Dreams

It seems dreams aren’t just visual non-sequiturs that happen behind closed eyelids. This piece from Jonah Lehrer, on the New York Times Opinionator blog, is interesting (and slightly worrying, for someone with at least occasional insomniac tendencies):

All this knowledge about the important roles dreams play in our waking lives is fascinating. But it doesn’t make me feel better about my insomnia. Obviously, my old consolation — dreams are nothing but useless melodramas — is clearly false.

So, in not sleeping, and thus not dreaming, one deprives oneself of valuable unconscious ‘solving’ time. The question is, how to get to sleep? And what role might nightmares have in this?

Fish on pragmatism

Stanley Fish on the New York Times Opinionator blog, on pragmatism (quoting from Joseph Margolis' new book Pragmatism's Advantage): 

What is truth? What is real? How are we to act? What is the source of moral and/or epistemological authority? Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to these questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like 'Be ye perfect'). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the 'ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind'. 

Being 'good'

To live well (the breadth of interpretability there is intentional), to live with some compassion, as well as passion. This is, at least in part, my version of the point of living.

That compassion part of it, however, doesn’t strike everyone as to the point, or even necessary. Caring for others, or even simply ‘being good’, isn’t very interesting.

Mark Vernon recently wrote on the idea of the ‘goody two shoes’ (as opposed to a more benignly-looked upon, yet still unfashionable, goodness):

‘I’ve been wondering why it’s so hard for us to talk about the notion of a good person. It fails to appeal, with its overtones of one who obeys the rules – worse, who habitually obeys the rules because they have a cloying, compliant character. 

‘I think that’s a clue to the problem: we’ve become so used to thinking about morality as being about obeying rules, doing the right thing, that we’ve lost sight of a more appealing notion of goodness.’

Love

Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.

Vincent van Gogh

Today’s Playlist

1. 5 Years Time, Noah and the Whale
2. Pick Up the Phone, Dragonette
3. Take Me to the Riot, Stars
4. Trick Pony, Charlotte Gainsbourg
5. Open, Kahn Brothers
6. Polyester Bride, Liz Phair
7. Lets Fall Back In Love, Slow Club
8. Hold My Hand, Hootie & The Blowfish
9. Islands, The XX
10. It’s Good To Be In Love, Frou Frou
11. For Emma, Bon Iver

From hope to hope

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Samuel Johnson

10 Simple Things

1. Grace under fire.

2. Smile at the right time.

3. Don’t take things personally.

4. Silence can be golden.

5. Lean on your friends.

6. In an argument, deal in the present, not the past.

7. Don’t hold others to a higher standard.

8. Be the bigger person. Let go.

9. It’s all about timing …

10. Don’t overanalyse!

Friday

The weekend's too short, so let's start Friday ...

On Loss

Three meditations on loss.


One 
At the start of this month, I watched Isabel Allende talking to Andrew Denton on Elders. Her words stayed in my head for days afterwards – she was like a mystical sage. Viz:

Denton: You left Chile and you went into exile because your life was in danger. What is it like not to have a place to belong? 

Allende: At the beginning I was totally paralysed by nostalgia, the feeling that everything had been taken away from me. I had lost my family, my house, my in-laws that I adored, even my dog, my job, of course, everything that was dear to me. And my country. Your country is the place where you don’t have to ask – you know the code, you know the clues, you know the jokes, you have the references, you get the accent. You look at a person and you know exactly where that person stands in the society. You only have that in your own country and, of course, I lost it when I left Chile. I became a writer because I was living in exile and my first book was an attempt to recover what I had lost. So in a way now I have my country in my books.

Two 
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop

Three
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?

He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the ‘Es muss sein!’ of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nagel on Nietzsche

The point is to … live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilised being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

Thomas Nagel, summarising the teaching of Nietzsche