We Have All
Misunderstood
Billy the Kid
I was speaking to Amelia.
"Not self-slaughter in the crude sense. Rather the construction of surrogates. Think of it as a transplant."
"Daumier," she said, "you are not making me happy."
"The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self, which is a dirty great villain, as can be testified and sworn to by anyone who has ever been awake."
"The self also dances," she said, "sometimes."
"Yes," I said, "I have noticed that, but one pays dear for the occasional schottische. Now, here is the point about the self: It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full. I need only adduce the names of Alexander, Bonaparte, Messalina, and Billy the Kid."
"You have misunderstood Billy the Kid," she murmured.
"Whereas the surrogate, the construct, is in principle satiable. We design for satiability."
"Have you taken action?" she asked. "Or is all this just the usual?"
"I have one out now," I said, "a Daumier, on the plains and pampas of consciousness, and he is doing very well, I can tell you that He has an important post in a large organization. I get regular reports."
"What type of fellow is he?"
"A good true fellow," I said, "and he knows his limits. He doesn't overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum. Just enough left to make him go. Loved and respected by all."
"Tosh," she said, "Tosh and bosh."
"You will want one," I said, "when you see what they are like."
"We have all misunderstood Billy the Kid," she said in parting.
Donald Barthleme
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4 comments:
The insert link function on googledocuments works ok for this. You can use the flyover text as a sort of comment tracker.
I meant to get to this earlier, but what exactly are you meaning by map?
We are looking at texts and simply recording the iterative processes that occur. For example, if I notice a particular word that confuses me or connects to something else,
1) I write it down
2) propose the connection or meaning
3) research the meaning or connection
4) was I right or can I propose a better connection
lather, rinse, repeat.
As the project slowly grows, I get a large set of these feedback loops (iterations of the scientific method). Eventually, loops that get referenced multiple times can be recognized as more likely candidates for "true" or "meaningful" content. I think of it as a sort of text based spectral analysis with the relative importance of a loop linked to the number of times I use it.
We are going to illustrate this process in the next few classes with mind mapping software, so we have a visual grasp on the process.
Very cool. That's a very machine learning approach where by the likelihood that something is correct (in this case the proposed connection) increases with the number of times that it's been encountered. Given that way of thinking about it, I definitely recommend looking up the statistical coolness that is the "Chinese Restaurant Process".
I assume that XMind is one of these mind mapping programs?
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