A bit of diary

I am not trying to show off. I just want to tell about how I am exploring what should be called ‘science’, reading ‘difficult books’.

First let me tell which book it is: ‘I am a Strange Loop’ by Douglas Hofstadter (mentioned in an earlier blog). In order to really appeal to a reader, great capacities are needed: to write in an interesting, catchy and very humane way, like Hofstadter does so well.

“Look! Anton is reading a BOOK!” Yes, I am reading a book again. Anyway, I am trying to explain how and why scientific matters have started to attract me so much in the last few years. I am very bad at numbers. At high school I was very bad at math, physics and chemistry. Any numbers seem to have an instant ability to make me feel lazy. Just now, I realized why: because basically I AM lazy; quite a discovery! (A great discovery indeed! I should remember to explore the workings of these matters!)

I was reading the part in ‘I am a Strange Loop’ about the connection between the primes and the squares, as an example of scientists’ search for the reasons behind regularities, just before introducing the mathematician Gödel’s work. It feels like such matters could ‘absorb’ me, which is very intriguing but also a bit dangerous. Psychologically, this is a matter to be careful with. But nevertheless, I want, and I will go deeper into the mysteries of numbers and their connections to nature and everything! So that I can ‘see’ how crystals grow, and connect what we call ‘small’ and ‘big’. This fits well with my ambitions to once leave all my/our habitual but very limited misconceptions of space and time behind and truly expand my vision.

For example, aren’t our concepts of space and dimensionality based on living in an animal body and our shared past of being hunter-gatherers and land tillers? (Not to be patronizing about the massive skills that such people have compared to us city people.) We still try to measure the vastness of space with the lengths of our arms and feet and we get bored thinking of anything that is too small for our eyes to see.

As I will try to explain later, I don’t believe so much in 'time'. As evidenced; the other day, I really was forgetting time, and not only that….



I have to leave these things for later. I will come back to them when I am up to it. If I would do them now, some things would get damaged in my head and in my life. And I have to do other things, much other things. I have to go on trying to make music for children.

Spontaneity and curiosity are the key ingredients of improvisation. Spontaneity much is about ‘to do what comes first’, mostly also in the most easy ways. Curiosity is something very natural and good to have. Children still have lots of it.


(a fragment of one of my paintings)

Today i finished a music piece named "summer". It is on www.reverbnation.com/antonlustig and www.myspace.com/anktonplankton.
I'm very happy with this piece. I think it is refreshing. It makes me think of cooling breezes during hot summer days.
These days, it's really very hot here in Beijing. Too hot for coffee, and everything has to be done at a slower pace. But then, the summer rewards us with different feelings and sensations.