Pushing Thoreau & Talking About Happiness, sort of

Jared Schickling, in a recent e-mail: "If nothing else I simply can't help defending this stuff I'm reading and taking to. I think I might live in the 19th century for a while."

My response, in part: "I agree with you one-hundred percent about the 19th century. When I think what the "average" human mind in America would have contained back then and imagine what it contains now, I see anything but progress [just compare the literacy and penmanship of soldiers' letters home]. Technology has had an inversive effect to its intents. We have less time, less freedom, less well-being. It's not saving but destroying the world. And since you [Schickling] are where you are, I'm hopeful at some point, when you're finally ready to go fucking nuts and get all John Brown and shit, you'll pick up Thoreau. And read all of it. Then start the journals.

"One of these days I'm going to Walden where they have the mss of his journals in a library and I'm going to study them. The experts I respect most claim this is the true treasure trove of Thoreau's genius. No one I've read truly stands up to the totality of his achievement. Einstein comes to mind, but he became really popular really fast. Thoreau's beyond that because, in my autodidactically informed opinion, he bears witness to the esoteric in material terms like no one else I've come across. Beckett, Melville, Whitman, Flannery O'Connor, Hawthorne, Kafka, Nabakov, Marquez, Borges, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg...the list goes on of people who bear witness to the esoteric in material terms very well. But Thoreau gets the most across, in my opinion.

"All these folks are better writers than Thoreau, but none have a more transcendent original language that seems other than or beyond human in its function. In other words, one doesn't read Thoreau to find out how a human being should behave so much as how humans actually behave within their cosmic situation. Language like nature does not so much conform to us as we to it. Thoreau isn't self-help or a guide book of any sort. It's an odyssey through life into the recognition that you and I are not fundamentally human, or even fundamentally earthlings, as the stuff we are made of is stardust...The truth is not meant to make human beings feel good. In fact, truth has no intention at all...it insists on nothing, including non-insistence.

"Of course, Thoreau didn't know that stuff about stardust as a scientific fact, but intuited it as an essential and necessary human reality in light of the big picture as he witnessed it, according to the language he let pass through him...

"I'm rambling, but I'm psyched that you're going where you're going."

In the same chain, a day or so earlier, Jared wrote: "but i wanted to send you this keats i'm reading. seems a little closer to home, sort of end-stage romanticism proper, keats an expressed atheist, which seems only in the way blake was an atheist, not atheism, verb not noun (but a modifier)

"To G. and G. Keats, 1819

"I have been reading lately two very different books Robertson's America and Voltaire's Siecle De Louis xiv It is like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch. In How lementabl a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Man might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries--and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence--even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Baliffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life--The whole appears to resolve into this--that Man is originally 'a poor forked creature' subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accomodations and comforts--at each stage, at each accent there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances--he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars abov his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy--I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme--but what must it end in?--Death--and who could in such a case bear with death--the whole troubles of life which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of a being who instead of hailing its approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise--But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectability--the nature of the world will not admit of it--the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself--Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes--Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness--The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the paralel state in inanimate nature and no further--"

And I responded: "Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead” seems the very essence of nihilism, or the belief in no-thing-ness, only the mental essence of something referred to as “existence.” The void, however, is not meaningless, the black hole of death does not usurp the spirit, it does not snuff out awareness…though it indeed does try to do these things, it actually creates our shared “event horizon.” The void is Wile E. Coyote, the sometimes comical sword of Damocles subverting our very situation at every moment…until “we” as someone inevitably get up and walk away, full from our meal…We’re not dead yet…Shit doesn’t always happen, but it will. The limit my imagination may arrive at seems recursive to the imagined limits of the things it imagines, and can go no further…Perfection is irrelevant as a conscious aim because it’s beyond imagination, nothing anyone can imagine is perfect, which is to say universal and standard and unending…Who the fuck wants that anyway?...The words of any language will correspond with the words of that language only…and if everyone’s language is like a fingerprint—experienced as touch, formed from the inside-out—no word I use will correspond with any word you use absolutely…it’s a leap of faith on our part that we both see the same black letters on white background [sic]…and we must at least agree there’s a consistency of pattern allowing for the agreement of terms…but what if...every time we enter into the illusion we share something in common we become neo-Adams and new-Eve’s re-entering the imaginary Eden of our faith-based mutual understanding, the closest thing we can agree on in terms of “happiness?” Until death do us part heightens the illusion and heightens the happiness…for “us”…and so fucking what, actually? But, then again, why the fuck not? Is one alternative better than another? Says who? Says what? Isn’t there more than one alternative, one alternative or other person actually speaking themselves? For starters, I don’t think it necessarily takes a Socrates to have the kind of conversation that can create a thrilling enough illusion of shared meaning to call it happiness. Anyone with a gift of gab, sex appeal, money, good food, weed, anything you want…can be a Socrates. Socrates is Santa Claus, knowing who’s naughty and nice [and you are always nice], etc., and at some point we gotta kill him because he’s corrupting our chirren, and killing him like killing the Buddha is a gateway to enlightenment and presumably greater happiness, or higher dimension thereof…

"The inner chaos of anyone worthy of happiness gives birth to dancing stars…Who will find the limits of their imagination? Those who are grief-stricken and truly happy for it? Who’s worthy of happiness? Consider this from William Blake’s notes written on the pages of the Four Zoas:

Christ’s Crucifix shall be made an excuse for Executing Criminals.

Till thou dost injure the distrest
Thou shalt never have peace within thy breast.

The Christian Religion teaches that No Man is Indifferent to you, but that every one is Either your friend or your enemy; he must necessarily be the one or the other, And that he will be equally profitable both ways if you treat him as he deserves.

Unorganiz’d Innocence: An Impossibility.
Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance.

"I would suggest that, echoing Blake, those who innocently cultivate the proper Ignorance, treating themselves and others as they actually deserve, heaping further injury upon the sources of pain, the undeserving speakers of happy talk who strive after happiness, who will always have a use for the term “happy” in their lexicon, are truly happy because they need not insist on their being happy anymore than they would insist on being unhappy. Truly happy people need not speak of happiness, much less bother pursuing it. A country that idealizes the “pursuit of happiness” is informed by ideologies of profound sadness, where a “slave”* can be counted 3/5 human…Those who pursue happiness are pathetic; therefore, the good American seems, perhaps, a somewhat pathetic ideal.

"Bottom line: If you’re happy you deserve it clap your hands…

*“Slave” has an evolving etymology…consider the long-forgotten term "wage slave," which today might mean all poor people, everyone middle class and under, all organic as opposed to corporate “human beings.” The ideal American is inhuman, or incorporate…a “good corporate citizen.”

Smoke Reviewed in NHR

Here's the first review of my novel, Smoke. It would not have been written without the influence of the late, great Raymond Federman, who passed away last week. It also wouldn't have been as acutely articulated without the deep reading of my friend, Jared Schickling, the best reader this writer could hope to have. And finally, without Geoffrey Gatza's agreeing to publish it, and then doing a phenomenal job designing the book and doing the artwork for the cover, it would have never taken its present form. I hope I can pass this generosity along some day.

http://newhavenreview.com/index.php/2009/10/12/smoke-mirrors/

Just Launched: Mayday Magazine

Congratulations to the folks over at New American Press for Friday’s launch of Mayday Magazine, which includes two little "prosies" from me [#1 & #2], a wonderful piece of critifiction from Jared Schickling and an interesting letter on the state of poetry criticism by the ever-pugnacious, admirably pissed poet Kent Johnson.

Here are some comments I made to Schickling regarding an earlier draft of what appears on Mayday:

Jared: This is truly an outstanding piece. I have nothing but praise and a desire to see you finish this. It needs to be about 30 percent longer. Part IV needs to be fleshed out a bit, and I see a possibility for a V that would invariably rock the boat. But a little more on that at the bottom.

You’re an amazing fiction writer.

The Avoidance Canon meets the criteria for critifiction:

The term critifiction is used because the discourse that follows is critical as well as fictitious; imagination is used in the sense that it is essential in the formulation of a discourse; plagiarism [read play-giarism] because the writing of a discourse always implies bringing together pieces of other discourses; an unfinished endless discourse because what is presented here is open at both ends, and as such more could be added endlessly. (Federman, Critifiction, p. 49)

On the one hand, you begin with a great quote by Joseph Warton [an enthusiast of Pope and the mock epic, nice touch] outlining the ideal poetic fiction, which also explains what you’re going to do. This will only be read this way by those whose minds have been similarly exercised, who you set up to enjoy a treatise on the aesthetics of literary language only to hit us with the legalese of torture, an avoidance canon that seems to pressure the neophyte reader into praising the emperor’s new clothes via some form of constructed peer pressure. For others, who joyfully participate in the same elitist administrative structure as torturers [I’m thinking of Kafka’s apparatus from The Penal Colony], will take offense at what they’re being equated to [imagining -------- as a target here], whether implied or not. As for me and other sick shits, I love the juxtapositions of alleged authorship and audience, and the tension it raises between cruelty and aesthetics…how the author-ities need to avoid cruelty in their language for aesthetic reasons, not ethical ones. It occurs to me that the redacted words, which equate to torture, might also equate to teaching or pedagogy. A lesson plan becomes a method of torture sanctioned by the department. I’m getting ahead of myself…

And of course, the intro is dated April Fool’s Day, implying the joke is on the reader and re-enforcing the presence of Warton, deploying the paradox that all writers are liars and this was composed by a writer, a liar as opposed to the systemically desired “truth teller.” The narrator is now unreliable, a reaction perhaps to the authoritarianism of the fascist structures he’s attempting to navigate and negotiate to graduate and gain admittance to the author-itarian system. A means of survival akin to Ziggy Fumar’s letter to the author-ities in Smoke, but more abstract and critifictional [as opposed to the more metafictional method of Smoke’s chapter].

This is a very abstract piece yet deeply rooted if the reader’s as twisted as the narrator and able to “get” the nature of the lie being so subtly revealed [via avoidance/lying/figurative language, ironically enough].

I love it that you seem to be equating sanctioned torture with graduate writing programs, the AWP, the whole industrial process…that diplomacy equals how to navigate the inhumane industry of the humanities. Part I seems a parable relating student-teacher relations to power mechanisms and behavioral psychology:

“Pursuant to conduct of operations during any construction of laws that regulate the authority to determine the treatment of serious questions. Moreover we do not believe any general provisions, such as prohibitions against assault, maiming, or interstate stalking, pursuant to any express authority, would allow it to infringe on control over the operation.”

This is what happens to those students who question the authority of their Writer’s Workshop, modeled, of course, on Iowa [the lily white host state of which shocking sprung Obama forward as a frontrunner]. Naturally, these behaviors are to be literally avoided while figuratively deployed.

In II, I see you equating the author/narrator with unlawful combatant. The system breeds paranoia on both sides, especially students with anarchic impulses who recognize chaos as a fact that can’t be avoided, putting them in direct opposition to those professors whose self-esteem relies on keeping them in their place, who are allowed under statute to defend themselves against literary attack by any means necessary, as the rights of the sovereign to exist adhere to them in any given situation:

“As one commentator has explained, they [student writers] are more often than not treated as they are liable to be treated, and there are almost no regulatory safeguards with respect to them, and thus no obligation is owed towards them or any who do not enjoy the privileges according to a customary rule of law [tenure]. The right to treat such individuals under traditional practice, as expressed in the customary laws, is left to the sovereign’s [professor's] discretion. As one commentator has stated, the treatment is left to the discretion of the threatened [bona fide member of the status quo], and while law enforcement efforts frequently require the literal violation of facially applicable statutes, as we explain below, to persons acting under the color of law, the legislative history indicates no intent to apply this to the conduct of personnel.”

III justifies violence in a way that seems antithetical to Hannah Arendt’s ethical reasoning with regards to the use of violence: that it could only be justified if its aims were defensive and immediate, any offensive or long-term aim of violence was evil. Here the “graduate writing program” actually sanctions certain forms of torture in the guise of pedagogy, bifurcating mind from body as if psychological torture isn’t as horrific as physical torture [ironic considering this comes from those who profess to live lives of the mind], though proportionate responses of this kind are allowed should a like threat be perceived [whether actual or not, preemptive war is one of their options]. In fact, the program’s intent is to inflict long-term mental damage and derangement on future writers to preserve its authoritative status [similar to the ways cults inculcate their adherents]:

“In addition these acts must cause long term mental harm. Indeed this view of the act is consistent with the term’s common meaning, generally understood to involve intense or excruciating pain, or put another way, extreme anguish, Webster’s New International Dictionary. In short, reading the definition as a whole, it is plain that the term encompasses only extreme acts, because the purpose of our analysis here is to ascertain acts that would cross the threshold of producing the list of illustrative purposes for which it is inflicted. Therefore, it would not affect this analysis.”

It seems in IV a more precise description of the terrorist “student” [outsider, illegal alien, interloper, savage] writer with anarchic tendencies—these enemies of the “Writing State”—might be played out.

And a V could be added, where you might propose a final solution to this threat from literary terrorists…the imperialist designs of writing programs.

And then you might present it placed as an exhibit by a professor who's warning other professors what they need to watch for today, footnoted by an editor with an axe to grind against academia and writers smarter than she...

When you get this published I'll write a lunatic review of it. I really think this is something...you're using your antipathy with playful purpose and chagrined resolve. Keep it up.

I want more more more more!

Don’t forget the bonobos, Dennett!

Jesus Murphy this is the medicalization of illness in the peach shirt of philosophy.

Jared Schickling

Correspondence between myself and Jared Schickling this week worked over a fifteen minute talk by Daniel C. Dennett on TED, among other things.

The conversation began with me sending him these links and comment:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes.html
Something's wrong with his picture, though it seems relevant to Germ.

Also, here’s some salt with that pepper. Or maybe it’s garlic salt…I’m not sure.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html

Jared: "Memetics is morally neutral." Yeah ok…Sorry don't mean to bombard you. But I'm watching and increasingly tired…reducing the realm of thought to biological mechanisms does more harm than good, it isn't particularly useful at getting at the complexity of the thing. The logic of the analogy is wonderfully conveniently workable. But the shape of an idea once it's involved itself in a brain is unpredictably irrational at the level of detail in a way observable bacteria isn't. Jesus Murphy this is the medicalization of illness in the peach shirt of philosophy.

ME: You're nailing it. What he's saying about "germ" is kind of the very basic premise from which I'm writing the novel. However, beyond the premise, beyond the useful fiction and his allusions to a kind of recursive symmetry across scale [recursive typology?][the fluke parasite in the ant’s brain being analogous to a meme in the human mind], all kinds of other stuff is going on that pops up in the writing…Dennett appears to be a major domo reductionist. He can't seem to get his head around the idea that though mind, matter, and energy are aspects/dimensions/scales of the same thing, they are not the same thing themselves. Dennett/Dawkins have the problem of being rational secular humanists, which means they each operate brilliantly from false premises. Luckily, this doesn't prevent them from falsifying others' premises. Neither seems capable of saying the productions of their rational minds—their philosophies—are useful fictions. They have complete faith in themselves, that is to say their philosophy. They seem quite Romantic about their rational anti-Romanticism. They seem the protagonists of their own anti-stories, the rational heroes who destroy narrative with grammar. Very similar to Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost...ego run amok...passing judgment on God. They fail to perceive that the most important thing is the premise itself. Humans produce premises. Dennett/Dawkins are trying to do away with that...They are not tinkering with the Mechanism of Premise, but assuming premises about imagined mechanisms...prejudiced against premises... That seems wildly inadequate to me, using philosophy to justify one's own perceived superiority, the validity of your false premise over other false premises. Premises are always false, yet humans incessantly produce them. In this sense/aspect/dimension/scale, false premises are therefore true premises. The odor of urine and urine itself are two different things that signify the same thing. The assumption that the smell of urine and urine itself are the same thing is a false premise that is nonetheless useful and true within certain parameters of action. Useful fictions and delusion are necessary to the human experience. Without them, there is no "human" experience… That said, looking at Dennett-Dawkins from the imagined self-perception of the human superorganism [if memes are viruses and alive how else can one contextualize their environment or ecosystem or milieu than to say they exist within the human superorganism as seams or fascia or membranes of Its mind-being?], I'd say they're doing their jobs as "mental" enzymes and/or psychic catalysts within the human membrane [member brain? meme brain?]. They're pimples not on God's ass, or chancres upon Its divine genitalia, but blemishes upon Its imagined forehead, the protrusive pus-erupting kind that make other angels look away, re-membering their own traumatic follies with such cysts and boils…Just my opinion from out here in the cheap seats... And yes, I love popping zits. The bigger more subaceous the cyst the better. Hooray!

Jared: I also think this guy goes astray at certain basic points. e.g. the idea that human genetic interests can be subordinated to "other interests." Yes they can, yes they are; no they can't, no they aren't. He doesn't get hung up on the prospect, which sounds convenient, leading to an idea that must feel good, "humans are the only species that do this." Were he to get hung up, at least caught up, it might lead to deeper suspicions of deeper affinities with non-human species, which might find relational undifferentiation that is human and non. Or not.

ME: Absolutely. Some of my favorite writers are bonobos [see more, and comments below these].

Jared: Here's an excerpt [of a] Dennett quote from a Michael Pollan article titled “An Animal’s Place”. I think Dennett's comment here is very stupid for such a learned man: "As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in "Dead Man Walking," that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. 'If we fail to find suffering in the animal lives we can see,' Dennett writes in "Kinds of Minds," 'we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.'"

ME: First of all, as a point of fact, many bovine species have evolved the ability to hide suffering/illness as a defense mechanism in the wild. You don’t need predators knowing you’re not feeling well. This is fairly common knowledge among Dennett’s crowd, so why would he so willfully ignore it when advancing his ideas, or viral memes, germs we must defend ourselves against?

Jared: The whole thing shows its colors. He talks of infectious ideas—certain ideas are "to die for," but all ideas are infections. That's the scheme. This raises a problem when he begins to talk about using ideas responsibly; what real I is actually capable of using ideas responsibly? It's not itself, it's an idea of itself that is something ("why is there something rather than nothing"). Allowing the "benign variance of our ideas to continue to spread" would be a utopian myth without admitting the act of thinking is a religious act in the first place—If ideas are infections, they must compete like other viral things.

ME: Aside from the messenger, I'm very intrigued by the idea of memes as viruses because looking at them that way forms a seam between mind and matter. They are recursive types situated in different dimensions. To complete the picture, however, an energy aspect might be imagined. It's not just two things, it's three. Once that's grasped, we might imagine a fourth necessary aspect or dimension. To catch up to string theory, we'd have to find a total of eleven. Dennett's dealing with two thinking that's all there is. I'm trying to incorporate three, intuiting that's not all there is. Dennett seems to ignore Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as he doesn't see himself changing the equation at all. Perhaps the perceiver might somehow fit in as "energy" somehow. Maybe the intention of the perceiver isn't so much mind as energy. I don't know. I do think, however, that it's possible that memes/ideas/intentions compete on the personal level, but cooperate on the level of the superorganism. All ideas are necessary to It. My will is a dimension of The Human Will, my perception is an aspect of The Human Perception, my body is a scale of The Human Body...I am a microcosm of human civilization...but I am different from It in terms of scale/dimension/intention/energy etc. & et al. So will/energy/intention seem to be necessary for any paradigm fictively imagined to be useful on a personal level for the "creative person" trying to adequately imagine The Human Being, which is but one small thing in an effectively infinite multiverse…I know I don't know what I'm talking about, and the more I speak the more certain this uncertainty becomes. Dennett & Dawkins might put that in their pipe and smoke it...if they "Smoke."

*****

Remarks about about "Apes that Write:"

Jared: Bonobo: I remember a while back reading in a class about chimps and language acquisition. It involved defining human language in order to talk about similarities/differences across species. The conclusion I came to, and I can't remember if it was Kanzi or Koko (I believe Koko was a "common" chimp) who convinced me of this, that chimps can acquire language skills that humans develop by age 5. That's as far as it seemed to go in the papers and videos I was looking at. My question then was why is this the case, that this was a more useful question than simply whether or not chimps can acquire a defined human language. What language faculties do these chimps already possess, how is it expressed in the land of chimps, and why won't these chimps go on learning more. I think this comes to bear somehow on her basic point in accounting for differences between human and chimp behavior, that it's cultural and not biological. I think she's on to something, that the learning environment accounts for chimp cultural development, not genetic makeups. But there seems to be biological differences preventing chimps from becoming fully-fledged humans. This would seem obvious; except that Rumbaugh suggests through continued exposure to humans there's no reason to assume chimps couldn't develop similarly human abilities. They're almost genetically indistinguishable and share many of the same desires—both are intrigued by the capacity to make musical sounds, both are driven to communicate, both are curious about what they don't understand (though there might be some devolution here in the course of turning human), etc., but she talks about bonobo sexuality—a free, permissive, communicative tool—against human sexuality, categorized into a discreet area of experience, removed from public view, often variously taboo. I'd account for this by suggesting humans attach emotions and traumas and more to sexual acts in ways bonobos don't. Neuromechanisms must structure this…I wonder how similar human and chimp brains are or aren't.

Me: Very interesting. I couldn't help feel, however, that the bonobo who hadn't been outside for days and was looking longingly out into the forest, was being dumbed down, tortured in effect, for the purpose of these studies. Interesting they didn’t tell us why she hadn’t been outside for days. The struggle of the researcher to put what they're observing into their own terms...The inventors and teachers of grammar...liberal colonist’s not shrugging off their “white man’s burden”…presuming the innate inferiority of the enslaved…certitude run amok...spinning Heisenberg in his grave…I actually saw and see the whole thing as tragic and pathetic. I am not so curious about these things that it snuffs out my empathy for a captured ape longing for freedom. Does the good we derive from this communication justify the evil that's been done, that is being done to these poor beings? …Which leads to food consumption, which puts me on a moral level with Hitler and Stalin. I occasionally drool for a Big Mac and fantasize torturing "evil" folk in the name of the "truth." That's part of the American/Western delusion. Is it cultural or genetic, or both, this phantastic ideology of violence/oppression/dominion/zionism? Perhaps that's a recursive delusion necessary to all civilizations [human organs within the human superorganism?]…It occurs to me the role of the postmodern hero [or anti-hero] might be to rebel against the superorganism, which necessarily oppresses individuals [mere cells], exercising its dominion over them, in its desire to reach the promised land of self-satisfaction, that Zion of self-actualization. Less "society" [which is always virtual and public] seams more sociability [which is always actual and private]. I've met very few individual beings I've despised and very few groups of beings I didn't despise. I'm digressing, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "modern" "human being" is living in a box. Most of the "modern human being's" experiences are mediated by technology, which is a mediation itself from a media personality that [not who] reads what his producers have imagined themselves to have interpreted. The "modern human" "hero's journey" may lie in stepping down from her perch and out of her box to participate, cooperate and empathize with all the beings composing her present milieu. This may also mean the heroic human cell might choose to go malignant or viral in terms of not only defending itself against its national or tribal superorgan and that superorgan’s superorganism's internalizing/consuming necessities, to which a thus contextualized individual being might respond by seeking out its own justification via some ideology espousing radical individualism? Of course, "chosen people" never operate in a vacuum, so the game goes on...I naturally empathize with the egg, not the wall it’s whipped at. Most people just see a mess...I feel a bonobo longing for home…These scientists and their studies, as well-intentioned and empathetic and even necessary in light of habitat destruction as they may be, might never reveal anything innate about those they’re manipulating any more than physicists have ever pinned down an ultimate particle of matter. Whether the subjects they observe seem animate or inanimate beings will not matter in the objective sense. These scientists have perhaps not yet come to grips with the essence of their own objectivity, their being as objects. Nothing of true value can emerge from their false premises [the object's essence—neither the observer's nor the observed's] beyond the random and unintended effects of their actions...So that's why my favorite writer's a bonobo...a great ape longing for freedom, bound by inferiors who think otherwise, in a room not a forest breathing, hoping change will bring him home. If I were Jesus, I'd say forgive them Lord for they know not what they do. But I'm not Jesus and I don't care if they're forgiven or not. I just want them to stop studying these fine beings in this stupid way. Love them more. Go all the way. Shatter the tabboos and enter new planes of reality. Find a new heroic face to wear. Become more human by becoming more of an Earthling. Fuck everything, literally. And get married to whatever you want…And, I know, this contradicts my earlier idea about rebelling against the superorganism and harkens back more to my Lutheran upbringing: Love thy enemy. If Nature/nature’s your enemy, learn to love It/it…cause you can never leave It. This might be one of those times when insisting on non-insistence is insisting too much. But I won’t insist upon it. Aside from all that, Rumbaugh’s presentation was a rather fascinating and charming little presentation wasn't it? Yes, the music and narrative of some of the clips was annoying, and it’s tone exemplifies my criticism, I did enjoy it very much. It stirred my compassion.

*****

This is in regards to Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on Genius at TED:

Jared: Just watched the Gilbert talk on genius. I more or less don't take issue with what she's suggesting though I think how she talks about it is troublesome and might work against itself. It's a mistake to draw clear boundaries between pantheons and human experience. The god or spirit or Muse that is outside material and over and above is a trick. The classical notion of genius, which persists idiosyncratically and persecuted up to the present (Melville talked in these terms, as does Dan Beachy-Quick) is that it's a shared thing. It's beyond the human capacity to confine it, to own it completely, which Gilbert suggests, but contrary to her schema it's a shared human event, necessarily entailing failure at completely embodying it. Genius exhausts "the" genius's abilities. Melville read Shakespeare's work and called it "genius," while noting in a letter to Hawthorne that the most incredible thing is what the work never said, perhaps what the artist couldn't say, all that this genius took to the grave. Genius, then, as it finds shape through individuals and their work, should be understood in terms of the work it leaves to be done as much as it should be understood as the work that is actually done. Genius, when we find it, makes us accutely aware of what hasn't been accomplished. Genius reveals failure! Shortcomings! You might say it's inspirational, that it inspires, remaining ever a shared, visionary potential. The source of this for Gilbert are demons in the wall spreading "fairy juice" over the work, who either graces the worker with its presence or not. It might be much simpler (though not really), the force shaped in the constellation of texts and voices and faces and rivers that we encounter and will shape our capacity for thinking about them, this material of genius everywhere abundant.

ME: Well said. I think you took her a bit literally, though. I viewed her as espousing useful fictions, recognizing them as such, and lightening up. Genius is not a burden. For people in touch with genius as you so ably describe it, I would imagine that's an inspirational thing to hear, because I’ve read and heard elsewhere that dealing with genius can be exhausting. The river must be heard. The river is the genius. It erodes, fascinates, reveals, drowns, floods, nurtures, destroys...it's wild and natural. We can dam[n] it for a little while, but eventually such damnations are always futile. Genius is the mind evolving, which is to say expanding consciousness in time. Where I thought she dragged was saying how the writer shows up to work every day and the genius is fickle. I didn't buy that. I’ve heard some "pros" say that they’ve learned how to contact and communicate with the genius on a fairly regular basis. Tiger Woods' drives while warming up on the driving range are all better than my best drive ever. That's because he's become a pro at communing his matter-energy with the golf genius, which is an aspect or dimension of the genius-at-large that all genius taps into, that river of Mind in the mind-matter-energy exemplasy. What do I know beyond my own processes? The universe is vast, but when I think of it, I fail to know It. Also, Elizabeth, should you read this, I think you're gorgeous...