I see that there are many exremely articulate pleas coming from motivated Obama supporters. Pleas to keep it calm this time, and not to offend the culturally innocent; not to hand the election once again to those who would play with democracy on the way to winning an election. And I am struggling with my own paranoia.
This time for me differs from the last time in at least the simple sense that I am older and won't be able to muster any energy another time around with this nonsense. With Reagan, I was young enough to be cautious with my certainties, though by rights I should have been young enough to be certain. But I did still believe in a kind of true love, my wonderful daughters were yet ahead of me, and I since have aborted as many careers as children; enough to justify my uncertainty at least. I might have been wrong, and I might have proven it by success in various fields of human endeavor.
But they've gone too far. I am not looking forward to comfortable retirement, and I think I have a lot of company. I expend considerable angst about getting it right at work, and yet I also face the emotional limitations of workmates who just might prefer the dysfunction as it is. The rewards are all skewed, and getting it right at work is as likely to get you fired as is doing very little work at all. Sometimes doing very little work at all is the safest thing, since at least you won't be risking any kind of line crossing. Lots of the time, what is wanted is a kind of inner compliance toward that thing which goes by the corporate shorthand of culture.
So, I have been quietly hoping for improvements to the sanity-direction of our collective actions, even rooting for technological breakthroughs of the sort to solve the food and energy crises which constantly bedevil my middle American equanimity at what could very well be a very nice life. What a wonderful daydream is "clean nuclear" or "green revolution". As if our problems were not a matter more for proper distribution and conservative behaviors than technical fixes. As if it weren't already obvious that more of these inputs would (and have!) simply energize the very grotesqueness of the distortions between those within and those without the castle walls.
There is little question that open markets do provide the best means for "wealth creation", and that an inevitable consequence of such improvements overall is that some will need to be cared for because they will be left behind in the generalized competition. There is probably also little question that the effort to care, preemptively, for those who might need it can only leave them failed at the outset.
Our social contract is meant to provide for basic education, which should mean basic preparation to compete using a variety of skillsets, the most basic of which ought to be gumption and grim endurance. The social contract ought to be extended at least to allow for enough basic healthcare that accidents of fate and genetics don't leave people literally in the cold. There ought to be a minimal community table at which we can be nourished, and to which we may always return clothed and warm.
It must be when, in the midst of plenty, we are literally goaded to ignore as inevitable the abject misery of so many among us, in the face of unspeakable wantonness among the beautiful and wealthy, that we should take notice that everything about our collective human living has spun disastrously out of balance.
Up until the beginning of the last century collective humanity could feel certain of its enlightenment thrust beyond simple ignorance. We were tracking and travelling the entire globe, and by cataloging our anthropological distinctions, were rubbing dull - or some were -the sharp ignorant insistences of superiority by those in happenstance possession of power.
At an absurdly early moment, when the harnessing of earth's great fossil treasure would make possible ever more rapid transgressions across land and water, and finally even into the air and out of it to lunacy; at this same moment when dynamite would leave its legacy in reward of great thought as amends for greater destruction -- at that absurdly early moment it was already clear in the reformulations of a young Albert Einstein that clarity in our human understanding would be a receding over-the-horizon goal on an increasingly dangerous grail quest.
From that moment has descended destruction on an unthinkable scale, along with the communications technologies which might yet mitigate such destructive impulses. Oil alone, without the transistor, would surely never have enabled our collective gasp of so much outbreathed carbon condensate to risk a fatal unbalancing of the very living earth which for a while yet will elude our hubristic efforts to control.
While still not yet having come to terms with Einstein's humble genius, it may be necessary to complete the fatal equation. When light was seen not to propogate as waves through some supposed ether, but rather as massive particles whose velocity was by definition terminal, and when their energy could be released only by an act of perception, which implies not only at least another particle on which to exercise its only ever relative energy, but also a kind of measure-taking, it should already have been apparent that apart from the meauring mind, there could be no meaningful existence to the thing being measured.
We exist as in a pause. It is the very pause between perceived flash, stomach-felt concussion, and final collapse of a modern building undergoing planned demolition. If this weren't a common enough sight, the entire world has internalized an approximation of the sequence from watching the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, 1 and 2. The structure appears coherent after puffing almost imperceptably out. It is the very near-perfect timing of the dissolution of each internal linkage which allows all the parts to pause in suspension before, now only seeming intact, falling to the ground in a manner to take the very air down with it, leaving the dust for afterward.
The trade towers were demolished so perfectly by luck, from the top, and followed a sequence down so that their illusion of integrity had to be expanded back in time to the very improbability of their ever having been built in the first place. At the time, metaphors of hubris abounded.
But still we wait for the supercollider to finish its work before declaring that there may be no free rides on this spaceship earth. Kurtzweil be damned, there may be no hubristic response allowable to our failure to heed what has already been made so abundantly manifest; that it is the observer who must be transformed before the object of her observation will yield any further revelation.
We continue to act, in other words, as though the cosmos were deterministic and determined, and as though our only human role - consciousness being our myterious bestowed distinction - were progressively to reveal its workings. This despite the apparent finality of our implication, by simple physics, in the workings of the things observed. By the very dimensionality of space having been itself revealed to be an extension of those particles, whose very particulate nature resists definition except, perhaps, by that dimensionality which presupposes measured mass and not more fleeting energy. We continue to act, quite simply, as though we weren't responsible for creation, preferring to project that responsibility onto some invisible hand, responsive to laws, in classical validation of what we already know to be patently absurd.
The "hand" of Fate is as the end of the cosmos, curving back on itself in some other nonperceived and nonperceptible dimension. These are abstractions. Yet what is real is our hands, and our mind, and our collective decision making and will. There has never been, and can never be, any cosmos apart from mind. Mind too, quite apparently, has a reductive existence, more minor than that of the still yet-to-be-detected Hadron. Mind without emotion, breaking the definition for mind -- like human without conscience -- is simply some absurd simulacrum, or at best an abstraction which can never be found in actual existence.
And emotion is simply the caring that a connection exist. This fifth force, perhaps weaker than gravity, or perhaps stronger than that strongest intra-nuclear force, is the only one without theoretical particles in mediation. Absolutely nothing is transferred. And yet, apart from this conceptual connection - in mind alone - nothing of the perceptual cosmos, in measured exchange of particulate mass, would or could be other than static, suspended, and block-like meaningless because it might be coming together or flying apart.
Who could tell?
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Chapter 5 from 1983
I used Jackie to release me from my prison. There soon came to be no other communication than the physical. Long periods of melancholic silence having only one answer. She gave herself purely to a sexuality she believed in despite the fact that she never once achieved orgasm.
I really did love her. That wasn't false, but the cruelty was that so much was still in the way. It was impossible for me to grow and change and at the same time cling to an ideal that I only understood out of faith. We were too young, and I offer only that if I ever ask for forgiveness. Of course that is what the school knew, my parents knew, and all authority by which I felt limited. Even blind fate knew that we were too young. Depression was the cost of breaking the rules. Not parents' rules, or society's rules, but the common law of all who grow up healthy because they are like everyone else. That rule I was determined to break because, as I saw it, there was evil afoot in the normal life.
Who knows when it started. I'd grown up on Lake Erie, and watched the clear seedbed of fantasy that I knew turn into a stinking cesspool. I knew the reasons. I couldn't always decide whether greed or the rationale given by the greedy made more sense to explain it, but I'd read enough to know without a shadow of a doubt that it was evil. I believed with the conviction of one who understood simple statistics and computation and logic that when you added it all up there wasn't much time left to disaster. That made all the other escapes unreal. I would still defend myself in that. Life as usual in a decaying world is the most dangerous fantasy.
I grew up with the implicit assumption that war was a masculine right of passage. The war of my father's generation filled my senses. It was everywhere in mythology. It was a just war. The soldiers of the good side were good. The mythology bolstered the childish assumption that authority is right and made my collapse more thorough when I found that the war which had been arranged for my generation was being fought in Vietnam.
I grew up in a house where the playroom that most attracted our fantasies was a fallout shelter. I remember very clearly the piles of cinder blocks passed along a board to the basement. I remember the pride I had in my father's ability to construct such a fortress. I remember understanding not at all the seriousness of the project; that, though water and food stores and blankets and other necessities were all laid aside, the reality of their purpose was never made known. It was a fun place -- and fun to imagine being trapped there. But the collapse was greater when I found out later the impossible escape it was pretending. Nuclear war was an abstraction. Fallout couldn't penetrate the earth so we would be safe. Coffins to assure that putrefaction begins well before burial.
Something must have snapped very early which made me too serious and too private in an obsession with meaning. Everywhere, it was a simple matter to point out to myself the one serious omission made by all the normal voices in all the normal tracks. Yes, I wanted to know, but why do you all act as though what doesn't matter matters, and what does doesn't. Why should I prepare to take a place in a society that is corrupt to its very soul. Finally, why is happiness important in a world so full of misery -- actual and potential.
Who can untangle the threads? It must have started almost from the beginning. I prefer to think that it started simply with the very real love I'd gotten at home. I prefer to think it started when my mother, against the advice of doctors and the ridicule of friends, fed me from her breast, thus soldering a link that others can't recover. I prefer to think that there has been something real in the rejections and false starts of my life, which look so much like mistakes on the surface. When lost without certain guidance, I have tried to opt for the way most true to my feelings. Meaningless though such choices may seem, I prefer to think that they harken back along a well-connected path to something I once did know with certainty.
I remember very clearly one summer evening in a sleeping bag in the back yard which overhung the lake. The stars were out in myriad brilliance. A friend was beside me, and we were moved to thoughts as children have of the distance to the stars. My calm and pleasure at being under the stars that night began to turn toward agony as I measured infinity and found always a brick wall there at the end. I don't know how old I was, but there I have proof of some motion in me that was untutored and unstoppable. No one had prepared me. The trap lay waiting in the language.
Some are never moved in their own thoughts to the boundaries of sense. They leave that to the experts. Some may find themselves there and not be bothered. I'm sure the puzzle I found in my mind is some sort of cliche. But some can't forget the agony. They hubristically try for a solution on the power of their own thoughts. If they seek help they are considered cute. And who had the answer to that conundrum? For whatever reason, I was left only with my own devices and with a puzzle that wouldn't disappear.
I remember when I was very young, perhaps six or seven, an exultant feeling of being elect. I remember the circumstances exactly, though I can't recall the reason. I was on the schoolbus, and I looked around at all the other children. Things had a crystal clarity that I have seldom recaptured. I knew that there was something in me that was lacking in them. Perhaps it was the day after the night under the stars. That strikes the most consonant key. It's hateful now to think that I was that way, but perhaps that feeling, too, lay buried in the language -- available to those who needed it; who could be snared by it.
I remember, much later when my own language had grown, a similar exultancy that remains equally elusive to the kind of memory that could bring it back. That time, I was on the streets of New York, walking. I knew with the same exultant certainty that I had known my own specialness, that there about me on the crowded streets walked infinite infinities. I was filled with a sense of wonder at my own smallness, and the hubris of anyone who could claim a measure of more than was in each private universe.
I remember sitting at my school desk in the sixth grade and feeling a tiny prick in my rear end, such as might have been caused by a splinter in my pants, or some random excitement at a nerve end. But I remember being certain that it was the injection of some mysterious hypodermic syringe, and equally certain that I couldn't reveal my notice -- even to myself. Because I was tortured by the possibility that I had been chosen by some other-wordly force either for my liberation or my enslavement. In the first case, the hypodermic would confirm my distinction from those around me -- I must have belonged to the race of aliens and I needed the booster to survive here. In the second, I was being drugged so as to keep me from something. In either case, it was part of necessity that I not reveal my awareness because, in the first I knew from my previous ignorance that I hadn't been supposed to know -- I feared losing my role -- and in the second, if I was to escape, I needed the liberty that continued pretense of ignorance would give.
It never occurred to me that the pinprick alone was the source of awareness; that I was being injected with a drug that had waked me. It never occurred to me because I would have had to be told. It was not an insanity, nor even the beginnings of insanity. I was living in a world of mysteries, and I was confident they would be unfolded. I kept my mouth shut until the reality of the thing was made apparent, and then I would wonder that everyone could have thought such a thing. People hold stranger fantasies as reality, and what interests me is my preoccupation with having been chosen.
I don't think it came directly from any unhealthy input. My parents may have held the proverbial hopes that I would grow up to be president -- important in some way. But Santa Claus came to everyone's house, and God knew all my thoughts. I reasoned, if that were so, that when I prayed to God he would appreciate my jokes. I joked with Him even without decorum because, so I reasoned, he could not be affronted. If he knew all my thoughts, then there was no use evading what was central in me by making a pious pretense that contradicted who I actually was. I had no feeling that I could hang-up on God when the prayer was over, and so prayer was a means of discovery for me. I wanted to prove to myself what I really meant when I called him a bastard. I knew He would know.
I think I may have been theologically correct. That ignores the other possibility that prayer plays an active part in forming one's life. But, I did pray fervently. Whatever prayer was doing for other people who mouthed more pious words in their heads, I wasn't always fooling myself when I made a comparison favorable to myself. I was good in all the essentials. It's hard to remember what good and bad were in childhood, but I loved my parents, did what I was told when it made sense and when I wasn't overcome by curiosity; I took my naps and so forth.
But, what was good? I got my share of spankings and caused my share of grief. I don't think I felt the pain I caused untrue. I deserved the spankings. Yet when I made my prayers, I truly wanted to be good and felt that perhaps, insofar as I could control it, I was good. Sin is so arcane that I could easily have convinced myself that I was damned for all the petty breaches. But I knew that I was good.
And I knew that I was chosen. That, if I was good then my life could not but hold meaning and that, since I was not equipped to fathom that meaning, all I need do was be good --and wait. I began the quest to uncover the meaning of my life, thus, at a very early age. I wasn't really waiting; I was looking for clues.
I think that I was aware that meaning might be held out until after death, and of this I was terrified. That part of Christianity never became real. The language into which I was born provided convenient stepping stones for the eradication of demons. Each step led further into consciousness from where the possibility of eternal life made no sense. Heaven and hell were only real for my body. They bore no fruit in my mind except as abstract reward and punishment. I wanted desperately to go to heaven, but not to look down upon meaning -- merely as proof that I was good. I couldn't believe that consciousness was possible after death; and meaning was a matter for consciousness.
There were gremlins, I recall quite clearly, which inhabited the door of the family car so that when you turned the crank, the window went up and down. They were hidden by the mystic veil of the panel. I peopled the space with actual gremlins, and tried to imagine how they made the window work. Have we all forgotten these things? Or is this just evidence that I am helpless in my need to know? I hadn't the equipment to imagine gears and levers, but the essential thing was that something had to be there.
Whatever pulls on the imagination pulled on mine in that way. Mine weren't frivolous gremlins invented only for delight. Something had to be there between my hand and the window, and without the gremlins I could make no connection. I imagined people in the box of the TV who went through all the utterly impossible antics of cartoons. Their smallness and infinite malleability confounded me, but there had to be something.
Is it all these things which combined, and having no more real answers to the bulk of humanity, leave most of the world asleep? Do we all learn so early because the natural questions literally cannot be answered, to put off asking them and to finally forget that they were ever a question at all? I have since eradicated the ghosts and the gremlins, but with great effort. Others may watch a television or drive a car or fly in a plane with the incurious mind of one who knows only that someone else knows; and takes it for granted that there are no gremlins. It seems to me now not a deficient mode, but I cannot.
I don't know the cause -- where it started. But I find myself here in this position, and I have left only responsibility that what I am entails. Voids itch in me forever; until they are filled. It is simply the way I am. I shouldn't have to ask forgiveness for this quality, though it has caused endless pain. And God grant me grace not to boast, though I have done that often enough.
No! I am here and I have eradicated all the gremlins except God -- to my satisfaction. I began the life of violent atheism soon after meeting Jackie. That was a violent denial which, as do all denials, affirmed more than it denied. Then I slipped into despair and agnosticism. Finally, I found in the East something new to fill the void, but it still itched.
I hope now to fill the void by writing this. Actually, I mean that quite literally. It will not stop itching until it is either filled or until I can leave it empty in the manner of the vacuum which satisfactorily names the void between for some physicists. Like a normal itch, scratching makes it worse, and in my case leads onward to the hope of a cure. It won't go away. And I have been led to write this. There is no answer here. But neither is the writing just for me that I may have my own answer in the engagement --though it is partly that. It is, like all writing, like all proofs, mathematical or otherwise, like all argument -- it is a trail left after some prior impulse started the travel.
I have always found that my arguments don't occur to me until they have been voiced. For that reason I am always engaged in argument, and always excited -- to the dismay of my interlocutor as often as not, for whom other things are important. But they start on a clear impulse, my arguments, and I am convinced of them before I have even made them clear -- in words -- to myself. I have been accused -- and have even assented on occasion -- of being a devil's advocate, but I am not. I can never act the side I don't believe in, and so I have been silent of late. That is why I am writing this. I have had a clear impulse that it is right, and pray that I can show it to be so.
If there is truth, it will strike hollowly on those for whom the void has never existed. But there are many more who have only tried to forget desperately something that is now so long past that it can easily be forgotten. I cannot forget. I don't mean that everyone must know the workings of a TV, or a car, or a computer; or a tree, or a frog or a human. It cannot be wrong even to rest on the faith that someone else knows, because it is a practical faith. But the other faith -- the one that knows that there is meaning to existence. That cannot be given over to others. If you have faith in God, then ACT like it! or by God, I'll call your bluff. If you don't, then listen. And if you think it doesn't matter, then watch as the drain is pulled out, and you are sucked away with the waste. Not God. God doesn't matter -- but meaning does.
"Getting a little carried away there, aren't we? You begin to sound nasty; and preachy."
Yeah, well. I don't know if there's really going to be anything here. I just have to go on. Each step of the way there are barriers that channel my path, and it has come to this. I feel at once constrained and boundlessly free. That is a feeling I would like to impart. And this is the price of my freedom.
"How about a few more constraints on the style?"
I'm trying.
I really did love her. That wasn't false, but the cruelty was that so much was still in the way. It was impossible for me to grow and change and at the same time cling to an ideal that I only understood out of faith. We were too young, and I offer only that if I ever ask for forgiveness. Of course that is what the school knew, my parents knew, and all authority by which I felt limited. Even blind fate knew that we were too young. Depression was the cost of breaking the rules. Not parents' rules, or society's rules, but the common law of all who grow up healthy because they are like everyone else. That rule I was determined to break because, as I saw it, there was evil afoot in the normal life.
Who knows when it started. I'd grown up on Lake Erie, and watched the clear seedbed of fantasy that I knew turn into a stinking cesspool. I knew the reasons. I couldn't always decide whether greed or the rationale given by the greedy made more sense to explain it, but I'd read enough to know without a shadow of a doubt that it was evil. I believed with the conviction of one who understood simple statistics and computation and logic that when you added it all up there wasn't much time left to disaster. That made all the other escapes unreal. I would still defend myself in that. Life as usual in a decaying world is the most dangerous fantasy.
I grew up with the implicit assumption that war was a masculine right of passage. The war of my father's generation filled my senses. It was everywhere in mythology. It was a just war. The soldiers of the good side were good. The mythology bolstered the childish assumption that authority is right and made my collapse more thorough when I found that the war which had been arranged for my generation was being fought in Vietnam.
I grew up in a house where the playroom that most attracted our fantasies was a fallout shelter. I remember very clearly the piles of cinder blocks passed along a board to the basement. I remember the pride I had in my father's ability to construct such a fortress. I remember understanding not at all the seriousness of the project; that, though water and food stores and blankets and other necessities were all laid aside, the reality of their purpose was never made known. It was a fun place -- and fun to imagine being trapped there. But the collapse was greater when I found out later the impossible escape it was pretending. Nuclear war was an abstraction. Fallout couldn't penetrate the earth so we would be safe. Coffins to assure that putrefaction begins well before burial.
Something must have snapped very early which made me too serious and too private in an obsession with meaning. Everywhere, it was a simple matter to point out to myself the one serious omission made by all the normal voices in all the normal tracks. Yes, I wanted to know, but why do you all act as though what doesn't matter matters, and what does doesn't. Why should I prepare to take a place in a society that is corrupt to its very soul. Finally, why is happiness important in a world so full of misery -- actual and potential.
Who can untangle the threads? It must have started almost from the beginning. I prefer to think that it started simply with the very real love I'd gotten at home. I prefer to think it started when my mother, against the advice of doctors and the ridicule of friends, fed me from her breast, thus soldering a link that others can't recover. I prefer to think that there has been something real in the rejections and false starts of my life, which look so much like mistakes on the surface. When lost without certain guidance, I have tried to opt for the way most true to my feelings. Meaningless though such choices may seem, I prefer to think that they harken back along a well-connected path to something I once did know with certainty.
I remember very clearly one summer evening in a sleeping bag in the back yard which overhung the lake. The stars were out in myriad brilliance. A friend was beside me, and we were moved to thoughts as children have of the distance to the stars. My calm and pleasure at being under the stars that night began to turn toward agony as I measured infinity and found always a brick wall there at the end. I don't know how old I was, but there I have proof of some motion in me that was untutored and unstoppable. No one had prepared me. The trap lay waiting in the language.
Some are never moved in their own thoughts to the boundaries of sense. They leave that to the experts. Some may find themselves there and not be bothered. I'm sure the puzzle I found in my mind is some sort of cliche. But some can't forget the agony. They hubristically try for a solution on the power of their own thoughts. If they seek help they are considered cute. And who had the answer to that conundrum? For whatever reason, I was left only with my own devices and with a puzzle that wouldn't disappear.
I remember when I was very young, perhaps six or seven, an exultant feeling of being elect. I remember the circumstances exactly, though I can't recall the reason. I was on the schoolbus, and I looked around at all the other children. Things had a crystal clarity that I have seldom recaptured. I knew that there was something in me that was lacking in them. Perhaps it was the day after the night under the stars. That strikes the most consonant key. It's hateful now to think that I was that way, but perhaps that feeling, too, lay buried in the language -- available to those who needed it; who could be snared by it.
I remember, much later when my own language had grown, a similar exultancy that remains equally elusive to the kind of memory that could bring it back. That time, I was on the streets of New York, walking. I knew with the same exultant certainty that I had known my own specialness, that there about me on the crowded streets walked infinite infinities. I was filled with a sense of wonder at my own smallness, and the hubris of anyone who could claim a measure of more than was in each private universe.
I remember sitting at my school desk in the sixth grade and feeling a tiny prick in my rear end, such as might have been caused by a splinter in my pants, or some random excitement at a nerve end. But I remember being certain that it was the injection of some mysterious hypodermic syringe, and equally certain that I couldn't reveal my notice -- even to myself. Because I was tortured by the possibility that I had been chosen by some other-wordly force either for my liberation or my enslavement. In the first case, the hypodermic would confirm my distinction from those around me -- I must have belonged to the race of aliens and I needed the booster to survive here. In the second, I was being drugged so as to keep me from something. In either case, it was part of necessity that I not reveal my awareness because, in the first I knew from my previous ignorance that I hadn't been supposed to know -- I feared losing my role -- and in the second, if I was to escape, I needed the liberty that continued pretense of ignorance would give.
It never occurred to me that the pinprick alone was the source of awareness; that I was being injected with a drug that had waked me. It never occurred to me because I would have had to be told. It was not an insanity, nor even the beginnings of insanity. I was living in a world of mysteries, and I was confident they would be unfolded. I kept my mouth shut until the reality of the thing was made apparent, and then I would wonder that everyone could have thought such a thing. People hold stranger fantasies as reality, and what interests me is my preoccupation with having been chosen.
I don't think it came directly from any unhealthy input. My parents may have held the proverbial hopes that I would grow up to be president -- important in some way. But Santa Claus came to everyone's house, and God knew all my thoughts. I reasoned, if that were so, that when I prayed to God he would appreciate my jokes. I joked with Him even without decorum because, so I reasoned, he could not be affronted. If he knew all my thoughts, then there was no use evading what was central in me by making a pious pretense that contradicted who I actually was. I had no feeling that I could hang-up on God when the prayer was over, and so prayer was a means of discovery for me. I wanted to prove to myself what I really meant when I called him a bastard. I knew He would know.
I think I may have been theologically correct. That ignores the other possibility that prayer plays an active part in forming one's life. But, I did pray fervently. Whatever prayer was doing for other people who mouthed more pious words in their heads, I wasn't always fooling myself when I made a comparison favorable to myself. I was good in all the essentials. It's hard to remember what good and bad were in childhood, but I loved my parents, did what I was told when it made sense and when I wasn't overcome by curiosity; I took my naps and so forth.
But, what was good? I got my share of spankings and caused my share of grief. I don't think I felt the pain I caused untrue. I deserved the spankings. Yet when I made my prayers, I truly wanted to be good and felt that perhaps, insofar as I could control it, I was good. Sin is so arcane that I could easily have convinced myself that I was damned for all the petty breaches. But I knew that I was good.
And I knew that I was chosen. That, if I was good then my life could not but hold meaning and that, since I was not equipped to fathom that meaning, all I need do was be good --and wait. I began the quest to uncover the meaning of my life, thus, at a very early age. I wasn't really waiting; I was looking for clues.
I think that I was aware that meaning might be held out until after death, and of this I was terrified. That part of Christianity never became real. The language into which I was born provided convenient stepping stones for the eradication of demons. Each step led further into consciousness from where the possibility of eternal life made no sense. Heaven and hell were only real for my body. They bore no fruit in my mind except as abstract reward and punishment. I wanted desperately to go to heaven, but not to look down upon meaning -- merely as proof that I was good. I couldn't believe that consciousness was possible after death; and meaning was a matter for consciousness.
There were gremlins, I recall quite clearly, which inhabited the door of the family car so that when you turned the crank, the window went up and down. They were hidden by the mystic veil of the panel. I peopled the space with actual gremlins, and tried to imagine how they made the window work. Have we all forgotten these things? Or is this just evidence that I am helpless in my need to know? I hadn't the equipment to imagine gears and levers, but the essential thing was that something had to be there.
Whatever pulls on the imagination pulled on mine in that way. Mine weren't frivolous gremlins invented only for delight. Something had to be there between my hand and the window, and without the gremlins I could make no connection. I imagined people in the box of the TV who went through all the utterly impossible antics of cartoons. Their smallness and infinite malleability confounded me, but there had to be something.
Is it all these things which combined, and having no more real answers to the bulk of humanity, leave most of the world asleep? Do we all learn so early because the natural questions literally cannot be answered, to put off asking them and to finally forget that they were ever a question at all? I have since eradicated the ghosts and the gremlins, but with great effort. Others may watch a television or drive a car or fly in a plane with the incurious mind of one who knows only that someone else knows; and takes it for granted that there are no gremlins. It seems to me now not a deficient mode, but I cannot.
I don't know the cause -- where it started. But I find myself here in this position, and I have left only responsibility that what I am entails. Voids itch in me forever; until they are filled. It is simply the way I am. I shouldn't have to ask forgiveness for this quality, though it has caused endless pain. And God grant me grace not to boast, though I have done that often enough.
No! I am here and I have eradicated all the gremlins except God -- to my satisfaction. I began the life of violent atheism soon after meeting Jackie. That was a violent denial which, as do all denials, affirmed more than it denied. Then I slipped into despair and agnosticism. Finally, I found in the East something new to fill the void, but it still itched.
I hope now to fill the void by writing this. Actually, I mean that quite literally. It will not stop itching until it is either filled or until I can leave it empty in the manner of the vacuum which satisfactorily names the void between for some physicists. Like a normal itch, scratching makes it worse, and in my case leads onward to the hope of a cure. It won't go away. And I have been led to write this. There is no answer here. But neither is the writing just for me that I may have my own answer in the engagement --though it is partly that. It is, like all writing, like all proofs, mathematical or otherwise, like all argument -- it is a trail left after some prior impulse started the travel.
I have always found that my arguments don't occur to me until they have been voiced. For that reason I am always engaged in argument, and always excited -- to the dismay of my interlocutor as often as not, for whom other things are important. But they start on a clear impulse, my arguments, and I am convinced of them before I have even made them clear -- in words -- to myself. I have been accused -- and have even assented on occasion -- of being a devil's advocate, but I am not. I can never act the side I don't believe in, and so I have been silent of late. That is why I am writing this. I have had a clear impulse that it is right, and pray that I can show it to be so.
If there is truth, it will strike hollowly on those for whom the void has never existed. But there are many more who have only tried to forget desperately something that is now so long past that it can easily be forgotten. I cannot forget. I don't mean that everyone must know the workings of a TV, or a car, or a computer; or a tree, or a frog or a human. It cannot be wrong even to rest on the faith that someone else knows, because it is a practical faith. But the other faith -- the one that knows that there is meaning to existence. That cannot be given over to others. If you have faith in God, then ACT like it! or by God, I'll call your bluff. If you don't, then listen. And if you think it doesn't matter, then watch as the drain is pulled out, and you are sucked away with the waste. Not God. God doesn't matter -- but meaning does.
"Getting a little carried away there, aren't we? You begin to sound nasty; and preachy."
Yeah, well. I don't know if there's really going to be anything here. I just have to go on. Each step of the way there are barriers that channel my path, and it has come to this. I feel at once constrained and boundlessly free. That is a feeling I would like to impart. And this is the price of my freedom.
"How about a few more constraints on the style?"
I'm trying.
Oh my, this is somewhat difficult - Being Sarah Palin
It is 25 years since I was transfixed in horror watching Ronald Reagan actually swamp the country by his re-election bid. (I had campaigned for Barry Commoner the first time- remember him? No wonder I've become so defeatist!) I'd thought at the time that the world would soon end. I'd written up my diatribe, and just about given up on finding anyone to read it. I didn't think the writing was that great, but I couldn't think of any other way to get the point, so to speak, across.
Now, as I prepare to watch what will have to be the greatest spectacle of the century - this "debate" between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden - I have somehow been driven to re-read some of what I've posted here over these last months.
It's pretty excruciating. Plenty embarrassing. But maybe I'm learning to accept life as a nudist, and just move along with the flow. Visiting Spain not too long ago, it wasn't that strange to walk along the nudist beach (although I do still regret that those incredibly nubile topless babes I squinted to descry were bending over actually to lift my glasses while I floated nearsighted away on the Mediterranean swells. The glasses I now wear aren't nearly as well calibrated, and as always I mistook charm for innocence in shrugging off the apparent theft in progress. I was more worried about the cap, never imagining bifocals as booty!)
So, I guess I'm embarked on this project of authentic ground laying for the great reveal of that Eureka Thing I discovered now over 25 years ago. The authentic part is just that it's all too crude to be crafted or worked on or airbrushed neat. I'm not talking about that authenticity which is what all post-modern Westerners crave, although I am surely guilty of craving that too. But truly, I'm beyond that pale, into the realm of skeezy if I leer at shapeliness in a pick-up bar (never have, never do!). There is something vaguely pleasant in the hormonal let-down.
Surely there is something earnest here. I try very hard, despite my refusal of craft, to get at the right words. I think the blogging format releases me, or perhaps even demands that I stay away, from editorial correctness, and even from the editorial function altogether. Although this still may not be the right medium to convey that re-description of the world which I persist in thinking is so important for more than just myself to adopt. I may have to break down and work at the conveyance. But this could still be considered a kind of scratch pad. The potential for someone to see imposes a certain limited and limiting kind of discipline, I think and hope.
It does feel very much as though the cosmos has cycled around, this time at a pitch more shrill, back to that spot where I watched in horror as this nation embraced Reagan. Now Sarah Palin presumes to take over the cockpit not just of the bus I've referred to previously in metaphoric reference to one aspect of leadership, but an actual chock full 747. Her conceit is surely the moral equivalent of murderous psychopathy! And there is even some truth to the retort I recently heard from a friend to my likening Palin's lack of shame to me pretending to the cockpit of a loaded plane, that "no, because at least you have sense and intelligence and could probably figure out how to fly it when the pilot drops dead."
Well, no, but this is really grotesque. It's an advertisement, as if we need one after Bush, of just how inconsequential the figurehead actually is to the power structure he or she sits atop. And if it's only a figurehead we vote for, then it's also an advertisement for the bankruptcy of democracy and everything recently meant with that term by those in power who've abused it.
I do continue to be amazed that there are earnest and intelligent people who intone the term with reverence for America (I suppose Naomi Klein's book could only have been written by a Canadian). I feel that reverence too, though for something slipping if not slipped away. It's as vacant of meaning as Palin is of substance.
So, will we watch tonight a comparing of logos, imbued with all their relative flavor associations, to a people who still raise Pepsi and Coke to the top of the heap (made up of derivative healthier sounding brands of sugar- or Rumsfeld-water). Are we that afraid of the local? Do we have so little faith in the familiar, because, like Buffalo, we only might have been but never quite will be? Where the really talented get writ so large and so excruciatingly beautiful and patently reproducible, if difficult to contain, digitally, that we actual people are by comparison lowly?
But on the good side, there is Barack Obama this time and not just Barry Commoner in opposition. I mean Barck Obama the credible candidate with an actual chance to win, because, as I recall, I liked the Citizen's Party rather a lot, but the game wasn't quite sufficiently revealed by that time.
So this medium is for the moment free. This nation remains for the moment subject to the peoples' will. And I feel this nearly desperate urgency to get some minds changed. And perhaps, overall, the ground is better manured this cycle.
Shortly before I moved my life, briefly, onto my old wooden sailboat, flush with excitement over my first automobile, I'd driven to New Mexico with my girlfriend for the summer. We happened, no malice aforethought, on a "Rainbow Festival" (A Rainbow Family Gathering) in the Gila National Monument.
I remember being mystified on the way in by the hippie conveyances moving the other direction, with souls hanging out of them shouting "Welcome Home" as though my girlfriend and I knew what they were talking about. I remember the triple rainbow on the way out of the festival. And I remember the competing "rap 17" introductions as we wandered, haplessly, from massive grassy hippie-mobile lot, then by pickup-truck shuttle, to the start of an unnaturally well defined narrow path down into the actual hidden and very Eden-like valley.
I have since found no reference to this, but I know that I am not the only one who heard, --I think it was the second and less "official" because "official" was the opposite of what this "Festival" was all about -- rap 17 which told about the Hopi future-tale (we were on Hopi ground) of the world being covered by a web.
I remember being certain that the vision was of the electrical power grid. I'm pretty sure that no-one -- this was 1977 -- was thinking of what we subsequently called the "world-wide-web", although the Hopi tale might be the proper referential attribution. Does anyone know?
I have often remembered that factoid with a start which resembles my awe at the triple rainbow.
So anyhow, I guess I'm not really trying to convey anything, since that implies something in me - in my head, say - which I want to get over to you, gentle reader. I guess I'm more just bashing on some noisemakers hoping to find that right note or tune so someone will turn their head and then, perhaps semi-consciously, whistle it themselves from time to time.
If, instead of figurehead, we elect someone who actually articulates what it is he stands for in a fashion different from scripted recitals, then we might break that chain of deniability which is what truly defines sociopathy.
I actually don't believe that there are, brother-in-law notwithstanding, actual sociopaths in the world. Rather, I think that the hearts - full metal metaphor - of such people are so layered over by desperation stand-ins for the self that it's very much as if there were none. The behavior of a sociopath, in other words, is simply analog for the behavior of corporations removed from productive purpose. The behavior of our government under Bush, in other words, is manifestly sociopathic, in precisely the same way as is the behavior of global capital. McCain and Palin only move in the same wrong direction.
Radical outsourcing, which is part and parcel of the holy grail quest after perfect market efficiencies, leads as inexorably to attrocities as did Stalin or Mao's rendition of the quest for Marxist perfection. It does so, quite simply, by quite simply breaking all caring links in order to free each part for itself, in perfection of Fundamental Christian Individualism. God help us all, since in the real world there are no radical individuals. In phsyics, as I hope eventually to demonstrate, such particles can't exist.
Now, as I prepare to watch what will have to be the greatest spectacle of the century - this "debate" between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden - I have somehow been driven to re-read some of what I've posted here over these last months.
It's pretty excruciating. Plenty embarrassing. But maybe I'm learning to accept life as a nudist, and just move along with the flow. Visiting Spain not too long ago, it wasn't that strange to walk along the nudist beach (although I do still regret that those incredibly nubile topless babes I squinted to descry were bending over actually to lift my glasses while I floated nearsighted away on the Mediterranean swells. The glasses I now wear aren't nearly as well calibrated, and as always I mistook charm for innocence in shrugging off the apparent theft in progress. I was more worried about the cap, never imagining bifocals as booty!)
So, I guess I'm embarked on this project of authentic ground laying for the great reveal of that Eureka Thing I discovered now over 25 years ago. The authentic part is just that it's all too crude to be crafted or worked on or airbrushed neat. I'm not talking about that authenticity which is what all post-modern Westerners crave, although I am surely guilty of craving that too. But truly, I'm beyond that pale, into the realm of skeezy if I leer at shapeliness in a pick-up bar (never have, never do!). There is something vaguely pleasant in the hormonal let-down.
Surely there is something earnest here. I try very hard, despite my refusal of craft, to get at the right words. I think the blogging format releases me, or perhaps even demands that I stay away, from editorial correctness, and even from the editorial function altogether. Although this still may not be the right medium to convey that re-description of the world which I persist in thinking is so important for more than just myself to adopt. I may have to break down and work at the conveyance. But this could still be considered a kind of scratch pad. The potential for someone to see imposes a certain limited and limiting kind of discipline, I think and hope.
It does feel very much as though the cosmos has cycled around, this time at a pitch more shrill, back to that spot where I watched in horror as this nation embraced Reagan. Now Sarah Palin presumes to take over the cockpit not just of the bus I've referred to previously in metaphoric reference to one aspect of leadership, but an actual chock full 747. Her conceit is surely the moral equivalent of murderous psychopathy! And there is even some truth to the retort I recently heard from a friend to my likening Palin's lack of shame to me pretending to the cockpit of a loaded plane, that "no, because at least you have sense and intelligence and could probably figure out how to fly it when the pilot drops dead."
Well, no, but this is really grotesque. It's an advertisement, as if we need one after Bush, of just how inconsequential the figurehead actually is to the power structure he or she sits atop. And if it's only a figurehead we vote for, then it's also an advertisement for the bankruptcy of democracy and everything recently meant with that term by those in power who've abused it.
I do continue to be amazed that there are earnest and intelligent people who intone the term with reverence for America (I suppose Naomi Klein's book could only have been written by a Canadian). I feel that reverence too, though for something slipping if not slipped away. It's as vacant of meaning as Palin is of substance.
So, will we watch tonight a comparing of logos, imbued with all their relative flavor associations, to a people who still raise Pepsi and Coke to the top of the heap (made up of derivative healthier sounding brands of sugar- or Rumsfeld-water). Are we that afraid of the local? Do we have so little faith in the familiar, because, like Buffalo, we only might have been but never quite will be? Where the really talented get writ so large and so excruciatingly beautiful and patently reproducible, if difficult to contain, digitally, that we actual people are by comparison lowly?
But on the good side, there is Barack Obama this time and not just Barry Commoner in opposition. I mean Barck Obama the credible candidate with an actual chance to win, because, as I recall, I liked the Citizen's Party rather a lot, but the game wasn't quite sufficiently revealed by that time.
So this medium is for the moment free. This nation remains for the moment subject to the peoples' will. And I feel this nearly desperate urgency to get some minds changed. And perhaps, overall, the ground is better manured this cycle.
Shortly before I moved my life, briefly, onto my old wooden sailboat, flush with excitement over my first automobile, I'd driven to New Mexico with my girlfriend for the summer. We happened, no malice aforethought, on a "Rainbow Festival" (A Rainbow Family Gathering) in the Gila National Monument.
I remember being mystified on the way in by the hippie conveyances moving the other direction, with souls hanging out of them shouting "Welcome Home" as though my girlfriend and I knew what they were talking about. I remember the triple rainbow on the way out of the festival. And I remember the competing "rap 17" introductions as we wandered, haplessly, from massive grassy hippie-mobile lot, then by pickup-truck shuttle, to the start of an unnaturally well defined narrow path down into the actual hidden and very Eden-like valley.
I have since found no reference to this, but I know that I am not the only one who heard, --I think it was the second and less "official" because "official" was the opposite of what this "Festival" was all about -- rap 17 which told about the Hopi future-tale (we were on Hopi ground) of the world being covered by a web.
I remember being certain that the vision was of the electrical power grid. I'm pretty sure that no-one -- this was 1977 -- was thinking of what we subsequently called the "world-wide-web", although the Hopi tale might be the proper referential attribution. Does anyone know?
I have often remembered that factoid with a start which resembles my awe at the triple rainbow.
So anyhow, I guess I'm not really trying to convey anything, since that implies something in me - in my head, say - which I want to get over to you, gentle reader. I guess I'm more just bashing on some noisemakers hoping to find that right note or tune so someone will turn their head and then, perhaps semi-consciously, whistle it themselves from time to time.
If, instead of figurehead, we elect someone who actually articulates what it is he stands for in a fashion different from scripted recitals, then we might break that chain of deniability which is what truly defines sociopathy.
I actually don't believe that there are, brother-in-law notwithstanding, actual sociopaths in the world. Rather, I think that the hearts - full metal metaphor - of such people are so layered over by desperation stand-ins for the self that it's very much as if there were none. The behavior of a sociopath, in other words, is simply analog for the behavior of corporations removed from productive purpose. The behavior of our government under Bush, in other words, is manifestly sociopathic, in precisely the same way as is the behavior of global capital. McCain and Palin only move in the same wrong direction.
Radical outsourcing, which is part and parcel of the holy grail quest after perfect market efficiencies, leads as inexorably to attrocities as did Stalin or Mao's rendition of the quest for Marxist perfection. It does so, quite simply, by quite simply breaking all caring links in order to free each part for itself, in perfection of Fundamental Christian Individualism. God help us all, since in the real world there are no radical individuals. In phsyics, as I hope eventually to demonstrate, such particles can't exist.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Chapter 4 from 1983
Now look. There I was, entered onto that course in my life when the simple existence of childhood with its real joys and pains was being replaced by the agonies of adolescence. Where I was trying to become my own person, and kept getting stuck on the twin horns of the ecstasy of meaning revealed and the depression of meaning withheld. That period has lasted until right now. I'm still hung up on meaning. I'm still seeking a way to be my own person in a world where the gods are dead, where all authority is suspect as mere convention, and where my own inner voice is as suspect as all the rest. By now, I've been wiped out in my beliefs. There was a time when I could ride the horn of meaning revealed, grasping it tightly; but I would be shifted as easily to the other horn. All the while, however, the bull managed to keep on its feet. How glad I am of that.
Masturbation is OK. It's natural, Howie told himself. Lies about hairy palms and idiocy were invented by the same world that told boy scouts to take cold baths when they get strange feelings. A repression of what is natural. A healthy person explores his body and learns to know it. Authority ends where his privacy begins and that's the way it should be. These lies were attempts to lead that authority so deeply that it would pervade even physical privacy to the depths, apparently, of the unconscious.
Howie was learning about guilt, and its dangers. But he had also seen caged monkeys in the zoo, and wondered how natural was their constant playing with their genitals. Natural, yes, but what bars could there be circumscribing his life that made it so like that caged chimpanzee. It was a theme in his life. The discovery of some intense feeling --a joy, a revelation -- and then the repeated and compulsive return to the source of the joy that in the end, of course, only insured that it was lost.
A very masculine theme, for aren't men bent on repeated ejaculation. The goal is all. And let it come in a burst of glory. It seems built into the anatomy. The active twin in whose power lies the goal achieved cannot disengage himself from the attainment. Cannot for a minute value the way there. Cannot, because, so it seems, the body won't allow it. Such at least goes the naive argument which subtly refuses all other responses than those which seem unlearned because they were learned so remotely. Repress them by accepting them as an art that needs to be learned. So are men convinced of the value of the feminine without often remembering that the art learned is another one unlearned.
As you know, Howie had to learn to masturbate, and had no help after the humiliation of his initial failure. Again, when he learned, it was revelation. Is it to all boys? I don't know, but for him it had unbounded power. It became a private shibboleth for mocking all deceitful social restraints at the same time that it enacted the mockery of his own cage. What could cause that insane repetition? Sure, it felt good. But as the gratification became more and more automatic, why not leave it and progress? Why keep furtively trying to reawaken a discovery that was only alive in its discovery? The goal is forever lost, once it has been achieved.
But eating is gratifying each time anew, and so are other things. In actual frequency, he later found out how normal he was. But the cage was real, and normalcy meaningless. It wasn't just guilt; he hardly felt guilty, though he was furtive. It was a cage he refused to see was erected by no-one and removable only by himself. Oh, there were lots of possible places to lay the blame. Guilt was only one. His inability to do what he wanted described the cage, and the misunderstanding of his family, the misunderstanding of the school and of society, and finally the blindness of fate, were what was keeping him caged.
It was simple adolescent disappointment. He wasn't happy and it must have been because, either he was restricted by parents who thought they still needed to control him for his own good, or by a school which insisted on his need for an education by which he was literally bored to tears. Or simply because he hadn't been lucky enough to have the means to do what he wanted to be.
Are there more of him out there? Who see and hear about other lives both more and less fortunate than their own by means of the television which is the only intrusion of the world beyond the playground? Who digest both the good fortune of being who they are and the bad fortune of not being wealthier, flashier, earthier, more lovable, more real in comparison to the images on the screen. Who digest both the good fortune and the bad in the one paradoxical pill which makes his own life both unreal and the only reality.
Life in the suburbs, where everyone who doesn't belong is suspect -- whether luckier or less fortunate -- and where the deep suspicion grows that life throbs elsewhere. What then? Why, get out of course. Be richer or more earthy or more poetic or more urbane or even be a bum. But get out. Why for Howie was it all unreal? He looked until he found the death behind the mask of all of these escapes. They were acts in direct response to the fear of death they were impositions of something else that was not yet life.
An arbitrary response, so he felt. Where is the rule that says the richer are more powerful and the powerful are more alive? He unwound all the rules until finally, there was only a tangle. Yes, he was drawn to the thrill of power, to the earthiness of a gypsy, to the erudition of a scholar, to the fame of a poet, to the selflessness of a bum -- to everything in which he ever had fleetingly felt the pulse of life and in which when he measured his soul against the mask he found a poor fit.
"Do you mind untangling this, Howie? And then, please, come off it."
I am getting carried away. Too far afield in the story. They weren't masks. He saw the faces, and they were lighted. But the light was not communicable. So that gradually, as he discovered that these others were not him, he would be disgusted that they had no way to communicate their light to him. They hadn't found the answer he was seeking. He pried enough to discover that, and then they turned with some demonic power that was his alone into masks for him. Stupid, petty people, ultimately, who hid behind their masks so people wouldn't discover how little they know.
"You're making him pretty hateful."
That's good. Because he's me. And there's too much of me here. He wasn't like that. Never with friends. He liked people simply and with feeling. He... It doesn't matter.
He became angry at all those possible jailers and at his fate, but that didn't ease the feeling of being limited. That is, it didn't ease his depression and he continued to clutch at whatever could release him.
"You know, your attempts at weighty language are unbearable at moments like this. I'd laugh harder than I am except that I get the feeling you want ‘clutching at whatever could release him' to be made weighty by its vagueness. But it's so obvious that it stinks. It's worse than laughable. It's pathetic."
I'd better try a different mode.
Masturbation is OK. It's natural, Howie told himself. Lies about hairy palms and idiocy were invented by the same world that told boy scouts to take cold baths when they get strange feelings. A repression of what is natural. A healthy person explores his body and learns to know it. Authority ends where his privacy begins and that's the way it should be. These lies were attempts to lead that authority so deeply that it would pervade even physical privacy to the depths, apparently, of the unconscious.
Howie was learning about guilt, and its dangers. But he had also seen caged monkeys in the zoo, and wondered how natural was their constant playing with their genitals. Natural, yes, but what bars could there be circumscribing his life that made it so like that caged chimpanzee. It was a theme in his life. The discovery of some intense feeling --a joy, a revelation -- and then the repeated and compulsive return to the source of the joy that in the end, of course, only insured that it was lost.
A very masculine theme, for aren't men bent on repeated ejaculation. The goal is all. And let it come in a burst of glory. It seems built into the anatomy. The active twin in whose power lies the goal achieved cannot disengage himself from the attainment. Cannot for a minute value the way there. Cannot, because, so it seems, the body won't allow it. Such at least goes the naive argument which subtly refuses all other responses than those which seem unlearned because they were learned so remotely. Repress them by accepting them as an art that needs to be learned. So are men convinced of the value of the feminine without often remembering that the art learned is another one unlearned.
As you know, Howie had to learn to masturbate, and had no help after the humiliation of his initial failure. Again, when he learned, it was revelation. Is it to all boys? I don't know, but for him it had unbounded power. It became a private shibboleth for mocking all deceitful social restraints at the same time that it enacted the mockery of his own cage. What could cause that insane repetition? Sure, it felt good. But as the gratification became more and more automatic, why not leave it and progress? Why keep furtively trying to reawaken a discovery that was only alive in its discovery? The goal is forever lost, once it has been achieved.
But eating is gratifying each time anew, and so are other things. In actual frequency, he later found out how normal he was. But the cage was real, and normalcy meaningless. It wasn't just guilt; he hardly felt guilty, though he was furtive. It was a cage he refused to see was erected by no-one and removable only by himself. Oh, there were lots of possible places to lay the blame. Guilt was only one. His inability to do what he wanted described the cage, and the misunderstanding of his family, the misunderstanding of the school and of society, and finally the blindness of fate, were what was keeping him caged.
It was simple adolescent disappointment. He wasn't happy and it must have been because, either he was restricted by parents who thought they still needed to control him for his own good, or by a school which insisted on his need for an education by which he was literally bored to tears. Or simply because he hadn't been lucky enough to have the means to do what he wanted to be.
Are there more of him out there? Who see and hear about other lives both more and less fortunate than their own by means of the television which is the only intrusion of the world beyond the playground? Who digest both the good fortune of being who they are and the bad fortune of not being wealthier, flashier, earthier, more lovable, more real in comparison to the images on the screen. Who digest both the good fortune and the bad in the one paradoxical pill which makes his own life both unreal and the only reality.
Life in the suburbs, where everyone who doesn't belong is suspect -- whether luckier or less fortunate -- and where the deep suspicion grows that life throbs elsewhere. What then? Why, get out of course. Be richer or more earthy or more poetic or more urbane or even be a bum. But get out. Why for Howie was it all unreal? He looked until he found the death behind the mask of all of these escapes. They were acts in direct response to the fear of death they were impositions of something else that was not yet life.
An arbitrary response, so he felt. Where is the rule that says the richer are more powerful and the powerful are more alive? He unwound all the rules until finally, there was only a tangle. Yes, he was drawn to the thrill of power, to the earthiness of a gypsy, to the erudition of a scholar, to the fame of a poet, to the selflessness of a bum -- to everything in which he ever had fleetingly felt the pulse of life and in which when he measured his soul against the mask he found a poor fit.
"Do you mind untangling this, Howie? And then, please, come off it."
I am getting carried away. Too far afield in the story. They weren't masks. He saw the faces, and they were lighted. But the light was not communicable. So that gradually, as he discovered that these others were not him, he would be disgusted that they had no way to communicate their light to him. They hadn't found the answer he was seeking. He pried enough to discover that, and then they turned with some demonic power that was his alone into masks for him. Stupid, petty people, ultimately, who hid behind their masks so people wouldn't discover how little they know.
"You're making him pretty hateful."
That's good. Because he's me. And there's too much of me here. He wasn't like that. Never with friends. He liked people simply and with feeling. He... It doesn't matter.
He became angry at all those possible jailers and at his fate, but that didn't ease the feeling of being limited. That is, it didn't ease his depression and he continued to clutch at whatever could release him.
"You know, your attempts at weighty language are unbearable at moments like this. I'd laugh harder than I am except that I get the feeling you want ‘clutching at whatever could release him' to be made weighty by its vagueness. But it's so obvious that it stinks. It's worse than laughable. It's pathetic."
I'd better try a different mode.
Hold On Just One Minute!
While there is a minute left, I continue to struggle to understand how this particular power grab was so cleverly orchestrated. I try to hang back from the level of conspiracy theory on the one hand which would have Bush orchestrating the constructed deconstruction of the Trade Center towers. On the other, I hang back from reifying the Devil. But it seems almost undeniable that this is a manufactured crisis; a perfect opportunity to hand the peoples' wealth almost literally on a platter, over to the vaunted private capital markets.
As with the Trade Center destruction, the interesting thing was not how did they plan it, but how were they so perfectly prepared to respond to it when it happened. And how did the timing happen so perfectly in concert with readiness for it. The questions to be asked were all about the response, but the response was, as is the case in all moral decision-making, an emotional matter. And for those without emotion, what I've previously shorthanded as the sociopaths, all the decisions are theirs for the taking, since the rest of us are too wary of entering those dark woods.
Could it be that the subconscious, collectively, is the manufacturer? That at each opportunity, there is a simple-minded choice, and that in the mediated world these choices can be handed up, so that even the timing of the seemingly random events can seem, almost bizarrely, orchestrated?
There is an obvious connection between the melamine in the milk in China, the rendition of so many victims of personal vendettas to Gitmo, the e-coli in the food chain, the mistaken identification of terrorists at the airline gate because their database identity veers so close to that of someone who could be capable . . . These are all matters where there has been a subcontracting out of accountability and a deidentified handing up of deniability. This is how the modern corporation runs, and this is how the government runs. General Electric, I was told quite personally, doesn't wish to manufacture anything. There's not enough money in it. So the government has become a holding company for our national best interest, just as Nike has become a brand name for intellectual property standards brought into embodied existence wherever and by whomever for so long as they bear the brand and not the stain of original sin.
I am compelled to make parallels between sociopathy and corporate behavior. We finally have true artificial intelligence in the behavior of capital, unfettered by human contact with communities. I suppose that's what global actually means.
Local motives, always impure, are now aggregated to the point where it is the mindless money almost itself which is the great motive engine. A sociopath like Dick Cheney (I'm certain he "loves" his family) can actually and rationally direct his personal and financial investments in a kind of "Disaster Capitalism" which literally targets "inevitable" catastrophes, including pandemics or the threat of them (AIDS, smallpox) or terrorism amuck (the security business) and plans to capitalize on ownership of patent rights. One pictures a satisfied jabba the hut sitting atop a Sadean castle with loathsome, smoldering masses attempting to cross the moat below.
Can anyone really want this for himself? I'm pretty sure that at sociopath can and does. But I'm also pretty sure that we are all sociopaths at the level of the petty. The small Chinese milk producer is not, quite literally, thinking of the death or even possible death of thousands when he waters his milk in order to meet quotas or to stretch the ironclad marketlaw margins to feed his own family. Hell, even the SUV driver is apoplectic to delegate a tank to his not-so-trustworthy teenage daughter for driving to the prom. I suppose the torturing security-contract worker may well be a sociopath, but he's also driven by better money than he can make in the nonexistent factory back home.
And the hell of it is that the SUVs kill just as surely as the little beetle-bugs. Texting while driving, or swerving in a top-heavy driving fortress have killed in my acquaintance and neighborhood more surely and often than that scary other driver.
So, the problem becomes how not to hand up this authority (and hand down the blame, since now a careless match lighting a forest fire is punishable as mass murder, while the actual accomplishment of it is excused by apology). At its root, this is simply the problem to defund and delegitimize the corporatization of everything. For starters we have to distinguish free market capitalism from global corporatism. I doubt there is a bright red line between them, but I'm pretty sure that we can all, pornography style, tell the difference. We probably need a line between the "financial economy", so newly called, and the "real economy," so that there aren't any more holding companies which split the difference.
We probably have to parse the term "core competency" in a way more closely related to the expertise of the deciders rather than the media-savvy extortion-salaried captains of globocap. There isn't much mystery left to the results this direction.
And, for me at least, there isn't much mystery left to timing of the opportunities for opportunism.
I remain very very uncertain about what to do with this latest wholesaling of the people's power to the private sector. It seems clear that there won't be time to stop it. I guess it further seems clear that the only way to have stopped it would be to backstop the economy with something entirely other from the corporatization which made the emergency inevitable, and the response as if there were no choice.
This cannot be done as an emergency, though it might have to be done in an emergency. I have been asking friends who know how to field dress a pig, and grow potatoes without poison, though I really don't relish deployment of those skills. Sadly, my brother in law knows all these things. In preparation for the rapture. But, the proper response is to develop nonchalance toward those who would manipulate us.
As with the Trade Center destruction, the interesting thing was not how did they plan it, but how were they so perfectly prepared to respond to it when it happened. And how did the timing happen so perfectly in concert with readiness for it. The questions to be asked were all about the response, but the response was, as is the case in all moral decision-making, an emotional matter. And for those without emotion, what I've previously shorthanded as the sociopaths, all the decisions are theirs for the taking, since the rest of us are too wary of entering those dark woods.
Could it be that the subconscious, collectively, is the manufacturer? That at each opportunity, there is a simple-minded choice, and that in the mediated world these choices can be handed up, so that even the timing of the seemingly random events can seem, almost bizarrely, orchestrated?
There is an obvious connection between the melamine in the milk in China, the rendition of so many victims of personal vendettas to Gitmo, the e-coli in the food chain, the mistaken identification of terrorists at the airline gate because their database identity veers so close to that of someone who could be capable . . . These are all matters where there has been a subcontracting out of accountability and a deidentified handing up of deniability. This is how the modern corporation runs, and this is how the government runs. General Electric, I was told quite personally, doesn't wish to manufacture anything. There's not enough money in it. So the government has become a holding company for our national best interest, just as Nike has become a brand name for intellectual property standards brought into embodied existence wherever and by whomever for so long as they bear the brand and not the stain of original sin.
I am compelled to make parallels between sociopathy and corporate behavior. We finally have true artificial intelligence in the behavior of capital, unfettered by human contact with communities. I suppose that's what global actually means.
Local motives, always impure, are now aggregated to the point where it is the mindless money almost itself which is the great motive engine. A sociopath like Dick Cheney (I'm certain he "loves" his family) can actually and rationally direct his personal and financial investments in a kind of "Disaster Capitalism" which literally targets "inevitable" catastrophes, including pandemics or the threat of them (AIDS, smallpox) or terrorism amuck (the security business) and plans to capitalize on ownership of patent rights. One pictures a satisfied jabba the hut sitting atop a Sadean castle with loathsome, smoldering masses attempting to cross the moat below.
Can anyone really want this for himself? I'm pretty sure that at sociopath can and does. But I'm also pretty sure that we are all sociopaths at the level of the petty. The small Chinese milk producer is not, quite literally, thinking of the death or even possible death of thousands when he waters his milk in order to meet quotas or to stretch the ironclad marketlaw margins to feed his own family. Hell, even the SUV driver is apoplectic to delegate a tank to his not-so-trustworthy teenage daughter for driving to the prom. I suppose the torturing security-contract worker may well be a sociopath, but he's also driven by better money than he can make in the nonexistent factory back home.
And the hell of it is that the SUVs kill just as surely as the little beetle-bugs. Texting while driving, or swerving in a top-heavy driving fortress have killed in my acquaintance and neighborhood more surely and often than that scary other driver.
So, the problem becomes how not to hand up this authority (and hand down the blame, since now a careless match lighting a forest fire is punishable as mass murder, while the actual accomplishment of it is excused by apology). At its root, this is simply the problem to defund and delegitimize the corporatization of everything. For starters we have to distinguish free market capitalism from global corporatism. I doubt there is a bright red line between them, but I'm pretty sure that we can all, pornography style, tell the difference. We probably need a line between the "financial economy", so newly called, and the "real economy," so that there aren't any more holding companies which split the difference.
We probably have to parse the term "core competency" in a way more closely related to the expertise of the deciders rather than the media-savvy extortion-salaried captains of globocap. There isn't much mystery left to the results this direction.
And, for me at least, there isn't much mystery left to timing of the opportunities for opportunism.
I remain very very uncertain about what to do with this latest wholesaling of the people's power to the private sector. It seems clear that there won't be time to stop it. I guess it further seems clear that the only way to have stopped it would be to backstop the economy with something entirely other from the corporatization which made the emergency inevitable, and the response as if there were no choice.
This cannot be done as an emergency, though it might have to be done in an emergency. I have been asking friends who know how to field dress a pig, and grow potatoes without poison, though I really don't relish deployment of those skills. Sadly, my brother in law knows all these things. In preparation for the rapture. But, the proper response is to develop nonchalance toward those who would manipulate us.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Well, that was interesting . . . .(how the world really ends)
I write these things in some vague attempt to chronicle the meanderings of my thinking. I seem to have a conviction that this is the moment in time and space when everything changes, and I cling to the necessity for written words to link all the inward fluctuations of my thinking, since I know my memory to be faulty, and my disposition to be very very far toward the self-indulgent. This kind of writing is, perhaps, a self-indulgence which has a slight potential to lead beyond self-indulgence, though I remain extremely unsure of that.
In trying to understand my (nihilated) brother-in-law, I've been reading up on sociopathy, and in particular a very useful book called The Sociopath Next Door. It does a very nice job of defining sociopathy as the absence of conscience, and conscience as a function of emotion rather than of moral reasoning or cognitive thought processes. Specifically, conscience is a function of love, and sociopaths have no capacity for it.
I recognize in myself a difficulty with self-love, and I believe that to be the root of my self-indulgence. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think my sister's life offers a clue, as does my budding awareness of the primal significance of this election cycle.
We lefties are always troubled to understand how the undereducated can be so easily duped by the logowork (apologies Naomi Klein) of the Republican party. And we assume that it is simply a matter of undereducation, and craven manipulation; ignorance and greed; fear and insecurity, and on and on. Until we come across reasoned and reasonable studies, including this one, which explain that enlightenment-descended liberal notions of morality and moral behavior leave out 3/5ths of the modalities concerned. That moral behavior is never a matter of cognitive calculation, and always a matter of emotional first response, which can only be grounded in upbringing, and conditioned as much by recognition and respect for authority, group membership, and sanctity.
I have been as troubled by anything as I have by the question of why sexual behavior matters to morality. Divorced from reproduction, and the implications for upbringing, it would seem that sexual behavior is irrelevant. But in a broader sense of morality, deviant sexual behavior cheapens the ways in which we relate to one another and learn to trust one another. The dangers of disease and pregnancy are not the main case; these simply highlight what was already evidently true.
We have now learned, if we didn't know it already, the extent to which our financial markets depend on trust for their functioning. In the absence of trust, there seemed absolutely no other choice than for the government, in the largest way ever in the history of mankind, to step in, standing for the public at large, to re-establish basic trust, enough for the system to function again. The talking heads call it a confidence game, without so much as a blush in reference to the con-men who have talked us into this catastrophe.
In trying to understand my bother-in-law's behavior, I have come across interesting essays, apparently from both sides of the political divide, trying to understand the difference between the state's interest in gay sex and incest. The biology of the matter, again, seems to the side of the main question.
Again, I think it's a matter of trust. My brother-in-law has been described by his victims (even those who don't yet know they are victims) as the world's greatest manipulator. He's a con-man, plain and simple, and sociopathic in the absence of concern expressed or demonstrated for the mayhem he leaves in his wake. Obscenely, he abuses God to urge upon my sister the notion that marriage is forever, for better or for worse. I doubt if even Sarah Palin would require that the rape victim stay married to the rapist in addition to carrying his child (but who knows, perhaps she would, even while championing the proper choice exercised by the person from who she would like to remove all choice!!!).
So, there is at least a distinction between casual sex, of interest and excitement to both (or all!) parties involved, and sex between a father and his daughter, which breaks all bonds of trust and faithfulness: Given that you can still tinker around the edges with concerns about the self-esteem of participants in the casual exercise of something so potentially consequential, at least emotionally if not socially and for life, there is no tinkering around the edges of power-based abuses.
And one might Hope that there is room now in the authority imprint for a woman. And in the ingroup tent for a black. One might hope that a positive impact of globalization has been that our morality has expanded to fit the shrinking global village, and that we recognize that atavistic behaviors, however functional in the long genetic and developmental run-up until now, can only secure our annihilation.
So, the lie which has been exposed by my brother-in-law's behavior, and by the meltdown of the world's financial markets, is that the agenda of anyone at all has been what they themselves have professed it to be. The loss in trust has been final.
We can at least delineate the progression. When the radical individualism which is a hallmark of liberal moralizing (choice!) moves to the grotesque extreme of SUVs with video screens, and when conservative moralists seem to defend that as the proper reward for deserving winners in the competition of life. When Fox news transparently panders sexiness in its smilingly extreme(and seemingly intelligent) reporters, and McCain follows the same in his choice for VEEP. When this in turn has built upon the perfected methods of the global capitalists to mold and manipulate our every market choice by those same methods of flesh-trading (and when the literal face of a position is mistaken for the very studied prompting which makes up the actual message).
The loss of trust is final.
The positions themselves, and the supposed philosophies behind them, have become almost entirely irrelevant, just as the candidates for president have become almost entirely irrelevant behind the very real requirement for the actual government to act. I think even the President himself, who should be too ashamed to show his face, has receded behind who we now fully understand to be the actual actors; the actual "deciders."
The main issue now is trust. The main issue is transparency - whether we can see through the presentations to the guts and machinery behind them. The main issue is what is in the heart, and who cares.
If only a game is being played, then there need be no concern at all. If cars are only for fun, and the cost to drive them factors in fully the cost to society at large for doing so, then who cares? But as it turns out, we live in an economy where you very simply cannot function without these cars, and where their cost is only recently now far exceeded by the cost to run them. Suddenly, the frills are unseemly, as we digest the awareness that each of them presses costs on the whole which we rather frankly don't trust to be represented by the cost of the gasoline, no matter how high it might soar.
We know that there can be no cost high enough to cover the mayhem in Iraq. We know that there can be no cost high enough to cover the meltdown of the icecaps, or the disappearance of the Polar Bear. And we know that there is no limit to the desire of those in control to have more control, at least as demonstrated by the insatiable drive for wealth, once experienced.
This is all serious business, and there are surely lives at stake, if not the fate of the earth itself.
Who cares?
In trying to understand my (nihilated) brother-in-law, I've been reading up on sociopathy, and in particular a very useful book called The Sociopath Next Door. It does a very nice job of defining sociopathy as the absence of conscience, and conscience as a function of emotion rather than of moral reasoning or cognitive thought processes. Specifically, conscience is a function of love, and sociopaths have no capacity for it.
I recognize in myself a difficulty with self-love, and I believe that to be the root of my self-indulgence. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think my sister's life offers a clue, as does my budding awareness of the primal significance of this election cycle.
We lefties are always troubled to understand how the undereducated can be so easily duped by the logowork (apologies Naomi Klein) of the Republican party. And we assume that it is simply a matter of undereducation, and craven manipulation; ignorance and greed; fear and insecurity, and on and on. Until we come across reasoned and reasonable studies, including this one, which explain that enlightenment-descended liberal notions of morality and moral behavior leave out 3/5ths of the modalities concerned. That moral behavior is never a matter of cognitive calculation, and always a matter of emotional first response, which can only be grounded in upbringing, and conditioned as much by recognition and respect for authority, group membership, and sanctity.
I have been as troubled by anything as I have by the question of why sexual behavior matters to morality. Divorced from reproduction, and the implications for upbringing, it would seem that sexual behavior is irrelevant. But in a broader sense of morality, deviant sexual behavior cheapens the ways in which we relate to one another and learn to trust one another. The dangers of disease and pregnancy are not the main case; these simply highlight what was already evidently true.
We have now learned, if we didn't know it already, the extent to which our financial markets depend on trust for their functioning. In the absence of trust, there seemed absolutely no other choice than for the government, in the largest way ever in the history of mankind, to step in, standing for the public at large, to re-establish basic trust, enough for the system to function again. The talking heads call it a confidence game, without so much as a blush in reference to the con-men who have talked us into this catastrophe.
In trying to understand my bother-in-law's behavior, I have come across interesting essays, apparently from both sides of the political divide, trying to understand the difference between the state's interest in gay sex and incest. The biology of the matter, again, seems to the side of the main question.
Again, I think it's a matter of trust. My brother-in-law has been described by his victims (even those who don't yet know they are victims) as the world's greatest manipulator. He's a con-man, plain and simple, and sociopathic in the absence of concern expressed or demonstrated for the mayhem he leaves in his wake. Obscenely, he abuses God to urge upon my sister the notion that marriage is forever, for better or for worse. I doubt if even Sarah Palin would require that the rape victim stay married to the rapist in addition to carrying his child (but who knows, perhaps she would, even while championing the proper choice exercised by the person from who she would like to remove all choice!!!).
So, there is at least a distinction between casual sex, of interest and excitement to both (or all!) parties involved, and sex between a father and his daughter, which breaks all bonds of trust and faithfulness: Given that you can still tinker around the edges with concerns about the self-esteem of participants in the casual exercise of something so potentially consequential, at least emotionally if not socially and for life, there is no tinkering around the edges of power-based abuses.
And one might Hope that there is room now in the authority imprint for a woman. And in the ingroup tent for a black. One might hope that a positive impact of globalization has been that our morality has expanded to fit the shrinking global village, and that we recognize that atavistic behaviors, however functional in the long genetic and developmental run-up until now, can only secure our annihilation.
So, the lie which has been exposed by my brother-in-law's behavior, and by the meltdown of the world's financial markets, is that the agenda of anyone at all has been what they themselves have professed it to be. The loss in trust has been final.
We can at least delineate the progression. When the radical individualism which is a hallmark of liberal moralizing (choice!) moves to the grotesque extreme of SUVs with video screens, and when conservative moralists seem to defend that as the proper reward for deserving winners in the competition of life. When Fox news transparently panders sexiness in its smilingly extreme(and seemingly intelligent) reporters, and McCain follows the same in his choice for VEEP. When this in turn has built upon the perfected methods of the global capitalists to mold and manipulate our every market choice by those same methods of flesh-trading (and when the literal face of a position is mistaken for the very studied prompting which makes up the actual message).
The loss of trust is final.
The positions themselves, and the supposed philosophies behind them, have become almost entirely irrelevant, just as the candidates for president have become almost entirely irrelevant behind the very real requirement for the actual government to act. I think even the President himself, who should be too ashamed to show his face, has receded behind who we now fully understand to be the actual actors; the actual "deciders."
The main issue now is trust. The main issue is transparency - whether we can see through the presentations to the guts and machinery behind them. The main issue is what is in the heart, and who cares.
If only a game is being played, then there need be no concern at all. If cars are only for fun, and the cost to drive them factors in fully the cost to society at large for doing so, then who cares? But as it turns out, we live in an economy where you very simply cannot function without these cars, and where their cost is only recently now far exceeded by the cost to run them. Suddenly, the frills are unseemly, as we digest the awareness that each of them presses costs on the whole which we rather frankly don't trust to be represented by the cost of the gasoline, no matter how high it might soar.
We know that there can be no cost high enough to cover the mayhem in Iraq. We know that there can be no cost high enough to cover the meltdown of the icecaps, or the disappearance of the Polar Bear. And we know that there is no limit to the desire of those in control to have more control, at least as demonstrated by the insatiable drive for wealth, once experienced.
This is all serious business, and there are surely lives at stake, if not the fate of the earth itself.
Who cares?
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Why Didn't the World End - Yet?
They turned on the big supercollider, and it worked!! It seems there was only one frightened scientist, who certainly looked the part, from my glimpse of him on TV. I'd thought I wrote something here about my thoughts on the machine, but it must have been an email, or just in my mind. Just as well . . .
But in a personal sense, the world did end. This supercollider (is that what it's called? Hadron something?) is constructed after the crossroads, when the scientific enterprise should have recognized that it's all about words and labels. That new particles can be proliferated ad-infinitum provided we have the will and the money, and that there are no essential new secrets to be revealed, other than that, by omission, the actual world of words and human beings is slipping into oblivion, for neglect.
Of course, duh, I'm in the midst of reading Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism, so I'm in a frame of mind to identify and debunk grand narratives. I want to know what agenda the supercollider really serves, since it seems at best unlikely that it actually serves some quest for knowledge and understanding (At worst, does it represent some instrument for mass destruction, or has it moved on to the meta-level of mass control, which was the whole point of mass destruction, or is it just what it seems to be - an engine to perpetuate excitement toward something that will never be; the discovery of unambiguous reality, and by that the instrumentation of trueing?).
I suspect it's just a happy diversion to keep the techies sharp while the economy retools for its next grand project. It doesn't seem likely to lead to cold fusion or some other apocalyptic energy solution. Just a new footnote. A really really expensive one. Well, unless that self-aggrandizing black hole theory turns out to be true, but really now, can you imagine something as definitionally opposed to the prospect as a black hole, aggrandizing!?
That's the other part. Me. This typing on a billboard visible in principle to everyone and anyone on the planet, while remaining calm in my certainty that no one will ever notice. It's not like geo-caching, where there is something remotely hidden. But it's also not quite like dressing outrageously in public. More like the couple making love in the Skydome hotel suite during the Big Game (is it the Rogers Center or something like that now?) who forgot about the TV cameras? (or did they?) Like a Bush gesture when he thinks the recording machines aren't rolling?
Anyhow, it's just weird. I don't even have any interest in what I myself have written. It's too boring to review - too dense to get back into. It doesn't progress and doesn't move toward anything like a conclusion.
Meanwhile, my little sister, raised by the example of a helpless mother, trained as a southern belle without the southern motherly training in the wielding of the southern belle's secret power - raised, in other words, as a southern belle by a southern father, but with a northern mother. And the mother delivered into the arms of a northern patriarch. Both mother and father insecure about the gender roles defined for them, and therefore playing them in caricature. That little sister has just awoken to the fact that her ignorant and manipulative husband has been sexually involved with her newly 18 year old daughter, who thus found the strength to expose the fact.
This is how the world ends, I'm certain. This is how the world is ending. Much though I would like to push this away, as something separate from myself, I know that her innocent vulnerability - my sister's - is my own. I know that I am, internally, the whole entire structure of second-guessing and self doubt which failed, until now, to crystallize the warning signs into what I've always known they were. Predation. Manipulation. Raising self-justification to religion. Perfected paranoia about everything public, and so moving to what's left of the outback, and into a society which is further caricature, truly, than that depicted in the Handmaiden's Tale. (A Boy and his Dog?).
I could have known but chose not to. I could have stopped it, but lacked the clear insight to do so.
At least I now know what born-again really means (need I say the offender professes himself so, as does my for-the-moment still deluded and supportive of his redemption sister). Self-election to a club of similarly ashamed hiders away from judgement and responsibility for their inner tendencies and hidden actions. Is it sort-of like blogging away so that only Jesus will or need ever know? But in the fullness of time and revelation, open to anyone and everyone to see?
Surely, it is an escape from human judgement. Let's hope the moment has not truly passed, when human judgement, soundly exercised, can turn the tide away from shameful acts committed in secret and having the public face of righteousness (or is it the public face of clinical neutrality that's worse?). Help us Jesus to be born-again more truly to our human responsibilities, and not simply to the relief the many panderers of your Name profer.
But in a personal sense, the world did end. This supercollider (is that what it's called? Hadron something?) is constructed after the crossroads, when the scientific enterprise should have recognized that it's all about words and labels. That new particles can be proliferated ad-infinitum provided we have the will and the money, and that there are no essential new secrets to be revealed, other than that, by omission, the actual world of words and human beings is slipping into oblivion, for neglect.
Of course, duh, I'm in the midst of reading Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism, so I'm in a frame of mind to identify and debunk grand narratives. I want to know what agenda the supercollider really serves, since it seems at best unlikely that it actually serves some quest for knowledge and understanding (At worst, does it represent some instrument for mass destruction, or has it moved on to the meta-level of mass control, which was the whole point of mass destruction, or is it just what it seems to be - an engine to perpetuate excitement toward something that will never be; the discovery of unambiguous reality, and by that the instrumentation of trueing?).
I suspect it's just a happy diversion to keep the techies sharp while the economy retools for its next grand project. It doesn't seem likely to lead to cold fusion or some other apocalyptic energy solution. Just a new footnote. A really really expensive one. Well, unless that self-aggrandizing black hole theory turns out to be true, but really now, can you imagine something as definitionally opposed to the prospect as a black hole, aggrandizing!?
That's the other part. Me. This typing on a billboard visible in principle to everyone and anyone on the planet, while remaining calm in my certainty that no one will ever notice. It's not like geo-caching, where there is something remotely hidden. But it's also not quite like dressing outrageously in public. More like the couple making love in the Skydome hotel suite during the Big Game (is it the Rogers Center or something like that now?) who forgot about the TV cameras? (or did they?) Like a Bush gesture when he thinks the recording machines aren't rolling?
Anyhow, it's just weird. I don't even have any interest in what I myself have written. It's too boring to review - too dense to get back into. It doesn't progress and doesn't move toward anything like a conclusion.
Meanwhile, my little sister, raised by the example of a helpless mother, trained as a southern belle without the southern motherly training in the wielding of the southern belle's secret power - raised, in other words, as a southern belle by a southern father, but with a northern mother. And the mother delivered into the arms of a northern patriarch. Both mother and father insecure about the gender roles defined for them, and therefore playing them in caricature. That little sister has just awoken to the fact that her ignorant and manipulative husband has been sexually involved with her newly 18 year old daughter, who thus found the strength to expose the fact.
This is how the world ends, I'm certain. This is how the world is ending. Much though I would like to push this away, as something separate from myself, I know that her innocent vulnerability - my sister's - is my own. I know that I am, internally, the whole entire structure of second-guessing and self doubt which failed, until now, to crystallize the warning signs into what I've always known they were. Predation. Manipulation. Raising self-justification to religion. Perfected paranoia about everything public, and so moving to what's left of the outback, and into a society which is further caricature, truly, than that depicted in the Handmaiden's Tale. (A Boy and his Dog?).
I could have known but chose not to. I could have stopped it, but lacked the clear insight to do so.
At least I now know what born-again really means (need I say the offender professes himself so, as does my for-the-moment still deluded and supportive of his redemption sister). Self-election to a club of similarly ashamed hiders away from judgement and responsibility for their inner tendencies and hidden actions. Is it sort-of like blogging away so that only Jesus will or need ever know? But in the fullness of time and revelation, open to anyone and everyone to see?
Surely, it is an escape from human judgement. Let's hope the moment has not truly passed, when human judgement, soundly exercised, can turn the tide away from shameful acts committed in secret and having the public face of righteousness (or is it the public face of clinical neutrality that's worse?). Help us Jesus to be born-again more truly to our human responsibilities, and not simply to the relief the many panderers of your Name profer.
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