The free association thread

[dada]

I'm finding that to have considered the possibility that a post in the cat thread was deleted by the mods says something. Not about the mods, or the 'current climate' of the board, although it might say something about that, too. But it says something about me.

What does it say, though. It says Cats are super important to me, of course.

I don't know, maybe it doesn't 'say' anything. Not like a cigar is a cigar, but like a sign is silent.

[dada]

In the quarter of the tavern, there are many men
Who can decipher secrets from the tablet of existence,
Outside the wonders of the conditions of the world,
They are aware of secrets, but they lead their normal lives.

Don't you believe it.

I found it in the memoirs of the first Aga Khan, he's quoting Suhrawardi. There's been a shit-ton of research on and translations of Ismaili literature from the Alamut period in recent years. We've come a long way from "assassins lurking in a cloud of hashish."

Although research had already put the propaganda to rest long before. Bill Burroughs and Bob Wilson should have known better, or didn't want to know better.

I'm not angry at them, just disappointed. Since then, Bill did turn me on to Denton Welch. So I guess Bill is redeemed. Denton's prose goes down so easy. It's as if what is said extends right up to the horizon of what's left unsaid, there's no "gray zone" left in between. A thoroughly enjoyable writer.

Not that the Old Man of the Mountain isn't dangerous. It just isn't because of any assassin drug cult. It's because he proclaimed the great resurrection in August of 1164. The end of sharia law. Women need no longer wear veils, and should be educated alongside men.

So you can see why the old man was dangerous. These heresies are always the same heresy, aren't they?

But what does the great resurrection mean for you, a stubborn literalist who doesn't live under the shariat. Nothing, nothing at all.

Obviously I'm not technically free associating here. But where else to put a post like this? Don't feel like searching through the thousands of threads for an appropriate one. Or starting a fresh Alamut thread. I see no reason. I'm not on a crusade for the Ismailis.

Why bother writing it at all. Or writing, at all. I don't know. Maybe you have heard of the wound that can only be healed by the weapon that made it. Or the fetters that can only be loosed by the one who tied them.

But whatever. I'll let you get back to more important matters. The great debates. How many licks to the center, mr. owl. How many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Yes, but how many can you fit at the end of your pen?

[Harvey]

Obviously I'm not technically free associating here.

I believe you're perfectly within the wide and generous spirit of the thread.

[dada]

Thanks, I do try.

But now perhaps I should free associate in a more traditional way, as an encouragement to participation. Although, all my words nowadays could be considered an invitation.

A wide and generous spirit, a wide mouth with generous lips. A big smile. A cheshire cat, a Cheshire cheese.

Why does a Cheshire cat grin like that. The historians continue to speculate. Some say the smiling cat was a popular label on good, crumbly Cheshire cheeses. But that doesn't answer the question, why put the cat on the label in the first place?

This is because in an area where much cheese is produced, there are lots of mice. Also, lots of milk, naturally.

A cat would be quite happy there, wouldn't you say. I can just picture a contented cat sitting by the fireside, reading a book. Of Mice and Milk, of course.

Also, the cats all have milk on their whiskers. A milk moustache on a cat highlights the shape of the cat mouth, brings out the grin.

Moustaches, mario, mushrooms. We're still in the vicinity of Wonderland, here.

Adding the vanishing cat to the moustache leads to Groucho singing Hello, I Must Be Going. And we're back to crumbling cheese.

[Harvey]

Thanks, I do try.

But now perhaps I should free associate in a more traditional way, as an encouragement to participation. Although, all my words nowadays could be considered an invitation.

A wide and generous spirit, a wide mouth with generous lips. A big smile. A cheshire cat, a Cheshire cheese.

Why does a Cheshire cat grin like that. The historians continue to speculate. Some say the smiling cat was a popular label on good, crumbly Cheshire cheeses. But that doesn't answer the question, why put the cat on the label in the first place?

This is because in an area where much cheese is produced, there are lots of mice. Also, lots of milk, naturally.

A cat would be quite happy there, wouldn't you say. I can just picture a contented cat sitting by the fireside, reading a book. Of Mice and Milk, of course.

Also, the cats all have milk on their whiskers. A milk moustache on a cat highlights the shape of the cat mouth, brings out the grin.

Moustaches, mario, mushrooms. We're still in the vicinity of Wonderland, here.

Adding the vanishing cat to the moustache leads to Groucho singing Hello, I Must Be Going. And we're back to crumbling cheese.

I take it this is a personal invitation, since you bring up the Cheshire cat (real enough, like the Welsh dragon (which was adopted by Liverpool for their symbolic heraldic beast, the 'Liver Bird') all of whom I've seen and vivdly remember (much as the genesis of Frederic Edwin Church's vision was clearly remembered by him)

Frederic_Edwin_Church_-_Our_Banner_in_the_Sky_(Terra_Foundation).jpg

but the real question remains, 'what is real?') and since you appear aware that I'm a denizen of Cheshire and have been much of my life, perhaps I should accept the invitation, despite not knowing what it entails. My experience was of a gigantic golden intricately drawn cat, woven of cloud and evening sun, grinning straight out of Tenniel, but with no attached suggestion of origins. It led me one day to the Cheshire Cat pub ostensibly to apply for a job. While I waited for my interview, I noticed some archive photographs of King George V visiting Chester in 1913 https://www.britishpathe.com/video/king-at-chester-drive-in-open-coach in a 'motorcade' of open topped carriages, on a stretch of road remarkably evocative of Dallas in the photo I saw. I'd just been immersed in reading about the Black Hand and Gavrillo Princep, and suddenly it occurred to me that if George had been assassinated here (this feeling was accompanied by intense intimations of some such unrealised plot) other European heads of state would have been slightly more careful in the year that followed, and of course modern history would have been very different. I never followed up the lead but I do remember the vivid 'intuition.'

[dada]

I didn't know you are in Cheshire, but free associating led me there.

What is real, like a riddle? I feel like gollum when bilbo asks him, 'what have I got in my pocket.'

Not an official invitation, more like the stars are an invitation to look up. They don't send out official invitations.

Looking up at the invitation of the stars, one sees them turning around a centre, marked by the pole star. Is this a real perspective? It is for the navigator charting a course. Real enough.

Exactly as real as it needs to be, more or less. But really for the navigator, every sky is a painting of the banner of a nation in one world or another. All the places he'll be making stop overs. Resupply, give the crew a break.

Traditional free association: Dragon, King George. A King, a throne. Angels. Cabbages. Walrus, capenter. Joker, thief. Thief, baggins.

[dada]

Guess I'm out, too. Skies look favorable.

Hail freedonia, save the whales.

[Cordelia]

Africa, the most beautiful word in the world, Africa.

[dada]

Jupiter and Saturn will appear closer in our sky than they have in centuries, mimicking the Christmas star on Monday, the 2020 winter solstice.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lehighvalleylive.com/weather/2020/12/a-christmas-star-on-the-first-day-of-winter-everything-to-know-about-the-2020-winter-solstice-the-shortest-day-of-the-year-122120.html%3foutputType=amp

This sort of conjunction with Jupiter and Saturn happens about every 20 years this century, according to NASA. But it is very rare that Jupiter and Saturn will appear quite this close. An observable conjunction of these two planets that close hasn’t happened since the year 1226, according to EarthySky.org.

...

The Ursid meteor shower will unfold during the second half of Monday night and into the early hours of Tuesday morning, but will only be visible for skywatchers across the Northern Hemisphere.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.11alive.com/amp/article/weather/accuweather/winter-solstice-ursid-meteor-shower-how-to-see/507-bec12cd7-6542-4dac-8b34-59ad2eb6892e

"The Ursids are often neglected due to the fact it peaks just before Christmas and the rates are much less than the Geminds, which peaks just a week before the Ursids," the American Meteor Society (AMS) explained.

"Observers will normally see 5-10 Ursids per hour during the late morning hours on the date of maximum activity," the AMS added. "There have been occasional outbursts when rates have exceeded 25 per hour."

After the Ursids subside, there will be one more opportunity to view a meteor shower in the coming weeks before there is a three-month spell of no major meteor showers.

On the second night of January, the Quadrantid meteor shower will peak, and like the Ursids, will only be visible across the Northern Hemisphere. This shower tends to be more impressive than its predecessor and can feature anywhere from 20 to 120 meteors per hour, according to the AMS.

Once the Quadrantids come and go, it will be three long months before another meteor shower sparkles in the night sky - the Lyrids in late April.

[dada]

All this freedom of talk speech has me ruminating on the different types of freedom. Freedom won, freedom earned, freedom found, and freedom desired. The highest type of freedom is desired.

Freedom won is fought for, to keep it, or to take it by force. But the logic of freedom dictates that you can't earn freedom unless you lose the fight.

As well, you can't find freedom unless you go bankrupt, and you can't have freedom desired unless you fail to find it.

That's the logic of freedom, seemingly counter-intuitive. Freedom desired is the most confusing, because when you have it, you don't. And when you don't have it, you do.

Another false dilemma. So we call freedom desired freedom's angel, the angel of freedom. As stated in the hauntology thread, an angel is philosophical shorthand, facilitating discussion without getting caught up or bogged down in false dilemmas.

The angel of freedom is desired. We say this is the desire that turns the heavenly bodies in their orbits. When the angel of freedom finds you, you find the angel. It happens simultaneously. The angel teaches that to earn freedom, we use a different kind of currency.

This is the angelic pedagogy. The angel fights for you when you fight for the angel. The fight for the angel in both the senses of freeing the angel, like freeing princess zelda from the desert prince of power, and fighting under the angel's banner.

[dada]

Terry Gilliam's take on the end of Brazil, from NYT article 1986:

"Although ''Brazil'' ends with Lowry being destroyed by the heedlessly malign bureaucracy, Mr. Gilliam doesn't view that choice as irredeemably bleak. ''He escapes into madness, which I've always considered a reasonable approach to life in certain situations,'' says the 45-year-old film maker cheerfully. ''To me that's an optimistic ending. Lowry's imagination is still free and alive; they haven't got that. They may have his body, but they don't have his mind. The girl rescues him and takes him away and they live happily forever; it's only in his mind, but that's sufficient, I think. It's better than nothing, folks!''

Mr. Gilliam admits that the studio may have been correct in its insistence that audiences would prefer a sugar-coated ending, but that, to him, is beside the point. ''I'm more interested in saying something than I am in pandering,'' he explains. ''There's a lot of pandering that goes on, and it's bad for society, because people aren't being encouraged to think. I do think there's a terrible lack of responsibility out there. You can't talk about artistic values or social values or philosophical values; economic values are the only ones that count. This is a divisive film; people have quite strong reactions to it, and they argue about it, but at least it gets them talking.''

Mr. Palin claims that Mr. Gilliam did the film because it allowed him ''the chance to make what he's always wanted - really big explosions.''"

A few more quotes from the article:

"'"We were in this steel town on the coast, Port Talbot, a really awful place,'' he recalls. ''The beach was completely covered with iron ore, black and awful, and I was there at sunset, seeing these strange industrial shapes all over the place.''

At that moment an odd image floated into his mind. ''All I could see was this guy at sunset, sitting on the beach, fidding with his radio,'' Mr. Gilliam says. ''He's tuning in the radio and getting this wonderful Latin escapist romantic music that has nothing to do with the world he's in. As it turned out, that's not in the film, but it's still what the film is about.""

*

"''There were a lot of frustrations that had been building up about the world we live in, and I just wanted to get them out of my system: the over-complication and over-organization of life, the loss of humanity, things about dreams - your own dreams, the dreams you're sold, other people's dreams of you. That's one of the reasons I left America: I couldn't distinguish my dreams from the dreams that had been processed for me. Walking down a beach at sunset, I couldn't tell whether I was enjoying it because it was enjoyable, or because I'd seen it on too many commercials.""

[dada]

"Like all good discoveries, the new inorganic pigment was identified by coincidence. A team of chemists at Oregon State University (OSU), led by Mas Subramanian, was experimenting with rare earth elements while developing materials for use in electronics in 2009 when the pigment was accidentally created.

Andrew Smith, a graduate student at the time, mixed Yttrium, Indium, Manganese, and Oxygen at about 2000 °F. What emerged from the furnace was a never-before-seen brilliant blue compound. Subramanian understood immediately that his team stumbled on a major discovery.

“People have been looking for a good, durable blue color for a couple of centuries,” the researcher told NPR in 2016. "The fact that this pigment was synthesized at such high temperatures signaled that this new compound was extremely stable, a property long sought in a blue pigment."



Look like spice.

Since the discovery, Subramanian and his team have expanded their research, producing a range of new pigments, from bright oranges to shades of purple, turquoise, and green. They continue to search for a new stable, heat-reflecting, and brilliant red, calling it “the most elusive color to synthesize."