using a mask to poison Your partner
(can sometimes be tricky)
reassure Your loved one by cradling them in Your arms
(or on Your knee)
gently stroke their face with the mask
(so that they get used to it)
talk to them softly and smile
(the victim will sense if You are anxious)
You can hold the mask over their nose and mouth
(to give them a dose while they are sleeping)
loved ones will also breathe in the poisonous gas
(while they are crying)
Anon
From In the Jungle of Cities:
Love, the warmth of bodies in contact, is the only mercy shown to us in the darkness. But the only union is that of the organs, and it can’t bridge over the cleavage made by speech. Yet they unite in order to produce beings to stand by them in their hopeless isolation. And the generations look coldly into each other’s eyes. If you cram a ship full to bursting with human bodies, they all freeze with loneliness.
From Baal:
EKART: There’s a kind of sky in my head, very green and vast, where my thoughts drift like featherweight clouds in the wind. They’re completely undecided in their course. All that’s inside me.
BAAL: It’s delirium. You’re an alcoholic. You see, it gets you in the end.
EKART: When I’m delirious I can feel it by my face.
BAAL: Your face has room for the four winds. Concave! [He looks at him.] You haven’t a face. You’re nothing. You’re transparent.
EKART: I’m growing more and more mathematical.
BAAL: Nobody knows your history. Why don’t you ever talk about yourself?
EKART: I shan’t ever have one. Who’s that outside?
BAAL: You’ve got a good ear! There’s something in you that you hide. You’re a bad man, like me, a devil. But one day you’ll see rats. Then you’ll be a good man again.
I’m having an interesting email exchange with a colleague about life and love, etc. We I seem to be converging on reiterating the idea that often it doesn’t make sense to ask if a concept exists but rather what properties someone’s variant of a concept has. “Love” and “God” are labels for something; people don’t invent names for no reason, so the correct question is whether two people mean the same thing when they use the word “love”. By “meaning” here I mean a very organic set of feelings as well as linguistically expressible stuff. I can see how this extends to God. So the question is again not whether a god exists, but rather what properties someone’s conception of God has. But still even here you could imagine that someone’s God concept could be horrendously self-contradictory. Schopenhauer argues quite convincingly that one concept of a Christian God is unacceptable:
“… According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment. And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance. So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know. … Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all.”
I can’t recall if Schopenhauer takes the last step and declares the existence of the god he describes impossible, and in general who’s to say that a worst case characterisation is not true. The same can be said of love, and occasionally one hears mention of the impossibility of “true love”, or how it’s all “just” the action of various polypeptides, or how it just evolved to trick us all into reproducing, etc. These ideas could be correct.
One problem with discussing this stuff is perhaps solvable by making explicit the different ways psychological things are described in general. I like the idea of personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. So at the personal level you focus on feelings, people are in control of their actions, you focus on what it means to be a person, holistically. At sub-personal levels of explanation, upon which the personal level is built I suppose, you can talk about what influences (in a strong determininistic sense) behaviour and feelings. It’s crucial to make clear at what level of explanation one speaks to avoid making category mistakes (and more importantly to avoid making others miserable).
To elaborate further, I imagine it will never be the case that a therapist would sit a client down and say:
“Ah you’re depressed today. Well we inhabit a deterministic universe so a set of experiences beyond your control has caused you, together with genetic predispositions, to feel the way you do and to behave the way you have, including, thankfully for you, your inevitable decision to come to me today where I will (because of my life history and genome) tell you what I’ve just told you and begin a set of interventions where I’ll make you believe you’re in control of what you’re doing but actually that belief, that feeling of conscious choice, is just an unavoidable epiphenomena resulting from the deterministic but random process of evolution which brought us all here.”
This could, on some level, be a true characterisation of what’s going on, but the problem is that we feel we are in control regardless of what the physics says, and our language, including word-emotion relations, evolved accordingly. Back to love again, many of us have a pure and beautiful notion of love which comes mainly from feelings and can’t adequately be put into words and certainly cannot be adequately expressed by any (necessarily sub-personal) scientific theory.
This reminds me of empirical work. Laing, Phillipson, and Lee’s (1966) book Interpersonal Perception is on the very subject of trying to determine empirically if two people have a shared set of ideas about each other. They use questionnaires with questions like:
How true do you think the following are?
- She understand me
- I understand her
- She understands herself
- I understand myself
How would SHE answer the following?
- “I understand him”
- “He understands me”
- “I understand myself”
- “He understands himself”
How would SHE think you have answered the following?
- She understand me
- I understand her
- She understands herself
- I understand myself
The idea is that by comparing people’s answers you can predict stuff about their relationship. I imagine this sort of thing could be helpful to determine if two people or a group of people have compatible notions of love, God, life, the universe, and everything. But perhaps the more natural way to discover such things is the good old traditional technques of meeting people and having a wee chat…
“Life, love and romance are all about surprise: the surprise of an unexpected bouquet of flowers, a mysterious stranger met by chance at a party, the unannounced return of an old lover at your doorstep, the confusion of finding the unknown side of an old friend or acquaintance who becomes your partner. The freshness of a relationship kept new even after years.
“Alive equals surprise.
“The logical world … seems to be a world of no surprise, no serendipity, no romance. Axioms generate propositions, one deduction blindly follows another. The game is over almost as soon as it is begun. Where is the romance in that? No chance for the heart to overrule the head, contradiction to conquer cogitation, desperation and devotion to deliver you from derivation.
“Or is there?
“In the 1920s, a mathematician named Goedel proved that in any consistent logical system [the result is a bit weaker than that... AF], there will always be statements whose truth or falsity can’t be proved by the simple mechanical rules of logic. Even if these “undecidable” statements are appended to the list of axioms, as long as this enlarged system remains consistent, there will still be other statements whose proof or refutation lies outside the power of formal reasoning.
“The unknowable and the unpredictable is embedded in even the most simple of things. Romantically speaking, I like to think of this as saying that if we have a guarantee of truth, and thus the possibility of honesty, then from this we must necessarily have surprise, even mystery—and maybe then, just maybe, with a little bit of luck, we must have love. Q.E.D.”
All Tomorrow’s Parties = lush. Favourites: Spiritualised (“Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space” still does the job), Yann Tiersen (in a burn Amélie burn phase), Nick Cave, Einstürzende Neubauten (table tennis bats on bits of plastic piping, throwing bits of metal from a bucket), Low, Devastations (“… all about silence… holes… big enough and empty enough to fill the grand canyon…”), Joanna Newsom (cute, with a harp), Psarandonis (bouncy Greek madness), Felix Lajko (playing a zyther[?!])…
Love is… tongues conjoined with a rusty spike… defibrillation after a fall from a tree…
Dov Gabbay, logician, fan of psychologism:
I got married in 1970. My wife is an artist, and I learned a lot from her; the fact that I can talk about things, for instance. I remember I was going out with her, before we were married, and we were walking from one part of the university to another part. My objective was to get from A to B, she wanted to stop and look at the moon, because it looked very nice. And I thought: “What the hell would I want to look at the moon for, when I want to go to B?” Now, of course, I will look at the moon at all times with her.
(From an interview with “Ta!”) My reluctance to look at the lunar eclipse suggests I need to meet an artist—pronto 
A few months ago, Linus Nilsson and Vadim Dubrov, students between IT universitet and Konsthögskolan Valand in Gothenburg, Sweden, designed a project which explores the meaning of the word “love”. They wrote software which searches blogs for sentences including the phrases “I love” and “You love”, and randomly displays them every few minutes on a couple of screens. Simple but amusing. I like.
(More photos.)
Very nice tune. My iPod first delivered this to me after a very long day… Lyrics:
I want to explore you
I’m gonna get under your skin
So you can feel me running through your veinsI want to examine
Every inch of your frame
The pressure points that cause your joy and painOur love goes under the knife
There is no room for doubtNow i’m inside you
My hands can feel their way
Further inside than I have ever beenNow i can really
Mess around with your heart
And fill it to the brim with broken dreamsOur love goes under the knife
Two lives may be savedAnd if I pull this off
I’ll refuse the Nobel prize
Instead I will look into your eyesIf I pull this off your whole body will be mine
And I’m prepared to work throughout the nightOur love goes under the knife
Nothing is taboo
…Here on the cutting edge of scienceToo much information
I feel i’m getting lost
Absorbed into the fibre of your soulDeep within the abbatoir
Of your entrails your insides
Lost in you forever far from homeOur love goes under the knife
Someone got too closeOur love goes under the knife
The heart was rejected by the host
