Sarcastic ending

tokyo undressed

For the utopian mind the defects of every known society are not signs of flaws in human nature. They are marks of universal repression - which, however, will soon be ended. History is a nightmare from which we must awake, and when we do we will find that human possibilities are limitless.

John Gray, Black Mass, p29

Life after youth

Timothy Leary's dead

Since I dissed John Gray earlier I went back to my notes and decided to pull this from page 3 of Straw Dogs:

If Darwin's discovery had been made in a Taoist or Shinto, Hindu or animist culture it would very likely have become just one more strand in its intertwining mythologies.

It's a good idea, but is it true? I should ask my Taoist students, although it should be noted that Taoism, practiced as a religion, has very little do with the great and godless philosphy of Lao-Zi and Zhuang-zi.

A man in the sky

I like John Gray, not the Venus / Mars guy, but the LSE /Straw Dogs guy. That book meant a lot to me a few years ago, mainly because I read it on a long bus ride coming down from Taipei after reading the Atomized [aka The Elementary Particles], my first Houellebecq, on the way up. Both considered the inability to overcome our animal nature, and reading them together left me intoxicated for several months.

I reread Straw Dogs [SD] last year and took notes. I reread the notes two months ago when I started this blog and found little worth repeating. I don't think that reflects too badly on either the book or myself. You climb the ladder and then it's unnecessary, or, as Alan Watts said of why he gave up acid: "When you've got the message, you hang up the phone".

One of the things that annoyed me in SD, and in the other works of Gray's I've read [all the popular one's apart from the most recent, Black Mass, which I'm waiting for fate to lay in front of me - things aren't just on the shelf in southern Taiwan], is the clinging to religion as a Good Thing. Nassim Taleb also has this, but in his Long Now talk he practically came out and said the function of religion is to keep the proles in line, since they can't take their philosophy any other way. I may have misinterpreted him on this.

Gray's set out another religious defense in the Guardian recently. Many annoying things, like the tiresome claim that atheism is another kind of religious belief, rather than an assertion of what is known against what's demonstrably unknown and / or unknowable. The odd thing is that Gray's theme across all his later works is to show up the illusions we have about ourselves, but he's unwilling to accept that religious belief is another one of these.

Still, he's a writer, the idea being to strike ideas together and create some light and noise, and in this he succeeds and is often fun, but never forget that what he and other public intellectual apologists of religion are defending so energetically is the belief that there is an invisible being who made everything, sees everything and can choose to intervene any time he wants, but chooses not to.

Hard, and then harder

Mishima has a trial run

When I first came here I was the typical English teacher, only interested in $ and fun. Well, interested in $, but not that interested in working for it, so I made some and mainly went for the fun, all of which was unhealthy.

I was not out hiking or learning tai-chi. There are reasons why I look like I do.

Anyway, a few years ago I started working hard, and then harder. I saved a lot. It felt good. I have tendency to get stuck in loops of behavior, and they can be either good or bad, but the one sure thing is that I'll ramp up the loading and rotations until I've got the mania of falling down stairs with my pants on fire while spinning plates and playing with a yo-yo. None of which, I should add, I do with grace or even base ability, but I get by and kid myself with raw enthusiasm.

So...I have the tendency to push myself too far and to like it right up until the point when it's no fun anymore, and then to keep hovering just on the wrong side of that line too long, until my face begins to numb.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that although my PC's back and running well I've got myself too busy with teaching and proofreading for this at the moment, but that could and should change if only I can master time.

The next post - which has been sitting half written for days - should be a semi-attack on John Gray, whose Straw Dogs is very good and is supposed to keep appearing here, but rarely does. Here's the last paragraph:

Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

The Elementary Particles

The Singularity is when everything is supposed to change. Straw Dogs holds up the other side, that nothing ever does.

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. p155

The future will be better everything.

Better junk food, better porn, better drugs, better distractions and better forms of control.

Sex, domination and boredom - any vision of the future that doesn't account for these is incomplete.