SHELL OF MAN

2 Mar

…not visual or aural stimulation but a convenient way to shut oneself off from the ugliness of a money-grubbing society…

— THIS is the next great invention.

19 Sep

An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise, it confuses. If it is not simple, it won’t work.

— — Peter Drucker

1 Aug

You are asleep and you have a dream that you’ve been hunting and you see the long sequence of events leading up to the hunt; eventually, the quarry flies up, you shoot and you wake up. The sound of the shot was a real sound, the sound of a shutter slamming in the wind. Your imagination manufactured the entire story of the hunt at the moment of waking.

28 Jun

There was that New Yorker story about the woman whose head itched so badly that her fingertips eventually breached her skull. [Fiona] recalled, from it, the ‘mirror box,’ a simple device that duplicates the reflection of the remaining limb when the other’s been lost, so that the phantom pain goes away, and this made her cry when she read it, she’d had ‘years and years of pain, and it’s this simple little trick, the brain is so stupid.’ Her OCD, still with her, is better now, and she’s realized, over time, that ‘the brain is just a machine that sometimes gets a little glitch, and this is just something that got into a loop, and it’s getting reinforced.’

—

— From ‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out With Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit by Dan P. Lee.

Her compassion for her ailing subject is palpable and mildly inspiring, but my favorite part of this quote is when Apple mentions the brain being so stupid. Here she is insulting her motor, seemingly disgusted by the object that not only makes her run but gave her that very thought, and yet she didn’t drop dead on the spot for such treason. The ability to trick the brain (or essentially ourselves) reinforces that Descartian notion that “mind and body” or “head and heart” are separate entities. It’s the second time in a week I’ve heard someone mention “tricking the brain.” A daytime NPR program recently revisited a 2010 study in which subjects were able to satiate their appetites by simply thinking about a specific food. “Using M&Ms and cheese cubes, researchers at Carnegie Mellon discovered that by imagining eating a lot of something, your mind subconsciously limits what you later put into your mouth. … [the research] found that people who imagined eating 30 M&Ms instead of three, or 30 cheese cubes instead of three, afterward ate less from a bowl containing 40 grams of cheese cubes or M&Ms, and in this case it seemed that only imagining the consumption of the specific food reduced their actual consumption later on.” While the mirror box and food study are sort of miraculous in their own ways, the idea that our brains can be so easily duped is kind of deflating, especially when you consider how often we satisfy ourselves by figuratively patting our own backs.

Fritjof Capra once wrote an entire book, The Turning Point (1982), to challenge Descartes’ dualism and analyze how dissociating our minds from our bodies will eventually lead us to the current scientific, economical, and environmental crises we face today because, similarly, such blind dissociation allows us to ignore consequence and responsibility. He argues that “science needs to develop the concepts and insights of holism and systems theory to solve society’s complex problems.” Yet studies like the one above only reinforce that we are not whole, complete, but that we can become whole, one with everything, with a few simple little tricks.

16 May

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

—

— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

If you’ve never read any of Kurt Vonnegut’s other work, don’t. It’s bad. But I was once told that every human has the capacity to create a single masterpiece in their lifetime. Vonnegut finally wrote his famous book about Dresden. Read it.

14 May

‘In a book I once read by Peter Freuchen,’ Fanshawe writes, ‘the famous Arctic explorer describes being trapped by a blizzard in northern Greenland. Alone, his supplies dwindling, he decided to build an igloo and wait out the storm. Many days passed. Afraid, above all, that he would be attacked by wolves— for he heard them prowling hungrily on the roof of his igloo— he would periodically step outside and sing at the top of his lungs in order to frighten them away. But the wind was blowing fiercely, and no matter how hard he sang, the only thing he could hear was the wind. If this was a serious problem, however, the problem of the igloo itself was much greater. For Freuchen began to notice that the walls of his little shelter were gradually closing in on him. Because of the particular weather conditions outside, his breath was literally freezing to the walls, and with each breath the walls became that much thicker, the igloo became that much smaller, until eventually there was almost no room left for his body. It is surely a frightening thing, to imagine breathing yourself into a coffin of ice, and to my mind considerably more compelling than, say, the Pit and the Pendulum by Poe. For in this case it is the man himself who is the agent of his own destruction, and further, the instrument of that destruction is the very thing he needs to keep himself alive. For surely a man cannot live if he does not breathe. but at the same time, he will not live if he does breathe.’

— Paul Auster, The Locked Room

24 Mar

“I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. “And what else do you do for fun?” I tried to bring up boys and friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done – whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. “What do you want out of life?” I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear… “What do you do on Sunday afternoons?” I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. “What do you do on a warm summer’s night?” She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn.”

— ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac

19 Jan

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

— Jack Kerouac, On The Road

I know nobody that yawns not, so that’s just absolutely outrageous.

31 Dec

“The girl had a pretty face, in a rubicund country girl sort of way… but she was buttery, stubby, and chubby. The chances of her ever achieving the twenty-first-century female ideal of a lean, hard, slim-hipped, well-defined body were remote, if not nil. She just wasn’t made for it. Yet here she was, sitting in her boxer shorts in a public lounge in the middle of the night, looking forward to boyfriends and having her turn at sexiling* her roommate. A nice, cheery, normal-looking girl — who assumed all this was the natural order of things!”

— Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons

*Sexile: To be banished (as in exiled) from one’s dorm room by a roommate so the said roommate can have coitus**
**Coitus: F***ing banging

26 Dec

“…most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking… 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99% of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.”

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest