Look, I'm just trying to put emotion back into the universe. I think it is there and belongs there. I don't mean the cold dead stars that are still abstractions to us. I mean here. There's no physical universe. That's a propoganda ploy to keep you from believing in yourself. You're not a number or a feather in the wind. You exist because you feel and because all history wanted to make you You're not an accident. It's OK. It's alright. Calm down.
Nor can you escape. You aren't what you see or even what you feel; emotionally alone. You're also all the little molecular attractions that keep you bound in this world at this time. It's not so bad. They don't want you to leave.
I've known about the physical universe for years. As soon as I learned about relativity I knew. It was a vision, an excitement, an elation. It was a memory.
But I also knew that I couldn't know what I knew, and that I didn't have the words. And without the words, you know nothing. I had no confidence. I listened to the voice of authority. And I became neurotic, and depressed and suicidal, and useless and lazy and all those other things the voice of authority hates so much -- even while it is the cause.
If I can do anything now in this world, I hope to be able to give men the confidence to believe in themselves. No one has any true authority over you. But you must believe that your life is meaningful. Take heart, and don't be afraid.
Don't get me wrong. It is crazy to think you know something. That you have something to say, but nobody's listening. No. If you have something to say, you say it. If it isn't understood, then you say it better. You don't give up.
And words aren't important. There's nothing to discover about truth. It's always a matter of remembering --sometimes it's the difficult matter of finding the words for what you remember. Sometimes you remember it alone. Sometimes you paint a picture or sing a tune or cry or shout. Words don't mean anything without the connection -- and a connection that's forced is a rape -- nothing less. Don't believe what "they" tell you.
I'm getting carried away again. What I knew years ago in the little cabin up in Canada was quite simple. Einstein had added the dimension of time to the others -- those of the physical, spatial universe -- the perceptual, and with time, moving universe -- and it was added for the first time on equal footing with the other three.
The trouble was that we couldn't deal with time on an equal footing. It could be done mathematically, but we can't. Time defines the dimension by which we can be circumspect about the rest, but we can't be circumspect about time -- we're stuck in it.
Then Einstein had the further stroke of genius to equate gravity with acceleration in his general relativity. Now when I heard that, I started reeling. It wasa true epiphany. I knew that, and it's kept me going since.
Einstein spent his life looking for some universal field theory. Something to unite gravitational, electromagnetic and all the other "forces" in the universe whereby things move together or apart without colliding as actual billiard balls seem to do, or which hold things in some constant relationship -- electrons to nucleuses and all those other metaphorical descriptions of what is really unknowable except by a complex system of trust and belief which differs very little from abstraction.
And Einstein balked at quantum theory. "God doesn't play dice." Well, I don't believe in god. And I never thought I was a number. But I guess I didn't really believe in myself either. I mean really believe, in the way a truly religious person really believes in God. I didn't believe that my life meant anything and, without knowing it, I set out to prove it, while at the same time wanting to prove that it did mean something. All answers are paradox -- obviously. Everybody knows that. Except that somewhere along the line we've been conned into believing in absolutes. The woman's knowledge has been forgotten.
Look. God is an abstraction. Now. In this age. Time is an abstraction. Space, molecules, electrons, percepts, concepts. Emotion is an abstraction. We use a language by which we know our mind is shared, and we try to describe things that aren't universally shared. We use metaphor. We use terms that we are familiar with to refer to something unfamiliar.
"This boat is as cold as a witch's teat", to give a paradoxical example. I have no idea how cold a witch's teat might be. I use it to mean damn cold. People laugh (the first time they hear such a thing) because it's jarring and also because it reverses the metaphorical process.
Wouldn't it be a pretty rotten joke if we were so mixed up that we thought a "witch's teat" was something we were familiar with and cold was a surprise. Because that's the way metaphor usually works. Yet we often describe truth as though it were an abstraction. We use the physical world as a metaphor for reality, when we know there's more to it than that. And ultimately, we believe what we hear in words --from authority -- even though we, all of us, remember something more true.
I knew when I learned about Special and General Relativity that there was some hanky-panky going on. Time was mathematically equivalent to the other dimensions, but not conceptually. We didn't really want time to be equivalent, because we believed so strongly in progress --that we are going somewhere. There has to be direction to time, we reasoned, because our whole entire utter existence would be meaningless without it. We might as well go backward as forward. We might as well return to the caves. We might as well blow up the world. Hell, it's all meaningless anyway. Play like you mean it, though. Play tough. Play hard. You got to believe, man. Get the spirit.
We got the spirit, but it's all a game. When the goal isn't real. When you've invented it. It just isn't the same. A game is exciting for a while. But it isn't life.
They tell me that time cannot be an equivalent dimension because, mathematically, you end up with imaginary numbers when you consider it to be so. But that depends on the way all the machinery of mathematics leading up to that result has been applied. Mathematics can be a very elaborate game indeed when it is not connected. In math, anything is possible. But let's not get lost in the maze. It may be tremendous fun -- it may be true artistry. But don't pander beauty for truth unless you really believe that is the only connection yourself. Don't try to convince.
No. Progress has to be real. It has to. It has to. We resort to the "human conditon" to explain the directionality of time. It has no direction, but we are bound as though it does.
Sure. Bound, as always, by ignorance and hatred.
I was bound. I couldn't bear it. As obvious as it was -- blaring over every radio speaker in the country -- "Ail we need is love". Sure, we all know that. But we don't really believe it. We have no faith. None at all. We can't believe it's all a game -- that we have to invent the goals. Yet some of us seem to believe that. And all of us act that way. Like it's all a game. It doesn't mean anything.
Look. Time is like the other dimensions. When length -- the dimension along the direction of motion -- shrinks, it's presumed that it goes back to normal when the motion slows to subrelativistic rates. But time, presumably, can't do that because when it slows -- I mean really slows, not just apparently -- then everything changes. But we can't assume that means a different universe. So we suppose it to be the same one aging more slowly.
But that's really rather preposterous. That's our point of view -- the proud originator. We don't know what the universe looks like from high enough speeds to change the measurement of dimensions. We don't know what energy on the way to becoming matter looks like or vice-versa, because we can only experience the end points and the explosion in between. Time slows from our point of view for something in motion. We see a part of the "object" which remains in our universe. But the rest is in a universe beyond -~ other --and we don't perceive or conceive that universe -- Yet.
We don't know how to enter other universes and return. We can't even maintain our own. We're going to either perish of neglect, because we don't care -- or we're going to blow ourselves to the other side, by making the fast trip from matter to energy. Funny thing is, only a few pounds get to make the journey -- the rest of us just blow-up.
The only way to unite with what is other is to feel. To find the entrance spontaneously because it feels right. The only entrance to other universes is to let go. It may take some time. But we may be immortal right now.
It's easy to go to the moon and back. Perceptually --conceptually -- all the molecules remain in touch. Hell, the moon's bound by our gravity, and the tides of the world's life-blood are tied to the moon's. There's no time shift. We didn't go nearly fast enough, and we only lost touch for a while on the dark side. Propogandists will tell you the spaceboys came back younger. Don't believe them. We were all changed.
Motion takes time. That's the definition. Changing takes time. Growth, learning, loving, leaving -- they all take time. You just can't have it all now. There's no instant gratification. You have to earn the moment. And you can't escape time any more than you can escape your skin. Bound by a conspiracy of love and utter devotion, your fate is the earth's.
Oh, sure, we could send one astronaut off at a pretty high speed. We could even arrange that he accelerate forever without our help. I don't know how he'd ever find hiway back. We haven't mapped the universe at that speed. He might map it as he goes -- to make sure he could get back. But in order to go very fast at all he's going to have to accelerate for a very long time -- unless he breaks all the physical laws we know -- and for all that time the universe will be changing.
Changing change. Acceleration. Gravity. Maybe he could bring along some super-micro-miniature computer to find his way back through the new world. There'd have to be test missions at ever increased speed and distance. It all takes time. We don't know if we've got a decade left. Even if the physicists are right. Even if he'd come back younger, he'd have to be damn sure that an older world would care. A much older world, because it takes so damn long. He'd have to be sure that the world would still be there -- in either sense. He might not be able to find it.
The universe doesn't care much if you turn it around between mass and energy. It's all a matter of point of view. Bonds are made and broken all the time. Hell, as far as it's concerned you can burn up the whole goddamned earth to shoot a little seed into the blackness of space. "'Cause that's what you'd have to do. It's not "ready for take off". It's ready for jack-off. We haven't seen the face of the universe and we're just shooting into outer space. And nobody's seen God's face for eons. How do we know God's a woman?! Better save our act.
No, the universe doesn't care. We can play fool and try to replace the dirty smelly dangerous randomness of nature with what we've synthesized. We can pull the metal levers on plastic lighted boards with our rubber-gloved hands. We can do it all. The universe will have a good laugh. What a joke! Smelly little man whose own body is beyond his control wants to take over itsy-bitsy planet earth whose control is so simple.
Let's see now. Where's the key. Who knows what's under the hood? But if I could just find the key to turn the damn thing on. Why won't it start. Must be doing something wrong. Have to call in a mechanic. I don't know what's under the damn hood. What makes it all go. God damn it.
Fuck you Earth. A kick in the tires and walk away.
Yeah, right.
Where to, bud?
Like man, spacey. Way Out!
Oh wow.
Hey man, stay cool.
Yeah, man, quit you shakin'.You ain't goin' nowhere.
So GET DOWN!
DANCE, MOTHER FUCKER.
"Howie."
Yeah?
"This is God. You can't write this. This is classified."
Fuck you, God. (it's only words)
"That isn't nice."
We're not gonna blow it, man. This ain't your show no more. Leave us alone. We ain't coming crying to you. You got other places, man. Other souls need saving. Dig?
Let's come off the stage and live. Let's greet each other again. Take off the masks. Remember who you are. Only you can know. I begin to remember who I am. Don't leave me so alone. Let's not forsake one another. We have never been so alone. We have killed our father as the ancient prophecy said we must. We have slept with our mother. And we must not blind ourselves. We must not. We must open our eyes and see that we have no choice. There is no choice. I am so alone. Help me.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Chapter 15 seems like a continuation of 14, so here you go!
In general, tools for regularizing perceptual matters themselves have a perceptual relationship to the user. The sure feel of a wrench in the hand. But it might also be considered an emotional relationship. I like the feel of my tools. Tools for regularizing conceptual matters generally have an emotional relationship to the user. Words, gestures; but also perceptual tools which create perceptual patterns which can have primarily emotive value. The artist. The poet.
No words -- tools -- have absolute meanings. Concepts may be considered percepts from some other point of view. Motions may be considered emotions. But at least this minimal configuration cannot be reduced further. There are no universes conceivable in which perception and motion describe, exhaustively, that universe. There are no universes bereft of emotion. On that minimal configuration, we must agree.
We must agree because no other construing can make sense any longer. Tools must make sense in order to be useful. There may be an ending. Ambiguities revealed also end the mystery which made them so compelling. But it cannot be right to preserve ambiguity when it no longer exists. That is the only evil. It is frightening to imagine a language to account for everything -- to render everything understandable. So many of our activities will have to change drastically. But that has always been the case. The only difference is in scale.
And this language preserves otherness. There is no longer any basis for judging the validity -- the truth value -- of any other. Of any other culture, way of life, or person. The judgement itself becomes evil. Science is the attempt at a universal language, which, paradoxically, through its presumption that it is value free, ends up by judging every other which is not organized scientifically. Science is truly value-free, and that is the only condemnation necessary to awaken and realize that it cannot be a universal language. No universe is conceivable without emotion.
In a common sense way, we all know that otherness, paradox, or the reductive existence of a least two is essential for any minimal universe. Absolute assimilation is thereby the equivalent of non-existence. Likewise, absolute dissociation between self and other is impossible or unthinkable.
The quality of pattern-recognizing mind that is now predominant on the earth is the ability to organize complex perceptual motions, according to the mathematical language, as "universal laws". At least that is the apparently predominating quality of mind. "Nature" may yet have the last word. Still, the presumption is that this rational mind is predominant, and that these "universal laws" are valid for all physical existence throughout the universe. A further assumption is made that they are approximations which have proven validity within the known cosmos. So far as we can see with the aid of various perceptual and conceptual tools, the laws are valid. Apparently, as the tool inventory increases, these universal laws now apparently valid will be shown as approximations. In infinite universe, therefore, their validity is approximately nil.
"Infinite Universe" would include other dimensional structures. Anything other than what we can now conceive. In other words, our universal laws express the limits of our universe. But limits approached provide the necessity for change. If limits are approached too closely, that change is explosive. The future is always a surprise. We must not close our minds because of what was once exiting in its truth -- in the Past.
What, then, are the universal physical laws upon which we place so much trust? They are precisely tools for determining the degree to which we must share the same corner of perceptual -- moving -- universe. They determine the degree to which we must agree in order to share this universe.
Beyond what we can perceive, they are not universal. It is merely boastful to presume that they are. A pronouncement of specialness, and a fear of hostility. And they only describe one facet of this corner of the universe. They leave out emotion.
"Are there other universal laws than those we have 'discovered'?"
It is fruitless to consider that matter. This is the corner of the universe we have been fated to inhabit. These are the laws we have been fated to uncover. It is far too late now to imagine other universes. Or too early. A self which denies the laws of our universe forsakes membership. In the human realm, he is dead. In other realms, he merely ceases to exist. However, other universes may exist. Don't wait for them to call on the phone, though.
It is a common problem in quantum physics to wonder if information can be conveyed instantaneously. This problem, historically stems from Einstein and other's unwillingness to accept the precepts of quantum mechanics, whereby existence is seen to be a probability function. At the extremes of the physical universe -- the perceptual moving universe --existence can not even theoretically be known beyond a "cloud of probability". The act of perception -- measurement -- is said to "collapse" the probability function such that existence is either determined or not. However, according to Heisenberg, not everything can be known about the percept whose existence can be determined. If its exact location is to be known, then its momentum cannot be known, and vice-versa. This is the uncertainty principle. An apparently universal law.
The problem of instantaneous conveying of information comes in when it is observed that percepts are often inexorably paired with other percepts. Such a pair can be separated in space. If the existence and some quality of one percept in the pair is determined, the other is also determined, even though according to physical theory, nothing can be known about the physically distant percept prior to the act of perception. And the act of perception is limited by the speed of light. Perceptual information cannot travel faster. But in this case, information seems to have been conveyed instantaneously. What is the structure of physical universe that allows this to occur, scientists want to know. Einstein was disturbed, because he had determined the absolute limit of the propagation of perceptual information to be that of the speed of light. All information is conveyed according to this limit, in a perceptual universe.
It might anger some scientists to consider the connection between paired percepts to be a conceptual one. In a physical universe apart from mind, concepts cannot be prior to physical events. They are a property of mind, and arise from the experimenter and not the experiments. However, there are certain rather obvious consequences of quantum physics that are often overlooked: A single percept fills the universe with its probability function. If there are no other percepts, that probability function is universe. In a reductive universe of one self and one other, therefore, the probability function of each is affected by that of the other. This, of course, is all abstraction, because we are always conceiving of such scenarios from some outside vantage -- as though we could do such a thing.
Physicists do not deal in abstraction. There is a wonderful paradox here. Physicists deal with what exists concretely -- not abstractly. And yet, prior to quantum physics, they have assumed their position outside the realm of the percepts perceived by them. The universe exists in abstraction until the act of perception occurs which makes it concrete. That is to say, physical universe is known only by perception -- never in the abstract. The basic rule of science. Now with quantum physics, at least parts of the universe are actually determined by perception. Prior to that perception, of course, must be some conception of what is about to be perceived. Complex instruments need to be invented such that quantum mechanical perceptions can be made.
Now the physicist can never be sure that the universe of his perception is not merely the universe of his conception. At least at the reductive limits, he has entered into the picture according to the uncertainty principle. He no longer perceives what is there from some passive remove. He is connected by the act of perception. Whatever causes him to look here or there, this way or that, is now a part of what he perceives.
Now abstraction must be clarified. Abstraction is a universe that is totally in the mind. The practical physicist does not deal in abstraction. The quantum physicist, however, cannot inexorably determine the dividing line between what is in the mind and what is other. His universe may be abstract or concrete depending only on the priority of conception or perception. At the limits of perception, it is not at all clear which is prior.
Let's look again at a reductive universe of two. It can be said to have been fated that the two lonely percepts bear relationship to one another. If they are not connected perceptually; that is, by motion -- the case of the instant transmission of information referred to above -- then they are connected conceptually. This conceptual connection may be considered an emotional connection that is mutual or it may be inherent in the mind that is other to this reductive universe.
However, if we infer an other mind, then we have extended universe beyond its bounds of two percepts. But there is no universe in abstraction, and other mind must always be inferred if the conceptual relationship between percepts is not inherent in them, but is fated, or inherent in other mind.
Actually, the universe is myriad -- but there are some things which must be said about its reductive arrangement. To be conceived, universe must consist at least of self and other. To be perceived, other must be connected by motion. Motion, however, is instigated by emotional attraction that must be fated. There is, then, a quality at the reductive level, to the conceptual relationship between self and other. It can be a neutral relationship, in which case the mind of some other is required -- other to the two. It can be an attractive relationship in which case the attraction may be fated. It is interesting to note that in our universe, any motion between two percepts alone is always motion towards. There is no repulsion. Space-time is curved.
The light from the stars is not a spontaneous emission. It exists as a reminder that our universe is connected. All that has come together is in constant, moving, perceptual contact by the propagation of light waves in "space".
Fate, in the everyday universe, is the matter of accident. Those things which occur beyond our control. That is, beyond our ability to do anything about them or to predict their occurrence. These are said to be fated. In fact, most every activity in our everyday world is a response to fate. We control and understand very little. What we can do is to recognize patterns in the workings of fate, such that we insure our continued existence to the limits of probability. There is always, of course, an absolute limit beyond which we are helpless.
In the reductive universe, the fate of two percepts in motion is ineluctable. There is no direction for motion that will prevent their eventual collision. That collision would entail either that they conjoin and become a single percept, or that they forever meet and separate. However, in the reductive universe, we are really speaking only of probability clouds. And so the motion of percepts, in either response to their fate, can be expressed according to a single probability function. There is no difference whether they are in motion or not -- whether their relationship is conceptual or perceptual -- whether, indeed, they are concepts or percepts. Until mind is inferred.
Mind need have no existence in the manner of percepts or concepts. Mind is the pattern maker. It is that which results from a complex enough dynamic of concepts, percepts, motions, and emotions so as to have connection with other through definition of self or vice-versa. Mind and universe are eternally other, lest mind be universe, or universe be mind.
If the fate of a pair of percepts, which may be concepts in motion, which motion is initiated by emotion; If the fate of a pair of percepts in ineluctable, then they may be considered one in opposition to mind. If the universe apart from mind consists of two concepts, their relationship has been fated as such by mind. A conceptual relationship becomes a perceptual one when emotion arises. If universe apart from mind is all fated by mind, then mind and universe may be consisted one. If universe outside of mind is connected to mind in a manner not wholly originated in mind, then the existence of other mind must be inferred. Conceptual relationship between mind and other mind in turn depends on yet a third mind. Movement between minds -- a perceptual connection -- depends on either mutual emotion or the fate that inheres in third mind.
In our everyday world, we assume that fate has made the random connections which have led to our existence as human minds. We assume that the recombination of the stuff of the universe through the evolution of life on earth has been the result of hazardous -- or random -- meetings. These recombinations which result in turn are faced with random environment which determines which combinations may bear further fruit. Random environment in turn takes on attributes which are patterned according to the evolution of life. The life on earth -- or biosphere -- eventually overcomes the purely random events by which universe seems to be tending toward disorderliness, and instills a kind of anti-random process which is known as life. The conflict between the random and the anti-random. Between death and life is what -- over time -- has led to our existence.
We commonly assume that emotion is a purely human attribute. It may be possible to construe emotion as a universal attribute. Indeed, I think there is no choice. If instead of assuming that two giraffes, say, mate because they happen to meet, we assume some emotional attraction, then we will have to grossly alter our conception of emotion.
According to the foregoing, it must be recalled that motion is a function of time. The only sensible means for assuming the separation of percepts in motion in a reductive universe is time. Percepts not in motion, if there are two, must be connected conceptually. Their separation is not time-bound. In this reductive universe, emotion is a prognostication or a memory, depending on the direction of time. Percepts having mutual emotion will move toward or away from one another. Conceptual or perceptual relationships may be fated. Motions may be fated. But an emotion, once felt, can no longer be considered the action of fate. That is when other mind loses control. Loses the origination of connection. Felt emotions destroy origination.
Now suppose that, instead of assuming that all of the hazardous meetings that precede our existence have been merely accidents, we assume them to have occurred emotionally. We are here. Either it is fated -- in which case mind other than self has been involved, though we may have no emotional attachment to that mind. Or the various meetings have been the result of the prognostication of emotion. Emotion is the attraction to what one is fated to be attracted to. Emotion prognosticates perceptual relationship. That is, emotion timelessly foretells a relationship that only time will make perceptual. In the past we were connected to our mothers --we were one. Our emotion is the timeless prognostication of that connection. Time has no direction. Memory predicts.
We meet a member of the opposite sex. Our emotion is a timeless prognostication of connection. If the connection is strong, the emotion prior to consummation is painful. Some part of us is felt to be cut-off. But pain is a part of living, and should not be shunned. There are worse pains.
Appearance and reality function equivalently relative to human emotion. 0nly we can know what we really feel. 0nly we can know what is real. Part of that reality is always the existence of other. If we knowingly create the appearance of reality -- when in our hearts we know it to be false -- we will always cause pain. Some pain is needed. Time is our prison. But the pain caused of lies is a fruitless pain. Don't pretend unless you have to. Ultimately, there is no need.
To set up a goal and then to achieve it is very gratifying. This gratification confirms the existence of our will. In the West, that is equivalent to saying that it confirms the existence of our minds, whereby mind is defined as that which can take into itself what is perceptual or conceptual other. I see the hilltop. Only time separates my position here and my position there if I am strong, skillful, lucky, and have the will. I have lost my old position, but I have now the hilltop and from there many more goals will be reachable.
But will is only a partial attribute of mind. It is a lie -- a delusion -- when it is seen to represent the whole story. If we assume that it is only through will that our lives become meaningful, then we cut our selves off absolutely from the fabric of existence out of which we have sprung. Ultimately, we can't know why we do everything we do. Mostly we react to what fate throws our way. It is a delusion to believe that we can control very much. And if we succumb to the delusion, we progressively cut ourselves off from the only sustenance -- all of the universe.
That separation is not manifest through pain, but through numbness. We all live in a literal limbo, so long as we blind ourselves to our connections to the universe. It is an emotional blindness. We cut off the heartstrings. Ego is the scalpel, and the balm. Ego cuts us off. Ego makes us numb. I can offer no proof that the universe is the way I am suggesting here. Only you can do that. All I can tell you is that wonderful things can happen if you let go. The story of your life will write itself. Baffling coincidence will provide release from what you thought you had to find -- to figure out -- inside your own tiny mind. The answers are written as on a billboard all around you. I can't prove it to you. All I can do is ask you to believe that I have seen such answers, and that, If you let go you will too.
To be lucky is sometimes more gratifying than to succeed in an exercise of will. To be emotionally attracted to something and to have that something. Supposing you fall in love. There will be a connection there, if in your universe that is what love means. If you feel nothing, there will be no connection. Emotion is subject apparently to will, circumstance, words, etc. To the whole panoply of interpretation to which motion is subject. But will is an inhibitor of emotion. Willfully employed words will quench emotion. Poetry sets it afire. Motion is timebound. Emotion is perpetual.
So there is immortality, but it exists only in the moment. When you are connected to the entire universe --past, present, and future --you are immortal. To cut yourself off is a fate far worse than death. To attempt to refuse death is to refuse the moment, and assure that you are not immortal. If connections are severed, there is no future. And the past becomes meaningless accident. There would be no difference between a past that is void, and the one we remember, if we create a vacant future. All the myriad connections that led to the point of destruction would be mistakes. No different at all from the swirling chaos of physical universe that is other because we believe it to be dead. The balance of the universe is always held in the moment. Right now. And each individual is responsible --though only to himself. Meaning is up to everyone right now. If we imagine a grim future, we create it. If we feel depressed, we create the reasons. Optimism itself is the only optimistic future. Don't forget. And it's so simple to remember -- all the connections.
If any of emotion, concept, motion or percept are removed from the universe, meaning and existence are impossible. Accidents that are merely accidents are always dead -- apart from mind. Accidents that lead somewhere are always emotional. The attempt to remove accident from existence is an attempt to remove emotion.
You can't get to heaven by believing in someone else. You can't be immortal that simply. There is no such insurance policy. You must simply believe in yourself. Christ's work is finished. He has brought you here, and now you must believe in yourself. Everyone is the savior.
"My God, you don't stop. I indulge you and I try to offer advice, and I keep to myself what I really think, but you don't stop. You're not just preaching, you're ranting!"
I really can't help it. I made the mistake of rereading parts of this. It's true. I know it's true. I'm shaking with the truth. Maybe it's just the cold, or like when the wind shakes the boat and I can't tell whether it's the wind or my excitement, but I'm shaking, and I know this is true.
"For Christ's sake! You don't believe in truth. You said so yourself. This isn't truth. This is your belief. Now the problem is to get somebody to believe you. I'm skeptical. You're hardly making sense. You cross too many bounds. Too many fields."
I know. You're right. I can't prove anything. I don't want to prove anything. There's plenty of time for people to fool with proving things. But this is important. It has to be done now -- no later. People have to start to believe. I can't wait until I can say it better. It's now or never. But how do I go on? I'm getting shaky.
No words -- tools -- have absolute meanings. Concepts may be considered percepts from some other point of view. Motions may be considered emotions. But at least this minimal configuration cannot be reduced further. There are no universes conceivable in which perception and motion describe, exhaustively, that universe. There are no universes bereft of emotion. On that minimal configuration, we must agree.
We must agree because no other construing can make sense any longer. Tools must make sense in order to be useful. There may be an ending. Ambiguities revealed also end the mystery which made them so compelling. But it cannot be right to preserve ambiguity when it no longer exists. That is the only evil. It is frightening to imagine a language to account for everything -- to render everything understandable. So many of our activities will have to change drastically. But that has always been the case. The only difference is in scale.
And this language preserves otherness. There is no longer any basis for judging the validity -- the truth value -- of any other. Of any other culture, way of life, or person. The judgement itself becomes evil. Science is the attempt at a universal language, which, paradoxically, through its presumption that it is value free, ends up by judging every other which is not organized scientifically. Science is truly value-free, and that is the only condemnation necessary to awaken and realize that it cannot be a universal language. No universe is conceivable without emotion.
In a common sense way, we all know that otherness, paradox, or the reductive existence of a least two is essential for any minimal universe. Absolute assimilation is thereby the equivalent of non-existence. Likewise, absolute dissociation between self and other is impossible or unthinkable.
The quality of pattern-recognizing mind that is now predominant on the earth is the ability to organize complex perceptual motions, according to the mathematical language, as "universal laws". At least that is the apparently predominating quality of mind. "Nature" may yet have the last word. Still, the presumption is that this rational mind is predominant, and that these "universal laws" are valid for all physical existence throughout the universe. A further assumption is made that they are approximations which have proven validity within the known cosmos. So far as we can see with the aid of various perceptual and conceptual tools, the laws are valid. Apparently, as the tool inventory increases, these universal laws now apparently valid will be shown as approximations. In infinite universe, therefore, their validity is approximately nil.
"Infinite Universe" would include other dimensional structures. Anything other than what we can now conceive. In other words, our universal laws express the limits of our universe. But limits approached provide the necessity for change. If limits are approached too closely, that change is explosive. The future is always a surprise. We must not close our minds because of what was once exiting in its truth -- in the Past.
What, then, are the universal physical laws upon which we place so much trust? They are precisely tools for determining the degree to which we must share the same corner of perceptual -- moving -- universe. They determine the degree to which we must agree in order to share this universe.
Beyond what we can perceive, they are not universal. It is merely boastful to presume that they are. A pronouncement of specialness, and a fear of hostility. And they only describe one facet of this corner of the universe. They leave out emotion.
"Are there other universal laws than those we have 'discovered'?"
It is fruitless to consider that matter. This is the corner of the universe we have been fated to inhabit. These are the laws we have been fated to uncover. It is far too late now to imagine other universes. Or too early. A self which denies the laws of our universe forsakes membership. In the human realm, he is dead. In other realms, he merely ceases to exist. However, other universes may exist. Don't wait for them to call on the phone, though.
It is a common problem in quantum physics to wonder if information can be conveyed instantaneously. This problem, historically stems from Einstein and other's unwillingness to accept the precepts of quantum mechanics, whereby existence is seen to be a probability function. At the extremes of the physical universe -- the perceptual moving universe --existence can not even theoretically be known beyond a "cloud of probability". The act of perception -- measurement -- is said to "collapse" the probability function such that existence is either determined or not. However, according to Heisenberg, not everything can be known about the percept whose existence can be determined. If its exact location is to be known, then its momentum cannot be known, and vice-versa. This is the uncertainty principle. An apparently universal law.
The problem of instantaneous conveying of information comes in when it is observed that percepts are often inexorably paired with other percepts. Such a pair can be separated in space. If the existence and some quality of one percept in the pair is determined, the other is also determined, even though according to physical theory, nothing can be known about the physically distant percept prior to the act of perception. And the act of perception is limited by the speed of light. Perceptual information cannot travel faster. But in this case, information seems to have been conveyed instantaneously. What is the structure of physical universe that allows this to occur, scientists want to know. Einstein was disturbed, because he had determined the absolute limit of the propagation of perceptual information to be that of the speed of light. All information is conveyed according to this limit, in a perceptual universe.
It might anger some scientists to consider the connection between paired percepts to be a conceptual one. In a physical universe apart from mind, concepts cannot be prior to physical events. They are a property of mind, and arise from the experimenter and not the experiments. However, there are certain rather obvious consequences of quantum physics that are often overlooked: A single percept fills the universe with its probability function. If there are no other percepts, that probability function is universe. In a reductive universe of one self and one other, therefore, the probability function of each is affected by that of the other. This, of course, is all abstraction, because we are always conceiving of such scenarios from some outside vantage -- as though we could do such a thing.
Physicists do not deal in abstraction. There is a wonderful paradox here. Physicists deal with what exists concretely -- not abstractly. And yet, prior to quantum physics, they have assumed their position outside the realm of the percepts perceived by them. The universe exists in abstraction until the act of perception occurs which makes it concrete. That is to say, physical universe is known only by perception -- never in the abstract. The basic rule of science. Now with quantum physics, at least parts of the universe are actually determined by perception. Prior to that perception, of course, must be some conception of what is about to be perceived. Complex instruments need to be invented such that quantum mechanical perceptions can be made.
Now the physicist can never be sure that the universe of his perception is not merely the universe of his conception. At least at the reductive limits, he has entered into the picture according to the uncertainty principle. He no longer perceives what is there from some passive remove. He is connected by the act of perception. Whatever causes him to look here or there, this way or that, is now a part of what he perceives.
Now abstraction must be clarified. Abstraction is a universe that is totally in the mind. The practical physicist does not deal in abstraction. The quantum physicist, however, cannot inexorably determine the dividing line between what is in the mind and what is other. His universe may be abstract or concrete depending only on the priority of conception or perception. At the limits of perception, it is not at all clear which is prior.
Let's look again at a reductive universe of two. It can be said to have been fated that the two lonely percepts bear relationship to one another. If they are not connected perceptually; that is, by motion -- the case of the instant transmission of information referred to above -- then they are connected conceptually. This conceptual connection may be considered an emotional connection that is mutual or it may be inherent in the mind that is other to this reductive universe.
However, if we infer an other mind, then we have extended universe beyond its bounds of two percepts. But there is no universe in abstraction, and other mind must always be inferred if the conceptual relationship between percepts is not inherent in them, but is fated, or inherent in other mind.
Actually, the universe is myriad -- but there are some things which must be said about its reductive arrangement. To be conceived, universe must consist at least of self and other. To be perceived, other must be connected by motion. Motion, however, is instigated by emotional attraction that must be fated. There is, then, a quality at the reductive level, to the conceptual relationship between self and other. It can be a neutral relationship, in which case the mind of some other is required -- other to the two. It can be an attractive relationship in which case the attraction may be fated. It is interesting to note that in our universe, any motion between two percepts alone is always motion towards. There is no repulsion. Space-time is curved.
The light from the stars is not a spontaneous emission. It exists as a reminder that our universe is connected. All that has come together is in constant, moving, perceptual contact by the propagation of light waves in "space".
Fate, in the everyday universe, is the matter of accident. Those things which occur beyond our control. That is, beyond our ability to do anything about them or to predict their occurrence. These are said to be fated. In fact, most every activity in our everyday world is a response to fate. We control and understand very little. What we can do is to recognize patterns in the workings of fate, such that we insure our continued existence to the limits of probability. There is always, of course, an absolute limit beyond which we are helpless.
In the reductive universe, the fate of two percepts in motion is ineluctable. There is no direction for motion that will prevent their eventual collision. That collision would entail either that they conjoin and become a single percept, or that they forever meet and separate. However, in the reductive universe, we are really speaking only of probability clouds. And so the motion of percepts, in either response to their fate, can be expressed according to a single probability function. There is no difference whether they are in motion or not -- whether their relationship is conceptual or perceptual -- whether, indeed, they are concepts or percepts. Until mind is inferred.
Mind need have no existence in the manner of percepts or concepts. Mind is the pattern maker. It is that which results from a complex enough dynamic of concepts, percepts, motions, and emotions so as to have connection with other through definition of self or vice-versa. Mind and universe are eternally other, lest mind be universe, or universe be mind.
If the fate of a pair of percepts, which may be concepts in motion, which motion is initiated by emotion; If the fate of a pair of percepts in ineluctable, then they may be considered one in opposition to mind. If the universe apart from mind consists of two concepts, their relationship has been fated as such by mind. A conceptual relationship becomes a perceptual one when emotion arises. If universe apart from mind is all fated by mind, then mind and universe may be consisted one. If universe outside of mind is connected to mind in a manner not wholly originated in mind, then the existence of other mind must be inferred. Conceptual relationship between mind and other mind in turn depends on yet a third mind. Movement between minds -- a perceptual connection -- depends on either mutual emotion or the fate that inheres in third mind.
In our everyday world, we assume that fate has made the random connections which have led to our existence as human minds. We assume that the recombination of the stuff of the universe through the evolution of life on earth has been the result of hazardous -- or random -- meetings. These recombinations which result in turn are faced with random environment which determines which combinations may bear further fruit. Random environment in turn takes on attributes which are patterned according to the evolution of life. The life on earth -- or biosphere -- eventually overcomes the purely random events by which universe seems to be tending toward disorderliness, and instills a kind of anti-random process which is known as life. The conflict between the random and the anti-random. Between death and life is what -- over time -- has led to our existence.
We commonly assume that emotion is a purely human attribute. It may be possible to construe emotion as a universal attribute. Indeed, I think there is no choice. If instead of assuming that two giraffes, say, mate because they happen to meet, we assume some emotional attraction, then we will have to grossly alter our conception of emotion.
According to the foregoing, it must be recalled that motion is a function of time. The only sensible means for assuming the separation of percepts in motion in a reductive universe is time. Percepts not in motion, if there are two, must be connected conceptually. Their separation is not time-bound. In this reductive universe, emotion is a prognostication or a memory, depending on the direction of time. Percepts having mutual emotion will move toward or away from one another. Conceptual or perceptual relationships may be fated. Motions may be fated. But an emotion, once felt, can no longer be considered the action of fate. That is when other mind loses control. Loses the origination of connection. Felt emotions destroy origination.
Now suppose that, instead of assuming that all of the hazardous meetings that precede our existence have been merely accidents, we assume them to have occurred emotionally. We are here. Either it is fated -- in which case mind other than self has been involved, though we may have no emotional attachment to that mind. Or the various meetings have been the result of the prognostication of emotion. Emotion is the attraction to what one is fated to be attracted to. Emotion prognosticates perceptual relationship. That is, emotion timelessly foretells a relationship that only time will make perceptual. In the past we were connected to our mothers --we were one. Our emotion is the timeless prognostication of that connection. Time has no direction. Memory predicts.
We meet a member of the opposite sex. Our emotion is a timeless prognostication of connection. If the connection is strong, the emotion prior to consummation is painful. Some part of us is felt to be cut-off. But pain is a part of living, and should not be shunned. There are worse pains.
Appearance and reality function equivalently relative to human emotion. 0nly we can know what we really feel. 0nly we can know what is real. Part of that reality is always the existence of other. If we knowingly create the appearance of reality -- when in our hearts we know it to be false -- we will always cause pain. Some pain is needed. Time is our prison. But the pain caused of lies is a fruitless pain. Don't pretend unless you have to. Ultimately, there is no need.
To set up a goal and then to achieve it is very gratifying. This gratification confirms the existence of our will. In the West, that is equivalent to saying that it confirms the existence of our minds, whereby mind is defined as that which can take into itself what is perceptual or conceptual other. I see the hilltop. Only time separates my position here and my position there if I am strong, skillful, lucky, and have the will. I have lost my old position, but I have now the hilltop and from there many more goals will be reachable.
But will is only a partial attribute of mind. It is a lie -- a delusion -- when it is seen to represent the whole story. If we assume that it is only through will that our lives become meaningful, then we cut our selves off absolutely from the fabric of existence out of which we have sprung. Ultimately, we can't know why we do everything we do. Mostly we react to what fate throws our way. It is a delusion to believe that we can control very much. And if we succumb to the delusion, we progressively cut ourselves off from the only sustenance -- all of the universe.
That separation is not manifest through pain, but through numbness. We all live in a literal limbo, so long as we blind ourselves to our connections to the universe. It is an emotional blindness. We cut off the heartstrings. Ego is the scalpel, and the balm. Ego cuts us off. Ego makes us numb. I can offer no proof that the universe is the way I am suggesting here. Only you can do that. All I can tell you is that wonderful things can happen if you let go. The story of your life will write itself. Baffling coincidence will provide release from what you thought you had to find -- to figure out -- inside your own tiny mind. The answers are written as on a billboard all around you. I can't prove it to you. All I can do is ask you to believe that I have seen such answers, and that, If you let go you will too.
To be lucky is sometimes more gratifying than to succeed in an exercise of will. To be emotionally attracted to something and to have that something. Supposing you fall in love. There will be a connection there, if in your universe that is what love means. If you feel nothing, there will be no connection. Emotion is subject apparently to will, circumstance, words, etc. To the whole panoply of interpretation to which motion is subject. But will is an inhibitor of emotion. Willfully employed words will quench emotion. Poetry sets it afire. Motion is timebound. Emotion is perpetual.
So there is immortality, but it exists only in the moment. When you are connected to the entire universe --past, present, and future --you are immortal. To cut yourself off is a fate far worse than death. To attempt to refuse death is to refuse the moment, and assure that you are not immortal. If connections are severed, there is no future. And the past becomes meaningless accident. There would be no difference between a past that is void, and the one we remember, if we create a vacant future. All the myriad connections that led to the point of destruction would be mistakes. No different at all from the swirling chaos of physical universe that is other because we believe it to be dead. The balance of the universe is always held in the moment. Right now. And each individual is responsible --though only to himself. Meaning is up to everyone right now. If we imagine a grim future, we create it. If we feel depressed, we create the reasons. Optimism itself is the only optimistic future. Don't forget. And it's so simple to remember -- all the connections.
If any of emotion, concept, motion or percept are removed from the universe, meaning and existence are impossible. Accidents that are merely accidents are always dead -- apart from mind. Accidents that lead somewhere are always emotional. The attempt to remove accident from existence is an attempt to remove emotion.
You can't get to heaven by believing in someone else. You can't be immortal that simply. There is no such insurance policy. You must simply believe in yourself. Christ's work is finished. He has brought you here, and now you must believe in yourself. Everyone is the savior.
"My God, you don't stop. I indulge you and I try to offer advice, and I keep to myself what I really think, but you don't stop. You're not just preaching, you're ranting!"
I really can't help it. I made the mistake of rereading parts of this. It's true. I know it's true. I'm shaking with the truth. Maybe it's just the cold, or like when the wind shakes the boat and I can't tell whether it's the wind or my excitement, but I'm shaking, and I know this is true.
"For Christ's sake! You don't believe in truth. You said so yourself. This isn't truth. This is your belief. Now the problem is to get somebody to believe you. I'm skeptical. You're hardly making sense. You cross too many bounds. Too many fields."
I know. You're right. I can't prove anything. I don't want to prove anything. There's plenty of time for people to fool with proving things. But this is important. It has to be done now -- no later. People have to start to believe. I can't wait until I can say it better. It's now or never. But how do I go on? I'm getting shaky.
oooh! Friday the 13 - better get in Chapter 14 1983
Mathematics is a powerful language. I have been good at it, but my study was forsaken because of my own misplaced anger and by the world's apparently misplaced use of number. I lost my desire. As a language, mathematics is a powerful tool. Computation is not a prominent facility of the human mind, however. It takes arduous learning, and in the end is a task that can always be performed more reliably and simply by computers. The principles of mathematics are not difficult, however. The computer is useless without the prior human understanding of the principles of math. The computer might also be dangerous if it is used to prove things whose proof depends on principles not apparent to the person who is being convinced.
We are being made into numbers. As always we are told that it is for our own good. Rationally, there's nothing wrong with a social security number. It's for your own good. But it seems to be required everywhere, and most of us sense something evil in that. Those who aren't dominated by the demon rationality which tells them to ignore what they know with their hearts. Credit cards. Who are you anyway? Do you even exist without your number? Without countable quantities of money you are nothing.
Is it really your money? Are you willing to act like a number because you can't believe in yourself? Are you willing to believe that you are a nobody? It isn't your money. As long as you believe that owning those countable amounts is the key to having a name, you are the slave of the true possessor of the money -- the holder of the purse strings of your soul. It isn't the wealthy. They are more horribly enslaved. It is the institution. The bank which credits your number, and by that credit accrues more capital for the great institutions -- the corporations -- that truly own the earth. We are all slaves to a system. An inhuman, incorporeal web of false desire which stays erect only out of our fear -- yours and mine. Don't be a number.
The power of mathematics comes from its ability to regularize the pattern sensing capability, which is the highest attribute of mind. Any tool effectively does the same thing. Certain shapes are useful in nature. To a human mind, equipped with pattern perceiving abilities and their reciprocal pattern making abilities -- hands -- these shapes are related immediately to the problem of survival, which provides the simplest why of man's relationship to the universe.
A knife can regularize shapes which are otherwise only randomly available, the regularized shape in turn provides through its vagaries a new set of random impressions from which further improvements suggest themselves to pattern recognizing mind. Words can allow the involvement of many minds in the process so that the randomly dispersed vagaries among the individual minds may combine to produce and implement some pattern which best resolves the why of their collective existence.
Words themselves are tools; that is, pattern regularizing devices. Their import is to regularize not just the environment, but the entire and cacophonous assemblage of experiences which are man's relationship to the environment. Emotions, concepts, percepts, and motions are all regularized by language so that, within a community, the mind can be shared. Through use of language that is honest and open, a sharing of fates occurs whereby all the random --fated; hazarded -- stuff of which patterns are made are shared by the community. Upon this affective sharing depends the why of the group -- its relationship to what is other.
Mathematics deals only with the regularization of percepts and motions. It is a partial language, but by far the most powerful for that sort of regularization. It provides a handle on the world. It enables the most powerful manipulations. When it is understood. And the understanding is an agreement. Concepts must be formed in order for the tool to be used. A relationship between the tool and its meaning --its use -- needs to be understood. Patterns are regularized in such a way that demonstrable rules can be shown to organize their behavior. Mathematics is very stable, and within the limits of the particular dialect, the rules don't change. That is despite the fact that mathematics is often used to describe the most dynamic of phenomena.
Regularization of concepts must precede and follow the employment of mathematics as a tool. The proofs can be elaborate which establish the basis for agreement among minds using the same branch of mathematics. And when mathematics is used for regularizing percepts and motions in the matter of the why of man's existence, its usefulness depends on measurement. There has to be a way for relating the rough assemblages of experience to the powerful language of mathematics. The more precise the measurement, the more surely useful are the descriptions that mathematics can provide.
Measurement is the conceptualization of universe. The rendering static what otherwise is constantly changing. Words are a measure in the same way, though what they can measure goes well beyond percepts and motions.
Prior to the regularization of concepts which precedes the employment of any tool, there must be some emotion. It may begin with a simple desire to survive. A concept may be formed by which the regularity of, say, the seasons is noticed. The language of mathematical computation will be used to further regularize those percepts and motions that seem to be included in the regularized change of the seasons.
More pattern regularizing -- more manipulation -- is seen to be required than when other is only different. Survival is always limited. We are born and we die. In direct response to a fear of death we attempt to create tools that will prolong individual life. We want to preserve our specialness against the hostility of nature which mocks our specialness by indifference to our mortality. The mystery of nature is challenged. It is really a silly competition. We will always die. We will always be limited.
Death need not be considered a threat. Men are afraid of what is other. But women can experience an other self within their own when they are with child. They are not so threatened by paradox. It is not apparently a terrible accommodation, although some women seem to accept the manly propaganda that carrying a child is a suffering. I can't know because I am a man. But it would seem that the joy would equal the suffering. I have been told as much. Women can be reminded more easily of their connection to what is other. Men forget more easily, and fear the return. They use tools. They manipulate. Their bodies are constructed as procreative tools to be forever denied an intimate knowledge of self and other as one. Pity the pricks.
Can you laugh? Some will be angry with men because they are all rapists. Some will be angry with the West because it has been raping mother earth. Some will be angry with me because of my terrible language. My pomposity. (Though I doubt they would have read this far) Some will be angry with themselves. But can you laugh? Paradox is also a joke. We really can't have known until now. There is still time to change.
There are two ways to breech the boundary between the self and other. A perceptual breech involves the establishment of moving connections between self and other. Other is assimilated when movements originating within self are seen to be connected to what is other. When the moving connections have no origin -- but are mutual -- then there has been a breech, though not an assimilation. We may clothe ourselves to limit such breeches. Other may be similarly clothed.
A conceptual breech involves emotive connection. Likewise, when there is origination, the other has been assimilated, at least in part. When the connection has no origin, but is mutual, then the breech is not a violation. The distinction between self and other is left intact.
Out of all breeches of boundaries comes something new. The breech is a connection. Self and other become one when the new life is allowed to grow. The new life produced of violation is always unbalanced.
Violation is only possible when there is origination. In man, when there is will. A perceptual connection -- a connection of motion -- that has no origin, is a fated connection. When the body is considered other than self, for example, the perceptual or moving connections which conspire to give it a regular and recognizable shape are all fated, within limits. Generally, unless we willfully damage our bodies, the interconnections are not considered to have any origin. Origin implies will.
Emotional connection that is originated would be a willful employment of conceptual tools -- words -- to induce an emotional connection that is not mutual. A seductress attracts without being attracted. Gestures. Voice. Willful manipulation of patterns to induce emotional connection or assimilation.
There is no need to fear the various tendencies. Manipulation may be required. Submission may be appropriate. It is only important to know the truth. To make the effort at vision. To see when -- at what time -- the will becomes evil. When a willful definition of self automatically entails a violation of any other.
We are being made into numbers. As always we are told that it is for our own good. Rationally, there's nothing wrong with a social security number. It's for your own good. But it seems to be required everywhere, and most of us sense something evil in that. Those who aren't dominated by the demon rationality which tells them to ignore what they know with their hearts. Credit cards. Who are you anyway? Do you even exist without your number? Without countable quantities of money you are nothing.
Is it really your money? Are you willing to act like a number because you can't believe in yourself? Are you willing to believe that you are a nobody? It isn't your money. As long as you believe that owning those countable amounts is the key to having a name, you are the slave of the true possessor of the money -- the holder of the purse strings of your soul. It isn't the wealthy. They are more horribly enslaved. It is the institution. The bank which credits your number, and by that credit accrues more capital for the great institutions -- the corporations -- that truly own the earth. We are all slaves to a system. An inhuman, incorporeal web of false desire which stays erect only out of our fear -- yours and mine. Don't be a number.
The power of mathematics comes from its ability to regularize the pattern sensing capability, which is the highest attribute of mind. Any tool effectively does the same thing. Certain shapes are useful in nature. To a human mind, equipped with pattern perceiving abilities and their reciprocal pattern making abilities -- hands -- these shapes are related immediately to the problem of survival, which provides the simplest why of man's relationship to the universe.
A knife can regularize shapes which are otherwise only randomly available, the regularized shape in turn provides through its vagaries a new set of random impressions from which further improvements suggest themselves to pattern recognizing mind. Words can allow the involvement of many minds in the process so that the randomly dispersed vagaries among the individual minds may combine to produce and implement some pattern which best resolves the why of their collective existence.
Words themselves are tools; that is, pattern regularizing devices. Their import is to regularize not just the environment, but the entire and cacophonous assemblage of experiences which are man's relationship to the environment. Emotions, concepts, percepts, and motions are all regularized by language so that, within a community, the mind can be shared. Through use of language that is honest and open, a sharing of fates occurs whereby all the random --fated; hazarded -- stuff of which patterns are made are shared by the community. Upon this affective sharing depends the why of the group -- its relationship to what is other.
Mathematics deals only with the regularization of percepts and motions. It is a partial language, but by far the most powerful for that sort of regularization. It provides a handle on the world. It enables the most powerful manipulations. When it is understood. And the understanding is an agreement. Concepts must be formed in order for the tool to be used. A relationship between the tool and its meaning --its use -- needs to be understood. Patterns are regularized in such a way that demonstrable rules can be shown to organize their behavior. Mathematics is very stable, and within the limits of the particular dialect, the rules don't change. That is despite the fact that mathematics is often used to describe the most dynamic of phenomena.
Regularization of concepts must precede and follow the employment of mathematics as a tool. The proofs can be elaborate which establish the basis for agreement among minds using the same branch of mathematics. And when mathematics is used for regularizing percepts and motions in the matter of the why of man's existence, its usefulness depends on measurement. There has to be a way for relating the rough assemblages of experience to the powerful language of mathematics. The more precise the measurement, the more surely useful are the descriptions that mathematics can provide.
Measurement is the conceptualization of universe. The rendering static what otherwise is constantly changing. Words are a measure in the same way, though what they can measure goes well beyond percepts and motions.
Prior to the regularization of concepts which precedes the employment of any tool, there must be some emotion. It may begin with a simple desire to survive. A concept may be formed by which the regularity of, say, the seasons is noticed. The language of mathematical computation will be used to further regularize those percepts and motions that seem to be included in the regularized change of the seasons.
The phases of the moon or the passage from day to night might be simply added together and compared with the passage of the seasons.
It is a kind of magic which allows mind to gain a measure of control over his existence. In the matter of why, he has gained a simple answer by his ability to predict those matters of which he can conceive. The conception comes before the perception whenever there is more than one mind. The very existence of more than one mind depends on the proof of connection between them. The only proof is the sharing of language. And that depends on the measure of words. You can't know what your companion sees until he tells you. And you must understand him. You must agree to believe. You must trust.
That is the answer that all mind seeks. Not the answer in words -- but the answer through words. What does my existence mean. The first answer is always to the matter of survival. The mind of animal life is simple, but at least it knows how to pose the proper question. In that man is hopelessly stupid. He considers only the tool. He weighs it in his hand, then turns it on himself in order to unlock an answer that is only inherent in the relationship. Or he turns it on what is other. We have met the enemy and he is US.
Computers are very powerful tools which can complete very complex calculations unapproachable by human mind; or rather, approachable only through the computer. All the complex emotions including trust, desire, belief, fear or whatever are included in the understanding of the way the computer works; or in the trust that it does work the way one has been told, which makes its calculations useful. We can trust the employment of the computer to aid on the way to the moon, much as we can trust a knife to carve a spear --provided we are skilled in its employment.
Ultimately, all of the tools of mankind, if freely and openly employed, attend to a sharing of the fates of all mankind in the matter of why -- mankind’s relationship to the universe. If not freely and openly employed, they may seem to include one community and exclude another. In reality, I believe that such employment insures only that the fate of the entire community, which is now all mankind, is sealed.
When survival describes completely the why of a mind, or community of minds, the chances are optimized when that mind is open -- free to make patterns in the widest possible sense. A language which prevents certain patterns from recognition, for instance, has negative survival value. I am not thinking here of natural or evolutionary limitations in tool production. (it would help to have pistols instead of spears to fight off tigers, etc.) I am thinking, rather, of arbitrary closings off of mind, such as a taboo against speaking with women, for instance, or the refusal to use the left hand -- any sort of restriction. The only natural restriction -- which is a time-bound one -- is that the tool work. That it make sense.
The mind oscillates. What was once an opening up, becomes a closing off when the relationship between self and other has changed. There is a different answer to the question of why at every moment of existence. But the patterns made by mind are themselves only possible if there is an indulgence of the fiction that such patterns endure. They surely endure beyond the lifetime of any individual. Language changes but slowly. But communities, too, must live and die. And when the community or the individual refuses to die, it is as perverse as the unmoving grain of sand in the face of the wind. There can be no such refusal.
When faced with a choice in the matter of survival between one mind or community and another, it would seem clear that the obvious pattern for mind to recognize is that "it's us or them." Happens every time -- a simple pattern.
Except that, on occasion, mind may notice that its survival chances are enhanced by allowing an increase through inclusion of the alien mind. There may be cases where the matter of why is best attended by a closed mind, but I confess that I have a hard time imagining them. What really occurs is that the sustenance of mind is conceived to be dependent on the automatic pattern integration which is conceived to be other than mind. Nature. And the sustenance of nature is seen as limited.
Nature's sustenance is limited at various times in history. There have been times when it has truly been a case of us or them. I wonder what we lose each time we make that decision. For at its base is a simple inability to agree. What is shared is the agreement that sustenance is limited. What isn't shared is the priority of one or the other's survival. But there is the choice of agreement on priority, and trust in sustenance. I wonder what might be gained. To live or perish together. Perhaps if we get together, we can come up with a new pattern which will render the limits of nature's sustenance fictional limits.
That has been the true pattern of history. The sharings are what endure. The wars are aberrations. We get caught up in them because we are ensnared by the mythology of control. We hardly notice that the wars are a mask over the actual sharing which ensues. They may be love acts or they may be rapes. And it may be our own point of view that determines the difference. We are the progeny. We may decide whether our lives are accidents -- whether we are all bastards -- or whether the joinings have been heartfelt and meaningful.
We do not live in that kind of world any more. We are clever. We have learned some of nature's secrets. And we have the choice of keeping them secret, or of sharing them. There need no longer be any question about the sustenance of nature. We know now that if we are careful, nature's bounty is limitless. We have gone far beyond the simple plowshares at the origin of civilization. Our tools are myriad, and their uses unbounded. But we have to agree. And be careful.
There is only one evil, and that is the refusal to see when the capacity is offered. What has been done in the history of man up to now has not been evil. It has all been necessary in order that this moment exists. There have been good tendencies and bad, but the sum total depends only on us now in this moment for its balance. We make the pattern. And we only keep it good by our willingness to see. There can be no condemnations except of oneself.
Nature is other than mind for some communities. For some, the body is other than mind. It might be considered part of nature -- only important to mind for its sustenance. Mind is always self. But where the boundary is drawn makes all the difference in the world in the matter of why. The boundary may be at the neck. It may be at the skin. Or there may only be a flexible boundary depending on how we are connected to what is other.
There must be a boundary. When we use tools evasively, we express something about the quality of this boundary. We are saying either that the boundary should not be crossed, or that the crossing may not be mutual. An honest and open use of tools always expresses the belief that boundaries must be crossed such that self and other are preserved in the crossing. It is always a rape to make a crossing that is beneficial to the self and not to the other. And it can only be a rape when the rapist knows. Some boundaries may be best left uncrossed, but there is usually no need for evasion then. Because true desire is a mutual thing. Evasion is a defense against lies as often as it is the origin of the lie. And boundaries may be moved, but the attempt to dissolve any boundary altogether is the worst kind of willful blindness. Nothing is without limits. And the time must be right for boundaries to be moved.
The use of tools demands the conception of self and other. The use of some tools, such as language, demands the conception of community -- connections among different minds. There have been conflicts, throughout history, between responses to other which assimilate and those which subjugate or destroy. The first response regards the other as different. The second response regards the difference as hostility --potential or actual. Real or imagined. To regard other as hostile demands a certain why. It is mind's function to be special when other is hostile. But mind's function may only be to be different -- to be other.
Competition is the response to a threat to specialness.
More tools are created when other is considered hostile.
It is a kind of magic which allows mind to gain a measure of control over his existence. In the matter of why, he has gained a simple answer by his ability to predict those matters of which he can conceive. The conception comes before the perception whenever there is more than one mind. The very existence of more than one mind depends on the proof of connection between them. The only proof is the sharing of language. And that depends on the measure of words. You can't know what your companion sees until he tells you. And you must understand him. You must agree to believe. You must trust.
That is the answer that all mind seeks. Not the answer in words -- but the answer through words. What does my existence mean. The first answer is always to the matter of survival. The mind of animal life is simple, but at least it knows how to pose the proper question. In that man is hopelessly stupid. He considers only the tool. He weighs it in his hand, then turns it on himself in order to unlock an answer that is only inherent in the relationship. Or he turns it on what is other. We have met the enemy and he is US.
Computers are very powerful tools which can complete very complex calculations unapproachable by human mind; or rather, approachable only through the computer. All the complex emotions including trust, desire, belief, fear or whatever are included in the understanding of the way the computer works; or in the trust that it does work the way one has been told, which makes its calculations useful. We can trust the employment of the computer to aid on the way to the moon, much as we can trust a knife to carve a spear --provided we are skilled in its employment.
Ultimately, all of the tools of mankind, if freely and openly employed, attend to a sharing of the fates of all mankind in the matter of why -- mankind’s relationship to the universe. If not freely and openly employed, they may seem to include one community and exclude another. In reality, I believe that such employment insures only that the fate of the entire community, which is now all mankind, is sealed.
When survival describes completely the why of a mind, or community of minds, the chances are optimized when that mind is open -- free to make patterns in the widest possible sense. A language which prevents certain patterns from recognition, for instance, has negative survival value. I am not thinking here of natural or evolutionary limitations in tool production. (it would help to have pistols instead of spears to fight off tigers, etc.) I am thinking, rather, of arbitrary closings off of mind, such as a taboo against speaking with women, for instance, or the refusal to use the left hand -- any sort of restriction. The only natural restriction -- which is a time-bound one -- is that the tool work. That it make sense.
The mind oscillates. What was once an opening up, becomes a closing off when the relationship between self and other has changed. There is a different answer to the question of why at every moment of existence. But the patterns made by mind are themselves only possible if there is an indulgence of the fiction that such patterns endure. They surely endure beyond the lifetime of any individual. Language changes but slowly. But communities, too, must live and die. And when the community or the individual refuses to die, it is as perverse as the unmoving grain of sand in the face of the wind. There can be no such refusal.
When faced with a choice in the matter of survival between one mind or community and another, it would seem clear that the obvious pattern for mind to recognize is that "it's us or them." Happens every time -- a simple pattern.
Except that, on occasion, mind may notice that its survival chances are enhanced by allowing an increase through inclusion of the alien mind. There may be cases where the matter of why is best attended by a closed mind, but I confess that I have a hard time imagining them. What really occurs is that the sustenance of mind is conceived to be dependent on the automatic pattern integration which is conceived to be other than mind. Nature. And the sustenance of nature is seen as limited.
Nature's sustenance is limited at various times in history. There have been times when it has truly been a case of us or them. I wonder what we lose each time we make that decision. For at its base is a simple inability to agree. What is shared is the agreement that sustenance is limited. What isn't shared is the priority of one or the other's survival. But there is the choice of agreement on priority, and trust in sustenance. I wonder what might be gained. To live or perish together. Perhaps if we get together, we can come up with a new pattern which will render the limits of nature's sustenance fictional limits.
That has been the true pattern of history. The sharings are what endure. The wars are aberrations. We get caught up in them because we are ensnared by the mythology of control. We hardly notice that the wars are a mask over the actual sharing which ensues. They may be love acts or they may be rapes. And it may be our own point of view that determines the difference. We are the progeny. We may decide whether our lives are accidents -- whether we are all bastards -- or whether the joinings have been heartfelt and meaningful.
We do not live in that kind of world any more. We are clever. We have learned some of nature's secrets. And we have the choice of keeping them secret, or of sharing them. There need no longer be any question about the sustenance of nature. We know now that if we are careful, nature's bounty is limitless. We have gone far beyond the simple plowshares at the origin of civilization. Our tools are myriad, and their uses unbounded. But we have to agree. And be careful.
There is only one evil, and that is the refusal to see when the capacity is offered. What has been done in the history of man up to now has not been evil. It has all been necessary in order that this moment exists. There have been good tendencies and bad, but the sum total depends only on us now in this moment for its balance. We make the pattern. And we only keep it good by our willingness to see. There can be no condemnations except of oneself.
Nature is other than mind for some communities. For some, the body is other than mind. It might be considered part of nature -- only important to mind for its sustenance. Mind is always self. But where the boundary is drawn makes all the difference in the world in the matter of why. The boundary may be at the neck. It may be at the skin. Or there may only be a flexible boundary depending on how we are connected to what is other.
There must be a boundary. When we use tools evasively, we express something about the quality of this boundary. We are saying either that the boundary should not be crossed, or that the crossing may not be mutual. An honest and open use of tools always expresses the belief that boundaries must be crossed such that self and other are preserved in the crossing. It is always a rape to make a crossing that is beneficial to the self and not to the other. And it can only be a rape when the rapist knows. Some boundaries may be best left uncrossed, but there is usually no need for evasion then. Because true desire is a mutual thing. Evasion is a defense against lies as often as it is the origin of the lie. And boundaries may be moved, but the attempt to dissolve any boundary altogether is the worst kind of willful blindness. Nothing is without limits. And the time must be right for boundaries to be moved.
The use of tools demands the conception of self and other. The use of some tools, such as language, demands the conception of community -- connections among different minds. There have been conflicts, throughout history, between responses to other which assimilate and those which subjugate or destroy. The first response regards the other as different. The second response regards the difference as hostility --potential or actual. Real or imagined. To regard other as hostile demands a certain why. It is mind's function to be special when other is hostile. But mind's function may only be to be different -- to be other.
Competition is the response to a threat to specialness.
More tools are created when other is considered hostile.
More pattern regularizing -- more manipulation -- is seen to be required than when other is only different. Survival is always limited. We are born and we die. In direct response to a fear of death we attempt to create tools that will prolong individual life. We want to preserve our specialness against the hostility of nature which mocks our specialness by indifference to our mortality. The mystery of nature is challenged. It is really a silly competition. We will always die. We will always be limited.
Death need not be considered a threat. Men are afraid of what is other. But women can experience an other self within their own when they are with child. They are not so threatened by paradox. It is not apparently a terrible accommodation, although some women seem to accept the manly propaganda that carrying a child is a suffering. I can't know because I am a man. But it would seem that the joy would equal the suffering. I have been told as much. Women can be reminded more easily of their connection to what is other. Men forget more easily, and fear the return. They use tools. They manipulate. Their bodies are constructed as procreative tools to be forever denied an intimate knowledge of self and other as one. Pity the pricks.
Can you laugh? Some will be angry with men because they are all rapists. Some will be angry with the West because it has been raping mother earth. Some will be angry with me because of my terrible language. My pomposity. (Though I doubt they would have read this far) Some will be angry with themselves. But can you laugh? Paradox is also a joke. We really can't have known until now. There is still time to change.
There are two ways to breech the boundary between the self and other. A perceptual breech involves the establishment of moving connections between self and other. Other is assimilated when movements originating within self are seen to be connected to what is other. When the moving connections have no origin -- but are mutual -- then there has been a breech, though not an assimilation. We may clothe ourselves to limit such breeches. Other may be similarly clothed.
A conceptual breech involves emotive connection. Likewise, when there is origination, the other has been assimilated, at least in part. When the connection has no origin, but is mutual, then the breech is not a violation. The distinction between self and other is left intact.
Out of all breeches of boundaries comes something new. The breech is a connection. Self and other become one when the new life is allowed to grow. The new life produced of violation is always unbalanced.
Violation is only possible when there is origination. In man, when there is will. A perceptual connection -- a connection of motion -- that has no origin, is a fated connection. When the body is considered other than self, for example, the perceptual or moving connections which conspire to give it a regular and recognizable shape are all fated, within limits. Generally, unless we willfully damage our bodies, the interconnections are not considered to have any origin. Origin implies will.
Emotional connection that is originated would be a willful employment of conceptual tools -- words -- to induce an emotional connection that is not mutual. A seductress attracts without being attracted. Gestures. Voice. Willful manipulation of patterns to induce emotional connection or assimilation.
There is no need to fear the various tendencies. Manipulation may be required. Submission may be appropriate. It is only important to know the truth. To make the effort at vision. To see when -- at what time -- the will becomes evil. When a willful definition of self automatically entails a violation of any other.
Time to Move On!
Well, despite the dentist's best efforts, the insurance company denied the cracked, rotted, and broken down tooth. There must have been some sort of internal memo at the company, to increase the denials and staunch the cash flow bleeding the world now suffers together. I called. They'll resubmit. Very friendly, all. I trust no jobs are at stake.
But I think it's about time to put childish things aside, as my still and favorite Pres. suggested, and get down to the business of doing something. I just finished my most recent cosmology tome, and was bemused to find that a search on its title revealed that a "Surfer Dude" has one-upped the University scholars. But the surfer dude moves in the wrong direction, I'm certain.
So, I won't get anywhere further down the road by compulsively reading for clues. This latest, provocatively titled "New Theories of Everything" was truly incredibly well written, well researched, and displayed a virtuoso mastery not only of physics and the math behind it, but also philosophy and, in some excruciating detail, the very same conclusions, if you can call them that, about abstraction arrived at by David Foster Wallace, in his Infinity book. The thing is, and it really is emperor's new clothes here, the entire resolution left hanging is the one I offer, but can't quite articulate. It's very much a both/and kind of thing, where the world is neither software running on hardware, nor does the anthropic principle need to be strong or weak.
The complexity of consciousness, as neatly detailed in this last book, more or less drops out from the parameters, and if I understand it correctly, achieves its maximal complexity in very neat order. Without a whole lot of fuss in cosmological time. And given that there is a kind of centering rather than distancing required to posit consciousness as integral - that is to say that there need be no priority to the matter of consciousness, nor any issue of simultaneity since concepts are by definition as timeless as the identity-less atomic particles they descend from. There is no telling one from t'other.
So, consciousness-evolved is just as valid as consciousness-prior. Things held in mind are simply and neatly the origin and the end, more as the body contains the soul rather than defines it; opposed very much metaphorically to the software/hardware conjunction. Point being that there is all this continual fuss about understanding the instant information transfer implied in Quantum Mechanics, when the pairing in mind simply obviates the fuss. As 'twere.
And emotion more than thermodynamics is what determines time's arrow. The wanting here and now. So, I guess I will have to take some time out again to detail this more slowly, starting from the obvious case that since we can indeed blow consciousness all to hell, we should ascribe at least as much priority to the matter of our collective caring for one another as we do to the matter of understanding, well, matter.
These pesky issues to the side of our main attention - negotiating treaties, and achieving cross cultural accommodations, and containing all the drunk drivers and match tossers and suicide bombers whose harm is the flip side possibility raised by the very technological progress our astute understandings of the physical world have made possible - those pesky side issues require our main attention. And they all center on emotion, in a way which won't be readily medicated to a dull roar. The fact that you toss a match into a dry forest of tinder does not necessarily make you a mass murderer, does it? I mean, unless that's what you intended to do. But the result is the same, intention or no. Any one can bring down the whole, desire or no, and something like fate ends up defining the difference.
But if mind is universal, and if therefore emotion is universal, as a kind of wave to thinking's particle - a matter of strange attractions and forces mediated by exchange of particulars - then it's time, I think, to turn from a further exploration into the nether reaches of physical explanations, and explore instead the proper limits to that kind of understanding.
So, I'll post in rapid fire fashion, I think, the remainder of my childish writings (so much more readable than these compressed bits of shorthand) and turn my attention to the more labored telling. Labored for me, but hopefully less so for you.
I need and want to explore, again, this matter of fate. The broken symmetries of events not conditioned. Where there might be proof that no algorithm can compress the data to pattern. Where mind requires a kind of kung-fu (I speak precisely here) agility to avoid the occult end. This is surprising stuff. That there may be patterns never intelligible nor certainly perceptible, which may nonetheless guide and determine, the way a narrative, only after the fact, can give shape to what has come to be. That this reverse narrative, reduced poetically to a rhyme in composition against its opposite trajectory, might actually compel us too, if we release our goal orientation in favor of relations, and other female manners.
That hanging on to a plan requires letting go of all that might have been just as much as the other is surely true (the planless is chaotic).That there may be as much value in training emotions as minds. That intuitions are no less mindless - nor surely more mindful - than carefully executed articulations of what is already known.
A turning point is surely reached. Balance is required. The masculine direction toward abstraction now risks more the tearing apart of that which binds us together, far more than it can further accomplish in definition about that upon which we must agree. Physical reality begs the question anymore. As species disappear, complexity diminishes, and my mind becomes unbalanced. Floating free, nauseated by virtigo, left only some parting jab from Dick Cheney disparaging trust and love and other fellow feeling in the face of horrible threat about which we cannot be allowed to know. Anything at all. At all. All. All. all all all
Monday, January 26, 2009
I Owe it to You
I'm sure you're just dying to know about my teeth. Well, as it turns out, so am I. I got the one crown; on the theory that it's better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, I wasn't going to ask the insurance company a second time after the first refusal, since by now the tooth had entirely fallen apart and was cutting my tongue, causing the entire staff to cluck their tongues in some kind of sympathy that they couldn't believe that the insurance company denied the need for a crown. There are so many gathered interests in my teeth.
But, on some kind of arcane schedule, the opposite tooth on the opposite side flared up in a mind numbing toothache just the night before, while skiing, so I went into the dental chair fully expecting a wallet ripping root canal along with the known crown, and some kind of cascading series of unfortunate events which would take me well beyond the cost of just tearing them all out and replacing them with dentures.
Sort of like with the car. (Brakes, thermostat, a bunch of simple decisions all adding up to a lot of money I don't have, but also don't feel much choice about). So, my theory is that the tender side (the crown I knew I needed) caused shifting of bite to the other side, where a latent misalignment lurked, and new pain triggered by bite-shift. Made sense to the dentist too, but he gave me an antibiotic prescription just in case his realignment of my bite didn't do the trick and I would still require a root canal.
That's the backstory. Hanging in limbo up against some balance among enthusiasms and the means to address them. Except that there's no room for enthusiasms any more. Just room to hang on.
So, this thing with teeth is just about the boundaries between in and out, and the grinding ways in which passages are made. I'm interested in the Freudian vagina dentata in that regard, and with regard to my sister who apparently has issues with her emotional skin. Prickly anger management issues combined with being hoodwinked into allowing rape. Perpetual rape. She needs teeth, of some emotional/metaphorical sort.
But here in the hinterlands, where my daughters assure me that I own most of the teeth -whatever their cost or artificiality - in the collective township, I recede ever inward, successfully ducking all social commerce, seeming back into my wombspace, ever to emerge? I continue to work, nervous as we all are that my job too will disappear down the wormhole now opened in the fundament of collapsed capitalist machinery.
But I wonder what difference it could make? The balance between income and outflow is exquisitely made, with some magic guarantee that there would never be room to exercise enthusiasms , even if I had them, apart from those which are directed toward work, and recompensed therefore.
Should I shave comforts? Would it even make a difference? I make a comfort of my wood stove, really to save money. I drive an ancient car, into the ground, even though my mileage is reimbursed, mostly to realise the 35 mpg, with some heavenly reward for avoiding the cost to earth of manufacturing another.
So, I do wonder if I have retracted all enthusiasms in response to the impossibility to exercise them. The boat sits beside the garage as a kind of tooth gap in my life's story. Politely unnoticed. Bothering me if I pay it any attention, which I studiously don't.
Or is age my main comfort, leaving me content just to sit and read, which I think and mildly fear is somewhat the case? That is what I look forward to. That is what I scramble my logistical efforts toward accomplishing. That is even where most of my disposables are directed, just to keep my widipedia-reader's-companion access energized, not to mention book purchases. As well as to keep open the possibility for telephonic social commerce at the remove I seem to prefer. There is truly a perfected price/value equation, all about indenture (!!) to the company store.
The gaps are all apparent in my narrative. Clearly, I can't ski without some sort of social existence. Still more clearly, I have and exercise more choice than almost anyone on the planet has ever experienced. And yet my skin grows tight as something transforms inside me and I feel constricted by everything about my self definition. I want to molt and fly (again?). I want actually to experience something more human than this perpetual treadmill of only apparent motion toward some truly nutty apolcalyptic endpoint. (And if you follow that link, you tell me which and who are the nutjobs!)
I know that the flight will be a joining of narrative trajectories. I kinow that it is all about social commerce. I know that somehow I have been burned by my own betrayals and disappointments, which cause this worming in. But damned if I know what to do about it.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Slumdog jilted
Isn't it ironic? I mean after my previous post, and then after spending much of the day working up arguments against the Obama bashers in the family, who just can't quit. I guess Fox TV just can't quit either. Then this perfected film about the standard projected theme. Hollywood Bollywood (is that how you spell it?) Schmalliwood. Are they all the same? Are we looking in the mirror here toward our own future, where the slums of Mumbai look so terribly much like the dystopic dreams of our environmentalist avant garde. And the poverty there a cruel caricature of the Bush direction for the grand old homeland?
I simply don't understand which film has made it so big in this country. I think I can't actually touch what everyone else is watching. Is this feelgoodism? Are we so jaded with our own love stories? Surely we have hung back from this extreme such that it had to be made in the land of the outsourced call centers? Did we even outsource our earnest dreams because to be quite this parodic is, like picking crops, beneath us? Or is this film the very opposite to Foster Wallace earnesty, and is it meant to be viewed ironically? Perhaps I'm simply the only one to view it?
Is it brilliant or incredibly crass, or like what happened with Love Story way back when, does someone need to be politely excused from Yale before he embarrasses us all? I genuinely don't know how to watch this film. My daughter loved it, and as I shall when my ticker quits, I remained mum, not wanting to upset anyone. Because I'm probably just out of touch. I wasn't around when this particular style calmed down. Imagine waking up to platform shoes without what led up to them. Or is it just now OK, in political incorrect fashion, to condescend. Or do I have that completely backwards?
Needless to say, though there is much power in the projected "reality" depicted, the plot is pure bombast, no? (OK, so I looked the word up. I mean I wiki'd it, and find that the fabric referred to -fustian - covers - I mean the irony will never end - jeans. I guess as in blue jeans. So bombast has to cover aspirations to worker casual turned hot advert for enough money for a trainer? This is way way too cool!). So, is it fustian prose I aspire to? Do people write that shit? I mean using 'fustian', say, under control rather than as a reach for prosodic power just beyond control? I'll bet David Foster Wallace could have. Virtuousity in anything is as close to witness of miracle as I ever need to come.
I aim for clarity, believe it or not. Virtuousity never was my forte. (that's a funny line right there)
So, the formula is simple enough. You have to come by this love thing honestly, and then you have to value it more than the most extreme kind of life affirmation apart from it, and then if you put them together you just simply pop. Or something. The ever after Jesus thing.
So why, in this land of no parody - I'm talking here about the people that are able, and I'm not one of them, to distinguish Saturday Night Live from televangelism in structural form - . . . I think I've already written, ad nauseum, about my great confusion, when coming off one hermetic episode or another in my extreme youth, upon coming across What Was on Television at the time. I truly mistook the televangelism for parody, and was bizarrely shocked that Saturday Night Live could do that on TV. We're talking way back around the time of Archie Bunker, though I could be off by a few decades. I have yet to recover. Rip Van Winkle shocked is what I'm talking about here.
But hasn't this just simply got to be the end of something? Aren't we finished with the projection of life, and isn't it time for the living?
I, of course, have moved beyond hope for that one true love, and displace all socializing onto this blog, since what once passed for feelings has become so impacted that it would take the proverbial icepick to move my innards (hence these gaseous emissions).
But there's nobody out there. Not a single soul that I can touch where it counts. And I don't think that I'm receding within. I'm really really trying to find a way to say this thing, though it may already be past time. I'm not looking for friends here. I have plenty, though I mostly hide from them. (I don't want to be a burden?)
So my silly life's plot is at least as outrageous as any other plot acceptable for projection. I'm holding out. I'm looking for true contact. I need a reader. Just one would do. I'm not trying to be coy.
Officially speaking, I liked Revolutionary Road much better. But they are at the same historic moment, about the same historic thing. This tragicomic finding of the thing itself when you let go of it. This giving up on the prospect ever to be other than in the audience for life. I stagger out after some kind of Michelangelo Antonioni festival, maybe it was called the Little Carnegie at the time, way back in the 70's, before I ever even sat through Pink Flamingos. Divine. Eat shit. I stagger out (those Antonioni movies were really slow moving) and figure it can't go any further than this. I stagger out, and now just like on the boat way back when, except that I'm burning lots more fossil fuel about it, I just can't get warm. The furnace won't keep up with the huge differential, uninsulated, between inside and out.
This vision of Mumbai's slums a vision of humanity's failure. Of humanity as karmic stiving so that maybe someday someone's child will be delivered into Nirvana. The same story of technological climbing out of the shit which just might find us loving our brothers and sisters. Some day soon, John Boy.
I don't understand why there needs to be so much evangelization of fear. Why we hope that our secret service secretly breaks the law to protect us from unenlightened zealots. Why we have so little faith in the humanity we already know and understand.
Humanity is the coming together of man with man for something other than terror, right? Humanity is reaching out from the winner's circle. Humanity is so not about winners and losers. And sadly, purity of soul and spirit will not grant eternal life of the sort left behind when we leave the theater. But that's what people think Jesus was talking about.
Not!
We are furless, and hearth will warm only when cooperatively clothed and sheltered. We are naked, and our teeth (happily, my broken one which cuts my tongue will be crowned Monday, insurance or no!) don't do so well against living flesh. We were apparently made to be human, no? (another one right there - I watched the redneck comedy thing once)
My own little hydroponic heating system, washing my cells in rusted sea water not so different from the sulferous metalic tasting stuff I now can handpump so gridfree from my well, still pumps out heat to my extremities. And my lonely mind does reach out across skinned and skinless boundaries. A little bit educated. (A little bit redundant.) A little bit capable with the indrawn syllables of conspiring humanity. And very much certain that eternal life is that which transcends the innering of thought and feeling made possible only by definition of my personal limits of life span and skin which defines me as only me. Eternal life is just the love which powers this self thing beyond itself. I think there is nothing so trivial.
But the moment is now. Eternally.
Oh dear, this is not profound at all.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Ground Moving Generational Inflection
Inflexion? I like that spelling better, considering what's up (how interesting that in this late internetted age, there should even be choices to spelling!?).
Maybe in recompense for the disappointments of W for those of us who expected or even hoped for a juicy roasting (in the event, I really liked the film, drawing as it did its drama from verisimilitude rather than satire), it was tempting to register a fist pumping skewering score against the outgoing yesterday at the moment of inauguration. Especially in the punch of the speech.
But I think W handled it right, celebrating his retirement, and keeping his prune face in check if he even registered himself any repudiation in the upswelling of arrival.
This was a generational handoff, and the baby boomers are officially off the cusp. Thanks God. We tended too black and white; good and evil. We never could resolve the 60's movements into something more real than hallucinatory, and we weren't prepared for the marketing hype which followed which we bought as easily as we did our own imagined utopias.
The television easily mixed popular culture with what hit me hard as the first real historic turning point in my own life, on the downslide as I find myself. I felt in solid contact with greatness, but of an easy unselfconscious sort. I felt and could detect no panic at the miscue with the very sacred words of the oath. I prayed in actual fact for the preservation of this man's life and family and health. But my tears turned to a big wide grin after I finished dinner and watched Obama actually dance, almost as gracelessly as I might, but in a manner which was utterly and obviously continuous with how he might have danced at his best friend's wedding. This is a man who rides the historic more easily than those of us in the first television generation ever could imagine.
So, I will put aside my concerns about the hucksterism surrounding the event. Of course hucksterism has always been there from the beginnings of our nation, but finally we have mastered our age, and only we old farts feel even the impulse toward purity; as though the technoglitz were a threat to our control. The superstars cried real tears, Sting and Stevie Wonder achieved real transcendent artistry, and somehow everyone knows that a corner has been turned.
But the best part for me is the actual palpable relief that I myself don't need any longer to measure myself up against some gold ring grabbing lottery success. I'm not simply talking about a recalibration and rebalancing of the body politic, away from what I so hit home jabbingly call Savage Capitalism. I'm not only talking about the liberation from near total enslavement to wealth generation signalled by a return to neighborhoods and communities.
I also feel, palpably I might add, a powerful sense that I also am on stage, there with the Man. That it is alright for Sting to have made it, and me to have no personal trainer. That my narrative intertwines with the one Writ Large, and my role is secured in the chorus, perhaps, but secured nonetheless, in support of a plot not defined entirely by its punch.
This is a good day indeed. To stop projecting and to start living. I will sing as hard; though noone ever picks out my voice it swells the tone of celebration still - is carried by the large and more pure note.
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