Blogging is just applied… literacy?

Go to this page for more excellent nerdy humour! I, on the other hand, have to try to tear myself away from xkcd and get back to studying applied biology.

Love (according to Fromm)

Gah. All I do these days is study. (Except for last week, when the study was mixed with either planning, or actually having, my birthday dinner and other celebrations.) When I’m not studying, I’m reading study-related books, like A Hundred Years of Psychology (printed in 1933, but with an afterword for the 1966 edition), which is fascinating, amusing and worrisome in equal parts, and Escape From Freedom, by Eric Fromm. Fromm was a close associate of Freud, but more of an existentialist. Fascism worried him, and so he tried to synthesize psycho-analytic thought and Marxism – something right up my alley, in other words. :-p The book isn’t exactly easy reading, but this is a part worth getting into:

“Love is not primarily “caused” by a specific object, but is a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain “object”. Hatred is a wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of an “object”; it is not an “affect”, but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves.

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself. To be sure, it is not accidental that a certain person becomes the “object” of manifest love. The factors conditioning such a specific choice are too numerous and too complex to be discussed here. The important point, however, is that love for a particular “object” is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one can love, that it is the great chance of one’s life to find that person, and that love for him results in a withdrawal from all others. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love but a sado-masochistic attachment.

The basic affirmation contained in love is directed towards the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities. Love for one person implies love for man as such. Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming “after” the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific “object”; it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.

From this it follows that my own self, in principle, is as much an object of my love as another person. The affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and ability for such an affirmation. If an individual has this readiness, he has it also toward himself; if he can only “love” others, he cannot love at all.

Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite.”

He then goes on to talk about selfishness and greed, and how it screws with society. Cool.

Ikon #1

I don’t really want to compare myself to Marilyn Monroe (for so, so, many reasons), but must say that I like the sentiment expressed here:

Also, it goes kinda well with the theme for next edition of argument, which is Ikoner. My article will be in Norwegian (first one!), but maybe I’ll try to translate it for this blog too… we’ll see. If you want to read my article for the last edition (about homing pigeons; the theme was Home) it is on page 22 of this pdf.

Helvete heller

Bare et kjapt notat for å melde fra om den andre endringen i himmelhvelvingen i løpet av Hanne Melgård Watkins’ 24 år lange liv. Første endring skjedde da hun, på sin 17 års bursdag, fikk The Little Prince i gave på toppen av Mt Feathertop, Victoria, Australia. Der oppe, i skumringen, leste hun dette:

“For those of you who, like me, love the little prince, nothing in the universe can  be the same while somewhere, nobody knows where, a sheep which we have never seen may or may not have eaten a flower… Look at the sky. Ask yourselves: Has the sheep eaten the flower, yes or no?  And you will see how everything changes…”

Første endring gjaldt altså hennes forhold til stjernene. Andre endring derimot, gjelder et annet, også nattlig, himmellegeme: månen.

Stjernene ler og har sauer på seg takket være The Little Prince.
Månen, takket være Darlah, er bebodd av demoner. Onde demoner. Skikkelig skikkelig SKIKKELIG onde demoner. (Ok, teknisk sett er de kanskje bare destruktive. Men det blir et definisjonsspørsmål.)

Seriously, det må være den skumleste boka jeg har lest siden… tja. Jeg husker ikke sist jeg leste noe som gjorde meg redd for å gå tilbake til senga etter å ha skrudd av lyset i gangen og blitt stående i stummende mørke. Og det er lissom en barnebok! Bibbi Bokkens magiske bibliotek ga meg skumle frysninger da jeg var barn; hadde jeg lest Darlah hadde jeg aldri gått ut om natta igjen. Huff.

Tell Him He’s Dreaming

In this post I wrote about how I reckoned I could think myself into a depression, if I wanted to.

Apart from the cognitive stuff (negative triads, automatic thoughts, depressogenic assumptions, blahblah), another potential cause of depression is dreaming. The smart people in white coats worked this out because depressed people seem more so in the mornings. Complete sleep deprivation didn’t help, but if the patients were prevented from entering REM sleep (the type of sleep where you dream, though apparently they’ve found out that we dream at other times as well) throughout the night, they felt better the following day.

Conversely, you would expect that if on a specific night a depressed person dreamt more than usual, they would feel worse than usual the next day.

I don’t know if this applies to “normals” as well. (ie to non-depressed people.) If it does, I think I may have fallen prey to these evil mechanism and accidentally given myself a case of the blues. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not depressed. But, I have been waking up gloomy in the morning faaaar too often over the past week. It takes me a couple of hours, and then I’m back to “normal” (hehe, whatever that may be). And couldn’t a possible cause be that I have been snoozing for an average of two hours each morning, and thus spending a lot more time see-sawing in and out of REM sleep?

I’d like that to be the case. Because otherwise, I have no idea what’s up. Autumn? Also, if I am in fact “making myself depressed” in this way, there’s an easy cure! Just get up when the alarm rings.

London… again

If my last trip to London was a whirlwind, this trip was a gentle breeze. Andreas and I flew from Oslo Thursday night, and stayed at Erlend’s house until the following Tuesday. The four days inbetween were spent wandering about, through mostly sunshine and a few drops of rain, visiting a few cafés and fewer museums, catching lots of tubes and busses, and generally having an utterly relaxing time.

The photos reflect the relaxation, in the sense that I didn’t take very many. But here’s an overview, anyway…

Right by Erlend’s house there was a park, which we visited first thing in the morning. Frognerparken would be greatly improved by a few of these, don’t you think?

Andreas doesn’t like being photographed. He also doesn’t like wasting time waiting for public transport, but on this trip it was not at all a problem- I think the longest we had to wait was 3 minutes. Just enough time for a wornout homeless lady to come over and ask us for money, and then give Andreas a plastic flower. It’s still in my pocket.

A cappuccino and a slice of bruschetta for lunch?

….

No! A macchiato and a nibble! Either that, or Andreas’ hand has suddenly doubled in size.

This was in the National Geographic shop on Regent (?) St. From there we meandered off to gork at the Buckingham Palace (just to check if it was still there. Nothing had changed), and then head to Regent Park. Regent Park is well known for its balancing bowling balls.

Next up:

To prove that we were in fact in London.

The above was all of Friday, Saturday we wore ourselves out in the British Museum, and Sunday therefore had to be spent in, recuperating.

Three sculptures in the living room (/inflatable-mattress-bedroom). One of them is called Bruno.
Apart from hanging out with these three, Erlend and Siri, we took a walk through the park…

to a pub called The Plough for a solid old Sunday brunch, complete with strawberry beer and artistically beframed fence.

Where’s Wally?

Monday, and the view from a doubledecker bus,

…on our way to the…

Natural History Museum!

Which I absolutely loved. How could I not – they have the original Moosecap! (maybe)

And dinosaurs!

I was actually quite surprised at my own excitement at seeing these old skeletons (which were actually just plastercasts of the real bones) – kinda thought I’d grown out of the dino-craze in primary school. In some ways I have grown up though – I no longer found them scary. These, on the other hand…:

So many of them! (They are hummingbirds.) All stuffed, and all flying straight at you! Creepy.

The plan was originally to divide our Monday between the Natural History Museum and Tate Modern, but in the end half a day wasn’t really enough for the NHM. So we didn’t actually end up going to the Tate until late in the afternoon, about 40 minutes before closing time. Ooops.

The (blurry) End.

Free Love?

The day I saw this poem on the tube, I also read this in The Possibility of an Island:

“…It must be said that I had just passed by a ‘Poetry on the Metro’ poster, more precisely the one that reproduced ‘Free Love’  by André Breton, and, whatever the disgust inspired by the personality of André Breton, whatever the stupidity of the title, its pitiful antinomy, which only demonstrated, in addition to a certain softening of the brain, the instinct for publicity that characterised and ultimately summed up Surrealism, you had to admit it: this idiot had, under the circumstances, written a very beautiful poem.”

And with such an introduction, of course I now really badly want to read ‘Free Love’! Except, I can’t find it anywhere. Someone help? The closest I came with assistance from the internet was this:

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It’s a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It’s a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time

André Breton

Which just seems kinda voyeuristic… but I guess that’s ‘free’ too.

Moosehead Revisited

In this post I wrote about my inconsistencies with regards to clothing. Another, potentially more “serious” inconsistency regards my vegetarianism. In short, I’m not a vegetarian. I eat fish and seafood. I wear leather shoes. (Though I avoid fur. It creeps me out.) I occasionally have bacon-flavoured chips. (But only if I’m really hungry. I don’t really like chips much.) I sporadically try to think about where my eggs come from (don’t be rude), but more often than not my wallet decides which ones I buy. I think Norwegian sheep have such a good life that it’s ok to eat them occasionally.  I would eat Moose or Kangaroo if someone went out and hunted me one. Speaking of Moose- I’m not quite sure how to interpret this:

The Possibility of an Island

While in London, I read this book by Michel Houllebecq. It alternates between the story of Daniel1, a stand-up comedian living approximately in the present, and the stories of Daniel24 and Daniel25, his neo-human descendents (who live approximately 2000 years into the future). Neo-humans are a new species of human, and in Daniel1’s tale we come closer and closer to discovering how they came into being, through a fairly linear (but riddled with philosophical sidetracks) storyline. Daniel24 and Daniel25’s stories jump around a bit more in time, but also eventually provide a picture of the life of the neo-humans since their conception (if you can talk about the conception of something artificial?).

At one point, Daniel24 is ruminating on the narratives that humans tended to come up with:

“No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us; homosexual love like heterosexual love is touched on, without us being able, up until now, to uncover any significant difference; no subject either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses, by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans in the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. The life story of Daniel1, turbulent, painful, as often unreservedly sentimental as frankly cynical, and contradictory from all points of view, is in this regard characteristic. “

And those last two sentences pretty much sum up the whole book. Houllebecq’s (or his characters’) cynicism is what stuck me in Platform, and though I don’t exactly share his pessimistic world view it was presented very very convincingly. In The Possibility of an Island the cynical, misantrophic and misogynist opinions are tempered by Daniel1’s occasional bouts of irrationality, emotionality and cringeworthy poetry – those things that are in some sense considered humanity’s flaws, but that are what define us as a species (according to the neo-humans). As far as the book goes, it is the blend that makes it brilliant, and even a touch more convincing than Platform.

I could hardly put it down. I have read and reread several paragraphs, from so many pages with folded-down corners that the book is looking ravaged and rather older than its two weeks. I’ve reconsidered my opinions on love, morality, sexuality and dogs. Which in itself I guess is no big deal, my opinions are constantly a work in progress anyway – but many of the viewpoints of The Possibility of an Island are completely new to me.

One thing for example that completely suprised me, was how little I got angry at his derogatory comments on women. By contrast, Neuromancer brought out the long-dormant feminist in me. (If I can at all claim to ever have been a non-dormant feminist. Probably not.) I think the difference is that while the Neuromancer-women were badly written and shallow, in The Possibility etc the masochism is consistent with the plot and the characters – you can disagree with Daniel1/24/25’s opinions, but if you accept his premisses and consider his past, the rest follows logically.

…I could go on. But I just realised what the time is. Time to go look after my guests from Italy/Australia, in fact! I’ve been a terrible hostess today, but tomorrow should be better. So long!

Colour

A quick thought on colour:

I read an article a while ago which focused on how art is “used” – in a specific case, abstract art has even been used as torture. Colour psychology is (was?) a huge area of quasi-science, and the Expressionists were in a sense ahead of their times when they researched the effect of colours on viewers. Green was found to be sad, and so Mondrian didn’t use green in his paintings, nor did he want anything green in his studio. The torture mentioned in the article involved (among other things) a completely green room.

When I went to Northern Ireland for Easter this year, one of the things that struck me was the greeeeenness. It certainly didn’t make me sad, instead it was a pleasant contrast to a grey Oslo. Since then spring and summer have been and gone here as well, and my green-cravings have been satisfied.

Which is perhaps a requirement for my current enjoyment of autumn. I mean, look at it:

No more green! Instead, beautiful, beautiful optimistic (and concentration-enhancing, according to some) yellow.
People supposedly lose their tempers more in yellow rooms, but I don’t believe it. I loved my yellow room with the wonky floor…
And I love autumn.
And, it’s things-I-love Thursday! Fancy that.