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Notes from a traffic jam
Feb. 27th, 2014 07:55 pm1. I pooped three times today. I'm not a scat fetishist, but there is a distinctive pleasure from pooping that is related to cleanliness. It is as if you have gotten rid of something very large and filthy inside of you. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon at a workshop (in the bathrooms of course) and once at home in the evening. After the last round of pooping I lay on my bed and thought of my intestines. And then I thought of what a curious and strange creature I am, this organism that consumes other organisms and transforms the organisms into poop in my body. It made me wonder about how I came about. It made me think of where I am going to. How did the human being emerge? This organism consuming, organism processing object?
2. I listened to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and I thought it pretty good, if dated, I clapped several times in the car. It was heavy traffic to and fro.
- Dostoevsky is a dualist, what would later be categorized by Nietzsche as Apollonian and Dionysian. (The contrast between the Apollonian force of Prospero and the Dionysian world of Caliban is one of the appeals of The Tempest to me. Going through the play again, it seems to me that The Tempest is best appreciated as a philosophical text, particularly on the philosophy of the artist and relation to aesthetics; and that it is best read after familiarity with other Shakespeare plays) Superman vs. Joker.
- I've been thinking about Russian literature and art lately and I can't help but wonder if the Russian need to cling to the era of the greats is what is stifling it. Maybe it's due to the lack of translation in anything else, but as much as I dislike Pussy Riot, they really are the only true inheritors of the great Russian artists (it's their artists' statements that place them in that category). Well, I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Russian art and literature.
3. I watched birds fly in the evening and wondered if there was a mathematical order to the pattern of their evening flight. Their paths are so geometric. Then, my mind still on Mathematics, I glanced at a solitary palm tree -- just one, surrounded by human construction and concrete and bitumen and commercial buildings. I immediately imagined the angles and geomatry of the spaces between the leaves, and wondered if there was a mathematical formulation for their width based on the mathematical formulation of the intensity of the wind that blew it. And I marvelled at how complex Creation was. Beside the tree there was a crane, because the new LRT stations to Subang were under construction, and I remarked at how simplistic the human formulations were. In the play Arcadia the character Thomasina wonders why geometry only seems to prescribe the shapes of manufacture. The answer is pretty simple: a rose, like the fronds of a palm tree, are a combination of the full expression of complex geometry and our cranes and concrete pillars are childish, imbecilic forms of it.
4. If I'm very free and money or audience were not a concern I'd probably go on Khan Academy to work out Mathematics, but since there is no immediate purpose of it to my survival as a human being, I might not.
5. I had a good workshop session at Taylors' College Subang. But I don't envy workshop coaches, who have to teach a whole day.
2. I listened to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and I thought it pretty good, if dated, I clapped several times in the car. It was heavy traffic to and fro.
- Dostoevsky is a dualist, what would later be categorized by Nietzsche as Apollonian and Dionysian. (The contrast between the Apollonian force of Prospero and the Dionysian world of Caliban is one of the appeals of The Tempest to me. Going through the play again, it seems to me that The Tempest is best appreciated as a philosophical text, particularly on the philosophy of the artist and relation to aesthetics; and that it is best read after familiarity with other Shakespeare plays) Superman vs. Joker.
- I've been thinking about Russian literature and art lately and I can't help but wonder if the Russian need to cling to the era of the greats is what is stifling it. Maybe it's due to the lack of translation in anything else, but as much as I dislike Pussy Riot, they really are the only true inheritors of the great Russian artists (it's their artists' statements that place them in that category). Well, I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Russian art and literature.
3. I watched birds fly in the evening and wondered if there was a mathematical order to the pattern of their evening flight. Their paths are so geometric. Then, my mind still on Mathematics, I glanced at a solitary palm tree -- just one, surrounded by human construction and concrete and bitumen and commercial buildings. I immediately imagined the angles and geomatry of the spaces between the leaves, and wondered if there was a mathematical formulation for their width based on the mathematical formulation of the intensity of the wind that blew it. And I marvelled at how complex Creation was. Beside the tree there was a crane, because the new LRT stations to Subang were under construction, and I remarked at how simplistic the human formulations were. In the play Arcadia the character Thomasina wonders why geometry only seems to prescribe the shapes of manufacture. The answer is pretty simple: a rose, like the fronds of a palm tree, are a combination of the full expression of complex geometry and our cranes and concrete pillars are childish, imbecilic forms of it.
4. If I'm very free and money or audience were not a concern I'd probably go on Khan Academy to work out Mathematics, but since there is no immediate purpose of it to my survival as a human being, I might not.
5. I had a good workshop session at Taylors' College Subang. But I don't envy workshop coaches, who have to teach a whole day.