Reality Hits

A damaging wind storm is heading my way. I'm camping at its epicenter, waiting for my new apartment to open up. That means that I will move from the boonies back into the urban eye of COVID-19. Tomorrow is showtime. 

Showtime, the TV network, will air a revealing documentary on the Ronald Reagan presidency. We have yet to come to terms with Reagan's surreality. Or JFK's, for that matter. I hope that we soon will.

By now, Television has pivoted to Internet images. I am of the first generation to grow up with TV, although we were restricted from watching it at my home. I did watch enough on our little Black and White TV to understand that it presented a kind of idealized world. Perhaps I was provided some inoculation.

I've been shouting into the wind about Reagan for most of my life. But people liked the way they felt with him as our TV president. If they were white and suburban and "middle class," which, of course, we all were. It's hard to imagine that was not Reagan's core.

He'd been a union man until he became General Electric's shill. Somehow he was groomed to be the image of a new Republican ideology which has only hardened over time. Front man for wealth making, no matter the ravages along the way. Shill of the rich and powerful. Ascribed identity for our country, our home. 

It was unions that ushered in reality TV. When the writers struck, the producers simply said among themselves, 'we don't need no stinkin' writers!' The people themselves will write their own scripts when put in front of a camera. If we select them carefully, and then edit the result carefully, the masses will buy it. We did. 

Sure, I have a TV in my tiny house. I feel as though I need it for reality check along my travels. Trailers don't lend themselves to city living, so I've mostly toured Trumplandia, with respites, occasionally, in National Parks; playgrounds for cosmopolitans with money and education, to some extent.

Mostly I use the TV to stream movies, which make for nice diversion when the weather's not nice and my eyes won't stay still for reading or writing (mostly translation work, which is another story altogether).

Anhow, that lifestyle is coming to an end, as it must. I want to re-establish a home, as my kids establish theirs. Truth be told, as I told you here before, I'm camping now to be out of mandatory quarantine for my son-in-law whose house I'd been living in while repairing all its many deficits. 

My body remains sore from that, and so I imagine I won't be up for the mobile life for all that much longer. I like being around family, even though I will likely no longer be able to visit Mom in the memory care unit. Because of the COVID reality surge.

But anyhow, I've had - and continue to have - plenty of occasion for lively discussion with people who, according to my belief, inhabit fantasy lands with eyes wide shut toward what's actually going on all around them. We all create our internal narrative with ourselves as the protagonist, pulling in all the descriptions from abroad which feel right.

I have yet to meet anyone who enjoys having their version of reality challenged. I keep trying to broaden my own. I must be among a minority who enjoys that. No brag, just fact. Ha!

The Internet was supposed (by all right thinking people at its inception, though some of us saw dot com for what it was. We'd started when the Internet was mostly academic. Now it's for real!) to remedy the mass-mediated sleep walk into lala land. By now we are split - the Internet has literally split us - among realities, none of which are entirely coherent. Since there's no way to digest all that's available, we have to pick and choose.

Or, rather, we have to let the keepers of our preferences choose for us. It can be very hard to see how that's any improvement on what preceded reality TV. The lala land of Ronald Reagan, which a majority of us once did internalize. We felt like one nation, very much under God. Now we don't.

The course of my own personal history feels like one long political slide into the swamp. Can you even imagine that Dubya seems a statesman in retrospect? I can't say that I've been all that aware, but I suppose that I did interact with people who were. I'm astonished at my own ignorance back in the day, so I can't take credit for being in better touch with actual reality than many of the people I interact with seem to be. I'm not on solid ground, still. 

But here to my left I talk with people who declare supporters of Trump racists before even talking with them. I understand the sentiment, but it's not what I've experienced. Sure many are, and it's not hard to discern that in the way some talk about personal grievances. But again, to my political left, are plenty of racist union folks.

As many folks have remarked, the political center has been hollowed out, so I can't exactly claim to be there. If there were a center, it would be more real than either extreme, I'm pretty sure.

In my expressed politics, I lean hard left. But reality tempers my belief that those goals can be soon nor certainly easily achieved. Tempered by reality, I want to believe in achievable goals, and not just those achievable by "natural disaster." That seems to be the only realistic scenario just now, writing from the eye of every storm. 

That means that I have to believe that there is a narrative which can bring us together. As the name for my blog indicates, I am a believer in the foundational power of narrative. It's how we define ourselves, pulling in whatever version of reality suits us. It's what politics is made of, and it's surely how religion compels belief.

My own faith is that there is - imminently - a scientific narrative which can and will embrace and overcome the corrupted Jesus narrative which seems to prevail now on the right. That new narrative will describe the limits to materialistic science. It will embrace emotion as part of reality, and not just as part of human subjectivity. It will end the illusion that complete understanding is ever possible. 

In very simple terms, that's because our human understanding will always include the creative fictions which we will always require to keep on keeping on. Understanding our own creation is not the same as understanding what gets called God's creation, and never will be. I believe that to be foundational, even though I would quibble with most God language.

I've tried here over the years to explain the particulars of my belief. I doubt that I've done a very good job, but it's about all I've got. My mind grows frail, and I doubt that I can do this any better. I'm not signing off. I'm just calling out a moment which feels very very fraught. 

I am begging people to pause and to consider that they might not be entirely right in their beliefs; about reality and about each other. 

Love is a pause of sorts. A suspension of disbelief. I hope and I pray that we can pull it off.

Well, I'm camping now in my new apartment. The heat is fine and the windows sound as the tree outside my third floor view dances in the wind. As though it had its own motivation. My landlord tells me that a previous tenant climbed the tree these three stories to climb in through the terrace. He'd forgotten his key.

I suppose I will slowly furnish to fill in the expanse of the polished oak floor. The camper's safely put to sleep. I have hope for the future today!

Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

Bird Flew Redux (all over again)

I know that you know that this H1N1 is the real deal. It's a highly contagious virus, which can so easily pass from one infected person to anyone he comes into contact with. Sure, maybe Don Rumsfeld and some others stand to profit by the scare, and by distributing ever more vaccine, but there have always been war profiteers, and we always seem to need them too.

And somewhere in the background, like me, you're wondering when the Big One is going to hit us, now that we're all so crowded on the planet, and now that viruses can jump from livestock to people, and we raise our livestock in very tightened little pens. So we have to dope them up with drugs, which creates a kind of breeding ground for the drug resistant sort of bugs. Too much anti-bacterial stuff, and you just destroy the competition for the viruses, pretty much like the Japanese do by sterilizing everything too darned much.

My own sister, who's medically trained, but still somehow thinks she's not as smart as me, has been trying to understand what I've been working on, and figured out that emotional reality also travels kind of virally, to where people who care about one another, especially if and when they care enough to keep each other honest, can spread around just like those cellular automata which model birds in flight so well.

They look as if they flow, or as if they were all of one mind, when really all they do is stay in touch with the one right next to them, and maybe someone new takes point when that poor bird poops out or loses his sense of direction.

It's not a bad way to understand how emotions can work among us. But I still seem to want more.

Just like right now, I'm waiting for some viral marketing to kick in to this cool new website we've created at pikk.com. We're hoping that some people will like it well enough to tell their friends, who will tell their friends, and so on down the line.

But there are so many such sites out there, and so many of them are so well funded, that it feels pretty unlikely that anyone will find ours any more interesting than the others.

Unless, of course, lots of people were to start using it, in which case it would get really interesting really fast.

But you do have to be careful what you wish for. I mean it's nice living alone out in the middle of the country where the only thing you have to worry about is a bear or a hunter every once in a while.

And you who have read me right along understand that I don't much appreciate the crazies who have to make of Jesus something any more real than that he's managed over these couple of millennia to stay in hearts and minds. Which ought to be enough by itself, without all the ridiculous claims of life everlasting or getting sucked up into heaven.

But it seems to me Gary Snyder once remarked that whatever it takes to engender faith is fair enough, so long as faith results. Like secret pores to make statues cry, is the one I think he used. Or makeup for a Saturday Night Date, if that's the one you really want to like you. Just so long as you don't confuse the props with the real deal, which all those impassioned words were trying to convince you of. No really, it's true, I was there. It happened.

We do that all the time with our stories, because without a little embellishment, how are we going to get people actually to believe us.

I do surely and sorely object to the proselytizers who pretend to speak for God, borrowing words of uncertain authorship purveyed by one of the biggest institutions around. And as you know, I think really big is a really big temptation to evil.

Emotions, anyhow, can ride the strangest vectors. They don't really need much more than pen and paper, although they do just fine over the wire, and through the ether. Sometimes all it takes is knowing that your sweetheart is at the other end of the earth looking at the very same moon, perhaps even at the very same time.

I'll bet at least one or two of you have known the magic of discovery that there really was or is or has been a connection which no amount of testing can or could or will ever tease out from the traceable connections. No wires, no line of sight, and still there is some connection.

Maybe you attribute that sort of thing to Jesus. Fair enough. But I think it's time to grow up now, and accept that we are co-creators. I think that gets attributed to Gary Snyder too, come to think of it.

The connections we make can be full of love or hate, spite or profiteering. We can be looking for love or we can be looking for sex, or we can be so jaded that we don't even believe in a difference. It's awfully hard to trust another human being. And even the best among us betray the ones we love the very most each and every day.

But what if, I mean really, what if there were some reason to believe that emotional connections across no measurable divide are actually as real as the clouds and rain (I love that, it's my secret little joke for sex, borrowed from the Chinese who use it as a euphemism).

I'm not talking about a mechanism, since physic's got that stuff all wrapped up. The kinds of connections I'm talking about break the physical laws of simultaneity, since for you and your sweetheart to be feeling something at the very same time, the connection would have to travel faster than the speed of light which is just plain physically impossible.

Oh sure, it would be hard to tell, since light can get from here to California lickety split. Quick enough so that even when your voice bounces off some satellite to get there you can't sense any delay.

But what about when you're nowhere near anything that can carry your private signal? Well maybe, and I'd say this is easily enough proven, the two of you have started to inhabit something of the same emotional space, and just like birds flying toward the same sun, if that sun were to move you'd all move at the very same time to stay with it.

Which is about, come to think of it, what they intend to do over at the CERN collider. Not moving the sun, there aren't levers long enough for that Archimedes, but come close enough to creating mass out of nothingness that it will be very much as if the sun had moved.

I know it's a really hard thing to buy, but lots of people buy miracles from baby Jesus which are a lot harder to buy, if you catch my drift. I'm not trying to be cute here, they really really do.




Miracles like that never happen to me, or maybe they do each and every day, and I'm just too obtuse to credit them. Yeah, I'll buy that. It sounds suspiciously what the very best of the Jesus people say, which I'll have to grant you (what's free, what costs? Sometimes it's hard to tell).

But I no longer believe in random. It's an old Taoist trick I learned long ago. That random's just another word for beyond the reach of mind. And to label it meaningless makes the very same mistake as labelling God, well, God.

The missing link in evolutionary theory, or so it seems to me, is the same one missing from the toolbox of the experimental physicist. If you call these random connections emotional connections instead of meaningless spins of some dice, a whole lot of stuff becomes rather instantly clear.

I'm not saying you can win the lottery by this kind of understanding. That would clearly be just plain nuts. But I am saying that the collective set of accidents which have brought us to this place across the eons of evolutionary time, can be labelled connections of love without losing one single solitary iota of physical or other meaning.

It's just a label. It doesn't change how far they are and will remain from our conscious understanding mind. These accidents of fate.

Just down the road from me, some poor and surely sweet kids were driving a little bit too fast without their seatbelts. A bear had spooked some horses penned around the corner. The horses ran up the road and right across the path of the speeding car, and three people were killed.

There's no meaning to that. It's just plain sad, tragic, and awful. And I have to say I'm glad I wasn't around when it happened, because I don't know what I would or could have done, except to call 911. I might have been too scared even to approach the scene. I hope not, but I am glad enough not to know. We do know there are quite a few heroes in our midst, though, from some other things that have gone wrong recently.

There's no meaning either to falling in love, especially if you keep doing it over and over and over.

But there is meaning to what we conspire to do together, and it's up to us now to turn all those random connections leading up to this very moment into connections of love or hate.

I have to say, at this particular moment, the way we've overpopulated our home sweet Earth by keeping back the creepy crawlies and the bears and the snakes, it's not looking too good for the love connection. And I also have to say that all the people waiting around for Jesus to arrive aren't making things any better. Especially when they watch too much Fox TV.

We've borrowed the extravagant gift of oil. We've managed to keep back the germs which would plague us if they could. Mostly, we've done that with sanitation and more robust diets, even though we're still awfully happy for the work of charitable scientists like Jonas Salk in years gone by.

Now we've made a business of getting people to believe there need be no more tragedy. That technology will save us from ourselves. And we lure away our brightest minds to the business of making money, as if that alone could cure the Earth of the illness of humankind.

Good living lowers birthrates. It cures disease. It allows the rich people to lower their walls, and cameras to come down from streetlamps. But we just can't seem to figure out how to get there from here.

Well, folks, it's not so hard as you might think. Just give a damn, and do it out loud. The mass of us are decent, have good consciences, and would never do anything horrible in the name of any god unless and until we were backed right up to some wall.

And oh yeah, another thing. Stop thinking science can tell you when and how life begins. You can't stop the twinkle in my eye. You can't murder twice what you've already killed by your neglect.

But I still can't put my finger on that final word which might convince you. I guess you'll just have to feel it for yourself. That when you occupy the same emotional space with someone else, it's just like winning the lottery only better. Because the more you give away the more you get.

OK, OK, I'm just one big fat cliche. I'm not sure if that's better than being a non-sequitur, which someone I love once meant as a compliment. I thinks it's some kind of literary in-joke. Whatever!

Connections emotionally felt are still real, and cross infinite distances in an instant. Trust me, it's been proven by physicists with quantum pairs. They just don't have the right vocabulary yet. They're still searching for some answer which is beyond the realm of objective truing. They still want to see what can only happen in some mind.

We've gotten as far as we're gonna get in that particular direction, and there's so much work we have to do right here at home, which would be trivial if we all were working in some approximation of the same direction.

Tweet tweet.

Resurrection

Resurrection is the hardest part of the Christ story to get one's head around. Why so extravagant? Why so inconceivable? It's paired, quite magically, with the virgin birth as those things which are at once perfectly beyond the reach of science to touch, and which present such great taboos when science does approach.

There's cloning on the one end. Frankenstein monstering. And at the other a kind of fever dream of robots or zombies or uploaded souls. Still with the full knowledge that these could never approach the absurdity of Christ's resurrection, and before that His virgin birth. 

And people do aspire to believe these things, quite "literally," or so that term does get abused. These, of course, are people who by definition can't read, and so you're left to wonder what literal could possibly mean here. You can find it in the Left Behind series, which does earnestly and without apparent effort that which Saturday Night Live can only accomplish with heroic labor. You find it in Ray Kurzweil's absurd celebrations of man's dominion; a scientist overcome with himself and the manic dream of creating the one thing nature never will endure - a geometric expansion which sustains rather than destroys life. 

I say, imperiously, that they can't read, so we'll have to wonder just what reading is along the way toward resurrection and creation out of nothing. Let's just say, for now, that to read is reliably to place a set of words in their proper context. A joke occurs along with the jarring of words quite out of context. A joke on oneself when words are misread and contexts traded. People lounging on chaise, say, or when liberal education is thought to relate to books and liberaries (sic). We all do this, and manage to endure, despite the ridicule of our betters. 

But when you extrapolate full out, you gain a sense of just how difficult reading really is, and how absurd such phrases are as "absolute truth" or "faith".  And how unlikely, at the fringes, that anyone really can read another soul. Or in my case, that I can even read myself. 

So "Left Behind" and the "Singularity is Near" are cosmic pratfalls among people who simply don't know how to read. They are those roobs who fall for the magic trick and then want to buy it for use at home. "Disappear your wife" in five simple steps. 

But I guess the Jesus story endures because it does provide, somehow, that limit. That end beyond which there must and can only be God. A cosmic joke for sure, but also a true endpoint to what we can and should and will ever read and true against what can only be very personal and limited experience.

Science provides a trueing along the way, of readings we must share. I mean this ever so simply, as to describe those things, like knowing that the ground underneath our feet will support us, on which we must agree. By abstractions to the max in our mathematical descriptions, and reductions to the very most economical structures, we seem able to arrive at many many understandings (English is so punny - but not, I assure you, as much as is Chinese) which have that wondrous quality to be universal.

These understandings describe the same reality in any cultural setting, and presumably across the cosmos, though we may not be quite ever finally confident in our ability to translate these to technological controls. There's so much confusion between these two pursuits, especially now that we have become so overcome by our own technological prowess, that we have almost forgotten the science. Scientifically now, our wonder at ourselves will ecologically if not by geometric release of nuclear fissions or fusions (same thing monkey boy) only destroy us.

There can be no question now that the scientific enterprise not only did not but could not have developed in some other culture from that of the Christian European West. Post modernists can and do go fuck themselves, but this trivial observation (that science is culturally grounded) takes nothing from the universality of scientific conclusions, properly made. (It's the "properly made" part which makes those post modernists right almost all the time, but their language is just so damned annoying, and itself always a parody of what they rail against).

So faith starts there, with feet on ground, and finally gets rendered up to what it is we confront in contact with another human being. How much can or do we know that person? Or a book. Or perhaps an entire ideology (what a word, that one!). God?  I think not! (therefore I am)

It's never so trivial to trust that to which we're attracted in another soul. They might turn out robotic, like that sociopath next door. Or we might discover that we're turned off by their feet when we do finally get in bed together, and then the thrall is done for. There's divorce and much worse utter foolishness to pay for these mistakings.

But hanging back from ultimates, many many friends if not lovers do prove true. I guess because the expectation is so much less. The navigations and negotiations so intermittent; the in and out from other's lives so much less quickened. And friendship is capped by that fine taboo at end of day that you never ever will or would get in bed with one another.  Sure, in a pinch, you might for survival, or even intimately resuscitate, mouth to mouth. But if there were a quickening there in bed, I think the friendship must end, don't you? Or blossom. 

But it is that impossibility in principle which defines friendship at its limits, and enables a kind of constancy. Don't worry chum, I'll never stop at your home for more than a few weeks at a time, along the road to somewhere else. But we'll share better times than you will ever have with your wife - that much is certain. And our souls will come much closer and merge more fully simply because there is that boundary to define, contain, and shape our perfect pairing. Nothing lost, but geometric expansions and progressions gained in that most true conspiring. There need never be any subordination at all. There is perfect parity, and no struggle between and among, say justice and relating, the male and female roles, however sexed.

But the ultimate faith, of love, of marriage, in God, just for a few examples. That one is a leap so long that only fools attempt it. The rest of us find ourselves pinnacled and without place to go but down down down, and still along the way there has never been worse terror than to lose oneself that way. It would be so utterly foolish. So like the man who would dive right through the ground. Buckaroo Bonzai!!!! And away. . . . 

I must and do confess that I am terrorized by the act of sex. Not quite in the sense you think. I am not nerdy sexless, nor timid in the act, and would some safely aloof former partner quite allow it, there are no limits to what I wouldn't like to try (hohohaha!). None. But it's the implications terrify me. They are so much forever. Not just disease, but possibility for hurt and misunderstanding, and fallings out, no matter what the interval. That moment is sheer terror. That aloof moment where you realize that yes, it was only physical. Or chemical. Or instinctual, and in any case not forever or even a day. Or far worse, that the deal you'd meant for a moment won't ever stop. Ever. The deal does not get any simpler, young friends, as you grow older.

***

In that interval right there, gentle reader, in service to writing's worst enemy (necessity for taking a dump) and on the toilet reading the New York Times while I still can (yes, it was on my phone, OK?? So, put me in jail already! Throw away the key, I both read on the toilet, and don't pay any attention to internet ads. At all!) before its also necessary demise, I am saddened almost beyond reason to learn of the death by suicide of Sylvia Plath's son sweet Nick sweet son. I know nothing of either of them, yet enough to understand the dimensions of this tragedy. And I must apologize to you that I have been diverted from this writing in and by the act of writing species of love letters toward human contact of the sort which terrifies me more, apparently, than to be alone forever and anon. You just aren't there, you see. I have not yet, and despair I ever will, that kind of faith. That there is a reader.

But I still do make this pledge: That my writing and living and direction will never tend in that particular direction. I will never make that secret pact to end on some high note because I fear my ability to endure the lower lows. It is to life and love and light alone that I direct myself. Alone. All one.

***

Now where was I? That faith which is so hard to conjure. I do actually believe, you know? That in extremis, when finally I must leave my job because there is no more room for me there. Up against that wall where, let me now enumerate, love is not possible across the taboo of workplace, though that's the least of it. Where faith is superstructured by the only living remnant of medieval monarchy to outlast enlightenment (though I actually have no problem with that, it's just that this particular institution's perversions remind me much too much of the Sadean version). I cannot live in public any longer what I mock so hard in private. 

And I will surely never trust myself in love again, after once tripping over my own feet on the way toward what became a lifetime of indentured servitude, and another time in pursuit of what never was in the first place attainable. These twinned poles represent for me all that is possible in the falling out from sense and good friendship's underpinnings. I retreat now and again for long intervals into some sort of mild cocooning, and I'm not even sure that it's time yet to molt again and again and again. 

But I do trust - have faith even - that it's the right time now to refuse any more work or love in which I am not quite myself. Extravagant though that is, and I'm not after "authenticity." I want only to be just one me, cliched and ordinary dull though my character might prove to be.  I must strap myself to whatever mast I have (it's rotting) or can find, to resist temptations for comfort and repose and six figure rescue from the necessity to disburse a lifetime's debris of bicycles, boats, books and papers papers papers, though these I can and do and have uploaded to that proprietary cloud whose stewardship I perversely trust so much more than tangibles in my possession. 

I refuse, I do, any further servitude in maintenance of my slack body and it's sprawling messy dishevelled extensions. (The real estate lady demurred a bit when she came for a visit, that perhaps we can start showing "next week" after I manage to dispose of a few more things which make it difficult to navigate the space. Not so bad, please, as those left behind houses of demented souls having pathways through piles of newsprint and garbage to some inside nest you can't conceive.) Just the look of a house vacant all weekends because in the end, my remaining at-home daughter just cannot endure teenage occupancy alone with Dad in the wilderness. That is not a sentiment I care to contest. At all. And so I write only weekends, apartmented in the city. Wondering where and when and how I'll find either the time or energy to wash the windows and overall brighten up my latest silly womb with but dim view. My house in the country I now must leave, in preservation of what time I've left to write my way out of this ethereal paper bag.

So, that's the faith I have. That at this post-half-century turning point, I have become proof against ever taking another day job act. Against ever again so energetically pursuing love that I shave my beard and trim my hair and my rhetoric too and wear other more presentable clothes, or God help me, endure the indignity of a younger babe so easily mistaken for my daughter. These things make me just cringe anymore. I cannot but be myself. It's less the finding of my authentic self, than the drooling paunch of no more choices, but I'll take it.

Sure, it does help that my hormones no longer rage. Not quite so old as "brother" Cohen, I still have no real regrets for leaving that garden I never did quite enter and therefore won't have to leave. It was only ever thorny for me. (Well, OK, so invite me in and we'll just test my resolve)

It helps also that my mind is aged by cigarettes and wine and never enough time nor energy to read the things I really should. Not near so much capacity in dissipation as say, that self-same Leonard Cohen, but I feel the same dimming he talks of but does not show. The structures for mind's youthful blooming recede, and I haven't the energy, even in principle, to elaborate just what I mean when I talk about particle physics or Chinese poetry or other pursuits on whose trail I once was hot.

I doubt I will ever have that energy again, though I guess it's not impossible. I mean, if someone were to pay me for it, I surely would re-systematize my knowledge. But the university is not open to my paltry accomplishments. I don't own those degrees of freedom, and even if I did I'm just not so sure that there wouldn't be still more constraint there than on my own; with political pathways up, and narrative trueings so much more constrictive and less open to surprise than even the most extreme cases of anti-global-warming-conspiracy-of-dunces-theorizing.

I must remain unbounded. Promethean in my reach if surely not my grasp. But I am so lost with torch burning down and noplace yet to alight my spark.

You see, these folks are quite right in at least one reductive sense. (I had dinner finally just the other day for the first time after almost seven years with my good friend and ultra conservative Catholic neighbor, and had to endure, though it cost me absolutely nothing in good humor, his fulminating rhetoric about the global warming hoax) Approaches to scientists will automatically fall flat and dead at that point where you wish to implicate them in their research.

I do believe that there is one most false branch to science; cosmology. It is there alone that science cannot go, but demands to still. It is there alone that science will and does and has, would it but wake up to that fact, find that it is measuring only the mind of the observer.

Oh, I hate these personifications, as though "science" were some "them." Science does not "say" anything, and scientists, surely at the limit of cosmology, are so unlikely to have read the stuff they really need to comprehend before they peer off into the readings out from instrumentation at least 17 miles in diameter (was it circumference???) and declare any findings.

I do know from hard experience, that it is equally difficult to talk to - just for example now - a disbeliever in global warming, about science, as it is to talk to a scientist about the end(s) of science. They are simply not prepared for that particular surprise, so invested must they be in towering edifices of accumulated understandings and trued arcane verbiage and degrees of distinction from everything and everyone here below in the muck of direct experience.

So I was and remain chastened now, this Easter morning, by last night's meeting with my former student. I'd tried to teach him Chinese once so long ago (though I was and am a fraud, I did have and could teach, at least, perfect pronunciation, and build a good foundation, demonstrably, for more native ministrations), and then as headmaster, by the skin of both our teeths, to get him some degree. 

He surprised me to tell that he never did earn any single degree. Not high school. Not college, though he often teaches theater there. And I am chastened, not just because I feel so lucky proud to have pulled what degrees I own back from the temptations, always, to chuck it all (it took three rough passages through Yale before they let me out. Sanctioned my outing, is more like it). I am chastened because he has become so fully my teacher now. And because my failure was not his.

I came to him for help to stage my "Womb with a View" (working title, please) monologue. And he, upon only the very briefest hearing, shot back authors and plays and readings so erudite that I had to beg him please to email the names, since I had no hope of recall. 

I held his door last night - the house was absolutely packed with only one last seat for me. I only snoozed a moment this second time to witness his terrific play. I think I snoozed because I felt the beginnings of some relaxation to my quest. There will be those who know so much more than I do, can help to true what words I have. There will be help along the way. 

And so I think it time for me to de-cocoon once more. I don't know about spreading any wings of Icarus or surfactin-stimulated butterfly, as was the manner for my little peanut daughter to survive her own way-too-early escape from her mother's womb; butterfly wings and kisses. It must be the same substance. For my daughter, at two pounds she was very lucky that her mother's doctor missed the textbook case, and left her and mom both traumatized in the womb so that when she finally was hacked out (it was that bad - I was there), her lungs would not stick together which is what is the worst for preemies.

Lucky for me, I should properly say, since she would be her no matter what had happened, but now she provides me such bright pride and joy and even company. She listens to my words and claims they make sense to her, which is way more than a father ever could deserve, since the obligation is so much the reverse. And she never did try me that way. Always so easy to understand. Such a joy.  So perfectly articulate.

So, it must be this same substance on butterflies' wings, which must get discharged in some precise quickening before the molt. Why cocoons must never be warmed. Why term is at all costs to be allowed before the labor is begun. Why sometimes, with luck, too early de-cocoonings, like even that one for me from boat so long ago, can still be survived provided further artificial incubation. 

For me, all artifice has ended (Well, lash me to some mast, we'll see). Perversely, I will endeavor to refuse all offers of comfort - at least those even where I only have to torque my soul a tiny bit (metaphorical, since I don't have faith now in the literal one) to represent someone else's brand. Not Church. Not government. Not China which does not know herself at all. Not startup internet business even, unless it wants me as I am. I'll whore for anyone, provided the deal is honest. Now there's the rub.

It is only you, gentle reader, that I can or will but also surely must have faith in. It is you must be resurrected here. Your context for some reading. Your willingness to make that effort (I do know that it is extreme, and beyond all reason what I ask) to read. To listen. To watch. To make some sense. Not of me and what I write (don't be a fool!), but of what is now so out there. You really have to be perverse, and bound to rigid stupid absolutist words - I guess simply because you're so afraid that you might be fooled? - not to read it. Right off the web, the wall, the street, the news. Just learn to read is all.

And you, gentle friends or daughters, who must trust that Howie or Dad has not now finally lost his mind for good and ever, and isn't marching off perversely into some chip-on-shoulder spiting of himself. That I will never refuse love when offered, nor to offer it to my full capacity, which might not be very much. But I'll try. I do try. I am very limited is all.

Let's hope it's true what says AARP, that there is life after 50. I sure do hope so. My younger daughter is my very best companion. And yet I want her so much to be free that I hang back criminally from enough guidance. I offer no discipline. She does far too much what she pleases.

But I do, I guess perversely, still have faith that it's the love that counts. Love expressed in seasons turning, a conspiracy of life entire, which guarantees that the moment for the peepers is just the right moment for decocooning. That there is more than just her father to mediate her growth. And that what she needs most from me is more gentle than those stern and fearsome words I got, which still did no good against my own transgressions and fallings short. Though I won't blame them for that. Nor their deliverers. The times were different, is all.

If Dad has lost his mind, he might yet be in good company. There are readings all around (I'll get them shortly by email) which move in the same direction. I guess there might be enough surfactin now that I can fly myself, alone, flittingly, for just a moment before the season turns again. 

I do believe, you see, that there is so much more to life than what can be accomplished alone. That mankind's flight is made of words, though words alone, whether those of science and its instrumental extensions, or the true distilled and very litterary great essence of our greatest minds, cannot describe the flight. For that there must be face to face and much more quickened turnings.

And as my young former student (and now my mentor) did so charmingly wonder, why is it that actual presentations must be lower on some scale than literary readings?  He had become somehow aware that in our past - and I think this is true - those who could read were regarded with suspicion. Those who could read silently to themselves were thought possessed. Out of commerce with where life actually quickened, and where profundity could be found first hand. Only priests were sanctioned to read, leaving witches, demons, perverts and other outlaws as the only other possibilties. More dangerous than revered for what they might know. 

And now this equation is so fully reversed. To where televised presentations cannot, and likely do not, even potentially possess anything near the power of the written word. But why not? Why not YouTube? Why not theater again? Why must it be contained in and by words, this truth we would approach, though never, because it would blind us and melt our wings, quite touch?

Well, because the metaphor is wrong is all. Truth is not a thing can be approached. There is no Omega endpoint to this questing. That's misplaced words. There is no absoluting truth. There is only trueing, and for that we need each other, alive and stimulating and responding and being and here. And there.  Which is neither here nor there, silly reader.

Do I leave you now, alone. Having fallen this far short? Were you expecting some great final revelation through these words? (If I did not doubt it, then I would not dare to write it, surely!) Well, if so, here it is. That punchline I never can remember, or even reconstruct. That final turn of phrase which captures, just right, that moment of apprehension you used to go to Church for. That apotheosis of the Word. Made flesh. Was God.

Well, here, then, it is. Here it is. You'll have to read it all again. And again and again and again and anon. 

There's really nothing more to say, though I will keep trying, poor gentle reader. For life. For love. For my daughters. I will make you pay me, too, since what choice do I have? What choice do you have?

Well, Happy Easter, and I do pray for your resurrection. I really do. Turn off that one-way television. Turn the projector on yourself, and YouTube it to infinite regress. But then please do go outside. It's a beautifuly day to be alive!

Happy Easter, you nonexistent fool you. Happy Easter!

In The Beginning

This feels very scary. I am doing this (almost) on a whim - no malice aforethought! Scary, like a remedy for agoraphobia, and scary like I actually want to have something to say, not just blah blog my personal life.

I have a feeling that it must break a rule of blog etiquette to attempt narratives of any significance. (I have never read a blog before - honest! I can't imagine anything more dreary, and haven't summoned the curiosity to be proven wrong, partly since my work puts me in front of a computer, ruining the fun of it) Commentary of significance is apparently OK, but I have a sense that blogs are supposed to be stream of consciousness. The medium inherently rejects completed and formed works, except, I guess, as paste-ins, as a sort of reference to the commentary. I suppose that blogs have to be interesting enough to read. I also have a sense that there is much narcissism involved, and that there is some blending toward voyeurism in the reading.

I guess that's what scares me. That I might be wanting to expose myself, or that by breaking into this medium, I am wanting to escape some basic rules, like for instance any need for discipline, since I'm pretty sure that if I were in any way disciplined, I wouldn't be in this pit I want to write myself out of.

I've discovered, over and over and over, that I don't know how to write, and lack the discipline to learn. And yet, narcissistically I'm sure, I've been bedevilled most of my life (I am not a young man!) by the conviction that there is something important which I must put in the form of a narrative. Is there any chance that this newish medium of blogging could move beyond factual exposure, alongside news media, to a kind of art form? I am imaging, and now semi-publicly hoping, that there could be a space for a kind of writing performance art.

If there is, I could go poking around to find it, but I do this from dial-up. I don't find the technology very interesting in any case. What is interesting is the conjunction of Speakers' Corner, with a kind of infinite asynchronos performance space

I'm really not at all sure that I have 'something to say'. Truly, every time I read a book (which is most of what I do these days), I feel relieved that at least I am not depriving the world of anything by failing to develop any latent literary promise. There are lots of great writers out there!

There, that statement exposes what I'm getting at. I do suffer from a sense of failure to myself - lost promise, you might say. Not just that the rat race has ground me down, but more likely something that I have in common with most of humanity, or maybe I really mean most of first-world humanity; those of us who suffer guilt and anxiety about the fate of spaceship earth and yet have no clue what to do about it. (not an entirely felicitous metaphor, as I hope we'll see, but I like Bucky, and it suits me here for now - I'd rather say something like Gaia (sp?), but that feels wrong in the other direction) Those of us who have not been anaesthetized by sufficient wealth or fame (I'll take mine straight, thanks!) to succumb to the illusion of being apart from those who toil and succumb. Those of us who really don't imagine that there can be life, in any meaningful sense, apart from all of that creepy crawly nature which remains, at least from the point of view of complexity, at the center of our known cosmos, and bounded by Earth.

We are left, Willy Loman like, with a sense of lost perhaps not promise, but we see ourselves as from the audience, and we cry for ourselves, glad, perhaps, that we cannot be implicated in some great sell-out, but sad nontheless that we haven't much to say for ourselves.

Hence the blog.

I can be pretty proud of my emails from time to time, though I have never gotten feedback from any correspondent to validate my sense of a well-turned phrase. I have to suspect that my correspondants are embarrassed for me - to the extent I become enthralled by the language, I must seem to be overreaching and pompous. Which is probably why my attempts at crafted narrative always end up scrapped. I end up sounding to myself the way I imagine I must sound to my correspondents, though it is at least conceivable that there is general dullness out there.

More recently, I dusted off a book called The Artists Way (Julia Cameron), which prescribes a daily regimen of uncrafted narrative as a means to discover oneself; to unfetter whatever creative powers are latent. And, true to form, I can't summon the discipline. (I think she wrote the book before blogs were imagined.)

I have to wonder if it is entirely out-of-bounds to use the public space for what should be done in private. There is surely something wrong about not pulling the blinds, say, unless it is that you shouldn't be where even such a signal as pulling the blinds could be noticed. So, I'm that kind of scared. As well as pretty sure that I am simply too clueless to know how to live, and risk exposing that fact.

Does everyone rehearse the meaning of blogs before starting? I must be like a victorian at a rock concert. Same setting. Same meaning. But the music sounds like noise, and the people don't behave. Just lack of exposure? I'll come along.

Nerve endings have built in them the facility to numb the annoying or the repetitive. My dental hygenist is amazed that I can use the traditional Listerine for instance, but I just got beyond the training period. (Masking that awful flavor just makes it worse to me) Just as I have never understood getting past the endorphin barrier with physical activity. Really really really spicy Szechuan-style food, for instance, tastes like a really really hot rock concert, and would be entirely missed by, say, my mother (yours too!).

So maybe I've just numbed down, and am willing to venture out? Blogs are about this blurring of private and public, aren't they? They make it hard for nefarious pols to pander their lies. They make all-powerful corporate entities actually accountable in ways that might rescue some aspect of democracy (do I tip my hand too far when I observe that the United States is fast becoming a caricature of that aristocratic England against which we once rebelled). And blogs allow me to implicate myself in the age of narcissism. To let go of the idea that I will ever write that Great American Novel (which is as much neurosis as any of us should be allowed to expose), without quite letting go of the idea that I might have something to say.

Which is where I started this particular screed. (scroll up to look!). I am proposing a kind of experiment. I am pretty sure that I have nothing very literary in me. But I am also pretty sure that I once discovered something, almost science-style, which if effectively shared, would change everything. This discovery, if that's what it turns out to be, was made way back at the canonical age of, say, 25 or so (24? 27?), and had, for me, what I can only imagine to be the power discovery has for a scientist.

The trouble for me was that I soon found that I had no way to demonstrate this find. There was no microscope through which to see it. No body of theory waiting for this tipping-point measured observation to indicate its next direction. But neither was it quite the same as spiritual revelation, which, judging by numbers anyhow, is much more reliably communicated than any scientific finding.

I have felt, at times, saddened that I am apparently immune to extra-scientific communions of any sort. I have also felt distressed that the growing body of scientific understanding leaves life cold, so to speak. And of course this body of understanding, if that is anything like the right way to speak of it, cannot be encompassed by any one mind. In the end, there seems always to be some kind of faith invoked, whether material or spiritual.

By the same sort of happenstance which frames most good thinking (there I go, exposing my lack of discipline again), I recently read Ray Kurzweil's Singularity book. I realized that it was the same story told in those satirical Left Behind books, where the Revelation tales get told out literally. (They are satirical, aren't they? Please?) Kurzweil apparently actually believes that computing power will saturate the cosmos, and I think he means literally.

I guess a lot of people haven't quite taken notice that we already inhabit virtual reality. That the Candy 2000 virtual date can be had in most bars (I hear, but I find the stories reliable). That we can transport ourselves in the space of a dream to far-off places, even as we make what was exotic local. That perhaps intelligence already pervades the cosmos, since how would we know anyhow - not seeming so intelligent ourselves much of the time.

Anyhow, I quickly found that my "discovery" could not be shown, way back then in my extreme youth. It had to be told. And I apparently lacked the equipment, because I tried and tried, but could not tell it. And of course I realized that this finding was becoming reliably identical to a simple delerious disease (other people thought so too!). I'm pretty sure that there could be no clinical distinction.

So, I relaxed, already. If, as I was certain, this matter was more toward a scientific than spiritual discovery, then it was sure to be found out by myriad others, and all I would have to do would be to join in the more collective delerium when, as it surely would, it developed. Clinical sanity in a world transformed!

But that was back at the outset of the Standard Model (of physical reality). Did I hear on the radio, 30 years ago now?? I was there at the beginning. And mum's been the word, as we wait for the CERN collider to come on line - which to be honest has filled me with a sense of urgency - and some laser-connected satellites to report on Einstein's curvature.

So, I've started to get restless again. It seems as though no-one else is going to come out with this thing, and so it maybe falls back to me. I am alarmed at the collective delerium forming all around me. I feel some responsibility, you know, because I never did rise to the obligation of that fated discovery. Sort of the reciprocal of remaining silent as witness to some heinous crime, because to speak out entails so much impact.

Although, I guess it's not very recipriocal, because that's exactly how I feel - silent witness to heinous crime. Craziness is afoot, and it's not just the religious fundamentalists and their nut-job reality, of which I remain jealously oblivious (I am not entirely oblivious of the truer parts of their realities - the what happens if you act as-if part - but wouldn't it be nice if you really could have your cake and eat it too).

On the one hand, Corporations expend actual billions in reparation and reaction and public relations paranoia when some tiny fraction of the techno-violent destruction of modern living gets meted out in the form of transgressions of the my space safety bounds (whew! Sorry!!). As if horror can be lodged in spinach (Popeye?), and terror in psychosis, when real terror and horror gets not so much meted as rained down on much of the world outside the castle grounds by that same techno-violence, of which we remain the beneficiaries as well as directors and even toward which we have diverted our very lust.

Sorry, sorry. That's what happens when I start writing. But those thirty years ago, I think I imagined some publishing medium without implication. Someplace where a sort of gift-to-the-world-take-it-or-leave-it statement of incontrovertable fact could be dropped off and distributed, not quite anonymously, but at least without needing to make it good enough to make a living at. While still discharging my responsibility, as it were (I always want to say things like "as it were" or "so to speak").

And I do feel some urgency as species drop from the face of the earth. I can't claim any physical pain, but it is very much as if these were insults to my extended physical body. I don't have any faith that I am in any meaningful way apart from this earth, that the boundaries between my self and others are distinct and absolute, that my death is the end of me any more than my skin is the end of me. But I do find notions of eternal to be very silly, metaphorically as though my personal body could pervade forever. And I do find the notion of soul to have become problematical, when it seems to have become an excuse for the self - as though humanity were a grant, rather than something toward which to aspire.

So, at this particular moment, having discovered this great and powerful medium to penetrate that sacred boundary between public and private, and ever hopefull that all such transgressions are not necessarily boorish (though they very well might be!), I am staking my flag that on the faith that there might be a way -- call it catalytic narrative -- to effect global change other than by this confusion of ends and means we now experience as technology-driven military-industrial economic expansion which costs so much of life.

It is narrative in words which has defined humanity - a set of stories - apart from if not the culmination of natural history. Now we have become authors, perhaps, in our own collective story, even as we chafe at the responsibility and prefer to live by our Picaresqe wits at the behest of God or Fate. We might accept a designation as Hero of our own story, so long as by living it we don't have to write it too, which would break the God-man contract.

My claim is that it has long passed time to define humanity more poetically than by narrative. Where Author is less maker than finder, as much delighted as delighter. Where words need not have a point, and narrative trajectories may start all over again before they end.

I do declare, this is a fine new medium! There is some tiny spark of that pleasure in actual human company. And some hope for me that I will actually remember what I once discovered, now so long ago, when my memory, humanity and intelligence were so much more intact.

Technology has finally caught up with my promise, I am hoping, in the humble sense of a promise I once made to myself. I have, truly, nearly forgotten the promise, and my sense of responsibility, which swamped my earlier excitement. Now I am at that other canonical age (50 something) when one is at the peak of power (I was just reviewing the Time 100 -- they're practically all 50-s0mething!). I have to do something!