Sale of the Century

The challenge of historicism post Hegel is not diagnosing ghosts for the metaphors by which they organized their lives or elaborating upon the tropes that kept them from seeing the plain truth before them, nor is it in diagnosing the dead's schizophrenia and condemning their certitude that phantoms were real. Explaining to one another that they were all infected and limned by the absurd "seven races of man" and exploring the narrative of such a belief is not frightening. No. What the anxiety of historicism is the awareness it commands of us that we ourselves are hooded by a metaphor we speak so often that we no longer hear it and the dire likelihood that many things we know to be obviously true, even clear states of physical being, are just as much phantasms as the "murderer's brow ridge."

Once we learn about Hegel's idea of history as an ineffable force, we're confronted with a paradox and a panic. The paradox is that, if history is determining and no person is ever free of history, then how was or is anyone ever able to come to the realization that history is a determining force? It would have to be the historical moment of Hegel that made it necessary and fitting for Hegelianism to occur, because there is no room for "genius" to be effective. The panic is that the student of history as much as the subjects of historical narratives is being controlled by the historical moment.

In the 1970's American intellectuals devised the notion of "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts." Around the same time, Michel Foucault wrote about the "episteme." Both are related, if not genealogically descended, from Hegelian historical determinism. In both cases, every generation or epoch of humanity organizes not merely what it knows, but what it can know along specific framing metaphors. It may be "father/family" that acts as a prefiguring metaphor in an age -- showing up in everything from discourse about the king/nation to church/flock to landlord/tenant to market regulations -- or it may be "inviolability of the body." Regardless, the who world of speakers and thinker is captured before it even emerges by a pattern of perception, processing and speaking. Political and economic power flows through these figures, but human knowledge itself moves only when "revolutions" occur in these frames.

We can reaffirm this anxiety, if we ever start to calm down or feel hopeful, by resorting to Marxism or remembering the painful lessons of Wittgenstein. According to the former, super-structure is only ever a reflection of base conditions. Marx never quite got around to writing a book about art, but the Marxists have hardly been able to shut up. Let's just say that what exists in language is not anything so coarse as Immanuel Goldstein's NewSpeak from 1984, nor is knowledge and artistic expression controlled by the capitalist directly, but what we can know and say and ask is at least engaged in a project of social and economic control. It gets that way coincidentally, and not because someone at Goldman-Sachs declares it, but ideas that spread do so because they are going through expensive media that is funded by investors, and "successful" persons are emulated, so individual, class-conscious, and free expression is at long odds.

Wittgenstein simply casts a doubt on the status of interrogation. He does not make knowledge less likely, but he points out so clearly that our words control our thoughts that he makes any honest person a skeptic about even asking questions.

No one wants to hear that he or she is a fool, and no one prospers by talking about the emperor's nakedness. However, I'm about to suggest that something "obvious" is actually artificial and mercantile.

I have dealt with being a religious intellectual for a long time. As I have gotten older, I have recognized that the dormitory conversation about "is too!" "is not!" in regard to God never grows up, because every year a new group comes into the dorm room. Therefore, I try not to get involved with naive arguments on the subject. People who argue their passions instead of their reason are impossible to reason with, so, since my religion forbids my slapping them, I really don't have much to say.

However, I was drawn on the subject too recently. I get annoyed by the "Stupid people are religious" line. I can have 20+ years of college education, and the other person can have a high school degree, but that person is much "smarter" and "knows" more because he (or she) does not believe in God. After all, he is following the course of Reason and Science. Only people who don't know anything believe in a "magic sky father."

What I said there caused enormous hurt. I said, "You bought your atheism from the store, and it was on sale, cheap." I pointed out that all of his argument was a script written for him and a discourse of power, that he had swallowed a cultural narrative that had been invented. He had not discovered it, had not bravely achieved courageous individualism against the repressive hoards, and he had not surmounted some vast intellectual height. He had gone along with a cliche.

That is what I'd like to discuss, perhaps in my next, since this is already long and has big words. Atheism is an invented concept. It is a cultural moment that has a history and functions in history. Like most of the poisonous metaphors that limit perception, it tells a lie about itself. Like most of the successful cultural adhesions of the last century, it serves capital.

Therapeutics and Cures

I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. Iam very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. -- Hamlet III i

Hamlet is a great play for grumbling. It has the best condemnations of life one could hope to find. Hamlet, the character, is a peevish young man, but Shakespeare was a middle aged man who had license to write a peevish young man. It's the perfect combination.

"You know, I just can't stand myself/ And it takes a whole lot of medicine/ For me to pretend that I'm somebody else," Randy Newman wrote, in "Guilty," and the song (on "Good Old Boys") hit a common vein for muddled up men. From guys in foam trucker hats to bicultural intellectuals with delivery marijuana in Manhattan to stifled men hurling insults and encomiums at ESPN, the sense of self-loathing may be the most common sense, the only commonsense, in the American man.

I suppose there are men who like themselves. I think I've met some who, standing in a flood light and a room of mirrors, puff their chests out and say, "That's what I'm talking about!" However, I'm not talking about the water bugs who can live on a soap bubble. If those men don't make up for their lack of self-loathing in outright hatred from everyone they know, then I, at least, will hold them odious.

We begin in fantasy. We start as princes to be, quarterbacks and inventors of indispensable goods that will benefit humanity. We dally in plans that give us joy because of their fundamental justice: every plan is an affirmation of our potential, our uniqueness, our power. We even put plans into action and make achievements. However, we are not the jet pilots, the commandos, the secret agents, the wizards and rock stars we knew we could be, if reality honored -- if reality only allowed us to enact our plans.

Sartre said that Hell is other people, and the adolescent's fantasies fail to take into account other people, except as objects. Young men's plans fail to take into account unfairness as a founding principle of society. Each individual relationship is as fair as the two persons make it, and there is goodness beyond description to be found, but lurking behind the immediate, always present beyond the personal, is a force like entropy -- a force of profit, of grasping, of protecting power and subjugating the masses, and this force asserts itself like a flood against the leaky boat of the personal and the social.

Thoughtful people talk about The Combine or The System or late capitalism (although we're really in a post-capitalist state, to my way of thinking, as capital has divorced itself entirely from commodity and produces rents without reference to any commodity exchange). The less thoughtful people talk about The Government or immigrants or nepotism or loss of traditional values. All of the young men who had their plans and put their plans into action and found themselves anxious at the end of every month, or deciding which bill to be late on, know that something isn't right. All of them know that they have failed, and they know, accurately I'd say, that they never really had a chance.

Anger turned inward is depression. Yeah, well, depression is also realism.

Some of the most capable, beautiful people I have known have been crippled by depression. It never mattered what they could do. It only mattered how far they failed themselves, and they had failed themselves pretty deeply.

It occurs to me at this date, far too late a date, that we are a strange, crazed people. We are trying to "treat" depression. We are not trying to treat the fact that inflation is occurring (all food products are shrinking and staying the same price -- as if there were only a few manufacturers and they colluded to raise prices by shrinking portions. . . but such a thing could never really happen, could it?) but not showing up in an inflation rate, that surplus labor has meant increasing profits and no increase in employment, that tax rates for the top go down, while the taxes on the bottom go up. . . but I'm only speaking of money, because money is bothering me, personally. We have no frontiers, no new societies for humans to forge their identities anew, so our old accumulations of cultural power have begun to rot and invite violence. We have turned our nation into the value system of the MBA, and the MBA's value system is anti-humanistic and anti-human (as well as irrational).

There is no cure for depression. There is no point in asking for this or that thing, this or that process of chemistry, to intervene. Depression is not, after all, abnormal. It is legitimate, and it comes from never becoming persons. It is despair, in the Kierkegaardian sense, but it carries with it its own ever-shifting demands. Unlike Kierkegaard's notion of despair, where one must live in the eternal present and engage the self in full awareness of the religious obligation, this is a compass with fixed legs: as the self gets more engaged, its expectation of what it requires to be fully alive moves farther along, and the gap is an acute sadness.

That, I suspect, is a prospect of living.

Advice for the Love Shorn

No. . . I spelled it right.

I have some experience with being the one left behind at the end of a love affair. The love lorn are, you know. . . lorn. "Lorn" is from Middle English, "leosan" (i.e. "lose"). It's the past participle, and you know it most often with its prepositional friend "for," as in "forlorn." Since the love lorn are those who are without love, that's everybody. The love shorn, though, are the ones who were not expecting anything, even though they should have been.

If you are a normal, functioning human being, then when your boy/girl friend (or wife/husband) says, "It's over" -- with or without the "I'm seeing someone else" (I rather think the people who don't announce the breakup until they're in the arms of someone else are cowards; they need that other person to be a shield or an insult that will make the breakup "stick," or they aren't going to break up until they know they can "do better" (even though, of course, they never will do better than YOU)), then you won't take it lying down. No: you'll pace back and forth, throw yourself at the wall and door, and then demand that she or he tell you WHY it's ending.

You poor sap.

Think about what you're asking for. You're asking for a set of reasons for an emotional state. Second, you're not going to listen to anything the other person says, because your question is corrupt. You don't want to know why he is dumping you. You don't want to know why she feels that things are working out. Even if your former lover were possessed of Orphic clarity, even if the beloved could say why love has gone, it wouldn't mean anything to you.

What you really want is a list of reasons why you would break up with you, why you would end the relationship. You're asking to be convinced to not love the other person in the same way that she doesn't love you.

She says you're taking her for granted. You say that you're not. She says that you show no affection, and you say that real love means not having to do that.

Parse this, or its inverse (you want all her time), and what you see is that she's saying, "I feel," and you're saying, "I think" or "That feeling isn't justified." The argument only confirms the premise (the real premise: "This relationship is over") because it's taking place. What's worse is that no one can beat another person into loving.

This isn't a very deep insight I'm offering, is it? It's obvious that no one can argue another person, much less threaten another person, into liking him or her. Nor is it possible to accept the kind of damage being dumped brings without protest. All in all, it doesn't help to know the fruitlessness of arguing. What the love shorn needs and wants is to be validated, to be worthy or worthier.

This really basic dynamic works on humans from their early to their late years. In fact, I know of an institution that, having been rejected, has resorted to argument. It's hard to sue the country club into making you a member; if you win, you won't want to go.

Þæs ofereode,
	þisses swa mæg.

With respect, of course.

The Well Tempered Clavicle

I had needed, I think, to say the things I said below, to throw the tiles of the mosaic out. The truth is that I have arrived at a position where I can take satisfaction that one life's work has been achieved, although its consummation has left me barren. Though I do not say it could have been otherwise even with effort and desire and luck, I have achieved the goal of ignominious anonymity. I have worked at not trying, worked harder at not getting, and can now, at the milestone of fifty, say that perhaps I made it, after all.

Before you reach for an air sickness bag, this is not about any talent I might have or lack. This is about the desires. I assume that hundreds with more genius and capacity have felt the same and achieved lack of note, and I do not doubt that some have even less capacity and genius than myself and feel the same call of the mild -- the unlined margin where there is no place to record a name.

"Occasionally...you meet a traveling Englishman who is, as it were, the incarnation of this talent (for boredom) -- a heavy, immovable animal, whose entire language exhausts its riches in a single word of one syllable, an interjection by which he signifies his deepest admiration and his supreme indifference, admiration and indifference having been neutralized in the unity of boredom. No other nation produces such miracles of nature..." -- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or ("The Rotation Method")

 There has been an innovation in theology of late. My reader may be familiar with the concept of total depravity. I stepped off the train right there, myself, even though we were between stations. (There was a service hut, but it had a sign over it saying, "Closed.") So, if we creatures are totally depraved by nature, then we need grace from God. Ok. The Catholics say that we need grace to get to a point where our free will operates and we, with God's help, will goodness. The Calvinists say that we can't do that, because we're just too depraved, and so God is at the helm all the way. (With me so far?) There's this bit of Paul where he talks about Christ and the spirit. The way I read it, Paul is trying to explain to the Romans how to understand eternal life when it's obvious that the bodies of Christians are easy to kill. He is speaking of metaphysics and explaining -- to my Classicist training -- essence. He is saying that our flesh, which is in existence and fallen, partakes of a sinful essence, but salvation rewrites that and gives us a new essence, a new "nature," and that is eternal and perfect. On the last judgment, we will be resurrected into bodies that reflect this new nature, too (it's the whole of Romans 7 and the earliest bit of Romans 8; if it reads like philosophy, then...).

Ok, back to the innovators. This line from Paul seems to mean, to many, that the conversion experience, which is mandatory (I could link to recent articles in internal publications, but I don't want to condemn or praise anyone), flushes the system of the believer. The believer gains the grace filled nature. At that point, grace is covering sins. Hence the bumper stickers that say, "Not perfect. Just forgiven." This is forgiveness as an ongoing condition, because it is bound in grace, and the new nature is like a new team jersey. What happens, as a practical matter, is that guilt, and especially contrition disappear. Because God forgives automatically, there is no real need for contrition. That scares me.

I have lived a life fitting invariably as unremarkably into a classic description of an under achiever, but I have extended that juvenile maladptation into a philosophy of life (the link I gave is really "blame the kid"). The under achiever does not try for fear of failing. The bright kid who won't study, because then the test will reflect his best and the best will be known, is an under achiever. They usually have a lack of support at home for their talents and a really serious fear of failure. I learned about this profile as a junior in high school, and it fit me to a T. That didn't stop anything, though.

I overcame the intellectual under achiever profile, but the heart of the matter still murmurs. Unlike some, guilt is a real presence for me. In fact, most of my emotions are variations on its motif. My desire for anonymity is not fear, but guilt. When I did overcome the fear of failing, and when I did finally see what I could do and be, I saw no reason to strive and every fault. If I could magnify myself through words or influence another through argument, then I would be responsible for a shadow cast on the landscape or an action taken. By what right should I presume?

Do not mistake this for humility, as I have tried to do in the past. This is flat out guilt. This is the guilt of ability and action. It is the guilt of harming another person. I already feel thick blankets of the stuff for what I say or fail to say to those who care for me, and finding that I give offense or add injury is too much. It is also the guilt of inability. There is a weighted door on most of us, as we have absurd, unjustified and unjustifiable demands placed on us by banks, merchants, advertisers, and the law. We can add to these nebulous forces particular injustices done to the poor -- the "overdraft protection" that is designed to harm the poor, the "buy here pay here" car lots that aim to repossess from the start, the banks that "write down losses" that are actually houses that people have been ejected from and that the bank will not sell or adjust a payment on. Either way, we fail. We fail our children, our parents, our peers, our employers.

Commercially, there is greater profit in indebted than solvent citizens, and so all businesses are seeking to ensure debt. There is more profit in unhappy people who buy out of body hatred, and so all forces seek to uphold irrational beauty. Nothing stands in the way of fear and guilt, and new accelerants come along every year.

Oh, and how's your life life, retirement planning, and hormone level?

Guilt is the wrapping of my life, the substance of my thought, and so it should be no wonder that my personal philosophy is to join the ranks of the invisible. I would love to be as unperceiving as unperceived, as painless as harmless, but that's too much to ask, and I feel bad for asking for such favors. Why do I have a good novel that I have written that I show no one? Why do I have a good novella that I show no one? I have no need to show them, and I want no responsibility. 

The people who go about without guilt do more than mystify me. They offend me. They seem a denial of reality, but, more to the point, they will charge ahead without consequence. 

[On grace: Imagine a coach in basketball. He says, 'When you take a jump shot, release at the high point of the jump, and get your elbow straight behind the stroke. Make sure the angle of the shot is high, and keep your knees bent.' He knows that the shooting guard won't do all of that every time, but it doesn't change the instruction. In a game, the guard goes to try to win the game, hogs the ball, jumps and throws the ball at the hoop, where it's blocked, leading to a turnover and a loss.

If the player comes to the bench and says, 'I'm sorry coach. I didn't do what you told me. I want to work on it,' then it's fine. If the player says, 'Hey, coach, I know you'll forgive me, so what's the big deal. It seemed like a good idea. The important thing is that I'm wearing the jersey that says "Christians" on it,' then the coach will kick him off the team.]

I can look back and forward, and the horizon's the same. I have achieved my philosophy. I wish I could be proud of that.

Unmoved

"...my interest in most things lies in the nominal rather than the phenomenal aspect. Some fine day I intend to try to get to the bottom of WHAT'S GOING ON HERE -- the real world here, rather than the world of seeming. Are we all liars and humbugs and if so, why not?" -- Myles na gCopaleen

If the average person exists, then the average person in the United States has a smudge where the meaning of “paradox” should be. Of the persons who know the word without its -ical handmaiden (“It's paradoxical that so many people know the adjective and so few the noun”), the Liar's Paradox and Zeno's Paradox must be the only occupants of the set. Oh, “set of all sets” and other strangers wave from beyond the margins at certain professions, but Zeno's paradox of motion far outweighs the argument he made that there is no pain, and Cretans lie (aren't Cretins the only ones fooled by the Boolean trap, or do we hold out for prepubertal viewers of "Star Trek" like me, too?).

For me, Zeno's paradox has been something of a haunting presence. I have never been satisfied with the answers that I have gotten to it, except the answer of my senses (those flying turtles hurt). Furthermore, I am haunted by the fact that we have somehow managed to go about our business, playing Math and Physics for centuries without getting a good answer to the paradox. Not only that, but I am molested, every time I consider this, with just how pleasant the people are who believe that they have solved the 'problem.'

My reader is an above average reader in every way, and so my reader already knows all there is to know about the paradox itself.

[Above Average Reader Of Note: Yeah, but we want to hear you say it, so we can make fun of how much you get wrong, later.]

Well, Zeno was slaloming in between the pillars and posts of his porch, wondering when the Romans would come make it all intramural, and I'm told he was ranting about how much Parminedes bothered him. Parminedes's paradox of time and motion, he said, was stubborn. “The way I heard it,” he told his students, “Usain Bolt and Rafael, the teenaged mutant ninja turtle, were going to have a race. Because it was unfair on the face of things for Usain Bolt to race a fictional character, he decided to give the turtle a fifty yard head start. However, when the race began, Usain Bolt discovered that he could not win, because he was unable to pass the turtle.” “This is because the turtle is a poorly conceived cartoon character, isn't it,” one of Zeno's students asked. “No,” Zeno replied, “but because Bolt, to pass the turtle, had to cross half the distance between himself and it. He then had to make up half the remaining distance. After that, he had to make up the very slight half distance remaining, but only to discover that there was as much distance to go. He crossed half of that, but then there was half again remaining. Of this half, he crossed half, and then saw that he could only cross half of the remainder. This would go on, as it turned out, forever, or for as long as there were divisions and numbers, and Bolt simply could not pass the turtle.”

[Aaron: That's not how we heard it.]

I know. That's why I told it differently. The point is that “time and motion are both illusions,” like Parminedes said, except, of course, that they're not, no matter what you've heard to the contrary.

Aristotle said that the problem with Zeno's paradox is that he presupposes and infinite amount of space to cross, but not an infinite amount of time to do it in. If we segmented time just as infinitely as movement, then the turtle would be in the soup. Something or other to do with the definition of time or the definition of motion or something. I usually agree with Aristotle – which is to say that I usually understand Aristotle – but in this case I'm still left with that “infinite division” thing. Worse than him, though, mathematicians have told me that Zeno's paradox is not only not a paradox, it isn't even a problem. While all of us were sliding off our seats drunk at a wedding reception after-party, a mathematician told me that I was just confused because I hadn't realized that some infinities are larger than others. The infinity of fractions is larger than the infinity of whole numbers, sez him, but they are contained within the whole numbers, and so we were just playing a game with sets... or something... or one infinity overtook or ate the other. I thought it was drink talking until a sober mathematician (speaking of poorly conceived fictional characters!) attempted to tell me something very similar.

Ever since I received those explanations, I have used them as a test of soul, as a Procrustean bed. If Aristotle has it right, then you, Madam, are clearly meant for a physicist. If, on the other hand, new groom Bill's cousin the mathematics professor had it, then, Sir, you may be fit for any number of jobs, but you are no humanist. Both results are, of course, to your credit and health. You will, I have no doubt, sleep better at night, and your horror scope indicates that you will be able to accomplish deeds surprising and proficient.

[Aaron: Yes, very amusing, in a 19^th century Gentleman's Magazine sort of way, but not a humanist? Exaggeration is one thing, but insult is another!]

I mean it, every word. Well, I mean the words I mean, but not the words that are meant in jest or gesture (watch carefully). However, the people who agree with Aristurtle or the math folk are not humanity centered, not placing the human reality at its proper position -- which is the center of all possible perception. This is not egoism, nor species egotism, but rather knowing one's place and recognizing that it's a great deal better than it might be otherwise. Let me explain.

[Aaron: And now he's asking permission? Where's my pouch of Red Man?]

The new groom whose wedding we were dunking till drunk went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. I would like to say that he's one of my life's friends. However, his doctorate was in analog signals, and this was in the middle of the 1990's. “I thought the point is that everything is, uh, digital,” I said to him one day, “so why analog signals?” “Because,” he answered, “at the high end, digital signals begin to act like analog.” I thought about this for a few moments, made no progress, and then went on to worry about chain marks in bibliography class or some other important problem. I still needed, after all, to distinguish between late 17^th century usages of “lampoon,” “burlesque,” “satire,” and “parody.”

I was so ignorant then!

Sometimes a fact will wedge in the soil of the mind, and layers of information, passion, misdirection, reconnection, and agitation will eventually force it back up. The process is not vegetative. People have been speaking of ideas “growing” in the mind since at least Charlemagne, and probably ideas do grow, send out rhizomes, cross-pollinate, and need pruning, but facts do not. Facts are like colored glass beads to the magpie mind. They go into the nest. In the course of the seasons of straw, hatchlings, and matings, the bead will turn up again in a new context where it will – by itself still only a bead – become part of a new mosaic. So it was with the fact that digital becomes analog analogy for me.

Right now, I have iTunes playing in the background. It is playing a song recorded by The Ventures in monoaural in the 1960's that was converted to stereo, pressed onto an album, converted to a digital CD, purchased by me (I buy CD's, and not because I'm old and bewildered, either), and then converted to the super-magic iTunes format, and now it is playing. I am enjoying it, too, in case you were wondering. However, the way those lovely surf guitar sounds were made and recorded was analog.

In analog recording...

[Aaron: Sheesh! Now you're going to explain analog? Plug it in and go.]

...voltage went to a microphone beneath the strings and one in front of the amplifier, and an electromagnet recorded increasing and decreasing voltage continuously that was then recorded, continuously up and down on magnetic film. [I know! 'To learn more about analog recording, consult your local library.'] The vinyl record was a cut groove that continuously reflected the pushing of a stylus in response to voltage increases. The digital, on the other hand, is based on sampling. A computer is told to capture sound levels and take an exact picture of all voltage levels on all microphones and to write this data down. It will do this a number of times a second. It might do it sixteen times a second (low quality) or thirty-two times a second (standard) or one hundred and twenty-eight times a second. Regardless of how many times a second the computer is taking a 'snapshot,' it is still taking a “sample,” which is an audio record of all values, at discrete moments.

You can see now what I did not see, I am sure. The super high end samples will begin to act as if they were continuous. Bright man, my friend Bill.

[...And yet you want to connect this to Zeno's paradox by …]

Quiet you! I do not. I may not be as clever as Bill, but I'm not as clumsy as that.

You see, the digital music that I am listening to right now, which, incidentally, is Pink Floyd, is tricking me. [Pink Floyd? I thought the air smelled a little sweet!] It is playing back thirty-two separate clips of music per second, and I am too sluggish of thought to hear the silences between them. [Yep. That's what happens.] This is because I am a man – sufficient reason to be miserable, as the Greek said. However, if it were slower in its clips, would I still perceive the music? Think about watching television with your dog. Your poor dog never liked your old analog television set, because it emitted a high pitched whine and because he couldn't see a picture. That is because there wasn't a picture. Only a third of the screen was lit up at a time,and the third rolled from bottom to top, and not that quickly, either. If you took a picture of a television screen, all that you saw, in the old days, as a third of the screen. Well, that's what your poor dog saw when you tapped the glass and said, “Look, Rufus! Another doggie!”

A movie is twenty-four frames per second of pictures showing in sequence. A cartoon is a sequence of drawings flipped past the eye. There is nothing continuous in any of these three things. The old television, the movie, the cartoon: all of them were discrete objects that we insisted we experienced as continuous, as analog. Digital music is therefore no surprise.

They call the human blur/blend illusion the Phi phenomenon. Phenomenologically speaking, one can see where this is going – which is around and around, like a fly in a Coca-Cola bottle on Wittgenstein's lectern.

[I really must object! That's neither funny nor necessary.]

They laughed at Heidelberg.

[Yeah, but not at Heisenberg. No one could tell where the punchline was.]

There is always the possibility that Zeno's was 'right,' as it were, or that Parminedes was, and that we don't move, that motion is a phenomenon, a Phi phenomenon. Perhaps analog is digital, and, if we were to look at that “continuous” electrical charge going up and down in a microphone line, it would be made up of greater and lesser infinities of incremental measurements. It's just that there sure seems to be a difference. It sure feels different. Actual movement, with persistent objects, really seems to have some distinction against representations presented sequentially, no matter how rapidly.

If, though, you have enough of a humanist in you to think, as I do, that there is something about the world, about living, that is different, and even superior, to super-rapid sequence, then we're right back at Zeno's question: Where is it? If the digital acts like analog when chopped finely enough and the analog can be chopped into digital, where is the whole number?

You see, the answer to Zeno's paradox that does not require phantasms of infinity or time is to declare that there is an indivisible unit of space. If you deny infinity itself, then Zeno has to stop cutting the space in half. If you say that “there is no more distance,” then Usain Bolt finally gets to the finish line and the autograph seekers. The alternative is to say that a mystic Something Happens whereby the infinities surpass one another in a glibly invisible and imperceptible leapfrog as we move in whole numbers, unmindful of the limitless fractions we toss by. In either case, the skeptic (or Eleatic) has the right to ask you, “Ok, Buck, so tell me where it is.”

It is to avoid that question that everyone else seeks purely logical, non-mystical answers, no matter how much they hurt the brain.

I don't have a bead on the answer. As I said, Zeno's paradox keeps giving me the bad touch when I least want it. I was wondering, though, the other day, that we are so happy to ask no questions about another impossibility. We mumble and mutter along every day with circles and other oddities and their attendant irrational numbers. Pi, like movement, lodges like a pretzel in our windpipes. It just won't go away, even though it is generally a simple expression. What's more, like running around in a circle, it is infuriatingly rooted in the real! We know that the circumference of a circle is pi multiplied by the squared radius. That means that we get pi always from every danged circle. If circles are actual (real, existing), then so is pi. Well, that's simply intolerable.

Is pi proof that there has to be an irrational or a-rational or suprarational answer to the question of divisibility of space, time, and motion? I'm not that juvenile. Pi floats out there, infinitely, and waves at us from beyond our capacity to limit and define, just as motion does, just as the difference between the infinitely divided and the continuous does. All of these weave from the margins of our minds, producing a garland of phenomena and rational limit. They humble us. They insist that we are products of reality and consequently can never judge it entirely.

Unpardonable Interruption

"Averagely wise a man ought to be,

a man should be
never too wise;
for a wise man's heart is seldom cheerful,
if he who owns it is too wise." Poetic Edda, "Sayings of the High One" #55

I have an idea for writing about interrupting, because I interrupt, and because interruption seems to be a skill by itself, but this is not it. This is, instead, about music, which is why the quote has nothing to do with music.

I have alluded to my punk rock past in the past, and even I am tired of the glory days.

I do still harbor a grudge against Lee Abrahms (now at XM/Sirius), who kept my brothers and sisters off the radio back in '81, who made "punk" a scare word, who played into the "Nightly News" stories on "punk rockers from England with safety pins in their cheeks whose battle cry is 'Anarchy.'" It's shocking that Lee Abrahms managed to harbor shocking thoughts, after so carefully screening America from shock, but apparently he had a "send all" e-mail with some Thought Crime in it. His inside came outside, and that's not allowed in business.

Anyway, before people were scared of rap and rappers, they were scared of punks. The difference is that they never got a chance to get over their fear of punks, never put us in the top 40 (unless you count The Police and Talking Heads, and even now - even as The Pogues sing about drinking to the point of damnation and have it used as a soundtrack for a Kia sport utility vehicle - the same folks who denied us space then are erasing us from "oldies" and making us unexist). We remained the unclean bacon product of music.

Why? Why the hatred from music itself?

Well, our central point of pride was anti-corporate sentiment, so I'm sure that didn't help. On the other hand, we were touring machines, and the corporations don't care what you think of them, if you go on tour for them. We were liberals (unless we were Nazis), so that might have been out of tune in the cocaine Reaganaut industry, but the hippies were worse. We were relatively intellectual. None of this makes sense, though. In general, the punks were no more unmanageable than what came later. (Rappers have been singularly obliging for the corporations. Their "more money, more bling" ethos has been tailor made for corporate bottom lines. The fact that the group is usually one highly addictive personality is also good for managing and replacing.)

No.

I actually think that other musicians and the musical component of the music business (the folks who manned the operating boards) disliked Punk in a way that they wouldn't rap and didn't disco.

Disco, lest we forget, sucks. It is horrible. I don't care what you say: it's awful. It has one beat, no lyrical content, and is, at best, an adjunct to coke and sex, not an art. Take the best disco song, strip the rhythm track, the synthesized strings, and play it with a Dixieland band, and it's fine. However, it had synthesized strings. It had synthesized beats, as soon as they could be synthesized. It had loops. It had, in short, studio magic. The old guys with the ratty beards and stringy pony tails didn't want to ever listen to a disco record (although they seemed to enjoy the coke and sex), but they loved disco because of all the fun they could have in the studio making those interesting burps and gurgles.

The corporate guys.... Well, let's not consider those reptiles. They've demonstrated that they do not think at all, most of the time, and, when they try, it's a mistake.

Rap, too, is a great deal for producers. Rap, in fact, is a producer's medium. The producer often gets artist credit on a rap song, because the studio writes and makes the "song." Studio rats think rap is neato, because they get to push tons of buttons and run all kinds of software and experiment endlessly with loops and stuff. They pride themselves on inventing "beats," which have little or nothing to do with playing drums.

The studio guys, and the corporate guys alike hated punk because we interrupted.

We didn't merely interrupt their smooth progression from Fleetwood Mac to Mack Daddy, but we interrupted musically, too. You see, to make a song, the process is supposed to be:

1. Audition as a singer
2. Get a producer from the company
3. Buy a song that the producer thinks is right for you
4. Sing the song over some tracks
5. Thank the company and wear its placard.

Or, if you are a "band" (and they would rather you not be), the process is:

1. Learn the instrument to virtuosity
2. With said group of musicians, produce a demo of professional quality
3. Submit finished record (demo) to Artist and Repertory dude with packet of cocaine "accidentally fell in there"
4. Get signed and assigned a producer
5. Have demo re-recorded by producer who rewrites the songs for their "potential," puts new drums on, makes the rhythm sound like whatever sold most last year
6. Have singer praised and given "side projects" until she or he does steps 1-5 above

What you are not supposed to do is be a collaborative unit or a team, a la The Beatles. You are also not supposed to go perform and build up a fan base of people who like the music as it is instead of how the producer thinks it should be or how Lee Abrahms's closet of teenagers says it should be.

Punk annoyed everyone. The corporate guys saw it as a monkey wrench to a system that was working just fine. The punk route meant less cocaine, for one thing, and it meant that there would be no way to be sure of the next financial quarter's profits.

It annoyed the studio guys, too. It interrupted. Instead of studying the instrument for decades and then submitting the perfected performance to modification, people were shortcutting. They were having their witty lyrics or protests and going straight out with them, and yet without relying on a studio to do it.

That's awful, isn't it?

Instead of sturm und drang compositions about what it would be like to be a ghost in a wishing well, we were strum and dang. We grabbed Ventures records and rockabilly and just ... played ... badly, but we needed no one's help in doing it. If we bored the audience, we heard about it. We didn't have to wait for a report from a focus group.

Demons and the Devil (Way Down in the Hole)

"Yes, I don't think that Obama or whatever his name is is ready for the White House, him and his wife. They don't act like they've got that many smarts to me. But anyway, if it was me and they was putting me in there it would scare me to death. I know I ain't that smart so I don't think they are neither." -- Unidentified voter, Georgia, Feb. 5, 2008

I have grown weary of the first person singular, and I thought I might avoid having it be the first word of this blog entry, or at least some blog entry some time. I guess today isn't my day. Despite the fact that solipsism is the one thing that plagues our society most, the attempt to deny one's own place in opinion or judgment is another. We have two alternating problems. The one is a world without empathy because it is a world where everything outside of the self is a flattened image of "not me," and, on the other, people who, when they have a desire, will squirm about verbally and blame their own impulses on inevitability, expedience, or the needs of others. I would prefer to talk about this, in one of my tried and true "neither/nor" essays, at some later point, though. Perhaps my next will deal with it under the topic of "Going to the movies." For now, I want to address something else. I want to address keeping the devil way down in the hole, as Tom Waits says we should.

A week or more ago, I saw "Into the Wild," directed by Sean Penn and concerning Chris McCandless. I went to the local art house (the town my great-great-great-great grandfather helped settle has just gotten one). The movie, for those who can't follow a link or who do not yet know, concerns a young man who graduated with honors from Emory University and then, out of a sense of great resentment toward his parents and the machine of materialism and expectations, gave away his trust fund, tore up his identification, and set off walking. He eventually went to Alaska, where he died of malnutrition, although not because of any amateurishness on his part. As I sat in the theater, a voice over came on to give some background to the man. I knew little about the movie ahead of time except its plot outline, and I didn't know the name of the hero. However, the name began to bother me. As the voice over man said that he had gone to Emory and graduated in 1989, it gnawed at me more. I realized that there was a very, very strong chance that I had met him.

Without going into the "famous dead people I have known" routine, it's enough to say that I had a red shirt senior year at Emory, and I had to take a Poetry class (Poetry 205) in my fifth year. I was already an experienced English Major at that point and a competent writer of close readings, and so the other students in the class, who were all Freshmen, gathered around me for help on writing papers. I really think I met the youngster then.

He was possessed of a devil, and, had I known him well, I would have done exactly what all the others did, including himself, and mistaken it for a demon.

There is a great deal of folderol about "daemons," since that Golden Compass movie, but it merely adds to the babble surrounding the demon. You see, it's good to have a demon. A demon is the minor aggravation that produces a pearl, it is the generative unhappiness. If you have demons, you have things that rob you of contentment, but not of joy. With a demon, you never quite settle. You think you're fat, and your friends tell you you are not, but they know nothing compared to the internal censor. You feel friendless, despite all the people calling you their friend, and so you continue to glad hand strangers and buy books on influencing others. You cannot quite get over seeing your parents naked, or dead, or fight, and so you write poem after poem about social malaise and the menace of mayonnaise culture. Mysterious images coalesce like sunbeams in your subconsciousness and strike common objects with holy light, and all thanks to your demon. In time, you can even come to give your demon a name. Like a stranger wielding a goad, you call it everything from Io's flies to Unresolved Identity Fixation or Inferiority Complex.

People with demons are easy to spot. Not only do they keep beating away at creative expression, but they show unearthly interest in themselves. It's common to laugh at people like this, if they are not young. However, they are not interested in the complexity of themselves because of egotism, but because of unhappiness. They are restless, most of all. If they are graphically or physically or verbally inclined, they will, either as a hobby or annoyingly public party trick, create art. If they are jabbed by duller demons, they may buy endless and repetitive books on working It out. There is a great deal of money spent that way, so people with demons are common as people with noses.

Devils are another matter. Devils are the ones who not only inflict the impulse on their victims but also suggest a really destructive object. Chris McCandless hated his parents, even though they did not appear to be too dramatically unlike other assortments of hypocrites, compromisers, and achievers (but who says that the other assortments shouldn't be as possessed and miserable?), and he felt that pain from top to bottom, as tens of thousands of other young people have. However, he also had a notion of how to fix things. He would go on the Romantic American trip of self-reliance and self-discovery and find his own identity in his own way, and without any compromises. That's what a devil does.

If I knew him, he was not the only possessed person I knew. I knew another who was working as a prostitute. She was attending Georgia Tech, and she was graduating, and she was working as a particular sort of prostitute. She had been inspired by Genesis P. Orridge and his girlfriend and their stage shows that included self-mutilation and on-stage bodily functions. At least she and her boyfriend seemed to be entranced by that, but she was also being paid to be the victim of scatalogical and violent sex fantasies. I had no idea about that. Do you suppose that this was a demon? When a person's "art" goes to the stage where she is being tied up by drugged up rock stars and slashed or urinated upon, is that the slight irritation of an unresolved issue or an unbalanced equation in the mind, or is that, just perhaps, a little bit more?
She, however, did what she did, and none of us knew, and now she is doing fine. McCandless, of course, is dead. Another I knew. She was one of the prettiest, happiest, most wonderful young women I knew. She was fantastic, and I wished with all my might that she would date me at some point. Sending such wishes is as well as sending fishes, of course. Many demons persuade us to date the least appropriate person, but she dated the most wretched. She did not seek out the married or unavailable, or gay, as so many women I have known have done, but only those who would be certain to abuse her affections. I lost touch with her for years and ran into her again only after a suicide attempt and a complete psychotic break as a result to sexual abuse from a step-father that had been going on all the time that I had known her.

Devils are perverse. They hold out the worst things and make them seem inevitable. They sit at the center and draw us to them. They propel us toward their own ends. Sometimes, as with my friend, they are clear wounds that suppurate and multiply, the wounds at the center of the psyche that try to spread out to claim the whole mind. Sometimes, like my artist friend, they take their own paths to satisfy the consumption of the person in odure and death. Sometimes, as in McCandless, they demand purity that can only come in a shortened life. Whatever they do, though, they consume.

I will leave my attentive reader to guess the connections between these unfortunate people and the voter I begin with, but I will tie up the bow with a recurrent reference to myself.

I have a bit of the demon of self-destruction, but it is only a demon. I cannot keep it in the hole, but I can keep a foot outside of the open mouth of the grave. I regard it as rather common to say, with Beckett's Murphy, that the good old days are when you wished you were dead. It's only surprising and worrisome, to me, when a new method comes to mind or a new form of self-destruction appears in the rear view mirror as a fait d'accompli.

Reasoning with the Earth

I'm on a roll here, with at least four hilarious posts in a row. I'd like to continue that level of hilarity by talking about puberty, cancer, and death. Get your weight lifting belt out, because you'll need it from all the laughter.

"Naturam expella furca licet, usque recurret." -- Horace, Ars Poetica

I noticed this morning that I've developed arthritis in my right hip. My poor dog is eleven years old, and she, too, has arthritis in her right hip, so the two of us match in that regard. However, I can give her expensive pills that have her frisking about like a puppy, while all the NSAID's are contraindicated for me, of course. Why are they contraindicated? Because I have a mechanical heart valve. Why do I have one of those? Because I had heart surgery in 1998 to follow up on surgery from 1969. Why did I have surgery in 1969? Because I am my family's genetic sin eater or my mother's litter's runt.

Now, when I was seven years old and having open heart surgery, and very risky heart surgery (and once upon a time that would have been a tautology (very funny link, there), but now the modifier is necessary), I was told frequently that I was being "brave." I thought not. I thought I was merely being manly -- which meant, of course, being stoic. I was uncomplaining. I've since made up for it by a stream of whining that could make a corpse run away, but, at the time, I was a 'brave little Geogre.' I assume that the three week coma was brave, too, but, at any rate, I then wanted to prove my manhood -- despite the fact that I would not possess manhood for four more years or so.

Later on, there were more things to do, more surgeries, more indignities (presuming one has dignity to be negated, and I've always found dignity to be a bit of a burden), and I decided, after becoming a man, that the events would hurt as much if one complains or not, but that complaining might mean getting medicated, so I might as well make a pest of myself. That was my attitude for a cholecystectomy (I think I was one of the datapoints for that article), and I actually had a fairly good time flirting with the nurses and getting zapped with morphine during that operation, but I soon reversed my attitude. You see, there's nothing brave about it, but there's nothing cowardly, either.

Forget your Susan Sontag books and just think about how we use volitional language when we speak of disease. The point to disease is that it's involuntary. You cannot be brave or fearful or happy or sad in regard to the disease. The disease just happens. It's biology. You can't have it because of moral failing or foolishness, and you can't have it for virtue or strength. After all, there are virtuous people dying young and villains living to great age, smokers and drinkers like Winston Churchill and bystanders who die of mesothelioma who never went near a cigarette.

The body is morally neutral. You can kick nature out with a pitchfork, Horace says, but she'll seep back in. You can argue all you want with biology. You can tell it that it shouldn't do that. You can put up a law. You can tell it to do something else, instead. The body will obey, to a point, and then it will go back to being what it is.

Think about teenagers. Their bodies are illegal. Literally, a teenager's physical body is a violation of the law. A youngster told me that, in high school, his school had put on a production of Quills. I gasped. No, I said in shock, you simply couldn't have! That play has nudity in it, and high school students can't be naked. In fact, no one under 18 may ever be naked, even if attempting to be nude. A 17 year old who drops his pants at the beach is not only violating the usual laws against public disturbances, but any tourist who captures the scene out of the corner of the frame is guilty of pornography. A minute past midnight on his 18th birthday, and he can take a picture of his naughty bits with his telephone and send them to all his friends.

In the case of girls, it's much worse, because a girl does not desire to become a loaded weapon. She does not choose to be taboo. She does not choose to be the object of covetousness. Like the paradoxical wretchedness surrounding virginity, this is potent so long as it is undesired, and yet those are the years that a girl will most learn how to see herself. It is when the gaze of the law and society is most telling her that her body is an offense. She can't opt-out, either. It just happens.

The final act for most of us, at least on earth, is death. I have thought a great deal about how it is frightening precisely the way that disease is. The most common reaction would be, "I'm not ready."

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you prepare for death or do not, if you are at peace or turmoil, if you are 85 or 15, if you are calm or frantic. No qualifications are necessary for dying well or poorly, and no skill is involved. Just as with achieving puberty or arthritis, you will face the thing because it is neutral. It is not good, not bad, and not sentient enough to be indifferent.

There is no good I can imagine for these matters. I believe in the afterlife. It is part of my creed. However, death looms for all, believer and unbeliever, but we are all born with a death sentence. We are all born with a sentence upon us to mature, age, and die, and the only good I can see from pondering these matters is relieving ourselves of judgment.

If you are reading this and are young, remember that you are not as different as the glare of society tells you you are. If you are middle aged, just realize that the diseases and maladies you suffer with are just normal, and you couldn't have prevented them and yet been yourself. If you are thinking of death, don't rail at its injustice. Anything that happens to all of us, the good and bad alike, cannot be anything but neutral. You cannot win the argument against biology, and you cannot reason with the earth.

That One Kind of Disease

Another general fault in conversation is, that of those who affect to talk of themselves: Some, without any ceremony, will run over the history of their lives; will relate the annals of their diseases, with the several symptoms and circumstances of them; will enumerate the hardships and injustice they have suffered in court, in parliament, in love, or in law. -- Jonathan Swift, Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation

So it may have been, then, that such conversations were themselves a sort of illness. However, we now speak of our illnesses together. Of course, we have treatment groups, discussion circles, web forums, and all sorts of informal and formal groups to meet up with one another and average our diseases. By pooling them, like mad insurance companies, we ameliorate them.

More than that, though, we can also share a disease in another way. Do I have proof for this? Yes, I do.

Loads of folks have wondered what, exactly the obsession is with "divas" and the miseries of celebrities. I've wondered, as well. I have preferred not to think too ill of my countrymen. After all, I know that Faustina Bodoni was all the rage in 1728. Poor Ann Cargill washed up, naked, with an infant in her arms in 1784. People were interested in Edmund Kean/Carey's parentage. Don't even ask about John Ruskin's "salon," Christina Rossetti's company kept, or, the greatest of them all, Byron's affairs and postage (Leslie Marchand has a nice long bit on whether a spurned woman sent him hair from a particular part of her body or not).

In other words, it's not new. Inside Access has always been with us, and the prurient and vain interest in vain and pallid celebrities has been a lamentable fact of society for ages and ages. I would imagine that Eloisa was the Britney Gwefani of her day. In fact, we can go back to the scandal of Thisbe wanting to sneak around with that boy at the trysting tree, if we want.

Not, of course, that I want to conflate drunken pudenda exhibition with romantic tragedy. In fact, the big stories that kept being told, like Abelard's, have something else involved than just shame and misery, as shame and misery are commonplaces. Nor, though, do I accept that people like to watch Chistina adopt Madonna's babies because they are themselves leading degraded lives and want to look down on someone.

Instead, I would like to see celebrity as a show that appeals to pity and fear. Audiences to these real degradations can cheer for the heroes and heroines, can shout, "Oh, no, Lindsay! Don't go out with him!" They can invest in the stock of the celebrity, much like people playing rotisserie league baseball. Every Monday, thousands of people, mainly men, turn to the sports page and feel that their investments have paid off variously by seeing professional athletes performing across teams in various sports, while that night millions of people, mainly women, tune into television shows to find out how one Perilous Pauline or another has fared with her rehabilitation and how another Glamorous Glenda has married.

There is another quote, and I can't be sure it's accurately attributed, much less offer a citation, but I heard it this weekend on a quiz show. Supposedly, T. S. Eliot said that radio is a device that allows thousands of people to listen to exactly the same junk at the same time and yet still feel lonesome.

I worry about that quote, because I cannot imagine Eliot, who ditched his Americanisms as thoroughly as he could, using "lonesome," or "junk." At the same time, the sentiment of the quote sounds right for Eliot, and right for me. In fact, it is an acute observation. Those who watch television or listen to the radio are experiencing precisely the same things at the same time, and yet they do so passively and yet feel entirely alone. The television set, more than the radio set, says, "You are the only person in the world, and I am showing this to you." Couples sit on the couch together, and each sets eyes on the television, each receiving a private experience. Like audience members at the theater, the television viewer is constructing a private experience out of stimuli that force themselves upon her.

Lonesome, though? Despite longstanding principles, I looked the word up in the dictionary. Oddly enough, the dictionary saw a distinction between "lonesome" and "lonely." The former is more affective. A person who is "lonely" is only sad at definition #3, where a person who is "lonesome" is sad right off the bat.

Eliot's radio has the listener feeling sad, where I would have said that the television victim is merely lonely. Such a person is unconscious of being lonesome. However, like a big barmecidal plate of Splenda, the privately constructed hors d'oeuvre leaves the viewer even more empty than before, because now time has passed and appetite increased. The viewer, therefore, needs even more spectacular scenes, perhaps.

When we watch the miseries of the celebrities, we get the miniature engagement of catharsis, but with no communal sense to exercise it. The classic model of tragedy requires not just pity and fear (or fitty, if you prefer (and let no one think that these operatic plots belong only to Hollywood celebrities, for the rap world's "beef" operas are every bit as involved)), but also an elevated hero. The causes have to be mighty, and the consequences have to be extraordinary, if we're to have true tragedy, and that means that more than the personal has to be at work. Even when German Expressionist film did kammerspiel with things like my favorite film of all time, The Last Laugh, or the Italian neo-realists did things like The Bicycle Thief, the themes were consciously shaped to be beyond the personal, and the artists worked at creating elevation to the subjects (although they denied it). No. To be tragic and pity-ful, we need there to be something social that we can do or have done to us.

This is the crisis of loneliness, not tragedy. By all receiving the same story, we have a temporary involvement and a permanent vacuity. Our own participation is confined to either wagers of good will or seeing ourselves in the celebrity.

On the other hand, we can participate with that other great paradox of loneliness: the web. Here, and I include myself at this very moment, we can pursue individual courses and believe ourselves utterly self-determining, and yet only show free choice, not free will. If we take the final step and contribute and "create content" with Wikipedia or a forum, we toss in our little bits of self into the giant bucket.

We again average ourselves. We pool ourselves. We take comfort in the fact that we are all alone together and that we are individually like the rest.