Wednesday, September 27, 2006

squilla di lontano

"Every human being is involved in a desperate attempt to narrate himself into a safe place." ...

Narrative, then, is a primal reflex, a mode of action as integral to our species as the sandhill cranes' migratory programming is to theirs. "Consciousness is a storytelling machine," ...

What can it mean to think thoughts you can't recognize as your own? If such thoughts can only belong to "someone else," what's happened to the "me" you think you are? ...

When I brought up President Bush's statement to reporters on a visit to Panama last November, "We do not torture," in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Powers quipped, "He could be a character out of an Oliver Sacks book." ~ interview around The Echo Maker. via
Storytelling and programming the same thing?

[after an interval] Why do media and we not see that Bush has escaped from a Sacks book?

Bonus quote: "Are animals religious?" One might amend to: Are animals antireligious?

[quite a bit later] More Powers on enthusiasm.

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"A single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering," Powers notes in The Echo Maker.

Vonnegut's representation of time/consciousness as mosaic in Slaughterhouse-Five.


"One of the things that attracted me to neurological science," Powers told me, "is its inescapable suggestion that intellectual processes are dependent on emotional processes. The power of Capgras' is to show what happens to reason when it's separated from emotion."

Ran across this the other day:

"The scientific approach to life is not really appropriate to states of visceral anguish." -Anthony Burgess

9/28/2006 12:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

9/28/2006 12:34 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Merci, M. ah.

He looks there more like the man who mistook his wife for a pretzel.

9/28/2006 12:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jon, the polarization is big, in the media, to be sure. I see a lot of people managing to enjoy life. I was in NYC not too long ago, and the place was as pleased as punch with life, and with itself. So there is this scary question of why do more people not share your fear. Who's out of it - the bonvivants or those who are fearful? Is one group sleeping a media nightmare while the other is dreaming a sitcom sleep? Is your fear as stagemanaged as their fearlessness? Are we all scared shiteless but some of us know this better than others? Or do the others just enjoy better coping mechanisms? This country has enjoyed great airspace, both around its perimeter, and inside itself, for a long time. It's helped build a habit of tranquility, underneath the narcotized breastfeeding. Some habits are difficult to change. I sometimes wish to have lived in a place that made some sense.

9/28/2006 7:32 PM  
Blogger Juke said...

How much sense?
All of it? All the way?
Isn't religion about return, movement toward?
Speciation is the new black.
Moral centers, in a Velikovskian geometric, have Onanist characteristics.
When Dimensions Collide.

The pigs have bred themselves to apotheosis.
Rosa Luxemburg or Mata Hari.

9/28/2006 8:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When it comes to rechronologization, Velikovsky can't hold a candle to this guy.

9/29/2006 1:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jon - think drift dive in a Green Zone - a worthwhile interview - snip:

when you’re inside the Green Zone, you couldn’t hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, you couldn’t smell the acrid smoke of a car bomb, you couldn’t hear the honking of traffic on the outside. It was like you were in a whole different world. It’s like you had blasted off from somewhere outside in Baghdad and wound up on Mars.

9/29/2006 1:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"So there is this scary question of why do more people not share your fear. Who's out of it - the bonvivants or those who are fearful? Is one group sleeping a media nightmare while the other is dreaming a sitcom sleep? Is your fear as stagemanaged as their fearlessness? Are we all scared shiteless but some of us know this better than others? Or do the others just enjoy better coping mechanisms?"

Life is a Cabaret

9/30/2006 12:31 AM  
Blogger Juke said...

Do gypsies have inalienable cultural rights?
To what? What boundaries are they hitting?
Life is a bowl of cheerios.
Velikovsky said amongst the rags of sense/nonsense and scattered indecipherables, that the earth gets smacked periodically by large celestial bodies, and that this accounts for much in the fossil record that seems anomalous.
These are in fact really the birth pangs of some thing, and speciation's not too outlandish for it. Lots of folk are scared and have no voice, no representative to scream that fear, it doesn't behoove so to scream, exactly. Despair is still the greatest sin.
Life is a cabernet. Un petite sauve et non mais beaucoup difficile.

10/01/2006 7:53 AM  

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