I toil, like many others in my generation, in a corporate world. There I seek illusory glory, and bear unnamable sufferings.

I suppose, if completely submitted to its culture, one could indeed be happy and successful and well-fed. But one would drift away from one’s true self, and interact in chary manner towards people with similar guises, and be a team player in a machinery that exists solely to profit its shareholders.

Yet it would be far-fetched to call this “suffering” when we consider the magnitude of upheavals in our era.

To those who were dying of hunger in China in 1960s, it would be a divine blessing to be working in a corporate world. But to those who studied Renaissance in college, it is only natural to regard Excel spreadsheets with contempt.

It is with this sense of ambivalence, an irresolution between feeling grateful and feeling entrapped, that I conduct my professional life.

To relieve my petty sufferings, I try to emulate the qualities of J Alfred Prufrock:

no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

At times, alas, I also bullshit.
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David Bohm has an interesting insight on order and complexity.

He gives the following example: A straight line is the simplest curve, in which each line segment differs in position and similar in direction. A circle gets a little more complex, in which each line segment differs in position and direction, but the angles between segments are the same. Then comes the spiral, when successive pairs of segments differ in that they define different planes, turning the curve into a third dimension.

It is interesting to note that the similarities that define a straight line is different to the similarities that define a circle. We can therefore say the circle has a higher order than the line. Brownian motion, the “chaotic” movements of particles, would then be tracing a curve of infinite order.

He believes that people assume that perceptions are subjective or private, when they are simply lacking the understanding or language to describe the true quality of the order they are perceiving.

Newspeak is the weird official language of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in George Orwell’s 1984. Its purpsose is “not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” It has three categories: A, B, and C vocabulary. A vocabulary are words used in everyday life, but stripped down and then recombined (knife, speedful, doublepluscold, undark). B vocabulary are words constructed for political purposes (goodsex, thinkpol, duckspeaker). C vocabulary are obscure technical terms without reference to any scientific thinking.

I think the New Newspeak, as we have today, is conceived so as not to diminish the range of thoughts, but to extend and obscure them. I am quite amused by these trendy words: copyleft, geek, hentai, organic, terrorist, hot, design… above all, I think the word “free” has presently acquired a bizarre Orwellian taste. Free as in free speech, free beer, or free range chicken?

Panamarenko’s craft is as great as his obsession, meticulously building flying machines that will not fly at all. But the lightness of thought floats above the weight of metal, and animates these heroic yet tragic creations. I can almost hear their creaks and groans, see how they stretch, tremble, stumble onward, lift off, and then explode.

Two fantastic portraits of artist come to my mind.

The first portrait comes from Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet. A lustrous mouth appears on the artist’s hand, sighing and whispering, bringing along much pleasures and much confusions. The artist puts his hand-mouth on the sensual parts of his body.

The second comes from Paul Klee’s book, On Modern Art. He compares the artist to a tree. The root is the branching and ordering of a passing stream of image and experience, and the crown of the tree is his art. The artist is the stem, gathering and passing on what comes to him from the depths. “He neither serves nor rules — he transmits.”

I suspect an artist is someone who swings wildly between such strange spectrum, from sensation and obsession to wisdom and wholeness.

Jacob Bronowski wrote a fine essay called “The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language”. He believed that animal languages convey only instructions, while human language can convey information that is separable from the emotional charge and therefore allows more than one interpretation.

Bronowski quoted the work of N. I. Zhinkin, the Russian scientist who applied theory of algorithm to the study of animal speech. Zhinkin showed that baboons can say lots of things in a very small number of grunts, but they have only one way to say any one thing. So that, I guess, grunt-grunt-grunt means I love you.

Evolution from a poor baboon to a romantic Miss Elizabeth Barrett is very curious indeed. She used a great many grunts to say one thing (to Robert Browning) –

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height…

But it now becomes quite apparent that the human language is too inadequate to express the depth of humanity. We now apply “attraction” to an act of electron, use “your ass” for artistic emphasis, and seek short-lived happiness in “pr0n”.

Indeed, our language offers no word or grunt that means just one thing. There are so many ways to say one thing, and so little time to say it, that must have made Mr. Prufrock exclaimed: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”

On this very special day, if you are to express your true feelings to a special person, what words will you choose, what music to play, what time and place? I like this intricate advice from Thomas Mann, though it is much less obvious than a fluffy teddy bear or a pink hallmark card –

A “clear word” and a benevolent, pointing out the better course, seems powerless today; world events pass all such over with brutal disregard. But let us hold fast to the anti-diabolic faith, that mankind has after all a “keen learning,” and that words born of one’s own striving may do it good and not perish from its heart.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I am fascinated by Dr Daina Taimina’s hyperbolic needlework. Pseudospheres become tangible, geodesics are shown, and the Parallel postulate is falsified in these lovely, fluffy models.

It is a romantic scene: a mathematician, sitting by the candlelight, weave together arts and sciences, thread by thread.

Jean-Henri Fabre observes that a grasshopper will say goodbye to its fellow grasshoppers before hopping away. If it goes away without saying goodbye, such silence implies danger and will make all grasshoppers flee in silent panic.

Silence has a powerful voice. Press the start button and the microwave does nothing; the computer freezes; the sound system malfunctions in the middle of a movie; someone tells a bad joke; vivid dreams between the alarm clock’s snooze intervals; no one calls, not even telemarketers; a love letter sent, yet unreturned…

Alas, we the modern people can neither flee the noises nor the silence!

My childhood hero is this robotic cat, who lives with a middle-class family, takes gadgets out of his Kangaroo-like magic pocket and saves the day. What are Doraemon’s gadgets?

• Gravity Paint: paint it on the wall, and the wall becomes the ground!
• Raining Umbrella: open it and it rains!
• Girlfriend directory: find all your future girlfriends’ information!
• Memory bread: write notes on it, eat it, and you will remember it!
• Story shoes: wear the shoes and walk into the world inside the story book!
• Totalitarian button: make a person vanish by simply pressing the button!

It is sad that Doraemon is no more, and I have grown up.

While well-cooked pasta are good for teeth, well-designed pasta are food for thought. When I was living in a small Italian town, and had too many idle evenings, I cooked pasta and contemplated upon their forms. What a fantastic medium to capture tomato sauce indeed!

Spaghetti often isn’t sauce enough, and Rigatoni sometimes has too much. Variations of Fusilli (spiral-shape), Farfalle (butterfly-shaped), and Casarecce (has a nice twist) are lovely, practical, and well-engineered solutions. My favourite is Canalini: it is like Linguini but with a “canal” in the middle, into which the perfect amount of sauce flows. It is an intellectual pasta.

Because of these witty, elegant, and high-carb inventions, life is good.