Discarding Descartes.

The truth is that Walkers is genuinely interested in what she does. He
has read Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty on aphasia and language
acquisition, has given serious thought to there matters because of his
engagement with words, and therefore he does not feel like a fraud or
a conniver when he starts pelting her with questions. At first, Hélène
is taken aback by his enthusiasm, but once she realizes that he is in
earnest, she begins to talk about articulation disorders in children,
her methods of treating the lisping, garble-mouthed, stuttering
youngsters who come to her clinic, but no, she doesn't only work with
children, there are the adults as well, the old people, the victims of
stroke and various brain injuries, the aphasics, the ones who have
lost the power of speech or can't remember words or jumble words to
such an extent that pen becomes paper and tree becomes house. There
are several different forms of aphasia, Walker learns, depending on
which part of the brain is affected--Broca's aphasia, Werincke's
aphasia, conduction aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, anomic
aphasia, and so on--and isn't it intriguing, Hélène says, smiling for
the first time since she entered the restaurant, truly smiling at
last, isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language,
and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say
that language--the ability to experience the world through symbols--is
in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that
the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu,
Descartes. The mind and the body are one.
Paul Auster

Amen

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not
rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary
rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that
contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things,
but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit
of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions
dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and
Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the
unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite
deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by
mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should
conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights" is a part of a
continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and
mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that
the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and
Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the
mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture,
sustains the mind and--since there is no other metaphor--also the
soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever
find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more
crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper
statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would
be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except
through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that
we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible
that, once people accepted the fact of their short struggling lives,
they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe
with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And
we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has
caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better
than others, but award themselves permission to behave in ways that
would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery
of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account
when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot
believe."
Christopher Hitchens

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The invisible leash.

El derrumbe de un sueño
algo hallado pasando
resultabas ser tú.
Una esponja sin dueño
un silbido buscando
resultaba ser yo

Cuando se hallan dos balas
sobre un campo de guerra
algo debe ocurrir
que prediga el amor
de cabeza hacia el suelo
una nube vendrá
o estampidas de tiempo
los ojos tendrán.

Fue preciso algo siempre
y no fue porque tú
tenías lazos blancos en la piel
tú tenías precio puesto desde ayer
tú valías cuatro cuños de la ley
tú, sentada sobre el miedo
de correr

Una buena muchacha de casa decente no puede salir
que diría la gente el domingo en la misa
si saben de ti
que dirían los amigos
los viejos vecinos
que vienen aquí
Qué dirían las ventanas,
tu madre y su hermana
y todos los siglos de colonialismo español
que no en balde te han hecho cobarde
qué diría Dios
sin amas sin la Iglesia
y sin la ley
Dios, a quien ya te entregaste en comunión
Dios, que hace eternas las almas de los niños
que destrozarán las bombas y el napalm

El derrumbe de un sueño
algo hallado pasando
resultaba ser yo
Una esponja sin dueño un silbido buscando
resultabas ser tú

Busca amor con anillos
y papeles firmados
y cuando dejes de amar
ten presentes los hijos
no dejes tu esposo
ni una buena casa
y si no se resisten
serruchen los bienes
que tienes derecho también
porque tú
tenías lazos blancos en la piel
tú tenías precio puesto desde ayer
tú valías cuatro cuños de la ley
tú, sentada sobre el miedo
de correr

Silvio Rodríguez

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Who wants to be a referee?

You will encounter in your travels folks of your own age who chose the
institutional path, who became the arts administrators rather than the
actors, the casting agents rather than the writers. These folks chose
to serve an institutional authority in exchange for a paycheck, and
these folks are going to be with you for the rest of your life, and
you actors and writers and people who come up off the street, who live
without certainty day to day and year to year are going to have to
bear with being called children by these institutional types; you
will, as Shakespeare tells us, endure "the spurns that patient merit
the unworthy takes."
It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a
craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution.
It's courageous and requires a courage of the order that the
institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so
unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so
excuse their exploitation of you.
David Mamet

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Green penitence.

The "be less bad" environmental approaches to industry have been
crucial in sending important messages of environmental
concern--messages that continue to catch the public's attention and
spur important research. At the same time, they forward conclusions
that re less useful. Instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting
vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what
not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt
management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western
culture.
In very early societies, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice were
typical reactions to complex systems, like nature, over which people
felt they had little control. Societies around the world developed
belief systems based on myth in which bad weather, famine, or disease
meant one had displeased the gods, and sacrifices were a way to
appease them. In some cultures, even today, one must sacrifice
something of value in order to regain the blessing of the gods (or
god) and reestablish stability and harmony.
Environmental destruction is a complex system in its own
right--widespread, with deeper causes that are difficult to see and
understand. Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with
terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves--which
the "eco-efficiency" movement provides in abundance, with its
exhortations to consume and produce less by minimizing, avoiding,
reducing and sacrificing. Humans are condemned as the one species on
the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as
such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities, and
even our population so as to become almost invisible. (Those who
believe population is the root of our ills think people should mostly
stop having children.) The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions,
zero "ecological footprint."
As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal.
But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that
poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans
can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a
failure of the imagination.
William McDonough & Michael Braungart

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Successful zombies.

There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are
scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some
conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set
them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or
their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over
to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of
their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them
with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to
such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough;
and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated
to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to
the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the
whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour
or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes
open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and
no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or
alienated: and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own
way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the
market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they
had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and
mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their
own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they
have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play;
until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant
of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against
another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he
might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have
stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box
empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with
lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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Awakening

para bien o para mal mi memoria no es un diccionario que yo pueda consultar como garufa de mis insomnios
de manera que no sabría decir cuándo exactamente empezó este relajo sacrosanto este optimismo de cuerpo entero
sí podría asegurar que uno abre las ventanas antes que la puerta y ve la realidad como paisaje antes de que el paisaje dé aldabonazo
y también que uno puede tener una gran experiencia en sofocar latidos en apagar fogatas pero siempre se trata de malsanas prórrogas y la gran experiencia de poco sirve cuando el corazón y el cerebro empiezan a arder y el latido se convierte en pulso subterráneo
la cosa se pone realmente grave la noche en que ese tembladeral de conciencia me impide hacer el amor con luisa nada menos
y ahí nomás tomo la decisión
se acabaron las contradicciones la dicotomía el conflicto interior
algo evidentemente marcha mal
no es justo que lo dialéctico entorpezca lo erótico

y lo que andaba mal era la duda sobre todo porque no había ya duda posible
era la oscuridad especialmente porque todo estaba claro
era la indecisión tal vez porque en el fondo estaba decidido
era porquenó el miedo y su olor penetrante debido sobre todo a la cabal certeza de que era necesario sobreponerse a él
y esto no es el suicidio
conviene aclararlo de una vez por todas
la revolución no es jamás el suicidio
la revolución ni siquiera es la muerte
la revolución es la vida más que ninguna otra cosa
aunque pueda morirse en ella
aunque se muera efectivamente
es la vida conjuro
la vida exorcismo
la vida sacrílega que profana a la muerte

incluso cuando se mata
cuando se asume conscientemente semejante escalofrío
se mata como coacción de vida
para quitar la muerte del camino

qué instante surtidor ese en que uno adivina
que el pueblo
ese condenado a paciencia perpetua
es nuestro cómplice

tal es más o menos la historia
la vida pasión y muerte de mis conciliaciones y el nacimiento de mi inconciliación

Mario Benedetti

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Manufacturing Depression

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.”

In fact, Greenberg seems to believe that contemporary psychiatry in most of its forms except existential-humanistic talk therapy, which is an actual school of psychotherapy, and which appears to be what he practices, is mainly about getting people to accept current arrangements. And it’s not even that drug companies and the psychiatric establishment have some kind of moral or political stake in these arrangements—that they’re in the game in order to protect the status quo. They just see, in the world’s unhappiness, a chance to make money. They invented a disease so that they could sell the cure.

Louis Menand

Full article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/01/100301crat_atlarge_menand#ixzz0h3rpUOB2

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Stockbreaker

By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were
growing. He had glimpsed the essential truth of the market: that even
people who called themselves professionals are often incapable of
independent thought and that most people, though obsessed with money,
have little ability to make decisions about it. He knew what he was
doing, or thought he did. He had learned to find everything he wanted
to know about a company on the Internet; what he couldn't find, he ran
down in the flesh. It became part of Connie Lebed's life to drive her
son to various corporate headquarters to make sure they existed. He
also persuaded her to open an account with Ameritrade. ''He'd done so
well with the stock contest, I figured, Let's see what he can do,''
Connie said.
What he did was turn his $8,000 savings bond into $28,000 inside of 18
months. During the same period, he created his own Web site devoted to
companies with small market capitalization -- penny stocks. The Web
site came to be known as Stock-dogs.com. (''You know, like racing
dogs.'') Stock-dogs.com plugged the stocks of companies Jonathan found
interesting or that people Jonathan met on the Internet found
interesting. At its peak, Stock-dogs.com had maybe 1,500 visitors a
day. Even so, the officers of what seemed to Jonathan to be serious
companies wrote to him to sell him on their companies. Within a couple
of months of becoming an amateur stock-market analyst, he was in the
middle of a network of people who spent every waking hour chatting
about and trading stocks on the Internet.
Michael Lewis
Full article at NYT: http://ow.ly/15FYd

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Vengeance is a dish best served scorching hot

Cuentan los hombres dignos de fe (pero Alá sabe más) que en los
primeros días hubo un rey de las islas de Babilonia que congregó a sus
arquitectos y magos y les mandó construir un laberinto tan perplejo y
sutil que los varones más prudentes no se aventuraban a entrar, y los
que entraban se perdían. Esa obra era un escándalo, porque la
confusión y la maravilla son operaciones propias de Dios y no de los
hombres. Con el andar del tiempo vino a su corte un rey de los árabes,
y el rey de Babilonia (para hacer burla de la simplicidad de su
huésped) lo hizo penetrar en el laberinto, donde vagó afrentado y
confundido hasta la declinación de la tarde. Entonces imploró socorro
divino y dio con la puerta. Sus labios no profirieron queja ninguna,
pero le dijo al rey de Babilonia que él en Arabia tenía otro laberinto
y que, si Dios era servido, se lo daría a conocer algún día. Luego
regreso a Arabia, juntó sus capitanes y sus alcaides y estragó los
reinos de Babilonia con tan venturosa fortuna que derribó sus
castillos, rompió sus gentes e hizo cautivo al mismo rey. Lo amarró
encima de un camello veloz y lo llevó al desierto. Cabalagron tres
días, y le dijo: "¡Oh, rey del tiempo y substancia y cifra del siglo!,
en Babilonia me quisiste perder en un laberinto de bronce con muchas
escaleras, puertas y muros; ahora el Poderoso ha tenido a bien que te
muestre el mío, donde no hay escaleras que subir, ni puertas que
forzar, ni fatigosas galerías que recorrer, ni muros que te veden el
paso".
Luego le desató las ligaduras y lo abandonó en mitad del desierto,
donde murió de hambre y de sed. La gloria sea con Aquel que no muere.
Jorge Luis Borges

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Nietzsche gazing into the abyss.

La publicidad es una técnica parásita, aprovecha para su beneficio el
talento de otros, reutiliza hallazgos, vampiriza ideas. No deja de ser
lógico. En nuestro afán por conectar con el consumidor resulta más
seguro, y también más cómodo, aprovecharnos de aquello que ya ha
alcanzado el alma de nuestro público. Hemos hecho evolucionar tanto
ese instinto que en ocasiones somos nosotros quienes desarrollamos
algo larvado que quizá nunca hubiese trascendido, o no lo hubiese
hecho tan rápidamente, sin la colaboración del altavoz social que es
la publicidad.
Es ahí donde se percibe el camino de retorno. El discípulo enseñando
al maestro. El cine y la publicidad se parecen a veces tanto que hemos
olvidado hasta qué punto son diametralmente opuestos. Nosotros, al
utilizar los trucos, los discursos, los alientos de nuestro modélico
profesor, hemos tenido la necesidad de adaptarlos hasta hacerlos
irreconocibles. Y hemos educado con ello a la sociedad. La brevedad,
la elípsis, la síntesis, la concreción infinitesimal en el montaje, el
efectismo, el ritmo han variado al ser utilizados en un género nuevo.
Y la gente se ha acostumbrado a ello. Hoy es fácil distinguir hasta
qué punto la publicidad ha transformado el lenguaje cinematográfico,
en una inequívoca devolución de aportaciones.
Toni Segarra

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Mud. Rib. Sex.

In the beginning, in the garden, a baby was supposed to be a surprise,
appearing as suddenly as a sneeze. The way God intended it, two people
in love would share a like-minded pretty thought, and then there it
would be -a baby nesting in a tree above their heads. Or someone might
lay a cheek upon someone else's stomach and simply feel happy to be
alive, then would come the sudden weight of a baby upon the person's
back. People would like this, too. It wouldn't be like they'd walk
around afraid to have a good time for fear of making babies.
But the way God intended it did not pan out.
After He cast Adam and Eve out of the garden, God wed the creation of
babies with the act of sex. It was like pairing the eating of a
nectarine with a lunar eclipse, the tearing of a fig leaf with a
sudden snowfall. Previously it had no inherent logic but since God
made logic, now it was the way things would be.
Jonathan Goldstein

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