A Meditation on Humanizing Mankind

Pictures by J. 
 Dear, you rock all the way to the edge of your stem cells. Happy birthday to you as well and I wish for you all that you wish for.

Happy birthday Senator Fulbright, your gift keeps on giving, your legacy instills all of us with awe and commitment, your ideology has a cancerous behavior with a viral outreach. Long may your memory endure.

"Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behavior seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms, as the embodiment, that is, of some evil design or ideology." [Speech to the Council on International Educational Exchange, 1983]

 "International educational exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace--eventually even to cooperate in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction....We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education." [From remarks on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Fulbright Program, 1976]

This week-end has been fruitful in all kinds of celebrations, food, laughter, and conversations: a versatile meditation over our own passage through the U.S. from rich souls of different perspectives, different majors, different countries, sharing passionate tendencies and commitment overdrive and the audacity to stand by ideas and concepts, live by them and fight for them.

Among the intimate exchanges we shared, the one D. and I were hung on was the human condition: perhaps, it's PhD in philosophy, perhaps it's the sewers of humankind where we delve in, perhaps it's Z. psychological and gender studies, but it was a long meditation over what it meant to be human, and when one answers to such a title: All of us have had our fair share of human interactions in this country and witnessing and living through alienating episodes or humbling ones, and so we were discussing the difference between when a biped is more of a puppet than a social animal, when a social animal is more of a creature of mind than a self-aware life form, when a self-aware life form is more of a bundle of thoughts and emotions than a consciousness able to react, assess and process and grow, and when... and when, and when...

There is no end to it, there is a feel to it though. It will take more writing, so much more writing Senator, so much more coffee, exchange, experiences. It will take more lifetimes. I am grateful nonetheless. There is a lot of personal stake on the Fulbright legacy on an intricate scale and every time, I rediscover it and find out it grew and unraveled some more and it instills in me a terrible and fascinating sense of inner awareness.

Good-bye Fay, you've been a soothing limbo

I miss these three so so much already. Please guys, keep on shining and pursuing your quests, keep on working for the advancement of yourselves and the species. I wish you never grow old.

I wish we meet again. I will see to it. Let's do it over and over again.

Echoes of Conversations II : When we are together

...And they are done with most of the bottles, and the conversations are filled with laughter, passion, knowledge, insight, inside jokes and hilarious or sad stories.

Suddenly, your head is mindfucked, and filled with plenty. So much to process, to go through over again. So much dreamed of.

 -"When I start my PhD, I will make a home out of my place, and I hope I will get to decorate it with these."

-"J., my dear, I will bring you one but it'll be a rat dipped in sulfate copper."

-"It won't latch, you need an exoskeleton"

 Problem solved. Although, it's a rabbit. I'm sure I can get him a rat.

-"Very few scientific organizations are allowed to work with defective fertilized cells."

-"Social sciences are heavily involved in biology and other disciplines of STEM. Ethics are not luxury of the people living in a moral bubble, they are additional restrictions that push us to aim harder, work more and have more awareness and respect of precious resources that we can never give back, that is life and time, joy and lack of pain.

-"I'd sacrifice one person for the sake of 500"

-"But to spare 500 of what? If we consider sufferance as a compulsory parameter of the human condition and its management an undeniable condition to pretend to be a human being, you will be technically depriving 500 people of their right to claim more humanity."

-"There is no guarantee 500 people dealing with pain will grow out of it. The social animal will always escape sufferance by any leisure means available, whether they are harmful to his body or the other parts of his being or not."

-"With the kind of lack of awareness and self-reflection and looking for the easy way for anything that is predominating the vox populis culture, I would not be surprised that the spared 500 will not only not grow out of their sufferance, but they themselves will become a source of disease to others from the lack of healing and the absence of self-reflection and acceptance of pain.

-Hence, my point: I'll sacrifice one to spare the world 500 new diseases.

-Spare the world? Bitch please, more social animals to feed on it with gluttony is not what I would describe as sparing the world.

-When one piece of the cohesive identity is getting attacked, ego switches to it and the person chooses to become defined by it: if your religious group is getting the heat, you identify more as part of this community and strive to show it through your immediate choices and acts. You forget the other parts of your cohesive identity and focus solely on this part, paradoxically enough drowning your own identity into one adjective, one robotic feature, one cliche. It can be more though, more pieces of your identity getting heat from the outside as interpreted by your mind and therefore your ego focusing solely on them.
-You end up with an ego consuming you and a linear image of the self you used to have before burying it deep inside.
-The ego doesn't consume so much as it becomes more stupid. It's not irreversible though. The rehabilitation of brainwashed and PTSD patients is not far-fetched. The issue is to focus on the ego instead of the mind: convincing this entity that strives to be an individual while being part of a group and being idolized and loved that it's not threatened by change is difficult. The ego is very fragile and will do anything to stay as granitic as possible. It doesn't help when the mind is not in collaboration either and the personal worth is not of balance in aspect to these other components...
-What about instilling the mind with the quest of the higher s..."
-K. I'm done with philosophy, f*** I just want to graduate, have a 9-5 pm job and feel like going through the motion of life without thinking of every aspect of this bitch.
-He killed you man.
-He killed the sonofacunt.

Echoes of Conversations I : A Warm Limbo

I'm afraid I won't be able to put in words what the everything everything I felt and was surrounded with this week-end. Enumerating will only demean the warm limbo I was in. 

 -"Z. let us know at least next time. Only David gets to pose, not fair"

 -"This college town is so beautiful, it's not fair. You guys get to be together AND have a beautiful cheap city to live in"

 -"You know me too well my dear dear Jesus. How will I ever walk out of this store? This place is amazing"

-"Quick then! Let's pull back the bookshelves and bury you here under the volumes. You will never leave"

-"This is the town square by the way. It took sometime to realize this square of tulips surrounding the estate building was the town square"

-"To be fair, it is a square."

You look high without weed man, what are you high on? Philosophy?

-"Remember when I used to be passionate about Wittgenstein and philosophy and was all passionate and shit? now it's all Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich"

Sonofab!tch killed his inner fire, all the best to rekindle another one D.

My cutie-patootie, amongst them the one and first and only Murican-Murican I had the pleasure to meet so far, who is a genuine person.

Today will be fun

I feel I have steel lungs and an aquatic heart, and I'm about to step in the green jungle filled with moisture and get rusted gladly, quietly and in the companionship of myself. I can already picture myself rusting peacefully against the fresh ground of the ruins covered by the vegetation, under a continuing summer afternoon.
Under the shadow of that tree, I enjoy the fresh breeze and the warming rays as I rust at ease, my mind prisoner of the harmonics of the water.

Jeez, it's been forever since I had a night cap XD, the world is under hallucinogens right now and Master Hirasawa is not making it any more tangible.

Python is barely making sense. Fanan is pooping and peeing everywhere. Coffee tastes weird. Writing yet another report for thesis.
In my head right now, there is a baby voice that is the offspring of Kylie and Lorde, the kind of voice that sings the ending credits on an insignificant existence that came to wither within a forest. Ghost in The Shell on the background, I missed Major.

3h00 am is surreal for writing. I'm starting to want to be done with this.
At least my head will be clear for my personal writing
There are other thesis reports requiring my attention though, other presentations,  but at least then I can go back and forth between the writings.

Dad,
A home guard
When in liquor
Missed his target
Killed the vicar
With practice
likely or not
Dad will be a better shot