A Resolution for a New Year

I have this old car, which isn't old enough to lack the universal connector which throws the codes which tells the mechanic which is the part which likely needs replacing. The part was replaced, but the light show now goes on and off, and I despair that there will ever be any definitive resolution which doesn't implicate rats eating the wiring harness. 

I have a new porch with a new light which has two bulbs. Each bulb is the minimum brightness that an outdoor LED light may have, or so they told me at the electric wholesaler. The light is more pleasant when only one of the bulbs is lit, but now randomly the second goes on. Is it even worth the trip up the ladder with head bent back to troubleshoot? This was installed by an extremely competent, experienced, professional but old electrician. Like me, he may not have enough experience with the on/off workings of digital replacement reality. 

At night my bed is a little bit cold for comfort. I could turn up the heat, but I bought a heated mattress pad instead. The documentation in this case is sufficient to the usage, and I am well pleased. I still don't understand why natural gas costs nearly half of what it did last year, given the war in Ukraine, and then there is the mildness of the weather. I need not be so concerned.

I am urged to purchase a new car, since I've poured so much money into this one. But it would be a betrayal of my soul to drive an automatic.

Our Earth now is blanketed in electronic debris in outer space, and I manically binge For All Mankind wondering, has it really come to this? Which this?

So many people observe that we are like Wile-E-Coyote, having crossed the point of no return, legs still churning in the comic gap between over the edge and the realization of gravity.

Meaning simply that we inhabit a seventeenth century world and lack the instruction manual to live in the twenty-first. Since we have never been modern, we can never be post-modern. All that we can do is to accept irony as our final stance. Both/and is not the same as on/off.

Our world is so much better now, and yet the oppressed remain oppressed. The wealthy are, effectively, more wealthy than ever in earth's history. They own all of our enthusiasms, which is plenty to keep us down.

I make the modest proposal that our resolution is social, and hardly technical. We already know better than to imagine that we can, as a species, triumph over whatever mysterious evolutionary processes brought us to this point. And yet we already know that our failure is certain if we continue to allow our lowest common denominator to prevail. Call it the artificial intelligence of money. Where greed replaces love as the prime mover.

Yes, of course, we continue to evolve. We trick ourselves into thinking that our evolution is continuous with all that came before. That ours is the natural elaboration of those processes and that our injection of intention to the quick is right and proper. 

Which would be so, truly, if our thinking had ever progressed from Newton's. Who dissected dogs while they still lived, so certain was he that they weren't sentient. Whose object was still God and not the Truth. Who is credited with triggering all of this accelerating development, which is geologically explosive in its form. 

And yet across this particular New Year - the first that I remember which I transgressed without remarking it, even internally. Having been preoccupied with other things. Like picking photos for the slide show for Mom's funeral, some of which turn sideways by the undocumented internal workings of the cheap projection system on which I watched the Bills win, excitingly, nail-bitingly, and barely,  yesterday afternoon. My excitement was enhanced by the fact that my little portable but great-sounding battery powered speaker system, which works on boat, in trailer,  and even in the rain and was very cheap, like me, was either no longer charging or the charge indicator light went out. 

Black box.

Which is likely also why spell-check no longer works. I supposed Google has gone all AI, because that's the overall trend, and they are now so clever than I can no longer click to repair, but have to type around their over-sophisticated suggestions. My mattress pad delivered on New Year's Eve, late, after the game. Could we even have imagined this world when I was but a child?

Nope. 

And yet there is nothing unfamiliar about it, though there should be. 

Not even a heated mattress pad provisions my night for sleep, though I was asleep before I heard the midnight noise too close nearby. Which hardly awakened me. It's not commotion which keeps me awake.

This morning, on New Year's Day, the New Yawk Times offers a week's worth of fine and tested resolutions of the energy loss from sleep deprivation issues that each of us now, apparently, faces. I have zero hope that any of these will work for me, but hey, I'm game! I slept so easily and naturally until my frequent flying to and from China. I still blame the dietary rather than time-zone upset.

I shall likely not be able to let the attendees at Mom's funeral know quite how much I loved her. It was never with my Dad that I could discuss all that was on my mind. She was always my champion, no matter how negligent I was and remain about what I did was doing to her. Dad made all the decisions, and was uptight for that. Not someone you might talk with until we took a sailing trip blind across the Big Lake in his old age. In an old-style wooden boat. 

Which might have been a death pact of mutual trust. We "landed" by dead reckoning, which is all we had, within the plot where we found ourselves marked out on the charts as "restricted" by reason of ordnance testing, from which we laughingly hightailed out. We could espy the shore by then, and knew right were we were. 

And so, sure, my dead reckoning does espy the resolution to our contemporary madness. It's rather post-modern, if you can stand that. I'm a mid-century modern man myself, contaminated now by Mom's decorating effluence, which tended colonial as does, well, this post-colonial house.

We shall never populate Mars, but not for lack of cleverness. Our trouble is that we've definitively cut ourselves off from cosmos, which is the deeper meaning for digital. The conflagration on whose tail end we live is identical in form to the instant Trinity test by which Oppenheimer's success was meted out and then away. I am no big fan of Christopher Nolan's scientistic fantasies, but he nailed this one. Has he grown a literary heart? Doubtful, but hey!

Each of us has outsourced by now the better angels of our nature to the good graces of ambitious people. And what's wrong with ambition? Daniel Dennett has it in spades, as do those Mars rovers for all mankind.

What choice do we have? Who among us would arrogate the resolution of important matters to ourself? Who among us would consider themselves to have that expertise? If I can code, you might still pay me very well, but you'd be paying me for the blinders I wear about the bigger picture. Which is identical to C-level corporate compensation. Watch only the bottom line, and learn to speak to the boardroom the way that Steve Jobs spoke to the world. Coders are paid well to have no ambition beyond the code. C-level requires Ivy-grade networks. A death-pact of mutual trust.

Reconnecting with cosmos requires humility. And the realization that we've never been apart. Most of our human brainpower is "meant" to be social and not intellectual. Mom was never allowed to make the big decisions, though she had the real intelligence in the family.

I still can't find the baby Jesus for Mom's stylish Christmas crèche. No worries. It's someone in one of the boxes, I'm sure. Someday I'll have the energy to open the rest of them,

The brain is neither isomorphic nor coterminous with the mind. The mind is spread, though perhaps the brain acts, metaphorically, as a kind of microcosm for the all. Not a receiver of cosmic emanations, though that metaphor might get you pretty far. But an ironically social and intellectual nexus in a kind of living thinking swamp of humanity. The irony is that while we have never been more individually named and free and potentially heroic, we have never been so subsumed in and by the human All. 

The novel I would write, if I could write, would be the last novel. The hero disappears. I have the whole thing in plates. Never to be finished. The protagonist . . . 

On Catholic Autopilot

Richard Dawkins was right that getting brought up Catholic constitutes a kind of child abuse. Rote gets substituted for understanding, so that men can use you for their purposes. Guilt is built up until it feels inborn. You deviate, you cringe. And here in Buffalo, the most Catholic city in the country, it is almost guaranteed that you can't start up something new. The certain response is mockery; a kind of sure, yeah, go ahead and give it a try, but you'll be back working for your dad soon enough. Buffalo is the place were dreams meet reality!

This is how abused people must respond. Free thinking is scary. Around here, good enough really is good enough, and maybe that's how it should be. The more we talk excellence, the more it seems another hail Mary pass for what at best is snow-bound and mediocre. Suicide in Buffalo, after all, is dramatically redundant.

And yet somehow there remain theatrical productions of almost every sort nearly every night of every week no matter what they do in the Big City. My very favorite is having a kind of NPR-style might-go-out-of-business fundraiser tonight, where I hope to see you. Live music and a reading from subversive Santa!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
A Colbert Christmas: Another Christmas Song
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Urban farming takes root in Buffalo too - and I even heard about an urban fish farm, taking advantage of the fact of basements, no matter the condition of their wooden cover. Why not, right? Water holds incredible quantities of heat, and can be charged up when everyone else is driving. Sell the fish and pay for the heat! We sure have lots of water.

I'm writing on Catholic autopilot now too. I have a simple mantra, and I can't seem to find any way to say it better, so I just recite it over and over like counting my rosary beads. Eventually, my I is expendable even to myself. That's the trouble with having an agenda. Or the hope.

Without any agenda, in my dreams, I was loved just for my being. That time so long ago now that I can't even project myself there, when I had no sense of shame and no need to perform on any level. Before the zits could make me insecure, such were our worries in the suburbs. Before there was any need for comparison shopping. Before even Mom had hopes for me. I've been beside myself for love, but never could do anyone quite proud enough. I've been oppressed by me.

So, as you know, I've fixated on a spice rack, my agenda for yesterday left over from the day before. I have no room now in my cupboards for all the junk I've mashed into this apartment. I'm too tired to throw any more away. I found some hooks to put coffee mugs outside the tiny cupboards. For those, I had to take a walk into my color-blind spot; the other way in my cognitive map of this post-modern urban landscape. Underneath the rainbow style of my own neighborhood, lurk cool divides which still tend black and white.

My ears were bitten from the driving snow, and I had to drive myself in any case to larger shops farther afield. My car's heater core is as old and clogged as my heart, and as expensive to replace. I became a Tibetan for a day then, on my Xanadu quest to find a spice-rack without resorting to the Internet. My excuse was that I had to stop by to fix my daughter's car, which was too far away to walk. And the subway - not quite on my cognitive map either - passes by no likely spots for spice racks.

Tibetan quests are always the goal they seek, where what you learn along the way provides relief for the vacancy of the goal once accomplished. The nothing after the layers of the onion get peeled. The fact that I could easily have assembled lumber, screws, and paint to build my spice rack before burning all that gas, in a fraction of the time it took to search.

I need more space for food in my cupboards, and I can't see cinnamon from pepper flakes up at eye level behind the rest. Cinnamon tastes really weird on pizza, trust me, and would never make it out of Buffalo like once-garbage chicken wings did.

Driving then, absurdly around cars sidelined by the inevitable bent fenders of first snow, my ears perked up when NPR Science Friday did a radio show on patenting genes. Genetic defectives who need to know whether to lop off their breasts must pay a company which owns that patent to find out if they've got the patented gene.

This is serious business, and people wonder out loud if there's any charity left in the world. Or if the only way there is to harness greed. Or if greed is just motive, and no trouble with that, except what ever happened to research motivated simply to true our understandings with reality? Is saving lives the same as selling widgets?

Like all such things, the point is reduced to minuscule punning differences among meanings. What is nature and what is artifice, what is science and what is art, what is discovery, what is invention? What is the difference anyhow between natural law and laws of nature? Perhaps the only difference is when a claim gets staked. Eureka! I've deciphered the code of nature, and now I claim it for my own.

There are elaborated sets of terms, and manuals of usage, to guard the way in to any advanced discussions. Citations which can and must be made to true these words and get at what essentially has already reached some point beyond absurdity. But you would never know it without a life's worth of study. So go, and be the first, and for a time you'll own it. You'll be filthy rich before the courts catch up. Before the side effects take hold. Before the Ponzi scheme that is life's perpetuation falls apart.

Still, I was compelled to listen since I've been following this discussion for quite a while. I moved Ira Flatow over to my internet-connected phone so I could continue listening even while connecting the battery charger to her car so that my daughter has some independence after I bring her home from college. I have no memory of what I did, and so when her mother called to wonder if it was I who hooked the car up, I could only conclude that it obviously must have been. Would someone else have done it?

Perhaps it is natural that Buffalo provides a center for Secular Humanism. We are among the most churchgoing and religious cities in the land - for some reason, I think we're at the very top. Perhaps it is inevitable that a scholar at the center of these debates about patenting genes should have gotten his start here, as my student at a school with Catholic roots; at a University with aspirations to aspire to greatness but where good enough is still good enough. And as executive director of that center for atheistic rationality. I also, did I mention, am not nor ever have been Catholic.

Apart from the snow, I know that driving during the shopping season is a dream here in Buffalo. I know that the traffic is infinitely more slight than wherever you live. And yet I had no patience at all to navigate and negotiate parking, to wonder from which side the hit might come; the slide; the crash. Walking across parking lots rather than to commit the absurdity to move my car from big box to big box, and realizing that once inside the car, the drivers no longer see those of us walking as real.

I had no patience, and so I entered a dream state myself, detached from the car, detached from my frozen feet and ears, marvelling that anyone could find anything they needed among the endless shelves overstocked with want. Spice racks galore, though most came intact with certified-sanitary jars full already. I could find nothing that I needed, and only things that I might want but have no room for. Bizarrely, some of these over-elaborations cost half the price I would ultimately spend for simple racks to hold the jars I already own for free when paying, supposedly, for their contents.

I finally found my spice rack at a local hardware chain store. This one's a holdout from just before national big-box, but just after the local stores got destroyed. They somehow cling to their niche by remaining small enough to navigate in a single bite, but large enough to overlap the really big box places. A sort of convenience store for between Home Despot forays.

Where people follow you and wonder what you're looking for in imitation of the old days. My old friend of a friend Danny Nevearth used to advertise them on TV. He was king of radio in Buffalo once, when radio was king. He turned out to be nearly as engaging on TV ads.

Now there's someone else who preserves his moves for those TV advertisements - I imagine Danny became too expensive? I wonder if he gets a royalty from those moves, or are there still things you can't patent? I saw a Julia Roberts look-alike on an Internet ad (you can see her too, just above, and see if you agree). Maybe it really was her? But, no you can't imagine she'd stoop to that. I wonder what the laws are for impersonation?

Well, I impersonate a real person most of the time. Or maybe all of us just simulate a time when something seemed more real. Maybe we're all just acting out by rote, behaviors which once were real. As in my writing, I just rehearse my stupid mantra. There's no one here anymore. There's only rote.

Or. Well, I've got to go now and see how the battery charged on my daughter's dormant car. I'm the energizer bunny. I'm on autopilot. There is a drug now which can be administered just as you are exciting memories, and which will selectively destroy them. It shows promise for traumatic stress syndromes. White-out for your disorders.

I also learned - on the radio of all places - that there is evidence that simple rote learning of phonics actually does build "white matter" in the brain for kids with trouble reading. I taught for a while at a school for dyslexic boys - I think that term's fallen out of favor - where we all learned to drill like that. That was when whole language was in and out of favor, and everyone was gifted.

Gosh, I remember trying to write a paper for a graduate course in Progressive Education, to qualify the certainties of "whole language". No wonder I always sound the fool - the science isn't there yet.

So, maybe rote will bring Jesus back down to earth after all. Maybe the very words will be made flesh, like white matter in the brain. Maybe if we just white out the guilty remains of magical thinking that if you break this chain of spam. And maybe with practice the brain can be reconstructed, and the sense will come back in to the words. Maybe we've just forgotten how to read. Maybe not.

Happy Catalytic Thanksgiving

Lots of Post Modernist types like me have a little problem with celebrating our invasion of this Brave New World. But you know, we weren't as successful in our predations as we sometimes make out. It was really the bugs we brought over which decimated the Native Americans. Without those diseases, we probably would have been utterly turned back by superior warriors with something real to fight for.

Now we're terrified of other supposedly unenlightened types, who believe in a different style of spirituality from our own. And we go at them with the very same mismatch of weaponry, and we'll probably take credit too, when they perish, inevitably, of the diseases of modernism. Like our blue jeans, we spread these incidentally over the entire globe, never mind our rapacious designs on earth's treasures.

Still, I don't mind celebrating Thanksgiving in its true spirit. It's a time to come together with friends and family, and actually to remember who lived here first, and what we would be without that grant. I suppose you could almost say that the Natives here will celebrate the last laugh as we kill ourselves off now with corn sweeteners.

But we're not dead yet.

We still have a chance to retreat from Empire building. Our President, ever the wiser man, has postponed his announcement of new swarms of troops until after we feast. And then he will invite the entire world to take part in what still can be a mission to create rather than to destroy our peace.

It's never easy, though, when those we send have been so mis-schooled into thinking that we are the good guys by the default of dreaming it up. That somehow our flag is better than theirs, and our style of family gathering puts theirs to shame. Whoever they are.

There is something magical about what we, the people, have created on these stolen shores. The whole world saw it, just as the whole world cringes when we act like uncivilized and spoiled bratty usurpers. If we actually do manage legitimately to reclaim for ourselves what it is we've given over to crass corporatism these last forty or so years, then there will be no trouble at all getting the world to join our efforts.

We've come of age now since pretty womanizing JFK beat the television marketing bejeezus right out of innocent wooden Tricky Dick. Let's prove it to the whole world. Let's show that we can't be fooled by the marketers into believing in an America as completed fact, when we're still very much on the make.

We've never yet been true to our promise.

We're still brand new. Our entire history up until now has been one long story of greed and corruption, which has been just fine for so long as there remained great stores from mother nature.

Our frontier has ended. There's no more free bounty. Our frothy wealth no longer spills freely over the entire globe. We're suffocating our earth, and it's long since become clear that we're not innocent about the misery in our wake.

Mom's lost her patience, and has no more to grant us in any case. It's time for us to smarten up, give up the magical thinking of our youth, and re-read our constitution.

There won't be endless stores of oil, and even if there were, it would melt us down to burn them. There won't be endless clean energy to allow us to continue a rapacious life-style. There won't be some savior coming down from the skys. But there's plenty we can do right here and now if we decide to.

Let's show the world what we've got in us. Let's get our act together, and stop allowing the ones who have only proven their success in the old world - the modern world - from continuing to control it now. They're done. They have nothing to offer us now.

The oil companies, the drug marketers, the health insurance consortiums. They sell death and we should know it. There's far too much good news afoot for us to let the ones who hoard our wealth make all the decisions. We the people should give thanks and then take back our government. You have to wonder why we gave it away in the first place, unless we thought folks with good hair and pretty faces were really that much better than us.

Spread some love. It travels faster and better than H1N1, and won't make anyone rich who doesn't need to be.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Halloween Dirty Dancing

This is one of those 'quick bury that previous post' posts. I still have a tiny modicum of modesty left in me.

I'm thinking of Halloween and how, while I was driving home today, I listened, as you may have done, to an author who'd written a book about cannibalism. It was interesting enough that I switched to my handy dandy internet radio so I could hear it over hill and through dale where the old fashioned broadcast signal never reaches.

Now come on, cannibalism?! Even for Halloween that's a little gross.

But the author was eminently qualified, both because her Dad was a chef to stars (OK, yuch for the associations) and she herself has been a chef, but mostly because this was her professional field. Cultural paleontology or something like that. As with all good research, her study had become a prism for all of life and history.

I listened and sure enough she included the Christian "this is my body" stuff along with her discovery that in every case where cannibalism is sanctioned, there are elaborate religious rituals and justifications around the practice. She also pointed out that, just like slavery, cannibalism is still very much with us, ranging in forms from criminal to martial to sexual to primitive.

As a proper scientist she was utterly certain that this is only a cultural taboo, and that we could be normalized to the practice as easily as to any other practice if that were how we got brought up. Fine, no problem here. She was as grossed out as you or I are, and she had plenty of cases from history about how normal it can be, even within shouting memory in mainstream Western civ.

But it does get you thinking. There's a lot about the way we live which is at least as grotesque. Yep, you betcha, I'm going to pound those idiot Republicans again. Not conservatives, if there are any left. I mean the Republicans who seem bent on confusing outsized business with business, and think somehow they should be exempted from being thought to have normal human natures.

These are the ones, remember, who fight for free speech for corporations. Who insist that campaign contributions don't interfere with their judgment. Who accept the undoubtedly incredibly well researched and well written opinions of corporate lobbyists for the positions they themselves are too busy to formulate. And who still love to complain about the so-called Main Stream Media who use the same process to generate the news they produce for us, the consumers, to consume.

This strikes me for all the world as a kind of cannibalism. After all, these massive companies have so much power that they can determine our tastes and our preferences; what we consider to be important to pay attention to, what we're afraid of, who we hate, who we agree with. I'm not immune. How could I be? How else am I going to know what's going on in the world if not via the MSM?

But the process definitely fuels itself. And there is plenty of religious seeming ritual around the choices we're meant to feel are the only ones available to us. That health care has to be expensive. That drugs won't be developed unless greed is harnessed to do it. That without drugs, our lives would be a nightmare of savage living. That we really must not only own cars, but love them too. And care about the fine distinctions among brands.

I just reviewed a set of videos for the Obama administration for the sake of voting up the most effective anti insurance-lobby health-care reform ad to place on TV. I was extremely disappointed. They were all pretty good at hitting at your emotive gut. But nowhere among them was the highly conservative position that it would be darned good for business if they could count on a healthy and educated workforce without putting that burden on their own books as an expense. How the hell else are we to compete with the rest of the "first" world, which is increasingly healthier and better educated than we are on the whole? Shall we all just be slaves to global corporations? That seems the default desire.

Shall we also go back to toll roads run by private companies because the government is so inept? Maybe. I'd just like to think that there is some nourishment to the system which isn't generated by the system's owners.

OK, I'm not trying to defend the Democrats. They seem to be just as embedded, and even my favorite living Pres. is acting as if he has to play the same game the same way if he wants to make any progress at all. I'm sure he does. We don't leave him any choice.

The real trouble is monopoly capitalism - corporatism - and the fact that, like normalized cannibalism, we don't even see it as strange. We still actually do believe that there was no other choice from granting our land to the pathologically lying railroad barrons so that they could bind our lands. My very favorite President ever, Old Honest Abe, was the one who got duped for this.

I'm not saying the railroads were necessarily a bad thing, but we can't even see that they weren't inevitable in the form they took. We still believe that there is only one direction for what gets called progress, and that it will and must go on forever and ever, amen.

Sure, we have pretty well harnessed the greed of the foundational developers, and turned what they wrought into something which works pretty well for all of us. But within very short order, from the twinned foundational efforts of Darwin and Lincoln until now, we've moved from connecting the frontiers to actual danger of boiling away the lifeblood of the entire planet.

And we're still enamored of the most rapacious among us, so long as they turn their efforts to the public good upon late or early retirement. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, Nobel. These are all monsters of monopoly. I'm pretty sure the list could go on and on and on.

If you ask me, you might as well include the Church and its Board of Directors. Tholugh at least they have the decency to call cannibalism by its rightful name. At least we know we're eating that Man we worship.

It is no mistake now that Halloween begins to rival Christmas for the extravagance of decoration and celebration; outdoor lighting and blowup animatronics lawn decor. The main thing is that we can pretend to be what we're not. And that we don't have to escalate our gifting.

My sister reminded me recently of that Halloween dance she'd invited me to crash when we were so much younger. Where my friend Peter and I decided to share an ape costume. Where there were that many more women than men among the nursing graduate students. Where I was the one to arrive dressed as an ape, and put on my very best and uninhibited moves. I think I might have been a really good Saturday Night Date in my mockery of myself.

Then halfway through, we swapped. My sister tells me some girl was disconcerted by this transformation. The guy she'd been coming on to had changed somehow internally. It makes me wistfully sad only in the retelling from some outsider's point of view. By myself, I never would have had the nerve, and the shy me without costume would never be confused for that dancing ape.

So you can point to computers and claim they would never exist nor surely be as ubiquitous as they've become without the Microsoft monopoly. You can point to the massive transportation and communications infrastructure which supports our just-in-time goods and services manufacturing economy, and understand that it never would have come about without the energy devouring orgy of industrial strength oil-fed warfare. And you can call these facts the price of progress.

I see them rather as some mockery of human, some abdication of our need to own up to who we actually are in the face of very local and very personal responsibilities to be decent. No matter how mild the ruse, it's not nice to fool with peoples' hopes and dreams. It's not nice to make them feel that their only real choice is to eat or be eaten.

I'll dance and play the fool myself now, and learn by aping those around me until they think I know some moves. My costume's off for good. It's no real fun to act the monster when the real life powers pull it off so well.

I take no real position on cannibalistic practices; am willing to guess that it can be an act of honor as much as revenge. I do think that our meat eating habits could use some adjusting. That our orgies of speed and life-projection have reached their terminal limits.

I also believe that as unnecessary as have been these rapacious monopolists' victories, they have brought us to this particular brink from which we can, in fact, if we wish to, reclaim humanity from our ash heap.

We can realize that indeed things have come about very much as if it were inevitable. The the singular and unifying language of science, which has made possible all the predatory exploitations of the innocence of masses of people for the sake of serial and parallel incarnations of this or that Attilla the Hun, has also brought us all together to this particular moment in our collective history - and we are still very much all one - from where it's possible, if we want it, to become that fully human.

I am vigilant now. Internally silent. Waiting for the CERN Large Hadron Collider to go looking again for the next so-called particle or boson or scintillating string. I have no particular hopes attached. What I am hoping for and waiting to see is that a few people will have, just in time, awakened to the obvious.

It is not our choosing which determines reality. It is our response. There is infinite regress on the one hand - an endless chase after our own tail toward particles indistinguishable from flitting fancies in our minds. This will always empower our blood lust.

Or there is a stepping back to find that this ape has always been animated by something human. That the accidental and random merging of waves which causes hard reality to condense from merest possibility is always emotionally prefigured.

That conquest is never victory. That pinning down in words or deed the stuff of our dreams can only destroy it by making it far too real. That meaning is minimally dialogic, and that machines and beasts are both excluded from the exercise. I'll not be eating any human flesh, nor even mocking that ghoulish practice.

The stuff I want to realize can only exist in communication - call it communion if you will - between onself and others. There is no imaginable world where that reality can be touched in the flesh. Or reified on some highly instrumented screen.  That chase is terminal, terminated and boring already. It postpones, for glory, a response we already know.

Glorify God - Evolve Beyond Belief! (extinguish godophobia)

Yay! Finally, it's out there, the huckster come-on to end all come-ons, the billboard at the end of the universe, the signpost to eternity, the answer to the question of what's it all about? Life, the Universe, and Everything?

I confess, of course, that this is not original with me. Somewhere on the Internet I found a reference to an actual combative billboard "Glorify Darwin - Evolve Beyond Belief!", but I don't want to be combative. I don't really want to be ironical either. I guess I really do aspire to funny, but there's scant hope of that.

But really now, what is belief? I have plenty of faith that the sun will come up tomorrow (and that if it doesn't there's utterly no point in thinking about it). I have about the same faith that the ground will be there when I place one foot in front of the other.

And I have utterly no interest to know what becomes of "me" after I die. Alright, like Tom and Huck and Joe, I'm curious, but it's not that big a mystery.

That's the part which will stick in some people's craw. But I really don't get why it should. I don't extend beyond my skin, do I? Why should I extend beyond my time span? Why would I want to?

I can't even be defined as me without some shapely boundaries to contain me. They have a recognizable and persistent form, each and every one of them, and like my squiggle on the dotted line when I sign my name, I can see me in an instant, even if others might be fooled.

My motions and emotions also leave distinctive traces, shaped in others' hearts and minds even while not reproducible. Except indirectly through words or movies or others' tellings you might know me. It is the me that's not quite reproducible. I guess they know it when they see it, my friends and family. Most can tell the mockery from the real me, even as I cringe beneath it, finding too much of me sometimes, in what others reflect back.

Sure, I have had plenty of occasion to be unnerved, finding myself where I didn't know I was. Sometimes I even have the pleasant discovery of my very own work, years and years later, still holding up. I can hardly credit it as mine, but then the memories start flooding in. Oh yeah, that was me! I recognize my signature shortcomings, the slip-ups of my chisels, right along with what I did that endures.

I have even more experience with someone mistaking me for someone else that they have known. I guess I have a common enough face, or maybe it's distinct enough that it rings a bell which triggers a memory of someone else distinct? Yeah, that must be it. Surely there's no-one who can be mistaken for moi?

Or what about when some old highschool classmate remembers me and I don't remember him? I get the name first, the face slowly resolving into something vaguely familiar, but still I can't make who he was when I actually knew him come back to mind quite presently. It happens all the time with former students.

I know that I have a weakness in that regard. I find it impossible to remember song lyrics, which is my lame defense against inevitable allegations of being absorbed in myself when I don't remember who you are. Absurdly, I studied classical Chinese poetry in college, a discipline which utterly depends on memorizing a massive literary corpus. Talk about misplacement!

A signal memory in my life was being selected to play Father Time back in kindergarten. I flubbed my lines, and couldn't stop laughing up on stage, holding a staff as I remember, my head covered in a ridiculous white sheet covered in cotton balls that I had made myself.

I have no memory of whether the audience of parents was laughing with me, or if I peed my pants. I do know that no-one ever made the mistake again to put me in any theatrical leads. (Well, except for when I tried to introduce the Chinese acrobats - in Chinese no less! - for a fundraiser to rescue the failing school I then was heading. I'm pretty sure I flubbed that one too).

I'm pretty sure Mom was mortified for me, or was she too laughing uncontrollably? I'll see if she remembers when I see her later tonight. I hate to pin my shyness on her without checking my facts, but let's hope she's quite forgotten.

What you really do remember about someone is what animates those familiar shapes; in particular the face, though one old classmate told me she only recognized me by my walk. I guess otherwise I might have passed unnoticed and unremarked.

I have a moustache and wear glasses, which means that my entire faculty could mock me once, all of them up on stage, putting on five and dime store Groucho Marx noses, and each or was it all sporting maybe one or two of what they thought I might not have seen about myself the way that they did. If it was love or hatred, I had to take it all the same, and will not soon forget it. I am too bashful to claim love, but I will choose it every time. It chains me to my pain, and kept me fighting for that school too, which fight I also flubbed.

Gradually, usually, you remember the person as an identity. In common parlance, you remember their heart; or at least the heart of the thing you remember is whatever it is that does, in fact, remain constant over all the years of our lives. It's not a static quality. It's an animating force. It defines an individual.

Imagine if it didn't! We then would die over and over again in the course of just one "life". I know some tricksters try for that, some sociopathic liars. We hear all the time about people waking up one day to find out who their spouse really was.

I don't mean the sexual infidelities, I mean the really big stuff. We're just fooling ourselves if we don't think the thinker in our pants has a mind of its own. Drawn as it is to beauty it must impale or torture or treat as dirt even while the controlling mind conjurs words like soulmate. And fear defines your makings up too, all liars to yourselves. Especially when you insist that she must like it when you act like a perfect beast. Especially when you think that you must be in control.

But did those people ever really live? I'm not talking about the one who got fooled. I'm talking about the trickster. I've had occasion to wonder if being "born again" can also be a way to hide instead of to own up to who you really are. Disappearing from social commerce to bury your nose in rote-ish words. Escaping to some wilderness. Hiding behind rules of behavior and dress. Formulaic "praise god" greetings.

Why not call that thing which identifies us for our whole life long our heart? I've always liked the fact that in Chinese the metaphor of center - their term for heart - indicates both the literal and figurative center; in English the emotive heart as well as the intellectual mind. They even use a similar term to define their state, although it seems they might have betrayed its character lately. The Central Construct ("Middle Kingdom" so passé).

Here in the West, we still seem pretty caught up with beginnings and endings. With a causal universe - a created universe - and with our own ability to take control, through technology's extension of our grasp, of as much as we possibly can.

Now those Godless Chinese are proving to be even more predatory than we are in their gougings of the Earth. Let's hope they find their Center again, lest their recurrent epochal re-carvings of manly patterns on the face of too-wild earth finally does destroy it. Unless we in the West get to it first. Our race is still for the wilderness, the outer space, the rapture, the end of it all, the perfect perpetual motion machine.

The entire civilization of the globe now is under our American Corporatocratic thumb, as innocently propagated as blue jeans. Let's hope that civilization itself is not destroyed by this mad importation by China, just for example, of something which makes their notion of civilization - the placing of heart in Earth's wildness by bringing the constancy of the heaven's down here to everchanging Earth, which is what the term for "writing", radically, means - let's hope that this fine figure does not get fully displaced by Western machinery for the carving of dragons.

Let's hope we regain our balance first.

In the West we feel still compelled to separate our control center from our responsive emotive center - our mind from our heart - and somehow feel, almost desperately, that when we lose control, we've lost our life. Forgetting that we have almost no control over what others think of us; at least none that technology can help with. Unless you're willing to accept the airbrushed photoshopped object as the person you really do love.

We have lots of control over how we respond to those around us. And a large part of what might get called our character relates intimately to how gracefully we leave off where we don't belong. How we zip our pants. How we enclose our private spaces.

We do end at our skin, yes, and before these last very few centuries of civilized history, our physical control mostly ended at and with our fingers.

Our fingernails such weak tools for gouging, it has been our toolmaking which enabled our peak survival as Earth's temporarily most fit creatures.

Still more recently, we learned to project our hearts out across space and even time, through writing and its related technologies. Through media, more generally. And now our media has become massive in a two-way direction, dear God!

What would have happened in China way back when the written language was always and only a technology for truing hearts toward civilization's center, where a living Imperial Superstar did actually live? Where bureaucrats were trained in poetry, but where the Imperial accountings also worked their way through language. What would mass literacy have done to that Imperial Church? Would it have exposed their deep corruption? Would people have demanded direct relationships to their own truths?

How very nice of Google now, to help China's single party put the governor on this gathering movement, though they say, at least, the fact that something's being blocked is still exposed, if not the thing that's stoppered.

I'm not waiting for the 'Net now dialogic to come awake. But I sure am waiting for the mass-mediated people to do so. And honestly, I don't really know from Left or Right, which side has the best moral compass. I do know who's shouting loudest now. Who lacks all grace. But none who represent us may be the best of us right now. And shouting is sometimes all that's left, when you feel ignored and marginalized.

Now there seem to be some among us, literally enraptured by our technologies, who think that "information technologies" will extend our controlling reach into some kind of infinity. I recently learned that a term had been coined for this: the Geek Rapture. Peels of howling laughter from this quarter (hey, I'm a geek).

Intelligence is as intelligence does, and I don't think it's very smart to separate, even in language, our emotional from our intellectual center. I will never actually care that much for my machines.

When my control ends, I am not dead and gone. I might easily be in love, enraptured by what I find around me, giving myself over to something that rightly is not only more powerful than me, but that I wouldn't want to control even if I could. When my intelligence stops, I might simply be sleeping or drugged or taking a break to let some mediated entertainment in. I might be meditating. I might be listening.

And I also do think that even though I end right at my skin, there is also a me which can be conjured from all the ones who know me and have known me and that sometimes that me is more me than the one I think I know myself. The one I think I inhabit. I mean after all, there are lots and lots of things about myself I just can't stand to look at, think about or emotionally own up to.

My own mom now is at that scary place in her life. She just bought some very expensive lenses to replace the ones she was born with which had become clouded over with cataracts. Thank goodness, as with my home mortgage, the money brokers aren't allowed to discriminate on the basis that I'll be dead before it's paid for.

Well, OK, in the case of my home mortgage, it's just space and land to be bought and sold, and I'm already getting out of that market. I'm too old to keep up with owning a house already (there's a wink in there somewhere).

But I wouldn't have the choice if someone matched the actuarial tables against the paydown mortgage schedule. Hell, if you dig deeply enough, I think you'll find those two concepts even share a set of linguistic or at least mathematical roots.

But I am glad there is no-one telling Mom that she won't live long enough to take full advantage of her new bionic eyes. And I rather hope that when I'm there on my deathbed, as my dear uncle "Bud" was just yesterday, society will be humane enough to give me the choice not to live out my last moments in terror and in pain.

I rather hope that the Godists - the ones who think they have a patent on what God could mean - will have relinquished their stranglehold on what we can say in public and still become a leader. I hope that they will have learned to relinquish their fear, and to find something more like faith than their far too hotly protested "beliefs".

Their faith in God, those Bible thumping evangelicals and Taliban - now there's a fine distinction - seems about as odd as would be my belief if I doubted that the sun would come up tomorrow. I think they have no faith at all. I think they protest way too much. I think they are terrified of what they do not feel, but unlike Mother Theresa, say, don't even continue to act as if they do. I think they are God-o-phobes. There, now I'll lay claim to that term. People who must destroy what they are afraid of in themselves.

I get the power of being "born again," I really do. It's a way to take on a new character, to shed the old that by its being clung to meant clinging to all the mistakes and flaws and fallings short which cannot be rectified except up against something so much more powerful and mysterious and graceful than anything wrought by man.

I get that. I get that truing oneself against words which have rung true across the generations is probably a good idea. I get that there are many many Christians who live their faith, and that young Muslims who strap bombs to their bodies, when they aren't tricked into it, are earnest in their approach to something beyond earthly power.

But the spirit dies even in words. These words, especially when forced into the artificial man-made container of literalness, into which no words - none - can be made to fit, are long dead, and their purveyors are pandering fear now. Love is a far simpler matter than the mystery they would make it.

As if we could interfere with God by taking things into our own hands. As if the Earth would allow it, never mind some reified projection of what man would do if he were perfect. My God is so far beyond man that he doesn't even have a name. Hell, call him Bud.

It is simple care that we must exercise as humans. Not infinite care. Not terrorized capitulation to some human words which inflated hypocrites mesmerized by their own voices scare us into thinking came from God. God doesn't need to speak to me in human language for me to glorify his sacred heart. Hell, I'd say the human language can only get in the way.

I'd say it's long past time to stop the shouting and the pointing fingers, and the sowing seeds of mistrust.

And, for my kicker, I actually do think that love should direct the course of evolution. I actually think it always has. And always will. Any other construing of the far-fetched and nearly infinitely long string of accidents which have become us rings hollow, cold, empty and devoid of meaning.

Hallelujah, for I'm a bum. Today my bank balance passes zero in the wrong direction. Again. But I'll own up to my one and only identity, and challenge every last born-again to come out of their sinning closet too. It is not my "soul" which endures. That is a dusty abstraction, designed to make me wish and long for an eternity which will never come. It is my heart which will never end if only I let if fill now.

Einstein's Better Half

Not too long ago various idiots savant pondered whether Einstein might have stolen his ideas from his wife. I have proof that he couldn't have. As I tell my friends who haven't seen me for a while; "I've aged well, I have the body of a god (Buddha) in the mind of a lunatic (yours if you believe it)". See, it depends what you mean by better half, and in whose mind ideas might reside.

I was wonderfully gratified today to learn that Bill Clinton secretly cared more for his daughter than for the obligations of world leadership. You can go ahead and contrast that with GWB if you'd like, including the part about sexual transgressions. Some sins are just more serious than others, George, and just because you got in with the wrong crowd doesn't let you off the hook.

So, being a man, of course Einstein forgot to complete his wonderful insight. The part he got for us - the scientific discovery which entailed no moral reasoning on his part since it was and still is just wondrously true for whoever happens to think about it - is the part that made the bomb possible.

The better half - the part which now it might already be too late to reveal, and for that I can only apologize that I'm not a woman - is that he should have and could have noticed that once you've pinned the speed of light, you've also turned accident right on its head.

Things which aren't connected perceptually, which we now understand to involve the exchange of force-defining sub-atomic particles limited in their exchange by the speed of light, are "only" connected conceptually, which means, by definition, in some "mind".

Things with some future connection which can't be established by a chain of causation are - now this is obvious to the point of banality - connectible only by accident. Now I'm making shit up here, but if you really think about it you'll see that it's true - this accident when it's anticipated by some mind can be called an emotional connection, a wanting, a gap to be fulfilled. OK, there's the part you're going to choke on, but think about it now.

You make something happen you want to happen, and you work like hell to avoid the things you're terrified of. I'm not so very sure at all about free will and prestigipredestination, but honestly I could care less. It sure feels as though I'm the decider some of the time.

Now it's easy enough to claim no connection at all when accidents happen, but looking backward, you might simply say that the connection was emotionally prefigured, prior to its perceptual realization. It can be lots of fun to look around at the subconscious, but I'm going way farther than that. I know, I'm messing with sacred words we think we understand here, but give me a little chance . . . I mean that literally, of course! At the extreme, fate and the subconscious are identical, as any good psychotherapist will have to agree.

Emotion is a direction toward, say, something bound by love, and away, perhaps, when that direction is impelled by hatred, and it exists only in the absence of causal proof. Once contact is made, well, then you have causation.

The really cool part is that all reality is always an interplay among and between these aspects, so we needn't bother very much at all with the silly chicken and egg question of which came first, mind or matter. Because it doesn't, well, really matter. Both are fundamental, fundamentalists be damned!

But there is a reductive necessity, in any language which is going to make any sense, for concept, percept, mind and particle, motion and emotion. Otherwise, well, what's a wavicle to consist in, for goodness sake? Paradox (well, yes as a matter of fact, but Žižek can be really tough to read)!? There's no ether, there is simultaneous "action" at a distance when a de-Broglie wave is collapsed by an act of perception, but what's happened, strictly speaking, is conceptual, and is tough to prove by simultaneous measurement (not so tough to prove by other more clever types of measurement).

So the strong anthropic principle, the Goldilocks principle which posits that of course the cosmos beats all the wildest lottery odds to suit us perfectly [because we wouldn't be here if it didn't] can be restated to say that we were wanted. Absolutely nothing else changes. Or everything does. It's only semantics after all.

Now, I've got to go comfort my daughter whose boyfriend is too obtuse to see her charm anymore. Now that their freshman college year has begun, I'm sure he doesn't want to be constrained in what turns his head. If I were a woman, I'd tear him to shreds, but well, I kind of like the guy, so he has no worries from me, and for Pete's sake they're way too young to get serious. Even at my age promises are hard to keep.

All's fair in love and war, but pity the fool who hurts my kids. Now that right there is nuclear power. If only we could harness that stuff, you know, like that toddler energy we all comment about.

Oh, wait, we can!!! We can do the right thing, avoid the haters, steer clear of the magical thinkers, stop thinking in algorithms, religious or scientific, and learn to behave decently, in civilized fashion, with feelings expressed politely. Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself.

Disconnect

There is, of course, a lovely lightness now, to have liberated myself from any particular machine. I do all my writing ethereally, up in the cloud as they say, and have no worries about lost sectors on some spinning disk, or before that, lost, shuffled or wind-strewn pieces of paper.

The machines are all interchangeable, and apart from the time it takes to boot them up, and sometimes a vicious cycle thrashing from an older computing unit which can't outrace saves to the slowly spinning disk, they're all one to me. So long as the keyboards work, then I truly am indifferent now to operating system or if the machine sits on my lap or under my desk, or even if it's borrowed from someone else.

Even the loading up of a new machine, or newer, meaning if I am granted one from someone else's garbage, is trivially quick and dirty. And all this freedom is granted free, I suppose by the grace of some other gang of fools which will actually pay attention to the advertising which supports this evil monopoly empire.

I pay rather a lot for access on a monthly basis, though the reason I pay more is also so that I might be liberated from plugs or securitized wireless, or coffee shops or more borrowing. I prefer the Macs and Linux machines, because they accept my cellular device without any need to search for the metering software which Windows must deploy, presumably for the same reason - market share - that they are targeted by so much malware.

So, I take my Internet with me too, in the form of a tiny piece of hardware, whose usage costs me more than I can afford, but such is the cost of freedom. Truth be told, I think Internet should be ubiquitous and free, and perhaps it will be, all on the backs of those other foolish people who pay attention to ads. Commercial interest should almost demand it, especially when you consider the unsupportable costs to ship catalogs and mass-mailed come-ons, still, into so many peoples' literal mailboxes.

And I want to know why, given all this freedom, there are still people who want anything. Why would anyone, after the instant of making love to some vision of beauty which comes in to one's life, would one ever want or need or ask or complain about or for anything more, ever, again?

But you know it's not about the machine or the access or the writing. It's also about the place in which you do it, and now here in the lovely fall Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, I am sitting opposite a cheery fire, lit against the rapidly encroaching autumn so that I can remain comfortable, although it isn't cold. The fall which will bring bold colors and tourists to this place I am about to leave.

There are small enough margins for choice in our lives now, once the marketplace has perfected the distance between what we might be worth and what we need to buy, filling the gap with seemingly insatiable desires, each one of which, like my internet access, is calibrated to match the scale of desire in each one of us. Just against our possible illness, we must keep a full-time job, and then the cost of the other baubles is trivial enough to keep it below the decision threshold.

But I do wonder when someone other than myself will notice that in this way, all distinction between software and hardware has gone away. It's just a connection, rather, between what is stored in a kind of frozen-hard state, and what is gotten at in more liquid fashion. These words I can manipulate until I want to fix them. And I really don't care anymore at all about the machinery which makes that possible, until it stops functioning.

But software - a set of instructions - which depends on hardware to be set in motion is itself that hard because it never changes. And the hardware is a perfect analog for imprinted media, with fixed code as represented by the circuits and transistors initially mapped in such fashion that the schematic and the final product resemble one another almost interchangeably. So all that really matters is the change of state, happening now on this machine maybe a million times per second, but happening overall for the meaning of my transcriptions, who could possibly know or even care, since it's all so distributed about the cloud.

So we do still think of transmissions and storage and instructions stepping through and by. But that makes no more sense than to think of Walmart actually selling me a bicycle. They sell a form of crystallized misery is all. Its form, the bicycle's, exists somewhere now in software, as a set of specs. Machines realize these specs, almost apart from human intervention, and in the end there is always slave labor in China to do what hands are still required for.

So first of all, the hardware bicycle can be gotten so cheaply for almost the same reason a computer chip can. Once the design is set, it's like printing books almost. The marginal cost of each additional copy becomes almost nil. Actually, what our market economy now means is that it must be pushed as close to nil as possible, with all margins left for the creator alone. The designer. The one in the room with a view.

The funny thing is that the actual designer doesn't get a whole lot. He's just some middle class slob eager to sell his soul for the company boxer shorts. The one really on the take is the one gaming the logo, managed in trust for the hoards who own its equity. And these equity corporations act just like sociopathic machines, destroying anything small and beautiful on their way to world domination.

What a terrible thing has been accomplished to give these machines the rights of man. They resolve our collective aspirations, just like the gleam in the eye of my daughter, say, when she got her new Walmart bicycle which was all I could afford. We just want our money to grow, just like the value in our houses, so that we can turn it into interchangeable space to be bought and sold.

The resolution of our collective will, betokened only by money which is as interchangeable, precisely, as an identity-less subatomic particle, assures that whoever is custodian of that capital must labor to maximize its value, quite regardless of what gets harmed along the way.

This is the truest law of the jungle. This is the opposite of civilization.

Resurrection

Resurrection is the hardest part of the Christ story to get one's head around. Why so extravagant? Why so inconceivable? It's paired, quite magically, with the virgin birth as those things which are at once perfectly beyond the reach of science to touch, and which present such great taboos when science does approach.

There's cloning on the one end. Frankenstein monstering. And at the other a kind of fever dream of robots or zombies or uploaded souls. Still with the full knowledge that these could never approach the absurdity of Christ's resurrection, and before that His virgin birth. 

And people do aspire to believe these things, quite "literally," or so that term does get abused. These, of course, are people who by definition can't read, and so you're left to wonder what literal could possibly mean here. You can find it in the Left Behind series, which does earnestly and without apparent effort that which Saturday Night Live can only accomplish with heroic labor. You find it in Ray Kurzweil's absurd celebrations of man's dominion; a scientist overcome with himself and the manic dream of creating the one thing nature never will endure - a geometric expansion which sustains rather than destroys life. 

I say, imperiously, that they can't read, so we'll have to wonder just what reading is along the way toward resurrection and creation out of nothing. Let's just say, for now, that to read is reliably to place a set of words in their proper context. A joke occurs along with the jarring of words quite out of context. A joke on oneself when words are misread and contexts traded. People lounging on chaise, say, or when liberal education is thought to relate to books and liberaries (sic). We all do this, and manage to endure, despite the ridicule of our betters. 

But when you extrapolate full out, you gain a sense of just how difficult reading really is, and how absurd such phrases are as "absolute truth" or "faith".  And how unlikely, at the fringes, that anyone really can read another soul. Or in my case, that I can even read myself. 

So "Left Behind" and the "Singularity is Near" are cosmic pratfalls among people who simply don't know how to read. They are those roobs who fall for the magic trick and then want to buy it for use at home. "Disappear your wife" in five simple steps. 

But I guess the Jesus story endures because it does provide, somehow, that limit. That end beyond which there must and can only be God. A cosmic joke for sure, but also a true endpoint to what we can and should and will ever read and true against what can only be very personal and limited experience.

Science provides a trueing along the way, of readings we must share. I mean this ever so simply, as to describe those things, like knowing that the ground underneath our feet will support us, on which we must agree. By abstractions to the max in our mathematical descriptions, and reductions to the very most economical structures, we seem able to arrive at many many understandings (English is so punny - but not, I assure you, as much as is Chinese) which have that wondrous quality to be universal.

These understandings describe the same reality in any cultural setting, and presumably across the cosmos, though we may not be quite ever finally confident in our ability to translate these to technological controls. There's so much confusion between these two pursuits, especially now that we have become so overcome by our own technological prowess, that we have almost forgotten the science. Scientifically now, our wonder at ourselves will ecologically if not by geometric release of nuclear fissions or fusions (same thing monkey boy) only destroy us.

There can be no question now that the scientific enterprise not only did not but could not have developed in some other culture from that of the Christian European West. Post modernists can and do go fuck themselves, but this trivial observation (that science is culturally grounded) takes nothing from the universality of scientific conclusions, properly made. (It's the "properly made" part which makes those post modernists right almost all the time, but their language is just so damned annoying, and itself always a parody of what they rail against).

So faith starts there, with feet on ground, and finally gets rendered up to what it is we confront in contact with another human being. How much can or do we know that person? Or a book. Or perhaps an entire ideology (what a word, that one!). God?  I think not! (therefore I am)

It's never so trivial to trust that to which we're attracted in another soul. They might turn out robotic, like that sociopath next door. Or we might discover that we're turned off by their feet when we do finally get in bed together, and then the thrall is done for. There's divorce and much worse utter foolishness to pay for these mistakings.

But hanging back from ultimates, many many friends if not lovers do prove true. I guess because the expectation is so much less. The navigations and negotiations so intermittent; the in and out from other's lives so much less quickened. And friendship is capped by that fine taboo at end of day that you never ever will or would get in bed with one another.  Sure, in a pinch, you might for survival, or even intimately resuscitate, mouth to mouth. But if there were a quickening there in bed, I think the friendship must end, don't you? Or blossom. 

But it is that impossibility in principle which defines friendship at its limits, and enables a kind of constancy. Don't worry chum, I'll never stop at your home for more than a few weeks at a time, along the road to somewhere else. But we'll share better times than you will ever have with your wife - that much is certain. And our souls will come much closer and merge more fully simply because there is that boundary to define, contain, and shape our perfect pairing. Nothing lost, but geometric expansions and progressions gained in that most true conspiring. There need never be any subordination at all. There is perfect parity, and no struggle between and among, say justice and relating, the male and female roles, however sexed.

But the ultimate faith, of love, of marriage, in God, just for a few examples. That one is a leap so long that only fools attempt it. The rest of us find ourselves pinnacled and without place to go but down down down, and still along the way there has never been worse terror than to lose oneself that way. It would be so utterly foolish. So like the man who would dive right through the ground. Buckaroo Bonzai!!!! And away. . . . 

I must and do confess that I am terrorized by the act of sex. Not quite in the sense you think. I am not nerdy sexless, nor timid in the act, and would some safely aloof former partner quite allow it, there are no limits to what I wouldn't like to try (hohohaha!). None. But it's the implications terrify me. They are so much forever. Not just disease, but possibility for hurt and misunderstanding, and fallings out, no matter what the interval. That moment is sheer terror. That aloof moment where you realize that yes, it was only physical. Or chemical. Or instinctual, and in any case not forever or even a day. Or far worse, that the deal you'd meant for a moment won't ever stop. Ever. The deal does not get any simpler, young friends, as you grow older.

***

In that interval right there, gentle reader, in service to writing's worst enemy (necessity for taking a dump) and on the toilet reading the New York Times while I still can (yes, it was on my phone, OK?? So, put me in jail already! Throw away the key, I both read on the toilet, and don't pay any attention to internet ads. At all!) before its also necessary demise, I am saddened almost beyond reason to learn of the death by suicide of Sylvia Plath's son sweet Nick sweet son. I know nothing of either of them, yet enough to understand the dimensions of this tragedy. And I must apologize to you that I have been diverted from this writing in and by the act of writing species of love letters toward human contact of the sort which terrifies me more, apparently, than to be alone forever and anon. You just aren't there, you see. I have not yet, and despair I ever will, that kind of faith. That there is a reader.

But I still do make this pledge: That my writing and living and direction will never tend in that particular direction. I will never make that secret pact to end on some high note because I fear my ability to endure the lower lows. It is to life and love and light alone that I direct myself. Alone. All one.

***

Now where was I? That faith which is so hard to conjure. I do actually believe, you know? That in extremis, when finally I must leave my job because there is no more room for me there. Up against that wall where, let me now enumerate, love is not possible across the taboo of workplace, though that's the least of it. Where faith is superstructured by the only living remnant of medieval monarchy to outlast enlightenment (though I actually have no problem with that, it's just that this particular institution's perversions remind me much too much of the Sadean version). I cannot live in public any longer what I mock so hard in private. 

And I will surely never trust myself in love again, after once tripping over my own feet on the way toward what became a lifetime of indentured servitude, and another time in pursuit of what never was in the first place attainable. These twinned poles represent for me all that is possible in the falling out from sense and good friendship's underpinnings. I retreat now and again for long intervals into some sort of mild cocooning, and I'm not even sure that it's time yet to molt again and again and again. 

But I do trust - have faith even - that it's the right time now to refuse any more work or love in which I am not quite myself. Extravagant though that is, and I'm not after "authenticity." I want only to be just one me, cliched and ordinary dull though my character might prove to be.  I must strap myself to whatever mast I have (it's rotting) or can find, to resist temptations for comfort and repose and six figure rescue from the necessity to disburse a lifetime's debris of bicycles, boats, books and papers papers papers, though these I can and do and have uploaded to that proprietary cloud whose stewardship I perversely trust so much more than tangibles in my possession. 

I refuse, I do, any further servitude in maintenance of my slack body and it's sprawling messy dishevelled extensions. (The real estate lady demurred a bit when she came for a visit, that perhaps we can start showing "next week" after I manage to dispose of a few more things which make it difficult to navigate the space. Not so bad, please, as those left behind houses of demented souls having pathways through piles of newsprint and garbage to some inside nest you can't conceive.) Just the look of a house vacant all weekends because in the end, my remaining at-home daughter just cannot endure teenage occupancy alone with Dad in the wilderness. That is not a sentiment I care to contest. At all. And so I write only weekends, apartmented in the city. Wondering where and when and how I'll find either the time or energy to wash the windows and overall brighten up my latest silly womb with but dim view. My house in the country I now must leave, in preservation of what time I've left to write my way out of this ethereal paper bag.

So, that's the faith I have. That at this post-half-century turning point, I have become proof against ever taking another day job act. Against ever again so energetically pursuing love that I shave my beard and trim my hair and my rhetoric too and wear other more presentable clothes, or God help me, endure the indignity of a younger babe so easily mistaken for my daughter. These things make me just cringe anymore. I cannot but be myself. It's less the finding of my authentic self, than the drooling paunch of no more choices, but I'll take it.

Sure, it does help that my hormones no longer rage. Not quite so old as "brother" Cohen, I still have no real regrets for leaving that garden I never did quite enter and therefore won't have to leave. It was only ever thorny for me. (Well, OK, so invite me in and we'll just test my resolve)

It helps also that my mind is aged by cigarettes and wine and never enough time nor energy to read the things I really should. Not near so much capacity in dissipation as say, that self-same Leonard Cohen, but I feel the same dimming he talks of but does not show. The structures for mind's youthful blooming recede, and I haven't the energy, even in principle, to elaborate just what I mean when I talk about particle physics or Chinese poetry or other pursuits on whose trail I once was hot.

I doubt I will ever have that energy again, though I guess it's not impossible. I mean, if someone were to pay me for it, I surely would re-systematize my knowledge. But the university is not open to my paltry accomplishments. I don't own those degrees of freedom, and even if I did I'm just not so sure that there wouldn't be still more constraint there than on my own; with political pathways up, and narrative trueings so much more constrictive and less open to surprise than even the most extreme cases of anti-global-warming-conspiracy-of-dunces-theorizing.

I must remain unbounded. Promethean in my reach if surely not my grasp. But I am so lost with torch burning down and noplace yet to alight my spark.

You see, these folks are quite right in at least one reductive sense. (I had dinner finally just the other day for the first time after almost seven years with my good friend and ultra conservative Catholic neighbor, and had to endure, though it cost me absolutely nothing in good humor, his fulminating rhetoric about the global warming hoax) Approaches to scientists will automatically fall flat and dead at that point where you wish to implicate them in their research.

I do believe that there is one most false branch to science; cosmology. It is there alone that science cannot go, but demands to still. It is there alone that science will and does and has, would it but wake up to that fact, find that it is measuring only the mind of the observer.

Oh, I hate these personifications, as though "science" were some "them." Science does not "say" anything, and scientists, surely at the limit of cosmology, are so unlikely to have read the stuff they really need to comprehend before they peer off into the readings out from instrumentation at least 17 miles in diameter (was it circumference???) and declare any findings.

I do know from hard experience, that it is equally difficult to talk to - just for example now - a disbeliever in global warming, about science, as it is to talk to a scientist about the end(s) of science. They are simply not prepared for that particular surprise, so invested must they be in towering edifices of accumulated understandings and trued arcane verbiage and degrees of distinction from everything and everyone here below in the muck of direct experience.

So I was and remain chastened now, this Easter morning, by last night's meeting with my former student. I'd tried to teach him Chinese once so long ago (though I was and am a fraud, I did have and could teach, at least, perfect pronunciation, and build a good foundation, demonstrably, for more native ministrations), and then as headmaster, by the skin of both our teeths, to get him some degree. 

He surprised me to tell that he never did earn any single degree. Not high school. Not college, though he often teaches theater there. And I am chastened, not just because I feel so lucky proud to have pulled what degrees I own back from the temptations, always, to chuck it all (it took three rough passages through Yale before they let me out. Sanctioned my outing, is more like it). I am chastened because he has become so fully my teacher now. And because my failure was not his.

I came to him for help to stage my "Womb with a View" (working title, please) monologue. And he, upon only the very briefest hearing, shot back authors and plays and readings so erudite that I had to beg him please to email the names, since I had no hope of recall. 

I held his door last night - the house was absolutely packed with only one last seat for me. I only snoozed a moment this second time to witness his terrific play. I think I snoozed because I felt the beginnings of some relaxation to my quest. There will be those who know so much more than I do, can help to true what words I have. There will be help along the way. 

And so I think it time for me to de-cocoon once more. I don't know about spreading any wings of Icarus or surfactin-stimulated butterfly, as was the manner for my little peanut daughter to survive her own way-too-early escape from her mother's womb; butterfly wings and kisses. It must be the same substance. For my daughter, at two pounds she was very lucky that her mother's doctor missed the textbook case, and left her and mom both traumatized in the womb so that when she finally was hacked out (it was that bad - I was there), her lungs would not stick together which is what is the worst for preemies.

Lucky for me, I should properly say, since she would be her no matter what had happened, but now she provides me such bright pride and joy and even company. She listens to my words and claims they make sense to her, which is way more than a father ever could deserve, since the obligation is so much the reverse. And she never did try me that way. Always so easy to understand. Such a joy.  So perfectly articulate.

So, it must be this same substance on butterflies' wings, which must get discharged in some precise quickening before the molt. Why cocoons must never be warmed. Why term is at all costs to be allowed before the labor is begun. Why sometimes, with luck, too early de-cocoonings, like even that one for me from boat so long ago, can still be survived provided further artificial incubation. 

For me, all artifice has ended (Well, lash me to some mast, we'll see). Perversely, I will endeavor to refuse all offers of comfort - at least those even where I only have to torque my soul a tiny bit (metaphorical, since I don't have faith now in the literal one) to represent someone else's brand. Not Church. Not government. Not China which does not know herself at all. Not startup internet business even, unless it wants me as I am. I'll whore for anyone, provided the deal is honest. Now there's the rub.

It is only you, gentle reader, that I can or will but also surely must have faith in. It is you must be resurrected here. Your context for some reading. Your willingness to make that effort (I do know that it is extreme, and beyond all reason what I ask) to read. To listen. To watch. To make some sense. Not of me and what I write (don't be a fool!), but of what is now so out there. You really have to be perverse, and bound to rigid stupid absolutist words - I guess simply because you're so afraid that you might be fooled? - not to read it. Right off the web, the wall, the street, the news. Just learn to read is all.

And you, gentle friends or daughters, who must trust that Howie or Dad has not now finally lost his mind for good and ever, and isn't marching off perversely into some chip-on-shoulder spiting of himself. That I will never refuse love when offered, nor to offer it to my full capacity, which might not be very much. But I'll try. I do try. I am very limited is all.

Let's hope it's true what says AARP, that there is life after 50. I sure do hope so. My younger daughter is my very best companion. And yet I want her so much to be free that I hang back criminally from enough guidance. I offer no discipline. She does far too much what she pleases.

But I do, I guess perversely, still have faith that it's the love that counts. Love expressed in seasons turning, a conspiracy of life entire, which guarantees that the moment for the peepers is just the right moment for decocooning. That there is more than just her father to mediate her growth. And that what she needs most from me is more gentle than those stern and fearsome words I got, which still did no good against my own transgressions and fallings short. Though I won't blame them for that. Nor their deliverers. The times were different, is all.

If Dad has lost his mind, he might yet be in good company. There are readings all around (I'll get them shortly by email) which move in the same direction. I guess there might be enough surfactin now that I can fly myself, alone, flittingly, for just a moment before the season turns again. 

I do believe, you see, that there is so much more to life than what can be accomplished alone. That mankind's flight is made of words, though words alone, whether those of science and its instrumental extensions, or the true distilled and very litterary great essence of our greatest minds, cannot describe the flight. For that there must be face to face and much more quickened turnings.

And as my young former student (and now my mentor) did so charmingly wonder, why is it that actual presentations must be lower on some scale than literary readings?  He had become somehow aware that in our past - and I think this is true - those who could read were regarded with suspicion. Those who could read silently to themselves were thought possessed. Out of commerce with where life actually quickened, and where profundity could be found first hand. Only priests were sanctioned to read, leaving witches, demons, perverts and other outlaws as the only other possibilties. More dangerous than revered for what they might know. 

And now this equation is so fully reversed. To where televised presentations cannot, and likely do not, even potentially possess anything near the power of the written word. But why not? Why not YouTube? Why not theater again? Why must it be contained in and by words, this truth we would approach, though never, because it would blind us and melt our wings, quite touch?

Well, because the metaphor is wrong is all. Truth is not a thing can be approached. There is no Omega endpoint to this questing. That's misplaced words. There is no absoluting truth. There is only trueing, and for that we need each other, alive and stimulating and responding and being and here. And there.  Which is neither here nor there, silly reader.

Do I leave you now, alone. Having fallen this far short? Were you expecting some great final revelation through these words? (If I did not doubt it, then I would not dare to write it, surely!) Well, if so, here it is. That punchline I never can remember, or even reconstruct. That final turn of phrase which captures, just right, that moment of apprehension you used to go to Church for. That apotheosis of the Word. Made flesh. Was God.

Well, here, then, it is. Here it is. You'll have to read it all again. And again and again and again and anon. 

There's really nothing more to say, though I will keep trying, poor gentle reader. For life. For love. For my daughters. I will make you pay me, too, since what choice do I have? What choice do you have?

Well, Happy Easter, and I do pray for your resurrection. I really do. Turn off that one-way television. Turn the projector on yourself, and YouTube it to infinite regress. But then please do go outside. It's a beautifuly day to be alive!

Happy Easter, you nonexistent fool you. Happy Easter!