A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

-Wittgenstein

Sleepless...

It is late. Too late. much, much too late. 

my perfect time.

Us night owls are an odd bunch. I think my night owl nature might stem from my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I put off going to bed at night, and I put off getting up in the morning. Invariably this causes sleep deprivation, which, if pushed, can yield a somewhat hallucinatory state.

For an insomniac, everything is a hallucination. Nothing's quite real. There's something about the rhythm of sleeping, waking, sleeping, and waking, that gives one a sense of the linearity of TIME. When you don't sleep, the rhythm is lost. And soon, all sense of meaning of TIME is lost. The ancients thought in terms of cycles. The sun rises and sets. So does the moon. The tides go in and out. The seasons repeat in sequence.

Man sleeps. Wakes. Then sleeps again, then wakes again.

The state of mind, or rather the state of 'perception', induced by the onset of prolonged insomnia is similar to that induced by opiates. The hard edges of the world are softened. Everything...recedes. An uneasy euphoria settles like a grey mist, enveloping the world, blurring what once appeared to be clear cut boundaries between self and other, form and emptiness. The mind...slows.

The world becomes a dream where nothing is real and nothing matters, insofar as everything is real and everything matters. Paradoxes are commonplace and taken for granted. Contradiction infuses everything...no problems.

Then the second wind blows in. The body's desperate attempt to stay alive, to keep functioning by opening the adrenaline floodgates. 

But in TIME, The body declares war on the opiate. And at last,

we succumb.

and drift back into the ancient rhythm of movement between worlds. The world behind closed eyes, behind thought, behind perception. And then,

WAKE

Simplicity

A collection of links, a series of associations.

An ode to simplicity.

The art of good writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance " and stop. - Michael Williams, Review

Simplicity - William Zinsser

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

On Political Speech Writing - Phil Collins, BBC Arts and Ideas PodCast

This is one of the cardinal virtues of good writing. Simplicity. If you must speak, speak plainly.

The Magician's Son

This is the first story the Internet ever told me. I was 13 years old. That means I've been tooting around a copy in one format or another for 13 years. I've managed to save it all this time. It's not available online anymore, search for it and you don't find anything. Not a trace. I never met the author. Even the web server that hosted the original site is long gone. 13 years is a long time in internet years. It fascinates me that this is, in a sense, an internet 'relic'. I wonder if the internet is still around in 100 years if there will be 'digital archiologists' uncovering old data from the out time. I like to think of the story as an artifact, long since disappeared from the vast information sea, except tha I saved a copy. I loved this story, i still do. I hope you like it too. It's about MAGIC



The Magician's Son

A long time ago there lived a Great Magician. The Magician had a wonderful power that made absolutely everything full of love and beautiful to look upon. There was no such thing as pain or unhappiness in the Great Magician's realm.

At the Magician's side walked his son, whom he loved dearly. The boy was very beautiful and loved his father with all his heart. The Magician and his son did everything together, and there was nothing that they hid from one another. The son was in every way his father's equal -- except, of course, that he was the son and his father the father.

One day a strange and fascinating idea came to the mind of the Magician's son. He decided to make a special and wonderful gift for his father. It would be a surprise, and unlike any gift ever before given. To make the gift he would, of course, have to use his father's power, since his father's power was the only power there was anywhere. They'd always shared this power fully - yet for the making of his special gift, the boy thought he'd "borrow" a tiny corner of it, without his father's knowledge. This way the gift could be a surprise.

And so the gift was made - made in no more time than it took to think the thought of making it, which was no time at all since there was no such thing as time in those days.

And the gift? What exactly was this special thing the Great Magician's son made for him? Well, it was a feeling actually, a feeling the boy took upon himself to experience in his father's presence. The feeling was one of sadness, of hurt, of not having enough.

This was certainly a strange sort of gift for a loving son to give his father! No one had ever experienced such a feeling before, nor even heard of it. It was a thing entirely new - which I suppose was part of its appeal. But there was more to it than that. The boy had the idea that if his father saw him suffering, he would feel badly too, and want to comfort him with a special kind of love; he thought that if his father saw him in need of something, he would do his best to give it to him. In a way, this was indeed a wonderful idea for a gift. It was meant as a sort of game, you see. The boy would pretend he was hurting and in need and so on, and his father would go along with the make-believe and give him what he wanted.

But there turned out to be a serious problem with this gift. The problem was that the boy really wasn't hurting or in need. He was perfectly happy and had all there was to have. To make the gift be believable at all, he had to hide this truth from himself and really believe he was hurting and unhappy. This is where his father's power came in. For a stripped-down version of this power enabled him to see whatever he wanted to see and believe it real.

Well, this seemed sensible enough, but there was still a serious problem. For his father's power had never been intended to deny what really was and replace it with something else. Misused in this fashion, it simply plunged the boy into a magical dream. And although the dream allowed him to believe he was suffering and in need, it did nothing to change the reality of the world and his own actual happiness. He could go around all he liked believing he was miserable, but who else was going to believe it? Who else could even know about it, since the whole thing was just a dream? How could a dream be shared?

Still, the Great Magician was no fool. The moment his son's strange gift was offered, he knew something odd was going on. He could not see within the dream and know what was happening there, but he knew that something was and that it was making his son think himself unhappy. And though he would never think of forcing his son to wake up and quit believing his childish fantasies, he was hardly powerless. So what he did was this: At the very moment his son's gift was offered, he sent into the dream his love, a memory of himself and the world as they really were.

Instantly the son awoke, as was his father's intention.

Yet, in a tiny portion of the boy's mind, the dream lingered on. Although the decision to put aside the dream had been made, a fascination with it yet remained and had to run its course. Because within the dream itself the Magician's gift of love had not been accepted. Rather it had been seen as an insult, an illusion, a thing to be totally denied. For at the core of the dream was the boy's desire to please his father with a very special gift; and his father had not even acknowledged the gift, as far as he could tell - much less shown any appreciation for it. The fact that the Magician was unable to see any part of the gift, it being wholly a dream, never even occurred to the boy. How could the unreality of a dream be perceived from inside the dream itself?

So the son, seeing no sign of appreciation from his father, tried all the harder to shove the gift down his throat. He made the dream more and more solid and violent in an effort to have it be seen and accepted. This, of course, only made matters worse. Feeling himself betrayed by his father's denial of the wonderful gift, he became filled with anger and resentment. The Great Magician seemed now to haunt his son's dream as a cruel and terrible enemy, threatening awful punishment for his rebellion.

Trapped in the fabric of his own dream, the boy was terrified. Yet though he blamed his father for his fear, he feared even more to attack the Great Magician directly - though deep inside, in some obscure corner of his mind, he believed this to be exactly what he had already done by stealing his father's magic and falling into a dream. And deeper still, even more obscure and hidden, was the terrifying belief that he had somehow actually killed the Great Magician's real son and replaced him with a vile and evil impostor -- himself.

This was not a thought anyone would choose to look upon, however; so the boy buried his fear and guilt beneath a wall of rage. And he vented this rage by peopling his dream with others like himself, and conjuring up a world of things to have and want and fight over. From the figures of his dream he stole what he wanted, to meet the imagined needs unmet by his father. With some he joined in temporary friendship, with others he joined in battle. And through it all he imagined himself as special and different from all the rest. And he blamed them for the misery and guilt he now felt, saying that they in their greed were the cause, and not he. And more and more there dwelt, deep within his heart, a terrible feeling of aloneness; for he believed that all who existed were his enemy.

Such was the dream of the Great Magician's son. And horrible as it was, the boy cherished it passionately, claiming it a thing of beauty and wonder. For the world he had made was his world and not his father's, and in his mind it was a good one. True, it was a world filled with failure, cruelty, suffering and betrayal. But it also contained loftier things, like victory and all-consuming passions. And there was pleasure and gentleness, and love of a very special kind. These wonderful things could not be found in his father's world, but only in his own. His was a fine world, and a far more interesting one. He, the son, was as good a magician as his father ever was! For had he not made this wonderful world all on his own?

Well, no, not actually, since it was his father's borrowed power he had used to make it with.

All right, maybe he'd conveniently forgotten about that. But still, the original purpose of the world - the experience of pain and loss and imperfection - was his and his alone. The Great Magician could never have conceived of such things, much less brought them into being. The dream was his, and there was no way he was going to give it up! And anyway, the Magician hated him and would punish him terribly if he ever tried to go back. And the hatred was mutual, of course. For his wonderful gift - now twisted and altered beyond recognition, even by himself - remained unacknowledged, unappreciated, unloved. So screw the Old Man. Who needed him anyway?

Yet into this dream, at the very moment of its inception, the Great Magician had placed his own wonderful gift: the memory of love, and of the only world that could ever be real. And the gift had been instantly accepted, the decision to return home made. Yet because of his pride, his fear, his anger, his pain, the boy had to go about this return in his own special way. In the instant of its birth, the entire dream had been played out in every detail, like a complex design in a great tapestry. In that one instant, every step of his return was taken, its place unchangeable in the overall pattern.

But even though the boy's decision to set aside the dream had been made, and indeed the entire path to his awakening been walked through to the very end, still was he free to decide when he would recognize that this was so. He was free to replay the dream as often as he liked, savoring it, pondering it, hating it, loving it, pretending he didn't already know what was going to happen next. He invented a new and wondrous device to embody this reluctance to recognize the acceptance of his own decision to awaken. The device pushed away the inevitable moment of reconciliation and kept it separate from the reality of now; it put distance between the steps of his chosen path, making the way seem long and difficult. It was now easy to pretend the path lost or forgotten, or one not in agreement with his own true desire. He called this new invention "time", and calls it that to this day. For yes, the boy is dreaming still.

Yet is this reluctance, this unwillingness, balanced in his mind. It is balanced by the certainty of his eventual wakening, by the anticipation of the moment when he makes the final decision to renounce the dream and all its effects forever. The anticipation of this moment, a moment which has already occurred beyond time and apart from it, is the source of all the joy and peace he experiences while yet within the dream. For the dream itself contains neither peace nor joy, but only sensation, the thrill of victory, and the satisfaction of desire. Peace and joy must come from outside the dream -- from, in fact, the sure knowledge of the dream's final passing.

And so the son dreams on. . . .