dimanche 21 décembre 2003

Know thyself ... but which one? I woke up long before dawn, despite lights out late because a gripping development in last night's book would not let me go. At the expense of John Fowles and Michael Ondaatje, Alastair Reynold's 'Revelation Space' (Gollancz, 2000) narrowly won my "best opening lines" test and is next up for review here. Thus far, it's a superb first novel. My mind remained troubled on awakening, not by Alastair's latest clever and sinister twist aboard the vast, decaying "lighthugger" of a ship, Nostalgia for Infinity, but by much talk of identity. To switch on Radio 4 LW and find my favourite morning channel taken over by Day Five of bloody cricket, even on a Sunday, improved nothing. I imagine the interminable hours of "commentary" for a third week in a row are driving my old friend Tony half-mad, especially since he's having eye surgery which temporarily renders accessing visual brain-food difficult. Then I was soothed for a while by the bland, inane vacuity of the garbage surrounding England vs. Sri Lanka. Test match tedium seems timeless, from dawn to dusk, and a recent 'Desert Island Discs' featuring "Blowers" served merely to assure me that these people live in a world light years from mine. "(Henry) Blofeld’s become known as much for his musings on pigeons, planes, double decker buses, tea ladies, cakes and his catchphrase ‘My dear old thing’ as he is for his cricket commentary." Such musings are allowed because they won't even take suspended cricket off the air if the rain seems remotely likely to lift... I remember Roy Plomley ('DID' history) from throughout childhood, but have just learned that what he started is "the third longest running radio programme in the world", reassuringly older than me. Many a life-telling castaway has spoken of identity "problems", the times when they had to determine who they "really were", often at career turning points. These past few days, I've been assailed by people with ... er, a challenged sense of identity, from a fellow in the Canteen to Wildcat and Kid -- and even a surprising number of people at work whose questions and volunteered information appear to have been triggered by my own readiness to speak of changes which happened to me during my six-month absence from the Factory. Younger and more arrogant than I usually manage to be now, I was among those who half-despised and half-envied people who never seemed to question anything, least of all themselves; getting older has taught me that such individuals are far less numerous than I liked to imagine and that both the contempt and the jealousy were misplaced. At GreekPhilosophy.com, the maxim 'Know Thyself' is in part the subject of a downloadable e-play on 'The Trial of Socrates' by contemporary writer Giorgos Skourtis. "However, according to the ancient historian Plutarch, 'Know Thyself' was originally the admonition 'Gnothi se auton' ('Know Thyself') inscribed on the Sun god Apollo's Oracle of Delphi temple in ancient Greece. Plutarch should know about the inscription on the Oracle, since he was once one of its caretakers. In deference to Socrates, it's known that Apollo's Oracle of Delphi identified him as being the wisest of all men." Those lines at 'About' are by Anthony Peña, an interesting man who brings much study of Carl Jung's writing to his own reflections on astrology ("art or science?" ('About' again). Increasingly I suspect that the "self" we're expected to know is a multiple and incoherent entity, a collection of selves, more or less integrated from one person to another. The complex diagnosis from my recent illness, like past experience, has reminded me how gifted we are at the art of self-deception, since I've had to learn that there is almost infinitely more to the interaction between the false poles of mind and matter than I was willing to admit in May. One of the reasons I enjoy science fiction -- and rail against people determined to consider the best of it a kind of writing apart, in a ghetto remote from whatever they consider "mainstream" literature -- is that many of my favourite authors, those who are as profoundly interested in character development as they are in technology, bring a new approach to ideas of identity. That science fiction often tackles questions of spirituality and religion as much as it challenges notions of "progress" no longer surprises me. When it comes to issues such as ageing and memory, "virtual" reality and the so-called real world of our sensory perceptions, mind drugs and altered states of consciousness, artificial intelligence and cloning, many "sci-fi" writers are as much pioneers and probers of the nature of identity as Buddhist monks. Kim Stanley Robinson, mentioned here several times, pursues an interesting theme in the Mars trilogy, when he considers the effects much increased human longevity by medical means might have on the sense of self. Today, I find that my own view of self as disintegrated and multiple is not so far from the "teachings" of that half-Greek, half-Armenian writer, philosopher, "psychologist" and composer Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and his 'Fourth Way'. I devoured (and probably much misunderstood) Gurdjieff's books as an adolescent, including the monstrous tome 'Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson' -- otherwise modestly entitled 'All and Everything'. Equally intriguing was the work of his sometime "disciple" Petyr Ouspensky, who left us both a book and that phrase, 'The Fourth Way' -- the path of inner development without withdrawing from the world as monk, fakir or yogi -- along with 'Tertium Organum' (1920; Amazon US), which was far from easy going! One Michael Presley has produced a commendably balanced but not so "brief overview" of aspects of Ouspensky's thought at the splendid 'Sumeria', which links into the very first Virtual Library, an astonishing resource set up by the father of the WWW himself, Tim Berners-Lee. Two of Gurdjieff's ideas have remained with me all my life: the first is that most people are "asleep" without knowing it, but "human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive influence of culture and education, which engrave in them the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only an egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will." (Jacob Needleman) Then comes the notion -- equally well summed up by Needleman, a San Francisco State University professor of philosophy, in 'Gurdjieff and his school' (Berkeley) -- that: "Modern man’s world perception and his mode of living are not the conscious expression of his being taken as a complete whole. Quite the contrary, they are only the unconscious manifestation of one or another part of him. From this point of view our psychic life, both as regards our world perception and our expression of it, fail to present a unique and indivisible whole, that is to say a whole acting both as common repository of all our perceptions and as the source of all our expressions." Needleman (his home page), is in his own right a prolific author. In 1997, he published 'Time and the Soul,' which has received such rave reviews that I've added it to my wishlist. In my not so weird worldview, time ultimately doesn't exist. But the trouble remains that it's also "the greatest modern scarcity. What used to be considered signs of success--being busy, having many responsibilities, being involved in many projects or activities--are today being felt as afflictions (...) Needleman, shows how to take a bold and unconventional approach to time. The aim: to get more out of it by breaking free of our illusions about it. Needleman dispenses with tricks and techniques that only serve to make our obsessiveness more 'efficient'. Instead he shows how we can understand what our days are for. It's this understanding that allows time to finally begin to 'breathe' in our lives" (from the book jacket description). Now that's a need I have absolutely no problem identifying with! Asleep or awake, this entry bites off far more than I'm ready to chew on right now with a rediscovery, on the Net, of now retired Professor Jack Smart (Australian National University). A genial and extensive essay by this sometime controversial social scientist and philosopher is available on the WWW as 'The Identity Theory of Mind', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2000 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) 8:06:59 PM  link   your views? [] Protected copy? The butter, the 'bread' & the greed "...cette anomalie restreint son utilisation et constitue un vice caché au sens de l'Article 1641 du Code civil." Which, being translated, is where a high court ruling slaps the record industry straight across the face for copy protecting CDs, telling it "Stop that! Or tell the truth." This judgement against EMI France came in two cases brought in summer before the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, and spread a wave still unfurling through the media this side of "the pond". EMI's release of a 'Best of' classy jazz-blues-rock singer Liane Foly -- 'Au Fur et à Mesure' (Amazon UK) is a personal favourite -- was the first CD to land the music giant in trouble in July ('EMI condamné...'; 01net, Fr). Consumers' associations CLCV (Consommation, logement et cadre de vie - Consumption, housing, lifestyle) and UFC-Que Choisir put the boot in again in September (Juriscom.net - "the law and information technology"; Fr), this time over Alain Souchon's 'J'veux du Live' (RTL2; Fr). In both cases, EMI was ordered to repay the cost of the flawed CD, with damages and interest in the first, and henceforth explicitly to mention on discs: "Attention: this cannot be read on all players and autoradios". The "hidden vice" or defect in such CDs referred to the consumers' groups by hundreds of purchasers was the manufacturer's manifest breach of the Civil Code in failing to sell them with the mention that they would not work in your car stereo, computer and certain other players, let alone copied. The story was taken up then by The Register, which also, with characteristic snottiness, saw fit to describe the offending Souchon CD as "to non-French ears, offensive". However, the Paris High Court in October threw out (01.net, Fr) similar cases against BMG and Sony, ruling that the plaintiffs had failed to bring enough evidence of insufficient warning that the incriminated articles were copy-protected. This showdown is far from finished. Consumers' associations rightly consider, with some compelling arguments, that French courts have yet to determine whether copy protection as such breaks the law. It is facile to conclude that the record companies are still winning the war because they have won a battle or two; they're running scared. Last week, an informed source working in a specialised music retail chain of stores told me, on condition of anonymity, that "some of the big firms have begun to stockpile unprotected copies of the CDs in case of further trouble with the courts". I have yet to find a record company spokeperson ready to comment on this assertion, but I can believe it. What goes down singularly badly in France is that we not only have to pay 19.6 percent VAT on CDs (and DVDs and software), but since 1985, we have also had to pay a special tax on blank CD-Rs and CD-RWs. What for? The legislation would have it that the sum raised is to reimburse artists against the breaches of copyright caused by pirates. At Que Choisir ('What to Choose'), the magazine is collecting further protests from the public about this double duty and breaches of citizens' rights. Its editor-in-chief, Jean-Paul Geai, estimates that in France in 2002, this special tax alone raised "almost 135 million euros (167 million dollars) which were collected and distributed to artists in compensatory payments." There's a French expression, "tu ne peux pas avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre". While the music industry insists on keeping both the copyright and the compensatory sums paid for it, it's going to face one court case after another. French justice has impressed me sufficiently often in 20 years by coming down squarely on the side of reason and common sense that I imagine the record companies are in for further unpleasant surprises. In an opinion piece in the January 2004 issue of a first-rate magazine launched in June to which I wish every success, 'World musiques ... destinations' (sadly, no website), copyright law specialist Eric Caprioli (Caprioli@vocats, Nice, Fr.) points to the next step in this country: "(...) we might ask ourselves," he writes, "if it's enough to inform the consumer of the limits built into a support [a CD or DVD] in adding a description, as ordered by the [Nanterre] judges, when the user has a legal right to own private copies." It ain't over yet. 6:19:48 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.