Notes While Reading The Dawn of Everything, by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow

Lately, I've been amazed at how often my local library has the books I want to read. Sadly, even though I could use the out-of-house time to make the nice and interesting walk to the central library, I mostly get them digitally. Now I have a backlog.

Whatever else I might eventually wish to say about this book, it surely does give the reader enough remove from Western Ways to see that we here in these United States revert to the aristocratic European form we'd meant to leave, far more than we diverge from it. Anymore.

The book dives into the question about why we seem stuck in our Western Ways which have revealed themselves to be at such a remove from Freedom, and even survivability. Their main objective seems to be to question the popularly received truths that ours is inevitably the social setup that all history would inevitably tend toward.

Whether in terms of political or financial power, the structure is aristocratic, no matter who the controllers are by any other name. If anything, our new aristocrats are more stupid, more foolish, more juvenile and more selfish than even the court of Louis XIV. I shall see if this book answers the question why.

Of course, to me, from the remove of China, I already have an answer. But China has also become more like than different anymore, and so I'll still want to know what better answers might be hinted in my read. 

The book's grand omission, so far as I can see so far, is the impact of the written language on history. I need to know, and I'm not sure these authors have anything on offer, if (and then how) it might be that the written word has created our most recent and now global prisonhouse. It's hard for me to disconnect the written language from our scientific and technological advances.

Of course history requires writing to be history, which means imposition of narrative onto the raw stuff.   

For sure there is a connection to law, as the sublimated and humanized version of subjugation to God's Word. And then, for equally certain there is the tabulation and recording of money hoards, and their transmutation into property and title (as the root of all evil).

But I think these authors are leaving the obvious alone. They deconstruct our projected histories according to a meticulously scientific method. They unsettle the seemingly obvious progressive timeline, where the "discovery" of agriculture is conceived as a unitary event, which sets us on the way toward our constrained bureaucratized state of complexity, which we can't seem to imagine ourselves getting beyond.

But these few observations threaten to paint these authors as just a newer sort of essentializer about what it means to be human. Or in other words, they stretch humanity to be coterminous with our genetic biological advent, where most of us would place humans in history, which means written history (along with our fantasies about what went on before history, which it is this book's main burden to reveal).

The answer I read for is about whether there might be a way to escape the prisonhouse of the written word without leaving history altogether. A way through instead of a way out. I think that's what they aim for as well.

It seems harder for me to trash our technologies entirely than it does for these authors. I want to keep my feeling that there might yet be something worthwhile about what we may indeed foolishly construe as our human ascendance. (The foolishness would be in our destruction of our earthly body, which makes us cancer, the single most powerful metaphor on offer in my other recent library reads, which would be the works of Ibram X. Kendi.)

Perhaps it is just that our preoccupations focus more on physical pleasures, offered or withheld, than could the primitives which precede us. Perhaps that's what entraps us. But if we are obsessed with pleasures, that might make us collectively one with all of life, which evolves toward fitting in some niche, which is made by all of other life? 

As a whole, must we be cancer? Or might we be fitting in to something even greater than our earthly body? Might we be a channel for the grander schemes of evolution. A scheme which would even entail the destruction of individuality among us. A reversion, in false historical terms, to the most primitive state of all. We become the rhizome, the media for some message that there is no one to read.

And then what will that sort of life look and feel like? Well, no inside, no outside, it will feel like nothing. Which could be a kind of nirvanha, right? Right?

Read on, read on, and see if you are liberated or if you are trapped. Really, this book is only about whether our own internal subversives - those whose books I seem able to find in the public library - have ever been real and in the flesh, or if they have only ever been jesters to the courts of power. Rhetorical devices designed to challenge and seeming to want to subvert the powers that be, but only ever actually bolstering those powers by their own inevitable and highly regularized failures.

How shall we succeed, is the question I want answered.

In partial answer, I would like to offer a smashup of the early reference in this book to Gregory Bateson's "schismogenesis" with Johan Huizinga's calling out of agonistic contest as the "play" which unites us with all animal life. Play is the realm of freedom, that thing which these authors now attribute, in debate, to introductions from American native peoples.

Or, in other words, our recent history is marked by a taking too seriously of our truths. We offer academic degrees in seriousness, and so the sides take up, in deadly earnest, their disagreements with the other side. As Bateson points out, each side moves to some sort of opposite extreme from the other, as now our Red and Blue teams do. The result is, of course, polarization and anger, as, perhaps, between the sexes which is one of Bateson's examples from the “savage” world.

And so the possibility for success might be prefigured in the comedic processes of queerness and transgender, but also in the raw comedy calling out each team for its exaggerations. It only seems that there is no common ground, which is not the reason for our deadly anger at one another. Rather it is our deadly anger which erases all the common ground, which does, in fact exist.

Pull the clothes off our representative leaders, and you will find harlequin fool facing off against harlequin fool; the people having willingly given over our every freedom. 

It would seem that non-Western "primitives," among other things, have a better sense of humor than we do. They might not take themselves so seriously, just as Huizinga once thought about us more recent Americans in contrast to the seriousness of European and Chinese politics. Now we follow the inevitable grim pathways of all imperialists, and we charge along as seriously as did those damnable Jesuits before us.

Would that we could mock our scientific and technological advances! Well, I sure do! There has never been a more Arlequin Sauvage than our kidlets riding their Unicorns worth billions. There is nothing more silly than a sexy car as apex object of desire. Inequality and even lack of freedom may be the inevitable result of divisions of labor according to economic valence, but our arrangements are grotesque by any measure. And most of us do laugh. 

So here's a definition of time, in human terms. Future is a place where things have yet to happen. It can be a source of dread or hope or even ecstasy or despair. But the future is never thought to be the cause for what happens in the now. Primarily, that's because it's not a fact yet.

A fact is something whose causal relation to the now can be proven, in a way, theoretically. An idea can only be related to a fact by way of some sort of documentation. Otherwise, an idea can only be a goad toward some future or other.

Now if I am right (and of course I am) that mind has always been an aspect of reality, since at least the Big Bang, then the distinction between past and future becomes much more interesting. And our problem in the present is transformed. 

Just now, those of us on the literate side of the great red/blue divide feel almost nothing but dread about our collective future. In part, that must feel like a tremendous sense of loss. We've had a near lifetime of experience with our cherished democracy persisting despite the idiots - charlatans, cheats, snake-oil peddlers - who have always been in charge. We developed a sort of faith in the system.

Mostly, we've experienced our fellows as idiots who don't understand the pleasures of comfort over extravagance, good wine over a good drunk, travel to wild places instead of to Disneyland. We've been content to see them deluded by cartoonish religious beliefs, mostly because it keeps them passive. And we've pretty much assumed, qua Steven Pinker, that history moves in an anti-racist ameliorative direction.

But now none of us can imagine how to get out of the mess we've made. Global Warming has become our catch-all, which manages even to lump into its bin all the reddening folk who seem to want to destroy any and all dreams of democracy in the name of a fantasy that things were oh so wonderful in the recent past. About the only thing that reds share with blues - our common ground - is a dread about the future.

Each group probably thinks the other has taken the red pill (blue pill? I honestly can't keep them straight) where fantasy replaces reality wholesale.

Anyhow, our overall trick is to replace dread with something toward excitement. Sure plenty of blueish people do that by way of the cool whiz-bang of our inventive recent history. But those darned redsters keep wanting to tear it all up with their coaling monster trucks.

So which of us is falling into the Somerset Maugham Razor's Edge trap of thinking that if we can think it, it can be real? Which of us is destroying our collective future by our dread of it?

Now along comes this contrarian, anarchistic, view of humanity which I want to believe in just simply because I like the authors so much, but they posit a pre-written language sort of consciousness that I just simply can't see. The writing on the wall tells me something different.

The Writing on the Wall shall be the title of my upcoming science fiction book, which will be about this hinge in time where present and past swap, in a way, and the writing no longer predicts or foretells or guides us into our futures, but as though light started to go backwards, is coming to us from a future which is as far from us as the stars. 

Not everything important is physical Larry Darrell. That's the name I was given as an outlier space cadet at Yale, when we had all just read that book. The only thing I had in common with the prepsters. I did, of course, deserve it. Already a classic, and old. But we had not yet escaped its thrall. 

I was, of course, a mistaken admit who made it in the back door of the engineering school.Worth David  - now there's a name right out of fiction - told me so by a look. He corrected course quickly, to allow the institution more certainty that its recruits would uphold the fiction of merit and talent and be out mostly for themselves, and eventually their alma mater. Most certainly yes.

And so which team, red or blue, betrays the promise of anti-aristocracy? That's the bigger question than the rest, no matter how caught up we all are in that trivia.

To put the matter into other words, has the written word become our prison house, or might it yet be our redemption. Read on, Sailor Moon, read on. Notes from the future take no time at all to reach us. They have been there all the time. It's the parsing takes time.

And nope, no Julian Jaynes, no Johan Huizinga in these authors' bibliography. Tant pis. We all have our blind spots and shortcomings and can't keep up with everything. Hardly. But the term "homo ludens" does appear. Shall I doubt their documentation, then? Of course to cite Julian Jaynes is to court ridicule.

But here is the reason why the globe is now overrun by the imperialistic and very racist police state: it's because we're in a mad dash to our future. We're on the move, and like societies everywhere, we don't dare to allow ourselves to be pushed off course. Our forebears also clamped down while on the hunt.  

The Trumpers are right to detect a kind of illicit coercion in all the sound scientific advice they're meant to ingest. They're right that it's a false future that's being held in trust. That we have construed a (virtual?) state of perpetual warfare, and that's why we're "stuck" (to use these authors' word).

This is a major insight from this massive book. Many societies which predeceased ours had cyclical periods of control and anarchism. The control was never gentle, but the anarchism mostly was. The control was focused on the capture of a kind of annual  plenty. The Buffalo Police of the American plains would viciously corral everyone to corral the Buffalo. Once the plenty is gotten, they revert to gentle anarchy.

And so here we are, so very excited by the plenty dangled in front of us or on our screens. And we want to squash everyone in our way. Some - the Trumpers - are saying enough already, leave us be. We don't want no stinkin' yacht to take care of. The rest - the literate - are just plain excited by the ever-elaboration of high culture, and want to know where it might end. 

Slowing down would be the thing, wouldn't it? But alas, all of us are addicted to speed.

In the back of my mind, and perhaps in the back of everyone's mind, while reading this book, is writing. While focusing on the likely equivalency between the political savvy of primitives and moderns, these authors do conflate pre-literate and post-literate humanity. They make a good case, in other words, for the fictional myth-making nature of our grand political histories, which move Biblically from primitive to modern, while apparently ignoring the forward march of science. 

Who is the sinner and who is sinned against here? It is hardly arguable that the explosion of technology in our contemporary world is disconnected from the warmaking and prodigious bloodletting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Now, we have made the emergencies permanent, but in a tiredly positive sense. We are feeling on the brink of breakthrough, and have for quite a while. Therefore the full regime of control as deployed by the written word is being deployed 24/7/365 as led by these United States. 

The trouble is that you can't follow science if you can't read, and so it was inevitable that the hoi polloi would, as these authors do, conflate political with scientific (anti-religious) thinking. Oppressed politically, the non-literate naturally assume that the oppressive forces extend to science. All authority is bad, unless it be a permanent jester-king, Buffalo Bob's Howdy Doody - Ronald Reagan in all his forms - who has always been meant to amuse us to death. 

Along with the technology inevitably comes social media. But social media with its algorithms of hate-concentration (this is just a law of nature, since anger promulgates far faster and wider than love) misses the main point. Which is that in our red counties, people still check in with one another. That is how they form their political opinions and actions. There is an hermetic distance now between urban and rural, and it is the distance of art from colloquy. 

Scientific discourse is political discourse in only the metaphorical sense. And vice versa. It is our figures that are mixed up. Private property is no requirement of the sciences, and in many cases has become its enemy, where money leads any discourse now.

And, back to the main point. If we are to become hopeful again about our collective future, we will then have to let go of the imminence of completion. We will have to recover seasonal ways of being rather silly. We will have to, periodically, issue get out jail free cards to all those who sinned against our ritual kings when we were stuck in the permanence of the hunt.

* * *

Anyhow, as I continue to read along in this lovely book, I am becoming rather convinced of its main thesis (at least as that appears to me so far, about halfway through). As humans apparently always will, we have imposed our narratives backwards across the vast expanse of time, and seen there all the signs of a narrative progress toward where we are today.

These authors are therefore solidly in line with scientific thinking, which takes evidence first before creating their narrative. They have a theory, sure, which is approximately that subjugation of man by man is not the necessary end of history, along with, of course, exposure of the equally false corollary; that further "progress" will get us beyond this local aberration. Here I find more true believers in human agency, so long as that agency makes allowances for something beyond rational economic ecological adjustments. So long as there is room for quirk.

It must be in the back of every reader's mind that they will have to explain away notions of scientific progress as well, along with the general certainty that this follows, more or less inevitably, upon the advent of writing. Certainly, they will at least localize our particular scientific fluorescence, perhaps following upon the WEIRD thesis.

As I might say myself, science is as stuck as everything else about our now globalized ways, and I hope and actually by now believe that the arguments in this book shall help us to get unstuck. I am puzzled for a moment when they declare that there have been no real scientific breakthroughs since Einstein. Perhaps to them, as to me, it's the physics which really matters?

I awaken this morning after the dire warnings yesterday of a wind storm. Funnel storms have churned a path from Arkansas through Tennessee, centering on Kentucky, as long as any recorded in history. The crows (are they ravens?) have returned to what I lately discover is their highest Buffalo concentration, just beyond my windows. What does their noise portend?

At the very least, I am convinced of the unity between private property and the narrative construction of an individual and highly specific self, housed within the boundaries of our skin. We have reduced agency to these terms as well. And we shall - we must - soon discover the fiction of this arrangement for our thinking right along with exposing the fictions of our grand stories for geologic time.

As these authors describe cars, whose insides are legally inviolate while their disposition and usage are incredibly circumscribed by not only law but by infrastructure and even, dare we say it?, civic norms. (Of course those norms have been massively disrupted in cities now, where loud and law-breaking two and four wheel Mad Max vehicles scream through the nights) . . . as they describe cars, they will certainly describe humans. Ownership of our fetishized self is as much a fiction as are the national boundaries.

Liberty is not available to those who fetishize narrative eternal life. (I also just completed Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway) There is no necessary progression through the agricultural "revolution" to enclosure to the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons also describes the tragedy of dividing of be-souled humans from the rest of life.

We shall see. The crows have dispersed with the sunrise. I remember that the Mad Max marauders are far milder and more funny than that term allows. There are also electric skateboards and unicycles and proliferating bikes. Perhaps my thinking has calmed.

So back to cars for a moment - that focal point for all that is wrong with the way we live now. Our mediated lives tend to lead us to think that the solution to cars is less polluting cars, when the only real solution is not to want the particular life which allows us to live, even in cities, without really having to interact with anyone outside our small circle of friends. 

The same lens needs to be applied to the meaning of all this communications technology and artificial reality. Does it solve a problem or exacerbate one (which might, as ever, be a goad to evolution)? What change in our consciousness - our sense of self - could change this? What are the powers which are desperate to keep us wanting what we want, and how do they infect our lives? Is it even possible that the Trump reaction is actually salutary, in a cosmic sense?

Horror of horrors, right? But where is the desperate rhetoric about what is going wrong lodged, and whom does it serve? Why are we meant to feel the precarity of the anthropocene and the inevitability of cataclysm if not utter ecological and economic collapse? Should these sorts of exhortations lead us to double down to preserve what we have or to dismantle it? We really can't seem to decide. 

Urban elites seem divided between thoaty exotic sports cars (I suppose one would have to include Beemers and Benzes and newly cheap Maseratis and the Japanese luxury models here as well), and the quicker and more acceptable to the authorial elite Teslas and their potential descendants. Meanwhile, the ride of choice in the redder counties is the pickup truck, around whose bed men commune and communicate. 

Could it be that the social networks are not powering social polarization and anti-literate chaos? Could it be that those outside the city still do actually know and go to church with and talk to each other? And form their takes on the world that way?

As tempting as it is - and it is really tempting - to see everything about the Trumpers in terms of racism and even white supremacy, the urban centers remain largely defined by exclusive neighborhoods if not by exclusive politics. Who among us participates in that politics to the level and extent of rural churchgoing?

If one doesn't read all the urban rags but listens instead to the likes of Rush Limbaugh (R.I.P.), or Hannity or that Fucker Tucker, or all the other fabulously wealthy exploiters of ignorance, why, really, wouldn't one be fairly certain that there is a conspiracy afoot which considers its opposition to be a Conspiracy of Dunces. 

I'm about to read this other book, which I consider to be a tract of the opposition. I am certain that its arguments will proceed conspiracy style. It's called Life 3.0, and it will reduce life the universe and everything to that old hardware/software saw. You won't even know what's been denied existence by omission. And I, for one, will be horrified that there are people who actually buy and believe this shit. 

Can't we please just get beyond conspiracy theorizing?

This book Life 3.0 will take to absurdity the procrustean logic which is deconstructed in the book I'm reading now, The Dawn of Everything, which is co-written by an anarchist who wanted to help guide us out from our current nightmares. 

The corrective lens The Dawn of Everything applies to our grand histories of the past can be and must be applied equally to our suppositions about our collective future. Already - halfway through - I find myself deconstructing apocalypse as yet another Platonic Christian imposition. And here I'd thought it was scientifically considered opinion, just like the grand histories Hariri and Diamond wrote.

Nope. Just more mythmaking. It's not that global warming isn't anthropogenic, it's just that the earth has turned more wildly many times before. One gets the feeling that we actually do still evolve and are still evolving and that far from being the end of history, we are closer to its beginning. Pushing back the timeline of the Anthropocene - which the book also implicitly does - also highlights our recent accellerationism.

Yes indeed now is far "worse" than when the dinosaurs were killed or when the earth was crusted in ice and human habits and habitats were squeezed. But as we are, we are hardly poised to prevail in our current disposition. What comes next becomes far more interesting and not necessarily deadly.

Whatever we explode into, supernova-like, it won't be Life 3.0. That sort of cognition riding on fully describable hardware is so very YESTERDAY. The belief system of (mostly male) children who don't even know what love, literature and good living are. Who fervently believe that they have driven the godhead from existence permanently and for all time by good common sense. Now that right there is just nuts.

Right there at the beginning, the author declares:

"But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose. Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless.

He then goes on to describe Larry Page as some kind of change-the-world genius. Really?!? These dudes are the reason I should have hope?

I mean the arrogance to suppose that without us the cosmos is meaningless! Our physics tell us that we can't know. What we can see is always from our past, and if one were to suppose that life develops according to the same universal timeline that life on earth has, then we shall never know, even before our inevitable flameout. And so we should fill the cosmos with us? I'd say that right along with Larry Page, these AI folks extend (to infinity, if they have their ways) our private property enslavement culture of totalitarian empire.

Apparently, I am the only non-Godist who understands that there is no time required for emotive contact. God Himself is, of course, just another anthropomorphic imposition on cosmos, in precisely the way that AI is. We reduce life, the universe and everything to our parochial terms and then we declare it ours. I'd say that's what's beyond boring.

We have always been in contact with other life, and it's not cognitive in the way that math could describe it. We just simply aren't paying attention.

Well back to more reading about what is and isn't "common sense."

* * *

And now, finally, by the summary chapter, I see it! As the discoverer of an earth-shaking scientific principle that I've strived to share for most of my life, I've also tortured myself each time - and it's only moments here and there - that I wish for fame and fortune. I see myself being interviewed on TV, say, where I will know what to say, when I can't while writing. 

But I don't need no stinkin' audience. I need only a single interlocutor, and I can't find them.

And so I realize that there is terrorism - and slavery - implied by individualism. If only my name were a title, shared by those in my geographically dispersed clan, I would be able to remain calm about my imminent death, for whatever reason it will come. Though I may never experience a spirit dream of sufficient power to marshal all my clan's power, I may know when one comes along. I would recognize it by obvious ways without possibility for trickery or secrecy, because it would be written on the landscape, in the weather, on the evening news. 

That is what money is for. Selfiness. GDP. GPP. MIT. And all I am allowed - no longer allowed - is the brief ecstasy of copulation. Now even that has been cleansed of smell and shaved and rendered into a commodity with almost all fetish power leached away, though I may still make claim to how amazing it really is to be slingshot into space. Changed forever. So profound. Orgasm and away, with Big Boobs, eh Bezos you big rocket prick?

My nightmare would be to awaken as Zuckerberg. Abandon hope, for your script is written. What does it profit you to gain the entire world? Oh one name men of the world all Ga Ga for the very same thing. So singular. So detached from all that keeps the rest of us alive. 

Sour grapes? You say. Well, I can't know. I don't know. I know that the plot of my own life interests me, and that it remains almost entirely unpredictable. And I'm nobody's slave.

Cycling down toward the end of the book, I find myself feeling hope and despair both. The hope, of course, is the loss of the feeling of inevitability toward the end of history. We've been here before. Perhaps not to this scale, but the pattern is the same. And so the Trumpers fit into the longer sweep of history, and are no more (certainly not less) deluded than the rest of us who have been both mystified and taken in by the arrangements of our modern world. 

As have peoples eternally, we don't even recognize what we've lost, even in the face of extremes of lost liberty (properly so defined) and lost truths and an apology for democracy that could not be more forced, and grotesque for that. And so the despair is that it must always be this way, cycling toward and away from more communal and congenial forms of life, perhaps because the strains of any sort of living can always lead to dreams of something better.

And so I am left wondering what can be preserved? Could we who have inherited the roles of priests and nobles in our brave new world extrapolated from all mystery come down from on high to understand the misery of the masses of people who feel so pushed around? Could that even be what 'woke' could come to be? If we could ever even take the esoteric out of that term.

At least I have a model for our future. We will have titles and not proper names, and we will share these and be therefore less alone. The ego will dissolve as will the state, and we shall be once again a part of nature. Could there be anything more certain than that?

Well, spoiler alert, by the end of this book the authors make a pretty good case that it really is all about private property and its genetic connection to slavery. It's about money, and if agriculture is important, it's because cereal grains can be counted and stored and are fungible forms of edible energy. 

We are not so smart. Our cities are no more complex than the many which came before we could write history. In most ways, our cities are far simpler. We are constrained in our behaviors in ways that were never even imagined before. We actually believe it's all hardware/software and that we are somehow different from all of life because we are conscious. And our definition for consciousness - like any good conspiracy theory anywhere - is perfectly circular. A perfectly empty concept. And round we go, above the earth and under our waters and never even touching life. Just gawking at how boring it would be without us.

Oh Please!

And Thank You Graeber and Wengrow for this wonderful book. It has given me actual, tangible, scientific hope. I'd thought hope was gone, and I am very glad to be proven wrong!

Virtuous Reality

There's been a lot both in and on the news lately, about how virtual reality gets mixed in the mind, in memory, with what's really real. Those guys out in the American desert who fly the drones which cause the collateral damage in Pakistan, say, they get PTSD too. And we were all afraid that they were killing with impunity. I was.

There's also stuff about how brain scans reveal some cognitive response in some patients who had been thought virtually dead. Who had been supposed to be existing in a "persistent vegetative state" PVS gomers I think they must call them. And I can just hear the pro-lifers now spouting all sorts of I told you so-isms, for what is more likely an analog to the harmonic vibrations which can be generated one guitar to another.

Don't you think your interlocutor depends on you to raise the stakes of her being? Did you think that you could be conscious and alive all on your own? Are you that righteous?

The Intentional Fallacy, from back in the day when my teachers were studying literature, is when you suppose that the author, of a book, say, but you could as easily call it a life, has some point to make, some conclusion she's leading you toward, some accomplished state of mind that he would lead you to, also. As if the author weren't there reading along with you, rehearsing words which if they could take you they'd take him also, to that place of something seeming higher than where you'd started.

I've never talked with God, and I'm pretty sure I'd beg for the same good drugs they use over in Iraq to keep our soldiers killing if I ever heard him talking back. That would just flip me right out. Seriously.

God doesn't make nearly so good an interlocutor as you do, and you don't even exist (either?), but you know what I mean. It's just crazy to talk to God and expect an answer. Unless you know where and how to look, of course. But that would be like opening your mind or something, not exactly the strong suit of most religionists.

It's pretty scary to open your mind. Really. I've tried, and failed in every which way direction since Sunday. But I haven't given up yet. Just today, as I was perusing the front page of The Buffalo News on my phone as I am wont to do, there was this young seeming thug (not sure which part the seemingness belongs to) who had bragged about all his crimes up on Facebook. And the cops were crowing about how stupid he was and how easy he made their job. And the commentators were piling on. At least we're smarter and prettier than that guy.

And nobody can see that this guy was just crying out for love? It's scary, really to think that the whole world is not made up of sociopaths, psycho-killers, and that maybe nothing really terrible would happen if we were to leave our doors open, like the used to up in Canada, if you want to believe Michael Moore. I do. This guy didn't want to be so alone.

We can find virtual love on our phones, and virtual friends on Facebook, and can make the claim that shoot-em-ups in virtual reality don't do a bit of damage to our minds. And we can even keep ourselves virtual when in real touch with human beings who we just take advantage of for our pleasures. Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby. As if the logo-wear could make us authentic?

I think I told you, right, that I went out - yeah it's pathetic, there was me and maybe one other person in the theater - to see Up in the Air the other day? I would have taken you, but I had other things on my mind. Anyhow, there's gorgeous and single (even I can see it) George Clooney whose Dad used to broadcast the news here in Buffalo, non sequitur, but I couldn't resist, playing himself down to the core. And there's this scared and snotty Cornellian (that's Ivy, right?) top of her class chick who's going to save the company all this money by replacing face to faces with telepresence. You know, telepresence, that better than reality you find yourself in on reality TV?

Of course, nobody's allowed to look even nearly as hot as George Clooney (even I can see that), who we envy mainly because he's such a whistle-while-you-work kind of guy even though he has absolutely nothing going on for him in real life. He fires people for a living, and they project all their hatred onto him. And still he goes on whistling, saving up the frequent flyer miles, hating when he has to be home, alone, in his vacant apartment.

I have a cousin who is severely schizophrenic (he won't be reading this, so it's OK) who calls me maybe once a week so we can recite a prayer together. I've got him in my friends and family list so I don't have to think about the minutes to the Verizon evil gods of communication gaming my limits. He was at the ice-breaking moment for drug remedies for schizophrenia, even written up in the New York Times in an article about his Ivy league savior. But I love my cousin, and don't mind saying the prayer with him, even though I've never been able to memorize it. It's nuts, you know one of those ". . . and for the sake of his sorrowful passion" things which can make you numb to any sense at all of what Jesus really might have been.

I have no idea if I do it for him or for me, you know, to assuage my guilt for not being there, presently, in his life. I confess that I have to keep my distance from crazy talkers, because they start to make sense to me, and then I get sucked a little bit into their paranoia, you know, whether it's about the Federal Reserve, the drugs that were administered to keep the secrets about the missing Kennedy or Nixon tapes, the Trade Towers being doped, the don't-walk-on-cracks metronymic mantras which have to be repeated or you'll lose your mind.

My cousin walks all over town - you've probably even seen him in your town - pretty deliberately, eyes ahead, almost no matter the weather. Yesterday I walked all the way downtown msyelf, probably looking like some crazy, all alone through the slush and I didn't even have proper footware. I don't have proper footware. I eschew proper footware. I think Nike's pretty evil.

But you know, it makes me happy, to see things that I never notice driving by; I like to experience the architecture from the ground as a real person might, and to get a sense of neighborhood. Of course, I'm utterly alone in this, which does make me a little strange, and if I were to do it every day, people might start to notice. I had a goal, though. I wanted to score some of that Sumatra they roast right there in the shop downtown. I was too embarrassed to tell them I walked the whole way for my pound of beans. I wasn't sure I'd make it back. But here I am. Fresh coffee is worth the walk. They sure don't have it in Starbucks, where they brag about "only three months". Give me a break!

The really sad part is that as you approach the center of Buffalo, you can't avoid the sense that you are in some ghost town. There are new buildings going up, but not so fast as grand older ones get mothballed. This area can have the highest hotel occupancy rate in the country because of cross-border shopping when the Canadian dollar buys so much more here than there, but even still the central hotels can't stay in business??!! Even while they're building new ones just a couple of streets over? Footsteps echo on the pedestrian mall. Stores are shuttered. It feels sad. It feels exactly like that ghost-town in Nevada somewhere that I found on my motorcycle running out of gas, which made it a pretty stupid diversion from the main road. I spent the night there, alone, not sure if I'd have to walk the long way back out in the morning along the dirt road to literally nowhere. Sorry, I didn't have to tell you about that. It just makes me sound weird.

And yet, if you follow the cars, which it seems don't even know how to stop anymore, which is a funny pun about Toyota I got right off the news, there's plenty of life and commerce all around. Just not at the center. Anymore.

I guess the problem now is that our cars just drive-by-wire, and so there's no real direct connection between your touch and what the car thinks you want it to do. All the other companies are doing emergency pre-emptive software "downloads" now to their drive-by-wire cars, to be sure that they don't get embarrassed the way that Toyota has been. And they talk of the electronic "content" of cars soon approaching something like 40% of what will be their costs. And we don't want to ride trains, where the cars are in physical contact with one another???? Because, what, we're afraid they might go off the rails every once in a while and kill some tiny fraction of what the cars do? Or that the engineer might be sexting?

We seem pretty math challenged in this country. Not understanding that if you multiply points of failure, failure pretty much becomes inevitable, ubiquitous, and certain. You could, instead, multiply the points of success, you know, by hanging back from taking advantage, by not always looking for that hundred dollar bill dropped from God, the way my cousin once found one.

Think of how much they (whoever they is) have to pay people now to sell their soul. I know you think it's just criminal how much more CEOs get paid now than the labor whose productivity has gone right through the roof. I know you think it's criminal how much more those Blackwater thugs get paid than our patriotic soldiers. I know you think its a travesty that some trailer trash might get rich on the Lottery and then just make his life worse because he doesn't know how to handle it. But consider how much value this all places on the soul that you haven't yet sold out yourself. The one in touch and real and undermedicated and not even thinking you ever could hear God's voice, even if you wanted to. I'm using "soul" metaphorically, in case you couldn't tell.

I think it's ours to turn around any which way we want to. The economy has finally caught up with reality. Virtually.

Lost Faith

Isn't there some brain research which compares religious rapture to falling in love? This must be the same sort of chemistry which keeps runners running to get that endorphin high (which I have never known; knowing only the lalalalalala in my head from working out to the point where I could keep going forever). That same sort of chemistry which keeps people coming back to church on Sunday, and it must be that much better than whatever I get from watching a movie, a play, reading a book, which also feels like approaching some sort of high.

Over its edge, people say and do and believe really crazy things. As if they get pulled into their own narratives; their own private stories which have such a powerful trajectory that they can take over from reality itself: People climb into their personal story and can manage some conclusion so powerfully that it becomes an embodiment, in seeming reality.

Christ, for instance, of course belongs only in the heart, and yet the idea of embodiment - the embodied idea - is so powerful that it can catapult true believers out of all sense. Ideas are such nonsense. Truly. What's real is so much more so.

I had something like an idea of myself. A story of my life. Which can be made to look pretty OK. But the trouble with such tales is that they can collapse in an instant when glanced at from some other angle. When a single word, say, turns that wannabe conclusion into something different from what it seemed to be becoming. A twist. Like finding yourself in some video and then realizing who you really seem to others. Cringe.

This must be a kind of test; who is used to seeing themselves depicted and still feeling proud? Is that something only trained actors can do? Who else could survive the public stage? I have only one professional photo of myself, which I allow as my profile picture. I think I stole it. But it makes me cringe less.

I listened to the great great grandson of Charles Darwin explaining the man to Terry Gross yesterday on NPR. Darwin was so close to us in time, and he did struggle also with the faith around him. His own faith, one must suppose. His legacy scholar great great grandson spoke so slowly and deliberately; to an anglophile American he sounded erudite, but even Terry seemed to need to interrupt him from time to time as he rehearsed his slow way to some point.

She sounded embarrassed too, to ask the question about how it was to re-present his ancestor's life here in America, where we seem to have a lot more propensity than they do in the old country, to believe outrageous narratives. There are so many Creationists here. And the title of the film to be produced on Darwin's life - "Creation" - seems such a blatant tweak.

Well, of course he expressed gladness, this legacy thinker did, that there would be strong challenges to the thinking which in its time was worked out with real agony and cost to its thinker. A kind of survival of the fittest narrative, was the contest in question, and Darwin's legacy must welcome it.

In some ways, I can lay claim to be microcosm of America. I never would read when I was a child. I was therefore uncivilized. I know that this was directly related to what I can identify in retrospect as emotional incest. Very mild. Very common. You may recognize it in yourself if you were brought up in the suburbs. Far too much hope projected onto me.

I was thought smart, and therefore there was a kind of pressure put on me to demonstrate that, as a kind of show dog. What could I have done but refuse? Displace my interests out-of-doors, into the wild, where no-one would ever be watching. I never did read a book, really, until Plato's Republic one long night. Where I discovered the idea of the idea. And the surprising fact that I could read. I exaggerate less than you would credit.

I never could stand to see myself in pictures, though later I would find myself on television as a presumptive expert on giftedness, because I had been defaulted to the headship of a failing school for gifted kids. I cringe to think that I endured that. All of it. What could I have been thinking? That I looked the part?

It must have given me practice for this exposure here. Which I just do now, out of some practiced habit, as if I'd undergone a sex change operation and finally put on the dress in public (now there's some courage I really have to honor!). Pretending that I have something to say. Retaining, I suppose, that stupid American innocence as if things could be that simple. Hollywood simple.

Looking back, there must have been a kind of inevitability that I would study Chinese. Lots of irony, that study of the world's oldest continuous direct legacy chain of cultured civilization, represented by the most populous political entity on earth, could allow me a position of relative parity with those so much better read in English. Scratching the surface could make me relatively deep. Irony that by finding oneself on the other side of the planet, I could seem distinguished by minor efforts, just as I would by simply standing among Chinese from whom I looked different.

Inevitably, I had the wrong memory style for good study of literary Chinese. I'm deft enough with speech, but memorizing texts is not exactly a strength. In math or physics classes, I had to derive formulas during the exams, since I never could commit them, nor the recipe-like procedures, to memory. It was a painful deficit, which also allowed me to rationalize not taking any books home each night, which I wasn't going to open anyhow. There must be something traumatic which I can't remember, or is it just my wiring? I was proud enough of my ability to fake it, like some Matt Damon character or was it Leo, pretending to be a pilot.

Dad's memory is nearly gone now. Mom still can't find a way in to her own life. I still cringe at her unnecessary worries about me. They make me want to disappear. The two of them together remind me of how unlikely my own independence will always be. I'm an American, and I must be independent, authentic, and truly me. So, I fail by definition. But I do love my family. I would be lost without them.

There is something beyond taboo to rehearse these things in public. Something far worse than to expose oneself; a naked body, say. It would be better to promote the narrative to good conclusion. To write something finished.

Perhaps someday I will. I rather doubt it. How angry can we be at John Edwards, now, without being angry with ourselves for still wanting to believe those outrageous lies. What did he see in his mirror? How far is anybody willing to drive their narrative if they can seem to fill its part?

Just yesterday, I went over that edge myself. I thought that it would be important to let you in so far to my thinking that you would need to know just where and how I had come up with whatever outrageous connection I was making. That I located it, right on the toilet, as if thereby I could fix that much more credibility. Deletion is nice, though once spoken, words sometimes can't be taken back.

I wasn't so much embarrassed for myself. I had dragged other people into my thoughts. Like Edwards paying off his staffer to take the hit. What, for the greater good of the country? We can do without pretty people in love with their own reflections.

Charles Darwin made his discoveries so recently, and yet we find it strange that there are primitives among us still rehearsing Darwin's own struggles with the Biblical idea of creation? How can so much time seem to have passed? When it really was only yesterday that we lacked any good evidence for time's scale. When molecular structures for encoding legacy combinations were nowhere near a twinkle in any scientist's eye. When the stars were understood only marginally better than the way they look to me, in love.

Of course it remains offensive that humans should crowd out their projected God as if we could understand and derive those formulas which had been handed down by rote. Explanations don't and can't stand in for what we know to be true in our hearts. That we are not just random. Darwin lost a child, and felt no less pain for his understanding that it was a natural process and no retribution for his loss of faith.

You know, I understand the American romance for the wild. That sense that nature left alone must be preserved for future generations. I also treasure the Chinese sense of kept gardens and pruning and enhancing with pagodas and terraces and steles engraved with poetically related written characters to make the stamp of great poets upon the land. Even their filling in with water what we might call God's gorges. God's gouges. I can understand that, as a continuation of the inevitable and proper course of civilization. Bringing heaven's constancy down to earth. Regularizing the wild.

I am in from the cold. My apartment shakes in the wind, but it will not come down when the earth shakes. There is warmth in civilization.

And I really am just a dog in manly disguise. Not such a bad thing to be. But I've lost my faith that I'm a man. Which is rough. Ruff ruff.

Moon Landing Lunacy

I seem to be on a theme of anniversaries, mostly just past. I missed the 40th for the moon landing, and wanted to be part of some flame war which just flamed out rather like, well, our enthusiasm for outer space. I myself run hot and cold on the value of explorations of outer space. For sure, there should be at least as much value to such explorations as there is to explorations under the sea, or new catalogings of (old) species, or now so much earlier, the very mapping of our globe.

But it costs a lot of money, great gobs of our precious energy, and must pollute our skies each time we launch one of those great rockets beyond gravity's reach. I'm going to make the claim that the value of our space explorations depends very much on what it is that we do with or by them.

If we think that we will extend the limits for our exploitations and predations, so that we can relieve some pressure from earth's carrying capacity, that is one thing. If we think we are doing basic science, wanting answers to basic questions about our origins, that is quite another. And if we accomplish something very opposite to what we set out to accomplish, that is always interesting.

Another anniversary just gone by is my own birthday; now entering my 55th year, I should have figured out by now what I really want to do with my life. I've chosen to focus - as rankest amateur - on the basic questions, and so have little or nothing to show for a life lived this long, in the way of professional accomplishment.

Sometimes I wish I did. But sometimes I'm glad that I have resisted those investments, in favor of a kind of hanging loose, so that I might have the liberty, even now, even still, to go off in some other direction without having too much invested in staying put. My kids are mostly grown. There are no golden or other handcuffs tying me to what I've already done.

We live in a time of generalized anxiety, prevented from enjoying the fruits of historical labors by some vague sense that we might have blown it or be about to blow it. It's clear to most thinking people that we can't keep living off the fat of earth's stored up solar energy; the oil and coal. It's clear that even apart from the squandering and the pollution we used to worry more about, the very basic throwing up into our atmosphere of all this stored carbon changes all sorts of basic balances.

We're nervous that we won't be able, politically, to contain our twitchy tendancy to deploy all sorts of nuclear devices. We might have created a cyber-structure of such complexity that it could be brought down by something analogous to flying planes into overreaching towers.

We've entered into a spiraling panic about our health, feeling some kind of right to be cured of every dis-ease which must accompany biological life; to where the very germs now have become as idealized as our screen idols, able to resist our every sterilizing tool to raise the spector of pandemic, flesh eating, antibiotic resistance.

What a perfect metaphor, where each of us has the basic right to fight off the germs within us, even if to the detriment of the common pool of resistance. Or is it more in the way we raise our meat, saturating it with antibiotics to create an alternate ecology where the only germs to survive - and we ingest the antibiotics along with the steer it rode in on - are the ones we don't know how to combat?

We somehow think, or fantasize, that arctic storehouses, even though they too are threatened by global warming, may provide repositories to hold in trust those species we now so rapidly displace. That our zoos may be adequate as breeding grounds for species lost in the wild already.

We forget that the genetic code thus preserved is only the positive imprint whose other half in the ecological ground, in the context already destroyed. Species are only "meaningful" in their environmental contexts. That's what species mean. They are what remains of life's variation when contexts shift and flow.

My friend Dr. Koepsell is concerned that we establish a proper commons in outer space. That otherwise we might extend the reach for the predations of the Huns among us against our common heritage. While I find there only emptiness, rather like those concrete habitats at some zoo, or plastic Animatronics life-like dioramas, or permadefrosted crypts for seeds and spores, all cataloged and neat.

I tend to be more focused on our Earth, although I can't help but find myself sympathetic with those who decry our loss of questing glories, like setting foot on our own moon. I do think it's a mistake to think that these kinds of ship sailings can replicate the ones which landed us in America, where a true new world got discovered. They are fantasies, rather, akin to ones of immortality and perfect joy.

Back here on earth, we cannot be abstracted from our context. Anymore than we could really live as heads alone, fed by some concocted soup, as in those nightmarish old TV ads (were they public service ads, or ads for Saab brainy sportscars???). We are the evolutionary outcome from all that came before us, surely, but also remain embedded in a matrix not just of nutrients, but of extensions to our very body of a sort not subject to our control and guidance and manipulation, which is what technology is for.

True Spaceship Earth is a dystopic vision of life uprooted and taken over for a joy ride. All joy rides are brief, or if not, end badly. We are not and never could be that in charge.

I do believe that at it's root, it is a Christian delusion that consciousness was granted, and bounds us from our literal roots, right here on beastly earth. As though we were or are that fundamentally different from our evolved-from heritage, and could persist without our ground. Dominion is a metaphor which ends with the collapse of earthly frontiers.

The quest we must make is all inward, toward bringing new life to what our founding fathers granted us, here in this actual New World, where the Commonwealth was meant to be held literally in common, and our leaders were to do our bidding and not the other way around. Questing outward is not a godlike move. It is a sociopathic manipulation of more humanistic dreams. Our fears leave sociopaths in charge.

Our fears about our own competencies. Our fear, even, that the professionals know best, and we must leave to them our basic decisions. Yes Doctor sir, I will take Lipitor if that's what you think best, so that I may live in perfect perpetual fear of my own heart's betrayal.

Our problems are political, emotional, psychological, but no longer technical. If we were to find some perfect source for free perpetual energy. Clean nuclear, say, which is no more oxymoronic than clean coal. Given our current state of enlightenment, such energy could only guarantee our quicker and more final destruction, because it would accelerate the pace at which and by which we foul our habitat, which is now the entire planet.

These problems do, however, actually have a very technical solution. It was a scant century ago that we did wake up to our implication in the physical composition of the cosmos. It was then we realized that all limits were limits of mind. The speed of light, for instance. The "force" of gravity. Time's direction. Mind is implicated. The position and momentum of matter cannot, even in principle, be determined prior to the act of measurement, which is at the most diminutive level, an act of cognition.

We continue to act as though our minds, collectively, were never implicated in the stuff out there cosmically beyond us. And so our injection into outer space is, in fact, an attempt to colonize nothing. It's an escape from what we are rather than a quest for new discovery. It's an as if conjecture that we really need not be responsible, and in contradiction of those office signs above the copy machine, that Mother will clean up after us.