Drat, Foiled Again!

I am nothing if not persistent, enjoying makeshift MacGyver repairs to things way more than replacing with new.  And I hate to give up.  But I just couldn't extract the knob from its stem to put the bathroom latch back in working condition.  Does this prefigure my pending automotive decision? If so, how?  

I know I'll go back to this one until there's been some resolution, or until I destroy the damn thing entirely.  There's a delicate balance between twisting the knob off and releasing the stuck threads. WD-40 magically appeared among all the gutted basement stuff, cleaned out from my previous residence here, and I thought surely this was the fated gift I needed.

But not yet.  Not today.

Still, I did post my picture, "In Utero" as it should be called.  Or "still behind bars".  Or "Is He Dead Yet?"  Literally steaming hot from the bathtub.  Smokin!

On an Anhedonic Tear Here

There is no way to read Infinite Jest without getting the sense that David Foster Wallace prefigures his own de-mapping. I guess you have to honor the literate press for not making hay of this.  It surely does deepen the sadness, however.  And for sure ironizes the truly great book he wrote afterward (A Short History of Infinity), which traces the history of abstraction.  So, not being sure which standards I am beholden to here in the Blogosphere, I feel at least confident that I can, without fear of accusation of digital theft, cite an excruciating passage from the novel:

". . . anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content.  Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy - happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love - are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas.  They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation . . ." (page 693 of the most recent paperback edition)

There's more.  

But this has been enough to help me to understand just why, in my accelerating anhedonic accomplishment toward perfected denotative abstraction of the very self, my very very tentative efforts at reaching out and friending seem only to leave me with the burden for all the be- part of the friend.  As in, I've got to do all the self-inviting, I guess because I seem so very self contained and likely do broadcast my preference for alonehood, and even more likely am just no fun to be around (not true!).  But I don't want, and am very unsure that I even want to want.

So digital, by definition is abstract.  If it has any existence at all independent of some actual thing, it's what gets left behind when the machinery of its creation is turned off, and that for which the machinery might perhaps be turned on again.  It can never get any more thingy than that (wow, read the ambiguity in that sentence!), and no matter how well embodied, it will never - Zeno again - achieve actual independent thinghood.  It just can't.  Those little diminutive digit thingies are just too damn abstractedly determined.  And reality isn't.

And though it will seem as though to borrow Wallace's own term (de-mapping) is to make light of the act; since there is no machine other than the reader for words to re-embody the mind behind, as it were, the act of the writing, so I mean the usage as an expression of actual love and not dismissal as trivial of what in fact saddens not just me, but readers far greater, and more worthy. How truly and finally sad.

Is digital theft only ever the software's misattribution; and all digital theft just simply identity theft? I guess this is what the Open Source community is so strenuously trying to work out. The battle lines remain blurred, however.

Perhaps identity preserved should claim income from performance and authority, and not from sale of reproduced plans. Though this ancient Chinese order had its issues too. For sure, reproduction of the plot or plan can be inhibited by never quite controlled, so terms, like people, must eventually expire and enter the public domain.

But there is a crisis looming if not already upon us, as more and more actual things are valued only as their plans for disembodied reproduction.  Straight from factory, for manual assembly by the purchaser Christmas eve, with Chinese reproductions even of actual one-of-a-kind crafts overwhelming the draw of personality, even as tacky craft shows proliferate as ways for the semi-skilled to stay marginally e-Bay employed.  Authority has way too much claim these days. Way way way and so damn paradoxically, when the popular claim is so opposite.

Well, duh.  Madoff Made Off with Billions, read the headlines.  (Central casting is never far away!)  The cages were never properly maintained, and the lions made off with the lambs (I hear that many of Madoff's victims were hapless liberals).  I guess it's just the old authority without responsibility issue over and over and over again.

I stake my Intellectual Property claim on the notion that there never truly is an original thought. The ground, after all is out there in the language community, and there's only ever discovery of the particular among the very abstracted possibilities.  And rights attendant on discovery should be mitigated, just as should recompense for windmills which so pit the landowners against the untitled owners of the view. Why not spread the wealth?

So the body/mind false distinction gets turned on its head, so to speak, as the thing thought has, weirdly, more reality and I guess more value still than the thing which manifests the thought. Demapping as redundancy. This trading of words in abstracted space, what used to take months and years for dissemination now assembling instantaneous interfaces among faceless handles in the cloud.  All stupid sounding, but whose words, sometimes at least, can far far outpace what the actual mouthing would excite.

Jesus, I can't even read my own writing.  No wonder that those finely crafted emails of which I have such pride in ownership get filed away behind the eyewash so quickly to be gotten through, and then never gotten back to as even friends must finally admit to me.  

Encryption being a veil over the mask of a face which actually you never really get to see. I think that all art must be performance art, and that all performances are stale the moment they become reproduced.  Even breaking encryption being just a matter of time, which can be compressed by massively parallel processes, until who knows which Oz will be revealed when the curtain draws back.  Intellectual production takes time to disseminate or be visited, and there is simply a necessity to inject some viscosity to the lubricative or is it lubricious injections of identity controls, without which we could never keep track.

Shit man, but a man's reach must excede his grasp, or what's a meta for? (overheard among English lit dweebs).

I try, and do but deepen my aloneness. Meta-existence really sucks.

More Problems of the Day - the backstory

So I went, the other day, to the dentist and complained that my far back tooth did hurt when crunched, and recalled the day, some weeks back, when biting on a piece of bread (!!) sent electric shock through my jaw, and I pondered mid sentence while conversing with colleagues at work how I was going to afford to deal with this. And for the first time I put in for a pre-evaluation, since the dentist announced two actually cracked teeth, both of which needed crowns. 

Now, I've had crowns before, and facing what seemed no choice, I've never pre-submitted my claims, and the insurance company has always paid.  So, playing by the rules this time, they found their reason to refuse, I guess because by submitting I did confirm my actual choice (!!!).

To be fair, I think cracks don't show up on x-rays.  

But now, and the punch line to this little tale of woe (as if - I should be so lucky as to have to patronize those outdoor bazaar-style dentist collectives like I witnessed in China, where pulling teeth is a spectator sport, like eating beating snake hearts, and the anaesthesia consists in really bad rot gut) is that now the opposite tooth - opposite both in side and up/downness - is killing me.

So clearly, faced with choices proliferating, I must be grinding my teeth at night, and thus compounding the fracture in my life's non-plan cash flow crisis.

And, to be entirely honest about the cage thing, I do actually own a spare car, in all senses of that term.  It's a 1988 spartan-style VW, currently leaking antifreeze from the heater core, but otherwise, apart from WNY salt cancer of the body, in fine tough shape and getting some 36 mpg.  In the case of this car, it's not the sunken costs so much as the sunken labor.   Actual weeks spent writhing on the cold cement slab of my garage (in my youth, I would have done this is the freezing mud) replacing brake lines and bearings.  (My own body perversely none-the-better for the exercise, and still going the way of all post menopausal flesh)

So, the choice I present is, as I suppose it always must be, not a real choice.  It is more a Joni Mitchell too-much choice.  As now, my main preoccupation is which of my next generation blood relatives can be lured into driving the old spartan cage back to my country hermitage from city digs where I thought it would be useful over the Christmas gathering - to have a spare car.

In the event, the spare was one too many (and no thanks from the driveway juggle challenged who did nonetheless benefit from the added flexibility in arrangements, even though a tweak to control freakishness), and now snowstorms and other lame excuses have prevented its transport back while I was in the country, leaving me with two cars and only one driver (daughter returned to college), and no spare to back my possibly poor decision making.

My ex, of course being the control freak, since perhaps what else could you be or become dealing with someone who acts so much as if he's stoned on pot thinking about things even if he never actually is (stoned on pot).  Thinking about things for sure.

My definition of control freak being someone who views every incursion on orderly planning as a potential disruption, to be deflected with all possible vigor as default catastrophic.  In most cases, control freakishness is very hard to distinguish from plain vanilla negativity.  But I do think extreme go with the flowishness such as I might be said to exhibit just might exacerbate that particular latent tendency.  Right?

So, the problem is to clear and not dislodge the clot which is stopping continued arterial movement.  I seek an economy of repair, with only minor newness, don't I?  Savage Capitalism:Cancer::Enlightened Socialism:Life.  Marriage:commitment::prostitution:evernew. Prostitution:worn smooth::virginity:obtuse disappointment.  Old famliar:broken down::New shiny::cookie cutter same.  Digital:infinite regress::analog:evolution.  Digital:House of mirrors but always reflection::Analog:no mistaking the original. Me:you::Inside:out.

I hate that this is the week to dispose of that truly most beautiful Christmas tree which I now both scent and watch.  The days elongate, and I am saddened.  How odd.  I must crave excuses to cover up, burrow under, hide out, crawl into, and twinkle little lights under the covers. I do, however, love the Christmas driving, past ethnic descended (what else could it be?) lighting displays of ostentation surely beyond what all the cooler geocodes on earth could ever need to aspire to.

but wait!

I truly am in danger of signing up for a new "cage", so called by true biker dudes.  Hey, I'm a biker dude, except that when I'm gotten up in leathers, passing tourists literally fall over - no kidding - laughing at the sight.  Can't hardly blame them.  But I don't wear bright striped running shoes that look like boats, along with logowear, which makes me less the clown.  It's all a matter of perspective, right? There is no look I can inhabit, but that I am a fool on the road for sure, good buddy.

But, as a dollars and cents calculation, I almost have to, since this time I'm going properly to sense the impending final sunken cost thousands $$$ before they are sent down that rathole, and preemptively score one more consumptive point for the Gipper, bless his always addled soul. It's almost my duty in these few days before Barack gets sworn in (and the prices rise again), and the French lose their high ground to become, yet another time, only garlic smelly and unwashed frogs disdaining the darkies among them. 

Yo!  Bush!  Motha!  Buy this!  (I sent my economic incentive check straight to the Obama campaign.  So why do I feel so patriotic now?  Is this like goodbye sex? Which truly is the sweetest, I declare!)

Surely the trains won't be running in time for me not to own a set of wheels.  Those darn Dems will likely resurrect the addled (did I say that already?) auto industry, and just like the co-opted sixties, will spin this final final gasp of Savage Capitalism (soon to be called by Frenchies Freedom Capitalism, and they'll mean it) into its strung out inverse probitive parody.  And I can't single handedly make things change.  Gotta have a car, right?

This time I'm going to wear those tires down to the very quick though, snowstorms be damned (though there is something extremely disconcerting about heading down a steep hill and finding that the brakes do absolutely nothing in the snow), suck the very juice out of my anti-freeze (not that way, please) before it needs a flush and fill, and I know the thermostat is flaky.  The front bearings are growling, and I can't believe the shocks or engine really have another few hundred thou in them.  

So, this time I'm going to game the system, get the flesh-only trade-in price (keeping soul coyly hidden), and decrease my payments below what would be my mounting monthly repair and upkeep costs.  Hell, it worked for my Harley (selling for a price plus the cost of needed repairs -about which I was entirely up front - which still far exceeded the cost of a new one!).

Or is there something bubbleicious about this plan?  Do my rationalizations sound more like ad copy than sound planning?  But the new car could run on french fry oil. . .   But but but . . . 

I feel so implicated.  I know that normal people just throw out those plastic food packages, but I really actually do reuse and reuse and reuse them.  I have had so very few cars for those literal millions of miles I've driven.  Surely I get points in someone's heaven for this.

Whose fundamentalism do I inhabit, and which would I like to inhibit?  My literary structuralist (read modernist) training reminds me that, structurally, Kurtzweil and Falwell are saying precisely the same thing. It's the same story, and so avowed atheist really simply protests a bit too much, methinks, as surely does avowed God believer who wallows in the slime for a fact.

My fundamentalism hinges on a cosmic joke; surfing the Zizakian wavicle of accepted paradox, which makes my story - *gasp* and double *choke* structurally identical to the Jesus story as properly and not fundamentalistically told (nor Catholically, sad to relate).  Not my story, for chrissakes (I know you're thinking I'm thinking that, rapacious reader)!!!  I mean the story I'm trying so hard to relate. The story of paradox and impossible divinity of actual flesh.  The story that though there are no perfect circles in nature out there, there is something special about that species which can true perfect circles in here.  That beauty is real and worthy of possession, but that in the possessing, the accomplishment has got to be release, so that life moves beyond the stinking self.

Metaphor scintillates and never leads.

This becomes a bit unnerving, especially in the face of life decisions (just now I was bopping in car with daughter to a set of songs about riding my disco stick (!!!!) and how sometimes a woman just needs a boy and I'm going to take you home and nasty something - I always have trouble with lyrics, being perfectly at home in the beat) which are and should be so simple.

So, is Buffalo where it was or where it will be?  Is Seattle dead and has been?  What about these great and wonderful United States of Promise (gone or yet to come?)?  Is there really a moral dimension to sex, and if so why?  And what is, precisely now, the linkage between inside and out which makes us truly want the one sold from the attractive facade more than the one from Walmart (well, we used to)? Is it all and always about only price?  (we've established that already, Mac, but for the record, I will not bargain away my loyalty to that dealer, no matter how attractive the other offers, and no matter if they don't love me back.  I've always been a dweeb about cutting the best deal, and seem fine living with that in a world where a pretty good bet about a blond in an SUV is what she does for a living, even though the terms are longer, and the price of beans very much depends on where you do your shopping and if you literally worship at the temple of dollar value)

I can't and won't buy my car from the place which has a latte bar (is this a clue about where I belong between Buffalo and Seattle?), because I just know that I'm gonna get Spitzered there. But the other more scruffy place might lowboy me into spending more than I should because they just don't know how to outsource bean counting well enough.

Oh worra worra.

Can one plan drive?  Can one drive a plan.  Can one opt not to drive?  Can one sit still and by sitting, still live?

OK, so the savage capitalist in me knows perfectly well that the starving minions in sweatshops all over the globe servicing my privilege to brand my very authentic soul are actually in a dance no more vulgar than is the zebra's dance with her devouring tiger.  I blithely eat my meat, even though I do actually know (was this GB Shaw?) that there are no meat eaters who have visited an abbattoir.  Bull? Bull!

Fundamentalists all need somehow to hide these aweful facts from their Tammy Faye realities.

And still the choices seem to have moment.  To screw or not to screw?  To love, to live, to drive and drive and drive in service to what has become so beastly seeming, Biblically.

I do insist, however, that this act be comedy.  On that I do insist.  We've had enough of "dying for."  The fated end.  The clown burns his money, and continues smiling.  His want is your amusement.

A Happy New Year! Coda

I write now on chrome, and it gives me little charge of excitement that there still is something better out there.  Technologically, I am thrilled by its snickety-snick improvement over the bloatware which diminishes the bored-out raw power of whatever machine I get new and ever more cheaply. 

And now I'm excited about the cordwood pile of superannuated laptops which I can resurrect when chrome is loadable straight on top of an OS-less hypervisor. Even Mom will be able to surf and email.  What else is there to the digital wii innering of tactical and physically nausea-transcending excitement?  It's about communication, man, and the emotional content which has to come from someone, somewhere, even though at a remove from the actual physical touch which technological progress yuchs us against.

Driving behind the endangered Hummer species a while ago, I did wake up to realize that my moral superiority for sucking not quite so much gas (I sure do blow a lot!) was, like, totally misplaced, and even said so over the phone to a friend while thinking it.  The distinction, after all, between the grotesquely massive Hummer and even the diminutive Smart Car is non-existent symbolically.  (or perhaps it's only symbolically that there is any significance to the difference?)

A car is a car, and it's about the mobility of personal space, ultimately to the point of abstraction from any pavement, or alternatively oneness with the road, as with the Biker or RVer.  This misplaced lust, in whatever politically correct form, is grotesquely destructive of mother earth, and demonstrably immisserating to the bulk of the logoshpere demonstrably indentured to its service. (I declare!)

The solution, of course, is to lose the lust, not to tweak the car.  Restricting the lust, as all the prim right wingers among us surely know, only forces it out in worse expressions;  less savory gaseous emissions!

I am, as you have already well imagined, gentle reader, something of a crank in my interpersonal intellectualizations.  (this I distinguish, perhaps obtusely, from interpersonal communications more generally)  I work up a cranky head of steam over the idiocy of four wheel drive (it costs gas and repairs and I live up high in snow country having driven near 300,000 miles without significant repair at 31 mpg in a big station wagon (insert VW advert here) and without even having felt a glimmer of need for either off road or 4 wheel drive which only gets you going and likely teases you into gully smashed and ditch-turtled belief that you can stop better because I'm so damn smart!)  I would be nearly insufferable if I didn't - oh yes it's true - censor myself so often.  OK, so I am actually insufferable.

Interpersonally, I am nothing but empathy for why having a four wheeler feels so much better, and why there is no moral content to ones gaseous consumption or expulsion for that matter, since, as I well know who would rather never drive, that's how the world is organized and there isn't much that I as a lone individual can do about it, for chrissakes!  Nice jeans too!

But my inner crank needs displacement onto something rather more productive, and likely to be heard as sympathetically as those mild pronouncements of mine get made.

I confess to plenty of optimistic glee at reportings of scientific advancements.  Hell, just the other day there was piece on the news about something like "artificial biology" whereby new organisms would be engineered to do cool things like deliver vaccines or cancer killers right on the spot. Or gobble up oil spills. I get way Kurtzweil optimistic that really we need not nurse all this global warming anxiety about our footprint. That we truly are less significant than the orders of magnitude huger fluctuations of the global climactic cycles.

. . . that the post-historical global capitalistic marketplace will right itself now and forever more.

But I think my optimism will have to move in a different direction, ultimately.  I am optimistic that this technolust will be, and is now being, digitally displaced internally to where geographic removes for the pleasures of landscape, imagined cultural distinction, or better opportunities to market our inner authenticity so that it can be outered again with ostentatious splendor; to where these removes no longer have to be mediated by oil and gas powered launchings over roads and through airy space so that we can feel and touch again those tight relations, if only for Christmases and other funerals.  (I enjoyed a truly wonderful jet-age Christmas this year, where I played joyous part-host, and never did have to endure anxious cattle-prodded germ sharing sleepless and therefore mania-inducing stuttering trajectories across the continental divide)

There is, quite sensibly, a cosyness projected from stylish houses.  We want, naturally, in to places built on a view, having well-tuned paint and manicured gardens.  Inside, there is the tele-view, which should but somehow never does render all these spaces identical.  Womb with a view (c).

I think this is not much different from the wanting in to a beautiful woman, as though carnal sameness (there's ample proof all over the internet, if you care to be disgusted) were truly and finally not subject to the sex organ of the imagination.

Through this map (apologies David Foster Wallace) to the individual we truly do crave closeness to some other whose very brightness belies something like what we know ourselves to possess. The subjective me which is arcing it's starshot trace through lives and gaseous fields, but which alone blinks out without so much as a wish to make it real.

Now I am trying to talk myself out from moving away from the Queen City, presumably toward Seattle, where all the women are beautiful and the inner craving for a creative life is not so Buffalo-style winged and clipped.  Where I won't need to drive so much, tracing my geographic mandala, and coming closer only to old age and clogged passages across my own arterial map.

The car grows old, as do I, and I lose hope that there is a single soul out there who isn't questing still after the perfect pair (of blue jeans), pairing (of souls), or quantum hadron which will confirm that we, collectively me, really do deserve to inherit this earth, which by the time it's ours will already be old and haggard herself, true soul.

Is it already too late?

Chapter 12, still faster, from way back then

So, I went to the library at Yale to search out some refreshment on my relativity theory. I got angry at the blatant propaganda in some of the more elementary texts. Science writers can sound pretty pompous to a doubter. Then I discovered my objection to the idea that space travelers speeding near the velocity of light return home younger than their counterparts on earth. It has a name -- the "twin paradox" or the "clock paradox". It's amazing and disturbing how easily we forget things -- I forget things. Somehow when this paradox bothered me before, I couldn't find evidence that it bothered anyone else. I was angry and impotent. I've puzzled over it for a long time. I must have come across the twin paradox before, but I'd forgotten.

It's rather silly to just think of things and let them bother you when you don't have the means to understand. I should leave these problems to the physicist who understands them. My anger turned to contrition and remorse. I began to be convinced again that I was terribly misled -- that my life has been a waste, as my advisor so clearly told me when I veered from the straight and narrow. Science is the only important study. Or if not science, then at least gain some expertise in some field so you know what you talk about. I haven't learned anything well. I only speak English fluently. My life has been a shambles of scattered experiences.

I learned some interesting things browsing through the shelves. About the relativity of electric and magnetic fields to explain -- or rather establish the consistency of -- foreshortening. I learned about information-carrying waves that travel, or oscillate, at a speed greater than the speed of light. They can't carry energy because of the absolute limit of the speed of light, but if there are information carrying waves, then everything changes. They might belong to another universe with different limits. But it's still a theory, and we can't know yet. I also found what promised to be a simple resolution of the twin paradox, and settled down to do away with it. I was convinced. It was rather simple. The experts are right again.

There were a lot of explanations that bothered me a bit. But the author anticipated my disturbance and always went a step further. I'd forgotten just how willing I was to be convinced, the first time I encountered relativity. Then, it was a revelation. It angered me at the stupidity of a world that acted as if it didn't know. But I was in the hands of the scientists who'd discovered and explained and explored the phenomena. It was only slowly that I became angry with the scientists for allowing the new truth to be fit into old metaphors. Now I was coming at the theory with an unwillingness, and what had been delightful and exciting was limiting me.

I sat there dejected that my feeling of being limited was misplaced. I'd only limited my own understanding by not continuing with physics. But the paradox kept eating at me. There were mathematical proofs that I couldn’t face puzzling out. I was as sure as anybody that when a spaceman leaves earth and returns, he's aged less than his fellows on earth. Some said the paradox was dissolved because the traveler wasn't in an inertial time frame -- which would be necessary for the special theory of relativity. The general theory which covers the acceleration of the space-man as he turns around to come back, and as he leaves the earth and stops there again, is apparently in dispute. One book assured me that the math would prove that the theory of difference in aging would hold very neatly with the general theory. I couldn't argue.

Yet it bothered me. Acceleration slows time relative to a non-accelerated framework. And gravity is equivalent to acceleration according to the general theory. So perhaps the acceleration of turning around would slow the time of the traveler down, relative to the homebound, enough to solve the problem. I couldn't puzzle out the math. But one book attempted to dispatch the paradox without recourse to the general theory. This dispatch involved the reminder that time is conventional or relative to a frame of reference, and not absolute. It did some chicanery with points of view from home base and destination and tried to show its maintenance of consistency. But I couldn't quite buy. To me, in a relativistic universe, there could be no difference between the homebound and the traveler. They would both be moving relative to one another.

Take the case of two spaceships that depart in opposite directions from one another; pass through no gravitational fields, follow identical preset flight paths, and then meet again. They've had identical experiences, but it's unde­niable that, according to the theory, they would face the paradox of the appearance of greater time having passed for oneself than for the other. It would be a mutual incommen­surability. Of course, this is meaningless abstraction, since spaceships don't just materialize in places without gravitational fields -- there's no such place in the uni­verse. And even if there were, they wouldn’t have any roadmarks or points of reference to get back to one another. They'd have to keep in contact the whole time for the exper­iment to have any meaning. The distance they could travel away from one another would simply be a function of their ability to maintain contact. Distance would have no other meaning. Actually, in this abstraction, I doubt distance would have any meaning at all. Nor of course would anything else.

Or take the case of the traveler who ages only two and one half years during a twenty-five light-year journey. This is borrowed from some text. I can't remember for sure, but I think he is traveling at ninety percent of the speed of light as measured relative to earth. He knows his destination to be twenty-five light-years away when he leaves. News of his departure would have preceded him to his destination accord­ing to the difference between his speed and the speed of light. That news must take twenty-five earth years to arrive, but it will be dated only two and one half years prior to his arrival. The news of his arrival will precede him by two and one half years. Presumably he knows it to have taken twenty-five years to arrive. But if we suppose him to have aged only two and one half years during the journey, then from his point of view the news of his arrival will have traveled faster than the speed of light. Especial­ly when you consider that from his point of view, the earth is aging more slowly than he is.

From his point of view, two and a half years will have passed by the time he reaches a destination he knows to have been twenty five light years away when he left. OK, so it's just the effects of his high rate of travel. I'm sure I can be proved wrong by mathematical calculation. But calculation depends on the choice of where it is applied. The most powerful machinery is useless without some foundation to check its power. A lever long enough will move the earth only if there is a sturdy enough fulcrum. The same calcula­tions that are applied to prove me wrong, if applied by the space-man would have to indicate that something twenty-five light years away is twenty-five light years away. If he is in transit and it is to take him only two and one half years, then the nature of his destiny must have changed so as to make it closer than it had appeared prior to departure. That's fine from the earth's point of view -- nothing will have changed except the time convention in this incommen­surate frame of reference.

But in his frame of reference, the object of his travel will have to have changed. It cannot be twenty-five light years distant, if he is to reach there in only two and one half. If fact, for him, the nearer he approaches the speed of light, the more all destination becomes instantaneously achieved. At the speed of light, there would be no time for the spaceman. All the matter of the universe would have become energy -- not just because of the relativistic shift -- but it would have had to be converted into energy just in order to propel him. The whole universe would be energy on his behalf. And all the material destinations would be instantaneously achieved. There would be no time between one and the next. They would, in fact, have been subsumed within his being. He would be all destiny. Who knows how the universe would appear? We would have been destroyed in the effort at his speed. Not just from his point of view. From our own, we know that all the matter in the universe must be exhausted to propel him -- and that includes us.

Science is uncomfortable with paradoxes. It tries to dissolve them. All language is uncomfortable with paradox -- and usually ignores it. That is the necessity for carrying on. But all language depends on paradox. At its root, all existence is paradox. Ultimately, for science, the paradox that is most fearful, and most essential, is the paradox of self and other. There cannot be one without the other. Black is incommensurate with white. Here with there. Up with down. Life with death. Good with evil. Incommen­surate, but indivisible. Language and existence depend on it. To erase the distinction is to erase existence.

But science, secretly, seeks to erase the distinction. It would make the other into the self. How? Well, I know myself because I know what I feel -- perceive-- and I know what falls under my will. I can move my fingers and feel with my skin. I do this by a very meager understanding. But beyond that meagerness, I can see things that are far away according to visual language. I can effect things far away through the manipulation of my body and its extended instruments. Perfect scientific knowledge would render all accidents perceivable and all events controllable, such that all that is other can be rendered unto the self. The perfect knowledge is a perfect mastery of one's destiny. An ability to perceive perfectly the order of the universe.

Science doesn't pretend to perfection. It is on a journey with that as its Holy Grail. No one expects to find it. But the journey is everything. Not only can't we reach the stars along this journey; we can never render the other-ness of the earth unto ourselves. The examples are myriad, though they aren't proofs. The attempt to bring the earth's environment under our control will only poison us. We simply haven't the means to replace the earth's natural equilibrium-keeping devices with our own. For every piece of land we wrest from nature's grip, we gain a realm of unwanted vassalage. It's ours. We control it. But what then? ' It's us and the other which had sustained us now rebels. It throws its maintenance hard-put to the task of subsuming us back into it. We would be rendered back into the otherness of nature to become once more not ourselves. Dust.

And if we succeed, the otherness of the universe would do battle against us. We would become a world -- totally self contained and self-regulating -- all food would be manufactured according to our intimate understanding of the chemical balances in our body -- and we would have cast ourselves off from the sustaining web of nature. The only difference from our present ecologically balanced spaceship earth would be that we would be in control. The only accidents would come from somewhere other than earth. Outer space?? Nonsense.

Is it really possible? Are synthetic vitamins equivalent to natural ones? Yes, say the scientists, of course. But who in the universe has subsisted totally on man-made products? Nature penetrates even our ruses. The eggs we force unnaturally out of a chicken are still from a chicken. The plants we infect with chemicals to turn them into bags of water are still plants. Even if we replace the soil they grow from, their chemical composition is ultimately beyond us.

Not in the future, say the scientists. What future? They have a lot of faith.

When all the vast library of nature which contains more information than was ever captured by man in words has been rendered obsolete by its replacement with scientific knowledge -- what will be left to know? We may discover the chemical make-up of a bacterium, but that may be all that is left.

But science doesn't kill all the species -- man does that with his technology. But where's the distinction? Are scientists removed from the community of man so that they aren't responsible? They know why species are extinguished. They turn their head the other way in the blissful ignorance of those who can claim not to know what the future holds.

Or is it the scientists turning their heads? Maybe we won't listen to them. Perhaps many of them are trying to tell us what needs to be done. How to effect the stability of the earth once again. How to keep from crashing. There are ecologists. But they don't fit the mythology. We want scientists who act the role of high priests. Not scientists who tell us that it's up to us to understand. Some scien­tists fall into the role, and forget their humility. I imagine that most remain humble. It is not a proud position to watch the careening trajectory of the earth -- to be able to see clearly what is happening, and to have the drivers, the owners, turn their willful blindness on your cries. The scientists will be made martyrs by a blindness that is not theirs alone. It really isn't necessary.

"This is getting insane!!"

Not quite. I'm frightened and angry and excited. I can't find my way out of the web of words. I'm stuck. I'm stuck.

"You want to be insane!"

I want to know.

"What?"

I want to know that knowledge is impossible. I want to know how to have faith. This is me. This boat that I live in. I put it together. I control it. I feel it. But it remains intractable. It has its own substance and is other than me. But so is my body. It has diseases and spots that I don't know. It is intractable. But it is myself. There is no other. Not my brain or my mind -- but everything. There is no division at the skin. There is only the dividing up of words words words.

"Stop. Do something else. Read a book. You'll go insane."

I will. But there is something more. We are always afraid of what is other because we can't trust it. We get the answers we want. We look into the face of the other and we read there sometimes trust in what we are. And we are not sure that this trust is warranted, because we have not been able to trust ourselves. We can never know when we have gotten the answer we want because we wanted it or because it was offered. We may manipulate, or be manipulated, but where is the true trust when self and other meet on equal terms?

There may be mutual manipulation. Poet's stare at the otherness of the world and find there a response. It is sometimes frightening. They know that something has been given them, but society tells them to copyright. To own. They are told that this thing that has been given is theirs because they have brought it into being with their control. But they know that it was given, and they have no right to possess it. They know that their words are not their own. They cherish the mind that acts as a doorway.

But there is always fear. The door may close. The love may prove false. The other may close its heart. The mind is not in the head. It is everything that is self. The body partakes in fear, and refuses to offer itself where impossible crossings are proposed. The body hangs back while the rest screams for deliverance.

There are many homosexual poets. That bothers some, and causes others to chuckle. But I know the pain that grips their soul. Not pity. But a fear of what is other because of a terrible mistrust of the self. I have slept with men. It is always manipulation. What else could it be? Sometimes it is mutual. There can be no harm. I was raped once, though. I didn't know it. I couldn't have known. A mild and insignificant rape. The simple matter of manipulating the self in blindness toward the other. I have never been able to reach orgasm with another man, though I value the crossing of the barrier of withheld intimacy.

It is difficult to cross that barrier. I could not do it without being seduced. I am shy, but I am trusting. And it is easy to swallow my fear. It is as difficult to cross the barrier of taboo that would have kept these matters secret. But I am seduced by honesty, because it has begun to reveal some of its secrets. Worlds are closed out only by ourselves. The only honesty that matters is the ability to trust oneself. Everything must be told.

I cannot blind myself to the fiction of the skin. There are no true barriers, and no true taboos. But worlds are closed off by the refusal to see. And clear vision requires trust in oneself -- and only trust. There is nothing evil in transgression. It is only when there is the possibility for trust, and it is withheld. That is the only evil. I cannot be homosexual. I am not. I have been curious. Now I fear that all otherness revealed will be sinful transgression for me. I may yet learn to trust myself too well. The man for whom too much is revealed exists with the danger of manipulating every other.

Love is a connection yet to be revealed. The emotion preceding consummation is always painful, because it is the recognition of a severed part. One is suddenly not whole when smitten. It is the pain of severing one's hand, though it is not a physical pain. There is nothing one can do. To seduce the object of one's love; to manipulate her into loving, would be the only sure way to destroy the possibility for true consummation and connection. Seduction is only safe when both are honest. The hand has been cut-off and manipulation is impossible. I fear that I will never be made whole. Such is the pain of opening the heart. But to keep it closed is far far worse.

Slouching Toward the New Year - a little thought experiment

All that we really need to do is to measure our wants. In a world of fragranced french fries and balooning obesity, it may already be beyond disputing that what we want is want. In this country, from where we have accomplished the immiserating of the rest of the globe for our greater comfort, we may have moved well beyond physical want to a baptismal immersion in the fear that our very comforts are themselves at risk.

Of course I don't mean to implicate every last one of us, since we clearly have internalized those third-world realities within our own boundaries, and live right down the road from clear and present want.

But folks like me, who doubt our talent for speaking out and acting meaningfully, live in a strange kind of panic that we won't make it somehow. That we will be discomfitted by the discomfort of our children. That we won't have launched them sufficiently along the road toward neo-liberal accomplishment, and worse that we will be a burden to them in our old age.

Or is it simply that we want space for more art and music? More community and communication? More touching and less digital stimulus? Imagine a world where there truly was more expectation of surprise from the cultural production of consciousness expanded and even bloated on our glut of oil. As opposed to the contraction in fear that we now experience that the powerless, terrified and sociopathic will overcome us. That the complexities of ecological sustainability will foil us as we fumble our stewardship of even the plot we live in. That we somehow have to exercise still more rather than less control.

Did I already write that I recently test drove the infamous Wii and was severely underimpressed. Saddened, really. That this is that to which desire has been reduced! That anyone could possibly consider this kind of play at play actually to be fun! That people are likely waiting for the elaboration on the theme at least to the point where the feedback loops are in place and touch, too, can be simulated.

Have we not finally completed our libidinal investment in things, outered and perfectly reproduced? Is there not still more surprise in the people around us, once their minds too have been liberated from the mandated measures of worth which invest our late capitalist so-called democracies? I think that Žižek did already actually adequately explain why modern democracies require a kind of instrumental reading of worth, which purports to be itself content free. Why IQ must become a thermometer of intelligence and SATs a measure of admissability to the permanent elite. (although I can't seem to verify by web search that it was actually Žižek who did that)

Can we even begin to know what wonders remain unrealized behind the fetters holding back those not even invited to play the game?