Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Epilogue
This isn't strictly speaking an epilogue as I haven't written anything that has gone before it, but if I had written something you can take it that this would have been the bit that came after.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Monday, 18 April 2011
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Saturday, 9 April 2011
Friday, 8 April 2011
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Schvelte Vos
Another one of my musical things, Schvelte Vos. It really should be re-recorded, the bass for one more or less inaudible, but twill have to do for now:
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Friday, 11 March 2011
Ocean
A man was sailing in calm waters in an expensive boat. Looking about himself, he was very satisfied with himself and his boat, and glancing at the waters beneath him he declared, "The ocean is not great. I, on the other hand . . . " - though this last bit, and what remained of it, was more felt than uttered, or if it was uttered it was done so very quietly. He might have felt though like roaring it.
Sadly though, things alter, and after a while the weather changed, the sea grew rough and rougher, the expensive boat was tossed about as a thing of nothing, was soon enough smashed on the rocks, and the little man was swallowed up by the waters and heard of no more.
Sadly though, things alter, and after a while the weather changed, the sea grew rough and rougher, the expensive boat was tossed about as a thing of nothing, was soon enough smashed on the rocks, and the little man was swallowed up by the waters and heard of no more.
Thursday, 3 March 2011
'American' Art
I won't pretend to have any kind of extensive knowledge of art but one aversion or dislike I'll try to overcome the tediums fnd difficulties of expressing is for certain American artists, or aspects of their work, and this aspect is their monumentality of scale. What tipped the scales to trying to actually set to words this feeling is seeing a few minutes of a programme on the artist Julian Schnabel, featuring some exhibition of his works, the scale of which as in short enormous, requiring high wall space and certainly not for any ordinary home.
Firstly the po-faced attitude that determines the wish to work on this scale, and the crudeness of this thought: since to work on a huge scale is very awkward, then it cannot lie within a natural desire for artistic expression; the natural expression of art I would say is someone like a child faced with a fairly ordinary piece of paper, canvas or whatever and start drawing or painting. Working on the huge scale cannot be done in any such whimsical, of-the-moment fashion, and the thought behind it which I find so poor is that "I work on a monumental scale; therefore my work is of monumental import." That scale is equal to artistic import. I'll mention here my favourite artist of the 20th centry, Paul Klee, whose works tend to be typically of dimensions someting like 30cm by 40cm or some such, and just as likely to be smaller than that as bigger. Thereis an unbumptious intimacy of such in Klee's case highly concentrated works, and which if blown-up can easily survive such magnification, since these enclosed universes are sufficient to themselves. They are perfectly formed in themselves and retain their interest and integrity whatever the scale. Contrarily the American artists I am thinking of, the likes of Rothko, need to work on the huge scale so as to overpower 'sensually', perhaps comparable to the bombast of someone like Wagner; and in direct contrast to Klee, when such works are seen in miniature, in reproduction on the page, the effect is diminished to the point of non-existence; the paucity of any aspect of formal interest in the image renders the picture wholly uninteresting,and this is the difference between these modern Americans, as well of course as plenty others, working on this scale and old masters like Tintoretto or Caravaggio. Their best works are structurally fascinating and while, as above, losing quite a bit in terms of overpowering the senses , they easily survive the reduction in scale to the page, ad if Caravaggio's Martrdom of Saint Matthew were, instead of 323 cm × 343 cm, 32 by 34cm, it would still be a masterpiece.
Another aspect to my aversion to the inner motivation to work on this unwieldy, 'unnatural' monumental scale relates again to the intimacy I spoke of in relation to Klee; the works he produces are intimate processes in the act of production, and also intimate experiences in the act of viewing for the perceiver. Klee is not seeking to make to pun a public exhibit of himself and his work. Contrarily these American artists and their grandness of scale are very much within the American order of thing precisely in their desire to make of theselves and their works as public as possible - the greater the physical object the more 'public' it is - the more it partakes in the public, physical arena and is open to perception by the greatest number. It is the opposite of intimacy, and part of what one could call the current American mores where there is no intimate, private self; instead one participates wholly as part of the public whole; and in its apogee this manifesting itself where troubled selves tell of their most private problems on carnivorous talk-shows. There is I suppose nothing wrong with wishing to partake in the public thoroughfare, in the social, political life but these should very much be incidentals to the artist, and such a desire is in itself crude, apllicable to things like advertising slogans and if dominant contrary to the subtle integrity of self that produces real art, art which to be real art must be intimate. This desire to be 'public' should come into play after the creation of the work, not as prior motivation.
. . .
This has already taken up too much of my morning so rather re-read it, try and shape it into anything elegant, etc I'll stop there more or less mid-sentence.
Firstly the po-faced attitude that determines the wish to work on this scale, and the crudeness of this thought: since to work on a huge scale is very awkward, then it cannot lie within a natural desire for artistic expression; the natural expression of art I would say is someone like a child faced with a fairly ordinary piece of paper, canvas or whatever and start drawing or painting. Working on the huge scale cannot be done in any such whimsical, of-the-moment fashion, and the thought behind it which I find so poor is that "I work on a monumental scale; therefore my work is of monumental import." That scale is equal to artistic import. I'll mention here my favourite artist of the 20th centry, Paul Klee, whose works tend to be typically of dimensions someting like 30cm by 40cm or some such, and just as likely to be smaller than that as bigger. Thereis an unbumptious intimacy of such in Klee's case highly concentrated works, and which if blown-up can easily survive such magnification, since these enclosed universes are sufficient to themselves. They are perfectly formed in themselves and retain their interest and integrity whatever the scale. Contrarily the American artists I am thinking of, the likes of Rothko, need to work on the huge scale so as to overpower 'sensually', perhaps comparable to the bombast of someone like Wagner; and in direct contrast to Klee, when such works are seen in miniature, in reproduction on the page, the effect is diminished to the point of non-existence; the paucity of any aspect of formal interest in the image renders the picture wholly uninteresting,and this is the difference between these modern Americans, as well of course as plenty others, working on this scale and old masters like Tintoretto or Caravaggio. Their best works are structurally fascinating and while, as above, losing quite a bit in terms of overpowering the senses , they easily survive the reduction in scale to the page, ad if Caravaggio's Martrdom of Saint Matthew were, instead of 323 cm × 343 cm, 32 by 34cm, it would still be a masterpiece.
Another aspect to my aversion to the inner motivation to work on this unwieldy, 'unnatural' monumental scale relates again to the intimacy I spoke of in relation to Klee; the works he produces are intimate processes in the act of production, and also intimate experiences in the act of viewing for the perceiver. Klee is not seeking to make to pun a public exhibit of himself and his work. Contrarily these American artists and their grandness of scale are very much within the American order of thing precisely in their desire to make of theselves and their works as public as possible - the greater the physical object the more 'public' it is - the more it partakes in the public, physical arena and is open to perception by the greatest number. It is the opposite of intimacy, and part of what one could call the current American mores where there is no intimate, private self; instead one participates wholly as part of the public whole; and in its apogee this manifesting itself where troubled selves tell of their most private problems on carnivorous talk-shows. There is I suppose nothing wrong with wishing to partake in the public thoroughfare, in the social, political life but these should very much be incidentals to the artist, and such a desire is in itself crude, apllicable to things like advertising slogans and if dominant contrary to the subtle integrity of self that produces real art, art which to be real art must be intimate. This desire to be 'public' should come into play after the creation of the work, not as prior motivation.
. . .
This has already taken up too much of my morning so rather re-read it, try and shape it into anything elegant, etc I'll stop there more or less mid-sentence.
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Quick, Bit Unpleasant,Thought
Such I suppose is vanity intermingled with a dash of stupidity, there are people who seem to imagine the mere act of reading we'll say more refined writers places themselves on an equal or perhaps even higher intellectual footing than those very writers; that this level of expression or thought is their own natural intellectual level which chance or perhaps just their earlier position in the temporal sequence had allowed those writers to express those thoughts before they themselves had a chance to do so. The same self-exaltation of course goes in the various artistic fields - the relevant artist looked down on from a position on high.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
Friday, 18 February 2011
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Death's Non-Existence
I've repeated to and beyond the point of tedium how language properly used is meaningful, how this is unarguable as the very arguing itself proceeds from the acceptance of the meaningfulness of the language used in the arguing; I've shown quite a few cases of supposed paradoxes, alleging as consequence language being a flawed tool, being no such things, simply errors of language; and I've described how science itself is enveloped within the folds of this intrinsic meaningfulness of language. Also how language properly used in intellectual matters always corresponds to a what one might call living reality. Reality isn't being dictated to by language, say in the manner of a magic spell, but the reality and the language correspond, cannot contradict one another.
In relation to all this what I am going to look at here is the thought of death, which earlier thoughts are reproduced below:
Death is non-existence. Non-existence by its very non-nature does not exist. Therefore death does not exist.
This might seem a mere elegant play on words but not actually to be taken seriously. However language meaningfully used is meaningful and there is nothing false about the given logic. But to look at it slightly differently, but heading towards perhaps the same logical destination: putting into perspective, for example, a writer who is 'obsessed with death', or simply anyone's fear of death. This is all a process of thought, and what is the nature of the thought, 'death'?
The language term 'death' is an idea or principle of absolute negation and inertia. One cannot be in a state of inertia while engaged in an activity- tautologically. A concept is an activity of the mind. And so the very idea of death as absolute inertia contradicts its very nature as an idea, or activity in which the mind is engaged. An activity cannot produce inertia. 'Death' is an unintelligible concept; the idea that the mental substance of an idea can be devoid of substance.
Another tangent is to say that the products of the mind are emanations of life. Death is the one thing that does not exist in life, and so for this reason is a meaningless concept.
So stressing again that 'death' is a thought, and so what I have done is look closer at the nature of this thought and in the inevitable process upset a very crude but very well-accepted notion of the reality of death. And doubly stressing that while language is autonomous in the sense that correct language is self-sufficient in many matters of self-exploration, ike here, it is not a self-enclosed autonomousness, i.e. that it corresponds to life beyond its verbal confines. Madness by contrast is language where this correspondence to a very large degree has broken down. So I am not merely playing like a musician with language to produce some odd idea. A reality dwells in tandem with this declaration of death's non-existence and which can be experienced, admittedly in a very subtle way by the mind.
Another angle of perceptual attack on this issue is this, and also showing how the most apparently simple sentence can be a much more slippery, subtle beast than imagined:
John died yesterday.
So here is expression of the normal attitude with regard to death. "John died, he is dead." A word refers to something which is, and in this case "John." However to say that John died is to say that the word John corresponds to an external essence - and yesterday he died. John here is the noun and a noun is something to which one can point as a reality but here there is no such reality, and so it is nonsense to talk about anything happening to something which is not. And so it is an illegitimate intellectual construct to say that John died yesterday.
Similarly, another way this traditional view of death's reality would be expressed is to say that "John is dead." Again however there is no John who can be anything. To say that John is dead is to say that John is, he is in a state of existence, and that this state is non-existence. This is obviously full of self-contradictions, and so when one looks to the intellectual sense of the statement one that someone is dead or died, one sees quite simply that there is no sense. And to stress that the purported thought of someone dying cannot be expressed coherently in this pure intellectual sense.
So, repeating the earlier point, language is a truth tool of absolute intellectual precision if used correctly; it cannot be so if used loosely. I can easily imagine people thinking my statement of death's non-existence being simply a facile, 'smart' use of language and 'merely a matter of language' but this would be a misapprehension of the unarguable nature of language and its correspondence with 'living truth'. Even someone who wishes to believe in the religious idea of death's non-existence might well be dissatisfied with all the above as almost inhumanly dry. However language in this field of intellectual enquiry must be 'dry', precise; this is the means by which it yields the truths legitimately available to it; and also this language does not stand alone but that there is an inner truth to this language which can, however subtly elusive, be understood, or rather experienced, in a deeper sense.
In relation to all this what I am going to look at here is the thought of death, which earlier thoughts are reproduced below:
Death is non-existence. Non-existence by its very non-nature does not exist. Therefore death does not exist.
This might seem a mere elegant play on words but not actually to be taken seriously. However language meaningfully used is meaningful and there is nothing false about the given logic. But to look at it slightly differently, but heading towards perhaps the same logical destination: putting into perspective, for example, a writer who is 'obsessed with death', or simply anyone's fear of death. This is all a process of thought, and what is the nature of the thought, 'death'?
The language term 'death' is an idea or principle of absolute negation and inertia. One cannot be in a state of inertia while engaged in an activity- tautologically. A concept is an activity of the mind. And so the very idea of death as absolute inertia contradicts its very nature as an idea, or activity in which the mind is engaged. An activity cannot produce inertia. 'Death' is an unintelligible concept; the idea that the mental substance of an idea can be devoid of substance.
Another tangent is to say that the products of the mind are emanations of life. Death is the one thing that does not exist in life, and so for this reason is a meaningless concept.
So stressing again that 'death' is a thought, and so what I have done is look closer at the nature of this thought and in the inevitable process upset a very crude but very well-accepted notion of the reality of death. And doubly stressing that while language is autonomous in the sense that correct language is self-sufficient in many matters of self-exploration, ike here, it is not a self-enclosed autonomousness, i.e. that it corresponds to life beyond its verbal confines. Madness by contrast is language where this correspondence to a very large degree has broken down. So I am not merely playing like a musician with language to produce some odd idea. A reality dwells in tandem with this declaration of death's non-existence and which can be experienced, admittedly in a very subtle way by the mind.
Another angle of perceptual attack on this issue is this, and also showing how the most apparently simple sentence can be a much more slippery, subtle beast than imagined:
John died yesterday.
So here is expression of the normal attitude with regard to death. "John died, he is dead." A word refers to something which is, and in this case "John." However to say that John died is to say that the word John corresponds to an external essence - and yesterday he died. John here is the noun and a noun is something to which one can point as a reality but here there is no such reality, and so it is nonsense to talk about anything happening to something which is not. And so it is an illegitimate intellectual construct to say that John died yesterday.
Similarly, another way this traditional view of death's reality would be expressed is to say that "John is dead." Again however there is no John who can be anything. To say that John is dead is to say that John is, he is in a state of existence, and that this state is non-existence. This is obviously full of self-contradictions, and so when one looks to the intellectual sense of the statement one that someone is dead or died, one sees quite simply that there is no sense. And to stress that the purported thought of someone dying cannot be expressed coherently in this pure intellectual sense.
So, repeating the earlier point, language is a truth tool of absolute intellectual precision if used correctly; it cannot be so if used loosely. I can easily imagine people thinking my statement of death's non-existence being simply a facile, 'smart' use of language and 'merely a matter of language' but this would be a misapprehension of the unarguable nature of language and its correspondence with 'living truth'. Even someone who wishes to believe in the religious idea of death's non-existence might well be dissatisfied with all the above as almost inhumanly dry. However language in this field of intellectual enquiry must be 'dry', precise; this is the means by which it yields the truths legitimately available to it; and also this language does not stand alone but that there is an inner truth to this language which can, however subtly elusive, be understood, or rather experienced, in a deeper sense.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Seraphim
And there appeared before him three seraphim, terrible and beautiful to behold.
"We is the Beings of Light - "
"Are."
"What, mortal?!"
"We are the Beings of Light, not We is the Beings of Light." . . .
"We is the Beings of Light - "
"Are."
"What, mortal?!"
"We are the Beings of Light, not We is the Beings of Light." . . .
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Monday, 31 January 2011
Once Again
Read this once you'll never read it again. Why is that? Because it's hardly worth reading once never mind ever again.
But then again you mightn't enjoy being dictated to like this, or if not quite dictated to then taken for granted, and so instead of this never reading it again, accepting that is of course the reading of it the first time, you go ahead, in spite of its worthlessness, and read if it not just twice maybe even many more times again.
But then again you mightn't enjoy being dictated to like this, or if not quite dictated to then taken for granted, and so instead of this never reading it again, accepting that is of course the reading of it the first time, you go ahead, in spite of its worthlessness, and read if it not just twice maybe even many more times again.
Friday, 28 January 2011
Another Man, Another Box, Schrodinger Again
"We put this man into a box . . . "
"A man in a box, what are you on about?"
"Wait there now, give me a chance. We put this fella into a box but once he's in the box we can't see him, the box is closed, do you get me?"
"Did he do something wrong?"
"No, nothing."
"So why do we put him in the box?"
"Just hold on and you'll see. So he's in the box and we can't see him."
"How do we know he's still in there if we can't see him?"
"Because there's no way out."
"There might be a trapdoor under the box."
"There's no trapdoor."
"How do you know? It might be like them magician things, you think he's there and instead he's somewhere else."
"Look, just accept that he's in the box. We put him in there, and there he is."
"He's very docile is he?"
"Docile?"
"To just accept being put into a box - there's not many would accept that."
"All right so, he's docile. So anyway, there he is, in the box, but what we also have in the box, the sealed box . . . "
"Sealed!? Why the hell is it sealed!?"
"Just listen will you. So also in the box, along with the man, is a flask containing a poisonous gas and a radioactive source - "
"Have you gone mad?! What are you going to do to the poor man?"
"Would you hear me out for God sake! So we have the man and the flask now in the box, and there's this Geiger counter and when it detects the radiation the flask shatters and the poisonous gas escapes killing the man. . . . "
"God almighty!"
"Except . . . "
"Except what?"
"Here's the good bit. Is he really dead?"
"Oh you mean you just want to scare him with all this gas stuff. It's like some kind of mock execution?"
""No, no, there's no scaring. Logically he must be dead, mustn't he?"
"I don't know, sure we can't see what's going on in the bloody box. Maybe the poison wasn't enough to kill him."
"No, it's enough all right."
"How do you now?"
"Because it's deadly stuff."
"But how do you know it was even in the flask in the first place?"
"Of course we know, it's clearly labeled."
"Where would we be without labels. And what about that Geiger counter stuff, how do we know that stuff is working right? Where did you get it all from?"
"A man from a laboratory said it was all A1."
"And what did this man do again to deserve all this?"
"Look, as I said already he did nothing wrong. I've nothing against him personally. This is all just a kind of experiment."
"I'd hate to see what you do to someone who did do something wrong."
" But anyway as said the poison is in the flask, the flask breaks, out comes the poison and your man dies - that's what must happen you'd think, isn't it?"
"Well maybe the flask doesn't break. And anyway how do we know any of this convoluted stuff is happening inside this box we can't see inside. And even if he is dead when we open the box, how do we know he didn't have a weak heart and being in the box with all this stuff was enough to do him in before any gas released?"
"We'd do an autopsy to establish cause of death."
"And what if he produces a gas-mask while in the box? . . . "
All this springing initially from a humorous spark but beyond the humour it relates directly and seriously to the earlier post on Schrodinger's Cat , within which I wrote that my coin in a drawer notion, relating to the same field of intellectual inquiry, was "a much better and simpler case than the needlessly complex cat notion". In the dialogue above, though with man substituting cat, is shown how unsatisfactory Schrodinger's thought-piece actually is as a vehicle for intellectual knowledge. This also illustrates what I wrote of science and language here: "Science, in all its manifestations, is not an autonomous or 'pure' discipline, but is encompassed within, or a branch of, Language. What science , or true science, consists of is true language statements, and so the first principle of science is the innate and intrinsic meaningfulness of correct language, and science in all its applications also demonstrably shows the intrinsic truth and power of correct language, while also emphasising the absolute necessity of the language's correctness and precision." And so here, unlike his box, as an intellectual phenomenon Schrodinger's idea is a system far from sealed.
"A man in a box, what are you on about?"
"Wait there now, give me a chance. We put this fella into a box but once he's in the box we can't see him, the box is closed, do you get me?"
"Did he do something wrong?"
"No, nothing."
"So why do we put him in the box?"
"Just hold on and you'll see. So he's in the box and we can't see him."
"How do we know he's still in there if we can't see him?"
"Because there's no way out."
"There might be a trapdoor under the box."
"There's no trapdoor."
"How do you know? It might be like them magician things, you think he's there and instead he's somewhere else."
"Look, just accept that he's in the box. We put him in there, and there he is."
"He's very docile is he?"
"Docile?"
"To just accept being put into a box - there's not many would accept that."
"All right so, he's docile. So anyway, there he is, in the box, but what we also have in the box, the sealed box . . . "
"Sealed!? Why the hell is it sealed!?"
"Just listen will you. So also in the box, along with the man, is a flask containing a poisonous gas and a radioactive source - "
"Have you gone mad?! What are you going to do to the poor man?"
"Would you hear me out for God sake! So we have the man and the flask now in the box, and there's this Geiger counter and when it detects the radiation the flask shatters and the poisonous gas escapes killing the man. . . . "
"God almighty!"
"Except . . . "
"Except what?"
"Here's the good bit. Is he really dead?"
"Oh you mean you just want to scare him with all this gas stuff. It's like some kind of mock execution?"
""No, no, there's no scaring. Logically he must be dead, mustn't he?"
"I don't know, sure we can't see what's going on in the bloody box. Maybe the poison wasn't enough to kill him."
"No, it's enough all right."
"How do you now?"
"Because it's deadly stuff."
"But how do you know it was even in the flask in the first place?"
"Of course we know, it's clearly labeled."
"Where would we be without labels. And what about that Geiger counter stuff, how do we know that stuff is working right? Where did you get it all from?"
"A man from a laboratory said it was all A1."
"And what did this man do again to deserve all this?"
"Look, as I said already he did nothing wrong. I've nothing against him personally. This is all just a kind of experiment."
"I'd hate to see what you do to someone who did do something wrong."
" But anyway as said the poison is in the flask, the flask breaks, out comes the poison and your man dies - that's what must happen you'd think, isn't it?"
"Well maybe the flask doesn't break. And anyway how do we know any of this convoluted stuff is happening inside this box we can't see inside. And even if he is dead when we open the box, how do we know he didn't have a weak heart and being in the box with all this stuff was enough to do him in before any gas released?"
"We'd do an autopsy to establish cause of death."
"And what if he produces a gas-mask while in the box? . . . "
All this springing initially from a humorous spark but beyond the humour it relates directly and seriously to the earlier post on Schrodinger's Cat , within which I wrote that my coin in a drawer notion, relating to the same field of intellectual inquiry, was "a much better and simpler case than the needlessly complex cat notion". In the dialogue above, though with man substituting cat, is shown how unsatisfactory Schrodinger's thought-piece actually is as a vehicle for intellectual knowledge. This also illustrates what I wrote of science and language here: "Science, in all its manifestations, is not an autonomous or 'pure' discipline, but is encompassed within, or a branch of, Language. What science , or true science, consists of is true language statements, and so the first principle of science is the innate and intrinsic meaningfulness of correct language, and science in all its applications also demonstrably shows the intrinsic truth and power of correct language, while also emphasising the absolute necessity of the language's correctness and precision." And so here, unlike his box, as an intellectual phenomenon Schrodinger's idea is a system far from sealed.
Monday, 17 January 2011
Specific
"There was this person . . . "
- "Be more specific."
"There was this particular person . . . "
"Proceed."
- "Be more specific."
"There was this particular person . . . "
"Proceed."
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Monday, 10 January 2011
Ascending or Descending
A ladder was descending from above . . . or it would probably be truer to say it was ascending from below . . . but anyway what difference does it make, ascending or descending, it's all the same. Or maybe there's a world of difference . . . but anyway, a ladder, you could go up it or you could go down it, you could even have one person going up it and at the same time someone else coming down it, the fellow below going up to the top of the ladder, the one above coming down to the bottom, or beyond rather the bottom, off somewhere else. But what would they do when they met each other? It would want to be a very wide ladder for them to pass each other, amicably one would hope, and everyone knows intimacy breeds amicability, and what could be more intimate than passing someone on a ladder.
"Intimacy breeds amicability" - I should try and remember that, it's the kind of thing that could get you noticed, you'd just have to choose the right moment . . .
But anyway the two people - men say, it would be more likely to be men - passing each other on the ladder . . . but in all probability, as I was saying, or beginning to say, they wouldn't be passing each other as how many ladders are wide enough to be condusive to passing? Instead you'd have an impasse, the two of them stuck, looking at each other, and after a while of this looking probably some kind of exchange:
"Could you get out of my way?"
"How can I?"
"You could move aside."
"You can see yourself I can't. There's no room."
"Hmm."
The man from above coming down could agree to start to retreat upwards but it wouldn't take long to see the problem there: the man below could still never get past, the man above always remaining above. So intead it's the lower man who'd have to retreat, retreat in an absolute sense, that is down to the ground and off to the side, out ofthe way, and then the other fellow could descend fully also, all the way down, and now with him gone if he still felt like ascending, the formerly lower man that is, could now unimpeded go up all the way to the top, at least unimpeded that is as long as there isn't someone else now also coming down, blocking his way, a someone who was all along behind, or rather above, or beyond the earler high up fellow who in the meantime came down. In which case of course the lower man going up would have to retreat again if he really wanted to persist in trying to get all the way up to the top.
It would be a bit much if after that came another unexpected descending man, but anyway, that's something about a ladder and maybe going up or down it and what might happen if there's a conflict of practical interests in the going up or the down.
"Intimacy breeds amicability" - I should try and remember that, it's the kind of thing that could get you noticed, you'd just have to choose the right moment . . .
But anyway the two people - men say, it would be more likely to be men - passing each other on the ladder . . . but in all probability, as I was saying, or beginning to say, they wouldn't be passing each other as how many ladders are wide enough to be condusive to passing? Instead you'd have an impasse, the two of them stuck, looking at each other, and after a while of this looking probably some kind of exchange:
"Could you get out of my way?"
"How can I?"
"You could move aside."
"You can see yourself I can't. There's no room."
"Hmm."
The man from above coming down could agree to start to retreat upwards but it wouldn't take long to see the problem there: the man below could still never get past, the man above always remaining above. So intead it's the lower man who'd have to retreat, retreat in an absolute sense, that is down to the ground and off to the side, out ofthe way, and then the other fellow could descend fully also, all the way down, and now with him gone if he still felt like ascending, the formerly lower man that is, could now unimpeded go up all the way to the top, at least unimpeded that is as long as there isn't someone else now also coming down, blocking his way, a someone who was all along behind, or rather above, or beyond the earler high up fellow who in the meantime came down. In which case of course the lower man going up would have to retreat again if he really wanted to persist in trying to get all the way up to the top.
It would be a bit much if after that came another unexpected descending man, but anyway, that's something about a ladder and maybe going up or down it and what might happen if there's a conflict of practical interests in the going up or the down.
Monday, 3 January 2011
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