A New Idea about Ideas!

As you know, Faithful Reader, I'm not a big believer in "ideas." I'm not an idealist, and I'm not a goddist, and I'm not even much on the whole notion of a spiritual self which might persist beyond the grave or as it were above this earthly realm. I don't really get the idea of myself, and remain radically skeptical that there is any meaning to the "I" I use just as much or more than anybody who writes or talks or exposes the goings on inside.

But the thing is, also just as much as anyone, when I have something to say I often introduce it by some vague enumeration of the points I'm about to make. Now it would be impossible for me to tell if my exposition retrofits itself into the enumeration I've committed to, or if I really do have some kind of inception [sic] "in mind" which only awaits the words to be "fleshed out," as it were, for someone else's comprehension.

Of course, as I age, I sometimes can't keep hold of these objects in my head, and I find myself apologizing to my interlocutor that I can't remember "point three" or whichever one it was. I know it's there, I know I had it, but I can't bring it back to mind. Just this morning, for instance, I had this idea about what I was going to write about in this blog, and after my shower I had a moment's panic that it was gone.

I also panicked that my day would be dogged by this nagging sense that I'd forgotten something important. But in the event I retraced some of my earlier steps, consciously trying to empty my mind, glancing back across the pages of the newspaper I'd perused earlier, and oh thank the heavens, it came back.

You see I've been trying to rehabilitate my usage of Mandarin Chinese. I watch Chinese TV which, amazingly, is all over the place here in SoCal. I open my mouth in Chinese bookstores, and quite often I find myself fishing for words just beyond the tip of my tongue. I know what it is I want to say, and not in English either. . .

Well, of course this is near enough related to what happens in my native tongue. Again, the ravages of age. I have some clear conceptual construing of some topic clear in my head, but I can't find the words. I feel bankrupt of vocabulary.

Generally speaking, if I just start talking, I can recover the shape of the concept and get across, in the main, what it is I have in mind, and if I'm allowed to keep talking long enough, I'm usually satisfied that I did the job. But for the nagging feeling that there was a word; something more economical which would have gotten the concept across either more quickly or more precisely. Oftentimes, using Chinese, I'll get the right kind of help from the person I'm speaking with. Less often using English.

While speaking Chinese, I have to beat around the bush to make a point, not having the words, although as happens nearly as often in English now, I'm aware that I once did know the word, or someone did, or at least I know I've come across it somewhere once.

This is all, of course, nothing other than a trick of the brain; the way that consciousness, so called, is able or not to pay attention to all its activities. My brain has likely formed its concepts using proto-words, which simply can't make it out into the quasi-tangible cosmos of shared words until they're slowed way down and captured. These proto-words are like a shorthand, the brain dancing over the space where words are formed in a near-perfect analog to the relation my aging verbalizations now have to my once more limber speech.

Except that as a younger man my vocabulary was so much less rich, even if more alacritous for recall. Or was it only that the smaller repository allowed for at least the sensation of rapid recall. I fade, and yet my brain can claim elaboration beyond that it showed when I was brighter. Or someone can claim such for it.

Anyhow, these concepts formed before they can be articulated or expressed are what gets called "ideas." It would be - no it IS - a mistake to consider them prior to language or closer to some ideal form, the way a geometric circle mocks attempts in reality to reproduce it's concept. The ideal shape is caricature, only seeming perfect because it hasn't yet been realized. Or ever.

Mathematics is an economical shorthand, and by its usage we can arrive at things like perfect circles, but even there reality mocks the attempts, since perfect circles remains measurably and thus demonstrably absent from reality.

Together with some really smart friends and relations, I recently had some fun trying to come up with the obviously lacking English-language word for that condition of ironic made in earnest. It seems clear that there is a gap there in English. The closest we could come is 'po-faced' which is awkward at best and whose likely etymology - "potty faced" relates to the look you have coming out of the outhouse, trying to look as though you haven't been doing what anyone you see knows you have been. But without the self-awareness.

And it is just such absence, whose existence now is as certain as the existence of the word you do catch when the tip of your tongue is actually working, which delineates the I which only seems to exist but doesn't. It has always been as faded as it will have been in my grave. Subject to recall, perhaps, in minds around me did they but love me.

Though what business do I have calling it "my" grave? Surely it will not be I who occupy it. It will only be the idea of me, which is all I ever was and shall be.

New Digs

Well, I haven't moved yet, but since I was making a little bit of fun of the idea that peoples' ashes need to be respected, it seems appropriate that my bike ride today landed me in the cemetery. New digs indeed!

I wasn't sure that bikes were allowed, but that worry evaporated the first time someone whizzed by. Lots of folks were moving in today, and there were a lot of fresh openings. Some really beautiful mausoleums, lots with recognizable local names; a few like advertisements for the prominent businesses named after them. The coolest sculpture I saw was of leather-looking couches made of granite. They looked really comfortable, but I'll bet they give new meaning to the notion of chillin'.

I knew I would and eventually did find my grandparents' grave, and that of my uncle nearby. It had to be within sight of Red Jacket, where Granddaddy wanted to be buried. (I imagine he mentioned it once, and it somehow became his most ardent wish for death). All in all a nice wind-y ride.

Along the way, I toured the living mausoleums to days gone by. We have some really really fine mansions in this town, most still available for less than a small house elsewhere. One of the finest is occupied now by this alleged coke dealer and pimp who came here from Las Vegas. I used to have the blueprints for that one in my office, since it was supposed to house the school I once headed, but I think the founder pissed off the family and so it went to the preppy Proddy school, which sold it to, you know, the pornographer dude. There goes the neighborhood.

Of course, I couldn't resist going by the old school; gazing into what had been my office reverted back to a mansion now. Overall, the most powerful feeling I had was to hope that there wouldn't be some former students driving by to make me look as though I were part of the past too, patrolling the place like some kind of ghost. These students are remarkably attached to the place.

I guess I'm ready to check out, though. You know, I was really really angered by the governor of Arizona, giving her self-righteous spiel about how the Federal government hasn't done anything about the "illegals" living among them. As though this is the fault of the new administration she wants to tweak. As though there would be any way to establish "suspicion" of being illegal other than by profiling. Um, hello, that's what suspicion means. What the hell could seeming alien mean other from acting "different???"

But she gets up a head of righteous indignation and lots of folks will follow her, feeling invaded somehow, as if these border crossers weren't also leaving something behind. As if they really want to leave strong and deep connections with people, traditions, land, the burial grounds.

But when there's no economy, what are you going to do? I know Buffalo is holding out better than lots of places, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot of what gets called innovation here. We talk a good game, but mostly things are run by the folks who've always run them, and they're holding on tighter and tighter the less there is to go around. And, um, I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me anyhow. There's always some hidden codicil to the arrangement. A spot in some mausoleum. Spooky.

Hey, I went to the Sabres game last night. It was a pretty big deal, although I feel toward all the hype the way lots of people must feel about ghosts. I mean, I'm into it and everything, and I did the screaming jumping out of my seat high five thing. But I felt askance, as though way too much was being made of what is really just a game. I especially felt this when the crowd roared for the shaking booty up on the big screen when the booty was right down in front of me and wouldn't have been shaking but for the screen.

Here, check it out:

Can't you just see where the megatron in the middle will someday soon become a hologram, with 3-D seeming figures. Maybe you'll be able to watch from inside the action, with all the music and cheering seeming just for you. Don't get me wrong, it was fun. Just not all that fun compared to other possibilities I can imagine. Especially considering the cost these days. And they screen you on the way in as though it could be as dangerous inside as, say, riding a bike on the streets is. Just a little creepy for the scale of the simulated mayhem.

Then there was this big glove throwing fight at the very end, tweaking the rules requiring that its instigator be suspended when the fight is in the last seconds. But it gave the crowd it's punctuation thrill. We went screaming into the streets, "Let's go Buffalo!!!" against a rhythm played on hundreds of car horns.

I'm not saying all these hyper-innovations are bad. I try to implicate myself with everything I say. I do have elaborate ways to say goodbye though, and that's for sure.

Well, moving on then. The car heat's back, the boat is gone, the belongings winnowed way down. Spring has sprung. You know the drill. Don't cry for me, I'm still on this side of all those ashes.

The thought I had was that the arena where the hockey playoff game was played was itself in fact a hologram, or microcosm if you will. The feedback loops for hormonal interactions were compressed, pretty much in the way that the radioactive materials are brought into proximity so that they can "go critical" and create heat or a bomb in a nuclear reaction.

I think that's what the marvels of information technologies is doing for the planet, really. It would be nice if we could cheer together without having to mark someone as the enemy. It would be nice if there didn't seem always to be the requirement for someone to hate, someone to be angry with, someone to act as scapegoat for what frustrates us.

It would be nice if we weren't holding on quite so tightly so something which indeed was once really really nice, but now it's time to move on. Move on in the direction of humanity, decency, bigger hearts and minds. Move beyond endless graveyards and meaningless ritual toward something more alive. Where people who once were loved live on in fact, through words or even pictures or videos that they participated in. These are the only meanings which really cross the boundaries of space and time. Eternity is meaning meant not symbols preserved. Well, if you were to ask me, which I know you're not, but that's what I'd say if you were to.

Busted!

In the ever interesting scrimmage between Google and China, it seems a compromise is about to be reached. This will be hard for us on this side of the globe to understand, but students in China now are so patriotic that they will do the government's bidding without ever being asked. Actually, even when they are admonished strenuously not to do it, they will read Big Brother's mind.

In this country, the unruly teabaggers are as far from the Academy as they can possibly get. There is almost no intelligence there (I don't mean that there are no intelligent people there, I just mean that as a movement, it is utterly chaotic), just inchoate anger looking for an object. The obvious object is the government itself, which becomes almost spooky similar to what we used to taunt one another about as kids: "You have one finger pointing at me, and three pointing back at you! Neaner neaner neenah!!!"

It's astonishing that they accept Sarah Palin as their spokesmodel. Here is a woman who is as far from understanding real life as the Bushes and the Kennedys were, and yet they hold her up as some kind of one of them. Hers is a different sort of remove from reality, sure, but just because you hunt moose in Alaska doesn't make it real. Just because your husband's a mensch doesn't make him like your husband. They live a fantasy life up there, where the government gives them money.

This woman defines the very term "bitch goddess" and she wouldn't even know what that means. She'd think it was some kind of political incorrectness that she has a right to point her finger at. Well, debating her would be an utter waste of time, so I don't know why I bother. I had something to say about China.

(I always have something to say about China). You'd think, wouldn't you? that after what we call the Tian-an Men massacre in 1989, the students in China would be rather more radicalized toward their government. You'd be wrong. Those punished for that uprising were almost exclusively workers. The students were chastised for allowing their privileged understanding to spill out into the streets. The entire event became what we might call an object lesson. The students followed it very closely.

It is not hard to understand the terms of the bargain the Chinese government has made with its people. Their lives are getting palpably better day by day, and the only thing which can put a brake on that would be chaos; not accidentally the very word which the Chinese use to describe the events on Tian-an Men square that fateful day.

The Academy over here is meant to enlighten. The Academy there is meant to rectify. In both cases, this supposition forms a kind of benign fiction, masking all sorts of petty corruption and deviation. (If you think the Ivy League is all about enlightenment, you should examine the power structure of our nation once in a while)

Rectification means putting words in their proper contexts, mostly. Establishing their meaning - their proper usage - against, in China's case, thousands of years of usage. As you might imagine, this can put the brakes on what we celebrate as "innovation."

Corruption is a deviation, which doesn't change the main stream of improvement. It is the purpose of government, in China, for instance, to keep the rivers flowing in their proper channels, since the weather plays chaotic havoc from time to time, wiping out farms and farmers.

One might suggest that they have gone a bit too far now, damming up the Yangtze and in the process wiping out farms and farmers. Not to mention artifacts and history. But one would never suggest that inside China. That would be to invite chaos.

Decisions, once rendered, must be upheld in a single composed face. Of course we, on our side, also only pay lip service to protests which are now as effectively restrained to within the walls of the Academy as they had been before Vietnam. Only the teabaggers spill out onto the streets.

This is not accidental. Our elite students also accept the bargains offered them. The same riches, beautiful women, access to power, and a chance to enter the government and improve it. This also, is trivial to document. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not always pretty.

So, while I actually don't think that Paul Wellstone was killed by some earnest non-agent of the Bush administration who was reading the mind of Big Brother, I do think that this precise thing explains the cyber-attacks from China. I think Google and China should shake hands and carry on, and that the rest of us should get a clue.

The Chinese government is precisely as responsible as ours is, and precisely as corrupt. I don't say that because of some need for fearful symmetry. It just falls out from the actual balance of power, trade and what these mean for the rest of the world. We have a hard time understanding, much less condoning, China's behavior in Tibet, while the rest of the world has a hard time with us in the Middle East. Or with regard to Israel a lot of the time. Which is also in the Middle East, come to think of it. Duh.

Thinking these things does nothing about making them right or wrong in practice. The problem for Tibet is not its being inside our outside the Chinese sphere of linguistic rectitude, which is arguably as tried and trued as our sphere of scientific enlightenment. The problem is rather, what happens to the stuff that's actually valuable which is a part of their culture and only their culture. The living part and not just the artifacts, which I'm sure the Chinese government will be very careful to preserve.

What happens to all the cultures of the earth now that American English has swapped places with the Queen's own Empire? What happens when we're all just WalMart civ?

I don't think any of us should be pointing fingers, but I do think that we shouldn't exactly trust the Academies to do our dirty work for us either. Clearly, life is not getting palpably better over here day by day. But it surely is for the elites. Why, indeed, would they want anything at all to change??

I think there's room for righteous anger about that. Let the dialogs begin!!

Swindled!

Last night, arguing with a very talented lawyer friend of mine (we like to posture adversarially, although it's not a fair match, since he does this professionally) I heard a sad and funny story.

We were arguing about Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, and the Starr commission and framing and responsibility. For the sake of argument, let's say I was taking Clinton's side, excoriating (a word lawyers would never use in a courtroom) Starr for dispensing with procedural justice in his rabid pursuit of some truth with a capital T. It seemed to me that Clinton was simply maneuvered into a position where his answer was guaranteed, and that it would necessarily be at odds with the goods being held in reserve against him.

The other side of the argument in this case being that he was *out* maneuvered, and that Clnton was the one with the brains, the staff, the power to avoid precisely this predicament, and in the end he still lied to the American public, in whose service he had pledged to labor.

Clinton lied, perhaps, because it was a small matter. He lied, perhaps, because the consequences of telling the truth would cause greater harm to the public than the harm of keeping it from them. He'd been cornered, and perhaps he'd proved his mettle?

I don't much care about the proper answer. It makes interesting dinner conversation.

So, there was this judge, having an affair with a university professor. One night, they are caught on tape having "not-sex" (if you speak like Clinton) in the parking lot of a restaurant. There was a small accident - a fender bender in the process of backing out - which entailed a quick "no problem, officer" check written on the spot (not to the officer, to the victim, sorry!). There was a tale of drunken weaving on the skyway bridge, and an arrest for DWI.

You pretty much know which side you should be on, until you hear that the judge's wife was having him tailed, and that the DWI was a setup. A tipoff. The pictures were not captured accidentally. Who knows about the bumper bumping?

Apart from your envy that these participants in an illicit affair could keep it that hot after two years, it's not all that easy to tell where the justice is or should be. At least not for me.

The part that's hard to get beyond though, is that you do know that the scorned wife was the reason that the affair stayed hot. She was being used that way. You also know that these players probably knew that about themselves, and wanted to keep things that way for as long as they could. Well, you don't really know, but you can reasonably surmise.

I don't really know the end of the story, although I have to assume that a few lives were wrecked. Once public, these things make a hard time stuffing them back into the can. It's hard not to see the wife both vindicated and justified. But you don't really know the backstory. You don't really know anything about their homelife, what led up to things. Do you need to? So what if she was just a controlling bitch. Isn't that just a cliche to put down those who outmaneuver you?

I spent part of yesterday in the VW shop. My brakes were always on (take that Toyota!), and it was costing me lots of gas mileage. They'd just completed a total redecoration of their shop, which made the entire customer service experience much more lavish than it used to be. I hardly need to tell you that it made me nervous.

Now, I'm pretty loaded down with technology, and I tend to know how to use it. This was the first time that I remember their quote for the part being so far out of line with the "standard" price on the Internet. They'd suggested I should have the brakes replaced at the same time but I held off, on the reasonable argument that I'm still not working. I made some lame jokes about how they'd better not start serving Cappuccino or I'd start thinking I was among the wrong class of customer anymore. They assured me I'd have to bring my own. (the coffee was pretty good, oh, and I just rechecked and it must have been a fluke, like looking up prices on Travelocity before you move to commit. It no longer looks like they overcharged me.)

Of course it did turn out that there was more wear left "than we'd thought". I couldn't tell if that was said sheepishly. It wouldn't have mattered to me. I've driven this car nearly 300,000 miles, and all the service has been done at this shop, and I'm not about to stop loving them just because they made their showroom and customer waiting area look more like that rip-off place which serves Cappuccino, and which I, of course, eschew.

But there's more to the story, of course. Recently, in Toronto, on a Sunday, picking up my girls from the airport, one of my coils went out. (yeah, I thought there was only one too) The car made it home at potentially great expense to the car, and later on I found that the 'net is full of VW haters and flamers who post about this issue, and how VW sux. But when I'd taken my car in for the brake diagnosis, they just replaced all these coils, no charge to me, fixed the rattle with some duct tape arrangement, and told me how I could get reimbursed for the coil I'd bought myself, on the road, on a guess.

The coil I bought was too cheap to bother searching for its receipt (that plus the time to manage the paperwork). And I know the VW shop was eager to do this for me because the newly official recall would mean that they would be paid for charging me nothing. I'm not stupid. But it felt like I was being respected, treated well, favored. Any damage done to the car was by now ancient history. I mean that rather literally.

But now I have no way to tell which was the bigger factor in my lost gas mileage, and where the permanent injury is. An ambiguity I'll just have to live with.  I think the difference from Toyota is that there was never any danger to life and limb here. Just pocketbook risk. But they didn't exactly come clean about it ahead of time, and who knows if maybe the flamers on the 'net had something to do with forcing their hand.

Trust is rough. The temptations are all over the place - I'm sure the VW shop is hurting as much as anyone else for business.

***

Sorry, had to take a break. You know how it is when you stay out late, have a few drinks (I walked home!). You're ravenous the next morning.

I made myself an omelette. It was incredible. I don't know if you'd like it, or if it was just incredible to me. It was a garbage omelette, full of too much unmatched stuff that I had by the dregs. Beans. Chorizo. Olives. Broccoli. Brie. Salza. Little bits of stuff. I have no way to know if I liked it because I'm an easy sell, or because I was happy to find use for those dregs. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the potatoes fried in olive oil.

The one thing I do know for certain is that you would never be able to eat such a thing in any restaurant. That I know for certain. What I don't know is whether that is because there can't possibly be that much love in a plate for hire, or if no self-respecting chef would even think of that combination, or simply because there would be some guarantee of returns to the kitchen. All I know for certain is that you'd never get that in a restaurant.

I also know for certain that I'd never have satisfied my particular craving in a restaurant.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, OK, sure, you're thinking this is pretty clever, right, trying to make it seem as though these things just happen and I don't orchestrate them, and that they will somehow magically fit right into the story?

I'm not that disingenuous. Please! I make shit up as much as the next guy. I edit. I revise. (the omelette story is true though, and even I know I'll have a hard time selling the notion that I revise. I'm not stupid)

I was going to speak, rather, about how, magically, on the news, as if I were the one to cause it, there are these seemingly coincident happenings. Well, their happening is not coincident, it's plain fact that they coincided. But the randomness of their apparent alignment, that's the seeming part.

First, there's Dick Cheney outing himself as a "big fan of torture." Then there's this guy over in England who pretty much confesses to murder right on TV; how he suffocated his "partner" suffering from terminal AIDS and lots of pain. How he thereby relieved the doctors and his lover all, of what he knew they could never do. And how he was interrogated for 30 hours against the likelihood that he was, in fact, guilty of murder.

Here's the shocker. I want to give them both a pass, both Cheney and the lover. Both of them had the decency to speak their "truths" out loud and in public. Now, you might say that they have little enough to lose. They're old, both of  them, on death's door for various reasons. But there's little enough of that truth telling out there. (there are few enough cars that even get that far!) I'd really like for Cheney to be interrogated, on the power of risking his life, but I'm tipping my hat that he at least says out loud what he's doing in private. When it affects us, I mean. I don't really give a damn what he does in his closet.

How are the rest of us supposed to make good decisions, when everyone's making up stories? How, when everyone's got an angle on everyone else's story?

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Really the omelette was incredible. I'm not about to open a restaurant, but still . . . .

Glorify God - Evolve Beyond Belief! (extinguish godophobia)

Yay! Finally, it's out there, the huckster come-on to end all come-ons, the billboard at the end of the universe, the signpost to eternity, the answer to the question of what's it all about? Life, the Universe, and Everything?

I confess, of course, that this is not original with me. Somewhere on the Internet I found a reference to an actual combative billboard "Glorify Darwin - Evolve Beyond Belief!", but I don't want to be combative. I don't really want to be ironical either. I guess I really do aspire to funny, but there's scant hope of that.

But really now, what is belief? I have plenty of faith that the sun will come up tomorrow (and that if it doesn't there's utterly no point in thinking about it). I have about the same faith that the ground will be there when I place one foot in front of the other.

And I have utterly no interest to know what becomes of "me" after I die. Alright, like Tom and Huck and Joe, I'm curious, but it's not that big a mystery.

That's the part which will stick in some people's craw. But I really don't get why it should. I don't extend beyond my skin, do I? Why should I extend beyond my time span? Why would I want to?

I can't even be defined as me without some shapely boundaries to contain me. They have a recognizable and persistent form, each and every one of them, and like my squiggle on the dotted line when I sign my name, I can see me in an instant, even if others might be fooled.

My motions and emotions also leave distinctive traces, shaped in others' hearts and minds even while not reproducible. Except indirectly through words or movies or others' tellings you might know me. It is the me that's not quite reproducible. I guess they know it when they see it, my friends and family. Most can tell the mockery from the real me, even as I cringe beneath it, finding too much of me sometimes, in what others reflect back.

Sure, I have had plenty of occasion to be unnerved, finding myself where I didn't know I was. Sometimes I even have the pleasant discovery of my very own work, years and years later, still holding up. I can hardly credit it as mine, but then the memories start flooding in. Oh yeah, that was me! I recognize my signature shortcomings, the slip-ups of my chisels, right along with what I did that endures.

I have even more experience with someone mistaking me for someone else that they have known. I guess I have a common enough face, or maybe it's distinct enough that it rings a bell which triggers a memory of someone else distinct? Yeah, that must be it. Surely there's no-one who can be mistaken for moi?

Or what about when some old highschool classmate remembers me and I don't remember him? I get the name first, the face slowly resolving into something vaguely familiar, but still I can't make who he was when I actually knew him come back to mind quite presently. It happens all the time with former students.

I know that I have a weakness in that regard. I find it impossible to remember song lyrics, which is my lame defense against inevitable allegations of being absorbed in myself when I don't remember who you are. Absurdly, I studied classical Chinese poetry in college, a discipline which utterly depends on memorizing a massive literary corpus. Talk about misplacement!

A signal memory in my life was being selected to play Father Time back in kindergarten. I flubbed my lines, and couldn't stop laughing up on stage, holding a staff as I remember, my head covered in a ridiculous white sheet covered in cotton balls that I had made myself.

I have no memory of whether the audience of parents was laughing with me, or if I peed my pants. I do know that no-one ever made the mistake again to put me in any theatrical leads. (Well, except for when I tried to introduce the Chinese acrobats - in Chinese no less! - for a fundraiser to rescue the failing school I then was heading. I'm pretty sure I flubbed that one too).

I'm pretty sure Mom was mortified for me, or was she too laughing uncontrollably? I'll see if she remembers when I see her later tonight. I hate to pin my shyness on her without checking my facts, but let's hope she's quite forgotten.

What you really do remember about someone is what animates those familiar shapes; in particular the face, though one old classmate told me she only recognized me by my walk. I guess otherwise I might have passed unnoticed and unremarked.

I have a moustache and wear glasses, which means that my entire faculty could mock me once, all of them up on stage, putting on five and dime store Groucho Marx noses, and each or was it all sporting maybe one or two of what they thought I might not have seen about myself the way that they did. If it was love or hatred, I had to take it all the same, and will not soon forget it. I am too bashful to claim love, but I will choose it every time. It chains me to my pain, and kept me fighting for that school too, which fight I also flubbed.

Gradually, usually, you remember the person as an identity. In common parlance, you remember their heart; or at least the heart of the thing you remember is whatever it is that does, in fact, remain constant over all the years of our lives. It's not a static quality. It's an animating force. It defines an individual.

Imagine if it didn't! We then would die over and over again in the course of just one "life". I know some tricksters try for that, some sociopathic liars. We hear all the time about people waking up one day to find out who their spouse really was.

I don't mean the sexual infidelities, I mean the really big stuff. We're just fooling ourselves if we don't think the thinker in our pants has a mind of its own. Drawn as it is to beauty it must impale or torture or treat as dirt even while the controlling mind conjurs words like soulmate. And fear defines your makings up too, all liars to yourselves. Especially when you insist that she must like it when you act like a perfect beast. Especially when you think that you must be in control.

But did those people ever really live? I'm not talking about the one who got fooled. I'm talking about the trickster. I've had occasion to wonder if being "born again" can also be a way to hide instead of to own up to who you really are. Disappearing from social commerce to bury your nose in rote-ish words. Escaping to some wilderness. Hiding behind rules of behavior and dress. Formulaic "praise god" greetings.

Why not call that thing which identifies us for our whole life long our heart? I've always liked the fact that in Chinese the metaphor of center - their term for heart - indicates both the literal and figurative center; in English the emotive heart as well as the intellectual mind. They even use a similar term to define their state, although it seems they might have betrayed its character lately. The Central Construct ("Middle Kingdom" so passé).

Here in the West, we still seem pretty caught up with beginnings and endings. With a causal universe - a created universe - and with our own ability to take control, through technology's extension of our grasp, of as much as we possibly can.

Now those Godless Chinese are proving to be even more predatory than we are in their gougings of the Earth. Let's hope they find their Center again, lest their recurrent epochal re-carvings of manly patterns on the face of too-wild earth finally does destroy it. Unless we in the West get to it first. Our race is still for the wilderness, the outer space, the rapture, the end of it all, the perfect perpetual motion machine.

The entire civilization of the globe now is under our American Corporatocratic thumb, as innocently propagated as blue jeans. Let's hope that civilization itself is not destroyed by this mad importation by China, just for example, of something which makes their notion of civilization - the placing of heart in Earth's wildness by bringing the constancy of the heaven's down here to everchanging Earth, which is what the term for "writing", radically, means - let's hope that this fine figure does not get fully displaced by Western machinery for the carving of dragons.

Let's hope we regain our balance first.

In the West we feel still compelled to separate our control center from our responsive emotive center - our mind from our heart - and somehow feel, almost desperately, that when we lose control, we've lost our life. Forgetting that we have almost no control over what others think of us; at least none that technology can help with. Unless you're willing to accept the airbrushed photoshopped object as the person you really do love.

We have lots of control over how we respond to those around us. And a large part of what might get called our character relates intimately to how gracefully we leave off where we don't belong. How we zip our pants. How we enclose our private spaces.

We do end at our skin, yes, and before these last very few centuries of civilized history, our physical control mostly ended at and with our fingers.

Our fingernails such weak tools for gouging, it has been our toolmaking which enabled our peak survival as Earth's temporarily most fit creatures.

Still more recently, we learned to project our hearts out across space and even time, through writing and its related technologies. Through media, more generally. And now our media has become massive in a two-way direction, dear God!

What would have happened in China way back when the written language was always and only a technology for truing hearts toward civilization's center, where a living Imperial Superstar did actually live? Where bureaucrats were trained in poetry, but where the Imperial accountings also worked their way through language. What would mass literacy have done to that Imperial Church? Would it have exposed their deep corruption? Would people have demanded direct relationships to their own truths?

How very nice of Google now, to help China's single party put the governor on this gathering movement, though they say, at least, the fact that something's being blocked is still exposed, if not the thing that's stoppered.

I'm not waiting for the 'Net now dialogic to come awake. But I sure am waiting for the mass-mediated people to do so. And honestly, I don't really know from Left or Right, which side has the best moral compass. I do know who's shouting loudest now. Who lacks all grace. But none who represent us may be the best of us right now. And shouting is sometimes all that's left, when you feel ignored and marginalized.

Now there seem to be some among us, literally enraptured by our technologies, who think that "information technologies" will extend our controlling reach into some kind of infinity. I recently learned that a term had been coined for this: the Geek Rapture. Peels of howling laughter from this quarter (hey, I'm a geek).

Intelligence is as intelligence does, and I don't think it's very smart to separate, even in language, our emotional from our intellectual center. I will never actually care that much for my machines.

When my control ends, I am not dead and gone. I might easily be in love, enraptured by what I find around me, giving myself over to something that rightly is not only more powerful than me, but that I wouldn't want to control even if I could. When my intelligence stops, I might simply be sleeping or drugged or taking a break to let some mediated entertainment in. I might be meditating. I might be listening.

And I also do think that even though I end right at my skin, there is also a me which can be conjured from all the ones who know me and have known me and that sometimes that me is more me than the one I think I know myself. The one I think I inhabit. I mean after all, there are lots and lots of things about myself I just can't stand to look at, think about or emotionally own up to.

My own mom now is at that scary place in her life. She just bought some very expensive lenses to replace the ones she was born with which had become clouded over with cataracts. Thank goodness, as with my home mortgage, the money brokers aren't allowed to discriminate on the basis that I'll be dead before it's paid for.

Well, OK, in the case of my home mortgage, it's just space and land to be bought and sold, and I'm already getting out of that market. I'm too old to keep up with owning a house already (there's a wink in there somewhere).

But I wouldn't have the choice if someone matched the actuarial tables against the paydown mortgage schedule. Hell, if you dig deeply enough, I think you'll find those two concepts even share a set of linguistic or at least mathematical roots.

But I am glad there is no-one telling Mom that she won't live long enough to take full advantage of her new bionic eyes. And I rather hope that when I'm there on my deathbed, as my dear uncle "Bud" was just yesterday, society will be humane enough to give me the choice not to live out my last moments in terror and in pain.

I rather hope that the Godists - the ones who think they have a patent on what God could mean - will have relinquished their stranglehold on what we can say in public and still become a leader. I hope that they will have learned to relinquish their fear, and to find something more like faith than their far too hotly protested "beliefs".

Their faith in God, those Bible thumping evangelicals and Taliban - now there's a fine distinction - seems about as odd as would be my belief if I doubted that the sun would come up tomorrow. I think they have no faith at all. I think they protest way too much. I think they are terrified of what they do not feel, but unlike Mother Theresa, say, don't even continue to act as if they do. I think they are God-o-phobes. There, now I'll lay claim to that term. People who must destroy what they are afraid of in themselves.

I get the power of being "born again," I really do. It's a way to take on a new character, to shed the old that by its being clung to meant clinging to all the mistakes and flaws and fallings short which cannot be rectified except up against something so much more powerful and mysterious and graceful than anything wrought by man.

I get that. I get that truing oneself against words which have rung true across the generations is probably a good idea. I get that there are many many Christians who live their faith, and that young Muslims who strap bombs to their bodies, when they aren't tricked into it, are earnest in their approach to something beyond earthly power.

But the spirit dies even in words. These words, especially when forced into the artificial man-made container of literalness, into which no words - none - can be made to fit, are long dead, and their purveyors are pandering fear now. Love is a far simpler matter than the mystery they would make it.

As if we could interfere with God by taking things into our own hands. As if the Earth would allow it, never mind some reified projection of what man would do if he were perfect. My God is so far beyond man that he doesn't even have a name. Hell, call him Bud.

It is simple care that we must exercise as humans. Not infinite care. Not terrorized capitulation to some human words which inflated hypocrites mesmerized by their own voices scare us into thinking came from God. God doesn't need to speak to me in human language for me to glorify his sacred heart. Hell, I'd say the human language can only get in the way.

I'd say it's long past time to stop the shouting and the pointing fingers, and the sowing seeds of mistrust.

And, for my kicker, I actually do think that love should direct the course of evolution. I actually think it always has. And always will. Any other construing of the far-fetched and nearly infinitely long string of accidents which have become us rings hollow, cold, empty and devoid of meaning.

Hallelujah, for I'm a bum. Today my bank balance passes zero in the wrong direction. Again. But I'll own up to my one and only identity, and challenge every last born-again to come out of their sinning closet too. It is not my "soul" which endures. That is a dusty abstraction, designed to make me wish and long for an eternity which will never come. It is my heart which will never end if only I let if fill now.