Where do babies come from? Your Levi's

"Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;

And I will cry with my loud lips and publish

Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,

It is so frail." -- John Crowe Ransom, "Blue Girls"

Hold that thought.

On the television, they have medicines more various than any Wild West show tent. At the break of the 20th century, men adventurous and adventitious went about with products to cure each malady, even the ones that people hadn't any idea they suffered from. (Be aware, O ye historically naive, that the wild west in 1825 was Alabama, that it did not go to Texas, Arizona and the like until the 1840's, and the people who showed up fully grown malcontents were already twisted criminals back home in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi.)

The television makes money for people today as surely as the newspapers did then. Why, now you can not only cure your iron-poor blood, but you can make your eye lashes grow! The huckster's old claim that "it" will restore youth has turned into "Regeneris" face cream to putty-in wrinkles or Botox to freeze them, and his pitch that "it" will grow hair on a bald man is, at long, long last, a dream come true. O brave new world that has such creams and potions in it! In fact, the same pill can relieve the blues or relieve your pain, and this is revolutionary, because, in the past, we were only worried about nasty, evil people who, when sad, would go buy illegal drugs that would make them happy and relieve their pain.

Well, among the illnesses we have discovered once we found their cures on the television was "man-o-pause" or, for those wanting language that sounds less like a joke, "andropause." ("Andros" is the Greek word for male, but that "pause" is a problem.) Here is a typical discussion, guys. It will help you with "that little problem."

Now, me? I entered into the shadow of death long ago, and time's umbra covered me in its numbing wing. Like the noble mosquito, "it doesn't hurt when it begins," but, of course, it does not merely begin. I was never particularly over dosing on martial prowess, or any other sort, but a few blood tests showed the infamous "low T." I thus found a ready supplier of injectables and began a few months of imitating Barry Bonds and other heroes of the game.

My motivation on the surface was to rectify biochemical abnormalities and to achieve triglyceride reduction. My ulterior motivation was the relief of fatigue. Really, it was. Ok, and some awakening of desire, but not in any way the other. That, alas, has not been a concern.

You don't care about why, though. You want to know what happened. Well, after a full summer of shooting the dope every two weeks, I have decided to return to my old self. The effect of exogenous testosterone was....

Do you know where babies come from? They come from lawn mowers. Now, I have never seen a lawn mower directly involved in the insemination or ovulation or carrying of a fetal human, but I have noticed an overwhelming correlation between young couples purchasing a lawn mower and producing a baby. Newly weds beware the John Deere salesman! Unless the purchase is of an ATV -- which is a well known contraceptive and cause of sterility -- any purchase of a lawnmower is likely to cause conception.

Not many people are aware of this correlative relationship, but I figured it out about the time my friends Bill and Donna bought a lawn and then a lawn mower. I had no proof of causality, no isolation of the agent, but I knew the phenomenon. I could not isolate the cause... until now! You see, taking testosterone made me want to mow the lawn.

I'm serious. All summer, I watched the grass grow, hoping for it to recover from its last scalping so that I could go inflict more savagery upon it. I loved the soaking with sweat, the smushing of dog poo, the face slap of tree branches, the stings of the ants. I stomped and chopped and was smelly, wet, and manly.

I was not, however, more lusty. Not in one way or the other. Nor did I grow large. Not in one way or the other.

So, do I quit shooting it because autumn will be coming in two or three months? No.

Remember that quote from John Crowe Ransom? Well, compare it to something I wrote recently: "The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies." Pretty whiny, isn't it?

What both of them are talking about is that men and women who grow older as they stand before college audiences notice, more and more keenly, the beauty of young members of the opposite sex. The desire increases as the distance from the competition for them does. Now, there certainly are creeps. Make no mistake: some people are creeps and maladaptive fools. However, every one I have known has been content to sit in the stands and watch the game, has loved walking through the gallery and looking at the paintings. None of them has grown confused and tried to grab the merchandise, run onto the field, or believed that he or she was in the game.

Actually, I take that back. Very recently, I knew of a teacher who was by no means on the field nor artist. However, every female student reported that she was creeped out by the way he looked at her. They were not able to articulate precisely what it was, but they knew what they experienced, understood what was conveyed. The pornographic gaze wishes to take. It wishes to strip, to dissect, to grab, and to own. The other one... the aged eye, I suppose, wishes to linger and to revel and is shy; it wants the original to remain. (It can be as guilty of objectifying as anything -- is guilty -- but not guilty of malice.)

John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt saw the pretty girls. This is no surprise. Robert Herrick saw them too. Whether a man has the years to justify it or not, the same feeling is the same: presence calls to loss, loss longs for surfeit. Surfeit never knows itself. These are truths abiding. However, the sweet melancholy plays an artistic tune in even the dullest woman or man.

At the same time, Levi's Jeans company is running commercials, has been running them, which purport to be American (TM). They have Frosty sounding recitations. "You (glug glug) are a god!/ The gods (glug) dance before you (glug)/ Hoping to catch your radiance (glug glug) on their tongues/ The dumb jerks," the poet says, and we see truly spectacular images of youth.

I'm amazed. The pictures are exactly like the poetry. Both are seductions. Read the Whitman, or the Ginsberg. These are poetic lines in praise of the young American, and of American youth, that is primarily flattering, not celebratory. Instead of taking a real quality and showing its beauty, it takes a quality and gives it hyperbolic, mythic, supernatural qualities. Instead of, "You weave through the air," it is "her skin is like nature dipp'd her hands in milk." Everyone knows that the lover gets the beloved by compliments.

The message from Levi's is not "go, do something," but "come here, you." The visuals celebrate the bodies of youth, youth stretching, contorting, sweating, and doing other physical functions that show the body's shapes and features alone, and they do so wonderfully but synecdotally. Each is a clipped fragment rather than a montage. The message is, "Your blue jeans want to have you," rather than "you want to have blue jeans."

Perhaps young buyers are flattered by the commercials, but it's more likely that men and women of my age are stricken by sympathy pains. We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole.

Are You Tough Enough, Strong Enough, Fit Enough?

Blake: We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?
[Holds up prize]
Blake: Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
from "Glengarry Glen Ross" 1992, found at IMDB

A show of hands: who here was shocked when David Mamet announced that he was a conservative? The man who celebrated strong men preying on weak women, womenly men, and scorning mercy is a conservative? Nooooo, really? What's more, his "conservative" views are remarkably like his characters: Nietzschean humping of the muscled up thigh of the leather glove that slaps, the boot that stamps, and the lip that sneers. Whoopie. Mistress Roxana might help him with his problem without his needing to inflict it on the world.

Mamet has a claim to an American vision, a claim given to him by theater critics who noticed in his abusive, abrasive, and humiliating works an accurate mirror to the world America had become, first in the home (apparently, theater critics have alcoholic fathers) and then in sexual and office politics. The common theme is that America is about competing, and everyone is competing, whether they know it or not, and the strong will not merely triumph over the weak, but they will degrade and punish them, too.

You can tell from my tone, can't you, that I disagree?

I don't want to give it away too much, but, gosh, I'm not sure I can keep it in much longer. The Ayn Randian vision (Nietzsche misunderstood for America) that each superior person must take what is necessary and that compassion is a slave quality is anti-Christian. Rand herself made the point openly. Mamet's expressed vision was beyond her, though, because his strong men were not John Galt as much as John Gotti. (Of course, I rather think that John Galt is John Gotti.) Nevertheless, as countless articles have suddenly realized and you and I have known all along, there is a truth to the observation that the world sure seems to be acting like one of those plays.

Part of this is that it only takes one jackass to dominate the soundscape and convince the farmer that the entire corral of horses is filled with asses. One really determined sociopath can trigger defensive and offensive reactions, and so it just doesn't take much. (I wrote, somewhere, about the person galloping down the hall being a jerk and the rest ducking out of the way, but I can't find the post. I may have deleted it as being obviously about a co-worker.) Then again, our corporate structures have seen no reason not to hold a carpet knife to the collective carotid artery, so there is fear enough for all.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin

We are in competition, constant competition, in the American system, and it is "survival of the fittest." Since Americans know that "fitness means being physically fit," it follows that our society should favor and honor the most athletic, the most intelligent, and the most speedy. They are the fittest. Never mind what you just read. Darwin meant, we're convinced, what we think he meant, even though he never said it nor intended it.

This is the heart of the Nietzschean and Objectivist myth, after all: we will have the greater person by having the best person who will be the fittest person, whether we measure fitness by will or power. The fact that Darwin argued that the best was the most adaptable to the changing circumstances, that Odysseus (the crafty) is better than Ajax (strongest of warriors), just couldn't get through those prejudiced skulls.

We should be thinking about who's creative, who's malleable, who's quick to modify, but we instead worry always.

"... there are so many fools placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself." --Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling.

Are you the right one? Will you keep your job through the year? When you go to the interview, will your looks be adequate? When you go to the dance, will someone be cooler than you? When you wake up in the morning, the referee looks at your eyelids flutter and chants, "1, 2, 3... fight!" Therefore, you must always assert yourself against others, over others, away from others.

I had a brief exchange recently with someone who said that it was impossible to have an identity without opposing someone or something.

The secret of envy is competition, and the seeds of it come from looking about. Oh, sure, it is tied up in pride, but envy is not reserved for the well to do wishing for the material goods of their neighbors. It's in every person who says, "Oh, pshw! Can you believe how much they pay that jerk?" It's comparing.

Descartes beginning point of philosophy was Cogito ero sum. It is quite possible to say "I am" without saying, "and I'm glad I'm not you!" There is no need to contrast in order to be oneself. When the discussion of "I can't believe they pay Bozo so much" starts, it should only be to resolve with "We should all be paid well."

Envy may thrive more today than any time in its history. In a land of plenty, people grouse about income taxes and what's "theirs." In a place of riches, people look over at their neighbors more and more to decry how those people are acting. Envy takes time away from building any part of a self, fills one's heart with ashes, and leads only to imitation or negation, but it is one of our dearest, deadliest friends.

Our Best Fiend: Lust

Love bears all, but lust bares it all.

On “Freshairre” with Terry Gross today, a neuro-scientist was on to talk about oxytocin and dopamine and addiction and pathways of pleasure. Now, I might normally consider a pathway of pleasure a cool autumnal arbor strewn with pine straw, with a light show of spots of sun poking their jagged thorns through the canopy, but his pathways of pleasure are all chemical. Nuero-scientists are thus Rosicrucians, seeking out a chemical wedding, a chemical bliss, a consummation of the elements in a fusion of ecstasy that is only mistaken for a feeling.

I would like to harsh this trip. It's what I do. It's also not my nature to trust the machine that does not account for the ghost. I'm with Koestler on that, however many mistakes he made in his technical argument. Therefore, I would begin by my usual critique of cause and effect. (I say “my,” but I copped it from Hume. He hasn't complained yet.) If you've read me for any length of time, you've encountered this criticism. Here it is, indented:

• Chemicals in the brain may be the result of an emotional state or the cause of an emotional state. Their presence does not establish cause. Therefore, if you orphan a child and examine brain chemistry, it may show depression chemicals, but those chemicals didn't make the child sad. You did. If you prevent the expression of the chemicals, you may prevent the emotion, or you may delay it or push it into another health effect, as we cannot say that bad feelings or good feelings are non-functional.

Well, I want to do that, but I kind of can't. You see, I started to form the syllables in my mouth's mind, or my mind's mouth, and I got as far as “pleasure is.” Pleasure is... what? What is pleasure?

Define "pleasure" without a negation or synonym, and you'll be in for it. Happy? Isn't happy pleasure? The querulous and quarrelsome are going to be reaching for the comment field already, either to tell me that pleasure is simple or that Webster's says it's this or that damned thing. Stop it.


Imagine that you had to program a robot to feel pleasure. You could weight some actions more than others, but that would be preference. You could open up more resources upon the completion of a task, but that's reward. What would you do to create pleasure in a mechanical model? How would you construct an analog of it in a creature that otherwise has never had it?

Maybe I'm being a fool, but I feel moderately confident that this is not an easy task, and not just because it evades me. There are multiple concepts that seem atomic – things that are indivisible analytically, concepts that are nearly immune to Professor Kant's system. They're baseline. Time is one of them. We all have to know what it is before we discuss it, and the same is true of pleasure. Pain, to some degree, is like pleasure, but we have things like “damage” and “firing nerves” that we can lean on for it. “Life” is a wobbler that is somewhat atomic. John Locke would say that these are the ideas that are just plain there as innate ideas. (I'm not aware of any society lacking them. The small group without tense may or may not lack time. It made the news that someone found one small group at all that even appeared to lack one, and this scarcity makes my point rather well.)


So, if we don't know what pleasure is, how on earth can we say that this much or that much comes from this state of chemical eruption or that? Obviously, subjectivity is involved, since these are subjective states we're talking about, and therefore the scientific discussion is going to have to be, if you think about it, of itself.

• A creature exhibits the signs of pleasure with oxytocin,
  
• and then a human subject reports feelings of love and intimacy when exposed to it. If there are humans who do not respond to it, or who express a different chemical or in a different mixture, then they won't have been found, but the compound will have been named,
  
• and, from then on, the discussion will be of the compound, not the phenomenon. The equivalence of the chemical and subjective state will be affirmed once and will hold everything together.

Pleasure in its own pursuit is the essence of lust. Lust defines pleasure as the object of desire rather than love. One of the odd things about male sexuality that women have noticed is that men are absolutely obsessed with the female orgasm. While some feminists have spoken confidently of men only caring because they can then claim to have conquered the woman, I do not know where their confidence comes from, unless it is associating with a bad crowd. Men themselves are at a loss to describe or explain it, but they desperately plead that they are doing it out of love. Gay men have the same obsession, it turns out, and the rather unlovely culmination of male sexual activity is a high point of their erotica.

I think, if there is any way of knowing why this is so, it would be more nearly found in pleasure than violence. Men want pleasure and want to observe pleasure, because their sexuality is visual. Pleasure is thus a feedback loop, as emotional pleasure is a feedback cycle otherwise for both cycles and love is a feedback circuit should be for both and is for women. Women will want to hear and know about a man's feelings to feed back into the emit/receive cycle of pleasure/love that works along a non-visual pathway, but men are going for their "pathways of pleasure" by objects being looked at, actions being seen: testimony is not sufficient.

On a more dull level, the pathway of pleasure is the salmon run of teenagers perpetually misunderstanding themselves and each other. “The girls are all stuck up, because they know how hot they are,” the boy told me. Girls are, of course, horribly insecure and think themselves ugly. “Guys always go out with girls who are such sluts. Don't they realize that she's going to cheat on him, too,” the girl asked me. The boy in question is like an animal with a festering disease at his last extremity. He is no more capable of rational thought than he is of growing the chest hair he lacks.

In one town I lived in, there was a massage parlor on main street. On the front door, it has pressed on letters from a stencil set that said, “Use Back Entrance Please.” If that weren't bad enough, the /e/ fell off of “Use.” When someone robbed the place, police were able to find the thieves thanks to the video surveillance the place used in its entry. Suddenly, a great many men in the next town were blanching and having long, serious talks with their partners and wives.

Such is lust. It is not rational, because it is not orderly. It has no purpose. It only has a goal, and the goal is rather ignoble.

Lust's downfall is love. Lust is a psychotic that cuts the heads off of paper dolls. It carefully preserves those 'pathways of pleasure,' but it doesn't have to tolerate fights or compromises or being ignored. Love bears harm, takes pain. Lust refuses to hear its partner's name, walks out in the morning, regrets the night before or forgets it and swears off martinits. Love holds all, encompasses and incorporates into itself, and it can never be described chemically.