You’ll Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger

Watched Woody’s new flick. Very mediocre. Worse than his last one Whatever Works (2009), which I actually quite enjoyed. You should pace yourself to one movie every two years, perhaps.

Is there any good body-centered therapist out there in HK? Or Gestalt therapist? That’s why I still don’t see it as a cosmopolitan city.

Reich views orgasm as an important function because it discharges excess energy and leads to a breakdown of neurotic character structures. He says, full orgasm is absent in neurosis and that only a free mind in a free body can experience and express a total body orgasm, not just a genital one.

Body and mind are functionally identical and that unfinished, blocked energy must be released from muscles of the body and expressed through movement as well as be psychologically finished.

Orgiastic potency! The ability to express all emotions fully!

Work is a Comfort

Finally got a day off. Actually a couple. I don’t even know how to deal with this sudden rush of luxury of time.

Work is a comfort, or can be a blessing, from time to time. It is a nice distraction from mulling over mid-night life questions.

What do people think when they wake up in the middle of the night? Now it’s becoming a routine for me, like an old friend. 3:40 am, or 4:15. Waking up 5am is normal.

I like to keep it dark…so that sleeping can crawl back in easily. Reading Kindle against this dim backlight is now a new favorite. But this morning was watching the new season of “In Treatment”. “My life was broken,” Paul said. Gabriel Byrne does age very well, doesn’t he.

“That after a while all these stars are going to burn out and everything is going to be gone,” that’s Woody’s mid-night musing.

It must be difficult. Difficult for everybody, or at least those who have a tender heart. “It’s always difficult and always hard to find someone that you can relate to in the world, in a lasting and a fulfilling relationship. It’s very hard to have a relationship for one’s entire adult life with one person that’s good for them and good for you. It’s a difficult problem.”

Went to a boring media luncheon yesterday. Hated the vibe. I came for the fish, I’d have to say.

Reader of His Own Self

Proust says, in reality, every reader is, while he is reading , the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely  kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof its veracity.

The experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment. Yeah. Reading fictions makes us feel less lonely.

Alain de Botton: “An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through continuousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm. Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changebility of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend, or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known as we could feel sad about. The book will have sensitized us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.”

A Secret Erotic Need

“To be violated is perhaps a need in women…a secret erotic need,” says Anais Nin.

To be loved is a mysterious thing, even under the best of circumstances. And it does not help much to try and inquire about love; if anything, asking about it muddles the situation further.

At best, the other person cannot tell you why he loves you; at worst, his reason for loving you turns out to be something about yourself you have never thought to be particularly lovable.

Watzlawick’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion was, do not simply and gratefully accept what life offers you by way of your partner’s affection. Ponder. Ask yourself — but not him — why he is fond of you. For he must have a vested interest or some other selfish reason that he is not likely to reveal to you.

Such as — to maintain the illusion that he’s still got possibilities life can offer … there’s still an “Other” way, an “Other” person, an “Other” life…few people can bear staring life at its bare, naked face.

The Hendricks say close relationship is the short path to revealing and sustaining essence. I never feel more alive than when I’m in an intimate relationship with another human being.

With Z, what felt like conflict initially often turned out to be the relationship trying to deepen. We’re moving closer to and further away from each other simultaneously.

The Situation is Hopeless, but not Serious

“We might only have been living a half-life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consists of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answer when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may even resort to some spectacular follies.”

On Steroid of Lurve

Woke up around 3am. Can’t sleep, can’t read, can’t do anything serious…wandering around on the VS website and Etsy. I need to knock myself out in brainless consumerism to escape that menacing sense of loss and forced missing-out!

Probably I just rushed down too much magnesium in my system too quick.

We’re listening to Nick Cave’s No More Shall We Part at the same time, but thousands of miles apart.

I feel the heavy weight of destiny.

Reality is Opaque

Was a very quiet news day yesterday. Had to blow up the Beidou satellite story which I’d only use as a photo-caption story on a busier day. Turned out it was a quiet day for everybody and every other news desk; the Beidou story ended up as the splash; this morning unknowing readers picking up our paper would be put under impression that something huge has been achieved in China’s space program. A piece of reality was socially constructed.

Not “Why?” But “How?”

“Why?” is not the ideal question to ask if you want to get closer to the nature of things; “How” would provide more hints than “Why”. The renunciation of the classical ideal of causality didn’t come from some fluffy post-modernism theories, but from hard-core science of quantum mechanics. According to Heisenberg’s Uncertain Principle, it’s impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron or any other particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty.

Where do moral sentiments originate? Perhaps we’re really only “a bundle of sensations” that Hume described? Sentimentalists say ethics is based on (gut) feelings rather than absolute moral principles. It may sound wacky but feels closer to the answer. Reason cannot be behind morality. One cannot be motivated by reason alone; it got to involve the input of the passions.

Philosophy can be defined as the human desire for the fundamental explanation that is never met. It is the constant attempt to understand a reality when we know we can never get beyond our limited consciousness. Therefore we are locked in a process of continuously philosophising in a futile attempt to deify our place within reality.

A miracle is a violation of all prior experiences.

The Art of Slowness

Slow down, you’re moving too fast. You’ve got to make the morning last!

Internet fragments our attention span in a way that is so scary. It actually erodes, slowly, one’s sense of self.

It certainly erodes one’s capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has. The printed book serves to focus one’s attention, promoting deep and creative thoughts. In stark contrast, Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from various sources. It worships speed and efficiency of optimized production and consumption.

A Lion in Winter

Putting away all summer clothes, packing up all those summer memories, taking out winter sweaters, toughing out next couple of months. Change of seasons always makes me sad.

From time to time, I yearn for pure escapism, completely divorced from reality.

Went for a brisk walk on Bowen Road. Glorious sunshine. But like Z said once, winter sunshine doesn’t warm your soul.

Anais Nin: “What we are really suffering from is just a lack of capacity for relationship. The difficulties of relationship have nothing to do with the partner we choose.”

Possessions Diminished by Possession

So why men stray?

Biological need for more sex, sexual variety and opportunistic sex. To boost ego to feel special. For the thrill of the chase. To escape the inevitable existential futility, angst and terror.

Read something from somewhere quoting a transgender man saying: “There’s a significant uptick in casual sex, a lowering of inhibitions, and far more interest in sexual variety…personally, I have noticed I have a new-found ability to completely divorce sexuality from emotional commitment.”

The genesis of love. Nietzsche delivers the cruelest analysis of the human emotion known as “love”. The German said love is born of egoism and actually “may be the most ingenuous expression of egoism”. Two main ingredients of love are desire and lust, which are always seeking after the new, as we tire of existing possessions and crave new attractions. “Possessions are generally diminished by possession.” Brilliantly brutal.

As Idiosyncratic as Fingerprints

Robert Burton called it “gut feeling” — “involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason”. William James described it as “felt knowledge”, something extraordinarily difficult to be dislodged through rational arguments. I call it “intuitive knowledge”.

Cognitive scientists now seem to believe the bulk of our thoughts originate in the areas of the brain inaccessible to conscious introspection. The trick in Chris Nolan’s “Inception” — the planting of an idea in human mind — if it can ever work, we have to sort out where to plant it first. Thoughts arrive in consciousness already coloured with inherent bias. Our perceptions are filtered through our genetic predispositions, biological differences and idiosyncratic life experiences. Your red is not my red. These differences extend to the very building blocks of thoughts. Thinking may be as idiosyncratic as fingerprints.

Illusion is also a form of perception. If you think you can actually see the world as it is, you are in illusion.

Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty.

A Matter of Life or Death

Just got to know my good friend’s mom passed away. Life is just a blink and the present moment is all that we got.

Anxiety — the default response to the unknown. All the cultural constructions are necessarily illusory, because the existential position of man is unbearable in the Final Analysis.

Once again detected a relative high level of irritability in my temperament. Almost lost temper to a new colleague yesterday, within a matter of several seconds.

Neuro-plasticity. New catchphrase. I thought the predominant belief is “neurogenetic determinism” — your genes and subconscious are the essential shapers of who you are and how you think and behave. The conscious mind is little more than a self-important figurehead along for the ride.

I just discovered Newton’s First Law of Motion is actually a profound statement of passivity and pessimistic view of life. Look: An object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

No-one, and no-thing, would voluntarily change their status quo. The status quo bias. A fundamental behavioral proclivity to prefer the status quo to change. The change involves a huge amount of incentive, which normal life usually doesn’t provide. One main reason: the prospect of losses looms larger than that of gains of equivalent magnitude.

I remember I expounded this view to Z some three years ago; he concurred, and went on with his way of living.

Headless Youth

The verdict of Milgram experiment was, ordinary people would obey immoral orders. Ordinary people, just like you and me, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can actually become agents in a terrible destructive process. We’re capable of becoming evil.

Fanfan reminded me of that scrap of paper I gave her some, gee — must be 10 or 15 years ago, with my handwriting on it: “Reason is, and only ought to be the slave of  the passions. David Hume.” The headless youth!

What comprises human passions? In his last major work, Descartes listed six categories: wonder, desire, love, hatred, joy and sadness. But Descartes was more concerned about how to control passions with acquired skills, which he called “the chief use of wisdom”.

Ordered six books from Amazon.com. Most looking forward to “How Real is Real” by Paul Watzlawick. Out of print actually. The best that the creative mind can do, is to heroically create new illusions.

And also two books on body-mind connections, a topic to which I will devote my amateurish research vigor.

All problems started with Descartes. The radical doubt he set off some 400 years ago still sticks around. All epistemology since then has had to seek to battle the possibility the Great Frenchman raised: There may be no World outside the Self.

Blue Moonlight

Woke up in the early morning again. A light blanket of moonlight was shining through my window. Some similar moments in the past — 20 years ago so exuberant about great books as to handwrite them down in thick notebooks in the wee hours powered by ice coffee, not knowing where I was going but full of hope; some 12 years ago at a shared dorm in Southwest Beijing, toning down desk light to read in the early morning; nine years ago in the first couple of weeks in the U.S., staying on a boat and counting the stars in the early morning, filled with equal amounts of anxiety and hope; five years ago in a smallish HK flat plotting my return to CA and getting up early for a run in Quarry Bay Park nearby…these shreds of memories, are so real and so close. My life is a blink.

So who was the chicken to call off the USS GW-involved joint exercise between Pentagon and Seoul in the Yellow Sea? The 3rd flip-flop over 2 months, which made Pentagon look pretty bad. Someone just said Washington had bigger fish to fry and Seoul was fuming…and am still slightly surprised Beijing seems increasingly able to have its way these days. Just a day ago, Geithner had to meet Wang Qishan at the Qingdao airport for an impromptu meeting. Second time the treasure secretary met with his Chinese counterpart in a makeshift meeting room inside the airport.

There was this meta-analysis on the relations between democracy and economic development (Przeworski and Limongi, 1993) — 21 finds, 8 positive, 8 negative and 5 no relationship. Exactly even. What did that tell you? Democracy doesn’t necessarily make you rich, and dictatorship might just work if you get the mixture right.

My Kindle has arrived. So has that box of wines.