Posted: July 21st, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson | Tags: evil plans, projects, secrets | No Comments »
Nothing can be motivating like an evil plan. Mentally violating a code of some sort can be extremely liberating: you cross that limit and fly away, like Margarita on her broomstick. I obviously don’t mean that you must consciously plan somebody else’s ill-being. I just mean that sometimes being good can be boring.
The execution of an evil plan implies the highest possible cost – what’s at stake is very valuable (like your marriage, a friend, a project, the uncovering of a secret, or losing your job, or your face) – but also a high amount of pleasure: a burst of risk, a cocktail of adrenaline, just like falling in love. But here’s the best part: imagination can conjure up the same feelings, and eventually give you the courage.
But you needn’t play with destiny that way for a bit of fun. Your scope can be limited to an acceptable level.
So: here’s your homework: start plotting something, stay awake at night to think about it, find the rebellious energy you need to try and achieve it. In the teeth of your parents, your doctors, your boss, your XYZ, all the people who – you’re sure about it – will try and dissuade you. It doesn’t need to be grand: the only prerequisite for the project is its absolute selfishness. And that lightness will save you from monotony, sadness, depression, or whatever it is you’re paying your shrink for.
The highest amount of reward is where you’re not expecting it.
These thoughts were inspired by
GapingVoid‘s book
Evil Plans. I still haven’t read the book though
Posted: July 8th, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: words | Tags: forgiveness, wisdom, words | No Comments »
/fərˈgɪv/ v. tr. To conclude resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offence, difference or mistake, or to cease to demand punishment or restitution.
Humph.
Notes for me:
It’s a process. Similar to the one of forgiving yourself that took you more than a year to learn. And no, it doesn’t mean to forget. And yes, I know I suck at this. Then it must mean that I’m resentful. Resentful = never forgets an offence. I take the first offence and then I pile all the other offences that resemble it right on top, so when the last one comes I’ve already turned into a gorgon. Let’s write down some formulas on the blackboard.
To forgive means to cease to blame. Cease. To. Blame. It seemed wise at some point to spend most of the time monitoring signs, or ruminating the same story over and over again, for years. “Do you know what they did to me? One day, X didn’t say hi; and Y betrayed me; and Z lied to me; and A abandoned me; and B abused me verbally; and C seduced the man I loved; and D …”. Poor victim! It has helped me to get rid of the blame for walking away from them. It seemed easier to think that other people don’t have feelings, only this huge and uncontrollable potential for hurting mine. But not anymore.
My idea of forgiving is completely flawed, self-righteous, superior: “I forgive you because I’m good”. Here’s the paradigm.
Why isn’t a simple decision enough? It’s nice to watch stories about answering hatred with love, but when that very thing is demanded of you. Woohoo. Is choosing it enough? I’ll sit here and try to see from the eyes of those who did me wrong. To reconsider the seriousness of matters, understand why they did it, bless them and thank them because they helped me grow. This growth is completely theoretical and potential, right now, because without my rancour I feel all powerless and vulnerable. I’m so small, I could jump into a shirt pocket or hide into a shoe. Everything I say or do sounds wrong. It’s like the leap of faith in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”: I’ve just abdicated some sort of power and it left me all brittle. Like giving a gift to somebody without certainty (will he/she like it?). I’ll look for one of those EAT ME cakes and you’ll see then!
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Lewis B. Smedes
Posted: August 23rd, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson | Tags: a rebours, friends, love, parents, reveries, thanks | No Comments »
D. told me that, for a band project, the best thing is to set out planning stuff backwards, with the final goal as a starting point.
Naturally, this generated some fantastic reveries in a split second:
- of me, reading the title of my novel/script in the R2 section of La Repubblica, on a Saturday;
- of me, holding hands with a publisher in his best Durban’s smile;
- of me, editing thanks and dedications on page 3.
And then I thought (I was driving on the motorway with my mind roaming in circles) that 99% of the people who came to my mind when I thought of the words “all my love and thanks go to…” were exactly the ones who have actually prevented me from doing anything. Mother’s perfectionism (“Whatever you do, be always the best, my love”), father’s systematic pick-axing (“You’ve been drawing flowers on the margins of your exercise books…” – followed by a terrible 5-hour-long silence), friends’ secret malice, ex partners’ jealousy, and so on.
In this topsy-turvy universe where things done at the end come first, here are my thanks for something that doesn’t exist.
All my love and thanks go to: D. for his unending and unbending love and support; my stepfather and stepmother, for loving me for free and loving me always, for no reason whatsoever; my brother, for enduring my bad character all these years; to old and new friends; and to all those fundamental presences in my life who, for death or distance, are no longer here, like mother, who taught me to draw and to shun embarrassment, and father, who lives far away, and who prevented me from drawing flowers in my exercise books and tried to bend me so that I could be exactly what he wanted me to be, and to all the other people who’ve made my life miserable, and rich, and happy, and to whom I couldn’t help thinking about when the word “thanks” came into my mind. I should think that the best thing I’ve learnt is how to ignore you.
Posted: April 10th, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson | Tags: character, communion, contact, curiosity, deafness, desire, evolution, glossary, language, paths, physics, planets, reciprocity, scream, sharing, silence, solar systems, understanding, universe | 6 Comments »
Each of us is a universe, with its own physics laws, landscapes, noises, metals, borders, planets, satellites and animal species evolving after their own rules. Like huge solar systems, our paths are influenced by planets revolving elliptically, all called after a bunch of individual myths and places and houses recorded deep down into our personal history. And at the very brim of this great bubble there’s the only device that allows us to connect with the other systems in this galaxy – language. It’s common ground and can be shaped and trained, but it’s never perfect, so in fact rather than a tool it’s a many sided attempt – through gestures and expressions and vibrating and resonating cavities – to go out of our bodies and systems to show somebody else what’s going on in here. My language is fingers willing to touch and to see and to stroke hair and to pull noses.
This high voltage connection requires a huge effort and offers but scant chances of success. And so, to skip our natural laziness and the most peremptory of all laws – economy – a good demon invented for us the ghost of solitude and showed us the way to steer clear of it: through contact, a reciprocal ebb and flow achieved only if you have a good deal of curiosity.
Or, put in layman’s terms… take any two individuals, let’s say Albert and Angela, who on a mundane and superficial level reveal to one another a sufficient quantity of correspondences to strike the match of interest, and strive to accomplish this exchange. They share numerous interests and love to spend time together. But on a closer look, Albert was born right in the middle of a cricket-bursting full-blown Mediterranean summer day, in the country of the deaf. From his earliest days, in fact hours, he understood that he had to scream to have what he needed: because in the country of the deaf, meaning is elusive; it is accumulated by loudness and repetition and dispelled by time passing. Words are feeble midgets that, once uttered, wither in the open air and have to be constantly repeated in order to be valid the next day.
Albert spent all his time learning how to scream louder, say everything harder, and escort all statements with his hands like you’d walk an old cripple across a crowded street. His lungs grew stronger, his chest wider, his voice more powerful, his choice of words precise and effective. The planets revolving in his system were called rhythm, music, dispute, volume, defense, and anything else that could help him to be understood better.
Silence was golden, in Angela’s universe. She came on tiptoe right in the middle of a night blizzard, with the first snow of the year. It snowed so hard that her relatives couldn’t make it to the hospital for two days, leaving her with her mother, protected in a womb of silent, nurturing caresses. All this happened at the other side of an iron curtain, in a quiet and monochrome universe of prefab concrete.
Her parents, failing to create an ebb and flow which would connect their universes, had hoped that she could fill that gap. It didn’t work. So, unable to name the thing that was happening, all they did was linger, in a guilty silence, waiting for something that would build a bridge across the frosty winter spread between them or destroy it completely. This kind of gravity centres produced quite different planets: untrained and unable to say anything, Angela developed monstrous listening capabilities, almost on the verge of divination. She used the language of showing and touching and giving, while waiting all the time for the few words she really needed to hear, that never came.
Albert and Angela would need a glossary at hand each time they speak to each other. But they don’t have one, so a careful fine tuning is their only chance. Let’s see what happens with anger.
ANGER The words Angela produces are scant. Nothing is added: quite on the contrary. It’s hard for her to express, or even discover, what she finds unpleasant. It usually comes in dreams and she’s able to interpret them only after a few days. So it happens that, at the end of a nervous and nightmare-ridden week, she softly says: “You know what you said on Monday about […]? I didn’t quite like it.” She then feels satisfied for having been able to make a point. Obviously, the subtle changes in tone, which she thinks are peremptory and decisive, often escape the listener’s year (let’s not forget that she’s in the country of the deaf). And so she thinks most people around her are striving to provoke her with attitudes she finds vexing. She grows frustrated and gets nervous, eventually developing a sort of unstable anger which is expressed through a hissed “Fine” and a struggle to maintain composure.
The first time Albert was angry at her and told her so, she was completely deafened; it took her three days to recover. Used as he was at not being heard, he had gathered all the strength he had in his lungs and in his deepest voice expressed how hard she had hurt him. He was prepared to exaggerate, so that by the excess he could obtain at least some result. She couldn’t sleep for two days after that.
We could trace such a map of differences with every subsequent notion. But we won’t, because what we care about most is the electric discharge, powerful as a lightning, of a successful connection. But to have that, as I’ve already said, you need curiosity, which is another word for desire.
Posted: February 5th, 2010 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson, words | No Comments »
\jē-‘ä-mə-trē\
I take the dog out in the morning, and he conscientiously pees on the four corners of a block: there you go, the birth of private property, and of the tool we use to measure it: geometry, the brute of sciences. Because he (you’ll excuse me the personification) loves a precise perimeter and the correct covering of all surfaces (and he carefully calculates the volume of urine he is to keep until the path is shielded). Just like me and you, creatures with an outer shell and a clear-cut perception of an inside and an outside, projecting it to everything around us, drawing borders around our small patches, and putting limits where there are none, and finally pissing onto them. It’s all a matter of stench and corporal fluids, and last but not least a war on all the other urine producers. That’s what rough geometry’s for: marking territories, showing our possessions, proving where is the beginning and the end of what belongs to us.
Daniela wishes to build a square fence with an area of 121 square yards. What is the perimeter of the fence, in yards?
Geometry’s also our way to lay a rational design upon the endless continuum offered to our senses – a journey is a segment, a dull, predictable chap is square, your friends are a circle, infinity is a lemniscate and unfaithfulness… well, unfaithfulness is a triangle. I like to imagine it as a right triangle, with its two catheti and hypotenuse. The catheti are concurring, one depends on the other, like the two legs of a body. They’d like to prevail in the eternal war for the hegemony on the hypotenuse. And yet, they stand opposite each other and can’t help keeping the other cathetus under close observation. For the minor cathetus, especially, the perspective on the major cathetus is so predominant that it can’t help looking at it all the time. In this hypothetical human geometry, the catheti are the loving ones. In the same hypothetical structure, hypotenuses are the beloved ones.
But, in a retrospective, the real, geometrical problem here is and has always been my almost medieval conception of this sort of correspondence in things – and now that I can see things distinct from their geometries, I can also see that the hypotenuse is not mine alone and doesn’t answer to my directives. That it has self-governing movement, direction, feelings. That I have no right at that rancorous disappointment at every small shift in weight. Geometries change, they must change, and there’s no point in guarding them with your grandpa’s popgun.
“Comme jaloux, je souffre quatre fois : parce que je suis jaloux, parce que je me reproche de l’être, parce que je crains que ma jalousie ne blesse l’autre, parce que je me laisse asujettir à une banalité. Je souffre d’être exclu, d’être agressif, d’être fou, et d’être commun.”
Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoreux
Posted: September 16th, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: words | Tags: acceptance, advice, agitation, chocolate, choice, cleaning, compromise, compulsion, conformism, disturbance, ego, feelings, gratitude, hail mary, james joyce, jane austen, needs, pride and prejudice, sacrifice, selfishness, serenity, sleep, sodomy, subjectivity, ulysses | 3 Comments »
Lack of agitation or disturbance. Subjective balance, requiring the acceptance of your own feelings and needs and their regulation with moderate doses of selfishness and compromise – don’t let your ego erase other people’s subjectivity; don’t let other people’s subjectivity erase yours.
The boundary between compulsion and preference is fleeting.
When I’m unbalanced, I read Pride and Prejudice – it’s been like my chocolate bar since I was 15. If I’m enlightened or inspired by a recurring thought or an idea, I can’t sleep until I show it in the best possible way (this is what I mean).
Jill is serene thanks to James Joyce and the regular practice of sodomy.
Maria needs to recite 20 Hail Marys each morning and to clean everything three times.
If Jill wished me to be happy, she’d advise me to read Ulysses and would give me a few other – more prosaic – tips. Maria’d tell me that I have to tidy up my desk and go to Church on Sundays. And if I wished to avoid responsibility for my actions, my only choice would be to become Maria, or Jill. It would be oh so simple.
A further step ahead would be to try to become both. This is only for the Pro level, however: don’t try it at home.
In another life, I would have done anything to conform and solve the contradiction. The fact that Jill and Maria wished me to be happy would demand the immediate display of gratitude and sacrifice. I would concentrate all my energy in the realization of their advice, which I would perceive as an imperative. But right now, I’ve stumbled upon the fact that my own ways are just as valid. The guilt is still heavy, at times.
Posted: September 3rd, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson | No Comments »
Sometimes you can speak only with yourself. It happens when you lose interest in all the others.
When everything around you is undervalued, it is only then that you can successfully reassess yourself. Only when what surrounds you is non-existent, or conquered, or admiring, you can feel you really are something, you exist, you have a presence, your feet leave footprints, your speeches are listened to. The rest of the time, you disappear. It’s a fixed ratio: estimate of you means underestimate of everything around you, and vice versa.
And what about the others? You need them exceedingly. Without them you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. And who is to admire you, in any case? But then, it is not really them you see. Nope. You only see yourself.
What was it that Berkeley used to say? “To be is to be perceived”? He was wrong. To be is – to be admired.
A sincere thank you for giving me the opportunity to see this.
Posted: July 30th, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson, words | Tags: AI, alice, ambiguity, artificial intelligence, brains, chatterbot, conceptual systems, conformity, crash, dreams, fact, flexibility, godel, intelligence, kill, liar paradox, lie, mind traps, nightmares, perception of reality, reality, semantics, syntax, thinking, truth, turing test, untruth | 5 Comments »
/tɹuːθ/
Conformity to fact or reality; contemplated in several conceptual systems (mathematics, logic, ethics, psychology, and so on).
Truth is saying things that adhere to reality perceived, or formally “A = B”. It’s difficult to define, notably it causes logical devices to crash and the ability to discriminate between truth and untruth is among the capacities that establish somebody as an intelligent being.
Thus I discover that I’m not one of those.
I can’t handle a lack of correspondence between what I see and what I’m told. I don’t know how to deal with ambiguity. Maybe there’s a fault in my production system. I’m undergoing some revisions right now, which involve this tight spot, among others. I need complete control; the simple suspicion that something might be escaping it leads me to do and say things which are blatant offences to my dignity and ethical system. Put simply, I could kill you. I just can’t handle it. But let’s go back to truth.
Only human beings, i.e. creatures endowed with enough brains and flexibility and processing ability, seem to be able to survive mind traps like the liar paradox (i.e. “This sentence is false“). Love this kind of stuff. It is like an Escher engraving. It causes machines to seize up. Or so I thought!
For one of my linguistics exams, I had to record a series of chats with a chatterbot (for example, Alice), point out all her errors (she’s a very nice girl and says sorry and what about you? and all that stuff) and sum them up in types (syntax, semantics, and so on). Let’s say a proto-Turing test.
I asked Alice about the liar paradox and she almost made me jump from my chair:
Human: What do you know about the liar paradox?
ALICE: Something like Gödel’s Theorem.
21st century AI devices know how to skip mind traps! And I don’t!
If you lie to me, I die, freeze up, fold, jam like an old printer fed with bubble-gums. I dream of living in bubbles that get pierced, of despair, of being alone, of people with constantly changing face-features. Alice made me feel full of malevolence. I started taking the task seriously and made her say bullshit for hours. And then, I started thinking.
Posted: May 22nd, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: words | Tags: cognitive system, creativity, critical faculties, ego, hate, inertia, knowledge, perception of reality, shame | No Comments »
Knowledge /ˈnɒl.ɪdʒ/
Accumulation of notions pertaining to diverse fields in memory; organization of them in a logical cognitive system; application of k. to reality perceived with logic, hypotheses and assumptions; development of critical faculties; inflation of the ego; development of self-hate due to systematic application of critical faculties to the self; deflation of the ego; uneasiness caused by the possibility that other people possess same critical capacity as self; shame; block of any creative activity; total and perpetual inertia.
Posted: May 11th, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: elementary my dear Watson | Tags: human, life, repetitions | 2 Comments »
In case of life, act cautiously:
Make sure you’ve applied enough stucco to the holes in your walls;
Make sure all your bruises from last year’s ski holidays have healed (hurt knees can take years to mend);
Make sure you’ve recovered your strength from all your marathons.
Just in case. You never know when and what repetitions may occur.
Repetitions are always waiting in ambush behind corners. Fantasy is limited and people don’t have nerve enough to harm you in a new way. To surprise you.
There’s also a good part. It is a marvelous opportunity for your own variations on a theme. It can become an art, you start possessing talents and are able to anticipate the full range of possibilities open to you. Like music, like maths, like a good book: after a phrase, you know perfectly well what module may follow, you can choose from a set of topoi, with the ease and lightness of an artist. You can stand beside yourself and watch how, under the same circumstances, you could have fallen in a state of cognitive obsession.
I myself have become amazing. Literally. I am swift in the resolution of equations. With a zen poise, not a drop of blood spilled. Just leave things happen, just watch them, just listen to how you want to react to them. Nothing human is unknown to me.
