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: 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: 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.
