Stabbing Out the Eyes of the Beholder
Hello all - I hope I find you all in miserable feeling and tragic circumstance.
The other day, I saw some great comments (here, here and here) about the nature of emotions and how one Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is doing sterling work in explaining them all away as ancient forms of language, social adaptation and other definite motives.
In the third comment I cited, Jaded mentions the questions "what's so funny?" and "why are you crying?", and it's these exact questions that this quality fellow is trying to answer - using absolutely no poetry whatsoever. Just solid, scientific inductions and measurable experiments.
Killing the esotericism of our feelings is all good. I want it. Hard.
Let's take "what's so funny?" as a good example of one of the targets of his enigma-cannon. Ramachandran postulated (and proved - I think? I'm not sure) that laughter and amusement are signals that we give out when a supposed danger is shown to be false. For instance, if someone slips on a banana skin, and falls over, and is found to be unhurt, we laugh. Others around us know that there was a false alarm. It's communication. But communication on a level that pre-dates language and culture. It's communication from the days when the best way of us saying 'hey, dude - false alarm' was a series of garbled, oafish chortles, drool slithering down our faces.
And if you think about it - laughter still escapes us in those same circumstances. When bad things seem to be happening, but there is actually no danger. Watching disasterous sit-coms, being ridiculed, riding a rollercoaster, and so on.
So bang, there goes the mystery of laughter.
One day, the sights will be set firmly on love. It'll be explained away so fucking exhaustively that it will no longer be the stuff of poems or individuality. It'll just be that thing that exists to cunt you up, make you weak, chew you up and spit you out.
Of course, at about this point, the power in all beauty will die. Awe and humility will be explained and pointless. The bond between child and mother will be bottled, customised and injected into adopted kids. The chemical imbalance caused in us by observing sunsets will be seen as childish and masturbatory. And Ramachandran will sit emotionless in a darkened room, cradling our stabbed-out eyeballs, rocking them back and forth to sleep...
The other day, I saw some great comments (here, here and here) about the nature of emotions and how one Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is doing sterling work in explaining them all away as ancient forms of language, social adaptation and other definite motives.
In the third comment I cited, Jaded mentions the questions "what's so funny?" and "why are you crying?", and it's these exact questions that this quality fellow is trying to answer - using absolutely no poetry whatsoever. Just solid, scientific inductions and measurable experiments.
Killing the esotericism of our feelings is all good. I want it. Hard.
Let's take "what's so funny?" as a good example of one of the targets of his enigma-cannon. Ramachandran postulated (and proved - I think? I'm not sure) that laughter and amusement are signals that we give out when a supposed danger is shown to be false. For instance, if someone slips on a banana skin, and falls over, and is found to be unhurt, we laugh. Others around us know that there was a false alarm. It's communication. But communication on a level that pre-dates language and culture. It's communication from the days when the best way of us saying 'hey, dude - false alarm' was a series of garbled, oafish chortles, drool slithering down our faces.
And if you think about it - laughter still escapes us in those same circumstances. When bad things seem to be happening, but there is actually no danger. Watching disasterous sit-coms, being ridiculed, riding a rollercoaster, and so on.
So bang, there goes the mystery of laughter.
One day, the sights will be set firmly on love. It'll be explained away so fucking exhaustively that it will no longer be the stuff of poems or individuality. It'll just be that thing that exists to cunt you up, make you weak, chew you up and spit you out.
Of course, at about this point, the power in all beauty will die. Awe and humility will be explained and pointless. The bond between child and mother will be bottled, customised and injected into adopted kids. The chemical imbalance caused in us by observing sunsets will be seen as childish and masturbatory. And Ramachandran will sit emotionless in a darkened room, cradling our stabbed-out eyeballs, rocking them back and forth to sleep...
posted by Juliet is Bleeding... | 1:52 pm
I have manipulated your post, such that the link is both fine and dandy. You can see how I did it if you try editing it.
Lucifer smiles on good HTML... Good luck.
CM: I like the idea of that dating agency. Though I'm fairly certain that, even worse than asking a girl out and being turned down, even worse than getting drunk and trying it on with a bunch of girls who say no, even worse then going speed dating and being rejected by thirty women in a single night - attempting a neuropetidic match across half a billion women and finding that you're too freakish to be with even one, might just send one scurrying for the sweet oblivion of a heroin OD.
It is a cool idea though - I'll check out Franzen.
I wouldn't worry, most of the concepts here are pretty ineffable anyway(, yo).
I am enjoying your abbreviation comedy. A bit.