Flex Mentallo

In an endless stream

A great deal of gift sharing goes on.

And here they come!

The groom's family are coming to greet the bride.

The house that Mridula built is being used for the first ceremony.

Preparations have been going on for days before my arrival.

The family had trekked out to the airport to meet me. I have to be honest and say, I always get a kick out of this, and not only because it is just so great to see them. Mridula's youngest daughter rugby tackles me on sight. The crowds at the airport never quite know what to make of all the hugging going on. Like, 'who is this hulking ferangi, to be greeted so enthusiastically by a flutter of Indian women? And look, now he's hugging them. Scandalous!'

Kolkata International Airport. Early March. In Manchester, it had been 3 degrees Celsius with negligible humidity. In Kolkata the temperature was 33 degrees, with 70% humidity. (Actually I was fortunate - the temperature just yesterday in Kolkata was a record-equaling 43 degrees!)

But the wedding I had been invited to attend, and photograph, was Lucina's.

In all I attended three weddings during my latest visit.

But each wedding also has its idiosyncrasies. This bride has been wrapped in banana leaves, but no-one could tell me why.

Indian weddings are complex affairs, taking place over three exhausting days.

March in India is wedding season.

LIGHT

Neoooow sweeet meeestery of love I've fooouunnnd yooooou!

That's my old copy as well! Has anyone around her got a #14 I've not previously owned?

That's my old copy.

I though the #9 went pretty high as well. I had made up my mind not to bid a few weeks ago. Did you win it Jason? I have a few Planets I want to upgrade, but I also made up my mind to not pursue any at this auction ( although the number 5 is tempting...) Prices are pretty strong...I thought they might wane when cheetah 'retired'.

I though the #9 went pretty high as well. I had made up my mind not to bid a few weeks ago. Did you win it Jason?

GCD has no credit but it's so distinctively him I'm confident of the designation. Not the slightest doubt.

Nice one Pat. Do we change the past by studying it? I just adore books on time travel, and I guess paleontology & comparative mythology are a portal of sorts.

Absolutely fascinating. I'm sure I've read something about him because the part about the Greeks not having a modern consciousness rings a bell, but I definitely haven't read his book. Reading the article, he has the kind of intellect I admire most - an iconoclast, willing to stand by his convictions in the teeth of a howling gale. All sorts of recollections were stirred - Allen Upward, on early humans, 'When people saw other people as trees walking, and trees as people standing still." And of course, GBS in 'Man and Superman' 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.' The notion that consciousness emerges from language raises a couple of interesting thoughts as well. Do dolphins have a language? The difference between language and communication And here is Wittgenstein: The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained. Tractatus Tractatus was the only work published in his lifetime, and is only 76 pages long. Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and therefore the limits of what can be thought. "What we can say at all can be said clearly," he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be. I find Wittgenstein interesting because he seemingly went back on his original argument in his later work, published posthumously. I remember seeing the play Jumpers by Tom Stoppard at the National Theatre in London many years ago, in which a philosopher played by Michael Horden hilariously ties himself in verbal knots much as Wittgenstein did. He vocalizes a chain of thought that is in fact a true story: Someone apparently went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said "What a lot of m*rons back in the Middle Ages must have been to have looked, every morning, at the dawn and to have thought what they were seeing was the Sun going around the Earth," when every school kid knows that the Earth goes around the Sun, to which Wittgenstein replied, "Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth?" Critic Terry Eagleton has described Wittgenstein as the philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists. Which raises another question. Do whales sing?

What then of the self aware entity that lacks the capacity for introspection? The recognition of oneself being separate from one's environment ...and by extension separate from other individuals does not indicate a lack of self-awareness, but rather an obsession with it. Conscience implies empathy or at least the capacity for it. Knowing thyself is supplanted by knowing how one is perceived by others, insight being a manipulative tool used by self aware sociopaths to appear more reasonable by those needed for empathetic support. We all play the cards we're dealt. All things being equal, I'm an advocate of hands that can be played in no trump. Dinosaurs didn't look to the heavens for an answer to their evolutionary dilemma, it arrived unannounced. Given how long we've been here and the long evolutionary path dinosaurs took prior to their untimely extinction, we cannot say with absolute certainty that saurians didn't have an evolutionary spurt providing some advanced bipedal species with self awareness. Fossil remains being what they are, we might never resolve that 50 million year old question. Hey, maybe there was a saurian philosopher who foresaw the end days and monkeys taking over the earth. Oh, wait a minute, that's been done. I agree.