Hard Irony

I've been declaring for a while now that 'my religion is irony, or something to that effect. I've felt hugely tentative about my usage of the term, especially as nobody seems able to help me out. I've tried David Foster Wallace, I've tried the dictionary, of course, and I've posted about my pet theory that irony exists only in Goddist cultures. 

To broaden that, I'd say that irony exists in cultures descended from Platonic philosophies. You have to inherit some kind of belief in absolute, sort-of preordained universal truthiness in order to spin off that into irony. Otherwise, irony is no different from Yin/Yang, say, and certainly nothing very funny about it. 

Well, my supremely well-read son-in-law wondered if I was referring to Richard Rorty's usage of irony. Now, I'm no troglodyte, and I have read Rorty, but if I could do attributions perhaps I'd be a scholar like my son-in-law is. My mind doesn't seem to work that way. Call it a cataloguing weakness. Or call it a failure in belief that anything even close to universal can be trued. If I believe in anything, I believe in (non-Goddist!) love. Love cannot be trued, but it sure can be tested. Stop testing and it disappears.

So, I Wikipediaed Rorty and finally feel comfortable with my usage, which is pretty much identical to his. Of course that gives me no particular credibility, especially as I don't have any way really to know where Rorty stands in the pantheon of philosophers.

But from my own history I draw a chain of analogs and feel confident in my deduction that there is no more chauvinistic stance than the one which might be built upon theories of general intelligence. These, of course, descend from definitions for humanity, which Rorty calls out as the bedrock for denigration of "others" (of whatever stripe). 

Just now, at this moment in our history, we are in the mindless thrall of a definition for intelligence as a kind of logical acuity, which really means that the most perfect mind would be a machine, on the cybernetic model of a computer. For me, nothing could be more silly. But perhaps we've always construed something like 'intelligence' as the defining feature of humanity. Or at least we make attempts to generalize what it is we value most; only lately calling it intelligence.

Cybernetics (I doubt that I'm using the correct term here) reverses the human-as-evolution's-apotheosis trope to reduce us to being but the product of our own projections. My image is from the yellow submarine where the tuba player sucks himself into oblivion. (I can't find that image now, so maybe I'm inventing it, though I swear I remember it through a cannabinoid fog)

As you know, gentle reader, I've recently re-read Dawkins on the selfish gene. I find sparks of divinity there, ironically enough. While he demolishes genetic pressure at the social level, he does seem to rehabilitate the notion of humanity as apex critter; ideal vehicle for selfish gene survival. That's because we're such generalists, and can use something like intelligence to get past most any environmental challenge, given world enough and time. We make clothes, we make houses, we make tools.

But it's precisely at the social level that we're killing not just ourselves, but the entire planet. Well, but for the cucarachas, right Wall-E? Our selfish genes must be jumping right out of our skin!

As I write, ol' Elon Musk is showing off his brain-reading technology, as though that might make human life better or more satisfying, and as if that is less terrifying than the Artificial Intelligence that Elon is so terrified of. Somehow this brain-reading tech is more human??? Is it only about keeping us in charge? I don't hardly ever like those who are in charge . . .

Well, you also know that I've discovered Riccardo Manzotti's theory of the Spread Mind, which pretty much blows any notion that the brain contains us right out of the water. So reading minds, I have to confess, looks to me like a fools' game if ever there were one. You'd end up by ignoring the person you actually do know in favor of a meter reading, even from within what you think of as the self you know.

Let's face it, bro, none of us knows ourselves as well as those who love us do. If they really love us, they'll tell us where to get off.

Or in other words, there's no escaping life, and life is about evolution which is about replicators (genes) finding ways to replicate themselves reliably, which is all about adapting to environments, which is what we are setting about destroying.

That won't matter a whole lot, will it? I mean we do live as though we were the lowest rather than the highest creatures, where struggling means for a bigger flatscreen in a bigger house as far from our burgeoning landfills and poor, dangerous, neighborhoods as possible. That doesn't really feel like life at all. Neither does watching commuters ram out of town in cars, from the perch of my new e-bike.

Still and all, if evolution must truly be located at the level of the "selfish" gene and no higher than that, it does seem that society as analog to the multi-tenanted (human, say) body must make a difference to the chances for those apex genes. That's "apex" even though many of them go right on back to the cucarachas and beyond the very beginning.

At the level of society, one would hope and even imagine that a viral insult on the scale of Trump would inure the body politic to his dangers and evolve itself into something that's better proof against the disease germ's destructive powers. I guess that even viral DNA is built into us. So build in Trump in antibody form.

What seems to stop us is that our addictive selves are still having too much raw fun treating politics as a spectator team sport. We get to belong easily to people we get along with, part of which seems to involve vilifying some 'other.' The degree of sell-out among Republicans now does not bode well for the future of the US's experiment with democracy. But adapting or adopting team Blue just deepens the trouble. It's not like they're (we're?) clean.

Now my brilliant son-in-law writes about 'cosmopolitan constitutionalism,' which as I understand it purports to begin the narrative of a post-national form of governance which avoids the problem of othering difference. The trouble is that said son-in-law behaves as though he is the exemplar of tippy top general intelligence, and that his deeply learned methods for philosophical inquiry can deal with any and all manner of truthiness. My exhibit "A" is always something like practical car mechanics, which is far beyond the pale of philosophy to learn.

Irony resonates for me when someone crosses over to the imperialism of white UN Land Rovers coming to fix some backward culture. I end up preferring the absence of irony now on display in Africa by the highly culturally chauvinistic Chinese. I shouldn't, but I do. I just like too many Chinese. Just now I dislike my own type. I'm sure I'll get over it.

So, if you're not going to denigrate and belittle people who don't quite think and write the way that you do by purporting to lift them up by your brilliance, what's a thinker, or a doer even, to do? So many Trumpsters seem perfectly kind to me, and likeable. I don't want to psychoanalyze what's wrong with their thinking any more than I want to psychoanalyze my son-in-law for why he must mistrust my judgement as his patron, laboring on this very very old house that they wanted my help with. But it's really hard not to.

My conclusion is that it just won't help. Trumpsters 'believe in' their world view, I suppose because it gets reinforced by their buddies. They don't trust their pretentious "betters" among the political elite, and really why should they? Do you? How, really, does any politician stay 'true' during the process of sausage-making?

How does one avoid condescension? The one you're looking down upon will feel it immediately, unless you've already enslaved them to your evident whitewashed brilliance. So the answer is that you have to like them. You have to learn to like them. You have to give a shit enough to live among those you would help. Ah, but the trappings of wealth are so attractive. There's the rub.

Well, I'd better get back to work. I'm slaving for love of my children who live so much better than I do, or ever could, which somehow gives the right to denigrate my form of knowledge, as though I didn't have their best interests at heart. There truly is no justice! There is only evolution, ironically enough.

HOLLYWOOD (the sign) Won't Go Away!

I first saw the sign "in person" after climbing up a long set of steps from the walk of stars in Hollywood. The steps took me inside what I think was a shopping mall, but I'm not so accustomed, yet, to the strange inside/outside mix that is Southern California.

Although there weren't many people gawking the way that I was, it did seem as though the architecture of this place was designed to frame the iconic sign up in the hills. It also allowed a view out the scruffy back door of the place, and I suppose the sign itself isn't that big a draw anymore.

You'd think there would be an exclamation mark on the actual sign. (Oh! There almost was!) It stays put though, as though the place might prove as ephemeral as its productions were it to stop promoting itself. It was never a planned thing; having been erected by a real-estate developer, it used to say "HollywoodLand."

I just witnessed our annual mass-mediated (not massive enough this year is what I hear) contest to sort out who's best among those who've already won  at the Oscars. I gawked along with the rest of us who are certainly not in the game. But it's not like an Olympic contest. I could do what they do, right?

This is ground zero for style in the midst of all the uplifting story-lines of the year. People are crying out against dictators "enough already!" Rampant capitalism is chastened by oil spills and media exposes of direct harm caused to people by careless scrambling after winners' gold. Even in China. The usual stuff.

The Oscars are all about style - even in our choice of what to watch in the documentary department. Michael Moore is out, Banksy is in. It's not quite cool to promote yourself on the backs of real social issues. It's cooler to remain Anonymous (losing must have been part of his plan) and just to poke fun at the process of sorting out the cool. Everyone gets punked, especially if they think they're talking to the Big Studio Director (you've always gotta watch out for sleepers from Buffalo).

I'm still looking for a good replacement for the term "po-faced" to describe the bizarre condition of someone in an ironic posture to the world who feels himself in earnest. This is the condition of religionists being indistinguishable from satirists, or like that Kung-fu special I saw on the "Iron Crotch" school, where you train yourself to lift weights with your penis. Hey, you really can't make this shit up!

The thing I really want to know though, is how come we're all so obsessed with contests? Technology in service to winning?

Our economic system is organized around winning, a contest of value and production. This all starts in school where standardized testing helps to predict who might be a winner, and funnels them to the most privileged position at the head of any class. Which is fine as far as it goes, and as long as you don't have to sleep with the producer to get there, but what about the rest of the students who really just need some feedback about what they need to work on?

Well and so the world is being neatly divided between people with an ironic posture on everything and the rest who are either Born Again, Republicans, Chinese Communist party hacks, Chinese elite Nationalist students in America, Singaporeans, or just plain old machines. No irony.

See a machine would never be able to equate gold with poison thus:

ROMEO

There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.
Farewell: buy food, and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me
To Juliet's grave; for there must I use thee. 

Exeunt

And crazy people all over the place are still wondering what will happen when machines become conscious. Sheesh! Look around!! You don't need the Hollywood hi-tech special effects version. You don't think it's humans wrecking the earth, do you?

Still Trying to Find Myself

No, not that way. I gave up that jejune exercise a long time ago, although I think a lot of people I know remain unconvinced. I mean I really have a hard time finding the self that is mine. I'm not so concerned with finding the essential me which might be expressed by style and a life's work leading to accomplishment. I just have a hard time actually believing that there's anyone me at home here.

There's been a lot written lately about traumatic brain injury survivors following on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. It almost seems as though a shot to the head is not the quickest way to kill someone, despite assumptions we've all fostered on TV. Or to put it another way, there are lots of critical systems in the body, but there is also a lot of redundancy - proven by our ability to remain alive despite all sorts of outrages to the body - including in the brain.

The brain's analog would be a hologram, whose information is distributed throughout the substrate, but the more substrate, the sharper the image. So, with the brain, it turns out that we can still be ourselves despite radical attenuation of the brain's substrate. Naturally, there are critical regions and parts without which nothing much goes right.

As I was ruminating the other day, much of the brain's activity is alien to that self I seek. It seems to operate more quickly - the subliminal level seems to throw things up faster than I can process them. So this organizing principle, or is it principal, which makes some kind of sense out of all that random sensation seems closer to me. Some process of the brain, but not the brain itself. Maybe we stop being when the ratio tips upside down to where there is some sort of stalling in the information to be ordered.

I mean, if you think about it, we know that sensory deprivation leads to hallucinatory insanity - we seem to need the relative stability of a relatively unchanging world outside our heads. But on the other hand, if there is no motion there is no perception either. Our eyeballs bounce around to construct a stable and seamless reality "out there" and our brain fills in the gaps to where the seeming is still more enhanced.

We need to learn to see. "Above" seeing we need to learn to organize what we see, much of which will remain invisible until we have some kind of category for it. Eventually, we need some language to smooth our raw insights to some sort of conformity with those held by everyone else. And as we learn, many of these tasks move to someplace "beneath" our conscious attention, so that we can deploy that for higher order ordering.

It's funny (or NOT) how much of what gets called education relates to making conscious all that stuff which works better when it remains unconscious. Well, OK, so let's say someone has a lot of musical talent. If they want to play the violin, there's lots of technique to be focused on until the point where it can be fogotten and the focus is on the music.

But what waste for someone without musical talent. Well, unless you're a Chinese Tiger Mom, and then you might want to push the technique anyhow. And the very success of such efforts might do a lot to disprove certainties about "native talent."

But learning is about conforming what you can do to the way it's being done by others, and to the technologies which have evolved to enhance what you could do without them. Silent reading was impossible not so long ago, but now we've pushed those voices well back beneath our vocal apparatus.

It turns out that brain trauma survivability is partially a function of the mental power of the victim before the accident. For sure, we know that anyone who works out will look and be more physically fit. But being mentally fit is not always such a popular pursuit in American society, where anti-intellectualism often engenders a kind of inverse association between mental and physical virility.

Intelligence is so commonly thought to be a fixed attribute. Indeed the studies of brain trauma survival which indicate that brain power predicts speed and quality of recovery depend on the intelligence assessments conducted by the Army, thus producing a massive pool of data for Vietnam War brain trauma survivors.

But who knows where the mental desire which leads to fitness is first engendered? In the womb? In the genes? In the family constellation? There are so many chicken-egg type problems to sort out, since surely curiosity of any sort is where real learning starts. Who would ever start by wanting to know how to answer multiple choice problems. Who would start wanting to know how to do arithmetic? But it isn't so hard to imagine starting with music. Or with being able to build a durable house.

I have experienced several kinds of near death. The two most acute both involved loss of breath,. In the first instance, by drowning, my conscious knowledge of impending death against which I could and did swim with all my resources, induced that storied sensation of my entire life passing before me. In the second, a pulmonary embolism where there was nothing I could do, I only felt a fairly calm and actually serene sense that I was checking out. That this would be it, and afterward nothing at all.

Learners who already know that they have no "native talent" must also stimulate nothing at all to arise in the brain, and so the thoughts become flaccid. But you know, given a sharp enough sensation of impending end,  combined with some real swimming and breath-holding ability, the result may also be a kind of eternal life, if time is compressed toward the limit of zero.

It must be this then, in which consciousness consists. This compression ratio where the information coming in does neither over nor under whelm its organizer. Where there is just enough to stimulate the forward motion, but not so much as to stun the self into massive hallucinatory chaos.

Just so, consciousness has not always been an attribute of human animals. And its origins must be not unlike that memory I have of writing my name for the first time, on a paper bag with a pencil. Right up there with where I was when JFK was shot, or when the Trade Towers came down. No real mystery to it at all. And no real moment of inception.

Magical Thinking

The other day while driving my car some unconscionable distance, I was listening to NPR talking about the volume of oil escaping from that deep sea fiasco in the Gulf. It was somehow encouraging to hear that there are entire ecosystems which handle the natural leakage of oil from the ocean floor.

Then today I find that they are running out of clever tricks, and that it might be months, and that each week will be like another Exxon Valdiz cracking open its hull. This is not encouraging. Our little pinprick down a bit too deep could clearly overwhelm a lot of ecosystems. I can only hope the contrarians on global warming will take note.

I've recently discovered a slew of Chinese movies whose scope is blockbuster huge. These rehearse the span of Chinese narrative history. I've seen a few more rehearsing Western narratives. There's always lots of blood. Lots of miraculous fighting even after the fatal blow. I'm not really sure why that particular fiction captivates audiences, as though a well trained and determined fighter can keep on keeping on after his blood is drained..

The Earth is clearly bleeding. This wound could be fatal, though not, of course, for the living Earth. It could be fatal for us, Earth's conscious denizens. We are those for whom the oil has been meant. And we have perched ourselves precariously on oil's pinnacle with scant time to climb down before the structure beneath us crumbles.

Yes, I did say that. The oil is meant for us. And we have gone a click too far. It is long past trivial to observe that the Earth is a living organism. The balance of systems is far far more complex than that in any one identifiable organism on her surface (by which I mean to include the shallows of our oceans, by which I mean their depths). This is clear enough, since those systems include and incorporate every single individual subsystem.

We'd thought until now that the earth as a whole was rather simpler than us. That it was the ground for our complex species; we the capstone of evolution, conscious creatures of the Earth. We still secretly did and do believe that we are at the very center of the cosmos, defined in terms of the complexity of our nervous system. The elaboration of our understandings.

We are none of that. Our bodies, rather, are but the ground for dialogic thought, and this in turn, through writing, is what is meant by consciousness. We had none before we got civilized. Period.

The earth has no vocal apparatus. No means to store communications. Well, apart from us. We are the voice of the earth, and not of our individual selves, nor certainly of our "culture." Whatever complexity we represent is embedded, not separated, from the ecosystems of the entire planet. We cannot be abstracted, no matter how much we exalt that particular sense of "meaning." Earth's oil was meant for us in precisely the same manner that anything is meant. It's not about intention.

It is easy now to imagine the end. The oil will gush for months. The price impact of peak oil will hit the globe, very much as though we'd reached that magic tipping point. Cars will suddenly look absurd, and the failure of the economy, writ large, will engender anger far far beyond what folks feel now, directing it willy nilly against this or that object.

Our monocultural food basket will collapse in an instant, from some virus, from lack of oil inputs, by analog to oil blowout prevention failure. There will surely be a systemic collapse of the flimsy scaffolding of law. Nature will sort this out. We won't. We will have gone beyond ourselves, and God help us.

Against the oil leakage, we will eventually deploy all remaining resources. But it will be too late.

Not too late for nature's crops. Not too late for the Earth. But far too late for the current manner of our human organization, an economy built on an extravagant narrative of absurdist religious hope and fervor and insanity.

There will be those who Praise the Lord as he fulfills his promised destiny. I won't be among them. Our complicity in our demise will have been too obvious. We have crawled into our narrative. We are gone insane.

The massive influence of the Christian narrative is a piece of evidence that we remain willfully blind to. We might take it as evidence of Divinity, as how else to explain its clear impact on our human history and now, very recently, on the fate of the very Earth. But it would be wiser to take it as a grand example - the grandest example - of how narrative forms as much as it describes reality. Imagine others. Please!

There are alternatives, you know. It won't be luck that stops the gushing. It will be deliberate acts of care, of doctoring, of re-established equilibrium. It will be our stepping back from this Devil's brink (oh, why must I capitalize that Name?) where sweets and fats and oversalting trump our bodies' sense of safety. We must not slaughter the fatted Earth. Her prodigal Son has not returned. We have fallen.

Now hey, how is it we are so certain the the Earth herself is not in dialogic communion with other organismic planets, huh? Why is our personal narrative so compelling? Who, indeed, do we think we are? If the Earth were conscious, it would be just barely; a babe among babes whose language is only started and almost certainly not yet written.

Or are we that pathetic beginning, despite how impressed we are with our shiny toys and trinkets.

I remember changing my daughters' diapers while having a conversation with them. Assuming consciousness includes some function to control the bowels, it's not enough simply to be able to speak. It's not even enough to be able to read and write. Just now I had to deal again with Dad, who can deploy reason well enough in defense of his angry position that he can still drive a car, but then can't remember the position he's already agreed to after another minute goes by. His anger no longer belongs to him. It's ours, his family's, and utterly dependent on our manner of presentation.

Tonight I will go to a book signing for a book I feel that I must read. It details the demise of Eliot Spitzer who, the book's author claims, might have made some significant difference in the fate this great Empire State now suffers. Another sad instance of the fallacy that mind has dominion over flesh. Spitzer's is, by all accounts, one of the finest minds among the current stock of politicians. And that brilliance is now for naught, just as our most brilliant human contrivances are as naught against the ever so much more powerful juggernaut of our lowest common denominator desires. Rendered up by the magic of capitalist economics to an utter dependence on oil.

We will drive, dammit, and we will eat red meat and we will be angry at any deprivation thereof. If it is so hard to take Dad's car from him, just imagine how tough it will be for the rest of the planet, which still believes that it can hoist itself with the cleverness of its engineered narrative.

Screw that! It is fully NOT necessary that our lust for oil trump every bit of common sense. But the way in which we organize our economy would have to change. As it is, the prizes flow to he or to that organization which best harnesses the lowest part of each of us. These tea baggers are onto something, but they're not in on the joke. They seem to think that decency at the dinner table is the same as decency in the only sense that matters. The cosmic sense.

We may feel virtuous because of our polite behaviors and politically correct actions as we sail our yachts, drive leather upholstered disposable cars, set tables groaning with ethnic delicacies from around the world, and speak of edgy arts. But we are not only no better, we are no different from the pornographer who preys by means of lust. We may shutter our minds, but it's not our minds which lead us.

I am sick to death of people invoking religious or health-based objections to this or that food on offer to them as a guest. I will honor only politically motivated requests, and those only if I may be educated as to the offensive content of what I have on offer. It is not my body's purity which must be defended. Nor is it the precious sensibility of some animal which had to be slaughtered. It is the planet, and our place on it.

Parents who create perfect and perfectly beautiful minds for admission to Yale and Harvard have in fact created analogs of sex slaves; made beautiful by being trained to ape actual thought and adult creation. This is easily enough proven by the choices the graduates of these places largely make for high profile careers and lifestyles and private jets and hauty cuisine. These are, in essence, childish choices. No different from dolled up sex slaves to depraved adult lusts. Good work, helicopter parents! You have created perfect apes of humanity, brilliant in all ways but those which count. Our lust is always for youth, and yet we discount those who act as we know our priests should. They are merely normal, and the priests depraved. But each of us is trained in stimulus response to candy on offer to the babe within us.

What if, instead of the idiotic conception of the human mind as something whose power can be measured, we were to consider it like a tuning fork, in harmony with the entire cosmos. What if the range from hideous to beautiful were considered a range of gifts, and the measure of the character of their properly named embodiment was the distance between the gift and the congruence of its usage with the health of the entire planet. What if intelligence is analog to beauty, and what if all of this is culturally relative.

Would we ever learn to see as truly hideous the winners who indulge only themselves at the expense of everyone on the planet less fortunate? Would we ever learn to see the luscious bodies on display as the monstrous embodiments of decay they really are? Doubtful. But, you know, that was the narrative which got us to this point. That was the burden of Christ's story. It is not our cleverness which can harmonize with the natural impulses of our planet.

Well, this is tiresome. My voice gets weird when I try to work these things out. I would far rather ride my Walmart (guilty!!) bicycle around town on such a sunny day, and marvel at this beautiful but empty city, decked out in springtime glory, waiting for the fall. Wheeee!!!! (plus, I stopped along the way to get my locally roasted Sumatra, which is almost too wonderful to embody in words).

So Long JD . . .

Yes, I'm of the Catcher in the Rye generation. I'm also of the generation of scholarship - tutelage more properly - where we learned not to implicate the author - the author's life - in our read of his writing (I can say "his" right, since one doesn't say "actress" anymore???). I actually learned about that indirectly from Cleanth Brooks, the man himself, central to the New Critics school. He told all sorts of stories about how William Faulkner was in real life. Is that ironic?

I'm of the generation of those taught by the generation invested in New Criticism. These were my elders, dying out and being replaced by other sorts of scientist wannabes. There is so much scholarship of which I must remain unaware, oh Academy, you gentle tyrant you. Making objects of my dreams. And changing the terms of my understanding, way faster than I can read.

But I cannot possibly be the only one to make a connection between salient facts in the obituary of JD Salinger, and a recent film just coming out on HBO [(and which I therefore won't ever see). Or maybe that's what NetFlix is really for? To bridge the gaps among TiVO, cinematic rentals, and pay-to-watch TV?] Whatever.

In any case, the film involves this autistic woman who's managed to extricate herself from the potential of institutional life to become a prominent consultant to the meat-packing industry. She's the one who engineers the processes leading up to slaughter. She's able, in other words, to translate what the livestock are feeling, into structures which will lull them into their final moment - just as we all should like for ours - without ever knowing what is coming.

This, of course, is a great boon to humanity, by which I mean the humane sort of humanity, not the bloodlusting inhumanity-to-man sort which seems to form most of our truth. With a capital T. To minimize the agony.

So this reclusive champion of our youth (sic) [I'm not talking about the slaughterhouse gal - back to Salinger] was remarkable in his [youth], for being able to score young women cruising the bars on Manhattan [who's cruising whom?].

Oh please, gentle reader, you must see this, right? He was very much like that autistic guide to the slaughter house. He could read the women that directly and, Bill Clinton-like, feel their pain. And he would know what to say and how to behave and where to touch, and there would be nothing that they wouldn't do in reader-response to his power.

We recoil now, ever so slightly, at what might have been his interactions among actual youth were he to release himself from his self-imposed exile. But clearly, readers all [I address you here], he had that same empathy with youth which made him not a literary lion. It put him more in company with the dumbest lambs to whom he gave actual voice. Us. As if acting like Holden Caufield ever got any of us any scores. Predators get the booty.

You know, I think Salinger was an honorable man. He knew what he didn't want to be, and how he could hurt those who might want to love him. His life reads like an Anne Tyler novel. Alone and content in the end. Though there's no way he should be. Either.

I guess his personal habits were as strange as those of James Joyce. And as out of bounds to critics, who run hot and cold on him in almost precisely the same way they do with Howard Zinn, [historian critics, I mean here] the other author I killed off yesterday while in the process of selling my soul back to the University. (If they listened carefully, they would know that I can't be trusted with their secrets.)

So this author, JD Salinger, did lead us all to the slaughterhouse, and wasn't really there to catch us going over that cliff. That was our job. It was us whose voice was granted. We've failed ourselves, for sure.

I read his stories with a kind of hightened interest because I once did head a school for the likes of those game-show geniuses in Salinger's projected family. And just yesterday, having lunch with some University administrator types very directly involved with the local school systems, by work or by parental proxy, I had a chance to remember some early facts of my own naivist (sic) youth.

Way back when we thought that giftedness was a kind of uni-dimensional quality, perhaps representable by a single IQ score (not me, I always knew better). I also had a leadership role in a school for dyslexic boys, which treated them as though that term were some kind of medical diagnosis. That they all needed the very same kind of phonic drilling, which, ironically enough now, really has been shown to bolster the white matter part of the brain which might have been somehow under-exercised. (With the amount of time kids now spend NOT reading, why is this not as epidemic as diabetes???? ADHD? Does anybody even read anymore?)

We know so much more now about Asperger's sydrome, savantism, and a whole array of subcategories which might cause trouble with reading. Trouble with school.  Trouble with schoolmates. We can work that much harder to embrace the differences among our charges, and allow them each to be, herself, empowered. While we sort them out and ever so gently, allow the dull ones to find their way to the various bottoms. The ones without the voice which might be granted to those lucky enough to attend the, well, um, private schools. No matter their native talents.

Cleanth Brooks was a Southern gentleman, and therefore contextually if not genetically disposed to respect and even work to preserve the right of man to present himself formally, and to allow that presentation to stand alone, for itself, whatever the reader might do. Sucks if you don't have that wherewithal!

Now, we exist in a kind of conspiracy theorist's nightmare of the general public inside out private pants. And, well, somehow A Catcher in the Rye (underline, sic) remains right there at the center.

Sure, you know, when your car gets totalled, like so many did yesterday on our Buffalo skyway whose recent improvement engineered a kind of plunging from clear thin air down into a snowy pit of potential death as the wind blows straight in from the Lake. To drift the road such that even if you are a good Buffalo driver, there will be nothing you can do to avoid the pilings up of cars stopped in and by the drifts beyond your incoming tsunami sightline. On the very anniversary of our great blizzard of '77. When I was dropping out on motorcycle, and thankfully away. You see, I want you in my pants. I can't keep myself out of this.

But I must thank you, old JD, for guiding me down that chute as well. Last night I was driving home through white-out myself, preferring the back roads to the Thruway where nutjobs in SUVs would thrill by at the fact of their speed and leave me in their blinding wake. Where semi-trailers with views from up above would envelope me in their fury. I'll take my voided white-out blank, thank you very much. No surprises. Nothing. I'm still here to talk about it. Write? (sic)

Discourse, urges David Foster Wallace, is a life or death matter. Get the signals wrong, and you may betray your tribe; you may be exiled, you may cause your own or someone else's death. It's no wonder, he writes - as one who was on the receiving end of schoolyard brawls - that these rules must be drilled in to classmates. It's no wonder that teachers must rehearse for their charges what they surely know about what it's like to be one [a charge, and not in charge]. I want you to read this book. It will tell you about me understanding you.

Or perhaps we can drop that book now from our canon? This freakish man whose projected youthful voice overshadows an entire generation? Writers can't get him out of their head, I hear, is all. But there's nothing crafted there. Is that it?

When your car gets totalled - should I say totalized? - you have some sort of absolute right to extract from the guy who caused it whatever it takes to set things straight. Sure, in the end, the car will never be quite the same, but if you'd like an entire plastic bumper to be replaced for just one scratch, then that is your perfect right.

If you have a chance to live, although you might be 80-something, although it might cost a literal million bucks which might be more than you have earned in your entire lifetime, then you have that perfect right to demand that it be paid on your behalf. So that you may be a proper gomer in the end? So that someone with diabetes which they never really earned can be deprived? Or better yet, the genetic pre-dispositions.

How hard it must be to relinquish those rights and to tell the one who hit you, hey, give me $25 bucks, and I'll just accept the scratch. You mine. Got yours. Back. Scratch.

Entire houses of cards would then come crashing down, right? The insurance adjuster who writes up, without flinching, the $300 bumper, and the autobody shop which expends the time to make that key-scratch disappear. I know some people who draw a key down the side of their new car just as soon as they acquire it. We should do the same with each other, maybe, so that the real bumps won't be so hard to take.

Instead, we tell the abused among us that they should and must be sorrowful for their losses. They might bury a stillborn child and name it and carry that grief forever. Failing to learn from the Ashanti in Ghana that you should never name a child before a week is up, before which they are only a visiting spirit, checking out the digs, maybe. The priests were instructed that it could do no lasting harm, their touch, right? Unless it results in conceived life . . .

Authenticity is phony! The laying on of hands depends very much upon intention.

You have the right, well, except if you are watching from some upper window, as your car gets bumped in the process of liberation from some parking space. Then, you're just plain out of luck. Or what if you're boxed in? Must you seek out the owner of that inconsiderate car?

What do you do with all that anger, if not mis-direct it against the world? Have a tea party??

What if you were on the outs when everyone else was getting Catcher in the Rye? Must you kill John Lennon? Or must you lay the claim, like Mel Gibson did in life and in his role, that you are the only one to read it right [correctly]? That sometimes paranoids have enemies too? That there is some truth that you just really know, and sometimes there's at least one to believe you? True love in the end?

Scouts honor, honest injun, the dream I awoke with this morning had me sliding off a snowy roof right along with GWB and his Chevy Chase-like sidekick, perhaps in the role of Dick Cheney. As we passed the corner where some sort of satellite dish should be, out into the void which somehow didn't bother me. Perhaps I knew that there would be soft snow to catch me. I looked at George, who knew me as his loyal adversary, me wanting always to bring him down for the sake of the people. I asked him, as he was hanging from the gutter, and I was flying by, wasn't that the thingamajob which kept us safe from terror. That thing which came off - I didn't do it, I swear! - or was already off as I sailed over the edge.

George turned to Dick and asked, "does that mean I won't get my secret porn?" And then he turned to me, and I was laughing almost to the verge of control, and then he started laughing. And I knew that if I could only keep him laughing that hard, everything would be alright. And I woke up. Where's the intentionality in that, I'd like to know?

Of course, I can't vouch for the word-for-word accuracy of my recalling. I give it a shape, right, to play in to recent world events? I invest myself in there too. Well, it was my dream. But I gotta tell you, I re-read the Catcher in the Rye some good long time ago now, and, um, I don't see it. I think I never did. I never could relate with Holden Caulfield. He was some kind of prepster. I was always just a wannabe. Confused and illiterate and never having a clue. But I never did get beat up, quite. And once I helped a nerd pick up his books after they got scattered in the snow by bullies. Once.

And I've died so many times in my life now that I'm pretty sure I'll take it in the end. Quietly. Without wanting to take it all with me. And all.

Carnevale followup

Well, it wasn't much of a reunion, but it was very nice. Absolutely no one I knew, and all my age, except for my dear friend who was their teacher. I don't think those relationships ever quite change, as witness the difficulty letting go of the "Mister", and so I was rather privileged as his friend. These folks were before my time, and therefore went to the school I actually did refuse in my youth, but not for the reasons they indicated - most peers would regard them as dweebs.

I was gently reminded that the school was not so much founded on the IQ test per se, although it was the age of Sputnik, and such instruments were all the rage. More on a kind of mission to combat American anti-intellectualism, which still needs combating, and to correct American prep school notions of who are and should be the elite. An utterly unsupportable mission, beyond the Sputnik age, and certainly through stagflation, as I would find out to my misery.

Still, when you put these groups into a room, just as when you put hundreds of priests in a room, there are some unavoidable observations to be made, all tending in the direction of reinforcing certain stereotypes. While at the same time tempering the ones you'd have without seeing them in a room together.

So, of course, as to Mom, I do have to revise the observation, since however much I'd love it to be her fault for not having good boundaries (my very favorite piece of psychobabble), I do have to own up, if that's what it is, to my own genetic (are they?) predispostions toward hiding out. I am, by nature, very shy.

But hell, even genetics is far too complicated to master. I watched a NOVA special about how science was made to stand trial, yet again, recently somewhere in Pennsylvania just to my south. Now surely some stop should have been put to the very notion of trying science in court (that's a nice phrase, right there, Larry). And luckily common sense ruled. But a little too narrowly, as in the margin would have to be infinity.

Still, there is surely something to the Creationist complaint. Not to their claims. Just the complaint, since scientific certainty is very very unscientific, and always parochial. I've been reading lots about infinity, its limits (!!!), or more properly, the limits of abstraction, and well for sure to claim anything for sure is to claim too much. Lots of lost minds along the trail.

There still remains much silliness about eugenics, back to the IQ theme. I'm remain pretty sure (but never certain) that species differentiation happens when boundaries occur between groups, and not when some creative genius-style mutation happens to the individual. I think the Good Man Kinsey did demonstrate this fact decisively back in the dark ages before sex was polymorphous and perverse right in the University. Well, you know what I mean.

There are no ideal types, nor certain boundaries. So that there has to be environmental change, group migration, and boundaries abstracted from blurred distinctions, before cross mating stops being possible, right?

Ours, for sure, was language, and more recently, that mighty crossroads of consciousness where language became written down. I draw all lines at beastiality. (and incest, thank you very much)

So here we are, slouching toward that, what did Douglass Adams call it, cafe at the end of the universe. That place off which our words only echo, and there is nothing more. Not, surely, understanding, but rather the dead end for tools' manipulations which don't, by their very exercise, attempt a hoist by our own, very precisely now, petard.  I'm talking the red button, or the frog in a pail over a fire global warming, or simply an overwhelming sense of too much want.

This is not a spaceship we can fly, nor ever should want to, remember. Since I do know that my body extends throughout the biosphere, and is not, finally, bounded from my mind (which bounds and bounds, sometimes quite out of control) and that these mysteries, right here in this cosy logosphere, are oh so much less costly to explore.  

Yesterday's post, truth to tell, was made through an impossibly obsolete instrument. An old laptop I can't bear to toss away, steward of the environment as I try to be. I had to laugh out loud, because I actually do have some understanding of what's going on inside that particular black box, at the battle among virus definitions, memory limits, and Microsoft's very very terminal fixation on prolix code, to where simply turning it on to the point of access to my very own ethereal tablet allowed me to complete an entire chapter of Hot Flat and Crowded.  Now that's good irony, right there, Larry!

I have always preferred hand tools. Frankly, I find them faster, and a whole lot less fuss. I think snowblowers are foolish hangovers from, first, when there actually used to be snow, and second, when machinery was still fun to deal with. Rebuilding my boat went a whole lot more smoothly, and just as fast with a hand plane. You know my feelings about 4 wheel drive, but out here in the middle of nowhere, I'm pretty sure I've shovelled maybe 4 times in the past three years. And I get a lot more snow than Buffalo. (and I DON'T have four wheel drive)

OK, end of sermon. Still, oh gifted humans, can't we do something a little bit more noble than to resurrect our old bad ways? Isn't there something properly post-capitalistic which can help us along the way toward more humanity, and a little less hot, flat and crowded?  (Hint, I'm pretty sure Friedman's still stuck on flatland)

oooh, I'm shivering.  I have to find out why my damned stove won't properly catch. Later.  I have a sinking feeling that it's the wood I bought so cheaply. Can't trust anyone these days . . . 

Off to the Mardi Gras!

I'm off this kick for a bit, as I invest my time back into writing up my "book".  It's hard, and I very much doubt my talent.

. . . so I'm off to a reunion, of sorts, for folks who can't stop identifying with the "school for the gifted" I once did head. This, also, is hard for me, since closing the school was so costly personally, and since I am not terribly sociable.  I am very touchy on my various skins, and need just a bit more molting time in my cocoon. My cocoon which has always been a feature of me - likely relating to some not quite clear enough boundaries between Mom and me. She invested too much delight in me and not enough in herself. Made me want to hide all the time.

Sort of like these alumni, some of whom may be too attached to whatever they thought was special about that they associate with the school. Like Mensa dweebs. I think it's abusive to tell kids their IQ. The test has some validity as a diagnostic, and I surely tried to identify the school more with its approach to learning, which certainly wouldn't appeal to all kids, because it was very brainy. The kids didn't need more label than that. And for sure, the best of the reasons so many still stay close is because it really was a special group, some great teachers, and most of all an honest interaction between the teachers and students, built more on respect than instrumental inculcation, which seems to have become what most schooling is about.

So, hi and bye, and more later . . . .