51%

I think by now I properly believe that the majority of things is shit.

15 years

I used to play SEGA a lot. There was this one game I gave up on. The protagonist was some sort of a weird creature; as you go through levels you collect pieces for something that looked suspiciously like a moonshine machine. There was one level with four buttons you had to jump. They all had to be somehow pushed simultaneously. It was so unsolvable I gave up.

I was going back to Berlin this weekend; I was falling asleep and I came up with a perfectly viable the solution. 15 years. You jump, repetitively.

Somehow, it is Wallace's thing. There are two ways to half-raise a flag: to actually half-raise it, or make the pole twice as tall..

briefly

Briefly,

i'm back from Florence & Rome. i was told the other day: "i fucking hate Rome, that's why i'm staying". well, i sort of fucking hated it either but am used to other methods of self-punishment. Florence is narrow and crowded, like a never-ending marketplace or a metro station after 5pm. Rome is not so narrow but that is generously compensated by the abundance of motor vehicles. i had fun, it's nice to socialize with friendly eclans, drink wine on the Medici church stairs, eat out at least once a day and have cheap Italian coffe; but now i feel like spending a week in a solitary confinement, away, away. i spent 2 days in Brest. i skipped trolleys and buses because they looked too crowded. Berlin is the best place i've been to so far but i'm thinking of Paris this summer.

i've read a big article about David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker. coincidentally, they have posthumously released his third novel three days ago, The Pale King. it's on the library.nu already, of course. i'm buying Kindle in two days. i have finally started Infinite Jest, that over a thousand pages monstrosity, which is a mighty fun read.

i can see a blind spot in my left eye. i don't take it as a troubling sign, rather an opportunity to explore, phenomenologically, and factually, the interplay of sensations my eyes and brain produce. so far i have managed to see my own face in the blackness of a closed eye. that was moderately troubling. i have big plans of teaching myself not to be deceived by all optical illusions.

i have many other plans. i forget things so i developed a habit of carrying a small notebook and a pen with me. it helps. i even like to reread it. sometimes i don't understand what i meant by a sentence or two but it's ok, i'll have more.

Agriculture

This week i carried furniture, painted an apartment, made fire and grilled meat. It felt primordially exciting. Jared Diamond in his 'The Third Chimpanzee' writes it's very likely that hunter-gatherers lived happier lives. Paleopathology shows, that they had a better diet, fewer diseases and healthier teeth. A few 'primitive' tribes that exit today have a working load (hunting and gathering) of about 20 hours per week, something barely attainable for an average westerner.

Hey Cool Kid

One has to habituate to certain music but I never knew it could happen without any involvement on my part (i.e. Sartrean free will exercise). I've watched a 'Hey Cool Kid' music video by Cloud Nothings at p4k a few months ago. I thought it was shit and forgot about it. Then a few days ago it started playing in my head and I had to listen to that 'Hey Cool Kid' again. When i did I already liked it. Cloud Nothings, nice guy.

Războinici de la Pankow

By now everyone is pretty much comfortable with each other and friendships start sprouting. I love this place for the amount of pseudo-intellectual bullshit conversations we can do in a day. Funny but also stimulates the memory. What we've got the most of is pseudo-clans and bullshit theories.

Members of all the following pseudo-clans is a loosely related group of all and the same individuals including many Romanians, a Polish guy, a Turkish guy, moi, and who ever else we feel like including these days. Pankow Warriors is a band of nonconformist anarchist renegades wearing cheap sun glasses from a euro store. Pankow Patrol are their antagonists, organized, cold and always ready to use force to instill order. Waldstrasse Boys is mostly just Ionut and Milan singing cheesy stream of consciousness love songs on the spot (seems to be disbanded as of now). Mayakowski Circle is more serious, a small group with a Marxist skew, devoted to writing manifestos and thinking about class struggle. For very obvious reasons we also have Checkpoint Zoltan in front of 15.

Bioehics

My Polish friend told me the other day - and he is a no gullible obscurantist of any sort so I tend to trust him - that people who die in all sorts of car accidents lose their shoes. Symbolically (and otherwise), shoes may stand for civilization and the loss of them by death negating whatever we have or will come up with culturally.

Spring!

I remember the times when I could go all night without sleep and just be a bit drowsy next evening. Well that is the case no more. My hands are trembling, people's voices echo, and the reality looks menacing. Yet it was worth it. I met Lola with her lovely sisters (one of whom I think I managed to piss off by proxy) on their way back to the glorious city of Minsk, learned about Czech men all looking like Jesus, chilled at a rock-pub, chilled at a British pub, got called 'big boy' by a bartender, smoked a lot, drank a lot, took an expensive cab, chilled at Schonefeld, chilled on S9 (goes directly to Pankow!), came home at 7, made a powerpoint presentation about cloning, ate a Paracetamol, ate breakfast, took a 2-hour nap (it's a nap, man), heard a lecture on Dante, amused Ionut with this story, amused people with my good mood, made a joke about gravity, got tired, hallucinated for an hour at a seminar on Dante, enjoyed the sun, got cold; good nite it was but I wish the day was already over.

One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I've just had one of the worst flu's in my life. It has also been the shortest. My body is amazingly resilient given what I'm putting it through.

Two days of not knowing whether it's too hot or too cold in the room, sleeping 14 hours a day and shivering under the blanket for the rest.

Also had the worst nightmare. I had the most painful intellectual experience reading a book by some feminist writer. Sentences made sense separately but they didn't as a whole. There were no punchlines and even semi-conclusions. But what was even worse is that the book made sense chronologically and so all those sentences were somehow connected and couldn't just be reshuffled. And when they didn't make sense they still deed via leaping through several unobserved dimensions as per string theory (at a certain point I saw it visualized and it was painfully incomprehensible - loops of loops of grayish intertwined bands - in fact, it looked like this, where my imagination, i'm assuming, stole it from). The longest nightmare I've ever had: not scary enough to wake you up, exhausting enough to make you want to sleep more.

I'm doing better now and it's a sort of happy ending. It also turned out there's at least one person in here who genuinely (inasmuch as it can be said about humans at all) cares about me which is of course always heartening.

The Scientific Method

Now it just dawned on me. Sure, I've been (am and probably will be) criticizing science quite vehemently but here's a story. My cousin is two years older than I am and when we were kids he was a big authority for me. I remember we had this argument (which was already a big thing) about the spelling of "Manhattan." He added an extra letter in there and was standing his ground. A few hours later I found a pack of coffee incidentally called "Manhattan" and showed it to him. I won. Quite a formative experience now that I think of it.

Spoon

Somehow I can never get over 'I Summon You' of Spoon's Gimme Fiction. Given that I can pretty much digest anyone from Wagner to Shostakovich by now.

the primacy of perception

Today have realized that 'shrooms might be up to something. Haven't tried but according to descriptions it goes well with Merleau-Ponty. The lived perception is lacking but it seems all other primordial perception attributes are there.

Danny

Have just finished '127 Hours'. Boyle's range is amazing. He's shot a drug addicts movie, a zombie movie, a rich kid movie, a space movie, a poor kid movie, and, as of recently, a one-armed guy movie. There's just nothing he cannot do. And surely, there's always a theme that unites them all: humans put in somewhat extraordinary situations and the way they deal with them. Oh so tastefully.

The Republic

Thank you, Plato.

Today I have finished my final essay for The Republic course. I have also read Bloom's interpretive essay. I knew Whitehead called philosophy a series of footnotes to The Republic but now I understand. It also feels my background in economics helped. It's about scarcity. I know it is. Were there not scarcity there wouldn't be injustice. There would also not be immoderate reproduction rates. Philosophy is the only way to make us happy again. For it's beyond scarcity. There is a tiny flaw in this logic concerning abiogenesis but I will play it down.

The Social Network

I think it is actually an important film and I quite liked it. First, it is more or less the first movie about things on the Internet. Second, they actually used scary words like Python, Pearl and Apache and never bothered to explain. Finally, Fincher, the rest of the cast and the narrative - cute. Aaalso, the fact that they used real names and real company names - they must have spoken and/or paid to A LOT of people.

Space Station Cézanne

It's painful to realize the absence of a natural talent to write concisely. It's also rather pathetic that neither 11 years of school nor 1 + 4 years of college could fix that. My Space Station Cézanne which I've been building for the whole day today took off, orbited the Moon once or twice, tripped, fell into the Pacific Ocean and got eaten by a shark. I'm not sure if it counts but I can come up with many excuses: 1) one day is not enough to write a paper from scratch; 2) phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty + antics of Cézanne is a pie I tried to bite too much of; 3) I smoked too much; 4) I ate too much (nope); 5) I slept too little; 6) I'm lazy; 7) Nietzsche fucked me up. All but 4 and 5 seem valid and 6 is an über-excuse implying one can but does not want to. I'll try harder next time. I enjoyed it, really. And I've learned disproportionately more than it shows.

Two things

First, it came to my attention that in a certain thesaurus of philosophic terms the definition of the meaning of life is "grilled cheese sandwich". It is somewhat heartening that we have arrived at the point where the question - at least in academia - is admittedly unanswerable and hence can be joked about. On the other hand it seems dangerous to simply discard it as a joke and proceed with one's intellectual endeavors elsewhere. All the good stuff is always open to interpretation without ever giving definitions and step by step guidelines. Plato's scribblings would have never survived for well over 2k years if he actually told us what the good or justice is. Heidegger complained we aren't perplexed enough and Camus elaborating on Kirkegaard would invent an absurd man - a notion in itself irreconcilable, inconclusive and without definitive answers. In the best traditions of Mr. Bloom the "grilled cheese sandwich" is a symptom of "nihilism without the abyss": there's no meaning but I'm good; are you good? good.

Second, for today's French test, among other things, I had to memorize genders of quite a few inanimate objects. I drew two pictures: the "Le picture" and the "La picture". It helps: here's le bureau sur le tapis with a bunch of les cahiers et les crayons lying around. We are wired to better remember stories and space-time relationships rather than abstract notions. And surely making up pictures and/or tales is a great shorthand for fast learning. But in the end the method seems to be a crutch for an ancient sitting-around-fire-song-singing brain. There is no place for abstract notions in such frame of thinking. It's about time we learned to be led to conclusions "through forms by forms" rather than simplifying and inevitably distorting abstractions by tying them to concrete objects. thus the question is this: Do I deal with my imperfect brain via crutches or do I struggle for the sake of pure dialectics and lose time? I cannot but think in evolutionary terms that even if abstract thinking proved to be a somehow more advantageous approach to natural selection (doubtful) it is just not worth pursuing from the perspective of a single individual's lifespan.

In a way those two things seems to be connected. Do I deal with the given and maybe relax a little bit or do I struggle towards something new but so uncertain? It sometimes appears an individual is enough to push the whole of history into a new spiral. Such individuals - I'm thinking Cézanne - exhibit inhuman determination toward their thing that, by itself, by not being given up, validates the effort. The reward often comes posthumously and thus, in a way, means nothing. This is the problem that cannot be easily (if ever) reconciled with and for which the "grilled cheese sandwich" is an answer both appropriate and very much not.

Ahem

About three days ago I promised myself the following: writing a post a day, in English. Clearly, I'm already three posts overdue so it's not going well. Reasons behind the shift of format are very simple and effective (or so I'd like to think). There's no thought beyond language and there're no ultimate ideas that we 'put into language'. And so I thought a piece of writing a day would really help conceptualize and synthesize the actuality of the day. (I also decided not to ever use "reality" but replace it with "actuality"). The second reason is even simpler. I generally dislike Russian and I'm forgetting how to use it anyway. Switching to English, on the other hand, would cater to an array of my ambitions from improving the language to becoming a world-renowned haiku writer. Lets try then.

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#003

Снегу нападало.

Перечитался книжек про Сезана и всю ночь мне снилось как я обсуждаю сам с собой его картину. Картина запомнилась, умел бы - нарисовал. Две искоса слева направо чуть вверх полосы разного оттенка белого и жирное белое пятно посередине. На пятно было потрачено столько масла, что рельеф дает четкую тень. Это я, видимо, сам с собой и обсуждал. Я, конечно, был неправ во сне - Сезан бы такое никогда не нарисовал, хотя вот был период в его жизни, когда масла он совсем не жалел.

Остаюсь на каникулы в Берлине. Приобрел абонемент во все госмузеи - там преимущественно и буду обитать.