Television Everywhere

There are so many homeless in LA. As with the depth of snow when I was a little person, how am I to know how much of this is life as normal in the sunnier climes, and how much is the impact of our economic meltdown. They say I came of age during a mini Ice Age, and so the snow was likely really deeper then.

Some wheel around with impressive quantities of stuff. I wonder what's bundled up within the third-world-wrap improvised baggage. I wonder if it would be very easy to distinguish mental illness from hard luck, or if the distinction gets lost by the time a person is used to living on the street. By the time one gets to know the purple-shirted downtown security marshals by name.

I am barely holding my stuff together. Some's here in California, and some's in Buffalo. Some is among the contacts I keep going, grateful for the existence again of correspondence, of the sort I used to write before the days of email. There was that awful time when no-one was writing anymore, and before you could be very sure that everyone had email. Thank God that desert is in my past.

I've reconnected with people I haven't seen for years, thanks to Facebook, or thanks to profiles on various Internet sites. My world feels manageable again, as though I never did leave so much behind. My daughters will visit me in my new place, and I will settle my mind.

This self I am, nestled among stuff and correspondence. This self whose eternal existence I don't quite believe.

Then what is consciousness? From where does this conviction come that I am me and here and now and concerned about my persistence at least for a while longer?

My reflexes and behaviors are not so different from the dog I now befriend. We have - dogs and mankind - co-evolved over that same time span which created humanity floating atop of so much meat. We conspire with language to create something more than just a species of animal embedded in the holograph of life's matrix. Even our personal consciousness, that self we hold onto so closely, is conspiracy's merest end.

There was once so much talk of finding oneself, of being true to oneself, of the possibility to lose oneself sometimes for the good, and sometimes for the ill of it. Perhaps we've grown to realize that this fetishised self never did exist, and that the nirvana satori states which ancient exotic practice once promised us exist only at a metaphorical remove from real. Where our own true singular God resides.

Now we know there are no limits to what an individual will aggrandize to himself and for himself alone. In stunning competition with those grandiose rulers from the days of our inception as humanity, the Chin Shih-huang dis (Emperors) or however the hell you prefer to spell it (秦始皇）from back when the rest of us behaved ourselves as worker bees, individuated in terracotta,  with faces enough to mimic proper names.

Was he a psychopath, then, that despotic unifier of what China still claims for it's persistent identity? If you lose yourself in drink or beneath the kind of psychosis that either sends you to, or which develops as a result of, living on the street, are you then in that same remove from self-ness that those with the power of life, death, and personal pleasure from the backs of lowlier selves once had?

So many of those we admire now have that capacity to live as kings or princes or emperors. They do good works and give their money to programs for people in need. They would keep psychotic shooters away from crowds if they could, and, like the autocrats of old, they strive to be responsible and to resist the temptations to live as though there were nothing else in the cosmos but their personal self, and perhaps some comely other for a while.

They show up on TV.

Not too long ago, back when families would eat together, we would also sit together to watch network TV. These were somewhat communal moments, not too far removed from attending a live show or a concert. Television has since become fragmented to the point where it would be hard to understand how people know what they like to watch, and since the gradations are so fine, it seems unlikely that even family groupings might like to watch the same shows.

Our small screens have grown now, and they show things ranging from games to avatars moving in synch with our gestures to Internet redirected amateur-generated YouTubes to the movies we still like to watch in a group when they aren't too lurid.

People still gather up the news on television screens, although this also blends with computer screens, and it's almost impossible now to distinguish responsible news reporting from a packaged and hyped presentation calibrated to capture attention. And much of this descends into a strange kind of semi-hypnotic telling to folks who are frustrated by their own difficulty making sense of the world around them, things which will cause them to be assured that they are right in their lazy and unschooled assumptions about how things must be.

Even those of us who are demonstrably enlightened, at least by virtue of our schooling and our ability to read and to agree with peer-reviewed thinking from among the very best prepared among us, cannot seem to help but to live as though things which we know to be true aren't true.

We know that global warming is real. We know that temperatures in Antarctica are rising at a terrifying rate. We know in our very bones that the human species cannot keep on the way it is, and yet we keep on as though it really can and will. As though a real and tangible God will descend to rescue us. As though we can achieve technologic and satori of a sort which won't alienate us from that self we never want to leave, though we might wish to invent a new one.

This all generates a kind of extreme cognitive dissonance. We live in a perpetual state of waiting for the next shoe to drop. We wait for the final war of the worlds to erupt, and there might be a tiny part of each of us which would feel relief when it does. But there's absolutely nothing any of us can do to head it off.

We listen to the reasonable people up on TV who wag their heads because they also can't get any action even though they have voices that we don't. People carry on as though there's nothing to be done because there's nothing they can do themselves and we're scared about changing what's worked in the past. Indeed, as with the US Constitution, we valorize those things to the point almost of making them sacred. We need something to hold onto. We need something to behave as if forever.

Meanwhile, as we all stare at screens ranging in size from pocket-sized and hand held to wall-sized and almost theatrical, we keep in touch with one another and with the world, and the one thing that we must suppose is that there's something indelibly me about me and that can't change until something kills me. Even then some of us think that there's a way to carry on in the great beyond, whatever that could possibly mean.

Sometimes we worry about whether we have inherited DNA which is just a little bit off. That secret code, still inscrutable even to the one who owns it, which represents our right to exist according only to natural law, and as part of an environment from which we now diverge relentlessly and at an accelerated pace.

Will we be tripped up earlier than some of our cohort, perhaps because the environment has been shifted too far too fast? Or is it just that we may have outlived the span for which the code was optimized? Or are we just simply deserving, according to that natural law, to go away and good riddance. To what extent would you re-invent yourself if you could? How far would you transform from the one those who love you love?

I think we stare at screens for the same sort of fix. We want to know if we are sound in our thinking, in our environment, and we want to check ourselves out according to the widest possible sweep of what's out there.

It seems clear enough that warm homes, shelter from the weather, flush toilets and other such innovations are to be desired universally. We even want those around us to share the amenities, since otherwise we all might be drowning in shit and filth from those who live like animals. There is no-one short of Jesus who loves a smelly homeless person. A dog does better. And yet we must distance ourselves from the shooters and the thieves, and why not the shouters and the haters too?

Sometimes we just want to be entertained or amused, which must stimulate a process internal to our brains which can also be stimulated just by ingesting certain substances. Drugs. We used to entertain each other face to face. We used to watch entertainers live. Now they would look amateurish. We have become used to the best. Projections on a screen at ever heightened fidelity.

Or are the ones we watch the best? We watch them because their genes expressed themselves in bodily forms of exceeding beauty. Comic genius, maybe, or glibness with tongue. We watch them because their parents imbued them with a work ethic which made them climb and climb until they were at the very top, while the rest of us continued to play the lottery of when will someone notice me.

I don't wish for someone better than the ones I  love. I don't dream of perfect skin and form and intelligence. There is something better than that, and it's right here before me now. And still I am intrigued by all the new ways I can get "content" on my various screens. Quite soon now, it will all be mediated by the ubiquitous trade in packets of diminutive data. A kind of genetics of communication, which will render obsolete all investments in satellite infrastructure, or cable plant, or even fiber optics except for the backbones. Even these might get subsumed in some vibratory pulsation through the ether.

We will all swim in that same electromagnetic vibrant soup beyond the sensory capacity of mere organism to detect. Perhaps the screen will turn into a pair of cheap 3D glasses, and we can tune in and out from reality, sight and sound, depending on where we want to be. We can expand its virtual size to all-encompass the drear reality round about us. We can inhabit filmic dystopias and they can become real and real is good.

Except that when the electromagnetic resonance drops, when the generators hiccup, we all fall down, we all fall down and then what of that vaunted selfness which was to be so elaborated? What of that then?

Yes, and it's true that we already condition reality at that remove from our animal selves. We have already touched the quantum fringes, and life on the edge is all that there ever has been. Our reality is already shared. But that we can still, for a moment longer, chose to shut it out by virtue of those historically extravagant riches that you and I, demonstrably by our ability to read and write across the ether, share.

This is the moment then, when all collapses and we face a collective future. Or not. As always.

Is Reality Over-rated?

Is reality overrated? I'd have to say so, although it surely does matter what you mean by "real". A long time ago I remember reading some line in The Razor's Edge about how if you could believe something then it would be real, but you'd have to really believe it, like the ground beneath your feet. In the context of that book, or of that age, it did seem to be a powerful statement, although I'm certain it just sounds fluffy here.

Of course at the tender age when I and everyone else was reading Somerset Maugham, I hadn't yet experienced insanity of the sort where you really do inhabit a world of your own creation. Only once, thank goodness, have I been hoist by my own narrative petard out of sensible reality. It wasn't fun like drugs, although there was a certain similarity, I'd have to guess.

I'm pretty nutty in the choices that I make, but lots of people actually think that I'm the paradigm of solid grip on reality when it comes to making sense of what I interact with. Honest!

Sure, I have lots of trouble with career and women choices, but who does that distinguish me from except for movie stars and really rich people, and hasn't anyone ever watched Citizen Kane?

Just look around you and you'll see lots of love affairs defined by irresistible looks, or aspects or whatever else can support projections of fantasy love. You'll see people reaching after fantasy homes and kids too. I wonder if it works for them. We've given a real shot now at material comfort to more people than ever before in the history of mankind. But we sure haven't brought reality up for the masses of mankind.

As a pretty left-leaning thinker it isn't much of a stretch for me to blame the ever more massive immiseration of the population of our planet on the cultural uprootings accomplished by the blue-jean imperialism of America the Beautiful.

But if I fall off the leftward edge into a kind of Libertarian idiocy, I also know that there is something pretty dreamy about what we've represented. Lots of people happily leave behind their magical belief systems in favor of something so demonstrably real. Ordinary people living in virtual castles and driving cars. Based on engineering can-doism based in turn on science.

The extremist flag wavers want to have us as innocent as our tear-streaming songs about ourselves. The other ones, like me, want us to wake up to how much actual and deliberate harm we've caused to nascent people-power in the name of our corporate interests. Think Pinochet, and Iran Contra, and then think CIA.

But there is one thing undeniable about this true American Dream. To the extent that we base our gettings together on science, there really is some reality to the good part. That's the basic horror right there in so-called Creation Science, since there is no way short of coercion to get people to agree on what is so patently a crazy notion. That all the evidence for earth's true age was planted by a trickster God? That's just nuts!

Scientific agreements are nothing more or less than the ones with the greatest chance of getting the most people to agree. And that right there is a truly wonderful thing. No matter, truly, that there can be collateral damage along the way; when what we agree to falls a little bit short since it's always still a work in progress.

And too bad that things like politics and economics can't be so grounded in science. I mean really, way too bad!

For sure the one thing that absolutely must drop out from scientific reality is the possibility of a personal God. Or does that just throw a baby out with some bathwater . . . .

I'm pretty sure that one may be a difference without a distinction. If scientific thinking limits you to the very razor's edge of what it is about yourself which is distinct from everything else out there - if that's all the room there is for choice, then OK that's also all the room there is for God's intervention too. I'm not sure the problem survives the thought experiment. That's really plenty of room.

Let's say, just for instance, that pikk.com tanks. Hey, it could happen! But maybe someone likes the name and offers us a million dollars. Then would we have done all that hard work just as a kind of lipstick on our pig. Like makeup for a Saturday Night Date, would it make any difference how the connection got made?

I haven't a clue most any minute of my life what I really want the next. But I do know what I'm missing, and it's almost always people. My sweetheart, my daughters, my friends. The rest is so I have that space for the missing, I guess; so that I can have some security against the daily buffetings of life.

That's what compelled me to rebuild my old sailboat too. It was the metaphor, I guess. A warm cabin down below in the face of stormy weather. It's where I could and would and did feel most alive. No need to really brave the wildest oceans, just a taste was all I needed. And I did love it best alone.

Now I can easily imagine lots of improvements to life on planet Earth. If we'd all stop clambering over one anothers' backs to get to some very top, we could dial back our load on the planet and begin actually to enjoy one another. We really could.

But in the meantime, in almost precisely the way that our now so antiquated automobiles allowed the redefinition of our landscapes, there is a more powerful transformation afoot which can really wreck havoc to our collective reality.

At the very farthest reaches of our collective scientific agreements must be by very definition the realm of physics. That's what digs down to the really hard stuff, upon which everything else must ride. We all know that physics is almost done and the really interesting stuff now will come from the life sciences; genetics, bioengineering, bioinformatics, that sort of thing. Maybe nano-technology if you can stand Neal Stephenson any more.

But at their root, these are all what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science" which fills in the gaps to our theoretical picture of the world. These are not paradigm shifting realms unless and until they come up with new mechanisms to understand mind, say, or inheritance of characteristics, say, or how to assert perfect corrections to our imperfections.

But so far as they are mechanisms, they will still depend on physics, and anyhow it's the nature of paradigms that they are pretty soup-to-nuts. So, when the life sciences folks "discover" that mind really does matter, the same thing will have happened in physics. It's just a Somerset Maugham chicken/egg problem to which there's no real way out other than to shift the whole darned paradigm.

So now on our quantum edge, as I keep saying over and over and over until you feel like you're hitting your head on bricks (I know, I know), waiting excitedly for our newest particle accelerator to find the last one, it really is time to wake up and smell the, um, delusions? I wonder what delusions smell like. Let's smell the coffee!

So, do this little thought experiment. Ask yourself what links together all the little pieces which make up the story of your life. If you're a little bit too sophisticated like, ahem, I am, you'll already know that there are only constructed narratives of your life's history. You can prove this easily enough by rubbing off some of your memories of yourself with those who know and love you.

I would never go so far as some nutty post-modernists, who would say that all reality is constructed, leading up to the really big Grand Narrative of Normal Science, which is really just a tale of raw power. I would never do that. I am way too tied to reality, as I've already told you.

But anyhow, even the parts of your own story which won't rub off - the ones which stick in every single version, the skeleton if you will - this narrative frame still depends on all sorts of emotional connections being made. Even if mom was just a flash in the pan, dad probably liked her for at least a moment. And someone had to care for you before you could learn to speak (which "they" now find out starts already in the womb, duh!).

And the words you use are all about getting together with other minds. The shouting and warnings and pushings back, these are all things which define who you interact with, and then they in turn define you too.

And that right there is a whole slew of non-physical reality, well, unless you are just a bag of invasive germs because you can't stop wanting to have physical contact all the time with everyone, which is perfectly understandable, but a little gross.

I mean if everyone remains available that way, then we're all just beasts, right? Doesn't a kind of sameness come over every connection as if we ourselves were just undifferentiated sub-atomic particles? Well, obviously, I can't speak for you.

But anyhow, what do you really care about? Would you like those things to be separated from reality? Can you live on only your dreams?

It's long since plenty clear that at the very most extreme reaches of our abstract thinking, we can't really tell if reality is hard or just a kind of probability wave propogated in literal nothingness. We even have real experiments which prove that you can't pin down the smallest particles - that all you can do is approximate their position until you collapse them into reality by rubbing them off on some of their partners. That's called perception.

But until that happens, these sub-atomics (funny name, that) only exist as a cloud. And that cloud, while real, is also truly conceptual until the moment of its perception. I'm not making this stuff up, it's in any physics text book. The probability cloud quite literally cannot be perceived, but it's reality is trivial (well, relatively) to prove. It's not in your mind, but it's also not quite in reality. It's a kind of conceptual reality that's 'out there.'

So if, at the limits - at the razor's edge - there is a kind of conceptual reality which is provably not "in" the mind, but "in" reality, then one might wonder about the connections between and among the pieces of this conceptual reality. If, by definition, there can't be a physical, perceptual connection, then perhaps there is some other kind. Perhaps emotions are also provably 'out there.'

They are certainly harder to measure, these emotions. They don't have any kind of physical distance metric, right? But as a human being, I know you know what I'm talking about. And at the limits of our physical understanding of the cosmos, what if it did turn out that these subatomic particles, which after all provably can't possibly inhabit the same physical universe as one another, because they don't even perceptually exist yet, are only connectable by a kind of emotional relation.

I think you'd then have to say that emotion really is out there in the cosmos, as the kind of improbability glue which holds all this non-perceptual reality together.

That's good enough for me to count as a kind of personal God. You know, as a kind of aspirational entity which doesn't, you know, actually have to, like, really, um, exist.

So leaving that big can of worms alone, I sure do wish you could see how this changes everything. I sure do wish you could see that the gravity-hadron - the "force-carrying" particle which might put the final nail into the standard physical theory's coffin, ahem, is purest chimera. It's both a figment of our imagination and real, and while it might be findable, we still might not be able to find it, by virtue of cosmic twists of fate.

I'm fine either way. Gravity and physical love make another fine distinction without a difference for me. You can't really have one without the other, I mean physical and emotional love, at least not beyond a single life-time if you want to be a nun or priest or something else really out there. Or maybe you never even want to see the kids you sire? Well, I guess you could have test-tube babies certified high IQ or something, like the magic synthetic oil which makes my car run forever. I wonder, would you have a trade-in policy on those kids? If there were some sort of genetic mixup?

I'm glad for the stuggle with and against my physical impulses. I'm glad that science never ends. But most of all I'm glad for love, and for that I don't really care what turns you on, gentle reader, I really don't. Because it won't be real unless it's real for you too.

OK, so I do care. You're wrecking my cosmos by your not caring, and damn it, I'm rather attached to it, my little cosmos!

Embarrassing imature twaddle

sorry, but I've yet to grow up that way . . . 

I haven't really worked out what a blog is or should be. I think when I first heard of them, I simply wondered why anyone would be interested at all - so, you can publish your daily thoughts? You could already do that. HTML isn't very hard. Then I kind of got how it was being made so very trivial. How young girls at the age of narcissism just wanted the whole world to know what they were thinking. 

Then, seemingly overnight since I almost always have my head too far into whatever I'm doing to notice, blogs became serious, and covered what serious writers want you to know on a minute by minute basis, apparently in a way to deepen the published and editorial coverage of what's new but not new enough. 

In any case, I am finding the process transformative in a way which interests and intrigues me. I take it as given that letter writing is dead and gone and never will return. As with all transformations, I find this more than a trifle sad. Letter writing, when practiced, aspired to a kind of elegance and turn of phrase which was lovely in its compact precision. 

I'm certain that there have been people who write their letters starting with a rough draft, leading ultimately to a clean copy, but I certainly never did. Almost precisely as when I used to dictate letters into a tape machine for my secretary to transcribe, I developed a simple discipline which made it possible to contain the structure whole in my mind, and in the dictating - or in the letter writing - get it out.

I somewhat mourn - and it is a guilty mourning - that my daughter does not get letters from me the way I used to from my parents. And I don't get any from her. We are really no less in touch than before she went to college, since her cell phone number is the same; and the need to know precisely where one is and what one is doing is long attenuated. 

So I get calls for advice on rare occasion, and we exchange emails on occasions still more rare. But it surely is not the same, any more than neighborhoods full of children playing outdoors among neighbors who actually knew one another can still survive our sprawling wombs with views. 

Sure, I do try to write emails as though they were letters, but truth to tell, as rare as truth telling is, they don't get read. Email is far too hoppy for someone to tuck into quite. Emails have to be almost bite sized. 

I had long distance when I was in college, but it was costly, and entailed some permission or trade for beer money (when beer cost a quarter). So, I think I was energized by simple heartstrings, whether of loneliness or fond familiarity, there was simply a desire to let my folks know what was going on and what was new and what was on my mind. I surely didn't tell them everything, but it was pleasant enough and almost entirely without guilty pressure that I would sit at my desk to compose my thoughts.

And in almost the same manner did I devour the letters from home.

I do remember a transition to typed letters. This must have been some while after college note-taking destroyed my script, and college paper writing trained my fingers to fly across the manually hammered keyboard.  It was after my handwritten letters from my backpacking spring and summer across Europe had been transcribed by my Dad's secretary, probably so that they were legible. But I knew there was some pride in the compilation.

Much of our history is recovered from letters, when they aren't destroyed from too fine a sense of what is private. When discovered - these very private letters not destroyed - we get a sense of in to some truth beyond the scripted and edited version of history.   Though surely many epistolary writers wrote in full consciousness of private now and eventual public archival significance then.

So, for me for now, that is where the bloggers' art comes in, if art it can become. Maybe just beyond the verge of embarrassing if your friends or workmates were to know what you're up to. More like what you might disclose to a benchmate in the train station (if there were train stations anymore), but of course don't anymore in the airport, so anxiously nervous lest you be delayed and bumped or can't find some space to relax amid the noise and too much informality of dress and of behavior.

I wonder where is the space for those truly private thoughts which should get burned. What can happen to the art of making love long distance? Never mind. 

So, for me, this practice, while far removed from keeping in touch, might yet provide some energy back to a mind itself grown jumpy and disconnected and distracted and oh so very abstracted. It is distressing not to be able to coax a thread where once there was actual correspondence. 

I still do have, on my actual desk at which I seldom sit (laptops actually work better on the lap I find) a series of now ancient letters which I myself never could respond to. From China, say, or from a very close friend who moved away, and whom I actually did try to visit motorcycling through Little Rock. Something had happened to me. I was too busy for sure, but also inwardly there was nothing left with which to press a write. Only a vague sense of guilt and want. I think it was simply that the leisure space in my life, and perhaps in all of ours, had been squeezed away. There was too much on my mind and too much to take care of. 

Or maybe it was simply the fuss to set up the typewriter? The awkwardness to tame my hand? A simple habit lost? I was fooling around with how to compose Chinese on a computerized word processor, well before the GUI. My Chinese hand is well beyond execrable, though that can hardly be the whole excuse.

I think rather, and this is quite extravagant be warned, that in the very way that holographic films contain the entire image across their whole - such that when broken in half each part contains an attenuated version of the whole - so we humans, as conscious beings, but even were we not, are in microcosm the entire cosmos.

This is hardly radical in itself, though I do mean it in the most radical possible way. And as we whittle away our planet earth, which for my very own purposes is the only living cosmos in our way, our souls are attenuated too. This earth is cosmos whole, and there is no other. In complexity it more than comprehends all else "out there". It is, in very precise sense, cosmos' heart. Copernicus be damned along with all those concupiscent Piarists who so befriended Galileo.

It is always possible to be quite wrong while being right. While correcting one strain, as in the Inquisition, torturing out another which might itself have guided the way toward salvation, if that is what you want.

It just may be that in our throes of certainty about the physical cosmos, as though that is all that is there, we are in process to destroy our emotional heart, which also does pervade creation. 

And so, dear heart, I blog in desperation, perhaps, to kindle back some kindred connection, heart to heart, that consciousness can be raised to its proper estate, co-creator of a world never ever quite created in the first place. Because that sort of Creationism is become a very very dangerous fiction. God has come to earth, and he is in us. Unborn still. In grave peril of abortive loss. And you know where I stand on that issue . . . 

Damn!  Off to work, hi ho hi ho . . . or what's a meta for????