should learn how to do, (1) to think and (2) how to fight, so no one will tell him what to think, and he'll be able to stand by what he thinks is right.

Do those two things, you’ll walk taller for it.

c) Don’t get anyone pregnant.

19 to 25
Get a trade or career.
Decide what your dream is, and if you really want to follow it.

a) Pick a trade or a career. Pick something that is a specialized skill, and is likely to give you employment over your life time. Be a plumber, a solicitor, a doctor, a carpenter, a teacher, a dentist, a mechanic, a boiler maker, an engineer. Pick something that requires two to six years to complete, and has lots of job opportunities, and is relatively secure. Don’t pick anything high risk like corporate management, trading, stock broking, if you’re first generation, unless you’re really good at it, or you really do want to do it. Look for secure money, or get the secure money first, do the teaching, or accounting degree, then follow the speculative trading as your dream.

b) Sort out, from all the things you’d like, what you might like to most do, if you could do anything. This is your dream. This is what you chase after you get your trade or proffession.

Is it a dirt bike champion, a rock star, an actor, an investigative journalist, a Nobel prize winning scientist, a science fiction writer? It might tie into your career or trade in some way.

25 to 34

Follow your dream, try to make it happen.
But keep in mind, if you’re getting to 32, 34 and nothing, you might need to put away your dream, fall back on your career or trade, so you can start your family, and come back to it, after you’ve had your family.

You might have to chase your dream in your late forties, and early fifties. But at least then, you'll have had a family, and you'll have your resources to go after it, if you still want it. You're not going to get stuck in the middle with nothing to fall back on.


______________________

Notes on hierarchical structures and building dynasties.

Once the first generation has made its mark in a family, a number of members will be successful, a numbers of others, less so, and a number still, will be a dead loss.

Some interesting properties start to emerge.


(1) High risk /big money opportunities become not only feasible, but lose their ‘riskiness’.
Familial money becomes available for high risk ventures, like starting a new business, or investment finance. Big money investments become possible. If all the members of the family, are averaging incomes of between, say, thirty thousand, and a hundred and twenty thousand, then there will be surplus family wealth, where it becomes possible, for a family member coming through who wants to start a new company, or wants to try their hand at a high risk profession, like day trading, to acquire funds, a spare three grand here, five grand there, two grand here, to bring up the fifteen or thirty grand, to have a go at making serious cash, that isn’t available in a first generation hierarchy.

(2) Dukes and Lords.
The family begins to acquire Dukes and Lords. Dukes are like a member of the family who is a mechanic, or a solicitor, or carpenter, who can do work for other members of the family. Lords, are members of the family in a particular field, who, can get other members of that family into said field. Uncle Moe might be a carpenter, who knows someone who’s an electrician they work with, who can get young cousin Curly, into that trade. Recognizing these two infrastructures are an indirect source of wealth, that emerges in second generation hierarchies. It also becomes possible for families to barter with each other, over collective familial resources.

(3) King Makers.
In Medieval Europe, it quickly became necessary, if you were a royal family competing for the Crown, to have an inside man on the clergy, to make sure, when you finally do get in a position for that crown, you’re man will be able to tip the nod, that crowns the king. King Makers are the most powerful units, they’re slightly above Lords, in that they can open the doorway to professions, they literally tip the nods to get make sure such and such gets the crown. – Teachers, administration staff, professors, people with their foot inside the door of education generally, who know what sorts of things go inside of the selective high school tests, the procedures and forms to fill out, the back roads into universities, or the formal requirements of a capstone, and trade certificate registry, talent scouts, publishing, or talent agents, people in charge of rosters, or assignments at a television station, or a modeling agency, or with a foot in the door at a recording studio, these are the King Makers.

The difference between King Makers, and Lords, is King Makers can forward on dreams, while Lords tend to be centered in and around lower professions, and there’s probably a hierarchy to be explored in this.

Bad eggs.
These are family members who are detrimental to the rise of the family. There are any number of reasons for this – I suspect sometimes it’s just birth order, you get a good leaders who are born in the wrong order, or members who sabotage everyone else for bizarre or irrational reasons. I honestly don’t know what to do with these members, but generally, they’re the reason why out of two branches of a family, one will go on to be successful, the other will drop, or be sucked down into the depths of society and stay there. My bet is, it is usually a sabotaging member.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
29 March 2012 @ 10:56 pm
I might save that from facebook oblivion.

Seems important for some reason.

___________________________________

Actually, what I need is a week off, to drive off somewhere deserted and drag drift wood along a beach somewhere in the fading light, to construct towering bonfires in the black night, then sit there, somewhere between the black abyss of cliff, ocean and night - with the flickering flames lighting up my face, drinking rum, and reading poems outta Henry Kendall’s Leaves From an Australian Forrest, until poetry, ocean and night become one, and I pass out, alone on the sand. Godless, like my convict ancestors, in a land of spirits and secrets, nurtured in a dark womb of night and starlight, till at last the withering crackle and hiss of the dying flames yields to the dawnlight, and the creep of early morning tide.


. . .

The cottage he lived in is no more than an hour's walk and a stone's throw from my uncle's cabin on the coast. Sometimes when I go up there, at night, I'll go out there, jump the chain-link fence and sit in the shadows, trying to feel, I'm not sure what? For the bones of the poet in the dark spots left in the hollows and eves. Try to feel the poet's isolation all those years ago, out in the darkness and land of alien spirits, staring into the black night with just the written word. . . Sometimes, in the gloom and silence when it wanders, it still half seems like you can feel the old poet's bones are there.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
26 February 2012 @ 04:32 am
“I have the enlightenment, quick everyone, follow me.”
“Wait, up, wait up, hold on. Everyone wait! Now, where exactly is this enlightenment?”
“I have it.”
“Where?”
“At my place.”
“Where abouts at your place?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Where about’s in the kitchen?”
“Errr, on the shelf above the stove”
“What colour is it?”
“Why it’s a lovely shade of red if you must know.”
“And how big is it?”
“Rather big.”
“How tall?”
“Yay."
“How wide?”
“Yay by yay.”
“Ah-ha, there is no enlightenment. If it was yay by yay, it couldn’t possibly fit on the top shelf.”
"Errr."

A week later.
“Quick everyone, follow me. I have the enlightenment.”
“Wait, wait up, everyone slow down. Stop, just wait. Now, ahem, where exactly is this enlightenment. At home on the top shelf I suppose?”
“No, it’s here, in this book.”
“What book?”
“This one.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Errrrrrr”.
“Ah-ha. Yes. You see. Now, quick everyone, follow me.”


Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hall-e-luj-ah. . .

Three thousand years later.

“And now, a reading from the book of –“
“Just a minute.”
“What?”
“The book, it’s wrong.”
“What book?”
“The Book.”
“It can’t be wrong. It’s got ‘the enlightenment’ in it.”
“The first bit. The first bit is wrong,” takes a bite out of an apple “dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“And apes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I have the anti-enlightenment.”
“Where?”
“In this book.”
“What, that one?”
“Yup” another bite “says it all in here. Monkeys, dinosaurs, geothermic strata in the earth’s crust.”
“Does it really?”
“Yup.”
“Fucken, damn well took you long enough.”

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hall-e-luj-ah. . .
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
22 February 2012 @ 10:40 pm
Ryle’s got this agitational calculus, that’s pretty cool. You can calculate approximations to levels of agitation, a bit the way you can work out units of pleasure in Bentham’s Hedonic gear. Must be like an English Grammar school thing. To be honest, I just don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want to refute it because it looks like a lot of fun, but it doesn’t fit in with the haunting. The critical flaw is that a person can change their motives, inclinations and re-construe their factual impediments, by kicking consciousness up to a theitic level. But in reality, that’s not always possible, and moreover, there are people out there, I suspect, who can’t access theitic or higher reflective states consciousness, because they really are, and their consciousness is, literally, that embedded in the world.

I think Sartre was being a little overly optimistic in his apprasil of our faculties in ascirbing them a generic distrabution. There are people, genuinely out there, I reckon, who don't know what it's like, or lack the capacity to reflect. They may pretend to do it, when other's start to catch on, or they may learn tricks to fake it, but I suspect, really, they can't. Got my own little suspician going on about it.

The basics of calculating agitation are easy enough to pick up and work out once you understand the basics.

: Inclinations are things you like to do,
: Motives involve sub-structures that contain to ambitions, hankerings, and needs.
: Factual Impediments prevent the carry-on of the two dispositional forms above.

Inclination + Contrary Inclination = agitation.
Inclination + Contrary Motive = agitation
Motive + Contrary Motive = agitation
Motive + Contrary Inclination = agitation
Inclination + Factual Impediment = agitation
Motive + Contrary Impediment = agitation
Motive + Motive + Factual Impediment = agitation
And so on.


____________________Ryle: Concept of Mind (extracts)

In fact, inclinations and agitations are things of different kinds.
Agitations can be violent or mild, inclinations cannot be cither.
Inclinations can be relatively strong or relatively weak, but this
difference is not a difference of degree of upsettingness; it is a
difference of degree of operativeness, which is quite a different
sort of difference. Hume's word 'passion' was being used to
signify things of at least two disparate types.

A keen walker walks because he wants to walk,
but a perplexed man does not wrinkle his brows because he wants
or means to wrinkle them, though the actor or hypocrite may
wrinkle his brows because he wants or means to appear perplexed.
The reason for these differences is simple. To be distracted is not
like being thirsty in the presence of drinking-water; it is like being
thirsty in the absence of water, or in the presence of foul water.
It is wanting to do something while not being able to do it, or
wanting to do something and at the same time wanting not to
do it. It is the conjunction of an inclination to behave in a certain
way with an inhibition upon behaving in that way. The agitated
person cannot think what to do, or what to think. Aimless and
vacillating behaviour, as well as paralysis of behaviour, are symptoms
of agitations in a way in which making a joke is not a symptom
but an exercise of a sense of humour .

As the words 'distraction' and 'agitation' themselves indicate,
people in these conditions are, to use a hazardous metaphor, subject
to opposing forces. The two radical kinds of such conflicts are these,
namely when one inclination runs counter to another, and when an
inclination is thwarted by the hard facts of the world. A man who
wants a country life and wants to hold a position which requires
his living in a town is inclined in opposing directions. A man who
wants to live and is dying is precluded by the facts from doing what
he wants. These instances show an important feature of agitations,
namely that they presuppose the existence of inclinations which are
not themselves agitations, mucH as eddies presuppose the existence
of currents which are not themselves eddies. An eddy is an
interference-condition which requires that there exist, say, two
currents, or a current and a rock; an agitation requires that there
exist two inclinations or an inclination and a factual impedi-
ment. Grief, of one sort, is affection blocked by death; suspense, of
one sort, is hope interfered with by fear. To be torn between
patriotism and ambition the victim must be both patriotic and
ambitious.

When a man is described as being both very avaricious and
rather fond of gardening, part of what is being said is that the
former motive is stronger than the latter, in the sense that much
more of his internal and external conduct is directed towards self-
enrichment than is directed towards horticulture. Moreover, when
situations arise in which a slight financial loss would be accompanied
by a major improvement to his garden, he is likely to give up the
orchids and to keep the cash. But more is being said than this. For
a man to be describable as very avaricious, this propensity must in
the same way be dominant over all or nearly all his other inclin-
ations. Even to be described as rather fond of gardening indicates
that this motive dominates a lot of other inclinations. The strengths
of motives are their relative strengths vis-h-vis either some other
specified motive, or every other motive, or most other motives.
They are determined partly by the way in which the agent
distributes his internal and external activities and, what is only a
special case of this, partly by the outcomes of competitions between
his inclinations, when circumstance? bring about such competitions,
i.e. when he cannot do two things, to both of which he is inclined.
Indeed, to say that his motives have such and such strengths is
simply to say that he tends to distribute his activities in such and
such ways.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
Here, that’s the difference between a skills based education and a memory by rote episodic one – if anyone is looking for it in Ryle. He makes the distinction any number of other places, but the clearest cut is in the recollection, and the ways in which we use ‘to remember’, since most tests and exams rely on retaining what you’ve been exposed to, so syllabuses are set out in terms of preparing you to remember for a test, and the form of memory function that you perform is a dead give away to the sort of learning you've been involved it. – The former raises competencies in all areas, gives you hands on abilities, skills, methods and techniques. The later gives you little bits of episodic information to retain, memorize, usually broken down by a syllabus.

With the exception of philosophy, some areas of English, and the parts of maths they can’t turn into the simple memorization of formulas to be applied when a stimulus is presented, most of our high school and primary school educational subject content is pretty useless.

We should be teaching kids how to read the stock market to predict interest rates hikes and drops and use programming languages, alongside reading the classics, 2nd and 3rd languages, and solving abstract math problems without falling back on prepared rote formulas, learned by drill, and isolated from the body of genuine mathematical practice and theory.

______________________

We must begin by noticing two widely different ways in which the verb 'to remember' is commonly used.

(a) By far the most important and the least discussed use of the
verb is that use in which remembering something means having
learned something and not forgotten it. This is the sense in
which we speak of remembering the Greek alphabet, or the way
from the gravel-pit to the bathing-place, or the proof of a theorem,
or how to bicycle, or that the next meeting of the Board will be in
the last week of July. To say that a person has not forgotten some-
thing is not to say that he is now doing or undergoing anything, or
even that he regularly or occasionally does or undergoes anything.
It is to say that he can do certain things, such as go through the
Greek alphabet, direct a stranger back from the bathing-place to
the gravel-pit and correct someone.

What, in this use, is said to be remembered is any learned lesson,
and what is learned and not forgotten need have nothing to do with
the past, though the learning of it of course precedes the condition
of not having forgotten it. 'Remember' in this use is often, though
not always, an allowable paraphrase of the verb 'to know'.

(b) Quite different from this is the use of the verb 'to remember*
in which a person is said to have remembered, or been recollecting,
something at a particular moment, or is said to be now
recalling, reviewing or dwelling on some episode of his own past.
In this use, remembering is an occurrence; it is something which a
person may try successfully, or in vain, to do; it occupies his attention
for a time and he may do it with pleasure or distress and with ease
or effort. The barrister presses the witness to recall things, where the
teacher trains his pupils not to forget things.

______________________

That’s just my take on it, and that’s the distinction pulled out of Ryle if anyone is looking for it.

I really like the idea of a skills based education, where we focus on skills, and sets of skills, instead of rote learning and memorization.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
14 February 2012 @ 02:38 pm
Here this bothers me.

See, in England, depending on which school you went to, you got taught a different form of grammar, at least, right up to the 70s. I don’t know if they still do it. There used to be three sets of public grammar, and one reserved set of Royal Grammar, which only the Queen and royal family spoke.

They lampoon it in that Gulliver’s Travels with Jack Black, and Bernard Shaw gets stuck into this.

The lower classes spoke, what 90% of the world speaks, which is some hybrid of Cockney English, that’s where all your “ain’t –s”, “nothings” and ‘ahh’, as in ‘swank’ comes from, as apposed to your ‘ah’, as in father. It has no ‘grammar’ as such, and the only bits of it that are written from our common ancestor, are in things like Bernard Shaw, when it was starting die out, or fused in to the common grammar, as middle class schooling became universal towards the end of the 1800s, and early 20th Century, or in Charles Dickens you find a lot of it. He’d go out and listen to the people in the street, and wrote a lot of it down.

Then you have the middle class grammar – this developed out of book keepers and office workers. This was systematically and conscientiously developed for people who would work in Government positions for the Crown, around the 1700s, based on imitating what the French were doing, which was something similar. This is the object/subject casing, a simplified version of the Continental system of Grammar, which dates back to the Greeks and Romans, and probably reached its height with The Port Royal Grammarians. This is what they taught in their public education system, and I suspect it’s what they still teach. It’s what our English teachers mistake for real English grammar, because they don’t know any better.

The Continental Grammar, is of course, what they teach to the upper classes, in their version of the Private Education system.

Now why this is interesting, is that Ryle is using continental grammar to make a lot of his distinctions in places, he talks about cases, and such like, so he’s using an upper class grammar, along with English upper class terminology, like ‘dispositions’, ‘countenance’ here and there, and suchlike, but the vocabulary he is using this Grammar and ‘terminology on’ is distinctively middle class, almost consciously semi-vulgar English. Things like ‘he knows what he’s about’ which he lifts and redistributes in Grammatical terminology, then reformulates as a thesis ‘knowing what one is about’.

Now I wonder if he is doing that consciously, as part of his language thinking, or if that’s a habit he’s picked up, from some sort of mixed schooling, or background, or just what was going around England in the period, it was the Post-War era, Gents and Lads would have shared space in the trenches, no doubt.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
What I can’t work out is whether to use a certain perspective in Ryle. – There’s this theory, buried in his work, that language is a sort of hyper-behavior. You need to grasp the idea that the mind and body are the same thing, in the sense that the body is the animated aspect of the mind, and the world is the continuation of the mind, where the activity of the mind takes place – and get rid of the metaphysical Western atomistic/materialist notion that only solid things exist, like blocks and quandaries. A workman, for instance, doesn’t audibly think to himself ‘oh my, it’s going to rain’ every five minutes, instead, he keeps the cover tarps and rain jacket close by as he works. The keeping close-by, is the thinking, in the behavior – it’s the mind in the world, as the world, as the place where minds happen.

Turkey, arming itself, and putting its soldiers on the border of Iraq, while promising peace and love, and espousing a philosophy of live-and-let-live, is thinking, in the sense of the world as a place where minds happen. The putting of the soldiers, on the border, next to Iraq, is what it is really thinking – it’s real thoughts are in its behavior. The ‘peace and love’ is the part that is the ‘communication’ and has the social dimension, the putting the soldiers on the border is the real ‘thinking’ in the behavior.

Language, in Ryle’s background story, develops as hyper-behavior with these social dimensions. The act of espousing ‘peace and love’ by Turkey is another form of behavior. – Not the contents of the message, but the act the message plays, that’s the behavior. Now behavior manifests in what he calls ‘unstudied talk’ and ‘being alive to what one is doing’ – these just reports of whatever is going on inside your head, authentic and genuine forms of communication – which he thinks is the way we were originally set up – when they’re going on inside out heads, they manifest as the audible part of behavior.

So if you imagine behavior as a roller-coaster, the low bits are the keeping the tarp and rain gear close by as you work, and the high bits are thinking to one’s self ‘my is that the first drops of rain’ or ‘I might go and get something to eat later on’.

I call it hyper behavior because it takes place at a faster rate, in humans, than the slower forms of behavior – the ‘non-immediate’ which is what he calls the no-linguistic dips of my roller coaster analogy.

By a faster rate, I don't really mean it's simply bodily behavior sped-up, because something happens to it when it hits those roller coaster tips - it mutates in its linguistic form, it acquires structures that are more distinct than the simplistic ones we use in the bodily thinking of things like running, cooking, and eating - it acquires distinct motives, beliefs, capacities, tendencies, and so on, that were confused in the old bodily form of thinking - but in the new form, give it an audible structure, as a new mutated, complex, and intense form of behavior. The new bits of thinking that take place in behavioral frameworks, like motives, which would be dredged out by the old behavioral attitudes of working things out over a number of moves, steps, flexes, jumps, take place at a much, much faster rate in the new audible hyper-behavioral framework. Attacking someone required a process of sizing them up, stepping forward, stepping back, push-push, retreat-attack, structures. I've seen this in bars a hundred times. The person attacks a little, doesn't like it, wants to feel safe, retreats a little, looks back, sees how the other person is reacting - the joy of hostility, against the fear of being hurt. It's all touchy-feely, and worked out in terms of behavior.

To challeng someone verbally is instantaneous, physically, or behaviorally, that takes time. By analogy, thinking about actions in the new framework, is a lot quicker, than the old method of working things out behaviorally in the body. Deciding to attack someone in the new linguistic framework, is also instantaneous, and devastating to someone who can only think with their body, and escalate in touchy-feely steps and pushes. Trust me, I know. I'm set up, so when my mind flips a switch, my body fills with adrenalin, and I usually attack. - It's hard for me not to. There's no escalation process. It just flips.

Or think about what a kitten is doing with a ball of wool as it plays with it. It's thinking with it's body. - Think about the cat about to pounce on something it thinks is a mouse, again, it's thinking in an embedded way, in the world, with its body.

Now that, I think is what we have of Professor Ryle’s original theory of common language and use, which probably existed in a purified, though notably (most likely by a colleague) flawed form, in some long lost manuscriptual ancestor to The Concept of Mind. Tied into that picture is the duel linguistic structure of a behavioral analysis of language, as a behavior, like Turkey’s espousals of peace and love, while moving soldiers to the boarder, and hyper-language, as the super-condensed ability of behavior to manifest itself in forms of thinking. That’s what he was getting up to with the different types of verbs, adverbial phrases, and so on.

But, behind that, he’s started to develop a different, inconsistent account of the mind, which comes out in a few chapters, particularly the ones on, or involving the imagination, because his behavioral-linguistic ruberic isn’t strong enough to cope with visual impressions, or modes of apprehending objects, beyond behavioral analyses of language. So he’s tacked on this doctrine of the ‘mind’s eye’ which has caused problems with his original theory. Now my treatment of a Phenomenological, Self-Consistent, and Ordinary Language Ryle deals with the get-up, for most of his inconsistencies, the problem comes in the form of self-consistent Ryle. If I include the back story, then the up-shot is a different interpretation of Sellars in EPM, within the framework of two ways of interpreting him. – Believe me, you can do both, I’ve got annotations down to the paragraphs for the entire tract, from two different readings, and notes from my Hons thesis, taken from the first.

You can interpret Sellars as criticizing Ryle, in the non-back-story account, without the set up of language as both behavioral, and hyper-behavioral. That is, Ryle doesn’t have the resources to deal with a report language as indicative of private episodes.

You can interpret Sellars as proposing a solution to Ryle, which is that the linguistic-behavioral story is good, so far as it goes, but at some stage the Ryleans become ultra-Ryleans when they develop a phenomeno-linguistic language that lets them have phenomenological experiences.

Which is to say either of two thing, either Sellars is arguing the Ryleans in his story have private episodes, but don’t know how to talk about them, or that they begin having private episodes when they turn the observational/theoretical language, which observes that Tribe member C is leaping around and yelling ‘Good God y’all, pinky pink’, as Tribe member C is having a pink fit, therefore, must be having ‘hypothesized private experiences of pink’ into “Good God y’all, I am having a private fit-like pink episode”- the report language.
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
There’s about 30 pages, smack bang in the middle of The Imaginary, 97 – 125, which I reckon you could develop into a theory of street art, or at least use to talk about some of the hypnotic imagery and kinesthetic movement, as well as the complex differences between symbolic, schematic and cryptic objects.

At the base of the objects we recognize in perception is what Sartre calls the analogon, this is an idealistic substrata, like a ‘cartoon skeleton’ in a sense that underlies familiar objects we encounter through perception in reality. When you reduce/ truncate images down to a few mere points, or distort them, the analogon is the structure you use to put the image together in the eye. It’s the bit you animate in say an old folded and crushed picture of someone you carry in your wallet.

What you do with an analogon will determine whether you produce a symbol, caricature, diagram, image, symbol, lexis portrait or illustration.

(Working vocab draft 1– this will change; Sartre’s dense reading – lots of psychological terms, phenomenological exercises, and references to studies, and so forth, this is a simplified system of working vocabulary.)

- A symbol is the concrete realization of a thought in an image
- An image aims at an object
- A symbol differs from an image through context
- The form of an object lifted from perception is an analogon
- An analogon animates an object through recognition
- The object aimed at is the irreal
- A caricature is the analogon realized through a symbol
- A portrait is the analogon realized through an image
- A schema is a collection of symbols
- Illustrations contain ‘more and less’ than what’s essential for the analogon or the symbol in the thought, they’ve got associations in them, and contexts attached to them. – There are mountains in the background, or a specific time or place.
- The analogon of a schema is a diagram
- A slogan or a phrase is a lexis
- When the lexis is a sign it aims at either the object or context through the irreal.
- All signs are representative
- The sign refers to conceptual awareness of an object or concept (as opposed to imaged and perceptive)
- The movement of kinesthetic movement of the eye around an analogon produces a hypnogogic object.
- The hypnogogic object (kinesthetic movements in the eye, that turn a shape, like say an oil stain, or clouds, into an object like a face, by the way they move the eye around the pattern), is a transcendence. (Ibid, see page 49, i.e. consciousness goes outside of itself to constitute a perceptive object, but the object may be illusionary, hypnotic - like when the eye loses itself in a deceptive form – the crystal ball, the coffee grind).
 
 
Dr Mindbender 82
14 December 2011 @ 10:58 pm
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The Man Who Bought a Volcano

CHAPTER ONE
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July 18, I still don’t know what to do with my volcano. I am encamped at its foot. It looms over me, ominous, ancient and expensive. I still recall when I bought it with my dear wife Julie-Anne.

The children were already somewhere off in the distance, climbing over one of its dry lava cake beds.
“Oh Roger, could we?”
“I, I, well I don’t see how I could afford it Julie”
“But Roger, the children. And it’d mean so much to them. To us, as a family”
“I’m aware of that Julie, but I’m just not sure nows the right time for us, for this family to be buying a volcano.”
“Oh Roger”

I wish I had been stronger back then. Little did I know that Julie was looking in me, for the stern father she never had. She wanted me to be firm, to say “No Julie-Anne, I am not buying a Volcano.” But I didn’t, I was soft, little was I to know that this, would come to be my great downfall. That the Volcano, which cam to symbolize so much, would eventually symbolie so little, that it would be the beginning of my emptiness, the doorway to my nothingness, that less than a mere score of five years from that warm July evening I would be out here, alone, beneath the stars, purposeless. . .

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CHAPTER FOUR

When the banks foreclosed, and came to repossess the children, I knew we’d pushed it too far. Of course, in my head I had been telling myself for months we’d pull through, that everything would come out fair, that I would find... a way. I always had in the past. But it was too late. I wasn’t living the dream, I was living a lie, and now the banks had come to take the children.

They’d been more than fair of course. No one could fault them that. They could have foreclosed months ago, but they didn’t. But I hadn’t the heart to tell little Suzie-Jane that.

“Daddy” she said to me “are they really going to turn us into gold fish food?”
I hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth.
“No honey, there’s been some mistake at the bank, I’ll come get you in the morning.”
I knew that I wouldn’t.
After that, my wife never forgave me, and rue, did I, the day I bought the volcano. Rue did I.

From that moment on, no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t seem to pay it off. Even with the kids gone, and my wife secluded to her bedroom on the respirator.

I felt incomplete. Did I own the Volcano, or did it own me? I owned it, but I didn’t really own it. The banks did. But who owned the banks? Did they own me? I was working so much, I had almost no time to enjoy the volcano. The kids weren’t around. It just sat out there, in the distance, empty.

One week I got a phone call, a couple of homeless people had moved into it – so after work, I got in my car and took a drive out there. It was late evening by the time I arrived. . .