Time Bandits

In 1981 Terry Gillian directs and produces a film called "Time Bandits ". The film talks about this young boy who joins a group of dwarfs on a trip through Time meeting several famous historical characters from King Agamenon to Napoleon .
Ever since my teenage years being a fan of History , i have always been fascinated by the concept of Time Travelling . Who among us has never seen the fun and naive Hollywood trilogy " Back to Future " with Michael J Fox and marveled at all those strolls back and forth in Time ??
The idea of travelling through Time and seeing in loco all the characters you have read in the History books and see how those people really lived and died would be one of the best experiences a person could ever had . Only comparable to leaving this tiny little planet and explore other worlds in distant star systems . I often envy astronauts who can turn their heads on one side and behold the spectacle of our beautiful blue planet , the theatre of all our misfortunes and petty glories and on the other side can gaze at the vast , infinite cosmic ocean . How Godlike they must feel !? And what else could feed our already active imagination than that superb heavenly view ??

In 1895 the British novelist and futurist HG Wells , popularize the idea of a machine that would take us to travel through Time in his book called precisely " Time Machine ".
In the book a man obsessed with the idea of travelling through Time and knowing the future of mankind , invents a machine and jumps in to the distant future where he faces an apocalyptical mankind divided into two races in which one of them canibalizes another .
I am not so pessimistic as Wells about the future of mankind but being as nostalgic as i am , the future doesn`t hold much appeal to me and i would rather visit the past .
imagining yourself in the time of Ramses I and see thousands of people erecting a gigantic wonderful useless thing like a pyramid for the glory of one man elevated by the superstition of man to category of God ? Imagining following the armies of Sargon the Akkadian as he conquered the city states of the Sumerians or be part of the Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan as they spread fire and blood through the Asian steppes ; Watching Mozart composing his Requiem by the dim light of candles ; Paganini playing his Caprices ; Jesus giving one of his sermons ; Caesar being murdered ; Guttenberg printing his first bible ; Cortez arriving to Tenochtitlan with his rag army .
think of the immense richness of knowledge that a creature possessing such a machine would acquire?

Wormhole 

Although Einstein`s General Relativity finds little support for of Time Travel to become a reality , recent discoveries on the field of quantum mechanics opens a gap for that possibility in a more or less distant future with the concept of Wormhole , who can be seen as a tunnel connects two points far from each other in the spacetime structure .
However be as it may , its unlikely that in the near future anyone will be able to travel in the 4th dimension of reality . And even if that was possible we have to take in consideration that there are some paradoxes embedded in Time Travel that might prove dangerous to the traveler .
In the 1st film of the trilogy " Back to Future " the hero , Marty McFly , met his mother when she was young and she fell in love for him which consequently prevent her to meet his father and therefore preventing him from ever being born at all .
The lesson is that changing Time events , no matter how trivial can have disastrous consequences in our present .
So maybe nature is wise in trapping us in the present because imagine what bandits we could do with this overwhelming power !??

The Aesthetic of Sadness

I love a sad story , a sad tune , a sad film , a sad landscape . Personally i have always been truly affected by the beauty of sadness . I do not see myself as a masochist and therefore i enjoy the pleasurable fun things of life , but there is something in sadness that touches my soul deeply .
When you see a comedy film you laugh , you have fun , the innocent and playful side of living comes to the surface and you just forget the painful inconsistencies of life . But when you watch a drama you were suddenly brought back to life`s little miseries and that sticks into your mind for quite sometime .
Joy is frivolous , light as a feather and written in the sand washed by the tide of life .
Sadness is deep , it voices our despair , anguish that in most of the cases follow us through life .
I think the beauty of sadness lies in the fact that it remind us that everything is transitory , frail and in that frailty lies its beauty .
The love for gardens in Japanese culture is related to the fact that flowers and extremely frail objects with a very limited lifespan and its precisely there that lies their beauty . Like King Priam says to Achilles " the Gods envy us because we are mortals ". Mortality gives uniqueness and glorifies the moment , who is beautiful because its brief and unrepeatable .
Maybe there lies the beauty of sadness. The moment , unique carries the magic of the finitude of things .
Sadness also invokes the nostalgia of times past in which one was happy or has an happy image of those times .
The Portuguese have a word that describes that state of nostalgia. The word is "Saudade ".
Saudade is a feeling of loss , of longing for an object that one thinks will never have it back .
In spite of its element of suffering , Saudade carries with it a bitter sweet taste . Its a pain but a sweet pain , one that puts you in a dormant, dreamy state.
Proust knew it very well when in pages and pages of his " A le recherche du temps perdu " he tried desperately to capture the aroma of the coffee of his youth .
The best Art should wet your eyes and squash your soul .

Choices

"To be or Not Be !?
This is the immortal question posed by the Prince Hamlet in the 1st scene of the III Act of the famous Shakespearean drama .
One of the most common and transforming actions of a person is the act of choosing and sticking to that choice and the various consequences that that choice carries .
While most of the choices we have to make in our daily life are completely harmless and inconsequently , others that might define our lives for ever and presented to those choices we experience the loneliness of the decision we have to make .
No matter how much we avoid the tribunal of Life , we always reach this point in the forest of one´s existence to a place where you stand in front of a bifurcation of paths and you are confronted with the drama of a decision .  should i go this way ? or that way ?
Either way will change our lives in completely different patterns .
Accepting the consequences of the choice you made and don´t look back and think of what it would if the path would be taken its a challenge .
The existencial doubts of the Danish prince invented by the bard of Strafford Upon Avon are to me very familiar .
Mistakes are unavoidable and somehow necessary . The no safety net in Life . You walk blindly in a pitch black knowing that somewhere there is an abyss where you will fall . But you have to walk , keep walking no matter how many times you trip on the pebbles scattered on the road .
The pain you receive bad choices though sometimes its not comparable with the pain that you inflict to others that are somehow dependable of those choices .
Again Hamlet hit the nerve " conscience doth makes cowards of us all ".
Wouldn´t be lovely if we were all careless and light free children like Pinocchio without is Talking Cricket ? But maybe the Talking Cricket no matter how annoying he is has a reason to exist because otherwise our soul would be like the grotesque  Portrait of Dorian Grey.

Anatomy of a Belief

God, Deus , Dio , Gott, Theos; Allah , Bog .
Many different ways of saying ; many different ways of sound it ; Same reality though .
Why is the necessity of Believing in a supreme Being so fundamental in the lives of most of the 7 billion human beings that tread on this planet ?
The History of Mankind is also the History of numerous deities that were created and later replaced and substitute by more sophisticated forms of materializing this very powerful idea and so intrinsically human which is the idea of an Entity to whom we owe our existence and most forever pay tribute and seek for help whenever we need it .

The Israelite Sociologist Yuval Noah Harari in 2014 publishes a book called " Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind " in which he speaks of  several Ideas that are absolutely crucial for a society, they are the building blocks upon not only societies as particular cultural unities are built but the entire human civilization . Ideas who are completely abstract , with no correspondence in the real world , but we humans made them real by putting our trust , our faith in them .
Money and God are two of those abstract and yet powerful ideas .
In his book Harari asks her to make a mental experiment : ask a monkey to trade a banana with you for money . the monkey sees the money as a piece of paper , not as banana . we would not obviously trade with you his delicious banana for a dirty piece of paper even if with what dirty piece of paper he would buy five bananas .
Now ask the same monkey to give you his banana because by doing that he would do a good deed and live in a paradise filled with bananas for all eternity after his dead .
Obviously the monkey would never agree with such a deal . Yet this is the deal that human beings have been accepting for thousand of years . Why ? are we more stupid than our simian cousins ?
Why do we invest so much in these abstractions and built entire civilizations upon it ?
The response of Harari is that unlike the monkey we can plan things ahead of the present moment and see future benefits far ahead in the future .

But what are the benefits we extract from the belief in God ?  Why do we need it ? And why do we gather ourselves around gigantic dogmatic systems that we call Religions ?

In a very small book called " The Future of an Illusion " , Sigmund Freud tells us that religion or the belief in a God ( that in this case is that same cos with the exception of Buddhism one cannot live without the other ) serves two purposes :
1- It permits us to humanize Nature and therefore taken some of its power that frighten us because we cannot control it . With the creation of a God , Chaos ends and the Cosmos begins . Everything is explained by God´s Will even things that have no explanation whatsoever .
2- Religion becomes an instrument of control of the masses by the privileged elite of that culture .
It prevents the masses of rebelling against that elite and accept their miserable condition as part of a divine plan that will reward the obedience of the individual to that plan in an after life.

Being this all true , it doesn`t however explain the power that the religion feeling has in the human psychosis . The British biologist Richard Dawkins , a well known atheist , claims that religion exists because mankind is still in its infancy in most parts of the planet and therefore religion feeds itself of the fear of the little child lost in a world that is hostile .
Freud has the same idea when he says that God is the father that we lose when we become adults .
My view is close to Dawkins and Freud . We humans have a need to explain what cannot be explained because we have a need to control . Uncertainty disturbs us and life is too uncertain , too unpredictable , and for the human psyche the unknow is something generally negative , sinister , dark.
So lets make light by making comprehensible what is not ; know what is unknown . Death is a mystery , lets clear that mystery by saying that its not the end but the beginning of something else . Something nice of course , something will fit our wishes .
As much as i would love to believe in God , even because its a creative and rather elegant hypothesis , it crashes with my reason a God in the terms presented by the various religions .
God is a fictional character that became reality because we need it to be real and unlike Dawkings who this it will become obsolete as mankind progresses technologically i think otherwise , and thing with a taint of sadness that we will never overcome this fable because we will not stop fearing and God`s best friend is fear .

However it would be an exercise of mental hygiene to read  Feurbach ´s " The Essence of Christianity " which is for me the most brilliant critical analysis of the process of Belief .
In this book Feurbach shows us how we feed this fictional character with qualities that we have and by doing that we impoverish ourselves . The notions of Justice , Kindness, Omnipotence , Compassion are all within us , and yet we transfer them a being external to us .
How much suffering in the world would be spared in every individual realized that God is simply an extension of each and everyone of us ?

The Horde

When i started this blog my idea was never to immerse myself in the contemporaneity which i find its absolutely hideous , particularly is aesthetics terms , ( in that sense, using the Hegelian expression , i definitely do not incarnate the spirit of my Time ) but sometimes the events out there in the real world are so powerful that they demand an answer even from a soul of the past like me .
Actually Crowds and their irrational , savage behaviour can be unfortunately traced throughout History so the events that triggered the death of George Floyd in the United States are nothing new .
But it does not stop to amaze me the fascination that most seem to have for mass movements and the need to belong to them .
I am not a psychologist , so i lack the technical expertise that could give  me a better insight in this topic , but i can not help thinking that something profoundly humiliating in an individual that by joining a crowd like a good little obedient sheep of a flock , abdicates of its own individuality follow an ideal , a movement , that left alone to its own device probably wouldn´t agree with it .
Without getting into the particular details of the Floyd case and the sheer stupidity of destroying statues which basically means destroying the memory of nations , that like the memory of people is formed of good and bad things , i think that crowds give a very poor spectacle of humans as a species that cultivate somehow this idea , however illusionary it might be, of a so called intelectual superiority over the other species .

The French Sociologist Gustave Le Bon , who wrote a series of brilliant essays about the psychology of masses , pointed out very well in his writings to the character of absolute savagery of the masses .
Le Bon was particularly keen in observing the loss of the personal conscience of the individual and the predominance of his unconscious personality submerged in the crowd turns the individual into an automaton with no longer a will of his own .
Religion and Politics are masters in this form of manipulation . The Crowd more than anything shows the profound mediocracy of the human kind.
Le Bon and also Wilhelm  Reich in their writings show is very well that History is built the individuals who have the courage to stand out from the Crowd and fight for the originality of their ideas .

"At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit many millions of men swarmed to the East; the words of an hallucinated person … have created the force necessary to triumph over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther set Europe ablaze and bathed in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius transform a civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history." 
                                                                                          Gustave Le Bon
                                                                               
As a human being ill never give up the treasure giving to me by nature of thinking by my own head and therefore ill always refuse to be just a member of the herd .


 Gustave Le Bon : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
Wilhelm Reich : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

Chronos

In Greek mythology Chronos the God of Time would eat his own children .
This show us that from a very early age the ancient Greeks had a clear perception of the corrosive nature of Time .
Time , this invisible fiend of reality that is forever present in a subtle but very enduring way in our lives .
I often pondered about the nature of Time . Its benefits and its losses .
Augustine of Hipona was probably the first thinker in western philosophy to discuss the nature of Time. For one of the princes of the Christian church , Time was a big hand filled with nothing . Like sand going through your hands . You only the moment and even this would quickly vanish into the past leaving you nothing . He was also the first to tell us the difference between chronological Time and psychological Time. Depending of our state of mind Time would seem  expand and contract .
Already before him , the Romans had this perception of psychological Time . who doesn`t know the famous phrase of the poet Virgil : Tempus Fugit  ( Time flies ) ?
The idea that Time is a precious that always escape from us and its the only thing that we can´t get back .
The Irish writer Lord Dunsany , one of the fathers of Fantasy literature , has this curious tale of a King who assembles a powerful army to fight Time , this destroyer of everything that is living .
The army wanders through the kingdom looking for its enemy but never finds it . In the end all the soldiers perish and the king realizes that not only his army but him also were once again defeated by Time .
I do not know what was the idea of Dunsany behind this story but i interpret it as a reminder of the frailty of reality . Nothing remains of all our plans , projects , earthly ambitions . In the end its all carried away by the sandstorm of Time .  This is an enemy we cannot vanquish because Chronos is the other face of Thanatos . Time is the Dance Macabre of Death .

Time also not only corrupts our bodies but also the way we look at things .
Things once so vital for us are now laughable and tuck away in the trunk of memory .
That house you once wanted so much , not that you got after years living there seems like its nothing but a hut.
The woman or the man you once loved with passion now it becomes a nuisance, an annoying background rattle .
People, Places , Objects they all lose value to us after a certain Time . What was once amazing now its dull and we will go searching for something amazing until eventually this new wonder fades its glow with Time .
However Time compels us to move forward , do things . Because Time is precious and the need to accomplish something , to leave our footprint in this world, to satisfy our vanity ( " my writings will survive Iron and Fire " - said the poet Ovid ) no matter how futile that is , is so pressing, that without
the cold grip of Time we would have been simply too lazy to do anything . Again the ancient warning Carpe Diem ( Cease the Day ) ! Do something ! Use your time . Do not let it go to waste .
Even though the moon contemplates our achievements with a mocking face as the great Persian poet Omar Khayyám so beautifully put it

  “Drink wine and look up at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by.” 

Even the moon itself will one day will  be another of Time`s victims .                          

The Art of Travel

photo : https://500px.com/jskirschstein

For me one the things that makes alive the most is travelling .
It always seemed to me that people who neither travelled or travelled very little ( the family of the author of this Blog included ) were very unfortunate and sad individuals .
To go through life , now that we are well in the 21st century , living as a man of the Middle Ages , living and dying in the same , looks to me as a real tragedy .
What will possess an individual living the Global Age of Digitalization which a cheap and varied network of transports to stay planted in the same place , living as a tree , without a single curiosity to the world that goes beyond its limited boundaries ?
Probably the same reason that makes millions of homo sapiens throughout the planet not to pick up a book and read at least a few lines : lack of curiosity .
Lack of curiosity in a species that owes its survival to its compulsive need of discover is another of the many riddles in life that i still have not decipher in life .
No, the economical factor cannot be the reason .
Millions of years ago our ancestors crossed continents just using their feet . Necessity compel them to do so yes , but that fact just confirms that a sedentary existence that provides all the basic needs of the individual makes him passive , complacent with his situation , numbing our sense of curiosity , of adventure that made our species thrive on this Planet .
Having the world displayed on a screen or at the distance of a mere mouse click took our verve to explore this beautiful blue planet of ours .
St Augustine of Hipona once wrote that " a man who doesn`t travel beyond his own land is like a man who reads only the 1st page of a book ".
How shameful the lives of some of my contemporaries is compared with the life of the 14th century Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta who in an age with no airplanes , cars or trains , travelled throughout the entire Muslim world for 20 years , From the his birthplace Morocco to Indonesia !!


To travel is not only a trip to discover the world but also to discover yourself . The Discover levels of tolerance to others and resources of autonomy that you weren`t aware of its existence within you.
Travel makes you leave your comfort zone , break the routine that suffocates you and makes you like Chaplin`s character in the film Modern Times , just a gear , a robot .
As the Swiss London based philosopher Alain de Botton says in his book The art of Travel

         “The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, ‘anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!” 

Out of OUR world.
Travels also feed our imagination . Prevents our minds to rust because at the end of the trip we are richer with new ideas and emotions and boosted with an energy that refuses to accept that we cannot change as our daily environment remains changeless as well.
again de Botton puts its brilliantly ;

       “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are."

So i urge you all , Travel , Travel , Travel !
Dare to cross the boundaries of your village like Samwise Gamjee , even if you do not have the company of a Froddo Baggins