An Ontology of Covid-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, death for one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other becomes us!

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

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

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

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

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

Too bad the road is closed to my tiny house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Last One!

That one was sitting there for weeks and weeks, while I got into the swing of working again. I'm almost there. Look, ma, I'm writing again! Wheeee!

I went to the LA Times Book Fair at USC yesterday, and stood in line, standby, to hear Patti Smith and David Eggers talk about the writing process. I was flanked by professionals. That was cool. Although I was distressed that Patti Smith seems stuck in the specialness of being an artist, and the ridiculous notion that artists strive to realize things which come to them clear in their minds. And then they do the work to realize those visions.

But Eggers, you know, quietly put the lie to that and talked gently about his teaching process, and I think he was a lot more honest about how the medium pushes back and so does the reader, even if it's you the writer that's standing in for the reader, and he seemed to think that anyone can write, which pretty much dethrones the Artist as some kind of special person.

Patti Smith was talking about how artists are burdened by having to be commenting all the time in their head, as though writing stories about what they are living through, as though that's not actually the human condition and doesn't distinguish her from anyone on the planet. It doesn't, but I haven't read her stuff, and it got a big award, so I'll have to grant that she's as good as all that, and I'm glad to have heard her, but even more glad to have heard Eggers, because I think we're all really congratulating ourselves still for recognizing cool when we see it, and he seems to have moved beyond that.

I like this Chinese semi-dissident writer I read about in the LA Times this morning, who criticizes Ai Weiwei for maybe mis-taking that New York state of mind where everything has to be edgy all the time to be legitimate, as though just being shocking were being free.

And I'm certain that I love and support Ai, even though I don't know his work either. But I do think he's too much into the idea that information just wants to be free, which is what Ariana Huffungton thought so that she could make millions off the backs of bloggers who just wanted the exposure her site would give them.

Here's how free I think information is. When we think information is free, we cheapen it to the point that it's meaningless, just like when we think that we need to be credited for inventing things which were in the air, but we got there first, we make of ourselves a fool against eternity. Information is what you do with it, and so HuffPo descends, sometimes, into the realm of the National Enquirer when it used to be all that, and sometimes random lonely bloggers without an audience have things to say. But I self-aggrandize, and so . . .

For instance, I think when we email we are doing something like what I've been doing talking to people whose English is about as good as my Chinese. I simplify. Not just my vocabulary, but my tone and pacing, and if I'm writing an email to someone I don't know, I take out all the nuance such as I would use to a compadre who knows me well.

If I write to a friend, I could write freely, writing to someone who knows me well, and fill my writing with what I consider style and feel pretty good about how much I managed to pack into a phrase, though even then most times people won't bother to read it closely.

Still I'd rather my writing over-reached, than was always forced to strive for the lowest common denominator so that it will certainly be understood or at least not misread to the detriment of all. And while I'm writing this pidgin style I find that I no longer can tell how I might change it. I can't find the style I would have used if I weren't cramping it so much.

Like, you know, when I'm writing to someone with whom I speak Chinese, but neither of us is as good as native in the other person's native tongue, then my own writing descends into a kind of reduced form, and I can't even come up with natural phrases and so everything looks Chinglish, even my own writing. I think that's about the state of the world of language right now. The opposite of Babel is not perfect harmony. It's the loss of any communication with anyone at all because we're all saying the same thing all the time.

Well, as always, that's worth about two cents.

Acting Out!

"Home" for the holidays, I have to turn on my legacy computer to redo my taxes, since who knows where the TurboTax CD went after my daughter used it, and I don't have a CD player on my more-often-used mini-laptop anyhow. It seems my daughter and I have both claimed her as a deduction, and monetary pain awaits one or both of us but far worse might be in store if one or both of us fails to face the music.

But I'm wise to pain. When I went to hear my nephew play - well OK scream - in a Clash tribute band, I wore my chainsaw earplugs, no matter how stupid they looked. I glanced around and saw quite a few more discreet earplugs among the throngs, but I never did care for cool all that much as you can see . . .

Well hell I also watched Joaquin Phoenix perpetrate a hoax on the whole word of who gives a shit anyhow, like this is authentic acting channeling a nutcakes version of himself that is all too believable and what makes it any less authentic than the version of himself who does Letterman more straight up. What the hell can straight up mean anyhow?

I think my nephew put a bit more into his act than Phoenix did. And he had to do this in front of his entire extended family, and so what can an actor do that a rock star hasn't already done. To abase himself. Although a tribute band is not quite the real thing, I guess. I guess genuinely mentally ill people get no credit for being themselves either. Just now I said the chaplet of divine mercy with my schizophrenic cousin, and neither of us was really acting, although I can't say I think reciting this does a damned thing good for anyone. Well, except for my cousin who is comforted by my recitation.

And as you can see in the previous post, I also helped my bro-in-law pare down a video of his recent Big Wall Climb at Yosemite which is fairly real, but not real in the sense that there's real danger other than to be caught out while having medical issues or something. Or miscalculating on the many layers of redundant protection. It doesn't look all that fun to me, but that's not for me to say. Fun and thrill and danger for me consist in tapping on this keyboard here and now.

So, I guess I have to go and bring my old legacy computer up to date. What a pain!! That must be what it would feel like if you could freeze yourself and then boot up in some future date when there is a cure for mortality. You'd have to update all the virus protection and patches before you could even get to work, not to mention the glitches in the tax code embodied by that version of Turbo Tax which apparently wasn't adequate to get you to do it right in the first place, which along with the notice that all the money I've paid out to keep my VW going beyond any reasonable lifetime is maybe reimbursable since the issues I had were issues that everyone was having but didn't catch in time like I did. I mean I don't exactly feel cheated or did I just cheat death which is what should have happened to everyone who was so victimized by something falling short of perfection and having to be paid attention to in order to remain viable????

Such a drone! But hey, at least I'm not a rock star.

Allergic to What?

Finally, the other shoe drops on the nuttiness (pun allowed) of certain tony private schools and some public ones in tony locations where no parent can bring in cupcakes anymore, and peanut butter is outlawed. Well, of course peanut butter should be outlawed. It's a known carcinogen! Just not in airplanes.

These are the places where falling short of perfection requires medical investigation, and where it's presumed healthy to hover eternally over your kids for their sake. Anything short of some earthly approximation of paradise for kids in these places is to be eradicated like a disease bug. And heaven forfend that they be warehoused in daycare while parents work.

Play dates might spread a different kind of competitive germ, though. Transmitted among parents and with no immunity in sight.

Oh please may my daughter get in to Yale. But there are crazies out there who actually think that immunizations cause autism. The same ones who believe that GWB and company brought down the trade towers? And just what does divide those of us who rely on scientifically validated medical advice, from those who mistrust everything coming from some sanctioned, as opposed to sanctified, authority?

Could this be it, then? A litmus test, a quasi-scientific way to determine what it is that makes those who love Sarah Palin also hate gay marriage, public schooling, evolution, and immunization? That makes wealthy liberal types certain that their little princeling could do so much better if peanuts were avoided. Look for the allergic reaction and you will find it. Or could we all be overgeneralizing?

Fussy allergies makes you a hard-headed realist about food, while conspiracy theories make you an extremist wacko. Ah, but certainly it is true that information proliferates like a virus and will soon overwhelm our ability to assimilate. We need machines to sort it all out; to predigest the stuff our brains will feed on.  And these machines are, of course, the very paragon of hard-headed neutrality of opinion. Maybe it's information we are overdosed with, and we need hookworms in our thinking to even take our first mental step away from indigestion and inflammation.

Or do we have entirely the wrong notion of what it is that constitutes intelligence? Perhaps there is no equation between man and machine and bits of information. Other than the fact that we relinquish so much of our prerogative to our tools. Perhaps you can't increase the number of words in common usage any more than you can over-elaborate the mind beyond its physical substrate.

Wouldn't it be funny if it turns out that the mind can shape and bring to our attention only so much signal from among the noise, and that the proliferation of so-called "information" is in fact driving us back down the ladder of civilization toward some kind of beastly dumbness?

Well, not so funny really. The proper response to being expected to be a superstar is to shut down and refuse any further input. To show an allergic reaction of the mind. Or perhaps to become like Sarah Palin or Paris Hilton or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or any of the seeming hordes of well-placed attention-magnets who snap at certainties or claim the right of celebrity without any more foundation in their prominence than a lizard in the sun. Sitting on a rock. I'm just sayin'.

The Trouble with Computers

Against my better judgment, I recently agreed to "help out" at a local non-profit which was having trouble with computers. It was pretty clear that there was some sort of infestation. I explained that I wasn't really looking to do this sort of work anymore, but agreed to help, setting a price that we could both feel good about - something like a quarter of the going rate - about what a gardener might charge.

The recommendations were easy enough, and the emergency patch up was smooth except for that one computer. There's always one, maybe the Executive Director's, maybe the volunteer workstation (in this case), but the general rule is that 90% of the issues/machines/whatever take 10% of the time, and then there is that 10%.  This isn't a precise rule, but you get the idea. It gets called the Pareto Principle generally, and I find that I'm no longer the only person who seems to have heard of this rule.

The temptation is always to just get rid of the 10%, but the way it works is that it's the rule, not the machine, and so you pretty much have no choice about this. There will always be the 10%, just like work will always expand to fill the time available for it. It's why computer techs after the briefest trial by fire become really arbitrary and dictatorial about standards. Without them you spend 90% of your time getting nothing productive done. And when you're "helping out" with an unmanaged network for a not-for-profit, you know that going in, which is why I agreed to such a low rate.

Well, then the Executive Director, without so much as a nevermind, went ahead and ordered a Mac into the mix. Now if I had the dough, I'd definitely have a Mac for home use, but you can see what happens to the whole idea of standards. It just doesn't make sense in a network which needs to be managed.

Which got me thinking about how the trouble with computers is that they are both tools and desirable objects in and of themselves. That is to say that people want these things still, if you can imagine that, pretty much the way they want all libidinously invested objects, which is what capitalism is all about after all. If there weren't any of that sort of desire, we'd all drive Ladas or identical Beetles, and our computers would still be black and white and look like little file cabinets the way my first one did. Way back when the excitement was in the magic that this new tool could do, and not how it looked or felt.

Steve Jobs, of course, understands this about machines. You'd be nuts not to want a Mac more than a PC. It's just cooler, which is pretty much what cool means. Libidinous investment.

And even in the work place, people can't avoid playing with these attractive machines. Hell, a Windows machine is pretty libidinously invested these days too, especially after Windows 7. It's fluid, slick and cool, but still manages to do that within the "confines" of being more straightforward to deploy as a tool. But in an unmanaged state, it really still is an attractive nuisance for workers' free time, or for volunteers to play with, especially before broadband was ubiquitous in the home. This is why techs are so arbitrary and dictatorial about management and locking things down against being toyed with.

This volunteer computer today just plain defeated me. The more infestation I ripped out by the roots, the more that was revealed, lurking, being contained by the thing I'd ripped out. The thing is that many of the bits of what we in the business call "spyware" are themselves pandered as configuration assistants, spyware destroyers, and system tweakers. Everyone with a home computer has a favorite that they swear by. And sometimes the more the merrier.

I pretty much decided that this particular computer had a "root kit" by which is meant something so intertwined, as it were, "beneath" the actual OS that you can't even tell in principle that it's there and the only real remedy is a system rebuild. Which, in the absence of standardized setups and cataloged software licenses and media becomes a necessarily destructive process. You can see why I consider this gig to be against my better judgement.

But here's the thing. I can't go so far as to bemoan the capitalist system and what it does to trick us into relationships with our tools instead of what those tools can do for our actual work. I'm not a big fan of Amish furniture, for instance. I think it's ugly and represents the work of people who are doing it for God, or something extrinsic to the beauty of what they produce.

I think you can convince yourself that it's somehow beautiful, and perhaps sometimes it is, in the manner of naive untutored "vernacular"  art. But frankly, I prefer the self-consciously beautiful stuff, even when it will obviously go out of style shortly. Anyhow, the Amish stuff confuses something about either the tool or the one who's meant to be pleased or both. You use basic tools to create objects which are themselves only meant to be purposeful. Yuch.

But there is no craftsperson on the planet, or artist I imagine, who doesn't form a kind of relationship with his particular tools. Tools are, not incidentally, those things which according to Marx, the capitalist system expropriates from the worker. Not only can't you form a relationship with your tools in the manner of a journeyman craftsperson once you work for the system, you can't select them or care for them, or become attached to them in any way.

I hope you see where I'm going with this.

Hell, maybe someday real soon, when all the work is in "the cloud" it really won't matter what tool you bring to bear on your work. Maybe you'll bring your own, the way I once did when I worked as a bicycle mechanic. The young turks I worked alongside made fun of me because my tools were all Craftsman/Sears which is all I could afford. But I have them still, and they served me well enough.

Anyhow the "knowledge workers" who use computers to get their work done are generally of the managerial class. They directly serve the capitalists, maybe like chambermaids or something. The "administrative assistants" who serve the managers have a much greater tendency to form something approaching an emotional relationship with their machines, calling them things like "'puters" or maybe even naming them. It must be part of what they look forward to each day.

And, of course, at the very top you get to use whatever tool you feel like using and the techs had better make it OK.

I have no real point here, except that it should be obvious to anyone that the PC (here I use the term to encompass Macs, probably smartphones, and certainly the iPad) exists at an interesting intersection in our history of labor. It is, in fact now, the universal tool and as such crosses boundaries between work and play, home and office, right along with its making those boundaries more porous and much less meaningful.

Anyhow, it's why I can't do tech work anymore; at least not on the level of PC support. I could easily enjoy guiding the work of others. I'd be arbitrary and dictatorial and insist that if workers were to use company machines, then they will have little to no choice about their configuration. At the same time, I'd be working to move all the applications into the cloud, for access from strictly sandboxed (insulated from whatever workers do with these things in their play-time) secure and company deployed browsers.

Then the workers could take their own machines home, like a company car say. Or maybe they'd just be responsible to bring their own tools to work. Well, it's a thought.

Meanwhile, I think we should disinvest the objectified female form a bit. Now that should be an interesting project. But seriously, this is where capitalism really does go too far. Because human value should not be determined by relative anything; wealth, beauty, intelligence. These things can be allowed to spread as much as is comfortable, but wouldn't it be cool if we could disentangle actual love from economic relations?? I mean, good luck with that and everything, but stranger things have happened.

Drama King

King for a day!

So, I have this ghost story on my mind (I'm supposed to read it publicly tomorrow evening), boxed like a rose between these two thorny films, each of which proposes somehow to mark the beginnings of our modern history. The tales are each subject to endless interpretation and re-interpretation, foregrounding love or duty or what you will.

One is the story of China's unification under the first emperor of the Qin dynasty; China's first proper dynasty. I loved the movie Hero, testing out various narrative possibilities about what really happened to stay the assassin's sword. In that film, the Emperor is hero more than tyrant, having to shoulder the burden and deny himself for the sake of history.

More recently, I saw The Emperor and the Assassin, which focuses just a little bit more on the love story. The Emperor and his lover both might have longed for the days of their youth, when, without means for clothing or food, they at least shared honest love. Now the Emperor was in charge of killing hoards of people who had offended his office if not himself. All sorts of effrontery against the noble and historically necessary cause to unify "all under heaven."

The other story is of Tristan and Isolde, recently (well, by my timeline) made into a movie itself. It's almost spooky how similar these plot lines are; Tristan and Isolde are actually presented with the possibility for escape and must relinquish it, against the thrall of history. It's the same story in its way, but this time instead of 'all under heaven,' it's the warring tribes of England which must learn to work together under a single King.

(I'm still in the middle of V. for Vendetta, a kind of re-enlivening of the Guy Fawkes day tale, a hoiliday the students used to celebrate at that private school I nearly didn't endure for the year I worked there - the kids being that much more clever than the teachers to understand the symbolism of "tear down these walls.")

Then there is the ghost story, a tale I once translated from the Chinese of a time to parallel the so-called dark ages brought to life in that film version of Tristan and Isolde. The ghost story rehearses the power of love to bring back the ghost of a former lover from beyond the pale of death. This theme also saturates East and West.

It is my burden, right, to disentangle these traditions, hopefully in time to avert the seeming inevitable contest between, say, China and the U.S. as we butt heads over important things like freedom of speech and intellectual property law. But sometimes I wonder where's the difference among all this apparent similarity?

Well, for starters, the Chinese story depicted in the films I watched is purported to be actual history. It was written down as such, even though all scholars recognize the tension between narrative requirements and historical facticity. I guess academic historians these days discount quite out of hand even the radical possibility of truing to fact as regards our narratives of history. I think that's part of what post-modern means.

The story of Tristan and Isolde is regarded as outright legend, although you'd think, being that much more recent, that something about its "truth" might be discoverable. Have there never been any Kings in love? Henry?

One question which might get begged is what is the relative valence, East to West, of what it is we wish to regard as fiction, and what fact. It has long since become cliché that the West is obsessed with romance, while the East is, by comparison, practical. Here in the West, we need our beginnings and endings, and remedy eternity with the pleasant fiction of  "ever after" in story and in religulous belief.

Where China cycles, and the East more generally accepts the idea that personalities and types and narratives just keep coming back around; the reuniting of ghost with lover neither more of tragedy or comedy, but a kind of exquisite blending of both.

How many movies lately play with these themes; moving time backwards, letting go from beyond the grave, truest love existing beyond the bonds of marriage, duty, honor, whatever it is, right on up to Jesus himself, which must keep a person from his personal right, in the face of duty to all humanity. This tension seems universal.

No wonder we are so scandalized when our leaders betray true love. We are the ones who must turn it into lust, the way of all flesh, corrupted, scandalized, for the worms. They are allowed only our idealized version, and should know that true love is allowed only to Hollywood stars. Over and over and over again, until they get it right and then we'll elect them back into office, whee!!!

(Hmmmm, I wonder why Spitzer hasn't been talking to Hollywood. I think Palin may be onto something here)

So, I write, trying to evacuate each little blog snippet from any particular narrative trajectory, so that I can look back someday and find the one for my real life. Where will I end up? On the road? In Seattle? Duty bound to my own future? To that of all mankind? Although it seems clear now that I won't live to see the difference unless we really get a move on. I think I won't shut up yet. Well, I've made those kinds of lies before, in all sorts of different directions, so don't hold your breath. Damn, I think I got it backwards again, now who's Puck and who's Bottom?

Morning has Broken

No frost! Those stupid weather men. Can't trust anybody these days. Er, well, I know the weather now all comes from the same place, like a machine so there's no-one to blame. It's all random.

Is Cat Stevens a terrorist because he trusts a different God? How can people talk about "my God?" Oh! I look out now that the sun is up and there are sparkles on my car's roof. Even though the Internet temperometer told me it had never frosted, my car now tells me differently. Are the flowers lost? Must I apologize to the weatherman? Does any of this make me happy?

I walk a lot because I hardly need my car in the city, and I like to make eye contact and smile, but the pretty girls are always looking away. Is every man a predator now? I guess you'd have to think so, but then why are they so easy about their sex these days? Do all the frat boys just apply this "trust in a bottle" stuff, which is spinning off that NPR story, and lots like it. I wish I were making this stuff up, but I'm not.

It seems that we need trust to run our economy, but with people rushing out to capitalize on the latest bit of science news almost before it's out of the lab, how are we to trust anybody at all, ever? Or, on the other hand, most of our doctors still hold on to whatever the frames were when they graduated from school, and some hold onto them with a death grip, so how are we to trust that?

Maybe it's like my Dad, whose body still remembers how to drive, and whose narrative still insists that to drive is to be free, but who can't, cognitively, take any direction and so he must be gotten off the road. Which isn't as easy as you might think.

You know, hormones do travel across the Internet, which is easy enough to prove if you've ever been misinterpreted in an email. Whatever hormonal reaction the person on the other end felt, you feel it too as soon as you find out that you've been taken the "wrong" way. It's very much like the bottom dropping out or the earth moving. Trust is a tricky business.

Skepticism is a posture of perpetual mistrust toward the cosmos. Goddism purports to be its opposite. But it seems all mixed up anymore. Sometimes the people that betray you have their own good reasons that you know nothing about. Sometimes if they were to tell you the actual truth, that's when you'd start to mistrust them. What if I were to tell all those pretty girls how hot they look? It wouldn't mean I wanted to have sex with them, but isn't that what they want me to think?

Lots of people seem to think that exchanging Bible texts is a way to establish trust. But there's plenty of evidence that that is a really really bad idea. Right on up to the priests. The whole Catholic church now is having a really hard time with trust, and even the Pope seems pretty clueless about what to do.

I do think that the match between context and text, figure and ground, environment and consciousness, is where trust, ultimately, is at. You can trade your Bible quotes, and ascertain that you both follow the same belief system, but that doesn't mean the person is trustworthy. He might still be interested only to get into your pants.

Or maybe he has some addiction, or was twisted at birth, or maybe you can blame it on the devil? All of this is some pretty weird stuff, but in the end (!!!) it's clear enough that if we don't solve this trust stuff, the world is toast. Well, not the earth, which will do alright, but humanity living on it is toast. Toasted.

Under pressure of a "bad economy," people gotta do what they gotta do, which sometimes just undermines trust. Stress undermines trust, apparently also hormonally, dys-regulating oxytosin levels. Mothers' milk contains this stuff, right? And just like the Chinese did this massive social experiment with their one child per family little emperor policy, we did one with the bottle feeding.

And what about the corn sweeteners now? Are they really worse than sugar? What about Toyota, even though their overall safety record is better than the rest? What about flying on small commuter airlines, even though it's still that much safer than to drive? What about interring the ashes of lost soldiers, with honor, even though their family never cared all that much for the meaningless remains? Who's playing on your emotions now? What about volcanic ash in jet engines? Is that just Earth's revenge for all the air transit spewings? Is everything some scam of get mine now, even up to the level of the Earth? Is God angry and jealous or is God Love?

At night, when my brain is too tired to do much more, I watch a lot of rented movies. I could save lots of money to sign up for Internet delivery, but I don't exactly have a fixed address, nor do I want to sign up for anything, contractually, so I let them rip me off for that much more than I should be paying. Hell, someone's gotta power this failing economy.

But they tell me I can cancel anytime!! What am I, nuts? I wanted a little bluetooth dongle for my new spiffy mini laptop which I almost didn't buy because it didn't have "built-in" bluetooth. But I find that I can get it for only $17 bucks at Target. But then I buy one for $3 bucks, shipping included, from Amazon! How can anyone trust anything under these conditions???

I claim that driving my car longer beats the low emissions of a Prius every time, given the cost to manufacture a new one, but I'm only protecting my personal economic integrity in the same way that I mock food purists about worshipping themselves when they should care about their environment. The really pure reason not to eat red meat is that it's better for the environment not to. So, I shouldn't want the stuff, right? Does it matter why it is that I don't; indulging some fantasy of longer life without it.

Remember when the billboards told us to spend a buck, stimulate the economy, render war redundant? Was that the same time that they were urging us to stock up on plastic and duct tape against possible anthrax? Was it? Yesteday all the "we are the world" voices were urging clean energy in honor of Earth Day, but isn't wanting energy the real problem? What if I just love my old car more than I want a new one? Am I thereby dropping out of normal commerce and strangling our auto industry? Does it really matter to buy local? What's local mean? Brands are all national now, and we're supposed to believe that the origin of the idea is what counts, and that's what we want to keep at home. The innovation.

So here's a trio of films: "Whatever Works," Woody Allen's swan song to justify sleeping with your stepdaughter maybe.
v
It's a good film, and Larry David channels Allen well. The girl, I suddenly now realize, is a depiction of that overtrusting disease from too much oxytosin (or too little?), the Williams syndrome. She just loves everyone, which makes her a grand cheater in the end. Untrustworthy herself, since she can't seem to stay out of bed with handsome guys.

Then there's "the Emperor and the Assassin," yet another Chinese rehearsal of is their original unifying Emperor a tyrant or a hero? Did he even know himself? Does it matter? The film rehearses lots of tribal/national loyalties and how these lead to massive genocide, but all in the interest of making just one nation, under heaven (under God?) where there can be peace eternally. Wasn't that Hitler's idea?

And now I'm in the middle of Tristan and Isolde, where post-Roman dark-ages England is trying to unite the tribes against the Irish who were spared the Roman unifying forces. I guess this one is just pure fiction. I'll have to see if I can get the original text free on my kindle. No, there would have to be some copyright for the translation, right? Since, unlike Chinese, the phonetically written languages are not isomorphic over time.

Well, neither is your wife, but you can fantasize about strange pussy if you like, right? Or is that sinning in your mind, which gets me back to why won't everyone smile at me?? I'm not a sinner, honest, although I sure could feel my hormones raging when that nice blond cop followed me when I pulled over to let the siren by like a good and proper driver. She told me I sure did go through the red light. I was sure I hadn't and might have wished for a stoplight camera of the sort that people get all paranoid about these days.

But, you know, they're only going to round up the ragheads, and if you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. Like with the health insurance, the trouble is you don't get to know ahead of time what "something wrong" might mean. And the light changes too fast for me, even when I'm going well within the speed limit. No, I didn't think she was hitting on me. I didn't even know she was pretty until after I'd gone through the outrage anger cycle. I told her I was sure that she was right, since I've learned that one should say that to people in authority. She let me off, and thank God for that, since I swore to myself that if I got a ticket, that would be the end of me driving. Yeah, like I could trust myself on that one!

Anyhow, it's interesting, at least to me, how the old English tales and the old Chinese tales both rehearse the same thing. Uniting tribally divided mankind until there's no-one on the outside. Well, except now China and the West are gearing up to misunderstand each other big time. And we're about to deploy really smart really fast really accurate pinpoint bombs, which are that much better than nuclear devices. Like a Goggle search that actually works instead of handing you back a haystack with what they think is your needle on a cushion right on top. When what you wanted was the pea down under that pile of stuffing. Yeah, let's trust those smart bombs, and the video game jockeys they ride in on.

Or how about let's try trusting no-one and nothing and see where that gets us?

Remember when bicycles were fun and kids rode them all over the city? Now, I ride my bike and it scares me to death amongst the people in cars in a hurry. Imagine thinking about your kid doing that? And you can't exactly go shopping with one since none of the stores welcome them inside, and they'll just get ripped off outside. And the only other people riding bikes are these really bizarrely clothed aficionados who've figured out how to turn a really really pleasant and fun and relaxing (and inexpensive!) invention into some kind of torture device, judging from their labors and grimaces. Or are they just pumping different drugs into their veins, and are they smiling beneath their dark wraparounds and Buck Rogers helmets which look like some kind of raygun on their heads? And they pay real money for these torture devices?

You can buy a really spiffy electric tricycle if you want to pay more than a car for your virtue. What's wrong with this picture? Sorry, I can't find the company today, even though it popped up first thing the other day during my Internet searching out of curiosity to see what regenerative braking electric power conversion for my bike would cost (either more or less than you think, depending on what you think!). And then I came across this very convincing post about why regenerative braking is stupid for a bike in the first place, since there's so little weight and most of the friction is aerodynamic, and the ratio of time to charge over time to discharge is so high that you're better off just going wheeeeee down the hills and coast back up, which conforms with my own experience riding around this pretty flat city.

Sheesh, how is one to know anything for certain? Well, who said you were supposed to in the first place, huh? I mean, I think I know more than enough about heating and cooling systems to know what's up with mine, but apparently the dealer can't figure it out, and I sure can't, although I know it's not fundamentally some big mystery. Although it might be like some computer network issues, just simply enough complexity to mimic mystery.

Man, I am just Heisenberg uncertain about everything today. I might as well become a Jehovah's Witness, because ain't it aweful? There's nothing to be done about any of it, so, hey, I've got a tract for you. Of course it has that necessary clause of all magical tracts that if you doubt it you ruin its spell. Something to tweak your superstition hormone. Ain't change aweful now? If only we could keep things the way they were when we were feeling really good. Suckling.

Well, one thing of which I'm certain. Morning ain't broken. It's a beautiful day, and I'm going to check it out.

Coda: I'm a Lot Stupider Than I Look!

Now, there's a statement to elicit broad general agreement!

In the correlation isn't causation department, I just discovered that the basement sink drain isn't even connected to the sanitary drain. Honest it wasn't me, but somebody must have removed the trap to clean it out and put it back, quite literally, backwards. I think that was from way back when the standpipe hat rotted out, which I discovered once when my daughter was taking a shower and the water was draining into the basement.

But, in my defense here, I've only been doing laundry in this apartment since I moved out of my house in December, and a lot of that time I've been away dealing with various pneumatic issues. I'd thought that all that water was because the basement leaked, since it was correlated with wet weather. Of course, looking back I realize that I was generally doing laundry when the weather wasn't nice enough to go outside (today is an exception, simply because I ran out of socks and underwear, which I'll just bet is too much information).

Then the other day I thought my coffee ginder switch was going bad. My testing pretty much proved that since when I knocked the grinder it would go back on. Well, I discovered that the shock waves were travelling up the power cord to the outlet where the plug was loose. Glad I didn't move to take that thing apart, which would be typical of me.

This stuff happens all the time, and not just to me, I'll bet. The only thing which correlates the non-causally related stuff going on around me is my mind, which is implicated. It's tricky to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em and when to interfere and when to leave well enough alone and when to call in the experts. A lot of the time, I am the expert, like with computer networks, and then it's especially hard to convince people that I'm stupider than I look, because it seems that everyone wants to be the stupidest when it comes to computer networks, unless they make their living that way, in which case they just want a perpetual emergency.

But I knew you'd want to know about each and every plumbing victory. Now I have to go roto-root my car's core, just to give the old girl a few more miles of life. In this case, the experts simply cost more than the car is worth, and so the math is simple.

But I didn't want anyone thinking that I was mistaking correlation, which is only in my head, with causation, which is real. Well, except for the part where I act on what's in my head. And if I start laughing when I'm the only one who thinks any of this is remotely funny.

Qi Whiz - an Earth Day Cerebration

So, here are the ingredients, in no particular order. Qi. Fluid dynamics. Blood. Salt. Obesity. Viagra (and analogs). Emboli (embolisms?). Gas transfer. Heat transfer. Pressure. Pumping. Repression. Expression. Balance. Flow. I could probably go on.

If you've followed the news, you know that there are lots of items about obesity and salt in the diet and about the general meltdown of health among those privileged enough to live inside the American triumphalist economy. The sky is surely falling, and we are our own worst enemies, and if only I could want what I need!!!

This is not to mention global warming, melting of the icecaps, spending more on bombs and viagra than schools and antiobiotics, or smart bacteria or pandemic flu or conspiracies to profit off your fears. If you watch advertisements, you know that Viagra and the like are making lots of money. If you've been reading me, you know that I have had issues with pulmonary emboli as well as air emboli in the heating system of my car.

Now I make no claims for superior intelligence or access, other than whatever I come by as a matter of luck. I guess I was born with good genes for intelligence of the sort what we mean by the word in schools (which has demonstrably little to do with intelligence in the "real world" outside of school). I haven't done a whole lot to cultivate that, so I'm not claiming any particular accomplishment here. I figure the congruence between my particular life matters and those in the news is also a matter of something like luck (good or bad). But on the other hand, judging from the voice message on my doctor's phone, lots of people take blood thinners.

Lots of VW owners have clogged heater cores, although apparently not a lot of them quite understand the involvement of air embolism in the loss of flow. I learned about that from SCUBA diving. Lots of people apparently take Viagra, which increases blood flow as I understand it. Lots of people have high blood pressure, or high cholesterol or both. Not to mention diabetes, and other circulatory and cross-membrane osmotic pressure issues.

Everyone I know seems to focus on which inputs corrupt their personal self. Red meat? Sugar? Corn syrup? Fat? Chemicals? MSG? People worry about the impingement of electromagnetic radiation on their physical selves which had been pure a mere century ago, its somehow having been rendered moot that these impingements also involve the impressive macro-effect of television, radio, cell phones, internet over the air, not to mention powering the lighting in our houses. You don't even need a conspiracy theory to sort out some of those effects. Well, unless you really think these are all just ways to dupe you away from Godliness, which they might be for all I know.

The earth seems to be undergoing various kinds of pressure release, as it always has, from earthquakes (tectonic pressures built up and released?) volcanoes (are these related to tectonic shifts?), melting of clotted water. Is the earth alive? Are we? What shall we do, oh worra worra worra . . .

I am a part of all this fluid dynamics, as are you. I "believe" that the world operates a lot more on the model of microcosm, macrocosm than it does cause and effect, so no congruence is surprising or upsetting to me. I would be rather more surprised if that were not the case. I shall worry more about the cost to my environment of eating meat since my body will definitely go the way of all flesh no matter how much I pay for a personal trainer, or organic inputs, or artificial silicone inputs, or what-you-will. I'd love to hear a truly convincing argument that I am not my environment. Neither is very pure, but I'd rather not worship me.

Some examples of microcosm/macrocosm which might be familiar within the commonly accepted scientific paradigms would be holograms (where a chip off the block contains a complete, though attenuated, set of whatever was contained in the whole (rather than an analytic component of that whole); chaos, which is a provable mathematical construct whereby the micro view of chaotic structures can be shown to match the macro view; the narrative structures of popular entertainment up against the supposed course of history, just as a few quick ferinstances.

I know - believe me I know - how crashingly boring it can become to watch someone rehearse the happenstance of his own paltry life and try to make some meaning from it.  It should be far more interesting to watch someone more purposeful construct real meaning in the manner of a talented artist. But artists all lie if they lead you to believe that they are the creators of something which existed prior in the space of their head.

What else do I have but the material of my accidental existence? The heater core turns out actually to be clogged, and the purging of gas only changes the pressure differential slightly so that some heat can make it through the uptight core. The experts were more right than wrong, although I have other tricks up my sleeve to keep the car in heat.

My heart enlarged, but not to the point of bursting when my lungs got clogged. I guess plenty of hearts shut down long before the ridge I topped. What a lucky dog am I! I never even knew I was climbing.

The earth is macro for our micro. All we must do is to change our minds and the earth will be saved. The trouble is that changing our minds is not trivial. It can't be accomplished in a prayer circle, no matter how much straining the prayer involves. It can't be accomplished by some sort of willful belief. The analytic understanding we now do have about how the climate "works" only leaves us feeling helpless with dreams of technological overcomings of the way of all flesh toward corruption and death.

The only way to change our minds is via science. The method to accomplish agreement. Of course, we'll have to leave behind all true believers, but they form a minuscule minority among a vast majority of sensible people willing to drive cars and fly planes and take medicines because they trust, according to a much more fundamental paradigm of faith than the one the religionists pander. Protest as you will, these things work and you know it, and you can't just throw out that baby with the bathwater of your protested-too-much faith in some "higher power." Yeah, there's a higher power. The sun gives off a lot of wattage.

At its limits, the world out there is what we make it. No matter how many new particles we can describe or discover or bring into being by our deployments of artificial containments of that awesome power of nature, there is no getting around the most basic artifact of scientific progress: that at the very limits of objective knowledge, the mind is implicated.

So, choose your narrative. Does it require conclusion for sense? Must there be some imposed shape drawn from the abstract; which means abstracted from the real in the first place? Or can we yet internalize some of that Eastern wisdom, where the seed contains the whole, and the end of the individual is as beautiful as the setting sun, and no more final? (Final enough for the hapless individual though, but who would want to go on for ever and ever, amen? You'd have to be nuts! Or a real gasbag like me!)

With regret, I look back on a life lived less well than it might have been. On days when I was sprung and didn't have a clue what to do about it. I wonder at the accidents which might have killed me so many different times. I wonder at the accident of survival. But I don't really wonder that my life, in microcosm, should reflect the life of the entire earth. I see nothing lost in coming down from the pinnacle of my own would-be successes. There is no loss in relinquishing property and wealth, if love can be gained. Why look back in regret? Might I?

Here I sit, lonely hearted, I have  no art, but I only started. What pneumatic tale of woe does that remind me of? What impolitic release of what gas? Is it really the same one which overwarms our planet (A: Yes!)? Is expression nothing more than the release of what got corrupted inside in the first place? Fermented! Is nonsense really nonsense, or is it the stuff taken seriously that becomes nonsense? What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of life? Is God red? Is God a red? Sentences don't make sense, people do. Sometimes. Though surely not always.

How dee!! It's a GOOD DAY I declare.

De-contextualizing on Oscar Sunday

I know Oscar about as well as I know Superbowl. But I was alerted by the popcorn man when, the night before, I watched A Single Man, film version, with some friends at a miraculously preserved massive old cinema here in Buffalo. It's the same theater where my father remembers going for the double feature for ten cents on a Saturday or Sunday matinee.

Those who work at this place are true film lovers, and so the Oscars are significant to them. Enter the ancient doors and there is a genuine old-fashioned ticket booth (you might want to picture something descended from a London phone booth, and only slightly larger - perhaps like those booths from which they sell tickets at carnivals, but more ornate). Inside is a fairly old man - well, older than me - who I believe has been taking tickets for as long as I've been buying them. He smiles and seems genuinely glad to see you, inviting you to go ahead in and look around for your friends if you want. I said, no I'd just go ahead and buy my ticket.

This is one of those times when I might wish I could deploy a movie camera instead of just words. Picture me now before the movie - if each of us can pull it off - driving out of Buffalo to our spiritually grounded exurb to the south, East Aurora. East Aurora is the onetime home of Elbert Hubbard, the Roycrofter, and is and has been a significant one among a local spread of spiritual hubs. Around here the Mormons got their start, as did the patron saints of spiritualism more generally. The Fox sisters (yeah, I never heard of them either) grew up here. This is Iroquois land, long since desecrated by the white man.

I am an interloper also to this spiritualist gathering, organized (well, sprung like an impromptu party, in fact) in honor of a man - a true adept - who would later let our host know that he'd turned back home when he learned that there would be a party in his honor. He is that shy. My own entrance was announced in such a way that I was afraid I might be called on to make some sort of speech: "Chinese scholar, former headmaster, brilliant man" if I'm not mistaken. I didn't even blush, so absurd was it.

This was as nice a party as I've ever attended, populated by the likes of those on the inside of that Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in case you have that cinematic image ready to hand. I learned about Tarot, astrology, alchemy, qi-gong (with which I am acquainted in rather academic fashion - that far from practice), Native American spirituality, and a whole lot more. I wished I had a chance to learn about dousing, although now that I'm back in the city I don't think I'll need it.

I am very much an outsider to this sort of understanding, and therefore was by far the most ignorant of the bunch. To a person, these people are almost incredibly diligent in their studies. I can't imagine a single one of them fitting any billing as "charlatan" (just in case you're in the market for a reading).

There was one moment when the party was paused by our host, who'd been drinking - to be highly politically incorrect about it - like an Indian (which I could only be jealous about, having recently been ordered away from the sauce), announced that his recently proposed book about Native American spirituality had won a contract. Two, in fact, which must be the dream of any author - to have two houses competing for one's work. Applause and congratulations!

Then he told a funny story about how white people like to act as gatekeepers to the arcana of those whose tribes they bond with. Which must be about as funny from the inside as it is from the outside. I don't think Mason was intending to speak for the tradition. He would write, rather, about the tradition. Which, as a bona fide teacher of and about Chinese, I do actually know can sometimes be accomplished better as a non-native; a member of the target audience with whom the bond is more important at the outset. Sometimes those foreign to English have been its most accomplished stylists.

The pause in the party to make space for that announcement extended to that singular moment when the party is all one. The little clusters of animated conversation had stopped, and the topic turned to Buffalo. As in "what is it about the pall which hangs over our city?" The grey which almost always greets you driving or flying in. The certainty among our citizens that things will always be as they have been and that change is impossible. That we deserve our fate and can only learn to like it (which we typically succeed in doing).

Now here's the part where I would love it if you could be watching on film. Spontaneously around the circle there were offerings of astrological reads of the city ('very Taurian, and therefore stubborn and caught up in itself'), remembrances of some sort of grudge about a running race between the Iroquois and the white man, where the white man cheated. Desecration more generally of this sacred ground.

I felt my mouth opening to offer up my own prognostications of hope.  But of course I realized discretion as the better part of valor. I was out-gunned here in all ways of knowing; the literary, the local and cultural history, the current politics. I'm only recently back in town and so what do I know? Plus, I've never been diligent in anything. I was certainly out-gunned in the occult ways of knowing.

As you know, faithful reader (I guess I'm speaking to myself again now, although even I don't have a good read on what I've written. Maybe especially I), I've had trouble lately with pulmonary embolisms, whose symptoms seem to keep me on my toes by coming back. As I often say, just like "I'm driving a Toyota" now in relation to my own body.

Well, even I know that just as Adam and Eve are a convenient fiction about what must be intertwined in each of us, and just as Jesus was distorted if not destroyed by a patriarchal power-elite which still owns His Church, there is no sense to believing or acting as though your body can be distinguished from your mind. Well, except for this Native American medicine man who recommends treating your body as your pet if you want to get healthy. Which seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time.

Mostly, though, these folks stay clear of terms like soul and divinity. And for my part, I'm not exactly despairing that the enshrined and fully institutionalized and almost ungodly expensive Western medical establishment has no certain answers for me. After all, that would mean that something about me was definitively broken, even if they were able to offer some sort of fix for it. Some extravagantly expensive fix, just as the rule-out testing has been - extravagantly expensive.

The nice thing about no certain diagnosis is that perhaps there really is something you can and might and even should do about it yourself. I might just follow up on some leads for Shiatsu massage, or qi-gong internal alchemical exercises. Although they have yet to be theoretically validated by Western science, there is a growing body of evidence that these things "work" even in the absence of theory. Even government institutions now sanction their practice.

And for sure, within the theoretical frames as were presented or represented to me that night, my symtoms find a fit and therefore a reason for hope. Neither the diagnosis nor the treatment require much reaching in any of these "alternative" traditions, where in my "native" tradition, they are at an almost complete loss without a slot to put me in.

Which pretty much just begs the question about Buffalo, don't you almost have to say? As in why are these folks sitting around and grousing about what's wrong with Buffalo the same as everyone else does, no matter what their frame of reference. Shouldn't they be doing something about it? Or would Buffalo as a whole need to be willing to sit for its reading???

We do that already in the "what if a whole community were to read the same book" department. Like everything else about this town, we probably have much higher rates of participation than is the norm. But I guess we're hardly all together about what we want. I guess Buffalo would have to change its mind as a whole, and what are the chances for that?

So, I retreated from the party to the more conventional fare of dinner and a movie. I'd missed the dinner part, but the movie is where I started in this post. I did need to stay clear of the attraction of drink at each of the three dinners I avoided that night - so popcorn was my fare. Mmmmmm. Real butter!!

And then there were the inevitable Oscars. I have rabbit ears (no, silly, my TV does), being still not ready to sign any contracts or leases but the ones for mobility. The one channel I can never pull in is the one showing the Oscars. Now I never watch the Oscars, but somehow not being able to made me feel terribly alone. I tried every conceivable antenna position, scanned on-line to confirm that in fact there was no feed, gave up for about the third time, and then finally, as if by some miracle, I hit upon the one magic Kundalini position in which I could sync with the ethereal feed.

Now I was chained to the show. I felt less alone, but so very distant from the accomplishment of this apparent horde of winners. I was glad for their work. Who doesn't love the movies? The humility sounded almost genuine to me, moved just a bit beyond the acting. Mostly, I was bored. I guess that was true of a lot of people.

The stars almost did look and act like normal people though. That has to be some kind of progress, right? Now here's the kicker: (I've been at this now for a length of time unusual for me, who bangs out a thought a day, just about) Yesterday, which is now Monday, I fulfilled my appointment with my Native-to-me Doc. I have a diagnosis! I have a fairly rare mutation among my genes which causes a drastically increased propensity for clotting.

Of course, that hardly "explains" why me, why here, why now; all of which questions have the one important answer that if not me and here and now I would most likely not be alive. Lucky, in other words, that I had family around and was near a hospital. The propensity simply explains the why me part as a chain of unlucky inheritance.

The funny thing is that the mutation, called the "Factor V (Leiden) mutation" descends from that city in Holland from where the Mayflower set sail, where there was a cluster of such clotters. I guess that proves my ancestry, in a way that's hardly comforting. It means more tests now, and a lifelong blood-thinning regimen which, while handling one set of risk factors, hands me another.

So, I guess I won't be letting go of the Western medicine trapeze just yet. They've found me a place and made me an adherent. Not that it might not also be useful to go for the Eastern frame at the same time, which might help to address the why here, why now part of the equation, which in the West is always left to random chance.

It doesn't feel like random chance to me. There have been too many recent changes in my life. I still hold out hope that I can go back to un-medicated and happy without having my life changed by the contaminating knowledge that asteroids may hit, earthquakes may let loose, clots may form, the accelerator may stick, and even the key is no longer a mechanical object. It is a code and impossible to enter while driving.

Many of you may think that we are in the midst of some kind of information explosion. That there is so much *more* we know now than we ever did before. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize the absurdity of that notion. Our brains have not changed one iota since we were formed as a species. To use that hackneyed and tired brain-as-computer metaphor, believing in some kind of explosion of information would be to believe that our brains have been consistently upgraded, according to some kind of biological Moore's law of geometric expansion, which they clearly haven't been.

But no, you will say, the "information," so-called, is what's "out there" all around us, cataloged in libraries and on the internet now, in papers and in teaching traditions, and simply not possible of containment within a single mind. What has changed has been our relationship to the information that's always been there. Our frames have been filled out, almost to the point of being "fleshed." We now know that we can, in principle, guide ourselves to some solid sense of reality, and that we will not be disappointed *except* by random incursions from what must remain, in principle, like a roll of dice, beyond our ability to know, to control, to predict.

A single mind is no more elaborate than it ever was, it is simply better aligned than it could have been with all other non-disformed minds. This is the magic of trans-cultural scientific understanding, grounded in the universal "language" of mathematics. It's what you *must* agree with, unless you're nuts, perverse, true religious or some other patently dysfunctional aberration from survivability.

This then, is that precisely wonderful moment in history, where you can only imagine what God has written for us, for he hasn't said a thing (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It must be wonderful, right? Just as quickly as Toyota can transform from being the trusted creator of trusty automobiles into the panderer of more complexity than even they can be on top of (give me back my mechanical linkage, gas pedal to carburetor; key to ignition; brake pedal to pads); so quickly does a person leave his body.

Not some "soul" which is the silliest idea since ideas were thought of (the silliest word since "information"), rather some utter absence of the ability, or the need, to look forward. The plots - largely fictional - that we must hatch for ourselves to bridge each moment to the next must surely end somewhere. After a certain age, you simply are no longer your best and brightest self. There is more looking back than forward, and then it stops. The interval grows infinite, in mirror-image mockery of what Newton's Calculus once resolved.

This fact is hardly cause for terror. There never was a "you" in the first place. We're all gerunds - activities - spanning the intervals between one instance and the next. It is only the forward and the backing; there is no *being*. That would be absurd.

And therefore there is no end to being. There was never any beginning. As it now and ever shall be, Amen.

The hope I hold out, for Buffalo, and for the world, is trivially simple to apprehend. It is that there will be some rather massive conspiracy. Some breathing together of words which simply and perhaps suddenly make sense to all and each of us. This is the catalyzing of the language which is now upon us. Not more information, not more truth exactly, unless by that you mean truing, one against the other. We all suddenly agree on the basics. The frames unite, and we become all one. As it was in the beginning (which never was).

OK, bye bye for now. This is getting a bit overheated. My little brain needs a break before it turns to crystal and shatters into a million shards.