Textual Reflexions

[I ought to have published this entry almost three months ago, but I didn't find time nor motivation to finish it properly and I a not sure I ever will. But time passes and I am far beyond schedule, so I hope that nobody will bother if I'll delete this entry in the future replacing it with a more complete one. I would like to dedicate it to my friends Paola and Federico Fedrizzi and Delia and Razvan Gurau who got married in July.]

In the interview that the German actress Cosma Shiva Hagen (IMDB) gave to the DB Mobil magazine I found some words worth quotation:

Romeo und Julia sind ja zwei Kinder, die sich ineinander verlieben und sich da voll reinhängen. Was im Erwachsenenalter oft verschwindet, weil man nicht mehr an die Liebe glaubt, sie viel theoretischer sieht.¹

I couldn’t agree more. The long road that brings us from childhood through puberty to the adult life is filled with disenchantment, the death of the more naïve ideals and the painful aknoledgement of the complexity of the world. First we learn that Santa Claus is just one of our relatives with a funny beard and costume; then it is the turn of the other illusions of Foscolo:

The ideals of justice, democracy, glory, beauty, the importance of life and somebody could say God, fall from their pedestals into the category of chimeras or just approximations of the real life.

Justice isn’t the same for everyone and all the attorneys know it: their skills can make a cause just or unjust. Democracy easily turns into demagogy: it is the power of those those who cry louder.

Glory goes to those who amuse the crowds: football players, singers, actors. Most great people are almost unknown outside their circles.

Love doesn’t make an exception: it is far away from the romantic irrational feeling, without any compromise. It is more complicated, it has a much more material and chemical basis, making lovers and OCDs not very different² An adult Juliet would surely subscribe an insurance policy in case of her death and Romeo would surely forget about Juliet’s death and move over after a while.

In order to free our lives from false truths, we must abjure these illusions and understand the real mechanisms of the world: wars, power struggles, corruption, compromises. We should be able to use these against whatever the fortune throws at us.

But if we were permitted to take a souvenir from our past lives, to make an illusion true, I have no doubt what I would choose: love. Everything else is worth dying for, but it’s certainly not worth living for. I hope that my friends managed in some mysterious way (for me), to make that wish come true.

¹Which roughly translates into:

Romeo and Julia are just two children that fall in love each for the other and they throw themselves entirely into it. They see in a very theoretical way what often changes in the adult age, because one doesn’t believe in love any more.

² Ig Nobel prize 2000 for Chemistry.

I probably will had to leave this city and everything that comes with it. With the opening of 43 Places I remembered that the world is big and there are still many places to visit before death. By surfing I found this quote, which is quite reassuring:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.
Ernest Hemingway

Dampyr nr. 16 Delta Blues
(images.sergiobonellieditore.it)

Je disais que j’étais amoureux¹ et même plusieurs fois. J’avais tort. Je ne l’ai découvert pas en trouvant le “vrai amour”, mais bien le contraire : une preuve que l’amour auquel je pensais n’existe pas, sûrement pas envers une femme ou autre être humain ou sentient.

Les moments heureux de ma vie n’étaient pas à côté d’une femelle de mon espèce, mais des moments de contemplation ; contemplation de quoi ? Je l’ignore pour l’instant. Je me rappelle un instant, 20 minutes peut-être, quand j’écoutais Atom Heart Mother et je lisait au même temps “Delta Blues” de la série Dampyr.

Je me souviens que j’étais heureux quand j’ai reçu le lecteur de disquettes pour mon Commodore 64.

Mais je dois creuser dans mon cerveau pour en trouver des autres et je ne suis pas sur qu’ils seront dignes d’être rappelés. De toute manière les filles sont totalement exclues de cette liste et tout le temps qui j’ai passé seul avec eux.

La raison de cette situation dérive de la vraie nature de l’amour : quand on est dans tel état nos sens sont confus, de la même façon comme quand nicotine ou l’éthanol remplissent notre sang. La quantité d’hormones dans notre corps nous fait agir de manière totalement débile envers les représentants de l’autre sexe et on l’appelle être amoureux. Je peux ainsi réformuler ma première phrase : J’étais ivre, j’étais sous effet de la nicotine, caféine et autres drogues et j’étais aussi amoureux.

L’opinion des autres est diametralement opposée, je le sais : “l’amour est la chose plus belle de la vie”, “c’est l’unique raison pour laquelle vaut vivre”, etc. Je respecte leur opinion, mais je ne la condivise pas. La vie pour la vie, les mathématiques pour les mathématiques, l’amour (dans mon sens) pour l’amour.

Ce sont des choix arbitraires, et aucun choix n’est meilleur qu’un autre. Pour ce qui me concerne c’est pile pour les maths, face pour l’amour…

¹ Je l’ai dit dans des conversations de vie réelle. Sur ce blog j’en ai fait allusion dans un commentaire

所有的記憶都是潮濕的*

(All memories are traces of tears)

Even if this quote comes only from a film, I’d like to include it in my favourites Chinese fortunes, since it describes one of the strongest truths of life.

Indeed, no one was ever born without crying, as soon as oxygen got into his lungs. No one ever died without regrets.

Perhaps it is a bit extremist to say that every memory we have is sad, but it is not far from the truth. Tears make up most part of our lives, the part spared by boredom, while happiness is just a solitary flower in a frozen field. There is no such a question as whether life is beautiful or cruel, but whether the moments of happiness are worth carrying on.

Personally I think the good spikes justify survival, but the advantage is very small and it is quite easy to pass the border. Thus the scorn for those who chose that way is not justifiable.

“I think they’re looking for something worth dying for, because it’s easier than finding something worth living for.” (Michael Garibaldi from Babylon 5)

I think I also should find something worth living for, dying it’s just too easy. But since glory, richness, poetry, love are but illusions, I’ll stand to the life for life’s sake concept, until I’ll find something better. Anyway I already study mathematic for mathematics’ sake.

Je viens de pondre encore un autre stupide Curriculum Vitæ et m’apercevoir ainsi que tous les idéaux pour lesquels on s’est battu dans notre vie, les instants pendant lesquels on s’est considérés heureux n’ont aucune signification. De nous ne restera qu’une page avec plus ou moins de faillites ou d’événements.

Je me rend bien compte qu’un CV n’est pas notre vie, qu’il pourrait y avoir quelque chose de non matériel dans notre existence, mais il en est une bonne approximation, bien plus proche de la vérité que le soit l’ensemble de vos idéaux. Beaucoup parmi les petits joueurs de cette tragédie-comédie titrée La vie de l’homme et sa beauté m’envieraient mon CV, mais si par quelque miracle ils pouvaient l’obtenir ils le regretteraient bien tôt.

Je vous laisse remplir votre résumé de la vie, pour que vous puissiez en découvrir la vacuité et inutilité. Je ne crois guère d’exagérer si je ne cesse jamais de répéter que la vie est une maladie.

A y bien réfléchir ce n’est pas absurde que ce soit comme ça. Votre système d’exploitation Windows, si vous voulez une comparaison informatique, est lui-même un virus et le mieux caché parmi les virus. Ainsi la vie est la mieux cachée des maladies, si qu’elle semble être une valeur fondamentale.

Je cherche encore quelqu’un qui ait attrapé la version bénigne de ce cancer, mais je ne suis pas sur d’en connaître. Si je vous dit que chaque faute qui vous faites ne vous sera jamais remise, considérez-vous encore possible d’améliorer cette existence ?

There are only two kinds of people, those who read A. A. Milne and those who read J. S. Milne, that’s all.

My today’s fortune cookie says:


Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.



Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Phototropism makes ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering makes sky so blue,
Sexual hormones are why I love you.


Some time ago I wished the second part of it didn’t exist, I thought human beings were metaphysical entities, but I was wrong. As far as I can tell we love the sun, because it gives as energy and we are selected to collect it. We like company, because it is strategically better in the case of an aggression and last, but not least important, we love people of opposite sex because our hormones program us to transmit the species and the sexually transmitted disease we call life.

So please leave all your romantic attitudes and thoughts about a greater nature of human beings. They are just wrong. We are here to be born, reproduce and die. All other activities are only utilities to accomplish these aims.

OHC-RM stands for Open Human Communication - Reference Model is my attempt to classify the human communication processes the way the OSI-RM classifies communication between logical machines. Having quite no knowledge of epistemology (at the moment I am writing at least, I don’t exclude the possibility of influencing my thoughts) I should end up with an alternative vision of human knowledge.

As a matter of fact I tend to classify human languages on three levels:

• low level: letters and other forms of communication, like sounds or computer bits, form words. There is a great variety of protocols for this level. We have already oral and written communication, but surely there are more.
• middle level: words are syntactically tied up to form sentences. I think this layer could be splitted into more parts to deal with the complexity of human languages and different grammars.
• high level: there are some processes in our mind that link the sentences with the meaning. This level should be the domain of logic, but there are some other aspects that I am not sure how to classify. There are some sentences that are grammaticaly perfect, but are not used in the human language. To this category belong the sentences generated by literal translation of sentences in other languages.

I sketched up only the main lines of how we could classify human communication by means of logic, algebra or computer science. I hope many more posts will follow and any hint will be welcome.

Who has programmed us? Is this just a big simulation of a human world to test reactions that couldn’t be tested on the real creatures?

I suppose we’ll never know it, we’ll never know why a simple sentence can crush a man more than an atomic bomb. We are not talking about some standard form to announce bad news, saying “He’s no more with us” or “You mean nothing to me”, “You are fired”, but of some sort of passwords that open only one door. “Is it correct to mortgage a live in order to follow a dream” once touched me, while sparing all the others who listened.

Today another secret access was granted to my mind, a backdoor known only by few whom the Programmer gave it, that I would rather not to divulgate knowing how much it means to me. I have to make a bug report, whom to address it to?

It is entirely possible that this world has a rational explanation, but it would be a pity to know it.

…Connection reset by peer…