Mom Died, and I Am Still Here for this Happiest of New Years

Somehow, this puts me in mind of my nephew when he was about five. Our family was together for Thanksgiving, and we were going around the table telling each other what we were thankful for. Memory-challenged Dad was thankful that everything was always new all the time. Taking up the jocular cue, my nephew wondered that since mammals all have hair, and grandpa doesn't but grandpa is human and humans are mammals, then is grandpa not human?

That was a nice Thanksgiving. 

Mom hasn't been entirely present for a long time. She can't register a thought about whatever it was that just happened. I doubt she even knows that she's not even here any more. But while alive and maybe not even thinking, she was recognizably herself and she did recognize every single person that she loved, by name, by old stories and by familiarity. This was proven when we celebrated her 95th birthday recently, and loved ones came from far away.

Thanksgiving came and went without her. Every sibling but me was away, and somehow I don't do Thanksgiving by myself. They'd dressed her up in memory care, thinking that she would be taken out. I paid her a visit and sent around her picture of vitality and actual beauty. I had dinner with my ex, at her sister's house, and it was lovely. 

Both of us somehow live out our vow of love for eternity. Maybe the vow is as present as Mom was for her birthday. She was there in spirit on Thanksgiving just because I have mastered her art of making the rolls! The exclamation point is because she always almost forgot about them as we were sitting down, and they were always almost burned. OH! The rolls! I have a post-it note now, under the alarm pad, which says "Stove Off?"

Had the dinner been at my ex's house, Mom would have been there. I never made it back to see her again that day as I'd said I would. Probably because I'd drunk some wine. Lame excuse!

As things happened, just before she had a stroke, my sister-in-law had decided that she would clean out some stuff from Mom's storage unit, which is where we stowed the stuff which might be too personal to give away, but which would no longer fit in Mom's ever-shrinking living spaces. Each of her downsized apartments and then rooms still managed to look like her. And as she lay dying, my own house had already been transformed to look like her.

I'd unboxed pictures and objects, including a Christmas crèche somehow missing the baby Jesus. It's the only sign my house had that it was Christmas. I thought my sister, the only one of us who still keeps Jesus in her heart, must have taken the baby Jesus for herself, when we all were packing up Mom's stuff some years ago. She says no, but I feel better for not having to hold in memory my suspicion. 

Now we are all preparing for Mom's funeral, where I won't speak since I can never be sure that I can hold myself together. And I don't want to fall apart in front of friends and family. Such a cop-out, but I have grown feeble that way. 

Last Christmas was cancelled because of a massive snowfall, which might have killed me as it did many others in our fair city. When my power went out, I'd opened all 9 faucets, hot and cold to a bare trickle, and layered myself with enough outer wear that I soon discovered that it would be my exhaustion and not my freezing to death which would kill me as I left the house to plow through drifts above my chest. The 40,000 BTU water heater ran the whole 80+ hours without electricity and the 1850's uninsulated brick house stayed just above freezing.

I am always so relieved when Christmas is cancelled. Once it was because of an appendicitis, when I was living over the border in Canada from my newly estranged wife and kids (one still on the way). The Christmas Eve trip to the hospital would have made for exciting film! The very nice customs officer was sure that I was faking.

The next time was a pulmonary embolism which went the way that Vladimir Harkonnen went when his heart plug was pulled by Sting in Dune from 1984. I may have been that film's only fan. I was on a walk with my icy mountain climbing sister when it was well below zero near my uninsulated apartment when I slumped on that Christmas Eve. 

Now Mom rescued me from not having bought any gifts. I show my love year 'round by my constructions, and have always been repulsed by mercantile capitalist Christmas. Except for when I knew what everyone wanted and was filled with joy at the prospect of giving it to them. Now I am the poor one. Poor me. I don't even own the pot I piss in. 

I feel rich in most ways. I am the beneficiary of love. Graced by good fortune, my social capital overfloweth. Social Security is sufficient, and I have good saving habits. I've worked hard jobs all my life. I'd be a regular guy, if I weren't so white.

And yet I persist to think and even sometimes claim that I own a wonderful secret that I would like so very much to give away, but can't. I try and try and try, but it remains meaningless to anyone else. 

Like, for just a quick example, I don't think that cars are necessary conveniences. I continue to pour money into the old Outback that was gifted me, simply because one can't buy a stick shift any more. If I must drive, I want to drive and not be driven. I've always loved the road. But I would be thrilled if there were working mass transit and high-speed rail of the sort they have in China; where I could go anywhere in sprawling Shanghai without even thinking much about it. Try that in the orbit of LA, where there might be lots of things going on, but it will take you longer to get there and back than almost any of them will be worth.

Cars to me are metaphor. They express our capitalist individuality, and as such represent our deadly fictional distance from one another. Cars are human robots, our truest selves now, and our intelligence within is all artifice, expressed with the subtlety of a tweet composed while driving. Musk and the Tesla he rode in on be damned for perpetuating the farce.

At least when I drive, I am not watching a moving picture, although truth be told I once did watch a Bills game on my mounted phone while I cruise-control traversed one of New York's vacant freeways, no self-driving required. That sure kept me awake! Go Bills!

While all the world remains fixated on the Sometime Great Notion that the brain is the mind, that the human is a wet robot, that emotion distracts from truth, that God is a delusion just as consciousness is an illusion (I am truly and eternally grateful to Daniel Dennett for these less-wrong assumptions), I remain a lonely holdout.

I no longer look to quantum physics to explain connection at a distance, and no longer need to denigrate metaphor as a parochial Western figure of speech. I just finished a speed read of God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn. I am familiar with all her references and sources, but her book was a revelation because she put them all in context. I can only dream of being able to write so well.

Dennett rids himself and us from the absurd Cartesian theater, only to reintroduce the mind/body split by virtue of an obsolete and newly dangerous notion that the mind is only embodied by being contained in the skull. It might as well be detached. The body composes our universal grammars, Doctor Chomsky, not some black box in or about the brain.

My Mom kept her language and her consciousness even without her short-term memory. She could even read and write. Her memory loss was a blessing, so fretful and worried had she been before. Trying to understand the strange paths her children and grandchildren took. Loving them just the same, no matter. Even the tattoos and the gender transitions.

I wonder why it is so hard to see a distributed eternal God, there at the beginning and perpetually here beyond all ends. No anthropomorphizing required, no perfect understanding allowed. Is it still the scientific mandate to remove all wonder? Must truth be expressed in mathematical equations? Do we consider love to be a merely human invention? Epiphenomena of the illusion of consciousness?

What, I ask, is wrong with love as the definer of time's direction? If evolution is progressive, then it is progressive across time whose only motive is love, apart from decay, its opposition. Yes, Virginia, the world is a better place now, and remains without end Dr. Oppenheimer, as realized by the Inception maker? What?

On balance, love wins out over hate and greed. Science introduces more wonder than it destroys. Religion now militates against the good, wanting the diktat of order where it doesn't belong. God is not a showman, please.

This all makes no nevermind, if your only goal is to make it in life. You can't take it with you, but it can be a blast right now! I really really want a motorcycle again, but now is not the season. I want for nothing, that is true. But I still want you to understand that we are not going to hell in a handbasket. 

Love prevails in the cosmos, and always will for so long as we don't replace our hearts with the artificial hearts of those we so wish to admire.

Happy Happy New Year, and many, many fine returns.

I love you Mom

An Ontology of Covid-19

We know it's real, and we know that it probably jumped the bat-human divide, and we know that it's our own immunological response which kills us. We must construct narratives, and they must be but some approximation of true. Truth, in the abstract, is but the old Platonic match of perceived pattern to ideal form. We now must move beyond that.

Far from one single truth, there are as many narratives as there are people in the world, past and present, and imagined future too. We have now been required (oh, passive cosmos, be not taxed) to match our narratives across the globe; to true them. 

Now in retrospect, it feels as though COVID was inevitable, and plenty of people are named for unheeded warnings (What really does go on inside Bill Gate's massive houses? We know what goes on inside his head because he tells us that his brain is a CPU.) 

The pandemic also takes place beside a host of other anxieties of our age. The most relevant linkage among all of them might be absence of trust. We don't really agree about who we want in charge, and how the machinery of power might work if we did agree. This is nothing but the struggle for the right narrative to take us forward.

We are in the final throes of an absurd belief that it is possible to understand everything by way of the scientific method, and to therefore, by agency, make everything alright. For sure, that is as crazy an assumption as are the various ones about some personal God. It's not so hard to imagine the vacuity of a world of perfect understanding. These are the preoccupations of all philosophers down through the ages. If perfect understanding is the end, then we are already finished.

We are confused just now about the differences between happiness and pleasure, when in fact and in deed the two have little to do with one another. Sure the wealthy can enjoy pleasures beyond our imagining, though it is quite apparent that there is nothing of fundamental happiness there. Still, one can endure indefinitely in a state of pleasure. 

Happiness becomes but a distant dream in the throes of addiction, and it's never the right time to go sober.

We can all agree that there is no such thing as a happiness machine. Pleasure machines abound, of course, and it would be trivial to invent an un-happiness machine. There is no cure for the challenges that nature will always pose. 

Happiness may inhere in simple homeostasis, and it may be fleeting. That is a physical fact of physical life.

Me, I find my happiness in the deferred pleasure of after death. No, I don't mean that kind of literal eternity. I mean that my self never did end at my skin, and my mind has always been distributed in the world around me. If happiness is a function only of what you can accomplish before you die, then I'd say you've already pushed happiness off to eternity. You only want pleasure.

The virus doesn't listen to no stongman, it listen to a lady. This is a test of the emergency social agency system. The strongman ain't no use. He talk to hisself and to his bros. They gonna get sick too.

I was young when I babysat Michael Harrington's children (no relation!). He was a good friend of the artist whose children I took care of in return for room and board and a little closet bunk bed in a loft near Washington Square Park. I was introduced to the notion of an artist's loft, art that is challenging, and fine food and wine. It has been my lame attempt at humor to remark that Harrington was an aficionado of fine wine. As though that revealed a contradiction. 

Still, it's hard not to find it a tad ironic, but then irony be my God. George Carlin be my priest. Science knew irony when its workings gave us the Bomb so quickly, and still it has nothing to say about love. Well let me tell you that I am the genius of emotion, and that is likely because I have some handicap in that regard. Sometimes it takes a blind man or an innocent to point out the obvious.

Now Michael Harrington is resurrected all over again. There have always been two Americas from the very start with the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the slave states and the free. It seems to be how we are built. But we have now moved beyond even 'truths that are self-evident,' and can't share even the bedrock under our feet. Even the New Yorker from New York can not be trusted, if you trust the New York Times.

I cannot be resigned to Trump again, and yet I must be. Diseases are never eradicated, though they may be displaced. Bedrock truth will always be beyond us. That is how the world spins. Trump is but the pustule on the Nation. Popping him will do nothing but gross us out. Love him and we might be immunized. That is really hard to do. You'd have to give up on narrative truth altogether.

My body is a colony. It has a story. My asshole is far from my mouth, and sometimes I just have to jump in the nearby shower when the toilet paper doesn't cut it, or I run out. I live in a sea of memes, and I can't even handle a good story ark [sic]. My curves are all flat. As though that told the story of the virus. 

I read William S Burroughs as a kid; his Naked Lunch. I had no idea from drugs. I just knew that it described my real world. I only recently learned that he was descended from the wealth of typewriters And now I learn of Iceberg Slim, by way of this Chinese humorist who doesn't know irony, and then back to Bratton, who seems to, but maybe doesn't. And so how could I know that Iceberg Slim articulated the seventies, my formative years.

He was a pimp, and we are all the pimp's whores when our world is so constricted that we need some boss to lord over us with threats so that we do, for our sustenance, what he wants us to, just because his world is somewhat larger. We are all of us wage-slaves and dependent on the water pipes the sewer pipes the pipe dreams of our betters. Better bettors, though they may be.

Why, oh why did I decide to spend so much of my life swimming in sea of Chinese words? It doubles the cosmos that I'm not competent for. This Chinese dude was a technician for the broadcast industry in Beijing and he liked to write. The English version is so much less interesting. He knows how to write fairy-tales, and so do all of our leaders. It's what we need and want to hear. He's my age, but much funnier, and surely easier to read.

They have an entire tab in the Kindle store on Chinese Amazon for the Three Body Problem. Don't they have any other writers? I mean he's good, but not THAT good. He's a nuclear engineer, fer chrissakes. Dharma Bums across the universe. 

Trust is what's required for social agency. Otherwise we have strongman agency, at a time when we can only grab for truth, and when we read only on the surface. 

Half of us neither understand not believe in genetic truths. The virus is defined by genes and pools of genes. Easy to deny. You can't even see them. But there you go!

Science, among other things, is the language of trust.That trust is also broken.

Half of us trust only in what we want to hear. We stop at The Word. And why is it so nearly always halfway always. Can't we write a better story? Our homeostasis is always so ready to explode, held in check by mere balanced anarchy, loosed upon the world. 

Red and Blue, the primary hues, purple and green the story machine.

And yet we use our smartphones, buy our goods on Amazon, and generally know that cities are full of glass and stainless steel and fully automated underground trains, and high speed internet that works, and still half of us believe in creationism. This is just weird! Or is it just Occam's razor? We will do whatever you tell us to, Iceberg Slim.

History has been plagued with plagues, but this is the first time we really know what a virus is. That doesn't seem to have made a difference. Our behaviors haven't changed. Has science jumped the shark now too, Fonzarelli? 

Well, why is there news now about those nasty Chinese trying to steal our valuable intellectual property about vaccines? Shouldn't that be public domain? Do we really want someone to make money by fighting the virus? How can we even think in those kinds of incentives?

The good news and the bad news both is that we do share beliefs. In action, we believe in technology as what brings scientific understanding down to earth. In words, some of us believe in whatever the strong man has to say. But do we really think our high tech guns and shooter games are made by God? Ah, no, those get to be mankind's inventions. Right.

An accident or a rogue player might loose the nukes, and an earthquake could hit at any time - not only along the San Andreas, but farther north where the tsunami might be a lot worse, or inland. 

There are plenty of things we haven't prepared for, but we don't even really believe in agency at the social level. We believe in an invisible hand of capitalism, and we believe in some mystic crowd wisdom for democracy. But undergirding these is a culture of zero-sum gaming, and the politics of adversity borrowed from the adversarial justice we practice in the courtroom.

This all goes on behind the new overlays to our living, which have become so natural. The Stack, as Bratton would call them. The overlays are the overlords at least as much as the virus is. We believe (in?) the virus because we know what it can do. The Stack is as remote as God. We deny what it is doing.

We don't even know whether to thank the fates that so much of our lives had already moved online so that we could isolate without quite being cut off, or to curse them for shrinking the globe so much that we are truly all in the same boat now. Whatever the case, our response seems not much different from that during the flu that ended the First World War, or even the Plague that Daniel Defoe wrote about.

But surely this much is true: we are now one world and we can see what is happening all over. Except that the flood of imagery means we see nearly nothing other from what we want to see. That's how the media makes its messaging now. Is there even the remotest possibility to make sense through all the noise?

I wonder how we can remain so much as we were, given how fundamental we thought the changes have been. 

What is it that hasn't changed? What are we stuck on?

Now that we trade selfies globally, try to emulate the same superstars in looks, money, personality or whatever, or in the other direction to create our most authentic selfie self? What hasn't changed?

We have global time automatically adjusted for any relativistic warpage, linked to the multi-national global positional satellite orbiters. We are about to send a new generation of privatized astronauts out in the direction of those satellites. What is it that hasn't changed, I ask!? 

Well, death for one.

But really, what is a social animal? Do we, collectively, resemble more a beehive? A termite nest? A school of fish. A swarm of bird flu? The best antiseptic for this plague would be a wholesale wiping clean of those in power in these United States. Start with the Republicans, please! And so the question is, how did they get there? Why aren't the proper people in charge? Where are they hiding?

Another thing that clearly hasn't changed is that we believe that each of us individually is special. That's a nice thing too, like our personal God, Lord Jesus, wants us to know. And yet our new notions of how special we are seem highly mediated by our, well, media. Instead of a president, we have a narcissist in chief. I mean, he does channel us as we are, doesn't he?

We are glued to our screens just like Plato's denizens in the cave. So, we haven''t changed at all? We remain at a remove from reality, in our wombs with a view. Now we're stocking our caves with guns. Is this our return to frontier days?  Is there no other story to tell?

The trouble really is that we never quite stopped believing in Plato. We think we have ideas in our heads. We think only humans have them. And we think creativity is ours alone, too. Generating ideas is like getting something from nothing, as though there were no interactions with our media ahead of time. We don't believe in an uncarved block that feeds back as we work on it. We believe in spontaneous generation inside our empty heads. We don't even have a germ theory for consciousness. 

The screens we have are now the real screens - the Dao that can be spoken is the eternal Dao - and they've brought into being what we only thought before. There must be some screen inside our head. We still think that God is out there if only we get the pixels in alignment. Surely they will show us the ideal world as it was meant to be!

I have no license to think, nor certainly to write. I am a handyman. I have fixed some very big and complex things, and many of them remain fixed, though some were beyond my simple means to preserve. A school, a massive distributed computer network, houses, parts of houses, a boat, cars and cycles. I am emotionally attached to my tools, and when I sharpen them, I am attached to the sharpeners. It is like a caress. It makes me happy.

Now, I've given most of them away. I make do.

I maintain that absent belief in God, there is no sense of irony. I mean this in the most ironic way! I've proven this to my own satisfaction by asking an expert in China, where the plague was caused by a routine pun, which got turned into food as medicine. The bat, after all, is an auspicious "sign" in so many ways in Chinese, so why wouldn't they eat it? They have no sense of irony. They only laugh at puns. 

The selfie stick was invented in China, or at least found mass appeal there. The irony is that so was the software which will transform your selfie into something much closer to the ideal look for a black-haired Chinese lass with almond eyes. The miracle is that it will still be recognized as you. Just a better, more ideal, you. Beats makeup!

The other becomes us!

I hold in my hand now the most wonderful tool of all. After my original iPhone 6 - which had as many lives as a cat - started taking me more time waiting than finding, I bought the new one. It's not so much the piece of jewelry the 6 was, but it has the same feeling in my hand. I bought a case as cheap insurance, and it wasn't perfect. I bought another and endured the wait for the Amazon delivery man, wondering if they would go on strike first. Just like Christmas, the new one was a disappointment. I need it to charge wirelessly, to stick to the magnet in my car, and to not add weight. I know I'm asking a lot. But I finally got it!

As if life were going back to normal. As if I even want it to.

I was disappointed that the new case from Canada was also made in China. I was only disappointed because I might have been overcharged. As though I wasn't already overcharged by Apple. 

One is black and military style. It feels confidence-inspiring, It was cheap - no bones about China! But it's magnetic disk interferes with the wireless charging The other feels almost slippery, but it works with the wireless. But when I plug in my cable so that I can stream to a bigger screen, its flaw is revealed. The video plug won't make it through the case.

No problem. I like to fix things right? I shaved the cable plug ever so slightly, and here I am having formed a new cathexis - that magical capitalistic transference of my self onto some object. I've had that so powerfully with motorcycles, bicycles, cars, boats, houses, and most of all with my tools. I look at them and feel warm in the recognition. And still, I've given them all away, or have allowed them to transmogrify. My self is in the process of contraction. Death be not proud.

Too bad the road is closed to my tiny house.

My old iPhone was drowned and replaced by one identical. Then it was traded for my daughter's, which had more memory. New battery, then full stop. Now I have an entirely new one, but it feels the same. Like the USS Constitution, which is the iconic Ship of Theseus, I don't want it to change. I was among the first to use a smartphone, and I would have kept my first one if it would have carried the burden. It was very cleverly designed - nothing like it since! It had a keyboard and a stylus!

I don't like the world of digital reality. I feel it accelerating our demise as a civilization. I shall continue to try to find the good in it. Plato doesn't have to be all wrong. Philosophy is not a zero-sum game.

The most exciting book that I'm reading just now is called The Spread Mind, which exposes the fallacy of our seemingly ingrained belief that we have a mental life apart from the life we experience as physical bodies out and about in the world. I find the thesis utterly convincing, while strangely hidebound in certain ways. The author, with whom I've communicated a bit, seems dogmatically bound to a kind of physical causality which is manifestly not true. 

I agree with him that cons-truing time or temperature as the metric for real destroys the real experience we have of time and temperature. Sure, we like to true our experience against the shared standard, but we know that there is also a deviant 'subjective' time which feels very different from the scientific 'true.' Indeed, meteorologists have had to invent the 'feels like' temperature to guide us about going outside. That takes into account things like wind and relative humidity, though it still replaces what we feel with a new external standard for what's real.

The thing is that Riccardo Manzotti complains about scientists with instruments getting in the way of our 'real' at the same time that he wants to do away with subjective experience altogether. I mean, I just simply find that ironic. Mainly because he won't entertain my modification of his theory. He's acting like the scientific authorities that he himself complains about, who would rob us of our authentic experience. 

But there is no subjective experience. Our experience is, literally, one with the objects of our perceptual experience. He and I agree about that.

Where I start parting company with Manzotti is when he makes the claim that it is our experience which defines the 'real' time. We experience change and we are embedded in a physical causal universe and therefore we experience the flow of time. 

I want to say first off that it is my emotions which first determine my sense of lived time, and second that my emotions are as much out there in the world as are my physical, perceptual, experiences are. I asked Riccardo if he had come across the work of Mark Solms, who locates consciousness in the affective regions of the brain stem. I think that question is what ended the communication, though I can't be sure. I probably just sounded nuts. By definition, I always do! No, I'm not nuts. I just sound nuts because I'm not writing or talking like everyone else. And still I feel like I'm in good company.

According to Solms, emotion is the inception of agency. The survival value of acting as near instantly as possible in the face of recognized danger is patently obvious to me. That means acting thoughtlessly. Another way to put it is that we must act automatically, in almost the way that we breathe. We don't have that much room in our conscious mind, and so we use the shorthand of 'stored' memories of similar experiences, and match them up to successful actions. The relationship is felt, emotively. That's what emotion means, in my vocabulary.

Riccardo seems afraid of reifying Platonic ideals, and therefore dances around the existence of a lion in our minds which might help us to deal with the one just now in front of us. I don't see the need for any ideal form of a lion. I only see the need for the shorthand of generalization, which must have happened in the animal realm long before and apart from human consciousness. The brain must engage in a game of pattern matching, which would help it to put away perceptions according to category. Else what would a mind be for? What would be its survival value?

That's what pattern recognition does, and that's what narrative is. It's how we get by. The brain trues the world by fantastic approximation of reality. There is no truth, and numerical control is useless for lived life, no matter how wonderfully it might enhance our perception.

I know that I can find my memories in my lived environment, and especially in those things I made and in my tools. Traditional proponents of neurologically-based consciousness would take issue with my location of memory in things outside me, but Manzotti would not. If our senses are stopped, we hallucinate. Of course I must exist in and with some world apart from me.

As I drift through the landscape, it's pretty clear what's present and what's immediately past. The past quickly merges with the imagined future for vagueness, and then sometimes there's an emotive charge and you might have some enduring image. It's not hard to conceptualize memory as just this preservation from the flow past 'present' into the less urgent past (and future). I see no need to think of memories somehow 'contained' in or by the brain, and have an easier time now just to imagine actual direct perception (no internal images) and a sort of quick falling off of the aftereffects due to variable attenuation, punctuated by a moderate number of "permanentized" impressions kept running in a nearly endless loop.

This strikes me as the great evolutionary value of a complex brain; first, the ability of the organism to project a wise and complex course of action, and second with the outering of words, to allow engagement with other organisms for the purpose of learning, social organizing, and long-range planning. Written words may be memorable in the same way landscapes are.

I look at the world and I find things to be familiar. I find familiar things. That is what generalization means in this context. If you have a proper name, and I know you, then there is only one of you. If you are a type, well then I generalize. This happened long before naming. Reptiles do it. Some things they bite, and some they run away from. Some they screw. (I don't know much about reptiles, but I'm still pretty confident to this extent)

Our sense of what is present in what Manzotti calls the spread NOW, is those perceptual objects that we can interact with. I would go further and locate the now among those perceptual objects on which we can act. It is our ability to act which informs our sense of time, and not just our ability to interact as thoughtless percepts. He seems to want the chicken/egg question about agency to be left open, while I want to preserve some of my own.

It doesn't seem a stretch to locate pleasure in homeostatic motion, and perhaps to locate happiness in a sense of agency about such motion. To be in control and to be surrounded by loved ones does seem to constitute happiness. Well, that plus being able to sit around a mesmerizing fire, sipping wine, perhaps, and smoking s cigar.

In just the sense that my future is constrained, I can know the future in a way similar to how I can know the past. I project onto it a whole host of generalizations to locate where my degrees of freedom lie. If I'm in a building and I have to get out, I'll have to go through the door, unless the catastrophe which meant my exit opens up a wall. If it does and if it's safe I'll take it!

This is no different from the 'reverse' causation of the double slit experiment in particle physics. I disagree with Riccardo Manzotti that time is not a physical dimension like all the others. All of our behaviors are conditioned by realistically available futures. Without agency, evolution goes nowhere and is like the world Riccardo imagines where time stands still. He is right that there would then be nothing; that such a state is not even conceivable. 

For photons, the double slit represents a timeless relation. Manzotti denies relations as real. He's wrong about that. I think it's also wrong to consider quantum entanglement to be about information. It's really about identity. The scale of separation in quantum entanglement just indicates something about the perceptual object. Information relates to perceptual relations between objects.

In my quirky cosmos, emotional relations are less about information and more about timeless matching as a felt prognostication.

Manzotti seems to miss that boundaries between objects are always fractal. Causation becomes predictable only when objects are rather large in time and space. At the scale of our perception without the enhancement of numerically calibrated instruments, predictions are highly reliable. We feel safe much of the time, even while at the wheel of an automobile hurtling along the highway.

But even billiard balls are subject to the butterfly effect, beyond a certain trajectory. Physically linked levers are subject only to accident, or wear and tear for their reliability. Only a fool would push too hard on a rusty lever. Only a fool would play dice with life. But lived life is reliably predictable up to a point.

On the scale of social agency, meshed time and temperature seem to work. If we could but trust them, Google and Apple could end this pandemic almost instantly, provided that usage of their devices saturates our population to the level of herd immunity, which it probably does. And provided that enough people who have such devices would decide to do the right thing. 

This is what my good friend Benjamin H. Bratton would advocate. He won't correspond with me either. I gotta say it baffles me when the stars diss their most enthusiastic fans. It must be that just like Trump, you can't really disagree with them very much. Maybe being a star goes to your head somehow.

Well, who really would want to be in any position of influence in this fucked up world? Trump, that's who, and if we're honest with ourselves, he's only there because we sure as hell don't want the job. We're the ones asleep at the switch here, waiting for our lovely white lives to come back.

OK, here's the real ontology of COVID-19. The virus is money. If you have it, you don't need agency. You can buy your pleasure, even if you can't buy your happiness. The viral qualities of money were never evident before information technology. Once upon a time, money was used to exchange value, in much the way that the brain delays ("stores") perceptions. 

Our mythical narratives would have us believe that there is some relation to the value of a person according to how much money they might amass. Trump certainly believes that (His world is winners and losers - in that we agree. We disagree about the moral valence of being a winner in his terms). That's what the perverted version of  'work ethic' means. By "perverted," I just simply mean when we assert absence of work-ethic where racism is at work. Our economy has become a lottery, and young white males like it that way.

We have to find ways to trust our institutions again, we have to find ways to trust our neighbors (defined by Žižek as those who smell [bad]) and we have to find ways to trust even our enemies. If they demonstrate they can drive a bus and have self-interest in keeping the bus on the road, then we should let them drive the bus. China has demonstrated that it can drive the bus of Covid-19, and we should learn from them rather than to vilify them.

I mean please, this is a pretty mild catastrophe that nature has tossed us. It's a slow pitch, and we should figure out what to do. For trivial starters, how about a $2K universal basic monthly income for the duration. Yay Democrats! 

And if we don't want to institute universal healthcare (which would be so much cheaper than to keep the economy closed because of the chaotic ways that poor people have to access healthcare) we could at least mandate that nobody gets charged (I'm talking money, but you can leave the pun in if you will) in any way for Covid-related testing and illness. 

Ditto immigrants whether with or without papers. Do we really want people hiding from the law now instead of feeling protected by it? Do we want people ducking exposure (more puns) because they need to go to work? Are we nuts? The illegals have always been essential workers. What choice do they have? What choice do we have?

So yes, I don't see Covid-19 as some external menace. I see it as yet another natural challenge in the non-zero-sum game of evolution for our planet. These 'emergencies' will continue to escalate until we get a clue. That's just how the game works. 

Prayer won't help, and science won't help either so long as it's subject to the virus of money. How much trust should we have in science now that funding for research is motivated by profit? How much confidence should we have that the price is right when Wall Street money is deployed to destroy an industry in order to monopolize the business and ultimately set the price however they want. 

Walmart is established on that crime, as are, obviously, Uber, or Doordash. Instead of the public spending money on research that we really need, we now practice sugar daddy science.

Money wasn't viral before the Internet. Who even remembers that now? When big pharma couldn't advertise and neither did lawyers. Being able to afford shelter and rent with whatever lousy job you wanted to do was better than a universal basic income. I've never been happier than I was as a minimum wage bike mechanic! I had a very nice penthouse apartment, furnished with comfy things of my own making!

I do believe that we are at the end of Science as a way to know or to control our lived environment. I don't believe in social agency on the China model, and I've lost my faith in social agency on the model of the United States. But I still recognize the promise at our inception.

I think it's time to reinvent ourselves all over again. This will surely mean getting away from our various screens and engaging with the real real again, not the fake real of represented reality. As Manzotti says (I know, that's even more rude than to use his first name), we cannot have experience of a representation. We experience only the screen. Information defines only the interaction between our bodies and some distant object. It can't inform our minds. And yet we still act on it. 

Get me an alarm on my phone (for proximity to proximity to COVID-19 infection) and I will act. But not until you do too. I'm ready to come out and play. Covid-19 is a natural goad to social agency. We should thank the gods for it. Without it we would already be back to normal, which has long been the most dangerous way to be. Of course that's self-serving of me!

Covid-19 is pure information. It isn't even alive. Viruses have always been with us. They fuck with the plans. There is no plan for our minds, unless and until we start acting like robots. Which we did at about the same time that the robots started acting like people.

It's time to open our eyes and wake up. Hello World! I've been asleep at the switch. Sorry! Knowledge doesn't inhere in information (I love what you can do to mangle English!). Our brains don't store information. Our brains mediate familiarity and agency, and by means of consciousness, to promote the survival of our selfish genes. 

And once we had a written language to turn our words into durable objects for perception, we could think (Jaynes was almost correct). And once we could think we could share our thoughts. And once we started to share our thoughts and science took off, we started up an hyperbolic curve which can never be flattened. 

That sort of narrative is very exciting, but it doesn't end well.

We have to accept that there are limits to what we can know. These are limits in principle and not only practical limits. Our interaction with the cosmos is not only perceptual. It is conceptual and driven by emotion. This things are real and out in the world just the way that percepts are.

In order to go back to living, we have to let go of certain fantasies. We have to be in touch with the world as it actually is and not how we wish it were. There is no ideal world, no utopia, no final understanding. There is only growth and decay, and I am rooting for growth to the whole. Personal decay is always a done deal.

OK, so I have to get back to work. I sure do wish that I had ever learned to write a story. But I do know that if we cure the money virus, all the other ones will fall into line.

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.

I Am Hamlet

(Meant to stand in for a review of I Am Hamlet, presented on stage at the Subversive Theatre Collective, as Adapted and Directed by Joe Siracusa and performed by Brian Morey)

We all are, Hamlet, seeking that point of intention which dictates the act. Tricking it out. Glancing at audience to see its reaction, play within, some truth to quiet raging unknowns. The act so well rehearsed by the time it's committed; to memory, to reality, that the intention has long since receded beneath what are nearly autonomous motions and their representation emotionally. The play's the thing. The actor is beside himself, drawn along by certain knowledge of what comes next, that thing we lack, our dreams projected.

If there is a flaw to this production of Shakespeare; this spin, perhaps, off Shakespeare, but really, who can know his intentions - but if there is  a flaw, it is that the actor, even more than the words, exceeds his audience. The energy required to pay attention, to follow the words, is exceeded by the energy required even to believe that this is a one man show. That there aren't at least several persons beneath the rapid fire costume transformations, just for instance. I stared mightily trying to decide if Brian Morey was lip syncing to some professionally pre-recorded soundtrack.

He might have been. This is not just Shakespeare brought up to date, it is Shakespeare transcending date and time and place. This actor is a rock star, a female rock star, a male rock star, Avatar floating above the stage (the fog machine failed I later found out, as did the microphone for proof that there was no trick and still intention prevailed, which is beyond metaphorical requirements for acted out reality, please!) and the play within the play is film is television, is playing in my own head, the sole member, yet again, of an audience adverted, apparently, by the Buffalo News to stay away, on pain of what? Some realization of your mortality? I am growing, well, weary of presentations meant for crowds and then finding myself alone.

During intermission I was as rube from county (my actual role in life) among the theater hags, so called by themselves, who were the only other witnesses to this remarkable show this summery night. They were recalling costume and lighting and sound and stage malfunctions in their own storied pasts. I was focussed on my own mortality, staged malfunction recently so many times in Emergency Departments, in dealing with aging parents and romantically spurned children whose future cannot be rehearsed, whose future remains mystery, all futures weighing now like pendulous question marks, anon.

These skulls on stage were not the prompt to my own pounding heart, which seems to have a mind of its own these days, acting out, stealing from me my own mind's ability to pay attention, and so the words, enunciated almost beyond perfection as if there were some better way to recite Hamlet, and it turns out that there actually is, the words had to wash over me, and I had to let them, they were that far beyond my grasp.

How many times have I seen Hamlet, have I read it? Not even once, it would seem, or am I rescued by failing memory, failing to internalize the plot, the point, the theme, it's all new to me every time as Dad said last Thanksgiving when around the table we were sharing "the new" and he can't remember the conversation less than a minute previous. But I guess he still has a sense of humor.

This then is my life, and I am truly Hamlet, and if I must endure one more turn as audience to myself there it will end. There will be an end to it. I will have become the narrative, without sense or sensibility. Acted out by others, even though they might call me by some name I once did inhabit. Poor Rick, I am Hamlet. You would be too if you were to dare genuine theater. I dare you, voice echoing in an ever empty skull.

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.

Go West Old Man

You won't recognize me. For one thing, I'm on borrowed computer, which has one of those updated curvy keyboards, which techies like me hate simply becuase we are trained to move from keyboard to keyboard and therefore different slows us down. (which also means, if you are a careful reader, that I am really quite indifferent to and about styles of device. I raise the level of generality to "pointing device" and could almost care less about mouse or trackpad or touchpad or ball, although keyboard is a bit more personal).

For another, I'm in Seattle, which I really shouldn't say, since my identity is all over the Internet now, and therefore like someone at a family funeral, I might be preyed upon by watchers of the press, who know an absentee resident when they see one. You know, those predators who read the obits and schedule their burglary during the bereavement making a double whammy for the sufferers.

Speaking of which, I have to resurrect this ancient VW, "Bob", which my duaghter out here has been driving, and which is way beyond her (sorry) last legs, just so's I have some wheels. I was going to drive out, but even I'm not quite that crazy, especially what with excess clotting factors, although for the moment I remain artificially blue-blooded. Speaking of [last] legs.

I've been meaning for a while now to blog about this Chinese heartthrob adverted on the front page of the New York Times. A blogger and novelist and racecar driver, who is likely the most widely read author of all times, simply becuase he has three hundred million (!!!!) daily readers of his blog, nevermind his novels, which might get read for the same reason Angelina Jolie gets watched, regardless of her acting abilities, which, I am certain, are prodigious.

It seems this fellow has become a little cheeky with his commentary about the Chinese government, and he takes it in stride when they remove his more edgy blog postings without so much as a nevermind (we all know who "they" are). But there's a long tradition in China of writers outwitting censors, which, oddly, places this fellow right in the mainstream literary traditions of China and not quite off in some pulpy ghetto where you'd think he belonged (I'm actually enjoying enhanced speed now on this curvy keyboard, only ever having tried them while troubleshooting computers - which is only a pain - and never actually to write with).

Government censors, rather like IRS agents or the FBI agents who did Senator McCarthy's bidding back in the days of HUAC, are known to be rather humorless, which must mean literal, in the discharge of their duties. And so, there's an almost implied invitation to toy with their sensibilities.

Plus, the government now is between a rock star and a hard place, don't you think? As with Google's practice of alerting readers to the fact of redaction, folks - Chinese folks - are thereby alerted to what their government is doing on their behalf. For the moment they seem a little bit more peeved with Google for being American and un-Chinese, and are therefore offended in their patriotism, but be patient and they will come around.

Now this Chinese blogger probably has a habit, much as I do, of writing each and every day. So any lacunae (to make a veiled reference to this truly excellent novel I am now reading on my Kindle (tm)) would be obvious to his loyal readers, which just gives him that much more opportunity to toy in and with the stuff they won't delete because they will be witless to do so. Literalists are always looking to protect their own asses, which generally means to jump all over you when you deviate from the norm. Maybe you get the joke here?

I've already had a few check-up calls about my absense, so I know I'm cared for. We'll see what the burglar literalists think, although I can assure them that I own nothing of value, having given away all the good stuff (which I simply no longer fit into). My electronics are positvely primitive, so don't bother. (actually, I do intensely dislike this wireless mouse, because the pointer is simply too jumpy)

My doctor just called to tweak my rat poison dosage, feeling embarrassed that it was as early as it is here on the Left Coast, although I assured him I've already been up for hours, but see, I am actually well cared for, no matter what I say about the Military-industrial health care/insurance complex.

So, here are a couple of things about which I intensely disagree with our fearless leader. And, honest, I absolutely adore the guy, especially because he has a tendancy not to use fear as a tool for manipulation of the public. But sometimes he skates close, as in the case of healthcare and education.

He is dead wrong about education, but as of today, it does seem as though he might actually have a plan to co-opt Republicans at their own game. He's taking some of the negative momentum among educators toward No Child Left Behind, and using it to gain Republican support for real and meaningful reform. The guy just mgiht be a jiu-jitsu master.

On the healthcare front, I tend to be a bit more dubious. I just don't buy the idea that the insurance companies are precisely evil. After all, if life is "priceless" and you deserve the same extraordinary measures toward the end of your life that you do at its early stages, even someone as clueless as me about economics can see that there is a genuinely insoluble problem. Lots of people will be worth more to the medical complex near death, just in terms of transfers of wealth out of the insurance industry coffers and into the healtcare industry coffers, than they were ever worth over the course of their entire working lives. The math for this simply can't work.

We can throw up examples of dishonest doctors and profiteering insurers, but really they're just the same as the rest of us, afraid to lose their jobs. Doing the bidding therefore of The Man (whoever the hell the man is, although I think he might be anybody really really high up and therefore, by definition, detached from the reality of the rest of us). Doesn't anybody else see that these two forces are aligned against not only each other, but against the masses of us, harnessing as they can and must, our fear of death and dying?

That very same thing used against us so effectively by true believers in some Allah or other. Since they have none - no fear of dying.

I, for my part, intend to take reasonable precautions, so long as they don't feed The Beast (whoever the hell the Beast is, although I think he might have something to do with literalist thinking which is therefore detached from reality, by definition). I'm a little bit sketchy when it comes to the conflict between drugs which insult the liver, and alcohol, which does so also. Take Lipitor, for instance. No, you take Lipitor.

But I might be an actual and genuine case for it. Or I might not be. It's really hard to know. OK, gotta go back to reading that other great novel. This one, Melville's The Confidence Man I've managed to "download" onto my phone for free. I'm so freaking ethereal it's not even funny. Not to mention all the lacunae in my understandings . . .

Legacy Islands

There is all this wonder now, about what the great author might have left behind. Will there be a great book in his vault?

Sorry to say it out loud, but I really could care less. Not interested, is what I mean. I could not care less for the man behind the beloved text. There was nothing more that he could write, and so he recused himself from life.

David Foster Wallace is by far the greater writer, and he recused himself more cruely. I've been reading his take on tennis starlet Tracy Austin, which reflected also upon the author's own self-consciousness tossing up his serves in public as a tennis pro in training.

He celebrates the transcendent accomplishment of sports super-stars, whose techne/technique/kung-fu(if you want to be wrong-headed about it) leads them to an embodiment of godliness, accomplished by a perfect vacancy in the strong mind which got them, the athletes, to that point of natural-law defying beauty.

He himself, he writes, could never get to that kind of perfect poise, playing tennis, although at least a few of his readers thought he came pretty close in in his writing. He's a magician with words, tricking you into following arguments that far (that far!) beyond your capacity to understand. Over-reaching metaphor, until you almost stand with him at whatever transcendent meaning he has, himself, accomplished.

But the trouble with writing is that it can never be a spectator sport. The audience was as essential to Tracy Austin's transcendent tennis as it was to her youthful self-destruction. It defined the context for perfection. It destroyed her body during its course of growth. The audience was the adversary she could overcome quite naturally in her gifted youth. The audience triumphed.

For a writer, the audience has skin in the game, and triumph is annihilation in fact and not on any performance stage. It is a dance in private, and how could David Foster Wallace ever have known that there are limits to argumentation, limits to metaphor, beyond which you are and must remain alone, dancing with only stars, having made an object of yourself. Synecdoche death.

Thank God for the Chinese. I mean that ironically, since, of course, there is no God in Chinese, nor metaphor the way we mean it. Just raw competition, falling short of which is defined pretty clearly by the hoards left behind. Writing accomplishment there is the reward, as in tennis, for practice practice practice according to a regimen no different in intensity from the one required to empty your mind in the kung-fu of martial arts.

How glad am I that I never was a prodigy of tennis nor of words. I can be satisfied that JD Salinger was more autist than artist, and that there is nothing to be found in further writings that is not already cliched behind whatever secret combination. His vault would be the last place I would look for greater writings. That ship has sailed. This world has changed already.

I would that I might have had a conversation with David Foster Wallace, though. I would have asked him about the limits to rhetoric, to narrative, to technique, to craft. The limits even, to art. I would have tried out a Chinese approach. Not the one the Chinese now, still, remain saddled with, but one which comes at the remove of a different tradition, in comparison, really, against it.

Once in the traction of words in the single language that the mediated world is left with, there is no resistance against the disappearance of the self sucked up into the tuba of the words which were their own transcendence. There is no drug, nor alcohol sufficiently refined against it that would not leave you at the same place in the end. Vacant. Voided.

Evolution is a farce played out on a competitive stage only if you wish to see it thus. Beneath its truth of dog eat dog, there is love in the granting of life to the victor. It's very hard to see, and no question about it, but it is there nonetheless. This willingness to be made the object. Fuck with me, sucka. I'm yours. I have wanted you, alone, all this time. I've made myself up. I'm ready.

Words are their own object. Carved upon the earth, they bring the heavens closer. They must be outered and still they will silence you forever. Not terribly complicated, although if you are well endowed, then it might be more difficult to cut loose of what got you started.

Be thankful that you're not. They will suck you in, these words.

Not these ones, silly.

So Long JD . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Kindling to Warm Your Heart

Last night, before the Golden Globes, I was getting more practice reading on my Kindle. It's odd: You read a book, but you can't really read a Kindle. You read a book on a Kindle, rather rhetorically like you might read a book on an airplane, say. And it comes with an owner's manual. A freebie that I haven't bothered to read yet. Why should I? If it isn't that transparent, then it can't beat reading on a book. What might I be writing in, on line? Surely, I'm not writing a book.

I was reading David Foster Wallace again. He makes good practice because he uses so many words which the built-in dictionary doesn't find. He likes footnotes so incredibly well that you can directly compare joysticking the cursor to flipping in and out of place while reading more conventionally. The only thing I really minded is that you can't reverse the direction of "back" - like if you flip around too far, it's nearly impossible to get back to the place you flipped past. There should be two joysticks, which reminds me of a funny joke Ricky Gervais made about his whatchamacallit right on broadcast TV and never even got bleeped.

There's probably a keystroke combination. I should RTFM! You do wonder, though, what people will eventually mean when they say things like "going on-line" down the line in our future. Will kids imagine hanging out from clothespins when their parents threaten to put them up on line if they get out of line? Like maybe to market them on whatever eBay has by then become.

Not even a good sleight of hand artist, I recently amazed some kids by showing how you could tap out a number on a phone without a dial. Buttons I mean. I wonder what goes on in people's heads when they say "dial up" if they've never seen a phone with a dial. Hmmmm. It must be like beaming up, only way more old-fashioned. With funny sound effects.

Foster Wallace's essay was on just this matter, authority in American English, and what is really meant by "standard." Hint: It's not what used to be meant by standard! To my read, he gets right to the heart of the matter, exposing the double-speak of political correctness, for instance, which ignores the fact that all language reads the speaker as much as it might inform the listener. That when you refer to someone as "weight challenged" you really want to be noticed yourself as one who would never even notice when someone's fat. As if. Those really nice-seeming oily people are really only wanting you to love them. And you thought they were being nice to you?

Kids getting beat up for being different, he wants us, the readers, to understand, is a necessary part of making sense. If you can't depend on the rules of discourse, then your very life might be in jeopardy. Lessons must be taught. And for me the very best part was when he exposes schooling as the very place which disempowers those who weren't fortunate enough to be brought up inside the voice. You are wrong wrong wrong and stupid.

This Martin Luther King day, NPR takes note of the fact that the overwhelmingly white citizens of Newton Mass. have blacks in each of their executive slots; as mayor, governor, and president. And that the big thing about this is that nobody notices. "It's no big deal".

I think that Foster Wallace might remark how remarkably white the speech is of each of those executives. No, actually, he does remark that. Before the fact, as it were. These leaders learned their lessons well.

And so the fact of difference and discrimination takes on a more occult form, beneath our surfaces and fault lines. We get distracted by the obvious. Almost as if someone were trying to fool us. Smilingly. They are.

On the way to the bus back to the Big City this morning, where she lives right under one of those Bowery Bridges where I once had my teeth worked on under laughing gas when it was a rougher place, my daughter wondered if there is any chance of a big earthquake here in Buffalo. Where sub-hurricane winds cause the frame house which houses my apartment to rock. Yes sweetie, we are perched right above one of the earth's great fault lines, but our houses won't come down. We've inherited margins for error still premised on former glories. When architects built to impress the newly rich with sound structures representing older money. And the fault is very very old by now. Tectonic pressures must have been displaced to elsewhere.

Pat Robertson really should go straight to hell for suggesting that he can read God's will on the face of earth's disasters. And he should go back and learn to read his Bible. There's no mystery about why tragedy strikes hardest among those without margins to address it ahead of time.

So - true story - I spent all last week falling in love all over again with a real life rhetorician. Someone who makes a career of what David Foster Wallace throws off his cuff and then has the temerity to off himself about. And then you have no way to know if you should be mad at him for taking out that little chance for making actual sense of a senseless world, or the world for making someone feel that alone for getting things which other people just yell about. If you believe him, he got beat up a lot back in school. He seems earnest enough. I believe him.

And I don't know how to deal with my absent lover now either, who had to go back home to the same town where Foster Wallace did himself in. For crying out loud! Sometimes it adds up to more than I can take, and sure yeah, I understand perfectly that it was a chemical imbalance and had nothing at all to do with how he felt inside (!!!), which is how I feel sometimes when I can't find a soul to read me. Either. It feels like your love resides in California, and you're worried it might fall off the face of the earth from some big fault line. Sheesh, and Holy Cow!

Too bad there aren't explanatory tags alongside God's work, the way there were for us, arm in arm or hand in hand or just strolling side by side when the syncopation of our steps worked more easily that way, as we visited closed museums, and sepulchral - literally - empty ones whose signs outside said "open."

Schoolkids in one basement gallery were putting up photos taken around Buffalo, to illustrate juxtapositions of justice and injustice. Beside each photo was some text, which became almost like poetry up against those pictures. "I know your executive director! She used to work for me . . . " I drop names shamelessly, and so how could anybody love me?

Pictures and text both striving to see some hope in the cracked and graffiti-ridden collapsing edifices. You must see this show! And then study the way the school decomposes curriculum into something kids might actually be interested to do. The crack ridden fallen elderly faces, slump shouldered. Falling down in place, like Buffalo's estimation in the world. Is there any life here at all, or has anyone actually residing here already suicided redundantly, with ugly nasal accent, rhetorically incorrect. Surely, this is not a place for love.

Niagara Falls Is

Is there even life here, in a place where if you knock on the door while the museum is setting up its next exhibit, some very nice and open person will take extravagant time to explain the background, the context, the sequences of accidents which did lead up to this place here and now which even were it open would not attract a crowd. Good bye and thanks ever so much for your generous explanations. You almost feel like blowing kisses.

James Joyce's words are archived here. People came from all around the world to celebrate Bloomsday, whatever that is or was or might be, and congratulate themselves for having learned how to read something which I have tried and tried again to get through. Still feeling almost as though I have. Now these words are illustrated with photographs. The words themselves on display. As artifacts.

Then what is love if not the meeting of minds which no longer have to take care of what they say out loud. The gloss is the thing itself, and the picture won't either capture or destroy what you would have seen without it. The clothes are off. There is more voltage, though, with strangers, or so I hear. Bosh and balderdash, I say.

That evening we went to see 84, passing by the Albright Knox we wondered what all the cars were about. And then, after the fact, I discovered the notice that the director himself would be there to answer questions about his documentary "Up the Yangtze." This is what I should have been doing, right? In preparation for recommitting myself to the critical task of interpreting China to the world. Up yours?

By strange coincidence, the very next day my sweetheart and I trekked to East Aurora which is home to the Aurora Theater and the Roycroft institution, which were the sponsors of the missed event at the Abstract Expressionist Heart of the World right here in talking proud Buffalo. There we strolled through a world devoted to the art of narrating craft on its face. With - I was informed - grammatically incorrect iconic statements such as "speak well of every one if you speak of them at all," a kind of writing which Foster Wallace also confessed would drive him wild.

The Roycrofters celebrate the look of the written word itself, in ways which would defy my Kindle to display without taking all its memory, now devoted to up to 1500 titles in a tome the size and heft of a single paperback. Words adorn the very beams of the dining room at the Roycroft; "Moderation" in its barroom. Exalted words on entry and exit through the beamy wooden doors.

What then am I to make of this absence all around the central regret of Friday evening? Or the books lined up at the bookstore, each one of which I longed, palpably, to read, but collectively all of which would render me a pauper on paper. Perhaps I can check them out on-line with my Kindle from the library (no, they won't lend me one, should I check out my punctuation?)?

So much to do, and so little time. It was the Burchfield-Penny which had Hubbard aphorisms on display. They had poetry too up against the wall in a corridor devoted to Native American art. Depicting pictures depicting scenes depicting life as Native Americans struggled to live it among the rest of us. Little Chief is one I remember in particular because it reminded me of the name of a friend who sold Iroquois Beer in the name of his father, the Chief.

We strolled a theme out in public. Even the beautiful old school we walked by displayed the name of its architect helpfully on a placard just as I asked the question out loud. Reality was being animated. The Golden Globes liked that version better too. Avatars of reality, really. Amazing. The architects names are also in the URL for the picture, if you get curious.

But I do know all about the Yangtze River and why the government of China had no choice but to damn [sic] the three gorges, and all the people and history there within to be inundated now, forever. I didn't really need to see that documentary, so vividly documented by its absence. Why would my viewing be enhanced, by narrations from its director who can only tell me what my heart already understands? It's very much as if I were being there.

It is the role of man to leave his imprint on the landscape. To inscribe regularity, in the form of words, upon the very vistas themselves. And thereby to internalize those brushstrokes nature would have made, all by heartless self, without man. Alone? As if nature could possibly know what to do without us.

Sure, China has gone too far now, bringing up to date the necessity to channel the rivers which otherwise would change course willy nilly and destroy farms and farmers. To stockpile grain and salt against the famines. To regularize life, to orchestrate with words the bureaucratic structures which can render something civilized and that much better than chaotic otherwise savagery. They use the term chaos to rationalize a lot.

Sure, we have too. Gone too far. With carriages whose opulence we don't even notice would put to shame the gilt ones at some museum which once carried royalty. Decrepit carriage houses here in Buffalo would make castles in most of the world, and they crumble from disuse. On alleyways not even mapped by Google (whoops, wrong again, I slander). New skyscrapers reach too high. We are in no position to chastise China. They were symbolically required to do what they have done also. Their Sacred Object is the Word itself. Ours requires lots of footnotes.

It would be trivial enough to change the way our distributions work. It would be as trivial as changing the way we lust. For ever larger houses, cars, boats and breasts. I'm spent. I want for nothing. I want. Nothing. Whew, I nearly lost my breath there, at Christmas, you know, in fact.

But, you know, I'm not a big fan of something to replace capitalism with, which would only accentuate the bureaucratic authority of SNOOTS who make the poor people feel even more economically challenged than they were without them to point it out. And the Golden Booty award winners were all very careful to discount their importance, up against that of Precious, so big and beautiful and black. I'm down with that.

Yes, Virginia, there is love in Buffalo. Snow mistaking that.