Thursday 28 April 2005

... one of those tortures where a task has constantly to be begun again, like that of the Danaids or of Ixion.

Jealousy, whose eyes are bandaged, is not only powerless to see anything in the surrounding darkness; it is one of those tortures where a task has constantly to be begun again, like that of the Danaids or of Ixion.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 135, Penguin Classics, 2003



So, how did the Greeks get it so right? And so long ago?
How did they work out that life consisted of such repetition that one felt like Ixion strapped to a never-ending turning wheel of fire (http://www.pantheon.org/articles/i/ixion.html), forever pronouncing "Be Nice To He Who Looks After You". Mind-numbing, horrifying repetition.

"They say that by the commands of the gods Ixion spins round and round on his feathered wheel, saying this to mortals: 'Repay your benefactor frequently with gentle favors in return'." [Pindar, Pythian Odes 2.20] (http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Ixion.html)


Ixion - Tormented For Eternity By A Flying (Burning) Wheel

Quel mortel insolent vient chercher le trepas? (What insolent mortal comes here to seek death?)

Quel mortel insolent vient chercher le trepas?

Est-ce pour vous qu'est fait cet ordre si severe?

Je ne trouve qu'en vous je ne sais quelle grace
Qui me charme toujours et jamais ne me lasse

---------------------------------------------------------

What insolent mortal comes here to seek death?

Was it for you that his stern order was made?

I find only in you a certain grace
Which always charms me and never tires me



from:
Racine, "Esther"
quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 106, Penguin Classics, 2003

... debris of a dream ... inattention ... vain anxieties: a life most like a dream.

We do not know, we shall never know, we struggle to put together the debris of a dream, and in the meantime our life with our mistress goes on, our life of inattention to what we do not know is important to us, attention to what we think important but perhaps is not, a life made nightmarish by beings who have no real connection with us, filled with forgetfulness, gaps, vain anxieties: a life most like a dream.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 131-2, Penguin Classics, 2003

Memory

For memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allows us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections; but there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memories and which we shall never be able to check.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 131, Penguin Classics, 2003

... that invisible, translucent yet changeable medium through which we looked ...

In front of my eyes, in front of Albertine's, there had been not just the morning sunshine but that invisible, translucent yet changeable medium through which we looked, I at her actions, she at the importance of her own life: that is to say, those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more a pure vacuum than the air we breathe; they compose around us a changing atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, which we could usefully measure and note as carefully as the temperature, pressure and season, for each of our days has its individual character, physical and psychological.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 133, Penguin Classics, 2003

=====================================================

By far the finest literary exposition of the concept of Weltanschauung
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltanschauung) (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1918freud-civwelt.html)
that I have ever read - and written maybe seventy years before used by Peter Checkland in his Soft Systems Methodology work
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Checkland) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_systems) (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~bustcfj/bola/research/ssm.html) (http://members.tripod.com/SSM_Delphi/ssm4.html) (http://valinor.ca/ssm3.html).

Here, Proust vividly describes the essential invisibility yet pervasiveness that constitutes a "Weltanschuung" that guides our thoughts (shallow and deep). Yet not only inform our thinking, but, by means of an almost self-referential loop, constitutes the bedrock by which thinking itself can only occur (in the same manner that air itself constitutes the means whereby (human) life can exist).

... her narrow, velvety gaze fastened on the passer-by, stuck to her, so gluey and corrosive ...

Certainly at these moments she was not at all the same as when it was she who was interested in some passing girl. In that case, her narrow, velvety gaze fastened on the passer-by, stuck to her, so gluey and corrosive that you felt it would not be able to detach itself without removing a patch of skin.

quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 134, Penguin Classics, 2003

Tuesday 26 April 2005

Boredom / Expectations on Achievement

There is so much attention played on achievement, right from an early
age.  Doesn't matter what age and doesn't matter even what level
of achievement.  It is more doing something, and making sure that doing achieves something that others can recognise - that others say "You achieved this thing".

So, you are directed to achieve from an early age.  Is it sociological or is it biological?  Do we have to achieve to simply stay alive - at least when we are young - we have to achieve to learn and to thrive and to grow?  Probably, probably not!

How much do we know there/here?  But whatever it means, this may not be the case when we are older.  We are imbued with having to achieve but at some point in life - earlier, or later - we sometimes (is that always?) decide that achievement does not matter any longer.  We don't care about achieving any longer - we just want to live and get from one day to
another.  And so we don't strive to achieve and therefore we don't achieve.

And following on from that level of on-achievement, nothing happens.  And we feel like nothing happens.

We have then the lack of an expectation of achieving something, which leads to the lack of action with respect to achievement, which leads to the lack of achievement, which then reinforces the lack of an expectation for achievement.

A nice loop indeed.

Does this mean, that from a certain point (in time, in life) - there is just that rather gradual, nice, slow decline to a quiet death?

Thursday 14 April 2005

Ahasuerus

Et la mort est le prix de tout audacieux
Qui sans etre appele se presente a ses yeux.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Rien ne met a l'abri de cet ordre fatal,
Ni le rang, ni le sexe, et le crime est egal.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Moi-meme . . .
Je suis a cette loi comme une autre sournise,
Et sans le prevenir it faut pour lui parler
Qu'il me cherche ou du moins qu'il me fasse appeler.

------------------------------------------------------

And death is the reward of any audacious person
Who without being called appears before his eyes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nothing can protect one from that deadly order,
Neither rank nor sex, and the crime is equal.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Even I . . .
am subject to this law like anyone else,
And without forestalling him, if I am to speak with him
I must wait for him to come to me or at least have me called.

-------------------------------------------------------------

from:
Racine, "Esther" (Act I, Scene iii)
quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"The Prisoner" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 5)
p. 11, Penguin Classics, 2003