Author: Christiaan van Gaal

Day 2398, dying thoughts.

Daily picture, Haiku, Poetry 

A kernel of truth
at the end of dying thoughts
a prolongation 

Nochrisis

Friedrich Nietzsche

Daybreak

Book 1

66 Capacity for visions. –Throughout the whole Middle Ages, the actual and decisive sign of the highest humanity was that one was capable of visions – that is to say, of a profound mental disturbance! And the objective of medieval prescriptions for the life of all higher natures (thereligiosi) was at bottom to make one capable of visions! It is thus no wonder that an over-estimation of the half-mad, the fantastic, the fanatical- of so-called men of genius- should have spilled over into our time; ‘they have seen things that others do not see’ – precisely! and this should make us cautious towards them, not credulous!

Read more here: https://nochrisis.blog/morgenrote/

Day 2397, illusory.

Daily picture

Definition of ’anthropomorphize’

anthropomorphize

in British English

[ an-thruh-puh-mawr-fahyz ]

verb (used with or without object), an·thro·po·mor·phized, an·thro·po·mor·phiz·ing.

Anthropomorphizing is the human tendency to see the illusory or theoretical human-behavior and qualities in humans*, animals, and other objects.

*a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens)

Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 94th Edition. Copyright © 2089 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights free.

Day 2395, lost cells.

Daily picture

I opened Lightroom today, which is my photo editing and organizing program, and I clicked by accident on the main folder; it showed me thumbnails of all the photos on my computer. I immediately saw my face and clicked on it to enlarge it. It is one of the scans of an old slide, probably from around 1996.

I find it a shame that you (or maybe it’s just me) can never look at yourself like you look at a stranger. If I meet someone for the first time, I will always get some impression of who this person is, and the longer we interact, the more detailed that mental picture becomes. It is a little bit more difficult if you only see the person in a photo, but even then, you could get some information out of it, even if it is just the type of cloth they wear or the setting they are in, it all combined tells you something.

As a good skeptic, I don’t attach too much value to what my first impression tells me, but it is at least something. If I look at myself in the mirror or at this picture from 25 years ago, I get nothing. Meeting myself would be nice, but that’s not possible yet; only on video can I see myself moving around and interacting with other people.

It is just something I find curious, and I wonder if it is just me or if this is normal. I think it has something to do with what I think about myself. In this picture, I see myself from 25 years ago, and I learned a few things in the meantime, but… I also know that what we think or feel about ourselves often has little to do with what others think or “feel” about us. There might be some truth in both observations*, but maybe, that what I think about myself conflicts with what the person on the photo shows me, which is why I have a hard time seeing anything when I stare into those eyes. As if I deny my past self.

I have to say that the longer I look at the picture, the more I see, so it is time to stop because all the staring and thinking dilute my first, perhaps purer, impression of what I wanted to write about today. You could say that I start to project what I might want to see onto the person in that old picture, something we humans are good at. Being real to yourself is hard

*Some people see your personality as not fixed but something that is constantly in motion. Every little turn or event changes you, even if it is just in the slightest. You are not the same as who you were yesterday, let alone 25 years ago. You can take this also literally, there is not one molecule in me that was also there in 1996. In that sense, I am now a whole other person, and only my copies of the original DNA know how to keep the whole façade intact, though I don’t understand why my DNA finds it necessary to take away some of my hair.

Day 2394, old door.

Daily picture

Part of my work is restoring old doors, and today I started with this door. This is an old door that is now in use as an emergency exit that also sometimes gets used for special occasions. It is in the main Library here in Trondheim, and the head historian of Trondheim told me today that she believes it was already part of the building before it got renovated in 1831. The door has been restored before, probably in the seventies, but the original fittings are still there, and only parts of the wooden construction (the lock stile) are relatively new.  

The hinges are old, they are fitted in such a way that we would damage the door if we try to remove them, so we leave them. It is pretty incredible that these old hinges are still doing their work after almost 200 years; modern hinges that are screwed to the doors of today will probably never last that long.

Another point that shows the craftsmanship used in making these old doors is that most of my job will be replacing parts of the wood used in the restoration they did 50 years ago. You have to understand that it is not only the carpenter’s work that makes these doors last but also the people that sell the wood. They understood what kind of wood was needed for making a quality door and were in contact with the right people that could deliver the right kind of wood for the job. In short, the whole ecosystem was “made” for quality, not quantity. We, of course, don’t know what happened to all the other old doors that are long gone; we only see the ones that lasted but still.

Doors like these are the reason that I  leaned towards restoring “old stuff.” It never felt right making more new things, and I like all the stories attached to all those old boats I helped restore, a door like this also has many stories: who all have opened this door, for instance, and what was their mood going in or getting out?

Day 2393, remembering.

Daily picture

The picture above is more or less what I saw in my mind while looking at the light on a ceiling. I decided to take a picture of that colorful light, and my phone didn’t do a good job, it more or less showed what the light looked like in reality and not as I saw it in my mind.

Reality is often dull compared to what we make of it in our minds. Hard facts will show that bleakness and after excepting forces us to repaint that reality using the memory of what we saw the first time in our mind.

We often live by following the flawed memory of what we were dreaming ones.