The Blind Owl

It's a Friday again, and I'm glad for a variety of reasons. The primary of which is the coming of a hard-earned rest over the weekend.

Anyway, mundane issues of light joy aside, there are other more interesting things to talk about first. I have recently completed the reading of the famous Feynman lecture series. They are a very interesting bunch of text---apart from helping me refresh my physics knowledge (`A'-Levels and then some), it also provided more interesting insights to some of the mathematical concepts that I had seen but hadn't got a good intuition for. Like the interpretation of the divergence, the curl, the notion of flux and circulation, as well as the [basic] quantum mechanical calculus in the form of amplitudes and bra-ket notations. Feynman writes in a relatively easy to understand manner, and I am still kicking myself for not having read his works any earlier than today. It also gives me an interesting perspective towards the modern trends in optimisation of objective functions (think argmax or argmin) often seen in machine learning algorithms: that quantum mechanics with the associated amplitude functions are an equivalence with the goal of obtaining some optimised set of parameters for a particular learning system.

Theoretical physics aside, I have also recently completed Sadeq Hedayat's ``The Blind Owl'' as translated by Iraj Bashiri. On the surface, the story is macabre, even to the point of pandering to what one would normally call a ``psychological thriller''. Scratching that surface, one reveals the transcendental nature in which the story (in two parts) takes on, appealling heavily to the death customs of Tibetans. Scratching that surface reveals a frustrated exhortation against the people in the repressed society of his time to stand up for their individual freedoms and to seek them out on their own, free of distraction, as a means of ultimately liberating their entire society through sheer numbers. The story and the deep analyses by Bashiri really made me stop to think about things that I had once thought of for a period of time, that is, the notion of mortality and the concept of attachment/desire. Thinking about it in perspective, I realised that it was probably easier to not fear mortality when one was truly alone---being along means roughly that one was only as attached to the material world as one is attached to one's corporeal body. But when one starts to have relationships with various people, be it friends or family, then the notion of attachment comes into play and it becomes increasingly hard to face mortality as the strength of one's relationships grow.

In my case, I suspect there will come a day where my innate stoicism and pragmatism will give way to something less intense as my relationships with a select group of people get stronger over time.

But karmic relief hasn't really been my goal in life. Of course, this is under the assumption that this life is all that I am getting. It's hard to believe in something that cannot be falsified and thus be subjected to the rigours of the scientific method. But this is merely my own observations---since I have no evidence to the contrary, I cannot make a meaningful answer.

For is it not the case that there are questions whose very nature make them unanswerable?