How many signs needs there to be? And is this one, the sign that is enough? This is the one that will stay with me.

Her kisses were sliding like a novice on rollerskates.

Connects to nothing. From inside into the outside. This is the journey, the senses open, hands, palms open, eyes looking, skin feeling. It is life.

My dear. One day we will go to the sea and see the ghosts playing with each other, like children in love. Nasty Roche with Stephen.

With the tiny little star. Not the way they are, but the way we see them. Small, shiny, cold.

An ultimate word.

Loose thoughts that might appear

The last post as much as this one, is not strictly a part of the project, it is more of a thought inspiration, and these might appear here more often, as a sign of business, life managing… Hope to write more soon.

For now.

She said. One day bombs just started to fall down onto the village. So we run. We run for two weeks. With the horse and the wagon. But the war was everywhere. And so, we went back home.

I wonder.

Do we need pain to feel close to one another?

If it was war, we would share the heat of our bodies, despite the differences of our minds.

How come in peace we grow so far away from each other? How do we grow so scared?

Isn’t prolonged fear more horrible than pain?

That The Wilderness is Gathering All its Children Back Again

As time passes, I can see my friends and me, all appearing clearer from the mash of all that lands inside me through my body. Above the grey matter of everything I can see rising stars of friends, the relationships bulging with good will. They have freedom and fantasy. We have care for each other. I guess it is the time when our childhood fears are fading in, we trust, respect and love.

 

With the ever present tickle of tragedy.

 

With the figure of the witch, the demon of sadness, always wondering around, we rise in good will with care for each other.

The Free Space

I will start with two signs

   and  

I wrote about the first sign already, you can find the definition here. The second sign is somehow opposite. The sound is simply:

The circle is a universe, it is everything and nothing. In the opposition to the dot, the circle has no concrete standpoint. No confines, no possibilities. There is no possibilities for a whole.

There is one problem. There is a space on a sheet of paper, and circle draws a border between the space outside and inside, that means that there is some idea of confinement involved in it.

Now to solve it, is to not think about space in and out. To imagine that the circle is in space not on a surface. What is important here is never-ending line. When I learnt geometry at school, my teacher told us that the straight line is never-ending… But line goes across, and circle flows in air as a symbol, a tight symbol of impossibility of the one that is a whole and everything.

The circle is a symbol of ultimate freedom… to the point when freedom ceases to exist, as there is no confines that could saturate it.

And again, a circle is not human, it is a whole, it is everything. It is unknown whether it has a spirit in it, or whether it is mechanical. It is another sign that is impossible to comprehend.

I drew this sign, and imagined the whole in relation to the whole, and the communication, exchange between them…

The Space of Personal Freedom

The two signs – circle and dot, are in a way a forward to the idea of space that forms in me. I called it a space of personal freedom. But it might just be a help name before a true name will appear.

I was thinking about Edith. A place is an open road. A place of constant journey.

Recently me and Quentin got interested in situations of extreme danger. In previous post I quoted a text by Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński. After that I also translated another one of his texts, concerning concentration camps. It was before my recent visit to Auschwitz.

Quentin and I agreed that our place should be a sort of mental landscape where anyone could go whenever they liked to.

Kępiński writes that the only way to survive in the concentration camp was to keep one’s own humanity and resist being “automaton” concentrated only on struggle to survive – in a situation of extreme and constant life danger. This was a paradox – to survive one had to create a space in one’s own mind, that was free from fight for survival.

Everything that even faintly reminded life outside of the camp, helped the prisoner to get away, even for a moment, from the depressing reality, and be himself rather than an automaton – prisoner. This was the first step to gaining an internal freedom. Signs of a human feeling, kindness, meeting a friend from the time of freedom, recalling the past or dreaming about future, lectures of the professors in Sachsenhausen, etc., all of this was bringing up the old structure of life. So indifference to the surrounding reality and strengthened sensitivity to what was bringing back the normal image of life – gave the chance for survival; the prisoner was not becoming an automaton, but kept his humanity.

An important feature of humanity is possibility to make a choice, to take a decision; an automaton as we know has no such possibility. Organisation of life in a concentration camp led mainly to destruction of the possibility of choice; it was the first step to destroy a human being, the second step was death. Memoirs of the ex prisoners show that ability to plan the choice, decision and purposeful activity appeared mainly in groups. A prisoner on his own felt powerless; in the group of fellow prisoners he was gathering confidence. “We can” was stronger than “I can”. Unconstrained space, which is necessary for purposeful action, was firstly a collective space, and then it was becoming an individual space. The prisoner didn’t feel crushed by the machinery of the camp but had enough strength to oppose it.

( “Koszmar” [Nightmare], Antoni Kępiński, translated by Dominika Kieruzel)

Now, I don’t feel I can write much more about concentration camps. Partially in fear of simplifying. But i would like to focus specifically on the importance of personal freedom that was, according to Kępiński, a decisive factor for survival in extremely difficult conditions.

So it was the space of taking decision, of being independent, a fully valuable human being.

This connected in my mind with the research made by sir Michael Mormot. Here is a Quote from Wiki:

In “THE STATUS SYNDROME: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy”, he argues that socio-economic position is an important determinant for health outcomes. This result holds even if we control for the effects of income, education and risk factors (such as smoking) on health. The causal pathway Marmot identifies concerns the psychic benefits of “being in control” of one’s life. Autonomy in this sense is related to our socio-economic position. Based on comparative studies, Marmot argues that we can make our society more participatory and inclusive in order to increase overall public health.

And here you can find a podcast of an interview with sir Michael Mormot.

So coming back to our space… I would like it to have exactly this aspect; the aspect of personal freedom of an individual to decide, to be oneself, to be valuable.

Always having road ahead.

And coming back to the very beginning of this post, the dot and the circle. A self with concrete standing point and an unconfined whole. This morning I was thinking of the space of personal freedom, and realized many obstacles in me, that don’t allow me to enter that space. All of them are parts of me. I am a /k/ rather than /ooo/. I have a concrete standpoint. And putting those symbols together allowed me to not think idealistically about myself. Or about humans generally. There is freedom within confinments. I imagined it now like a set of little pathways rather than an open road. So it is not a place of eternal happiness… It is a place of constant change, and a journey. I am working on a sign, to remember.

@ There is a War

The latest Quentin’s post made me think of few things in relation to our project.

1. Three-dimensional way of thinking. The figure of triangle rather than rectangle around the king. As in three couples rather than four couples. This figure though can be seen as an arrow too. It is an arrow that can point in all sorts of different directions.

2. There are many others who want to amputate something.
I begin to wonder if perhaps they are all trying to amputate the same thing. They always present it this way: We have been bad, and for our own good, we must be punished. We have been wrong, and for our own good, we must be corrected.

This makes me think of a hierarchy. I had for some time thought about that the sole fact of coronation might be problematic, in light of what we want to create, if its character is not specified.

Thinking about the quote above… to what extend a human can be free? To what extend freedom is bearable? Being told what to do takes the responsibility away from an individual, and gives some kind of sense of safety. And so the systems Quentin talks about are systems of dealing with the unknown, or ordering it into some kind of comprehensive whole, where guilt and fear can be released by sacrifice. Maybe? Maybe not.

It is interesting to think about it in a light of creating a country. Are we going to create a system? Or will it be just a place with its character?

The idea of the country will be expressed in the performance in some way.

So maybe after the coronation the king should kneel by the parts of his body and be caressed by them?

If the place we want to be in is freedom, and constant movement than this is a dangerous place, a place that lead Edith to suicide.

Or will it be space that, quite the opposite, leads to survival, an ability to be human no matter the circumstances, like the heroes of Miyazaki?

                

               

These four signs together create something new. The top right expresses all material, physical matter.

Q is so much, but here think of Quentin and Question.

There is a War

I’ve started keeping a separate Eehaah notebook in the hope that will assist me in focusing mentally on the project. I wrote something in the notebook today, transcribed it into an e-mail and sent it to Dominika, who suggested I post it on the blog. So, I shall.

I have a very associative way of thinking, like a kind of three-dimensional spider graph in my head. This is not always conducive to a sequential form of argument or explanation. I am tempted not to write anything about the associations in my mind with what I wrote in my notebook today. At least one of them, though, is the Leonard Cohen song, ‘There is a War‘, and the lines:

You cannot stand what I’ve become
You much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control;
I didn’t even know there was a war.

Another ‘fleeting’ association: There’s an episode of Blake’s 7 featuring a pacifist planet who have eliminated the instinct of aggression by chemical and social means. One of the regular characters in the series, Avon, describes their policy of non-intervention as “gutless inanity”.

There are many others. It seems to me that the ability to defend oneself if very important, and if someone is asking us to be humble, the very first question that should occur is, “Who is asking?” And maybe an appropriate response to such a request is, “If you want me to be humble, you go first; show me how it’s done.”

Another associaton, this from William Blake:

If He had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obey’d Himself to Caiaphas.
God wants not man to humble himself:
That is the trick of the Ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man,
Cursing the Rulers before the people
Even to the Temple’s highest steeple,
And when He humbled Himself to God
Then descended the cruel rod.
‘If Thou Humblest Thyself, Thou humblest Me.
Thou also dwell’st in Eternity.
Thou art a Man: God is no more:
Thy own Humanity learn to adore,
For that is My spirit of life.
Awake, arise to spiritual strife,
And Thy revenge abroad display
In terrors at the last Judgement Day.’

Anyway, so, here’s what I wrote in the notebook:

There are those who, in the name of Christianity, will try to amputate your instincts.
There are those who, in the name of Buddhism, will try to amputate your dreams.
There are those who, in the name of atheism, will try to amputate your soul.
There are those who, in the name of science, will try to amputate your imagination.
There are those who, in the name of Taoism, will try to amputate your newness.
There are those who, in the name of humanism, will try to amputate your humanity.
There are those who, in the name of paganism, will try to amputate your faith.
There are those who, in the name of liberalism, will try to amputate your honesty.
There are those who, in the name of capitalism, will try to amputate your moral impracticality.
There are those who, in the name of communism, will try to amputate your personal loyalties.
There are many others who want to amputate something.
I begin to wonder if perhaps they are all trying to amputate the same thing. They always present it this way: We have been bad, and for our own good, we must be punished. We have been wrong, and for our own good, we must be corrected.

Bubbles

The other day, as I was walking home from somewhere, I passed by, on the pavement, an old lady and a young boy. I don’t know what relation they were to each other. The lady was white and the boy black, but they could have been grandmother and grandson. Even if they were not so in a blood sense, that was the kind of relation that appeared to exist between them.

They were talking to each other, but not in English. What particularly caught my attention were some words that sounded like Japanese. The little boy seemed to say, “Otooto da kara”, which, in Japanese, depending on the context, would be something like, “Because he’s my little brother.” However, I didn’t ‘understand’ anything else that was said, and I suspect that they were not speaking Japanese at all. Perhaps you have had the experience, in a foreign country, when you hear someone talking a language you don’t know, and for whole sentences at a time you are convinced they are speaking English/Polish/Japanese or whatever your first language happens to be. When you have second and third languages and so on, the same phenomenon can be repeated for these.

But what if they had been speaking Japanese? It seemed interesting to speculate on how such a thing would have come about. The boy was so young he would either have had to have been brought up in Japan and only recently moved to England, or else to have been brought up in England with a Japanese parent. And I have never known a white person of the lady’s generation to be able to speak Japanese, though such people must exist.

Even if the language were not Japanese, the situation was still interesting. One way or another the woman and the child had different ethnic and therefore presumably cultural backgrounds, and here they were in England and their mutual language was not English.

For some reason there seemed to me something rather wonderful about this. We’re quite used to the idea of language decaying and degenerating, but I hear very little about the idea of new languages being born. This is what I thought of, however, when they passed me – the idea of new languages, hatching here in Britain, perhaps even without name, as spontaneously as soap bubbles in water. If only life could be like that – I thought – that would be my ideal, for creativity and culture to be so spontaneous that from sheer fellow-feeling and sheer fertility of imagination people could meet and immediately start talking a new language – one especially suited to them, and to the time and place in which they found themselves.

And what – I thought – taking this further, if the same principle could be extended to technology? Could there come a day when, instead of wind-power and solar-power, people will talk about dream-power, and mean something that is the direct resource on which human technology and society draws? Could there come a day when this is no longer even a new idea, but something obvious, like the language that you are brought up in?

words

It is a word with its status of the one that creates reality, it is the unquestionability of a word versus its character as a social agreement, as a human thing.

The word has its authority and it has its function. It constitutes the meaning and it is used to contain the meaning.

I like the idea of triadic signs, I was looking at the sign in linguistics: sign – wiki.

There are these images that describe the theories of dyadic and triadic signs:

dyadic sign:

triadic sign:

Although I like the second definition more, I have chosen the first as a basis for “a sign” or “word” in eehaah:

Then the word has a relation with the self:

So, we have this idea of equality of different parts in our country. I was thinking about two situations:

a) the word that is like icon, pure with it’s definition, with authority, the one that dictates the structure, and can dictate values

b) the word that is beneath and works as a function, it always serves the subject and is plastic.

So in the theories of linguistics these come at the same time. But with different people they come also in different proportions. As first seems more introverted, and second extraverted. Now how it would be to be not beneath or above but among? To gain the balance with words, through knowledge about the relation of concrete signs with their signifiers?

As far our language is based on quite ephemeral phenomena, and the core of it seems to be an idea of not knowing, rather of experiencing. So it is very subjective.

Can there be a violation of a phenomena through giving it name and definition that assumes a complete knowledge of that phenomena?

So the character of my country is the one of openness and always having a margin of unknown whether in perception of a phenomena or a person or a word. This is the openness of equality, a respect for the other and a space for it to unveil – if one wishes.

Movement

Metabolism… all things in movement, we are in movement at all times – does still mean dead? I have a few quotations from Antoni Kępiński, a Polish psychiatrist, who wrote many amazing books, though I don’t think any of them was translated to English; these are fragments translated by me, from the book “Psychopatie”:

Life is characterized by the dialectics of changeability and un-changeability. Life is based on a constant change; it even stems out of its metabolic character, live creatures are so-called “open systems”, i.e. existing thanks to constant exchange (metabolism) of energy and information with the environment; without their environment they cannot exist.

Therefore, from the point of view of methodology, it is a fault to examine a life structure independently from its environment. Unfortunately often we have to do this, because we are not capable of grasping a living person and its environment at once. We are separating it from the whole because we think that this way it is easier to observe it.

Another fault resulting from imperfection of human brain is a tendency to immobilize, or – to be drastic – “kill” the object of observation. Child that is interested in a butterfly usually tries first to capture the butterfly, then immobilize it; apart from the desire to possess and rule, here also matters curiosity, and it is satisfied easier, when an object of observation is in one’s hand, and one has a power over it. Apart from that it is easier to observe a still object, than the one that is moving. Observation of movement is a further stage of exploration of our world, it is something more difficult.

(I wasn’t killing butterflies, as far as I can remember, but I always wanted to have a star in my hand)
and

Saint John’s Gospel starts with the sentence “At the beginning there was Word.” Among Polynesian tribes giving something a name makes it exist, a thing doesn’t exist without a name. Magical power of a word lies among others in its power of “fiat” (let it be, or let it happen, let it start to exist). Under the influence of words we can find in our world things that don’t exist in reality. Our information metabolism has a social character. Because in communication between people words have the key role, we can say that “social” means “verbal”. Our image of the world is therefore an image based on words and definitions, it includes mainly things that have their names. In sciences existed and probably still does, we just not always realize it, a lot of objects that are purely words, things that do not exist but are considered as existing, because there is a word that is creating their existence (for example in chemistry and physics “phlogiston” or “ether”). In psychology and psychiatry, which are the sciences dealing mainly with the subjective aspect of reality – i.e. how human experiences himself or herself and his/her own world – checking the reality of a term is often very difficult, because it is based on the subjective image of reality. So I can only check it using my own experience. I will never for example get to know what does love, fear, hate, beauty, etc. mean, if i haven’t felt it myself.
In such a situation easily there is a lot of new created objects, existing only because of “fiat” of the word, created by the word. Because of that psychology and psychiatry sometimes seem to be sciences incredibly mysterious and complicated, when in reality they should be simple and clear, because they are concerned with basic human issues.
Tendencies for classification come from the need for order. World that we live in cannot be chaotic, we are trying to impose our own order on it, but it is not only our own order, but also a social order, order of our surroundings. In informational metabolism one’s own order is crushing with the order of the surrounding, the image of world is a balance of these two orders.

So we have two quotations. I would like to add a quote from Ursula K. Le Guinn too. It is from chapter seven, and I might have made mistakes in name spelling and punctuation, as I wrote it down from na audiobook.

(…)

-I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both.

- How? How you reconcile them? – the shy man asked earnestly. Shevek nearly laughed in despair.

-I don’t know, I have been working a long time on it, after all the rock does hit the tree, neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end, our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos, the complexity that includes not only duration, but creation, not only being, but becoming, not only geometry, but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.

-All very well, but what industry needs is answers – said Dearee

It is a part of a conversation about the theory of simultaneity, that Shevek works on. What he says here concerns cosmos and time, which as he says could be simultaneously linear and circular – or cyclic. But the above quote in parts expresses my feelings on quite a few spheres of life.

We don’t want purity, but complexity.

He has an approach of researching in depth, rather than defining. So it is an approach, where

incomprehensible is not impossible

illogical is not impossible

So it is for me, that purity is iconic and can possess mind, and that is what so much art was in past, so many icons of culture. Pure. Iconic is raised up and still, pure is pure and it is not about life and relation, but it is about a still dead idea.

Complexity lies lower, and it doesn’t posses, but it is open.

It is a word with its status of the one that creates reality, it is the unquestionability of a word versus its character as a social agreement, as a human thing.