In today’s ListServe Claire wrote of dealing with fear in her life.
Lately I’ve been digging into some deeply rooted fears and thought patterns that were established long before I can remember. It’s been a terrifying, humbling, hilarious and enlightening process. I’d like to encourage you to notice your fears when they arise and spend some time thinking about what fears and fear mean to you. Do your fears inspire you, challenge you or leave you feeling stuck? Is fear something to be conquered, managed, ignored or befriended? How does fear impact your relationships, goals and health?
– poverty stricken Indian farmes committing suicide
The West subsidizes industries (f.ex. cotton) with more than they earn – in order to maintain standards of living in their respective populations – in simultaneous and total disregard of the effects of these subsidies on developing countries and the people depending on these industries.
It’s ever more “OUR culture and the culture of those NOT like us”.
Based in Copenhagen since the early 90’s Jack Stevenson among other subjects from the weird and wonderful world of people abusing celluloid to it’s finest has written an unusual book about Danish Lars von Trier. But before Jack Stevenson came to notoriety, he wrote a lot of very personal and intense essays on film, which are dead links today. Due to the verisimilitude of the wayback machine most of these essays are preserved for posterity.
For example
THE SECRET HISTORY OF CULT MOVIES
– a Biblical tale of the Holy Unlikely
If an URL comes up empty, try searching for that specific URL directly at the archive homepage. It’s possible you have arrived at a link page, after the site has been shut down, but before wayback machine has stopped coming by.
What would you say, if you had the ears of 1 million people, and only one go?
What would be your message, if you had the ears of 1 million people?
Hook up to thelistserve and receive 1 mail every day from one person on the listserve mailing list chosen in a random lottery to be the one to share their life and meaning.
One day it could be you.
On the listserve website you can enter your email to participate, see the number of participants from your own country and all the rest of the countries in the world, as well as read about the project – but it’s really quite simple.
Why care about the ebook reader, when the world can be changed from your living room?
Paul Otlet was a Belgian, *1868, died †1944, who perfected the Dewey Classification system as “the Universal Decimal Classification”, in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge.
(The basic structure of the classification system, where every 10 parts are subdivided into ten and so forth, into eternity. It’s a actually an image of the capabilities of the human mind to distinguish between particles and thus make value out of everything.)
Seeing the complexity of human knowledge as an almost eternal subdivision of topics, he believed that accessibility to all knowledge for all contained it itself the road to peace for all of humankind. His own library, his “Mundaneum” reflected this vision.
(Part of the Mundaneum after years of neglect, as Paul Otlet was prevented access to it by small minded city officials, who cared little for his visions)
Most of his professional life he harbored the dream of a Universal City, a focus for “harmonious, pacifist and progressive civilization”, which he shared with an American sculptor, Hendrik Christian Andersen.
(Part of the enormous and beautiful sketch of the city of peace by Hendrik Christian Andersen)
When Andersen in the mid-30’s turned to the Italian dictator Mussolini for support to build the city, Otlet turned away in disgust, but soon found renewed support in the great architect Le Corbusier, who drew up plans and assisted him to until the very end.
Paul Otlet can be said to be among the chief architects behind the League of Nations (founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War), a unifying body of peace making among all nations, but even so his dreams of a permanent city of peace workers – politicians, intellectuals, scientist and artists working towards the abolition of war – was never recognized for real. And if it wasn’t enough that two world wars brought whole societies to their knees, and with them the real-world effects of his firm belief in pacifism; petty thinking in his own nation also destroyed his library and collections of art and science.
Even so his ideas of connecting all knowledge and making it accessible in images, audio and instant connections to anyone, anywhere, remained in the world. He described “the new book” as the combination of all existing singular medias.
His vision is basically the first 20th century version of the story of the difficult birth of the interconnectednes, which we today term “the Internet”.
”I repeat: My papers form a whole. Every part is related and together they compose one unique work, my archives ’Aeramundus Mundaneum’, a tool designed for world knowledge”. — Paul Otlet
A beautiful documentary, “The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World“, was created by Francoise Levie for release by Sofidoc Productions in 2002, following almost 1 year of opening and cataloguing the remains of his personal papers: 100 mice infested crates and boxes documenting every little thing in a life full of dreams, theory, planning, and action.
Paul Otlet threw nothing away. Even a torn up letter was saved in a separate envelope. But out of the boxes grew a full life, where almost no endeavour went awry:
He had found his voice and conviction in pacifism – springing from the innate need to classify and put in order everything, which mankind discovered, developed and thought – and this certainty carried him through out the whole of his life. Not a Ghandi, not a Martin Luther King working among his people, but an intellectual working from a dream so large that one would almost call it a pipe dream, if not for his total conviction: That peace among all nations was possible, if only there was a common focus on peace for all to see and believe in.
(The League of Nations, which Paul Otlet soon found to be squabbling hens)
Paul Otlet died in the winter of 1944, 8 months before the world war II was declared over.
His decimal classification system, the UDC, is still in use today. His major work on classification, ‘The Book of Books”, is still being read.
I believe his description of the organization of information is the second most important factor in any human’s awakening to consciousness, the other being the creative survival combo of curiosity and synthesis.
Choosing between data – that’s the whole point. If we don’t know when to let go of information, that counting for the species as a whole as well as the individual alone, we will succumb to undigested information. That is a given. The question I am asking myself, though, is this:
Are we giving our synthesis of information away to the search engines, and therefore now as a species becoming stressed from symbiosis with an information system, which doesn’t always work to our advantage, but presents itself as if it is always the best it can be?
What we need to understand is that today, in the 21st century, we are all being sold a cheaper version of the New Book: the eBook reader is not the revalation of the new age. The computer is STILL the revalation – we’ve just gotten bored and want a new toy.
With our New Book we can change the world for the better. If we care.
Words cannot be wrong. The USAGE of words can have undesired results, but words, left on their own, are always right. Hey, being a word means being alive!
There are many types of Brain Wiring(Article arguing addiction is a form of neurodiversity én par with ADHD, autism, bipolarity, and seeing it as such is a benefit to all:
By embracing neurodiversity, we can … perhaps… begin to stop throwing away addicted people who are already here in counterproductive attempts to “save them from themselves” without understanding their perspective.
I agree. Think of the 60’s term “reality tunnels” decrying every person’s right to his and her different perspective and whole set of coherent survival tactics.
