Myth & Theory: Babbling, Procrastination & Babel

First, the procrastination. This week has been one of fiddle farting and might be characterized by this "poem."

Note: I consider myself no poet, but...

The way this works is as you click on each stanza you'll go to a wordle cloud. Then when you return to the poem, the part you've read will have disappeared. And each wordle word cloud gets smaller with each ensuing stanza.

It also seems each word cloud might be another poem randomly generated from the remnant stanzas.

Of course this is stupid and duh. But I'm procrastinating...farting around rather than writing my novel…

This may also be a humorous poem, intended as a joke [perhaps validating the intentional fallacy, making Wimsatt rather Beardsley]. For instance, "Myskin" seems a proper noun and in its context, seems an event. “Meta-For” and “Odd-Appeal” are perhaps the proper names of people.

Or not.

What a waste of time, or was/is it? I don't know. You decide...

Propersubjects/Impropernouns

Word/Wound de Meta-For sutures Odd-Appeal during Myskin, sweating Inside-Out

vibrating like This the Simile sewing Its scattered Black Hole Ashes, blowing Saturated Trombone

awareness as Onset de Mew-Tate Offspring stitching Redundant Emergencies, perverting Chaos into Arabesque Patterns of Itits Loving

regardless of Him Orher


*****

Poet and BlazeVox[books] publisher Geoffrey Gatza informed me at last weekend’s wildly successful Buffalo Small Press Bookfair that the cover of my novel, Smoke, which he designed, is a photograph!

This blew my mind as I was certain it was a work from Photoshop. It turns out he’s a sharpshooter and shot a series of photos of “Cloud Gate” by British artist Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park while attending the AWP conference in February.

Here are the links to these amazing pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303467281626059714

And here is the whole set of images around it. They start about half way down:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#

My favorite:



http://picasaweb.google.com/ggatza/AWP2009#5303472397146743506

These photos remind me of my limited understanding of M-Theory, which is related to string theory. M-theory states the big bang was actually the membranes of two universes colliding. The sparks from that collision and ensuing friction seams the observable matter of this universe or dimension. All we perceive and reflect-project-express—among them language and art—seems to seam reflections on this membrane, or brane as some pros may have it. So appearances change as we and "others" move through space time [consider Escher].

Gatza’s photos of Kapoor’s work seems to me a representation of mind-matter-energy in motion...a river-like progression projecting/reflecting cognitive material energy confronting space-time and scooping out portions of it with a camera lens.

And one of these spoonfuls made the cover for my novel.

For more info see:

http://www.millenniumpark.org/artandarchitecture/cloud_gate.html

"What I wanted to do in Millennium Park is make something that would engage the Chicago skyline…so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is in the form of a gate, the participant, the viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one's reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around."

-Anish Kapoor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor

An excerpt from Kapoor’s Wikipedia article:

"Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. Most often, the intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works' dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty, tactility through their inviting surfaces and fascination through their reflective facades. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India. His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind). His most recent works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings.

"When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said, 'I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.[1]'"

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...

Mish-Mash

I’ll be reading something from Smoke or a novel-in-progress somewhere at the Third Annual Buffalo Small Press Book Fair between noon and 6 p.m. Saturday, March 21, 2009 at Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY. It’s free and open to the public. For more info: http://www.buffalosmallpress.org/

My Smoke is not the first Smoke. Just found out Turgenev beat me to it. So far, there’s the obvious comparisons… There’s also the film starring Kevin Spacey, of which Paul Auster wrote the screenplay, which I haven’t seen. That has nothing to do with my novel…though Turgenev seems to have stolen a thing or two. Russian bastard. Should we ever meet …

I’m purchasing Joshua Cohen’s, A Heaven of Others, with my next paycheck. Consider this from the New Haven Review: “A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen…” Good God! See the publisher’s site

It seems someone else named Charles Richardson had a way with people, too. See: “There is no evidence to support later suggestions that Richardson whipped Chinese while horseback riding in China, though according to a local English-language newspaper Supplement on the Incident, he had been heard to say just prior to the incident, "I know how to deal with these people" at Namamugi Incident. Sometimes, history’s hilarious!

From Sam Hamill’s In Her Company: Denise Levertov, at Jacket: “We shared some “affinities of content,” to borrow the title of her 1991 essay on poetry of the Pacific Northwest, as well as convictions about the role of the “engaged” artist. And we both felt passionately about the necessity of serving poetry[1] — in my case including work as editor-printer as well as poet-translator-essayist. As “engaged poets,” we shared a common struggle to resist bending one’s art to the purpose of mere propagandizing while acknowledging one’s politics within the living arts of poetry.”

An interesting piece on David Foster Wallace at Rain Taxi: “One thing that Wallace did incredibly well was to co-opt metafiction’s recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader. He likened metafiction to a literary Armageddon (“art’s reflection on itself is terminal”) and called it a “permanent migraine”: you’re writing a novel about a novelist who sits down to write a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist who paralyzingly suspects that s/he’s nothing but a character in some novelist’s novel, and so on—sigh—you get the idea. Wallace called this kind of writing cleveritis, and he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer.”

An interesting interview with Ted Pelton, novelist and publisher of Starcherone, at Experimental Fiction Poetry: “I was very angry when I wrote that piece, in 1991, and I think the excitement of the form reflects that anger, that bitterness that after all this time, we are still putting stock in war to solve problems. What could be stupider? Really, what? Who can have so much certainty about themselves and their truths as to kill other people, simply for control of resources? And the first Gulf War was the one that changed how we look at wars today, sans reporters on the ground, showing us what’s really going on. Gulf War 1 was about information control, as much as it was about anything – and now we are very far from even remembering to be critical of what we are told is happening in combat areas. In essence, Dubya and his administration gave us a gift in being so stupid and incompetent in how he managed the wars; his father had figured out how to do brutal, illegal, moneymaking things very quietly. Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops! … I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.”

Bizarro scientist look to weaponize ball lightening.

New Blogs:

Experimental Fiction Poetry & Jazz

Mike Palacek’s New American Dream

Arts & Letters Daily

Book Forum

Kirkus Reviews, Fiction


Daily News:

Climate Feedback at Nature.com

Talking Points Memo

Today’s Papers

WHY WRITE: A MEANDERING ONTOLOGY OF VOICE

A Conversation with John Bloomberg-Rissman


The
River wants
To be heard.

John Bloomberg-Rissman, No Sounds of My Own Making

I don't know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn't feel the need to do it. All I can say, and I say it with utmost certainty, is that I have felt this need since my earliest adolescence. I'm talking about writing, in particular, writing as a vehicle to tell stories, imaginary stories that have never taken place in what we call the real world. Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Paul Auster, “I Want To Tell You A Story,” The Gaurdian

*****

When actually writing, I'm in that world with the things that move me... Antidepressants and Xanax were designed to enable me to come and go from that world as I pleased, but the end result was a grey mishmash of nonsensical sensibility. Leaving these SSI inhibitors behind and self-medicating with mother earth put me to bed in her womb, which is exactly as Kerouac stated: An Indian thing…Sometimes it's so beautiful I'm glad I'm apparently human, among other things.

Me, I Just Made That Up While Actually Writing

*****

This week John Bloomberg-Rissman responded to last week’s blog entry at FCF48. Zeitgeist Spam, which is permanently linked to at the bottom of this page, is an ongoing poetry project of John’s. I’m more of a fiction guy, but I think we have a lot in common. Here’s my response to his feedback and what transpired after [the added links are mine, some contributed by John, others may be seen as areas where I may have questioned him, and may still]:

Me: Would this be flarf? What I like about this piece is the way you seam together a wide range of sources, which you've read deeply, or thought deeply of, and yet ably gleaned from surfaces, snatches of this and that, then pooling them together into something that seems to occupy its own field of activity, its own mind grappling...and the point is, if there is a point, is yes it's bullshit, but what wonderful, pleasurable bullshit it can be. It seems to me a kind of schizo-sanity. Diversity glued together. I've heard of Tom Beckett, but now I'm going to look him up. We're having a conversation!? His virtual and real seem to jibe with my actual and real…The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think.

John: The bit I sent you is from Flux, Clot & Froth (=FCF), which will have 100 “sections” that are in fact 1. It’s written in discrete bits but will be presented as one long rolling river ... Or at least as the foam on the surface of that river. …it’s no more bullshit than any other work of “culture” ...... The whole work is an assemblage of many many language-bits (hence the “schizo-”). I find it kinda funny how every time I escape myself, well, there I am waiting ... Which brings me to your virtual/real, actual/real, erlebnis/ereignis; don’t forget Husserl’s noesis/noema, or – better yet, because not a duality, Lacan’s imaginary/symbolic/real. …I’m really taken w/Irigaray’s translation of philosophy as “the wisdom of love” rather than as the “love of wisdom” [John, I relate similar ideas to Thich Nhat Han] …I’m not sure I fully buy your “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the two in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse, I think”. I get what you’re saying; my only quibble is that it might be true that (Derrida, Lacan) “there’s no outside to language”, Heidegger’s “no exiting the house of language”, and at the same time it might be true that, and this is a bit of JBR “insight” (bullshit?), there may be no inside, either ... And perhaps Heidegger’s “house”, unlike his beloved hut, has no walls ...Which doesn’t mean we aren’t being lied to all the time, or that the external world doesn’t exist ... Or that politics is unnecessary, or ... It just means that, to go all “Buddhist” on you, maybe the struggle is “no-struggle”, or something, to quit wriggling on the hook, because there is no hook, and to just get on with it. It? The struggle you describe, of course, which (to stay “all Buddhist” another moment) I tend to think of as the struggle to “get” and to live up to the boddhisattva vow ... Which, in political terms, might mean some form of progressivism ... Tom B is well worth checking out. He’s a really really fine poet, and a really really good man. He interviewed me, by the way, in the latest Otoliths (no. 12), where a collaboration between Jared [Schickling] and me also appears…Chuck—The struggle we’re discussing ... That all takes place in as you note “the mind”. ..“When I was young, I laughed a lot at Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. He opens it with these words: "At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation..." Isn't this an exemplary introduction? A collection of examples in the same vein, so austere and meager, inspire the descriptions that follow. From his window the author sees some tree, always in bloom; he huddles over his desk; now and again a red blotch appears - it's a quote. What you can decipher in this book is a nice ethnology of city dwellers, who are hypertechnicalized, intellectualized, chained to their library chairs, and tragically stripped of any tangible experience. Lots of phenomenology and no sensation - everything via language...My book Les Cinq sends cries out at the empire of signs. (Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 131-2.)” … To quote Serres once again, “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” …That’s from his Angels: A Modern Myth…Now, Merleau-Ponty’s not as desiccated as Serres makes him, and Serres isn’t as out of his head as he’d like one to think. But, in any case, let’s not forget the flesh ...

Me: "Let's not forget the flesh." But what is "flesh?" A membrane? What is a membrane? What occurs there? How? What is it? Does it operate like a synapse? Is "communication," stimulus-response, cognition Its essence? What about energy? How is that related to mind and matter? And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language? It seems one might try to detach from the escapement into escapeness...forming a triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy [compare Barth's "coaxial esemplasy"]...Now I really don't know what I'm saying other than “it”—what “I” “am” “saying”—is a mish-mash of mind-matter-energy here now…[it seams an index, among other things—referring to a JBR statement after-the-fact, see further]...the escapeness of meaning that feels like a lazy river [I am upstream in the now going over this]. Perhaps I am not the one writing, perhaps I’m just along for the ride. Perhaps The Writing is somewhat distinct from me, or entwined with me, among other things. We’re all polluted with many things. As you say, “the river must be heard.”

John: What is flesh? Hell if I know. (According to the OED, no one really does. No one even really knows the etymology of “flesh” – which tells me it’s always been a mystery, “who feels it knows it”, but …)…Acid told me fast vibrations (of what I never grasped) appear immaterial, slow ones appear as “stuff”. Nevertheless, and somehow: flesh is the medium of thought. Most thought happens in and with the flesh, with what we think of as thought as the bringing to consciousness of what’s already been thought (That hurts, I’d better move my leg. I’m hungry. I gotta piss. She’s hot …). Most thought never comes to consciousness (beat, heart; breathe, lungs; twitch, muscles …). And as for the thought we normally call “reason”, well, that is utterly conditioned by our sensory apparatus, brain structure, etc. as well as by our cultures (which too are epiphenomena, so to speak, of our flesh. I mean, culture’s etymology: classical Latin cultura cultivation, tillage, etc etc.) It seemed to me that when you wrote “The struggle seems to be distinguishing the [actual vs. real/virtual—I’m saying reality is virtual and actuality is what exists beyond the virtual, of which faith—more later—plays a vital role] in one's mind, one's language...an emergent awareness occupying the space between signifier and signified, operating somewhat like a synapse” you were disembodying us (your synapse being the space *between* axon and dendrite) or forgetting for a moment to conceive us as embodied. Which of course could be over reading. So I mentioned the flesh. …Acid also taught me, by the way, that language doesn’t appear til the vibrations are plenty slow, down to flesh-level:

Words are thick, opaque,
Not Amida’s sweet clear light …
That’s from something I wrote more than 35 years ago. I’m still “there.”…I don’t think communication is stimulus-response because I’m not a [someone] who needs the black-box behaviorist. Behaviorism, by the way, is a metaphor. Which has been “replaced” by the more “sophisticated” metaphors of cognitive science (computation, connectivism, neural nets, etc). Which of course are totally dependent on the metaphors of neuroscience for their “validity”, or appropriateness. Not that neuroscience isn’t science, as much as any science is science. If you ever have a couple of years in which to devour a book, I suggest Margaret Boden’s *Mind as Machine*, which is an absolutely wonderful 2 vol history of cognitive science. I’m about halfway thru v.1. It’s a treasure, a big room full of fascinating geniuses (definition of genius: anyone who blows my mind with their mind)…All we have are metaphors for who-knows-what, man. And hunger pangs. And pangs of compassion. …You also ask (rhetorically, I know, but I can’t resist): “And what am "I" that produces/recycles/regurgitates this bullshit in what we call language?”… I think I is what’s called an indexical. It doesn’t stand for anything. It just helps point to something (Unspoken? Outside language, tho language has no inside or outside?). Since we use the same pointer, we think we’re always pointing at the same “thing”. What is that “thing”? Pound called it a “patterned integrity.” Of what is it made? I dunno. Perhaps statistical “likelihoods” created by big-bang asymmetries??? …From a poem about 5 yrs old:

Is a tree the seed’s adventure?
Am I the adventure of the first moment of time?
Big Bang Boy
High stepping
Howling
Time’s arrow sticking out of his ass?
This is a great conversation. Bits have worked their way into FCF. I don’t see why my poem can’t contain a record of this. Especially because I’m a magpie, and you write so great. Shiny! (exclaimed as only a happy magpie could) …Oh, one other thing, which *I* think is funny. You mentioned Barth. I thought Karl, not John. Which gave that esemplasy thing a whole different twist. I learn (OED again) that esemplasy’s a word from Coleridge: the power, that is, of infusing into the various parts of a subject an ever-present unity. Imagining that coming from a theologian, as I did, got me onto a whole train of thought …At least I didn’t think Barthes!

Me: There's so much I could say, much of it agreeing with you, basically, just saying it in a slightly different way…Karl Barth. That is funny. About 20 years ago I absorbed The World Treasury of Modern Religous Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. It begins with Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and ends with Solzhenytzin's Beauty Will Save the World. Barth's Faith as Confession is included in the first section: "Faith is God's mystery breaking forth; faith is God's freedom and man's freedom in action." I read that as the self-declaring “Christ” is the first person pronoun faithfully reflexing/reverbing/feedback looping itself into a sentient biological entity [a sentient triaxial esemplasy of mind-matter-energy going through a self-conscious phase space trajectory in time, which may be an awareness in and of itself] that commonly mistakes its body—that membrane coordinating/indexing its six senses contained within the membrane—for its flesh. It occurs to me that "faith" could just as well be replaced with "language" in the context of our discussion, and that "freedom" could be replaced with "will," which I see as akin to energy in the Mind-Matter-Energy formulation [a triaxial esemplasy leading to multi-dimensional arabesques displaying recursive symmetries across scale during their phase space trajectories as “I” faithfully perceive them from here?]. What's important, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, like that river you speak of, it is that river to my way of reading, which further upstream in my [mostly] self-education, leads back to Gleick's Chaos and Capra's Tao of Physics and The Web of Life. I don't think of my synapse metaphor as dis-embodied any more than the electric signal between neurons [in the synapse] has escaped the neurological system, or has escaped my body, but rather in terms of spandrels, which is a cognate term between evolution and architecture, a branching off that's still attached, signifying an evolving complexity that produces arbitrary forms which seem to serve no purpose in the overall systemic structure of its native environment....analogous to the human mind being a byproduct of evolutionary forces that seam a “spandrel” which seems to be evolving the means of linking up with other “spandrels,” finding a way to make themselves functional within the overall life system, which somehow becomes dependent on spandrels seaming spandrels at a particular point in imagined time. I agree wholeheartedly that language and mind are of the flesh, and so is faith [despite what many folks mistakenly believe]. I'm not an Ist of any sort, meaning I'm not an atheist. I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life…I'm just beginning to connect the dots in my head for this week's blog entry. I received your books yesterday. No Sounds of My Own Making. Now that looks like a text I'll derive some pleasure from. At first look it seems to be taking a bath in jouissance (as long as we're talking about Barth[e]s). It might be interesting to consider what you're doing here and what Barthe's is doing with Balzac in S/Z...the difference being he's using one source and commenting directly, you're using multiple/many sources and commenting [I presume] in the way context emerges within the text [see how I feel the message existing between the chemical stimulus and electric response without escaping the body in my synapse metaphor? In terms of scale, this is the Hotel California…we’ve checked in but we can never leave—once we do we’re not us in any recognizable form anymore, at least in my opinion]. Of course, I'm probably way off. I'm not a poet or particularly good at poetry criticism. I prefer making things up. All writers are liars, I am a writer. The less I know the more I have to write about.

John: For you to substitute “language” for Barth’s “faith” is almost kabbalistic. It also brings to mind Kukai’s theory of language, about which I’m reading in a book by Ryuichi Abe, The Weaving of Mantra. As summarized in an article on the web: “Kukai advanced a general theory of language based on his analysis of two forms of Buddhist ritual language: dharani and mantra. ... Kukai made mantra a special class of dharani which showed that every syllable of a dharani was a manifestation of the true nature of reality — in Buddhist terms that all sound is a manifestation of shunyata or emptiness of self-nature. Thus rather than being devoid of meaning, Kukai suggests that dharanis are in fact saturated with meaning — every syllable is symbolic on multiple levels. One of Kukai's distinctive contributions was to take this symbolic association even further by saying that there is no essential difference between the syllables of mantras and sacred texts, and those of ordinary language. If one understood the workings of mantra, then any sounds could be a representative of ultimate reality. This emphasis on sounds was one of the drivers for Kukai's championing of the phonetic writing system, the kana, which was adopted in Japan around the time of Kukai.”…The Stanford Ency of Philosophy also notes: “Ji, meaning “sign,” “word,” “letter,” or “character/graph,” is sound in its signifying character as naming or meaning something. As letter, it also provides a material base whereby the sign's distinction from other signs becomes retained and fixed.” …Derrida’s differance avant-le-lettre??...As for “will”, are you channeling Schopenhauer/Nietzsche? You write: “What's important here, in my opinion, is that faith/language is dynamic and freedom/will/energy is something we can only participate in and never control, ...” We certainly are on the same wavelength when it comes to seeing control as a consoling myth. Language certainly can’t be tamed. Energy is something we uh well sing along w/Crazy Fingers: “Gone are the days we stopped to decide where we should go, we just ride.” In Kukai’s world, of course, to distinguish between language and energy would be to reify two “versions” of the same thing…As the title of a Bruce Fink book has it: *The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance*. Not a bad place to be sandwiched ...I like your “I think the struggle is to overcome the babel...we always did feel the same we just saw it from different points of view...but we're not tangled up in blue, we're swimming in it. Eventually we'll all drown, but that's life.” I’m not sure I’d use the word “overcome”, tho, since we’ve just agreed that control is out of the question. Unless you mean overcome in the sense of roll with, be-there-now with, don’t shrink from, the babel ... Seems to me that remaining-present is the ONE way we have of actually “getting” that whether or not we always did feel the same, you felt what you felt and once I didn’t fight it it was cool ...I think that’s a definition of love, by the way. Being-present with someone, staying-present with them ... Relinquishing control. I think it’s also a definition of self-love ...

Me: And the only thing I can seam to that seems A-u-mmmm…

Also see FCF49, where this conversation beats on, elsewhere …

*****

Tom Beckett interviews John in Otoliths...

From Tom Beckett’s blog…

The Virtual and the Real:

I've dealt with some pretty gritty stuff in the course of doing public health work. And I've had some frightening encounters over the course of the last 30-some years. I've even been threatened with bodily harm from time-to-time. Once, memorably, at gun point. I say all of this because I want to establish that I do exist in your so-called real world, but...

I think as a poet I exist on a dividing line between realities.

I think as a poet I exist like basic but underappreciated parts of speech. Let me explain, or at least hint at an explanation, by quoting my buddy William James:

"With, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my--these words designate types of conjunctive relations arranged in a roughly ascending order of intimacy and inclusiveness."

Conjunctive relations.

I am a fucking allegory of virtual intent and a walker through messes, too. I am scathed.

POSTED BY TOM BECKETT AT 4:07 PM

*****

Next Week: Perhaps Tom Beckett, Kent Johnson and more as the conversation continues…or not. Stay tuned.

At times even monsters must have their fun

Starcherone Books Presents: Naked Kitchen Yoga
Friday, March 6, 2009 @ 7:00 PM
Rust Belt Books

STARCHERONE BOOKS is celebrating NATIONAL SMALL PRESS MONTH with NAKED KITCHEN YOGA on FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009, 7 pm, at RUST BELT BOOKS, 202 Allen St., Buffalo, NY. So far, these 17 writers and small press fans have tentatively agreed to partake: Mike Basinski, Robin Brox, Lisa Forrest, Kristi Gansworth, Gregory Gerke, Mark Gunther, Paul Hogan, Aaron Lowinger, Douglas Manson, Liz Mariani, Steve McCaffery, Ted Pelton, Chuck Richardson, Gary Earl Ross, Forrest Roth, Mike Sikkema, Ed Taylor.

You too are invited to be a part of this fundraising event. Participants are invited to share with us a 5 minute or less work written by themselves or others that has been published by a small press book, magazine, journal, chapbook, or other construction strongly or loosely affiliated with small presses. One lucky attendee will also win a complete set of the 18 (maybe 19) Starcherone Books published to date!

Starcherone Books is itself a nonprofit small press publisher of innovative fiction and hybrid prose stuff. This event will not only be a fun occasion to see old and new friends and together celebrate non-mainstream contemporary literature and its offshoots, it will also (hopefully) help us pay some bills. We are asking a $5 donation, which will entitle the contributor to ONE FREE DRINK (beer, wine, or nonalcoholic). Further refreshments will be available all evening.


Venue Information
Rust Belt Books
202 Allen St.
Buffalo

*****

A hodge-podge of this week’s thoughts and communiqués:

It is conscious relations

A friend writes: “I don't know how you can watch that stuff—MSNBC, CNN, etc etc. Since we've been without cable, I watch less and less TV, to the point that if I turn it on, as I did last night to eat my dinner, I last minutes at most…as to hope, I don't really see it…I see much more of the opposite, despair, hopelessness, being a form of emptiness…If I'm to live, I should do something and, I think, I'll choose to be a counterweight to that.”

Ah, to choose. A romantic notion. But I think the choice is given if you're here. In other words, if you haven't killed yourself you're choosing to be here. And since you're choosing to be here, what the fuck are you doing about it? For a thinking person, things get messy quick. And when things get messy it's hard to be smart. I think the most ethical and courageous thing a writer of any stripe can do today is admit s/he doesn't know anything outside his or her mind [this would not be ethical behavior for people who have different functions like actors, politicians, business people]. We only have clues…

I feel the whirling dervish in the tight mess of my perceptions. All living things are emergencies striving for delightfully complex, becalmed horrors that increasingly terrorize themselves over time, thanks to the way the dervish fevers a virus in one's memory banks, forcing dubious re-categorizations and classifications, etc., due to the modification of habituated identifiers...it's all fucking babble, and if we're loving it we're monstrous...maybe.

At times even monsters must have their fun. Life seems, among other things, a perpetual pursuit of pleasure...by and large people feel Life is something to get through properly so they can have a good afterlife. Life seams an undesirable temporary stitch to these self-perceiving, perhaps self-deluded, possibly infinite beings who believe that they, in and of themselves, are at the very least in conscious relations with God almighty.

Or, if one's an atheist, replace God almighty with "human mind" or some form of secular humanism.

I prefer It when referring to It. One doesn't have conscious relations with It. It is conscious relations, however, among other things, some of which are beyond our imagination…

The problem with APES

I hear what you're saying re: the economy. The way things are going finding a teaching job might be tough. Although English departments may fare better due to their budgets being much lower than the nuclear rocket departments. Literature is cheap, relatively speaking [a thousand dollar bailout could save the world!].

My theory is this: Obama knows damned well that the whole thing is fucked. He also knows damned well he can't say it and retain power until it's obvious to everyone. He also knows he has to be able to position himself outside the blame once everyone knows how thoroughly fucked the American Political-Economic System [APES] is [and he has to do this while appearing to work very hard to save it and being thwarted and frustrated by his eco-political-economic enemies who run the mainstream media (eg: GE, et al) ]. He's doing this by giving the political economic elite a lot of rope by which they're hanging themselves. He's keeping the military commissions act intact for the day when the new reality strikes home to a critical mass of the population and he has to put his enemies in a box. Extraordinary times calling for extraordinary measures. If he's successful beyond this wildest of wild dreams, by 2016 there will be no more Republican Party, Wall Street will be history, the Federal Reserve will be history, the big three automakers will be history, the m.i.c. will be broken beyond repair, the empire will be completely humpty dumptied, and his successor will be tasked with the gradual, peaceful dissolution of the federal level of government and begin the formation of something modeled on the EU. Large political-economomic entities will disappear because there's no longer a place for them, no longer enough stuff to sustain them, and the UN will be re-invigorated in an attempt to fill the power vacuum. Paradoxically, as the nation-state folds local eco-political-economies will form and a global framework of interaction among these communities will emerge. Nation states exist in the muddied unworkable phantasy between local and global. Nations are undesirable, parasitic middle men filling the dangerous voids of inaesthetic scales. Somehow, full scale nuclear war will be avoided, but I think a smaller scale exchange will occur resulting in people waking up all the more to the bullshit that is technology/growth. Anything that links progress to increased production/consumption will fail.

And, of course, that was all a bunch of bullshit. I don’t know anything. I only have clues which are dealt with by my imagination imagining what it sees…

The most profound problem the APES has, is that it seems to reward bad thought/behavior and punish adequate thought/decent behavior.

Nothing to do but dharma bum.

Going Rambo

I think when I finish Germ, which I hope is soon, I'm going to go on a radical physical regimen to totally reclaim my body. And if I can try to stop needing all my meds and drop health insurance for the extra money so I have it for absolutely necessary stuff like my animals’ health care, I will. I love them. I'd be lost without them.

It's beginning to be now or never. Can I will myself into adaptation or perish? We'll know the answer to that by 2012. I'll be a free man or a dead one.

It doesn't actually matter...what seems to matter most is a life worth the expense of living, which means a mind that's alive and bearing its own fruit. And that requires an indeterminate yet substantial amount of energy and matter…

Stupid consequences

When I repeatedly watched those towers come down something inside shifted. I could no longer hang out with my old friends and drink beer and watch football or go to a bar and jam with them or anything. The stuff that came out of their mouths about things seemed unbearably stupid. That stupidity was/is having actual consequences. They became little Eichmanns in my eyes. How awful, to discover the people you love are little Eichmanns.

So rather than kill them, I withdrew. I killed them mentally. The writing had a mission and within a month I was off my meds and back to work at the newspaper trying to kill Stupidity.

And I haven't been able to tolerate wrong thinking ever since.

There are all kinds of right ways of thinking and even more gray areas. But there are also wrong ways of thinking, ways of thinking that denigrate one's experience of living and pollute the experiences of others.

People who think wrongly can never be all they can be. They grow frustrated because of it and drown their sorrows in commodified fetishes, saying stupid things, and growing fat.

I see myself in the mirror and call him “you.” I’m fucked up. Call it a consequence of being stupid. You raised me that way.

When confronted with mud, wrestle in it

Back in my Navy daze I was privileged to attend a couple private affairs beyond the military...the most memorable being a pig roast in Monck's Corner, S.C. Rodney D---- and Timmy P----, shipmates and buddies of mine, the two who jammed bluegrass together at 200 feet, were hired to play and I went along. It was in this guy's back yard in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a swamp in October. The weather was perfect. I swear to god every person who came to this thing came with an instrument in hand, including homemade ones. I was [and still am] a fat stupid yankee, but I could sing and I loved the music and learned words quickly and the more stoned I got the better I got at making them up. I was fed lots of ribs and once I couldn't get up to get my re-fills this old farmer would laugh and hand me another one. I remember when it came time to piss and puke I was assisted to the bushes. I haven't remembered that in a long time, but that's why deep down I could never hate the South. The vast majority of rednecks [for my positive meaning of this term, see Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting With Jesus] were no different from you or me at rest. It's when riled, like a beehive, that they'll sting ya. And yes, sometimes they—we—have to be riled in order to act. But there is an ideal way of instigating action, and bluegrass and partying together is, in my view, the very first step in many positive behaviors. I've digressed. Obviously. Just thrilled about the choice of music [at the wedding]. Ole!

Now the only thing that worries me about this whole wedding is what I'll be wearing. I'm a real baby about wearing anything uncomfortable. I'll look nice if I must but will not wear a stiff buttoned collar with my Adam's apple garroted by some obscene necktie, symbolic of something far more heinous than a noose. In my dreams I would wear a light, loose fitting ensemble like Jesus. Perfect for "toasting," as the pope might say.

I know how you feel about -------, that it seems done. But trust me. It's not done with you. You're tired. You're begging it to stop squirming so you can tie off the knot...deep down we all want to be useful and productive, that's why the suggestion we're otherwise rankles us so [by "us" I mean artists in general]. But no, the fact is we strangle our productions, not to death but "out of consciousness" [our consciousness]. Once the work is limp in our hands we pass it on to its audience, which may or may not revive it. Of course, once others revive it you may wish to re-intervene and alter the evolved alterations emergent from its having passed through the other side. And every book is different, but if allowed to adequately develop, most seem to follow this basic or general framework. After putting together maybe a dozen or so booklength manuscripts over the years, this is what I've observed was common to them all...the way they ultimately achieve their final thought-feeling. And this seems to echo everything I've heard from other weirdo bookmakers.

I always say when confronted with mud, wrestle in it.

A tweaking of what ails…from LSD to SSE

Since I’ve been sick with the flu and unable to think coherently for the last few days, and having obligated myself [to myself, none other] regarding this discipline of updating this blog every week, I’m taking a middle route this time around, simply sharing some of the more notable items I’ve discovered while browsing these so-called internets these last couple weeks.

Hope they tweak you like they tweak me…

*****

Skinny Dipping in Reality: A coot’s account of the great hippie LSD enlightenment search party, by Joe Bageant

No words can describe an LSD trip, but let me say that at the end of this one, I sat down and cried. For happiness. My deepest hope and suspicion, the one to which I dared not cling, had been confirmed. Life could indeed be significant, piercing and meaningful…Five years later I was still taking it at least once a week, and to this day I consider LSD the promethean spark of whatever awakening I have managed to accomplish in the life…Nevertheless, once you've seen the face of eternity, you are left with the question of what to do about it. How to respond. "How will I live my life, in light of what I have seen?" I'm still wrestling with that question -- but then that's what I had wanted, wasn't it? That Great Question which would lead to the Great Answer? LSD doesn't give answers, just questions. But used with directed and sincere effort -- to the degree that is even possible -- it can make you ask the Great Questions, the only important ones. Such as "What are you going to do to eliminate human suffering? What are you going to do, Joe Bageant, now that you have seen the faces in the Great Wheel that turns both ways simultaneously? What will be your direct action?" If you really give a shit about the world, LSD will "serious your ass up real fast," as we used to say…But the good news, as I see it, is that we are inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is supposed to be more or less negotiable through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with whether or not we actualize truth…Enter Buddhism.

2009 Will Be A Year of Panic by Bruce Sterling

Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.

When Technology Fails: How to Survive the Long Emergency by Brian Godspeed

From the time when I was a kid in the 1960s and the Earth's population was 3 billion, it took only 40 more years for the planet to double again to reach a population of roughly 6 billion in the year 2000. It has been scientifically estimated that the global footprint of mankind exceeded the Earth's biocapacity in the mid-1980s, and that since that time we have been operating in an "overshoot" mode, meaning that we are consuming the planet's resources faster than they are regenerating.

American Gorbachev, by The Editors, N + 1 Magazine

Don't you see? Gorbachev tried to end the war—and did, only things got out of hand—and we want a President with the courage to abandon the false ideological struggle between capitalism and everything else. Let the members of our old bloc go their own way—let them be Bolivarians if they want. We won't intervene. We also believe in glasnost: at home, we need a new intellectual openness to wriggle free of the intolerant "old thinking." Abroad, we need to stop staring into people's eyes to see their souls, and start reminding them of American sanity and civility. And we want electoral reform while we're at it—proportional representation, instant run-off voting, public financing of campaigns, all that stuff—because the way the nomenklatura currently acquire their posts has them flattering ideologues and servicing lobbyists. And we want perestroika, because without some economic restructuring we're sunk. You can't hold down wages while increasing consumer spending forever. You can't run an economy on petroleum, debt, and accounting tricks!

We want our new President to be an American Gorbachev—to preserve the country by changing it—if only it's not too late for him to avoid Gorbachev's fate.

Beyond A Theory of Everything, by Sir Martin Rees

In terms of scale, the most complex entities we know of — ourselves  — are midway between atoms and stars. It would take about as many human bodies to make up a star as there are atoms in each of us. Living things are very large compared to atoms: They must be big enough to have layer upon layer of intricate structure. But they cannot be too large, otherwise they would be crushed by gravity.

We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan, by Matthew Landis

The singular position of the survivor: he who is left behind to carry the other as a wholly departed and singular other, a wholly departed and singular world. The survivor not only dwells within the breach, but carries the weight of the breach, “the tear/ compacted of silence.” In that moment, this tear, this glottal stop (the cleaving, in both senses, of the glottal folds) the survivor carries on with the other, with the other’s world, a conducting path gives testimony in its absence and writing “breaks into song”, the specter of a singular, departed voice etched onto the tableau through the pen, its medium.

Mishmash and Rehash , by Mark Amerika

Given the instability of the entire global economy, one cannot help but wonder where we will find our Moshe the Mashup Artist to part the (deep in the) red seas so that we can get back into the black. The self-proclaimed anarchist Bob Black (as his name just so happens to be) has always been a proponent of "ludic activism" where "the theory of comedic revolution is much more than a blueprint for crass struggle: like a red light in a window, it illuminates humanity's inevitable destiny, the declasse society."

Satellite Crash Poses New Political Risk, Reuters

Klinkrad said the fact one collision had occurred increased the likelihood of more collisions, particularly as even more space debris had been created…In the very long term, that raises the risk of something called Kessler's Syndrome, he said, in which one collision and the ensuing space debris cause another crash and more debris, expanding almost exponentially.

A few brief, perhaps ludicrous questions: What if this so-called Kessler’s Syndrome occurred, knocking down all the satellites? Would it mean war? And if so, how would it be waged? On horseback? Without technology, what would happen?

A Hormone to Remember, by Joe Kloc

Given only a small dose of oxytocin, individuals in a recent study found that their memory significantly improved. Not for historical dates, strings of digits, or bars of music, but for something much more significant: each other.

"We consider faces the most basic class of social stimulus," says Ulrike Rimmele, who led the study at the University of Zurich. Oxytocin's ability to exclusively enhance the recollection of faces points to an important distinction between different types of memory. Social memory — which we use to remember people — is distinct from other types of memory required to store dates, numbers, and objects.

The Credit Crunch According to Soros, by Chrystia Freeland

This is as close to mainstream intellectual acceptance as Soros has come in his two decades of writing and more than five decades since he gave up on academia. It feels like a breakthrough. When I asked him if he would still describe himself as a failed philosopher, he said no: “I think that I am actually succeeding as a philosopher.” For him, that is “obviously” the most important human accomplishment.

“I think it has to do with the human condition,” he said. “The fact that we are mortal and we would like to be immortal. The closest thing you can come to that is by creating something that lives beyond you. Wealth could be one of those things, but evidence shows that it doesn’t survive too many generations. However, if you can have an artistic or philosophical or scientific creation that withstands the test of time, then you have come as close to it as possible.”

If a delusional tree falls in the imaginary woods, but no sane person is really there to bear witness to it, does its delusion matter beyond what it imagined before it fell? If one displays hubris in a world that makes pride a virtue, and no humble person is present to perceive any difference, does hubris have any actual effect? In other words, does it actually make any difference who or what Soros thinks he is? As my dad used to say, “we’ll see.” Will it be tragedy or history? He’s already old and rich, no Lear [as yet, does he have daughters?], and the future lurking on the horizon might make history a moot point. But we’ll see…

East Europe is about to blow, by Mike Whitney

The "liquidationists" would like to see governments cut off the flow of funds to ailing financial institutions and let them fail by themselves. It's Darwinian madness, like waiting out a heart attack on the kitchen floor instead of rushing to the hospital for emergency care. The global economy is decelerating at the fastest pace on record. 40 percent of global wealth has been wiped out. The banking system is insolvent, unemployment is soaring, tax revenues are falling, the markets are in shock, housing is crashing, deficits are soaring, and consumer confidence is at its lowest point in history. This is no time to cling to half-baked ideology. The global economy is undergoing a massive system-wide contraction which could spin out of control and plunge us into another world war. Political leaders need to grasp the urgency of the moment and keep the vehicle from careening into the ditch.

Why everyone is an artist: Denis Dutton says evolutionary psychology explains the ubiquity of art across cultures and eons, A review by Carlin Romano

'What an artist dies with me!" whined the nasty Roman emperor Nero as he prepared to commit suicide. Posterity has generally mocked the thought, judging the occasional singer-actor more of an artless thug.

Advice to Obama, by Brian Czech

We would advise President-Elect Obama to become the first president to tell it like it is about the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. Taking office in the midst of climate change, Peak Oil, and financial meltdown, he can easily override the decades of that destructive rhetoric, “There is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting the environment!” He can resonate with the public’s dormant common sense that, in fact, there happens to be a fundamental conflict between economic growth and: 1) environmental protection, 2) economic sustainability, 3) national security, and, 4) international stability

Steady State Economics Basics, Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

Economic growth is simply an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services. Economic growth has provided many benefits over time, but now it is causing more problems - dire problems - than it solves. Slowly but surely, economic growth has become a primary threat to the environment, national security, international stability, and future generations. Yet it remains the highest priority in the domestic policy arena of the United States and most other nations. Citizens, especially students, are continually told that there is no limit to growth, in defiance of ecological principles and basic physics. To refute the misleading rhetoric that there is no conflict between economic growth and environmental protection - as well as economic sustainability - CASSE provides information on the downsides of growth with an emphasis on ecological concepts.

Inventing new ways of being, or not…

“Why don’t you do something more useful and productive?”

He’d worked on Skylab back in the day, was old enough to be my father, was related, and felt he had a right to condescend, regardless of the fact he was in my home, eating my food, drinking my coffee, etc. He’s a professor of mathematics and was criticizing my compulsion for writing. To do him justice would require a novel, which may happen, but for now let’s just say…

Back in the mid-1960s when he was pursuing his doctorate at Harvard, he was visiting our house for a cookout. It was late summer, early autumn, I’m not sure. There was a chill in the air, I do remember that. Everyone was in sweaters and sweatshirts. As we chatted, my relative, our hero, picked up a jart and wandered over to the side of our above ground aluminum sided swimming pool that was only three feet deep. No one paid much attention as our hero began anointing the pool with the jart, flicking its tip toward the water surface the way the pope might his wand toward some mass of people he’s blessing. It was my father, hip to my relative’s oddities, who looked up to see where he was and spotted him by the pool. Before my father could shout his name, our hero flicked the jart into the pool at a precise trajectory, breaking the surface of the water and responding to the sudden drag according to his calculations [which he proudly announced to our shock and awe a few moments later], trajecting downward and through the lining at the bottom of the pool. Good God. The water was 62 degrees. I know that because Dad repeated it repeatedly for years. We have pictures of the picnic and my dad in his plaid swim trunks going into the pool to administer an emergency patch so the pool wouldn’t flood out onto the picnic, while our hero looked sheepishly on wearing a windbreaker and black turtleneck, feebly attempting to explain the value of what he’d just accomplished to my furious Pop and mystified relatives.

There are other stories, but this jackass professor relative of mine has been something of a laughingstock in the family my whole life, since he’s old enough, as I said, to be my father. And I would also like to say he is fictional. I have no such relative. But if I did this would be true. He would also have Asperger Syndrome, be beautiful, making us a bunch of cruel-farted arses.

I imagine people like him or her wanting to know why people like me don’t do something more useful and productive. Meanwhile I imagine how much less damage they might have done had they been less useful and productive to the system they still automatically cling to, having successfully re-populated their rungs via breeding.

But the fact is, or seems to be, despite my digressions to the contrary, it doesn’t really matter, or didn’t really matter, no, still doesn’t, regardless of what’s actually going on around them. Their lives seam, untouched as yet by anything outside their minds. Their anxiety is interior, located in the threats they’re perceiving to their perceptions of comfortable, convenient ways of living that justify their non-negotiable thoughts their bedrock feelings justify, or at least still try to validate with varying degrees of success, tragedy and/or whatnot.

I don’t know. As I said, I’m just imagining these people, trying to find a way to love them if a failure at trying to come to some under-standing or over-standing or with-standing with or of them refuses to take shape in terms I know, or perhaps, in forms I don’t, yet still in shapes I can deal or play with, using or manipulating, maybe even profiting from…I don’t know and have serious doubts about my general ignorance. I’m simply trying to relate myself to the things I’m imagining. All I know in this regard is what I think I feel about what seems to be missing. Context is actually trans-text to a lesser degree. Context is whatever’s missing from the trans-text in the present tense, which is to say my tense…my angle and aspect. I am the eye of the storm, being everything It seems not. So what I don’t know now seems related to what I know elsewhere then. Or not, perhaps.

Thus mystified, I perused this interesting piece—On Bolano–in the latest issue of N + 1 magazine that asks why we should read Bolano at all “if these empty Chinese boxes constitute the only goods…?” By “empty Chinese boxes” the author is, in my opinion, referring to the authors/poets absented from Bolano’s texts whose characters go on mythical quests for…the writer’s physicality seams the missing elemental essence of their lives…which they’re perceiving, for better and worse, as their minds, distinct from the matter and energy comprising their cognition or awareness.

And again, I hear that question, the one the writer of that article has presumably asked herself outside the article in thought-feelings relative to it: “Why don’t you do something more useful and productive than read and comment on Roberto Bolano?” What use is it reading him? What do I gain from his skewerings of the jart trajectors, the abundantly literate do-nothings, eviscerating them, exposing their profound emptiness, shattering the delusional productions of their lives?

The writer/reader senses her reading/writing, seaming somehow that proverbial thing Itself. I read, lying [writing] somewhere in the seam between a world in which literature is everything, and another world in which it doesn’t have any meaning at all. She writes that in Bolano’s literary world, the characters “can’t conceive any redemption…except through the production of masterpieces. Masterpieces, however, are always unlikely, and redemption impossible” [in the literary and non-literary worlds alike]. So says the author of this interesting N + 1 ditty, in my opinion.

Thinking about these things, my mind wandered to Marquez, and I pulled 100 Years of Solitude down from the bookshelf. Upon the inside flap, I had written:

“Memory is how one imagines their histories…space-time is a byproduct of human cognition…Solitude is to Life what Death is to at-one-ment. Life is individuation, a movement out of Eden, away from magical wilder-ness toward disenchanted civilization. In this moment and each moment after that the increasing equilibrium of entropy overtakes the disequilibrium of chaos that maintains a being’s autonomy. The feedback loops [sacred hoops] break down. Solitude is the sensual, organic aspect of this search for a return to one’s imagined or hoped-for at-one-ment with ex-is-tence…the re-membering of hoops and re-establishment of feedback-ignited sacred loops. The recycling of names corresponds to the recycling of characters as part of the life cycle. The being is not the individual, but the family, the race’s bloodline, and by extension the species’ genome…the trajectory of seminal traces…all jizz-like sparks coming to an apocalyptic and natural end, apocalyptic in the sense these sparks are cognitive.”

It seems I was quite enthusiastic about Marquez [and still am].

So let’s try a re-cap: Some folks expect literature to be useful and productive in ways it can’t be, and the ways it can be useful aren’t very productive or useful [to them] and vice versa…at least from where these folks seem to be sitting. Therefore literature exists on the seam between literary and non-literary worlds in which it is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless, being between existence and non-existence. Literature is apocalyptic in the sense of the cognitive sparks it gives off, its brief revelations of something beyond the friction, beyond that which we’re rubbing up against.

Now how the hell does that invent a new way of being?

By emptying the struggle to escape our dark confines of its promethean-messianic aspect, exposing the taboo—the blasphemy—of such behavior via silence…a void echoing the heresies of our heroes.

The whole of literature seams a vestige of what can’t be spoken of…“a game that at a certain point,” writes Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature, “is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society.”

Calvino said the way we learn to accept our not so noble motives and learn to live through the ensuing crises is a way we can start inventing “new ways of being.” Bolano’s staring into the abyss of human knowledge seems a sublime negative capability in that it can handle the emptiness without taking unwise or wasteful action against it. In fact, he bathes in it. And rather than inviting the reader to join him, he’s actually joining the reader, taking a bath in the tub of literature. By staining various exteriors, shape is given to what seems to be lingering inside and outside [figure/ground] this imagined baby. Literature in Bolano’s hands seams a way of taking a cosmic bath. He seems to be turning the old Army saying “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” when you’re in combat into “Do no-thing, even if it’s wrong” as a means of ending that conflict. The friction we now make seems better.

A literature or fiction that does less, does more, perhaps.

So next time I’m asked why I don’t do anything more useful and productive, I might say because doing no-thing seams better…and that seam might seem to reveal a new way of being this.

Now why don’t you go calculate that apocalypse in your laboratory for awhile?

The Woe of Endless Desire: A Message to President Barack Obama

“But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall.”

Samuel Beckett, Molloy


The greatest dangers we human beings now face seem to lie in our desire for accurate classifications. We think we need to know what we refer to as facts because we sense ourselves coping with the assumed necessities of moving mountains, juggling conflicting co-incidents, trying to harmonize with the inexorability of recurring evolutions on all scales—all in the effort to make sense of everything so we can control our fate and choose our destiny, knowing all the while that all we can ever do is dream up inadequate ideologies, selfish solutions and vainglorious hopes of practically extending ourselves for as long as humanly possible.

That’s dominion. God damns It. It damns God. God dams It. It dams god. god das it. it das god.

Gradually disappearing, It gives then takes away. Appearing again, it is.

Before the beginning there is something. It is moving relative to no-thing, presumably. So the beginning isn’t really a beginning. There is no-thing already there, an emptied imagination imagining Its emptiness as other. As in the others Cain is forced to wander among. No-thing is all ways some thing. Nothing.

Then when this nothing-something’s membrane rubs up against the membrane of something-nothing else before the non-existent beginning, that friction seaming free of its initial cause tries to exactly analogize this incidental emergency of co-incidences it’s referring to as a bolt of lightning, or clap of thunder, or some such observed phenomena in nature that’s seeming to resonate with our categorizing perceptions. But it’s all in our mind.

God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.

That seems It outside the mind, the other we seam, strangely attracted, to.

Terrorized by this molestive, apparently metaphysical cyclical force, chemical entities change into biological entities that grow evermore complex entities that evolve sentient biological entities [among other things], some of which become egos—who perceive themselves terrified vagabonds and slaves as well as rightful masters of the universe—who seek refuge from death and suffering and failure by bonding together, growing stronger in numbers and exacting concessions from those they perceive as others coincidental to the initial conditions before their beginning so they can imagine themselves playing in ever-expanding fields.

We are the champions of the world. That’s zionism.

That virus becomes this germ, this germ becomes that cell, that cell becomes this organ, this organ becomes that body, from that body this mind emerges, from this mind emerges that terror which leads to our huddling together by the fire in the cave, which gets too crowded and so we spill out to conquer our terror, cities form from our desires, which bound from messiah seeking socializations to feudal arrangements to anarchic democracies seemingly all at once or at least as part of the same thing, coincidentally recurring in the imagined elsewheres we’re perceiving ourselves rubbing up against, others rubbing up against others which leads to war and chaos and interdestruction and new messiah clans and neo-feudal tribes and emergent democratic anarchies…all emerging from the desire to protect our precious bodily fluids.

It seems that inside the mind, that being this seaming eye It perceives my odd emergency from.

And then there is that clap of thunder again…that re-minder. God is killed and Nature dies. Nations disappear and, terrified, vagabonds and slaves, debtors and lenders all seek refuge from death and suffering and defeat by bonding together.

God is born. Nature lives. God is killed. Nature dies. God is born. Nature lives. God is killed; etc.

Maybe.

That seams life to death. Then death seams that to life.

What is That? Yes and No, perhaps. Then probably not.

Yet I desire to perceive my feelings simply. Whatever I survey has Its limits and all I can do is surround and inform them. They can’t be saved, but who or what can?

It’s in the stable covered in crusty, flaking shit. You can hear It sigh when you piss on it, and feel yourself in love for the first and perhaps last time considering the poison you’re playing with, that onanistic desire for dereliction rising up from the steaming puddle at your feet, annihilating everything but your imagined legacy, that shit we cultivate and trade among ourselves when you’re gone, obeying the necessities of your nausea, of your distressed bowels squirting your feces all over the map that the lovers of politics lick up like I scream, fire in our noisy faces burning It in a bottomless hell where Obama may or may not forgive those who were just following orders, preferring to audaciously chase his dreams instead…forgetting to re-instate habeas corpus.

Perhaps, then maybe not. Probably. Or no. Then yes. Sleepwalking all the way until our precious bodily fluids become something else, and or etc.,

I guess. You guess. We all guess for this time…