Wax Banks

He's probably spelled 'library' with one L again, poor bastard.

The quite good joke that leads off the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – in which Arthur Dent’s house is destroyed to make way for a bypass, but he’s not around to see it because he’s fleeing Earth, which is being destroyed to make way for a (hyperspace) bypass – deepens by degrees throughout the first four volumes of the series, until it attains a kind of comic grandeur. A quick overview:

• In the first volume, we start with the aforementioned good (but simple) joke on mindless bureaucracy. The planet is blown up, and the earthlings’ protests come too late – the plans have been on display at Alpha Centauri for decades. But it gets better: Earth wasn’t even a planet, it was a computer designed to find the Ultimate Question, destroyed at the moment of readout. Life on Earth was just part of a computer program.
• In the second volume (Restaurant) we find out that (1) Arthur has the Question in his brain, (2) it’s not even the right question, and (3) the reason for this cockup is that the simple peaceful cave-mammals populating prehistoric Earth were killed off by a bunch of idiot telephone sanitizers and management executives judged too stupid for their own planet. Earth was, it turns out, a backwater’s backwater. And by the way, the Vogons were actually hired by Zaphod’s analyst – who didn’t want the Ultimate Question interfering with his business. Even that cosmic conspiracy is absolutely petty in motivation. (And the whole thing might take place in Zarniwoop’s literal ‘pocket’ universe anyhow. Adams was fearless about tossing out his premises…)
• Then we get to Life &c. – in which we revisit Earth but just twenty pages or so at the beginning and another five or ten at the end, where we encounter one bloody clusterfuck after another, mostly revolving around the Ashes, which (I’m told) are something to do with cricket, which is what Englishmen play when they find baseball too fast-moving and stress-inducing. Earth – basically a floating calculator populated by stumbling morons, our hero included – is a bit player in the great drama of Krikkit. Arthur and Ford hang around long enough to be annoyed, and Arthur asks to be dropped off elsewhere.
• But in So Long and Thanks, he comes back – and meets Fenchurch, the crazy woman who figured out the answer to the Earth’s many problems on the first page of the first volume. They have a bit of sex on the wing of a plane and end up leaving Earth anyway. The series’s recurring nostalgia object isn’t, in the end, worth the trouble. There are other matters to attend to anyhow – the laughing truth-teller and God’s last message to His creation among them.
• I can’t remember Mostly Harmless but I’m sure it’s nice. There’s food in it, and some jokes about TV.

One extraordinary thing about this series of increasingly Weird treatments of Earth and its fate – too big to be a comic ‘runner’ but so lightly handled that it’s easy to miss its centrality to the (ahem) trilogy’s (ahem) philosophy – is that Douglas Adams kept finding new ways to tell grand jokes about the true nature of the human race and its beautiful, broken planet. The bit about the mice would’ve been a fine topper to the initial gag, but the Golgafrincham sequence manages to strip away its sentimentality while achieving real emotional resonance – we killed what was true and good about the Earth long before the Vogons justifiably did us in.

The contemptuous ease with which various beings (mice, Vogons, Halfrunt, the galactic judiciary, Disaster Area’s stage crew) kill off or otherwise terrorize various other beings (usually Arthur and his companions, but also the entire population of Earth, the telepathy-stricken inhabitants of Belcerebon, Prostetnic Jeltz’s crew, the billiards-ball planet in Ford’s story, et al.) is the blackest joke in the whole series. Of course in Adams’s ass-over-other-bits Darwinian cosmos, this is the nature of life, universe, everything. Which makes his ‘true’-nature-of-Earth revelations all the more bleak: they follow an emotional line straight toward dissipation and despair, and Arthur can only respond with an exhausted shrug.

Here’s one of Adams’s bleakest interpolated narratives, in full:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists” instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists”), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.

The entire Hitchhiker’s Guide universe runs just like that. The destruction of Earth in chapter 1 of the first book fits this pitch-black comic mood perfectly, but it’s also a comfortingly benign event at the time, because it seems so utterly out of measure with readers’ expectations. After all, England runs more or less the same way, is the obvious satiric point, but it’s all more civilized in a way, isn’t it? There’s contempt and then there’s contempt, right?

Well. By the end of the series, in an ironic ‘triumph’ of worldbuilding, Adams has lifted up Earth – or rather the various mutually-contradictory Earths – to the status of full participation in the carnival of malice and cruelty and offhand, even accidental, genocide which is his (nonetheless quite funny) titular Galaxy.

The only consistently nice, earnest, curious creature in the whole series is a mattress, which flollops around in a swamp.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, radio series (LP reissue), by Douglas Adams et al.: a quick review and a general point.

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in elementary school, on my friend Scott’s recommendation. I think he’d heard about the books from his older brother Sean; over the few years of our friendship I got a lot of my cultural learnin’ from Scott/Sean. (Good stuff too: Depeche Mode, Zork, Talisman, the Avalon Hill Civilization, Paul Simon’s Graceland, early Chili Peppers…)

Over the years I reread the first three volumes of the increasingly inaccurately named Guide trilogy many, many times. (I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish only twice, and Mostly Harmless just once, though I imagine I’d think more of its daddy-anxiety material now.) I also listened many, many, many, manymanymany times to a cassette of the Restaurant radio series – or rather, its LP rerelease, which abbreviates the radio show’s second storyline into an hourlong, headlong Magrathea > Milliway’s > sunship > B-Ark story of unusual-for-Adams structural cleanliness and utterly-typical-for-Adams comic density. The LP rerelease is actually a brand-new performance by the cast, from a revised version of the original radio scripts.

The performance is better by far than the original, with much stronger production, and I heartily recommend it to any DNA fan. For aforementioned personal reasons I’ll always consider it the definitive Restaurant recording, though like any right-thinking person I dearly love Zaphod’s trip to the Frogstar and Marvin’s duel to the death with the battle tank at Guide HQ, and have read those sections of the Restaurant novel more times than I can count.

God I love these stories. God Gosh I miss Douglas Adams.

* * *

Anyhow I just want to make a quick point about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories: the remarkable business of Adams’s fictional universe – its crowded urban vibe, the way Adams piles up incidental details through Guide entries and interpolated vignettes, always with a dead eye for his ongoing satirical project – invariably gives way, at peak narrative moments, to a powerful sparseness which not only serves his original narrative form (linked comic sketches for a handful of actors) but reflects Adams’s deeper concerns, which would find clearest expression in Last Chance to See.

Think of the moments of unexpected (but always totally earned) emotional seriousness and weight in the Guide trilogy: the songs of Krikkit, Ford’s look at the bartender near Arthur’s house, Marvin’s death, the factory floor on Magrathea, Ford and Arthur and the Scrabble pieces, Arthur and Fenchurch on the airplane’s wing, Arthur and Thor, Marvin’s hilariously sad monologue in the Milliway’s carpark (‘After that I went into a bit of a decline…’ is perfect), Zaphod on the Frogstar(!), and – of course – Zaphod, Trillian, and Zarniwoop visiting the man with the cat.

Almost without exception, they’re moments of stillness and isolation amidst a great deal of very effective background bustle. At these peak moments, the characters are afforded a sense of their own smallness, which less crushing than freeing – these are moments of taking responsibility. (The Total Perspective Vortex is a literalization of this two-sided revelation, though with Zaphod around you have to play for laffs, of course.) Indeed, one of the lovelier narrative arcs in the trilogy is Arthur’s slow journey from unhappy connectedness to melancholy contentment – learning to accept the immensity of the universe and his own essential aloneness in it. (By the end he’s done with all the other characters, isn’t he? Except Random, I suppose.)

The end of the Restaurant radio show has Ford and Arthur accepting, with characteristic good humour, the futility of trying to help prehistoric Earth’s cavemen: they’ve lost the evolutionary race, and humanity will evolve thereafter from the useless bloody loonies on the Golgafrincham B Ark, the telephone sanitizers and management executives and hairdressers and documentary filmmakers and insurance salesmen. The moderns. In one of the radio show’s deft little running gags, Ford relates a wild story (billiards this time); Arthur asks where he heard it, and Ford says it’s from the Guide. Arthur is totally underwhelmed. ‘Oh, that thing,’ I think he says. Nothing special. Just a travel book, after all, and the real human race is slowly, sadly wiped out all around them.

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

Gets me every time. A moment of perfect love for all living things, turned sideways a bit, with a ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide nested within another ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide (and ecocide, per the colonists’ mad tree-burning deflationary fiscal policy), sung with a sigh rather than a belly laugh. Ultimately the Guide isn’t about hijinks in a crowded galaxy that’s a merciless riff on the awfulness of modern ‘civilized’ life – or not just that, anyway. Not really. Deep down it’s about escaping, not even into space, but into the feeling that space affords. The matter is distance, and smallness.

Our yellow sun is close enough, important enough, to beat down on us, to beam, to burn. A ball of angry light with no mystery to it. Other stars must be content to hide during the day and be (barely) visible only at night – and to us they seem like tiny pinpoints, formless. Kind of pathetic, really.

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

an argument approached.

[notes from a project abandoned but not forever.]

the self misperceives itself (as eternal, coherent, unique, centre of the world, etc.). this central misapprehension and distortion is ‘allegorized’ or mirrored in every arena of our experience:

• essentiality/essentialism (‘dogs are essentially different from cats’ is only a thumbnail for ‘dogs and cats can’t interbreed due to interactions at a level (macromolecular) we couldn’t even perceive until the 19th century’)
• narcissism of small differences (nationalism, racism, etc.)
• behavioural intertia/addiction (bad habits are a damaging abstraction of experience; we fall into patterns without even perceiving them, and relinquish the ability to monitor our own behaviour)
• myopia continuing even after we know of it (stubborn resistance even to knowledge we already possess!)
• causal scale (look for problems’ causes at the problems’ site and scale – related to essentialism, e.g. ‘racial/culural differences must be due to race, which maps to skin colour, so look for skin colour first’)

it’s vital to understand the distortion that is the coherent ‘self’ in order to perceive the true relations of things without demanding comfort (e.g. in egocentric religious myths). life without lies will NOT reduce to life without fiction – when we understand what fiction does (allow for emotional/cognitive action at a distance, consciousness-alternation in other words, via a complex symbolic compression/encoding scheme) we will be prepared to experience it lovingly in its time and place, while not wrongly demanding fiction’s distorting/abstracting comfort in places like, say, the nightly news, or a tense conversation with family, or the concept of ‘true love.’

this mode of ‘scale-free thinking’ leads to an understanding of the purposes of the Self’s fictionalization, and sheds light on one of the most crucial ideas ever conceived by humans: sustainability. this term is more potent than is generally understood.

consider (in a goofy semi-related thread maybe): is the myth of santa claus sustainable? no. (eventually all kids figure it out, or are told.) does it hurt when we let go of it? yes. is the hurt a long-term problem? we don’t know. (no one’s ever studied the psychology of the santa claus myth, that i know of.) the fiction of santa claus scaffolds a complex belief system about the magical nature of life – but is that metaphor (‘magic’) necessary to perceive the beauty and, yes, ‘magic’ of the mere natural world? of mathematical equations and scientific concepts? of fiction in general? i’m not sure, but i doubt it.

in any case the point of the santa claus example is that LOTS of cultural myths are like that: as soon as the kid cares one way or another about finding out the truth, the kid’ll find out, and great pain and anxiety will result. (your parents lied to you for years, after all, about something as basic as ‘where good feelings and presents at christmas come from.’) but it really does take years – kids WANT to believe in santa claus. the myth is comforting: among other things, santa will never run out of presents. but mommy and daddy might…

ironically, the unsustainable myth of santa claus is in part a myth about sustainability itself: about the possibility of an experience, a force, a story, existing outside of time. santa claus invests the year-end holiday season with glorious anticipation. it amplifies feelings. but what if those feelings could be arrived at another way? what if the snow and cold were enough? the lights, sledding, decorating trees? what if the rituals of year’s end could function autonomously?

without lies underpinning them, i mean.

the Self demands the lies and retreats into ritual.

Laugh 'til you're grey in the face.

"To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder." --Malaclypse the Younger

Trouble online, trouble behind.

I don't get along with people online, and that's the plain fact. It's taken me a while to be matter-of-fact about it, but there it is. I spent a bunch of time discussing the situation in therapy a couple years ago, but never did arrive at a satisfactory solution.

OK. The the problem goes deeper than incivility.

The summer after 10th grade (1995) I spent five weeks at Johns Hopkins, taking classes in the Pre-College Program. (It's different from the well-known precocious-child program, CTY.) I got my first C (in a stultifying molecular biology lecture) and worked hard to get a life-changing A (in a small, prescient 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality' humanities seminar). Both grades were portents, but I didn't understand them.

The focus of the seminar was MUD/MOO/MUSH culture - 'A Rape in Cyberspace,' Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,' Neuromancer, some Bukatman, some Dery, that kind of thing. One of the requirements was to spend a bunch of time exploring the Diversity University MOO (moo.du.org:8888). I did. I also signed up for LambdaMOO (lambda.moo.mud.org:8888).

I'd never used the Internet before.

Some days I would get up, read the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog or my newly-purchased Principia Discordia for a while, then head over to the computer lab for a 12-hour stint in Lambda. I missed meals. I even missed class (see above re: 'my first C'). Tuition for the program came to $3,600 for five weeks. My dad mowed lawns to raise a few hundred dollars. A wonderful man in my hometown lent us the balance of the tuition and it took us a long while to pay him back; or else we never did.

I got some sun but not as much as I needed. I fell hard for a girl in the next dorm, who didn't notice me. Then I fell for someone with the username 'Sirena,' and that's one of the weirdest stories of my whole life, I think.

I learned to 'speak in public' on LambdaMOO but I learned plenty of other things as well; and I came to rely on it. When I went home at summer's end I felt totally disconnected from my hometown. I told myself and my family and even my couple of close friends that I just missed Baltimore, had a great time 'at college,' had never been around people who shared so many of my interests, just needed a little time to adjust. Junior year ahead, yay. That kind of thing. All of which was true, I suppose -

- but it occurs to me today, for the very first time, that as much as I missed the people and the school and the freedom, I was also going through withdrawal from the online world where my new self was being born. I mean that literally.

The term we're looking for is addiction, of course, more specifically a form of 'Internet addiction,' which in the late 90's was a subject of no small concern in the press and in academia.

You never hear about it now. Once everyone does some activity all day every day it's not an addiction, it's just 'part of life.' Like TV, or worrying about work, or hating the government.

* * *

I check my email several dozen times a day, yet I fail to respond in a timely fashion to friends and acquaintances. I may in fact be the worst correspondent I know. Yet I don't immediately forget about the 'need to respond': indeed, waves of anxiety about my Inbox full of unanswered emails continue to ripple for weeks and weeks. I am never, ever free of anxiety about these communications - but I avoid responding.

I've destroyed friendships - and strained family relationships - this way.

When I have spare time, I read websites and occasionally comment on them. Sometimes I do this even when I don't have spare time. Altogether I spend hours (hours!) a day looking at webpages and retaining almost nothing. I take no great pleasure from this activity. Indeed it has the dry sterility of pure compulsion, like pulling the arm of the slot machine.

I've posted to this blog more than 3,100 times since 29 September 2003. In that time I've been banned from one website, slunk away from several others, and stormed off several more. I get into fewer 'flame wars' than I used to, but it still happens. I still feel anxiety about websites I've 'stopped reading'; indeed, at the site where I've been banned, I continue to comment under a different name.

I feel contempt for such behaviour but haven't found a way to stop it, as yet.

Since 2009 I've posted upwards of 150 reviews to the phish.net - but I've only posted one or two since June, during which time I've posted 50 comments in discussion threads and in response to the admins' blog posts. I consciously avoided any such discussions until this summer. This correlation between 'chatting' online and posting more thought-out frontline pieces (reviews and articles) has held, in my case, for many years.

After building a (very very minor) reputation as a thoughtful writer at whedonesque.com, I've all but scuttled it by turning into a persnickety, ill-tempered commenter. Unsurprisingly, none of my posts have been featured there since I started commenting more regularly.

The term isn't brand dilution, but then what's the term? Would I be happier if I knew?

* * *

A longtime netizen (remember that term?) told me this when I was banned from phishthoughts.com (for 'trolling'):

You are a highly intelligent, very cerebral and I believe well meaning person but it seems that you have some form of internet Asperger's which makes it impossible for you to determine what is and is not socially acceptable in many circumstances online.

I wrote him a long email telling him, essentially, that he had no idea what he was talking about and I was perfectly justified in what I said about the site's owner and EVERYONE NEEDS TO THICKEN THE OLD SKIN, ETC., ETC. But I didn't send it. My wife approvingly refers to this kind of thing as de-escalation and always looks so relieved when I choose not to carry on such exchanges. The look on her face breaks my heart. I realize, at such moments, that I don't actually know how much damage I do to myself - or I won't acknowledge it, or (worst of all, and most likely) I've decided I need to hurt myself 'socially' in order to continue living as I am.

Last summer I wrote this:

I think we should purge the books and sell them, to alleviate my guilt (not a writer, not a devoted enough reader, nothing special...) and maybe recoup a bit of money. My wife thinks we should keep the books around[...] And dust them. I try to explain that life will stop and start over, better, if she'll just allow this one gesture; I mistake my self-indulgence for patience.

She evidently believes -- insists -- that life can't start or stop, can only continue, so we might allow ourselves to do the same. I imagine that our future must resemble my past. The books, I'm certain, are signs of my...well, my irresponsibility, profligacy, compulsions, status-consciousness. My individual failings, you might say. Don't I get the future I darkly deserve?

But what comes next is ours, not mine. `Mine' is just for comfort -- like the books. In our future[...]I'm glad my wife[...]made me keep the dreadful damned books way back when, and frustrated my urge to reduce our life to my story.

In grad school I went to a conference and met a young professor from some college out of sight/mind, and over the course of several joyful drunkening hours it became clear that we wanted to fuck each other, quite, but I was dating someone and she had to get back to her friends' house where she was staying, and in any case it would have been an absolutely colossal mistake, quite, but unforgivable? Who knows? Probably yes and deservedly so I'd say (were the situation reversed). Well. One of those stories I hold onto in which I 'miss an opportunity' to have a conventional 'good story' but still come close enough to some inner horizon that the light goes strange and new (or very old) things are revealed. So how bad a story can it really be, what I've got now? She was a Buffy fan too and I definitely should have called her when I was single, later. But I wasn't ever really single.

I mention it because, though I can't find the email she sent a few days later in response to my own message, I've memorized these phrases:

• 'maybe too smart for your own good'
• 'extremely socially awkward'

* * *

Shamefully, I often use 'Asperger's Syndrome' as a term of derision.

This is inappropriate and callous.

It would be, even if I were Oprah Winfrey.

* * *

Everyone wants his favourite band to also be The Very Best Band. This is really important to teenagers, who in this country have nothing else to do, but it stays important to nominal adults. Like me. Same for books/films of course. (Phish, Coltrane, James Joyce, Fight Club, etc.) Same for people, though I wouldn't know. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I didn't map my tastes on to the cosmic quality scale.

* * *

The point being that there are two problems compounding one another: I compulsively fiddle about on the Internet, either getting into arguments or zoning out pretending to be interested in what Ezra Klein and Arthur Silber have to say about anything, but at the same time I have very serious trouble maintaining a civil tone and spirit of congeniality in online fora. I tend to monologue at people - ever notice how rarely I respond to the wonderful comments around here? When the conversation gets two-sided I lose control of something (maybe just the conversation), and I end up saying things I regret. 'Being misunderstood,' HORROR!, but more than that: no longer trying to understand the people I talking to. Not reaching out.

And that's where I am this morning. Worried, if you're wondering, that I'll slowly lose friends and alienate readers and never stop doing the things I most hate about myself. And - you must know this is deeply related - worried, too, that I'll never write freely because it will always be about me.

You want 100% employment? Assign every single citizen to border patrol. The true meaning of the nation-state right there, the geographic Self. OK, hold one guy back to make dinner I guess. One guy for laundry. And someone to make sure the cable bill gets paid.

My son will probably wake up soon, and my wife with him. The day will start. Real life will start. This...this is the shadow. If you walk toward the light it'll hide from your sight, but not as a favour: your shadow will follow you wherever you go.

Lovecraft's 'cosmicism': another quick take.

For Lovecraft's 'cosmicism' to attain full flower, he'd have had to give up his (meta)fictional conceit of Ancient Races Lying Dormant - it's a philosophical copout. If your supposed philosophical point is that humanity is insignificant, it's enough to pit man against Nature, or Thermodynamics, or Chance...but that wasn't Lovecraft's point; or at least that wasn't where his heart resided. His emotional connection to his 'cosmicist' philosophy must be located in his obsessive return to his mythology of malign forces from Beyond. In other words, while 'The Call of Cthulhu' is a brilliant work of fiction in its own right, I'd say 'The Dunwich Horror' is closer to the center of Lovecraft's imaginarium, because its stakes are more accessibly human. Its horror might be invisible, but it can at least be directly felt.

Critics' dogged insistence on HPL's writing as 'cosmic horror' obscures the fact that it's horrific only to the extent that it happens to human beings - which is of course the opposite of 'cosmicism' if you take it halfway seriously, wuntcha say?

The trouble with having a recreational interest in 'occult' or 'magical' thinking...

...is that the folks committed enough to produce the great body of Occult Literature today do not, for the most part, know when to stop, but they so often lack self-awareness about why they keep going. Reading Mitch Horowitz's Occult America - a breezy pop introduction to a particular strain of irrational/mystical thought in the American popular tradition - is a maddening experience for this very reason, among others.

Horowitz's book is a mishmash, and that's fine; it's an introductory text, after all. And to the extent that he has a thesis, it's a pleasantly obvious one ('occult belief is a vital part of the American identity'). But in talking about his work he's happy to go from 'Joseph Smith's apocalyptic/prophetic writing is part of an important American homebrew-religious tradition' to 'I think leprechauns are real and ouija boards connect us to another universe.' His catholic approach to the occult is good'n'proper, but his credulity is lamentable, and it bleeds into the book. (He's wrong about the sooper seekrit Masonic origins of the Great Seal, for one thing, and that's how he leads off the book!)

The book is free of the rapturous Weirdness of Charles Fort [indeed Fort's not even in the index!], because Horowitz doesn't (can't?) play the complex ironic-epistemological tonalities that were Fort's whole schtick. He's like a Disneyland tour guide slowly letting on, in unguarded asides, that he thinks Mickey is a real mouse.

[UPDATED the following w/r/t ARRR's strong point:]

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those belief structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

'And yet, and yet' is the essence of properly ironic Weirdness, and Horowitz's entertaining book is totally free of it. Siiiiigh.

w e a v e

the light through the Weave is all things. the name of the Weave is all things. the false form of all things is written in the Weave. the true movement of all things pulses through the Weave. we remember into the Weave. we forget within the Weave. we transform under our own auspices by our own energies according to private fluid illogics, and the Weave binds us all things to each of all other things, and we are one another. we are becoming each other.

Christ, I don't recognize myself anymore!

I just read a column by someone who has dubbed herself the 'Teafaerie,' over at Erowid, and GOD HELP ME right now I think it's kind of fantastic. It's about sex and psychedelics, and it is a fine piece of writing, and ends with a kick, so there you have it. Go on.

While you read, I'll sit here thinking about what in the world could have happened to me, that I am who (what?) I evidently am. Then I'll see what I can do about this awesome capacity for judgment and negativity that I've come to identify with my Self. Fun, huh.

Simple exercise.

Here's a simple exercise you can try at home.

Look at your Twitter feed, or your friends' Facebook updates, or a local newspaper, or indeed any shortish list of people.

For each one in turn, try and imagine what he or she wants to accomplish today; or what he or she was feeling when writing that Twitter/Facebook update; or what he or she sees out the window upon waking or going to work/school. Easy, right? Just try to imagine his or her feelings. Try to feel them for a moment.

OK? Now try the same thing with, say, the national news. Or the blog or newspaper column of someone you vehemently disagree with or dislike. Or an ex-lover, or -spouse, or -boss.

No sweat, right? I'm sure you had no problem with any of those things. Lemme guess: even when arguing with someone over blog comments or email or Twitter, you still do exactly that, the very thing.

There is no such thing as a 'supporting character.'

An actual world gone mad.

Worried?

Parpety.

Every morning they were counting every thing to see if any thing ben took off in the nite. How many goats how many cows how many measurs weat and barly. Cudnt stop ther counting which wer clevverness and making mor the same. They said, `Them as counts counts moren them as dont count.'

Counting counting they wer all the time. They had iron then and big fire they had towns of parpety. They had machines et numbers up. They fed them numbers and they fractiont out the Power of things. They had the Nos. of the rain bow and the Power of the air all workit out with counting which is how they got boats in the air and picters on the wind. Counting clevverness is what it wer.

When they had all them things and marvelsome they cudnt sleap realy they dint have no res. They wer stressing ther self and straining all the time with counting. They said, `What good is nite its only dark time it aint no good for nothing only them as want to sly and sneak and take our parpety a way.' They los out of memberment who nite wer. They jus wantit day time all the time and they wer going to do it with the Master Chaynjis.

--Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Depression.

Depressed folks often insist that they 'don't matter,' and lose the will to act. In my experience (both personal and among depressive friends), depression manifests not as melodramatic woe but as quiet self-abnegation: you're 'too sad to do anything.' But of course this is just shadow- or inverse narcissism. If your feelings aren't actually important, why must you change your world all around just because you're sad? When you're depressed you misperceive your importance even more dramatically than usual. You are never, ever, ever the 'center of the world.' In the cosmic sense you don't matter one whit. That's (imaginative) freedom if you choose to claim it. Maybe you can't stave off depression without pills, I dunno, but there's a reason doctors prescribe exercise and healthy food and balanced, joyful work/play for folks prone to depression. It's the (an) opposite, not of happiness, but of accepting that your life is only your life.

The depressive's self-denying moping is grounded in a (preconscious!) belief or sense that his self is both damaged and very important. It is neither of those things. You're an animal and no one's watching you. You are safe.

When medical procedures are illegal, only outlaws will perform those medical procedures.

Just a friendly reminder that when third-trimester abortions are all but illegal, and safe, timely abortions in general are prohibitively difficult to procure - especially for the poor, or those who live in scientifically/religiously backwards regions of the country - monstrous things happen. The Gosnell case is a horror, of course, but it would never have occurred if our laws regarding abortion (and for that matter infanticide) weren't themselves horrific.

We owe it to our fellow human beings to legalize abortion in all three trimesters NOW.

[Just so we're clear: people who think things like this -

For many young liberal women, abortion is THE answer to being inconvenienced. They don’t even think about it as killing a baby. I am glad to hear about [H.R.3] since I don’t want to aid and abet in anyone’s abortion.

- are part of the horror as well. If you are capable of seeing an unwanted pregnancy as 'inconvenience,' you have completely lost touch with reality. But 'FirstSkirt,' the Malkin poster who made that comment, is one of literally millions.]

[Second update: Am I required to mouth the words 'Of course abortion itself is a terrible thing' in order to be considered respectable? I can't bring myself to bother. Because abortion is, to my mind, no more 'terrible' than any other medical procedure, except (usually) to the pregnant woman undergoing it. (You don't abort a fetus, you abort a pregnancy.) Is it sadder than most procedures? I imagine it would be, unquestionably so. Is it ending a life? Let's not brutalize the word 'life' that way, talking about 'a life' as if the average person had a clear understanding of what 'a single life' could possibly mean in anything but a parochial, person=life/dog=life sense. An abortion is the destruction of an organism, like cutting down a tree, but I believe that abortion and murder have nothing to do with one another. The existence and lunatic embrace of capital punishment and war suggest that the prohibition on 'murder' has less to do with life than with fairness and advantage. Neither of which are relevant to discussion of abortion.

And yes: the birth and life of my nearly five-month-old son have strengthened my belief in the absolute moral obligation to legalize and protect the availability of abortion.]

readyou.txt

That would be the perfect thing. To obliterate what I suppose is my 'nature' and become some endlessness. Not a thing but the idea of all-possibility. Not just 'egolessness' in the sense of 'lemme share my cupcakes/my work/my ideas/my sexual vulnerability/my blog posts with you,' please, please, but egolessness in the sense of 'there is no me to share, no you to share with, only transference, only this endlessly repeating obliteration and reexperience.' Tip top I guess. Always to be nothing more than transformation. Maybe that comes out as a novel. Or in verse. Or painting. Or I dance on a strip of grass and step onto concrete and decide I'm two bands of four people, one each, and they're talking to one another quietly at first then more enthusiastically and they would say there isn't any 'topic of discussion' but listening we (outside-we-imagined, everyone) tend to think they're (we're) singing songs, reciting magical incantations, solving math 'problems,' I mean really what's so problematic about not knowing everything yet? or just trying to figure out which of the eight gets to walk home, will it rain, what is our home tonight, to whom can we give the love that is listening-presence tonight? Tomorrow? Must we sleep alone? Must that dreamtime be divided between beds, properties, dominions of something like care-apportionment? No. Sleep where you like, you become everyone. Drink this or go without eating that or eat it, dance, there is music you can't hear, you become everyone. The 'one' in 'everyone' is the myth. Everyeveryhow is what it is. Fall asleep with her head on your arm or his breath on your shoulder, or remember to return that book you borrowed and maybe get coffee afterward, or drink all the coffee and sleep Thursday night, you become everyonlywhere. You are a medium of transmission.

Ending the drug war.

John McWhorter paints a picture of African-American culture after (drug) Prohibition. (Via.) I'm not with him on legalizing all drugs, I think, but it's an (ahem) intoxicating idea. Though I wish it were possible to get into a discussion of drug policy without gratuitous slaps at psychedelic culture(s) (McWhorter takes a shot at Timothy Leary's 'ideology' in the first paragraph). The enormous upside of careful (carefree) use of psychedelics, hallucinogens, and various'n'sundry consciousness-altering drugs is not a joke, nor is it a utopian 60's fantasy; nor should we dismiss the powerful lessons gleaned from psychedelic experience, even when they reveal our own postures and habits as fraudulent or selfish.

In any case, a little pick-me-up for ya this Monday afternoon in early Oh-Dubba-One.

(p.s. Why the 'Science' category? Because this is a matter of body/brain chemistry, which is to say a matter of personal liberty, first; and a political matter second.)

Sidebar re: 'astrobiology.'

Presumably the hype around the NASA press conference had to do with federal funding rather than any actual import for 'alien life.' Not that life could possibly get more alien than being a PR person at NASA, mind you.

Why am I not more excited about this WOW GOSH ZOOM bacterium?

I worry that I've swung from a moral/biological definition of 'life' to a thermodynamically-preoccupied disdain for the idea that life is special in some way, as opposed to just very something-or-other (efficient, complex, etc.). After all, there's a macroorganism that incorporates human beings, steel colossi, entire complex biomes into its memetic material (a 'city'); that sounds just as interesting - and a hell of a lot more complicated, in chemical terms! - than a bacterium that can incorporate arsenic (which all other life sensibly avoids) into its DNA.

I recognize the importance of the find for science as a field (or interlinked set of fields) of inquiry, and I love the knowledge, the feeling, that the frontiers of human knowledge are expanding. But at some point in the last three or four years I stopped believing strongly in the inevitability of scientific/rational expectation - we're deeply invested, as a species and as individuals, in our present belief systems, our precious taxonomies. But life-that's-into-arsenic is no different, in most senses, from life-that-can't-abide-arsenic. None of this matters to a stone; not a moment of today will change the Kuiper Belt's mind about anything; none of the worlds within my cell membranes so much as rustled when the NASA press conference started. Y'know? Not even during the Q&A period!

If you're interested in the news, by all means read about it, love it, give in to what happiness you are afforded (yes, yes, yes!) - but by all means take a moment, or an hour, or a decade, to wonder why one organism that does unlikely-but-highly-believable XYZ has an effect on you that quintillions of equally-unlikely-but-by-now-utterly-boring organisms no longer can. And spare a moment, while you're at it, for the offensive parochiality of considering sugar-phosphate backbones 'normal' in the first place. What's special about life is that it's the thing we call special.

Well.

Or maybe I'm just in a mood?

Of course.

"Empathy can't be taught, but it can be caught." --Mary Gordon

Jurrasic Park: Cambridge.

While nursing, my wife asks whether I could tell which part of the baby's most recent crying jag was the 'hunger cry.' 'Sure,' I say, and I imitate his high-pitched cawing. She sits for a moment in silence - surprised and impressed. It is a very accurate imitation. I am pleased with myself.

'Did I just make your other breast fill in with that sound?' I ask.

'No,' she responds, 'I think you just made some pterodactyl's breast fill in somewhere.'

I remain pleased with myself.

Pssssssst!!!!

Say hello to my son, Feliks Edgar Holland.

Feliks will probably say hello (or 'hello world') in a few months.

[Update: Less sleep-deprived spelling, now fiksed.]

Leave Hitchens alone, "for Christ's sake."

The suggestion that Christopher Hitchens, now dying of cancer, should 'convert' to religious superstition on his deathbed is cowardly and contemptible - even when presented as a glib little thought experiment:

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

[...]

Well, suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system?

(My emphasis.)

This is masturbatory nonsense. The ego doesn't dissolve at death; rather, among other inner-optical illusions it simply stops being generated by the brain. More importantly (and myopically), the human ego constantly undergoes processes of dissolution and reconstitution, and only the ignorant fear ego-dissolution or -suppression. Everyone who's paying attention understands that deep happiness - fulfillment - more or less consists of ego-dissolution. (Ever been 'lost in a book,' or so 'wrapped up' in some pleasurable activity that you 'forget yourself?') If Hitchens has accepted the materiality of his mind, which after all is something his brain does, then we needn't be suspicious of his insistence on the banality and boredom of death. If you're not lying to yourself about Entrance into Heaven and whatnot, if you've acknowledged the permeability and mutability of your self-consciousness and committed yourself to joyful action rather than literal Self-gratification, then of course death would seem like just another...thing.

But this is all separate from the etiquette matter. Yes, Hitchens has made waves with his articulate, angry atheism, and it's reasonable to talk to him about it. But the media/'critical' surprise that's greeted his ongoing refusal to embrace egotistical superstition is an embarrassment. He has no access to special wisdom except by having lived, been committed, worked hard, offered and received and laboured on behalf of love. Dying is just something you do once, maybe twice if you're lucky; it's almost always an accident; afterward your mind-functionality isn't around to worry about how it went or what's left; and being scared of death is an understandable and perfectly natural human shortcoming, like being afraid of the dark. Such fears are not admirable. How hard is that to understand?

Those who delude themselves so as not to be scared anymore are free to point out that their 'solution' works, if not robustly, but they should at least have the sense not to be proud - certainly not to call such delusion 'philosophy.'

How to tell a story.

'There are times when I spend the whole night thinking about things like, "God, my feet hurt," or "I gotta pay the rent," or "Why can't I get my guitar in tune; it doesn't sound quite right" - I never get past the trivial little bullshit, so I never see the audience, I never see anybody in the band, I'm just locked up in a little private hell - heh, really, man. But sometimes on those nights people will come up to me and say, "God, that was the most incredible music you guys have ever played; it sounded -" And I just go, "What?" I listen to a tape and it sounds amazing and I say, "I don't remember that; I didn't play that," and it's those moments that I realize that my conscious will, the me I know of as the day-to-day me, is just really not very involved in this whole thing in a way that can interfere with it substantially or cause it. It's something that occurs in a mediumistic way, something involuntary. I trust it because I know it's not me. If it was me, I wouldn't trust it because I couldn't dig it; I know myself too well.'

--Jerry Garcia, 1979

Miracles happen, are boring, mean nothing, are alright.

In a significant step toward an AIDS vaccine, U.S. government scientists have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.

Looking closely at the strongest antibody, they have detailed exactly what part of the virus it targets and how it attacks that site.

The antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally. Researchers screened 25 million of his cells to find 12 that produced the antibodies. Now the trick will be for scientists to develop a vaccine or other methods to make anyone's body produce them.

A few moments for several varieties of DNA, including the English one, and my personal bugbear, the fictionality of scale.

Things are interesting if you're interested in them. Think of DNA: we fixate on the fact that by some biological miracle the cells of the human body 'constitute a human being,' the information in DNA passing down through generations like a secret cipher, yet DNA replication is pure accident. The nontelic character of biological processes is probably the central fact in all the life sciences, but in high school we're taught about DNA as a means to an extremely narrowly-defined end at a specific scale, i.e. 'DNA carries genetic info.'

But that's like saying that the purpose of human interaction is to spread bacteria. These are 'side effects,' which is to say effects at a scale we needn't pay attention to - and our focus on them is misguided and harmful in the long run.

Why does DNA replicate? Molecules wanna bind'n'bond. Electrons wanna transfer. In more general terms, (chemical) gradients tend to resolve and balance continuously unless channeled or otherwise interfered with. The machinery doesn't serve the machinist, it just carries on.

From another angle: the fact that information persists under some transformation doesn't have anything to do with information as such - i.e. the 'replicator' function isn't purposeful. Information-preserving transformations and procedures exist independent of any conception of 'information' - which after all is an interpretation of the arrangement of certain elements. RNA 'replication' isn't the act of preserving info content during duplication - it's a process, happily puttering along for much more basic reasons, which happens to preserve what we think of as information. 'Preserving information' is absolutely not the goal of any of the many processes that constitute nucleic acid replication. The miracle of the genetic code (its mere existence!) isn't a miracle at all, it's happenstance.

I belabor that point in order to set up this one, no doubt familiar to readers of this weblog. Ever heard this verse proverb?

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
All for the want of a nail.

Its purpose is usually to get us to pay attention to small things - but its power comes from the oddity of a tiny event producing a huge effect. We like it when bold gestures yield big results - ask every Nice Guy who ever got angry at a Pretty Girl for not falling instantly in love with him over the mixtape he slaaaaaaved over. Similarly, it's uncomfortable to see our little doings reflected on a big stage. ('C'mon, she didn't mean anything to me. It was one kiss. I didn't tell her I love her or anything. You're my wife. You know I love you. And how'd you find out about it, anyway...?') Each revealed secret represents an unexpected/unwanted frameshift just as psychically demanding as grokking that buying decisions in the U.S. can affect military policy in China - or acclimating yourself to the width of the world when all you've known is the womb.

Discontinuities of scale are hard to take - so we work as hard as we can to avoid them. When they happen under controlled circumstances, we do what comes naturally: laugh.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually, of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

'It's just life,' they say.

--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

For a 5th grade school assignment I once had to tell a story (from memory) in front of the class. I told that one, substituting something one of them had just said for Arthur's 'I seem to having trouble...' None of my classmates had any idea what to make of it; the teacher was visibly confused and disgusted. I loved learning but mostly hated school - not that the one had too much to do with the other.

'Scale' is a filter or attenuation of engagement. The human mind is very effective at restricting its scale of activity, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that this is a premature optimization, and in many domains works against us. Here's one: perhaps you think that because the result of writing is a piece of text, the act of writing must centrally concern the production of written text; or in another domain entirely, perhaps you think 'the cause' of the BP oil spill was a specific mishap or chain or mishaps on the Deepwater Horizon itself, and that the event doesn't reflect in any way on fossil-fuel dependency in general...

'The miracle of life' is a name we give to how hard it is to live with pure dumb fucking luck. Adams again: 'The awe [evolutionary biology] inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.'

The first thing to understand is that freedom and independence are not the same thing - are quite nearly opposites, in fact - and after we've meditated under a tree for a few years and gotten that one down we can move on to the other stuff. In the meantime, carry on. (You will anyway, I bet.)

Gulf coast lullaby.

The nature of the event is coterminous with its visible manifestation: when a corporate oil well goes wrong the full extent of our response should involve punishing the corporation and fixing the well, and our inquiry into this industrial disaster need only consider its industrial nature.

The event can't possibly reveal or reflect a different scale of behaviour, practice, or phenomenon; that's what it means to 'keep your eye on the ball' (or 'eye on the prize,' if you like). The reason people have such a hard time understanding the extremely basic notion of emergent dynamics/phenomena is that there's no such thing as emergent behaviour.

The leak can be fixed, will be fixed, and that'll be the end of it. Catastrophe is a category of event that is by definition unconnected to the field from which it emerges everything else.

Don't say 'good and bad,' say 'good but bad' and don't make trouble.

I don't understand this phrase about chickens coming home to roost. What does anything have anything to do with chickens. I don't understand it. Just can't. I feel left out. Why do I feel so left out.

[Just so's we're clear, here: Irony Alert.]

When you feel like scaring and depressing yourself all at once...

...you want Wikipedia's 'Level of support for evolution' page. Start with this dispiriting graphic, if you like, then try to imagine a U.S.A. in which people actually received basic education about science, and were not forbidden by abusive church fathers from experiencing the joy of honest recognition of their place in the universe. Just you try it.

RIP Martin Gardner.

He helped me find myself and everything else.

Make your way home safe, old man.

One piece of evidence for atheism, if you like, is that atheism is utterly boring.

'Rational' arguments about the existence of deities tend to descend rapidly from reviews of evidence (inconclusive!) to abstract debate-club maneuvering. There is not a shred of evidence or 'proof' that a single 'deity' has ever existed, and scientific descriptions/analyses of the known universe's workings increasingly provide plausible accounts of heretofore intractable 'theological' problems. You know the type: 'the eye is too complex to have emerged by accident,' with its implicit denigration of 'accident' as less satisfying than design. That sort of thing. (True, we don't know the answer to the question 'Why is there something instead of nothing?' But then we don't really have a stake in the answer anyhow. It'd be nice to know, perhaps. But we needn't by bothered by the possibility that the answer is unknowable.)

The question Do deities exist? is 'theological' only in the which-department-is-providing-my-sinecure? sense. The question is scientific - journalistic, if you like - while its side question (What if we can't ever know?) is a matter for one's therapist.

Over the last 100 years we've (finally) come to grips in a systematic way with the limitations, capacities, flexibility, mutable categories, and astonishing variety of human minds; I feel certain that, barring some ecological catastrophe, mainstream human society will one day concern itself with human predispositions toward totalizing systems of thought ('theism' is one such system) rather than the appealing fancies of religious rules systems themselves. (We'll also legalize LSD. Just you watch.) The rise of the boorishly self-satisfied 'New Atheists' coincides with a revolution in scientific understanding of 'religious experience,' and it seems clear to me that the best atheist argument going forward will be a neurological critique of various common fallacies of bias and belief.

The tendency to confuse 'complication' and 'sophistication' (or 'complexity') is a common problem in theological debate; witness the galaxy of hysterical bullshit surrounding 'transcendence' in every such discussion. As a recent example - and moving in the direction of this post's title - consider a recent essay from David B. Hart in the Christian publication First Things:

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

The purity of Hart's evasive question-begging is awesome to behold, but the substance of his article ('argument' isn't quite the right word) is without value. Here ya have it:

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

Hart's version of God is essentially a metaphysical category rather than a thing/action/state: He's a condition of possibility, the 'absolute plenitude of actuality...the infinite act of of being itself.' This isn't a 'theological' claim so much as a narrative device. God, in Hart's view, is a good-enough answer to the unanswerable bottom-level question (Why are things?) that lets us get on with our lives. God is a premise. That's His goddamn purpose. How nice for Hart - God exists to answer the question of what God is for. He's His own reason, and that's that.

God's the guy who doesn't have to explain Himself to anyfuckingbody.

That Hart doesn't even bother making a logical case here ('one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude...'!!) is hardly unexpected; if you insist upon logic in 'theological' discourse while clinging to a belief system whose central element (God) is defined as 'the illogical condition of possibility of all logic' - what a charming little sub-Gödelian fanwank we've got going here - then you've guaranteed argumentative 'victory' on your own terms, by definition.

A skeptical Occamite might ask whether the real reason God 'exists' is to provide acolytes with an escape route when anyone questions their morality - to comfort the afflicted conqueror and afflict the conquerable.

Hart's essay isn't particularly worthwhile as an argument about the world, because it's not meant to be - he only has to reaffirm his premises to 'convince' his First Things readers anyhow. The usual business: he naturally conflates Christianity and theism because he's a Christian (Eastern Orthodox) theist, trying to slide 'the death of God on the cross' into a discussion about 'materialism' and theism, and ploddingly follows a long line of theists in defining 'existence' in the sense of 'God exists' as distinct from physical embodiment ('God is' is distinct from 'beer is in my fridge'). He knows he can't prove deities exist, so he defines them as things that must exist - a kind of conceptual placeholder for What We Can't Otherwise Define or Describe.' This line of sub-reasoning is stultifying, and Hart recurs to it all the time. From his 'What happened to Terry Schiavo's "soul?"' article in the Wall Street Journal:

I doubt even the dogmatic materialists among us are wholly insensible to the (1) miraculous oddity that (2) in the midst of organic nature there exists a creature (3) so exorbitantly in excess of what material causality could possibly adumbrate, a (4) living mirror where all splendors gather, an animal who is (5) also a creative and interpretive being with a (6) longing for eternity. Whether one is willing to speak of a (7) "rational (8) soul" or not, there is obviously an (9) irreducible mystery here, one that (10) commands our reverence. [my numbers and emphasis --wa.]

This lazy, insipid posturing follows standard apologetic lines: hoary presumed nature/Man (or nature/Soul) dualism (2, 3, 5, 8); casual introduction of 'miracles' as a category of experience both beyond and incomparable to 'normal' experience (1); teenage-romance metaphor (4); use of 'belief' as justification for belief's content (6, implicitly 10); attempt to slide 'rationality' into wholly impressionistic/metaphorical discussion (7); willfully ignorant anti-scientific language (9, 3!).

The rest of the Journal article is the same sort of stuff - a set of reassuring (irritable?) gestures seeking to resemble an argument, or at least a polite scolding. The same elements and overall structure appear in the First Things piece; let's not waste any more time hashing out such things. Suffice it to say that some smart people consider this sort of thing worth writing or reading, and whether or not they're correct, their belief - in the related usefulness of theology and religious belief themselves - is of interest.

* * *

Damon Linker used to be Hart's editor at First Things, and is sympathetic to his recent performance. (Sample massively condescending sentence from an earlier Linker post: '[W]hat America needs now is not faithlessness. It is intelligent faith.') In the course of a recent post at The New Republic, entitled 'A New Kind of Atheism,' Linker gets in some fine digs at Richard Dawkins and the puerile ignoramus P.Z. Myers. All's well! But he gets bogged down, by essay's end, in the following high-toned banality:

Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious.

Shorter Damon Linker: Atheism is not just 'difficult' but scary, and therefore today's atheists have an obligation to participate in theists' fearful handwringing about 'atheist morality,' even if the dual premises of theist morality (deities and deity-debt) are themselves unjustifiable and/or nonsensical. There's an implicit belief here, too, that civilization is made possible not just by shared myth but by (as Hart puts it) 'the enigma of the Christian event [...] the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike.' Note, again, that in the view of Linker and Hart, the scariest thing about godless existence isn't its pointlessness (the nominal 'existential crisis') but rather how tough it's gonna be on our delicate constitutions (the actual lapsed-Christian existentialist tantrum).

From a certain perspective the ultimate horizon of 'humanity,' of human identity as such, is the need to believe in an ultimate organizing principle - an anthropocentrism that hijacks our overgrown neocortex to concoct self-justifications ranging from the baroque (Hart's 'transcendental' mishmash) to the simplistic (Jesus is God so fuck off). Animals don't need 'worldviews,' not because they can't see the world - neither can we! - but because they lack the capacity to pretend they do. When we talk about the 'childlike bliss' of, say, a drugged-up raver kid, we tend to imply some kind of subhumanity, equating the loss (or 'unproductive' reassignment) of logical faculties with a descent into 'primitive' existence. In our culture nothing is worse than having one's primitivism pointed out. (Hence the attraction of Hart's 'lightning bolt' - we'll never be scared of the dark again! What could be more civilized than that?)

This isn't too bad a definition of 'humanity,' actually: not just association with our rough biological equivalents but a private/shared desire for centrality; it makes sense that the only animal evincing the ability to signify would become preoccupied with the desire for significance. The 'humility' of monotheists is scaffolded by an absolute faith in their own cosmic importance, their protagonism. The narrativizing imagination does its thing, bada-bing bada-boom, and the most important works of literature in all history are centrally concerned with superbeings talking to humans and reassuring them they're (1) not alone, (2) 'in charge' of the earth, and (3) required to stay humble about it all, but not too humble, ya dig?

No one is less humble than the guy insisting he won the lottery of Creation and (alone) can apprehend the Blessing. The metaphysical premise ('God') balances out the literally monumental self-centeredness of a monotheistic imaginative stance.

Finally, to our titular claim.

Hart and Linker (correctly) identify, if only by implication, the comforts that theism offers each individual; Hart is also explicit about the social value of theism, i.e. of shared transcendentalist belief. Buddhists garnish their materialism with an astonishingly silly mystical backstory involving reincarnation and 'karma,' which provides spiritual justification for that bit of reasonable moral advice, 'Watch out.' Jesus's anti-institutional teachings were readily adapted for nation-building purposes once a bit of mystical side-story was introduced (Jesus the mythic creature supplementing and in time supplanting Jesus the enlightened teacher). Mohammed having weird thoughts in a cave would've been a laughingstock; Mohammed passing on angelic speech motored a world-shaking political revolution. Complex belief-structures spread most easily when bound to compelling narrative structures and iconic symbolism.

In short, gods have flash. Zeus threw thunderbolts; the Hebrew God parted the Red Sea; Jesus is coming back with trumpets and a bit of infantry warfare.

Atheism, on the other hand, is boring.

If you understand the 'death of God' not as a change in our universal circumstances but as each individual's abandonment of an incorrect belief, then the 'tragedy' of godlessness is revealed as a self-fulfilling prophecy which can be easily opted out of. What's left is what we begin with: a set of circumstances, some parameters of which are knowable, which must be acted upon without knowledge of our actions' full consequences - and an identity that's porous, mutable, formed from our associations with other beings, and bound to change in the fullness of time into something unforeseeable. Christianity's greatest promise (and most contemptible, cynical fraud) is foreknowledge of How It All Ends, but the purpose of (say) meditative materialist practice is to lift from us the desire for that knowledge, which we misperceive as need. Hart and Linker nicely illustrate this misperception, failing to distinguish between the metaphysics we want and the biosocial optimization we (presumably) need.

The fact that individual organisms have no purpose but what they perceive - i.e. none at all - is only distressing if one feels entitled to such a purpose. If we can find a way to agree that the question of life's 'purpose' is ill-posed, then we can stop discussing human behaviour in terms of fanciful motivations and metaphysics, and focus instead on plain ol' human social- and psycho-dynamics: distress, entitlement, conditioning, agreement, the almost uncontrollable narrativizing and generalizing and imaginative impulses which our shared beliefs and institutions serve to constrain and instrumentalize.

Some folks say that 'life' is just a way for the second law of thermodynamics to go more efficiently about its business; as Mike Russell gleefully puts it, 'The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.' More and more scientists seem to believe that life's origin - and implicitly its 'purpose,' its 'nature' - will be found not in molecular replicators' capacity for preservation (informational stasis?) but in metabolic pathway's heightened efficiency at transformation. Life doesn't need a reason for being, in other words - it's just one form that metabolic doing can take. Which is to say, perhaps, that while there's obviously such a thing as 'life,' the main reason the category is more interesting than non-life is that we happen to belong to it.

Does the notion that (to the extent that 'purpose' at the thermodynamic level has any meaning) we exist to help our geosystem blow off steam upset you? It's entirely possible that the interplay of natural selection and far-from-equilibrium self-organization can explain the 'miraculous' complexity of the human eye - and it's just a short step from the eye to the tricky abstraction of the 'rational soul.' What's lost in the transition from (say) Christian mythology/cosmology to The Purposelessness-Driven Life, in terms of use-value? Only certainty. If you treat moral questions not as a matter of 'getting things right' in the eyes of some cosmic referee but rather as a kind of optimization problem, it's not hard to start from 'minimize suffering to maximize human sustainability' as an uncontroversial moral imperative and get to a robust moral code. (Surely it requires no more tortuous logic than, say, 'the invasion of Iraq is arguably a "just war" under international law.')

The idea that atheism must be 'tragic' in order to be authentic is nothing more than dead-enders' resentful carping. Atheist morality is not comparative; it doesn't have to supplement theist morality, and where they're forced to coexist, a sustainable belief system must be able to incorporate the fact that not everyone participates in it.

Unsurprisingly, Hart has a coward's contempt for this view:

One does not have to believe any of it, of course — the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

What Hart is demanding, here, is that atheist morality participate in the same system of satisfaction, the same comfort game, as the Christian literary/moral experience - more specifically, his own idiosyncratic and highly academic version of that belief system. This is stupid and myopic of course. Hart's 'image of the God-man' is no more 'morally novel' than the martyrdom of any other political-spiritual revolutionary, except insofar as men like Hart have encrusted it with an inconsistent, invented extraterrestrial mythology. Indeed, what makes the death of Jesus of Nazareth 'morally novel' is the stories we've told one another about it, which is precisely the point being made even by the barbaric New Atheists.

(And that's the real crime, here. What's awful about the New Atheism is precisely that it's barbaric, that it makes light of the hermeticism and sophistry which are central to Hart's view of the world. The best-known mouthpieces for the New Atheism are indeed self-satisfied contemptuous assholes, but the whole idea that moral 'novelty' and 'spiritual pathos' must be part of any 'appropriate' moral system is richly deserving of contempt. The real novelty, mythologically speaking, is found in a worldview that accepts that our wholly accidental existence need not be exciting or pathetic or (c'mon) novel to be dear to us, and which endeavours to find value in the joyful cocreation of new shared circumstance. Hart's morality permits him to extort a very specific emotional state from you under penalty of 'unseriousness.' That extortion is justified by a tiny little lie: Jesus was God, whatever that means.)

(A moral code built on lies is flawed, and those who seek profit by lying deserve contempt.)

If Jesus was just a man - even wise! - then there's nothing stopping us seeing the moral grandeur of his crucifixion in, say, Hamlet or Martin Luther King or a mother bear dying while protecting her cubs. And if you can kick your addiction to the notion of 'evil' - which pretty much washes the notion of 'good' out with it, though it does leave 'better' behind, thank heavens - then 'moral grandeur' starts to look an awful lot like courage plus publicity.

* * *

All of this might be moot, though. Hart's essay is simultaneously, or rather interchangeably, about atheism itself and the anti-religious feelings it so often travels with. I seem to have made the same mistake here. Yet atheism is boring partly because in an atheist universe pretty much everything is a tiny little stochastic 'miracle' - everything, that is, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Unitarian Church. Hart seems to strongly believe that the place of churches, and specifically the various Christian sects, must be filled by something but can't be filled by 'atheism'; but before making this interesting view explicit, he keeps rotating it into the silly, trivially incorrect claim that the 'truth' of the Christian mystery is irreplaceable. There's presumably some implied historical argument there - Jesus's martyrdom and (sigh) Resurrection as the organizing metaphor for Western political life and institutions - but Hart can't explicitly render it without falling back into more silliness about Jesus Christ, half-human incarnation of the condition of cosmological possibility.

So we're left with an attack on 'New Atheism' for being insufficiently attentive to the putative value of religious belief as such - a literary criticism when you get right down to it - floating atop a loosely-implied argument about the importance of religious institutions, which itself assumes not only the 'moral' but the cosmological truth of some Christian belief. And so it doesn't matter that the Passion is an important work of literature and moral teaching; it doesn't matter that the best-known so-called 'New Atheists' are for the most part lazy in their anti-religionism; it sure doesn't matter that Hart's trippy God-is-the-unknowable-end-of-every-regress argument (which doesn't originate with him of course) is actually a lovely bit of creative abstraction. Hart waves his hands at a circular argument that can pretend for tactical reasons to be about one or another thing depending on who's engaging with it.

And yet...there's even an argument to be made that you can't believe in money without believing in God (in His role as solution to every imaginative/categorial regress), because God's role is to provide a universal answer to the question 'Why should I trust you?' The character of God obviously exists, variously performed. Deities are as real as Hamlet; if Richard Dawkins spent his time lecturing about arguments for the (non)existence of Hamlet he'd be laughed back into his Fortean hidey-hole, for better or worse. Hamlet does something for us; so does God. (I'm less sure about David Hart.) Hart says atheism - and atheists! - can't provide something that's essential to Christianity, and that's trivially true, but the rest of his essay looks an awful lot like a set of gestures in the direction of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. And the strong claim at the heart of atheism, in my mind, is that the whole idea of man being 'meant' to know anything at all is just a fun story.

There's nothing 'tragic' about atheism because outside a pretty narrow ontological realm 'tragedy' isn't a meaningful category. Atheism doesn't provide the comforts of Christianity or the Christian story, but a life lived honestly, by some atheist definition, simply doesn't cause the existential discomfort that Hart desperately wishes for us all to feel. That discomfort is essential to his faith and irrelevant to mine, which is to say all this bother about deities is mostly willful ignorance about minds, and as I'm obviously happy to share half-baked first drafts of this sort of thing with you, dear Reader(s), there you have it, and have at it.

GOD DAMN YOU CRAVEN IRRESPONSIBLE FUCKING BASTARDS.

I hate our Congress. I wish these adolescent narcissists, these preening moralizing hypocritical reactionary morons, these cowardly little pipsqueaks, would get swallowed up by a hole in the motherfucking earth.

I can even think of one in particular. Neighborhood of the Gulf Coast, as it happens.

SON OF A BITCH. Wrong on sex, wrong on tech, wrong on work, wrong on science, wrong on every goddamn motherfucking imaginable thing. Both sides of the aisle, same side of the coin. These useless godforsaken monkeys.

Burn these fuckers down and start over.

Self-organization and natural selection.

If, as the poets say, each thing is every thing, then no matter where you feel like going, someone has already gotten there first - but if you're feeling waggish you're more than welcome to believe that it was (in any case) you. True freedom is trivial by definition:

I like to compare evolution to weaving of a great tapestry. The strong unyielding warp of this tapestry is formed by the essential nature of elementary non- living matter, and the way in which this matter has been brought together in the evolution of our planet. In building this warp the second law of thermodynamics has played a predominant role. The multicolored woof which forms the detail of the tapestry I like to think of a having been woven onto the warp principally by mutation and natural selection. While the warp establishes the dimensions and supports the whole, it is the woof that most intrigues the aesthetic sense of the student of organic evolution, showing as it does the beauty and variety of fitness of organisms to their environment. But why should we pay so little attention to the warp, which is after all a basic part of the whole structure? Perhaps the analogy would be more complete if something were introduced that is occasionally seen in textiles – the active participation of the warp in the pattern itself. Only then, I think, does one grasp the full significance of the analogy.

--Harold Blum

Good day, honey(s).

Smoo.

Already a thumbsucker!

Did anyone else subscribe to OMNI?

This brings back memories. As a kid in elementary school I used to buy Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (at either Kroger's or Randall's), but my big geek thrill was my monthly subscription to OMNI, in which I first read Harlan Ellison and caught glimpses of a pornographically lush pulp-sci future. "By 2000, Sweden will have a largely automated robot society." Maybe my mind is broken but that sounds both totally awesome and correct in every meaningful sense.

I sometimes think I got the wrong degree.

See, because this sort of thing is all I wanna think about lately:

If processes underlying life are explained as a tendency towards maximum entropy production, systems such as galaxies and hurricanes might be described as alive.

[Whitfield J (2007) Survival of the likeliest? PLoS Biol 5(5): e142.]

Here's a pile of papers on the philosophy of biology. Have at it.

How to write (semi)popular science.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Origin of Life at a submarine alkaline seepage. A page-turner. (Layman's version.)

I just wanna use the phrase 'Paulie Walnuts Exclusion Principle.'

You betcha!

How to talk to a climate skeptic.

From here(!) I got here(!!) and it's a hell of a resource.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald (2007).

[Update, a few weeks removed: I find myself longing for the sheer carnality and ecstatic polychromatic perversity of Brasyl's Brazil(s). This review doesn't give the book enough credit for its powerful atmosphere, which may be a little touristy or cinematic (vs. historical/realistic) but goddamn was it nice to dwell in that world for a while.]

I was swept up by Brasyl and took just a couple of sittings to read its 'cinematic' second half, in which McDonald's tripartite somewhat-cyberpunk narrative begins to pick up speed and answer questions. I recommend it, and if that's all you need then go get 'em, tiger.

[Spoilers follow.]

But this I confess: I never did manage to put aside the frustrations that crept in during the opening chapters. The science in the fiction is a little rickety, and 'quantum' is used as 'magic' might be in epic fantasy; that's par for the course, I suppose, but as the book builds to its grand climax(es) you'll find yourself peering into some worrisome plot holes. You (and McDonald) can get by on atmosphere and energy for most of the book, but it's hard to escape the feeling of anticlimax that settles in during the final 2033 section, when it becomes apparent that the book's great ontological revelation slips by almost unremarked, rendering the final 1733 segment (the book's most action-packed) almost...unnecessary. The multiverse has ended? We're a simulation cooked up by the will-to-live of embodied information? A plucky band of heroes has learned how to escape the Matrix and fight the Agents (excuse me, admonitories) with ninja skills? The outcome of the final battle doesn't particularly matter, since its key metaplot function is to show that the hero has learned how to travel between universes, which revelation occurs off the page? Well, so what: on with the cinematics.

The characters, meanwhile, are mired in type and trope: one Japanese scientist is referred to more often by her 'manga eyes' and dye-bright hair than any other feature or quality, while the castrating career-bitch Marcelina of course falls into syrupy love for her secret lover, realizing it (of course) at the last moment before entering Cosmic Warfare, and of course she's a self-proclaimed 'superhero' with capoeira skills worthy of The Matrix (Brazil Edition) (not an idle comparison, that). Plus her job and circle of friends ('alt dot family,' sigh) come off as unsuccessful attempts at satire, pointed as a TiVo recording of last week's sitcoms.

Never mind that Luis Quinn, the book's clearest authorial fantasy figure, seems to have emerged from The Name of the Rose, stopped off at a showing of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, and then, on his sea voyage to Brazil, picked up some infodumping and unbearably-tacky-'cute'-anachronism tips from Neal Stephenson and every steampunk poseur ever born. McDonald's attempts at humanizing and psychologizing Quinn (the metal-tankard story) seem hamfisted, as does the sub-Aubrey/Maturin friendship between Quinn and the less detailed Falcon.

McDonald's canny choice of Evocative Central Cultural Event - Brazil's loss in the 1950 World Cup final - makes for a fine point of narrative departure, but its role in his tale of quantum-historical divergence smacks of nation-scale psychobiography; nor is it the book's only such feature. How very Great White Male of him, if you like that whole critical-paradigmatic thing. And the fact that the book ends up being about multiverse-spanning conspiracies of comic book heroes and villains, some of whom happen to be Brazilian, doesn't actually ironize the book's closing epigraph (de Gaulle: 'Brazil is not a serious country') as McDonald presumably intends. All of which makes the unevenness of Brasyl's modern-day narrative thread difficult to take.

Then you've got the book's sometimes-overheated prose, weird lapses of taste (a bisexual transvestite hero does not make the book's depiction of sex, particularly women's sexuality, any less tacky), and as-depicted-in-the-movies imagery. It'd be easier to ignore the innumerable resonances between Brasyl and Philip Pullman's equally fast-moving but more self-consciously literary His Dark Materials trilogy if McDonald's main creepytech prop weren't a subtle knife capable of cutting holes in the fabric of the universe.

Yet I was totally involved in the book: snowed under by its sheer velocity, McDonald's obvious love of his various Brazilian settings and figures, its alt-urbanity contrasting nicely with the neo-Tokyo variations beloved of near-future writers. Its shortcomings bugged me, but I found myself wondering despite myself, What happens next? And McDonald keeps delivering the goods, sentences swooping this way and that, moving between scenes with a dancer's dexterity, liberally salting the whole mix with Brazilian slang and just-this-side-of-hip technofetishism. (It helps that the book's topical and cultural concerns are wired directly to my pleasure center, too.)

It took me a while to get through Brasyl, but that's not the book's fault, or not entirely. I kept getting distracted by boring stuff: work, family, pregnancy (not mine, strictly speaking), trips to the library to read about the science that McDonald was obviously not quite doing justice to. Life stuff, in other words; nothing as ecstatically garish and exotic as his titular southern wonderland. What a shame.

And yet I enjoyed the book - and I can't separate the pleasure it gave me from my complaints about its shortcomings. That they didn't ruin the book for me is perhaps McDonald's neatest trick, and I'd like to see him do it again. River of Gods is on the to-read list (as Brasyl should be on yours), but it is very definitely not next. How's that for a recommendation, Reader(s)?

Schemata.

Diagrammatic maps, class hierarchies, multiplication tables, vector fields, interpretive schemes, occult taxonomies, historical timelines, the Order of Battle, the Ladder of Creation, the Phish setlist file, the rules of Nomic, a summary of Gödel Escher Bach, the fearful symmetry of LISP code: the appearance of complexity and reassurance of its digestibility are drugs to me. I've lived wholly in abstraction for so long, and am narcotized by infographics and categorization schemes. (Multiplication tables and equation sheets give me tingles.) Hence the blush of Pynchon/Joyce love, Coltrane, Discordia, self-taught calculus as dream-cartography...schemata keep life orderly - i.e. not life. I'm learning.

Evolution.

Knowing and accepting are different. No gorilla 'rose up' to become human; homo sapiens isn't the 'end product' of anything. Many people 'know' humans evolved from lower primates, but what does that really mean? Undirected, nontelic, ongoing process; essential interspecies commonality; pure existential contingency. You're an accident, not even a 'you,' and your species doesn't 'deserve' to consume every imaginable natural resource. If natural selection produces only local optimizations and human consciousness is a biological phenomenon, then our relentless anthropocentrism is sinful, if anything is. Evolution should scare you a little. It undercuts exceptionalism, not dignity. That's no small thing.

Drugs.

I had opinions about drugs long before I ever tried any. (Same with Sarah Vaughan.) Now I see psychedelia as pedagogy and 'altered consciousness' as a category error; pity I didn't feel this way when I was going solo to mid-90's Phish festivals. The drug war is vicious stupidity but 'neuroexcellence' drugs like Adderall predict nightmares under legalization too. Still, weed should be in coffee shops, however stupid stoners always seem; not that I'll let my kids touch the stuff. (I am vast; I constrain multitudes.) Better a gateway than a wall, though. Brains are worlds; enjoy (and optimize) yours.

Bicameral minds? Julian Jaynes? Somebody, anybody?

OK, god damn it. Can someone help me out here?

[Update. OK, so folks now claim that a kind of 'protoconsciousness,' a sense of self, a protolanguage, is found in apes and whales? Not just communication-by-direct-reference, not just externally-aided proprioception, but abstract self-consciousness? That's the objection? Well, I guess I have to keep reading then.]

Julian Jaynes's 'bicameral mind' theory, in weak form, boils down in part to '"consciousness" properly understood is linguistic in nature, did not exist prior to the monotheistic era, and .' Jaynes begins from a literal, though (it is argued) too-selective, reading of ancient writings from several cultures, and interprets 'the gods' in their ancient forms as auditory hallucinations which now persist only in diminished, no longer socially sanctioned form: e.g. in schizophrenics, though recent studies show that far more people experience such hallucinations than was previously thought. (I've certainly hallucinated my mother's voice a few times since she died.)

If Jaynes's theory is 'self-evidently crazy' as all respectable types insist, why is it so? Is there a strong historical argument against his chronological claims and his reading of ancient myths? All I've found online (without access to academic journals, in which his book seems to have been largely dismissed anyhow) is 'Jaynes reads ancient poetry too selectively' and 'this is implausible.' I'm interested in one objection (noted here) about the reliability and incompleteness of ancient accounts of religious idolatry, but that's just one objection to one part of his (wide-ranging) theory. Meanwhile, I'm ambivalent about Jaynes's hand-wavy claim that seemingly 'post-bicameral' renderings of human activity, identity, and mentation in ancient writing are in fact recent interpolations or conceptual retrofitting via translation. (cf. The entire history of the damn Bible for every New Atheist's favourite version of this phenomenon.)

What I haven't found is a brain-scientific argument that Jaynes's 'bicameral' model is impossible. If 'consciousness' evolved at all then we should be able to cook up a provisional chronology of that evolution - so if Jaynes is not only 'out in left field' but provably wrong about the evolution of the human mind, can someone point me toward a more reliable model of the history of consciousness, supported by a stronger body of evidence drawn from an equally wide range of sources? If Jaynes's model of cognitive evolution is flawed, if he's too foggy on the process by which the bicameral mind supposedly was 'selected out,' then where can I find a similarly rigorously-materialist explanation for the development of consciousness? Would 500 years be enough for social selection pressures to produce a new shared 'mindset'? 300 years? Is my entire brain backwards on this one?

Believe me, I'm not invested in Jaynes's theory, except that it's eerily gorgeous and people's insistence on its obvious craziness sparks self-righteously contrarian feelings in me.

[And yes, this theory reminds me of Harold Bloom's goofy 'Shakespeare invented the modern personality' talk. Only the weak form of Bloom's theory - which is really a (psychedelic!) history of representation, not 'brains' as such - seems relatively unobjectionable. Hell, on a dark foggy night I can see the ghost-image of Bloom's theory inside Auerbach's Mimesis...]

That is all. Help?

Complexity.

Complexity is multiplicative connection; complication is additive succession. Complication reduces to linear growth - resolving plots one-by-one, isolating subproblems, etc. So the 'right answer' ends a complicated problem. 'Correctness' can only deepen the meaning of real complexity. Lost and Harry Potter are complicated, Deadwood and Riddley Walker complex. Pynchon, The Wire, human beings: both. Complication and profundity are unrelated, but digital kids increasingly think so, seemingly. Everything bad's still bad though. Meditating joyfully on paradox is one of art's complex functions; and religion's. My occasional opacity is failed complexity (i.e. skill-lack); I wanna be joyful, meditative, complex. Religious, even (sorta).

An addendum re: psychedelic music.

American 'Psychedelic music' is mostly bullshit. It's important to specify this. When folks blab about 'abstract psychedelia' they usually just mean open-ended improvisation including one or several boring stylistic markers: drones, circular rhythms, spacey atmospherics. The idea is to 'simulate' alternate consciousness. Seriously. In the Pro Tools era 'psychedelia' has begun to mean something else, something a little more mechanistic, brainwise, and that's probably a good thing - for precision's sake if nothing else. Even if it means putting up with the vacuity of techno, every variety of insipid dance-electronica, the death of through-composed melodic pop, etc. Still, my most frequent buzz is Phish's improvisation, which doesn't 'possess psychedelic qualities' so much as put me in a particular mood and mode of thinking quite distinct from my usual mindset(s). Their free improvisations achieve ecstatic release via repetitive patterning, subtle variation, destabilizing tonal alteration, and lucid melodic narrative - it's not supposed to 'sound like' drugs but that's what the kids keep saying. And the stuff does get me there. Still, to the extent that 'psychedelic' has any value as a musical marker, it describes not stylistic traits but a continuity of intention and attention. Half offering, half interpretation.

Psychedelia.

...meaning 'alternate consciousness' of a sort. I wrote in my notebook the other day: modern music is ancient medicine. Engineers can see mind-alteration as cognitive stress-testing - training the network - and that view appeals to me, as does connection to a methodical, materialist 'spiritual' tradition. We Catholics value sensuous ritual, but always under priestly supervision; psychedelic traditions offer DIY multisensory cog-remapping. Seeing Phish concerts, the 'runner's high,' vipassana meditation, and hypnagogic dreams as part of a continuum - along with all else - has helped me value each in turn. Not that I exercise. But I think about it.

The word 'bioluminescent'...

...does not need goddamn scare quotes, you illiterate schmuck.

Worst part of Avatar?

The worst thing about Avatar [mild spoilers follow!] is that such a powerfully, unexpectedly anti-anthrocentric and anti-egotistical movie - such an attentively biological one - cops out so dramatically in its final act by sliding into inevitable action-blockbuster Chosen One territory. Some of the dialogue is bad but you kind of don't mind in the end; talk is only one very small part of the film, after all. (It's not The Matrix, a very talky action film burdened with several dreadful expository passages despite its abundant dark wit and shining intelligence.)

In my personal version of Avatar, see, Jake simply disappears among the Na'vi, into the macro-neural network of Pandora, and the events of the third act play out without any kind of heroic focus at all - an eco-disaster film in reverse, with the audience cheering for Nature to wipe out the goddamn army. (Or better yet: something more complex than a fight. A plan, maybe?) At the moment I don't even care that the visual effects in Avatar are not just miles but light years beyond anything that's ever appeared on screen. I walked out of the theatre to see trees on the avenue lit up for Christmas, like this -

- and I flashed back immediately to the film's unbearably beautiful Tree of Souls. As animals go, homo sapiens is a decidedly mixed bag. I turned away to look at the Boston Common, that world-famous bit of 'nature' neatly trimmed and packaged and bound up amid the concrete cages, and I couldn't help thinking that the best thing about Avatar - which you should see, by the way - is that it dares to ask whether a species capable of producing 3D movies but incapable of admitting its essential kinship with its biological cousins deserves to survive. I can't answer the question; 'deserve' seems like the wrong frame word. But I like how uncomfortable it makes me to ask.

Global warming. Climate change.

[A friend asked where I stood on the matter of 'global warming,' noting the rhetorical shift toward talk of 'climate change' and (implicitly) chalking up that shift to the fact that we don't see a year-to-year average temperature increase. It turned ]

There's incontrovertible evidence that average global temperatures are rising and that human (let's say i.e. 'nonnatural') activity is responsible for the sharpness of this increase, natural cycles notwithstanding. (See below for 'rising' though.) We obviously have an incredibly destructive effect on our environment overall - our willingness to live in cities with unbreathable air is a sign of our stupid, heedless, parasitic behaviour. Well, 'that's life' I suppose.

Here's a dramatic image to illustrate this post.

I don't much care about Al Gore or gotcha games; if he misrepresents hard science that doesn't change the science. As for the East Anglia controversy, the emails themselves didn't indicate any kind of conspiracy, but even if they're offensive (which some of them are) they don't indicate any shortcomings in the science of climate change at all.

As for 'climate change' vs 'global warming,' the earth is a chaotically complex system composed of chaotically complex systems, and anecdotes about local oscillations in temperature don't change the more basic fact that human industry can be said to push this macrosystem further and further from safe equilibrium (equilibria, really) - i.e. we're making the world vastly more dangerous and we fucking should not be. Since private individuals can't be counted on to do anything serious about this - just as they can't be counted on to do anything at all about poverty they can't see, or hunger they don't experience themselves, or racism that benefits them - it falls to institutions to impose behavioural constraints in order to stabilize some parameters of System Earth (so to speak).

'Global warming skeptics' ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION have no 'take' on the scientific 'issues.' My guess is that 99.999% of people commenting on the East Anglia business have no idea what the 'relevant science' is, and couldn't begin even to characterize the very general mathematics behind climate models in imprecise terms. The stolen emails reveal the familiar frustration of scientists dealing with ignorant 'skeptics' whose questions aren't actually meant to improve the science, only to interfere with it.

(The same dynamic is visible with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans - who recently admitted that their proposed amendments to the health care bill(s) have nothing to do with improving the bills but are intended simply to slow the process. Why? Because these big bills almost always die slowly through procedural means, and the GOP Senators have no alternatives to the Dems' plan other than tax cuts for business.)

Human civilization is built on lies, as it must be I suppose, and the environmentalist movement (along with its spinoffs and successors and parallel movements) can't help but remind people that the biggest lie of all is the specialness not only of individual humans but of humanness. The projected effects of global warming - e.g. rising sea levels - will disproportionately affect those not directly responsible for anthropogenic climate change, e.g. Marshall Islanders whose homeworld will simply disappear when the seas rise. We're disproportionately responsible for CO2 emissions, and we're (naturally) defensive about being called out on this. Climate change denialism seems to stem from this defensiveness, linked in complex ways to luddism, eschatological terror, anti-elite parochialism, and rah-rah business cheerleading (which is in turn, I suspect, a form of reaching-out for comfort, not that this renders it any less upsetting).

The phrase 'climate change' isn't meant to cover up the 'incorrectness' of the term global warming. It's a better term. The climate is not the fucking temperature, as you well know - it's a system that reacts in complex ways to stimuli. We are changing those reactions. One of the effects of those changes is a rising global average temperature. If the ice caps melt, they will cool the oceans - it'd (or more melodramatically/realistically, 'it will') be easy to misunderstand that emergent behaviour as a form of 'global cooling.'

'Skeptics' want straight-line explanations. Nothing about the physical world actually goes in a straight line, ever, under any circumstances. The amount of abstraction necessary to produce linear change necessitates huge information loss - i.e. if I tell you my bank account increased $10K this year, and $10K last year, and $10K the year before, but will only increase $3K next year, you might imagine that's some dramatic change - but such a belief requires that you filter out any possibility of drama over the last few years. The year-over-year change says nothing about the content of my life day-to-day - indeed it's easy to produce a graph in which three $10K increases year-over-year are primarily functions of measurement frequency, and a $3K increase better characterizes my typical year!

Well, 'the science' is what it is:

The finding that the climate has warmed in recent decades and that this warming is likely attributable to human influence has been endorsed by every national science academy that has issued a statement on climate change, including the science academies of all of the major industrialized countries[22]. With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007[23], no remaining scientific society is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.[24] (via)

One specific example to counter one strain of skepticism:

Studies of ice cores show that carbon dioxide levels rise and fall with or after (as much as 1000 years) temperature variations.[53] This argument assumes that current climate change can be expected to be similar to past climate change. While it is generally agreed that variations before the industrial age are mostly timed by astronomical forcing,[54] the current variations, of whatever size, are claimed to be timed by anthropogenic releases of CO2 (thus returning the argument to the importance of human CO2 emissions). Analysis of carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2 shows that the recent observed CO2 increase cannot have come from the oceans, volcanoes, or the biosphere, and thus is not a response to rising temperatures as would be required if the same processes creating past lags were active now.[55]

And so forth, and so on.

* * *

OK, I'm getting pedantic and irritated (and each is reinforcing the other!).

To sum up: I believe that anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and I'm ashamed of my fellow humans' unwillingness to think seriously about the complex interrelationships between organisms, ecosystems, and the great globe. I don't think that the shift from 'global warming' to 'climate change' represents some kind of victory for so-called skeptics; indeed the shift increases terminological precision and in this case I'm all for that. I recognize that there's no real debate among scientists on the general question of whether humans have amplified and countered natural climate cycles, and have nothing but contempt for those who would turn that essential question into a matter of politics. I think that conservation efforts are vital, but the idea that individual conservation efforts can make a substantial difference in the face of rapacious corporate-industrial expansion is myopic and childish.

And I don't think any of this should be too strange to someone who connects as intimately to his natural environment as you do! Climate science deals with the world on a timescale that human beings literally can not imagine, but conservationists and hunter-naturalists see firsthand the complexity of natural systems, the stark impositions of the industrial world upon the organic; it's maddening to see political allegiance stand in the way of reasoned discussion about scientific principles/research/data, but I'm accustomed at this point to such madness.

Oh brave new world that has such absolute nonsense in it.

Of late: chemical bonds.

[From the thing I've been working on all summer.]

The Nature of Chemical Bonds (they’re just like love)

Most atoms want to form compounds: atomic combinations. The forces that bind atoms into compounds are called chemical bonds, and can take many forms. Chemical bonds are like love: sometimes they're about sharing something important to both of you (covalent bonds – shared electrons), or changing each other for the better (ionic bonds – exchanged electrons). With some love-bonds, it's the amount of electricity flowing all around you that keeps you together (metallic bonds – crystals trapped by a sea of electrons).

Sometimes the course of love has more to do with circumstances than what's between you; the same goes for molecules. There are chemical forces that aren’t bonds, and aren’t as strong as chemical bonds, but which do alter atomic behavior.

A molecule is the smallest group of atoms that can take part in a chemical reaction; it’s a tightly-bonded group of two or more atoms in a fixed ratio.* H2O, for instance, is the chemical formula for a molecule called "water." A billion oxygen atoms and two billion hydrogen atoms might constitute a quantity of water,** the substance, but the units are two-to-one clusters. The chemical formula indicates the ratio, not the molecule count.

[*] I won’t speculate on whether the "love" metaphor holds up for giant polyatomic molecules and ions.

[**] This is actually a miniscule amount of water. A decent-sized spoonful of Jell-O contains a million billion billion molecules of H2O. And yet, paradoxically, there's always room for Jell-O. It's a miracle, I guess.

Easy pieces.