Bimodal Male Development
'Adult male orangutans exhibit two modes of physical development, flanged and unflanged. Flanged adult males have a variety of secondary sexual characteristics, including cheek pads (called "flanges"), throat pouch, and long fur, that are absent from both adult females and from unflanged males. Flanged males establish and protect territories that do not overlap with other flanged males' territories. Adult females, juveniles, and unflanged males do not have established territories. A flanged male's mating strategy involves establishing and protecting a territory, advertising his presence, and waiting for receptive females to find him. Unflanged males are also able to reproduce; their mating strategy involving finding females in estrus and forcing copulation. Males appear to remain in the unflanged state until they are able to establish and defend a territory, at which point they can make the transition from unflanged to flanged within a few months. The two reproductive strategies, referred to as "call-and-wait" for flanged male and "sneak-and-rape" for the unflanged male, were found to be approximately equally effective in one study group in Sumatra,though this observation did occur during a period of instability in flanged male rank and unflanged male mating success may be lower in Borneo.'
--Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutans)
like a rich boy in shorts
'...That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened...
...So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression.'
--Arundhati Roy (from 'The God of Small Things')
on anarcho-syndicalism / social libertarianism
'...if it is correct, as I believe it is, tha a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions, then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue.
Now any form of coercion or repression, any form of autocratic control of some domain of existence, let's say, private ownership of capital or state control of some aspects of human life, any such autocratic restriction on some area of human subsistence, or the need for survival, or the need for defense against some horrible fate or something of that sort. It cannot be justified intrinsically, rather it must be overcome and eliminated.
And I think that, at least in the technologicall advanced societies of the West, we are now certainly in a position where meaningless drudgery can very largely be eliminated, and to the marginal extent that it's necessary, can be shared among the population; where centralized autocratic control of, in the first place, economic institutions, by which I mean either private capitalism or state totalitarianism or the various mixed forms of state capitalism that exist here and there, has become a destructive vestige in history.
They are all vestiges that have to be overthrown, eliminated in favor of direct participation in the form of workers' councils or other free associations that individuals will constitute themselves for the purpose of their social existence and their productive labor.
Now a federated, decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as aother social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will.'
--Noam Chomsky (from debate with Michel Foucault)
in praise of a natural world
'.All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however, exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is--marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, Iam too firm in my conscioussness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in the their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.'
--Joseph Conrad
--An interview with the late Irish poet John O'Donahue--a rare fountain of graceful thought and its expression. rip.
Comes the morning
When I can feel
That there's nothing left to be concealed
Moving on a scene surreal
No, my heart will never
Will never be far from here
Sure as I am breathing
Sure as I'm sad
I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh
I leave here believing more than I had
And there's a reason I'll be
A reason I'll be back
As I walk
The Hemisphere
Got my wish
To up and disappear
I been wounded
I been healed
Now for landing I been
Landing I been cleared
Sure as I'm breathing
Sure as I'm sad
I'll keep this wisdom
In my flesh
I leave here believing
More than I had
This Love has got
No Ceiling
--Eddie Vedder ('No Ceiling':Into the Wild)
'...nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary;
nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless'
--C.S. (Jacksie) Lewis
'But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is "sublime and beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so.'
--Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
'The easy possibility of letter-writing must—seen theoretically—have brought into the world a terrible dislocation [Zerrüttung] of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one's own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold—all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously [. . .]. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish.'
--Franz Kafka (Letters to Milena)
'...I will describe it. -- If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed -- I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one's steps now involutnarily rush along, now involuntarily lag;...a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded as necessary colour within such a superfluity of light;...Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. The involuntary nature of image, of metaphor is the most remarkable thing of all; one no longer has any idea what is image , what metaphor, everything presents itself as the readiest, the truest, the simplest means of expression...'
--Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
Arcade Fire - Black Mirror (Montreal, January 20, 2007)
2007-04-15>>
In an unfamiliar place
A shoreline endless
Sea as far as the eye.
No one swam.
And I stood, and stared at the edges, somewhere down the horizon
All I wanted, the only reason for being there, was to swim.
I walked to the water,
The sea retreated.
I followed; the edge foaming beneath my bare feet, withdrawing with each step
And left exposed was a field of pebbles, rounded, the bottom.
I realized that I had follwed in a trance
I realized how far I had gone
I looked back and couldn't see the beach anymore,
there I was: alone, standing in the middle of the sea.
Upon my realization I heard a deep rumbling:
no doubt, it was the water preparing to reclaim itself.
Gustav Klimt - Medicine (1898)
F.H. Varley - Stormy Weather (1920)
'Of whom and of what indeed can I say: 'I know that!'
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists.
This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it
exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is
construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel
sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing
but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one
by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those
likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing,
this origin, this ardour or these silences, this nobility or
this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very
heart which is mine will for ever remain indefinable to
me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and
the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will
never be filled. For ever I shall be a stranger to myself.
In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
Socrates' 'Know thyself' has as much value as the 'be
virtuous' of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at
the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile excercises
on great subjects. They are legitimate only precisely in
so far as they are approximate.'
--Albert Camus (excerpt from 'An Absurd Reasoning')
The Myth of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
--Albert Camus
I have your good clothes in the car
So cut your hair so no one knows
I have your dreams and your teeth marks
And all my fingernails are painted
I'm here to take you now
You were right about the end
It didn't make a difference
Everything I can remember
I remember wrong
How can anybody know
How they got to be this way
You must have known I'd do this someday
Break my arms around the one I love
And be forgiven by the time my lover comes
Break my arms around my love...
-from 'Daughters of the Soho Riots' --The National
...So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand...
-T.S. Eliot
The only thing buoying my sanity through these last few days of trenching through MCAT material has been a book I picked up just recently (and of course her);
Nihilism and Emancipation by Gianni Vattimo.
"...Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational—it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression."
Three more days of solitary...
In blood and bone is there she-
in that age between the smile in her eye and the thought of its departure-
beats this weathered heart-
blinded by that faithless hope--too late in seeing winter's coming.
So go Love and take you with me.
Inspiration Manifest...Karma Anyone?
Heroism is to act selflessly, often at one's own expense, for a cause greater than one self;
My good friend Mani has decided, merely months after getting his first serious bike, that he's going to bike 780kms over the course of four days in this sweltering summer heat to raise money for kids with cancer. Specifically, he's riding under a great charitable organization - Tour for Kids. He's doing this ride in memory of a friend lost to cancer this past year.
Go check out his story and pledge him here.
lol.
To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that.
Angels are partisans not of Good but of divine creation. The devil, on the other hand, is the one who refuses to grant any rational meaning to that divinely created world.
Dominion over the world, as we know, is divided between angels and devils. The good of the world, however, implies not that the angels have the advantage over the devils (as I believed when I was a child) but that the powers of the two sides are nearly in equilibrium. If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels' power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils' reign), we could not live either.
Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).
The first time an angel heard the devil's laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil's laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range (a bit like the sound made on the street of a seaside town by Michelle and Gabrielle), but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.
Thus the angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, but each one's noise expressed the absolute opposite of the other's. And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.
Laughable laughter is disastrous. Even so, the angels have gained something from it. They have tricked us with a semantic imposture. Their imitation of laughter and (the devil's) original laughter are both called by the same name. Nowadays we don't even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.
-Milan Kundera [from 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting']
Limerence: Love under the knife
"The limerent reaction (referring to the state of being "in love") begins, usually at a point discernible at the time and later recalled. Sexual attraction as such need not be experienced, although (a) the person is someone you view as a possible sexual partner, and (b) the initial "admiration" may be, or seem to be, primarily physical attraction.
Once limerence begins, you find yourself thinking about the LO (the Limerent Other: the current love object) and receiving considerable pleasure in the process. There is an initial phase in which you feel buoyant, elated, and, ironically, for this appears to be the beginning of an essentially involuntary process, free. Free not only from the usual restraints of gravity, but emotionally unburdened. You may be attracted to more than one potential LO. You feel that your response is a result of LO’s fine qualities.
With evidence of reciprocation from LO, you enjoy a state of extreme pleasure, even euphoria. Your thoughts are mainly occupied with considering and reconsidering what you may find attractive in LO, replaying whatever events may have thus far transpired between you and LO, and appreciating qualities in yourself which you perceive as possibly having sparked interest in you on the part of LO. (It is at this point in West Side Story that Maria, the contemporary Juliet, sings I Feel Pretty.)
Your degree of involvement increases if obstacles are externally imposed or if you doubt LO’s feelings for you. Only if LO were to be revealed as highly undesirable might your limerence subside. Usually, with some degree of doubt its intensity rises further, and you reach the stage at which the reaction is virtually impossible to dislodge, either by your own act of will, or by further evidence of LO’s undesirable qualities. This is what Stendhal called crystallisation. The doubt and increased intensity of limerence undermine your former satisfaction with yourself. You acquire new clothes, change your hairstyle, and are receptive to any suggestion by which you might increase your own desirability in LO’s eyes. You are inordinately fearful of rejection.
With increases in doubt interspersed with reason to hope that reciprocation may indeed occur, everything becomes intensified, especially your preoccupation with percentages. At 100% you are mooning about, in either a joyful or a despairing state, preferring your fantasies to virtually any other activity unless it is (a) acting in ways that you believe will help you attain your limerent objective, such as beautifying yourself and, therefore increasing the probability that you will impress LO favourably during your interaction, or (b) actually being in the presence of LO. Your motivation to attain a “relationship” (mating, or pair bond) continues to intensify so long as a "proper" mix of hope and uncertainty exist.
At any point in the process, if you perceive reciprocation, your degree of involvement ceases to rise — until, of course, you become uncertain again. The timid partners may attempt to conceal from each other the full nature of the reaction that has seized them, preventing full reciprocation in each other’s eyes and allowing the intensity to increase.
Limerence for a particular LO does cease under one of the following conditions: consummation - in which the bliss of reciprocation is gradually either blended into a lasting love or replaced by less positive feelings; starvation - in which even limerent sensitivity to signs of hope is useless against the onslaught of evidence that LO does not return the limerence; transformation - in which limerence is transferred to a new LO."
-Dorothy Tennov [from 'Love and Limerence: the Experience of Being in Love']
"Of the greatest difficulties to one's rationality and grace is to approach objectively and honestly the subject of a problem of which one is part"
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. "
-Dylan Thomas [Excerpt from 'Fern Hill']
Hey folks,
It's that time of the year when I ask again for your generosity; I'm doing a 24hr spin to raise money for the construction of the Betty Wallace Women's Health Centre--a fantastic new facility specializing in the treatment of breast-cancer. All the money raised will go directly to the centre--every dollar raised is a dollar invested back into the well-being and dignity of our community.
Please pledge me here
-thanks!
K.
"A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them."
-John Stuart Mill [Utilitarianism]
"The truths which are ultimately accepted as the first principles of a science, are really the last results of metaphysical analysis, practiced on the elementary notions with which the science is conversant; and their relation to the science is not that of foundations to an edifice, but of roots to a tree, which may perform their office equally well though they be never dug down to and exposed to light."
-John Stuart Mill [Utilitarianism]
"Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician...keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards the way they are supposed to be played, but also incessantly gauging and deciding, slowing the pace or speeding up, deleting or adding another phrase to a prayer, mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of the listeners in attendance."
-Daniel Dennett [Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon]
December Night Scene
cream blue refraction
halos and snow
ink moon,
and the sound
of dialogues condensed,
distance infused
in this cold December
I walk alone
-but carry you.
What I hunger most is the conquest of my appetite.
"We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts..."
-Aristotle
"Whenever and wherever she appeared, in the hope of receiving her miraculous salutation I felt I had not an enemy in the world. Indeed, I glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me; and if at that moment someone had asked me a question, about anything, my only reply would have been: 'Love', with a countenance clothed with humility. When she was on the point of bestowing her greeting, a spirit of love, destroying all the other spirits of the senses, drove away the frail spirits of vision and said: 'Go and pay homage to your lady'; and Love himself remained in their place. Anyone wanting to behold Love could have done so then by watching the quivering of my eyes. And when this most gracious being actually bestowed the saving power of her salutation, I do not say that Love as an intermediary could dim for me such unendurable bliss but, almost by excess of sweetness, his influence was such that my body, which was then utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object. So it is plain that in her greeting resided all my joy, which often exceeded and overflowed my capacity."
-Dante (La Vita Nuova XI)
Thanks to everyone who has sponsored me so far...fundraising goes until September 15th.
Mike Branch
Laura Thomson
Jessica Bodig
Mom & Dad
Delara Emami
Saman Nia
Maciej Sawicki
Jamie Sullivan
Angelle Lefebvre
Martha Bill
Patients of 101 Union Dental
Sue McClatchey
Dihim Emami
Kaveh Nateghi
Click here to pledge me.
Tour for Kids Update
This is the last entry before I go on this mamoth fundraising ride... If you want to support this cause (and give me some added moral support), it's not too late - you can pledge me until early September by clicking here.
Anyhow, here's a small confession: I'm kind of scared. Rightly so I suppose. This will likely be the most physically demanding thing I've ever done, but then again, this is the kind of thing that I live for. It'll be a pilgrimage of sorts. I'm going to ride hard and give it everything I have - promise. Much love and appreciation to everyone supporting me...
Kay
2005-08-08>>
Tour for Kids
My friend Derek and I have signed up for a fundraising bike ride.
We're raising money for camps for children with cancer. It's an 800km tour or southern Ontario. Any contribution you make will be hugely appreciated.
You can make a donation here
Thanks for your support!
Mike Branch
Laura Thomson
Jessica Bodig
Mom & Dad
Delara Emami
Saman Nia
Maciej Sawicki
Jamie Sullivan
Angelle Lefebvre
Martha Bill
Patients of 101 Union Dental
"The more sophisticated the rationalization offered for sub-optimal circumstances, the more evil there is to hide. If something that strikes you as bad is presented as better than all the alternatives, then you know evil is afoot because you are effectively being discouraged from asking how things got so bad in the first place. 'Invisible hand' explanations, whereby private vices allegedly make for public virtue, tend to induce precisely this diabolical form of distraction."
"...people rarely decide to believe anything in particular, simply because it is more convenient to move through a world already equipped with default beliefs. Active rejection takes work, passive acceptance does not. The intellectual ennobles humanity by providing opportunities for resistance - that is, situations that force us to take decisions. Put more mundanely, by excercising oppositional concsiousness, the intellectual behaves like a consumer who refuses to buy off the shelf."
-exerpts from The Intellectual by Steve Fuller
2005-02-11>>
Shrouding all the ground around me
Is this holy crow above me.
Black as holes within a memory
And blue as our new second sun.
I stick my hand into his shadow
To pull the pieces from the sand.
Which I attempt to reassemble
To see just who I might have been.
I do not recognize the vessel,
But the eyes seem so familiar.
Like phosphorescent desert buttons
Singing one familiar song...
So good to see you.
I've missed you so much...
- MJK
2005-02-10>> So tomorrow is the big ride. I'm actually overwhelmed by the level of support I've received from everyone. It's in this kind of thing that our sense of community shows itself.
Thanks again.
Mom & Dad
Andrej
Charmaine
Deanna
Dihim
Inovex Inc.
Jonny
Kaveh
Macan
Maciej
Sharare
Tahir
Timur
2005-01-28>>Based on an image of magnetic storms on the surface of the sun
-I call it Cold Fusion
2005-01-22>> Over the past few years cancer has taken several lives among close friends and their families.
Unfortunately it seems that this has become commonplace. In remembrance of these people passed, in support of those fighting, and in celebration of those who have defeated it I'm participating in a fund-raising event. The event is a 24 hour spin, held on the weekend of February 11th. All donated funds will go directly to the Betty Wallace Women's Health Centre at Trillium Health Centre. If you can pledge a few dollars in support of this event, go here
Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far!
2005-01-07>>
When love beckons you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's thresing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weap, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say,
"God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let thse be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
TO know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon our and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
-Kahlil Gibran
2004-12-19>>
Meeting is such sweet sorrow
Cause someday we may have to part
Hush don't you make a sound
You're gonna let me down
Living ain't easy
Since you've been gone
No one else can please me
Or make me feel home
Forgetting ain't easy
You stay on my mind
Thoughts of us haunt me
Can't leave them behind
-Ben Harper
2004-11-15>>
 | Haunting my dreams for the last little while - Bjork's new album: Medulla |
2004-11-13>>
Some words of wisdom;
"Think for yourself.
Question authority.
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality.
To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.
Think for yourself."
-Timothy Leary
2004-11-11>>
Lest We Forget
Remembrance Day has always made me think;
People volunteered their existence in hope and effort of defending the good of the world in which they lived. For a time, having lived through catastrophe, having lost family members, having felt real fear, we were sobered -the world became quiet. Peace had been won. Peace had been paid for. The lesson learned was to never be forgotten.
Unfortunately, history tells us that our memories are short, and it only takes a generation or two to come full circle.
I wonder if this is something that can change.
Given the state of the world right now, paying particular attention to the volatility in so many countries, the emergence of a borderline fascist superpower who does not subscribe to international treaties or conventions of any sort that aren't profitable, the increasing polarity of the extremely wealthy and poor, the diminution of limited resources and exploding world population, one can only fear the worst.
Maybe if we pull our heads out of the sand, maybe if we educate ourselves about the realities of our world, if we review our cultural priorites, if we take responsibility for ourselves, and make good choices as individuals, if we raise our voice when it needs to be heard, maybe we can have peace without paying the ultimate price for it all over again.
World War I
1. 628,736 Canadians served.
2. 66,573 died and 138,166 were wounded.
3. 2,818 were taken prisoner of war.
4. 175 merchant seamen died by enemy action.
World War II
1. 1,031,902 Canadian men and 49,963 Canadian women
served.
2. 44,927 died and 43,145 were wounded.
3. 8,271 were taken prisoner of war.
4. 1,146 merchant seamen died by enemy action.
Sources: Department of National Defence; Veterans Affairs Canada. Queries regarding these statistics shuld be referred to these departments. March 1992.
In memory of the good souls whose passing we must bear.
2004-11-07>>
The Last Question
(a summary of a story by Isaac Asimov)
The story begins in the year 2061, when a colossal computer has solved the earth's energy problems by designing a massive solar satellite in space that can beam the sun's energy back to earth. The AC (Analog Computer) is so large and advanced that its technicians have only the vaguest idea of how it operates. On a $5 bet, two drunken technicians ask the computer whether the universe must inevitably die. After quietly mulling over this question, the AC responds: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.Centuries into the future, the AC has solved the problem of hyperspace travel, and humans begin colonizing the thousands of star systems. The AC is so large that it occupies several hundred square miles on each planet and so complex that it maintains and services itself. A young family is rocketing through hyperspace, unerringly guided by the AC, in search of a new star system to colonize. When the father casually mentions that the stars must eventually die, the children become hysterical. "Don't let the stars die," plead the children. To calm the children, he asks the AC if entropy can be reversed. "See," reassures the father, reading the AC's response, the AC can solve everything. He comforts them by saying, "It will take care of everything when the time comes, so don't worry." He never tells the children that the AC actually prints out: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Thousands of years into the future, the Galaxy itself has been colonized. The AC has solved the problem of immortality and harnesses the energy of the Galaxy, but must find new galaxies for colonization. The AC is so complex that it is long past the point where anyone understands how it works. It continually redesigns and improves its own circuits. Two members of the Galactic Council, each hundreds of years old, debate the urgent question of finding new galactic energy sources, and wonder if the universe itself is running down. Can entropy be reversed? they ask. The AC responds: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Millions of years into the future, humanity has spread across the uncountable galaxies of the universe. The AC has solved the problem of releasing the mind from the body, and human minds are free to explore the vastness of millions of galaxies, with their bodies safely stored on some long forgotten planet. Two minds accidentally meet each other in outer space, and casually wonder where among the uncountable galaxies humans originated. The AC, which is now so large that most of it has to be housed in hyperspace, responds by instantly transporting them to an obscure galaxy. They are disappointed. The galaxy is so ordinary, like millions of other galaxies, and the original star has long since died. The two minds become anxious because
billions of stars in the heavens are slowly meeting the same fate. The two minds ask, can the death of the universe itself be avoided? From hyperspace, the AC responds: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Billions of years into the future, humanity consists of a trillion, trillion, trillion immortal bodies, each cared for by automatons. Humanity's collective mind, which is free to roam anywhere in the universe at will, eventually fuses into a single mind, which in turn fuses with the AC itself. It no longer makes sense to ask what the AC is made of, or where in hyperspace it really is. "The universe is dying," thinks Man, collectively. One by one, as the stars and galaxies cease to generate energy, temperatures throughout the universe approach absolute zero. Man desperately asks if the cold and darkness slowly engulfing the galaxies mean its eventual death. From hyperspace, the AC answers: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. When Man asks the AC to collect the necessary data, it responds: I WILL DO SO. I HAVE BEEN DOING SO FOR A HUNDRED BILLION YEARS. MY PREDECESSORS HAVE BEEN ASKED THIS QUESTION MANY TIMES. ALL THE DATA I HAVE REMAINS INSUFFICIENT. A timeless interval passes, and the universe has finally reached its ultimate death. From hyperspace, the AC spends an eternity collecting data and contemplating the final question. At last, the AC discovers the solution, even though there is no longer anyone to give the answer. The AC carefully formulates a program, and then begins the process of reversing Chaos. It collects cold, interstellar gas, brings together the dead stars, until a gigantic ball is created.
Then, when its labors are done, from hyperspace the AC thunders: LET THERE BE LIGHT!
And there was light-
And on the seventh day, He rested.
2004-11-06>>
On Our Choices in the Media;
"It would be a mistake to conclude from the fact that the public buys and watches the offerings of the increasingly commercialized media that the gradual erosion of the public sphere reflects the preferences and free choices of the public either as citizens or consumers. The citizenry was never given the opportunity to approve or disapprove the wholesale transfer of broadcasting rights to commercial interests back in 1934, and the pledge made by those interests, and subsequently by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) itself, that public service offerings would never be buried in favor of the entertainment preferred by advertisers, was never fulfilled. The public is not sovereign over the media-the owners and managers, seeking ads, decide what is to be offered, and the public must choose among these. People watch and read in good part on the basis of what is readily available and intensively promoted. Polls regularly show that the public would like more news, documentaries, and other information, and less sex, violence, and other entertainment, even as they do listen to and watch the latter. There is little reason to believe that they would not like to understand why they are working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material."
-Edward S. Herman / Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent
2004-11-05>>An excellent CBC documentary about our favourite thief.
The World According to Bush - Part 1
The World According to Bush - Part 2
You can also find it (it's probably a faster download)here.
2004-11-02>>A new adaptation of one of my old drawings.
2004-10-28>>"A corporation is a form of private tyranny. Its directors have a responsibility to increase profit and market share, not to do good works. If they fail that responsibility, they will be removed. They have some latitude for public relations purposes, and the talk about corporate responsibility falls within that territory. But it makes no sense to regard them as benevolent institutions, freed from their institutional role. It is a public responsibility to enforce decent behavior."
-Noam Chomsky
2004-10-27>>My friends' software company. www.inovex.ca
2004-10-26>>
2004-10-17>>My brother's site; If you're looking for photos from any official Nateghi® events this is the place to look:P www.kavehnateghi.com
2004-04-02>>Last update for the trip has been posted in the trip 2004/05 section.
2004-04-02>>More updates for the trip posted in the trip 2004/05 section.
2004-03-30>>Updates on the May canoe trip posted in the trip 2004/05 section.
2004-03-07>>Evergreen Kayak logo posted under the temp section.
2004-02-06>>Some info. about the first canoe trip of the year is up. Check out the trip 2004/05 section.
2004-01-20>>All private files that I distribute on this site are now 256b encrypted using Advanced File Encryptor by Zemerick Software
Unfortunately it only works on Windows systems. I'll probably write my own multiplatform Java-based encryptor this summer.
>>This is supposed to be a mirror of my original site http://ecf.utoronto.ca/~nategh