After listened to “If I told him”, the Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Picasso, again and again I found myself frustrated because I could not understand what she is trying to do. Then I rewrite slowly in my home this continuous repetition of nonsense and I realized that I’m still not getting her point. But then one thing passed through my mind: “If I write it”, or at least trying to make the same process to do a similar thing so then even if I could not understand her point, I could feel it. Therefore, I tried to do a similar thing in order to feel how it feels how it feels.

If it’s beating so I’m living, if I’m living so it’s beating

If I’m living and it’s beating so it beats for living

and if it beats for living, I’m living for its beating

Because beating and beating makes me living

and if I’m living so it’s beating

One step, two steps, and a third one and it is still beating

Continuously continuous its continuity

and will continue for my living,

if it won’t continue as is continuing now

will not beating and beating so I won’t go on living.

Strong

Fragile

Repeatedly

Unnoticed

Noisy but in silent

Is it continuously beating? So, am I living?

Because if it’s not beating I can’t live and

If I’m not living, I won’t continuously live to make it beating

I’m afraid,

Made me stronger, but I can’t stand it anymore

Because living just for beating is not a real life

but if it’s not real how could I beat just for living?

Nonsense, illogical, absurd, causeless

But it’s important to know the rational motive of its cause

Now I’m leaving while am living while am beating

while am beating while am beating

Is not a tic tac, but has the same pattern

in its continuously continuity

Pressure

blood

arteries and veins

oxygen

and is still beating

I don’t know how to feel, how to understand

or how to understand how it feels

but I know that I’m living, so I know my heart is beating

and if it’s beating so I’m living.

Sigmund Freud was some of the first psychologist who wrote about the expression of pleasure related to the unconscious mind. In “Beyond the Principle of Pleasure”, he presents us a pretty relevant theory or a “principal” of pleasure that in simple terms says all people avoid pain in order to get pleasure. The first thing that came to my mind after realize this concept from the reading was “wrestling”. Wrestling is an entertainment sport (it means that is a spectacle that combines athletics moves and theatrical performance) which consists in matches with predetermined outcomes in order to provide entertainment value, and all combative maneuverers are worked in order to lessen the chance of actual injury.

I have practicing wrestling since I was fifteen and I could see all the endeavour and pain each wrestler suffer in the ring in order to complete a sequence of movements, but after an exhausted and painful day of hard work all wrestlers are full of pleasure and happiness. This paradox of pain and pleasure just made me questioned this principal of pleasure that Freud referred in his book. Is it true that we avoid pain to get pleasure? Or pleasure is something more complex than the hypothesis of Sigmund Freud?

When you ask a wrestler how he can endure all that pain, it is certainly sure that he would response: because it makes me happy achieve a great match. This unconscious satisfaction produces in some way pleasure to the mind as much as to the body. In other words, this pain who each one pass through make them feels better and better. At this point, pain is not a factor that has to be avoided but a factor that we have to pass through to get pleasure.  This is also related with Plato says about happiness, we cannot know happiness if we never felt unhappiness.

For me, is a fact that happiness is correlated with pleasure and until we can defined what is happiness I think we cannot define pleasure as well. Pleasure is more than just a stage of equilibrium or stability as Freud shows it, is more than just an explosion of endorphins in our brain in an exciting moment. Pleasure is a complex set of things that can make us feel good. And for those people who expend all his life in a ring trying to perform a great spectacle, pleasure is not more than the satisfaction to finish a match with all the public clap them and accept all the pain brought with that.

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The real concept of the human nature has been discussed since the people realize that there is more than a luminous or a darker stage. This perception has been taken in the beginning of the seventh book by Socrates and he shows us a concrete example about two attributions of the human condition: education and ignorance.  In a simple way to analyze the allegory of the cave we can assume directly that the first stage, when the person is living in the dark cave only knowing the shadows of people and objects in the exterior reflected by a big fire above and back of them, is related with the ignorance of our human condition as in the first stages of our live and the second moment, when the person went to the light suffocated by this great shyness and appreciate the truly reality of things, is pretty related to the education and wisdom in human condition. But then, Socrates describes a third moment that can destroy the first theory of what wisdom and ignorance really are. This person now illuminated for the sun, which is the representation of the fount of knowledge, came back to the dark cave and back to his old life seeing shadows. The question here is, now this person who has been in a stage of wisdom came to a world when all the knowledge about the reality is completely different than he knows, even is wrong, is he still wise or ignorant?

With all this allegory Socrates wants to explain that the perception of what wisdom or ignorance is affected by the context and the process of the changes of stages, from darker to a more luminous one. Also he implicitly says that education is not the art to bring knowledge to people in fact but to teach the better way to orientate the knowledge of the human nature in order to accomplish wisdom itself. Therefore, he shows that education is to orientate but not to bring something that the soul already has, and with this ignorance is not the absent of wisdom but is the absent of education forcedly. So education and ignorance cannot be describes in the true condition of human nature, but they can be describes as stages when the wisdom is orientated to a place to other depending the world where we live.

Jesus Minano