Updated: 3/16/2004; 6:33:10 PM
3rd House Party
    The 3rd house in astrology is associated with writing, conversation, personal thoughts, day-to-day things, siblings and neighbors.

daily link  Tuesday, January 06, 2004

Do dreams carry meaning?

The other night I dreamed there were workmen installing new ductwork in my basement. I have no idea what it means; maybe just some subconscious rearranging of my thought patterns going on. But my immediate thought when I woke up was of George Lakoff’s “conduit” metaphor from Metaphors We Live By (posted about before). This metaphor has stuck in my head ever since I read it and associated it with all that ductwork in the movie, “Brazil.”

 

The conduit metaphor of communication says that “words carry meaning” apart from cultural context. Lakoff says the conduit metaphor is dangerous when applied to, say, government surveillance or computer files where “what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning.”

 

In “Brazil,” a man named Buttle is arrested and subsequently killed in place of a Mr. Tuttle all because of a typo. His name is disembodied from context so he ends up dead. (I have no idea if Terry Gilliam had the conduit metaphor in mind when he made the movie, but it’s so apt.)

 

Anyway, my mind leapt from “Brazil” to those French planes being grounded this Christmas because of several cases of mistaken identity. Not much harm done there except to people’s travel plans. But haven’t there also been cases since 9/11 of Middle Eastern men rounded up for questioning that were cases of mistaken identity or just unfortunate personal connections? I personally know men who are a bit on the swarthy side who’ve been pulled aside and missed flights because of their appearance. Again, in these latter cases it's only an inconvenience, but how far will all of this go if we have any new terror attacks here? Will the security threats we face push our society towards “Brazil”? That’s no dream, that's a nightmare.

Update: See SFGate.com on Quarantining dissent: How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech. (Via Abstract Dynamics.)

 

 
3:07:00 PM  permalink    trackback [] 

At last, the sun

This morning I woke to find the sun blazing and a glaze of ice and snow coating everything. I can't nearly capture it with my little camera (okay and my limited skills) but after days of dark damp grayness it's just beautiful.

 
8:25:11 AM  permalink    trackback [] 

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