Camera Front and Back

As with the true depth of the snow when I was little, I have no way to know how my memory is being distorted by age. I am more engaged with the news than I used to be, but I'm also having a hard time remembering my state of mind as recently as when we all turned the Y2K corner.

I love having a smartphone which I can use for instant references: Names and historical data; definitions and showtimes - and I'm certain that it's making me a kind of 'as-if' smarter. But what's it doing to my consciousness? What does it mean when I can and will and must check in about every little question and curiosity?

Driving past bus stops now or walking along the road, it seems that everyone with an idle minute is looking downward toward something in their hand. Fiddling with it. But strolling through the glorious Balboa Park in SanDiego there was a lone man slouched backwards like some iconic take of John Muir, engaged with the landscape and looking homeless. I could repose in mind with him.

Through txting now, there will be video chat, perhaps, though you can't do that under your desk in class. I want my 4G phone and I want it now. I want all my screens united and I want the biggest one to envelope me. (the "I" will disappear in the end through and by and with this process)

So, two things happened recently: One, I finally shlepped my phone into Verizon for a replacement since my touchscreen has  been referring touches to random other parts of the screen from those I intend. I could fix it by "coloring" in the screen until it re-established sync, but it was getting worse and worse, and this was my way to defer wanting something cooler and newer. It's always better to wait a while, and no-time more so than now. Two, I randomly remembered Superman the movie and then there it was on Dish. I'd forgotten the part at the beginning where the Kryptonite criminals are exiled onto a 2D screen. I'd thought it made nice symbolism at the time.

The funny thing is that now that I have a brand new replacement obsolete phone on its way, the one I have started working again. I feel guilty for burdening the globe with more junk, although it's hard to trust it just because I worked it over good trying one last time to fix it. And the movies now are poised to go 3D, and that's being touted as the "new color." As though we'll all look back on 2D the way we do on black and white or silent.

I'm not so sure.

You know, here in California, they've had some success bringing city centers back to life by enticing in the mall brands. I'm thinking of Pasadena and San Diego, but I also saw the same thing in Spokane Washington. (one has to wonder why Buffalo can't do it?)

But then you find these cute little specialty stores, located in architecturally interesting little retro establishments, all going out of business because you'd have to know they are there and frequent the place enough to go there when you think of wanting something they sell. Which brings me right back to the consciousness changes happening with all the mass mediation of what we ponder and think we know.

There's only so much room in the brain, you know? Keep us distracted by too much information, keep us daily tied to news about the Middle East or world-threatening disasters, and we'll only have room for the mall, or the mall-like downtown, and its limited brands. Familiars.

And we don't even know our neighbors, and wouldn't want their low skilled artisanal outputs which are what national branding and interchangeable parts (right down to the food we eat) were all about in the first place.

The bats are dying and so are the bees, and we weren't really thinking of them when we thought we could go it alone on the planet. But we can't. It's so easy for me to envision mass transit on rails for getting to work each day, but much harder to imagine the political shifts which would have to happen first.

The disastrous outcome of nuclear energy proliferation seems inevitable in retro, in particular because if even the Japanese can't work it out on the corruption front, how do the rest of us expect to do so?

Well, you won't likely get the answer from me, since I go back to work on Wednesday (insert Hooray track!). Just like the rest of us, I wish there were actually a way to direct my efforts which did good for the planet.

I would be happy with a better political arrangement, so that at least I might be assured that the actual leaders made it into leadership positions, and that the thoughtless classes weren't so much in charge. Without reverting to some sort of aristocracy.

Maybe I'm asking too much? I don't really think so. It's all about trust and education and finding ways to put the two together. Maybe the smartphone and other devices can help with that. Maybe it will be the wearable computers. For sure, we need to get back our commuting time and not spend so much energy on the virtual but highly stressful reality of the freeways.

That would be my vote anyhow. But you know, before I get a chance to vote, we the people will ourselves have been turned into interchangeable parts. Hooked on "authenticity" as on a drug. And isn't that simply the most poignant irony of all?

The Narrative Imperative

Now that I have a smartphone, I tend to use it to look up words. Here in America I don't mind so much that Google might be tracking my searches, but it does occur to me that did they want to they could pretty easily discover exactly what I'm reading; I'm pretty sure the choice and sequence of words I'm looking up makes a sort of signature for which book I'm reading.

That sort of search is trivial for computers, and tough for a guy like me. In fact, if you were to highlight all the terms in a particular book which stand out simply for being underutilized in the corpus of all books; nevermind the state of the particular reader's mastery, you'd have a pretty good way to catalog the books. It would also be more enriched than just titles, authors, dates and keyterms. Maybe.

I'm sure this is why Google is so hard at work accomplishing that great public service of scanning in all the works from the world's key libraries, and I wouldn't complain about it. Well, except that as has been indicated by the recent business losses descended from necessary changes to the Google search algorithms, they clearly have too much power.

But imagine if the government were to take the Google utility over. There'd be all sorts of politicization to what really should be decisions motivated only by Google's self interest. If we can't count on that, then what can we count on?

An ever changing catalog of word frequencies could allow the precise placement of written works within the ever shifting sands of cultural epistemes. Works could be dated, authors and readers profiled, and lots of conjecture could be accomplished, mechanically, about where the epistemes are headed. Who's the vanguard, and what is the conservative drag coefficient.

Or we could mandate a pubic database, using reliable and repeatable cataloging principles. Of course we'll have to keep a few libraries open and a few public-servant librarians employed at something better than slave wages if such an extravagant notion is to have a ghost of a chance in the Wild World Web, where information just wants to be free!!!

When I go to the movies, I make decisions about which one to see based on some powerful calculus of the relation among my energies: my desire to escape, to be entertained, or to learn something. But since it's almost always a series of either/or decisions, there's a diminishing chance I'll ever spend my money and time to watch a C-grade movie, whatever the genre. Even if some poor schmuck of a film-maker worked his heart out on the one I'll never see.

I don't read much stuff that's written for edgy specialists either, and why would I? The effort to be expended would quickly encompass the entire professional life I didn't spend. Not to mention the time spent looking things up.

I suppose it'll be a nice day when everything operates the way that NetFlix does, and so Google or some other book purveyor can recommend to me some signature books which follow the pattern of my affinities. (The government can track me down as well, lumping me in with those folks who have nefarious motives for their concealed reading or other weapon-toting habits.)

But there are two things which make life worth living (for the purposes of this narrative). One, of course, is serendipity. The other is authors who consider it their duty to write for a general public without dumbing their writing down the way that Harvard philosophy chair has done (I won't name him since I only read the free Kindle first chapter, and I found it insulting to my intelligence, as though written algorithmically with a flow of words so smooth I hardly even had to think).

Essentially, they reveal the wisdom of their narrow discipline to the greater reading public, among other things just in case someone from a different discipline - or even no discipline like yours truly - is able to take the writing and run with it. Reframing according to the principles of Occam's Razor can be such a powerful thing, and it can never happen at the pinnacle of accomplishment inside some discipline. Not able to see the forest for the trees kind of thing.

Of course, there's also money in writing for a mass audience, and the closer you can make your language conform to the prevalent popular waves, the more there is to be made.

I am apparently not the only person who's read of Rupert Sheldrake's crossword puzzle experiment. It's one of a series of experiments designed to test for "morphic resonance" which predicts, among other things, that tricks once learned are more trivial to learn once some one being has done it.

So, if you pre-publish the New York Times crossword puzzle so that it can be solved by a random selection of puzzlers before it gets published for the general public, that puzzle (presumably randomly selected from a bunch of norm-referenced puzzles) will be demonstrably easier for the general public to solve than puzzles which have not yet been puzzled over. Even though the pre-solvers are prevented from sharing their solutions.

Pretty cool, no? But are crossword puzzles in the realm of normal tasks which require complex understanding or detailed recipes for their solution? In my example yesterday, I contrasted unself-conscious mastery to mastery which can be taught in a kind of aha quantum leap fashion: recipe instruction compared with rapid deployment frame-changing.

I suggested that the most powerful teaching might always involve frame-shifting, which is specific subcategory of principle discovery as opposed to the simple recitation of factual narrative. I also said of myself, since I'm memory challenged, that internalizing operating principles is the only trick I have. I'm lazy I guess. I look for the most direct solution which doesn't involve much higher math.

The rest of you may not be so troubled by porous memory, and so you memorize formulas for a science or a math test, say. I can't and so I must derive them each and every time, or so my life's narrative goes. But I could never do it on my own without knowing that they had been derived before and having myself rehearsed their derivation. In essence I simply reiterate a familiar process. Maybe that's just another mnemonic device, like constructing mental architecture or other techniques I've heard about.

Crossword puzzles involve, sometimes, surprising word associations, which, like jokes, once told seem quickly to become general currency. If they were already general, then the puzzle part of the crossword simply wouldn't work.

But just as with jokes, they work because they are, more or less, in the air. If one comedian doesn't coin it, someone else will. Puzzle master, first solver, Stewart/Colbert (who always joke about the same stuff some of the time). This obsession with priority is so pre-post-modern!

The guy stuck in the old frame, who just doesn't get it (me!) can never be the teacher, and some jokes just aren't ready to be told, but once the overall ground of discourse is tilled for it, there is a kind of inevitability about someone somewhere and maybe almost everyone everywhere being able to come up with the resolution, the joke, the word-association.

Pinpointing the shift toward readiness is about like locating free will or the conscious actor on the Cartesian Stage. Among the contingencies and deliberations, false starts and completions of someone else's beginnings, I still wonder why it matters. What matters is that things do originate, it hardly matters where. Unless self-aggrandizement is the goal (which, of course, it always is - that's a part of the narrative imperative).

But clearly, if there is attention to the problem, and the solution is arrived at, then the world (of discourse, in this case) has moved a smidge in a direction it might not otherwise have moved. Because there is no known conduit for transmission doesn't mean we have to fill in the blanks with ESP or psi or other words which stand in for what we either don't or can't know or both or either.

The problem of precise origination or precise location or precise causal chains is remarkably analogous to the problem (solved!!) in physics about particle/wave mass/momentum information/perception. To within a cloud of precision some things simply can't be known. That doesn't mean they aren't.

I wonder why that is such a surprise, and why there is such resistance to buying it?

Well, of course it's a cheap trick and undermines all the hard work we've done to build up complex theories to explain not just how things work. In those momentary choices which must be made, while standing in line to watch the movies, or deciding what to read or with whom to mate, we really do want guidance. But not to the point of the absence of any free will.

Right now we are all still in thrall to the meme of mechanism, of cause and effect originating somehwere, which causes (!!!) us, collectively, to go marching off the virtual cliff, which will certainly be for the good of the planet if not for the good of the species. (Or was that the other way around? Our march to the cliff is wreaking an awful lot of havoc on the planet, which might wish that we would jump already, if it were to have wishes).

A crossword puzzle is an arbitrary shift in the ground of discourse, meant only for the amusement of those of us enamored of words. A choice about which movie to watch if of no consequence whatsoever. But if the field of possible choice is reduced to that with which the powers that be feel unthreatened, we start to worry about being entertained to somnolent death.

If the rewards for origination become so extravagant that individuals can control the wealth of nations (Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, the Googles not to mention the actors [actors!!??], we start to wonder about our relative freedoms.

We are all whores to dictators if the price is right!

If, on the other hand, the cataloging of our corpuses of words in the world of discourse were never a matter for proprietary algorithms: If the fiction of the private were dissolved within the fact that there is no private discourse, and if the catalog were to remain stable according to the well-worn paths of seekers. And finally if the role of serendipity were to be embraced as fundamental, finally, to what it means to be alive, which of course it is. Then we might not be required to follow one another over that cliff which is the only possible end to our clambering after the pinnacle of origination. The spike of free will's tipping point.

Yes, to make any sense at all a narrative has to be time-sequenced. Attention gets paid in order. The bounds of shared meaning get explanded. And when the seed crystal is dropped into the supersaturated tangle of words - or when the vessel gets tapped - sense does start to crystallize without any matter of authorship origination proprietorship or wealth to drag it down. The truth is feerer than all the efforts now deployed to keep it costly. Well, apart from the Scientologist, no-one does put a price on knowledge.

How odd that this mad mad race for knowledge and understanding should fall victim to its own efforts. Because it was thought more complicated than it is. If we simply were to recognize our interdependence and the role of chance in the lot of each of us, we might yet realize the fruits of our conscious labor.

That Lady Wasn't My Mother!!

So here's a nice rhetorical trick that cries out for clarification! A baby, abducted shortly after birth, now senses as an adult that her mother isn't really her mother. She Googles events around the time of her birth and finds notice of a baby abduction. DNA proves the match and she's re-united with Mom and now the law enforcement hunt is on for the fake Mom who abducted her.

What's the story here? Is it that biology trumps love, nature trumps nurture? Or is it that there never could have been "true" love involved, since what kind of mother would steal another woman's baby? Or is it that telling lies is what makes it a fictional attachment in the first place?

What about all those babies who never were loved or wanted by their DNA-matched "real" moms? What do they get, if not a real mom, to prove their misgivings? Only Jesus? No one calls Him Mama Jesus.

Just because you can find a story in reality whose odds might approach those of the Lottery, doesn't make the real story any less Hollywood. I mean this particular outcome isn't going to happen to you. Which doesn't mean a thing about how wonderful it might be for the reunited family in reality.

Still, as with Lottery winners who seem to get depressed and even kill themselves at a rate higher than the rest of us, and just as with Hollywood Hotties who seem to have a harder time than the rest of us staying in relationships, the real story is about keeping our dreams alive. This story is a realization of the fantasy that there really is someone out there who might love us the way that we deserve to be loved.

Except, oddly enough, most of us now feel lucky not to have been in the winner's shoes. Most of us are happy to have been raised by a real Mom who really did love us. Right? But, you know, I'm pretty sure that there are lots of people who do just fine without one.

The real prize is to be happy with what you are where you are, and there are as many different routes to that destination as there are individual stories. It's never easy. And the story never ends.

Will the Real ID Please Identify Itself?!

Some days, I swear, I would just like to have an actual identity. Something I can hang my hat on and call me for the purposes of employment and getting on with getting on. Still, on those days I'm glad I don't have a really real identity like Julian Assange or Liu Xiaobo, whose lives were effectively over the moment they realized that they were in their moment of truth.

There are so many funny things going on all at once these days! You have the whole WikiLeaks travesty, the Nobel peace prize being taken as an indictment of the Chinese government, crooks wearing Hollywood fake identities, and Hollywood re-presenting actual spooks as speakers of truth to power.

It would seem that Assange has fallen into some kind of understandable paranoia in contrast to Xiaobo's serenity, but it's in that strange category of  'even the paranoid have real enemies.' He knows he's targeted and hated by many in power, and he remains in a state of wanting to survive, which must be relatable to wanting to get laid. He seems tormented, or maybe it's his fan-club which is concocting this poison pill fail-safe of the "thermonuclear" trove of still more embarrassing leaked documents that they were apparently too scrupulous to let loose previously. Or were they just preparing their arsenal?

But that still seems a contrast to Liu Xiaobo and you have to honor the Nobel committee for being able to tell the difference unless they're just cuing/queuing up Assange for next year's prize. Liu seems already to have decided, long since, that his life is over: had only one direction to be lived out and that would be the direction of rule of law and (western-style?) freedom for China. Then you have the Chinese government at odds with seemingly the entire Western World about what they think is good for we the people, and granting such vitality to at least one person who can feel that totally alive on his extended reverse-Procrustean death-bed.

On the one side, you have plain criminals who have figured out that they can dress in silicone parodies of stereotyped crooks, and thus automatically deflect attention from who they really are. But you also have this asylum seeker who wanted to look more innocent. You have vigilantes out to get Mr. Leaker, but you also have freedom fighters on his side demonstrating their power against the likes of MasterCard and PayPal, wanting to teach them a lesson about denial of service and having corporate opinions. Or about pandering to perceived patriotic principles when they still accept contributions to the KKK since maybe nobody makes a stink about that and hey, business is business.

I'm trying to sell a car on Craig's list and find that there are more people employed in the art of seducing me into falling for some Internet trap than there are earnest and legitimate buyers. Caveat Emptor becomes something more like sell at your own risk and the employed are now all organized bandits, or was Jerry Rubin always right?

Hell, step out into public and you might be targeted for things you've never even heard about. What would you do if you were to find yourself the one on the hot seat with a public choice between honor and survival? Or even between comfort and turmoil? What if your blog starts getting comments other than the kind which are transparently part of someone else's self-promotion? Or is all you've got to do is to say something everyone in the world wants to agree with or disagree with or gawk at like a train wreck?

I'm making a kind of valiant attempt to rehabilitate my lapsed career as a professional involved with China. Aging transcripts seem to mean as much as what I might know right now, which is not so much a function of current reading and scholarship as it is of  a life-long habit of paying attention to things in ways different because of my once deep and serious study of things classically Chinese.

What's really real in all of this? Sometimes people have to disguise themselves just to be treated fairly at all. One has to pass for whatever the norm is where one wants to be protected and it can be courageous just to dress in native garb when you're out of your element. Sometimes one has to trot out a paper reality to substantiate the real one. Sometimes one just wants, earnestly, to be taken as oneself without, paradoxially, the need to assert some selfness in the process. You tell me! How the hell do I know who I am????

Last night I watched that film about Valerie Plame which I thought was quite well done. Simple recitations of the facts can lead to interesting themes. This guy, Joe Wilson, an ambassador who oddly doesn't seem quite to have it made therefore, marries a quite evident babe who's adept at leading a secret life, the details of which aren't even known to her husband. I guess being an ambassador ain't what it used to be. Maybe it's just a living, the way that working for The Company apparently is. Maybe there just isn't any more natural aristocracy Jeffy.

And then in this film portrayal of something approaching reality you have the White House, the seat of global power, acting for all the world like a lowly grifter, putting forward an image so utterly at odds with the reality that you'd have to really really want to believe - like being in love maybe or thinking you can get rich quick - to go along with their bald-faced lying.

There's another film upcoming about the King of England having to learn to speak in public so that the people can be rallied in the face of unspeakable horror. He has to put on a good false front, and he, apparently from the reality trailers, hires a nobody to do the training. How does this happen in a reality which so trails the movies?

Evidently, I can't really write, right? I have all these brilliant little points of light floating around in the soup of words which passes for my mind, and somehow, for some reason, I lack the discipline or training or self-belief or inborn talent to order them in ways that mesh with something in the future to cause them to crystallize here in the present on what was once a blank space.

I re-read myself as a fool and tip over into a kind of despair at what it is I just can't do, quite. I read the writings of published and accomplished voices and I see myself falling so short. Of young and talented voices. Of natural voices, and I just wish I were the analog of Valerie Plame or King George to be believable on my face no matter what, of substance, was lacking in actual fact.

And yet, I soldier on. Knowing full well that the blank page is always all that's between oneself and ones future. That scientific induction is really just a matter of teasing out the actual connections from the merely metaphoric and that at its root this is a fool's game because, apart from machinery which we construct - and even that doesn't always work flawlessly - all connections are probabilistic at best. There's always room for insertion of intentionality and therefore room to fool oneself.

I look on the blank page as I fill it and find, I'm afraid, even a little less than you might. I look to the fringes of the knowable universe and find nothing there in the direction of certainty, nor even a mirror nor even something very much not me. I am a diminutive jot.

As if there were ever anything other to be. Dutiful like a good Chinaman who still might be jettisoned overboard on his way across the mighty Niagara. Earnest like someone who believes that his word must be kept. Authentic likes someone whose greatest care is to appear not like anyone else. I'll take my chances being me. It ain't always easy. Sometimes I just wish it would happen all by itself.

Rallying for Sanity

As you may know, I've just driven across the country (again!). It's a fairly nutty thing to do, but I had more than a plane trip's worth of stuff I wanted to bring, and I'm not in a position to buy or rent another car. Plus, I rather enjoy the nearly hands-on sense of the vastness of this continent. Although four or five days of driving might be said to indicate still more how much we've shrunk.

There's plenty of time to let your mind wander driving more than a work-day's worth of highway every day. Sometimes you can kid yourself into thinking that you are thinking brilliant thoughts. By the end of the day you realize that driving is hard work, and there's no energy left to digest those thoughts.

I'm  more rested now.I feel the need to take a little time off from my real-world job hunting at the other end of my drive. I even sense some urgency to do this before tomorrow's rally on the Washington Mall. (Whoops! Too late.)

I'm not super-excited about this event, mainly because it's frustrating that the only thing left for the anti-nukes and anti-war crowd is a celebration of irony. Although to me, this is more a collective shout out about how come the only really punchy articulations of rage against the (political) machine can be made via a medium rather more like a political cartoon than like an essay.

I think we really don't know what it is we believe in with any passion worth fighting about, nor certainly worth dying for. We used to be almost willing to die for not dying in Viet Nam, and that was already after we were actually willing to die for civil rights. By the time of the nukes, we were willing to get pretty sure about needing to end their threat, but humor had already started to replace anger as we marched, Jericho-style, around the Pentagon. By now we're starting to think that nukes aren't even such a bad idea in the face of global warming.

It's a confusing time to want to be politically involved. The real worry is not so much that the crazies will take over as that everyone else will stay home. So, in the event, it was nice to see such a large crowd gathered, and John Stewart's earnest finish came as close at we might ever get to articulating what it is we need.

News-media attention grabbing dictates a narrative style which makes you really need to know stuff. You simply can't not pay attention. And now, in almost precisely the same way that we couldn't collectively turn away from SlumDog, that same director brings us a real-life horror story which makes even hardened news-reporters swoon. It's still the cheesy stuff which gets our attention.

Maybe it's because I'm on the West Coast now, but I've just experienced the my first packed movie house in decades, to watch a very well produced Swedish film, whose draw seems to descend from the blockbuster status of the books on which it's based. Strange reversals.

Our attention really is cartoonish. Despite the reasonableness of each of us, almost all of whom would never yell in someone's face no matter how powerful our disagreements, we mostly choose to spend our time - can you call this an investment? - on Crash-style hyper-constructed and and therefore by-definition artificial renderings of reality.

But even our reality is hyper-constructed. We consume a cornucopia whose inputs are being reduced as rapidly and radically as species are being wiped out. The genetic diversity and variety in our foodstuffs is being systematically simplified by well-meaning greeners of our planet who concoct massively profitable ways to coax ever more calories out of an acre of land. Inputs and outputs are being essentialized beyond viability.

Just as happened with antibiotics and surgery and sanitation and inoculations and all the triumphs of Western science, this process has enabled us to overrun our planet. To shrink it down to where I can cross it in five days without breaking too much sweat, or fly by it without any sweat at all. This could yet be a good thing.

I did watch the entire rally to restore sanity and/or fear on the Washington Mall. With or without reason, my mind pairs the event with the film Nashville. These are capstone media observations about media events about media. The danger is that we will never escape from our ironic remove from ourselves to inhabit our actual selves as we actually are. The danger is that we will never depart from politics as usual, that we will always be a SlumDog parody of who in the heck we think we are.

I watched Man on Wire recently, which is more than enough to prevent my wanting to watch 127 hours. I watched an actual tight-rope walker span Buffalo's twin towers, and that never did bother me. But the filmed documentary-style recounting of the actual walking across a rope stretched between the actual spans of the actual twin towers really messed with me.

I don't think I could stand the hyper-reality of a man needing to chop off his hand to escape the predicament into which he's accidentally fallen in a bid to challenge the fates. It would remind me too much of our human predicament, out on a ledge successfully beyond our ability to recover.

As you can see, the problem for me writing is that I seem not to know how to choose or why among the various things which impinge on my life. I seem to have no editorial agenda, which is why, of course, I blog instead of compose. I am looking to get out of the way of my mind. I know that everything important which ever happens to me or to anybody is something which surfaces from beyond those realms which we can and do and even must control.

My brain takes in and catalogs so very much more than I can be consciously aware of. The more I attempt to control that flow - especially as I grow older and what gets called my re-call ability grows ever more feeble - the more I am aware of the futility of that project. The important books I've read, the important people in my life, the important experiences which define me, the very love that I feel for others whose lives impinge on mine - these are all crossings which I could not and cannot control.

Everyone knows, or should know, that the distinction between fate and the subconscious is at the very best a formal distinction without testable content. Ultimately, one's own mind is as remote from oneself as are those arcane forces of the cosmos which arrange for this person to the be the one you fall in love with, or that accident to befall you at that particular time. Even in principle, not within the purview of conscious willing.

And in that sense the mind is one with its surroundings. To the extent that your perceptual apparatus is functioning, and maybe even when it isn't. Subconsciously, your brain first makes a shape and performs a culling before your mind can get a grip.

Learning then is like cultivation of the otherwise wild inlands of your brain. By words by cultural continuities by all sorts of human in-forming, we transform our brain's potential into something vaguely human, and it would not could not ever take place without some taming of the wild thoughts which would be there left alone.

Fundamentally, this process is narration. I - me, myself - am nothing if not a narrative shaped from the myriad possible narratives which flow through me. This narrative that is me is as much formative of this illusion I have of myself, as I am formative of it. My only human choice is about what I pay attention to among the flow. What I attend to. And to the extent that I allow mediated incursions to pre-condition what it is that I choose from, then I descend to something less than human. I become an ironic simulation of anything remotely possibly human.

That's what I take away, finally, from this rally to restore sanity. I place extravagant hope in mankind's collective ability to move beyond purely Western forms of command and control. I know that we are all made sick of women shouting at their men to man up. I know we're tired of flag-waving which leads to war.

I know that we don't want the insides of our minds to be as essentialized as the cartoonish reality our economic arrangements now increasingly render up for us. We don't all want to be cliches. Do we? Do we want to be cartoons of reality, Disney-like and without flaw?

If we continue to fail so miserably at making the stuff of our collective narrative more human and less machine-like (I love you too R2D2!!) then our passing will have been an event which nobody noticed. Like the brain damage I may have suffered from that most recent obstruction which passed through my brain, how would I know? How will we know? I'm still the guy ridings shotgun on myself. We still think that we're allive. We insist on it. But methinks we do protest too loudly.

I will not be a cartoon version of myself. And yet that is all that you can or will see of me. My presentations and re-presentations and smoothings out and uniform coloring. Ironic, isn't it? What a mess!

Dusty

Sometimes it can be fun to play with lost memories. I know that I did recently use a paintbrush to clean my screen. It's all dusty again, and I'm too smart to wipe it off which just makes permanent smudges and little scratches.

I know that it was mine, and what it looked like and I can remember placing it back into its cellophane wrapper after shaking clean the dust, but I can't remember when or where I must have been since there is no place around this apartment now where I would put a paintbrush. It must have been at my sister's house. It must have been a paintbrush I'd left there. I try not to touch the screen and smudge it and make it something less than pristine.

Dust gathers in all the most annoying places, and I can hardly imagine someone having the patience really to disassemble furniture and displace wall hangings and get at all the dust. Although it is only the existence of vacuum cleaners which makes even the attempt seem possible or worth essaying. And then you have to clean the filter, which I did already, before turning on the heat for the first time of the season because I don't really want to stir up dust until I clean. But cleaning out the vacuum cleaner is itself such a dirty business.

Still, there are times when I do enjoy tinkering with my thoughts, and chasing down memories and sometimes I do have the energy to get into all the crevices because I need to get my mind off something else, or am looking forward to the enjoyment after. But it never helps to make it an onerous chore, flecked with guilt, and so the dust mostly gathers. My mind grows old.

I cling to my subjectivity. Who among us would toss that away so carelessly as a song, and not regret in anticipation the moment after it all was just too late? Sure, if it were our child whose life we'd save, or maybe if there were some kind of wholesale emergency and everyone was dying and no way out. Perhaps then we'd throw ourselves in front of some bullet or onto some grenade if it seemed as though there were any hope left at all. Perhaps if there were some massive epidemic, we'd let go of our individual fear. Bad luck for all and some would live.

Screen projections of needless death are so sad. Projections of ourselves. Still, once towers of such complexity get built that their collapse is more likely than their staying erect, who shall you blame for their tumbling down? Must it be somebody's fault? Must there be an error at the root of every conflagration or might it be that we just weren't trying hard enough?

What is modernity but the collapse of subjectivity into the illusion of control and so if it does arrive before it's time, then death is always unjustified and terror permanent, until such time as there is no purchase of love any longer and the dust returns? Why do we not try our hardest at every single task before us? Why is that regret not so great? What about a college application or a job application? What if the game is rigged and trying hard isn't going to get it for you anyhow?

What is after this modern phase but waking up to the illusion of control and yet and still we don't do so quietly. Something not quite random would be nice, although it would be nice to win the lottery too. The intentional fallacy is what happens when you invest your talent with that of you that you would like to be proud of, but what is left but for verisimiltude to what you're not, or what you would have been without any you at all to it, but raw talent raw mimesis, clean of any dust.

Is there really anything at all to love in the very best among us, or do they just belong to the ages, to the recording media to something not quite perfected not quite clean but superficially so, airbrushed, who among us can resist tumbling into bed with a willing quarry?

And so what is there to hold onto except money honey? At least that can be counted. At least that counts. What is there to regret more than mis-spent or wasted money, and even rich people seem to have to invest something more like emotion in the money that counts, at least to the giving it away if not to the hoarding of it, or the calculating of the best values. It would not be fair if you didn't have to work for yours!

When you have a lot of it you can seem important to everyone who knows that you have lots of it, but do you feel safe? Isn't there a different kind of terror that maybe you're an asshole and that no-one would love you no matter how much money you might have?

Well, the memory goes anyhow, and so it might be worth investing some derring-do in something better than just to survive, just to make money, just to be clean or beautiful or even healthy.

The memory goes and with it the subjectivity and with that any claim to knowledge that isn't common. Although the common kind can make us feel secure.

A Chill this Morning - Dreams of Endings

This is  Buffalo, after all. I only hope that all those recent gardiners don't have their labors wrecked. Mom tells me that it really isn't safe to plant before Memorial Day. But the trouble is that once everyone starts, the good stuff sells out and so you have no choice but to go with the crowd, no matter how idiotic it is.

Well, she may be basing her certainties on the mini-ice age that I grew up under. During. Back when the frost penetrated to some canonical sixteen inches under the surface. We're lucky even to get any penetration these days, and I'll bet you can dig a grave now year 'round. (Sorry, it's just this Icelandic movie I happened to see the other day)

Still somehow this frost makes me happy, you know, because I just fixed the heater in my car and now I can feel justified. Hey, it's not as though I caused the frost! And I'm not one of those people who blow on dice, or otherwise mistake correlation with causality. I leave that stuff to the conspiracy theorists, the Goddists, the congratulators of themselves for the accomplishment of good luck. You know, the Republicans!

I take my good fortune as a gift, the way it was meant. Sharing is easier that way.

I promised some discussion of the differences between narrative frames, East and West, which is a pretty tall order. So tall, in fact, that I must demur a tad. I must retreat to the particular, and leave the grandiose schemes to more accomplished scholars who have earned that right.

Think of me as a kind of Grasshopper, in contact with the meridians of qi by virtue, simply, of my very basic neural structure which contains a kind of winding up of energy for sudden release now and then, triggered by God knows what random pressures from my momentary context. A touch, a bit of heat, a change in the shadows. My mind is not large enough to exercise control; I can only respond.

Without a good read on your audience, I think all such stories must be told as children's tales. Disney learned long ago that if you're going to capture the kids' attention, you have to be interesting to their parents as well. Put another way, good children's stories always exercise fully adult themes, albeit on a junior level.

I used to attempt this sort of thing with IT; where your audience all claims to know less than the next person, except that there's always at least one person who thinks that they know more than you do. Plus the bulk of them actually do know way more than you do about how people actually use this stuff in their daily lives. I mean, what real techie knows about multi-user massively networked gaming?

So you shoot for the universals, which can't be naysaid. You shoot for the overall context, which, by virtue of being that interested in the stuff you probably do get better than your audience or you wouldn't be up there doing the talking. You never claim superior knowledge, always taking challenges back down (or up?) to the level of the overall trends and directions for the stuff, assuming that someone in the audience will actually have tried something you've never even imagined.

So, I left off with the notion that narrative frames must, first and foremost, contain and direct desire. At the most basic level, this means the desire to turn the page. More generally, it means the desire of framer and "reader" for the story of their lives.

Right now, for instance, we in the West are almost entirely in the thrall of the root metaphor of our grand narrative going, generally, by the name of the Big Bang. Goddists take offense, in the same way that environmentalists take offense at the predations of capitalists upon the "environment." (Please do note the congruence of the term "environment" with "context", and hence the quotes)

From some other perspective - the Chinese one, say - the environmentalists and the capitalists are both inside the same frame. This one has to do with the genius of untouched nature, wildness; and the creativity of natural forces when released from human interference. No wonder that Chinese Taoism looks so attractive from that perspective.Well, except for the seemingly minor technical difficulty that Taoism, grounded as it is in a different grand narrative, has no notion about the directionality of things left to themselves.

No mistake that in the West, we presume a hubristic end to all human interference. This is the one where nature's genius is destroyed by human meddling. The fantastic art/nature divide. Whereas, from a different perspective, nature left to itself has no place for humanity, which is a regularizing, patterrn imposing, civilizing influence. Man eat man is just simply not acceptable in the realm of humanity.

So, that Big Bang thing again is only seeming in opposition to the glory of God's promise to us. That promise, remember, is outside of history, outside of physical reality, outside of all narrative framing, in the realm of the purely and utterly and perpetually abstract (paradoxically, without ever having been abstracted from anything, which is clearly nonsense by any other name). The Big Bang is just that portal at the end of what can be known, beyond which is the realm of, well, um, God.

The trouble with the Big Bang as the Big Frame is that it tends to have the effect of negating all desire. I mean who other than a grown up grasshopper wants sex if that's the end of it all? Where's the happily ever after in that? It's just supposed to feel like the massive climax, and then you get a chance to look forward all over again, until you grow old and eventually, well, die. Books, books and more books.

It's no wonder that among the great and divisive intellectual issues of our time are ones involving whether evolution leads to anything (whether consciousness is any kind of culmination), whether amelioration is best accomplished by interference or by leaving alone, whether natural disasters are even natural anymore (it's almost fun to watch the gymnastics of the talking heads now dancing around the Icelandic volcano. Trying to put it in some perspective for viewers who demonstrably know nearly nothing at all about scale. I mean it sure looks like a really massive tailpipe, no?)

It's no wonder that the issue of intellectual property law now looms as the basis for a new economic cold shoulder if not war. Any China hand could have told you this was coming, descended from our cult of authenticity, or was the cult of authenticity descended from intellectual property law, or were they all descended from God. Actually, I do think that's the One.

Anyhow, it's very hard to dislodge the narrative frame of the Big Bang, especially since and as its most ardent proponents really are know-it-alls who believe themselves at odds with the Goddists who, rhetorically, oppose them. Not only are all the established facts in their favor, but some pretty awesome instruments have been deployed to bolster the case. These cost almost, but not quite, as much as the instruments of mass destruction (of humanity, not incidentally) now in massive production and deployment across the globe. Most by the ones rhetorically disposed against both their deployment and their use. Us. U.S.

This, in brief, exposes the awesome power of rhetorical framing. I mean, it's almost as though having said it makes it so, which those evil Republicans figured out a long long time ago. Well, according to Lakoff, who is almost as alarmed as I am, though he can't seem to get it together with Chomsky. Boy, talk about digression!

As is the case of all massive arrays of awesome power, I think the best thing to do about them is a spirited endrun. And while running - over the shoulder and out the door, so to speak - yell out that by the very terms of relativity, the reality inside the "first few micronanomoments" of the Big Bang do indeed and in fact expand to fill all of eternity also. By any other Name.

Clearly, this project of mine is so far beyond me that I should just give it up already, The trouble is that every single job I apply for is gotten by some guy a full head and shoulders more qualified, dedicated, good looking and convincing than I am. What's a fellow to do when he can't compete? Shoot for the stars, I guess. Or lay low. But I don't have enough time left anymore to go and work for the Man again. Life's way way too short for that. Especially when the Man is so often the corporate mindless beast, ridden rather than guided by the very nice people supposedly in charge. You know, the ones so much better than me in all dimensions.

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go. Oh, wait, I'm already there. Sorry. I'll do better next time.

Li Chang-wu (a Chinese ghost story)

Li Chang-wu

By Li Ching-liang  (ca. 790 C.E.), translation by Rick Harrington
(for an introduction to this story, see the previous post)

Li Chang-wu , known as  Li Fei, came from Chang-shan [in modern Ting County, Hopeh]. He was very quick and clever at learning everything from the time of his birth. He was also well read, and very accomplished in letters. Although he heId a good opinion of himself because of his moral standards, he never put on airs. But, having a nice face, he had a pleasant effect on all who met him.

He was best of friends with Ts'ui Hsin from Ch'ing-ho [in modern Hopeh]. Hsin was also a refined gentleman, who notably owned a large collection of antique objects. Because of Chang-wu's quickness and intelligence, Hsin often called on him for discussion and debate. On those occasions, Chang-wu was always able to penetrate beneath the surface meanings and search out the hidden origins of things. His contemporaries compared him to Chang Hua of the Chin.

In the third year of the Chen-yuan reign period (785-804], Ts'ui Hsin was transferred to Hua-chou  [in modern Honan at the city of Cheng-chou] as assistant magistrate, where Chang-wu paid him a visit from Ch'ang-an. After a few days, while he was out strolling along a street in the northern part of the city he saw an extremely beautiful woman. To make an excuse he said to Hsin, "I must visit with some relatives outside of the county." He then went on to take apartments in the home of this fair woman. The master of the house was named Wang, and this was his son's wife. Chang-wu was delighted with her and they engaged in a secret affair.  He stayed there for over a month, spending upwards of thirty thousand, the girl's contribution doubling that amount. Their two hearts became coupled in harmony; their happiness was complete.

Not long after, some business came up and Chang-wu was called back to Ch'ang-an.  Tenderly, they took leave of one another.  Chang-wu gave her a bolt of silk depicting "mandarin ducks with necks entwined" in its weave, and presented a poem which went:

The duck and drake silk,

Who knows from how many threads it’s woven?

After parting, when we see to be re-entwined in love,

We will long for the time before we parted.

The girl gave him in return one white jade finger-ring and also presented him with a poem which went:

Twisting the finger-ring, thinking of the other;

Seeing the ring will strengthen your thoughts of me.

I wish you forever to fondle it,

Following the ring around without end.

Chang-wu had a servant named Yang Kuo. The son's wife gave him a thousand in cash as a reward for his diligence in serving his master.

They parted and eight or nine years went by. Chang-wu's home was in Ch'ang-an, so he had no means to communicate with her.  In the eleventh year of the Chen-yuan reign period, since his friend Chang Yuan-tsung lived in Hsia-kuei County [neighboring Hua-chou], Chang-wu again went from the capital to visit Yuan. Struck with thoughts of former joys, he turned his carriage across the Wei River to ask after the girl. It was dark when he got to Hua-chou. He planned to stay at the Wang family’s rooming house, but when he got to the gate it was desolate. There were only benches outside for guests. Chang-wu could only imagine that they had passed away, or had given up their trade for farming and moved to the country. Or perhaps they had simply been invited to some relatives' for a gathering from which they had yet to return. So he rested for a moment at their gate, thinking of looking for other lodgings. Then he saw a woman, their neighbor to the east, and went over to speak to her.

"The elders of the Wang family have gathered up all their affairs and set out traveling. The son's wife has been dead for two whole years," she said.

After going into more detail, she said, “My surname is Yang, the sixth born. I am the wife of their eastern neighbor. . . .  what is the gentleman’s surname?”

Chang-wu informed her.

“Did you have a servant by the name of Yang? Yang Kuo, wasn’t it?” she inquired again.

He said he did. This caused her to burst into tears, saying, "Since my marriage, I have been in this neighborhood for five years. I was close to Madame Wang. She would often say, 'My husband's residence is really like an official post station. I've seen a lot of men pass through. Many have tried to flirt with me, always throwing their money around - giving me sweet talk and vows. But I would never be moved. Then some years ago there was a refined Mr. Li who stayed for a while in our house. When I first saw him, I lost myself to him unwittingly. Afterwards I secretly served by his pillow and mat, and truly experienced blissful love. Now I have been parted with him for several years. With my heart longing I have been able neither to eat all day nor sleep all night. I have been led all over by my husband, so I would not be able to see him even if he were to return. Since I cannot trust the others in my family, I ask you to seek his identity by appearance and name if he should come. If he comes close to the description, I bid you serve him respectfully and reveal to him my feelings. If there is a servant by the name of Yang Kuo, then it surely is he.'”

"Before two or three years had passed, as the girl lay ill on her death bed, she reiterated her commission, saying, 'I am of a humble position, but I was fortunate enough to receive the gentleman's affection. I have long yearned for him, and now I have become ill. It is doubtful that I will be cured. About my former request: if by chance he should come here I wish you to convey my grief held even in death, and the remorse of this eternal parting.  Beg him to stop here so that our spirits may meet in the world of shadows. '"

Chang-wu then entreated the woman to open the gate. He ordered his servants to buy fodder and foodstuffs. Just as he was about to lay out his bedroll, a woman carrying a broom came out of the house to sweep the ground. She was unknown even to the neighbor's wife. The report from one of Chang-wu's servants was that she said she was someone from the house. He then pressed her with questions himself.

“The dead woman of the Wang family feels the depth of your love,” she said slowly in reply. She would like to meet with you, but she was afraid that the living would be frightened, so she has sent me ahed to let you know.”

"This is exactly the reason I have come here,” replied Chang-wu. "Even though the light and the dark are two different roads and men are properly afraid, feelings of longing get through. Of this I really have no doubt." His statement finished, the woman carrying the broom departed joyfully. Presently, she opened the door, not to be seen again.

Food and drink were prepared and the sacrifices brought out. After taking the meal by himself, Chang-wu went to bed. The light which was to the southeast of the bed suddenly flickered at about the second watch [9-11 p.m.]. This occurred two or three times. Chang-wu knew something strange was taking place. He ordered the candle moved to the further end of the wall, the southeast corner of the room, whereupon he heard a stirring in the northern corner. What seemed like a human form gradually appeared. As the form advanced five or six paces, one could make out its face and see its clothes. It was the wife of the proprietor's son. There was nothing different from her previous appearance; only her movements seemed lighter and quicker and her voice softer and more clear.

Chang-wu got down from the bed and took her in his arms. It was truly the joy of a lifetime.

"Ever since I have been on the register of the dead I have forgotten all of my relations," she said. “But my heart is tied to you as it was before."

Chang-wu made love to her with extra tenderness, and nothing seemed different; only she would constantly ask someone to look for the Morning Star. When it appeared, she would be able to linger no longer, but would have to leave. Between their moments of love, she commended the neighbor woman, Yang-shih, saying with gratitude, "Without this person, who would have conveyed my deep grief?"

When it came to the fifth watch [3-5 a.m.] someone said it was time for her to return. The girl tearfully got down from the bed and went out the gate arm in arm with Chang-wu. They gazed up at the Milky Way and she began to sob in her grief. She went back into the house where she unfastened an embroidered purse which was on the sash of her skirt. From the bag she took an object and presented it to Chang-wu.  It had the blue-green color of the heavens; it was hard and fine. It was cold like jade and shaped like a small leaf.

Chang-wu didn’t recognize it. The girl said, “This is called the Mo-ho jewel. It comes from the Mystery Garden of the K’un-lun Mountains and is not come by easily even there. I was recently lolling on the Western Summit with the Lady Goddess of Jade City when I saw this thing on top of a mound of jewels. I was enchanted and aked her about it. The Lady Goddess then took it and gave it to me, saying, ‘Whenever  the immortals of the Celestial Caves find this gem, they all consider it glorious.’ Since you are acquainted with esoteric ways and have a knowledge of fine things, I present it to you. You must cherish it forever. There is nothing like it in the human world.”

Then she presented him with a poem which went:

The Milky Way is already sloping down;

The spirits have to make their crossing.

I wish you to return and embrace me once more.

Till the end of heaven we will hereafter be parted.

Chang-wu took a white jade jeweled hairpin to requite her and matched her poem with a reply which went:

It is destiny that the obscure and the clear be separate;

Who can say if there will ever be a fair reunion?

I bid you farewell, for parted we must be.

Yet I lament: for what place are you bound?

They clung to each other and wept for a while. Then the girl presented another poem:

Before when we parted, we longed for another meeting;

Now when we part it will be until the end of heaven.

The new sorrow together with the old grieving,

Are forever bound in the reaches of the deep underworld.

Chang-wu answered her:

Another meeting cannot be expected, forever and ever;

By our former grief we have already sought each other out.

Along the road of our parting there will be no travel or news.

By what means shall I convey my heart’s love?

Their hearts spoken and their parting complete, she crossed over to the northwest corner. She took a few steps and turned around again to look at him.

“Master Li, don’t suppress your thoughts of this person from the underworld,” she said, wiping away her tears. Then she stood transfixed in her sobs again.

But seeing that the sky was about tot lighten, she hastened to the corner, and that was the last she was seen. The empty room was left with a vacant feeling; only the cold lamp flickered, nearly burning out.

Chang-wu hurriedly packed and left Hsia-kuei Prefecture to return to Wu-ting village in Ch’ang-an. The prefect of Hisa-kuei and a certain Chang Yüan-tsung drank wine and feasted with him. After they had all had a fair amount of drink, Chang-wu, caught up in his own thoughts, composed a poem to commemorate the events. The poem went:

As the rivers do not flow back west, nor does the moon remain full,

They cause a man to lament upon the ancient city wall;

In the desolate morning light we shall part at the forked road,

Not knowing how many years will pass before we meet again.

Having chanted the poem, he parted with the prefect and other officials. He traveled for a few miles alone and along the way started to compose and chant poems again to vent his feelings. He suddenly heard a sigh of appreciation in the air. It was a tone strained with melancholy. He listened more carefully. It was none other than the wife of Mr. Wang's son.

"In the world of darkness we have our alotted area of movement," she was heard saying. "After we part from this time, there will never be a day when there can be intercourse. I knew of your caring thoughts, and so I braved the guards of the underworld to come from afar and bid you farewell. Take care of yourself always.” Chang-wu felt for her even more than before.

When he got back to Ch’ang-an he spoke of all this with his comrade in the study of the Tao, Li Tsu of Lung-hsi  [in modern Kansu]. Li was movd by the sincerity of his feelings nad composed a poem:

The pebbles have sunk into the vastness of the ocean,

The man with the sword is parted by the breadth of the heavens.

You know there will be no day of reunion;

The sorrow of a torn heart; the sadness of the setting sun.

Chang-wu by now was working for the provincial governor at Tung-p’ing [modern Yün-cheng in Shantung]. Making use of his leisure, he asked a jeweler to look at the Mo-ho gem he had received. The jeweler knew nothing about it and dared not cut it. Later he was sent to Ta-liang [i.e., K’ai-feng, in modern Honan] on a mission, where he again called upon a jeweler, who this time was able to make something of it. Following its natural shape, he cut it into the likeness of a dentate oak leaf. Whenever he was sent to the capital, he kept this jewel close to his breast.

Once he was on a street in the eastern part of the city when he chanced to see a Buddhist monk of foreign origin who suddenly approached his horse and bowed.

“The gentleman has a precious gem upon his breast,” he said. “Might I beg to see it?”

He led Li to a quiet spot where it was brought out for inspection. The monk turned it over for a bit and said, “This is a most precious thing which comes from Heaven. It is not to be found in the world of men.”

Whenever Chang-wu passed through Hua-chou, he called on Yang-shih. He does so to this day.

I Have Heat!

Maybe someday soon I'll generate some light. But I've been driving around all winter on the assumption that I need a new heater core (OK, I'm being metonymic or something. I mean my car needs the heater core, of course), and that it would either take days of my time (plus skin off my knuckles and a lot of frustration) or lots of money to replace it. Then I found this post on the Internet telling me what I wanted to hear. And I believed it.

Sure, I could be using this event to grasp at some deeper meaning. Like perhaps that my dealer is just trying to rip me off. Well, I dealt with that in my last post, plus these are the guys who gave me 300K miles in the first place. I think their diagnosis was just a generic bandwagon certainty, like medical diagnoses, and a lot of other diagnoses, for instance. It certainly doesn't mean I'm more clever than they are. Sure, I got lucky, but what the hell does that mean?

OK, so there's more. On the way over to Canada (hey, I apparently like border crossings, plus it's where I have access to a garage, and it's a nice day, and I wanted to see the beach . . . . ) where I was going to work on the car, I pulled off to the side of the road to let a siren squealing cop go by. But the cop pulled off after me, and the very nice officer told me I had gone through a red light. I know I had pushed the limit of yellow, but these intervals are pushing my limits, and I was pretty sure that I hadn't gone through any red light. It's not something I generally do, unless I'm really daydreaming. She let me off - I was grateful. More good luck!

My sister tells me that in Seattle now they just take your picture and you don't even get a chance to tell your story. Well, in this case, I think that would have played in my favor. Who knows?

I do know that without a mental picture of what was really going on with the heater core, I couldn't have fixed it. This is the same thing that enabled me to deal with stuck bolts and parts on the other old VW I'd been working on in Seattle when I was out there recently. The young fellow I was helping was almost certainly stronger than I am, but didn't have the experience of having done this particular kind of work before. Without that felt sense of how much ooomph it will take to crack a bolt, you're just wailing against a blank resistance, and are as likely to break something as to break it loose. Which in fact did happen plenty of times. I'm just sayin' . . .

That's what I was seeking out on the Internet. That's what's so difficult to find on the Internet - actual understanding when you go seeking recommendations to fix cars, say. Rather than pompous certainties from people who are reaching just like you are.

I'm going to try to hang back from pompous certainties myself, and am certainly not about to ask you to just believe me. To take my word for what I know. I can tell you that the picture in my mind, so to speak, involves what they call a vapor lock combined with an alternate path for the cooling liquid to take in case this path (through the heater core) is blocked.

Getting the air out turns out to be very tricky, since the hoses aren't at the highest spot on the car. But it does explain the strange pattern of sometimes some heat and sometimes none, which was happening in a way quite contrary to the theory offered by the dealer's mechanics, which led to the conclusion of a clogged heater core.  Indeed, clogged heater cores are a "known problem" with this car, and so why would they want to look any further?

You can see where I'm going with this, right? Wrong! I'm not about to second guess my medical diagnosis, although it was a bit disconcerting to call today and find the message saying "if you require advice about your blood thinner medication, you may dial 1 immediately," almost as though they were either targeting me with the message machine, or the whole world is now on blood thinner medication for some strange reason. OK, maybe I'm doing a little bit of second guessing, but I'm not about to stop the blood thinners. Yet.

So here's the way I think it goes. You can't really understand anything without some more or less narrative frame in which to assemble the relevant facts. Well, from which you can decide what's relevant in the first place. These narrative frames differ culture to culture, and over time in the same culture. I know this. It's what I studied in college, among other things.

So, I promised you a ghost story. It follows. First, though, I want to give a little context. This is a story I translated from the (classical) Chinese about thirty years ago, during that same period when I was living aboard my newly acquired old wooden sailboat. I did the translation while living aboard, as a matter of fact. And it was published, which makes it my only published writing, er, translation, I mean, you know, published and cataloged in the Library of Congress kind of published.

I should have picked one about foxes, which are often the ghostly apparition of lovely ladies, speaking of cross-cultural congruences, given the number of foxes, automotive and literal, which grace my life, and have graced it lately, but instead I give you a very generic ghost story. You will see that it reaches not only for sense in the form of strange happenstance, but you may not know that it does actually, historically, reach for narrative sense in the manner of a form to tell stories.

As in the West, storytelling is also the invention of the romantic in China, to make a mild pun, which I think simply means a kind of happy ending tale. Something to give a sense of where we're going, along with an enhanced desire to get there.

I guess that sense comes from making conclusions, shapes, points. Actually, though, sense comes from a kind of congruence between the facts "out there" and the metaphorical shapes with which you might contain those unruly facts in and by your mind. Narrative fiction must, in fact, conform to the shapes lots of people have, and these people have to want to read it. That, in particular, is where the dialogic part comes in. You can't get meaning all by yourself, I'm afraid. No, actually, I'm NOT afraid. Indeed, I'm so not afraid that I used to sleep in graveyards when I would travel by bike or motorcycle. They were always peaceful, and had mown grass to pitch my tent. But I digress.

At some future time, I'll write more about the interesting contrasts between Chinese and Western literary solutions, and how these remain quite evidently relevant to events in current history. It's pretty useful stuff. Well, not just useful, but downright critical, given the impending and potentially catastrophic occasions for misunderstanding cropping up around intellectual property, censorship, legal protections, teaparty anger and the like. But first, the story (next post).

Catalytic Marketing

I like this term "Catalytic". I like it better than "viral" which has been used to describe the way that Youtube videos make their way around the Internet. I've watched it in action, when, say, college kids find a really engaging video and pretty soon it's all over campus. Pretty much like a virus.

It quickly becomes necessary to have seen the videos that everyone else has seen, almost reminiscent of the old days when there were only a few networks on TV and everyone had basic familiarity with the lineups. And then they become quaint and impossible to appreciate, because they made the next thing possible.

Of course, I never did have that basic familiarity with TV lineups say, so I don't feel so left out now either. I never did quite engage with popular culture, and even now, when people are getting their flu shots, or when they urge me to take some over the counter drug, I get that huh?? look in my mind, wondering what they're talking about or why they would say such things to me.

I pretty much assume those messages are for other people. I do watch the advertisements, but I guess as a subcategory of my lousy memory, they never stick with me. Although it does seem as though it's yet another case of the permanent memory of learning. I taught myself some ages ago that propaganda is all lies and that only stupid people pay attention to it.

If or when I get the flu and die, you can mock me out (we talk like that in Buffalo) about it, after the fact for certain.

At that school for gifted kids which I headed for a brief time, we expended a lot of effort to bring the kids up to a level of reading which would immunize them to all sorts of tricks of writing. As good readers, they were all able to catch the tricks which would push them toward unsubstantiated conclusions. It was always a little bit alarming to realize how many, if not most, of the naively-schooled kids when they started were utterly defenseless against such things. It took a lot of work to expose shoddy arguments. And then it would become second nature.

I think that Twitter is a case of viral marketing. Somehow it became a thing that everyone just had to do if they were going to be paid attention. And, yes of course, I still don't get it. I have a Twitter account, but I don't have very many followers. I guess I have a few, and I was supposed to return the favor and follow them back on the assumption that we all want exposure.

But I still really really don't get how it works. It seems as though it's a rapidly flowing stream of little messages, from among which how the hell would you pull the ones you're interested in? It's just another way for those at the top to rise further still, as far as I can tell, which makes it a part of that same vicious feedback loop which keeps the spammers spamming.

Well, someday someone will explain all this to me. Meantime, I'll just keep trying to get attention by making sense. Which, of course, I do realize I'm pretty clueless about also.

I think I must be missing some big chunk of feedback loop myself. When I write, I know perfectly well that I can't sense how someone else might read me. But it's not that easy to fix it up. At least it's not for me.

I think we all look with curiosity in mirrors as we pass them, to check out how we might look to the world. But I never really do get a clue. My curiosity is never satisfied. I look to myself like some Cubist construction which can't possibly make any sense.

No sense of style, a geek's sense of clash, I remember once - I still cringe at the memory - going out to the theater in really old clothes I'd found in a relative's attic. This was an elderly gent who needed help getting around, and I was a student who needed a cheap place to live. And somehow he still had in his closet his old finery from days long gone by.

Among old things in his attic, were some really well tailored clothes from another era, which fit me perfectly. He'd said I could, of course, take them, and I thought they looked really cool.

Now, given my sense that all advertisements are meant for other people, you can easily imagine how I thought I didn't look any more silly than people who sport wildly colored and striped running shoes, no matter what else they're wearing. Or sports clothes in general, for that matter, which I would plainly be too embarrassed to wear. It's funny how loud colors and bold racing stripes can make you disappear. They make me feel conspicuous. Go figure!

But I knew then, but was bullishly obtuse about it, that I was raising eyebrows with what must have looked like a theatrical costume. The waist was high, there were buttons instead of a zipper, elaborate cuffs and pleats, and a broadcloth wool flannel shirt.

As it happened, I actually think that look came into style a little later, but I was just a plain ass and cringe to think about it still. I think that's the way I write too. I can be so far inside the words sometimes that I have absolutely no sense of how someone else might read them. Only much later, or as the result of someone's offhand comment, can I be jarred into seeing it like it is. Like when you overhear or oversee someone caricaturing you, and you suddenly realize some little thing. Ouch.

It's all moderately painful. But also, maybe, related to what I'm trying to call "catalytic marketing" as differentiated or opposed, maybe, from "viral marketing".

Someone has to be a trendsetter. In the world of ideas, or the world of science, there is often a race to be the one out front. And if the discovery can be trued, then very quickly everyone's sense of style begins to quicken in that direction.

This is a catalytic process, and its results are fairly permanent. Unlike viruses, which kill off a bunch of hosts and then fall in to the background themselves once the population has made its adjustments.

I'm reading this book now, written by the former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, who ran afoul of party orthodoxy upon the events at Tiananmen square back in 1989. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, but still managed to secrete and smuggle out his thoughts by overtaping childrens' cassettes. It's a fascinating look inside the pinnacles of power.

He likens the corruption which China so famously unleashed during the time of first opening of their economy, to a kind of inevitable virus against which there were no institutional defenses. There was simply too much power in the hands of the government officials who had been in control of state run industries, and too much money in the hands of newly liberated businesspeople. Across that disconnect was a kind of undeniable voltage, which would inevitably lead to corruption.

If you can buy at state controlled prices and then sell on the market, of course you will, because there's too much money to be made. Zhao was confident that the institutional structures would catch up. But the rest of the cabal in power could not abide his speaking out of step against their absolute authority, and so he was silenced almost completely and almost permanently.

You have to assume that one day pretty soon, a kind of catalysis will take place in China. Where certain kinds of information will make it through the censors, and power structures will start to break up in their brittleness.

Or maybe not, since the intellectuals there now have so thoroughly internalized a kind of patriotism which is for all the world reminiscent of Confucian quasi-religious honor toward their Center.

The patriotism of Chinese intellectuals is an almost perfect analog to our own intellectuals' commitment to "democracy" as an ideal which is almost perfectly tarnished inside the intellectuals' academies themselves. Where everything is rank-order and politically correct. Honor in the breach, I guess. There would be no place at all in any academy for people who talk and think the way they do around where I live. I'm not saying there should be. I'm just pointing out the obvious. And scholarship is not just a matter of the cultivation of taste and style. There are much more serious things at stake than that.

And so we ourselves, in these United States, as lots of smart people understand perfectly well, have perfected state control by a kind of drowning out by the noise of commerce, the dangerous thoughts of anyone who would rail against our system. It's almost as if the more clearly you are able to state you case, the more marginalized you become, to any political party. Think Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader. Speaking straight will get you alienated from all strategists, no matter which side they're on.

However poorly our economic system does to provide for equitable distribution of wealth, it surely does a better job, for us inside our borders, than most systems which have been imagined. It would be crazy now to undermine the basics of free markets. Except at the extremes of size and power, there is no more rational way to line up supply with demand.

Which leaves us only to consider the optimal political arrangements for generating agreement about how to resolve the really big problems so that we can keep the market magic working.

Almost no-one on this continent would favor the Chinese methods. We celebrate free thought far too much, even while we throw sticks and stones at it. But as Tom Friedman and many others point out very effectively, we don't show any real promise about getting our act together to resolve the really really big issues, like global warming, or energy effectiveness, or healthcare.

Our political arrangements tend almost inevitably toward do-nothing compromises such as the one we're about to get with healthcare. We attempt to prevent harm to the bulk of the major franchises, to the point where no real forward motion is possible, and we end up with the same old same old, still tending toward catastrophe.

But a kind of catalysis can still occur. It happens all the time with marketing. Someone sees an actual use for something new, and it just catches on. I'm thinking of the really big things like telephones, and railroads, and automobiles, each of which was an abomination for many, or extremely improbable, but each of which very quickly became a fundamental necessity.

It's almost unbelievable to me, walking the streets of New York, how many people have Walkmans - whoops, I meant iPods - stuffed into their ears. I can't tell if it's a matter of style now, or if it really makes these people happy. Very few of them look happy, I must say, Perhaps they're getting the daily news.

This is the way our thinking will change too. And it will change, because it must. You really don't own your own mind, no matter how much you value free-thinking. Your mind is and will always be a function of commerce in so-called ideas. Your certainties can always be upset by someone more expert than you. If you're open minded, they must be.




Does "catalytic marketing" fit better than "viral marketing"?

Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic

Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century by Karl S. Y. Kao


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazing! This is the only published book to which I myself have ever made an actual contribution - who knew Goodreads was so complete! I worked on my translations while living on my sailboat back in maybe 1983. As I recall, these stories are written as though to convince their readers of their essential truth. You know, kind of the way you tell your friends things you know they'll never believe, but which really are really true. So you exaggerate a little to make your case, and a narrative forms itself to frame your story, and to make the telling that much more seeming real.

Back when I was a student of such things, we studied these tales for their structural features, and along the way toward understanding how all truths are constructed. All narratives must become a kind of fiction, or so we thought we knew. But they were still fun to read, these tales of the supernatural and fantastic. And you had to ponder the cosmos from which they descended.

And I still do wonder now which narratives are to be believed, and by which to be simply entertained. As we story tellers make our choices about which things to foreground, and which to leave alone, is there a way in the end to tell the truth from fiction? Maybe not, although I'll always trust an earnest teller, ironically enough. Holding back my skeptical heart for so long as the story's good. And often keeping my bubble popping needles to myself.

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What's a Meta For, Indeed

Finally, I just watched "The Corporation", a fairly ambitious documentary film whose first half traces the history of the "legal person", of much more recent vintage than you'd think. It was, I'm proud to say, a former student of mine who arranged the screening, for a (very very) small assortment of lefty thinkers and, apparently, homeless people who might have been attracted by the goulash. As one might expect, the screening was held in an old warehouse space - I think this one might have been the old Kittinger factory, or maybe the Pierce Arrow automobile factory, both centers for pride gone by in this "We're Talking Proud" community.

I'd been looking for the film - no surprise that you can't get it at Blockbuster - and so made a point to go. For some unknown reason, I can't seem to spring for the monthly fee to get those NetFlix discs, even though living out in the country without even a phone line now to do the Dish Pay-per-view, you'd think I'd make the perfect candidate.

So this film traces some sort of elaborate figure of speech, whereby a precise likeness is traced between a corporation, which has legal rights and standing as a fictional person, and a psychopath - a person, like my oft berated brother in law, without a conscience. Without a heart, in my own very precise terminology.

This, of course, sets out the very dangerous form of argumentation used in all conspiracy-type films. You paint a kind of picture, generally by editorializing on how you present the evidence, and then allow the congruence of this picture with the pattern of your proposed explanation to provide the force of your argumentation.

Gone are standards for evidence gathering. Gone are trails of proof. It's all circumstantial evidence, matching likely opportunity with likely motive, say, and leaving the blanks all but filled in.  It's what Michael Moore gets accused of, and it's what left me cold after watching about how the Bush administration brought down the World Trade Center towers deliberately. I had no way to assess the validity of the pictures and the information as presented. Like watching a magician on stage, I trust that what seemed to have happened cannot really have happened, and behind that trust is some solid sense of what can and cannot happen in the wide wide world.

So, when I watch some overheated documentary about how Bill Clinton arranged the murder of all his opposition, I'm only reminded of that numerologist I once did watch with gape-mouthed awe at some Rainbow Homecoming (I swear I was quite the outsider there). The coincidence of his math seems so unlikely that you wind up being convinced that there must be some occult meaning to the numbers, as assigned to letters of the alphabet, names like Reagan (hint - it ends up 666), or whatever. Like a really good magic act, you end up almost tasting the in to that secret key, to unlock all the secrets and leave you somehow what? Zoned in? Harmonically on some wavelength with all like minds, and not deluded like all the other unenlightened? In the presence of someone with real power?

Well, but then you're left with what these days goes by the shorthand MSM, to provide your better evidence against these slants???? Where editorializing is hardly even disguised, as though the magician were to expose all his sleights of hand before the show, so why would you even watch?  Perhaps in admiration of his talent, but not for the same reason that most do watch (to test their own credulity, I guess, and to address a puzzle beyond solution).

So, the argument at the heart of The Corporation is not quite one that can be tested. It urges a coloring on the way we find the world. A king of gestalt shift to where the old lady in the picture is young, even though there may be some other, editorially perverse, way to construe those lines.

A likeness is made, then, between the corporation and a person, but that a person acts with conscience and a corporation, qua corporation, never does. Evidence is presented that corporate behavior regards the laws and norms of society as so much new information for the calculus of the bottom line. And most compellingly of all, there is a tracing from enclosure movement, through fabulously edited outtakes from interviews, to a kind of exuberant celebration of the privatization of absolutely everything, from among those shilling for the wealth-generation point of view.

Most horrific and on the face of it beyond the pale of absurdity, are the claiming of patents on genetic codes, so that now not only has evolution been violently thwarted by wanton destruction of species along the way toward wealth generation in obliviousness of the externalities of living systems; but now to the extent that it can be consciously guided by genetic engineering, the course of evolution will and must be made profitable. So, presumably, we can progress and generate more wealth. Or rights to sell the water, and next the air. Because the commons has been so fully now enclosed. Natural systems will and should get replaced completely, so that we can move right in to the cartoon world of Disney.

Another presumption gets mocked, that the miserable of the world are and should be glad to earn a few cents per hour, as improved alternative to starvation. That this somehow lifts them up. But from what?? Can this be any better than coursing through the wild with spears to chuck and snarling jaws to outsmart? So that subsequent generations can be removed to Disney life? Wall-E?

Now, here comes the hard part again. There is, between metaphoric and literal truth, a divide not unlike that I claim between perceptual and conceptual reality. Of course I further claim that there is no way to privilege one from the other in any ultimate sense, but generally and in the local sense, there is no significant issue to distinguish what's meant literally from what's meant by indirection.

A person is a person, and a corporation is like a person, and everyone is meant to understand that the differences are writ large enough that no-one gets confused. But a person, acting without accountability, will generally devise a chain of deniability such that his actions have only local significance and that externalities are quite, and literally, beyond his comprehension. Such a person, now, is like a corporation.

But comprehension is itself a veiled metaphor, right? It means beyond his grasp. Beyond the grip of his hand, but in this case his mind is the thing doing the grasping. Metaphorically of course. And what is it that gives the mind this purchase? Well, a mental schema, of course.  A conceptual framework supposed to mirror or at best to idealize the perceptual world as it is, out there. It is what gives us confidence in our behaviors, or often what makes us shy.

It is indeed very very difficult to imagine our personal behaviors having much impact beyond our immediate circle of influence. And when they do, we must recoil in horror. Like when the cigarette so casually tossed from the window of a moving car lights up the forest, or a moment's inattention squashes a cat. But to be a trader on the stock market floor, you cannot pause to calculate the moral harm which made your trading day, as this film displays by interviews and examples of gold's value in response to the Trade Tower's collapse. Or how your purchase might stimulate some destruction by the socially misguided corporate power it encourages.

But how can you know?

You have to trust in some structure beyond your personal understanding, which rectifies these things together for the common good. Or perhaps you are a psychopath yourself, and there is some evidence, I guess, that market traders and lawyers are overrepresented among that crowd. You might only care about yourself and this very moment. But you have to trust that the pilot of the plane is not that way, and that its design represents thinking that is tested and trued.

The behavior of an individual in a corporation rehearses this very same sense of personal limitation, most excruciatingly portrayed in the film from the very top, where CEO's, whose legal mandate is so clearly limited to maximizing short term gains, have almost no discretion toward the common good. If they pilot a plane, then that plane is almost always on autopilot, perhaps until it is too late, and when the machine lets go the mere human is beyond his strength and reflex to respond.

Or maybe, like the captain on the spaceship ark in that dark and happy Disney film Wall-E, there is very little for him to do but uphold the appearance of being all he's worth. (Michael Moore claims it's greed which allows corporate powers to hoist themselves by their own petard, and I suppose he must be right)

It is this enclosure, of one from each other as we interact in response alone, to Main Stream Media and its collective framing, which enables deniability of one from each other, and each from the earth we do so collectively destroy - in this enclosure, there is nothing we can, individually, do. Metaphorically, the machines have already taken over, because there is no place for heart in the system. 

Although, to be absolutely sure, there will be no smiling and glad handing good cheer when Disney's world is finally complete. Psychopaths, I trust, when at the end of their hand's play, seem always and only to grow bored and off themselves.

Now, at land's end, I turn in tears toward my co-passenger. There is no return but afoot.

It is not only that conscience does provide a guide. It is not only that consultation with ones heart does provide for some accountability beyond the merely local. It is, for actual fact, that there are, by very design, as it were, true occult vibes which link us one to other. But the courage to let these be our guide is so far beyond what I for one can muster. It must be a common turning.

As Disney provides Wall-E, so the cosmos of corporate greed (and it is only that and nothing truly evil, since there is no heart to it) provides this Internet for my somewhat free amusement. Still, there could be a spark tossed off, and conflagration among myriad minds like thinking, aligned by words and images and thoughts.

There could be some resonance more powerful than that of MSM or the electrical grid. There could be some actual alignment of hearts along the vectors not of purchase power, but those more metaphorical vectors, arranged for systems quite beyond us and beyond our grasping control.

These evolved life systems have as their metaphorical ground our emotional caring, which is the meaning of their having come together in this particular way. A fated conclusion is what had to have happened, looking past, without even metaphorical access to why. So, looking forward, what is our fate dear hearts? Or do we even care?

I do know that particles, like money changing hands, must mediate the forces of the physical universe. I also know that waves describe seeming action at a distance, quantum collapsed to actual here and impossible now, by mind's perception. Waves, or their function more properly, pervade by inverse square attenuation, the entire cosmos depending on its population.

There must be some fair balance among the cancerous proliferation of minds on planet earth and its substrate which cannot support us. There must be some form of education which can lift our burden from this ecosystem, by the magic trick of courage to trust and to believe, but not in the Christ as metaphoric realization (I hedge my words). So Disneyesque now in ugly stentorian fascistic outline rules and awful commandments.

How about trust that there is some common good, or that self indulgence truly does become boring, and that aggrandizement is no longer sign of accomplishment toward anything other than hell on earth? Full wisdom is so common. So often childlike. So utterly thrilled to take off down a hill on a bicycle the moment the snow is melted even for a minute. 

And educated out from childhood is dull oblivion, grinding cogs, in corporate mass annihilation.

I must now screw up my courage to leave the Church, with whom I literally am employed. This quite dysfunctional embodiment of Christ on earth. A shell. A husk. A corporate structure of aristrocratic inertia, having at its center something no less absurd than a queen in Britain's heart. The child support winds down. The grasping after love is dulled. The care about endings or conclusions is narratively well away, and I shall attempt a turn towards poetry. (not for you, dear hearts, I would not torture the you so.  Merely for my passive taking in)

The world's a song, more like, than story with conclusion. Let's sing together full throated loud, a chorus against the booming. A song to carry the aching heart. A song to cheer full stop.