99% perspiration, 1% inspiration

Years ago when I was still feeling younger(!), there was a natural tendency in me towards language learning. Learning theory is not a hard row to hoe, it's in practice that you see to learn to use a language or even to use to learn a language needs burning much midnight oil. The cogent evidence (when I speak with indigenous people) says that I seem to be speaking Dutch to a convincing degree cum working out my understanding of differnt dialencts patriotically! With grammar I have no problem but the more I open my eyes to new scopes of a language, the better I see Chomsky's "UG" and Wittgenstein's "Family Resemblence. "
In two weeks I'll have to speak over interpretation of dreams in Dutch for ca 20 minutes.

Lanark dragged me to deep dark shadowy spots of depravity and the extent man can steep himself in decadance. This murky mire land... Evey single page of 573 pages of the body has something to talk over, evey single event is significant symbolically etc.
The next book I am intended to read is The Secret Agent which I should have read a decade ago. While busy doing Dutch problems, my mind was promenading on the hot cover of the book. I got it off the shelf and as it is my way touched it everywhere rubbing my hand on its cover and first pages fingering it in different spots like a cat playing with a mouse. Should I read "the philosophy of kiss," do the rest of Dutch problems, continue with Freud's Dreams, peruse Sweet Violence, interact with T S Elliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," or think of tomorrow 'what should I cook,' or no, wait, I must do the shopping too, no not tomorrow, there is a lot of paper work waiting to consume my energy and nerves, do I have time to do my job, no I am not sleepy, I have just started smoking again, it's past midnight, where is my cute daughter? add to this all parental obligations towards Mijo.

(116)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not true love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken,
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Is This The End of All Our Dramatic Democratic History?

Page 10

M L King's "I Have A Dream"

Kafka's Letter to His Father

Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (5)

Why are dreams forgotten after waking?
We always have a feeling that we can remember our dreams only in fragments. Sometimes we know we have dreamt but can't remember anything, sometimes we don't even know that we have dreamt and naturally nothing is recollected. Quite often we dream and think that we remember it fully. While sometimes we remember our dreams in the morning we tend to disremember them when day retreats. On the contrary hours after dreams in the course of day we tend to recollect parts of them. And finally some dreams have 'an extraordinary persistence in the memory.'
There are different reasons upon which we forget our dreams. Strümpell (1877) says that in the first place "all the causes that lead to to forgetting in waking life are operative for dreams as well." Sometimes dreams are forgotten because they are too weak. Still 'very vivid' dreams are forgotten whereas those which are 'shadowy and lacking in sensory force are among those retained in the memory.' Another cause is that we tend to forget events which happen only once while we learn to retain events which are repeated.
Normally upon waking we can remember a dream in fragments. Suppose if a verse line is divided into words making it, it would be harder to remember them than when they are arranged in groupings. Therefore, when thoughts, ideas, and sensations are isolated, we would find it hard to keep them in our memory. When events in a dream form nonsensical disorderliness, it would seem unusal for the memory to retain them as confused and disordered mess. Dreams can be forgotten when time shatters their components into pieces.
Strümpell further believes that dreams are like 'clouds' floating in the 'psychical space' and are scattered 'by the first breath of wind.' Just as stars are discoloured with appearance of the sun early in the morning, dreams, too, seem to give way to impressions of a new day.
Among other causes people's disregard to their dreams can be noticed, too. But important as it may seem to be is the fact that transiton from a less conscious state, if not purely unconscious, to a conscious state leaves little chance of retaining all bonds with the past ie memory of illogical rational free events in the psychic unconscious state.
Jessen (1855) writes that "when we recall dreams ... we almost always ... fill in the gaps in the dream-images... the tendency of human mind to see everything connectedly is so strong that in memory it unwittingly fills in any lack of conherence there may be in an incoherent dream," little knowing that our waking memory has partly completed a partial scenario.

Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (4)

One, perhaps minor, source of dreams can be "imaginative visual phenomena," as Johannes Müller (1862) puts. This is applied to rapidly changing images floating before eyes in lethergic states like "hypnagogic hallucinations." For instance when you are hungry but are tired too and are about to fall asleep, you may have a vision, right before sleep, that a plate of food (your favourite dish) is in front of you or you are eating from it. This source can be either auditory or visual mostly. It has certainly happened to all of us that in those specific moments we appear to have heard a word, a hum, a song, or even our recently dead relative talking to us. Dreams occuring soon afte entering dark places may also be due to retinal exitations and are different from dreams occuring in the morning before waking have an objective stimulus like the light penetrating from the window to our eyes.
Still one major component dream stimuli is internal organic somatic stimuli. Strümpel (1877) remarks that "during sleep the mind attains a far deeper and wider sensory consciousness of somatic events than during the waking state." This justifies why Aristotle believed that the beginning of an illness might make it felt in dreams owing to the magnifying effect produced upon impressions by dreams. Thus dreams can be promonitors of illness, too. When the brain in no more involved in daily conscious activities, it can scan the organs during sleep checking their function. When people dream of being choked or having a terrifying end it might be due to lung or heart diseases of which the sleeper is unaware. Of course, not always such dreams mean hidden diseases. Healthy people, too, can have such dreams but with a different origine. A good example is when you dream you are searching for a WC in a hurry and upon waking you see that you really have a full scrotum. Why we have a better consciousness of night time pain is also due to scanning activity of mental life during sleep. Schopenhauer holds that our intellect takes the impressions of the world and remodels them into the forms of time, space and causality. At night when our intellect is no more deafened by the impressions of the day, impressions arising from within are able to attract attention to which (stimuli) our intellect reacts and dreams start.
If an organ is excited during sleep it can produce an emotion which triggers images in dream appropriately connected to that excitation eg if you have tooth ache you probably find yourself at a dentist's, or when you dream of falling from a height it can be due to the movement in sleep which makes your hand fall from the edge of the bed_tactile sense is unconscious, when there is a movement it should be activated. The transition from unconscious to conscious stage prompts images and illusions forming content of a dream.
The most important, perhaps, source of dreams is psychical stimulations. It happens that you dream of an unimportant event of your daily activity because it has been ignored by your intellect classified as petty and insignificant. On the contrary you may also dream of an important issue which has engaged your mind during daily life. The material of this sort come from memory either from afar (childhood) or close by and are all due to associations and reproductions of memory.

Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, (3)

Looking at dream phenomena we should always take it into consideration that dreams are ungoverned by reason or common sense and that it is impossible to make generalisations concerning dream interpretation. Nevertheless, there are certain laboriously proved assumptions such as source of a dream, material of a dream and the content of a dream. Once we are worried about the reason, cause and origin of dreams, or the stimuli that trigger a dream, we are indeed dealing with source(s) of a dream.
As a matter of fact there are two major factors recognised: internal and external causes. If a dream is seen as reaction to sleep disturbance, then there can be reactions to disturbances coming from the exterity during sleep eg temperature fluctuations during night time, or disturbances resulting from internal organism eg heartache, or still other excitations prompted by psychic life (memory).
In general any kind of disturbance which targets our senses_auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, and tactile_bring about objective sensory excitations to which our body makes specific reactions (dreams) if we are not awaken by the powerful stimuli. While asleep the body tries to close important sensory channels, eyes; however, some senses are not fully retired such as ears or sense of tactile which reacts to cold and hot ambiance. When a sensory stimulus reaches us and a particular sense is addressed, the stimulus instigates a dream. The crowing of a cock makes dream images like a man’s cry of terror or the creaking of a door is turned into a dream of burglary. What seems interestingly amazing is the extent our mental activity compresses events in dreams thought to have lasted hours into some seconds.
“A dream dreamt by Maury (1878) has become famous. He was ill and lying in his room in bed, with his mother beside him and dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. After witnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he was finally himself brought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. He was questioned by them, and, after a number of incidents which were not retained in his memory, was condemned, and led to the place of execution surrounded by an immense mob. He climbed onto the scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body, woke up in extreme anxiety_and found that the top of the bed had fallen down and had struck his cervical vertebrae just in the way in which the blade of the guillotine would actually have struck them.”
This dream becomes the point of discussion between Le Lorrain (1894) and Egger (1895) in the Revue Philosophique: that “how it was possible for a dreamer to compress such an apparently superabundant quantity of material into the short period elapsing between his perceiving the rousing stimulus and his waking. Thus we come to know that the stimulus doesn’t appear in the dream in the real shape but is replaced by another image in some way related to it_in Mauray’s words: “une affinité quelconque, mais qui n’est pas unique et exclusive.”
The reason for this transition is that when the mind receives the stimulus, it is not in conscious state and therefore the conditions are favourable to the formation of illusions and images. When the mind is not in its conscious state, it can’t analyse the stimulus in its proper way thus the mind forms an illusion about it.

holiday

wow....holiday!

Scent of a Woman

Watched the film for the millionth time, amazing. each time something new pops out. Blind Al Pacino (determined to shoot himself) shouts at Charlie 'I'm in the dark, I'm lonely, do you understand?' who can understand what loneliness is? I'm sick and tired of necking this burdon, of sulking with myself all the time. I can't disremember that Percy B Shelly looks at his ring carved with 'good days wil come!' sighing that good days will not come

freedom is living a bit more freely in your fetter

what is the meaning of all this

i am feeling blue again what is the meaning of this eternal struggle this everlasting horror everyday waking up with the hope of a better life and ending your day worse than before where are we going what are we doing I miss my universe it's hard times

Fatalism, Free Will, Determinism_2

Absolute belief in determinism culminates in negating free will. Determinism thought as an entity leaving no choice for us to infuse our function is almost as bas as fatalism: "what will be will be," and that no matter how hard we try to change the current of events, they keep their 'pre-programmed' order as everything is predestined and planned . Perhaps the difference between fatalism and determinism is that fatalists believe that God has decided the fate of the world as is, but determinists hold that it's the acting and reacting of causes which bring about events_events are not planned beforehand but are the natural consequences of merging causes: the addition or subtraction of any cause can change the following result. Free will on the other hand accentuates the possibility of acting and reacting as one CAN_not really 'where there is a will, there is a way'.
Determinism seems logical except for the moral responsibility of people for their actions: determinism implies that people are not responsible for what they do. That's why Sartre says, 'man is condemned to be free and is responsible for this freedom.' Nevertheless, free will does not mean that I can, for instance, lay eggs, or act freely when a thief has his pistol on my forehead asking for my money. Our free will is internally and externally bound and constranined. We shouldn't fail to see that there is nothing absolute, nothing perfect, nothing a hundred percent.
Libertarians believe that some phenomena in the world are to happen like sun eclips and venereal diseases if we are not using contraceptives or are not careful enough. Many things follow deterministic law. Free will stresses that some of our actions are done without any obligation and only out of pure genuine free choice. A student can choose to study literature or quantum physics knowing that he has the capability to follow either and that with either degree he'll have almost the same status and income. When s/he opts for one it is not because s/he couldn't choose the other. But if we can't decide between available options it is because of Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle: there is always a certain indeterminacy in our knowledge. An act may be predictable but unpredictability is due to lack of knowledge rather than absence of causes. Add to all this the quantity of randomness and chance happenings.
A final word, perhaps for the moment and a bit naïve, is that we are all free in some cases to act but our acts are mostly bound by determinism. I believe there is something in between. Neither are we pre-programmed totally to shirk duty and become passive actors putting the responsibility on determinism, fate, God or something, nor are we purely free to act as we wish. Letting for the curbs, we are what we believe we are, and it is always good to believe that we can be the source of change, move and innovations both in our lives and in the lives of others, otherwise we would leave our children to be brought up by themselves saying that 'what will be will be,' or that we can't change the current of deterministic events. We should only believe in ourselves and be brave enough to accept the responsibility of what we do. And when we fail, we shouldn't lose heart: each failure means that there still other options which we haven't tried.

my books, my lonely life, and an impermeable cold world

I got my books today, Lanark, Stein, and the one anthology on theory and criticism which is superb in its kind.
These days I really did nothing, couldn't read anything, death of Ivan Noble shocked me terribly. Got busy with nothing and nothingness, mostly with Dutch studies and fooling around in sites here and there.
The Line of Beauty is not yet finished, but it was only when I was on page 330 that I started to appreciate it. Apart from the main plot on the secret sleeping around of an Oxford graduate gay guy, Nicholas Guest, the daughter of an MP in Thacher days in 1986 named Catherine, who is a bit of an unballanced girl, forms a sub-plot for herself. She is a taciturn but when she mouths words she really begins to give life to words, for instance while she darts them impertinently towards her father's rich friend:
'You're really very rich, aren't you, Sir Maurice,' she said after a while.
'Yes, I am,' he said, with a snuffle of frankness.
'How much money have you got?'
...
'Say, a hundred and fifty million [£].'

...[The two families have dined out during their holiday in France, then have gone to a church]

'I noticed you gave some money to the appeal at Podier church.' [Catherine remarks]
'Oh, we give to endless churches and appeals,' said Sally. [Sir Maurice's wife]
'How much did you give?'
'I don't recall exactly.'
'you gave five francs,' said Catherine. 'Which is about fifty new pence. But you could have given' _ she raised her glass and swept it across the vista of hills and the far glimps of river _ 'a million francs, without noticing really, and single-handedly saved the Romanesque narthex!'
...
'you simply can't give to everything,' said Sally.
...
'What is all this...?' said Gerald, [the MP, Catherine's father]
'The young lady was giving me some criticism. Apparently I'm rather mean.'
'Not in so many words,' said Catherine.
'I'm afraid the fact is that some people just are very rich,' said Sally.
...
'It's not that,' said Catherine vaguely and irritably. 'I just don't see why, when you have got, say, forty million you absolutely have to turn it into eighty million.'
...
'I mean who needs so much money? It's just like power, isn't it. Why do people want it? I mean, what's the point of having power?'
'The point of having power,' said Gerald, 'is that you can make the world a better place.'
'Quite so,' said Sir Maurice.

But do politicians and religious leaders and the rich, having power, make the world a better place? is the world a better place say, compared to the fin-de-sciècl? Aren't there any African children dying of hunger and disease? Isn't there any preposterous mass murder in Darfur? Are the people of the world leaving superstitions behind when a Tsunami happens? What is the point of having power? To make the world a better place? oh, yeah, thanks for reminding us

Free Will, Determinism, Fatalism_1

During BA days when my professor Dr M Parviz Alam was talking on Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, he introduced these terms. Later while working on my MA thesis on Transcendentalism I, once again, came across these words. Now a couple of months ago when I decided to give The Human Stain a serious look, the terms appeared in my life but this time with a demanding urge to finalise a firm tenet in my dubious mind. To this end, I am trying to move towards a cogent answer.
Fatalism doesn't exist outside our mind. There are different factors as causes whose interference and co-work in a given field produce an effect. Man, too, is free to act and decide _Sartre's saying that 'man is condemned to be free' leaves man's free will in a deterministic halo_among possible options (Bourdieu's Habitus limits the number of options bound with family, origin, ethinicity, religion while Sheffy and Swidle blieve that Itama Even-Zohar's PST's Repertoire leaves more room for freedom of choice for an agent in a field to line up actions using available options as 'Toolkit'). I can't believe that 'human book is written and we have no influence in its workings' and as my new British friend, Conrad, keeps saying 'we are all programmed.' There are forces as causes like biological, genetic, social, political, psychological which are influential in the shaping of an action, but man has his own say, too: whether it is action or reaction.
The sum of causes which give rise to an action (itself being the cause for consequent actions) is made up of factors named above plus human cause. Death by being drowned in a pool is easily prevented if the victim knows swimming or there is at least a lifeguard nearby. Death of hundreds of thousands in Tsunami has nothing to do with the will of God (Voltaire wrote Candide as a reply to Rossau's connecting Lisbon earthquake in 1751 with people's lack of faith), it could have been well prevented if the local guards would take transatlantic warnings seriously in time.
There is naturally nothing as total free will of course ('man is condemned to be free'). There is always a cause which determines an effect. The effect in turn is the result of many causes interacting and overlapping one another within the pot. If man has enough power to change an expected sonsequence of merging factors (like an earthquake which in LA killed only two but with the same force killed more than 50,000 in Bam) it's because he is smart enough to take all in account and make his impact in time. If man fails to turn the tide to his liking, it's because other factors are more powerful. Some of these factors limit our options drastically. A coloured person's options in a WASP community is widely limited in the 19th century, a Jew is not able to meet justice during the second world war, but all these don't prevent man's free will to choose. A poor man who rubs a bank may think that he had no other way, more like Catholicism which imputes the responsibility of man's guilt and failure on God. In other words it's shirking your responsibility if you belive that God or any other phenomenon acts over your free will and you can't do anything about it. The thief can easily decide not to rub the bank.
Each of engaged factors limit the probability of possible options on the table. It's a world of demarcation and Newtonian determinism. Dorris Day's "what will be will be" is only trying to disown responsibility for what we do. The presence of causes on the table or in the pit limits our free will, this is determinism. If you offer your vegetarian guest an option between a meat dish and a vegetarian dish, he certainly chooses the latter but he is free to choose the other one, too. This is of course different from a convict's choosing a desired way of death (being hanged, shot etc).
An action as the result of a number of causes co-working with our decision in entering the pit as a cause and force (exerting our free will) will not take place if we do not play in the game. But when we play the chess game, each of our moves is out of our free will and certainly either limited or influenced by a determining factor: we may lose a piece but may gain something better or perhaps worse instead but it's we who decide to take action. There are different drinks on the table, but only after we mix some of them according to our taste and knowledge, are we going to have a coctail. Otherwise there would be no coctail.
to be continued