Ransen's Blog

 

 "Conceptual artists have twisted themselves so much that their contortions leave them able to look up their own assholes. They claim to they see diamonds when all they actually see is their own shit." - Alpha F. She certainly has a way with words. "Critics have no expertise or insight into the workings of an artist's heart" - Alpha F.

 It's later than you think.

Anne Tyler is great at describing all sorts of humanity, including (in "A Patchwork Planet"), old men who leave their tools to surviving friends and relatives.  Old men who imagine, before they die, that their precious collection of useful objects will be gratefully received by other people. And then she goes on to say that the tools are usually ignored, then taken to the dump. I don't intend to die any time soon, but I think about that occasionally when I look at my collection of stuff. "He'd like that spanner!" I think. And "He'd like that power drill". And so on. Anne Tyler, even if she has never never met me, has my type down to a tee.

 I was using my soldering iron and unplugged it before I left the room. I stepped outside the door and thought: "Have I really unplugged it?" I stepped back in again and saw at a glance that I had:    And then I wondered when how had the concept of "unconnected" gotten into my brain, and how could I at a glance see that the soldering iron was unconnected. Somewhere in my brain the concept of unconnected was recognized as being active when shapes from my eyes we transmitted and interpreted.

 Sometimes nasty evil behaviour is excused by the fact that the nasty evil person has been brought up in an environment which produced that behaviour. That could be so, I cannot judge.  But there is a corollary of this which is hardly ever mentioned by the excusers. That is that extremely good people are also simply a result of their circumstance and upbringing . If there is no blame, there can be no praise.

More than 300 years ago, Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community.  I wonder if Spinoza (being on the whole a logical clear thinker) was amused by the phrasing: "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in." I'm a programmer so this has always struck me as odd. Once he is cursed by day and cursed by night you have covered all the possibilities. Any one of the three curses above covers all of Spinoza's life. I suppose religion is theater (and not logic or sense) and so needs theatrical curses (not logical ones).