biotelemetrica

TekeliLi

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

 

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

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.

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