Ŧ̂Ŧ̌Tekeli-Li! Ŧ̂Ŧ̌
about the pedal coop
March 3rd, 2009
the pedal co-op is a worker run organization specializing in hauling and recyclable waste disposable operating out of west philadelphia. on two wheels, some shaky welds, and a mighty prayer we haul recycling and compost for several philadelphia residents and businesses. we're small which means we're flexible. we can organize a pickup any day of the week and we ride in any weather. we can carry up to 300 gallons of glass, aluminum, plastic (1 and 2), paper, cardboard, and compostable food waste on a single trailer (we have four). we do this all by bicycle, spending no money on gasoline and sending nothing to the landfill. nearly 80% of the very reasonable money we charge for a pick up (.21 cents per gallon for recycling, .75 cents per gallon for compost) goes to the rider. the leftover goes towards overhead: purchasing parts to keep our deteriorating bicycles in a reasonable state of shambling usability and towards the minimal expenses of our composting operation. this means that nearly all of our clients' money stays in the local economy. moreover, it means the waste we responsibly dispose of also benefits the local economy - recycling pays, trash costs.
said composting operation looks as primitive as the "technology" of compost really is; all of the necessary work (sorting, turning, shredding, and screening) is done by hand. this is a matter of necessity and a matter of pragmatics. our compost is an experimental operation to prove the feasability and practicality of recycling food waste. we are dedicated to the principle that all waste is a resource disguised and imagine a future "zero-waste" philadelphia. however, we do not have the resources to press for, nor are we interested in waiting around for a top-down revision of the waste disposal infrastructure. a large scale composting facility can certainly outclass us in terms of efficiency. but such a facility requires an outlay of capital that doesn't currently exist. in contrast, we are turning food waste into usable soil right now and our costs are measured in terms of time and manual effort - resources in abundance and, in this economy, at risk of going to waste.
currently, the "executives" of the pedal co-op do not get paid. only riders get paid, and all the riders are owners. but the majority of the managerial work, organizing runs, repairing bikes managing the compost and a million other mundane tasks needed to keep our population of clients happy and expanding are done pro bono. these chores are done out a crazy passion for testing the strength of our bodies against the impossible experiment of pushing a major amerian city towards a climate of "zero waste." we love the burn of hauling 300 lbs up a 3% grade. we love the misery of slogging through the slush of a Philadelphia February. we don't pretend that we're making a huge difference, nor do we believe we're on the epitome of a fool's errand - "saving the world." we're just trying to do our best everyday, to not break our word to our dedicated clients, to make it over Greys Ferry Bridge a little faster, a little less out of breath today, and to divert the tiniest fraction of one man's "waste" to a meaningful existence outside of the landfill. our satisfaction arises out of proving to ourselves that this crazy idea works.
the pedal co-op has done all of this and continued to expand at an approximate rate of 10% monthly for over a year and half.
evenings without angels
The hidden remix.
Man on a mountain top alone in the glittering vacancy cries out for CONTACT! CONTACT!.
This bare Earth is that same Earth that we have heard of, fashioned "out of Chaos and Old Night." And in the vacant air of this bare Night our melancholy, less-furious selves wait and wait and wait for Eros to skewer us bloody upon razor barbs.
Inner meet me: a column of dust held up with a hundred layers of paint. Pierce me! Fashion a halo out of more than mere words. Words are words, their emptiness echoes round us everywhere. Tyrannical angels, their authority demands constant attention and their control is absolute(but bounded).
Are these not words also? What else do we have? The hypervortex, the cut-up, the creative-destruction of Dionysian terrorism swallowed up in gentle accusations of intellectual elitism from a punk girl in cut-up jeans and leather jacket smoking cigarettes purchased in Virginia at 17 dollars a carton.
Another evening on my knees praying to the exquisite emptiness of a quarter moon hung low in graveyard sky. In winter's earliest ending, I am circling myself in repetitions of sharp syllables and furious sighs, stillborn ideas about the thing, still not the thing itself.
The eye evolved six separate times. I bet you a silver dollar and my granddaddy's golden pocket watch, that the octopus sees the same world as you an me. Light is a physical thing and it clothes us. The sun is coming from the outside. But I'm not saying which outside.
do you believe in rapture, babe?
You ain't gotta look far. The signs are everywhere. Gravity is catching up to us. In New York State, airplanes drop from the skies and the numbers run backwards. Nuclear submarines and satellites careen towards each striving towards mutual dissolution. Distinguished senators from the honorable State of Stubborn Denial double down on a dead man's hand, sure of the imminent Rapture. And then there are things too horrible to mention. Isn't there such a thing as a sure thing anymore?
Descending into the belly of this machine, I've got them dead flag blues again. Imagining the skyline on fire, I ain't got no piti for mere mortals blinded by hindsight. Your momma and all the other monsters may got eyes in the back of their head, but haven't they forgot how to look forward?
Mythology matters. But let us not get confused. Origins have less to do with the nostalgia of place, than they do with the very real problem of teleology(or is it teleonomy?). In a world 6000 years old, the purpose of life becomes an exercise in moral purity. In a (neo-)Darwinian world, the purpose of life has been understood as the replication, though I'm told there is grandeur in this view of life. However, as easy as it is to mock Intelligent Design, this is no a trivial debate, especially not in times like these. Mythology matters because it is through mythology - and all explanations for the way things are or the way things work are mythologies - that individuals define themselves as individuals or as something else (whether or not they factually are individuals.) And the individual is on trial here. The much lauded Free Market of supposedly rational, self-interested individuals has collapsed into a steaming pile of panicked goo. From that perspective, of the one, the self, the lonely soul solely alone amidst the ravening crowd how can you not cry out for the Rapture? How can you not cry out for a higher Purpose to rescue you from yourself?
But if the Rapture isn't coming, if we really are here for the long haul, (and it is a long fucking haul), then purpose must be found in Nature. Our mythology must make room for it. Because if not then some competing mythology will. We must make peace with Purpose.
Enter the ecological perspective, the purpose of life as metabolism. We are not just our genes. We are not just ourselves. We are part of a larger project. And there is most certainly grandeur in this view of life, and an ethic implied as well. But there ain't no Rapture waiting in the wings, no deus ex machina. Rather Deus est Machina! (A sufficiently bad-ass phrase made better when amended parenthetically with (And so are you!))
Wyrd to your mythology.
chasing the winter mind
Never underestimate a Pennsylvania mountain, especially at the bottom of the ridge on a warm day in January. Three-hundred million years from now, the Tibetan plateau might look a lot like these old Alleghenies. Imagine that then, mythical Tibet as long flat ridges rounded at the ends by the ages long meditation of streams no more than two feet wide. Streams and roads turned deer trails where ancient Buddhas stand guard still smiling underneath the smooth mask of three hundred millions years of rain and wind.
Go to that place in the winter. But remember even here in Pennsylvania, six inches of snow doubles itself with each thousand foot elevation change. Drink from streams crusted in ice, but still flowing, always flowing, even when the glaciers were here there was flow. Post hole (hiking when you've left the snow shoes in the car) through 2 foot of snow crusted by a sparkling layer of ice. Turn a corner and find yourself faced with the serene stillness of recent carnage: a deer dismembered, intestines on ice, the red, red heart stark against the snow. There in the silence of bare trees, a pureness of death unimaginable in any other season. You will see no sign of human foot prints, only the many criss crossing tracks of predators too smart to be seen. You yourself feel barely human there, only knowing yourself from the loudness of your progress. And that progress is slow and it is hard. And the plateaus wear you down as much as the climbs. You have to pause to catch your breath, and even as you do, you lose your warmth. You squint against the sun. And for as long as your own heat will last you are submerged in the overwhelming silence of the woods in winter. A bare wind blows.
There is a mantra in that bare wind, blowing in that same bare place, for the bare armed listener who listens on the crunching ascent.
"And, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
But you cannot long remain the Snow Man, not long and retain yourself. Life, warmth, is in movement. But the stillness of winter is not in misery and in death. Or rather misery is not in death. And while death is of that bare place, that bare place is not dead. Death is of all seasons, and misery in none. Misery belongs to the listener alone, the listener's who listens in the snow, but listening only for the sounds of spring. Listen to the nothing itself!
But keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.
doc benway, meet doc graham
"It was a jungle. Survival was the law of the land... I am the only accomplished of my era that I've ever saw. I am the only that encompassed, that lasted, that has endured. I have endeavored in every participation known to the human brain where art, subterfuge and gall are involved."
roll on, columbia, roll on
Hey, America, go on, take out your digital camera and snap a picture of that cresting dawn. It rises just the same on this high history day. But even as the seasons roll on, (Roll on, Columbia, roll on) we take a deep breath and jump. Sure feels like a discontinuous leap in this step function towards... what? Heat-death? or Omega Point? It cannot matter at all. The long eventual there is not here where we pin our hopes (Roll on, Columbia, roll on.).
Remember the Grand Coulee Dam! Highest among the works of man. Them geezerly Giza pyramids would fit twice over in those walls. And never you mind them spawning salmons, cause this land is our land, this land was made for you and me.
(And now also, remember the missing verse:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.)
Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
supreme fiction, he says
I was 22 the first time I saw the Milky Way. It was October on top of a hill in the wilds of this improbable Commonwealth. In Reality, that distant relation to Imagination, glaciers once peaked and rounded that granite knob. How old will I be the last time I'll be able to see a glacier?
Nevermind this, my winter mind straining to be more wholly winter. The snow man, the glass man, the philospher's man, is as the Walrus, my dear Eggman. He need not seek meaning, and indeed he flees the intellect outright.
And in this post-prologue space, what we (quietly) speak of now is practicality and pragmatism. Not as a school of philosophy, but as a way of holding a wrench with two feet on the ground and grease on your hands. Calm those cravings for greener grass and clover fields, the nothing that is not there. And if you don't want to eat this hay for the rest of your life? If your belly is not full, starve honestly, then decide.
north american scum
So you say you want a revolution, yeah? Wait, wait, what was I saying - how does that go again?
Welcome to the 90's, again and again! Side 1, Track 1, loop it over, oh, whatever, nevermind. Hey baby, aren't I sexy, so apathet-chic? We been rocking out to that song for at least 15 years, and baby, don't you know, disillusionment never gets old. But them wrinkles under your eyes don't lie; you do.
Are we really out of ideas here?
Yes, sir? No, sir, fresh out, sir.
Turns out beauty isn't the same thing as authenticity. Turns out the marketeers have already preempted your revolution. Turns out even the clever rats drowned on the Titanic.
But the weirdest part about all this is the helpless self-awareness of the fatally titled hipsters. Hence the last refuge of the defeated, what they confusedly call irony. There's this one kid who "ironically" tattooed the state of Montana to his face. He's never even been to Montana. "Look, isn't that ironic?" No, that's just fucking stupid. That's a preemptive war on one's self. You done defeated yourself before you have a chance to be defeated. I suppose at least then you imagine you made the choice.
One thing is certain in that old refrain: here we are now. But how did we get here? How long have we been here? How do we get out?
Have you passed through this night? I know you have. I have been paying attention, but not saying much.
Yes, Montana, you are not in Control. Control is no longer even in Control (and never was, that was just clever accounting). And as you spill out bleary-eyed to face the dawn, imagine for a moment that this morning might be different, that authenticity is not a product outside yourself, and that, oh nobly born, the clear light of morning is there all the time, but you must grasp it.
unequivocal, irrevocable equanimity
and as for my inflammatory writ?
well I wrote it and i was not inflamed one bit!
the bottom of a tea cup - her favorite - lies to the sky, while
dripping dry its drying drip.
and on its rough surface, inscribed in block style,
smiles a reminder to annoyances finally quit.
UPPEKHA, it said, simply and sharply
and with muffled murmurs tickling your ears
and your eyes a window, a glass darkly,
your tongue unwrapped the simplest of questions
"what's that?"
"oh," she said, pausing in an old habit of steady contemplation,
"Metta embraces all beings,"
"Karuna embraces all those who suffer,"
"Mudita embraces the prosperous,"
"And Upekkha, poor poorly translated Upekkha,
embraces the good, bad, loved and unloved, pleasant and unpleasant."
goodbye, goodbye, (joyfully) goodbye
At 9:45 every morning, I try to take a geological view of things - imagine myself with the motives and mindset of glaciers. I hold my breath for as long as I can and try to flesh out the life and death and love of my each of my ancestors - and I just don't mean them silly Europeans (and according Mark Shriver, at least one African). I try to contextualize myself in the universal march towards to maximum entropy. By 9:46 I'm thinking about a second cup of coffee and obsessively fingering the refresh button to see just how far the Dow-Jones done slid in the last two minutes.
Oh, you know this is how it goes, every moment a fleeting chance at a statistical miracle. Matter matters. And matter is a medium that gets marked. I'm here because of everything that came before, but that only emphasizes, rather than precludes, the fraught potential, the hope and danger, the vitalness, of NOW. And the kindness of cruelty is irretrievably plopped in a blue box. Somethings you can never take back. And that's what makes them vital. Entropy means irreversibility. All actions are consequential by virtue of being unrepeatable and intertwingled. And I bow in gratitude to your confusion and your sadness. And with joy I recommend a dose of the future, taken over time.
something wikied this way comes
Thus, systems have only finite destinies because they cannot help incorporating new information as a result of their historical adventures, and this is because matter is a medium that gets marked. That is, with the universal expansion continuing apace, new information tends to precipitate into the world along with matter and mass. Yet, motivated by the Second Law, the material world allows no particular configuration to continue indefinitely.
Ssshh, do you hear that? Not the rumble of an earthquake or the ratatat of machine gun, not the dull click of an atomic trigger. An empty kind of sound, like the whoosh of an elevator in free fall. Does it make you tremble? At least with an atomic bomb, you know what you're getting.
Is this dawning of the golden age? Or the complete dissolution of euclidean space? Wait, wait, which is way is down again?
Let's review: punk is dead; idealism is dead; irony is dead; communism is dead; capitalism just croaked. Even if it were clear just exactly who is to blame, how do you revolt when the entire idea (image) of revolution is preempted by having been co-opted by the very markets that just done stuck a shotgun in their own mouths? The milieu of our times is not oppression, or liberalism, or cynicism (though we have plenty of that) but confusion.
This is your Wizard of Oz moment in 1984: Big Brother is a cardboard cutout behind the curtain. So much for regulation, so much for markets, so much for monomania and masters of the universe.
But hark, whats that! Something wikied this way comes. Not markets, but networks. This is not a treatise or a defense or a long winded exposition of that which is inevitable fact. Open source social networks are the strongest contenders for dealing with massive flows of information.
Forgive me for not citing references or expounding points, but I'm writing this in the fifteen minutes before I go home from work, but just as the idea struck. As the Dow Jones hurtles downward it becomes clear that this situation was precipitated by 1. massive intertwingled entities lacking 2. transparency and subsequently 3. trust. Open Source networks are formulated on 3. trust and 2. transparency to produce 1. massively intertwingled entities by the the most efficient means possible. And they do so in a way utilizing selection as defined by Stanley Salthe: "selection cannot foretell the future. It works every moment only upon choices present at that moment."
Make sense? If not, well, then I guess you'll have to wait until the book comes out. But you'll be sooner living in it that it's written.
like a rolling stone, like a rolling wave
hey there, job, you're staring at the sun again. left scratching at boils and patiently bearing the well-reasoned condolences of intellectualized pity. and as you prostrate yourself in supplication, you're still left wondering at the lesson of a god you never betrayed. and have you "had some of glimpse this? namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad." never questioning the reason of the ineffable - you're still staring at the sun.
hey there, ahab, you're staring at the sun again. "sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose." and we all know the story of your relentless pursuit, but dare we call you hero? washed by waves and lashed by wind, ahab, asleep, lantern in hand, dripping sleet and snow - you're still staring at the sun.
hey there, sisyphus, you're staring at the sun again. and yes, "great ideas come into this world as gently as doves," but your hands are mats of blisters and dust settles in the cracks of your skin and the rock gets no higher. and yet, imaging yourself happy, you smile and with head high, shoulders low, you put your back into this grim labor - still staring at the sun.
hey there, tekeli-li, what is it about the whiteness of white that makes you shout? that fills you with terror and ecstasy? you were a lover once, staring at the sun. it hasn't been so long. and next to that great unspeakable river, in a tangle of fingers and hair, you felt yourself connected to everything that came before. don't you know, you always stand between your shadow and the sun? go on and get back to the work.
go and tell the postman: the smell of vegetables on a cold day is good. it is so very good.
a long lay
Seven hundred and seventy-seventh, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. so says Bildad
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust does corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust does corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
The Ghost in the DNA
I'll tell you what happened there.
You were a microbe in a chemical soup, methane and nitrogen, salt in water. You met a permeable membrane and fell in love. She said to you "Great ideas come into this world as gently as doves." She invited you in. It was a war love, a love of place and time, of the battle against entropy.
You were a chemical factory, a molecular wrecking ball, an executioner to hydrogen bonds.
You were a receptor for light and information, a gradient sniffer, a proto-primitive-Newton taking the derivative of darkness.
You were a tree in the path of a volcano. You were at the bottom of a bog taking notes on the eons long lecture of pressure and heat. You were an infinite process, bounded.
All this happened while you lay on a mat of dead brown grass amidst straighter seeded stalks next to that great unspeakable river Schuylkill. Whispering a prairie prayer into her good ear, you asked "What makes a clearing clear?"
A fire burns at the end of brick smoke stack, like a giant cigar, or a middle finger with orange nail polish. You tried to explain, how it was that you saw God in DNA. How from the infinite production of variety, and the unceasing march of extinction, came the eternal. How souls never die, but they aren't portable neither. You said, You don't reincarnate as you the gypsy moth. The first law: everything persists; you can neither destroy nor create. The second law: nothing remains; you can't ever take anything back.
In that long, big-eyed silence of unaffected affection she squashed your schema and models, the half-formulated ravings of sloppy similes. As if to say, by not saying anything at all, here is your Theory of Every-Living-Thing: a crown of artemisia annua, a reef of plastic bottles, a stone for turning apples into wine, the staccato stridulation of music older than your words. And by that organic process of music, she hides her eyes behind her braids and returns your Empire to the soil from which it Never Ended.
And a shad jumps in the Schuylkill. This river will outlast your petroleum and phosphates. And in the fading, pink, purple skyline, a point of pressure reminds you your bones are but sharp clumps of calcium and carbon to carry your compassion upon.
what happens to happen
"What is this apprehension?"
he said.
no, not right, not quite.
Not apprehension, but attention to tension.
"Attestation,"
she said.
For aught I know,
not ought, nor should,
but a buzzing,
like cicadas in stereo.
potential energy straining against the levee, desperate for heavy kinetics.
a chair to slouch in,
restlessly resettling posture.
Out to pasture,
in a cybernetic meadow of mildewed madness.
I ask again,
wherefore hides the potential to do W?
in me?
This crier is but a carrier
asymptomatic of asymptosy.
Still the limit approaches 0,
following semantic processes.
And so it happens to happen.
Let's meet this afternoon
to get the ball rolling.
Ok,
I said.
and so. and so.
Straight hauling, mother-trucker!
And so - altogether now - gather from the hoary depths of your primeval gut an outright HOWL of good fortune and gratitude, of the hard path trod happily, of the bottom of the hill and starting upward, again and again. Greet that inertia with a grin and the shuddering push of that first rotation. Chew the dust in the air, lower the brim of your cap and keep the circle moving.
Next to you a diesel engines belches black soot, snorts and rumbles. Meet a lion like a lion and ROAR! right back at the fucker. Let 'em know your lungs work as well as your legs. More weight, a steeper grade! Push! Fuel me oats and millet, oil me with beer.
And so, And yet, you sit in your cube and dream on these inventions for elsewhere and elsetime. Oh pasty fluorescence, how you mangle the majesty of grime and sweat and toil. Instead of chasing skirts and frontiers, you chase signatures and the stamping of forms. You shuffle this bit here and that bit there, all these bits and bites, dots and loops and crossed t's - rusted skeletons and rotting wood. And even the potentials of metadata fantasies bore you with their lack of virtue. But we are warriors yet, while in prison barely even meeting the standards of civilized dress. We work at these foolish tasks in the meantime. Soon enough we shall create an industry of burrowing in the trash and an epic big enough for Titans.
meanwhile
Doktor Grumbles on his floating soap box spreads his arm as if to embrace the masses of the long eyed, hollow cheeked, sullen Furry Curs spread on the plane below.
"Seed we once: That Giverment givers the beast what givers last! Seed youself and I and I now: Giver no tall, for Nothing givers the all beast. Seed we once: Giverers giver weel what giver from the hurth. But the breed of that hurth crecks our Teeth. Strand we at the Great Gnashing! So and so and so, seed we now, taketh this Nothing and maketh mooch sweet breed."
fleschely janglers
AND THEN. An army of clipboard wielding skeletal primates arise from the concrete. Moaning, pulling themselves out of stormdrains, from under busted benches. Bits of broken fingernails and discarded styrofoam for breakfast. Shuffling creakingly their dusty bones whine, shutter, give off dry clouds of dust. They cough. The meek squeaks they mutter: "Help fight Global Warming with me?" "Stand up to Exxon-Mobil?" "Save the Earth?" They shakingly hold out their clipboards, like refugees begging for water. Crumbled paper bearing indecipherable runes, and a row after row of empty lines waiting for signatures. Signatures which disappear as they're written. Their pens never scratch more than half a word before running out of ink. One grabs the sleeve of one of the passing hoards Antilpols, the long-limbed loping interlopers of official existence, and the grasping finger and thumb break off, carried away as the Antipols speeds towards it's next official mundane act of telemurder. Eyeless sockets behind sunglasses, the Antipols glides along, blind and oblivious to the pleas of the clipboard primates. Further, along in the great metropolis, the Antilpols only stop their hurried prancing to mass around the feeding pools. These pools of incredibly dense liquid appear as giant televisions, hundreds upon hundreds of images appear, collide, mix, and dissipate. The Antilpols jostle for a position. They feed by removing their sunglasses, lowering their long knotted necks to just above the surface of the pool. A ghost of the images escapes from the liquid membrance and is sucked into the black empty holes were eyes should be. The Antilpols are clearly disgusted by one another and yet fear more than anything else the touch of the unknown. And so those on the outside of the mass press into the interior of the crowd.
AND THEN. Above this silent scene flutter the Fleschely Janglers.
"A pithyble thing, a shushed shuffle! Glittery gasp I, oh, these gaping gubblers! What a myracle of myriads. Oh, oh, OH! What sooth? What wonder? Say you, dearlings, why stutter they so? Why the tithe trying, why the fight failing?"
"Guilt and blindness, a symbiosis. Indifferent to insignificance. Ineffective to indifference. What can they do but dance?"
"But, but, but, why not rhize above such whirling! Can not these flagellaters forsake the divining idols of impending catastrophe? Or these others, that rush from command to command and go catatonic in withdraw if Control is removed even for the briefest of transcendent moments, can nothing be done for them?"
"Nothing can be done for them. They must do it themselves. Nothing can be done to them. They do not know how to feel."
clear aggregat
Doktor Grumbles - Head Abbott of Thee Holy Ego Machine
"My Deare Cisterns and Brothels, we strand at the thresher of a Great Gnashing. Everythere wheres down run, disdifferniates, sputters and crecks. Youself and I and I see shadows creeping, hear howlers dry wind prickle the underskin. Goostly freendes in God, pray thee, somme draining maw suckles at thee marrow of ire Fader's Worldbone! Youself and I and I are telling: We snuffer the vile'n'tense entropie of Old Phorms! 'OnOff!' sayest ire Fader. Youself and I and I moost bracketh asonder Old Phorms and beginne again. Derth to monies! Derth to Structure'n'Stasis! Derth to Giverment! Derth to Familie!"
Doktor Grumbles, born of an atom bomb at the hazy phase transition between Ages. Only later did the bomb explode over the peaceful tropic atoll of the Furry Curs - and to this day the offspring of the few unfortunate creatures to have survived that incident reek of singed hair and phosphorous. His origin, like all others, is wrapped in layers of rebounding echoes which the mathematics of our Age cannot pierce.
<--once a furry cur.
(The panels of a graphic novel for this origin myth - an atomic bomb hanging from a great scaffold in the desert test site. A countdown. The bomb drops. And hits the ground with a thud, crumbling. The plutonium hollow-pit rolls away from mangled steel of the bomb apparatus. Close-up of the plutonium sphere cracking like an egg. The tiny Doctor Grumbles emerges in Abbot's robes, hands folded. As he walks, in his wake the desert sands turn into the emerald green trinitite)
random walks
at every iteration, another step, another position. push the limit as the step size approaches infinity (note: infinity is not a number, but a semantic practice). you have a continuum, a fiction for the sake of analysis. a point is not a particle. a point has no mass, only position. a point is a semantic practice, existing through context. the point is no point. the key is no key. and by that the floor-assent prison is transformed. through the keyhole a topological magic maps every point of "there" to "no there"
a manner of inaction
random walks: a conceptual approach. statistico-mechanics sends you either one step forward or one step back at every iteration. At the ith iteration, where do you wind up in this Game of Life?
The largest density winds up crowded in the middle. Certain tremendous individuals are pushed to the extremes at either end. Where is this train going?
Bio-survival circuit flaring. That's when I reach for my Revolver. There must be something more to this fluorescent prison.
on the nonlinears dynamics of institutional education
A second attempt at communicating with larvals.
begin{center}
textbf{Question 1}
end{center}
%Have you ever been placed on probation, dismissed or suspended from any college or university for reasons pertaining to academic integrity? If yes, please include any facts that you believe bear on the significance of this circumstance.
begin{center}
A central axiom of my private ethos can be articulated thus: there is no such thing as a thing. This is not a non-sequitor, but a fundamental starting point towards formulating a personal statement of my educational history. No object exists in isolation, no single effect has any single cause. Deconstructive models, while useful, are far from complete. An organism must be consider in the context of an ecosystem. A special case of this general theory pertains specifically to this application process; any response to a question contains not only the impetus from that question, but also a ghost of the process by which that question developed - in this case by committee. Moreover, any response by an organism - in this special case, myself - is modeled off of every prior response. There is nothing radical in this preface, but if mathematics has taught me anything, it has ingrained in me the importance of clearly stating one's assumptions before proceeding.
I have never been placed on probation, dismissed or suspended from any college or university for any reason.
textbf{Question 2}
end{center}
%Describe your educational history and background, making sure to address whether your records and transcripts accurately reflect your academic ability. Explain fully if you have ever withdrawn, taken a leave of absence, or been dropped by any school, college, or university.
I have never withdrawn, taken a leave of absence or been dropped by any school, college, or university. Administratively speaking, my record is clean. However, I do not believe that my transcript accurately reflects my academic ability. I will leave aside speculations on the general quality of transcripts as predictors for continued success/failure for a more pragmatic assessment. My grades, while not poor by any stretch, were not as good as they could have been. This is not for lack of ability. Instead, at fault is an occasional lack of effort inspired by an occasional lack of interest. But, and I must be emphatic here, a lack of integrity plays no part. Returning to the central assumption delineated above, environmental factors, namely the culture of institutional education, must be considered. Though I stop short of assigning blame, or even identifying transgression, on the part of either the organism or the environment. And in the final analysis, my experiences - whether they received a grade or not - have rendered me a stronger academic and intellectual creature than the fossil record of a transcript might show.
I admit here to a chronic fault; I came to college equipped with a kind of antagonistic hubris in regards to the institution of education. I was never much concerned with grades as an outward sign of achievement, unless of course the grade served to affirm the quality of a work that I took pride in completing.
More pernicious examples of this behavior can be found in my transcript. One class, a class on writing proof, I only attended five times - once to get the syllabus and four times to hand in the periodic homework which made up the grade. I understood the material well enough, that I considered sitting through class redundant. I had a solid A going into the final exam, but I missed the final because in my hurried self-assurance I had gotten the date wrong. The graduate student instructor refused to let me make it up, having only known me through my flagrant non-presence. In a single stroke an A became a C. In a more regretful episode, I dropped a class not because it was difficult, but because it appeared at first too easy. The instructor, who I later realized to be a quite brilliant mathematician, would give extra credit points to students who properly filled in matrices on the blackboard. This practice became the dominant feature of the class. At the time, this seemed to me a capricious means of filling time. Rather than simply attending class or even participating in the extra credit, I stopped attending in some futile sense of protest. I harbored an inflated estimation of my own ability and refused to play what I viewed as a game. What should have been an easy A became a rather difficult exercise in catching up. Looking back, a fair number of the Bs and Cs on my transcript could have been something better if I had been willing to swallow my pride and my personal judgment and simply did what was required.
Admitting this particular fault must seem a peculiar tactic. After this confession, why should you admit me over a hypothetical candidate with an equivalent record, but who exhibited a genuine striving? Because as educators, you must have an inherent belief that human beings can change. Of all the lessons of my undergraduate years, there is one I consider revolutionary, but one I consider priceless. That lesson is this: in any interaction, whether between myself and another individual or myself and a larger system the only factor over which I have any sort of control is myself - my behavior, my attitude, and my reactions. Environmental conditions may set the boundaries of choice, but personal responsibility still reigns. This is what I learned in college, this above all else.
lemma
In mathematics, a seemingly disconnected statement used as a stepping stone to prove another statement is referred to as a lemma. I would like to introduce a lemma - clearly familiar to the admissions committee - on the concept of academic integrity. For the sake of argument, let us view the primary function of a university as the transmission of knowledge {k}. If this is the case, then why do universities(transmitters) emphasize and attempt to enforce a culture of academic integrity, or alternatively why do certain students(receivers) attempt to cheat? It is clear that by cheating a student only reduces the quality of the transmission of knowledge, {Q(k)} for him/herself, but not the university wide Q(k), for which he or she is ostensibly paying, and for which the university receives the same payment whether the transmission is authentic or not. Clearly if Q(k) were the only factor, no student would cheat, nor would a university emphasize academic integrity. In the minds of certain students a grade, a mark on a transcript, has more value than Q(k), which explains why certain students may cheat. Returning to the first assumption, a university is not an object in isolation. It exists in an ecosystem of other universities and among those universities there is a gradient. A 3.5 GPA from the University of Pennsylvania can be said to have more value than a 3.5 GPA from Penn State. Indeed, this is the justification for vast tuition differences. These tuition differences can be attributed to a perception of knowledge gained {P(k)} among potential students and potential employers of students about the k offered by. I assert that it is P(k), rather than the actual Q(k) that is a university's intellectual property, it's brand. By cheating a student is in effect stealing from the university by devaluing it's brand, i.e. he/she lowers university-wide P(k) while raising his/her own P(k). And so universities engage in practices to protect their P(k). Sometimes these practices can be extreme. For example, Penn State has recently built a computer lab specifically as an exam facility, monitored by security cameras and in-room proctors with randomly assigned seating and randomized order of exam questions. Interestingly, this analysis shows that Q(k) and P(k) are not correlated. On the student side it was shown that by cheating, a student can raise his/her own P(k) while actually lowering Q(k). University wide P(k) is lowered, but Q(k) is unaffected. And here is the point I wanted to reach by introducing this lemma. By engaging in practices emphasizing P(k) a university can negatively affect it's Q(k). This isn't always the case, but I have seen and experienced moments where a concern over cheating negatively impinged on the actual teaching of material.
autopoietic poetics
aghast!
a gasp,
a haunt,
a yawn,
a tremor, set a trembling.
a query surfacting over the bubble of time:
does anyone, can anyone, take one to know one? what about zero?
we are led to the following. the masses of men follow lives of quiet desperation. twitter, twitter, little boidie. fallow, shallow, rotting lives out of skulls. white, bleached white, teeth set a-gnashing, an-quashing, crecking and bracking.
have you heard of T.H.E.M.?
have you seen T.H.E.M.?
stalking in gutters, prowling lacunae,
fearsome avatars of entropic inevitability.
a tidal gradient crashing on ur noggin. wherefore hides the potential to do W?
hint-
exergize your mind!
tracer fire, ignight the knite scion fire!
be a hobo and come with me,
from hoboken into the sea.
repeat.
in case of emergency, break ego and follow instructions.
1.0 perform unheimlich maneuver.
1.6180339887498948482... ken the zen.
2.0 ?
3.0 catch and release. (please note: this does not mean catch and then release. the arrow of time does not operate on submicroscopic scales. you must catch and release at the same time.)
O
H
M
PocoGnosis
mingus unmodernizes
Usual:
his expression disclosed nothing of his carwarriors.
All:
and thy kinsmen have been slain.
Other:
honors and other wealth,
and those on his standard.
The device of a lion's tail
and not good places,
and these only when the sea is.
Should:
alone be employed.
A prudent king.
Will the train.
Coming south.
No one should ever know the happiness that is in store for me, o lord!'.
bonjour
"Observation -
especially of things other than repressive,
solitary thought, -
the most marked and the greatest quiet.
Invasion of its former principle.
But to the night
the appalling truth of what she had.
The little cakes delicious.
The next thing to clouds.
The clouds of heavy smoke which rose,
and he is sure to blow up sooner or later.
Take another from
which to the east of our track
we found more."
-modified from a spam poet invading to try to sell me penis enlargement pills. I am convinced that the commercial appeal to sexual selection (proving evermore that fitness can be faked) is merely a smoke screen to sell us an insurrectionary rise in consciousness.
....
White mulberry (which is not a berry) and service berry(which doesn't spring from your Blackberry),
russian olive (which is not an olive) and peppermint(which grows like a weed, but ain't),
concrete rubble and dusty cheeto's packaging.
Invasion!
Peak oil - looming specter. What we need now is a legion of Ex-Spectators
"looking out for cars and mortality
trying to find some sort of geometry
avoiding mistakes
keep an eye on every step i take
everything is building
and it appears
that you're all architects and engineers
that's how it looks that's how it looks from here
i'm an ex-spectator can't you see
i'm an ex-spectator never let me, never let my, never let my vision get in the way of
here's some questions that the writer sent
can an observer be a participant?
have i seen too much?
does it count if it doesn't touch?
if the view is all i can ascertain pure understanding is out of range
if i make that call
why can't i make that change?
i'm an ex-spectator can't you see?
i'm an ex-spectator never let my never let my vision get in the way of me"
but the observer can't avoid being a participant. we do not observe evolution from some lofty viewpoint of the immortal soul. this consciousness is part and particle, product and producer, of evolutionary happenstance.
flash, flash, rummbbbble, CRASH! the last broadcast a muzzle flash of dissipative structure's overpass.
the future regrets to inform you that your survival requires more than simply changing what kind of lightbulb you use.
the old double-bind. fucked if you do, fucked if you don't; a law as impermeable as entropy. and that is the miracle of this whole absurd carnival. it's downright improbable, laughable, that we should be here in the first place.
but we are tenacious breeders, slashing and burning every niche.
Invasive!
So?
So nothing. Life continues. Evolution continues. The rules haven't changed. Information marches collectively from peak experience to peak experience, a logarithmic pilgrimage of grand temples of all that is possible.
May you live, love, and die in interesting times, no matter your genus.
a cure for the post-apocalyptic-nostalgia blues
Tekeli-Li! Tekeli-Li! scream a pallidly legion of swooping seabirds; peering bloodthirsty over a prairie of soldier's bones. Vultures abound: in the sky, on the earth, but mostly underground. The great jealous war of the carrion eaters. Blood for bird shit and feeding rights to ancient carcases. And in the flicker interval between womb bardo and tomb world, the Fisher King stands mute and mournful as Death (the greasy conman) stacks ever more corpses to the fire. And if you believe in it, the smoke is thick enough to choke.
And from some slimy hypothetical future,
your silly survival centered Ego,
in saltpepper snicker quoths:
"For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed."
This is what you're up against: The Humungus! The Humungus is Control. Propagating itself ever forward, even beyond the veil of the impending catastrophic bifurcation. And even if you look around and see it is all green spring and see there isn't even a whisp of smoke on the horizon, it is only because the Humungus has told his hounds,
"Be still my dog of war. I understand your pain. We've all lost someone we love. But we do it my way! We do it my way. Fear is our ally."
Or so you imagine; such is the story you hear in the shriek of the gulls.
But little do you know you're actually in another movie.
Standing on top of a mountain before Gozer the Destroyer. And Gozer is asking you to choose. I don't think 80's pop-culture has a more resonant lesson on the awesome power of nothing.
There are consequences to the thought that just "pops in there." Which is all to show that you're fevered worries about the future, your delusions of Control, of the Humungus hold all the threat of a giant marshmallow.
Go ride your bike somewhere green. Stop reading the news and watching the movies and go fly a kite. Scrum up a cliff face. Stand under a waterfall. Hop barefoot from boulder to boulder. Entertain the possibility that there is something older, larger, and more powerful than Gozer: and that's the other Humungus. Return to Nothing. Realize the power of perspective and relativity and that from a point of view that doesn't include the fear of your own death there is nothing sinister in the house of cards and concrete. Nothing ever dies that doesn't get recycled. Fossil fuels teach us that much.
And the next time someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!
5/9/2008
907 Sherers Hill Rd
Riegelsville, PA 18077
United States of America
Dear Dalton Hance:
Thank you for submitting your application and supporting materials to the College of General Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I regret to inform you that, after careful consideration, we are not able to offer you admission to the Post-Baccalaureate Undergraduate Studies Program.
We applaud your interest in furthering your education and wish you the best in your academic pursuits.
Sincerely,
Nora Lewis
Director, Enrollment Management
the phenomenon of a man
I got this genetic heritage stretching all the way back to a little creature called LUCA. I don't wonder if this little LUCA knew what it was up to. LUCA didn't think (a perhaps disputed concept in itself) much past the immediacy of tearing up hydrogen bonds - busy metabolizing it's next little fix. In this way LUCA had a lot in common with my more recent ancestors, those silly time-binding apes that imagined a tomorrow that doesn't strictly exist. And for just one more of those ancestors, the most immediate one, tomorrow really is never gonna come. One more death, in a long history of deaths stretching back to the LUCA's original shuffling off.
de Chardin reminds gently: "But to have realized and accepted once and for all that each new being has and must have a cosmic embryogenesis in no way invalidates the reality of its historic birth."
On April 25th, 2008, just before dawn, there was a collision of particles yielding the release of an elusive and barely detectable energy. I'm told he probably didn't see it coming, probably didn't know what hit him. Died instantly. He was an organ donor. His corneas look out from someone else's eyes now.
And this all feels so abstract. This death is not felt as a loss, but as an abstraction of a loss. I must clumsily carve at it with symbols and memories. Signposts pointing to a place where something is missing. But I can't see through the instantaneousness of all this nowness to the thenness of the past - the past which isn't gone, the past which isn't even past. Time and sight. Those two curiously human means of filtering all this bittersweet madness.
"Wait. Wait. Time, a landing field. And Death needs time like a junkie needs junk."
"And what does Death need time for?"
"The answer is so simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook's sake, you stupid, vulgar, greedy, ugly American deathsucker."
And I am growing in time,
sprouting roots and crowns,
flowers and thorns.
And in the morning after the night,
I fall in love with the light.
Moonbeam memories of whiskey whiskers and cigars. And sun poisoning and alcohol poisoning are all so slight compared to the poisons that could've been. Medicine is a matter of dosage. This grief is a grief for a twice one-sided love. A mutual misunderstatement of what a white collared man toasted to Jesus - to "God as Relational DNA."
"What an awesome service for your Dad!" Sure was. Ritual works. Transubstantiate this loss.
Disingenuous and genuine southern Christians shaking my hand, saying to me "Nice to meet you. Your father was a wonderful man." Or not saying anything at all. Or worse saying "I love you. And God loves you too." I'm sorry, but who the fuck are you? And the only blood left of that blood that is also my blood is suddenly the angry one. After all this time, we switch roles again. He says to me. "Doesn't it piss you off that none of these people know who we are?"
No. It doesn't. It gladdens me to know that this creature foundered for so long, foundered and then found a piece of himself as a piece, a part and particle of a much larger Self. I guess I had given up on imagining some non-existent validation coming from him in some fashion. I'm done being pissed off, I won't start that again.
Seen him twice in seven years. Over the phone he recommends to me The Varieties of Religious Experience. He's been sober for five years. Done found God in that time (how typical, how wonderful.) And all the folks from AA and bible study laugh when the pastors quotes. "He had some great questions. We never agreed on anything." We agreed on a few things.
Time, a landing field. And the old pilot always imagined a future attractor. We'd meet down the road as men. Compare notes. Saying this is what I learned by doing the hard way. This is what no one else ever figured out.
And Death needs time for what it kills to grow in. That tomorrow comes not. We die as strangers strangely connected. Sharing in this relational DNA (the logos of interaction), sharing in this God (a universal substance of absolutely infinite attributes). But I can't cry no more. Not when it all seems so abstract. My phone will vibrate in my pocket four less times a year. I have now this name and little else. But I do love you, old man. Thanks for the genes, and the grin (which I never knew we shared) and all the grimness that could've been, but wasn't. I'll keep asking them questions; scrabbling, clawing towards that Omega point and grokking fullness in all the stillness. You did well in your way. And so, oh nobly born, I bid you a safe journey through the Bardo.
silly questions...in latex format
begin{center}
textbf{Question 1}
end{center}
%Have you ever been placed on probation, dismissed or suspended from any college or university for reasons pertaining to academic integrity? If yes, please include any facts that you believe bear on the significance of this circumstance.
I have never been placed on probation, dismissed
or suspended from any college or university or even high
school for reasons pertaining to academic integrity.
I have never been placed on probation, dismissed or
suspended from any establishment for any reason.
I haven't even been asked to leave a restuarant,
bar, or other public forum for uncivil behavior.
I find this an unusual question to address with
a page length essay for all applicants.
newpage
begin{center}
textbf{Question 2}
end{center}
%Describe your educational history and background, making sure to address whether your records and transcripts accurately reflect your academic ability. Explain fully if you have ever withdrawn, taken a leave of absence, or been dropped by any school, college, or university.
I doubt that records or transcripts can ever accurately reflect
anyone's academic ability. "The map is not the territory," declared
Alfred Korzybski based on the science of 1933 and by extension, in 2008,
the test is not the lesson. This is not to make an excuse for a mediocre
performance on the dog show of GPA (I think my grades are just fine), but more
to say that I learned far more than any report card or one page essay can
tell. Education is a process in which you learn how to learn, but never
quite perfect.
High School seems a far off dream, a half-remembered dance of dullness
and banality where I was initially lulled to a social and intellectual slumber.
I did not fail, I did not excel. Angular grecian glyphs--a smattering
of A's, a dose of B's, and even the occasional semi-circular brand
of the firmly undazzling--do nothing to summarize the unarticulated angst
that came to define my relationship to the educational authorities.
Succumbing to an institutionalized mediocrity, I blithely rehearsed the
same old motions. Only occasionally did I find the voice for the repressed:
in an essay, in graduation a speech, or in an insurrectionary hand thrust
skyward and a baiting question waiting in the wings.
When it came time for college, I applied to just one school, the only
one I could afford(and that just barely): Penn State.
I did so with the unenthusiastic cynicism of a man
who doesn't recognize that he does in fact have a choice. But somewhere
late on the path a delicate cyclone of an excellent mentor, personal
explorations of my interior spaces and the grace of either
blind coincidence or providence shook me to a wakefulness. I became
lustful for experience, for education, for the poetry of mathematics,
theory and rhetoric, for the creation myths of evolutionary psychology,
and for diverse formulations of something called the no"osphere.
Seek fossils of this evolution in my transcript if you will. I believe
my final semesters at Penn State were my best by all objective
standards. But I will not attempt to convince you with a laundry
list of classes taken, clubs joined, grades received,
etc, etc, ad nauseum. What I have learned and what I hope to learn
do not translate properly into a proportion of a 4.0. Frankly, the
mock supremacy of a grade point average and the desperation
for attainment of that status symbol may be the reason
why you have to ask the first question of this application. I do not learn
for the sake of an impressive name in my file. I learn for the passion
of discovering my way in this entangled bank. That is all the background
I require.
newpage
begin{center}
textbf{Question 3}
end{center}
%Write a brief essay describing your academic and personal goals and explain how these will be furthered by study at Penn in general and at CGS in particular. Feel free to discuss a specific academic topic you have enjoyed studying and explain why it is of interest to you.
Convinced as I am of flights of deterritorialization and
of a non-elementalistic construction of the world, my academic
and personal goals cannot be isolated from the silken web of my desires,
my hopes, and my fears. What do I want? To live well. A simple
statement that may be, but it necessitates the embrace of
a radical cosmology, which in turn requires one to acquire as many
tools as possible to navigate the sublime madness of creation.
That cosmology is based on [an interpretation of the second law
of thermodynamics]--which I confess I don't fully understand--that takes
a view of Life and lifeforms as complex self-organizing dissipative
structures. This half-grasped creation myth demands description in
terms of non-linear dynamics, thermodynamics, and evolutionary biology.
I will not attempt to summarize it here, but rather to invoke it as
an idea which impacts me. My fascination in this theory is not as a
cold objective abstraction, but as a vibrant participatory engagement.
Any cosmological narrative implies a teleology--a prescription for
purpose. If the point of life is to dissipate as much energy as
possible, then what is my role? How does a human being live well as an
organism-as-a-whole-in-its-environment? To fairly consider this question
draws upon the diverse and specialized languages of mathematics, ecology,
evolutionary psychology, philosophy, etc.
I don't know what I want to "be" and, frankly, I consider the question
absurd. I am already a becoming. That said, an academic doctorate program
is a likely future attractor, but the specter of specialization as yet
gives me pause. As I said, I desire the tools - the languages and models -
to navigate this world. What better place to seek a generalized
toolset than in a institution of General Studies? As such, I could stand
to know more about biological systems. A developed sense of probability and statistics can give me access to useful models of experience.
One only learns math by doing math. One only learns writing by writing.
Grant me entrance to the playground of a classroom and I will show
you my delight.
newpage
begin{center}
textbf{Question 4}
end{center}
%Describe any non-academic experiences that you feel strengthen your application such as employment, travel, community affairs, volunteer work, publications, etc.
Of late, I am a man who considers himself blessed by the meddling
of either Providence or cold blind chance. I won't speculate further on
the source of the convolutions of coincidence which have propelled me
to the here of now. But I will go involutionary on them and affirm,
affirm, affirm. As such, I can think of many several "non-academic
experiences" that have strengthened my spirit and mind, and hence
this application which intends to represent them. Given the forum,
I will limit myself to describing one such happy accident.
The best thing that ever happened to me is nothing, or at least
a very close approximation of nothing. Before coming to the
University of Pennsylvania I had the unlikely opportunity
to manage Penn State's upstart Flotation Restricted Environmental
Stimuli Laboratory under Dr. Mark Shriver and Dr. Rich Doyle.
In short, a flotation tank consists of a darkened,
sound-attentuated enclosed fiberglass tub filled with approximately
ten-inches of a dense Epsom salt solution. An individual floats easily
on the surface of the water with sensory stimuli, visual, audio, and tactile at
minimal levels. In scientific literature, an hour in a flotation tank is
associated with a relaxation response which includes lowered levels of
cortisol and other stress hormones, as well as subjective reports of altered
states of conciousness.
Dr. Shriver and Dr. Doyle became very interested with a certain question: given
the variation in individual accounts of these altered states, what if there
might be a genetic correlate governing access to these states? I was brought on
and given a great deal of leeway and autonomy in design of the studies,
subject recruitment, and management of the laboratory space. Lessons abounded
in the day-to-day management of a full-time human subjects trial. I became
responsible for coordination with the Institutional Review Board,
and recruited forty-one individuals for
six one-hour sessions a piece. More personally satisfying was my contact
with former researchers in the field and the gathering and reading of a
bibliography of prior research.
But the greatest lessons learned stemmed from making myself an experimental
subject. I used to joke that the real research was about the effects of the
flotation tank on the researchers. My space runs short and so I will not go
into great detail on what I learned from nothing --- which is a kind of cop
out for words which cannot aptly describe the place where no words go.
Instead I will leave it cryptically and incomplete as an entreaty for you,
anonymous reader, to go and seek for yourself what lies in nothingness.
end{document}
o tekelili ! ygg
smiles jealousy in yr mind-manifested words as dancer / rhetor,
smiles mischief at the poor and happy 'admissions' soul lucky to receive your words,
and smiles at the words we'll play with soon.
i'll meet you in the sandbox.
the truth is out there (not in here)
Truth finds itself up against the wall again, the guns of multiplicity aimed squarely from N directions in four-dimensional space-time. ("there is no Truth, only truths") Them shiny steel guns of rhetoric and logic, fully-automatic verbal forms cocked and loaded, safety off. Steel is hard and fast, steel doesn't shake. But a shooter does and a gun recoils. The shooter separate from the gun is another one of them convenient fictions. The best of the shooters barely breath. They are hard men, men who build their own guns from the ground up. Propositional triggers, axiomatic barrels, definition-scopes. Take careful aim, inhale, squeeze, exhale.
But Truth breathes easy, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Those guns are operating under a self-enclosed delusion. They are told that one of is firing a blank - a magic trick to rationalize a murder away - when in fact they're all firing blanks at a blank wall. Truth is simultaneously the target and the commander. Truth is the target in the center and the space outside the sphere. And when she screams "Fire!" she does so gleefully - prankster is Truth, elusive and vast.
Blood spurts. Truth makes a show of dying and dying again. Truth rises again. Pause to reload. Fire.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. In ever expanding circles and spirals and strange attractors. No gun, no shooter can kill Truth dead. Poke it full of holes, and it still spills blood. There is ever more to describe. Shooter-guns killed God, gun-shooters killed reason. The shooter has even attempted to turn the gun on himself and still there is no end to the game.
The Truth is out there. The Truth contains all the truths, and the falsehoods, and the meaningless. The Truth contains you and your incompleteness. And Truth wants you to keep firing away.
the will to do, the soul to dare
Up too late investigating rumors about giant peaches and other Divine Invasions, the boy awakened roughly on lumpy unfamiliar terrain - all crusty eyed and staggered by an unexpected grace who flies away through the gates painted by the dawn. The astrolabe in his skull whirls, gyrates and all in a rush spits out coordinates, determinates, and intersections - a destination. He savors days like these, this temporary autonomous time, stolen away from the tyrannical momentum of a steady routine. Politely, he smooths borrowed hay and leaves. Packs a small sack of provisions: berries and sassafras and a pint of clear wine.
A dragon named the R5 winds up due north along crooked line. As long as you ride contrary to the scheduled calendar of herd stampedes, they let you stash your steel steed in between seats on this aluminum beast. Rocked as an infant in a crib, strangers fleeting sharing secret eyes. Picking up where he left off, "he learned about pain and death from an ugly dying dog...
'Who mandated this death for you?' he asked the dog. 'What have you done?'
'I did nothing,' the dog replied.
'But this is a harsh death.'
'Nonetheless,' the dog told him, 'I am blameless.'
'Have you ever killed?'
'Oh yes. My jaws are designed to kill. I was constructed to kill smaller things.'
'Do you kill for food or pleasure?'
'I kill out of joy,' the dog told him. 'It is a game; it is the game I play.'
'I did not know about such games. Why do dogs kill and why do dogs die? Why are there such games?'
'These subtleties mean nothing to me,' the dog told him. 'I kill to kill; I die because I must. It is necessity, the rule that is the final rule. Don't you live and kill and die by that rule? Surely you do. You are a creature, too.'
'I do what I wish.'
'You lie to yourself,' the dog said. "Only God does as he wishes.'
'Then I must be God.'
'If you are God, heal me.'
'But you are under the law.'
'You are not God.'
'God willed the law, dog.'
'You have said it, then, yourself; you have answered your own question. Now let me die.'
Last stop. End of the line. Doyle's old town still haunted by wispy tendrils of former versions of himself. (Some other, Mobius.) He disembarks on the better part of a journey with the satisfying click-click of strapped-in stirrups. The first epic of the season and he's jockeying for asphalt with the fire-belching cattle of unusual size and foreign make. In degrees of progression he makes his way from fearsome Mordor to a more homely shire. Narrative here cannot suffice. Go ride your own bike. But take it up some steep climbs, over gravel and through a covered bridge. Rocket down a hill arms spread eagle in a state of complete muscle fatigue. Hit the green light in Ferndale perfectly at the bottom of a descent, shocking commuters with a sudden dis/appearance.
And at the end when you've already had to walk up three hills, take the long way around for the final stretch. Force yourself up one final climb. Wave to a child on a scooter hemmed in by invisible lines of a driveway and mother's stern warning. Crest to the little church on the hill in Durham, Pa to overlook trees just budding. This is the church with a preschool called Care-a-lot, where as a young prince you once cried yourself to exhaustion over a balloon escaping on wind. This is the church were at 12 years old you were confirmed a Lutheran, all because scared at night, restless, unable to sleep, you prayed for comfort, promised you'd be good, promised you'd go to church, promised anything to make the fear quiet. Prayed hard. It worked. To this day that still fascinates and grips you and you tremble at the awe-full power of a child's wonder. You discovered Mind and called it God. It worked. And you were right. Now, all full of your bodies own morphine and lactic acid, drenched in sweat and shaking muscles, you coast into the cemetery. And at a lone tree on the ridge, perfectly placed, you tumble off your horse and collapse in cool grass. Long out of water, you find the audacity to puff on the remains of a hand-rolled cigarette. And what you see looks something like this.
And then looking left your eyes is caught by small marble bench in front of small marble grave. And the bench speaks:
"The will to do, the soul to dare."
So quoth the dead captain on the hill. Christopher Scott Seifert etched in rock with those winsome wyrds of Sir Walter Scott. Bronze Star. Operation Iraqi Freedom.
What it doesn't say is that he was shot in the back by the US Army in the opening days of a fiasco. What it doesn't say is how this stinking farce doesn't become hard as stone until you stumbled across the bones on your hometown hill. You don't expect this raw and recent history hidden to find you breathless under a tree.
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
-Sir Walter Scott
writhing wormlike in undiluted skies
I meditate thus: on mud and wind and virgin mosquito pits pooled under railroad tracks. On hair tickling noses and caught in teeth, the floss and flutter of a passionate wiggle. And the universe has gone all intertwingly as I eschew the menu for a ripe bite of meat marinated in dirt and sweat. The menu/map is not the meal/territory - feast on river and tall grasses. Lose sight of the forest and the tree and that one leaf...
slowly falling.
And them hills are mighty big this time of year. Climb! Though your lungs may immolate and your heart may burst. Flatland is no land at all, not mine country certainly. I have a country, but not a state. A State - a bit. bit. bit. - a static shell just trying not to decompose for another year.
I am all unruly and lustful for disorder and invasive species. I mourn the dying hemlocks; them that killed Socrates wither and fall to a global mind signified as blight. But I too cherish russian olives, ivy and scraggly stickers, these hardy progenitors of an inherited landfill. The forest is always dying, reborn, a bubble slowly bursting. (We say slowly from the benefit of a frame of reference encapsulated in sharp angled elbows and knees.)
And Bey odes to the Neech.
Nihilists. Fuck me.
Stirner in lines, all high browed and curling smoke.
Crack a Ygg,
crack your neck.
Spines were meant to bend,
and wriggle and writhe.
Elbows and knives, ribs and hips.
Bleeding out on your shoulder blades and her sharp words.
I am the lion, the lamb, the shepherd-died-in-wool. The wolf howling on the hill and the peach budding on branch. Watch me sprout, feed me sun and nitrogen, and I will rot in time.
All this is love too.
a declaration of non-dependence from the children of the united states of america
we the young, the hip, the post-mtv, DARE-fed reagan-babies and younger, declare our dangerous choices ours to make again! we are taking back sticks and sand castles, mud puddles, piles of rusted junk and the possibilities of lost eyes. we bare bruises and skinned knees as badges of courage, testaments to futile but well-fought battles against the bullies we would fight alone. we embrace our sexuality and the hinterlands of possible sin as rightful inheritance - open the games lands, ye inept constables of wildness! we demand the unconditional release of all political prisoners (grades K-12). return to us broken bones and broken hearts! you who would kill divine play for the sake of suffocating earthly safety, we banish you to the cages you would build for us. we hereby relinquish our mothers and pledge our maternal allegiance to packs of wolves. not that we don't have love for you, but we require rougher stuff than your milk to call ourselves properly alive. we will no longer consider ourselves safeguarded by your terror of boogie men and sharp toothed phantoms. we would rather our wardens abandon us to the night and our wits than bind us in swaddling clothing and poison us with chicken soup. your fear is not love. shackle us no longer with your paranoid worries. we shuck the weight of your slow suicide and abandon you to your empty houses. you will find us running wild at midnight, stalking in shadows with bow and arrow to rout the ghosts you have imagined there for us. do not attempt to find us. do not follow. we have become the terrors you would keep out of cribs. now who will save you?
ontological anarchism
"Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images we've been "given" by the organizers of this salon--murder, war, famine, & greed)." Hakim Bey
Most of the serious anarchists I meet are so damn political. Pissed off at an inescapable web of murder-rape-war-capital, the slave State of despair: the Empire (Black Iron Prison). Dreadlocked or head-shaved engaged in the Sisyphean corpse-humping of righteous indignation. Atheistic worshipers of Thanatos. "Meat is Murder!"
Hypothesize a more radical response: Murder is Beauty. But hold! A dangerous koan that. This is no mere Manson-ism. Glorification this is not. I must tread carefully here. Satire misunderstood and suddenly frat boys are off starting Fight Clubs with secret hard-ons for Brad Pitt. I am not saying to commit a murder is to commit an act of art. I am by no means in with the Kill-maker. What I am saying is that Death is a gimmick, a con-man's greasy hook, and it's high time we got hip to it.
Start from the assumption that Chaos is ubiquitous. We will have to start with an intellectual assumption, but the real goal is to grasp Chaos intuitively and absolutely. And to do that we need to discover and reform the system function. (Koryzbski - compare to "metaprogram.")
Anarchism perceives a problem with the State - with the economic-moral-political formal system of order desperately trying to impose itself upon this primordial undifferentiated-ness: the not-Nothing devoid of all values (value is defined here in the mathematical sense; value as descriptor). No matter the form of Anarchism, the goal is eliminate this system of order - violently or non-violently depending on the strain - and to replace it with a different system of order, somehow more in harmony with Chaos. "Anarchy is not chaos." Maybe that system appears as bottom-up communalism, or maybe it is far-right individualism, but it is still an Order. The problem with a system of order, all ordered-systems, is that at the moment of birth it becomes a closed system. We do not believe we misapply thermodynamics when we say that any closed systems tend towards entropy. Logic and government are both imbedded in the flow of energy from the sun. (The Everything Under the Sun Clause.) Which is to say, Chaos infects any system of order. And it is this entropy-diseased Order which gets called Empire, which needs to be continually overthrown.
The problem I see it with angry anarchists is they are embedded in a system of order - the neuro-logics of semantic reactions and ideology. Here is where Korzybski's system-function enters play. The system-function is the set of doctrines (doctrine-functions) which as a whole make up an individual reality-tunnel. I offer a brief description, which strays a bit from my source. Take the phrase "Meat is Murder," which appears as a proposition. Nevermind for a moment that "is" - the is of identity - is a piss-poor and broken operator. We take "is" as an approximating operator here. We can tease out the doctrine-function if we take the constant and insert a variable. We now have the phrase "X is Murder" where X is an element of any single thing you care to imagine. Play with this; insert different values into the variable. "Fur is Murder," "Ice Cream is Murder," "Art is Murder," "Free Speech is Murder," and so forth. The doctrine function is defined by the intercept of the valued propositions which "make sense" and the valued propositions which "don't make sense." What we begin to see is that it matters very little what value is placed within the function as far as the "truth" of the statement. The doctrine function determines "truth" or "falsehood." And the system-function, the meta-program determines the doctrine functions.
Notice that we can only fail to describe the doctrine function directly by propositions (with words). Even more so with the system function. But the system-function is the Order setting unit. (Again, take that "is" lightly.) The system-function does not recognize that it is embedded, enmeshed, immersed, intertwingled in Chaos. And we cannot tell it otherwise. But we can jam it up with strangely valued proposition. Hence, "Murder is Beauty."
Grasp history with both sides of your brain and ask yourself, has murder ever been beautiful? Even once? Could you ever belly laugh to the Zapruder film?
The Empire Never Ended. A true proposition. The Empire Never Founded. Also a true proposition. So what's with all the anger? Oh anarchists. Buck the system and smile. Wave to a cop. Stick it to the man and make love on a picnic blanket in a cemetery under the sun.
Boy, wonder. Over. Out.
the-organism-as-a-whole-in-its-environment
Context populates stardust; abhored-vacuum elicts not creation/destruction. Imagination always responding to something, even as it does not directly apprehend the material of projection. Dial zero, inhabit the void, and propagate from there.
North American urban shell, post-industrial fallout. Ecosystems of decay. Katrina non-localized. A dissipative structure whirling, fingers the earth roughly at random. In its eddies spring up temporary autonomous zones of poetic terrorism. We creature-particles rudely gather broken twigs and discarded plastic bags and build from them chapels of grace. Don't imagine an endpoint to this - that takes a legendary perversity. Or if you do, imagine an endpoint and create, moment to moment, back from there. Denouement as reconstruction.
I've forgotten, abandoned, torn up and burned, my point. Appearing linear, these folds demand a cut and shuffle. Defeat the words to say what you really mean. Get out of the way of yourself, part the seas of assumptions and presupposition. Demand "silence on the objective level" with the cold relentlessness of an uninspected pick-up speeding brazenly through a redlight. Praise momentum, physics of dischord; when she's with you you're unstoppable, when she's not, happily greet the inertia of asphalt with the side of your face. Learn to love road rash and bruises and the implacable air of a city gone savage. Sing high praise to Darwinian self-interest, the cold victorian logic of natural selection. Kropotkin comes later. Make yourself hard, and then relearn softness. Repeat. In layers and strata, like the secret pill of the Hashishin.
Count your breaths. Count your cliches. Make the counting count. Count me out, in, up and dreaming.
Count on spring. And if it comes in like a lion, roar right the fuck back. When you meet a lion, meet a lion like a lion. Meet a lamb like a lamb, and never trust a shepherd.
Address unknown. Send to returner.
Flotation-REST - "good, but very uneventful": The Science of What Happens When Nothing Happens
Posting notes to organize my brain for a talk tomorrow on the flotation-REST Lab.
Things to keep in mind: the role of expectancy is experimental outcomes; how does SCIENCE find an objective observer for a fundamentally subjective experience; the perceived validity of first-person science and DIY science among a more formal scientific culture.
1.Into
2. Chamber-REST and Flotation-REST both date to the early 50s psychology research
Dry-REST is more recent, an attempt to get closer to the tactile aspect of flotation-REST without the mess, basically a fancy water bed. Doesn't really concern us.
3. Chamber-REST more classically called “Sensory Deprivation”
a “cell” environment (monk, or prisoner - depends on whose putting you there)
Effects seem to be more subtle - increased hypnotizability, doesn’t lower cortisol levels as much, less of an altered state of consciousness, or more depending on the author
Literature mentions behavior modification
Still being researched by Arreed Barabasz - Prolific Hypnotherapist at Washington State University
4. Flotation-REST
Brief run down we'll come back to this
5. John C Lilly, MD
U. Penn Med School (1942) Studied Biophysics and Psychoanalysis and taught 1942-1956
Also had stints at NIH and NIMH in this time period
a. Pioneered a technique to record brainwaves from the cortex of unanesthetized animals;
mapped pleasure and pain systems with electrodes ->discovered the “Lilly Wave” to electrically stimulate neurons-> (the monkey story);
b. Built first tank in 1954 to address question of what happens to brain without stimuli (a debate at the time); went through several versions, face masks, etc.
6. A First Person Exploration of the Human biocomputer
Why is Lilly Important besides having built the tank?
Brain as “biocomputer” -> A biological basis for consciousness “mind”
End goal of electrode research: wanted a brain VCR for himself -> avowed self-experimenter, a first-person scientist with a DIY ethic.
More of a Victorian observational style scientist, only of his own subjective states
Programming and Meta-programming in Human Biocomputer. “we may be nothing more than our programs” “programs”= habit structures
7. Donald O. Hebb
brilliant scientist and teacher. Wrote the Organization of Behavior - seminal neuroscience book of 1949 - “a general theory of behavior that attempts to bridge the gap between neurophysiology and psychology” ->
“Neurons the fire together wire together” = Hebbian rule
Addresses and develops a very good biological basis for mind!
8. Sensory Deprivation
Funded by the Office of Strategic Studies used undergraduate volunteers in a cold war study inspired by rumors of “brain washing”: the McGill University “Sensory Deprivation” studies -> More an example of what becomes called Chamber-REST -> Subjects required to lie on beds for extended periods wearing cardboard cuffs, diffused light goggles, white noise and sometimes propaganda -> (funny quote) “For the protection of the individual only propaganda material used concerning such relatively innocuous topics as ghosts, poltergeists, extrasensory perception and the Lamarckian theory of evolution.”
Results: hallucinations, stress, and intolerance for the experimental conditions
Understand that: High profile science in the height of the cold war -> famous research still brought up today in debates about torture.
9.Enter Peter Suedfeld, Prof, Dean Emeritus at UBC, a bit of a Lamarckian himself, who is “generally concerned with how human beings adapt to and cope with novelty, challenge, stress, and danger.”
Studied sensory deprivation, including extreme environments (antartic, ship) and became frustated with the scientific “truthes of” sensory deprivation
Pointed out flaws in experimental condition (but not flaws if you were testing a torture technique): not deprivation, but sensory restriction to a single bandwidth, “monotonous stimulation”/”panic button” and experimenter-induced expectation.
Coins term “R.E.S.T.” to distinguish from “sensory deprivation,”
Writes numerous papers seeking to highlight potentially beneficial reactions to physical isolation
Suedfeld articulated a distinction between distress and what is termed eustress - "stress that is good for you." (1987) REST, both in the chamber and in the flotation tank is not "an environment to which people react passively, stresslessly. It is challenging, in prospect, actuality and recall; but the challenge and the process of meeting it is positive, eustress. REST does demand coping responses. And it is ... a walk-in inkblot; what it is for you depends on what you make of it for yourself."
Lesson to keep in remind: rhetoric of the psychologists hypothesis has a huge effect on outcome when observing another subjects behavior. So can a researcher be an objective observer for a subjective experience without interfering?
10. What does it do?
“it” doesn’t do anything! Definition of nothing
Fine - naloxene and endorphins, but n = 2/ Kjellgren - “burnt out depression” subjective pain map studies
Stress Relief - strong evidence for a physiological “relaxation response” -> numerous studies, incl. several by Fine, et al. show lowered cortisol, ACTH, and adrenal hormones, lowered blood pressure; most recent is a meta-analysis by Dierendonck et al. How does a biological/physiological response tie to an ASC, or to something about the REST environment -> this isn’t clear from the literature.
Hypnotizability - Barabasz mostly, what is interesting here is that individuals are often divided in papers between “high hypnotizable” and “low hypnotizable” - is there a genetic correlate to a cognitive style?
ASCs - Lilly goes Deep. Suedfeld has papers on creativity, therapeutic benefits, Fine has very preliminary articles on EEG Theta state - but few subject numbers and few electrodes -> problem with tank environment to direct biological monitoring (MRI, EEG, etc) - we tried -> Norlander and the EDN -> How do you qualify who has one and who doesn’t?
Performance Enhancement - Archery, Basketball, Signal Recognition
Research has petered out, only one team in sweden is actively publishing
11. The rag tag story of the "only operating flotation-REST Lab in North America"
Just tell it as you knows it - be brief
12. Float Specs
-The Closest to no stimuli you can get
-Unknown to what degree effect is chemical - epsom salts used for muscle aches and pains
-Specific Gravity of 1.30
-Lowered tactile sensation - unique sense of weightlessness
-Filtration Procedures; Monitoring Precautions
-Audio/Video capabalities though largely unutilized
computer help forum
13. Pilot Study, 40 Fine Floaters Float
By the numbers:
28 of the initial 41 participants successfully completed their rounds of flotation-REST
Of the remaining 13 individuals, one withdrew from the study when coming in for his second float citing a "mild form of dread;" one withdrew before floating due to an overbooked schedule, but asked to be contacted for future studies; one signed up late and missed several floats, but said she would like to continue if possible, however never completed a report; one only entered the tank for 20 minutes and had a negative experience, she did complete a report but withdrew from the study; one, an older gentleman with a great deal of experience in meditation and a friend of several members of the department only floated on two occasions but was unable to commit to the full six floats; one individual - who quite enjoyed the flotation experience - withdrew over concerns of water in his ears
14. An Informal Content Analysis
Excerpts from float reports
Dream-like/daze-like: "The float was unusual today. Part of the experience was very intense, as I found myself in a more trance-like state. I had some water splash off the ceiling near my head and it woke me out of it, but I hadn't realized how intense the experience was until afterwards"
Sense of Deeper/Threshold: "I went into this float without any real expectations for the outcome. I felt the most comfortable during this float as opposed to my previous two. I experimented with moving around a bit in the tank this time. I slowly relaxed and I could feel myself start to slip into the dreamlike state. I never really got into that mindset this time, I would sort of twitch out of it as it settled into me. I did however feel that I was much more comfortable with the environment and that I was beginning get a deeper sense of myself. Again, it’s the slightest of feelings, the tip of the iceberg I think."
Vivid "eventful floats": "I began to think about death and the human reality of pain and struggle, hoping to achieve a universal connection with the species. However, my mind was racing too quickly; I could not concentrate, or slow my thoughts. I realized the need to clear my mind. I began a breathing technique to relax, taking slow large breaths. I imagined the inhalation to be white fire, silence, innocence. I imagined the exhalation as smoke, cynicism, excess and overwrought rationality. My mind slowed down, and entered a new place I had not yet experienced in my previous float. I was no longer overcome with thoughts; my mind felt clear, clean. I realized I had spent most of my previous time in the tank outputting thoughts into the space; here, instead, I listened. I spent the remainder of my time listening (or concerned with input rather than output). I had a profound sense of peace. I had vague outlines of visual hallucination, at one point culminating in a 4 second history of the planet and life (see below). I had visions of DNA and felt my body as a vessel. At no point was I bored, and remained in this state until I was called out."
"uneventful" but relaxing floats: "I am always surprised and disappointed when nothing really happens when I float. Before I began floating, I was really excited because I thought I would learn a lot about myself and have life changing experiences. I have come to realize that, for me, the tank is more of a chance to have a really good nap. I wouldn’t say that these experiences have affected me negatively, but I usually leave feeling like I should be getting more out of the float. Maybe what I have learned is that I do not have the capability to let my mind wonder. This is something I would like to work on, but the tank may not be the best environment for me to do that."
Not necessarily all positive: "I did not experience a self-realization, actualization or anything of the sort. My reaction to the tank, and my personal analysis of that reaction, corroborated with ideas and convictions that I already had about myself. Light has been shed on nothing new. For me, it was a negative experience that, given the chance, I would not repeat. Thank you."
15. Fall 07 Protocol
computer help forum
Psychometrics Towards a Phenotypic Delineation
Witkin Embedded Figure Test
Tellegen Absorption Scale
STAI
EDN
Data unavailable at this time, will likely need higher numbers of participants for statistical work.
16. The Genetics of Altered States?
So how does this relate to genetic anthropology? -> The entire phenotype is expressed by genotype; if alcoholism can be inherited why not God?
Precedence: Dean Hamer and The God Gene. -> Which should really have been called "A God Gene" -> Distinquished between religion and spirituality. -> Religion as institution, spirituality as a human universal. -> Why are some human beings drawn to spiritual experience? A very good question, which cannot ignore biology or evolution. -> Correlated measures on a "self-transcendence questionnaire" to a SNP on the VMAT2 gene (involved in breakdown of monoamines). (Explain SNP C-G -> A-T)
Criticism: one critic has suggested the title of the book should have been "A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study"
And critic is right, it is rigorous science, but important contribution for asking about the biological/evolutionary basis for human experience of consciousness.
Genes work in networks, there can be no such things as THE God Gene. But maybe if a gene influences the drive for spiritual experience, another gene or the same gene, or a network of genes can mediate access to the altered state of consciousness described by mystics.
And there are others: a paper correlating COMT to hypnotizability; a study on creative dancers claimed that that "the association between AVPR1a (arginine vasopressin receptor) and SLC6A49 (serotonin transport) reflects the social communication, courtship, and spiritual facets of the dancing"
It is not such a far-fetched idea. The issue becomes one of establishing the phenotypic difference to attempt to genotype. How do you measure an altered state?
yes, the map is not the territory, but
Meditating on Korzybski. And that phrase. It seems to me, the Smiths and Browns has him somewhat misquoted. Yes, he's accusing you of mistaking your map for the territory, but he's not telling you to throw away your map. He's telling Smith to build a better map. Korzybski is a straight up survivalist, and a map is a survival tool. And if we are to survive in this freakish and ever proliferating ecosystem, what we need is a good map.
"If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is in structure, and structure alone. "
The best map is a fractal! A map that shares a similar structure as the territory on a much smaller scale. Which is to say the best map may not look anything like the territory it describes. What matters is that it acts like it, or more properly interacts like it.
Which is why DNA is a language, but not one that speaks like these words speak. DNA "describes" or "maps" the objective world through interaction.
Even DNA contains no multiordinal terms, that is, an identical term that maps to different objects - (like "love" "good" "self" "other"). Your DNA maps exactly, and only to, you.
and the ghost of general washington emits from his pipes a declaration that there will be no more valley forges!
Ain't nothing in this world like a fixed gear bicycle in the snow. Traction controlled force feedback ligaments and sinew glide me home as taxis wheels spin. Mine spin too, but it's prettier when they don't - fishtailing down the Locust walk pedestrian bridge over 38th. And Locust is a dragon battling global warming with Dawn in a story a boy genius wrote.
But the snow didn't last long. A black miserable freezing rain coats trolley tracks and washes the weeks ration of litter down storm drains. This a filthy city. But I call it home these days, until the ice caps melt or ride the right horse West. But one thing I miss living here is winter, There used to be ice in the Delaware - you've all seen the pictures. I guess that's what happens when you manifest destiny a whole continent of old growth forest into sawdust in a few short centuries. Marx has nothing on Henry Ford and his assembly line. That revolution is downright geologic. Welcome to the Anthrocene, and the noosphere is a pollen cloud choking an antiquated immune system.
But don't slam the panic button, unless you happen to be a Polar Bear, King Penguin, or human - in short if you're survival depends on business as usual. You can't kill life. Maybe this whole global warming jazz is the plot hatched by a mushroom intelligence using human beings to give birth to a more humid colony. That's a parasite with a plan.
One thing is for certain. The poor are fucked and fucked again. Because the Empire Never Ended and never shall end. And Sisyphus is like a Bob Dylan song.
So what's left except for sex and a sense of humor? The best of DAMNED THINGS that deny Death his Time, every time. And Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in. So love and laugh, either would be the most revolutionary act a human being can engage in, both together are the only formula for spaceship fuel. And listen to the rain and the wind, they've been here a lot longer than you. Thems are knowing things.
All the Best Rats are Jumping Ship
Tragedy comes in threes, or fives if you're a discordian, or twos if you're the difference between tragedy and discord. In all the hoopla of cyclones sweeping political and prairie landscapes, two dignified and joyful men, two of the world's god damn best stuff, decided to shuffle off this silly ride. The one y'all probably heard of: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the one you might not have: Sheldon Brown. One asked us to think about thinking, one asked us to spin tinier and tinier circles. Great yogis depart. O nobly born, look out for the clear light.
The Wound As A Whole (Not Just a Hole)
As a "young professional" (a slanderous term) I suppose one should not admit that one has absolutely no official business to attend to. So I will not. Instead, I will affirm that exegesis takes precedence and proceed from there.
'Ello wiki, it's been a spot of time. I've been lurking in space-time and attending to your recent changes. Mobius bifurcates, inside jumps to out at unpredictable intervals and in-tense-ities. The world tree sings of the Empyrean; Virgil still holds my hand. And empiricism guides me at last to Korzybski.
"...any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that the organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language..."
An example in narrative form: on a recent trip the valley that done brought me up right I was relating details of my current posting here in the City of Brother-Spilt-Blood. Forgetting for a moment that I was speaking to a rhetorician, I mentioned that part of my job involves attending a pneuomonectomy coupled with an experimental cancer treatment, photodynamic therapy. Trying to describe my relative vantage point in the environmental theater of the operating room, I estimated that I stood "ten feet from the wound."
Mobius laughs.
"The Wound?" he asks, "Isn't the Wound in something?"
Yes, but of course the patient is not the wound is not the patient, though a relationship does exist. What even is the Wound? Is it the cancer or the hole cut to get at the cancer?
Now to defend my verbal slip, I will say that the Operating Room presents a rather convincing rhetorical ecosystem which allows through some clever tricks to reduce the patient (the person, the organism-as-a-whole-in-its-environment, the ex-smoker) to the hole in the chest cavity. The patient is not the patient, but is the bloody access port in a blue sheet at which to get at the cancer. And the cancer is not a process, but pernicious lumps to be removed and blasted away by lasers. And the lung gets plopped in a bucket for further processing.
"Pressing on the heart," says the doctor, moving the damned ticker out of the way of his work. Notice here how the heart is not the patient is not the person...unless it stops beating.
None of this gets me off the hook for that whole "the wound" business. Can one blame the signified for a misapplied "el" signifier? What's the order of abstraction here? ...in the beginning was the word...
Refer to the above map, which sure as hell ain't the territory. (Korzybski coined the phrase.) That there is a model for the structural differential, and I'll let the link do the defining.
"The Wound" is a confusion of the order of abstraction which erroneously points back to the parabolic and infinite-valued "non-el" as yet untermed "organism-as-a-whole" in which the wound resides. It is presented as a singular unit and acted upon as a singular unit for the sake of the surgery. But the whole surgical theater - and it is theater - is based upon this abstraction. The abstraction comes first. "The cigarette is not the pack is not the carton is not the cancer," says the person which is the patient which is the wound. Even though smoking is a process and cancer is a process just as living, dying, procreating, recreating and desecrating are irreducible processes.
But according to Korzybski, it's a semantic disease - wyrd authority! - which allows us or even forces us to habitualize our Wounds as both our identities and somehow separate from the process of ourself. And here I now speak of Wound in the dime-store negativist psychology sense. The "depression" which becomes "I am depressed." Notice there that the "is of identity" is the semantic equivalent to this: "=". And yet even though it is whole "I" which is depressed - a process reduced to static element the common cure is not on a procedural level, but is also singular and "el": the "anti-depressant."
None of this is to denigrate anti-depressants, which do "work" but to hack at the problem of identification and categorization - the semantic minefield of the Wound. You are not your Wound. And you in that sentence is not you, oh dear wikier.
How's that for a day's work?
See you soon.
Comments (3)
Anonymous said
at 1:22 pm on Feb 19, 2008
Tek:
This freakin rocks. Please record if you can and share. I added a link to "Lamarckian" to some contemporary lamarckians. And if you can, pass this along to any progeny you might have: Darwin was a Lamarckian! Enjoy yo-self!- mobius, who does Nothing regularly and is proud to be part of the Rag Tag Crew
blueshenlung said
at 8:37 pm on Sep 10, 2008
"The Ghost in the DNA," beautiful and moving. :)
hiroshi said
at 2:41 am on Oct 19, 2010
http://dumbtype.her.jp/
http://www.ariarishop.com/
http://core.aruaruvideo.com/
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