14. February 2008 by admin.

As a followup to my last real post in which I mentioned Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, I have decided to write up my favourite passage to share with you, in the off chance that someone is actually reading this.
And because I like remembering this passage and its a little easier to find it if I write it out online.
Before I begin, for those select few who are reading this blog and have never glanced at the pages of this masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451 is NOT written about 911 and predates the event by some 50 years or so. It so happens that 451 degrees fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns, and is a fitting title for the novel. Set in a future dystopian society, it is a world in which happiness and leisure is all that the government strives for for its populace, and all that is permitted within the city walls. Everything that has been deemed as a source of social problems has been banned, and those caught in contempt of the ban are killed. Intellectualism is considered to be unnecessary and troublesome, leading to jealousy and hatred in those who are mentally inferior, so the need for intellect is removed. In such, people are not born equal, they are made and raised to be equal. Work is not fun, so real work no longer exists. School is not fun, so ’school’ is reduced to ‘TV classes’ and suchlike. Children as young as 12 drive around in jet cars on unpoliced roads, killing anyone unlucky enough to be a pedestrian (a rare enough occurrence as even that is a crime) for the pure thrill of it. The government strove to please everybody so there could be no conflict within the city, but in doing so removed some of the most basic principles of freedom. Our protagonist is a man by the name of Guy Montag. He begins as one of the mindless drones; a fireman by profession, although not the type of fireman we know. Their job is to maintain the supposed peace and civility by burning down the houses of people caught with books; the believed root of all evil. He awakens to the true nature of their world when a young girl by the name of Clarisse McClellen encourages him to question the order of things, and to think for himself. I know that this brief description has barely even touched base with what the book entails, but for the sake of not having a 30 page long entry, it’ll have to do.

I will however add one thing. This book struck a real chord with me because of something that is beginning to become true in our world. As time progressed, people took less and less interest in thought and meaningful conversation. Attention spans shortened, and to keep peoples’ interest in every facet of life, things had to be quickened, and a gripping, yet snappy conclusion had to be reached. The pace of life become so fast that there was no time at all to just sit back and think about what on earth was going on. Outside the city walls, wars raged on but still people paid absolutely no attention because they were too absorbed in television programs, or radio shows. (Average movie length? 5 minutes) All people ever talked about was what was on the TV, or a new tune on the radio. Anything else was considered to be strange. Life no longer had true value. People died every day, and their bodies were immediately cremated so that others could forget, and not mourn them. The so-called ‘happy’ people had convinced themselves so well that they were perfectly happy, that they didn’t even know what they were doing when the inevitable suicide attempts came around, even denying the event the very day after. Anyway, without further ado (because I’m having a bit of a mind blank and my sentences have become fragmented heh), here’s the passage from Fahrenheit 451, a conversation between Montag, and his superior in the fire department, Captain Beatty. For reference, Mildred is Montag’s wife, who is deep down very depressed though she claims to be proud of how happy she is, and the parlour ‘aunts and uncles’ refer to the characters in the ‘parlour walls’- a futuristic equivalent of the TV, that occupy whole walls of the room and whose inhabitants ‘interract’ with the viewer. The underlined passage is that of which I dub of most significance, so if you don’t feel like reading all of this, at least read that section.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

“‘When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where when? Well, I’d say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.’
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
‘And because they had mass, they became simpler,’ said Beatty. ‘Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazine, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?’
‘I think so.’
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. ‘Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.’
‘Snap ending.’ Mildred nodded.
‘Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.’

[…]

‘School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?’

[…]

‘You like bowling, don’t you, Montag?’
‘Bowling, yes.’
‘And golf?’
‘Golf is a fine game.’
‘Basketball?’
‘A fine game.’
‘Billiards, pool? Football?’
‘Fine games, all of them.’
‘More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super-organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns run into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.’
Mildred went out of the room and slammed the door. The parlour ‘aunts’ began to laugh at the parlour ‘uncles’.

‘Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, machanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, where dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it , Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.’
‘Yes, but what about the firemen, then?’ asked Montag.
‘Ah.’ Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. ‘What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word “intellectual”, of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally “bright”, did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of fireman for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.’
The door to the parlour opened and Mildred stood there looking in at them, looking at Beatty and then at Montag. Behind her the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed almost completely of trap-drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it.
Beatty knocked his pipe into the palm of his pink hand, studied the ashes as if they were a symbol to be diagnosed and serached for meaning.
‘You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.’
‘Yes.’
Montag could lip-read what Mildred was saying in the doorway. He tried not to look at her mouth, because then Beatty might turn and read what was there too.
‘Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight ouside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.’
The fireworks died in the parlour behind Mildred. She had stopped talking at the same time; a miraculous coincidence. Montag held his breath.
‘There was a girl next door,’ he said, slowly. ‘She’s gone now, I think, dead. I can’t even remember her face. But she was different. How…how did she happen?’
Beatty smiled. ‘Here or there, that’s bound to occur. Clarisse McClellen? We’ve a record on her family. We’ve watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the McClellens, when they lived in Chicago. Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; anti-social. The girl? She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I’m sure, from what I saw of her school record. She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl’s better off dead.’
‘Yes, dead.’
‘Luckily, queer ones like her don’t happen often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.’
Beatty got up. ‘I must be going. Lecture’s over. I hope I’ve clarified things. The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.’”

-End quote

Have I missed anything?

There are so many concepts within this that I could write further on but I’ll let you do some thinkin. I think that’s fair. However, I will leave you with this. Life is all about inequalities. Social equality is all well and good, but once you start shoving everybody into the same mold, things inevitably start going sideways. Democracy is based on the principle that everyone is socially equal, and while it does not completely work in practice, it does recognize that everybody has their own place within the social pyramid; their own thoughts, their own strengths and weaknesses, their own opinions. Intellects, sportsmen, scientists, artists, mathematicians, cooks, protesters. Everyone has a place, and everyone is needed for whatever purpose. People can’t be made to be the same as everyone else; the balance of social order will be destroyed in the same way as the food chain in a delicate ecosystem. The ‘exceptionally bright boy’ who gets picked on in school, grows up and becomes the boss of the people who picked on him. We learn, and we evolve from our environment. Without conflict to strengthen us with, we will never evolve.

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8. February 2008 by admin.

Just because after that long and tiring introduction, here’s a bit of absolute retarded and unthinking toilet humour (because I couldn’t be bothered thinking of a better name) for you all to enjoy. Its one from my series of poop-inspired and poop-starring webcomic strips.

You might not enjoy it.

Whatever you feel like.

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8. February 2008 by admin.

Welcome to ramblings of the semi conscious, my insignificant slice in the magnitude of the world wide web. The concept of a notepad that consists of more than just my mind is something somewhat foreign to me, especially one that has the potential to be viewed by others (and quite possibly by minds far greater than mine), so forgive me while I overcome my web-shyness. On the other hand, having something a little more stable than a mental account of my thoughts will be something nice for a change, and of course much less likely to be tainted and lost over the course of time.

This concept, of deep and meaningful (for lack of a better word) thought, is something that is for the most part lost on the majority of today’s society. People have subconsciously deemed thought dealing with matters any less than immediately relevant to the current manifestations in their lives as unnecessary and bothersome, taking up too much time in the bustle of this day and age, and thus, do not give any significant time to the activity. We do not concern ourselves with these matters of ‘why’, rather always wonder ‘how’ or accept everything as necessary and natural process. (Even that sentence is highly restrictive in its subject! But I am far from wanting to touch on ‘what ifs’ and the multitude of other such categories…) Such blissful ignorance extends even to taking regular and everyday signifiers which exist in every single facet of life to be that which they signify; assuming the picture of paradise hanging on the wall to be paradise, rather than a construct. Nothing ever is as perfect as the sparkles make them seem, and we’d all realise that if we gave it a second thought. But that is neither here nor there, and is getting off my originally neutral and non-pessimistic topic of thought.

See now, that is precisely why I called this online blog ‘ramblings’. I start on one path and begin to meander aimlessly down completely unrelated paths and end up somewhere far away from my intended thoughts. Often the most negative of paths too. Perhaps that is one of the quirks of my nature: I (inwardly) attempted to deny myself the naivety of youth, and found myself skeptical of every happening, every thing that I used to accept as fact, or purely natural; the beginnings of an interest in philosophy. Oh, I would never voice such thoughts, but keeping these quiet inside keeps me up and awake every night as they continue to wander around my head like some sort of psychological virus nightmare.

Anyway, enough incoherent and ridiculous (and unnecessary!) chit chat to bore you about the tangled state of my mind, a proper introduction is in order. I’m Leanne, artist in charge of Ethereal Vision (how ego-inflating!, musical extraordinaire, owner of a secretly split persona and I’m ‘18 and crazy’. According to Clarisse McClellen, fictional 17yo from Ray Bradbury’s classic short “Fahrenheit 451″ the two always go together, although I’m not 17 …the insanity feels good nonetheless. I’m considered something of an enigma by people who know me (and myself) for having an uncanny ability to be great in whatever I try… and then boring of it and moving on to find some other thing to occupy my time and mind despite having the knowledge and talent to succeed in whatever area it is. Perhaps not so much for the lack of staying power, but more for a current lack of interest in what I do. I suppose I am far too intrigued by the whys of life to pay any prolonged attention to actually living it.

There, introductions done and completed and I’m no longer in a writing mood.

Good day to you all

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