jay_walk

This morning I read Hoffman's Der Sandmann. How do I feel about this, besides awfully nerdy for having done my schoolwork first thing in the morning and way ahead of schedule?
It is a nice (and rather short) story. And it makes sense to me, although my teachers will impose some much less interesting and more didactic interpretation on it, and then ruin my liking for the story by making us write long boring tedious essays about their interpretation. So I had better write down what I think of it now:
Yes it is clearly all in his head,but that doesn't make it less real. The sandman stole his eyes = his father dying made him deluded and permanently dreaming. I think eyes and sleep are a theme in this because his mind sees things differently, and that's the problem. And then he just gets so frustrated nobody believes him, Olimpia never seems to think anything herself and Clara also doesn't say anything which is meaningful to him either, that he thinks they are automatons, which is the logical thing for him to suspect, given his fear of alchemy and experiments he'll blame that for everyone else seeming a bit off.
There, done. I can't write an essay about that and I really don't want to, what's fun about this is that it's so simple and logical in it's own way that that's all the interpreting I want to do. I am going to be so bored and annoyed at german class.
I like stories with automatons, robots, artificial humans, homunculi, alchemy, etc. in them, and this one also agrees with me that people are mostly just machines and pretty much indistinguishable anyway. This reminds me that the whole artificial life thing didn't begin with Frankenstein (this story was published two years earlier) and that the whole robot thing didn't begin with Metropolis. There are probably earlier stories for me to read involving people that run on clockwork (which is fascinating and creepy and is bound to be a theme in literature as a response to when society suddenly started running on clockwork) and alchemically created people.

So that poem praising romanticism which I was internally violently disagreeing with: it first asserts that people must not systemize and categorise but rather let thinking and I imagination mix. Which is all very well,but the next line states that only then will all that is wrong be cleared away.
It just frustrated me, that it suddenly turned around and called the thinking part of everything absolutely wrong, and asserted that there is a truth to be found. I think I'm too postmodern for this argument (although I'm still not sure I'm applying that word correctly). I am so bored of direct discussion in literature of emotional vs rational, it is so overused. And it is all the same to me:
Emotions are a much quicker and more generalising version of thinking, religion is protoscience, machines are very crude forms of organisms, cities are something like a fungus...
So I get bored of arguing religion vs logic, or computers vs brains, when they're all indistinguishable from a certain point of view and we should instead be thinking of what logic there is in religion or how we can make computers more like organisms.
That being said I have nothing against the romanticism, dream logic is just thinking that is too efficient and complex to follow, but apparently it spews out the right result in the end, because humans do stay alive and society stays alive. Whatever people's brains are doing when they're not making simple understandable sense works mostly, except we don't have the brainpower to understand it, which is too bad. I don't think like Freud that the subconsciousness is to disturbing and dangerous for us to know about it, I don't think it's stunningly complex either, I just think we don't have just a bit more metathinking and analysing power because we survive just fine without being aware what's going on there, in fact it's probably distracting to monitor one's own brain processing everything, and our reasoning skills didn't develop to help us monitor our mental maintenance systems for our entertainment and enlightenment, they developed so that we have another tool for figuring out how to not die and how to have our species not die. I suspect all the thinking were conscious of doing is the back-up tool, being the newest and not entirely essential.
Off-topic: can anyone mentally turn their skull inside out? That instead of the world being the outside and the brains being the inside, your thought mechanism are the general background while the world is a cavern within that which you look into and make adjustments to the inside of? It's not quite solipsism, since the perceived world is still separate and autonomous and mostly outside of one's control, just not as important. Since I can conceive of it it must be possible with just a little bit more mental flexibility. Ideally a person ought to be able to shift it like a reversible figure optical illusion, but a lifetime in "normal" mode probably makes it more difficult to switch one way than the other. Or maybe some people or most people are in the other mode and I don't know it. And of course a persons insides are objectively smaller than the world. Nothing that a lifetime of living in a culture where the assumption is that thoughts are more important and true reality wouldn't solve though.

I could potentially actually make a post per day. I have a lot of free time and a lot of free brain-space. As well as technically an obligation to practice writing fiction on a regular basis, and a lot of opinions on a lot of things. I seem to be in a phase where the general topic is comparing stuff I found in various mythologies and especially in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Golden Bough to modern science and culture.
And yeah I'll get around to figuring out the rest of this thing outside of posting... hopefully soon and not in three weeks when the school year's over and I really have no more excuses.

So I went to the planetarium.
Humanity is very egocentric. They told us how everything from the beginning of the universe to now happened to contribute to us, the most amazing thing ever, existing. We are the most amazing thing ever because we can think about ourselves and our existence, apparently. I learned nothing about space because my brain was too busy making sarcastic comments and having argumentative reactions. So many gratuitous metaphors. "traffic accidents" "birth" "birthing rooms" "power plants". This just jarringly disrupts thinking about stars for me in favor of thinking about how the writers either for themselves or because they think it entertains the audience better had to make everything about us.
And there was a lot of orchestral accompaniment. Apparently it's rooted in everyone's mind that supernovae etc. should go well with majestic orchestral music. Which is rather illogical really, space is silent, neither explosions nor things slowly orbiting around fit the swelling majestic tempo, and violin music is a very human thing that doesn't really connect with space.

The whole thing was storytelling. It was the modern version of Genesis in that it had the general theme of everything coming into existence in a fixed order in preparation for the eventual existence of humans. There are some similarities to other creation myths too: The theme of each generation of stars/gods dying to create the world for the next generation and for humans, the theme of the world being made out of their remains (Ymir, Titans)*. With a sort of storytelling ritual too, via an illuminated dome and loudspeakers and background music. People used to achieve the same effect with amphitheaters and costumed performances and songs and drugs. Its funny because planetaria look very sciencefictiony, advanced, and enlightened, but its the same thing as always.

Very cool setting too (before they start the projecting), artificial-daylight illuminated white dome. Feels like old science fiction depictions of utopian enlightened places. I am quite sure I saw the same type of thing in quite a few Star Trek episodes.
The projector looks like a pre-70s science fiction gun.

Space is very empty. Maybe that's why they put so much orchestra and how important humans are in the whole thing. Or maybe I'm over-philosophising and all that "and all of this created you" is just to entertain and interest people.

I did learn where north is. You follow the front two stars of the big dipper, they point to the north star, which points north. Well, that's good to know.

*mythology I can name right now is very Europe-centric