Passages...

Busy preparing for yet another presentation and thought Ill share here few segments from the passages that I usually exploit as references to get across complex points on human consciousness.

The first is from Principles of New Evaluation- Fredrich Nietzsche, what my friend referred to as the incisive gem of human zenith.

[1]

''Knowledge is judgment!" But judgment is a belief that something is thus and thus! And not knowledge! "All knowledge consists of synthetic judgments" of universal validity (the case is thus and not otherwise in every case), of necessary validity (the opposite of the assertion can never occur).

The legitimacy of belief in knowledge is always presupposed: just as the legitimacy of the feelings of conscience judgments is presupposed. Here moral ontology is the dominant prejudice.

The conclusion is therefore:
1. There are assertions that we consider universally valid and necessary;
2. Necessity and universal validity cannot be derived from experience;
3. Consequently they must be founded, not upon experience, but upon something else, and derive from another source of knowledge!

(Kant infers (1) there are assertions which are valid only under a certain condition; (2) this condition is that they derive, not from experience, but from pure reason.)

Therefore: the question is, whence do we derive our reasons for believing in the truth of such assertions?
No, how our belief is caused!

But the origin of a belief, of a strong conviction, is a psychological problem: and a very narrow and limited experience often produces such a belief! It already presupposes that there is not "data a posteriori" but also data a priori, "preceding experience."
Necessity and universal validity could never be given to us by experience: why does that mean that they are present without any experience at all?

There are no isolated judgments!

An isolated judgment is never "true," never knowledge; only in the connection and relation of many judgments is there any surety.

What distinguishes the true from the false belief? What is knowledge? He "knows" it, that is heavenly!
Necessity and universality can never be given by experience! Thus they are independent of experience, prior to all experience! That insight that occurs a priori, therefore independently of all experience, out of sheer reason, is "a pure form of knowledge"!

"The basic laws of logic, the law of identity and the law of contradiction,are forms of pure knowledge because they precede all experience.''--But these are not forms of knowledge at all!they are regulative articles of belief.

To establish the a priori character (the pure rationality) of the judgments of mathematics, space must be conceived as a form of pure reason.

Hume had declared: "There are no synthetic a priori judgments." Kant says: But there are! Those of mathematics! And if there are such judgments, perhaps there is also metaphysics, a knowledge of things by pure reason!

Mathematics is possible under conditions under which metaphysics is never possible. All human knowlege is either experience or mathematics.

A judgment is synthetic; i.e., it connects different ideas.
It is a priori; i.e., every connection is a universally valid and necessary one, which can never be given by sense perception but only through pure reason.

If there are to be synthetic a priori judgments, then reason must be in a position to make connections: connection is a form. Reason must possess the capacity of giving form.


(Cant help but worship)

+++

The second is Calvino's lovely ride through prose poetry and metaphysics.

[2]

POLO:… Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind. . .

KUBLAI: . . . and however far our troubled enterprises as warriors and merchants may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.

POLO: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who strive in camps and ports exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these bamboo hedges, motionless since time began.

KUBLAI: Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush.

POLO: Unless porters, stonecutters, rubbish collectors, cooks cleaning the lights of chicken, washerwoman bent over stones, mothers stirring rice as they nurse their infants, exist only because we think of them.

KUBLAI: To tell the truth, I never think them.

POLO: Then they do not exist.

KUBLAI: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks.

POLO: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis is true: they exist and we do not.

KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

POLO: And here, in fact, we are.

+++
And there are those genius of passages from the one and only Doestoevesky. Notes from the Underground especially.

As I typed out the second am just pondering how it reflects so much on the Internet. Blogging in particular.

City mapping...

It is said that for a person, a name of the city invokes one dominant image.

Be it a café, monument, railway platform, a conversation, or even the flashy smile of the girl at the take-away joint; but it is almost always moulded by the circumstances of the image.

A farewell, a smile, a special love, aroma of the certain variety of tea or splattering of the rain that drenched you in your favourite shirt, in all - there you are to stand, enshrined in the religious sanctity of your own memories.

Adding colours, smiles and meaning.

A few dozens of these images become planks to navigate through the innumerable other less easily remembered images and then soon you find you have navigated across a significant segment of certain river they call life.

Inevitably.

For now lets just be content with brick and mortar. Shall we?




Liverpool.

West London.

Bath.

Manchester.

London- her camera but I shot it. So Its mine. Technically!

Car n Love....

                    L--o- V... e ?

                    Ro mA.A.A.A.n?tic lovE

          PlaToniC)(            love    ??

                                        filial *l[ov]e?

                                                                            l-O-v- E?

                                  S-t-i-l-l a love?
                                                                                  "...."

        
                          Big                              car ?

s........l......oooo..w                               ca..r 
 
 
                                                 Chauffeur-driven 
                 CAR 
 
B /r\k O e n \     car
 
 
                                                                             s--t--i--l--l a car ?
                           OOOO? 
 
PS: From Minghella's English patient.

Stonehenge....

Twilight song of the autumn.....

whispers of silhouettes
fade into
darkness of
dead papyrus leaves

mourn
an ancient
relationship
while waiting
for the last bus


someone's wearing
the same perfume
that
she used to ....

we could be still friends, you know
we consoled each other

an embrace

deep soulful sigh
a momentary funeral
for the two,

unmindful
the bus advances
to the future
through the
lingering aromas
of the past....

The Story of Thirteen benches.....

More of the benchtime stories.....

One of the absolutely ethereal haunts on the planet: Hyde Park opposite Serpentine.


The halogen washed 'quarter-backs' in Stratford .

The odd rectangular opposite Tower of London.

The red draped hematites in a train station- somewhere abouts Yorkshire.

For the just about minimalists : Piccadilly gardens , Manchester.

The famous Lord's balcony-Marylebone, London.

The Lancashire statement!

More of Hyde Park Fever.

The gorgeous entrail of a snugly arc : Colchester, Essex.

The cream curve covering the Windsor castle, Windsor. Had to wait like seventeen minutes to catch it vacant.

The irresistible circle in the shades: near Tower Bridge.

Perhaps the oldest in my collection(dating BC): Overlooking The roman bath, Bath, North east Somerset.

The royal property at the Windsor Gardens, Windsor and Maidenhead.

Play it again Sam?

The childhood of the azure morning grows into the adolescence of the perfect noon like a lady in her ballroom dress, embroidered in the cotton of the white clouds. The bright capacious light, that dances, wagging all through the distance of the baggies of green woods and over the sparkling waters and cascades through the valleys they call parking-spaces and plunges into the crevices of the routines.
Shadows formed on the warm pavement are darker and distinct, the dry air lies motionless with the mutual smiles of faces glistening heavily in the weight of the consolidate warmth.
Once a while a rare breeze gathered conveys the sweet of the lillies that it had gently stroked on the way. The women lovely in their cuts of bright pinks and parrot greens walk their voluptuous sways silently enjoying the admiring eyes of the bare-chested young men. Hordes of children engage in their own pleasant reverie unmindful of the grime, howling and laughing . Sweet invisible chirps are heard more than often from beyond the rickety yawning street.

As if this be just a fine tuning it rains from nowhere a few tiny droplets for a very brief moment and then the masterly rendition is repeated with the rainbow as the violin.

In such afternoons, what else could one taste but the bitter froths of the pint: many a pints and many a barrels.
Play it again Sam?
Will ya? This is as near as we could get to the sun.

PS: On the absolutely lovely day of 21 June, 2005 : The longest day of the calendar.

Fifty Five Fiction....

Extempore of the evestigio has passed me on one other of those virtual batons. I gather this is about writing anything fictional in fifty five words while indulging in the sentiments of instantaneous word gratification against the backdrop of diminishing attention span.

Whoever behind this idea should be rewarded by forced to read all the volumes of Remembrance of Things Past without any break!

Anyways here goes my flash effort written in the songtime of that lovely- The lonely shepherd by Georghe Zamfir from the Kill Bill OST:

Through the hustle she scrambled into the eastbound Piccadilly train. Finding herself a seat, she opened Brothers Karamazov and started midway through a long passage. The tall guy opposite was snatching a quarter-smile. It was then she noticed an old Brothers Karamazov tucked between his hands.

She smiled back.

That is how Lizzie met Charlie.

+++

On the way back home, Gods accorded a spark of muse. So here is another version:

No, ! ‘Not sea shells seeshells by the seashore’, he repeated again,
‘It’s She sells seashells by the seashore’.

Okay, I’ll try again ‘See shells seecells by the sheeshore’.

No dear, ‘S-h-e s-e-l-l-s s-e-a-s-h-e-l-l-s by the s-e-a-s-h-o-r-e’.

Right, 'See shells sheesells by the seashore'.

Come-on now, ... 'Its See shells seasells by the sheesore'.

She laughed wildy!

+++

And, in here, the baton lies buried .
Dig if you wish.

Skirtish...lagniappe

y
dus
ur
slky
skrt
avta
brsh
agnst
me
alwys??

Transit Thoughts...

College is like a summer holiday that haunts the later winters of the life.

So with the autumn term lectures on, you could see again those eager unsure eyes focussed on you, trying to religiously devour everything that you hurl.Strange feeling.
Just by looking at them, you could say who had spent time looking for meaning in the lyrics of rock anthems, who's gonna become the environmentalist, who would go on into politics and who would be the reputed art critic. The enthusiasm in the air brought back memories from my life, when I was doing my forensics.

I had gobbled up a whole manual of homicide n ballistics- the calibre, the spin of the bullet the type entry wounds, etc, with the intent to vomit out in the viva which, I nevertheless did, in the sadistic spectacle of that cruel questioning until that last question by the stout professor who asked,
‘Could you tell us what is the cause of death in the decapitation’? Being sure it wasn’t in the book, first I panicked and later tried holding hands of lady luck, ‘Bleeding secondary to severing of main vessels’, I pushed with a smile. So you mean ‘All the blood would flow out...’?

I shamelessly mumbled something about cardiac shock, very well aware that I was the focus of the Kodak moment. Then the bugger made me think for one whole embarrassing silent minute, right there in front of all, until I could think for myself and answer vagal hyperstimulation.

‘Good’ he retorted, and finally consoling ‘Don’t worry its not the junior-term question, actually you did well’.

That was some frigging learning. And now you see it from the other side, you realise how originality and spontaneity is so precious.

Speaking of original unprejudiced view on life, this gentleman- in the picture here on a hardback that I received today, stands like a pillar; precise and content, he ought to be recognised at least by one particular reader here.

Between Uni and such expectant pastime, the winter should be interesting to say the least.

Life, unclassified!

For now friday alcohol beckons !