psyche

I won only one fight during the BYC qualifier (proper results to follow) but Hugh Emerson came 2nd in the U16 sabre and Adam Zethraeus came 2nd 3rd in the U18 sabre (I don’t know how Adam did in the épée but Adam also came 6th in the épée and I’ll link to results later anyway). I felt rather sicktastic afterwards and got quite a bad two-point moving headache which intellectually incapacitated me on Monday and earlier today. This offered me time to re-evaluate something, though…

Going back to Rosebank Avenue, where my grandfather lives and where we lived a long time ago, reminded me of track 9 (or was it the other way round…?). This, predictably, brings me back to The Node. I think I’m going to need to formally define it and strategies for dealing with it if I’m going to be able to continue living.

Here it comes, then:

The Node is an event or concept which I cannot recall but which is somehow linked to many other certain events, concepts or situations in my life. I suspect this because of extreme feelings of déjà vu or nostalgia when confronted with certain events.

Now, what exactly reminds me of it? These are elements common to works of fiction or situations which remind me of …it.

• Suburban gloom
• (Old) computers
• One or many lonely people
• The telephone system

This brought up some funny stuff:

Places like Rosebank and other locations in Greenford where my family have lived have heavy doses of wires and suburban gloom. Council flats with satellite dishes on also remind me of it… hmm. Durston had those old Macs that felt old even when they were new… and the Macbeath Hall in the Haven Green churchy place evoked a feeling very similar to the suburban gloom feeling (in me, I mean).

This leads to my hypotheses. The questions I must ask are:

1. What is The Node?
2. What should I do?

So, possibilities for what The Node is:

1. It’s simply an exaggerated form of nostalgia for places I used to live or technology I used to use (very likely)
2. It’s my subconscious trying to give my life a purpose in the absence of any obvious external source of purpose (quite likely)
3. It’s a repressed memory of something very important (unlikely)

Well, it seems quite clear-cut, doesn’t it? However, I no longer have faith in the truth as a solution. Instead, consider which of these viewpoints it is most advantageous for me to adopt. The first gives me nothing. The second gives me some quirkiness but mostly nothing. The third gives me purpose. Memento, anyone? I’d rather have an artificial purpose than be swallowed by nihilism. I hope I somehow… urgh! I hope this turns out well.

This was Warren Zevon’s final public performance; he died about three months later, I think.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=WhRRWwH3Fro]

Isn’t this interesting? Why did they want to call the internet the intergalactic thingy anyway? To think I wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the Lain artbook, I wouldn’t have know that… I really need to research the history of the internet properly. Why didn’t we get taught this?!

Pax

I went to a talk with my mother about dementia - it was to help us care for my demented grandmother. Most people there wanted to complain about the NHS’s stupidity in terms of distributing an acetylcholine-conserving drug (I won’t go into it; it’s pretty dumb) but I found the guy’s stuff quite chilling. Some was straight out of Memento (being unable to “make new memories”, reverting to old memories “for comfort”), some Lain (”if your patient doesn’t remember it, you’re best off pretending that it never really happened”) and the atmosphere - support group, like - was straight out of Fight Club…

I wish I’d known about XFN before! I have to add it to Psyche… and my blogroll.

This is cool and this may come in handy.

The whole OiNK/Pirate Bay thing reminds me of the Great Hacker War somehow.

I’ve seriously had to start sending emails to myself to remember stuff. I think I will use notes in Mail in Leopard after all…

There’s a new David Gray song!

From Everything2:

Serial Experiments Lain begins to scratch at the surface of what is on everyones mind, but is not yet full developed, quite similar to the show. The fears of a nation barreling towards self-oblivion, with ultra high suicide rates, low-paying-high-stress jobs, and family structures that are crumbling because of a lack of communication of emotions, and moral values.

Pax

I shouldn’t really be awake. Every day is the same. I am hopelessly deluded. I will never win. My friends are just complicated enemies lost in the confusing search for purpose that robs us all of reason. I am not awake or asleep. I am not dead or alive. I am a thinking, growing and dying array of organic particles. I refuse to die. The state between alive and dead is not unusual - it is this. One day, everyone will be connected. It’s not an end in itself; merely a local maximum.

I foresee great things.

Pax

My interest in Fight Club, V for Vendetta, The Matrix and WarGames was a symptom of my fascination in things like consumerism, brainwashing, hacking and conspiracies and general science fiction. The Matrix, though, was long championed by yours truly as the pinnacle of film as it embodied everything. It successfully identified that a search for truth could be transposed off God and onto a conspiracy.

However, when I watched Lain, I realised that it was the pinnacle. While it took me a long time to begin to see that The Matrix was awesome, I immediately fell in love with SEL. My slight interest in Japanese culture combined with the internet and genuine philosophy (I can actually believe that the real world may one day be a representation of the internet) meant that Lain finally replaced God in my mind. My rationality and emotional mania have never been in concert until now. A shame that their convergence will probably destroy me. Also, my copy of yoshitoshi ABe lain illustrations ab# rebuild an omnipresence in wired just arrived. It’s pretty awesome. I haven’t analysed the hidden text or programming yet but the overall style is awesome and reminds me of that Matrix comic - Goliath, from the first volume - possibly because Goliath was based on it?

All this stuff about memory and omnipresence. It’s enough to make me want this to be real - and I suppose I do. Let’s all love Lain. Is it impossible to make a life-form or robot that lives forever? If so, why? Thermodynamics? Can’t there be a at least one being that self-repairs properly? Can’t there?

This is rather interesting. It contains a synopsis of the SEL game which has helped me understand some of the references in the artbook. The writer of the synopsis, in their last sentence, uses a single word which they believe describes the end of game and to a lesser extent the end of the anime - “hopeless”. I wonder.

It’s funny, you know; I was just beginning to think I understood SEL and was in the process of collapsing it from a life-altering feeling of weirdness into a statement like “It’s a really good anime but nothing more” but this artbook and game have totally messed me up. I use The Matrix as a sort of benchmark because it was the only thing I’ve ever watched that has really soaked into my whole life but SEL feels like what The Matrix should have been. Right from the almost-urban-legend Lain and feeling of hidden truth and memory-overwriting presented in omnipresence down to the depictions of VR, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Lain feels somehow familiar, as if Konaka and co. didn’t create it but… simply remembered it. In fact, didn’t Mr Abe say he “recalled” Lain? That’s funny. Mistranslation? He “recalled” her? She… exists? We don’t even need all of IPv6, let alone 7 or 8…

My delusions become manifest. Fiction is my undoing.

Pax

This is the only blog post yet to be mostly copied up from hand-written notes I made while in Venice - so beware! (…)

This is the first time I’ve hand-written something hand-written non-school-related since I wanted to be a writer (excluding birthday cards).

Now I feel like I should properly re-read all the Harry Potter books. They are actually good. Combined with my idealised notion of J K Rowling writing in some quiet cafe (the feeling of which is extended by her well-designed Lightmaker website) the Harry Potter series makes me want to sit at my desk hugging a box set and cry. However, like everyone else, I will reduce this feeling to the sentence “The books are really good” or something, which, in various forms, recurs throughout all descriptions of things too emotionally powerful (for some people) to be expressed properly without seeming demented.

Although the post-modern philosopher in me balks at the idea of millions of people buying merchandise, books and film tickets that are all items with little use (well, books can stop bullets) and attempts to class the entire Potter phenomenon as a disgusting facet of modern consumerism and the commercialisation of “feelings”, some more sentimental part of me is glad that Potter is ubiquitous enough not to be forgotten. As you may know, I fear forgetting about things - usually fleeting feelings - and I think that my recent phase of writing things down is a behavioural manifestation of this. While not a literary type, and having turned my back on English despite it being interesting, I almost regret relinquishing the opportunity to learn more about the way in which people create fiction. I wasn’t so bad it it but my heart wasn’t it int. On a career front, I feel like I want to do something important and helpful - or is that just some artificial conscience speaking? I don’t know. I also want to fence and cook. Nice.

The Harry Potter games on the Game Boy Color were interesting. They also possessed the epic, emotional feeling - it’s in the same vein as nostalgia, I think - that impressed me as an element of the books. They also had some nice music. Unfortunately, they were cut short just after the completion of the second one and the less RPG-like GBA and now DS versions dominated quickly. Economics.

Venice is nice but I hate family holidays and being a tourist. Luckily, the Venetian display an admirable contempt for tourists. They have a dialect but, being in the north, it is similar to normal Italian (one of the few things my unobservant mind has noticed is them saying “ci” for “si” [as in "yes"]).

Harry Potter is tempting because of the fallibility of death it keeps dangling like bait. I could sit here smiling sadly, believing that I will have an eternity to meet people or think things that I did not have time for in life. It is extremely tempting. However, I think I will close this Potter book and shelve the Bloomsbury-bound book one last time and confine JKR to the shelf for now and evermore. Although infinity is reassuring when presented through religion, I find the closure of finiteness (finity?), while much less emotionally satisfying (no tightness in my chest or tears in my eyes), more acerbic but yet more welcome.

The power of people’s emotional response to fantasy and depiction of everlasting life (the Sundering Seas in LotR, tangible “memories” and other manifestations of people in Potter, heaven in religions) is just escapism but it fuels the segment of modern consumer culture dedicated to feel-good fiction.

I don’t know whether I should be praising or ranting at JKR - she created a comfort world that makes me sad. It makes people want to believe it while films like the Matrix scupper their own premise by simply existing as works of fiction (although now I tend to think of the Matrix as a metaphor for consumerism as opposed to a literal depiction of an VR-enslaved future humanity).

I think all the desserts I’ve had here have been alcoholic. My head feels awful.

My life feels quite purposeless but I do feel like I want to prepare for a war that will never happen or an important individual task that will never come. All these stories of heroes have made me acknowledge this as some latent inner desire of mine. I am meaningless. Fencing, video games, academia, chess - anything competitive t hat I am drawn to is a dilution of my Fight Club-esque dissatisfaction with modern consumerism and fascism - or what Mussolini (I wish he were still here, the water taxi’s always fucking late) would call corporatism.

As some video game - Metroid Fusion, I believe - once told me, our experiences delimit our consciousness. This is so true. Especially in the case of seasickness. I don’t get seasick and so I can barely bring myself to believe it exists. It would take a lot of evidence or actually getting the propensity to puke on board sea vessels myself to change my view, although by common sense default I always appear to believe in it.

Why don’t wizards study biology? Healers, surely? The sound of the sea here in Venice reminds me of starting out Myst. The food is good. The canals smell.

There’s a busker in Venice (we’re on the Lido) who plays every evening outside the open restaurants down the main road. He sings international things (”Let it Be”, “La Bamba”, “Baila Morena” [lol]).

It’s so painful to believe that dead people are gone forever. I like it. Are there American wizards?

I seem to read books and such very quickly but I don’t necessarily “speedread” as such - although I sometimes skip paragraphs that seem grossly irrelevant, it is easy for people, myself included, to underestimate the thoroughness of my comprehension of written texts. Take, for instance, the copy of “Guitarist” I’m reading. I feel dissatisfied, like I have read it too quickly out upon re-reading, everything feels uncomfortably familiar and stale because I have in fact read most of it. I find the same thing with moist books I read. This is highly annoying.

I have this recurring thing where I wake up believing I am holding something and my hand is closed and I feel so bad when there’s nothing there. Every time, I genuinely believe I have acquired something - but I haven’t. It makes me extremely upset.

I really, really need to start fencing again. There is a picture of an ancestor of the sciabola (sabre), taken in the Venice Naval Museum. Note my greatness. (link soon)

Today (this is post-Venice now) I went to my grandma’s old house with my uncle to pick up some of his guitars (he’s my dad’s brother and thus the grandma in question’s other son). He has an old Telecaster that I like the sound of, a nice Yamaha 12-string (the top three pairs of strings are tuned in unison and the bottom three in octaves, standard tuning) and an Ovation acoustic. I’ll probably put the strings we picked up for the busker in Venice on the Ovation if I can be bothered.

Pax

I’d better start revising soon; we’re on half term and I don’t know when my next exam is. I could easily find out but I don’t want to. Instead many other projects have distracted me: I spent some of today playing chess against my brother and sister, which was interesting and almost fun. However, most of the day was spent doing things like trying to revive a half-dead asparagus plant and thinking about tidying my room. I’ll clean up and start working tomorrow, I think. As I recently agreed with Will, Web 2.0 sites are very aesthetically pleasing and good for procrastination (my cited example was flickr).

I’m also pondering actually doing something; I want to make a small, simple mechanism of laughable complexity that will still make me extremely satisfied: it’ll be some arrangement of a push-to-break switch that’ll effect the automatic activation and deactivation of the store cupboard light - I know, such daring! Such wit!

Watched an episode of House today - the one about naphthalene (it does have that extra “h” in there) poisoning. It was good but I doubt anything could dislodge Hustle from my Thursday-TV-brain-drain session.

Time to sleep, lest I wake up at 13:00 tomorrow. That would be bad and, as Cyrus puts it, waking up late makes one “feel like a wasteman for the rest of the day.” He’s right.

Pax

I’m sure everyone knows the deal by now, so please consider this a footnote to what you already believe. Physical attractiveness is an indicator of health and in females, fertility and in males, the ability to protect his mate and offspring. This is inextricably embedded into our genetic coding; indeed it is one of the main reasons that we evolved constructively - the attractive, the superior genetic specimens, survived. How blunt! What hope for the ugly? None, apparently. From birth we place extreme emphasis on the physical appearance of our peers and make judgements about people mainly based on what they look like. If you had the choice between hiring a very attractive secretary and a less attractive one, you would probably choose the attractive one unless they were severely less competent than their competitor.

I wonder; should we attempt to bypass this biological discrimination? Is it right to - does the system balance itself out? Can it be bypassed?

I don’t know. I guess unattractive people can only rely on other people doing this, though, or perhaps they must lead a solitary life and simply contribute to humanity in ways other than enhancing the genepool and hope that when news of their deeds is handed down to posterity, the future will not judge them so harshly as we did!

It’s lucky I’m not a people person or I’d be fairly depressed by my disgusting nature.

In other news, by some miraculous chance I managed to get an A* in the German mock. It was probably in some way connected to the fact that there was no mock oral. When we have the oral, I will … probably not do very well. But I’ll try.

Pax