Categories
Philosophy

Pale Blue You: a Beautiful Brain

Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]

Categories
culture

On unwritten words…

I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]

Categories
Psychology

Shame

You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – […]

Categories
culture

On never forgetting…

I found this photograph completely randomly recently. It is of a 9 year old girl on a train bound for Auschwitz- Birkenau. The “girl with a headscarf” was Anna Maria Steinbach. The scarf covered her (now) short-cropped hair. The girl was murdered by gas in July 1944. We can never forget the horrors of fascism […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Appetite for Destruction: the Aesthetics of War

As a species, we seem positively bound to cyclical, constructive inflation and reinvention of the artefacts, entities and cultural systems that quite naturally sediment in and as shared memory around such catastrophic historical episodes. The essence of history has been this headlong rush into cataclysmic violence, followed as denouement by much gentler growth and cultural […]

Categories
Philosophy

Embodied Uncertainty

Context: A Gut Bacteria That Improves Memory in Bees The model of intelligence and cognition that is emerging is one in which all component processes, information and/or energy-processing (i.e. computational) sub-procedures and dependencies are contributing factors. The catch is that the sum total of all dependencies is uncountable and as unpalatable as this remains to […]

Categories
Philosophy

Experience as Negation

Apophasis was a Medieval mystical method as philosophical heuristic which sought to  remove all noise, all excess, all mental chatter until all that was left is Divine. However one feels about this, and a Zen resonance notwithstanding, the fact remains that this procedural cognitive morphology represents the equal and inverse to that of accumulative, aggregative […]

Categories
Philosophy

A game of memory and sorrow.

Memory is neither friend nor foe and when we find ourselves afraid of the past or a suffering that still lives within us we often as reflex seek to fight it, but in pushing, rejecting, setting ourselves against a painful memory or experience that is perhaps so visceral and intimate that it incorporates and becomes […]

Categories
Psychology

Trauma Bites Twice

Trauma bites twice. The first time is when we suffer what others or the world through them inflicts upon us. The second time is when we suffer what we force ourselves to endure because, having been so shaped and bruised by the unthinkingly callous cruelty and endemic darkness and ignorance of a life we never […]

Categories
culture Philosophy

Self-identity is a Cultural Genome

Those small fragments of recombinatory information through which we understand and define ourselves and each other are nothing more or less than a patterned instance of the local, national and global cultures we inhabit and that, equally, inhabit us. In this way we are no different than the diverse and essentially narcissistic artefacts, entities and […]

Categories
life

Someone, somewhere…

It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]

Categories
Philosophy

My Love is a Marionette

My love is a marionette. Dancing on threads that she never controls or owns and like blindfolds in darkness, that I never know. Life’s theatre of pleasure is a labyrinth of pain and were it not that we all refine in game and grammar such intricate strategies of haunted self-deception as pure aspirations to continuing […]