Do The Right Thing With Digital

Let's think of it this way: we can never know ourselves as well as those who love us know us. There are certain kinds of self-knowledge that we really must resist if we are going to maintain our face to the world. The self requires a little varnishing. That's why ad hominem arguments should be expunged from our protestations. There is no better way to hit a brick wall, for the purposes of changing a mind.

I suppose that's why novelists often start with variations on their own lives. Sure I know that the reason I despise FaceBook, apart from its obvious political and organizational guilt, is that I've never felt comfortable on any social scene. People often assume I'm arrogant, perhaps just because I won't join in. As a small child, I would hide to nurse some small hurt, or perhaps just because that's how I felt comfortable. It would take a while before anyone was worried, and still I didn't want to be found out. I'm sure there's medical literature about such behaviors, but I'm not sure that I want to see it.

I'm one of those people about whom glancing acquaintances often say, in a nice way, that I'm trying to find myself. I'm more and more petulant with that. No, thank you, I found myself a long long time ago and now I have work to do. Frankly the whole notion of "finding oneself" has always struck me as a loser from the get go. What could it possibly mean? No wonder the sixties were co-opted by commerce.

I am quite certain that having myriad images, moving and still, and other forms of recording, sound or writing, will almost never allow anyone to know a person better than their friends do, even while you still might know that person better than they do themselves. Sure, it has changed me to see myself on TV, but it hasn't helped me to know myself. I just cringe and look away. Sometimes fascinated as by a train wreck.

Just imagine how unlikely Trump has ever been to know himself, and then just imagine him changing his mind. Why would he? As far as he can tell from his reflection (something he apparently never does) he's on top of the world, and can gather a crowd to his pleasing at any time, even as he warns others who know themselves better never to gather for any other reason. An edited and curated stint on reality TV must really mess with a person's self-image.

I've been trying my whole life to make sense of digital. Now it feels critical. And I still have no way to talk about the dangers of the digital revolution swamping us now. Most people blithely assume that it just another step in the long path of "progress." People seem to believe that, ultimately, this progress is what being alive and human is all about. 

The thing is we don't often agree about progress to what. I would call it progress if we were to preserve those high arts once reserved for the wealthy nobility, but open the doors to the masses of producers and appreciators. I feel like we've made good progress with that, taking a look at hip hop culture. We've done less well with the pleasures of nobility and wealth. Since our culture confuses pleasure with happiness, that part is problematical. 

I've placed up here the actual writing which brought me to an epiphany of sorts when I was a much younger man. My epiphany was rather like what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her Living With a Wild God. I was trying to make sense of what becomes different in the world through the lense of the Chinese literary tradition, along with what has changed in the world along with the then-new standard model of physics.

One might say that I had two basic insights. The one that tipped me over the edge was by way of the paradoxes introduced by quantum physics and relativistic time-dilation. Now recently with the apparent creation of a stable instance of Bose-Einstein condensate under weightless conditions on the space station, I feel a further boost for my epiphany. But it also would not have been possible without my deep dive into Chinese ways of knowing.

The relevant paradoxes involve such things as Bell's Theorem, quantum entanglement, time dilation, and more. My basic insight is that no object anywhere can be in any kind of basic contact with any other object. Of course everything depends on what is meant by "contact." The real trouble for me and for Ehrenreich is that there is no scientific theory to be disproven by my actual lived experience. There is nothing that one might do with this kind of understanding.

Or, in other words, my insights do nothing for what we call human progress. Agreement with them is not obligatory in relation to any definition for physical reality. Of course I don't really believe that. I believe that these insights make all the difference in the world to our thriving as a world community. But they don't seem to make me any more persuasive in the face of the stubborn recalcitrance demonstrated by that approximately half of our voting population which firmly believes in static and, to me, impossible truths.

So my obligation is as an educator, and indeed I have spent most of my academic life studying education, even while discouraged by actually doing it. As it is for many people who study education, part of my problem is that schooling continues to diverge from education to some terrifying extent. I would be a humble teacher if I had my druthers, but that doesn't seem to have been in the cards for me. I won't go into the reasons here, except to say that my teaching project keeps growing as I grow older. That's what I can't abandon.

I do know myself enough to admit that I arrogate to myself the really big questions. Of course I have no business doing that, but I'm not trying to be in anybody's face. Only once in my life did I ever introduce myself properly as a cosmologist, then quickly demurring that "of course I make my living in other ways." You do hair, then?

Far better to devote one's life to something interesting, like battery technology or gaming. Make a living and be humble. But for the astounding size of transnational conglomerates, and the even more astounding size of a small number of personal fortunes. In no good world would we allow so much power to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, even though I am grateful to him for introducing me to The Three Body Problem. His spoken Chinese is execrable, by the way. He sounds just like an American technocrat, all descended from Jobs.

The task to deconstruct the current order of things is just too massive. Of course global corporations aren't going to care that Black Lives Matter, but oddly they now seem to. Putting a good face on a corrupt body? Deeper change? Time will tell.

My insights involve the ways in which we are embedded in cosmos and not subject to it as object (I do love English for its tortured ambiguity, meaning, of course, that I love to torture English, even while I know that's not very nice to you, gentle reader . . .). I almost have to work backwards from our mistaken apprehension that computers approximate how our brain might work to get to what is wrong with digital. But that almost always seems to get me nowhere.

So let's start from the other end, shall we? Machines in general and digital machines in particular introduce structures which quite simply don't and can't exist "in nature." Sure, there is a continuum from our skeletal bodies as machines and through our hands to our tools as operators on the world around us, but it is at the inception of digital reality that we, literally now, lose touch. Recognizing patterns which are anomalously regular is how we recognize cognition out in the wild. We spend a lot of money on a SETI array to do precisely that. No dial-twiddling, digital requires only instruction.

In physics, of course, there is no actual touch between objects. Instead there are forces mediated by "particles" which define the interactions not of things, but of clouds of probability. Even our very own bodies can be described by those complex equations, though our accurate placement in any cosmos is hardly problematical at the scale of such huge bodily aggregations of smaller "particles." Our position scintillates, which is probably part of what it means to be alive.

We are working now on quantum computers which attempt to harness quantum entanglement for our next step in crypto. This apparently has nothing to do with breakthroughs in computational theory, but rather with the speed possible for certain types of computation. As I understand it, the speed is in turn a function of the fact that there is no time-delay for the transmission of "information" from one stateful cubit to its partner which is at some distance.

But of course, we are not talking about information so much as we are the definition for what may be considered a single "thing." The distance possible between "entangled" quanta has been experimentally shown to approach infinity. Touch "here" may be felt simultaneously "there." But what in the world does touch mean in that regard? Feeling???? Is there an emotional/physical divide too now? Yes!

I am less than an amateur with these matters. Of course, I would like to know more, but as with post-modern critical theory, there is simply not world enough and time. Each of us planes off at some point to focus on some very local problem that we find ourselves interested in. Well, if we're not black and if we have some social capital mostly. IF you're not forced to be a wage slave.

A cosmologist can't be too picky about what he chooses to study. The meanings could come from most anywhere.

I have been graced by resources not available to most of us, and feel a powerful reciprocal obligation to make something of that grace. But it is hard. I don't have the language to be native in any field. I can't get in the door. And I haven't worked hard enough for 'The Man' to be able to choose to retreat from the fray to just simply enjoy my wonderful life, although I do plenty of that. 

To simply enjoy life seems the most irresponsible choice at the moment in our history, and far worse than all the promise forsaken by my not choosing to embed myself in some one particular field. There are many kinds of regret now, aren't there? It's not that life is awful. We're not coming out of a World War. But it sure does feel like a tipping point.

As far as I know, people continue to search for some magic in the brain, as though it were the brain alone which makes us human. I am much more of a whole body (and whole earth) person. I can't separate any part from the whole. I have described elsewhere how and why I subscribe to Riccardo Manzotti's "Spread Mind" theory of consciousness. For me, it means that we are present in much more of the cosmos than the space displaced by our bodies can describe. The title for his book-form summary is The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. We are not so separate, one from each other.

So the root of digital evil is that digital reality chops off the connection. Much of what we enact now in our history realizes this chopping off in the form of a very American sort of radical individualism. I don't mean that digital reality is causing radical individualism, though I'm sure that a case could be made for that. I'm suggesting that both trends realize the same underlying misapprehension about who and what we are and what is cosmos.

I speak in radically metaphorical terms in everything that I can say. That's because there terms can only be meant metaphorically. Of course physicists don't really deal with actual particles at the subatomic level, starting with the atom in one direction or the other. There is nothing very particular about anything there. And of course I can make only a metaphorical connection between the literal digital divide I'm talking about here and the other one I want to talk about. But the connection is no less real than subatomic particles are. 

I happen to believe that the American experiment is very much worth preserving. That's not because the radical individual is the way into the future, but because, despite our original sin, we are the only place where the arc of history has even a chance to bend toward the good. This is fundamentally because we are structurally not afraid of knowledge. That is a very good thing, indeed.

We still need to figure out how to decide what to do with the knowledge that we gain.

We are prevented from being a great nation (in moral terms) because of our radical individualism and the peculiar form of rampant capitalism which we've adopted as native. Our brand of capitalism tends toward the same results in relation to the open pursuit of knowledge that various forms of totalitarianism do. Even China's approach is better. In China, they're not so much afraid of knowledge as they are cautious about what can count as knowledge in the short term. My problem is that the short term is much shorter than anyone seems to realize. 

Sure, I'm talking about climate change or pandemics or species and planet extinction, but I'm not talking about what we need to do about those things. I think I'm talking more about what we need to stop doing, and I mean in our systems of knowledge and understanding, not even in our behaviors. Well, that's a chicken/egg kind of problem. The trouble is that we have to figure out how to change our minds collectively. The story of Jesus did that once upon a time. Relativity theory did that too, with a very brief sort of boom.

We've tended in the direction of disparaging mind against digital machine, just because signals along the neurons move so slowly. We confuse our mind with our brain. By our brain? By the way we think!

We can't possibly be as efficient in our rational calculations as a machine can be. Heck, we can't even rationalize the decisions we've already made quickly enough to claim to have made them ourselves, and we somehow think that might be infringing on our precious free will. Guess what, free will takes time. That thing that we're running out of.

Manzotti points out that we're conceptualizing how the brain works in the wrong way. It's not about speed. In fact it's about slowing down perceptual information even to the point of holding that information in a kind of near perpetual cycling so that we can perceive it again in the form of memory. 

I came at this realization myself lo those many years ago, but I was coming at it from the perspective of Chinese literature, which isn't so concerned with the inner person. The patterns on the surfaces are what counts, and of course, we know those we love much better than they know themselves. 

So the brain is a complex series of slowed down cycling messages and intersections. It can be repurposed if there are injuries, and the circuits are largely self-healing even as the neurons wither and die. Sleep perchance and death and dreaming are all essential for this all to work. Too much conscious attention just makes a mess of things. The brain largely wants to be autonomous. The cycling from birth to death is also an over-ordering of the brain until it just simply can't track, much in the way that I can't remember which digital article I read this morning, and no matter how good search is, I'll never find it again. 

Immortality, like literal infinity, would just crowd out every other. Not a good result.

Autonomous machines are different. Make enough racial profiling facial recognizing deadly force drones and we can end the world in a jiffy. Not by killing it off, but by the backlash disruption we've been causing to all those feeling the pain of collateral damage. It's the immune response which does the killing. That's what this moment in history means.

We have all been enabled to socially distance ourselves from trouble to the extent that we've won the lottery jackpot of disrupting someone else's industry. And we have all the right and good ideas as we amuse ourselves up to the point of death, which is inevitable in any case. That's what socially distancing social stratification means, and guess who gets left behind to pay our piper? The ones out in the streets now, being called terrorists by our terrorist in chief.

So, not only do we have to deconstruct and rebuild our policing on the model of Camden, New Jersey, but we have to do the same with our military. We create the terrorists and then, just like Vietnam all over again, they outwit us with their very human ingenuity. The end. 

Of course fascists love technology. It keeps the trains on time, and identifies everyone so that they (we) can be pinched in an instant the moment we cross whatever line they've drawn for us. We in these United States think its fine when it's done commercially, but now it's being done politically, and for sure militarily.

Of course Big Business loves technology. It allows it to grow and grow and then the business itself turns into technology, just like the economy turns into finance and a bunch of gig workers. Producing nothing of any value, no matter how pleasant it might be.

Even still the ubiquitous smartphones make it hard for the powers that be to lie. Except why then does our commander in chief get to lie out loud and often and still have his following? Well, duh, it's because of all those autonomous processes which run our newsrooms. I'm not only talking about how Facebook spoons up its newsfeeds to a level of complexity impossible for any human to keep up with. I'm also talking about the actual newsrooms which profit the same way from whatever grabs eyeballs, and then the aggregators who find out what you like to read by the same algorithms used by Google and Facebook.

How the hell can we even know what truth is? What the truth is? One lie is as good as any other, and so it comes down to the stories we like to tell ourselves. And these are nearly all impervious to being educated out once we call ourselves adults. Trust me, I've tried really hard for most of my life and it can't be done.

So, that's why I dig down to the basics. Particle physics. Quantum reality. Chaos theory. Getting rid of the mind/body subject/object dualisms. That's the only thing that can save us or else we're just not worth saving, sayeth Gaia or what-you-will. We are now in the process of stepping out from nature, and if we keep it up we will have succeeded once and forevermore. We will be as dead as an autonomous robot whose plug got pulled.

What then is the difference between the information being held in mind and the information being held in computer memory? I'm going with Manzotti's definition here for information, which is just the stuff which passes among objects which makes them perceptible. Which means to be in touch. Which means that physical information-carrying signals, in the case of animal minds, impinge on our perceptual apparatus. Which means to feel.

In a computer, or should I say for a computer, the information needs to be digitized which means conceptualized which means a static relation among conceptual objects. Ideal Platonic Numbers, say. Conceptual objects are things held in mind for the purpose of organizing perceptual objects. A kind of literal calculus takes place in and by computational representations of reality where conceptual slices are stacked together to form an approximation of actual fluid non-binary reality. 

Irony be my north star.

As with any mathematical calculus, digital reality can only be a very precise approximation of what is being measured. Again, as Manzotti would have it, there are no images in our heads any more than there are images stored in computer memory. Computers can't see. We can. And no matter how many pixels, the stored image can never be the same as the live one. The live one is felt directly.

Our brains don't store conceptual reality. They store perceptual reality, which is much richer. Since we store concepts so poorly, we must construct a narrative frame to hold them. The narrative frame of science is the best and most durable one that has ever been constructed, but it's showing its age already. It apparently can't overpower the Jesus frame. Both have been expropriated for use by the military industrial complex. We need a new frame!

Bill Gates has built his spaceship here on earth, which is the only place such a life would be viable. I'm sure it's more impregnable than Donald Trump's bunker, even given all the secret service, who might, after all, be carrying some kind of virus. The wealthy everywhere have escaped reality and deploy the police and the military to keep themselves safe. They might as well be on Mars, and good riddance!

Why not? If life is only about happiness and if you only have so much time on earth, then why not make that short time as pleasant as possible? Too bad about the marginal classes and the precariat. We'd love to have them join us for the cost of membership.

The trouble is the carrying cost to the planet though, right? 

In my book, conceptual relations are just as real as perceptual relations are. In place of information to define the relation among objects in motion, I talk of e-motion to describe non-forceful relations among objects in free-fall. Love moves through the eons in the direction of life, while hate moves toward stasis in the direction of the dead. The difference then is between the quick and the dead, and we have been moving toward the dead. 

I want to convince the likes of Bill Gates to live more modestly. The party is down in the engine room in the bowels of the ship and not up where you need black tie. 

My changes are definitional and not scientifically testable. That's a shame, really, because I won't be able to convince anyone by showing them what I'm able to do that couldn't be done before because of some new theoretical understanding which is experimentally demonstrably real. This theory requires a different kind of enactment. The kind we're watching (most of us, stuck off in some safe space in our wombs with a view) playing out right now out in the streets. 

There simply is no army powerful enough to quiet the people. That's what defunding the police state has to mean. To the extent that we hold our smartphones high, we still own the digital reality. We will depopulate our prisons by deconstructing our militarized police force. We will depolarize the world by deconstructing our obsolete notions of armed forces. We will jump back into the fray of nature be reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and we won't have to lose a thing about our humanity to do it. We won't have to become beastly. We won't have to forsake our art and our music and our dance and especially not our food and wine. These are what connect us. These are how we touch the cosmic forces. These are our expressions of love in return for the love which brought us this far.

These are the facts of life, fight them though we think Jesus wants us to do. That's not Jesus talking, that's The Man, and he only wants to grab your pussy. Defund the Church (oh, right, that's already happening), and Jesus will come to life again for real.

Numbers don't exist in nature. Numbers are an abstraction from nature, but it isn't only humans who know how to count. Humans learned how to tabulate, and that was the start of all the trouble. Tabulation led to writing as one thing leads to another and we find ourselves in over our head. We have to get it together, people!

Science can't advance without metrics. Metrics means numbers. Before science government needed metrics. Before government, agriculture needed metrics. But somehow we learned to separate the perceptual world from the world of the subject who was doing the observations and working the metrics to abstract theories which would enable ever more fruitful manipulations of the world around so that the subjects could live and rest more easily. 

But now finally we know that mind cannot be abstracted from matter; it can't be separated. We should be culturally grown up enough to know - woke enough to realize - that there is no personal God who's going to rescue us and take it from here. We should also know that we aren't even close to being equal to the complexity of the natural environment in which we live. Our science has barely gotten started, for chissakes!

Along comes digital reality to accelerate everything and we seem to understand that we're going off the rails. That we have failed morally in our development. Not only have we failed our fellow humans, but we're about to destroy the natural homeostasis that we depend on in the same way that all life depends on it. We're acting as though we can destroy nature with impunity. But nature's destruction is what happens naturally when one tries to order it. When one takes dominion. 

I think we need to rediscover balance.

These separations - heart from mind, subject from object, mind from body - they all enable a disconnect not just from life but from our neighbors. By forcing and enforcing social distancing - by wearing masks and building walls - Covid-19 and the various Donald Trumps of the world call the question; what if we were to join together? What if we were never to profit again from illness? What if we were never to prosecute a deal where someone has to be the loser so that we can win?

Numbers to enhance scientific understanding somehow transmuted into numbers to represent reality. We can't know intimately what we can only see on TV.  We can't have a discussion by texting and tweeting. Nobody even reads a long email anymore. What choice is there but to take to the streets?

Man, I sure do wish I could write more better. Well, not more. You know what I mean, by very definition.

Love, Lust and Losing Things - Bye Bye John Edwards!

Can you imagine someone like John Edwards truly believing that he had to lie; that all the good that he could do for the world would be wrecked by his very private and personal weakness going public? Could that possibly excuse the lies he actually told out loud and in public?

I don't really think so, but I don't know for sure. I've never been rich and good looking and a prominent chick magnet who stayed true almost to the end.

The trouble with what he did is that he betrayed any trust at all he might have ever thought he had in the public. We thought. He can't claim to be an advocate for the poor and then suppose that the public, overrepresented by the poor, wouldn't understand his weaknesses. Just like Tiger Woods, he wanted to be thought one of the good guys, when he was really just another guy wanting or needing to get laid. Against his public vows. Are you proof against that? Really?

I gave Clinton a pass - in my mind right where Jimmy Carter lusted - because he was already in office, and fessing up would cause actual havoc. Too bad the havoc was wrought anyhow. Too bad for John Edwards that he didn't wake up earlier too. And if he was waiting for his wife to die so that he wouldn't have to break her heart, well, it's hard to find that noble. Not impossible. Just really hard.

Doesn't the public just want to get laid too? Maybe holding our representatives to a higher standard than we expect from ourselves just isn't working for us. Because, in the end, I'm simply not quite ready to call John Edwards a terrible person. I'll let him do that himself, if he wants to. If he wants his soul back, it will have to be done in public.

Or, you know, maybe we don't all want to be rich and beautiful and famous. Maybe we just want a chance to hang with the homies; by which I mean wife, kids, dog, decent job, a garden maybe. Maybe the trouble is our supposed lust after the life of those people we love to bring down once we expose their secret evils. How the hell did you think they got there? By playing tiddlywinks in Sunday School?

Hell, out in public, a single word, misplaced, can bring you down in a big hurry. And then people will think they know all sorts of things about you that you thought were hidden behind your public act. Just try saying Negro out loud. Your only excuse would be that you were living in a cave somewhere alongside Rip Van Winkle. (He wasn't gay, right?)

OK, here comes the strange part. There's always a strange part, but at least you can't say I didn't warn you! It's almost like I'm reverting back to the way I wrote when I was young enough to make a name for myself. I'm way too old now, without a chance.

There is that strange (see?) moment just before getting out of bed for the day, when there might be some clarity to thought. Some settled certainty, which feels as certain as if you will remember it. And then, like a dream precisely, you get out of bed and it's gone. Very much like those brilliant ideas you were in the middle of exposing, in the middle of a conversation, and then they're gone too, and you worry that you're losing your mind right along with your memory.

This morning though, I do remember the topic. It was nothing; the blissful realization that arriving at the still state of nowhere to go is bliss and that there never was anywhere to go and that finding nothing is finding everything. But I had some particular words which might go along with it. I was certain that I could write it, this nothing that was the proper goal of all searching. This it.

*Poof* Gone.

I watched the movie Klimpt last night, which was John Malkovich being Klimpt being John Malkovich, punning about body doubles and art objects and love objects and siphylitic madness and loss of mind from mercury mad hatting. In the film, in the paintings, in the mind, apparently, of Klimpt were these body lovlies, of a sort you might wish were pornographic. But they looked like paintings, and on the standard that you know it when you see it, I'm pretty certain that even the religionist nutjobs would not have found these moving naked bodies obscene.

They were juxtaposed, these lovelies on the screen, with intellectual crowds who looked ridiculous up against what we mean by modern art. Forgetting the costume of its day, when modern was something to look forward to instead of back on. Forgetting that people always did have a sense of humor, even when they took themselves seriously wearing track shoes in public, for instance, like we all did back in the 90s (except me. I never did that. I wear teal Chucks.). Bowler hats and black tie. Punching actual faces to settle scores.

How quaint. We murder now with words alone. With pictures.

Yes, art is that thing within the frame - Malkovich being Klimpt carried one he could look through to compose what he was seeing - and it must be distinguished from what has function and from the frame itself, which must be crafted and can't be art. Pedantry spoils the show. Klimpt had foul words for those who would make claims against him. He thought all art was shit. He was easily a man. There is no flattery in that. Women all, were his sacred objects.

Lust is functional, we suppose, for reproduction, and beauty too must have some evolutionary purpose. That must be why Adolf Hitler admired cheesy soft-pornographic paintings universally derided for having no artistic quality. He was all about eugenics and the celebration of a striving for his notion of perfection. Is it too bad he had no taste? We really must take better care of who we elect! The pretty people do not represent us.

Fashion is the thing which changes, and beauty moves along with it. These beauties in the film of Klimpt were post-modern beauties in the time of the audience now. They weren't the ones which got his juices going all the way back then. But these were cheesy beautiful in the way which would be mainstream hot. Not artsie hot. Hitler would approve if he were around today.

Which is a reminder, slightly, that the hot ones are always changing, always growing old, always a matter of taste, however bad. That while you catch glimpses, walking down the street or in coffee shops, of women whose practiced accomplishment at turning your heart and mind and eyes, in fantasy as in a dream, these are no more real for being real. The glimpses.

What is that thing that painters must strive for then, which can distinguish strawberry wine from the real stuff? Which would be so sublime if it did not make a buzz? I doubt it. Alcohol is what got civilization going in the first place, dummy! (sorry, I can't think of the modern term for you)

And women now, up against that certain age, will buy a test-tube man, apparently, rather than to remain barren, short of love, and I would never mock the impulse. At least the legal obligations won't be messy. At least Mom can trust herself then, forever and a day.

One hopes for family. One doesn't want to be alone forever. The arrangements for anonymity are so elaborate today. Let's say you want to be a Dad, but don't want any implication (OK, alright, I know, why would anyone want to do that??!! It could only be an oversight). Citibank will very helpfully protect my identity - I can monitor my credit score for only $10.99 per month on an hourly basis (!!!) - and you're terrorized by the ones who would steal you?

The other movie - I really should get back to reading - was amores perrros - "Love is a Bitch" - an absolutely brilliant look at love's betrayals through the desperate eyes of pit-fighting dogs who must maul for love. Men who will destroy all and any woman's heart for what they truly do believe is love. The kind on a billboard like a wet dream. If only I could remember. This film from corrupted Mexico is so far beyond anything Hollywood has ever produced that you might end up wondering if all we gringos watch is porn by analog?

This betrayal, then, will be its own final answer, for John Edwards as for me. This text beside the photo beside the reality of actual touch. I would betray my love out loud and in public, but it's the wrong place and the wrong time, like putting a marriage proposal up on a score-board during a game. Shouldn't the other party have a say?

My car also makes strange noises in its old age, and sometimes I wonder if the wheels are coming off. They do that sometimes, when the very nice mechanics forget to tighten the lugs. It's such a bother to do it myself now, in the ice and snow and cold of Buffalo winter. But it is distracting out on the highway to think that way. I wouldn't want someone to feel responsible because of my omission.

I think that exchanging words, exploring plots, fixing memories, does provide an entanglement at least as powerful as family ties. I do. John Edwards must feel very very alone right now. Hey, buddy, for a fee, I'll fix up your reputation. I'll coach you in honesty. Just as soon as I figure it out myself.

And so I live on now in some strange state of suspended animation, where nothing is happening, and I am breathless with anticipation. (no, really, to the point of landing in the hospital about it) Where weeks go by with no agenda, where there should be terror at the money running out, where I am indulged by friends and family who are under no obligation, where I can't even keep up with, never mind find, the words to fix it, anything, in place.

Now where is that clarity from my dream-state? Where is that nothing at my center? Even my broken cell phone mocks me. It awaits a new embodiment, to be delivered by FedEx tomorrow (yesterday by now, and the new one has a broken joystick. You can't make this shit up). And then I will retrieve my address book from the ether (got it!), so that I can know who's calling and how I might respond.

Shall I go on?

I could talk about IQ and how stupid it is to believe that numbers can pin us down . . . but it is not you I love. You don't even exist, remember? Reader of my dreams.

You know, this whole thing - this particular writing, and all my writing - reads almost exactly like a post-modernist academic rant. By the time you can understand what is being written about, it's already too late. You will have lost the strangeness of it to someone not in and of the academy. You will have forgotten that nobody in the real world talks like that or thinks like that or can respond to writing like that. You will have driven past the point, still waiting for a point, and you will be convinced with each new and brilliant sentence of the brilliance of the author, but then afterward, you also will not be able to recall the argument. Except maybe, to sum it up in a word or two. Power always gets the last word. Duh.

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.