Trued Love

Trued love is, of course, the sort which lasts. As with a join along a pair of boards, it requires lots of work and practice, and a good eye to make the fit right. Although you can do it repeatedly and near perfectly by machine, the work is very much more satisfying if you can learn to bring the pieces together by hand.

Planing off the bumps and rough spots, and then applying the finest layer of glue. When the match is right, the boards stay put forever. It's not only about the joint, but about matching the grains so the boards won't strain too much as they shrink and swell.

On my Kindle, grace of a gift card, I just started reading some David Foster Wallace essays again; the first called "Big Red Son". It's about the porn industry, and like all his writing resides at that spot between painful and funny; right about where you might find yourself while suffering a laugh attack during a serious lecture. Maybe that never happens to you?

Foster Wallace himself slipped along the razor's edge between earnest and ironic, not having, perhaps, quite the right tight-rope walker's genes to keep his balance. I think there has been no greater tragedy in our history. He had the gift to true our words, and there are few enough quite like him.

The porn-industry essay is not shy. It is not quite graphic either, skating along that edge to describe how insiders everywhere must define themselves. They are earnest toward their craft, these real people on the inside. They hone and perfect their tools (sorry) as relentlessly as any others. Maybe more so, since the competition is that fierce and the stakes that high. Think of Tiger Woods practicing his swing. You and I could never do it. The world will not suffer our falling short either. Our absence from the stage of prodigy is, well, quite fitting and quite proper.

If you believe our journalist, the porn industry is significantly larger than its more "mainstream" Hollywood pinafored sister. And its operators look, says Foster Wallace, precisely the way you would expect them to look; as if they were selected by central casting and prepped by the makeup department.

There is a clear divide there in the entertainment industry, between those who would perform lewd and pornographic acts, and those who do only earnest work for your wholesome entertainment. Often enough for your enlightenment.

On the inside of every craft, there is the requirement to perfect ones role; to inhabit and to refine it. The porn stars do what everyone does, they just do it in ways we must avert our eyes from in public; and they do it in ways to make a garment of their skin instead of to make naked scream from beneath their clothes the way more orthodox starlets do.

There is makeup and the airbrushing in every case. The adjustments to the core. The funniest parts of Foster Wallace's journalistic investigations are his descriptions of the abashed and nervous fans, getting autographs from barely clothed women about whose bodies they know more than most people know about themselves. I know I like my self better clothed while glancing in my mirror.

These starlets - either kind - represent a kind of aspiration for the ones we would really love. They indulge on screen those things which might turn our light switch to the on position in fact, if some actual woman (we're almost always men, right? No?) were to let herself be degraded that way. If someone could wear in real life that look of raw desire. If only your body could be such a perfect caricature of my desire.

Not, mind you, that we wouldn't prefer the ones up on the less vulgar silver screen. But you don't quite get off on them, now do you? Surveys show that every single man on the planet looks at porn now and then. No pollster has ever asked me any questions, but you know, they must be right.

So, what about the one right in front of you then? There's that kind of yeah yeah worn out familiarity, no matter how good the fit is, or maybe because of how good it is. The moves are practiced, the turn ons and turn offs almost entirely predictable, and then there are the petty resentments and complaints about what is always resisted, or what is that mismatched to the fantasy in your mind.

There's a message from true-believing Christians for all of us would-be or wannabe lovers everywhere. I mean, if you're not crazy, you have to know that the Christ we worship is an airbrushed version. No, actually, the Christ we worship is more like a Dreamworks Pixar studio creation. Avatar would be more realistic.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder about how many heros were born around the time of the winter solstice. Of how many of virgin moms. You suppose, maybe, that there was a Man who lived around the time of that crossroads of our awakening as conscious human beings. Who really was nailed to a cross for his worldly indiscretions. And whatever that image has represented across these two or so millennia, a kind of feeling has been maintained. You might even call the love, well, trued. It certainly does endure.

Back in that day, heros walked the earth in droves. They set down in canonical ranks the trivial words of our very first writing. The Name which can be spoken is not the Eternal Name. The Way which can be followed is not the Way. There is no God but Allah. And the Truth shall set you free.

And we still never do quite get beyond Homeric stories, or the ones the Greeks put up on stage; all philosophy sometimes seeming but footnotes still to our Plato, Aristotle and maybe Kung fu tzu. Foster Wallace wrote about that too, come to think of it. In his Brief History of Infinity.

There is, of course, no Truth but only truing, and so the simple words as first set down remain as good as any. There are only so many ways to rearrange them. Buried beneath the recent explosive proliferation of words words and more words, is still that nugget of whatever it was first turned you on. To life as lived by humans. The nothing at the center of all peelings away which reveals only that you were already there the whole time. But had to expend a whole lot of energy along the journey to make it conscious.

The thing about the little lies - the aspirational half truths - is that you might start to believe them yourself with practice. When caught in the right light at the right moment, your lover's face truly does channel something wonderful. And you should say so. Beauty also is something aspirational which collapses when faced head on. But for the body which will take whatever momentum on offer and ram on home to conclusion. Sorry. Sorry.

You'll think I read too much of that unsavory Marquis deSade, who pointed out definitively that there is no limit to what gross aspects of reality we will overlook on the way to the conclusion our body has demanded. I mean if you're as strange as he was. He lurks among us still, I'm afraid, as often literary as not.

Japanese soldiers in Nanjing must have been so rank-ordered in worshipful subservience to their earthly god, the Emperor, that once confused and on their own they had no moral compass at all. They regarded Chinese girls as animal objects for their desire. And slaughtered them as wantonly.

This happens still each day and all around us. Slavery is still very real. Though as with Grand Theft Auto, we should not confuse the gaming with the real. Especially when marketed by one of our most powerful corporate entities. The Church?

I don't know. I worry about the moral compass of those who have accepted a projected fiction in the place of what can only be known in the heart. I know at least one true believing Creationist who is in jail now for having rationalized the rape of his own daughter. I know another woman who had to spend her entire life in and out of mental institutions to finally prevail above her father. She is a twin, whose sister wore the white dress.

For sure, the one in jail was deluded by a fictional god. He accepted the exhortations to believe from men, and became a preacher for a while himself. There is no rational discussion possible with such men, who know only what they know. And have closed themselves off, therefore, to the Jesus who is real. They only know what they've been told, and are liberated therefore from being human. It is my aspiration to be human.

But there are as many Christians who have done and are doing exactly what you do if you still love your wife. You have trued by hand all those things about each other which are less than perfect. You accept that beauty was a fleeting thing, meant for foolish youth to get the process started. No older man would ever whistle on his way to war.

You marvel that that thing which you found through the Word has always been there, always will be. And that you'll never quite pin it down. Certainly not in words. Is this the day then, when Christ was born? According to which calendar, then; according to what mapping?

If you live your life as hero, you might become one? Hard though it remains to see him in the mirror. Those firemen on 9/11 had no idea when they went out that morning. The moments happen each and every day, and sometimes you find yourself in harms way and sometimes you do the right thing even though it may get you killed. Sometimes you don't. Life is a game of many chances, and, well, it's never a bad idea to keep on trying to get it right.

Now I have a few more hours until my sweetheart arrives. What shall I do? Read more about porn, I guess. It passes the time.

Dying to Live, all Over Again

Sorry, dear reader, I've been blocked up for a few days here. I have lots of posts in the can, but they just aren't working for me. So I thought I'd take a little excursion in the direction of dying for life. I've written lots before about how, when I nearly drowned, my life was before me in the instant of checkout. This time, it was a little different.

This time, in the ambulance, I felt no static perfect recall. No panic. No screaming for breath. I felt more watchful. The symptom was "can't catch his breath" but that's not what I felt. I felt calm, and they had some kind of oxygen monitor which showed good, and I was breathing oxygen, which should have suffused me with a sense of wellbeing, more like what I felt when I sat on someone's stoop during my walk. But I felt old and nearly gone.

I wasn't hyperventilating, and I wasn't blacking out. I wasn't really nauseous. But I felt as though I was receding and that it might be terminal, and I wondered out loud why the ambulance was moving so slowly and how it could possibly take this long to get to the hospital right around the corner.

I think I just felt like a very very old man who was on his way out for good. As though my body was receding from me. Although I do remember getting up to pee from the bed in the ER and I must have walked and I could stand, but then I also remember watching old guys stride past in ways I could hardly aspire to. Literally.

One of the things I started to write about yesterday was Steven Hawkings' statement that human evolution should be considered to include our literary, scientific and, in general, our civilized production. But then he related it all back to what we would be able to do, consciously, to improve our genome.

I'd thought for a minute that a guy like him, with blasted body and brilliant mind, would be awakened to the fact that evolution will never move in the direction of "improvement". Improvement in this case is presumed to be conscious intervention in the human genome. Which will improve our body's survivability. Which, without enlightenment, will only ensure that we have improved to the point of living in an environment created by our own effluent which is to say that we will be all that remains. If there were anyone around to read it, the epitaph would read "success as locusts upon the earth".

Every excremental process is self-limiting without some ecology of competing species to reprocess the waste, and we've removed ourselves now almost completely from that. Our autoimmune pathology still fails to give our conscious minds a clue. But a plastic world of eternal excrement is a dead word already. When there is nothing but consciousness, no matter the physical substrate, then the life will already have departed.

So, while I agree with Hawkings that Humanity continues to evolve, and that consciousness represents that truly human aspect of our being, he still doesn't get that consciousness is not "inside" any one of us - no matter how brilliant - but rather is epiphenomenal; riding, as it were, on our physical genome. I have to disagree that there can or should or will be any feedback loop into the genome itself. Except to cure individual disease when our evangelical truth-betrayers get out the way of scientific good will. They should all get a life already.

If there is - and plenty of sociopaths will attempt it - "improvement" to our breeding stock, it will finish us as a species, both literally and eternally, and that will be the end of that. Completion is never part of evolution. Being done is not the same as being alive and in process of evolution in some alive context.

These sociopaths will have been disgusted or betrayed by their personal physical manifestation, and will wish nothing like it on their progeny. And then we will seal our fate at the moment of our triumph. As my new T-shirt will say - the one to replace the "Unionize Walmart!" T-shirt in imitation of the Walmart logo-font which I have yet the courage nor money to produce - "Any One Success Can Finish You Off!!"

The missing link in our conscious evolution - or rather in the evolution of our consciousness - is to awaken to the existence of emotion in the actual cosmos around us. We consider this to be at some ultimate remove from our physical existence, like some sort of froth we can blow off the scupper before inhaling the brew. Something in the way of enlightenment, in just the way that a woman's beauty is in the way of her wanting us back.

But without construing each of the couplings in the muck out of which we grew to be some sort of emotional - very much as opposed to random - we truly are that dead and numb and cold already. We are in that place where I was heading, calmly, on the way to yet another second life all over again. From the hospital, reborn. Where once before, when having my appendix out perhaps, they found me in their computer which had been backfilled to my arriving there on day one.

These emotional connections are as real as are the ones which lead to genome's elaboration in the physical sense. We can catalog those connections in reverse and watch how the ecological niches swarmed along, ever retrofitting their organismic denizens, according to this or that cosmic stimulus and response. But, looking forward, there's no telling which way the winds of fate might blow. There's only feeling, a gut instinct as it were, and some kind of flying by the seat of our pants.

The enlightenment I seek - and you should too - is not the kind which would lead me or us to understand which inventions and interventions can save us from ourselves. The enlightenment I seek is the kind which would include rather than exclude all humanity in a participatory conspiracy of all mankind. Just like when we let women in to the enterprise, and more recently (or was it less recently?) blacks and as though by magic the collective brainpower applied to our collective survival expanded exponentially.

Just as how the Chinese discovered that by removing controls, their economy showed its inner life almost overnight. We should let in the poor and the wretched and the culturally weird. The same exponential math applies, and is not necessarily any threat to those of us who sit at the pinnacle looking down to instruct the unwashed masses how they too can get here if they only follow our example. As though luck were not the major factor in our personal rising. Luck defined simply as the refusal to acknowledge the love. Narcissism writ very very large.

There was such a powerful glimmer at the founding of our Republic - in the collective eye, as it were - of the right of every man (sic) to be considered human. And now we allow our corporate entities to turn us back to slaves. Gaming our learning curves, they make unconscionable profits from our calculated desires to maximize our minutes, press the limits of our cash reserves and credit lines, stay this side of dead and guess the moment before the prices drop so that we may have tomorrow's high tech today.

Our republican insight dims, and the Huns once again rampage the earth. This time, Oh China! it is not clear that civilization will prevail as it has so many times before. But for so long as there is love and life there is hope, Pandora, there is hope.

OK, so where does that leave the evolutionary process? Miscegenation for sure. New memes from unthinkable places will infect our cultural production. The wine which so offends my liver, will elaborate itself in ways which challenge my certainty that its subtleties are reserved for those who can't see that the emperor is naked. And Steven Hawkings, alas, will be wrong again. His blasted body needs no repair. It hosts his glorious mind.

And corporations will keep their dirty mits off my genes and my gene pool, which will evolve all of its own, by random couplings in the dirt. Otherwise, the Huns will continue their march of rape and pillage and twisting bayonets in the stomachs of young girls when they are finished with them. As the Japanese did in Nanjing not so long ago. And we credit only the industrial killers in Nazi Germany. Eugenicists then as now.

My God, why so gloomy? Humanity will prevail, as will life, and the basest instincts for personal salvation will recede, as ever, beneath the wave of love which is true to God, the one who cannot be named or sexed or aspired to, forever removed, amen.

This then, is my New Year's Resolution, somewhat late. I call it a new improved resolution, more pixels maybe, toward that clarity which removes intention from all directions for improvement. Which prioritizes love and life and therefore which allows death as part of the natural cycle and doesn't celebrate perpetual me so much. Perpetual me drones on and gets boring really fast.

The End

I just re-read my "In the Beginning" screed, and realize that I've become a broken record. Not a huge surprise, that. But still, there are only so many ways you can say the same thing, and I don't seem to be getting any closer to what I'd hoped I might be able to do here.

I'm not even sure I remember what it was anymore. Except a glimmer, an in-love kind of sense that if I would just write and write and write, then I might find myself back where I was one night living on my sailboat. Having actually discovered, in writing, something to give me direction and sense and hope.

I still have all the hope I ever did. That someone more literate than me, for instance, will be able to pick up my thread and make more sense than I can.

But I woke up last night to the cruel surprise I'd been, so unwittingly, waiting for. That it never has been me whose story has been writing itself across my life. That my boat was never a cocoon from which I ever could emerge a butterfly. That metaphors like that can only leave you fallen from flight into artificial light which burns because it's way too close to be real.

I myself am the cocoon, the husk, the lifeless word-woven tent within which an abstract idea has taken shape. And I don't even think the word "idea" has any sense, so now what am I to do? It's no idea at all, it's just another bundle of words, just like a formula in physics, but without the math.

And without the math, there's no way in heaven or hell to get to where every thinking person must agree. Not that I'm asking for any leaps of faith here. I'm not even asking that you look within yourself to see if you can feel what I have felt as a way to true this bunch of words. What I am trying to say is much closer to science; just a few words to change the gestalt shape of what it is our progressive sciences have uncovered these last brief centuries.

So, if you were to read me right along, you'd see it too. No tricks. Not like stupid Scientology screeds which are only massive P.T. Barnum tractatuses. No Biblical tales whose true believers now do more harm to any possibility of faith than good was ever done before. No Mormon protectionist scheme.

But I can't quite make it readable. Or at least not here.

The hardest things to learn are those which first require unlearning. Somewhere somehow, even if only by omission, we were all taught the divisions of nationality, race, and religion. And so, in setting out to discover those marvels, we've made us all the same now. And protesters against the wall are blown up or blow themselves up for being so stupid as not to want to be like us. We Americans were taught that these are our shores. We Christians were taught that ours is the only trued God. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

And in the end, folks like me, scientifically minded, become cemented in the one sure thing, that the only reliable certainty is doubt. That there is and always will be suffering in the world, as there always has been among us beasts.

But we humans may at least aspire to more, and science is our compass.

What are we to do then, except to continue the endless struggle to uncover whatever secrets are left in the world around us? Hoping against hope that someday really soon we will have found that powerful key, to unleash something as powerful as nuclear energy, but without the fallout. That somehow, along with it will come enough raw surplus that we can make every human life OK again, and never need to leave anyone on the outside of our fences. You know, unless that's where they want to stay.

We hope that we will find something that powerful, that much stronger than the locomotives which still seemed to help us out despite all the corruption along their way to getting built. Something also to put a stopper on the need for bombs at all. So that it will overwhelm the greedy among us, perhaps by just making it look silly to still be wanting more when you can so easily have whatever you want beyond your wildest dreams.

As if it doesn't look pretty silly already.

I think it's way past time. A world so tamed that all the beasts only occupy some plastic menagerie with labels is no world at all. Like Noah's arc and no receding ever of the flood. Wasn't there a movie about that recently? Even Christian types liked it, I have on high authority. Wall-e.

There must be some way we can all agree.

But I will call my journey ended. This one. Who knows now what's in store for the "real me". What odd jobs I can take or which will take me.

Because there's really only one kind of memory which endures. That's the kind which comes from unlearning, either crazy notions that you were schooled in, or the crazy ones you came up with on your own. And once you do, you can't go back, no matter how much you'd like to.

No matter how much you'd like to believe in Santa Claus again. No matter how much you'd like it if there really were a personal God. No matter how comfortable you've always felt in the certainty of your doubt.

Once you grow beyond those things, there's no going back. Ever. And I'd thought, silly me, that there could or would be some way through writing, to get at least one other soul to see what I can see.

Chasing, chasing after some perfect encapsulation of that trued set of words. And looking back I see that I can't do any better. It still must look like an hallucination to you.

So there you go!

And off I go. The fire I've kept going for many weeks now won't catch this morning. But I think it will be warm outside. So, what the hell, eh? No sense staring at a screen all day.

But I have to leave you with a wink. Because who knows, I might be back. I never seem to be quite as good as my word.

Bird Flew Redux (all over again)

I know that you know that this H1N1 is the real deal. It's a highly contagious virus, which can so easily pass from one infected person to anyone he comes into contact with. Sure, maybe Don Rumsfeld and some others stand to profit by the scare, and by distributing ever more vaccine, but there have always been war profiteers, and we always seem to need them too.

And somewhere in the background, like me, you're wondering when the Big One is going to hit us, now that we're all so crowded on the planet, and now that viruses can jump from livestock to people, and we raise our livestock in very tightened little pens. So we have to dope them up with drugs, which creates a kind of breeding ground for the drug resistant sort of bugs. Too much anti-bacterial stuff, and you just destroy the competition for the viruses, pretty much like the Japanese do by sterilizing everything too darned much.

My own sister, who's medically trained, but still somehow thinks she's not as smart as me, has been trying to understand what I've been working on, and figured out that emotional reality also travels kind of virally, to where people who care about one another, especially if and when they care enough to keep each other honest, can spread around just like those cellular automata which model birds in flight so well.

They look as if they flow, or as if they were all of one mind, when really all they do is stay in touch with the one right next to them, and maybe someone new takes point when that poor bird poops out or loses his sense of direction.

It's not a bad way to understand how emotions can work among us. But I still seem to want more.

Just like right now, I'm waiting for some viral marketing to kick in to this cool new website we've created at pikk.com. We're hoping that some people will like it well enough to tell their friends, who will tell their friends, and so on down the line.

But there are so many such sites out there, and so many of them are so well funded, that it feels pretty unlikely that anyone will find ours any more interesting than the others.

Unless, of course, lots of people were to start using it, in which case it would get really interesting really fast.

But you do have to be careful what you wish for. I mean it's nice living alone out in the middle of the country where the only thing you have to worry about is a bear or a hunter every once in a while.

And you who have read me right along understand that I don't much appreciate the crazies who have to make of Jesus something any more real than that he's managed over these couple of millennia to stay in hearts and minds. Which ought to be enough by itself, without all the ridiculous claims of life everlasting or getting sucked up into heaven.

But it seems to me Gary Snyder once remarked that whatever it takes to engender faith is fair enough, so long as faith results. Like secret pores to make statues cry, is the one I think he used. Or makeup for a Saturday Night Date, if that's the one you really want to like you. Just so long as you don't confuse the props with the real deal, which all those impassioned words were trying to convince you of. No really, it's true, I was there. It happened.

We do that all the time with our stories, because without a little embellishment, how are we going to get people actually to believe us.

I do surely and sorely object to the proselytizers who pretend to speak for God, borrowing words of uncertain authorship purveyed by one of the biggest institutions around. And as you know, I think really big is a really big temptation to evil.

Emotions, anyhow, can ride the strangest vectors. They don't really need much more than pen and paper, although they do just fine over the wire, and through the ether. Sometimes all it takes is knowing that your sweetheart is at the other end of the earth looking at the very same moon, perhaps even at the very same time.

I'll bet at least one or two of you have known the magic of discovery that there really was or is or has been a connection which no amount of testing can or could or will ever tease out from the traceable connections. No wires, no line of sight, and still there is some connection.

Maybe you attribute that sort of thing to Jesus. Fair enough. But I think it's time to grow up now, and accept that we are co-creators. I think that gets attributed to Gary Snyder too, come to think of it.

The connections we make can be full of love or hate, spite or profiteering. We can be looking for love or we can be looking for sex, or we can be so jaded that we don't even believe in a difference. It's awfully hard to trust another human being. And even the best among us betray the ones we love the very most each and every day.

But what if, I mean really, what if there were some reason to believe that emotional connections across no measurable divide are actually as real as the clouds and rain (I love that, it's my secret little joke for sex, borrowed from the Chinese who use it as a euphemism).

I'm not talking about a mechanism, since physic's got that stuff all wrapped up. The kinds of connections I'm talking about break the physical laws of simultaneity, since for you and your sweetheart to be feeling something at the very same time, the connection would have to travel faster than the speed of light which is just plain physically impossible.

Oh sure, it would be hard to tell, since light can get from here to California lickety split. Quick enough so that even when your voice bounces off some satellite to get there you can't sense any delay.

But what about when you're nowhere near anything that can carry your private signal? Well maybe, and I'd say this is easily enough proven, the two of you have started to inhabit something of the same emotional space, and just like birds flying toward the same sun, if that sun were to move you'd all move at the very same time to stay with it.

Which is about, come to think of it, what they intend to do over at the CERN collider. Not moving the sun, there aren't levers long enough for that Archimedes, but come close enough to creating mass out of nothingness that it will be very much as if the sun had moved.

I know it's a really hard thing to buy, but lots of people buy miracles from baby Jesus which are a lot harder to buy, if you catch my drift. I'm not trying to be cute here, they really really do.




Miracles like that never happen to me, or maybe they do each and every day, and I'm just too obtuse to credit them. Yeah, I'll buy that. It sounds suspiciously what the very best of the Jesus people say, which I'll have to grant you (what's free, what costs? Sometimes it's hard to tell).

But I no longer believe in random. It's an old Taoist trick I learned long ago. That random's just another word for beyond the reach of mind. And to label it meaningless makes the very same mistake as labelling God, well, God.

The missing link in evolutionary theory, or so it seems to me, is the same one missing from the toolbox of the experimental physicist. If you call these random connections emotional connections instead of meaningless spins of some dice, a whole lot of stuff becomes rather instantly clear.

I'm not saying you can win the lottery by this kind of understanding. That would clearly be just plain nuts. But I am saying that the collective set of accidents which have brought us to this place across the eons of evolutionary time, can be labelled connections of love without losing one single solitary iota of physical or other meaning.

It's just a label. It doesn't change how far they are and will remain from our conscious understanding mind. These accidents of fate.

Just down the road from me, some poor and surely sweet kids were driving a little bit too fast without their seatbelts. A bear had spooked some horses penned around the corner. The horses ran up the road and right across the path of the speeding car, and three people were killed.

There's no meaning to that. It's just plain sad, tragic, and awful. And I have to say I'm glad I wasn't around when it happened, because I don't know what I would or could have done, except to call 911. I might have been too scared even to approach the scene. I hope not, but I am glad enough not to know. We do know there are quite a few heroes in our midst, though, from some other things that have gone wrong recently.

There's no meaning either to falling in love, especially if you keep doing it over and over and over.

But there is meaning to what we conspire to do together, and it's up to us now to turn all those random connections leading up to this very moment into connections of love or hate.

I have to say, at this particular moment, the way we've overpopulated our home sweet Earth by keeping back the creepy crawlies and the bears and the snakes, it's not looking too good for the love connection. And I also have to say that all the people waiting around for Jesus to arrive aren't making things any better. Especially when they watch too much Fox TV.

We've borrowed the extravagant gift of oil. We've managed to keep back the germs which would plague us if they could. Mostly, we've done that with sanitation and more robust diets, even though we're still awfully happy for the work of charitable scientists like Jonas Salk in years gone by.

Now we've made a business of getting people to believe there need be no more tragedy. That technology will save us from ourselves. And we lure away our brightest minds to the business of making money, as if that alone could cure the Earth of the illness of humankind.

Good living lowers birthrates. It cures disease. It allows the rich people to lower their walls, and cameras to come down from streetlamps. But we just can't seem to figure out how to get there from here.

Well, folks, it's not so hard as you might think. Just give a damn, and do it out loud. The mass of us are decent, have good consciences, and would never do anything horrible in the name of any god unless and until we were backed right up to some wall.

And oh yeah, another thing. Stop thinking science can tell you when and how life begins. You can't stop the twinkle in my eye. You can't murder twice what you've already killed by your neglect.

But I still can't put my finger on that final word which might convince you. I guess you'll just have to feel it for yourself. That when you occupy the same emotional space with someone else, it's just like winning the lottery only better. Because the more you give away the more you get.

OK, OK, I'm just one big fat cliche. I'm not sure if that's better than being a non-sequitur, which someone I love once meant as a compliment. I thinks it's some kind of literary in-joke. Whatever!

Connections emotionally felt are still real, and cross infinite distances in an instant. Trust me, it's been proven by physicists with quantum pairs. They just don't have the right vocabulary yet. They're still searching for some answer which is beyond the realm of objective truing. They still want to see what can only happen in some mind.

We've gotten as far as we're gonna get in that particular direction, and there's so much work we have to do right here at home, which would be trivial if we all were working in some approximation of the same direction.

Tweet tweet.

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.

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!

Is Context Really Everything? (for perversion it is)

Actually, I think it is! Now, the other day's post got all Googled up somehow, with too much html tagging that I don't want to wade through. It's what wrong with computing. That somehow when we make it all too brain dead simple, it goes all wonky underneath.

I'd thought I understood my brother-in-law's sin. That it was the incest. The transgression of forbidden boundaries. Pure and simple. 

But I spent some time with an old and much more literate than me friend. It was one of these conversations when you wish you might somehow take notes. I remembered being there before, in his space of erudition and revelation, and despaired even in the moment that I would be able to recapture it on my own. 

I never can, or maybe it's just the beer we drink together, and that wherever that particular perversion sends me I can't make it back alone? Who knows.

But this old friend maintains that when he, as a child, gave priests blowjobs (or did he let them give it to him?  See, I never can quite remember) it was because he wanted to, and they were known as sure and risk free marks. And he finds nothing wrong at all with his "idyllic" childhood, nor, and I guess he's looked quite hard, any possibilty for actual perversion in life as it could be lived. 

I don't think he's denying crime. He might be denying sin. It's easy for us both to agree that my brother in law belongs in jail, but not exactly why.  Deterrent? No, I don't think so. Punishment? It's not sufficient. To get him out of commerce is what I'd likely think, but I'll have to revisit that one later, in more fullness of time (as if!).

Anyhow, back in my own thoughts now, and a little bit less dizzy, I do find one corrective which fits. It's not the boundary crossing, exactly, quite so much as it is the context which sharpens the transgression, and makes the boundary clear. I confess that I have an impossible time imagining any circumstance where the father/daughter boundary would be OK to cross, but are there other cultures where it might be? Dunno!

In this case, what her testimony revealed was that it was his way of self-righteousness which needed correcting. That without that, the transgression could have been resisted, she felt, because, I guess, it would have been so self-evidently wrong. It would seem he convinced himself too, that what he did was covered, somehow perversely by its absence, in the Bible.

And I hardly can avoid the irony - he is a Creationist - that this also is the error still among evolutioninsts. My friend - it won't shock you that he harbors mild racist tendancies - himself in all his way better read than me brilliance, still, I think, doesn't get how evolution works. 

It's not the boundary between the gifted and mutated for better survival individual and the rest of his crowd which counts. This gift for better survival has to get assimilated back by reproductive sex into that selfsame group. And it's the group's better survivability which over longish time which defines new species, as environmental boundaries get sharpened to some new niche. Which finally leaves out by genetic misfit, wayward one-time members who want to screw back in.

Now that's a mystery worth scientifically working on, and I'm certain there are fascinating books to read (I'll get right on it!). Not my field or niche for sure, but I'm confident enough that I've got the outline right. Better survivability has got to be screwed back in or its just irrelevant. And by very definition - that the offspring are not only better adapted for survival as adults, but also for survival through the grueling reproductive process (which is where the real winnowing gets done) - this survivability becomes exclusive.

Perverse sex is just non-productive sex, but there's no sin to it. Hell, it might be the opposite, as creative practice play must be part of life. It's surely part of growing up! Who even knows what might prove productive (or does fucking monkeys always and only suggest AIDS)?

So, it is appalling when some smooth talking sociopath gets away with stuff. Like that salesman in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, who somehow can't resist the dolled up wailing jilted lover he meets coming last one off the plane. She awake that promised lover was leading her on. He sincere in comforting her in such extremis (how could he not?), but also sincerely moved by her dolling up so sexy for the lying scoundrel lover. One thing leads to another, and the only thing, really, you can blame him for is telling about it. Or is that what exhonerates him?

Jesus!

I don't know. This here transgression now, writing about family and friends. Does that make my own identity forever dicey? Some fictions must be kept?

Or is it more, as my friend and interlocutor did urge, that the real sin is the keeping within ourselves the truth. The hiding. The pretending to more than what we are. It feels dicey, for sure. It is appalling.

And so, the mob, in evolutionary terms, need not cruelly reject any interlopers. Nature does it for them. So, who imitates what when we reject those who don't fit in? My favorite sophomoric question still. A school for gifted kind of thrill, where my friend and I both did teach (he still nurses anger for what I did when elevated, like by his instigation, to become his boss. I disagreed! But it was my role to take those hits, and did so.)

But certainly we must reserve jail for those who harm us, and never those who merely offend. I care not a whit for deterrence or penal theory. I just think away and gone is good, and for enough time to think about it and to come to terms. I favor country club prisons myself, and I'll bet they're cheaper in the long run, just simply because coming to terms would be that much more likely, but I'll save that breath for another time.

In this time here, I simply want to say that it's the bombast which makes him guilty (me too?). It's the proclaiming as knowledge what you can't know. As truth what you've never trued. As God what you could never, as judging by your actions, could ever have experienced. And if you did, then stop protesting so much too much already, and get on with doing something about it.

My daughter helped start a chapter at her college, of Students for a Free Tibet.  She actually used it as an excuse for why she doesn't write me! But she let me in to witness part of one gathering, where the members and interested people were way outnumbered by motivated elite Chinese overseas students, who were there to protest and to correct distortions to their government's fine record.

I was and am appalled. These students should at least know that they aren't allowed to know better. Somehow, even after time in this country, I guess, but then the language barrier is huge, I know, they've managed to keep intact the internal censorship their government imposes (yes, I still harbor much resentment for those who help Chinese Googling that way).

I take cold comfort that this will prove an evolutionary dead end for their country. This much I know; that you can't constrict free creativity without destroying survivability.

Oh hell, I know those naive American students are still more stifled by their own mediated understandings of China, as concocted by now near dead MSM for their own, the students', patriotic indigestion. I know there are distortions to and fro, and that religion also manages to make it into the equation for some likely conspiratorial conversion process. 

After all, the Dalai Lama is on the side of true religionists everywhere. And the Chinese on the side of rational science and progress. But how can patriotic fervor so trump independent thought. I know, I know, we do it here at home all the time. Still!!

So, this much is clear (and then I have to get dressed, take a shower, and compose my thoughts for announcing today to all the quarterly gathered executive directors whom I endeavor to serve, that I'll be moving on, perversely in these economic Hard Times.): That we will destroy our national survivability to the extent that we allow capitalist excess to distort the news and feed us pablum digestible shit.  That to the extent that we allow the ascension of religionists to positions of any secular power, we'll sin against mankind. That to the extent the Chinese manage to continue to quiet all dissent, they'll hand back to us all advantage.

This much is clear.

But also that horse breeding, and people breeding for that matter, have very little to nothing at all to do with evolution. That this bizarre supposition that there is or ever could be any racial priority on some evolutionary scale is not only harmful but perverse as well. That any thought that intellectual giftedness must be nurtured for its survival value is itself a Nazi offshoot (though I'm thinking seriously of a valiant attempt to resurrect my old school - it would make a good last ditch - in service, always and only, to those poor kids themselves, and I might just shill the shameless tout about their otherwise lost utility just to get the funding. But I might not. I still think basic research should have it's own claim to funding dollars, and literary and queer studies too for that matter, so there!)

Motivated research, just like guided evolution, is always and only a road to nowhere. Barbaro legs. Beauty is always and only ever a surprise. Truth too. 

There need be no laws against cloning, I declare. It's just too God Damned boring to worry about. I hope and trust.

I am so fucking sick and tired of bombast. My own too! There has to be grace to be found somewhere. I pray.