Red shoes

In English curriculum of high school there used to be a story called the Red shoes which when worn gave the little proud girl incessant motion. The motion itself was static and tiring for the proud girl and she soon finds herself unable to stop, getting exhausted and regretting her pride, that caused her to wear the accursed shoes in the first place.
All of us from time to time don the red shoes and then unable to stop are carried away. The shoes move on their own accord and soon one is exhausted yet unable to stop. The dancing itself takes a life of its own.
The key to taking the shoes off is what a lot of people talk about including Gustafson and all of his predecessors of psychological/philosophical investigators. I guess the unspoken assumption of all work is developing an insight. An insight can be termed as an integration of non verbal in to the domain of verbal. Something that can be manipulated with words and organized in logos.
(logos meaning the rational mind that assumes things on the basis of differentiating). This would be in contrast to non verbal where all exists in eros or in a state of creativity and organization according to all inclusiveness. (Lewis Hyde)
Taking off the red shoes according to eros is something that a lot of people try. The people who stumble through life with the faith in their own capabilities and knowing that they might have to dance a long while before they feel like taking off the shoes themselves without having to dissect their personalities. Unfortunately, some succeed and some get destroyed.
The red shoes are dangerous things!!!!

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Prigogine: The end of certainty

In his book, the end of certainty, Prigogine talks about irreversibility as a possibility. This is something that people have neglected when putting forward laws that describe how nature operates. He calls many laws deterministic in nature, in that, they can be bidirectional with respect to time. He however says that this bidirectional time is a very narrow minded view. It only takes into consideration the isolated experimental subjects and considers them free of the multiple other factors that are impacting on them.

I was involved with a functional behavioral analysis of a child with disruptive behaviors. In a functional behavioral analysis one tries to determine the antecedents that cause the behaviors and the consequences that either enforce or extinguish the behaviors. A hypothesis of the whole situation is made and that hypothesis is tested out. The parents are then given strategies to manage the behaviors from the hypotheses. The proof that those strategies work has been shown to the parents during the testing phase. Hypothesis like "the child can go to a non preferred activity if he knows that it is time limited and if it is followed by a preferred activity", is an example.

This kind of analysis of behaviors is fine if a behavior is only considered to be present and influenced by a limited number of antecedents and consequences. But the truth of the matter is that the true antecedents to a behavior are multiple and have a propensity to be unknown. Freud believed the majority of the decisions that a person was making were unconscious. When dealing with these many possibilities of environmental and psychological variability, it is essential not to "over simplify" or "over complicate"things to the point that incredulous demands be made of patients in "treatment".

Prigogine talks about phase space which would be very applicable to the scenario of the disruptive child. All the different possible behaviors of the child are represented in that phase space. Prigogine also talks about stable (determinism) and unstable (chaotic) equilibrium and details characteristics of those systems.

A beautiful example he uses is of Poincare who proved that dynamical systems are non integrable. An integrable system would be a static deterministic world without the possibility of freedom. Non integrability results from existence of resonances between degrees of freedom. What we have done with behavioral analysis is to put on deterministic glasses and translated the multi factorial world into a lesser dimension. The city of Oz was not really green.

Prigogine also talks about prevalent energies in a system. How potential energy is maximum in a state of equilibrium and free energy is at minimum in a state of equilibrium. Increasing energy in a system also increased the areas of randomness in it. He describes creativity as an irreversible phenomenon which has been associated with complexity. Any system in non equilibrium can spontaneously evolve in to increased complexity and any system in non equilibrium can lead to irreversible phenomenon, hence creation.

With this he comes full circle to creation as an irreversible process which creates a system of equilibrium for itself till of course it is pushed into non equilibrium again. It will get pushed into non equilibrium.

From this we glimpse a view of a world which is constantly oscillating in between equilibrium and non equilibrium. A world which is constantly changing due to chaos, organizing and disorganizing itself. And caught in the center is man who attempts to act like the universe, organizing and then disorganizing whatever it comes across. Creating and then uncreating. Cooking and then digesting. Being born and then dying.

Rumi in "Three cups of tea".

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?

I came across these verses of Rumi in "Three cups of tea" by Greg Mortinsen. Beautiful choice to begin the chapter.

The moon and six pence-Maugham

The moon and six pence is a short story by W. Somerset Maugham but by my standards it qualifies as a book in more ways than one. There are some commentaries about him writing this book about Gauguin but when I first read this book I was not aware of this connection. I read this book when I was in the second/third year of medical school and it shook me quite a bit primarily because I was involved with preoccupations and themes elaborated in this book.

The book talks about man's need for freedom. It talks about the mundane quality of every day life that mankind can find so oppressive. It talks about a quest for finding the thing that makes life worth living. It gives words to the fundamental desire, that is as inherent in the bosom of man as breathing. The desire being the quest of happiness. Biologically happiness equates to dopamine and endorphins being released in the pleasure centers of the brain and the quest for happiness would be all the ways that an organism can manipulate its surroundings to achieve that goal. The book actually makes this quest just that, a biological drive. It removes the guilt associated with achieving this goal. The guilt Maugham points out subtly is a machination of the mind.
The protagonist in this book is a person that does not feel any guilt but does things based primarily on whether it makes him happy. It results in disastrous consequences for his wife, children, acquaintances and lovers. And the human tragedy that is so beautifully delivered in the book speaks about the conflict that one decision of man puts him up against. Every decision comes with its sets of "advantages and disadvantages", "pros and cons." And the advantages turn into disadvantages the minute our frame of reference changes. Maugham describes how one man escapes the frames of reference of "normality." Normality of course being described in turns of averages and numbers only. This escape brings with it another set of shackles. So essentially the hero exchanges one set with another. However these shackles are of his own choosing and as he dies in the most wretched conditions he draws his masterpiece. Sometimes miseries of our choosing can be preferable to an alternate set of miseries because there is a certain pleasure that is derived by the act of exercising the will, as futile as it might be.

Maugham remains engrossed with these existential questions and concerns in his other works. also. There has been some criticism on Maugham's work as not being as technically sound in terms of allegories, but the content of his writings and the pace with which he keeps the story going is second to none. There is a certain elegance to his writing that struck me, especially the abstract discourses about paintings. He writes also very similarly to how one would paint. He uses brush strokes which are direct and to-the-point on one portion of the canvas and then uses languid purposeless strokes on another portion. The irregularities to detail, the seeming randomness and the transitions are following a pattern in the writer's mind which is not apparent at first but as the process of application of ideas to paper is complete, it is awe inspiring.

This is clearly a topic that has some deep personal significance for Maugham. And same was the case with me.

Platon Karataev

One of the most memorable characters that I have come across in a book. The amount of space afforded to this character in the voluminous War and Peace and the impact it has on the readers is a good yard stick for it to safely say that this character is not a mere depiction of conflicts or ideals. Actually the character was remarkable for the total indifference it had towards the creator of the book. It did not demand any extra space. It did not demand any extra brush strokes of paints to deck its already satisfied appearance. It existed and still exists in the world of the novel and out of the novel. It is a character that can be said goes beyond the book that gave it semblance and the author that gave it life. The character actually threatens to engulf its creator because it is through this character that the creator, Tolstoy is able to realize his most cherished ideal. He starts talking about him and then kills him by the French soldiers thus elevating him to the position that he is at. One wonders whether it was the inability of Tolstoy to further refine that perfection that made him kill this person.
Platon is the perfect archetype of the mystic. The Sufi. Incidentally one of the yard sticks that we just used with Platon (Russian for Plato) can also be used with innumerable sages and wise men. People who despite overwhelming odds realized their life and lived it to its potential. People through whom Life itself experienced itself in all its glory and Life as well as other people were left awe struck. That would be the transcendental archetype of which Platon is one example.
Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad PBUH is the perfect example of that archetype.

Joker

This is the gist of Joker when he speaks to Harvey Dent.

clipped from www.imdb.com Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans. You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So, when I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know that I'm telling the truth.