Dogs vs Cats

To transmit you some of my knowledge on dogs, the smaller they are likelier the chance of them being noisy and fierce, to make up for their reduced size. That size was achieved simply by breeding small dogs with smaller dogs until they got to the intended size.

Dogs possess a plastic gene. And that's why we say there's a certain dog breed.

 

Dogs use a hierarchic structure for social relationships just as in a wolf pack. That means the owner must act as the alpha of the pack, keeping the dog’s respect, who will then behave like an omega. One example is when the owner gets home. Instead of giving the dog the attention it's requiring, one should do something at home first, ignoring and not looking at the dog, no matter how hard it is to do that sometimes. And then, after a while, one can call for the dog and pat him. That sends the message to the dog of who is in charge, whose will is prevailing. A dog that thinks itself to be the Alpha can be a lot of trouble.

 

Unlike wolves though, dogs don't kill the alpha when he shows signs of weakness in order to assume the leader's role. They maintain the social structure until they die, or until they become leaderless animals. If a dog is raised among a herd of sheep, for example, and with no human contact, it’ll make the sheep its pack. It's not likely that it'll work the same way with snakes. 

 

Also unlike wolves, dogs evolved to pay attention to human actions, and to sometimes ask for human intervention for their own benefit. In an experiment that had to do with obtaining food stored in an unacessible place unless the animal was aided by a human, it was shown that wolves, even if bred by humans, do not possess that ability.

 

There’s a theory that dogs were initially wolf-runts that approached humans on account of food leftovers, not being able to feed themselves while members of a pack. This specialization could have led to the study of human behaviour, therefore enabling them to establish a communication bridge. Humans tolerated the presence of dogs because of their warning signs, fruit of a many times finer olfactory and auditive senses, as we weren’t the top predator yet.

 

If you think of dogs trained to aid blind persons, and also of dogs employed in hospitals to raise the spirits of children and thus helping in their cure, among many other examples, and if you also think of those very sad persons who breed dogs for fights and betting on the winner, you'll see that you have as much reason to be afraid of dogs as you have of people.

 

So if you ever get involved in such a discussion as that of dogs vs cats, which should be as fruitful as those of the chicken and the egg, and of God and the Big Bang, don’t be a pussy.

 

 

 

There is a man who preaches

There is a man who preaches.

Preaches with a voice of spring’s wind,

the love of a sugar lump and a June of sun.

Poises and juxtaposes beliefs,

mustering companions for the struggle,

for no one is one alone.

 

Preaches as if the universe understood,

spoke languages or heard prayers,

as if this magical power was neglected

by only the whole animal realm.

 

And preaches, as if his language could

attain what mathematicians never won.

 

And he preaches for long;

the duration of water in a creek

dismanteling an obstacle stone,

sand bit by sand bit

on its search for the unique river,

wide open to a dreamed ocean.

 

Yet the stone is a diamond;

countless perspectives reflected within;

Light the answer the question Light,

which no water was set to see.

 

 

 

Pagão

Sirvo apenas três senhores:

o sono, o erro e o medo.

As três divindades são elas,

a fome, a sede e a sede.

Os outros três os neutros

não sei, sei lá, e que sei.

 

 

Ordenado por todos,

uns em cima, no meio, debaixo,

mandaram-me abrir a boca fantoche

e anunciar no seu marketing divino

que deuses exclusivos, maiúsculos,

vendem ilusão por deslumbramento

e pão ao preço da carne.

 

 

A sede, a outra, em bocejo

pediu-me uma última nota:

Que o encantamento está no mistério,

que o mistério é tão só desconhecido,

que se deve procurar como amigo,

abraçar como estranho e louvar

a nossa falta de tempo, espaço,

memória transtornada em magia.

 

 

 

(Texto interligado a Apagão)

 

 

 

Don’t you ever sleep?

Don’t you ever sleep? She asked. For years,

I examined each memory kind enough to surface

for assessment, self-corrupted or virginal, even

otherwise, only to realize I’ve been doing nothing

else. It’ll come the time when she asks,

Are you awake? And I’ll reply,

I’m keeping one dream alive,

for when I die it'll die with me,

and if I rise there’ll be no one

in bed to fee—look,

it’s fading, so feeble:

Bring us breakfast, fast.

 

 

July in Lisbon – António and the Seagulls

     When I got back to work after my holidays, the reception was not the usual one. My colleagues and I normally ring at the gate bell and hear the faint ding-dong inside. This time, as soon as we passed through the gate, we were being squawked at by a low flying and menacing seagull.

     Querying the security, we learned that a couple of seagulls decided to have their baby in an inner garden. The security guards have to pass always near that garden, and every time they were threatened by a vigilant mother. She was then backed up by what seemed to be the father, and soon after there were up to six seagulls defending one greyish fluffy-feathered baby.

     This was repeated during three weeks. I was able to observe the mother during my work breaks. She seemed to being on the watch always from the same place. Even during our nightshifts she seemed to be alert all the time. When we heard the defenders' noisily attacks we knew that a security guard was near or in the garden.

     I liked to watch her from the window, smoking a cigarette, examining her nervous task. Her neck must had ached from the constant movement that it required. And some times, still from the window, one could watch her soar with grace, without effort, only to dive and intimidate any intruder. It is easy to see from where Alfred Hitchcock got his idea for “The Birds”. 

     Baby S was soon attempting flight, and each day was seen resting on a different spot of the nearby rooftops. Sometimes the mother was calling, seemingly incentivating baby S to fly to where she had landed. And then one day they were no more. They flew away, probably in the company of all their family. We now ring at the gate bell and hear the faint ding-dong from inside. We get into the yard. We get inside. We work.

*   *   *

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

     JSP is writing a notepoem on the subject of saudade. I keep on failing to find a way of helping  him to grasp something that is linguistically outlandish. I’m not even sure if I understand saudade myself--I was born into the pre-existing concept. But maybe baby S, who would necessarily fly away one day, and the mother, who stressed out for weeks in a row, and the helping party, which was always hidden but soon formed the white harsh wailing squadron to dive Stuka-like over any intruder, maybe they all are elements of saudade.

______________

«Gulls—the larger species in particular—are resourceful and highly intelligent birds, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly developed social structure; for example, many gull colonies display mobbing behaviour, attacking and harassing would-be predators and other intruders. In addition, certain species (e.g. the Herring Gull) have exhibited tool use behaviour. Many species of gull have learned to coexist successfully with humans and have thrived in human habitats. Others rely on kleptoparasitism to get their food. The urban gull population in the United Kingdom has been growing quickly, probably due to laws such as the Clean Air Act 1956, which prohibited the burning of garbage by local landfill owners, thus increasing the availability of food for the gulls.» Excerpt of Wikipedia's article as of 2008-09-01.

Madrid in August – António and Guernica

     Madrid in August is much more than the lesser capital of Spain. It was Saturday. That means a free entrance in the Centro de Arte Reina (Queen) Sofia museum after 2:30 p.m., and someone told me or I’m telling someone, ‘do buy a recuerdo from the shop when you leave, leaving a gift for the gift you will receive freely and for free.’

     The museum is built around a fresh courtyard in which olive trees exhibit their lonely beauty before being seen as a source for their precious oil. Or is it the central fountain and its sprinkled moist which lend another dimension to these trees, these natural survivors under baking sun? Yet the courtyard -- which could be Muslim, could be Andalucía itself -- is a premonition of the museum's inner juices. Or of the Queen’s, if she forgives me such an expression. Somehow I feel like having a Bourbon now. *

     "Yes, I’ll shut up in a minute, Sovereign Sir."

     One of the first sightings was a lifesize puppet singing with David Byrne's voice. The public is supposed to be impressed by its mechanized facial movements. Movements so precise that would make Da Vinci’s mechanized armour wonder if mankind’s ingenuity fell asleep with the long sleep of its inventor. A temporary contemporary exhibition it was, installed in the ground floor for some mysterious reason. But modern is interactivity too, and the good surprise came with two pieces of art which shape themselves to what their cameras catch, and they could be catching you, capturing you into art for a fleeting moment. Modern.

     Free to choose, I chose to get lost in the museum holding a plan in my hand. I climbed upstairs. Without surprise my first sighting was Picasso’s, a statuette. I could almost feel the closeness to Guernica. It’s not the Spanish civil war and its atrocities that draw me to such a work. It’s rather the daily exposure to it when we went to play in my father’s office after his last client left. And it could well have been one of those clients who paid in chicken for a lawyer's service they couldn’t otherwise afford. 

     It wasn’t long before I found the painting. I was not disappointed. To its left, many studies of each figure present in the main painting. Close to it, the photos taken from time to time showing the painting evolution as a work of art. Picasso was a good general too as he changed his first plan without apparent remorse, and to obtain better results.

    Such an encounter was an appetizer for André Breton and his Surrealism and real mates. In a small dark adjacent room, recovered films of the duo Buñuel and Dalí were being played non-stop. They produced a Nadja on film too. It’s their (re)creation. I left.

     For food? Always. But it was getting closer to 6 p.m.. It was still Saturday, Madrid still. El Prado museum was soon free of charge as well. Until 8 p.m. Two hours for a visit. It was enough for Velásquez, El Greco and Goya. Don’t forget the gift shop. Keeping art alive requires financing too.   

 

_____________

 

* The current Spanish dynasty is Bourbon, or rather Borbón. And I don't like whiskey.

 

Spanish Pride - a travel flashback

While having a menu del dia at night, somewhere in a secondary calle of Madrid, the news on national TV were reporting on my back that Spain got another medal in the Olympic Games. It went on the air as if it was happening right then, without any introduction, and the reporter's excitement was building up as the two Spanish rowers got nearer the finish line.

 

Then the news-flash pivot proudly announced that Spain had already obtained sixteen medals. No comparison established with other nations. No comparison with Spain’s previous records.

 

I understand. Maybe that’s how you keep the little people proud and able to work better the very next day. Proud of their origins. Proud of their language. And maybe that's why they are so loud. Maybe that’s what national TV is like under a monarchy. Or maybe I’m just teasing as usual.

 

The Spanair crash in Barajas airport was the next subject in line. And recently another flight of that company to Lanzarote made an emergency landing in Malaga. On account of the Spanish pride, I don’t understand why such airline wasn't forced yet by the king to change its name to Banair. He was man enough to tell Hugo Chávez, 'Why don't you shut up?'... 

 

All this to say that Barcelona should be the capital of Castilla - La Mancha too, that the geo-strategical reasons that led to the choice of Madrid as the capital are no longer valid in the age of satellite-laser-guided-missiles. Perhaps when and if Spain becomes a republic Barcelona will get the title that is beautifully and therefore rightly hers.

 

 

The Conciliation

My faith came late, in form

of a revelation: that God was

a suicide bomber.

 

As with S–>Paul, light obfuscated me,

and I saw before my needle-eyes

God’s last action, in His will to reunite

with His Father, in Grandgod's Heaven.

 

God’s Love weighed a belt of explosives.

He approached the unsuspicious demonic

crowd in a Heavy Gas concert.  

 

First there was the Word,

and thus He spake, “Let there be Light.”

And He pressed the switch.

And His whole body off blew.

And the scientists got it right;

that the Big Bang was

an universe starting anew.

 

“God is dead,” Nietzche told us.

Yet we smirk for he's dead also.

 

And here we stand. Relatively,

we're but the ephemeral insect

for whom a day is eternity,

while the bodily pieces of God

and Demons are still expanding

into space. For them it's fresh

this explosion. For us, it took place 

thirteen billion years ago. Or last night,

if in revelations there's any truth.

 

Will such movement ever end?

Will there be a contraction?

Will we forever expand?

To give these questions answer

my revelation's short as any. 

 

So here we stand, God’s

flesh everywhere, of Demons more, 

of which we're made--a paradox.

My revelation can well be that

each successful suicide-bomber

begets a new micro-universe.

 

 

 

What sells the best?

Yesterday, I don’t remember why exactly anymore, but probably out of examining many people’s postings on Multiply, the thought that the world (specifically the North American part of it, but it is a worldwide phenomena) was eager for inspirational stuff crossed my mind. It was a strong suspicion, and by chance I had a look today at amazon.com’s list of bestsellers… 

 

1.

The Last Lecture

by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow

 

2.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61)

by Eckhart Tolle

 

3.

Just Who Will You Be?: Big Question. Little Book. Answer Within.

by Maria Shriver

 

4.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

by Eckhart Tolle

 

5.

The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

 

 

Of number one, I watched a video posted by someone here on Multiply. Pausch is going to die of cancer (I don’t know yet when the lecture was filmed), had six months to live and decided to give a last lecture. He avoided touching the topic of religion and spirituality, among others, and showed a very good humour talking about his achieved dreams in life, how he did it, and I seriously hope his family’s welfare is secured by the sales of the video and the book, for he won’t be around to provide for them anymore. He's a good man.

 

Number two is recommended by Oprah.

 

Number three could be too.

 

Number four might still be.

 

And number five tries to undermine religious belief, the loss of which in turn has been helping to produce stuff like number two, three and four… and even number one, I guess.

 

On the top twenty list one can still find two books on how to lose weight. And that can well be the physical world epidemic, au pair with spiritualism — the metaphysical one.

 

Therefore, I think one day I'll write a book on how to lose weight spiritually, with all the inspirational matters I've came across with in life, including breathing in (inspiration) and out (expiration), eating (healthy input) and crapping (healthy output), before the true expiration (that's why we need inspiration while living, isn't it?).

 

 

 

 

Daimons, not Demons!

Due to a search for “daemons”, thanks to a tip by my friend JSP, I found the work Demonic Texts and Textual Demons by the Finnish scholar Frans Ilkka Mäyrä.

 

Here’s a quote from Part I, first chapter, “The Ancestry of the Demonic” (it was hard to select something to quote, as I’ve found everything to be interesting enough):

 

 

DEMONS AS AMBIVALENT OPPONENTS: THE DAIMON

 

Our word for demon is etymologically derived from the ancient Hellenic daimon. This is an interesting and challenging concept, and points towards an original ambivalence that efficiently resists all attempts to fix and delimit the meaning of demons and the demonic. In his Greek Philosophical Terms F.E. Peters defines daimon as “supernatural presence or entity, somewhere between a god (theos) and a hero.” [1] According to Peters, the Greeks had developed a belief in supernatural spirits at a very early stage; this can be detected in their language. For example, the Greek word for happiness was eudaimonia, which literally meant ‘having a good daimon.’ These people believed that a daimon attached to a person at the moment of birth and dictated one’s destiny, good or evil. A good daimon acted as a kind of “guardian spirit” in the life of a happy person. The exact forms of this belief seem to have varied, and according to the shamanistic view the daimon was a very intimate part of an individual, another name for the soul. Among the later transcendentalists it became popular to think about daimons as intermediary figures between the Olympians and the mortals; they inhabited areas close to men and exercised direct influence over their affairs. [2]

____________

 

[1] Peters 1967, 33. The classification of rational beings into four classes (gods, daimons,

heroes and men, in this order) comes from Hesiod and was followed by Plutarch in his

Moralia (see Ferguson 1984, 33). – Jatakari 1996 is a thorough study (in Finnish) about

the role of the daimon in Greek thought between 550 and 300 B.C.E. The original roots of

daimon are multiple and disputed. It is commonly related to the verb ‘to apportion’

(da ¤omai ), but the scholarship does not agree on what was originally apportioned. Some

researchers think that the earliest daimons were malign natural powers and spirits; the

“apportioning” would have signified violent rending or eating of body (W. Porzig). Others

have more positive hypotheses, and suggest that daimons at an early stage were bearers

of light (W. Buckert), or that the daimonic ‘apportioning’ included the dimension of

apportioning fate or destiny (M.P. Nilsson). See Jatakari 1996, 4.

 

[2] Peters 1967, 33-34. Everett Ferguson produces a useful summary of Greek views on

daimons in his study Demonology of the Early Christian World (Ferguson 1984, 33-59).

Jensen (1966) has a more specific goal: to trace the function of Greek demonology in the

philosophical and religious dualism of Pythagorean and Platonic thought.

 

 

Mäyrä also refers in his introduction that he came across many texts that kept the subject of demons popping up in his life. By accident and because I was more alert to the subject of daimons in literature, here are few poems I found on a single American poetry anthology:

 

Edgar Allan Poe’s Alone

 

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved—I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

 

 

Stephen Crane’s Many Red Devils

 

Many red devils ran from my heart

And out upon the page,

They were so tiny

The pen could mash them.

And many struggled in the ink.

It was strange

To write in this red muck

Of things from my heart.

 

 

from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Flammonde

 

(…) But what of him—
So firm in every look and limb?
What small satanic sort of kink
Was in his brain? What broken link
Withheld him from the destinies
That came so near to being his?

(…)

 

 

And I found these after spending but a hour or less reading through the anthology…

 

 ________

Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes the following on Mäyrä’s book:

Ilkka Mäyrä has written an absorbing and authoritative investigation of the role of demons and the demonic in literary and cultural history in the West. He draws impressively and with assurance on a wide range of theological, anthropological and philosophical sources to underpin and direct his analysis of a number of contemporary cultural texts. Rather than attempting to derive an underlying core of meaning from the shifting and polymorphous functions of devils and demons, Mäyrä argues suggestively that the demonic has come to embody uncertainty of identity and indeterminacy of meaning themselves. This makes the demonic a carrier of some of the most absorbing and widespread preoccupations of contemporary texts and cultural theory, and helps explain the stubborn survival of demons and demonism in contemporary writing. In the contemporary texts he discusses, from popular fiction such as Rosemary´s Baby and The Exorcist through to the novels of Anne Rice, Clive Barker and Salman Rushdie, Mäyrä finds the demonic at work within the idea of discourse itself. Most recently, the demonic has become a powerful explanatory metaphor for our increasingly complex relations with machines and technology. Historically well-informed, theoretically resourceful, critically subtle, this is an original and absorbing investigation of its topic.

 

 

As Mäyrä claims, the chapters of this book can be approached as individual items and in no specific order. And it is rich in bibliographical leads, which you can follow if you’re interested in different views of the same subject.

 

Mäyrä’s book is available online in PDF format here: http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Demon_2005/

Due to copyright issues for sure, the file unfortunately doesn’t come with illustrations. And handling a book is much a finer task than handling many printed pages. So I think I’ll buy me the book instead. There’s a link for it on that page also. The PDF file is great to quote the original work though.

 

 

 

Image: A woodcut from 1598 shows an exorcism performed on a woman by a priest and his assistant, with a demon emerging from her mouth. In Pierre Boaistuau, et al., Histoires prodigieuses et memorables, extraictes de plusieurs fameux autheurs, Grecs, & Latins, sacrez & prophanes (Paris, 1598), vol. 1.