The fashion picture at top is indicative of our (my) manipulation of “reality”. It also reflects the façade of Le Louvre museum in which many treasures of French art and of art from around the world are exhibited. The blue in Le Louvre windows indicate a blue sky on the day. I took the photograph, in 2016, deliberately as a moment in time. I often do this, like planting a stake in the moment — signifiant or not. I also placed a black “hole” on the central image. One would have to accept that the fashion would have changed since 2016. New garments in this exclusive shop would have been displayed and the mannequins (new ones?) may have changed position as well. This I don’t know unless I went back to the original location to investigate. 

Art is a deviation from reality. It can also often be a form of deception and a poor explanation of reality. Mathematics are a linguistic art form used at the edge of understanding reality. Religions are artful historical deception with no understanding of reality. Religious beliefs were “invented” as a substitute to understanding. Religious beliefs accept dogmas which are false.

In the words of Bertolt Brecht: "The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error…” By this, I believe that Brecht expresses the thought that “infinite error” is the epitome of religious beliefs. 

As well, one would be foolish to think that sciences are full of wisdom. Sciences explain in the best possible language (unfortunately complex), the image of reality in matter and energy fields which have no intrinsic wisdom. Wisdom is a weird concept that gives us the means of relative acceptance of our reality.

So were does wisdom come from. This is the multi-billion dollar question which was posed and answered in Voltaire’s Micromegas: Wisdom is a large book with blank pages.

But is it?

Over millennium  beliefs have plagued our understandings. We are ignorant and gullible people. Charlatans, druids, magicians, priests and imams have manipulated our brains to “believe in magic or miracles”, because we are geared and educated to become FEARFUL OF UNCERTAINTY.

Without miracles, would Jesus's fans still believe in him? This is rhetorical question, because the “supernatural” has to be imprinted in unreality to make us “believe” in our sins and redeem-options in which the "fear of hell" becomes a major motivator. Around this concept comes a large baggage of rituals and theatrics to enhance the sauce... But true Wisdom does not come from fear. Because humans can be nasty to each other, we are often fearful of the others, like wild animals that do not wish to come closer to other animals that could be deceptive. Humans are high on the scale of natural and invented deception. We cope by learning to fiddle and by developing relative (sometimes "unsure") alliances, be it in family, village and country structures. presently our Western world tells us not to trust the Russians or the Chinese… Why? 

Here a lot of false assumptions and fake or erroneous information come into play. The result: we believe in Jesus who died 2020 years ago but we don’t have the wisdom to relate to other human beings who live next door. Fear rules. Wisdom is lacking...

The notion of sin is the worse part of infinite error. 

You are in charge of your own behaviour within the context of the best information.

Science is the key to getting the best information possible, yet in this information universe, some scientific observations can be used by political forces, like religion was used by politics for deception in the past. At this level, scientific research/knowledge is relative to repeats of experiments. What we know about the Covid-19 development and our vaccines knowledge for example is still lacking a great number of verifications, (in relation to nuclear physics, it has barely reached 2 and a half sigmas) but politics has used unfinished scientific information to make various decrees, often in fear… This is why Big Pharma does not want to take responsibility of side-effects or even long-term defects of vaccines. Meanwhile:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Here again, it’s a beautiful thought but we have no way of knowing/verifying its truthfulness. All we can relatively say here is that gravity has no morality value. Gravity is neither godly nor demonic and does not control our behavioural values, though it makes us stick to planet earth. We scientifically know that GRAVITY IS (possibly so far) THE WEAKEST FORCE in the universe. the other three forces, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces are FAR STRONGER than gravity. Yet gravity has a far greater reach — and it is the least of the understandable forces in our universe of what’s what... 

So where does our wisdom, if we have any, come from?

Here we should relatively expect that evolution of life since 4 billion years ago has made us, from DNA survival, animal instincts and uncertainty in the value of our choices, develop a notion in which we can survey the general environmental factors, including our social environments, with a resultant in which we can survive at best — while minimising our natural aggressiveness and submissiveness...  We do not submit, nor do we aggress. This is the best form of wisdom. This could appear a bit bland, of course. 

But this help us “keep at bay” the moralisators (priests, imams, et al) who try to take advantage of us by selling us something that does not exist. This also gives us the power to choose/survey the best information possible and be prepared to be uncertain at the limit of this knowledge. 

In terms of democratic value, the CRUDE notion of queens and kings as rulers should have vanished long ago, but our CONservative social construct likes the illusions in order to keep us in our little cages. It’s time to fly...

As well, our wisdom tends to have too much retrospective attribute… or not enough, because we are going to choose evidences that suit our “beliefs” and cultivation of our ignorance.

For example, in her response to Christopher Hitchens, (now dead) atheist, at the Intelligence Squared debate, Ann Widdecombe — a convert Catholic — said:

If apologies are due tonight, they are due from Christopher Hitchens, who has just run through one of the longest series of misrepresentations of the Catholic Church that I have heard in a long time. He has said, with that certainty that characterises his utterances, that the Catholic Church has had a history of anti-Semitism.

Let us just look at the record of the Catholic Church, when the Jewish community was under the most serious threat that it has faced in recent centuries, and just look at the role that the Catholic Church played in the last World War.

Mr Hitchens ignores the thousands of Jews who were secreted and rescued in churches and monasteries throughout Europe. He ignores the 3000 Jews, who in the course of that conflict, took refuge in the Pope’s own summer palace. And coming nearer to our day, of course Christopher Hitchens is right, and who could possibly dispute with him, that the abuse of children, of innocent children, is one—in fact it is the—worst offence that anybody can commit.

Of that, no doubt. But again he seems to think that the Catholic Church should have had some unique insight, which demonstrably was lacking in society as a whole, do not expect the Catholic Church somehow, when that was the state of knowledge at the time, to have acted in a unique and completely different way.

In retrospect, yes, of course. In retrospect, yep. In retrospect, it should’ve done–so should the magistrates, so should the Samaritans, so should the National Council of Civil Liberties. But when we ask, whether the Catholic Church is a force for good, let’s just try to imagine a world today without, for example, the billions of pounds that are poured into overseas aid by the Catholic Church, contributing year on year more than any single nation. Imagine the developing world had been left without the input of the medicine and the education that was brought to it by the missions. Imagine the absence of those collections, Sunday upon Sunday, for famine relief. 

Imagine the absence of the church in the local community. We play a vital role. And you don’t need to be a Catholic to acknowledge that we play that role. What is the church? It is its members: it is the nuns and the monks and the priests and the layworkers and the congregations. It is not just the hierarchy of the Church. And I believe that the Church to which I belong is a massive, massive force for good. But, let us not just keep the debate at that level.

I knew somehow that when we were here tonight, we would be discussing child abuse—and condoms, they came in the end, I almost thought we were going to get through an entire speech from Christopher Hitchens without condoms, but we got them at the end—but that isn’t what the Catholic Church is about, it isn’t only about the physical relief of the poor, it isn’t only about the work it does on Earth, but it is the message that it preaches. And that message is one of hope, that message is one of salvation.

And it is all very well for some people to say, in an intellectual arrogance, we can do without that, but actually billions of people across the world live by that message of hope and of salvation. They try to live by the commandments and also by the interpretation of those commandments by Christ. Yea, sometimes they fail, sometimes their leaders fail—human beings do fail—but overwhelmingly, I say to you tonight with no apology whatever, that a world without the Catholic Church would be poorer, would be more hopeless, and would be a worse place in which to live.

Of course, Christopher Hitchens did not convince the entire audience about his views, but out of the 2,126 person in attendance, he (and Stephen Fry) managed to shift the opinion of 774 people, including some staunch religious “believers”.

https://www.amindatplay.eu/2009/12/02/intelligence²-catholic-church-debate-transcript/

Now we should go and explore the religious system called Islam. Islam — developed around the year 610, nearly three hundred years after the Nicaea conference of the Christian religion which had split into various “beliefs” —  worked from a trade and conquest point of view. Like the Catholic church during the Inquisition, Islam eventually demanded submission of its subject through fear of physical punishment. Unlike most of the Christian religions that have mellowed into “love", Islam is still in the grip of this physical punishment in order to keep subjects, in political and religious environments, underfoot.

Before Islam…

Religion in pre-Islamic Arabia included indigenous Arabian polytheism, ancient Semitic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Iranian religions such as Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and Manichaeism.

Arabian polytheism, the dominant form of religion in pre-Islamic Arabia, was based on veneration of deities and spirits. Worship was directed to various gods and goddesses, including Hubal and the goddesses al-Lāt, al-‘Uzzā, and Manāt, at local shrines and temples such as the Kaaba in Mecca. Deities were venerated and invoked through a variety of rituals, including pilgrimages and divination, as well as ritual sacrifice. Different theories have been proposed regarding the role of Allah in Meccan religion. Many of the physical descriptions of the pre-Islamic gods are traced to idols, especially near the Kaaba, which is said to have contained up to 360 of them.

Other religions were represented to varying, lesser degrees. The influence of the adjacent Roman and Aksumite civilizations resulted in Christian communities in the northwest, northeast, and south of Arabia. Christianity made a lesser impact in the remainder of the peninsula, but did secure some conversions. With the exception of Nestorianism in the northeast and the Persian Gulf, the dominant form of Christianity was Miaphysitism. The peninsula had been a destination for Jewish migration since Roman times, which had resulted in a diaspora community supplemented by local converts. Additionally, the influence of the Sasanian Empire resulted in Iranian religions being present in the peninsula. Zoroastrianism existed in the east and south, while there is evidence of Manichaeism or possibly Mazdakism being practiced in Mecca.

So what happened? Why do some people fear the rise of Islam? 

This should be explained by the investigation of fear of physical punishment and by the lack of philosophical flexibility. As well Islam has morphed into two branches, which, like the Catholic and the Protestants during the religious wars, are in a war of conquest — the Sunnis versus the Shiites. This is used by the West to help one Islam destroy the other, because of their alliances: the Shiites are aligned with Russia.

The West uses many deceptive art forms for its own public manipulative consumption to create focused hate and to make Islam become more rabid. The US created Daesh, al Qaeda, Al Nusra. The English created the Muslim Brotherhood. No one trust anyone in this crab basket. This became the dilemma of “Laurence of Arabia”.

This is where we should connect with Albert Camus rather than with Houellebecq… 

This to come next. Muons? We'll come back to them. Meanwhile, read from top AGAIN...

GL.

Rabid atheist.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....!!!!!

Coming to the realisation that we are made of atoms, themselves made of “elementary particles” can be daunting. The realisation of this concept can make us forget the “reality” of the natural world, which in its own evolution is more than 4 billion years old and very specific. We forget that the combination of these elementary particles have shaped our lives and what amazing ability we have to be who were are. This relationship with nature has been explored more and more, from Darwin’s work "On The Origin of Species” to the present times when we can develop mRNA vaccines at the drop of hat to fight another format of invasive DNA. 

We have also an amazing power: imagination. With imagination, in many ways, we deviate from the reality of physical possibilities into the realms of various fantasies, including science fiction. "The Maiden’s Tale”, “The Matrix”, at first, exploit this fantastic visionary ability, unfortunately to soon fall into the crass world of the sequel to make money. Over the years, I have also indulged in this visionary stuff, though unpublished, apart from a small story in FICTION… where I have thrown the gauntlet to Russian science fiction writers who in my mind are better story tellers in this regard, away from the Hollywood wiz-bang and more into the scientific future visionary. This is where the French writer, Michel Houellebecq, who "erks" me somewhat (I am not the only one) comes in:

From Frank Wynne:

Michel Houellebecq’s second novel “Les Particules Élémentaires” [Atomised] was my second major translation. At the time, Houellebecq was a virtual unknown (even in France). In January 2000, Ravi Mirchandani  asked me to read it and the first sentence of my  reader’s report for Heinemann read:

“This is an extraordinary novel, in every possible sense of that word. Part dialectic, part polemic, part digest history of the twentieth century, it is funny, intelligent, infuriating, didactic, touching, visceral, explicit and, possibly, dangerous.” 

But if I though it was unlike any novel I had ever read, my report also said: “The book is likely to garner equal loathing and admiration, and could certainly not be read without a fierce, passionate reaction one way or t’other.” Like most translations, I thought it would sell fewer than 5,000 copies and be largely ignored. How wrong I was – Atomised was a huge success in the UK  and the reviews were almost universally electrifying. It won the 2002 IMPAC Prize. This was the book which made it possible for me to become a full-time translator.

https://www.terribleman.com/atomised-by-michel-houellebecq/

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Despite the essentially elaborate scope of the plot revealed in the “Les Particules Élémentaires” novel's conclusion, the narrative focuses almost exclusively on the bleak and unrewarding day-to-day lives of the protagonists, two half-brothers who barely know each other. They seem devoid of love, and in their loveless or soon-to-be loveless journeys, Bruno becomes a saddened loner, wrecked by his upbringing and failure to individuate, while Michel's pioneering work in cloning removes love from the process of reproduction. Humans are proved, in the end, to be just particles and just as bodies decay (a theme in the book) they can also be created from particles.

The story unfolds as a sort of framed narrative, so despite the events described therein having taken place mostly in 1999, the story is essentially set some fifty or so years in the future. A similar device was used by Kurt Vonnegut in the novel Galápagos; however, unlike Vonnegut, Houellebecq only reveals the frame to the reader in the epilogue. Large sections of the story are presented in the form of suppertime storytelling dialogues between Michel, his childhood sweetheart Annabelle, Bruno, and Bruno's post-divorce girlfriend Christiane.

The story focuses on the lives of Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski, two French half-brothers born of a hippie-type mother. Michel is raised by his paternal grandmother and becomes an introverted molecular biologist, who is ultimately responsible for the discoveries which lead to the elimination of sexual reproduction. Bruno's upbringing is much more tragic as described: shuffled and forgotten from one abusive boarding school to another, he eventually finds himself in a loveless marriage and teaching at a high school. Bruno grows into a lecherous and insatiable sex addict whose dalliances with prostitutes and sex chat on Minitel do nothing to satisfy him, to the point where he finds himself on disability leave from his job and in a mental hospital after a failed attempt at seducing one of his students.

The novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies and propelled Houellebecq into the French intellectual and literary spotlight during the summer and autumn of 1998. The vivid, almost pornographic, sexual descriptions were a frequent target of criticism, and Houellebecq himself attracted both scorn and praise for his erratic proclamations and behaviour in television interviews and the like. The author was eventually awarded the Prix Novembre in recognition of the novel. He became the last one to get this prize under this name. Philippe Dennery, the founder of the Prix Novembre, disapproved of awarding the prize to Houellebecq and resigned; the prize got a new patron—Pierre Bergé—and a new name: Prix Décembre.[1]

In April 2008, Houellebecq's estranged mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, returned to France to publish The Innocent One, a rebuttal of his alleged mis-characterization of her parenting as contained in the novel. In press interviews, she promised that "if he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again he'll get my walking stick in his face and that'll knock his teeth out."[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomised

Knowing Michel Houellebecq’s life could explains the extraordinary imagination, which stretches from the bleak detritus to the non-sublime…

Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the French island of Réunion, the son of Lucie Ceccaldi, a French physician born in Algeria of Corsican descent,[7] and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide.[8] He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his maternal grandmother.[9] 

In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website (now defunct), he states that his parents "lost interest in [his] existence pretty quickly", and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her recent boyfriend.[9] His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name. Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux in the north-east of Paris, as a boarder. He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for grandes écoles (elite schools). He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called Karamazov (named after Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel) and wrote poetry. He graduated in 1980, married and had a son; then he divorced, and became depressed.[10][11]

He married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier, in 1998. They divorced in 2010.[10]

His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior, and a student of his works.[12][13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Houellebecq

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Meanwhile in "Communing with Camus in 2022", Edward Curtin reminds us of the extraordinary gifted simplicity of Albert Camus’s existentialism…

"To give up beauty and the sensual happiness that comes with it and devote one’s self exclusively to unhappiness requires a nobility I lack… isolate beauty ends in grimaces, solitary justice in oppression. Anyone who seeks to serve the one to the exclusion of the other serves no one, not even himself, and in the end is doubly the servant of injustice."

Albert Camus

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Here is Edward Curtin:

The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself. It’s just the way it is. I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic “know thyself” way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply.

We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of which never get expressed in words. 

Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives. We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away.

Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, “We come and go like a ripple on a stream.”

For most people, their congeries of living experiences evaporate as quickly as soap bubbles in a pan of dish water. This is also true for the social and personal facts of our lives that leave but vague traces. 

…Yet some strange people record them. They are a small minority, writers being chief among them. They keep words. Words unspoken and spoken words.

I have kept notebooks since my mid-twenties. They sit in cartons in a closet. They were at first my imaginary friends who never responded. Maybe I didn’t want them to. They are still silent, although every once in a while I seem to hear inarticulate sounds coming from the boxes.

I usually give them my ear at the end of each year when I read my notebook for the previous year. I then extract any entries that I have not yet used in my writing and put them in a small writing project notebook. But this year it was very strange. 

There was only one entry for 2021: “It’s all lies.” Those words keep echoing in my mind.

Most years I encounter many things that I have forgotten: a scene I saw and recorded; a snatch of conversation overheard; thoughts and musings; little paragraphs that I write that I might use later; feelings and emotions; questions; notes for future writing projects; things I did, people I met, books I read; events both personal and social that seem significant – almost anything that comes to mind.

I have a love/hate relationship with these jottings, for I know that when I am dead, few, if any, people will care to read them. Why should they? I don’t, except once at the end of each year. 

For some strange reason I feel that if I burn the lot of them, the real me might disappear. But I also don’t really believe that, for I know I am not in those boxes. But I keep writing to myself nevertheless and then shut those words up.

“It’s all lies” concisely summed up my private disgust throughout 2020-21. I had tried in my public writing to expose those lies while having no energy or inclination left to write to or for myself. 

The past two years have been so absurd, the Covid propaganda so all-consuming, its madness so disturbing as so many people have gone off the deep end believing such outlandish garbage, that to contemplate this madness any more than I was already doing publicly must have seemed…I don’t know what. 

All I know is that I didn’t. I could only take so much.

Anyway, to start this year, having read my three words for 2021, I turned to reading the notebooks of my companion since my early twenties, Albert Camus. 

He too kept notebooks – cahiers – from the age of twenty-two until his strange death in a car crash – accident or assassination? – on January 4, 1960, a few months after his forty-sixth birthday, the age my daughter will reach this month. 

Camus was born in 1913, the same year as my father. These facts may be significant. I am writing this on January 4, 2022.

Brother Albert had always striven to serve both justice and beauty; to find a way to oppose a world of lies while living fully. 

I have recently concluded that many people who accept or oppose the vast tapestry of lies within which we now exist, the closing down of freedom and the rise of a new totalitarianism, have in a strange way unknowingly embraced a trick of the propagandists: they have become so one-dimensional in their obsessive need to defend or oppose their positions that they have forgotten to relish life.

One side lives in perpetual fear of disease and death and has turned into obedient and vengeful children wanting to ban the dissidents from society or burn them at the stake. 

The other side, flabbergasted at the credulous behavior of the compliant ones in the face of so many official lies and contradictions, feels compelled – and rightly so – to resist at every turn the gradual slide into a digital dystopian totalitarianism. 

But emotions are so raw and twisted that they flip at the drop of a pin. Or are flipped. This is how great propaganda works. 

For those behind the COVID hoax, Russia-gate, etc. want all the peons to hate life itself and embrace their dark and evil nihilism. To forget that life is both beautiful and tragic. To cut each other to pieces.

The journalist Andre Vltchek used to remind us, as he traveled the world reporting on the empire’s atrocities, that to dispense with poetry and song and passion is to succumb to evil; it is to forget that true revolution demands art as well as politics, the best expressions of the human spirit.

For years before his untimely death in 2020, he noted how a grim sense of joylessness and indifference had descended on so many western countries, especially those, led by the United States, which cause so much human misery throughout the world. 

And he reminded us repeatedly, that throughout the world where people are oppressed, the spirit of resistance is preserved in remembering the great and beautiful poetry and music of their countries’ artists, whose words regular people have memorized and celebrate for their beauty and joie de vivre – despite oppressive conditions.

Speaking for himself, in a moving essay, Return to Tipasa, Camus wrote:

To give up beauty and the sensual happiness that comes with it and devote one’s self exclusively to unhappiness requires a nobility I lack…isolate beauty ends in grimaces, solitary justice in oppression. Anyone who seeks to serve the one to the exclusion of the other serves no one, not even himself, and in the end is doubly the servant of injustice.

So I have turned to Camus’ notebooks to see if I might fill in some gaps and learn some lessons for 2022.

On May 5, 1935 Camus made his first entry. Here is the opening sentence:

What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty.

That can be easily misunderstood, but he clarifies it. For Camus grew up in poverty but under the sun and by the sea in Algeria where he found beauty and joy in nature. He knew there was a grey, depressing form of poverty that did not provide such solace. 

He was trying at a young age to express what he later said differently: “I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

Yet here we are in 2022 drowning in an excess of things, possessions that keep the world captive to the evil genius of consumer capitalism and the false rhetoric of freedom, things that people don’t need but want because of advertising’s brainwashing and the existential emptiness that convinces people that if you surround yourself with enough things you are somehow protecting yourself, while that delusion feeds an environmental crisis that is destroying the earth.

Possessions as a form of demonic possession, a protection racket that doesn’t protect. But they give people an imaginary boost. Call them boosters. See the front page of The New York Times for all the latest consumer goods no one needs. They call it news, and the boosters, booster shots.

April 1937:

In the evening, the gentleness of the world on the bay. There are days when the world lies, days when it tells the truth. It is telling the truth this evening – with what sad and insistent beauty.

Yes, this has always been so, but it is terrifying and exhilarating. Living in constant fear as so many are now doing blocks both the sun and the clouds and reduces life to a caricature of its possibilities. All the official lies have produced passionless people afraid of themselves and others.

April 1941:

It is always a great crime to deprive people of its liberty on the pretext that it is using it wrongly.” (Tocqueville)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. When Camus wrote this, Germany was occupying France and the French Resistance was born. These days so many minds are occupied by endless propaganda that penetrates to the primal emotions and reduces carnal truth to digital abstractions. 

I think we will lose our freedom if we continue to embrace digital technology. Resistance is necessary.

August 1942:

Novel. Don’t put the “plague” in the title. Put something like “The Prisoners.”

He instinctively knew that is was not a plague that imprisons people but the mind-forged manacles of those who are afraid to confront it. Those who lack the courage to see the truth and resist it. To collaborate with the Nazis was for cowards. Free people fight back.

As editor of Combat, the banned newspaper, he knew that when voices were censored it was because the censors were afraid the truth would prevail. A good lesson for 2022.

October 1946:

What makes a man feel alone is the cowardice of others. Must one try to understand that cowardice too? But it’s beyond my strength. And, on the other hand, I cannot be a scorner.

Ditto.

September 1949:

One must love life before loving its meaning, Dostoevsky says. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it.

Even depression is good. Even confronting evil is good. Even arguing. Pleasure is good. It’s all good. Life is an agon, always conflictual and agreeable. 

We were born to love and fight and try always to make the fight a loving fight. Words are our best weapons. I have always enjoyed writing them, for they always have seemed to be like wild birds in my breast, struggling to leave the nest. They are always taking us somewhere. Where is the question. Or better yet: Where do we want to go?

February 1950:

Later write an essay, without hesitation or reservation, on what I know to be true. (Do what one doesn’t want, want what one doesn’t do.)

What was that? I think he never wrote the essay but left us with his beautiful, unfinished novel, The First Man, wherein he wrote without hesitation or reservation and opened his heart. His was an unfinished life. I wonder if that is true for all of us.

June 1951:

Man of 1950. He fornicated and read the newspapers.

Sort of still right. 2022: They masturbated and checked their cell phones. Call it transhumanism. What’s love got to do with it?

February 1953:

Two common errors: existence precedes essence or essence existence. Both rise and fall with the same step.

So the sagacious intellectuals ripped him for this. Subtleties of thought always escape them. Today’s common errors: Obama differs from Trump or Trump differs from Obama (Biden). 

I once thought I was an intellectual until I understood their thinking. Small minds looking through the wrong ends of their binoculars.

May 1954:

Play. A happy man. And nobody can put up with him.

So what is happiness? There are those who think that it consists of having “fun.” They cannot understand the joy of struggle, the artist’s efforts to give form to chaos. One can only live if one is drunk with life, Tolstoy said. And he spent a bit of his life writing. 

Was he happy? Of happiness and despair we have no measure.

November 1, 1954:

I often read that I am atheistic. I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

I do believe in God and yet one of my sisters years ago said to me that “I thought you were an atheist.” This shocked me. 

Camus too was shocked by the meaningless of such terms. He knew there was a sharp distinction between the heart and the head and that belief and faith were not the same thing. Only the living-dead cannot distinguish them. Faith guides me. 

Camus, too, was led by an invisible star; he said it differently: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” The current age denies the invisible and promotes defeatism.

July 1, 1958 (his last notebook entry):

The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die.

How to say it when “It’s all lies”? Keep trying, and try to make it beautiful. Only the artistic imagination can accomplish this. 

As you said, Albert: “Beauty never enslaved anyone…And for thousands of years, every day, at every second, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all. After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent. Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda.”

Create dangerously indeed, you advised!

For we are in the heat of combat.

Let us rejoice and fight on.

https://off-guardian.org/2022/01/16/communing-with-camus-in-2022/

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Back to the dour and silly Michel….

In Michel Houellebecq’s startlingly long new novel, the 735-page Anéantir [oblivion], our Everyman protagonist Paul Raison is returned by family illness to his childhood bedroom. There, in typical Houellbecqian fashion, he jabs us with a completely heterodox, completely confident provocation: Matrix Revolutions (2003) is the true masterpiece of the series. That third instalment may be, Paul knows, less innovative than the first; but in it, Paul believes the love story between Trinity and Neo — which had been a little awkward in such a “film de nerds” — becomes truly moving, “réellement boulversante”.

What should we make of this three-page tangent, one that neither develops into a real argument nor develops any real consequences for any of the novel’s admittedly smudgy plot-lines? Perhaps Houellebecq sees a parallel of his own oeuvre in that of the Wachowskis’: between the decade-defining original Matrix (1999) and the Molotov cocktail Houellebecq threw with his Nineties debuts, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) and Les particules élémentaries (1998).

Those first two novels were literary sensations, mixing fire-tongued dissection of l’après-68 with science fiction, evoking the dead-end of the everyday and imaging the dead-end of the species. On the newest tome, critics have been more divided.

https://unherd.com/2022/01/the-annihilation-of-michel-houellebecq/

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With Les particules élémentaries (1998), we are coming back to the Muon. It is part of the elementary particles but we really don’t know what it does in the scheme of things. And it seems that the non-meaningful life of Michel Houellebecq’s characters are as interesting as searching for dead fishes while using a cyclotron. It is senseless, frustrating and meaningless in itself. At this level, Albert Camus, born in Algeria, which Houellebecq knew for a few years, would be anathema for that country which is strongly Muslim. 

Violence was in the air as well in January 1956, when the celebrated writer Albert Camus checked into the Hotel Saint-George. The struggle against French colonialism was escalating, with civilians becoming the primary victims. Camus was a pied-noir—a term meaning “black foot,” perhaps derived from the coal-stained feet of Mediterranean sailors, or the black boots of French soldiers, and used to refer to the one million colonists of European origin living in Algeria during French rule. He had returned after 14 years in France to try to stop his homeland from sliding deeper into war. It was a perilous mission. Right-wing French settlers plotted to assassinate him. Algerian revolutionaries watched over him without his knowledge.

See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-is-albert-camus-still-a-stranger-in-his-native-algeria-13063/ 

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And this is where we cannot dismiss the amazing complex relationships between our peers — and  between our consciousness and our “atomised” bodies. This is where Michel Houellebecq tends to plunge our skills and monkey talents, into the muds of the shoreline, without seeing the magnificent sunset. It’s a question of seeing beauty in the molecular essence of life.

GL

Rabid atheist.

See also: 

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[Back in 2020]

Physicists have spotted the Higgs boson performing a new trick, but one that brings us no closer to understanding the workings of fundamental particles.

The Higgs boson, discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, is the particle that gives all other fundamental particles mass, according to the standard model of particle physics. However, despite the work of thousands of researchers around the world, nobody has been able to figure out exactly how it does that or why some particles are more massive than others.

The only way to try to solve that problem is by observing how the Higgs interacts with other particles using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For the first time, both of the major groups that use it – the CMS and ATLAS collaborations – have observed the Higgs decaying into two muons, a sort of particle we have never directly seen it interact with before. Members of the collaborations presented this work at the virtual International Conference on High Energy Physics.

Some researchers have suggested that particles have different masses because there is more than one type of Higgs boson, with each type of Higgs coupled to a different mass range of other particles.

Muons are much less massive than the other types of particles we’ve seen the regular Higgs interact with, so the new discovery makes it more likely there is only one Higgs. That behaviour is exactly what we expect from the standard model. Adam Gibson-Even at Valparaiso University in Indiana, who wasn’t involved with this work, says that it is an instance of “Higgs boson, exactly as ordered”.

But that leaves the mystery of why particles have different masses completely unanswered. While this result may not be surprising, Gibson-Even says, it is somewhat frustrating because we know the standard model is incomplete – in addition to not explaining why particles have different masses, it also doesn’t account for dark matter or dark energy. Nevertheless, experimental results have been entirely in line with the model.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251285-physicists-have-a-massive-problem-as-higgs-boson-refuses-to-misbehave/#ixzz7ISEKLG3o

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