Silence

Posted by yseult on May 14, 2005 in Personal, The Odd Philosophical Question

We learn to live with a lot of things. Deal with open hatred and envy, fight battles that we never dreamed up having in the first place, fall down and pick ourselves up again… ever on.

But silence… well, silence has a way of growing, of building itself up. Until at a certain, undefined point it starts to nurture itself, to sustain itself like some alien device. Built up from pictures, unsaid words, and loudly thought snippets of sentences that go unheard. Figments that go lost between the irrelevant and the importance of tomorrow. To the self they are real, almost ‘spoken’. In reality, they don’t exist.
In my mind and life I am a solitary wolf. I am used to silence around me (and very, very rarely in me), but there is nothing more painful than the deafening silence of the un-said… or the unshared.

Umberto?

Posted by yseult on Apr 5, 2005 in Personal, The Odd Philosophical Question

Décidément… des choses bizarres se passent. Umberto? Alors si c’est vraiment une manifestation spéculative de qui je crois… dis? Tu n’aurais pas sû trouver un nom un peu plus subtil?… ou alors mettre ton vrai nom? Mais il est vrai je pourrais me tromper. Après tout, qui sait quoi sur les speculations, les intellects ou les indications de voyage? gt; Merci pour les voeux de Pacques, trèsor…

After that nice meta-message to a ‘not lurking anymore’ character here (I’m feeling like being shadowed by a conspiratory Casaubon *clears throat and desk*), I’ll get back to topic… which is… nothing of importance.

I did clear up some issues with my book, discussed a new/old book project and got handed a new article to write. Fun, fun… and again FUN. No, seriously. I’m wrestling this translation down, slowely but it’s going down. And that’s a good thing. Work is basically the only thing on my mind at the moment since all doubts and insecurities come from there and my hope is that once I clear those my head will eventually stop spinning. Health is still bad, but hey… the sun is back. *gg*

I just went through the poems of the last three months and one thing strikes me as odd. Apart from the fact that most of the time I cannot remember having written what stares at me from the paper (sic!) there is a strange double articulation in these writings. On one side they express a clear and even obvious love and nearness to people, shared pain etc. and expectations. On the other hand this is mostly articulated by a vocabulary that designates a distance of space and physical removedness. I have always had a passion for ambiguous expressions and choosing the lesser obvious expression over the well used one. This can really be seen in my stories where there’s a constant game going on between me writing something and playing with the subconscious auto-completion going on in the reader’s mind. For instance (a recent example): my Lancelot – while being struck down by an evil, evil Saxon – hits the gound… with ‘sickening simpleness’… or when someone (Arthur) opens his hands in acceptance and let’s go of everything dear to him, they open like ‘withering flowers’… Too much lecture of Rodenbach and the Symbologists, I know.
But this nearness-removedness thing going on in the most recent writings is unsetteling me in a way. And most of all, it adds to the doubts and some choices I have made and am about to make. Or is it just the expression of this? What a nice causality puzzle for the philosopher…

The metaphysics of doubt

Posted by yseult on Apr 4, 2005 in Personal, The Odd Philosophical Question

Doubt can take up different forms while creeping up on you. It can do a lot of things for you or against you. In fact doubt is one of the main tools in the line of the work I am doing.
Technically speaking doubt is what you get when you assess your opinions, beliefs and stances of and towards the world and the situations of life. Opinions, beliefs ans stances are falsifiable, meaning that they can turn out to be wrong or wrong ones turn out to be accurate. In this rough sketch (JM, please don’t send me a copy of Brandom’s last article…) that hundreds of philosophers have tried to put so much better than I could do it, all turns around one little word: ‘…can…’ (replace that with a ‘could’ if you happen to be an external realist).
The whole modality of doubt runs from this verb.
In our everyday lives we are not thrown off balance by the fact alone that things turn out to be wrongly assessed or inaccurately described, not by the fact alone that we err, are wrong about things, people, situations…
What starts the perpetuum mobile of that tiny little voice or the little devil sitting on your shoulder is the uncertainty that flows from this. In the monumental set of our everyday stage it may only take so much as a changed iota to cause us to plummet. Because: if I was wrong about this, I could be wrong about that as well…. etc. And suddenly are our beliefs, opinions and stances are bracketed, put on hold, set under close scrutiny.
That’s what doubt really is about.
The futility of the reality we make up for ourselves. The fact that certainty is a mathematical illusion and that the world is literaly spiralling towards chaos. Doubt can be the one question you’re asking in class to be sure about an ascertained theory, it can be the feeling that someone just lied to you or it could be the switch that makes the light go out forever.
Some people turn towards faith or ideologic systems to rebuild some foundations that the doubts cannot reach or are not allowed to reach. Others make doubt their new ideology. Others again commit suicide since none of this seems to matter anyway.

Doubt can take up different forms and it can do a lot of things for you or against you.

I’m aware of the fact that this sounds all a bit weird and that I’m still under the influence of rather heavy codeine pain meds, but don’t worry. I am in no way giving in to the doubt. If anything I’d say the last year and the few months of this one have been filled with a huge load of doubts… and I am still here.
Doubt has a life of it’s own, not unlike bacteria it has a very cunning way of adapting itself to changed situations to survive. And as our beliefs and opinions of the world change, doubt mirrors this change. Not only that. Doubt is multi-layered. It comes in long or short term versions, minor insecurities or a major ‘I don’t know what my future holds’ crisis.
Whatever form it takes, it’s always a chance for reassessment, recalculation, reassurance and empowerment.

Doubt can take up different forms and it can do a lot of things for you or against you.

Quote of the Day.

Crusades of various meanings

Posted by yseult on Mar 22, 2005 in Personal, Writing

Thanks for your messages, guys. My back isn’t getting much better, I can only hold the pain down with the meds. Which means that I will take a train on Wednesday back to Switzerland (how I will get through 5 h of sitting on uncomfortable train seats is beyond me).

Other than that I don’t have much news. I read wilweathonDOTnet this morning and the meta-blogging is back to main-topic status. Seems that he went to msnbc for a coverage on celebrity blogging and was highly disappointed. What did he expect? I mean really. It’s not as if msnbc had a reputation for the ‘real story’ behind the media hype, no?
Anyway, Will reveals one basic truth about blogging (together with his friend Shane Nickerson): “I keep my blog because I want to write the way you do” Club. I am glad that ‘Salon’ picked him as a good example on how to blog as a celebrity, because his style and his writing are so close to reality that you have no trouble imagining him to be your next door neighbour instead of a famous writer and well known actor. (For those of you who are not experienced enough of the culture of the 90ies: he used to be one of the prodigies on ‘Star Trek: the Next Generation. But if you are in fact into this fandom, please, please spare me the discussion about the uniforms for outside missions and why they’re not matching each other according to rank or something…). Back to Will: His entries come straight from the heart and he doesn’t care if some of it appears to be either odd or silly. As a reader you never feel manipulated or manouvered which you easily feel with other blogs (also celebrity ones). So if you need a cheer up, you can be sure Will has something in store for you.

I’m coming back to Salon.com’s feature of celebrity blogs just for a second. As usual the piece is absolutely worth the read and it’s hilarious. But it starts with one of my most hated ideas about blogging: “For the people who write them, blogs are a means of self-expression first and foremost, but they also reinforce an individual’s sense of being part of a community. Even more important, they’re a rudimentary form of validation: I’m being read, therefore I am.”
I am cursed by the same recurring questions, right? I would certainly agree strongly with the first part of this assertation, but certainly not with the second part. (Btw: the ‘for those people’ at the beginning of this sentance makes it to the top list of my ‘things absolutely not to say if you don’t want to loose the reader). As someone who has spent a lot of time in the theories about personal identity, personality, individuality and all those terrific (sic!) ideas about the human self, I _know_ that a lot of your definition of the self depends on the object stance society takes towards us (thus making us an object, hence ‘object-stance’). But does that really compell me to be conscious about it all the time? Do I need to be read to keep on existing? I’ll cut this short now: no. The blog exists wether it is read or not. In fact I could keep a blog without ever reading back my own entries and not communicating the link to anybody. Does that mean that the Blog is dead? Unexisting? Unreal?

Let’s have a look at the French way of anwering this question. On the other side of the world there’s an event that calls itself: La fête de l’Internet (or Party of the Internet) and it’s funded by the French governement and the various offices of cultural advancements. That says it all, no? No? Really not?
Well, here’s what it’s about: creating links throughout the internet and celebrating its marvels. My first thought is that the best celebration is to use the internet accordingly instead of making a huge venture out of it. Nevermind.
On the frontpage another blogging apostle is ranting about THE experience. You don’t really get a name to go with that article and the web page of this ‘internet party’ is highly annoying to me. So they link to the initial page that this silly article was published on: here. (Proceed to this link at your own risk and please close your mouth before you continue to read… Thanks.) What the person says is basically this: blogging was a phenomenon until everybody decided to join in and now it’s a drag. But there will come the ‘cyber purge’ (aka the great metaphysical deluge sent from the ever watchful gods of the internet) and only the worthy blogs will survive. Only the good ones. The ones that deserve to survive.

Well. I don’t think I need to comment on that in any way. Everybody knows by now that I resent the normative judgements applied to the internet or its ways of expression. If you don’t by now: read the bloody banner on top of the page and START BLOGGING!

This and that

Posted by yseult on Mar 20, 2005 in Personal, Writing

Today was a marvellous sunny day. But funnily enough, the humour of the people in the streets doesn’t quite match the nice spring weather. They’re either very stressed or simply bad tempered. I have no idea why that is… they’re unpleasant and quite hostile. So, I am exiting the bank and one man – about to enter said bank – holds the door for a woman just before me, but when I get out and I am not ever really past him he snaps an annoyed ‘thank you!’ at me… Hm.

Anyway… I am still trying to update my story, but hell, all this time in between has washed all sorts of plot bunnies to my doorstep. They’re all lining up here and asking me to sidestep my plotting again. What am I gonna do? Make them leave? Take them in?
If I am going with what I have in mind right now, some people are sooooo going to hate me. But since I already was called an ‘evil, evil person’ by a reviewer (for almost killing Lancelot… I could never, but well, the reviewer didn’t know that it really can’t get any worse.

Apart from the already moribund candidates for a killing I think I will have to bring back some amount of action to this story or else… well, let’s be honest: there is only so much Arthur brooding you can take before the whole general angst theme wears thin and you lose the compassion of the reader. I’ve lost a lot of momentum with this new chapter, mainly because I tried to figure out the next three chapters instead of simply writing out the next logical step.
But I’m sure I’ll get to an ending one way or another.

Too many Saxons, to many knights on the verge of death and no logical timing… I’m with the back up against the wall and that’s the problem with a story you publish chapter by chapter I guess. You can’t go back and write a door into the wall as Bernard Cornwell once advised in a foreword to Sharpe’s Sword. And by the way: yes, the door was crucial to the story… saved Sharpe from being really dead instead of just dying, AND it gave him the chance to be saved by his best friend and a mute nun… *ggg* Don’t worry. There will be no nuns in this story, but maybe I can find the door…