There will be blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's There will be blood maintained his word: there was blood, but a fake blood, a blood that does not redeem.

Let's be clear on one point: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview) is an outstanding actor, unquestionably best Hollywood's villain, and deserves the Oscar for his magnificent interpretation. The Plainview character is reminiscent of one of the best villains ever, Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting, of Scorsese's Gangs of New York. But even Day-Lewis could not do much to save an utterly confused Anderson.

Throughout the movie, Plainview is not given a soul because he doesn't have one, and this makes Day-Lewis' interpretation unnecessarily flat. Daniel Day-Lewis tries hard to fill in an empty final scene, but even him doesn't know where Anderson is heading as it becomes evident from his exaggerate limping, the back and forth movements that breaks the tension between the two characters, and the pathetic chase scene around the bowling alley.

Anderson portrays in this movie an apology of the lie: family is a lie, religion is a lie, God is a lie. Only blood and oil are real. Yet, he shamelessly draws from the Bible to put forward his truth.

• In the first scene we are presented with Plainview's fall, where he gets of the forbidden fruit, the oil: this is the only moment where Plainview is obliged to look up above his plain view.
• When death strikes one of his co-workers in a derrick construction, he feels compelled to adopt his baby: an evident new Moses left in the basket, as it becomes evident by the end of the movie when Plainview-Pharaoh doesn't want to let his adopted son go to pursue his own business in Mexico: "You're a bastard from a basket."
• The twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday, are put before us as Jacob and Esau, as Plainview says : "You're not the chosen brother, Eli. It was Paul who was chosen" and as Eli savagely attacks his own old father for being stupid and idle, for believing a lie.
• Plainview is baptized while proclaiming a lie.
  
• Eli Sunday dies after confessing his lie. (I would go so far as to say that Eli is the anagram of lie).
• Plainview-Cain kills his brother Henry Bardy-Abel : but that's also a fake brother, a lie.
  

In Anderson's view everything is a lie, and this movie becomes his new Bible, the new Third Revelation, where he composes his moral conundrum.

In conclusion, we would like to address director Anderson with Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting very own words:

"Here's the thing... I don't give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meat-headed shit-sack... That's pretty much the thing."

God and the Vacuum Cleaner

In a previous note, I discussed the role of the observer and the observed in the context of the philosophy of science.

In that note I affirm that, in the context of a scientific observation, the observer has a higher ontological status than the the observed, and that we can escape the state of desperation induced by the event-self, only by admitting an act of creation for the whole reality.

One of the implicit assumptions that were not explicitly stated in that note, is that when we formulate a theory, we are necessarily making a judgment on the object of our observation. Our brains are hard-wired in this type of thinking and we constantly use in our interpersonal relations. Let me explain my point with an example of daily life.

Adam comes back home from work and finds that Eve has perfectly vacuumed the carpet, but forgot to put back the vacuum cleaner in the closet. Adam perceives the out of place vacuum cleaner as a phenomenon in the sense indicated by my previous considerations. Adam finds himself disturbed by the presence of the vacuum cleaner and asks Eve to please put it away. The situation repeats for many days on end: Eve diligently keep on her duties, but forgets to put the vacuum cleaner away. Adam needs to make sense of the situation, needs to create a theory to explain what is happening, and finally concludes scientifically that: "I have told Eve many times to put the vacuum cleaner away: either she does not listen to me, or she does it on purpose. In either case: she does not love me."

The consequences of such an event (viz., the product of the theory) are clear even to most unexperienced newly weds. The comic in this situation also evidences that there is something wrong somewhere, and this can be found in the fact that Adam's theory implies first a judgment, and then a displacement of the object of the observation from the vacuum cleaner to Eve that is using it. Obviously, Eve is not at a lower ontological level than the observer (Adam), as it was previously the case for the misplaced vacuum cleaner. Adam's judgment breaks the unity, and as such represents a negative attitude.

We note here that this type of behavior, is also common in our personal theology. If we happen to assist to the unfortunate event of a heavy stone rolling down a cliff towards a car, crashing the vehicle and killing the passengers, we hardly jump to an objective judgment on the theory of cliffs stability, and/or the theory of gravity that caused the movement of the rock. More often, instead,we displace the object of our judgment towards God, who is at a completely different ontological level with respect to the stone, and we respect to us. Like Adam, we formulate the same theory: "I have told God many times I do not want to see anymore suffering, God does not listen to me, hence God does not love me."

The movement from man to God is therefore impossible. We cannot access the infinity of God, by starting from the analysis of our human condition. Note that we know that God is there because every human being is born with an innate tendency to find the Creator.

The original sin is the visible sign of our broken unity with God. Hence the only possible movement is from God towards man, and this is the essence of the redemptive message of Jesus Christ.

1. Does this mean that we cannot relate ourselves to God? On the contrary, I believe that we can relate ourselves in a personal way to God, right at the moment that we leave out our misplaced judgments, and we accept the will of God in our life.
   
   
2. Does this mean that we do not have to take any action against the public administration that did not take care of the stability of the cliff? On the contrary, we can definitely make a judgment on their actions, and act accordingly to the law of the land against the responsible.
   
   
3. Does this mean that it is not our duty to change the world for better? On the contrary, this is our imperative duty, a duty that needs to be carried out though without a pre-judgmental attitude. I believe this has profound consequences on the foundations of the sociological, economical, and historical sciences.

Physiological tremors

[...] the theory of secularly perturbed systems plays a most important role in gravitational astronomy. It is quite possible that some of the physiological tremors may be treated somewhat roughly as secularly perturbed linear systems.

• I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Norbert Wiener, instead of writing this passage in the landmark book "Cybernetics" (1948), would have 60 years later thus motivated the request for a relatively small grant ... gibberish?

If one must choose between rigor and meaning, I shall unhesitatingly choose the latter. René Thom

Rene Thom and La carte du sens

"Ce qui limite le vrai, ce n'est pas le faux, c'est l'insignifiant",
René Thom, Prédire n'est pas expliquer, Flammarion, Paris, 1993.

''Truth is not limited by falsity, but by insignificance'', affirms Thom. How we, as scientists, are to interpret this aphorism in our scientific investigations?

In this "chart of sense", Thom proposes a classification of sciences and other human activities based on the opposition between truth and falsehood, and significance and insignificance. It is interesting to observe how one of Thom's main goals was to develop a mathematical theory of the analogy, which he places high on the ordinate of the significance, but on the side of false.

That an analogy is false, I hope is clear to everybody; yet its level of significance can be very high. We have to realize that, as scientists, we do not cease to use, mainly unconsciously, the analogy as a valuable tool to progress in our investigations. We need to lift up our spirits from the netherlands of the ambiguity, and climb the mountains up to the peak of the absurd, to be able to go down again through the river of science, back to the sea of the insignificance.

I realize, however, that this is a romantic view of science, as hard to understand today as it was when Thom was still alive: Techne' and her adepts do not take prisoners!