The Latent Realm
🔮(𓁹 𓁹) 𓆏

🎭 Extra‑Ordinary Language

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
Twixt this Turtle and his queen

— Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle

A cage went in search of a bird.

— Kafka, Aphorisms

I can't go on. I'll go on.

— Beckett, The Unnamable

Merry and tragical! Tedious and brief!
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

— Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Machines at Work

Quiet Please – Machines Are Learning

🤕 On Bad Conscience

At this point I can no longer avoid giving a first, preliminary expression to my own theory on the origin of bad conscience: it is not easy to get a hearing for this hypothesis, and it needs to be pondered, watched, and slept on.

I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by the pressure of the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced— that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace.

It must have been no different for these semi-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, war, the wandering life and adventure, than it was for the sea animals when they were forced to either become land animals or perish—at one go, all instincts were devalued and suspended.

Now they had to walk on their feet and "carry themselves," whereas they had been carried by the water up till then: a terrible heaviness bore down on them. They felt clumsy at performing the simplest task; they no longer had their familiar guide in this new, unknown world—those regulating impulses that had unconsciously led them to safety.

The poor creatures were reduced to relying on thinking, inference, calculation, and the connecting of cause with effect—in other words, to relying on their consciousness, that most impoverished and error-prone organ! I do not think there has ever been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort—and meanwhile, the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their demands!

— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, §16

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Not a phone in sight.

It is complicated

I think I might be the one on the left.