Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Recently many people who are not too familar with Libyan history started asking quations about the sanity of Gadaffi. Is this man clinically insane? To answer the question one only has to read the ‘Green Book’ Gadaffi wrote as some sort of political bible Libyans had to live up to. Let me quote from chapter three:

“According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period.” Colonel Gadaffi, Green Book, Part III, The Social Basis of The Third Universal Theory

Men do not menstruate or suffer during their monthly periods, says Colonel Gadaffi. Why thank you Mr Gadaffi, that was some very useful knowledge from the supreme high leader, the Chose revolutionary of the people!

Now can you please stop hiring mercenaries to shoot your own people?

Before I made it clear that I believe at this point NATO or the UN face a final test to their credibility: do they really care about human rights they should act now. But the same is true about the Arab nations: they should help out and intervene. Tunesia and Egypt, come on, help your neighbours out and stop the slaughter.

After a day of horrible, rash violence in the Libya uprising we get to see Mr Gadaffi, whom some said had already fled to Venezuela, but in a very strange and unsettling setting: holding an umbrella in an old lorry, wearing Russian ear-warmers. What a surreal image. It must have been done on purpose. But what does it mean and why these propagandistic choices?

The obvious explanation is that Gadaffi fears for his life and does the ‘Look, I’m a nut, please don’t kill me’ routine.

But a nut would speak about strange stuff. And he doesn’t. He just says I refuse to speak to you because it started to rain. And he is holding his grey umbrella while sitting in a 1960 style lorry van. Completely unnecessary since he’s already inside the van. What’s he holding the umbrella for? Is he scared that the lorry will get wet? Why the weird grey coloured sober umbrella? Russian ear-warmers? It a scene so weird even David Lynch would probably scrap it.

Now of course Gadaffi always was a colourful tyrant known for his posturing qualities. The war crimes he committed last days stand in stark contrast with his public image, because he is purposely playing the ‘sweet lunatic’ here. There is only one other possibility. That is the possibility that he is genuinely insane. Which is quite likely, for one must be insane to use ones air-force on ones own people.

Let’s hope the Libyans will succeed quickly in getting rid of this tyrant. I think this is the one case where NATO actually could make an impression as something not entirely irrelevant when it comes to freedom and democracy. So I say: intervene, and do it know. This is a place that needs a UN peace force. Libya consists of several tribes and there is a huge potential for civil war there. Institutionalize Gadaffi, get a peace keeping force in and let the Libyans for legitimate political parties and hold elections.

These have been two interesting months, to say the least. Whatever the real causes are, fact is that the current chain of revolutions is unprecedented in history. I cant recall any other period in history where such a chain of revolutions took place. Now Libya looks like its going to fall, lets hope all other tyrants are next. We need to make sure that humans rights and civil liberties are a global and not just a local phenomenon.

As to Gadaffi, here’s a song for you, old man:

Question: Does someone who frantically opens and closes doors as some sort of psychotic habit care about doors?

Obviously not, they are just there because they fell into his habit. I feel the same way about most people who claim to be into poetry: they don’t actually care about the substance, its just something that fell into their ritualized personality. Its just a piece of furniture of their soul.

The above observation is the actual cause of much frustration. Replace poetry with ‘love’ or ‘me’ and you see what I mean: most people cannot by nature be truly interested in any substance. The fact that they protray themselves as such doesn’t mean a thing. Its just social baggage. They learned to behave that way in order to be safe in this world. They pretend they love poetry because this identity protects them from the void.

A lot of people will be scared of the above idea, because in reality it means that most people are ritualized fakes. Well this is true. I dare you to go out to any bar or cafe and watch the environment attentively: there is hardly anyone who notices anything in their environment. They are some sort of ritualized fakes that do not live in reality. You have to force your presence upon them before they notice anything.

The military have a technique that consists of trying to remember and observe as many elements of your environment as you can. I often try practise this technique and I think its also vital when it comes to writing poetry. Think of it in this way: if you cant observe the world then how could you possibly observe your own thoughts? The observational skills are the same. Learn to be a brilliant observer and you are very close to being a briliant poet, or a brillinat artist, or a brilliant whatever.

It was in the news all around today: one of the sellouts of this century, at least that it feels that way to me: the Huffington post is bought by AOL for 300 million dollars.

What was special about the Huffington post? It was that it filled up a true gap: it proved there actually is a leftist American movement.

I have been watching Slavoj Zizek on Al Jazeera interviewed about Egypt. In the interview he analyses the actual lack of a left wing as the exact cause of the ‘radicalisms’ going on around the globe. That interview can be seen here:

So, I feel the exact same way as Zizek: what an utterly depressing message is this, to – all of a sudden, our of the blue – sell the most important leftist news-source to an incredibly conservative and irrelevant dinosaur as AOL. Very, very depressing. Except for the person who made 300 million with the deal, who is laughing all the way to the bank. If she ever gets the money, that is. Because my guess is that the Huffington will deflate like a balloon and soon there will be little left of it. And then she might not be so happy with AOLs Arabian owners who paid for 25 million users and their posts.

But philosophically, what a perfect moment to snuff the left media out – one year before the enxt elections, with the Teanutters warming up to take America over.

That’s a scary development. And as in all horror-films, such scares depend on their instant appearance.

Another philosophical angle: it seems a repeating pattern: a broad base of users builds a content network (and I think everyone would agree the reason the Huffington is popular is because people love to read critical comments of other users), its sold out for lots of money and deflates immediately. Isn’t this rather a modern variant of piracy? Is Arrianna Huffington a modern day pirate, or did she completely sell out her own principles?

What struck me as REALLY WEIRD is the news that she ‘will be the head of this-or-that department’ after she just earned 300 milllion bucks.

Think about it. You just earned 300 million bucks by selling your weblog to a corporate giant.
Are you inclined to sign a job contract with the firm? Of course not.

Any clever person would sell, and start an alternative.

So my guess is: the job positioin was either part of the deal, that, or Arrianna Huffington really does believe that AOL will give the Huffington Post ‘The speed of light’.

At any rate, it all stinks like a limburgian cheese. Then again, there must be at least SOMETHING wrong with you if this strikes you as the image of a ‘leftist person’:

The Craft

You have found a stone.
But it is not your stone.
So you keep polishing and polishing.
The craft, you say, is to create a flawless stone
one indistinguishably remarkable.

But it’s not your craft, is it?
It is the found beast of an old tradition.
True, there are worse things in this world
than a couple of polished stones.

One day you will stretch out your hand
and offer us your perfect stone.
It will glow, in the middle of your palm
like a star only dreamed of by puppets.

You will stand in front of the mob,
expect nothing less than a crucifixion
or, at least, to meet the original stone
receiving its autograph on your corpse.

But no one moves. The crowds stare
only reminds you of the desert of birth.
You, who owns an invisible star, are
now at mercy of a nursing wasteland.

Square one, home of the creator.
But it’s not your square, is it?

It’s been around. In all its hidden glory.
In all its hidden glory. It’s been around.

Martijn 18-01-2011

What originally motivated you to begin writing poetry?

Girls. I thought it was a great way of impressing girls. Of course
later I found out that having an expensive mobile phone works much
better. The girl I wrote my first poem to just looked at me like I was
crazy. So I got the natural idea that I was probably not good enough
at it yet and started with the vain idea that i could improve these
skills. Of course later on I realized that having a crisp hundred
dollar bill sticking out of your breast pocket is much more effective
if you want to get interactive.

Are all of your poems kind of constructed around a main theme?

No. In fact if you investigate this idea closely you will see that
‘themes’ actually do not exist in the entire corpus of poetry. This is
because of the nature of poetry, which primarily is a tool that tries
to name the unnameable. You could, for example, claim lots of poems
have ‘death’ as a theme. But do they really? The theme itself is often
just a metaphor for something else. And death is an abstract concept,
in this case operating in the abstract environment of a poem. So what
exactly does it mean to call ‘death’ a theme? Nothing much on closer
investigation. A poet could really be talking about anything
imaginable and make it look like a poem about death. Don’t be fooled.
Poets are tricksters.

How do you feel poetry is beneficial to the world of literature, and
the world itself?

The world of literature kind of stinks. It’s full of fools who have
invested a lot of time in ‘cultural capital’ and are very hungry to
get returns on those investments in the form of recognition. Frankly,
only a complete moron would waste his precious time on this planet
with such insane people. In my opinion poetry wants to have little to
do with those people. The stuff they praise always seems pretty random
to me. They praise good stuff and they praise bad stuff, all is the
same to them. If you wanna write poems just keep out of the world
of literature that’s what I say.

As to ‘what beneficial effect does poetry have on the world’ I am not
at liberty to answer that question since this is one of our trade
secrets.

When you pull together a piece of poetry, is it all at once, or do you
begin a piece and return to it later?

In my opinion the most effective way of writing poetry is to get up at
0600 in the morning every day and write, write the poem until the
draft is finished. I have heard this from several great poets – early
in the morning the mind is the cleanest and its most easy to produce
poetry without the mind interfering with itself. Just do that every
day for a few years, then you have like a few hundred drafts. Then
reserve a month or two to rewrite about 50 or 60 good poems from those
hundreds of drafts. And there you go.

Do you have any big inspirations for your poetry?

How exactly does one measure the size of inspirations? How am i
supposed to know if an inspiration is big or not? Sometimes you feel
something, a little tickle in the back of your head. Sometimes you
feel an incredible urge. Is the last ‘bigger’ than the first? Better?
Hell if I know. Big inspirations, little inspirations, I do them all,
dude. I’m an omni-inspirationalist. In my opinion the whole world is
fabricated by inspirations. But now I am getting dangerously close to
those trade secrets again.

Thanks a ton once again, I know you’re likely very busy and It’s very
much appreciated.

Welcome, Lee. I wish you the best of luck with your project. Let me
close this interview with one of my favourite poems from Milosz, which
concerns some of the topics we touched in this interview:

A Confession (1985)

My God, I loved strawberry jam.
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Czeslaw Milosz