Kundera, Milan

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.

Heidegger

the essence of man has the form of a question

Miguel de Unamuno

awareness is a disease

Jean-Paul Sartre

ik ben ertoe vervoordeeld vrij te zijn. dit betekent dat er voor mijn vrijheid geen andere grenzen kunnen worden gevonden dan de vrijheid zelf af, zo men liever wil, dat we niet vrij zijn op te houden vrij te zijn
I am condemned to be free. this means that there can be no limits to my freedom except freedom itself. so you may say that we are not free to stop being free

Milan Kundera

what is the difference between ignorance and indifference?
I don't know and I don't care!

Krishnamurti

het leven is als een revier, waarop je als een boot moet zijn, los van de oevers

je kan de ocean niet vertroebelen, want die is vrij, grenzloos, onmetelijk

te zijn of niet te zijn

te zijn of niet te zijn, dat is de vraag:
of 't nobeler van geest is pijl en slinger
van het meedogenloze lot te dulen,
of, strijd aanbinden met een zee van zorgen,
ze juist door weerstand tot een eind te brengen...

Insomnia

it was 1994 and I was taking a TTC demo in Niyavaran's amphitheatre for the ILI. the word had escaped my mind and the immediate person to help me was an American lady who told me the word only when I said sleeplessness. sometimes I think I am a nocturnal man, since from early twenties till now perhaps only a couple of good nights I have been able to sleep myself. one basic reason since my MA days in Teheran was the stress for exams. it goes without saying that the night before tests, I can hardly sleep a wink and amazingly mostly have a good result. the most impressive instance was the night before my thesis defence session in 1999. I slept only 3 hours but managed to produce the desired result.
now tonight again, I can't sleep. tomorrow should handle an interview over polysystem theory: piece of cake though, but the stress is here...
perhaps I read some more The Line of Beauty, which I don't like at all, 501 pages of waste logorrhoea

The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (2)

The reproduced material of dreams comes from experiences stored in memory, memories inaccessible in waking and already forgotton which seem alien to us in waking. One of the sources to this material is childhood memories. But why do these dreams keep coming to us? Volkelt (1875) remarks "dreams are continuously reminding us of things which we have ceased to think of and which have long ceased to be important to us." Dreams can feed on memories of recent time or very long ago, however it is false to believe that dreams have special missions to remind us of unimportant pieces of forgotten memory. Contrary to what Volkelt holds, my belief is that sometimes when the mind is engaged in an important insurmountable problem, our mind is kept busy with it even in dream life.
The relation between memory and the content of dream: in waking the mind deals with major and important (striking) issues, but in dreams what is reproduced is not "what is most important, but on the contrary, what is most indifferent and insifnificant as well." Dreams are fragmentary manifestation of reproductive activity of the mind "which is an end to itself."
I should add my own point here. I guess because at night or any time when the conscious state is switched off as a result of which ego is retired then, and of course the superego being absent, it is only the id which is left active. It is not unacceptable if we think the inhibitted (recent or old) wishes, thoughts etc which are stored (prohibited and inhibited by ego and not permitted expression in waking life) in the unconscious try to find a way out in the form of dreams. This doesn't hold all the time, sometimes a dream as said above is an unimportant forgotten memory. That's why Freud later comes up with the idea that an author's text is like his/er dream and should be given due attention because the constant unresolved conflicts between the ego and the id cause neurosis and one way for the mind to let them a sleuce hole is via expressing them converted into text, sometimes in the form of dreams and still sometimes in unnatural abnormalities (if any chasm to get out is blocked) such as psychic tics and so many different ways to show themsleves in a distorted manner.

The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst. I am on it now, but seems that I can't like it. The first few pages couldn't grip me.
Today I ordered Tender Buttons and A Life in Four Books.
We made some barbeque tonight in our mighty microwave. For tomorrow I have made Iranian stew with celery.
Yesterday a classmate in Dutch course had brought Turkish Rockey (43%) I drank it well along with another Lady's American maize-cake from Colorado. I made a demo on Bam, the oldest clay city in the world which was ruined in December 2003 earthquake devouring more than 50,000 souls. Today I saw that the victims of Tsunami earthquake and sea storm has gone high up to 220,000.
What a terrifying dream I had last night. I saw that I shot Hasti and Mijo and myself with a gun, she was dead the very first moment, Mijo lasted for some seconds and I didn't die until I was drowned in water by my father and Nahid's mother, the devil personified.

The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (1)

There are interesting points from the very beginning of the book. The first thing is that sleeping is different from dreaming and vision is the state between waking and sleeping. Next, come different views on interpretation of dreams. Generally there are pre-scientific and scientifc interpretations. The former states that dreams are sent by gods and evils, having superhuman qualities as portents. They are admonishments about future working as warnings to the sleeper. Aristotle is the first thinker who says dreams are related to the mental activities of the dreamer. The faithful believers of religions as well as superstitious people way up to our time hold that dreams are of divine nature or are the workings of devil; thus we have truthful dreams vs deceitful ones. Their reasoning is to "support their religious faith in the existence and activity of superhuman spiritual forces."
The relation of dream to waking and the material of dreams is also interesting. Nevertheless, there is a credibly convincing contradiction which Freud accpets as a fact. During dreaming stage the mind is completely cut off from reality. Dreams have their own existence and dream-life is separated from real-life. However, the material of dreams come from real life and the realities which we have seen or experiences that have found their way into our thoughts, internally or externally, directly or indirectly.
Therefore, while any relation between dream life and waking real life is denied, we see that the material of dreams comes from real life.

Austerlitz

I fininshed Austerlitz this morning: the story of a jewish 4.5 year old boy who is shipped to England in 1939. Brought up by foster parents, he doesn't have any clues to his background except for his real name which he is told in high school. Almost six decades later following curious events he is aspitant to find out about his origin. This brings him to Prague where he finds a picture of his mother, who had undergone concentration-camp ordeal. Of his father, a communist politician, whom the last trace is found in Paris there is nothing more known.
The trauma of a sudden change of life along with everything attached to it: parents, surroundings, mother tongue, culture, ... in his early childhood grips him leaving no key to real causes of psychic fits in Austerlitz. A wondering wanderer, a jew, a lonely man having no-body in this big world, Austerlitz marks the very epitome of the loss of 'good object' traumatically according to Freud.
Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which got the 2004 MAN Booker Prize is the next novel I'll read before I have my hands on Tender Buttons (Gertrud Stein) and Lanark's A Life in Four Books.
Mijo and I are planning to take a trip to Paris in February.

Philip Roth Society/ Philip Roth Studies

Sheila has signed me as a member of the society and asked for a year membership of Philip Roth Studies. Thank you Sheila. Guess I'll be able to do better with regard to the knowledge I'll gather being in the circle.
By the way, Coetzee's Disgrace gripped me for a time again, amazed to see so many thematic similarities between The Human Stain and Disgrace; that a university professor is brought down to a dogman role: collapse of cultural monsters not for a flaw but due to the society's decadence. Now Sebald's Austerlitz is on me. It's an un-put-down-able book after you reach almost half way through the book, say page 210 on.
Today I bought three books by Freud: Interpretations of Dreams (two vollumes) and Beyond Pleasure Principle. But will not touch them before summer. Should first read A Life in Four Books (Alasdair), and Conrad's The Secret Agent.

now and then

I am at the main library of the city's university. I can remember when I was at high shool and used to go to the library situated next to our school. Few resourses and no computer of course. I used it only to borrow books and sometimes study in its quiet ambience.
Now but it's a different story. So many references only here (I have at least 100 reference books on my hard disk only), wide rage of internet sites and computers to be used by the students. I am now at the study hall and am connected to internet via my own laptop listening to live Iranian radio and at the same time revising one of my articles on Iranian post-revolution crime fiction.
who knows what it would be like a decade and a half later from now.

Each time a year ends, it becomes more difficult to walk into the next shaking yourself off your burden. You become heavier all the time.