false gods (pt2)

Romantic antidote to modernity projected onto utopian future:

“[A]t every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.”

From The Part Played By Labour In The Transition From Apes To Man, Fred Engels (1876)

false gods (pt1)

Romantic antidote to modernity projected onto exotic location:

“To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.”

From The Diary of Anais Nin Vol 5 (1947/55)

analyze, interpret, and reconstruct

"Neuroscientists are also gaining an increasingly better understanding of how our brains analyze, interpret, and reconstruct place and space. We know the brain adds information to what it receives from the physical environment: in optical illusions, it supplies lines that the eyes don’t actually see, and it can form three-dimensional images where only two exist on paper (architects are particularly adept at this). The brain also brings memory to our environment. When you enter a particularly beautiful cathedral, your experience includes memories and emotions tied to the past experiences of spiritual places you’ve visited throughout your life. Your brain is drawing connections between place and memory, even if you don’t realize it."

In more Science-catching-up-with-spiritual-reality news, this article reveals a growing collusion between cutting edge architectural discourse and that of neurobiological research. Though the idea that the environment, the human brain and our subjective experience are interrelated could only come as a surprise to the most reductionist atheists and their dualistic alter egos, the literal religionists. (Both camps think human consciousness is somehow separated out from the general processes of the universe, the former thinking we have evolved to a point we can step outside of blind evolution and correct certain functions we think act counter to our best interests (the essential underpinning of Humanist thought), and the latter believe an overseeing God created us as independent souls, to wander over the earth as we please.)

Pic from original article

he creeps uninvited

"In short, there is a young woman in this film whom Bond correctly identifies (in his smug, smart-arse way) as a sex-worker who was kidnapped and enslaved as a child by human traffickers. She is now a brutalised and unwilling gangster’s moll. She gives no sign of being sexually interested in Bond, merely of being incredibly scared and unhappy. So he creeps uninvited into her hotel shower cubicle later that night, like Jimmy Savile, and silently screws her because he is bored." 

Found this interesting article via twitter. It's from Giles Coren and was posted on his wife's blog after the Times decided not to run it. It exposes the coldness in the heart of a certain kind of British film director who has taken the Hollywood dollar after a career in theatre or advertising. In this case the over-praised Sam Mendes, who made the film in question. His films are always vacuous exercises in theatrical style. I'd place the equally awful, and now deceased, Anthony Minghella in the same category (you can think of several others, I'm sure).