Most Important thing I ever learned

We are beautiful because we die. If we lived forever, nothing would ever fade away. No fear of loss... If everything was beautiful, nothing would be.

The End

Hmmm. The End. I won't write anything similar to The Doors' mythic song, "The End", but I will gibber-gabber alot about what I learned. If anything, this class has showed me how terrifying it is to be human. The living, breathing, daily reality, the inner and outer struggles. How amazing is life? But how pointless it is at the same time? Why do we die but our stories live on to be eternally repeated? Why? Why? Why? What is the point? That's the thing I need: what is the point of it all. I get the themes. I get the past and future and the present which was actually a few moments ago. But what does it mean? Why is mind so boggled, mystified, absorbed, sitting on top of a large avalanche with no idea what else is beneath the surface?

I suppose that's where I come in... The student who needs to pick up the pieces and discover what the "mysteries" really mean. It's so easy to live in a world without mystery, so easy to just exist, not explore this stuff further. Ignorance is bliss. Now that the mysteries are revealed what am I going to do from them? How am I going to learn from them? And most importantly what does it all mean? I thought long and hard about what I need to do with my acquired info, I'm going to forget it. Yeah, forget the mysteries, so I can relearn them over and over and over. How can one person hold so many truths and not go crazy? He forgets about them... Until he remembers them again. over and over and over. That's what life is. That's the point. Forgetting and relearning over and over. Anamnesis. Remembering what you forgotten.

So that's what I'm going to do: Forget what I learned.

P.S. I love you, Barkley. Seeya in another life, buddy.

Summary Tomorrow

Well, my dog died today. I loved him more than anything, but I think I can make it through, partly because of this class. That's all I really want to write right now. I'll write a summary tomorrow.

Dr. Smith and Midas

Everytime the story of Midas comes up in class, I can only think of a Lost in Space episode I saw when I was a kid. Dr. Smith was somehow endowed with the ability of turning everything he touched to gold. At first he thought this was a freaking capital idea. He was in paradise, ecstasy of goldness! Then the good doctor realized that EVERY THING HE FREAKING TOUCHED TURNED TO GOLD. And I mean everything: spoons, food, chairs, trees, cats, robots, little monkeys. Finally, he moved out into the planetary wilderness, lived in a home of gold, but was a miserable, miserable man.

Then a poor misguided Penny tried to persuade him to come home. He screamed at her to leave. LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE ME BE. It was an odd moment of empathy uncharacteristic of such a man as Dr. Smith. But it would NOT BE. He touched her on accident, and was mortified that the little girl was now a little golden girl. Egads. Less to say, I don't remember what happened. I do know that greedy Dr. Smith learned another valuable lesson.

eye power paper

A man takes a restless glance at a woman passing by. A girl flutters her eyelids at a cute boy. A child cries himself to sleep at 2'Oclock in the morning. Small tragedies in the course of the day, all brought together by one small connection... What is the first thing you see when you stare at another's face? Is it their rather bulbous nose? Their acne-scarred cheeks? The long, crinkled hair dangling gracelessly from their chin? No, the answer, for most, is the eyes, the window to the soul, to the sea of restless waters, plentiful valleys, and disease inside, beautiful blue, brown, black, green, billions upon billions of combinations of hues, shades, and vomit-themed tinges. For thousands of years the eyes have been seen as a symbol of power, of knowledge, of even the sun. And they are right; there is something special about the eyes. The right pair can stun me into silence, absorb me into their own inner horror, or cause me to immediately thrust hatred toward them. Yet they are all beautiful, showcasing the gods' presence in humans. Perfectly cylindrical, with circles layered upon circles, with intricate red scribbling lines zigzagging along the edges. Fragile, white, beacons to the creature inside.

In much of the ancient world it was believed one could bestow a curse on another by giving them an evil glare. So was the power held within, a person could curse another by simply staring at them the wrong way, quite accidentally. And the results could be disastrous: bad luck, disease, and even death! According to Wikipedia, praise be upon it, the ancient Greeks also believed in the “evil eye”, even going as far as rumor-mongering about the great Socrates, claiming he “possessed the evil eye […] his disciples and admirers were fascinated by Socrates' insistently glaring eyes. His followers were called Blepedaimones, which translates into demon look, not because they were possessors and transmitters of the evil eye, but because they were suspected of being under the hypnotic and dangerous spell of Socrates.” Many cultures throughout the world have gone to great lengths to void off the all threatening eye, fashioning talismans and hamsa to ward the threat off. Wikipedia bestows its unquestionable knowledge on me again: “It is tradition among many Muslims, that if a compliment is to be made, you are always supposed to say "Masha’Allah” to ward off the evil eye; it literally means ‘whatever God wills’.” Muslims take this eye stuff seriously, and so do many other cultures: the Greeks, ancient Romans, Jewish tradition, Indians, Muslims, some Latin Americans, and Voodoo practitioners.

And one need not look far to find evidence of this. In Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, Oedipus stabs out his eyes upon discovering the terrifying knowledge of his birth. He was blind, even though he could see, and Tiresius, who was blind, could see. The eye is used as a metaphor for knowledge. But counter intuitively, Sophocles warns his audience about the danger of optical vision. Being able to see, that act itself, makes us figuratively blind, and lack of eyes, well that gives us knowledge. Does having the ability to perceive the universe corrupt it? Alan Watts once claimed, “Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” But we do do that. We classify, order, file things into species, orders, families, genres, sizes, weights, heights, beauty, everything, and we shove it neatly somewhere in a filing cabinet. And this is the very essence of science! The act of grouping things together. But one has to wonder... would we do this if we couldn't see? Do the eyes give us power over the universe that we wouldn't otherwise have?

A famous experiment conducted by quantum theorists involved firing electrons through two slits. When only the outcome was observed, it appeared the electrons acted like waves, but when the scientists actually watched the electrons pass through one of the slits, they acted like particles. By watching the event, they changed its outcome. Take a ball and bounce it in the street. It has equal odds to be anywhere on the street, but by observing you choose its placement. So in truth, you are affecting the reality around you by watching it. According to an article passed widely around on the internet, astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the universe by looking at it. Not to go into too much detail, but apparently the universe may have been supposed to reset, but because we observed it, it continues to expand outward. Theorists believe “a strange yet-to-be detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the universe […] Dark energy is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the universe’s expansion. If so, the universe is not in a nice stable zero-vacuum state but simply another ‘false vacuum’ state that may abruptly decay again.” They continue by saying the longer the "reset" button isn't pressed means the better the universe has of becoming stabilized. But the bad news, the article claims, is that the quantum effect may have prevented the universe from "resetting" and now the universe is more likely to decay. The eye makes men into gods, gives us power superman could only dream of.

The eye is what gives us the power over others. The United States knew that when it put the all-seeing eye on the dollar bill, so did George Orwell, and the idea has crossed over into modern culture. Often the television show LOST will open in on a close-up of someone's eye, as do many shows and movies. And of course, the scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana closes eyes so he isn’t mutilated by the Arc of the Covenant. But I have to wonder, what would the universe be like if we couldn't see it? What would we be like? Living in complete darkness. Would we feel more one with our reality? Would we be in harmony, peace? Maybe to be truly enlightened, one has to SEE that he or she isn't supposed to SEE.

Eyes are terrifying. How else could Medusa turn whoever stared at her to stone? Why would the biblical character turn to ash when she turned around to see her fallen city? Why couldn't Psyche gaze at her lover? Because they would gain power over them, simply by observing their form. If all of this is to be believed, you are the one ultimately in control of the world around you. Your thoughts, your ill-will (be an angry gaze at another) has the power to affect the “real” world in “real” ways. We often see ourselves as victims of the outside, but are we instead victims of the inside? Our own poisons seeping out of our skin and polluting a sandbox. Alan Watts said these words, and I often wonder if they were not true:

I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream. And you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would I suppose start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life: love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, and music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at seventy-five years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you’d move over to an adventurous dimension, where there were certain dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, and eventually get into contests with enemies. And after you had done that for awhile, you’d think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, and think that is was all for real.

Is reality just a dream that we forgot to wake up from?

Would there even be a universe without something to observe it? Do the two complete each other, humans and the universe? Just like Aristophanes described man and woman at one time being one, so is the universe and man. Maybe the itch in your shoulders isn't only the longing to return to stability of "oneness with your mate", but also with the universe itself; to return to the peace of death, to finally be free from the chaos of life and just BE?

The Epiphany Toilet

Epiphany = sudden manifestation of the divine

The Power of Eyes

A man takes a wrestless glance at a woman passing by. A girl flutters her eyelids at a cute boy. A child cries himself to sleep at 2'Oclock in the morning. Small tragedies in the course of the day, all brought together by one small connection... What is the first thing you see when you stare at another's face? Is it their rather bulbous nose? Their acne-scarred cheeks? The long, crinkled hair dangling gracelessly from their chin? No, the answer, for most, is the eyes, the window to the soul, to the sea of wrestless waters, plentiful valleys, and disease inside, beautiful blue, brown, black, green, billions upon billions of combinations of hues, shades, and vomit-themed tinges. For thousands of years the eyes have been seen as a symbol of power, of knowledge, of even the sun. And they are right, there is something special about the eyes. The right pair can stun me into silence, absorb me into their own inner horror, or cause me to immediatelly thrust hatred toward them. Yet they are all beautiful, showcasing the gods' presence in humans. Perfectly cylindrical, with circles layered upon cirlces, with intricate red scribbling lines zigzagging along the edges. Fragile, white, beacons to the creature inside.

In much of the ancient world it was believed one could bestow a curse on another by giving them an evil glare. So was the power held within, a person could curse another by simply staring at them the wrong way, quite accidentally. And the results could be disastrous: bad luck, disease, and even death! According to Wikipedia, praise be upon it, the ancient Greeks also believed in the "evil eye", even going as far as rumor-mongering about the great Socrates, claiming he "possessed the evil eye and that his disciples and admirers were fascinated by Socrates' insistently glaring eyes. His followers were called Blepedaimones, which translates into demon look, not because they were possessors and transmitters of the evil eye, but because they were suspected of being under the hypnotic and dangerous spell of Socrates." So sayth the mighty Wikipedia, how dare I criticize its knowlege? Many cultures throughout the world have gone to great lengths to void off the all threatening eye, fashioning talismans and hamsa to ward the threat off. Wikipedia bestows its unquestionable knowledge on me again: "It is tradition among many Muslims, that if a compliment is to be made, you are always supposed to say "Masha'Allah" to ward off the evil eye; it literally means "whatever God wills"." Muslims take this eye sh*t seriously, man. And so do many other cultures: the Greeks, ancient Romans, Jewish tradition, Indians, Muslims, some Latin Americans, and Voodoo practicianers.

And one need not look far to find evidence of this. In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Oedipus stabs out his eyes upon discovering the terrifying knowledge of his birth. He was blind, even though he could see, and Tiresius, who was blind, could see... Confusing. Anyhow. The eye in this story is used as a metaphor for knowledge. But counterintuitively, Sochocles warns his audience about the danger of optical vision. Being able to see, that act itself, makes us figuratively blind, and lack of eyes, well that gives us knowledge. Does having the ability to perceive the universe, corrupt it? Alan Watts once claimed, "Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations." But we do do that. We classify, order, file things into species, orders, families, genres, sizes, weights, heights, beauty, everything, and we shove it neatly some where in a filing cabinet. And this is the very essence of science! The act of grouping things together. But one has to wonder... would we do this if we couldn't see? Do the eyes give us power over the universe that we wouldn't otherwise have?



By seeing an event you change it. Take a ball and bounce it in the street. It has equal odds to be anywhere on the street, but by observing you choose its placement. Quantum theorists have known this for years. It has even been claimed that "astromoners may have unwittingly hastened the the end of the Universe by simply looking at it". The eye makes men into gods, gives us power superman could only dream of. Would there even be a universe without someone to observe it?
Eyes are terrifying. How else could Medusa turn whoever stares at her to stone? Why would the biblical character turn to ash when she turned around to see her fallen city? Why couldn't Psyche gaze at her lover? Because they would gain power over them, simply by observing their form. The United States knew that:



So did George Orwell, and the idea has crossed over into modern culture. Often the television show LOST will open in on a closeup of someone's eye, as do many shows and movies. But I have to wonder, what would the universe be like if we couldn't see it? What would we be like? Living in complete darkness. Would we feel more one with our reality? Would we be in harmony, peace? Maybe to be truly enlightened, one has to SEE that he or she isn't supposed to SEE.

Golden Ass Street Performers

I found this video sort of amusing.

Old Comedy vs. New Comedy

I found an excellent site that explains the differences between old and new comedy: http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots/genrecm.htm

Old comedy is focused more on "slapstick action, scatological and sexual jokes and just about every other device of humor know to man", and is often used to parody "tragic" plays. Old Comedy does not typically base its story from tradition like tragedy, but is based primarily on the poet's fancy, or as the site puts it, "characterized by free comic fantasy". Political and social satire are also paradigms of Old Comedy, and can be based on "plausible solutions to contempory problems". An example would be in Lysistrata when the women come up with a plan to deny their husbands sex to stop the war. "political and intellecutal figures from contemporary Athenian scene such as Pericles, Cleon, Socrates and Euripides are [also] targets of harsh comic censure". (On a side note, according to wikipedia, Socrates didn't much care for this abuse, even going as far as blaming Aristophanes for leading to his death. Curious that Aristophanes is in the Symposium, wouldn't you say so?) Another important part of Old Comedy is the chorus, whose presense declines in New Comedy.

New Comedy "focuses on family matters such as complications in love relationships, with no interest in the concerns of the polis, which were central to Old Comedy". The site describes New Comedy as more universal, which made it easier to transfer to Rome, Italy and England, and later, to our television screens. The site declares, "Old Comedy, on the other hand, was tied to the political and social milieu of fifth century Athens and therefore could not be as easily transplanted. But the spirit of Old Comedy still survives, for example, in modern political cartoons, occasional musical comedies, and comedy skits on television which satirize political figures and current trends". So Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park would be considered a form of Old Comedy. They are satire, and focus on absurdities in our lives and the world at large. Judd Appatow style comedies, Arrested Development, Big Bang Theory, and most sitcoms are New Comedy, that is they focus on humor in relationships. It is also important to remember that comedy usually ends in celebration, weddings, feasts, dances, confetti, balloon animals, clowns, dancing kittens, hamsters on pianos, chimpanzees riding segways, and hypnotoad.

Everything is one

"The Big Thing is everything. It is the universe. You, me, your family, my family, everyone we know, every piece of sand on a beach, every tree in the forest, every flittering butterfly, every flower blooming in the prairie, rabbit, dog, cat, mouse, demon, beast, and decaying body. And like the great Alan Watts said, 'the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean’s depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets... Our feelings about the crawling world of the wasps’ nest and the snake pit are feelings about hidden aspects of our own bodies and brains, and all of their potentialities for unfamiliar creeps and shivers, for unsightly diseases, and unimaginable pains.' Everything is one, the good and the bad, black and white, death and life, woman and man, light and dark, happy and sad. You are not a soul encaged inside a flesh prison. You weren't thrown into an alien world. An alien universe. You are part of this universe. You are this universe. Look around you, everything, everything in the room you are in, it all came from earth, the sun, the galaxy, the universe. Stars, black holes, nebula clouds, exploding super novas and dying white dwarves, all you. All you. You didn't spring from no where. No. You are materials made of this planet. We all are. And that's what makes you special. Your ability to influence it."