Hamlet

As all know, except, needless to say, those who don't, in the opening scene of Hamlet, Marcellus, Barnardo and Horatio gather at night in fearful expectation of the arrival of the dead king's ghost, which duly arrives. Upon the ghost's appearance, Marcellus says to Horatio: "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." Which Horatio duly does, though he admits that the ghost "harrows me with fear and wonder."
Most will agree Horatio would have been fully entitled to ask what particular difference his being a scholar made. It is doubtful the dead king's strange and recurring appearance was provoked by a special desire for learned discourse.
As for the ghost, when a scene or few later he speaks to his son, Hamlet, and incites bloody revenge on his murderous brother, his fears should have been raised as to Hamlet's prospects in the task when his startlingly immediate plan for killing the new king, utterly vague but for this point, is to decide to pretend to all to have gone mad. Hamlet's father should have asked what bloody good this would do.
Naturally, Hamlet's subsequent mad behaviour achieves nothing but for driving the wholly innocent and cruelly treated Ophelia genuinely mad with confused grief, and onwards to a suicidal, pitiful death. What else Hamlet supposed this display of madness might achieve is anyone's guess.

If one were so crude as to reduce Shakespeare's most famed work to a moral, it would be that if when entrusting some important task to someone his immediate instinctive suggestion towards completion of the task is to pretend to be insane, chances are you are backing a loser. More than likely he's simply looking for an opportunity, however inappropriate, to pretend to be mad, and doesn't merit much trust.

Luminary

If light began to worry about the depth of darkness it needed to conquer, it would fade.

Personal Relations

"No, I'm not calling you an asshole. I'm just saying you have a marked tendency to behave exactly in the manner of an asshole."
"And you want me completely out of your life?"
"Yes, but it's nothing personal. It's just that I find you psychologically repellent."

The Stream of Language

What may be called the particular formal structures of a language are intrinsically connected to how a consciousness that uses that language sees itself, or has the capacity of seeing itself. And also connected to the previous post on a culture's inseparable entwining within its own language, to look at the simple expression of basic emotional experiences as expressed in the Irish and English languages.
In English one says "I am happy," or "I am sad." In Irish these would most simply be said, "Tá áthas orm," and "Tá brón orm." These are however far from parallel senses of being. In the English, such expressions begin infallibly with "I", and this I is then happy, sad, etc. In the Irish language, consciousness pours itself into a linguistic form of very different significance. To truly translate to English, "Tá brón orm" is to mean "Sadness is upon me." Here the self is placed within life and in a humbler more unified relationship to that life as a whole, as opposed to the narrower English form that begins with a solid entity of a self that is placed at an artificial centre of of the world, rather than dwelling within and part of that world. In English, everything reaches out from this centre of the individual ego, whereas in Irish this self is a far more passive aspect of existence.

Here the Irish is a much more satisfying form by which the human consciousness understands its place in life. There is then, of course, the question as to the sensibility- Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, etc- that forms the language into which it then flows in the first place, but what is clear is that when a culture loses its language and has an alien one grafted into itself, as in Ireland, what is occuring is far from a superficial window-dressing of the soul.

Cultural Immunity

The greatest immune system protecting a culture is its own language.
If the immune system of a culture is too protecting, the culture becomes a stagnant monstrosity; the solidification of certain energies in time. Loyalist marchers come to mind.
If the immune system is too weak, then the culture is liable to be overrun. If a country- say Ireland- had its own language, then it should prove much more resistant to, for example, the invasion of the worthless tabloid and celebrity 'culture' springing primarily from Britain and the US.
Though of course, the benefits of a culture's own language go far beyond merely defensive merits. That culture's whole historic sense is bound up in its language- think, if in England everyone spoke French for the last hundred years and English was little known, how much of the cultural reservoir would simply vanish from the common memory? This naturally explaining the heavy priority placed by experienced colonising powers on erasing the colonised's language and subsequent sense of self.

Moral Teachings

Poverty is a vice as it encourages destitution. Poverty should be discouraged and destitution avoided.

Odilon Redon- La Cellule d'Or 1892

Recently attracted by this painting by Redon, which coincidentally transpires to be the cover of Tolstoy's What is Art, which I just received. Redon an artist whose naive images often tread a thin line between charming and somewhat off-putting.

Positive Negative

The idea of nihilism contradicts the idea of nihilism.

Linguistics

An important new document by some of the world's leading linguists has declared that words are "imaginary." This, they admit, leaves them in a somewhat embarrassing situation, both linguistically and otherwise.
"It's hard to know what to say," said an academic.

Isaac Newton and the Defeat of Doubt

Isaac Newton is famous for discovering that the apparently unrelenting consistency with which things fell downwards from above, even if having been propelled from below, was a result of more than mere chance, and so was a set of pracical affairs set to continue beyond the horizons of all conjectured human futurity. This certainty in the ongoing downward pull of objects was of great help to man's progression as a rational animal on this earth, enabling him to plan ahead and to act in the sure knowledge that the earth was the natural and inevitable habitation for earthly matter, and apples and the like could continue to be harvested without fear of their escape into the further reaches of unattainable space. A great period of uncertainty had closed.

Victory for the West- US Troops Successfully Murder 61 Afghanistan Children

Story here. Sixty-one children who won't grow up to threaten our freedom, which they surely would have learnt to hate if they hadn't been blown to shit by high-powered modern weaponry, fired from a safe and abstract distance.
A military spokesman or intellectual lackey might, and surely would, question the linguistic legitimacy of 'murder' in this situation; that the deaths accruing from firing highly destructive missiles into large gatherings of civilians in their own village are incidental, not intentional. Naturally this is simply an example of the maxim that all evil needs is an excuse, however meaningless, to become respectable.

Spin

A fascinatingly vital work, using satellite feeds, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s, especialy focused on the Clinton won Presidential campaign against the elder Bush. Spin as described "is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality", where with behind the scenes footage of people like Bill Clinton, Larry King and Bush, reality is shown to be far stranger than fiction, and what people imagine to be reality pure fiction. For instance, between the ads, King tells a strangely zombie-like Clinton that media tycoon Ted Turner "would serve you... I'd call him after you're elected." See also how, if you're not approved from media figures on high, like Democrat candidate Larry Abraham, you don't get to exist. Manufactured 'democracy'. Watch https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/spin/

Vehicle

Two figures crawl out of a hole.
"A work of art is a vehicle containing truth."
"And the more truth, the greater the work?""
"Yes."
"But a vehicle goes somewhere. Where does the work of art travel?"
"Through time."

Rembrandt- John the Baptist Teaching

Light & Shadow

The brighter the light the more clearly delineated and dark the shadows of that which is out of that light. The murkier the light, the more uniform all appears.
To unfortunately make the analogous nature of this all a bit too obvious, there are certain false notions of spirituality that imagine that the brighter the light the more all is embraced as one, whereas in reality the more in truth the more clear that which is out of truth. This idea itself of all being accepted into one Truth is simply an emanation of the murkiness where vision is clouded and ultimately becomes the mandate of Hasan bin Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

The Will To Truth

"People tend to be only interested in as much 'truth' as confirms them in their ignorance."
"Yes."

Self-Contained

A leading figure has described literature's great mission being to create a literary language devoid of all external reference. Thus will literature finally become a pure art-form, he said.

Subjectivity Overcoming Of

Subjectivity requires the thought of subjectivity, objectivity, etc. All amounting to the ever shattering fragments arising from this self-imagined universal dualism. In silence all this intellectual artifice disappears, or rather fails to emerge. And since in silence it cannot emerge, it then doesn't exist as a reality or problem."

US Anthrax Murders Sourced from US Bio-Defense Program

See short clip from History Channel here. "All the spores were sent for immediate forensic testing. The bacterium that killed Robert Stevens was identified as the Ames strain. A strain long favoured by and under the near total control of the US Bio-Defense Program."
Terrorism emanating from the authorities fighting the terror are actually the ones creating the climate of terror? How astonishing. Admittedly it would be slightly more astonishing were not this terrorising tactic such a standard controlling mechanism of government. Though there is always the get-out clause of the lone nut theory for those so inclined.
Naturally it is very easy to govern someone in the absolute sense of control over their consciousness if you are intentionally triggering states of fear and anxiety. Such a mind isn't not free in some dreadful future, but unfree in that present, and such fettered consciousnesses extremely easily manipulated from that state of fear into acquiescing to necessary measures the state is wessentially claiming necessary to alleviate that insecurity and fear; while also feeding off the attendant ego lusts of hatred and love of bullying violence. The vicarious triumph of one's self through the bloody, high-tech victories of the state. Though as some may realise that alleviation never quite arrives. For example, hot on the heels of WW2- the Cold War, and hot on its heels the War on Terror. Which isn't to say the grand stand spectacles of terror don't exist occasionally to justify the hype. They are vital creations and components of the media industry, where news and entertainment are manufactured for the pleasure of all, and the lines between the two are blurred for the benefit of the loyal citizens. As when CNN had the line "The Empire Strikes Back" underlying their 'news' programmes while covering the exciting attacks on Afghanistan after the even more exciting events of 911.
As Thomas Mann wrote in Dr Faustus:

...in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will; that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies; that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle for political action- fables, chimeras, phantoms that needed to have nothing to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities.

Stream of Consciousness

The stream of consciousness in literature, as is often called, should rather be described as a stream of words. Only a lunatic, much learned though he may be, could imagine consciousness is identical to the transmutation of the flow of sense-perception and feeling into a more or less elegantly succession of those peculiar substances, words. Whatever consciousness is, it most definitely can't be reduced to this babbling onrush of language. A succession of words should be content to described themselves simply as a succession, or indeed a stream, of words.