On Othello 5: the Character and Death of Othello.

Othello clearly has issues.

It's not just critical thinking skills Othello lacks; some sausages are missing from Othello's barbeque. And he dies strangely content with the memory of a cruel act of justice he once dealt to a Turk, a non-Christian like he once was. Does Othello recognize his karma coming back as a tragedy from that act of rough "justice"? I think so.

Where Desdemona's death is the shock of the play, Othello's is a relief. I burst into tears reading Desdemona's last lines; how could I have read this play four or five times as a teenager and NOT wept, I wonder? Nothing could underline the difference in kind and degree between the teenager and the adult than the fact that only the adult who is experienced in the extremities of suffering can be adequate to comprehend the astonishing moral victory of Desdemona's last words. Desdemona reveals herself a warrior; by forgiving, she defeats Othello.

Coming back to Othello: Othello seems to recognise that his brutal nature is the true man at the end, but does that mean that the noble and sophisticated Othello of act 1 to 3 is fake? This is clearly false, but not an easy charge to avoid.

Othello of act 1 to 3 IS the real deal, but so is the completely different Othello of act 5. The intervening tormented Othello (act 4) is merely the alembic of Iago's alchemical psychiatry, not a man but a patient, a case study. What are we to make of these two different Othello's? And what are we to make of the transformations of youth and adulthood, whereby the same individual can become as different in himself as night from day?

The key lies in Iago's silence.

Is Iago the first psychiatrist? Undoubtedly.

I can't feel anything other than genuine satisfaction in Iago's total silence. Iago is complete, having returned to that avenging Element from which he arose; we feel the human aspect of the man was merely for show, and that in his silence the real man at last is revealed. We feel relieved, not of his speech, but to know him as he really is; Iago is not a human agent, and by his silence shows this is so.

Iago's silence illuminates the character of Othello as a product of primordial darkness and ignorance. Recognising the aboriginal depth of Othello in ourselves, we are humbled. How can we be sure we are just and wise? We can't, unless we become intimate with that darkness which we foolishly disown as evil in ourselves. Othello signifies that intimacy with our blackness, and the terrible cost of becoming estranged from our soul.

Monkey Business Time Management

Inspired by the efforts of GTD (Getting Things Done) time management cultists to mucho laughter, I wrote a pisstake time management system and surprised myself by learning something new.

Well, a LOT new.

I call it Monkey Business. I discovered it in three parts:

Just playing around for fun, I wrote an expose and critique of time management's implicit hidden Protestantism.

Then I got curious what time management would look like without the crap religiocultural baggage.

So I created a time management process with several new features and a crapload of benefits. My system needed:

- Explicitly stated values.
- Verifiable, testable propositions.
- Complete scaleability from a intellectually disabled child to a strong artificial intelligence.
- Viability in the context of the known facts about human nature.

Once I created it, which basically involved applying the Socratic method to the past time management systems, I had before my eyes the first time management system based firmly in the known fact of human nature, and it revealed to me a rather startling discovery:

I had accidentally discovered a revolutionary new time management paradigm firmly based on the explicit and demonstable values of evolutionary and developmental psychology.

The Monkey Business Time Management Paradigm (chuckles to self) proposes the following:

1. Time management without long inactive periods of reflection is just monkeying around.

2. Just try to unleash monkey business - which is to say, wild playful joyous creative silly hyperproductive innovative work - try to unleash monkey business WITHOUT long inactive periods of reflection and you will bust like a helium balloon in a needle factory. You will go mad, crack up, burn out, fall away. You will suffer long teeth and pointy ears and all manner of high strangeness.

I am quite serious. Monkey Business appears to be the genuine voodoo. After a bit more reflection and playing around I will put it up here and see how it goes.