Totally unnecessary, I guess this is the moment when I’m saying So long, and thanks for all the fish.

(Eisenstein’s 1946 diary entry as quoted in Eisenstein’s visual imagery – Criterion, 2000)

I was feeling peculiar. So many things didn’t fit. I mean, in the lawyer’s office, why was that man reading his newspaper upside-down? He belonged in the shrink’s office. Or maybe just the outside pages of the newspaper were upside-down and he was reading the inside straight-side-up? Was there a God? And where was the Red Sparrow? I had too many things to solve. Getting out of bed in the morning was the same as facing the blank wall of the Universe. Maybe I should go to a nude bar and stick a 5 buck bill into a G-string? Try to forget everything. Maybe I should go to a boxing match and watch two guys beat the shit out of each other?

But trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job. And sometimes even in sleep you couldn’t rest. Last dream I had I was laying under this elephant, I couldn’t move and he was releasing one of the biggest turds you ever saw, it was about to drop and then my cat, Hamburger, walked across the top of my head and I awakened. You tell that dream to a shrink and he’ll make something awful out of it. Because you are paying him excessively, he’s going to make sure to make you feel bad. He’ll tell you that the turd is a penis and that you are either frightened of it or that you want it, some kind of crap like that. What he really means is that he is frightened or wants the penis. It’s only a dream about a big elephant turd, nothing more. Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that’s all there is to it. The best interpreter of the dream is the dreamer. Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.

(Pulp, Charles Bukowski, 1994)

William S. Burroughs: A man within (Yony Leyser, 2010)

the new idiot = an intelligent, educated and articulate person whose thinking is muddled by lectures from the postmodernists of the left.

Manifestations:

the new idiot will describe the 9/11 terrorist attacks as ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos‘ (Karlheinz Stockhausen);

the new idiot’s reaction to unprovoked acts of violence by protesters against the police at a march, in a liberal democracy: ‘superb‘, ‘bravo’ , ‘well done‘ etc etc ;

the new idiot choses to sweep under the rug all the crimes done in the name of Our Lord Marx-Lenin the Engels, and, in general, tends to ignore the catastrophic effects of joining an utopian uprising (any utopia!);

the new idiot thinks that because he listen to Wagner or Bach, and reads Derrida or Baudrillard is morally superior to someone who listen to Pink Floyd or Radiohead, and reads Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler;

the new idiot believes that reality is a social construct;

Cure:

None. For some cases taking off the blindfolds might help, for others a visit to North Korea has been recommended, but I have my doubts that it will work.

Q: What are you writing?

A: A novel.

Q: What’s the story?

A: That’s no story. It’s just people, gestures, moments, bits of raptures, fleeting emotions…In short, the greatest story ever told.

Q: Are you in the story?

A: I don’t think so… But then, I’m kind of reading it, and then writing it.

(Waking Life, Richard Linklater, 2001)

1. Two-slit experiment (*):

2. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

(*)  The picture and the explanation of the two-slit experiment taken from A brief history of time by Stephen W. Hawking:

‘If electrons are sent through the slits one at a time, one would expect each to pass through one slit or the other, and so behave just if the slit it passed through were the only one there –giving  a uniform distribution on the screen. In reality, however, even when the electrons are sent one at a time, the fringe still appear. Each electron, therefore, must be passing though both slits at the same time!

(…)

One way of visualizing the wave/particle duality is the so-called sum over histories introduced by the American scientist Richard Feynman. In this approach the particle is not supposed to have a single history or path in space-time, as it would in a classical, nonquantum theory. Instead it is supposed to go from A to B by every possible path.’ (emphasis added)

…each of the radical theories about language and thought refutes one of the others in a game of rock-paper-scissors. Differences among languages, the point of pride for Linguistic Determinism, is a headache for Extreme Nativism, which assumes that concepts are innate, hence universal. The precision of word senses, which Extreme Nativism uses to discredit definitions, cast doubt on Radical Pragmatics, which assumes that one’s knowledge of a word is highly malleable. And polysemy, which motivates Radical Pragmatics, spells trouble for Linguistic Determinism, because it shows that thoughts must be much finer-grained than words.

The theory of conceptual semantics, which proposes that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought, stands at the center of this circle, compatible with all of the complications. Word meanings can vary across languages because children assemble and fine-tune them from more elementary concepts. They can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest. And they can support our reasoning because they represent lawful aspects of reality –space, time, causality, objects, intentions, and logic– rather than the system of noises that developed in a community to allow them to communicate. Conceptual semantics fits, too, with our commonsense notion that words are not the same as thoughts, and indeed, that much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other. “Words are wise men’s counters,” wrote Hobbes; “they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.” Centuries later, Siegfried Sassoon invoked a similar association when he wrote:

Words are fools

Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.

But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools

Of quiet; seldom-seen..

(Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, 2007)