Author: mariofvicente

Dracula’s prey

A walk in the Carpathian forest turns into a nightmare as night falls and Dracula closes in…

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.

Arthur & Guinevere

A man who fears nothing is a man who loves nothing.

Arthur

I performed these short impressions on the movie First Knight (directed by Jerry Zucker, Columbia Pictures, 1995).

I composed the music except for the two last parts which are free transcriptions from the original works. This has a dark stance on the theme and the chapters are:

I. Guinevere

II. Arthur

III. Marriage

IV. War

V. Arthur mourns Guinevere’s love (1/2)

VI. Arthur mourns Guinevere’s love (2/2) – from the aria “E Lucevan le Stelle” of Puccini’s Tosca

VII. Finale – from “After Dark” by Vadim Kiselev

The stills are from the before mentioned movie. The background image is adapted from the “Victorian Floral” wallpaper collection by Walls Need Love.

I am using the Pirastro Aricore string set which I consider a definite improvement over the standard sets. The most distinctive of these lower tone strings is evident at the end of part III.

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This recording is kept for historical reasons since it is not recent and I am practising & improving everyday. It is about the development process, not the actual technique.

Effort

The rugged teeth.
The powerful and faithful bite at any angle.
The simplicity and effectiveness.
The beauty of the design.

The Mayo-Hegar needle holder is one of the most beautiful purpose-fit man-made objects ever built.

It is a piece of art.

Because as Maia Bang put it, and as it aptly applies to the surgical practice, there should be no effort in art *.

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* Method for Violin, volume VI, Higher Art of Bowing

O que ele quer

source: Getty Images

E além disso, teremos todos os rapazitos insolentes de dez, quatorze, desasseis ou vinte anos a pegar numa mulher e a casar com ela sem qualquer temor de Deus (…), ou pior ainda, sem qualquer consideração pela forma como viverão em comum, se os seus ofícios e bens lhes providenciam sustento suficiente. Não, não! Isso não tem importância nenhuma, pois o que ele quer é ter a sua mulherzinha para abraçar, porque é a única coisa que deseja.

Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses, 1562, cited in David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 2022

Axiomas

Aquelas coisas que tomamos por certo sem necessidade de as demonstrar e sobre as quais elaboramos todas as outras asserções.

  1. especiais são os deficientes
  2. espertos também são os macacos
  3. os imprescindíveis estão no Alto de S. João
  4. papás e mamãs é lá em casa
  5. cuidadores é no hospital
  6. hierarquia é nas Forças Armadas

A Indústria (parte 2)

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Para perceber como é que uma política de pleno emprego pode coexistir com uma indústria automatizada, basta perceber em que é que aquela lhe pode ser útil.

No livro “Bullshit Jobs”, David Graeber fornece uma explicação a partir dos dados que recolheu. A interpretação aqui é minha, porque para já o que li da tese dele limita-se a constatar os factos em que me baseio. Mas acredito que ele irá chegar a esta conclusão, directa ou indirectamente.

Ter pessoas com valor político na organização, pessoas alienadas acerca da organização em que se inserem, pessoas que desconhecem qualquer racional a respeito dos processos que seguem, pessoas castradas ao ponto de perderem qualquer agência própria no local de trabalho, etc, apesar de contradizer todos os pressupostos de uma economia de mercado e em particular da iniciativa e gestão privada, é útil à organização fortemente automatizada. Porque é um layer de alienação adicional dos clientes relativamente aos mecanismos automáticos que regulam a actividade da organização. Dá uma cara humana a processos não humanos. Dá a ilusão de haver agência humana. Promove o score social da organização contando que ela desenvolva as métricas certas para ser socialmente percebida como útil e relevante (programas de caridade, mindfullness, redes sociais fofinhas, etc).

Nunca será mais fácil desenvolver automação do que isto.

E eu tenho a experiência que comprova a tese. Foi preciso dissecar o processo de atribuição de crédito de um dado banco, durante uma reunião presencial e dez iterações não presenciais, para finalmente ter um gerente a dizer-me que um dos componentes da decisão do banco é um score atribuído por um sistema de informação. E mesmo este gerente disse-me que, não sendo informático, não sabia nada a respeito desse sistema. Ao que obviamente lhe respondi que, tratando-se de informação de negócio, não se admite outra alternativa a não ser saber o que esse sistema faz e como o faz.

Thinking

All there is to thinking
is seeing something noticeable
which makes you see something you weren’t noticing
which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.

Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It, quoted by Frederick Goodman in Algebra – Abstract and Concrete, Ed 2.6, SemiSimple Press

I can’t praise enough Goodman’s book which you can find here, in case you’re interested in (introductory pure) mathematics.

Now, since

faith is the evidence of things not seen

excerpt from Hebrews 11:1 KJV

we can conclude that all there is to thinking is the knowledge of faith.

Unicity of Self

Gary Waters / Getty Images

Here I address the question of knowing wether the Self, meaning whatever we call ourselves, is indivisible or otherwise.

The sole assumption on which the reasoning rests is this:

— there is nothing which cannot be the object of perception, be it trough the senses or the intelect.

Now we assume that the self is indivisible.

If that is the case, then the self cannot uniquely identify with any specific (indivisible) object of perception, because there is no assumption that favours that object over any other. If we did identify it with a particular object, we would be contradicting its indivisibility since that identification would be arbitrary. That is, we would be stating that any object of perception could satisfy the requirements of an indivisible self.

Since by assumption there is nothing which cannot be the object of perception, then the indivisible self would be nothing, that is, that which cannot be object of perception.

We contradicted the indivisibility assumption, therefore proving it false.

This leaves the only alternative, that is the complement of the indivisibility of the self: the self is the whole of “its” perceptions. There is nothing else other than everything that is perceivable, hence the quoted “its”. No intermediate subset of it could be termed “self”.

This in turn means that the conscious effort (or the “life of the self”, or “consciousness”) is the distinguishing of a part of the self into an object of perception.

Of course we can explore other knowledge basis in which we admit the opposite of the first assumption (which is undoubtely an anthropocentric one), but the least we should do in any case is to make clear what are the minimal parameters, that is, the degree of choice we have to be able to develop knowledge about any subject. Another way to put this, is that here the structure of knowledge is no less important than the meaning of that structure.

More generaly, this structure means that if we admit the indivisibility of the Self, then we cannot turn it into an object of perception. Moreover, regardless of divisibility, the Self is in any case unperceivable.

Final remarks:

  1. pay attention to the implications of the initial assumption, which apply directly to any scientific endeavour and to scientific fields of knowledge. In particular, in Medicine. Here care to understand how its understanding of the personality fares against its own rational and scholastic assumptions.
  2. we can easily generalize the assertions to other objects of the intellect other than the Self, with the same results.
  3. this explains why the platonic world of ideas is, to our understanding, absolutely divorced from the realm of its concrete manifestations, although obviously both should be related regardless of our ability to perceive, ever since we admit the idealistic equivalence class of objects.
  4. we are not an agent that acts, feels and understands; we are literally what we do, feel and understand. This also explains the effectiveness of propaganda and coercion on the development of mass psychosis.
  5. this is in accord with Adyashanti’s notion that “Everything is I” as exposed in this video
  6. this does not mean that the Self does not exist, or that the knower does not exist, but instead that it is impossible to identify what that is.
  7. remark #4 is worth considering on a cartesian and rosicrucian perspective, since it is equivalent to asserting the reality of any intellectually formulated concept.