STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #16

To be deeply spiritual in the ecological sense is to perceive one's place and function within the organic system, then be it, and the only way to be it seems to live in communication with Its mind and seam with It, nostering with Its being. Otherwise, one might function differently, serving other purposes...



...Human desire reflects and manifests Nature's desire...our desire appears an extension of Nature's desire, a natural intention...dissolve concepts of self and other, humankind and Nature, ego and id, as unnecessarily distinct categories...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #15

The deeper one's understanding of language, the more deeply one might perceive Nature's cognitive processes and realize we are not the world's supreme consciousness when it comes to percipient contact with others.

Happy Thanksgiving!

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #14

The more that humans produce meaning in Nature by languaging, ever-honing more precise and complex descriptions of It, the more aware Nature will become of Itself, as the perception of humans communicating with other humans can be imagined as Nature communicating with Itself...or "thinking"...It be-ing mind perceiving matter and energy organizing Itself...



...so, the quality of our communication will seam the qualities of Nature's thinking...as It is, the planet seems depressed, suicidal...how do we heal It and ourselves?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #13

Grammar is the imagined and thus usefully fictive communication rule book by which these [autopoietic] systems maintain themselves, at least as we can perceive them, making their feedback loops possible. This understanding or sensibility, however, only exists in the cognitive dimension, as one must be aware of the constant uncertainty regarding the adequacy of description for what's actually going on, as opposed to what's really going on. What's really going on is what we imagine, or what we think and feel is going on; and what's actually happening is beyond that...inside or outside, but elsewhere nonetheless.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #12

...an autopoietic system undergoes continual structural changes while preserving its weblike pattern of organization. It couples to its environment structurally, in other words, through recurrent interactions, each of which triggers structural changes in the system. The living system is autonomous, however. The environment only triggers the structural changes. The autonomous living system also specifies which perturbation from the environment triggers these changes...and by doing so, the system "brings forth a world..."



Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living. The interactions of a living system [a biological entity] with its environment are cognitive interactions, and the process of living itself a process of cognition. In the words of Maturana and Varela, "To live is to know"...likewise, perhaps, language selects what is expressible and gives shape to the ineffable, or inexpressible, in a figure-ground relationship that seems the expression of awareness. Cognition is the continuous bringing forth of awareness through the process of language. The cognitive interactions of a living system with its environment are linguistic interactions, and the process of languaging itself is a process of cognition. In other words, language seams to know...

But I know nothing, perhaps. Maybe I'm nuts...somewhere beyond this language...like you.

Is that OK?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #11

...that if "we" seem to be conscious beings aware of each other as separate biological entities and that together "we" are functionaries cooperatively forming, via language, a psychic ecosystem that, on the global scale seems, in part, Nature's cognition, then Nature seams Itself, composing Its own awareness as the supersitial mind composing/thinking/dreaming-nostering/minding/feeling/obeying us into be-ing existent. This seams a psychic form of recursive symmetry across scale, functioning to maintain an equilibrium/meaning amidst the perceived chaos/confusion of Its own processes.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #10

...if one begins writing fiction with a few basic rules [the idea being for a "plot" or phase-space mechanism to emerge over time and pages] in sync with a "chaos game" of random limits, various meanings will begin arising from the text, moving toward a visible spectacle proportionate to scale, lured by some "strange attractor" across the textual "event horizon" toward some "black hole" singularity that's always ineffable to the individual human being...experiencing itself, for what seems like the first time, alive in something else...this seams the faith one starts with.

Thelonius Monk: Blue Monk

DH Lawrence has much the same view of women as Stephen Fry

"Pornography is the literature of prostitution. Prostitution and art have always lived together." Germaine Greer.

The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley Online

From the University of California Digital Library.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #9

Supersymmetry is the grail of string theory, addressing the vision of multidimensional feedback loops that also include quantum mechanics. The "string" is the feedback loop, fascia, membrane stitching/joining these dimensions together as they flow through time [or as time vibrates them in its passing]. The ultimate particle has been replaced by the image of a vibrating string whose pitch varies and harmonizes with the pitch variances and harmonizations of other strings [remember Emerson's "Nature?" Now keep going], which ravel together forming an infinitely large string and infinitely small strings harmonizing one to the others, and vice versa. It's the difference between music and noise, language and gibberish. It's a unifying theory, a titillating big picture and useful fiction.

SIMPLE COMPLEXITY

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #8

...consider how, as the human mind has evolved, its imagination and potential of perception has expanded into increasingly larger and smaller scales, as if perception were a simultaneous ripple effect inward and outward. At one time we were mentally stuck on the scale of things we perceive with our naked senses, but now we've left Earth, entered space and looked back at Earth, we've struggled to survive and thrive, examining the depths inside the atom and the expanses beyond our solar system...Since we are Earthlings, when we look at a photograph of Earth from space, the Earthling, or Earth Itself, looks with us, seeing an image of Itself recorded elsewhere. The Earth's biological system has possibly reached [if It wasn't already there and "we're" just catching up] a level of complexity where It's experiencing the first glimmers of sentience, or global consciousness. In theory, this planetary cognition seams an aspect, scale and/or dimension of cosmic psychignition, an awakening self that seems to work--in each dimension to the infinite micro and macro scales--at perceiving Itself as a unifying, and therefore by intention [as opposed to extension], rightly or wrongly, universal order...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #7

Literary texts apparently emerge from cognitive evolution, which seems a localized creative awareness. Languaging seams their most essential processes. Texts exist as the skins of reading/writing, and might even be considered "alive" if they were taking part in Life's evolution by writing, reading, thinking-feeling about and discussing whatever [on the externalized or extended page or screen] by manipulating various symbols within themselves [on the internalized or intended "mind's eye"]. While actively, selectively engaged by reader/writers, texts maintain their scrabbling, subjunctive fluidities, serving as flexible, permeable membranes vibrating meanings between one consciousness and another, evolving evermore complex we/ouis: Systemic cognitions [which some might call, rightly or wrongly, "singularities"], etc. & et al...

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #6

...the concept of cognitive equilibrium among autonomous functioning entities that are forming, and being formed by, their common and particular ecosystems across scale and over time.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #5

Evolutionary theories seem those that might try showing and telling the multidimensional grammar which, over time, produces complex systems producing a likely more complex system elsewhere, demonstrating some form of transdimensional functioning or, perhaps, recursive symmetry across scale...the arabesque as opposed to grotesque, or not.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #4

...attempt to help recalibrate American thinking so it can better cope with these dangerous, even apocalyptic, which is to say revelationary times. My aim is not to suggest what to think so much as how one might think. My focus is on process, fluidity and change as opposed to outcomes because process seams the perceivable effect. The ends will take care of themselves if we focus on the means, excepting unforeseen events...that require reflexive responses to stimulating obstacles which enable the formation of shared realities, provided the randomness that's occuring seems a knowable variable...falling within the parameters of human perception, language and thought.

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #3

...how to find our way out of this mess?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #2

What do most Americans need more these days than to grow up, think and act freely and be less rigid, to bravely assert themselves in the face of systemic crises?

STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT [WHEN WRITING FICTION] #1

Whenever I start a new writing project I jot down the main ideas then print them out. I end up re-reading the highlighted and bold stuff repeatedly before work each day. The eventual effect--theoretically/hypothetically--might seem uncanny.

Anyway, the "worry" part comes from it being related to the working title of a fiction piece I'm doing.

My idea is to share this list with you via daily excerpts. The list of "worries" is culled from a short "book" I was writing in 2007 called "Nature's Ching." This litany will take about a month of daily postings to get through. Please feel free to comment, either here or on Facebook. I'll read every one even if I don't respond.

Topping the list is everything we perceive, think and do is fiction. This is a lot like Richard Rorty's idea that science and philosophy are essentially stories or "literature." I say human life seams fiction...

Here's the opening quote:

I am quite willing to give up the goal of getting things right, and to substitute that [with] enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions. The point of philosophy, on this view, is not to find out what anything is “really” like, but to help us grow up—to make us happier, freer, and more flexible.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy As Cultural Politics

Etc. & Et al: A Few Notes on Smoke and So It Seams for Potential Reviewers

There seems to me at least two matters that an interesting review of Smoke and So It Seams might speculate upon:
1) The make-up of the narrative voice in Its relation to textual space and time [is It, perhaps, just ink squirted from an octopus?]; and,
2) What actually occurs vs. what really happens.
Such a critique might reveal hitherto unread seams possibly holding the texts together from below—seeming their voices’ hidden fascia, if you will.

A reviewer might also ask herself whether or not the texts render the return of “wildness/wilderness” as a potentially more evolved form of civilization the way chaos might seem a more complex form of order [to certain people ]? And if so, by extension, do the texts’ rendered implications suggest anarchy as a more evolved form of governing society, or not?

Actuality seems beyond our scope, and reality requires a leap of faith, conscious or not. We can only respond to real things because actual things might not stimulate the senses we apparently have. We respond to something whenever we perceive its importance, which seems its meaning. Vividness stimulates response, emerging meaning. Spirituality seams consciousness to meaning, perhaps.

Whom, by intuiting [that is feeling and/or sensing] the unwritten aspects or absented dimensions of these novels, seems to seam the writing narrator into a read text? You, perhaps? Who are you and who am I, or who do we seam to be, according to these novels? Who seems the reader and who seems the writer, relating to each other, meeting on this seam they call “text?”

These novels concern themselves with interiors, with what we imagine hiding inside Its shell. They approach their memes—subjects and objects, themes and characters—via sarcasm [a form of negation] while disclosing a universalism that destabilizes human being-ness, making a change of perception not only possible but necessary and actual for the next new message to be read. Our reality will then, perhaps, appear, trying to catch up. The action, far ahead as always, seems rooted in the verbs, not the nouns and modifiers we use in our vain attempts to apply meaning to what we perceive going on, what we think’s possibly happening to us…to “me”…what “we” do…the crisis of the crux Itself…whatever it seems itself be-ing.

These novels are as wild and loose as I could suture them, holding them together in the daily processes of writing. Their wildness and looseness serve as a negative, a contrast against which I [and, by extension, the reader] might perceive the shape of our own tameness and cultural sympathies.

The “wilder-ness” experience of reading/writing these novels seams to me the immediate reality of a natural universe within “human” experience. Sometimes, one might choose to surrender her desire and ability to make such experiences meaningful, choosing to give up one thing to gain another, so she might more simply experience the text in some less adulterated way [remember how you felt reading your first novel?]. Our ability to understand our actual position within any given situation seems limited, and therefore somewhat tangible, thanks to nature’s language function from which, it seems to me, emerges a kind of myth mentality where language seams comprehensibility into an incomprehensible universe. The fact language inevitably takes on “narrative” form makes myth, according to Joseph Campbell, “the secret opening through which inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” In other words, myth isn’t the story, but the process, the means by which language creates and/or replicates meaning. Myth is the verb that language seeks to modify and govern via “grammar.” Myths replicate whatever grammar misses: the human place in the possibly inhuman world. Myths seam [or linguify ] meme-machines, replicating culture; and languages seem the seams holding It [the presumably self-replicating universal myth-verb] together.

These novels might suggest [or not] a “posthistoric primitivism ” that reveals the seams of the mythological, as opposed to the more prevalent historical, consciousness of some of my fellow and contemporary “Americans.” These novels seek out their initial “American” conditions, their originating apocalypses rendering “Nature-in-its-manner-of-operation” as fictional revelations.

These novels possibly explore human apocalypse/revelation at its point of entry [or exit], while Its subject, perhaps, seams Life together in Its entirety. I think I feel these novels as “American” books of the between/among… membrane texts forming boundaries among past, present and future with now feeling the present tenseness seaming the only tangible thing we might presently experience for ourselves. Every single word possibly seams a pun into Its deeper symbol for Itself. There is no chance here, only experience. It seems actual karma, form seaming an extension into or onto content, content then intending the form, knotting the deal. No? OK.

Normally, we’re not aware of how the socio-political-economic venom of “history” conspires to direct, or at least heavily influence, the types of choices we too often perceive ourselves making because we don’t know any better, or if we do we feel intimidated by the prospects of making other choices. Hopefully, these novels strip naked the whys and wherefores of this situation. Hopefully, certain readers might feel empowered by their new level of Self awareness…or not. Maybe they’ll project their newly found Self hatred onto these texts or, worse, onto me. That would be too bad, because I’ve been trying very hard to sort these issues out and bring them into better view so I could actually deal with them within myself for 25 years, me learning to hate me hating rather than you, and Smoke and So It Seams are the results of my best efforts at Self hatred properly aimed at the Self. Pathetic? Perhaps. Worthy of derision? Maybe. But these novels are what they are in the same way venom is venom, and I’ve seen much worse…Defending one’s poison seems a way of defending one’s indefensible Self when It seems like “me,” no?

When one studies existence—one’s life and the fictive projection often referred to as “life in general”—pondering the differences between reality and actuality, the nature of being and the being of nature, the physics of physics, etc. & et al, one might come to an understanding of power that recognizes some validity in the idea that our decisions might actually create the successive worlds we perceive ourselves occupying/occupied by, we seem both inhabitants and nests, coevolving with our parasites the way our hosts co-evolve with us…the way our systems work together to maintain our mutually contextualizing system via increasingly complex interactions over time as our life form[s] grow, but then again, maybe not. Yet, if so, I imagine one simple formula might begin a description of the process of decision making: I=E/R. That’s Ohm’s Law —current equals voltage divided by resistance. Currencies, like choices, generally follow the path of least resistance to achieve oneness or at-one-ment with their hungered for opposite [a negative charge seeking something more positive from which naturally emerges something resembling the lowest common denominator beneath the highest imagined numerator], desiring as little friction and fireworks as possible until they get there. No? So for anything to systemically happen a complex of stimulation of desire, resistance, and necessary degrees of satiation must emerge that shapes the flow of time and energy through our possibly shared realities. But what do I know? I merely live-write fictions.

Everything in these texts seems a possible reflection of a word-being’s psychosomatic apparatus for following its narrator’s apparent system of decision-making. Everything seems a reflection of a reflection and totally imaginary. Duh. Some earnest readers might try making sense of these novels by trying to figure out where I’m coming from. Hopefully, you as a reviewer might write something that may facilitate putting these books in someone’s hands, and your review will give them some tools to derive greater pleasure from what I’ve possibly rendered. Hopefully, these notes will help you, but maybe not. Maybe the reader will hear there’s lots of sex in these novels and buy them for that. But be assured, gentle reviewer, the sex is not pornographic [at least in my opinion].

The differences among readings/reviews might reflect the differences of private mind-dimensions projecting personal thoughts into reading/reviewing the texts. In other words, I imagine some “folks,” unable to escape themselves, will simply misread these novels. And maybe you, being privy to these notes, can help or at least try setting them free onto happier trails...[!]. But I don’t know. In light of everything, I believe it’s better being paralyzed by knowledge than activated by ignorance. So I keep in mind Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” while writing the way an angry person might repeat “Thou shalt not kill” over and over to themselves as they go about their business, hoping for the best possible morals to emerge as an improved, or at least further evolved, effect…

Finally, if these novels have any utility whatsoever, they might be viewed as antidotes to the Tea Party mentality. They also have very nice covers designed by Geoffrey Gatza, a modern day Renaissance man, and will look cool on your coffee table or lap on the bus. So please buy a copy of each and tell your friends to buy them, too.

For better or worse, or no matter. It’s been fun. Cheers.

Chuck Richardson
October 20, 2010

NOTES

1. The boundary between “wilderness” and “civilization,” “wild” and “civil” don’t actually exist, but exist only as a mental construct or invention that makes mental processes possible [much like the number “0” was imagined as the boundary/seam/membrane/edge between positive and negative numbers, because “numbers” were always relative to each other and in motion, in that they needed to represent change to be useful. According to Max Oelschlaeger in The Idea of Wilderness: “The boundaries between wilderness and civilization can be explored only obliquely. If we look directly through the historical lens we see nothing. And the reason why we see nothing is clear: the idea of history itself precludes any understanding of a Paleolithic idea of wilderness. The idea of history itself has a history…What is crucial at this juncture is to recognize that through the lens of history human experience takes place entirely outside nature…Our prevailing definitions of ‘wildness’ and ‘wilderness’ preclude recognition of nature as a spontaneous and naturally organized system in which all parts are harmoniously interrelated; in consequence, humankind has believed itself compelled to impose order on nature…The Paleolithic counterrevolutionary, however, actually sees the deep past. From such a perspective…wild nature and culture are understood as organically related. So viewed, the destruction of things wild and free will entail the collapse of any civilization that rests upon them…the modern project, which has long promised the total humanization of the earth’s surface, is paradoxically destined to fail through its own success.”
2. The evolution of life seems a “self-organizing system.” From Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems: “Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have described the process of evolution in terms of their theory of autopoiesis, seeing the evolutionary history of a species as the history of its structural coupling….and Gaia theory explore[s] the planetary dimensions of the unfolding of life…Throughout the living world evolution cannot be limited to the adaptation of organisms to their environment, because the environment itself is shaped by a network of living systems capable of adaptation and creativity…they co-evolve…an ongoing dance that proceeds through a subtle interplay of competition and cooperation, creation and mutual adaptation.” [227] I would amend that to “…creation and destruction, unitary growth and mutual adaptation.” Capra’s view of nature reads a little too nice for my tastes. Nature/evolution seem meaner than that. I often wonder if “my” interests and Gaia’s interests are one and the same. I have strong doubts that whatever benefits me personally will benefit the planet, because I don’t think what would necessarily benefit the planet would behoove me in any way. In other words, I struggle with the idea that “man” and “God” have competing interests, and that the values of the one don’t actually work for the other. In light of this, it becomes very complicated to develop values that make universal sense. That’s not saying it’s impossible to do so, I’m merely confessing that I don’t know how it might be done. This problem might be the crux of my writing situation…I have ideas without knowledge. But that seems to me a universal among humans.
3. Civilization: 1) The result of man’s desire to please woman. 2) A relative term measuring the complexities of a given set of human social systems, where the greater the perceived complexity the greater quantity of civilization is assumed. 3) The domestication of wilderness, the taming of the wild. 4) Areas of dense human population. 5) The value of creating a culture that allows us to believe we’ve risen up out of the muck, inventing the bootstraps by which we pulled ourselves up. 5) The degree of comfy coziness one feels relative to a contestant on Survivor Island. 6) A more complex and secretive rendering of Goulding’s Lord of the Flies. 7) The way the human superorganism appears to be operating.
4. Chaos: Making A New Science, Robert Gleick: “A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances. Lorenz’s system was an example…The chaos Lorenz discovered was as stable as a marble in a bowl [if you nudged it, it would return to the same spot]. You could add noise to this system, jiggle it, stir it up, interfere with its motion, and then when everything settled down, the transients dying away like echoes in a canyon, the system would return to the same peculiar pattern of irregularity as before. It was locally unpredictable, globally stable.” [48]
5. Certain people are those who perceive their worlds as self-organizing systems as opposed to actually pre-ordained by a god in heaven. Those who see the world as a self-organizing system are process oriented, more interested in creating than their actual creations, which are always flawed replications of what they really meant [if they end up actually meaning something]. And that’s the whole point: Flawed does not equal fallen. It seems other than that…a systemic necessity, perhaps.
6. Anarchism: There’s not much agreement on a single definition for anarchism, evidenced by how controversial every definition seems to be. Regardless, I’ve come to define it for myself as the feeling that the political-economic state of human affairs—civilization itself—is a malignant tumor metastasizing across the face of its earthly host. Therefore, anarchism seems a necessary rebellion against the discontents of civilization, and an extremely individualistic collectivism opposing all authority beyond the local…not trusting in or having faith in global entities…again, the interests of “individual” seem opposed to the interests of “gods.” Worship might not be a good thing. Respect, maybe. But I’m not sure.
7. Thoreau begins Civil Disobedience: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Italics and bold signify my emphasis, not Thoreau’s.
8. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” Joseph Campbell.
9. Grammar [excerpts from a very good and short article on grammar by Cathbin Ayoob]:[Garammar is] “‘The internalized system that native speakers of a language share’…‘the unbound and ungoverned speech in which people actually live and manage their lives has become a challenge to the Crown’ [quote from first book of grammar, 1492, coinciding with the onset of the colonial era]…If these rules propose that there is one perfect language, and language creates reality, then it can be understood that these rules assume one perfect reality…James Baldwin writes: ‘People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by reality that they cannot articulate. It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power’ (40). Those who control language and the formation of language shape reality. Perhaps it is time to have language rules that incorporate all of these origins.”
10. Linguify. For an object to become a subject of language, having evolved from mere complex of atoms or gene-machine to word-being.
11. Etymology of sutra: "series of aphorisms," 1801, from Skt. sutram "rule," lit. "string, thread" (as a measure of straightness), from sivyati "sew;" cognate with L. suere "to sew" (see sew), “to suture.” Applied to rules of grammar, law, philosophy, etc., along with their commentaries. Also a collection of aphorisms relating to some aspect of the conduct of life; the sermons of Buddha; one of the approximately 4000 rules or aphorisms that constitute Panini's grammar of sanskrit. Therefore, So It Seams might also have been “So It Sutrad” [sic].
12. Posthistoric primitivism: Paul Shepard recommends that we need to recover pre-history and reconnect to mythos (sacred story), ancestors, and nonhuman Others. He believes that history’s real lesson is that it is no guide to the future, because it is a declaration of independence from the deep past and its peoples, living or dead, and from the natural state of our being. We must study primal peoples to begin thinking about living ecologically in post-historic and post-industrial ways.
13. Oelschlaeger, 11.
14. Ohm's law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference or voltage across the two points, and inversely proportional to the resistance between them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law#cite_ref-0.
15. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Observer Effect [from Wikipedia]: “The uncertainty principle is often stated this way: The measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum, and vice versa. This makes the uncertainty principle a kind of observer effect. This explanation is not incorrect, and was used by both Heisenberg and Bohr. But they were working within the philosophical framework of logical positivism. In this way of looking at the world, the true nature of a physical system, inasmuch as it exists, is defined by the answers to the best-possible measurements which can be made in principle. To state this differently, if a certain property of a system cannot be measured beyond a certain level of accuracy (in principle), then this limitation is a limitation of the system and not the limitation of the devices used to make this measurements. So when they made arguments about unavoidable disturbances in any conceivable measurement, it was obvious to them that this uncertainty was a property of the system, not of the devices. Today, logical positivism has become unfashionable in many cases,[citation needed] so the explanation of the uncertainty principle in terms of observer effect can be misleading.[original research?] For one, this explanation makes it seem to the non-positivist that the disturbances are not a property of the particle, but a property of the measurement process; the particle secretly does have a definite position and a definite momentum, but the experimental devices we have are not good enough to find out what these are. This interpretation is not compatible with standard quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, states that have both definite position and definite momentum at the same time do not exist. This explanation is misleading in another way, because sometimes it is a failure to measure the particle that produces the disturbance. For example, if a perfect photographic film contains a small hole, and an incident photon is not observed, then its momentum becomes uncertain by a large amount. By not observing the photon, we discover indirectly that it went through the hole, revealing the photon's position. The third way in which the explanation can be misleading is due to the nonlocal nature of a quantum state. Sometimes, two particles can be entangled, and then a distant measurement can be performed on one of the two. This measurement should not disturb the other particle in any classical sense, but it can sometimes reveal information about the distant particle. This restricts the possible values of position or momentum in strange ways. Unlike the other examples, a distant measurement will never cause the overall distribution of either position or momentum to change. The distribution only changes if the results of the distant measurement are known. A secret distant measurement has no effect whatsoever on a particle's position or momentum distribution. But the distant measurement of momentum for instance will still reveal new information, which causes the total wavefunction to collapse. This will restrict the distribution of position and momentum, once that classical information has been revealed and transmitted. For example If two photons are emitted in opposite directions from the decay of positronium, the momenta of the two photons are opposite. By measuring the momentum of one particle, the momentum of the other is determined, making its momentum distribution sharper, and leaving the position just as indeterminate. But unlike a local measurement, this process can never produce more position uncertainty than what was already there. It is only possible to restrict the uncertainties in different ways, with different statistical properties, depending on what property of the distant particle you choose to measure. By restricting the uncertainty in p to be very small by a distant measurement, the remaining uncertainty in x stays large. (This example was actually the basis of Albert Einstein's important suggestion of the EPR paradox in 1935.) This queer mechanism of quantum mechanics is the basis of quantum cryptography, where the measurement of a value on one of two entangled particles at one location forces, via the uncertainty principle, a property of a distant particle to become indeterminate and hence unmeasurable. But Heisenberg did not focus on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, he was primarily concerned with establishing that the uncertainty is actually a property of the world — that it is in fact physically impossible to measure the position and momentum of a particle to a precision better than that allowed by quantum mechanics. To do this, he used physical arguments based on the existence of quanta, but not the full quantum mechanical formalism. This was a surprising prediction of quantum mechanics, and not yet accepted. Many people would have considered it a flaw that there are no states of definite position and momentum. Heisenberg was trying to show this was not a bug, but a feature—a deep, surprising aspect of the universe. To do this, he could not just use the mathematical formalism, because it was the mathematical formalism itself that he was trying to justify.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Uncertainty_principle_and_observer_effect
16. 10 Rules I Seem to Live By: 1—Insist on nothing, including non-insistence. 2—Live philosophically. 3—Write: Recurse/Replicate evolutionary materials in linguistic form as an “artistic medium.” 4—Commune with, and meditate upon, “Shiva.” 5—Look for large ass stimulation. 6—When hungry, eat; when thirsty, drink—but be expedient about it and don’t dwell. 7—Be your own man; work and play for no one. 8—Don’t be ruled by superficial, commonplace desires. 9—Do what’s necessary to stay on course. 10—Your character seams a role to play, so go ahead and act it.


WORKS CITED
Ayoob, Cathbin. “The Systematic Teaching of Grammar: A Critique”, Intertext: A Student Publication of the Syracuse University Writing Program.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, Princeton University Press, 1968.

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Doubleday, New York. 1996.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making A New Science. Penguin, New York. 1988.

Heisenberg, Werner. Uncertainty Principle [and “Observer Effect”]. Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_Principle#Uncertainty_principle_and_observer_effect

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991.

“Ohm’s Law.” Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law

Shepard, Paul. Posthistoric primitivism at http://www.archive.org/stream/Post-historicPrimitivism/Post-historicPrimitivism_djvu.txt

Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience, 1849, @ http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html.

OTHER, PERHAPS RELEVANT READING, Etc.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Shambhala Publications. 2000.

Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (©1968); A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (©1971); Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (©1972); Tales of Power (©1974) ISBN 0-671-73252-8. (Autumn 1971 to the 'Final Meeting' with don Juan Matus in 1973.); & etc. @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Carlos_Castaneda

Crumb, R. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. W.W. Norton, New York, 2009.

Dick, Philip K. A Scanner Darkly. Vintage, New York, 1999.

Diogenes. At Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

Dylan, Bob. Time Out of Mind, Blood On The Tracks, Positively Fourth Street, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row, etc. & et al.

Epic of Gilgamesh. At Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_gilgamesh; and online text: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11000.

Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. SUNY, 2010.

Genesis, The Book of. As translated, annotated, etc. & et al, in the Oxford Annotated Edition, Oxford University Press, 1971.

Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey.

Jonah, The Book of. Ibid Genesis.

Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. Schocken. 1972.

Kama Sutra. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_Sutra.

Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Cody]; The Dharma Bums [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dharma_Bums]; Big Sur [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sur_(novel)]; Desolation Angels [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desolation_Angels_(novel)]; Visions of Gerard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Gerard].

Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth. W.W. Norton, 1995.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.”

Nollmann, Jim. Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature. Bantam, 1990.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1971.

Orwell, George. 1984, Animal Farm.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage, 1989; Adam, Eve & the Serpent: Sex & Politics and Early Christianity, Vintage, 1989.

Pirandello, Luigi. Various Works. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirandello

Popul Vuh, The. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popol_Vuh and The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, by Dennis Tedlock, Touchstone, 1996.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow, Viking Press, 1973.

Revelation, The Book of, Apocalypse of St. John of Patmos. Ibid, Oxford Bible.

Tao te Ching, Victor H. Mair, translator; Huston Smith, introduction; Quality Paperback Book Club, 1998.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden [http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html]; The Maine Woods [http://thoreau.eserver.org/mewoods.html]; “Walking,” [http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html].

Tibetan Book of the Dead, …(Mystical Classics of the World) by Huston Smith, Bantam, 1993.

So It Seams finally ready

I hope at least a few people enjoy this. Cheers.

One of those infrequent updates...

News: Robert Glick wrote a great review for Smoke in the current issue of American Book Review. A quote:

“...these hallucinatory acts performed by metafictive narrators in the name of solving a state-manufactured mystery may not enlighten Smoke’s psychically crippled characters, but they do give the reader a good deal of narrative pleasure. We profit from Smoke’s uncontained, comic dystopia—part X-Files, part Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), part Franz Kafka, part Philip K. Dick, part Three Stooges.”

*****

I’m slogging through the proofs of my next novel, So It Seams. I thought it was finished, but the first time through I found myself slightly altering almost every sentence. There are so many things to focus on and each draft requires a shifted focus...

Starting round two today.

*****

Some things I scribbled into my notebook yesterday morning in a hospital waiting room as a friend had pre-surgery tests:

FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT

People used to have very little and less to hide behind and couldn't talk shit or they'd get cracked in the mouth and only those who weren't finished when they got cracked in the mouth and fought back ever got more than enough shit to hide behind.

All this inglorious bullshit we witness today was nurtured out of non-bullshit times. Men don't wear suits to the ballpark anymore but you don't dare form a union or you'll destroy the country, the social fabric of consumption.

In a country where consumption outpaces production a lot of bullshit passes for product. Not everyone needs to produce but everyone needs some talent for bullshit that everyone must consume. Feeding one's face beats getting cracked, so we feed all the time.

Most thought when we selected the first black president we'd finally have leadership that keeps things real and represents...


AFTER THE BIG BUST

black thongs
push-up bras
fishnet stockings
spiked heels

right up to the big bust
the buttered phat ass co-
sponsoring the NRA's viagra
habit
miley cyrus DVDs for all the little girls and
pornography for all the little boys and
adult language for Mature Folks Only
otherwise known as MaFos

but some day
not too far from now, maybe even
today the black
thongs will become slingshots
bras will hold the nuts we gather
fishnet stockings will catch fish not men

after the big bust
we'll have militias
and hormones only.

fewer people will have babies.
and spiked heels will be used as weapons.

Giggling In The Face of Doom [or, Lilly In the Field of Poetry]

There’s a big hoopla going on about what Poetry magazine is, perhaps, doing with the millions of dollars the late Ruth Lilly donated to the outfit during the roaring nineties.

Seems despite the recent downturn the magazine’s assets have grown to $200 million and its staff stands accused of enjoying the good life.

I heard all about it from the godforsaken Chicago Tribune. It was pretty gruesome going for a sensitive poet-type like myself. There should be a rating system on such coverage, something that warns “for insensitive readers only.”

Here’s the offending article ... You be the judge.

And now that you’ve read it and perhaps done a little research of your own, here’s what I think:

All the money and related bullshit aside, when was the last time Poetry Inc. did anything interesting, substantial, important, influential...? Even before Lilly’s donation, was it doing anything?

The best way to kill art is to smother artists with money [it's my hoped-for cause of death]. An actual artist can be wrecked, I think, with too much money. If I were a rich patron, I would consider it my responsibility to fuck with an artist's mind in equal proportion to the money I gave, so his/her angst would be nurtured not soothed. I would personify "the man" for them because I prefer their psychotic pictures and texts to their pretty ones. I'd give the artist as much shit as s/he could handle, no more and no less.

Having enough is vital, but too much is deadly. The money basically took Poetry from a shoestring budget of nothing special and turned it into a corporation that needs to "play nice" for PR reasons.

Unlike us [sentient biological entities, not just legal persons], corporations seek to avoid dangerous artistic malfunctions [i.e.: stuff resulting in higher expenses and lower profits, embarrassment].

The corporate system and its sibling bureaucracy are the greatest evils in the world today...maybe ever because they seem so benign and necessary relative to fascism and communism, of which they're actually kin, the rich relatives of bastard children, one big illegitimate family of dis-eased inhuman ideologies.

People are slowly waking up to this fact, but I fear it's already too late. We're poised to see a cataclysmic drop in the world's human population resulting from an onslaught of catastrophes—magnetic field reversal, climate change, peak everything, nitrogen imbalance, dying oceans, famine, pestilence, war, disease, pandemic. People with children are going to have incredible, unbelievable, unprecedented horror, stress and anxiety to deal with. Their children will kill them, will be the reason they struggle to survive, will necessitate some form of law and order out of fear and exhaustion ... eventually ...and those people who most people fear and are tired of will be outlawed, institutionalized, jailed and/or killed. Even more so than today! C'est la vie.

And somewhere along the line it's likely that human mutations will begin appearing who, as new humans, will do to us what we Cro-Magnons possibly did to the Neanderthals: fuck and murder them/us out of existence. The new breed will, perhaps, be more OJ than Jesus. By the time the meek inherit the earth no one will want it. So it goes.

And of course, at some point a giant asteroid will strike, or something else like anomalous sun spot and flare activity will happen, ending hominid existence on the third planet from the sun...

We're all going to die...so it seams.

Thus [hate the tone of that word, the diction it implies, but its use seams correctly, hearing here the ear that says “ergo” would feel a step too far...] from Ruth Lilly's donation that kills Poetry to the end of the world. Only fitting we see the pernicious effects of ruling class "drug money."

I know. I go too far...But why not? Everything the profit/prophet-driven commie-fascists touch turns to shit! Global corporate libertarians merely think of flowers and their attention wilts flora far and wide...

So part of my life's mission, anyway, is to keep Thanatos' ideas away from my flowers...distract death and keep it at bay…wherever it lurks, blind it with my light and run like hell.

Amen.

For some reason, I can’t help giggling about all this…

Federman's Last Laugh

Raymond Federman’s last novel, Shhh: A Story of Childhood, forthcoming from Starcherone Books, is excerpted at viceland.com, with a piece called “LIST OF SCENES OF MY CHILDHOOD TO BE WRITTEN.”

Federman died last October, shortly after BlazeVox[books] published his novella, The Carcasses. The first relative works I thought of while reading it were The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Book of Natural Salvation, which I prefer, and Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes as well as some of his other short work.

Federman’s narrator seems to have fnacs [the afterlife revolutionary forces] dancing around in what is traditionally Satan’s rebellious role in Heaven by calling for a democratic transmutation of the dead—politicizing metamorphosis, the apparent essence of nature itself.

The Carcasses is not a human-centered fable, it’s not even biocentric, since there’s a likelihood at some point in one’s eternity they shall come back to this dimension as a piss pot. The novella’s flexible topology, its permeability of self, the apparent possibility of its imaginary carcass narrator’s future enlightenment/escape from karma, its wheel of life, make it a pleasure to read. And in the end, when facing transmutation, these feelings about civil rights among the dead seem irrelevant. Too much freedom and freedom’s meaningless, an emptiness that seems a death itself. A carcass with too much freedom is, perhaps, too much a carcass. One who’s free of one’s self is without self.

We laugh at all this death because we’re dying, which means we’re alive. It’s seems our grief can tickle our funny bone. Why? What does it say about us that we can laugh at death?

In The Carcasses I see mind, matter and energy seeking to sustain their inter-related disequilibria for as long as possible, an unsentimental journey with a dash of Calvino’s “lightness,” a tad bit of Laurence Sterne the Psychonaut resisting his uncarcassization…forever digressing because the novella’s ending is the carcass's ending…

Shhh: A Story of Childhood, on the other hand, seems from this brief yet tantalizing excerpt, Federman’s ever-playful, ever-youthful spirit looking back, planning ahead despite the fact…despite the unspeakable…laughing…

I was one of Raymond’s students at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-90s, and was quite surprised when, in one of our last e-mails before he died, he said Proust had influenced him more than Beckett. He’d barely ever mentioned Proust fifteen years ago. He said I should read Proust if I wanted to know what he meant. I recently began following that advice and one of the first things I came across, while doing some preliminary reading, was Proust’s [alleged, unverified source] statement that "An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates."

The portion of Shhh excerpted at Viceland is a list of things to do, an imperative litany fleshing out memory before it forever slips into the past tense, beginning with his Uncle Leon’s planting a tree, his digging in the yard a metaphor for Federman’s digging through memory, planting and dispersing seeds in the mind evolving into word-beings that populate a living text…a family tree…and in less than an hour Federman makes a universe of memories that never were, memories of senses left un-sensed…in a vase [or urn]…

Federman’s list of things to do is a list of things never done, the outline of some unspeakable undone, knowing that if not for the Holocaust these word-beings would have been people who would have, like us, had sex with themselves and others, congregated for various reasons, become excited over political ideas and whatnot, etc. & et al. They would have lived messy lives, like us…no better, no worse...moisnous.

This list of 33 imperatives perhaps signifies "Solomon's Seal" or the "Star of David"—a mature family tree that never bloomed except in these stories, in Federman’s mind where his imagination lived for them and words became beings…

The ninth item is, perhaps, the most poignant if the reader’s aware of Federman’s actual biography and the myth of Federman he created through 50 years of critifiction, surfiction and laughtrature. It’s here where his family leaves Paris, rather than staying as they actually did, when the Nazis invaded.

Then, three points later: “Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.”

Feel the fiction of the fiction to your bones.

I have a feeling that Shhh: A Story of Childhood might be my favorite of all Federman’s books, but I’ll have to wait and see like everyone else.

And that’s hard.

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.”

Now Crossposting to New Haven Review and Buffalo Examiner

I have a piece just published in the New Haven Review. It looks like I'll be a semi-regular contributor. I may also be focusing on the Buffalo writing scene for the Buffalo Examiner because, like everybody, I need a little cash. The Examiner wants 3-4 articles a week, which seems like a lot considering my schedule, so we'll see how it goes.

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/

JONATHAN SPEAKS:

THE ETERNAL BOY MATURING FOREVER INWARD
A Reading of Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others
Drawings by Michael Hafftka
Starcherone Books, Buffalo, NY, 2008, 178 pages.

[Note: This piece's original form included numerous endnotes and links, which I decided not to post here due to tedious technical difficulties. However, I hope this reading sings Cohen's novel as is. If not, nothing's perfect.]

Judaism’s cosmic hoop seems broken, at least for one dead child.

Joshua Cohen’s novel, A Heaven of Others, verbalizes 10-year-old Jonathan Schwarzstein’s soul’s trip through a Muslim heaven, which occurs after he and his parents’ are slaughtered at the hands of an exploding Palestinian boy outside a Jerusalem shoe store.

All Jonathan wants is the fundamental correction of his re-placement into the proper heaven where he’ll be re-united with his mother and father.

His desired afterlife seems an articulation of the common Jewish idea of heaven as some mystical future when, according to Cohen, human life on earth might actually become enlightened in the here-now, as opposed to the common Christian and Muslim traditions of heaven being a complex of eternal cosmic warehouses of the “good.”

Jonathan, like God and by Divine Intention “His” “chosen people,” desires to occupy a figment of his imagination, a shard of his former self dreaming the dream of when this between-phase exodus will end and he’ll be in his desired after heaven…stuck to the mindful membrane of his warmest, brightest fantasies…

The novel unravels these mental energies by showing them as demonstrations of mind. Jonathan’s lucid choices amid this apparent psychic chaos have ontological clout because they evolve the realms of awareness he recursively occupies.

Cohen states in his essay, “On Writing A Heaven of Others:”

For Jews, especially those after Spinoza’s Enlightenment, heaven is not the attainment of souls, but the work of the living embodied.

He doesn’t, however, cite any of the three “noble” religions [Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism ], nor Hinduism [except for some remark about elephants holding up the world ], as having influenced him. Yet the narrative he’s spun seems to fit over the patterns revealed in these eastern traditions, to which he claims to have sought some sort of reconciliation with Western philosophy via Judaism. Cohen writes:

… I set out to make…an art of peace. A Heaven of Others attempts to put to rest the idea of an afterlife established exclusively for one religion or race ….

The task of writing this epic “afterlife” prose poem necessitated Cohen’s becoming something of a “psychonaut,” imagining in the first person a murdered child’s post-mortem adventures, inviting whatever he’d been perhaps repressing to erupt within the given framework…as if in a dream. Cohen, in my view, unleashes his mind’s uncanny ability to project new realms of awareness by allowing Jonathan’s ego to become enough of an enabling obstacle, enough of an adequate form of the right kind of friction, for the author’s voice to make sense from nonsense, allowing for new emergencies from old content [new patterns within given parameters], surrendering to the ever-continuing existence of mind.

Over time and the space of pages, the reader of Cohen’s text may begin discerning the “psychomythology of everyday life.” Like God, Jonathan needs to “walk outside his own house” and experience otherness if he’s to re-occupy and have dominion over his imagined reality…his imagined Jewish desire for an imaginary Zion. But Jonathan would prefer not to. Israel symbolizes the setting of the stage for this future Zion, and like Jonathan must pass through the Valley of Nails [past Mohammed, symbolized by a serpent in the boy’s mind] to get there, to actually become what It’s dreaming. Jonathan, seeming the personification of Israel, repeatedly sees an image of himself nailed to a mountainside…God’s will be done not as It is in heaven, but because It is heaven…not because God is merciful, but because It isn’t unmerciful.

In “heaven” everything seems an inversion of the boy’s psychic processes…as if things were turned inside-out revealing the subconscious movements inside his awareness. His waking world seams projections as our dream-worlds suture away, the difference being the dimensions or aspects of the psyche actually seaming prominent in the seeming here-now, the one most constantly changing, evolving in some sort of self-sustaining disequilibrium.

The novel’s esoterica [that God seems absented in the Muslim heaven because Cohen approaches God—or Allah—via negation —a sighting of form without content—a heaven without us—a seeking of transcendence beyond the ever-present “me/them” duality, achieving at some future point at-one-ment with God on Earth] seems projected onto the page as Jonathan’s hoped-for reunion with his parents in a heaven of their own…the mystical Jewish heaven of Jonathan’s…

…KARMA…in which Jonathan’s angel via Cohen describes “the podiatry of [the child’s alienated] wandering” about his Muslim afterlife, feeling like an Exodus ending at some point when he might once again walk in his own shoes rather than roaming about “unshod” or in the ill-fitting hand-me-down footwear given to him as one of “them,” one of the displaced, the poor, the wandering wretched of “heaven,” whose trail of tears has no reservations…

Jonathan seems, to my reading, a Joseph, an Esau, the medieval Wandering Jew all rolled into one. He’s the Israelites, roaming the Wilderness without Moses, needing to somehow transcend his former Judaism the hard way, without dying, by “facing the more complex realities of daily exigencies,” as Cohen himself has written.

In the chapter “A Pilgrimage,” A Heaven of Others becomes something of a hero’s journey, a spiritual exodus sliding unshod along a seam[s] of eternity, becoming a repressed form of the heroic Self re-turning into the identifiable frameworks of ever re-creating emergencies, uncannily subverting Jonathan’s own word-being epistemologies with an ecstatic carpeting of verbal mind bombs...then slipping away, the hero eluding its necessary martyrdom, denying the once required sacrifice...

Despite the strength of his faith [which doesn’t move mountains, as stated above, but rather nails him to them], the fruit of Jonathan’s language seems to have fallen from its tree. Cohen invokes a mixture of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony, Zionism and the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah in “The Valley of the Nails” passage describing Mohammed’s heavenly situation, the necessary passage of His in-between, where God seams the language hearing-speaking Mohammed’s apparatus, that mechanism of nails ripping his flesh and torturing him, turning him into a giant, eternally disfigured, fork-tongued serpent forever passing along the gauntlet of the empathetic language gnawing Its way through Him with barbed words forming narratives of the displaced, of the repressed and/or oppressed. Apart from seeming an inversion of Jonathan’s identification with The Prophet, this passage seems a projection of Cohen’s own situation writing this novel. His portrayal feels empathetic with Mohammed’s cosmic predicament.

Then, through the sheer power of Cohen’s lyrical prose, the novel begins, perhaps, conjuring up a new myth, emerging from a mish-mash of old ones, maturing infinitely inward…nails forever ripening his impertinence…exploding the invalid, which is to say inadequate, representations of his all too human desire, hoping to uncover the seams of some new limitation…stitching…

…THREE ENTRY POINTS, BEIT PERHAPS…

…Kabbalists believe, to my understanding, that God created man in His own image [mind/body/soul] so He could possess man and dominate His own creation. I think “man” can, in some ways, be read as God’s fall into Nature. God didn’t create “man” in His image, but “man” emerged from God’s inward, ever-ripening, narcissistic self-reflection…Its eye/I seaming a nail. This God does not create creation so much as use the ongoing emergency of Its narcissism to forever become Itself in Its own “eyes.” Therefore, there is no “heaven of us” as previously desired—only a more sensitive, self-regarding state of mind some might call “heaven,” of which we are only players, and then only according to our degree of empathy.

In the chapter “Limitation,” Jonathan says “…a distinction must be made between limitation and weakness,” and that during his never-ending Odyssey, he “…sought the brotherhood merited in, and gracing surrender.”

It’s not that Jonathan would not pass through The Valley of Nails to help God inhabit Zion, it’s that the Valley of Nails passed through Jonathan to help Zion inhabit God. The fundamental direction of the old myth seems inverted, Jonathan listens, becomes passive rather than speaking. It’s not that he would not pass through, but should not as an article of the new faith [cognitive limit] emerging from his en-lightened experience, seeming the ripple effect of the original explosion of a few initial conditions…the big bang of his textual universe paradoxically seaming the obedient side of prayer, in which the listener would not ignore the exploding spirit.

Jonathan would have passed through the Valley of Nails but the old myth seemed stale, that story—having become a voice without an ear—had discovered its limits in real time, leading to his realization that “…though I am in the wrong heaven it is only because I think this is the wrong heaven,” and also leading to his decision that he “should like to consecrate this homesick history, mine—to vial and stop this mad gushing past,” venting his profound desire to go beyond it...

…WITHOUT BECOMING CLICHÉ…

…metamorphosing “A ‘Metaphor’”…mixing higher and lower waters… Jonathan’s angel tells Cohen, as if in a dream:

…bathing [writing] me was A process as strange and as involved as that of any political [psychological] negotiations… [my voice] required An artful and experienced manipulation of both taps [God and Man]…those twinned faucets pouring individually…so the mingling so the mating of the two waters…

…forever ripening one’s side of everything…a kind of ghost dance emergency evolving…
“like that absolute truly terrible dreaming of dreaming of mine.”

And so it seams to its own end. Perhaps the hoop is no longer broken, or all that unfixable…for now.

Yet at some point, if one matures forever inward, it seems to me some future text might require liberation from a merely human-centered focus into something else, something other…a transhuman sublime…if it’s to continue evolving.

Though A Heaven of Others doesn’t achieve this, its movement seems in that direction—from me to us to “chosen people” to humankind to animal kingdom to living things to life itself and perhaps beyond...

What else should one ask of a human novelist?

Finally, this novel is beautifully and disturbingly illustrated by Michael Hafftka. Check him out at www.hafftka.com.

*****

Further Reading:

“The Wrong Heaven: Critic Joshua Cohen on His New Novel,” By Dan Elkind, Published January 16, 2008, issue of Forward, January 18, 2008.

“On Writing A Heaven of Others,” By Joshua Cohen.

“In The Penal Colony,” Franz Kafka.

“Jackals and Arabs,” Franz Kafka.

"What's It About?"

Whenever I'm socializing and someone mentions I wrote a novel, the inevitable question "what's it about?" arises, and I never have a good answer. Frustrated, I decided to type out the whole conversation I always have later in my head, when I'm saying I should have said...And what I've done with it is put it in 8 pt. font so it fits on a single page, print out copies, carry a couple in my wallet, and when someone asks...So far I've given three away...

How would you describe Smoke and So It Seams?

As apocalyptic, magically real, eco-political-economic-post-future-SciFi-psychological-horror novels in the ecstatic mode. Where the first seems minimal, the second seems maximal. Together they form a kind of disequilibrium that seems to be trying, I hope, to maintain itself in ether and print. They’re informed by chaos theory, string theory, M-theory, deep ecology and my own alienated experiences. In other words, I imagine them as rather comical.

What are they about?

Smoke is about the incineration of de facto American ideals like the pursuit of happiness at a time of peak everything. The old forms of joy no longer deliver. What does one do about it? And then, how is one treated by those who support the status quo whenever one pursues their happiness in an alternative, untraditional way. It also displaces the human being from the center of textual reality in favor of something infinitely larger and smaller and more complex…something like “God” as Nature’s ego function, which allows for shapeshifting once one’s precise seam within the flow of things is discovered. The patterns of smoke seem to represent our phase space trajectories’ patterns, that is to say there seems to be a recursive symmetry informing the way human lives take shape, and the “writer” of these forms is most likely non-human, or beyond human, or sur-homo, or meta-sapient or something…some divine It wise enough to keep Its ego out of Its own way…

So It Seams continues in this vein, with some characters from Smoke appearing here as well, suggesting an overlapping of multiple worlds vis a vis intertextuality. The novel’s final words, “God’s mistakes seam this world, or not,” sum up the general idea that consciousness evolves [sews/stitches/sutures/seams] via error…and that error is perhaps a form/type/aspect/dimension of natural selection…and that these errors or flaws allow for the individualities within seemingly infinite patterns, and rather than being grotesque it’s actually an arabesque, which is to say rather than being ugly mistakes they are aesthetic. So It Seams is an arabesque techno-fetishization of cosmic error highlighting the crises of our perceptions as we seek the beautiful…an enlightenment of the Enlightenment…a neo-meta-enlightenment, perhaps…enlightenment as a movement toward Calvino’s idea of lightness and away from brainiac radiation, maybe…I’m digressing into aesthetics, at war against the ugly, which ironically seams the point…or particle-wavelength…

How do you account for the religiosity of these two novels, especially So It Seams?

By my long-time feeling that the old myths, as Joseph Campbell once said, no longer worked and that if the human superorganism is to continue evolving, new myths will takeover. One can’t stop this from happening. It’s something deeply programmed into us on the species level. Individually, we may debate the old myths, believe in Jesus, make choices, etc., but the number of compromises we have to make to continue existing in a world that no longer reflects the challenges those religions faced in surviving make new beliefs emerge. The traditional forms of Abraham’s beliefs make less and less sense as time goes on. New myths emerge from our dreams to take their place. Federman writes somewhere that he’s not a spiritual medium, but an artistic medium. The artist who knows his ego gets in the way of the larger work of allowing the subconscious mind to express itself, to find its human form without repression—much like an ideal democracy that overthrows its despotic leaders who formed then functioned as the political system’s ego—will be a conduit for these forms so they can appear in whatever medium the artist is working in. You channel a zeitgeist, a universe of forms, through the shape of your human mind, and hopefully what appears on the expressed end is something conveying some kind of vibrating multiplicity forming oneness to another human being. Someone once said that consciousness plus meaning equals spirituality. As I search for new meanings in this mess of a world, new and old meanings come and go through the course of time. The novel is an extended form of this passage and the shear accrual of the comings [sic] and goings [sic] of these meanings may take on the vestige of something spiritual over the course of the novel, which is too often mistaken for religious. For me, religion is the institutionalization of “God.” Spirituality seems about setting “It” free. The spirit is a holy thing and anything that provides meaning to what we experience feels sacred, relatively speaking. That said, if one were to read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao Te Ching, The Book of Revelation [from a Marxist perspective], Black Elk Speaks and Thoreau [all of it, including a couple good bios], one might get a feel for where I’m coming from with regards to the holy spirit.

What about all the sex?

It’s impossible to do what I’m trying to do in my work without much of it taking a sexual form. The essence of our shared membrane of reality is friction, it’s this rubbing up against that makes the world go round, that psychologically torques us…and there’s nothing like sex to reveal just how small a role the “ego” plays in all the really really big stuff in our lives. Something much deeper and bigger makes us approach each other with stirrings in our loins…Sex is also rather funny and ridiculous and violent and absurd and pathetic…There’s nothing quite like two people humping as Rome burns…and it’s perfectly natural to do so. Why? What’s reason or ego got to do with it? Sex is very spiritual because its meaning is beyond reason, and we get that meaning, whether we like it or not, every time we have sex with something capable of having sex itself. Take that where you may or where you will. That’s part of the psychological horror and, I hope, comedy of my fiction: the ways sexual acts recurse themselves throughout every situation…this seems maybe some kind of pan-sexuality akin to Freud, a truly frictional fiction, though I hope not too much.

Reading This Saturday at Western New York Book Arts Center

Nathan Graziano, Ted Pelton (Starcherone Press), and Chuck Richardson (BlazeVOX) will read at the Western New York Book Arts Center, 468 Washington St., Buffalo, this Saturday, October 3, as part of the closing reception for the exhibition Writing Pictures. Doors open at 6 p.m.

Five Postulations [as if I were some big time philosopher or literary theorist or something]:

1. A common recursion functions across scale, aspect, dimension whenever cognition seams together a membrane.
2. This common recursion is Itself a complex system, exhibiting the same interior functions as its exterior functionality…certain necessary “flaws” excepted.
3. Language is an aspect of this recursion, reflecting the same interior symbols as its exterior symbology…certain initial “misunderstandings” excepted.
4. Grammar is Karma is Mind—Each standing for something else like it in every direction, signifying transdimensional ripples in its signified aspects…certain aesthetic bifurcations seaming, understood.
5. We exist as the seemingly necessary flaws and effects of this universe’s cognitive aspect.

Watching the film Pi inspired this short list. This complex statement totals 216 letters, the sum postulation comprises 144 words exactly, averaging nearly 3.14 obligatory words per clause…

***

I’d like to thank Thieves Jargon for publishing a piece of my short fiction, “I Love You, Too, Sweetheart.” It’s a tender tale about the tales we tale our chirren. God bless us all.

And a special thanks to Geoffrey Gatza, publisher of BlazeVox[books], for agreeing to publish my next novel, So It Seams, sometime next year. Geoffrey’s the bravest publisher I can think of, a bona fide ubermensch of contemporary American literature…a working person’s book-maker and one of the best poets out there…or in here inside the internets.

Ciao.

Summer Reading/Autumn Writing: The Afterlife, or something like it…

One hasn’t found the singular until s/he’s discovered its in-forming complex system. That’s something I knew but found out all over again recently when trying to write a review of Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others, which, if accepted, might appear in the next issue of Mayday Magazine.

How to boil the novel down not just in words but to the very essence of “my” reading of it proved, as it always does with writing I love, an obsession. My late Aunt Cookie used to collect art she called “conversation pieces.” They made people discuss them, and by discussing them begin discussing themselves. When I read a really good book, the same thing begins happening inside my head, and more often than not I end up in a different mental place than I was before.

Examples that come to mind: reading Slaughterhouse Five in 1983 on patrol aboard a nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine; reading On The Road on acid in community college in 1985 while taking a basic composition class so I’d have a chance at succeeding at that academic level; reading Naked Lunch poolside while broke and unemployed in Van Nuys; reading the rest of Kerouac and Joseph Campbell while living in Hollywood, Ca., living on Greenpeace income; reading Samuel Beckett and Robbe-Grillet and John Hawkes while studying under Federman at UB; reading Walden while working a temp job in customer service at Cell One; reading Underworld while driving a taxi on winter nights in a small, depressed town; reading Gravity’s Rainbow and 100 Years of Solitude in the throes of creative dyspepsia, working overnights in a group home.

Reading Cohen’s novel hasn’t precipitated or coincided with a particularly dramatic period in my life, or changed my way of thinking—nor has it left it unchanged [nor is this a particularly un-dramatic time in my life]. Yet it’s a deep novel with complex mythological twists that took me nearly two weeks of writing to have something readable with quite a few footnotes [as a means of suggesting the internal conversation and struggle A Heaven of Others inspired]. I went to the trouble not only because the novel merits the effort and a friend asked me for something, but because it seems to fall in with a few other novels either published or about to be published with a similar flavor, one I find as having great appeal for imaginative writers of a, perhaps, delightfully morbid ilk: the afterlife or something like it. These novels seem to be emerging from the idea that something is dead or dying, yet life will continue. The sense seems to be that things are changing in ways that we can only begin imagining. These novels all seem to focus on what the perceiver of this situation might do or think…how they might come to terms with their own death, and by extension, perhaps, the dying of their species. They seam philological searches for what to do, what not to do, of how to be properly concerned for one’s self at a time of peak everything…if one’s self actually exists as a singular, which leads back to the first sentence: One hasn’t found the singular until s/he’s discovered its in-forming complex system. It’s not what we say or write; it’s “how” we say or write. These are novels examining the seaming dynamic at the root of speaking, a self-aware speaking in the face of death. All the works I’m talking about seek themselves out amidst complex conversations, discovering in the process not only how they are voices but voicing us, humankind, and how we’re all facing…

In the months ahead I plan to write and publish, and if not publish, post here, reviews of Goro Takano’s soon-to-be-released With One More Step Ahead, Raymond Federman’s The Carcasses, Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses and Donald Breckenridge’s You Are Here [not necessarily in that order]. Then I’ll have an essay about them if I can sort things out well enough.

Stay tuned [if you’re interested]…and may the conversation begin :))) [I'm double-chinned].

Summer Vacation

Although I planned to continue weekly updates starting today, I’m merely announcing that I’ll be taking the summer off except for sporadic updates. I just finished rough drafts of two book-length manuscripts I’m rather pleased with and feel exhausted. The novel is my best work yet.

So, I need time to re-create…

See you September 20…and send me an e-mail if you want to be notified should I decide to post a thing or two before then.

Enjoy your summer.

Cheers.