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Xymphora answers Trudeau's cheap shot with three of his own, two of them completely uncalled-for. Whereas herein will be found only calm and reasonable argumentation. - Anybody who's read the liberal op/ed blogs [i.e. Electrolite etc.] when a military voice checks in, as they do sometimes, especially on the Iraq situation, can witness the timorous fawning of other commentors, the relatively naked intimidation and submission it brings out in otherwise firmly positioned attitudes. They kiss ass. They want to be accepted by the stronger presence. They bend over backwards to include and be included. Imagine then the powerful sense of worth that would result from actually being accepted, from being "inside" whatever perimeter's been thrown up around the stockade. Trudeau's sneering at what most people call blogs comes from something like that I think. He clearly spent quite a bit of time with the war-wounded, drawing on that experience for his strip, and it's likely that out of that came an association with a less easily categorized group of actors on the current stage, whose concerns and attitudes would dwarf most of the public's basically simple ideas of what's what in this rapidly changing scene. Add to that his long and intimate experience of real journalists practicing real journalism, with the risks both acute and chronic that that involves versus his experience of what he thinks of as bloggers, and his attitude is pretty understandable, even if it remains a little weak for the circumstances. Considering the thousands of regular online "blog" presences that more or less meet the terms of that definition, especially the ones that have been up for more than a few years, I think it's unlikely Trudeau or anyone he knows has experienced a large enough sample of what's out there to make it statistically useful, let alone an accurate target for satiric criticism. Some of us still resist those terms, and some of us aren't as easily categorized and dismissed as Trudeau and his affinity groups would like to believe. Journalists would obviously tend toward an interest in journalism-analog web presences, and would probably tend to see that as central to the blogging "community" as well, with work like ::: wood s lot ::: being seen as peripheral, the way art and literature are seen as culturally peripheral to, and far less important than, say, the automobile or oil industries. The idea that semi-employed losers are somehow any less respectable, or their opinions any less credible - at whatever this is, and however it overlaps what journalism once was or might have been - than full-time journalists like David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, is interesting. The difference would be a paycheck I suppose, and the commitment a paycheck entails, the accountability and risk of censure or dismissal. Or the independent means that negates any need for a paycheck. But then paychecks bring a chain of command with them, no matter how liberal the employer - and doing this with a big bank account behind you would seem to be a vulnerable position right out the gate. A wealthy individual spending hours a day online sifting through current events and obscure archives would be trivialized much as the semi-employed losers Trudeau has his character scoffing at. Dilettantes versus the pros. Pros v. dilettantes, and the only other officially sanctioned place in that schema is in the audience, as an information consumer/end-user. Professionalism in that context isn't just a life path, it's a moral state, a tacit confirmation of the status quo. That rests on an assumption of the validity of current human enterprise and its direction. Real men get jobs, and of course real women do, too. And real kids get ready to get jobs. Where in that there's room for someone who feels that the current human enterprise is a suicidal rush toward oblivion, I just don't know. Here, maybe. If not here, then where? Time? The Washington Post? The New York Times? CBS? Bloggers - the voices of the possibly-soon-to-be-homeless. Losers. Who wants to hear from them? The crux of it would be the assessment of viability of things as they are - the less validity you find in the status quo, the more you have left over for alternatives. Alternatives like this, or something even newer that might come out of this, if it ferments long enough under the right conditions... See how corporate advertising has glommed on to stenciling and tagging and hip hop and those smirky/ironic late-adolescent attitudes of world-weary-irony-driven-to-reluctant-action-by-a-vestigial-sense-of-responsibility, or whatever that is. Point there being the Great Amoebic draws toward itself every threat it can recognize, to neutralize and/or co-opt, so there isn't much chance professional journalists are going to whup its ass anytime soon, not from the relatively secure vantage of its lap. Dissing non-professionals simply for being non-professionals is kind of complicitous. In a completely unrelated or-is-it note: The hierarchy Trudeau's term "semi-employed losers" operates in is a Darwinian one - that's where the winning and losing draw their content, it's a survival thing - though in this case it's survival within the petri dish of capitalism. But it's helpful to remember that the seeming finality of that winning and losing is biological before it's economic, or even social or cultural. Winning and losing in the frame Trudeau uses have more to do with reproduction and gene-survival, however masked by materialist metrics they are. The forces of anti-Darwinism are many if not legion - some overt and rhetorical, some covert and dynamic, and not all are religious. One aspect of that that needs constant expression and re-inforcement is that car wrecks are the single greatest killer of children in the US, and have been for decades. What I'd like to point out is no one wants that to be the case, no one is asking for it, voting for it, or choosing it in the aisles of the local mega-store. And yet there it is. Intention has nothing to do with it. And it's a completely non-Darwinian mortality, generally, as long as we don't consider the evolution of attributes like telepathic and pre-cognitive abilities, or divine intervention, as valid points of discussion. I'm personally of two minds about that. For this, as an address to the public, I'll stick to the practical consensus. Unintentional, non-predatory, non-pathogenic death, on the highway and street, is the main evolutionary pressure on our children at this time. What fitness is being selected for in that? And it's such an accepted part of our lives only an eccentric voice from the margins can bring it up at the meeting. No professional journalist is allowed to say that, even now. Which is why most Americans don't know that the automobile is killing their children at a greater rate than anything else is. Hello. And that's what this is to me - somewhere between a letter-to-the-editor venue and a town meeting. Use of those forums can't be restricted to the professional classes without great loss - and, like a lot of the more crucial losses we experience, what's missing won't be measurable, because it isn't real yet, it hasn't become yet. It should go without saying that a culture that's going in the wrong direction will have driven its visionaries and gadflies into the margins, and will seek to silence them there. So marginality isn't prima facie evidence of unsuitability - to the contrary. The debate as to whether or not this culture is headed in the wrong direction is over. The contest now is for the primacy of an attitude toward life, toward what we are and what we were, and toward what comes from that. Our regard for the future. Against the culture's disregard for any future other than its own. The great bulk of the currently dominant culture makes that contest almost impossibly one-sided; it has a gravitational pull that means only a rare few can be prominent and still resistant to it. The majority of the resistance will be the small and insignificant - losers, freaks, weirdos, the young, the old - the marginalized. The access to amplification this venue provides makes it potentially a very powerful tool, a weapon in that contest. That it's virtually free, compared to the requirements for officially-sanctioned journalists, means the otherwise voiceless have a chance to be heard, more than ever before. Some, many, maybe even most of those voiceless have nothing particularly constructive to say. But it doesn't take a majority to speak the truth; and out here in the margins is where the opposition to the lie is - not just the opposition to the destructive authority of the present moment, but to its vision of itself as benign and well-intentioned. That's what's disturbing to Trudeau I think, more than anyone here's lack of suitable employment or professional status. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 2:47 PM Tuesday, May 31, 2005 My father joined the army in the 1930's, I think around 1936 or so. He said. He was a fabulist, a deeply wounded one, and a lot of the things he told me when I was very young turned out not to be strictly real. The woundedness was real, but the stories, a lot of them, weren't. He told me he'd been in Hawaii then, in the 30's when he was in the peacetime Army, and land was for sale on Oahu for &100 an acre. A lot of money in the Depression for land you had to take a long boat ride to get to, he said.As near as I can tell, or remember from the little bit of family history I retain from what I was given, when the Second World War started he was still in the Army, stationed on the West Coast, and that's when he met my mom. There's some vagueness in the narrative about the years just before the war began. He was in it for the duration. He told me a story about being blown up by a land mine on the Burma Road, seeing his friend die. Later, as the stories lost their credible substance as fact, as the things I knew and found out refuted what he'd said too many times for trust, I had to put the rest of them into a kind of "wait and see" file, because some of them were true, or had truth in them, some of them were attempts at saying something that needed saying. He was on the Burma Road toward the end of the war, that much is true, it was in his records. The Burma Road is generally regarded as one of the most arduous campaigns of the war. Also in his records is that he was Section 8'ed out of the Army - that his discharge was medical, for psychiatric reasons. That can cover a lot of territory when it's applied to combat veterans. Later, when I was 14 and applying to enter a Catholic pre-seminarian boarding school, I had to sit for a personal interview that was conducted by the arch-bishop. He only asked me one question - whether or not there was any insanity in my family. As far as I knew there wasn't, so I told him that; though no more than a few years later I would become convinced that virtually everyone I knew was more or less insane, and not in a lighthearted or silly way. What makes that question interesting to me, the asking of it, and what makes my father's discharge interesting to me - and what makes some memories I have of events that took place around the time we were living in Ione, where Preston was, interesting to me - is that my father had been molested by a Catholic priest when he was an altar boy. My uncle told me this a few years after my father had already died. My uncle was younger than my father by enough years that he wasn't there when it happened. What he said he'd been told, in one of the rare times anyone in the family would talk about it, was that my grandfather had charged the parish house, made as big a stink as he could with what little power he had - he was a blue-collar Irishman, he worked for the railroad. My uncle said the end result was the family had moved across the city, had had to move out of the parish and across the city; this was in I believe Syracuse, New York. The precise interplay of forces that caused that move are unavailable to me. But it happened. And, years later, the bishop asked me if there was any insanity in my family. It was the only thing he asked me in our private interview to see whether, at 14, I was sufficiently pious enough to enter the pre-seminary. Once, earlier, on a trip to Mexico with my mother and father, we stopped south of LA in Oceanside to see his Army buddy Dave. We went body-surfing at night. The water wasn't cold, and it was dark out; swimming in the ocean with the two of them, grown men half-lit on beer and bourbon. It was a big event for me. And seeing my father with someone he knew, who knew him from that time, whatever shared nightmares they had, that was big, something like the ocean was, dark and huge and right there in front of me. He left my mom and I when I was 5, moved to Santa Rosa to a different job to live with a different woman. My mother and I stayed where we were living, in Ione - where he'd been working at Preston, the California Youth Authority, a penal institution, essentially a prison for under-18 year-old boys. I remember clearly an afternoon from those days, in the turmoil of grief and emotional panic my mother's life had become, and mine with it, when a man came to the house, and talked with me a little while, and gave me a book. He said his name was Joe Crossman, he wanted me to remember that, and I did; I have ever since, and I've forgotten an awful lot of very important things along the way. My impression was he was a friend of my father's, from the Army, not from Preston; though later, when I was in my thirties I asked my father about it, and he said he'd never had a friend with that name, and he had no idea who it might have been. I had that book all through my childhood, from before I could read until I could read the Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language cover to cover. Neither my mother nor my father ever remembered that man coming to the house, or anyone with that name in their lives, but he was there, he'd been there, in my life. The book was C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair. Lewis' religion and his religious activism make it hard for me to get back to the visions of Narnia I had as a boy, reading and rereading that book. I'm not a Catholic in any sense of the word. Not a Christian in most people's sense of that word. Like a leper on the streets of Calcutta I've been grateful for mercy and kindness that have come my way from that line of compassionate believers. The best teachers I had - few as they were, when they were good they were brilliantly good - up until my junior year in high school, were perforce Catholic nuns and priests. But there's the corpulent bishop with his ring and his question, and that priest that hurt my father; a series of educationally-credentialed madwomen whose cruelty and gibberish poisoned my early education with nonsensical lies and torment; and a vicious Jesuit priest, the Dean at the seminary, whose jealousy and rage scarred me for life. There's the buzzing swarm of the mindless faithful, waiting like locusts for the signal of their Redeemer. And Ratzinger and Lustiger in the Vatican - imps of Mordor with a burnished gloss of sanctimony. And yet there's that book. And all along, at the edge of things too horrible to recount, with none of the smug confidence and institutional courage that makes cheap angels out of moralistic thugs, some kind of light above the layer-on-layer of spiritual politics and gang war. It's how I imagine the American military now, the struggle behind the facade of unity; there are, there have to be, good men and women still in positions of power in the American military, who can see the darkness they're being driven toward, and who are trying like the rest of us to find a place to stand. That book. I think about it sometimes, it sparks a kind of dread and hope simultaneously; it's a reminder, for when the veils of conspiracy darken what seems like everything, that there were, that there still are, others - the presence of good intrigue in an evil world, in spite of what seem impossible odds. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 11:28 AM Friday, February 25, 2005 It's not enough to not mean it to have happened, or later, to mean it to not have happened; it's not enough to not really have known, you have to take responsibility for the things you didn't see, that you weren't able to see, that you missed, as hard as you tried to see everything. Or relinquish all responsibility. And that means determining who or what to relinquish that responsibility to; that's where most religions begin their hold on human things. So the choice, above the decisions we all have to take to go on living, is to accept responsibility for the choices we make, not just insofar as we can see their outcomes and effects, but for all their outcomes and effects, and that means taking responsibility for the way each action moves on past our intentions, the way everything moves toward the infinite and the eternal. Or giving up the choice and the responsibility and the worry it brings. And that means it all comes back to a kind of chance, fortune, the larger patterns concealed - a dealing out of complicities and circumstances by a hand or hands we can't see or know. In that way the responsibility ultimately is like biology, the rules of mutation and survival, the insistence of the transitory individual on its particular rightness, its fitness, and the other side of that, the failure that loss becomes, the seeming complete failure of annihilation, softened by kinship, that can be made vital by sacrifice and can be made irrelevant by simply living long enough, but that before that irrelevance, outside the healing arc of sacrifice, is one of the most serious human immoralities - causing the death of another; the kinship matters because it's the joining of fates, the survival of the individual linked to, though not necessary for, the survival of the larger thing from which it takes its being. So that individual lives are made significant or meaningless by the investment of the self in something larger; or by the importance of the self to itself; or by the designation of importances by the deferred-to authority that individual responsibilities were relinquished to. It sits there, individual importance, being small, being everything, precious and ephemeral, we're destined to not be no matter what we do, at least until very recently that was true - we were born to die, yet all we know of existence and each other is in that temporary being. It's the loss of that which becomes not just an individual failure but the loss of what the individual is part of, representing - the potential thing that would unfold from that individual life if it went on, that dies with it when it dies prematurely, the way the future would look, how things would be. That's a very big responsibility, that our lack of awareness only protects us from accusations about, not from its results, the way a blind man may be protected from fear of an unseen drop he walks right next to, or blame if he falls, but not from the consequences of his fall. The stress laid on individual intentions that most of us have been raised to accept as truthful instructive emphasis can be viewed in that light, that while true as far as it goes, it's less guidance than guidance into, toward, a kind of coercive slant, that makes it easier to convince people to shrug off the intense burdens of being responsible for things they can't see or understand, for the consequences of actions whose effects reach toward the infinite themselves. The ease of placid acceptance, bovine docility, sheep in flocks moving like clouds across the hills of possibility. It's the choice between blind faith and independence, and in that way it's a mechanism of separation, between the sheep and the wilder creatures gathered into the fenced pasture with them. - And if you want the real picture, what the battle really is about for me, you have to take on the seemingly impossible. Because what I'm facing, what I faced when it was on the line, is an enemy who can go back and forth through time, whose vindictive self-importance transcends human imagination, whose sense of itself isn't represented accurately in the given cosmologies of religion or science either one; and that's the baseline - the extension of it, the largest picture, is infinite, beyond my or your reach - the way all the largest things are infinite, and thus outside the scope of human understanding. What I work toward constantly now is the hope, and it's a kind of faith as well - and like other real faiths it's there my struggle is most vulnerable to doubt and confusion - that there are layers to the infinite as there are to the finite, that the realms of power that transcend the ones I can see around me are similar in construct to what they transcend, and that in the same way that I've been a kind of privileged captive in this hellish place, while powerful men strutted through their lives like small-hearted gods in some ancient play - their stage the political world of bent laws and intrigue, the abstract fist of money - the way I've always known without being able to say why or how, the way others have known without being able to tell me, less certainly but with the same hope I believe that the larger symptoms are of that same disease - the extension of the self into the purity of the selfless, where it corrupts and becomes corrupt, and falls apart. Eventually. When I say "hellish" I don't mean my adult experience of the world - which has been a nightmare of vengeance and trickery and smug omnipotent bitchiness in retaliation for things I've both done and not done, or threatened to do - that's all personal and may or may not have a lot to do with what's happening in the greater arena of the human present: when I say hellish, I mean the world of my childhood, the 1950's in America, when the streets were on fire and there was burning iron and poison gas everywhere, when atomic bombs were thrown like firecrackers into the air of the desert - where people lived, where my first love lived, and died from sudden cancer in her brain; and the adults - who shared the increasingly centralizing power of life and death over all our futures - were themselves on fire, in flames, breathing smoke and radiating strange harsh ideas like blasts of combustive heat that burned the innocent and sent cascades of unnecessary harm into the world. There were small groups and lone individuals who raised their voices against that hellishness then, of course there were, as there have been all along - I wouldn't be here if there hadn't been; but where is their place now, as we mill around in these pastures of selection - where do they belong? Not among the sheep, not there. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 4:23 PM The original documents for these antique statements are too linked with racist agendae for it to be beneficial to cite them. But as representative of the mentality of some if not most of the men and women who have gathered most of the world's political and financial power into their own hands, the words stand well and accurately. It's as a framework for reply that I find them worth repeating.1. He argued that LAW was FORCE only in disguise. He reasoned it was logical to conclude 'By the laws of nature right lies in force.' But it's an eminent force, the LAW - it says what it is, and in that sense it's a kind of dialogue, it happens within the inclusive boundaries of something larger. It's human beings talking to each other and to the future. Deception, manipulation, trickery, all those working-around-the-rules kinds of non-forceful coercion take place outside the boundaries of that agreement. It's the difference between a family and its internal rules and the natural environment which, until it's known, is full of constant surprises. The surprising difference between a poisonous insect and a non-poisonous one, between the camouflaged poisonous snake and the brightly-marked one. There, in "nature", things have to be experienced and cataloged, remembered and communicated, they aren't part of a locally immediate conversation or agreement, not without the too-rare inclusion of spiritual guidance and esoteric "natural" humility to make them part of the dialogue. That FORCE is the anything-goes permission slip, it doesn't mean necessarily force per se, it means coercion, attainment - whereas the law is specifically about that dialogue, that conversation; the law is overtly stating its demands. These are the rules, here are the punishments for violation. It has nothing to do with trickery and manipulation in its abstract presence.Yet in the context here the plainer definition is used to rebut the argument against the use of the more complex one; as though force meant simply dominance through any means. At some indefinable point this marks a separation from within the species. The heirs of this mentality, who now occupy the shadow government and wield most of the power in the artificial environments we inhabit, are separating from the human mass - even as they plot to transform it according to their own template, they way they have the physical world, to bring it into subservient posture. 2. Political freedom is an idea, not a fact. In order to usurp political power all that was necessary was to preach 'Liberalism' so that the electorate, for the sake of an idea, would yield some of their power and prerogatives which the plotters could then gather into their own hands. Trickery as a way of life. The extended ramifications of that, what it looks like cast against the stars, is inhuman. The insect beak thrust into the skin of who-cares-what as long as it gets its fill of blood. Again it's not about the moral background, it's about the division; the non-embrace, the refusal to embrace and accept the responsibilities of human things. Self-love demanding obeisance to the self. Worship your Insect Masters, or they'll eat your children right before your eyes. 3. The speaker asserted that the Power of Gold had usurped the power of Liberal rulers.... He pointed out that it was immaterial to the success of his plan whether the established governments were destroyed by external or internal foes because the victor had to of necessity ask the aid of 'Capital' which 'Is entirely in our hands'. This speaks adequately enough by itself. 4. He argued that the use of any and all means to reach their final goal was justified on the grounds that the ruler who governed by the moral code was not a skilled politician because he left himself vulnerable and in an unstable position. The beginnings of this for me were when I realized that all the way back in history there were men and women who had refused compromise and surrender, and who had been destroyed and thqt all record of their having been had also been destroyed with them. A truth without any provable foundation - but an undeniable and obvious thing. So then the debate, which lasted years for me, was whether compromise was superior. Because all we have with us are the succesful results of compromise and a kind of conjectural reconstruction of the ones who didn't compromise to survive and therefore didn't survive. Yet it's too easy to admire them, love them, honor them, even though they're gone. So easy that it's hard to think of what they did as failure. I'm not speaking of those who sacrificed themselves so that others could live - that's simple and fits with the larger, selfish utilitarian picture. I'm talking about those who chose death before dishonor, whatever the consequences. And this is the point of these occult statements, and it's also the ultimate moral justification of the men and women who now run this world. All decisions are alterable in the face of the promise of death, every compromise, every deceit, every watering-down of moral truth is justified, if it means survival. Survival is all. And yet the shine of the honorable seems to have more in it than anything these men and women are capable of saying or doing. 5. He asserted that 'Our right lies in force. The word RIGHT is an abstract thought and proves nothing. I find a new RIGHT... to attack by the Right of the Strong, to reconstruct all existing institutions, and to become the sovereign Lord of all those who left to us the Rights to their powers by laying them down to us in their liberalism. The beauty of these claims is that they come directly out of the mouths of men and women who would not exist except as the most marginal of creatures, if the human agreement hadn't been to allow the weak and the infirm equal standing, or relatively equal standing. Out of the civilized environment with its rules that protect the weak come these brave new warriors insisting on the validity of strength and power - but it's power and strength they have only because the rules were altered to create a barrier between the human and the naked warfare of the inhuman. Now that they've become central and powerful they want to return to those rules, now that the "natural" has been driven to its knees and they've become the top predators in a recontextualized environment. Again it's the lie as strategy, cunning as a kind of force, trickery as one more evolutionary gambit. I'm not attacking it on moral grounds so much as pointing out that it's inhuman, and closer to the manifestations of a parasitic insect than of a human being. 6. The power of our resources must remain invisible until the very moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning or force can undermine it. Well there it is I guess. The layers of intrigue waiting to unfold, into the new creature. Slavery, cannibalism, all the perverse realities we know about, that we've experienced and drawn lines against - none of it matters in the face of survival versus extinction, we should compromise with anything and anyone in order to achieve that platform; we should be so morally flexible that anything in its time, if it promises survival, will be acceptable - the edge of immortality taking shape in the labs, even as the well-springs of life go dry outside them. The randomness of the universe, the patternless chance of evolution, these are misunderstandings ultimately - there's order in the universe, there is a kind of tip, a lean away from the dead-center median neutrality - the universe has just that much more joy in it than bleak emptiness, and all your rationalized cowardice won't change that. There is no love in this game but grandiose self-love, and it's the same with the modern descendants of this way of being in the world. This is the inhuman thing, an illness in the human form, a malformation, a mutancy. Without a love that transcends the self what's left of the human is an empty carapace, a machine, a soulless thing - more or less evil depending on the reach of its power and influence. So what's invisible - hidden, crawling behind the scenes until its moment arrives, in this self-centered forecast - is inhuman. And so what? That's the big ticket ride right there. Answering that. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 4:23 PM Tuesday, January 18, 2005 I guess I'll have to do a little work on the Intelligent Design versus the Darwinists thing. I don't want to, mostly because these conflicts do a lot of masking, hiding the similarities between the two opposing sides, and it's generally those similarities that are most distressing to me.
But anyway. Both sides refuse to leave the temporal context that humans inhabit. Expected on the Darwinian side, sort of, though post-quantum physicists shouldn't have too much trouble leaving the clock behind; but the creationist/ID guys have no excuse, they point toward eternity, at least verbally they do. What could be, I'm not saying is, but could be, is a thing like intelligence, or organized volitional being, so greatly outside our experience that we have to miniaturize it to get it into our heads. That would be an eternal thing, and it would be "intelligent" as opposed to inanimate or empty. It isn't hard for me to imagine, all it takes is getting outside the personal dimension, the visible/tangible/temporal. Obviously what's here, around us, is infinite, and infinite in ways we can't comprehend rationally, or articulate accurately. The problem with talking about these things is that by using the terms, which seem to be copyright and proprietary, it too easily empowers the slaves, who have been led to believe they're free, and who are doing the expressed bidding of an obscene and disgusting intelligence, greater than human, but much too small to deserve the credit for Intelligent Design. It seems likely that something close to that is behind the inexplicable power of fundamentalism and Judeo-Christian superstition in this darkening time. In the same way primitive priests could use the accumulated arcana, the geometries of eclipse and solstice, to befuddle and misdirect their congregations, I think whatever it is that's driving this rise of ugly and shallow spirituality has usurped things far outside its sphere of ability, co-opted them, and now plays out its end-game using the credulous and anxious as pawns. So the argument isn't Darwinian fact against creationist fiction, though that's the form it takes most of the time, it's layered and it has more intrigue. Evolution's as real as fermentation or combustion, but the beginning of things, matter or animate molecules, is almost more an aesthetic judgement than a dissectable bit of reality. I'm using the term "aesthetic" here as an artist, as someone to whom aesthetic perception is numinous and essential to the life of the soul. Where does human life begin? At birth or at conception? It's a false question and the answer plays into one of two camps, both of whom are expressions of the same occult power. Human life is, the life of the individual accumulates coherence out of the chaos and flux of the womb, but the sperm and the ovum were living when they combined. I'm not interested in speaking to these things publicly much longer. I'm too disheartened by the presence in my life of organized gangs who take their power from these false conflicts, and want me, or to use me - dark or light - as some kind of token of their own validity. What I would have done, had I ever had the chance, would have been to go as close to the center of this as I could get, and speak from there. I wasn't allowed to do that; and I'm not free to do that now. How much of the cause of that is my own incompetence, how much because of the intelligent resistance of something dark and powerful that seeks to use the earth and the human race, and how much is just the chance banging around of matter and energy in the closed chamber of the world - well that's the question, sort of, isn't it? The answer is likely to be - both, all, and more. The immediate issue of concern is the apocalyptic certainty of dim-witted and vicious people whose political power is like an acid on the face of what might be. The argument's been shifted around until "science" has to defend the vision of a cold empty universe, and the religionists own the possibility of God, and the landscape of eternity. But they both, in their extreme, sanction an anthropocentric morality that places men, as they are now, against everything, including men as they might one day become. What it smells like is a gambit, what it looks like is corruption - a desperate intelligence, more than human, less than divine. I can't see any other explanation for what's happening. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 1:43 AM Tuesday, January 04, 2005 Absurdities of scale. The common science, the public version, when it talks about cosmology generally stops at astronomy or launches seamlessly into gibberish.We go from the "edges of the universe" to string theory and somehow curving "space", and in microscopic terms to quarks and gluons. What I'm exploring here are two things normally called time and space. Astronomical space has the dimensions carpenters are familiar with, height width and depth, and time has what could be called dimensions as well, the linear past present and future, and the totality of that, which we call eternity. Most of us think of eternity as an extension of linear time, a future that keeps on going, or when we turn toward the past a receding end-point that keeps going backward. But there's a way to look at time as all one thing, the totality of time, forward and backward inclusively. You can't do that too easily as long as you need to have a point on a line where your own moment is, where you are, looking at it. But if you imagine yourself stepped back somehow, viewing it from outside, it becomes a thing, and can be examined more precisely. The present is a solid in that the things in it are solid, our perceptions are of solid things, and we know that what this is, where we are, has the solidity of the real. But that moves out from under us, is moving out from under us even while we look at it. So if this moment is solid, why is the past not solid? And if the past is solid - because that's not hard to get to, the past is all those solid moments we've experienced already put together - where is it? What does it inhabit? Where does that moment I began this paragraph now reside? If it's gone, in the sense of disappeared, no longer existing, when did that happen? Was there a transition? What exists at that transition? Is there a threshold? An in-between state? Or is it more likely, and this is my contention, that what we see there is incomplete, and our understanding of the incomplete thing we see is incomplete also. Keep in mind I'm still talking about what we experience, what we know, working outward from the normal and the accepted every-day, the irrefutable reality we have in common, toward what I think is a more accurate, larger view. We move through these days and nights, and to our minds and our perceiving senses our passing confers reality on what we move through. So the past is less real, for all its solidity and changelessness, because it's gone; and the future is like a plan or a dream, an idea, because we haven't gotten there, we haven't seen it yet, so it isn't solid. In that sense we're creating the time we inhabit. Or we seem to be, it feels like it, that's our experience. Our being there makes the future happen, turns it into the present And that's where most of the debate around the concept of free will and pre-determination stalls, because it gets close to the sense that the future must be very like the past, just like it really, except that we're going toward it instead of away from it. And yet we can change things here, move things around, will ourselves to make things different, we have to, it's how we live. It's a problem of definition and viewpoint - the insistence on the one or the other masks the more likely answer that it's both, something bigger, and to our small wondering minds, much stranger than either one. What time is is like what the day is, what life is - the words describe essential things: the day - beginning with the light of dawn, ending with darkness when the sun goes down again, or - beginning at midnight and ending just before midnight 24 hours later. And life - beginning at birth or conception, ending with death or - beginning in some still untraceable early moment when proteins and amino acids formed and held and ending when there's nothing here anymore that meets that definition. Time is what's in front of us and behind us - unrolling in minutes and seconds and hours, and time is also the entirety of all that, eternity with us in it. Because without us, or without something that experienced that flowing forward, eternity would be a singular thing, a ceaseless moment, without temporal change. That's again not a description of the universe as it is but the universe as it is from where we find it - as we live in it, starting from the human position. - Space has, as we saw above, the simple dimensions of volume everyone knows, and those simple dimensions lead us directly to the infinite, which is not as all-encompassing to spatial existence as eternity is to time, unless you expand the definition of the infinite to include all the forms of it. Because obviously you can go in a linear direction any way you choose and just keep going, in an abstract sense. It's nonsense to pretend it stops, or curves or becomes something else that's impassable, just as it's nonsense to pretend that somewhere in the tiny particularities of the sub-atomic everything just stops, at the last place or particle or thing. But somewhere in that reach, outward or inward, we get close to what must be the much vaster thing outside the known; a glimpse or a reflection, the proximity having a scent or a taste, it hints at what must be, infinite infinities, the not only endless reaches of the dimensioned space we inhabit but the infinite reach of that endlessness, a kind of endlessness of endlessnesses. That goes outward as well as inward, forever in all directions. We live right in the middle of all that, neither insignificant nor signifying, and a little thought will show that in some fundamental way anything else that exists does, too. Because there's an infinite thing above and beyond us, and an infinite thing below and beyond us, though neither above nor below catches the position we have in relation to what's really there. Local takes on new meaning in that light. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 1:53 AM Friday, November 26, 2004 Ptarmigan 26.Nov.04:Pervasive systems that run relatively smoothly, that were there before we were born, become atmospheric, an unnoticed part of the world, the way things are. Money is not a thing, it's a system, a code, a set of symbols. That it might be skewed toward a particular kind of person, rewarding some more than others, rather than the neutral null-value abstraction it's assumed to be is a radical idea, yet the evidence seems to be that it is skewed, weighted, not neutral but proprietary, favoring one kind of person over another, though none of that is part of acceptable discourse. The educational system has stated goals that are widely variant from its achievements. One of the unspoken results of even a minimum educational experience, that's deepened and strengthened the further in you go, is the idea that there's something fundamentally dysfunctional about "wrong answers". Illogic, irrational assumptions, insane ideas, delusions, fantasies, all the wrong answers are supposed to be automatically disqualifying, and yet in the real world we can see it is not so. Fundamentalists are engaged in the same struggle we all are, for gene-selection, for individual survival, for propagation of their particular version of the human. Illogic and insanity are not necessarily detrimental to that struggle - they can aid it tremendously under the right circumstances. The failure to grasp this in time is what's put the American political dynamic into an irrecoverable tailspin. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 2:15 PM Friday, November 19, 2004 Crooked Timber 14 November 2004:Anyone who gets a glimpse of the inner workings of local politics when they're young enough to not have an investment in the status quo ante gets radicalized, or at least thoroughly disillusioned, unless they had no illusions to lose. It's hard to insist on moral behavior once you realize how fragile it is, how thin and human, but that's the task. The best argument for the invasion and occupation is the hideous tyranny of Saddam, that's the only basis for the use of the word "liberation" to describe the presence of the US military and the things they've done; but Saddam was a virtual employee of the US for years, as were the Taliban in Afghanistan. They wouldn't have been what they were without American encouragement. That isn't conjecture, it's history, and complicity. Geras, like John Wayne, wants to get rid of the bad guys, but simply getting rid of bad people is easy, it's preserving the good that's hard, protecting the innocent, things like that. Allawi would not appear to be a particularly devoted champion of the innocent. And the presence of John Negroponte in Iraq now should put paid to any nonsense about humanitarian motives, though it won't of course. Because no one who says there are humanitarian motives involved really believes it. What they mean is they'd like it be like that, it would be nice if it were. Geras can only repeat the p.r. mantra about Saddam, mewling about "the torture chambers" over and over - and ignoring the overwhelming stench of Abu Ghraib completely. He has no other point than that Saddam was terribly bad and therefore anything that gets rid of Saddam is automatically good. Bad cops use that same inversion to justify themseves no matter what they do. Pilger's logic is of a substantially higher order, as this piece shows. Though if it really is simply a matter of getting rid of the bad people, rest assured the extinction of the human race will remove every last villain from the planet, permanently. Like I said, the hard part is keeping the good, preserving it, encouraging it. Where's the moral encouragement in Iraq? What's being preserved? The polite Left kowtows to the gloating Right by talking about "foreign fighters" in Iraq, as though coming to the aid of your brothers in arms is against the rules. What nonsense. The only historical figure it's acceptable to point to for an example of appropriate resistance is Ghandi. But Ghandi would have been assassinated already if he was in this. Geras says "Stop The Denial" and I think that's excellent advice for everyone. Quit pretending there's anything decent about this nightmare, and while you're at it quit pretending it was about oil too. It's about empire, and the subjugation of Iraq is intentional. Lies to the credulous and bullets to the rebels. Mission Accomplished. - Crooked Timber 17 November 2004: To solve these difficulties of evidence and Geneva Convention-based rules of engagement we need officials - just as we have in professional sports - paid professionals themselves, wearing easily identifiable uniforms, unbiased toward either team, and fully cognizant of all appropriate laws and regulations. Then armchair combatants can concentrate more readily on the thrills and excitement of what is, after all, the thing out of which the metaphor of sport was born. - feral 19 November 2004: Another way to say that bit about the moon, it doesn't go around us, it goes around the sun, in and out, and we go through the middle of that. The illusion is it rises and sets, but the sun also presents that illusion, and we see through that with the help of astronomical science. Interesting that the moon's path should be so obscured still. The queen of clubs stands in for the muse and the thing within us that seeks the muse, both. Your will is the more-than-energy that moves between them. Once momentum's achieved redirection is simpler, and easier than the herculean task of getting up and moving in the first place was. It's a deception that we're puny in the vast and infinite universe. A lie really. We're in-between two infinite realms, one bigger than us, one we contain. We're taught to trivialize anything smaller than we are, and the corollary - that anything bigger makes us trivial, works to the advantage of what's in the way of understanding. There are things, creatures, which benefit from our confusion. Between us and the muse the queen of clubs stands in for. It isn't easy, and it isn't a matter of understanding alone, and the closer you get the more on fire everything seems, but there isn't anything else. - Open Brackets 18 November 2004: As a Brazilian. - As an American, or more specifically as a birth-entitled citizen of the US I'll fight to see the day when this country is no longer a vehicle driven by a scabby clot of clever madmen, with the majority of its citizenry strapped into the back like toddling children, going wherever they're taken, in wonder and unconcern. As an American I'd like some recognition from the international community that whatever process of appropriation and theft has taken their lands and resources has been operating here as well - and that the closer to the fire you find yourself, the more you will be likely get burned. The resistance here has vaporized. Atomized. No leaders, and only a few confused veterans; the rest are the young coming into their radicalization like pioneers, with nothing before them but a kind of greyed-out questionmark, as though no one had ever moved against the still nameless thing that the world calls America, but is in fact not American at all, and only hidden behind that name. - John Quiggin 18 November 2004: As long as you start somewhere in the middle of the chain of circumstance, it's relatively simple to make the case that reconstruction depends on political stability, because it does. The assumption being that instability proceeds from something other than the American presence, and once the resistance is subdued or removed entirely Iraq can commence its rebuilding, with American assistance playing the part of benevolent guide and patron. Which is true as far as it goes. Just as it would be true that I could assist in the rebuilding of your home, and the equitable reassigning of your possessions, possibly even the care of your children, once my invasion and occupation of your home was complete. Depending on how vehemently you resisted that invasion and occupation, of course. We would have to wait until you stopped fighting back, in other words, before we began to improve conditions, once I entered the premises. And let's not talk about what business I had invading your home to begin with - it's much too complex an issue and it's now fait accompli anyway. As far as 'silliness' pertaining to accusations of immorality about the invasion and occupation, or to accusations of Halliburton's obscene and corrupt profits as condemnatory of the entire operation, it's only distance, moral and emotional, from the carnage that makes that word possible. Halliburton's corruption, Saddam's iniquity, even Bush's deceit and incompetence are all side issues. Iraq is being metabolized. Working out the details of reconstruction, even as an academic exercise in that light would be silly in the extreme if it weren't happening as a result of something so appalling. The presence of the American military in Iraq is an ongoing criminal act under international law, and even if it weren't statutory it would be, and is, immoral by any accurate definition, and repugnant. letter to friend 12 November 2004: Have you learned to recognize compulsion? Can you tell the difference between obsession and fascination? These aren't academic questions. It's not that money is the god of small-hearted people, that's not it at all. They are. Themselves. It's not the money. They're the gods of themselves; the money is just a way for a third party to profit from that self-obsession. The selfishness would be there if there was no money in the world at all. Money's an opportunistic infection, secondary to the disease, which is selfishness. It's an important distinction, because making it strips the black-and-white mask off things, replacing it with the subtlety and wholeness of color. Balance is more complicated when there's more than two forces at work. Like standing still and staying upright requires a bunch of muscular coordination; but running through broken terrain takes all that and more. To live you have to take care of the self, your-self, so the second level of the scam is to throw your desire for transcendence into a denial of the self which is all too often a denial of life. Money isn't the god there. Money's like a tax on selfishness. Look around. See how selfishness has been encouraged so long and so well that for most now lightweight greed is a fact of life, the way things are. Desire is the incense of worship. The self is covered in gold at the heart of the church. Compulsion - I mean you can get the definition from books and therapists and online, but seeing it is mostly breakthrough, like gathering the information along with a lot you won't need or use and it just sits there, and then one day it clicks. Whether you hear that click or not isn't that crucial. Compulsion at its simplest means things you have to do, things you find yourself having done, then shamed after, scared after, or just confused about, but after. During there's a thrill sometimes, sometimes a sense of duty or something like duty, an obligation to some unseen authority, or you're just carried along like a bug on a leaf on a river, it's something you do because...because you do, because it needed doing. Mechanisms in the brain and soul, little parts of the machine that control the rest from hidden corners of what we are. It gets messy when there's pain involved, and for some of us there's always pain involved. Then avoiding the mess can become the only task. Short circuiting the mechanical triggers. Blocking the flow of command. In the sense that when you, personally, T.S., say God, you mean some extra-earthly power that makes things happen, it helps to see that if that God wanted you to avoid being here you wouldn't be - you know - getting through doesn't mean the same as getting out no matter what. Creating a smokescreen of healing out of a self-induced wound. It masks the wound beneath that one. It's all work. Still, we go on with what we can hold, what we remember to grab on the way out the door, what we find next to us when we wake up... - Crooked Timber 09 November: One is under the impression that by "indoor plumbing" is meant an indoor commode, or toilet. This distinction is paramount, there being no question that cooking facilities virtually necessitate quantities of water that plumbed-in access provides simply and on demand. The commode being indoors, however, is primarily a convenience and of benefit to the infirm, the elderly, and the busy - as opposed to piped-in water's beneficial necessity to the vital heart of any home, the cook. However, any meal's end result will eventually be a trip to the necessary, and anyone who's lived for any time with an outdoor facility, what rural Americans still call an "outhouse", can tell you there is a substantial olfactory difference between the two locations, a lingering one in the modern setting. In addition, doing one's business in an outdoor setting can be most conducive to contemplation, and the sight and scent of trees and natural flora can be metabolically facilitating and therapeutic. This is countered by the urban and suburban with the relatively minor inconvenience of it's requiring a longer walk to achieve the relief station - but what is that? A matter of a mere few yards. The benefits far outweigh the inconvenience unless one is ill or otherwise handicapped, or the weather being so inclement as to be adverse. The cumulative effect on local water tables of a responsible community's use of outhouse technologies can be minimized far past that of community use of great volumes of fresh water in sewage "sanitation". Depending on the sizes of the communities of course. But then that's also kind of the point about the bearing of arms by the average citizen. The way we live now it's probably not a good thing for most people to do; the overwhelming mass of humanity in ever-concentrated numbers precludes an armed civilian populace, by virtue of the necessity for enforced passivity amidst the pressures and constraints of such concentrated living; as also the outhouse is inappropriate and impossible in the heart of Manhattan or Chicago. The way we live now we can't all dig holes out back - many of us don't even have an "out back". Yet the same gesture that dispatches the outhouse without a moment's thought as primitive and unbearably inconvenient welcomes the unbreathable air of summertime Los Angeles as modern, and necessary to "progress". There may be more to this than simple knee-jerk ridiculing of so-called primitive facilities. Considering the elimination of solid waste is something the regular among us accomplish daily, it may behoove the thoughtful person to consider the disappearance of outdoor plumbing as somewhat of a loss, inasmuch as the experience al fresco (or nearly) is far more satisfying generally than that accomplished in any cramped water closet will ever be. the rumbling comfort of the engine's hum still here - 9:53 PM  
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