9/11/2021

I was just watching an interview with Peter Bergen who was one of the journalists that were in Afghanistan and managed to interview Bin Laden. The thing that I always focus in on is the metaphor of film—that there’s a slippage between reality and a film. There are similarities that we put together in our heads, but they are very different, and very much like dreams. Another salient point about information in general is that we’re always getting it from screens now, and screens obviously have a connection with film. There was a connection between film and print at some level—where a novel would be translated into a screenplay and a film would be made out of it. In a film experience we have a simulation of reality that can be very close or very distant, but we can’t always tell. Media are also “celebrity machines”, so the conflation of dreams, books, films, and screens of all kinds form our perception of reality. What I prefer to do is to find the people that were actually on the ground there. They are the sources of information that I think are most reliable. But at the same time, people’s memories are like degrading films. History is the impermanence of memory, and the fact that the text is always wet on history. So even if people are recounting their experiences, who knows if their memories are actually verifiable. People are always “storifying” memory. When we remember a dream we have to stitch together the various fragments. In my experience there are always three or four fragments in a dream and when I get up and attempt to write it down, that’s where things get lost in translation because you’re trying to weave in a narrative. The reality of a dream and the reality that we make when we remember a dream is different so it’s hard to really pinpoint where the truth is. So you have to take in a lot of different sources and you have to connect the dots on your own, and avoid telling the story to other people who pass it around and then gets transformed again, and it keeps going on for years and decades and millennia. So what we come away with is some version of reality or a consensus reality and we have to accept some of it. There might be some similarities and there will be differences. It’s like the perception of a color: we all know what red is but what’s the shade of the red? How do we experience red? Some cultures call green a blue and some green blues are sometimes called our red. The labels that we put on things aren’t reliable. Even text itself is a label or symbol for something and those symbols can vary from culture to culture so there are anthropological aspects to it as well. It’s multifactorial which makes it very interesting and engaging. 

*** 

9/11/2013

Putin writes Op-Ed in the NYT about the situation in Syria. I can’t make the connection between the American demonization and the spirit of this letter. One would not even believe it was written by him.