thread to cheer up shrromy

[starku]

so i am reading focaults pendulum again cause i found it when i moved
and i have decided there is a level i wasn't aware of the first time

see i had assumed that the biographical stuff outlined the reasons and mentality behind participants in the primary plot, which it does
but i think now that it also compares the way people build self image out of fragmentary or unrelated events in their lives

i talked to ford about this last night and i became mor aware of how every level of the work can be seen in this way

and i enjoyed the book when it was just making fun of people's desire to see patterns and meaning in unrelated things and how this leads to absurd conclusions and relationships with truth

but its an even more enjoyable work when viewing all these events and in particualr the narrative style as an in-progress attempt to form meaning from an essentially meaningless collection of personal facts

it seems to ask me mayeb when we are driven and shaped by our past and the things we do, we are really just choosing to create meaning around those events and that meaning becomes our identity

just as a fake conspiracy ebcomes real when people act like it is

the made up identity becomes real when you act like it is you

even more, the idea that building on a fake conspriacy creates a reality beased on nothing and not secret stuff
building an identity on what you decided was your past or its meaning is creating yourself from nothing and not the past

anyway i wanted to share

[Stofsk]

I never read the book so I'm half lost here, but a lot of what you wrote is something I've experienced for myself and definitely speaks to me.

so thanks for sharing

[starku]

I can't beleive I missed it because he subjectivity is in the fucking title - people talk abou how foucaults pendulum gives a fixed point below which the world turns, but it can be hung anywhere and make that point fixed

This is expressly saying that the meaning is created by the act of looking for meaning

I can't articulate it properly but these ideas suggest to me that freedom in a personal sense is the act of abandoning attempts to derive yourself from the past facts you remember and that by stopping a search for identity you can find your true identity, uncoloured by your own artificial and applied reactions to yourself

nd that's a cool idea

[Shroom Man 777]

:o

i should check this out bro

dabbling on the meanings of identity, pursuing the "true self", and what determines the construction of an identity sounds pretty cool

is basing oneself on ones conception of the past a legit way of constructing oneself?

or is it just shackling yourself to a dead past that you should get over?

what is freedom, is it foregoing these things and getting the courage to make choices in the now to defy whatever was laid out for you in the past - essentially making your own identity defined by actions you choose to take?

i should read this book

it might help in, ya know, finding self-identity

[Count Chocula]

Man, that was an interesting book. Almost as interesting as life. When I was a kid, I moved to FL from VA to reconnect with my dad. Course I brought my own habits and predilections with me, and they bit me on the ass (a little, not as much as when I was a teen) in FL. My dad's wife said something that I still remember: "you may be in a different place now, but you brought your problems with you." It's amazing how much of our daily lives is in our heads. And I thank God I didn't have either the fucked up upbringing or twisted psyche of Jerzy Kosinski or Gunter Grass. Grass wrote a trilogy but I couldn't get past the twisted fuckedupedness of The Tin Drum. Kosinski's "Cockpit" is just...aggh I have no words for it even though it's on my bookshelves.

[starku]

The IDE athat rather than being defined by our past, we're shaped by the semi-random links we make between events and he meanings we invent for them is really interesting

Rather than inevitable weight of history you have a conscious assignment of value and meaning to your own personal narrative and sel definition

[Count Chocula]

If you make the choice to understand yourself. The past is prologue, what?

Oh sit we're talking subjective pilosopical ideas don't tell TOB logics rulz.

EDIT: nice old computer harrrrdddrrriivvve interfact pun there stark. Was that deliberate?