So, if you think my pretensions are a tad bit extreme, wait until you see the territory I'm wanting to enter now! I actually want to comment on the state of the economy. Now, given that commenting on the state of reality is plenty reachy, why, I wonder, does it seem still more bold to comment on the state of the economy?
Well, because I don't know anything about economics. But I don't know anything about physics either, and yet . . .
OK, so here's the thing. I work for this organization, the Church, which is actually still organized around an assumption that authority in the organization and nearness to Godly truth are actually aligned. To many Americans, this might seem an archaic atrocity, sort of like arranged marriage. It would be as if we allowed scientific discovery only to those first certified as discoverers. . .
Except, well, that's sort of what we do do. And arranged marriages are getting some good press, at least from NPR, as we try to come to terms with Muslims in our midst, as well as to come to terms with the shortcomings of Romantic Love, and delusional self-insight, which leads to atrocities viz my oft-abused abusing brother-in-law. So, I won't pretend to authority with this, but I will attempt a commentary, in the vein of social criticism, which I will attempt to inform by my peculiar particular insight, which I continue to try to flesh out.
But no, that's precisely what I'm trying to avoid, right? I'm the little kid pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. That kind of truth recognizes no hierarchy, and entails no pride in the knower.
Is that why we Americans allow juveniles to run the world? Remember David Stockman? What's that bald technocrat's name now who's going to be allowed to spend a trillion of our hard-earned dollars? I once travelled to China as a young private school headmaster, an honorific I had something of a hard time internalizing even in these United States, but you should have seen the reaction to the translation on my business cards! This was like calling myself a member of the Central Party. People got a chuckle out of it, but were universally shocked. I don't think I got any prestige from it either. Rather, the dim view they already had of American culture, so called, was dimmed a trifle more.
And I do remember the moment when my own high school principal was replaced, due to heart attack I think, with someone who insisted on being called "Doctor", which fairly announced the cardboard nature of this once also honorific standard. He, of course, proceeded to install all the professional upgrades to our curriculum and methodologies, in a way, inevitably I'd say, to destroy what had been a humane and humanistic learning environment. When I ran into this same fellow some time later at a professional teacher job fair, he wanted to remark on the young ladies', I think he called them, "gozongas". And I was perversely satisfied with my youthful certainties now confirmed over time as I smugly relaxed in the interviewers' lounge between bouts of flesh shopping.
I'll try to stay toward the youthful sort of truth-telling, in deference and respect for professional expertise which still might have some place beyond the merely technocratic. I just want to send up a clue toward understanding the amoral nature of our "progress" of late.
So, there is little mystery that the American economy, by the engine of the American consumer, has been fueling the world economy for some time now, perhaps beginning after the Second World War. Government capital, militaristic research grants, farm and frontier driven ingenuity, union wages, and the pure joy of consumption have flooded the world with greenbacks, well endowed. And the aw shucks smiles of GIs, however expertly spun, papered over other possible interpretations of our innocence.
More recently, the American consumer has been fueling his purchases out in the "real" economy with a mounting wave of credit card debt, in rough terms of an order of magnitude (accumulated) commensurate with the amount of money the government has been getting authorization to pour back into the "financial" economy.
There is also little mystery that much of this credit card debt has been rationalized on the value of real estate, which is remarkably widely distributed in this country, apparently in contrast to much of the world. And apparently, the grossly deregulated "financial" marketplace has been trading on this bubble to the tune of great riches accumulated and accrued in the accounts of a new breed of technocratic warrior, subtly to be distinguished from the sociopathic warrior so lately loosed and identified as such. I'm talking about a wide breed, perhaps covering Nazi storm troopers, de-drafted professional soldiers, special-ops stuff, as well as the religious sociopath-equivalent in the form of a terrorist.
For the past many Christmases those around me have heard me grumble about how there is no "value" anymore. Plainly curmudgeonly, in imitation if not in fact of old age, I'm not referring to the shoddy quality of stuff on sale. In most cases, I've had in mind or found something which I felt suitable for my then-still-young beloved daughters, but along the lightly adrenaline-laced quest for the best price, I would often be shocked that after finding something half the price of the first place, I'd find it again at half that price, and sometimes after purchase, I'd find it still less again.
I'm not talking about equivalency of function. I'm talking about same brand name and shelf-recency identity. And who among us jetsetters has not felt reticent to ask our neighbors on an airplane flight how much they paid and how acquired? Never mind the rule of polite civility involved, I know I'm plainly shy to learn how much I (foolishly?) overpaid.
Aren't we all internally convinced that we're the naive fool who doesn't know how to negotiate? Or are you, gentle reader, like those atrocious libertarian techie types who thrill in the chase and fairly pound their innocent chests about the conquest just achieved on Priceline or some such popplesquat idiot-magnet. Don't we all imagine gaming and cheating going on at every turn in the outsourced chain from hands-on to actual consummate purchase? I know when I buy plane tickets on Travelocity, they are tweaking the price not just against the market but also against my own searching and seeking. I even know how to work around it, but I simply don't have the energy, and have lost that hormonal lust to think that I can be the king of that hill.
Oh, how I long for the calm of regulation, and the placid comfort of knowing that, in principal, my elected officials, corrupt though they might be, would actually put into place regulations to prevent such theft simply because the theft and the need for the regulation would be so transparently obvious that not to do so would expose them, naked-emperor-like.
But my elected officials follow Rumsfeld's lead, I can only imagine, so entirely sold (to himself, by himself) on the principle of outsourced government -that the gov should carry only the mission, but bid out its work to the most efficient marketplace provider. I guess he never even blushed when the bills came in, nor did or does, I'm sure, Good Ol' Brownie, when he hears how much the laborers get paid and how much the efficient outsourced brokerers of that labor, raking in the unbid government funds to reconstruct, sans poor, N'Orleans.
This delusional fantasy of efficiency, my friends, (heh heh, or is it hinh hinh - I don't think there's any spelling of that Bush-McCain Dorian Gray laugh) is built upon the same foundational construct as Creation, whereby the idea is primate (sorry, can't resist these jejune plays), and its implementation merely manual. Primative, primal, prior, whatever. The point is that this rationalizes why these days everyone gets to go to Yale free and then feel justified that their ideational power fully rationalizes their reward, no matter how extravagantly issued.
Well, I've rehearsed the chain of deniability before, and how it prevents emotional (we're talking guilt here) accountability. Now I'm talking design versus manufacture, and the very apparent fact that apart from commodity inputs, which have themselves been proven to fluctuate wildly in value these last few days, there is no bottom beneath which price cannot be pushed, nor top beyond which it can soar, once the market mechanisms so in need of regulation have become precisely as arcane as the guts of those computers I waste my talent interacting with.
If you buy lottery tickets, and value that rush more than the reality of your everyday despair, then you like it this way. If you actually believe that you have some equal chance to make it, compared, say, with a member of families Bush or Clinton, or whatever second or third generation Hollywood idol you choose, then you must like it this way. If American Idol captures your folly . . . You get the idea.
It really wouldn't be terribly difficult to reinstate the incredibly important laws, agencies and enforcement so necessary for labor to organize effectively. Proper wages are a much better engine for consumption than credit binging built on myths of perpetual expansion. Neither would it be terribly difficult to trim the derivatives and return to money properly meant, in a financial market properly regulated.
Perfected draftboard ideas are great, but they tend to come acropper when implemented right off the drawing board without some reality-testing. Perhaps this is what really happened when the Trade Towers came down, or Gurdy Galloped, or jet planes disintegrated when first flown on brittle wings. Do we blame the passersby for their wind when the house of cards comes tumbling down? I, for one, have had enough of experimenting with the earth itself. I'd like some reality injected back into the marketplace. (Careful what you wish for, right?)
It's not that there's anything totally false about the totalizing assumptions built into the patent and intellectual property economy. (It's just that they've been totalized!) It's just that they entail the same dangerous fiction as that horrific head without a body so iconic of AI nonsense. Or the earth without muck and myriad species as some sort of God-engineered spaceship requiring only piloting skills and no emotional bonding for its continued life. (It's the emotional bond with our forebears which, I guess, the religionists find so threatening) Or workers without a stake or voice to tell the owners that something is going terribly wrong along the production chain.
These are not deep mysteries, and yes Virginia, the Emperor has no clothes (avert your eyes, it ain't that pretty).
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
As Promised, Chapter 6 from 1983 on metaphors of transcendance, perhaps?
A young man once arrived in New Haven on a motorcycle; a little late for the start of fall classes, and a little buzzed by the four-hundred mile ride on a tiny one-seventy-five cc machine. He'd had a painful summer, which claims hardly any recall, but he was now back on the track. He'd had the second of his abortive voyages out into the world of solitary freedom, and was called back by the same thing twice; his lonliness which found focus in the love of a girl. The first adventure had been on a bicycle; this one was on a motorcycle. It began to dawn on him that he was not his own image. He liked aloneness and travel; but these were metaphorical journeys, and only served to point out where he really wanted to be.
It was a paired urge with a great tradition. The masculine impulse to adventure hampered by the homebound strings of his love. The outward urge was begun very early with a need for transcendence. The inward urge started even earlier, but found development in his own serious sexuality in high school. The urges were bounded by the skin -- one, the urge to get beyond; one to get beneath.
Getting out of his skin began as early as dreams of flying, and found its development through skis, bicycles, and swimming. They were all gestures made toward a world without physical encumbrance. Not running -- he was very flatfooted and could find no freedom. He couldn't tolerate the limits of activities whose arduous training left you skin-bound. The mechanical appurtenances were extensions of his body which allowed feats that approached transcendence; and the water was a medium in which transcendence could be mimicked with the naked body.
It happened over and over again. He needed a bicycle with the passionate need of one who knows that by its acquisition all his dreams will be answered. And they were, in a way. But then the same need recurred through various motorized conveyances to the motorcycle. And again with a need to have enough scuba diving equipment to be free under the water. By the time he was buying his black leathers for the motorcycle he'd begun to be seriously suspicious. He knew that the desires were unanswerable, but he could not make them less real thereby. He knew that none of these would satisfy him, yet the craving never waned and never grew wise.
But when he got into his new leather skins, and onto his sleeker, faster motorcycle and back again after trying through blind speed to eradicate all desire and looked in the mirror; the blackness reminded him of his wetsuit and he thought of all the skins he'd required and acquired with equal passion. He had a water skin, and a road skin -- a bicycling skin, a mountain climbing skin. He'd been trying to get out of his skin and all the while kept crawling into new ones. As though they would answer the craving for transcendence.
One night, at midnight on a full moon, he went out in his skiing skin to exhaust his depression. It was a white and sparkling world under a bright full moon. He looked up at the moon and began to laugh insanely and loudly. "We've been there. Fools! Fools fools!" The clarity of the night had invaded his soul, and he saw why we had been there. He saw the very masculine nature of transcendence as he pictured the men in their space-skins walking about to no other purpose than to shoot golf balls. It was too ludicrous. And too perfect.
They'd been shot up in the very complicated ejaculation of a phallic rocket to leave the sterile sperm of the earth on a moon which mocks us still. We have possessed the moon, but do we know her? "Lunacy, lunacy!" "No, we're not mad. This projectile can get us somewhere beyond ourselves. Why, we'll shoot down the very moon herself and prove we're not lunatic." We'll get there, by God, with all our masculine contraptions which really are developments of things that thrust and kill and have maimed our mother earth.
And again he wondered, as he rode the very obvious phallic contraption between his legs. Bullets, more effective than swords and knives, then caught before their exit down the launch tube and returned to be fired again. The reciprocating engine. Like all technology, a development of war and of men. They had gunpowder and rockets in China long before we did, but they didn't have guns or engines until we brought them. The masculine West -- a cliche but with something behind it.
He wondered about the thrust turned into a spinning. About goals being wound into patterns. He wondered if there could be some hope in this world bound toward the goal of explosion and decay. Perhaps the turning of guns into engines was a sign. Perhaps the nuclear explosion that would hurl all meaning to nonsense, all order to entropy, could also be contained and made to spin. Not literally -- God, no. But it might have been a sign -- a clue.
It had been an accident that allowed him to get his first ten-speed bicycle. He'd been racing out of the driveway to see how far he could coast up the hill in front of the house. He was carried away in the game. It was fun. He would go faster and faster and have less and less time to check the oncoming traffic. He was careful. He'd always be sure that there were no cars before reaching the street. But he got carried away and was going too fast.
The bicycle was demolished. Howie was in shock. His grandmother was at the house babysitting and took good care of him with the absolute concern that could not be shocked and that only she could have. The poor woman driving the car that hit him must have been driving somewhat too fast, because she felt guilty and got her insurance company to pay Howie one hundred dollars. Howie knew it had been his fault. He wondered that she would have felt guilty. It had been a shock to her. It didn't matter, it was only insurance money. Howie wasn't terribly good at admitting his guilt. He thought maybe she was going too fast, and would have been able to stop in time. So he bought himself and his brother new ten-speed bikes. Bad fortune turned to good. The bruises healed and Howie was thrilled.
Most (all?) of our technology results directly or indirectly from the frenzy of united effort that occurs in war. The wounds eventually scar over, and we are pleased with the new world. But there isn't always a chance to turn bad fortune into good. Howie might have been killed. A war may leave no survivors -- or so few that there can be no sense in turning bad fortune into good. Howie may have been crippled.
Howie wasn't to be so careless again. He learned to fear cars and the road. His risks, though they would often toe the line between control and letting loose, would never leave open the possibility of a car coming around the corner a bit too fast.
The risks increased as his control improved. As his awareness expanded. But if he had continued riding about at high speeds on his motorcycle, he would now be dead. There is no absolute control. The only safety is a constant vigilance against what cannot be predicted. He was an extremely safe driver. Always expected cars to pull out in front of him. Practiced skids on dirt roads. Knew how curves can be taken. How gravel and wet leaves can be anticipated, and ridden through if not anticipated. But he was always tempted by the thrill that comes when approaching transcendence. He would be extremely careful, until sometimes he would get depressed, and then the lure of speed would beset him.
Fortunately, his body would never allow him to pass that increment of friction that still tied him to the road. His heart would beat, and his breath would quicken, but his body -- his uncontrollable fear which could not be overridden by a mind that may not have cared for the moment -- would not let him transgress that point which miles of training had taught could not be crossed.
It was by accident that Howie turned to China from physics. And these thoughts were not in his mind when he made the decision. All of this is a foreword. It was an accident that might have been a design had he known it. The connections are too myriad to be made. The reasons all fall back upon earlier ones until any act is fated. The design goes back beyond the moment to its origins in an original act, which might yet be a point on a circle. The fool is made so by being buffeted beyond his control, but Shakespeare knew who was really wise. Only a fool clots out with dried words and reason a choice which is made inevitable by the wind. Only a fool refuses to acknowledge that chance carries the only wisdom. Because chance is another word for a design whose origins have been forgotten and cannot be recovered.
It was a paired urge with a great tradition. The masculine impulse to adventure hampered by the homebound strings of his love. The outward urge was begun very early with a need for transcendence. The inward urge started even earlier, but found development in his own serious sexuality in high school. The urges were bounded by the skin -- one, the urge to get beyond; one to get beneath.
Getting out of his skin began as early as dreams of flying, and found its development through skis, bicycles, and swimming. They were all gestures made toward a world without physical encumbrance. Not running -- he was very flatfooted and could find no freedom. He couldn't tolerate the limits of activities whose arduous training left you skin-bound. The mechanical appurtenances were extensions of his body which allowed feats that approached transcendence; and the water was a medium in which transcendence could be mimicked with the naked body.
It happened over and over again. He needed a bicycle with the passionate need of one who knows that by its acquisition all his dreams will be answered. And they were, in a way. But then the same need recurred through various motorized conveyances to the motorcycle. And again with a need to have enough scuba diving equipment to be free under the water. By the time he was buying his black leathers for the motorcycle he'd begun to be seriously suspicious. He knew that the desires were unanswerable, but he could not make them less real thereby. He knew that none of these would satisfy him, yet the craving never waned and never grew wise.
But when he got into his new leather skins, and onto his sleeker, faster motorcycle and back again after trying through blind speed to eradicate all desire and looked in the mirror; the blackness reminded him of his wetsuit and he thought of all the skins he'd required and acquired with equal passion. He had a water skin, and a road skin -- a bicycling skin, a mountain climbing skin. He'd been trying to get out of his skin and all the while kept crawling into new ones. As though they would answer the craving for transcendence.
One night, at midnight on a full moon, he went out in his skiing skin to exhaust his depression. It was a white and sparkling world under a bright full moon. He looked up at the moon and began to laugh insanely and loudly. "We've been there. Fools! Fools fools!" The clarity of the night had invaded his soul, and he saw why we had been there. He saw the very masculine nature of transcendence as he pictured the men in their space-skins walking about to no other purpose than to shoot golf balls. It was too ludicrous. And too perfect.
They'd been shot up in the very complicated ejaculation of a phallic rocket to leave the sterile sperm of the earth on a moon which mocks us still. We have possessed the moon, but do we know her? "Lunacy, lunacy!" "No, we're not mad. This projectile can get us somewhere beyond ourselves. Why, we'll shoot down the very moon herself and prove we're not lunatic." We'll get there, by God, with all our masculine contraptions which really are developments of things that thrust and kill and have maimed our mother earth.
And again he wondered, as he rode the very obvious phallic contraption between his legs. Bullets, more effective than swords and knives, then caught before their exit down the launch tube and returned to be fired again. The reciprocating engine. Like all technology, a development of war and of men. They had gunpowder and rockets in China long before we did, but they didn't have guns or engines until we brought them. The masculine West -- a cliche but with something behind it.
He wondered about the thrust turned into a spinning. About goals being wound into patterns. He wondered if there could be some hope in this world bound toward the goal of explosion and decay. Perhaps the turning of guns into engines was a sign. Perhaps the nuclear explosion that would hurl all meaning to nonsense, all order to entropy, could also be contained and made to spin. Not literally -- God, no. But it might have been a sign -- a clue.
It had been an accident that allowed him to get his first ten-speed bicycle. He'd been racing out of the driveway to see how far he could coast up the hill in front of the house. He was carried away in the game. It was fun. He would go faster and faster and have less and less time to check the oncoming traffic. He was careful. He'd always be sure that there were no cars before reaching the street. But he got carried away and was going too fast.
The bicycle was demolished. Howie was in shock. His grandmother was at the house babysitting and took good care of him with the absolute concern that could not be shocked and that only she could have. The poor woman driving the car that hit him must have been driving somewhat too fast, because she felt guilty and got her insurance company to pay Howie one hundred dollars. Howie knew it had been his fault. He wondered that she would have felt guilty. It had been a shock to her. It didn't matter, it was only insurance money. Howie wasn't terribly good at admitting his guilt. He thought maybe she was going too fast, and would have been able to stop in time. So he bought himself and his brother new ten-speed bikes. Bad fortune turned to good. The bruises healed and Howie was thrilled.
Most (all?) of our technology results directly or indirectly from the frenzy of united effort that occurs in war. The wounds eventually scar over, and we are pleased with the new world. But there isn't always a chance to turn bad fortune into good. Howie might have been killed. A war may leave no survivors -- or so few that there can be no sense in turning bad fortune into good. Howie may have been crippled.
Howie wasn't to be so careless again. He learned to fear cars and the road. His risks, though they would often toe the line between control and letting loose, would never leave open the possibility of a car coming around the corner a bit too fast.
The risks increased as his control improved. As his awareness expanded. But if he had continued riding about at high speeds on his motorcycle, he would now be dead. There is no absolute control. The only safety is a constant vigilance against what cannot be predicted. He was an extremely safe driver. Always expected cars to pull out in front of him. Practiced skids on dirt roads. Knew how curves can be taken. How gravel and wet leaves can be anticipated, and ridden through if not anticipated. But he was always tempted by the thrill that comes when approaching transcendence. He would be extremely careful, until sometimes he would get depressed, and then the lure of speed would beset him.
Fortunately, his body would never allow him to pass that increment of friction that still tied him to the road. His heart would beat, and his breath would quicken, but his body -- his uncontrollable fear which could not be overridden by a mind that may not have cared for the moment -- would not let him transgress that point which miles of training had taught could not be crossed.
It was by accident that Howie turned to China from physics. And these thoughts were not in his mind when he made the decision. All of this is a foreword. It was an accident that might have been a design had he known it. The connections are too myriad to be made. The reasons all fall back upon earlier ones until any act is fated. The design goes back beyond the moment to its origins in an original act, which might yet be a point on a circle. The fool is made so by being buffeted beyond his control, but Shakespeare knew who was really wise. Only a fool clots out with dried words and reason a choice which is made inevitable by the wind. Only a fool refuses to acknowledge that chance carries the only wisdom. Because chance is another word for a design whose origins have been forgotten and cannot be recovered.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Still Apparently Sane, after Finishing Said Book
None of the header statement is demonstrably or provably true. I certainly did finish Everything and More: a History of Infinity, but the truth is that I skimmed most of the symbolic systems recorded therein, just as I have done since about high school, which was the last time I ever aced math. But then I absolutely know that I did finish Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid way back when, and felt that I had read and understood every single word, but by now the state of my completeness is surely no better than that for this more recently, though perhaps less completely, finished book.
I suppose that at my advanced age, I'm going to have to stop apologizing for the laziness and non-programmatic way in which I approach all knowledge and understanding. But without that apology, my fully-to-be-expected claim that indeed even mathematics falls within the tractor beam of my Great Discovery, would at least seem several orders of magnitude more cheeky than it already is going to be (right about precisely now).
The thing is that I actually have been working on this, in one way or another, for my entire life, and indeed there have been great expenditures of mental labor and anxiety all along the way. I've bothered to master the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, if not quite its native speech, and I delved at least as far into its arcane (even to Chinese, much less Westerners) classical roots as I have more recently into the World Bill Gates Created. In either case, yes it's true, I have hung back from commitment, not incidentally as I have in my personal life.
This thing about the World Bill Gates Created is pretty fascinating in itself, since it represents an entire, as described to me by a retired Microsoft radical, "ecology" which could not have existed without the draconian rule over its own internal domain and that of its extended and connected community of developers, not to mention the docile unregulated markets (we know what that has come to) of almost the entire free world (sans China, where only a single legal copy of anything has ever been purchased, and where they patriotically labor toward Linux-opia, even though on purloined MS desktops).
But, as usual, I digress. Suffice it to say that I get actually paid, and I think do a pretty good job and real work with actual results, as part of an immense kind-of outsourced army of Microsoft's extended worker-bee network. I mean always to find the time to master the Open Source stuff - mostly so that I can recycle those cool old laptops I've been collecting for the Brave New Browser Only World I can't wait for especially now that I/we won't be able to keep buying new ones capable of holding the geometrically expanding MS OS - but there's too much always to master in the Microsoft cosmos even to begin.
If I were younger, of course, I'd have the enthusiasm, and therefore the time. But thanks God I'm not still subject to youthful fantasies of getting better laid which seem always connected to such enthusiasms (that last is a bald-faced lie, especially the "better" part, but it's true there's more down time) Likely, I'm just plain lazy.
Well, it - professional commitment - doesn't interest me nearly so much as reading books, and while reading them, sometimes, pondering how they validate or not my grand theory of Life the Universe and Everything, which I think, if we were all honest, is the way all of us read books, if we read seriously and at all.
I should really end this apology here.
The point is, at least as this reader abstracted the essential point of this now literally most recently read book, mathematics remains poised, as it were, on the horns of a paradox dilemma (laugh track) which has something to do with the impossibility post Gödel et al., of even imagining itself as an entirely self-contained formal system at the same time that it continues to demonstrate ever more power toward describing and therefore getting a handle on the real world, so called, of actual non-formal phenomena.
This apparently drives and has perhaps driven many actual mathematicians quite crazy, although as you might expect there is plenty of debate on that subject. Surely David Foster Wallace himself was not driven to hang himself by his own personal and truly masterful and prodigious feats of intellectual prowess. According to Wikipedia, according to his father, Wallace had long suffered dangerous and extreme depression, together with being an unfortunate outlier on the continuum of medication-related side effects such that he could no longer take (in every sense) the medications which had demonstrably helped him.
Packed in there might be some claim, make-able by someone not me, that he did in fact suffer from that thing I fear myself - spinning out of control with the battle he chose to wage with concepts so entirely abstracted from everyday normalcy that he must have found himself quite terribly alone. I look forward, with only a little trepidation, to reading his Infinite Jest which apparently tangles with The American Scene, and treats in particular of irony, that incredible indicator of whether these days one is Red or Blue.
I trust the man is (was, alas) uniquely suited to treat of irony. I am overawed by his mastery of mathematics, which for a literary type seems rare indeed (though this seeming is itself something of a formalized fiction since I'm pretty sure all the greats - admittedly biased selection - are amazingly deft with scientific realism, mathematical abstractions, and the symbolic ways these things penetrate to the soul of Man 2000 or so years Post Christus. That might even have a lot to do with Irony.
I do claim, however, that I have retained my sanity quite intact, and maybe even do so by not quite getting overheated by claims or counterclaims about what is really real, nor too distracted by apparently powerful arguments in one direction or another. This is, I believe, a little bit like the reserve a sane person must retain in the face of fevered claims, that, for instance GWB actually did plan and execute the demolition of the World Trade Center towers. Most of this is easy enough to do, since the argumentation plainly takes advantage of our degraded so-called education system and the fact that most people don't know - haven't been taught - how to distinguish a reasoned argument from an advertising claim. There's always someone just off camera saying "see, see, hunh? yeah?" when juxtapositions are made between, say Bill Clinton's whereabouts and someone's death as if that constitutes proof that he actually Did It. OK, so I shifted from Bush conspiracy theories to Clinton adversaries-murdered conspiracy theories, but you know what I'm talking about.
The thing is that at the end of the game, the mathematicians are in the very same position as are the apoplectic conspiracy nuts about the difference between circumstantial and hard evidence. And the very wanting to believe drives many many people to a frenzy, sometimes murderous, as witness recent McCain rallies, where even McCain grew alarmed at what he'd, by criminally actionable ads no different that screaming "fire" in a crowded auditorium, unleashed. His fans were shouting something which sounded very much like "Kill Obama" and in one case, McCain had to mount the unfamiliar high road and quiet a self-professed "scared" supporter (scared of the Obama he'd been systematically lied to about) with calming words of reassurance that Obama is a decent and well-meaning man.
What the hell do they expect? These are the same people who believed the videos they circulated about Bill Clinton's murders and about the US Government plans to bring down the Trade Centers. Why the hell wouldn't they believe the similarly poorly argued claims that Obama is a closet terrorist? Apparently, many many of the ironically challenged will believe most anything, especially if it pushes the God button.
So, here I am, as far as it's reasonably possible to be, from adopting the formal methods of proof, and I want you, gentle reader, to buy my claim that "emotion is out there" (quoting myself to sound eerily like the X-Files, which I never did watch, but got the gist of). Furthermore, I want you actually to accept that this is the very resolution of all mathematical and other paradoxes, simply because there is no certain separation between the phenomenal and formal (mental) worlds. And that the attempt to keep them separate, which is the attempt to keep Man (the superset) un-implicated in Creation (now I'm being metaphorical) is no longer a moral choice.
Well, that is to say that it is precisely now a moral choice, and the choice to hold onto the fiction that we are un-implicated is, very precisely, immoral.
I guess I'd better go back to posting more "chapters" of my youthful writings. I hear they are considerably more engaging than the cancerous explosion I'm indulging now. I did, not incidentally (is anything ever incidental?), confess the location of this blog to my psychotherapist, along with a quite accurate description of my quest to describe something between a scientific discovery and a delusional fantasy. I remain unperturbed that these might actually be the very same thing, even formally definable as such.
So there!
But I do actually worry (now that right there is pretty colossal hubris) about taking the wind out of the sails of so many earnest, talented and really really intelligent scientists who are so hard at work to solve the world's actual problems. So, I must say again, as I did say now over 25 years ago, that nothing in what I'm trying to say actually changes anything. It's a point of view shift. Nothing gets invalidated. I say this, in particular, because I really really really want those very smart economic technocrats to continue their very important work toward getting our financial markets back in order, even as we - so to - speak.
It reminds me of those nutcake Left Behind books. I want the pilot to keep flying, fer chrissakes, even if it is the endtimes. Too much depends on it. (and it's NOT the endtimes. It's the beginning times, and way way way more exciting than what technology has brought us - that kind of transcendance has always only been metaphorical. But damn, I think I'm quoting myself from 25 years ago . . . )
I suppose that at my advanced age, I'm going to have to stop apologizing for the laziness and non-programmatic way in which I approach all knowledge and understanding. But without that apology, my fully-to-be-expected claim that indeed even mathematics falls within the tractor beam of my Great Discovery, would at least seem several orders of magnitude more cheeky than it already is going to be (right about precisely now).
The thing is that I actually have been working on this, in one way or another, for my entire life, and indeed there have been great expenditures of mental labor and anxiety all along the way. I've bothered to master the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, if not quite its native speech, and I delved at least as far into its arcane (even to Chinese, much less Westerners) classical roots as I have more recently into the World Bill Gates Created. In either case, yes it's true, I have hung back from commitment, not incidentally as I have in my personal life.
This thing about the World Bill Gates Created is pretty fascinating in itself, since it represents an entire, as described to me by a retired Microsoft radical, "ecology" which could not have existed without the draconian rule over its own internal domain and that of its extended and connected community of developers, not to mention the docile unregulated markets (we know what that has come to) of almost the entire free world (sans China, where only a single legal copy of anything has ever been purchased, and where they patriotically labor toward Linux-opia, even though on purloined MS desktops).
But, as usual, I digress. Suffice it to say that I get actually paid, and I think do a pretty good job and real work with actual results, as part of an immense kind-of outsourced army of Microsoft's extended worker-bee network. I mean always to find the time to master the Open Source stuff - mostly so that I can recycle those cool old laptops I've been collecting for the Brave New Browser Only World I can't wait for especially now that I/we won't be able to keep buying new ones capable of holding the geometrically expanding MS OS - but there's too much always to master in the Microsoft cosmos even to begin.
If I were younger, of course, I'd have the enthusiasm, and therefore the time. But thanks God I'm not still subject to youthful fantasies of getting better laid which seem always connected to such enthusiasms (that last is a bald-faced lie, especially the "better" part, but it's true there's more down time) Likely, I'm just plain lazy.
Well, it - professional commitment - doesn't interest me nearly so much as reading books, and while reading them, sometimes, pondering how they validate or not my grand theory of Life the Universe and Everything, which I think, if we were all honest, is the way all of us read books, if we read seriously and at all.
I should really end this apology here.
The point is, at least as this reader abstracted the essential point of this now literally most recently read book, mathematics remains poised, as it were, on the horns of a paradox dilemma (laugh track) which has something to do with the impossibility post Gödel et al., of even imagining itself as an entirely self-contained formal system at the same time that it continues to demonstrate ever more power toward describing and therefore getting a handle on the real world, so called, of actual non-formal phenomena.
This apparently drives and has perhaps driven many actual mathematicians quite crazy, although as you might expect there is plenty of debate on that subject. Surely David Foster Wallace himself was not driven to hang himself by his own personal and truly masterful and prodigious feats of intellectual prowess. According to Wikipedia, according to his father, Wallace had long suffered dangerous and extreme depression, together with being an unfortunate outlier on the continuum of medication-related side effects such that he could no longer take (in every sense) the medications which had demonstrably helped him.
Packed in there might be some claim, make-able by someone not me, that he did in fact suffer from that thing I fear myself - spinning out of control with the battle he chose to wage with concepts so entirely abstracted from everyday normalcy that he must have found himself quite terribly alone. I look forward, with only a little trepidation, to reading his Infinite Jest which apparently tangles with The American Scene, and treats in particular of irony, that incredible indicator of whether these days one is Red or Blue.
I trust the man is (was, alas) uniquely suited to treat of irony. I am overawed by his mastery of mathematics, which for a literary type seems rare indeed (though this seeming is itself something of a formalized fiction since I'm pretty sure all the greats - admittedly biased selection - are amazingly deft with scientific realism, mathematical abstractions, and the symbolic ways these things penetrate to the soul of Man 2000 or so years Post Christus. That might even have a lot to do with Irony.
I do claim, however, that I have retained my sanity quite intact, and maybe even do so by not quite getting overheated by claims or counterclaims about what is really real, nor too distracted by apparently powerful arguments in one direction or another. This is, I believe, a little bit like the reserve a sane person must retain in the face of fevered claims, that, for instance GWB actually did plan and execute the demolition of the World Trade Center towers. Most of this is easy enough to do, since the argumentation plainly takes advantage of our degraded so-called education system and the fact that most people don't know - haven't been taught - how to distinguish a reasoned argument from an advertising claim. There's always someone just off camera saying "see, see, hunh? yeah?" when juxtapositions are made between, say Bill Clinton's whereabouts and someone's death as if that constitutes proof that he actually Did It. OK, so I shifted from Bush conspiracy theories to Clinton adversaries-murdered conspiracy theories, but you know what I'm talking about.
The thing is that at the end of the game, the mathematicians are in the very same position as are the apoplectic conspiracy nuts about the difference between circumstantial and hard evidence. And the very wanting to believe drives many many people to a frenzy, sometimes murderous, as witness recent McCain rallies, where even McCain grew alarmed at what he'd, by criminally actionable ads no different that screaming "fire" in a crowded auditorium, unleashed. His fans were shouting something which sounded very much like "Kill Obama" and in one case, McCain had to mount the unfamiliar high road and quiet a self-professed "scared" supporter (scared of the Obama he'd been systematically lied to about) with calming words of reassurance that Obama is a decent and well-meaning man.
What the hell do they expect? These are the same people who believed the videos they circulated about Bill Clinton's murders and about the US Government plans to bring down the Trade Centers. Why the hell wouldn't they believe the similarly poorly argued claims that Obama is a closet terrorist? Apparently, many many of the ironically challenged will believe most anything, especially if it pushes the God button.
So, here I am, as far as it's reasonably possible to be, from adopting the formal methods of proof, and I want you, gentle reader, to buy my claim that "emotion is out there" (quoting myself to sound eerily like the X-Files, which I never did watch, but got the gist of). Furthermore, I want you actually to accept that this is the very resolution of all mathematical and other paradoxes, simply because there is no certain separation between the phenomenal and formal (mental) worlds. And that the attempt to keep them separate, which is the attempt to keep Man (the superset) un-implicated in Creation (now I'm being metaphorical) is no longer a moral choice.
Well, that is to say that it is precisely now a moral choice, and the choice to hold onto the fiction that we are un-implicated is, very precisely, immoral.
I guess I'd better go back to posting more "chapters" of my youthful writings. I hear they are considerably more engaging than the cancerous explosion I'm indulging now. I did, not incidentally (is anything ever incidental?), confess the location of this blog to my psychotherapist, along with a quite accurate description of my quest to describe something between a scientific discovery and a delusional fantasy. I remain unperturbed that these might actually be the very same thing, even formally definable as such.
So there!
But I do actually worry (now that right there is pretty colossal hubris) about taking the wind out of the sails of so many earnest, talented and really really intelligent scientists who are so hard at work to solve the world's actual problems. So, I must say again, as I did say now over 25 years ago, that nothing in what I'm trying to say actually changes anything. It's a point of view shift. Nothing gets invalidated. I say this, in particular, because I really really really want those very smart economic technocrats to continue their very important work toward getting our financial markets back in order, even as we - so to - speak.
It reminds me of those nutcake Left Behind books. I want the pilot to keep flying, fer chrissakes, even if it is the endtimes. Too much depends on it. (and it's NOT the endtimes. It's the beginning times, and way way way more exciting than what technology has brought us - that kind of transcendance has always only been metaphorical. But damn, I think I'm quoting myself from 25 years ago . . . )
Friday, October 10, 2008
The Difference Between Blogging and Emailing: Reflecting on a Sad Sad Sad Obituary
I'm sure I've got this just wrong, but on the occasion of my sharing this URL with a few friends and family, I want to clear up a couple of things. The first is that I'm not trying to accomplish some feat of literary or journalistic accomplishment. If I thought I were actually any good at that stuff, I think I'd have tried my hand at it by now (although I'm not entirely certain of that, since I, as do all of us, suffer from plenty of self-destructive bad habits and blind spots).
I'm simply trying to figure out how to say something clearly, which I feel very strongly is extremely important to say. As far as I can tell, anything philosophical of quality which I read tends in the same direction toward this kind of summary statement. Right now, for example, I'm reading Everything and More: A Compact History of
I find that I can read only small chunks, in spare time say before work or just after dinner, because - and you'll find yourself rightly skeptical at this claim - it spins my head out of control, sort of like one of those little whirring sirens you blow into and they amazingly sing. Or maybe just like a top or Chinese diabolo which gets going to incredible orbital velocity with seemingly tiny inputs. Quite beyond being an excellent philosophical mind, Wallace was, I gather, an accomplished artist - I look forward to reading his novels, of which I had been unaware.
The trouble with this book is that it places my little quest in historic context, and reminds me, alarmingly, that I'm attempting something in the company of folks (don't you love that Bushism?) back to Plato and beyond. And then, bringing things up to date, that I'm just another dilettante, say, watching Star Wars, or even better, The Matrix, who wants to find in it some ultimate truth, which it would be absurd to think even its director would understand other than by means of his production.
Sure, it is pretty cool to come floating out of the Star Wars big screen to find your car transformed into a spaceship for a little moment, just as your mind has been expanded beyond its petty preoccupations by some artistic outlining which - and this quite simply is what makes it art - draws the mind beyond itself. Art is in touch with ultimate truths, and by its creation avoids the necessity to describe them more mundanely. Proper authors always refuse interviews or any privileged "insight" to their own work. Only hackers know exactly what they "meant" to say.
I might long to be an artist, at least because the project could be more literally in hand, but I think I'm something more like a craftsman, and very much less than a scientist. I am not attempting art. I think the blog - as a medium - is supposed to be free of aspirations toward journalistic excellence. And I include within the spaces of my thick verbiage "chapters" from my youthful writing, not because I think there was anything great there, nor certainly well written, but because it is the very thing itself. The documentary evidence of a discovery, actually embodied, so to speak, in the document itself. That is to say that the writing of the document was the occasion for the discovery of something which I found ever-so-slightly to be ahead of its or my time at the time, and which for whatever reason it is now my burden to reify virtually, as it were and is.
My god I hope there is another soul in the world who finds these words even remotely funny.
I wrote this thing in a single sitting - I'm not even sure that I took breaks to piss and eat and sleep, but I must have. And then I word-processed it out, at the dawn of such infernal machines, having developed that profane skill so far from piano playing, but ever so much more utilitarian - keyboarding. There was something magical in the word processor, just simply in that I didn't have to white out or literally cut and paste. Then there was the magic of double justified margins - whooey!
The occasion of my typing it out confirmed to me the "truth" of what I'd written, and then I proceeded to make a near complete ass of myself trying to explain the thing around town. I did, however, eventually make my way in the world, and almost completely shelved the document in my mind as well as in reality, as some youthful strange obsession, not unpleasant in recall, but certainly not worth near so much as I'd thought it to be at the time.
But things happen. Just as with this book I'm reading, I find that this fellow so recently self-hung, seems to grasp almost completely the nature of abstraction along with its history and the fact that attempts to understand such things before their time can and has lead to actual concrete insanity in this temporal world. I am incredibly saddened by his death, as I would imagine the accomplishment of great art to leave one other than alone. But apparently history belies this imagining.
So, at least I haven't completely lost my mind yet. I find it an actual marvel that I can manage to live all alone and by myself and still be shaved and almost completely dressed every day (the almost has to do with a certain cluelessness, as you might imagine, with regard to style). This very morning I did indeed install a new mailbox with my very own name lettered thereon, since the old one, along these New York salt encrusted roads, had finally almost entirely melted away and the much patched-again door was no longer responding to the mailman's flap. I imagined him angry with me - even in the outback, there are civil requirements!
Do I digress? Well, gentle reader, what follows is the actual letter I didn't have the nerve to send said friends and family because, I guess, I didn't want to be the cause of worry. So, now I put it here, even knowing that these self-same friends and family may - are even likely to - read the thing I didn't want to show them.
Everyone knows that great accomplishments are least recognized by those closest to the accomplished. My family in particular is made up of people doing pretty well for ourselves, thank-you-very-much, but almost literally surrounded by the in-your-face accomplishments of all those we grew up with. In many cases, we are demonstrably smarter and more capable than these avatars of success. So there must be something very intrafamilialy wrong. Hell, I've already described a very very extreme example, in conscious abuse of my very ex brother-in-law.
Among the family, I'm often supposed to be the one with the promise - no surprise there I imagine. I do alright, and keep myself manifestly sane, because I have a knack for the practical arts, now specifically computer networks and related technologies. Consistently, I don't pretend to any professionalism, so shortly I will have to move along as this field (also) proceeds to marginalize us talented amateurs. You might even observe that I patently eschew moves toward professionalism, nursing, such is my archetype, this truly silly notion that I sort-of "have" something of worth beyond whatever I might devote to and thus contribute via some developed profession.
My disease is nothing if not thoroughgoing and consistent.
In any case, you, gentle reader, will not worry very much about my sanity or safety, although a blog is a very live production, so that you might. A book is presumed to be finished, though almost the very opposite of dead. Its currency is a function of how well read it is. The blog is not exactly a live email , which ought to be to someone (explaining the apparent sin of even the best joke-spams which get sent around in such a way that the persons to approach almost the entire cosmos of readers, and in the case of really juicy stuff like an email about your neighbor Sarah Palin actually does get read by almost the entire cosmos.)
(I have a terrible fondness for parenthetical digressions)
So the blog pretends to something like a journal, but gets to be more immediate. And I pretend to something near eternal, but want to work it out in public, as it were, maybe partly because it seems that important (and I want it to be discoverable when I wander away from sensible reality), but also precisely because I don't think I have it in me actually professionally to write. You will have noticed that by now.
Here's the email to three closest friends and family, which I had provisionally titled:
fear and trepidation, but with a good natured laugh (here's letting the cat out of the bag)
Hello fine treo.
For some silly reason, reading this morning with the fire warmly glowing, a very disturbing book lent me by my friend Wayne over the weekend (Everything and More, A Compact History of, where infinity is the symbol I don't have time to figure out how to keyboard), I find myself compelled to "publish" the location of my little blog.
This is not some great big deal. There is nothing terribly embarrassing there (I hope, although I am not really certain). I'm just simply not sure where I will end up in the near future, especially as I feel myself descending, with the prologue to this book, into something which feels very much like coming unhinged.
Very disturbingly, this David Foster Wallace, who is undoubtedly one of the great intellects of our time, hung himself recently, and I assure you I do never want to find myself in such despair. ( I want you to know I'm sending this in the middle of the work day, and am doing so in good humor feeling very strong, especially as I mowed my lawn yesterday and watched the debate with only mild amusement rather than anxiety last night)
The opening of his book defines and describes "abstraction" in a way that is excruciating in its familiarity to me. In a very comical way, he explains why dealing with abstraction can and does, apparently often, lead to madness. That's this thing I feel.
I am, of course, re-entering the very abstract world of my Eureka epiphany moment on the boat-womb-cocoon, the anniversary of which, along with cat piss in the bed, time-zone crossings, and the oddly unfamiliar experience of sybaritic bliss did recently send me howling to the hospital. I assure you I will do everything possible in my power to avoid that fate a second time, including putting down this book for the moment, and possibly forever.
Meanwhile, I'm trusting you not to find in my blog rantings any cause or sign of insanity. I'm trusting you, in other words, with my secret. I'm also NOT trusting that you will understand what I write about, since I'm not nearly intelligent enough, nor a good enough writer (honestly, I'm not being modest, but what I'm attempting is really really difficult) - the burden is purely mine to make this intelligible and I haven't even gotten close. Wallace has such lucidity that I can only still marvel at my pretense.
Well, pretender or not, I remain convinced, especially as we watch this world tumbling down into something frankly terrifying (I'm not getting overheated here - I think I simply have my eyes open) that I am "on to" something.
I guess it, this thing I hit on when my mind was sharper, is the very essence of abstraction, properly so defined, and I am getting rather desperate to find someone to share these thoughts.
The blog thing seems to work better than private writing in journals, simply as a kind of discipline.
If I thought I were asking you to read what I've written, I would consider that to be an unforgivable abuse of friendship.
I'm just asking you to take note of the address, in case I hit on something there, and in the process wander off beyond the pale of sensible existence (you are meant to laugh here). A kind of mild paranoia, if you will. which I only sense as a kind of shadow in the darkness, off to the edge of my vision . . .
I do have hope that I'm not quite alone in this whole business, and so it is with some mild hope also that I share what I'm up to as the best way to stay sane.
Well, so with fear and trepidation, here you go . . . . .
I'm simply trying to figure out how to say something clearly, which I feel very strongly is extremely important to say. As far as I can tell, anything philosophical of quality which I read tends in the same direction toward this kind of summary statement. Right now, for example, I'm reading Everything and More: A Compact History of
I find that I can read only small chunks, in spare time say before work or just after dinner, because - and you'll find yourself rightly skeptical at this claim - it spins my head out of control, sort of like one of those little whirring sirens you blow into and they amazingly sing. Or maybe just like a top or Chinese diabolo which gets going to incredible orbital velocity with seemingly tiny inputs. Quite beyond being an excellent philosophical mind, Wallace was, I gather, an accomplished artist - I look forward to reading his novels, of which I had been unaware.
The trouble with this book is that it places my little quest in historic context, and reminds me, alarmingly, that I'm attempting something in the company of folks (don't you love that Bushism?) back to Plato and beyond. And then, bringing things up to date, that I'm just another dilettante, say, watching Star Wars, or even better, The Matrix, who wants to find in it some ultimate truth, which it would be absurd to think even its director would understand other than by means of his production.
Sure, it is pretty cool to come floating out of the Star Wars big screen to find your car transformed into a spaceship for a little moment, just as your mind has been expanded beyond its petty preoccupations by some artistic outlining which - and this quite simply is what makes it art - draws the mind beyond itself. Art is in touch with ultimate truths, and by its creation avoids the necessity to describe them more mundanely. Proper authors always refuse interviews or any privileged "insight" to their own work. Only hackers know exactly what they "meant" to say.
I might long to be an artist, at least because the project could be more literally in hand, but I think I'm something more like a craftsman, and very much less than a scientist. I am not attempting art. I think the blog - as a medium - is supposed to be free of aspirations toward journalistic excellence. And I include within the spaces of my thick verbiage "chapters" from my youthful writing, not because I think there was anything great there, nor certainly well written, but because it is the very thing itself. The documentary evidence of a discovery, actually embodied, so to speak, in the document itself. That is to say that the writing of the document was the occasion for the discovery of something which I found ever-so-slightly to be ahead of its or my time at the time, and which for whatever reason it is now my burden to reify virtually, as it were and is.
My god I hope there is another soul in the world who finds these words even remotely funny.
I wrote this thing in a single sitting - I'm not even sure that I took breaks to piss and eat and sleep, but I must have. And then I word-processed it out, at the dawn of such infernal machines, having developed that profane skill so far from piano playing, but ever so much more utilitarian - keyboarding. There was something magical in the word processor, just simply in that I didn't have to white out or literally cut and paste. Then there was the magic of double justified margins - whooey!
The occasion of my typing it out confirmed to me the "truth" of what I'd written, and then I proceeded to make a near complete ass of myself trying to explain the thing around town. I did, however, eventually make my way in the world, and almost completely shelved the document in my mind as well as in reality, as some youthful strange obsession, not unpleasant in recall, but certainly not worth near so much as I'd thought it to be at the time.
But things happen. Just as with this book I'm reading, I find that this fellow so recently self-hung, seems to grasp almost completely the nature of abstraction along with its history and the fact that attempts to understand such things before their time can and has lead to actual concrete insanity in this temporal world. I am incredibly saddened by his death, as I would imagine the accomplishment of great art to leave one other than alone. But apparently history belies this imagining.
So, at least I haven't completely lost my mind yet. I find it an actual marvel that I can manage to live all alone and by myself and still be shaved and almost completely dressed every day (the almost has to do with a certain cluelessness, as you might imagine, with regard to style). This very morning I did indeed install a new mailbox with my very own name lettered thereon, since the old one, along these New York salt encrusted roads, had finally almost entirely melted away and the much patched-again door was no longer responding to the mailman's flap. I imagined him angry with me - even in the outback, there are civil requirements!
Do I digress? Well, gentle reader, what follows is the actual letter I didn't have the nerve to send said friends and family because, I guess, I didn't want to be the cause of worry. So, now I put it here, even knowing that these self-same friends and family may - are even likely to - read the thing I didn't want to show them.
Everyone knows that great accomplishments are least recognized by those closest to the accomplished. My family in particular is made up of people doing pretty well for ourselves, thank-you-very-much, but almost literally surrounded by the in-your-face accomplishments of all those we grew up with. In many cases, we are demonstrably smarter and more capable than these avatars of success. So there must be something very intrafamilialy wrong. Hell, I've already described a very very extreme example, in conscious abuse of my very ex brother-in-law.
Among the family, I'm often supposed to be the one with the promise - no surprise there I imagine. I do alright, and keep myself manifestly sane, because I have a knack for the practical arts, now specifically computer networks and related technologies. Consistently, I don't pretend to any professionalism, so shortly I will have to move along as this field (also) proceeds to marginalize us talented amateurs. You might even observe that I patently eschew moves toward professionalism, nursing, such is my archetype, this truly silly notion that I sort-of "have" something of worth beyond whatever I might devote to and thus contribute via some developed profession.
My disease is nothing if not thoroughgoing and consistent.
In any case, you, gentle reader, will not worry very much about my sanity or safety, although a blog is a very live production, so that you might. A book is presumed to be finished, though almost the very opposite of dead. Its currency is a function of how well read it is. The blog is not exactly a live email , which ought to be to someone (explaining the apparent sin of even the best joke-spams which get sent around in such a way that the persons to approach almost the entire cosmos of readers, and in the case of really juicy stuff like an email about your neighbor Sarah Palin actually does get read by almost the entire cosmos.)
(I have a terrible fondness for parenthetical digressions)
So the blog pretends to something like a journal, but gets to be more immediate. And I pretend to something near eternal, but want to work it out in public, as it were, maybe partly because it seems that important (and I want it to be discoverable when I wander away from sensible reality), but also precisely because I don't think I have it in me actually professionally to write. You will have noticed that by now.
Here's the email to three closest friends and family, which I had provisionally titled:
fear and trepidation, but with a good natured laugh (here's letting the cat out of the bag)
Hello fine treo.
For some silly reason, reading this morning with the fire warmly glowing, a very disturbing book lent me by my friend Wayne over the weekend (Everything and More, A Compact History of
This is not some great big deal. There is nothing terribly embarrassing there (I hope, although I am not really certain). I'm just simply not sure where I will end up in the near future, especially as I feel myself descending, with the prologue to this book, into something which feels very much like coming unhinged.
Very disturbingly, this David Foster Wallace, who is undoubtedly one of the great intellects of our time, hung himself recently, and I assure you I do never want to find myself in such despair. ( I want you to know I'm sending this in the middle of the work day, and am doing so in good humor feeling very strong, especially as I mowed my lawn yesterday and watched the debate with only mild amusement rather than anxiety last night)
The opening of his book defines and describes "abstraction" in a way that is excruciating in its familiarity to me. In a very comical way, he explains why dealing with abstraction can and does, apparently often, lead to madness. That's this thing I feel.
I am, of course, re-entering the very abstract world of my Eureka epiphany moment on the boat-womb-cocoon, the anniversary of which, along with cat piss in the bed, time-zone crossings, and the oddly unfamiliar experience of sybaritic bliss did recently send me howling to the hospital. I assure you I will do everything possible in my power to avoid that fate a second time, including putting down this book for the moment, and possibly forever.
Meanwhile, I'm trusting you not to find in my blog rantings any cause or sign of insanity. I'm trusting you, in other words, with my secret. I'm also NOT trusting that you will understand what I write about, since I'm not nearly intelligent enough, nor a good enough writer (honestly, I'm not being modest, but what I'm attempting is really really difficult) - the burden is purely mine to make this intelligible and I haven't even gotten close. Wallace has such lucidity that I can only still marvel at my pretense.
Well, pretender or not, I remain convinced, especially as we watch this world tumbling down into something frankly terrifying (I'm not getting overheated here - I think I simply have my eyes open) that I am "on to" something.
I guess it, this thing I hit on when my mind was sharper, is the very essence of abstraction, properly so defined, and I am getting rather desperate to find someone to share these thoughts.
The blog thing seems to work better than private writing in journals, simply as a kind of discipline.
If I thought I were asking you to read what I've written, I would consider that to be an unforgivable abuse of friendship.
I'm just asking you to take note of the address, in case I hit on something there, and in the process wander off beyond the pale of sensible existence (you are meant to laugh here). A kind of mild paranoia, if you will. which I only sense as a kind of shadow in the darkness, off to the edge of my vision . . .
I do have hope that I'm not quite alone in this whole business, and so it is with some mild hope also that I share what I'm up to as the best way to stay sane.
Well, so with fear and trepidation, here you go . . . . .
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Caring and Not Caring With the Election Coming Up
I see that there are many exremely articulate pleas coming from motivated Obama supporters. Pleas to keep it calm this time, and not to offend the culturally innocent; not to hand the election once again to those who would play with democracy on the way to winning an election. And I am struggling with my own paranoia.
This time for me differs from the last time in at least the simple sense that I am older and won't be able to muster any energy another time around with this nonsense. With Reagan, I was young enough to be cautious with my certainties, though by rights I should have been young enough to be certain. But I did still believe in a kind of true love, my wonderful daughters were yet ahead of me, and I since have aborted as many careers as children; enough to justify my uncertainty at least. I might have been wrong, and I might have proven it by success in various fields of human endeavor.
But they've gone too far. I am not looking forward to comfortable retirement, and I think I have a lot of company. I expend considerable angst about getting it right at work, and yet I also face the emotional limitations of workmates who just might prefer the dysfunction as it is. The rewards are all skewed, and getting it right at work is as likely to get you fired as is doing very little work at all. Sometimes doing very little work at all is the safest thing, since at least you won't be risking any kind of line crossing. Lots of the time, what is wanted is a kind of inner compliance toward that thing which goes by the corporate shorthand of culture.
So, I have been quietly hoping for improvements to the sanity-direction of our collective actions, even rooting for technological breakthroughs of the sort to solve the food and energy crises which constantly bedevil my middle American equanimity at what could very well be a very nice life. What a wonderful daydream is "clean nuclear" or "green revolution". As if our problems were not a matter more for proper distribution and conservative behaviors than technical fixes. As if it weren't already obvious that more of these inputs would (and have!) simply energize the very grotesqueness of the distortions between those within and those without the castle walls.
There is little question that open markets do provide the best means for "wealth creation", and that an inevitable consequence of such improvements overall is that some will need to be cared for because they will be left behind in the generalized competition. There is probably also little question that the effort to care, preemptively, for those who might need it can only leave them failed at the outset.
Our social contract is meant to provide for basic education, which should mean basic preparation to compete using a variety of skillsets, the most basic of which ought to be gumption and grim endurance. The social contract ought to be extended at least to allow for enough basic healthcare that accidents of fate and genetics don't leave people literally in the cold. There ought to be a minimal community table at which we can be nourished, and to which we may always return clothed and warm.
It must be when, in the midst of plenty, we are literally goaded to ignore as inevitable the abject misery of so many among us, in the face of unspeakable wantonness among the beautiful and wealthy, that we should take notice that everything about our collective human living has spun disastrously out of balance.
Up until the beginning of the last century collective humanity could feel certain of its enlightenment thrust beyond simple ignorance. We were tracking and travelling the entire globe, and by cataloging our anthropological distinctions, were rubbing dull - or some were -the sharp ignorant insistences of superiority by those in happenstance possession of power.
At an absurdly early moment, when the harnessing of earth's great fossil treasure would make possible ever more rapid transgressions across land and water, and finally even into the air and out of it to lunacy; at this same moment when dynamite would leave its legacy in reward of great thought as amends for greater destruction -- at that absurdly early moment it was already clear in the reformulations of a young Albert Einstein that clarity in our human understanding would be a receding over-the-horizon goal on an increasingly dangerous grail quest.
From that moment has descended destruction on an unthinkable scale, along with the communications technologies which might yet mitigate such destructive impulses. Oil alone, without the transistor, would surely never have enabled our collective gasp of so much outbreathed carbon condensate to risk a fatal unbalancing of the very living earth which for a while yet will elude our hubristic efforts to control.
While still not yet having come to terms with Einstein's humble genius, it may be necessary to complete the fatal equation. When light was seen not to propogate as waves through some supposed ether, but rather as massive particles whose velocity was by definition terminal, and when their energy could be released only by an act of perception, which implies not only at least another particle on which to exercise its only ever relative energy, but also a kind of measure-taking, it should already have been apparent that apart from the meauring mind, there could be no meaningful existence to the thing being measured.
We exist as in a pause. It is the very pause between perceived flash, stomach-felt concussion, and final collapse of a modern building undergoing planned demolition. If this weren't a common enough sight, the entire world has internalized an approximation of the sequence from watching the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, 1 and 2. The structure appears coherent after puffing almost imperceptably out. It is the very near-perfect timing of the dissolution of each internal linkage which allows all the parts to pause in suspension before, now only seeming intact, falling to the ground in a manner to take the very air down with it, leaving the dust for afterward.
The trade towers were demolished so perfectly by luck, from the top, and followed a sequence down so that their illusion of integrity had to be expanded back in time to the very improbability of their ever having been built in the first place. At the time, metaphors of hubris abounded.
But still we wait for the supercollider to finish its work before declaring that there may be no free rides on this spaceship earth. Kurtzweil be damned, there may be no hubristic response allowable to our failure to heed what has already been made so abundantly manifest; that it is the observer who must be transformed before the object of her observation will yield any further revelation.
We continue to act, in other words, as though the cosmos were deterministic and determined, and as though our only human role - consciousness being our myterious bestowed distinction - were progressively to reveal its workings. This despite the apparent finality of our implication, by simple physics, in the workings of the things observed. By the very dimensionality of space having been itself revealed to be an extension of those particles, whose very particulate nature resists definition except, perhaps, by that dimensionality which presupposes measured mass and not more fleeting energy. We continue to act, quite simply, as though we weren't responsible for creation, preferring to project that responsibility onto some invisible hand, responsive to laws, in classical validation of what we already know to be patently absurd.
The "hand" of Fate is as the end of the cosmos, curving back on itself in some other nonperceived and nonperceptible dimension. These are abstractions. Yet what is real is our hands, and our mind, and our collective decision making and will. There has never been, and can never be, any cosmos apart from mind. Mind too, quite apparently, has a reductive existence, more minor than that of the still yet-to-be-detected Hadron. Mind without emotion, breaking the definition for mind -- like human without conscience -- is simply some absurd simulacrum, or at best an abstraction which can never be found in actual existence.
And emotion is simply the caring that a connection exist. This fifth force, perhaps weaker than gravity, or perhaps stronger than that strongest intra-nuclear force, is the only one without theoretical particles in mediation. Absolutely nothing is transferred. And yet, apart from this conceptual connection - in mind alone - nothing of the perceptual cosmos, in measured exchange of particulate mass, would or could be other than static, suspended, and block-like meaningless because it might be coming together or flying apart.
Who could tell?
This time for me differs from the last time in at least the simple sense that I am older and won't be able to muster any energy another time around with this nonsense. With Reagan, I was young enough to be cautious with my certainties, though by rights I should have been young enough to be certain. But I did still believe in a kind of true love, my wonderful daughters were yet ahead of me, and I since have aborted as many careers as children; enough to justify my uncertainty at least. I might have been wrong, and I might have proven it by success in various fields of human endeavor.
But they've gone too far. I am not looking forward to comfortable retirement, and I think I have a lot of company. I expend considerable angst about getting it right at work, and yet I also face the emotional limitations of workmates who just might prefer the dysfunction as it is. The rewards are all skewed, and getting it right at work is as likely to get you fired as is doing very little work at all. Sometimes doing very little work at all is the safest thing, since at least you won't be risking any kind of line crossing. Lots of the time, what is wanted is a kind of inner compliance toward that thing which goes by the corporate shorthand of culture.
So, I have been quietly hoping for improvements to the sanity-direction of our collective actions, even rooting for technological breakthroughs of the sort to solve the food and energy crises which constantly bedevil my middle American equanimity at what could very well be a very nice life. What a wonderful daydream is "clean nuclear" or "green revolution". As if our problems were not a matter more for proper distribution and conservative behaviors than technical fixes. As if it weren't already obvious that more of these inputs would (and have!) simply energize the very grotesqueness of the distortions between those within and those without the castle walls.
There is little question that open markets do provide the best means for "wealth creation", and that an inevitable consequence of such improvements overall is that some will need to be cared for because they will be left behind in the generalized competition. There is probably also little question that the effort to care, preemptively, for those who might need it can only leave them failed at the outset.
Our social contract is meant to provide for basic education, which should mean basic preparation to compete using a variety of skillsets, the most basic of which ought to be gumption and grim endurance. The social contract ought to be extended at least to allow for enough basic healthcare that accidents of fate and genetics don't leave people literally in the cold. There ought to be a minimal community table at which we can be nourished, and to which we may always return clothed and warm.
It must be when, in the midst of plenty, we are literally goaded to ignore as inevitable the abject misery of so many among us, in the face of unspeakable wantonness among the beautiful and wealthy, that we should take notice that everything about our collective human living has spun disastrously out of balance.
Up until the beginning of the last century collective humanity could feel certain of its enlightenment thrust beyond simple ignorance. We were tracking and travelling the entire globe, and by cataloging our anthropological distinctions, were rubbing dull - or some were -the sharp ignorant insistences of superiority by those in happenstance possession of power.
At an absurdly early moment, when the harnessing of earth's great fossil treasure would make possible ever more rapid transgressions across land and water, and finally even into the air and out of it to lunacy; at this same moment when dynamite would leave its legacy in reward of great thought as amends for greater destruction -- at that absurdly early moment it was already clear in the reformulations of a young Albert Einstein that clarity in our human understanding would be a receding over-the-horizon goal on an increasingly dangerous grail quest.
From that moment has descended destruction on an unthinkable scale, along with the communications technologies which might yet mitigate such destructive impulses. Oil alone, without the transistor, would surely never have enabled our collective gasp of so much outbreathed carbon condensate to risk a fatal unbalancing of the very living earth which for a while yet will elude our hubristic efforts to control.
While still not yet having come to terms with Einstein's humble genius, it may be necessary to complete the fatal equation. When light was seen not to propogate as waves through some supposed ether, but rather as massive particles whose velocity was by definition terminal, and when their energy could be released only by an act of perception, which implies not only at least another particle on which to exercise its only ever relative energy, but also a kind of measure-taking, it should already have been apparent that apart from the meauring mind, there could be no meaningful existence to the thing being measured.
We exist as in a pause. It is the very pause between perceived flash, stomach-felt concussion, and final collapse of a modern building undergoing planned demolition. If this weren't a common enough sight, the entire world has internalized an approximation of the sequence from watching the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, 1 and 2. The structure appears coherent after puffing almost imperceptably out. It is the very near-perfect timing of the dissolution of each internal linkage which allows all the parts to pause in suspension before, now only seeming intact, falling to the ground in a manner to take the very air down with it, leaving the dust for afterward.
The trade towers were demolished so perfectly by luck, from the top, and followed a sequence down so that their illusion of integrity had to be expanded back in time to the very improbability of their ever having been built in the first place. At the time, metaphors of hubris abounded.
But still we wait for the supercollider to finish its work before declaring that there may be no free rides on this spaceship earth. Kurtzweil be damned, there may be no hubristic response allowable to our failure to heed what has already been made so abundantly manifest; that it is the observer who must be transformed before the object of her observation will yield any further revelation.
We continue to act, in other words, as though the cosmos were deterministic and determined, and as though our only human role - consciousness being our myterious bestowed distinction - were progressively to reveal its workings. This despite the apparent finality of our implication, by simple physics, in the workings of the things observed. By the very dimensionality of space having been itself revealed to be an extension of those particles, whose very particulate nature resists definition except, perhaps, by that dimensionality which presupposes measured mass and not more fleeting energy. We continue to act, quite simply, as though we weren't responsible for creation, preferring to project that responsibility onto some invisible hand, responsive to laws, in classical validation of what we already know to be patently absurd.
The "hand" of Fate is as the end of the cosmos, curving back on itself in some other nonperceived and nonperceptible dimension. These are abstractions. Yet what is real is our hands, and our mind, and our collective decision making and will. There has never been, and can never be, any cosmos apart from mind. Mind too, quite apparently, has a reductive existence, more minor than that of the still yet-to-be-detected Hadron. Mind without emotion, breaking the definition for mind -- like human without conscience -- is simply some absurd simulacrum, or at best an abstraction which can never be found in actual existence.
And emotion is simply the caring that a connection exist. This fifth force, perhaps weaker than gravity, or perhaps stronger than that strongest intra-nuclear force, is the only one without theoretical particles in mediation. Absolutely nothing is transferred. And yet, apart from this conceptual connection - in mind alone - nothing of the perceptual cosmos, in measured exchange of particulate mass, would or could be other than static, suspended, and block-like meaningless because it might be coming together or flying apart.
Who could tell?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Chapter 5 from 1983
I used Jackie to release me from my prison. There soon came to be no other communication than the physical. Long periods of melancholic silence having only one answer. She gave herself purely to a sexuality she believed in despite the fact that she never once achieved orgasm.
I really did love her. That wasn't false, but the cruelty was that so much was still in the way. It was impossible for me to grow and change and at the same time cling to an ideal that I only understood out of faith. We were too young, and I offer only that if I ever ask for forgiveness. Of course that is what the school knew, my parents knew, and all authority by which I felt limited. Even blind fate knew that we were too young. Depression was the cost of breaking the rules. Not parents' rules, or society's rules, but the common law of all who grow up healthy because they are like everyone else. That rule I was determined to break because, as I saw it, there was evil afoot in the normal life.
Who knows when it started. I'd grown up on Lake Erie, and watched the clear seedbed of fantasy that I knew turn into a stinking cesspool. I knew the reasons. I couldn't always decide whether greed or the rationale given by the greedy made more sense to explain it, but I'd read enough to know without a shadow of a doubt that it was evil. I believed with the conviction of one who understood simple statistics and computation and logic that when you added it all up there wasn't much time left to disaster. That made all the other escapes unreal. I would still defend myself in that. Life as usual in a decaying world is the most dangerous fantasy.
I grew up with the implicit assumption that war was a masculine right of passage. The war of my father's generation filled my senses. It was everywhere in mythology. It was a just war. The soldiers of the good side were good. The mythology bolstered the childish assumption that authority is right and made my collapse more thorough when I found that the war which had been arranged for my generation was being fought in Vietnam.
I grew up in a house where the playroom that most attracted our fantasies was a fallout shelter. I remember very clearly the piles of cinder blocks passed along a board to the basement. I remember the pride I had in my father's ability to construct such a fortress. I remember understanding not at all the seriousness of the project; that, though water and food stores and blankets and other necessities were all laid aside, the reality of their purpose was never made known. It was a fun place -- and fun to imagine being trapped there. But the collapse was greater when I found out later the impossible escape it was pretending. Nuclear war was an abstraction. Fallout couldn't penetrate the earth so we would be safe. Coffins to assure that putrefaction begins well before burial.
Something must have snapped very early which made me too serious and too private in an obsession with meaning. Everywhere, it was a simple matter to point out to myself the one serious omission made by all the normal voices in all the normal tracks. Yes, I wanted to know, but why do you all act as though what doesn't matter matters, and what does doesn't. Why should I prepare to take a place in a society that is corrupt to its very soul. Finally, why is happiness important in a world so full of misery -- actual and potential.
Who can untangle the threads? It must have started almost from the beginning. I prefer to think that it started simply with the very real love I'd gotten at home. I prefer to think it started when my mother, against the advice of doctors and the ridicule of friends, fed me from her breast, thus soldering a link that others can't recover. I prefer to think that there has been something real in the rejections and false starts of my life, which look so much like mistakes on the surface. When lost without certain guidance, I have tried to opt for the way most true to my feelings. Meaningless though such choices may seem, I prefer to think that they harken back along a well-connected path to something I once did know with certainty.
I remember very clearly one summer evening in a sleeping bag in the back yard which overhung the lake. The stars were out in myriad brilliance. A friend was beside me, and we were moved to thoughts as children have of the distance to the stars. My calm and pleasure at being under the stars that night began to turn toward agony as I measured infinity and found always a brick wall there at the end. I don't know how old I was, but there I have proof of some motion in me that was untutored and unstoppable. No one had prepared me. The trap lay waiting in the language.
Some are never moved in their own thoughts to the boundaries of sense. They leave that to the experts. Some may find themselves there and not be bothered. I'm sure the puzzle I found in my mind is some sort of cliche. But some can't forget the agony. They hubristically try for a solution on the power of their own thoughts. If they seek help they are considered cute. And who had the answer to that conundrum? For whatever reason, I was left only with my own devices and with a puzzle that wouldn't disappear.
I remember when I was very young, perhaps six or seven, an exultant feeling of being elect. I remember the circumstances exactly, though I can't recall the reason. I was on the schoolbus, and I looked around at all the other children. Things had a crystal clarity that I have seldom recaptured. I knew that there was something in me that was lacking in them. Perhaps it was the day after the night under the stars. That strikes the most consonant key. It's hateful now to think that I was that way, but perhaps that feeling, too, lay buried in the language -- available to those who needed it; who could be snared by it.
I remember, much later when my own language had grown, a similar exultancy that remains equally elusive to the kind of memory that could bring it back. That time, I was on the streets of New York, walking. I knew with the same exultant certainty that I had known my own specialness, that there about me on the crowded streets walked infinite infinities. I was filled with a sense of wonder at my own smallness, and the hubris of anyone who could claim a measure of more than was in each private universe.
I remember sitting at my school desk in the sixth grade and feeling a tiny prick in my rear end, such as might have been caused by a splinter in my pants, or some random excitement at a nerve end. But I remember being certain that it was the injection of some mysterious hypodermic syringe, and equally certain that I couldn't reveal my notice -- even to myself. Because I was tortured by the possibility that I had been chosen by some other-wordly force either for my liberation or my enslavement. In the first case, the hypodermic would confirm my distinction from those around me -- I must have belonged to the race of aliens and I needed the booster to survive here. In the second, I was being drugged so as to keep me from something. In either case, it was part of necessity that I not reveal my awareness because, in the first I knew from my previous ignorance that I hadn't been supposed to know -- I feared losing my role -- and in the second, if I was to escape, I needed the liberty that continued pretense of ignorance would give.
It never occurred to me that the pinprick alone was the source of awareness; that I was being injected with a drug that had waked me. It never occurred to me because I would have had to be told. It was not an insanity, nor even the beginnings of insanity. I was living in a world of mysteries, and I was confident they would be unfolded. I kept my mouth shut until the reality of the thing was made apparent, and then I would wonder that everyone could have thought such a thing. People hold stranger fantasies as reality, and what interests me is my preoccupation with having been chosen.
I don't think it came directly from any unhealthy input. My parents may have held the proverbial hopes that I would grow up to be president -- important in some way. But Santa Claus came to everyone's house, and God knew all my thoughts. I reasoned, if that were so, that when I prayed to God he would appreciate my jokes. I joked with Him even without decorum because, so I reasoned, he could not be affronted. If he knew all my thoughts, then there was no use evading what was central in me by making a pious pretense that contradicted who I actually was. I had no feeling that I could hang-up on God when the prayer was over, and so prayer was a means of discovery for me. I wanted to prove to myself what I really meant when I called him a bastard. I knew He would know.
I think I may have been theologically correct. That ignores the other possibility that prayer plays an active part in forming one's life. But, I did pray fervently. Whatever prayer was doing for other people who mouthed more pious words in their heads, I wasn't always fooling myself when I made a comparison favorable to myself. I was good in all the essentials. It's hard to remember what good and bad were in childhood, but I loved my parents, did what I was told when it made sense and when I wasn't overcome by curiosity; I took my naps and so forth.
But, what was good? I got my share of spankings and caused my share of grief. I don't think I felt the pain I caused untrue. I deserved the spankings. Yet when I made my prayers, I truly wanted to be good and felt that perhaps, insofar as I could control it, I was good. Sin is so arcane that I could easily have convinced myself that I was damned for all the petty breaches. But I knew that I was good.
And I knew that I was chosen. That, if I was good then my life could not but hold meaning and that, since I was not equipped to fathom that meaning, all I need do was be good --and wait. I began the quest to uncover the meaning of my life, thus, at a very early age. I wasn't really waiting; I was looking for clues.
I think that I was aware that meaning might be held out until after death, and of this I was terrified. That part of Christianity never became real. The language into which I was born provided convenient stepping stones for the eradication of demons. Each step led further into consciousness from where the possibility of eternal life made no sense. Heaven and hell were only real for my body. They bore no fruit in my mind except as abstract reward and punishment. I wanted desperately to go to heaven, but not to look down upon meaning -- merely as proof that I was good. I couldn't believe that consciousness was possible after death; and meaning was a matter for consciousness.
There were gremlins, I recall quite clearly, which inhabited the door of the family car so that when you turned the crank, the window went up and down. They were hidden by the mystic veil of the panel. I peopled the space with actual gremlins, and tried to imagine how they made the window work. Have we all forgotten these things? Or is this just evidence that I am helpless in my need to know? I hadn't the equipment to imagine gears and levers, but the essential thing was that something had to be there.
Whatever pulls on the imagination pulled on mine in that way. Mine weren't frivolous gremlins invented only for delight. Something had to be there between my hand and the window, and without the gremlins I could make no connection. I imagined people in the box of the TV who went through all the utterly impossible antics of cartoons. Their smallness and infinite malleability confounded me, but there had to be something.
Is it all these things which combined, and having no more real answers to the bulk of humanity, leave most of the world asleep? Do we all learn so early because the natural questions literally cannot be answered, to put off asking them and to finally forget that they were ever a question at all? I have since eradicated the ghosts and the gremlins, but with great effort. Others may watch a television or drive a car or fly in a plane with the incurious mind of one who knows only that someone else knows; and takes it for granted that there are no gremlins. It seems to me now not a deficient mode, but I cannot.
I don't know the cause -- where it started. But I find myself here in this position, and I have left only responsibility that what I am entails. Voids itch in me forever; until they are filled. It is simply the way I am. I shouldn't have to ask forgiveness for this quality, though it has caused endless pain. And God grant me grace not to boast, though I have done that often enough.
No! I am here and I have eradicated all the gremlins except God -- to my satisfaction. I began the life of violent atheism soon after meeting Jackie. That was a violent denial which, as do all denials, affirmed more than it denied. Then I slipped into despair and agnosticism. Finally, I found in the East something new to fill the void, but it still itched.
I hope now to fill the void by writing this. Actually, I mean that quite literally. It will not stop itching until it is either filled or until I can leave it empty in the manner of the vacuum which satisfactorily names the void between for some physicists. Like a normal itch, scratching makes it worse, and in my case leads onward to the hope of a cure. It won't go away. And I have been led to write this. There is no answer here. But neither is the writing just for me that I may have my own answer in the engagement --though it is partly that. It is, like all writing, like all proofs, mathematical or otherwise, like all argument -- it is a trail left after some prior impulse started the travel.
I have always found that my arguments don't occur to me until they have been voiced. For that reason I am always engaged in argument, and always excited -- to the dismay of my interlocutor as often as not, for whom other things are important. But they start on a clear impulse, my arguments, and I am convinced of them before I have even made them clear -- in words -- to myself. I have been accused -- and have even assented on occasion -- of being a devil's advocate, but I am not. I can never act the side I don't believe in, and so I have been silent of late. That is why I am writing this. I have had a clear impulse that it is right, and pray that I can show it to be so.
If there is truth, it will strike hollowly on those for whom the void has never existed. But there are many more who have only tried to forget desperately something that is now so long past that it can easily be forgotten. I cannot forget. I don't mean that everyone must know the workings of a TV, or a car, or a computer; or a tree, or a frog or a human. It cannot be wrong even to rest on the faith that someone else knows, because it is a practical faith. But the other faith -- the one that knows that there is meaning to existence. That cannot be given over to others. If you have faith in God, then ACT like it! or by God, I'll call your bluff. If you don't, then listen. And if you think it doesn't matter, then watch as the drain is pulled out, and you are sucked away with the waste. Not God. God doesn't matter -- but meaning does.
"Getting a little carried away there, aren't we? You begin to sound nasty; and preachy."
Yeah, well. I don't know if there's really going to be anything here. I just have to go on. Each step of the way there are barriers that channel my path, and it has come to this. I feel at once constrained and boundlessly free. That is a feeling I would like to impart. And this is the price of my freedom.
"How about a few more constraints on the style?"
I'm trying.
I really did love her. That wasn't false, but the cruelty was that so much was still in the way. It was impossible for me to grow and change and at the same time cling to an ideal that I only understood out of faith. We were too young, and I offer only that if I ever ask for forgiveness. Of course that is what the school knew, my parents knew, and all authority by which I felt limited. Even blind fate knew that we were too young. Depression was the cost of breaking the rules. Not parents' rules, or society's rules, but the common law of all who grow up healthy because they are like everyone else. That rule I was determined to break because, as I saw it, there was evil afoot in the normal life.
Who knows when it started. I'd grown up on Lake Erie, and watched the clear seedbed of fantasy that I knew turn into a stinking cesspool. I knew the reasons. I couldn't always decide whether greed or the rationale given by the greedy made more sense to explain it, but I'd read enough to know without a shadow of a doubt that it was evil. I believed with the conviction of one who understood simple statistics and computation and logic that when you added it all up there wasn't much time left to disaster. That made all the other escapes unreal. I would still defend myself in that. Life as usual in a decaying world is the most dangerous fantasy.
I grew up with the implicit assumption that war was a masculine right of passage. The war of my father's generation filled my senses. It was everywhere in mythology. It was a just war. The soldiers of the good side were good. The mythology bolstered the childish assumption that authority is right and made my collapse more thorough when I found that the war which had been arranged for my generation was being fought in Vietnam.
I grew up in a house where the playroom that most attracted our fantasies was a fallout shelter. I remember very clearly the piles of cinder blocks passed along a board to the basement. I remember the pride I had in my father's ability to construct such a fortress. I remember understanding not at all the seriousness of the project; that, though water and food stores and blankets and other necessities were all laid aside, the reality of their purpose was never made known. It was a fun place -- and fun to imagine being trapped there. But the collapse was greater when I found out later the impossible escape it was pretending. Nuclear war was an abstraction. Fallout couldn't penetrate the earth so we would be safe. Coffins to assure that putrefaction begins well before burial.
Something must have snapped very early which made me too serious and too private in an obsession with meaning. Everywhere, it was a simple matter to point out to myself the one serious omission made by all the normal voices in all the normal tracks. Yes, I wanted to know, but why do you all act as though what doesn't matter matters, and what does doesn't. Why should I prepare to take a place in a society that is corrupt to its very soul. Finally, why is happiness important in a world so full of misery -- actual and potential.
Who can untangle the threads? It must have started almost from the beginning. I prefer to think that it started simply with the very real love I'd gotten at home. I prefer to think it started when my mother, against the advice of doctors and the ridicule of friends, fed me from her breast, thus soldering a link that others can't recover. I prefer to think that there has been something real in the rejections and false starts of my life, which look so much like mistakes on the surface. When lost without certain guidance, I have tried to opt for the way most true to my feelings. Meaningless though such choices may seem, I prefer to think that they harken back along a well-connected path to something I once did know with certainty.
I remember very clearly one summer evening in a sleeping bag in the back yard which overhung the lake. The stars were out in myriad brilliance. A friend was beside me, and we were moved to thoughts as children have of the distance to the stars. My calm and pleasure at being under the stars that night began to turn toward agony as I measured infinity and found always a brick wall there at the end. I don't know how old I was, but there I have proof of some motion in me that was untutored and unstoppable. No one had prepared me. The trap lay waiting in the language.
Some are never moved in their own thoughts to the boundaries of sense. They leave that to the experts. Some may find themselves there and not be bothered. I'm sure the puzzle I found in my mind is some sort of cliche. But some can't forget the agony. They hubristically try for a solution on the power of their own thoughts. If they seek help they are considered cute. And who had the answer to that conundrum? For whatever reason, I was left only with my own devices and with a puzzle that wouldn't disappear.
I remember when I was very young, perhaps six or seven, an exultant feeling of being elect. I remember the circumstances exactly, though I can't recall the reason. I was on the schoolbus, and I looked around at all the other children. Things had a crystal clarity that I have seldom recaptured. I knew that there was something in me that was lacking in them. Perhaps it was the day after the night under the stars. That strikes the most consonant key. It's hateful now to think that I was that way, but perhaps that feeling, too, lay buried in the language -- available to those who needed it; who could be snared by it.
I remember, much later when my own language had grown, a similar exultancy that remains equally elusive to the kind of memory that could bring it back. That time, I was on the streets of New York, walking. I knew with the same exultant certainty that I had known my own specialness, that there about me on the crowded streets walked infinite infinities. I was filled with a sense of wonder at my own smallness, and the hubris of anyone who could claim a measure of more than was in each private universe.
I remember sitting at my school desk in the sixth grade and feeling a tiny prick in my rear end, such as might have been caused by a splinter in my pants, or some random excitement at a nerve end. But I remember being certain that it was the injection of some mysterious hypodermic syringe, and equally certain that I couldn't reveal my notice -- even to myself. Because I was tortured by the possibility that I had been chosen by some other-wordly force either for my liberation or my enslavement. In the first case, the hypodermic would confirm my distinction from those around me -- I must have belonged to the race of aliens and I needed the booster to survive here. In the second, I was being drugged so as to keep me from something. In either case, it was part of necessity that I not reveal my awareness because, in the first I knew from my previous ignorance that I hadn't been supposed to know -- I feared losing my role -- and in the second, if I was to escape, I needed the liberty that continued pretense of ignorance would give.
It never occurred to me that the pinprick alone was the source of awareness; that I was being injected with a drug that had waked me. It never occurred to me because I would have had to be told. It was not an insanity, nor even the beginnings of insanity. I was living in a world of mysteries, and I was confident they would be unfolded. I kept my mouth shut until the reality of the thing was made apparent, and then I would wonder that everyone could have thought such a thing. People hold stranger fantasies as reality, and what interests me is my preoccupation with having been chosen.
I don't think it came directly from any unhealthy input. My parents may have held the proverbial hopes that I would grow up to be president -- important in some way. But Santa Claus came to everyone's house, and God knew all my thoughts. I reasoned, if that were so, that when I prayed to God he would appreciate my jokes. I joked with Him even without decorum because, so I reasoned, he could not be affronted. If he knew all my thoughts, then there was no use evading what was central in me by making a pious pretense that contradicted who I actually was. I had no feeling that I could hang-up on God when the prayer was over, and so prayer was a means of discovery for me. I wanted to prove to myself what I really meant when I called him a bastard. I knew He would know.
I think I may have been theologically correct. That ignores the other possibility that prayer plays an active part in forming one's life. But, I did pray fervently. Whatever prayer was doing for other people who mouthed more pious words in their heads, I wasn't always fooling myself when I made a comparison favorable to myself. I was good in all the essentials. It's hard to remember what good and bad were in childhood, but I loved my parents, did what I was told when it made sense and when I wasn't overcome by curiosity; I took my naps and so forth.
But, what was good? I got my share of spankings and caused my share of grief. I don't think I felt the pain I caused untrue. I deserved the spankings. Yet when I made my prayers, I truly wanted to be good and felt that perhaps, insofar as I could control it, I was good. Sin is so arcane that I could easily have convinced myself that I was damned for all the petty breaches. But I knew that I was good.
And I knew that I was chosen. That, if I was good then my life could not but hold meaning and that, since I was not equipped to fathom that meaning, all I need do was be good --and wait. I began the quest to uncover the meaning of my life, thus, at a very early age. I wasn't really waiting; I was looking for clues.
I think that I was aware that meaning might be held out until after death, and of this I was terrified. That part of Christianity never became real. The language into which I was born provided convenient stepping stones for the eradication of demons. Each step led further into consciousness from where the possibility of eternal life made no sense. Heaven and hell were only real for my body. They bore no fruit in my mind except as abstract reward and punishment. I wanted desperately to go to heaven, but not to look down upon meaning -- merely as proof that I was good. I couldn't believe that consciousness was possible after death; and meaning was a matter for consciousness.
There were gremlins, I recall quite clearly, which inhabited the door of the family car so that when you turned the crank, the window went up and down. They were hidden by the mystic veil of the panel. I peopled the space with actual gremlins, and tried to imagine how they made the window work. Have we all forgotten these things? Or is this just evidence that I am helpless in my need to know? I hadn't the equipment to imagine gears and levers, but the essential thing was that something had to be there.
Whatever pulls on the imagination pulled on mine in that way. Mine weren't frivolous gremlins invented only for delight. Something had to be there between my hand and the window, and without the gremlins I could make no connection. I imagined people in the box of the TV who went through all the utterly impossible antics of cartoons. Their smallness and infinite malleability confounded me, but there had to be something.
Is it all these things which combined, and having no more real answers to the bulk of humanity, leave most of the world asleep? Do we all learn so early because the natural questions literally cannot be answered, to put off asking them and to finally forget that they were ever a question at all? I have since eradicated the ghosts and the gremlins, but with great effort. Others may watch a television or drive a car or fly in a plane with the incurious mind of one who knows only that someone else knows; and takes it for granted that there are no gremlins. It seems to me now not a deficient mode, but I cannot.
I don't know the cause -- where it started. But I find myself here in this position, and I have left only responsibility that what I am entails. Voids itch in me forever; until they are filled. It is simply the way I am. I shouldn't have to ask forgiveness for this quality, though it has caused endless pain. And God grant me grace not to boast, though I have done that often enough.
No! I am here and I have eradicated all the gremlins except God -- to my satisfaction. I began the life of violent atheism soon after meeting Jackie. That was a violent denial which, as do all denials, affirmed more than it denied. Then I slipped into despair and agnosticism. Finally, I found in the East something new to fill the void, but it still itched.
I hope now to fill the void by writing this. Actually, I mean that quite literally. It will not stop itching until it is either filled or until I can leave it empty in the manner of the vacuum which satisfactorily names the void between for some physicists. Like a normal itch, scratching makes it worse, and in my case leads onward to the hope of a cure. It won't go away. And I have been led to write this. There is no answer here. But neither is the writing just for me that I may have my own answer in the engagement --though it is partly that. It is, like all writing, like all proofs, mathematical or otherwise, like all argument -- it is a trail left after some prior impulse started the travel.
I have always found that my arguments don't occur to me until they have been voiced. For that reason I am always engaged in argument, and always excited -- to the dismay of my interlocutor as often as not, for whom other things are important. But they start on a clear impulse, my arguments, and I am convinced of them before I have even made them clear -- in words -- to myself. I have been accused -- and have even assented on occasion -- of being a devil's advocate, but I am not. I can never act the side I don't believe in, and so I have been silent of late. That is why I am writing this. I have had a clear impulse that it is right, and pray that I can show it to be so.
If there is truth, it will strike hollowly on those for whom the void has never existed. But there are many more who have only tried to forget desperately something that is now so long past that it can easily be forgotten. I cannot forget. I don't mean that everyone must know the workings of a TV, or a car, or a computer; or a tree, or a frog or a human. It cannot be wrong even to rest on the faith that someone else knows, because it is a practical faith. But the other faith -- the one that knows that there is meaning to existence. That cannot be given over to others. If you have faith in God, then ACT like it! or by God, I'll call your bluff. If you don't, then listen. And if you think it doesn't matter, then watch as the drain is pulled out, and you are sucked away with the waste. Not God. God doesn't matter -- but meaning does.
"Getting a little carried away there, aren't we? You begin to sound nasty; and preachy."
Yeah, well. I don't know if there's really going to be anything here. I just have to go on. Each step of the way there are barriers that channel my path, and it has come to this. I feel at once constrained and boundlessly free. That is a feeling I would like to impart. And this is the price of my freedom.
"How about a few more constraints on the style?"
I'm trying.
Oh my, this is somewhat difficult - Being Sarah Palin
It is 25 years since I was transfixed in horror watching Ronald Reagan actually swamp the country by his re-election bid. (I had campaigned for Barry Commoner the first time- remember him? No wonder I've become so defeatist!) I'd thought at the time that the world would soon end. I'd written up my diatribe, and just about given up on finding anyone to read it. I didn't think the writing was that great, but I couldn't think of any other way to get the point, so to speak, across.
Now, as I prepare to watch what will have to be the greatest spectacle of the century - this "debate" between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden - I have somehow been driven to re-read some of what I've posted here over these last months.
It's pretty excruciating. Plenty embarrassing. But maybe I'm learning to accept life as a nudist, and just move along with the flow. Visiting Spain not too long ago, it wasn't that strange to walk along the nudist beach (although I do still regret that those incredibly nubile topless babes I squinted to descry were bending over actually to lift my glasses while I floated nearsighted away on the Mediterranean swells. The glasses I now wear aren't nearly as well calibrated, and as always I mistook charm for innocence in shrugging off the apparent theft in progress. I was more worried about the cap, never imagining bifocals as booty!)
So, I guess I'm embarked on this project of authentic ground laying for the great reveal of that Eureka Thing I discovered now over 25 years ago. The authentic part is just that it's all too crude to be crafted or worked on or airbrushed neat. I'm not talking about that authenticity which is what all post-modern Westerners crave, although I am surely guilty of craving that too. But truly, I'm beyond that pale, into the realm of skeezy if I leer at shapeliness in a pick-up bar (never have, never do!). There is something vaguely pleasant in the hormonal let-down.
Surely there is something earnest here. I try very hard, despite my refusal of craft, to get at the right words. I think the blogging format releases me, or perhaps even demands that I stay away, from editorial correctness, and even from the editorial function altogether. Although this still may not be the right medium to convey that re-description of the world which I persist in thinking is so important for more than just myself to adopt. I may have to break down and work at the conveyance. But this could still be considered a kind of scratch pad. The potential for someone to see imposes a certain limited and limiting kind of discipline, I think and hope.
It does feel very much as though the cosmos has cycled around, this time at a pitch more shrill, back to that spot where I watched in horror as this nation embraced Reagan. Now Sarah Palin presumes to take over the cockpit not just of the bus I've referred to previously in metaphoric reference to one aspect of leadership, but an actual chock full 747. Her conceit is surely the moral equivalent of murderous psychopathy! And there is even some truth to the retort I recently heard from a friend to my likening Palin's lack of shame to me pretending to the cockpit of a loaded plane, that "no, because at least you have sense and intelligence and could probably figure out how to fly it when the pilot drops dead."
Well, no, but this is really grotesque. It's an advertisement, as if we need one after Bush, of just how inconsequential the figurehead actually is to the power structure he or she sits atop. And if it's only a figurehead we vote for, then it's also an advertisement for the bankruptcy of democracy and everything recently meant with that term by those in power who've abused it.
I do continue to be amazed that there are earnest and intelligent people who intone the term with reverence for America (I suppose Naomi Klein's book could only have been written by a Canadian). I feel that reverence too, though for something slipping if not slipped away. It's as vacant of meaning as Palin is of substance.
So, will we watch tonight a comparing of logos, imbued with all their relative flavor associations, to a people who still raise Pepsi and Coke to the top of the heap (made up of derivative healthier sounding brands of sugar- or Rumsfeld-water). Are we that afraid of the local? Do we have so little faith in the familiar, because, like Buffalo, we only might have been but never quite will be? Where the really talented get writ so large and so excruciatingly beautiful and patently reproducible, if difficult to contain, digitally, that we actual people are by comparison lowly?
But on the good side, there is Barack Obama this time and not just Barry Commoner in opposition. I mean Barck Obama the credible candidate with an actual chance to win, because, as I recall, I liked the Citizen's Party rather a lot, but the game wasn't quite sufficiently revealed by that time.
So this medium is for the moment free. This nation remains for the moment subject to the peoples' will. And I feel this nearly desperate urgency to get some minds changed. And perhaps, overall, the ground is better manured this cycle.
Shortly before I moved my life, briefly, onto my old wooden sailboat, flush with excitement over my first automobile, I'd driven to New Mexico with my girlfriend for the summer. We happened, no malice aforethought, on a "Rainbow Festival" (A Rainbow Family Gathering) in the Gila National Monument.
I remember being mystified on the way in by the hippie conveyances moving the other direction, with souls hanging out of them shouting "Welcome Home" as though my girlfriend and I knew what they were talking about. I remember the triple rainbow on the way out of the festival. And I remember the competing "rap 17" introductions as we wandered, haplessly, from massive grassy hippie-mobile lot, then by pickup-truck shuttle, to the start of an unnaturally well defined narrow path down into the actual hidden and very Eden-like valley.
I have since found no reference to this, but I know that I am not the only one who heard, --I think it was the second and less "official" because "official" was the opposite of what this "Festival" was all about -- rap 17 which told about the Hopi future-tale (we were on Hopi ground) of the world being covered by a web.
I remember being certain that the vision was of the electrical power grid. I'm pretty sure that no-one -- this was 1977 -- was thinking of what we subsequently called the "world-wide-web", although the Hopi tale might be the proper referential attribution. Does anyone know?
I have often remembered that factoid with a start which resembles my awe at the triple rainbow.
So anyhow, I guess I'm not really trying to convey anything, since that implies something in me - in my head, say - which I want to get over to you, gentle reader. I guess I'm more just bashing on some noisemakers hoping to find that right note or tune so someone will turn their head and then, perhaps semi-consciously, whistle it themselves from time to time.
If, instead of figurehead, we elect someone who actually articulates what it is he stands for in a fashion different from scripted recitals, then we might break that chain of deniability which is what truly defines sociopathy.
I actually don't believe that there are, brother-in-law notwithstanding, actual sociopaths in the world. Rather, I think that the hearts - full metal metaphor - of such people are so layered over by desperation stand-ins for the self that it's very much as if there were none. The behavior of a sociopath, in other words, is simply analog for the behavior of corporations removed from productive purpose. The behavior of our government under Bush, in other words, is manifestly sociopathic, in precisely the same way as is the behavior of global capital. McCain and Palin only move in the same wrong direction.
Radical outsourcing, which is part and parcel of the holy grail quest after perfect market efficiencies, leads as inexorably to attrocities as did Stalin or Mao's rendition of the quest for Marxist perfection. It does so, quite simply, by quite simply breaking all caring links in order to free each part for itself, in perfection of Fundamental Christian Individualism. God help us all, since in the real world there are no radical individuals. In phsyics, as I hope eventually to demonstrate, such particles can't exist.
Now, as I prepare to watch what will have to be the greatest spectacle of the century - this "debate" between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden - I have somehow been driven to re-read some of what I've posted here over these last months.
It's pretty excruciating. Plenty embarrassing. But maybe I'm learning to accept life as a nudist, and just move along with the flow. Visiting Spain not too long ago, it wasn't that strange to walk along the nudist beach (although I do still regret that those incredibly nubile topless babes I squinted to descry were bending over actually to lift my glasses while I floated nearsighted away on the Mediterranean swells. The glasses I now wear aren't nearly as well calibrated, and as always I mistook charm for innocence in shrugging off the apparent theft in progress. I was more worried about the cap, never imagining bifocals as booty!)
So, I guess I'm embarked on this project of authentic ground laying for the great reveal of that Eureka Thing I discovered now over 25 years ago. The authentic part is just that it's all too crude to be crafted or worked on or airbrushed neat. I'm not talking about that authenticity which is what all post-modern Westerners crave, although I am surely guilty of craving that too. But truly, I'm beyond that pale, into the realm of skeezy if I leer at shapeliness in a pick-up bar (never have, never do!). There is something vaguely pleasant in the hormonal let-down.
Surely there is something earnest here. I try very hard, despite my refusal of craft, to get at the right words. I think the blogging format releases me, or perhaps even demands that I stay away, from editorial correctness, and even from the editorial function altogether. Although this still may not be the right medium to convey that re-description of the world which I persist in thinking is so important for more than just myself to adopt. I may have to break down and work at the conveyance. But this could still be considered a kind of scratch pad. The potential for someone to see imposes a certain limited and limiting kind of discipline, I think and hope.
It does feel very much as though the cosmos has cycled around, this time at a pitch more shrill, back to that spot where I watched in horror as this nation embraced Reagan. Now Sarah Palin presumes to take over the cockpit not just of the bus I've referred to previously in metaphoric reference to one aspect of leadership, but an actual chock full 747. Her conceit is surely the moral equivalent of murderous psychopathy! And there is even some truth to the retort I recently heard from a friend to my likening Palin's lack of shame to me pretending to the cockpit of a loaded plane, that "no, because at least you have sense and intelligence and could probably figure out how to fly it when the pilot drops dead."
Well, no, but this is really grotesque. It's an advertisement, as if we need one after Bush, of just how inconsequential the figurehead actually is to the power structure he or she sits atop. And if it's only a figurehead we vote for, then it's also an advertisement for the bankruptcy of democracy and everything recently meant with that term by those in power who've abused it.
I do continue to be amazed that there are earnest and intelligent people who intone the term with reverence for America (I suppose Naomi Klein's book could only have been written by a Canadian). I feel that reverence too, though for something slipping if not slipped away. It's as vacant of meaning as Palin is of substance.
So, will we watch tonight a comparing of logos, imbued with all their relative flavor associations, to a people who still raise Pepsi and Coke to the top of the heap (made up of derivative healthier sounding brands of sugar- or Rumsfeld-water). Are we that afraid of the local? Do we have so little faith in the familiar, because, like Buffalo, we only might have been but never quite will be? Where the really talented get writ so large and so excruciatingly beautiful and patently reproducible, if difficult to contain, digitally, that we actual people are by comparison lowly?
But on the good side, there is Barack Obama this time and not just Barry Commoner in opposition. I mean Barck Obama the credible candidate with an actual chance to win, because, as I recall, I liked the Citizen's Party rather a lot, but the game wasn't quite sufficiently revealed by that time.
So this medium is for the moment free. This nation remains for the moment subject to the peoples' will. And I feel this nearly desperate urgency to get some minds changed. And perhaps, overall, the ground is better manured this cycle.
Shortly before I moved my life, briefly, onto my old wooden sailboat, flush with excitement over my first automobile, I'd driven to New Mexico with my girlfriend for the summer. We happened, no malice aforethought, on a "Rainbow Festival" (A Rainbow Family Gathering) in the Gila National Monument.
I remember being mystified on the way in by the hippie conveyances moving the other direction, with souls hanging out of them shouting "Welcome Home" as though my girlfriend and I knew what they were talking about. I remember the triple rainbow on the way out of the festival. And I remember the competing "rap 17" introductions as we wandered, haplessly, from massive grassy hippie-mobile lot, then by pickup-truck shuttle, to the start of an unnaturally well defined narrow path down into the actual hidden and very Eden-like valley.
I have since found no reference to this, but I know that I am not the only one who heard, --I think it was the second and less "official" because "official" was the opposite of what this "Festival" was all about -- rap 17 which told about the Hopi future-tale (we were on Hopi ground) of the world being covered by a web.
I remember being certain that the vision was of the electrical power grid. I'm pretty sure that no-one -- this was 1977 -- was thinking of what we subsequently called the "world-wide-web", although the Hopi tale might be the proper referential attribution. Does anyone know?
I have often remembered that factoid with a start which resembles my awe at the triple rainbow.
So anyhow, I guess I'm not really trying to convey anything, since that implies something in me - in my head, say - which I want to get over to you, gentle reader. I guess I'm more just bashing on some noisemakers hoping to find that right note or tune so someone will turn their head and then, perhaps semi-consciously, whistle it themselves from time to time.
If, instead of figurehead, we elect someone who actually articulates what it is he stands for in a fashion different from scripted recitals, then we might break that chain of deniability which is what truly defines sociopathy.
I actually don't believe that there are, brother-in-law notwithstanding, actual sociopaths in the world. Rather, I think that the hearts - full metal metaphor - of such people are so layered over by desperation stand-ins for the self that it's very much as if there were none. The behavior of a sociopath, in other words, is simply analog for the behavior of corporations removed from productive purpose. The behavior of our government under Bush, in other words, is manifestly sociopathic, in precisely the same way as is the behavior of global capital. McCain and Palin only move in the same wrong direction.
Radical outsourcing, which is part and parcel of the holy grail quest after perfect market efficiencies, leads as inexorably to attrocities as did Stalin or Mao's rendition of the quest for Marxist perfection. It does so, quite simply, by quite simply breaking all caring links in order to free each part for itself, in perfection of Fundamental Christian Individualism. God help us all, since in the real world there are no radical individuals. In phsyics, as I hope eventually to demonstrate, such particles can't exist.
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