I Am Mr. Positive
When I get angry at Erlang for being a crappy language, I pretend it’s actually an OS.
I instantly feel much better.
Lost in Dictionary
Words that are perfect for each other, separated by so many pages.
Words lost among words, words that don’t know their loneliness.
Doors Swung Open
Notes I made (lightly edited) when I was high on weed.
The first half is about how my mind is a tapestry of
independent processes, beautifully coordinated.
The second half is about music.
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September 28th, 2008
It seems my planning faculty is greatly suppressed. As
though it’s slowed down, so cannot issue commands as
fast. It’s hard to make serial decisions. Or, rather, hard
to make decisions at all. Or at least, cannot make fast
consecutive decisions, each of which an atomic unit of will.
I tried that on tissue papers. It seems that my muscle
memory has some buffer. So when my mind issues a command. It
can carry out by itself. While pending for the next
signal. So, if i decide “2 folds”, my hands fold it twice
really fast. If I have to decide “2 folds”, on two wills
(fold once, hmmm, fold again), it takes much longer. My mind
pauses in between, thinking what to do. So the hands cannot
keep folding until issued a second command.
Another interesting observation is that there seems to be
background processes underneath my consciousness, for
habits. Every once in a while, my attention quickly shfits
to some place else. For example, to scan the msn buddy
list. This doesn’t take an active volition. It does it
entirely by itself. And I become very aware of these
attention shiftings, and other habits I have. It’s as though
there are various attention grabbing points that attracts my
attention. “Habit” expects these points to be at certain
regions, and suggests itself very strongly.
I see these habits, because now they are transparent. There
isn’t much going on in my mind, so these things suggest
itself to the mind’s eyes. I can feel twitching coming up
from my legs. I can feel the tight shorts. I notice how my
hands would quickly go back to home row as I type.
I can feel how careful my typing action is coordinated. It’s
all very elegant to watch, and I never noticed them. If I
want to go back several characters, I would tap really fast,
and when I get close to the target, slow down the tapping. A
sort of Fitt’s law on the keyboard. It’s automatic, but I
can see it happening. It’s very cool. Various independent
threads cooperating with each other to compose (literally) a
complete tapestry of motion, as complicated as typing on the
keyboard.
Typing is very interesting. It involves self-corrections. If
I notice something wrong, everything leaps into action to
fix it up.
It’s quite insidious how habits would carry themselves
out. They are like train tracks. If you get into the tunnel,
the individual chains within a chain suggest themselves
irresistibly.
I forgot what I was talking about. So my higher cognitive
system backtracked semantically, causing my eyes to backscan
on what I had previously written.
Ahhhhhh. I can feel the coldness of breathing through my
mouth. The air against the roof of my mouth. The roof of
Himalayas.
Haha. Random associations (or disassociations) are so
abundant in my mind now.
I noticed something really cool about my mouse using
habit. Rather than going strictly Fitt’s law, I move to my
target as though on a ballistic trajectory to maximize
success rate. I’d swing around the target, and strike against
it with an upward fling. Perhaps I am better and moving
upward? This seems to be the case only when I am moving from
quite far. If I am about a cm within range, I go Fitt’s law.
There are just so many strange habits. I’d swear!
Hahahaha.
I do the circle around thing especially when I have my hands
away from my mouse. I don’t know where the cursor is, so I
first draw a long tail to figure out where it is, then go to
the target. I just automatically do an ellipse, so I’d get
both up and down strokes. My vision system would have two
chances to detect the cursor. Wow, this is incredibly
elegant. If I saw the cursor on the first stroke, than the
second would become the trajectory to the target I
wanted to move to. This is very beautifully coordinated.
As I am writing, I also noticed another background process
when I am writing. One habit is not to repeat grammatical
structure if I can help it. Not to repeat it, except for
effect. So if I repeat the same structure as the previous
sentence, my mind catches it, and tries to rephrase on the
fly.
========================================
Music with strong rythms is great for weed. With lots of
layering and repetitive elements. Lots of patterns, self
similarities. So even if my mind fails to receive all the
elements, the music still retains its structural
texture. One word: Stravinsky! Of course, Jazz is great
too. But oh my god, STRAVINSKY!!! I am listening to
Petrushka: Danses des Cochers et des Palefreniers. It’s
beyond interesting.
Oh Jesus!! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. This is too
weird. I just feel so many bizarre things. The Stravinsky is
wickedly distorted. So much so it sounds like Philip
Glass. I’d swear!! I miss so many notes, it’s nuts. 90
second piece, it probably has (by lack of density) but 1/3
as many bars as the real piece.
My God. Stravinsky really does sound like Philip Glass.
Now, let’s see how Philip Glass’s own music would sound
like. Stravinsky sounds a lot lusher than Philip’s
Glass. But under weed, it definitely has the same structure.
Philip Glass’s piano concerto 2 is one of the lusher Philip
Glass pieces.
Wow. Piano sounds incredibly lush. With incredibly rich
resonance. My perception for sound is incredibly
sharpened. It’s a viceral sensation of REALLY feeling it.
Wow! Mahler is absolutely amazing! For some reason, weed
really helps me to see the structure of the music. The
second movement of his 5th symphony is absoutely
wonderful. Near the end there’s a triumphant “ending”. I was
thinking, hmmm, Mahler buddy, this is the second movement,
why are you ending it. And it kept going, rising,
rising. Absolutely transcending. Not in any cheap way too! A
genuine bursting out of the cave into light, and rising into
the sky (after about 9 minutes of darkness and gloom). So I
couldn’t believe. And it got really painful on me. I wanted
to know how Mahler can possibly keep going after absolutely
blasting the piece into the stratosphere in terms of
glorious ending. Then BOOM, it suddenly shifted mood. As
though the hero have broken through a storm cloud, relieved
by the sun blazing into his eyes. No sooner, enemy planes
appeared behind. Everything went pissed. Then the absolute
Evil Empire tramping on everyone music. What seemed perfect
and glorious immediately turned into a Nazi, imperial
oppression. Once we know that the seemimg glory only
presaged doom, and we were left there in contemplation, as
though sighing for the last glittering flints in the ashes
of the could’ve-been glory, then at the background, the
woods tweet, ba-ba-ba-da-da. The original glory-ascending
theme. In the same major key. But with a mocking, impish
smirk. Ha! I got you. What did you think it was? You
actually thought it was going to end beautifully?? Ha!
Think again! Look at this! Look at the dead, deflated skin
of your once glorious vision. Nothing but a puffed up
balloon now burst! The mocking voice then danced around
the discarded, wrinkly skin of the once-glorious.
Amazing stuff.
The appreciation of music definitely has to do with its
manipulating of one’s sense of time. Music is a time
sequence of pitches. By recurring the pitches, it can make
the listerner feeling suspended in time, of course. Certain
elements keep recurring. As memory to a time that had
been. But often twisted for various effects. Mahler is
absolutely fascinating to listen to. At around 4/5th of the
way into his third movement, there’s a sequence of short
tabloids. Each one displaying a little picture, that merges
into each other, like Escher’s engraving “Night and Day”. I
was absolutely fascinated. I paid attention to the
transitions, to see how it would turn into the next
picture. It’s marvelous and surprising. And Mahler made me
laugh with delightful unexpecations.
It’s really interesting how Mahler can suggest a harmony,
but leave out some notes. You’d see the shape there, but
feeling something’s missing. In the first half of the third
movement, he did a bunch of these shadowy harmonies with
notes missing. I could literally see tattered clothes
hanging. A begger limping his way.
About 2.00 into the fourth movement, there’s also this
incompleteness played by the harp in the background. Gives
it a sense of longing. The melody is gorgeous. But the harp
suggests something’s not quite right. Of course, then it
started to croon, telling me what’s not right. My mother. My
cat. My lover… so on and so on. What a whiner.
Referring back to the triumphantness of the false 2nd
movement ending. It’s comparable to the finale of
Beethoven’s Fifth. It’s that over the top. Completely
unexpected. “Over the top” not in a negative way.
Beethoven’s finale is, of course, religiously
over-the-top. Mahler’s false ending is also very
convincing. Now I feel so cheated by Mahler. I mean, he left
absolutely no room. And I saw him squeezing his back against
the roof. But he made it through! The false ending was in
no way trite. It felt genuine.
I hate poop music.
I mean, pop music.
It’s interesting how notes can feel rounded or jagged. The
same contour with slightly different harmony can feel soft
and elastic (with smooth bowing). Or sharp and jagged. With
strong, spiking accents.
Good lord. I sat through the entire Mahler’s Symphony No
5. This has probably the most enjoyable music listening in
my life. Never had I seen a piece of music so with so much
clarity. Mahler is a very good story teller. The weed’s
effects pretty much worn off now. It now seems the depth my
my perception is flatten again.
But I am very glad that I can appreciate music this
much. Now I perceive the variations. The musical puns. The
“intellectual” stuff I though I’d never perceive if I don’t
know any music theory. Bosh! I definitely saw it. It’s not
an intellectual problem. Really seeing the music is a
perceptual thing. Mahler makes many different things going
on at the same time. Certain parts of it almost seem
architectural. Again, there’s a general contour, but with
decorations. The decorations repeat some patterns, with
variations. So we get different textures by combining the
two. Lots of it are meaningless flourishes (as in, at too
syntatic a level to suggest any meaning independent of the
bigger context). But they are like the those turn of
phrases, those small details visual artists would put in,
but people would not take to be the prime focus. Small
flourishes that makes the countour richer.
I feel today is the first time I understood music. Before I
could appreciate the beautiful shape. The contour. It is as
though I can’t understand Arabic, but I can appreciate how
beautiful their script is. But all the sudden the music
started saying things. The story isn’t coherent, but it’s
definitely story telling. There’s no plot. But it’s as
though there are “prototypical” plot elements. We have
“struggles”, “breaking free”, “anguish”, “mocking” as plot
moods unsusbtantiated. A schizophrenic story if actually
set to words. But it works on the emotional-intellectual
level. It bypasses concrete… things. Just abstract
structures carrying emotional meanings.
What writing does is to point to things and suggest the
line. What music does is to draw the line without the dots.
Both depend on some kind of gestalt. It doesn’t seem that
one is “higher” or “lower” than other. It’s like they appear
at different distances, in different focuses. Words are very
closed up, highly focused experiences. Melodies are sort of
time distortions. Lacking the concrete things, you kinda
feel the space-time morphs and distorts into some
“experiential” shapes. You don’t really need to put in the
concrete things into the space, and you still get a sense of
what the picture is. It’s like taking a Dali painting,
passing it through a few passes of Gaussian blur. You end up
with a (bizarre) composition, you see patterns, colors
arranged in some way, but without the details.
I am glad I don’t need anything special to REALLY experience
music. I don’t need to be a synaesthete. I just need weed to
open the doors of my perception.
God Said So
Concurrency isn’t a “nice layer over pthreads” – the most important thing
is isolation – anything that mucks up isolation is a mistake.— Joe Armstrong
Chisel that on a mountain cliff 100 times, go now!
