Sunday, July 18, 2010

Fluid Dynamics

Extreme heat, then cold, then coffee, then a/c, having something to do with salt, I think my body can't calibrate properly. On a hybrid car, a Prius, say, not to name any corporate names, there is a pump to send coolant over the inverter, which is an electronic contraption to convert Alternating to Direct Current, and there is no fully lossless way. So there is waste heat, I'm thinking each time you put on the brakes, which means regenerate, and each time you draw from the battery.

And when the pump fails - I happen to know this - the entire car basically shuts down with error codes as if a fundamental connection were loosed. But there is also the possibility of a vapor lock, as happened on my P-P-Passat, when they were p-p-pretty sure that it was the heater core clogged, but it was bubbles and my logic was unassailable.  Because loosing the bubbles made heat, and so the clog theory didn't hold water, but, well, maybe there is something about changed balance, as when the inverter cooling pump decides to fail in extreme heat. Was it only losing power over time?

My body fluids - the blood in this case - were obstructed by a clot, a clog, in the lungs near the heart pump which might have shut down in response but didn't. But the inner view was a lot like the kind of crazy which I am apparently susceptible to when the correspondences in the world play games up against the ones I might think about and talk about and eventually maybe even write about. I'm like the guy who counts the cracks in the sidewalk, looking for signs then? I hope not.

My words are going. I spend time - not quite so bad as my Dad - snapping my fingers or making spin ahead motions with my hands trying to come up with words or with connections among memories, and a lot of the time they never do come, and so I am left with the connections which do come, of themselves as it were, in the events impinging on me. Radiator, heater, coolant, pump, bubbles continuum kind of stuff.

Which, at the end of the day is why I am so curious to explore the blogging genre, if it can be called a genre yet. Because of its immediacy, it has to be about impingements just beyond one's control. As in, you cannot really make them happen. You can't be the editor in charge of what is going on around you. At best you can choose to pay attention, but then eventually you yourself might get weirded out by the consiliencies among the stuff you notice which also seems beyond your power just to pick and choose. The world seems to focus. Not only your attention.

Let's say you have a plan. An idea in someone's canonical sense of how this works. And you set out intentionally to marshal your words, using skill and planning and malice aforethought, you make some sense for some reader somewhere. But if the sense is coming at you, like numbers from your landscape, then you have to wonder about the integrity of the one doing the noticing. That would be a little bit like planning to win the lottery.

But, well, what else is an individual, if not a noticer, a nexus, among happenstance? To be otherwise is to build, merely, on the stuff with which you've been didacted. That's what mastery of genre means, right? To increment along the way toward something authentically yours. But, well, what if you relinquish that claim right at the outset and make yourself Bartleby content only to reiterate what impinges, but finally without master, even without a self as master and without preference, finally, even to eat?

Surely it is a mind which notices the metaphoric crossings, yes? These are not in the things themselves. Surely. And if I notice things which do but seem to conspire because I notice them, I still may not have caused them. There are plenty of things I haven't noticed. Without the words, what would there be? Is there progress then beyond words, as there was Inception before them? Words must destroy as much as they create.

Words individuate, and divide which from t'other. Ultimately, this quest for individual authenticity ends with castellated aloneness, right? With some perfect physical comfort but without consilience because all has been brought within control. Order will all then be imposed. I shall not want.

Well and so my blog is clogged. Rats!

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Out Flooded

Oryx and CrakeOryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


By misrerable happenstance, I have found myself reading end-of-life-as-we-know-it books. Watching movies. I hate these things. Why must everyone show us ourselves in the funhouse mirror as if we don't already know these things. As if the oil does not still spew beneath the surfaces we do know. We can read. We can watch movies intelligently. Why does no-one offer something better. Something more like a way out?

I have read The Road now. I watched The Book of Eli. I hear of God and Word all around me as we all, collectively, hallucinate our demises. Gak. I don't need hapless romance. Christ!

Authors are smug, as though they see these things ahead of our time. I stole this book, I borrowed it with a click from my local library which offers it in e-form, and I am amazed that there is no line at whose end to wait as there is for The Year of the Flood which I might just have to purchase. It's not like dear Margaret Atwood can live enough longer to appreciate her royalties. I shouldn't feel so bad. Actually, I don't. She makes me mad now. Is a cautionary tale all that is on offer from our best minds?

I so want to offer hope, to see hope on offer, about how it is that humans are Earth's mouthpiece and not in voices, not in written words, in fulfillment of what was already always implicit. Still, those who cannot read will never know. Those who worship their own richness, their bodies, their foodist intake of ever more delightful essences. They can never see it coming anyhow. A writer wastes her breath.

But I know how to read. I can appreciate Atwood's prose which rehearses her project, to project consciousness of what it might mean to be human if only we could break free of venality, is that the word, or is it, also, extinct? As humans are as are all things natural, as Atwood has internalized, yes she has, masculine mankind and it does not leave her proud. Patriarch be gone!

These things will end, as has our entrancement by things perceptual which are all that we can control. It is our minds which conspire, through words, to make a thing conscious which has always been and ever. Relations in the mind alone and humans alone can run this thing - the mind - above the grey matter of their silly brains. Cocksure, I wish she would pay attention to what is going on among Mama Grizzlies! We men are slumbering still, living large and in charge of what is already that far beyond us.

In the beginning I really didn't think she was all that brilliant. As a writer. Now I know that she is, and I will read, with relish, the Year of the Flood. I will watch that story enacted all around me, understanding that not only human life, but all life can be snuffed out, to start again, by Mother Earth awakening and dancing careless of her methane farts alighted.

I understand, I undertake to understand that it is time we leaned to use our minds which would mean to loosen and not to assert control. To re-enter flood, the flow, the thing which makes its own road, path, Way. Lunatic undertow. Subversion. There is a way forward. Damn!

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