My residence is now a battery charging lab, and it shows. It has become a preoccupation of sorts. Maintaining the RV batteries, the ebike battery the phone the computer the mini vacuum the cordless drill the iPad the Kindle. I'm sure that I'm missing some.
I know the feeling of waking from a state of semi-sleep and not being able to recover that brilliant thought. Now it happens while I'm awake, as I get up to take a pee and something strikes me hard, and then it's gone and unrecoverable.
Remember when Freud thought that interpreting dreams was important? It almost seems quaint now. Remember when physicists thought they were on the verge of a Grand Universal Theorem?
I've been reading all these books which offer correctives on tidy narratives which impose a pretty story on the stuff of our history. We see what we want to see. What we should be seeing is messy and ugly sometimes, but then also sometimes there appears something like hope that the long curve of history really will bend toward the good and the light.
I suffered a realization in my youth, when my batteries were fully charged. It's slipping now, but I hold onto the core of it as a kind of guiding light to my thinking. It's like I already know The Truth and I'm just looking for the proper words to borrow so that I don't die alone with it. After my battery won't take any more charge.
Sometimes I think I write here to preserve my realization, but I don't really have any provision for what happens to this space when I'm gone. And anyhow nobody reads this and nobody ever will because why would they.
When people disturb a paradigm and especially when they claim to have worked a "paradigm shift," the normal reaction among those working within the existing paradigm and making a living from it is anger. How dare you.
So I rather like my invisibility. And anyhow I mostly write for the purpose of ordering my thoughts and keeping my mind intact. It's discouraging to find that what ticks up my meager stats is just the fact that I've passed more kooky and likely bot-written comments to certain posts. Like there's a kind of self-referential and utterly meaningless ghost readership made up of clicks that don't represent actual readers, or if they do then those actual readers don't actually read much.
Hmmm, maybe if I were to "monetize" this blog my readership would go up. Probably, but I don't really want to think that hard and I certainly don't want to join an economy that I find, frankly, detestable. Dangerous.
Well anyhow, I have it by my reading of 'we know these truths to be self-evident' that making the claim that one plus one will always equal two anywhere in any universe is not much of a claim. Numbers are abstractions and thus purely conceptual. Indeed 'emergence' in the technical sense reduces to conceptual primitives, and so a snowflake will be a snowflake in any universe as well, provided that there is water and that there is dust.
Things may represent numbers, but then as we know, the basic laws of math no longer apply, or else Zeno's paradox and its relations would prevail in reality and not only in the mind.
You know paradox, say in physics, is identical to a Zen koan? If you meditate on it long enough you might achieve some sort of enlightenment.
I think we tend to think that abstracted reality is fantasy. That quantum physics is stranger than actual reality, but in reality, quantum physics puts the lie to abstracted, say, mathematical constructions by the very evident fact that it's real. The abstractions on which we'd based our certainty now have a hard time keeping up with reality.
There's hope in that!
And now here's a massive rationalization for you: There's a reason I don't dive too deeply into specialist literature; the really good stuff. There's a reason that academics aren't generally activisists. There's a reason that it's so damned hard to be an academic. A political reason.
Academia is an efficient means to sidetrack otherwise dangerous alpha-males. The Donalds are the only alphas who can survive in the wild.
I made the mistake of reading the 'want to read' list of some dude who friended me on Goodreads. I thought he'd read them all, and boy was I abashed. My want-to-read list would be way longer, if I bothered to record it the way I do want-to-see movies so I don't have to work when I feel like kicking back. I'll take my reading list random, thank you very much.
But nah, I'm reading for some sense of direction, as in where is everybody going in their deeper studies and reading and writing. And I'm not so sure that I'm always deficient in my sense of a way; a direction. But on the other hand, there's always the lurking suspicion that I'm just plain nuts. That my compulsion that I have something kind of corrective to offer is some sort of hangover from some kind of youthful promise.
Like when I was the one offered braces for my teeth, I felt guilty, as though I was being rewarded for my oft complimented smile by being given a better one. But no, they said, it was my bite and the probability that I would lose my smile. My smile which I now compulsively keep up, honestly feeling almost physically the investment I've made in it over the years. The legacy weighs heavy.
Still, I rather doubt that keeping teeth bright white and the mouth without bacteria is really any better for my mouth than it is for my guts. But I still prefer to go with the experts rather than to think that hard, or especially rather than to doubt. And yet . . .
. . . and yet I spend stupid time trying to understand how to optimize the lifespan of all those batteries in which I've invested so much. As though there were ever any choice about it. I wonder what the next big thing will be after batteries?
Does anybody even realize that James Joyce wrote the very last novel? No matter how brilliant that dumb fucking white guy DFW was or how wordsmithy his buddy Franzen is, they're still writing out the lives and motives of individual characters, when our future will be written, if it's written at all, by and about post-individualistic post-capitalist socially enlightened people.
What, you too thought it was the end of history? Wake up. The novel really can't be extricated from the homo-economicus rational actor for recognition hocus-pocus of Vienna types like, what's his name? Van der Vries?? No, Ludwig Von Mises. Hayek. Rothbard. Freedman. I mean if you accept the premise that human beings have to be considered as individual units which are diminished by any discounting of that fact, then you may well be mystified and drawn in, just as we all are by expert explanations around the paradoxes of physics. When the abstract is brought down to earth with a clunk.
The future will not look like the world we now live in at all, and novels will not get us there. Energy storage that's not grown in sunlight only feeds the beast of individualistic want, which can never be met in the first place.
I need a recharge! Oh wait. Death be my recharge! I leave behind the flamingo's smile. Divine Pink Flamingo astride Muddy Waters. Anon.
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