Updates from the World

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

On Ultimate Realism

I haven't written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: "Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want to exist... does exist."

This view first occurred to me one day last year during a week of spiritual-existential difficulty. I had gone to a local bar and ran into an acquaintance, who said, having not seen me in ages due to my focus on school and writing, "welcome back to the real world," to which I could only reply, but isn't everywhere also just as real? and then wandered down the street struck by the total implications of everything around me being that real. There is some sense in which we tend to believe that only those habits and experiences that we usually have are really real, or at least of the most real importance to us, forgetting that other experiences we don't have are just as real. And beyond existing situations, every content of our imaginations and the stories we tell is real, in that these have real effects in the real world. And ultimately, any perspective that will allow us to articulate our lives in the whole of such a multifaceted reality, and perhaps allow us to formulate a perspective of global significance and understanding, will have to put us in relation to that whole, not just as it is scientifically and historically understood, but in relation to all that humans have said, imagined, believed, and dreamed.

This view has come out of years of questioning spiritual beliefs and the nature of the stories we tell. How do we, as human beings in a world with other human beings, deal with the fact that people have divergent and often contradictory views on what the world is and our place in it? Historically, belief systems have clashed, and continue to clash because each side takes their perspective as most true and right, whereas if one view was somehow objectively true and right there should be no cause for conflict; and yet there is. In my own life I have struggled with such limited perspectives, not knowing in what to believe, as the beliefs always seemed too small, and yet needing to believe in something, to tell some kind of story, and finally recognizing that any belief I would want to hold would have to be large enough to contain all possibilities of believing.

Similarly I fear global destruction due to the clash of these limited perspectives, and that we as a species do not have the stories to set us in relation to where we are now that might allow us to continue into the future in a meaningful, healthy, and positive way. The stories we are prone to tell today are often too small, quotidian, dealing with failure, comeuppance, and the meaningless joy ride of post-modernity, whereas we need a perspective that can address the Universe as a whole, for future generations of humanity in this Universe. These stories must be ultimate in order to place us and our actions in the widest set of meaning or significance necessary for survival.

My old professor, Dr. Fred Clothey (a student of famed mythographer Mircea Eliade), suggested that the stories we tell can tell us about ourselves, in effect modeling our understanding of reality in order to authenticate current actions and allow future actions. Our stories/ myths/ beliefs/ perspectives, etc. can do this precisely when they are cast in an "aura of ultimate significance," that is, by referring us to the widest possible scope of experience and understanding, to our cosmic and social beginnings, to our longed for and feared endings, to our ideals taking on human form. We find our place and being in between the limits of the real as we know it.

One such ultimate signifier, that has had a direct effect on real occurrences, is the concept of God(s). While belief in supernatural beings has allowed articulation of our relation to society and mortality, is has, perhaps most clearly and distressingly, served as a justification for centuries worth of horror and cruelty: crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, or just plain ignorance. But we are prone to forget in our polarized times that this personification of ultimate ideals was also a necessary and integral perspective for the development of scientific reasoning, framing an objective and total perspective that we humans could then hope to achieve ourselves, a belief that has existed coterminous to science up through the 20th century. Contemporary atheists might be glad that God is no longer a reference for rational understanding, but "His" death has negative impacts as well: God has traditionally not only been a signifier for ultimate perspective and knowing, but also for perfection and goodness, in short, ethical understanding of behavior, without which we do things like build the atomic bomb. Technology runs rampant when not placed in the widest relation to how it might rightly be used, or the lack of an ethical signifier allows the cultural insecurities that haunt us to become manifest, and such horrors not only be imagined but made real. One imagines a similar lack of ultimate significance in the perspectives that have allowed western culture's unparalleled material consumption, environmental destruction, and continued ideological warfare on the rest of humanity.

I am not arguing here for a return to a belief in the traditional monotheistic God or earlier gods. These stories, as we have seen, are just too small and conflict-provoking compared to those perspectives that now need to be adopted. I am arguing though for a greater belief in the reality and efficacy of the contents of our stories and imaginations, and an awareness of how these otherwise subconscious narratives influence the real world.

One of the problems to this approach is the primacy we give to literal truth, vs. the obvious falsity of our "true" representations of reality. I am a huge fan of stories of the fantastic, of the magical, supernatural, weird, heroic, or sci-fi, which, looking at the predominance of these themes in the current cultural media and imagination, I believe I am not alone in. But why do we love supermen, zombies, and the end of the world? There has been a trend in storytelling, dating from the late 18th century, of attempting to represent reality as it "really is," social or quotidian realism, and not as an allegorical reference for otherwise real things. Fiction, when it first was read as not literally true, was cast as "petite histories," in order to accept stories they had to mimic reality while being divorced from talking about reality. My immediate response to all this is, there's already too much of the world we experience on a daily basis, why create more of it, when stories beyond the everyday may raise possibilities of experience and understanding more than that which we are already familiar with. That familiarity constrains us, by being real, to the obviously inadequate belief systems we now live under. We hold up what we believe is a mirror and say, this is real, and because we say it, that marks the bounds up what we will allow to be really real.

My second issue with realism is that it is not reality despite how it primps and masquerades itself as such. It may represent aspects of reality, but does so by relying on and reaffirming our assumptions about how the world is and should be, which constrains us to accepting those views and realities as more true or valid, to the exclusion of wider views. And today it seems our view of the real is that it frankly sucks and nothing matters anymore. And any attempt to actually discuss real human issues in an emotionally valid way is negated by the irony and scorn with which we articulate the real world. The fantastic however, by being non-real and symbolic of the real (mythopoetic in Tolkien's terms), precisely allows us to highlight those human themes and conditions we want to examine in truthful ways. But in order to even accept the contents of fantastic stories we must (as Coleridge first suggested) suspend our disbelief of those things that couldn't be literally true in our everyday experience. We no longer have a problem leaping into wizard fights or across star systems, we can suspend disbelief but we are never asked to truly believe, and thus are not as prone to take such fantasies as being symbolic or ultimately significant for how we really are or could be in the world. We are content to let them be mere entertainments and diversions rather than suggestions of possibility.

Yet, are ghosts and gods really real, or is this even the right way of framing the question? There is a sense that certain things are existentially real, they commit us to accepting their physical reality, being right in front of us. The invisible and imaginative do not so commit us; one can not empirically and scientifically prove a god's actual existence. To argue one way or the other for this is to miss the entire point about gods. But one can clearly see the effects that belief in such unprovables has on our world, both on our perspectives and psychologies and in actual historical occurrences. Ignoring and belittling the immaterial causes of such beliefs and effects does little to add to our understanding of ourselves in the world, allows the results of inappropriate or too-small beliefs to continue unchecked, and limits the human imagination to articulate new possibilities of being and understanding being, which are necessary for our current and continued survival, let alone enjoyment and well being. On the other hand, if we do not remember that the stories we tell are only stories, that have been made up despite their real effects, we run the risk of mistaking the stories as literally true, thus causing us to act in dangerous and inappropriate ways, when imagining better stories to live by and through is always an option (and it is this lack of awareness of the power of our symbols that I mean by the absent narrative).

I do not know where we will go from here, but I am wary and sick of the post-modern skepticism that rejects any ultimate significance in favor of what we can directly lay our hands on (and in so doing, strangle it to death). I would prefer to see interconnections of the layers of reality rather than the whole's deconstruction and rebuttal. Acting as if we know everything and nothing really matters is perhaps the smallest and most dangerous perspective one could hold. Ultimately, we exist in a Universe which we barely understand, and in which we are a bare speck, and perhaps in that widest view humanity is indeed meaningless and fated to extinction for lack of any better options. And yet it is also possible to believe, and live by the belief, that life and our consciousness of life may be more than a random fluke or evolutionary mistake; not that we serve some clear teleological purpose or extant will of God, but that for all these unknowns we are still real, and still here, and confronted with the implications of that for all reality.

Though reality may be inherently meaningless we have the choice to take on meanings and act on those meanings, to continue to be and gather greater understanding and significance, both on this planet and in the Universe as a whole, should we choose to accept this mission. Anything less than such an Ultimately Realist perspective sells ourselves short, and will only propel us down the road of meaninglessness and destruction. But if we can perhaps articulate a perspective wide enough, not just for all humans, but all life in general and beyond life, then perhaps we can continue on until that perspective, and all else we can imagine, becomes real.

Ancient Verse

I've been doing a lot of research recently for an essay to submit to the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology, and have particularly grown fascinated by the scope of history, and particularly the birth of writing in the Mesopotamia river valley. Most well known is the Epic of Gilgamesh,a hero-myth written down in the 23rd century BCE Akkadian Empire, and for all intents the first action story as well as model for how kings and men ought to behave.


Around the same time though we also apparently find Enheduanna (above), daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad, high En (priestess) of Nanna, and the first poet known by name, if not the first recorded author. The link contains links to some of her poems, which seem for the most part to be temple hymns to Innana and other Sumerian goddesses. It is interesting to note that after the development of writing, it seems most myths and stories were told in poetic verse, and most narratives were mythic, which lasts until the second emergence of Greek culture and the prose myths of Hesiod's Theogony (800 BCE).

Non-mythic literature doesn't arise until the Japanese serialized "novel", The Tale of the Genji (finished 1021 CE), and European Medieval allegories of the 1300s. We don't start taking stories as literally fictive until Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and even then it had to be published as a "petite historie," a private, little, or dubious history, perhaps because it was still hard to believe that something you hear is true in itself though not true in reality, a bit of doublethink those of us who've grown up in the present are accustomed to.





And just because this is now becoming an absurd saga, Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down the Large Hadron Collider (Really), from Popular Science.

RIP Mac Tonnies

This post was supposed to be another collection of links, but that will have to wait, as I just learned that ufologogist and fellow blogger Mac Tonnies has passed away. While I never met Mac, and maybe commented on his blog once or twice, nor am I all that obsessed with UFOs (being much more intrigued by the beings that reside in our imaginations than in the star systems), I have been following Mac's writings for six years now, since my brother first got me into blogging and pointed at Posthuman Blues as a site to follow. And it was.

The thing that always struck me about Mac (besides that he looked like an exact duplicate of a friend of mine), is that he exemplified that rare breed of person who has conviction in their obsessions, patience and curiosity for research, a balanced blend of believe and skepticism. In short, reading Posthuman Blues you knew this stuff was very important to him, and if you kept reading, his conviction would make it important to you too. I hope now that he's not stuck here Mac will find what he's looking for out in the beyond.

It's not the End of the World

I've been insisting on this point for years now, so it's finally good to see the Mayans argue that 2012 is not the end of the world.

The only thing the Mayan long count calendar suggests is that one period of time is finished and the next begins, somewhat like a new year or an odometer clicking over. As it is based on the position of astral bodies, in particular the alignments of Venus, the metaphor of an odometer clicking over on a galactic scale is really about the closest meaning to what the calendar says.

The Mayans contend that any notion of apocalypses and singularities is a Western construction, perhaps a projection of our values onto another culture's belief and measurement systems. Bear in mind it is only in Western traditions such as Christianity that a teleological endpoint to time and reality are posited, often in terms of the spectacular fiery cataclysms we seem to enjoy or desire. The notion of an apocalypse is only valid in a culture based on belief systems that suggest that there is only linear time, and that only in later times can we find true reality or happiness (ie, in an afterlife). Take the notion of heaven after death and apply it collectively and you get a desire for a collective death. This notion applies to the ancient Norse Ragnarok as a collective means of reaching Valhalla, but does not apply to cycle notions of time, such as in Buddhism or Mayan cosmologies. Why would the world end if the myths played themselves out year after year, eon after eon, in the heavens as well as on Earth?

What strikes me as strange is that, though many people in Western culture no longer treat our foundational myths as real or valid, we still have that understanding of time as linear and endable, and enjoy if not demand such endings. Why do we want the world to end? Why do we want to project our desire for that onto someone else's beliefs, as if we can justify the desire by saying it is prophesied, and therefor not our fault? Whether the Mayans like it or not, 2012 has become a contemporary Western myth of the end of time, and as such says something about how we experience the world we live in. Perhaps we are too scared, too ashamed, of the extent of of the damage Western cultural values have inflicted on the planet, which along with the looming resource crises and potential threat of technological transcendence/annihilation, we can point to the Mayans and say, look it's not our fault, they said it was going to happen first, and how can we change that? What our myth of 2012 does is allow us to evade responsibility for our actions in the world we live in for the world that our children may still inherit. Who needs to worry about the future if no one will be around to experience it?

History is Fiction

Jim Shepard on fictionalizing true events:

The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: where do you get off writing about anything? Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender? A different person? Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago?

Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility. And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well. The whole project of literature – the entire project of the arts — is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?

[via The Millions]

Questioning Socrates through the Socratic Method

In my religious studies class on Wisdom we have been reading Plato's dialogues, and were asked to write a dialogue in that style on whether or not we thought Socrates was actually wise (meaning of course that we had to actually state what we though wisdom is, something Socrates was loathe to do). I'm posting the results as part of my ongoing inquiry into human value(s). Interestingly, my take that wisdom should be some sort of heuristic or useful way of determining how to live in the world seems to be answered in our next class reading, Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics."


The Sophia

SOPHIA: My dear, thank you for being able to meet with me, I know that you have a lot of work to do this weekend.

TAIT: It is my pleasure. If I can I will always be available to you, and besides, it is a wonderful day out along the river, and I desperately needed a break from my writing. Now what was it you wanted to discuss?

SOPHIA: Wisdom, of which I always have so many questions, and as you know am in sore need of these days.

TAIT: I agree with that for my own sake. Did you not read Plato’s Five Dialogues that I lent to you? Did you not find Socrates to be wise?

SOPHIA: Well, they say Socrates is the wisest man there was, at least in the Western tradition, but I had a hard time understanding just what he thought wisdom is.

TAIT: How so?

SOPHIA: Well he talks in circles, always confounding any clear point he might make by loosing me in a labyrinth of language, and then when each dialogue is over he rushes off without giving any clear answer to what he’s getting at, like when discussing piety or virtue. It seems disingenuous; the wise should at least be able to make a clear statement of what that means, so that others might understand, if not follow them.

TAIT: I agree with you, wisdom should be articulable if anything is, but perhaps Socrates doesn’t know what wisdom is enough to state it clearly? As he admits in his Apology, he alone knows that he does not know anything, and perhaps this makes him wiser than others who do think they know.

SOPHIA: Perhaps, but if this is wisdom, he is not using it to help others become more wise. As he states, his project is to prove if others are wiser than him or not, and finds them all lacking. It seems that if we were to listen to him we would all become confused fools unable to even say that we know our own names!

TAIT: That would be tragic if it was true! He also says in Phaedo that his purpose is that others may agree with him, which I’m not sure whether to take seriously either. One clear point I do agree with is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and clearly he wants us to examine our lives on this subject, and by throwing out what we think we know perhaps we can come to a better understanding of what we don’t. I think he says some things about wisdom that it would be hard not to agree with as well.

SOPHIA: Such as?

TAIT: Let us spell them out directly, as you and I are both inimical to Socrates’ circular arguments, and perhaps we can make some sense of this subject. Reading through the dialogues, Socrates variously states that wisdom relates to the following: deciding what is right or doing and believing in what is right, piety or duty to obligations and agreements, justice, a preference for the truth, not prejudging knowledge, striving for such positive abstractions as Beauty or Goodness, courage or not fearing death, obeying the state or one’s superiors, caring for one’s virtue or excellence of the soul over the body or material concerns, examining our lives, finding what is right in oneself rather than in popular opinion, not doing wrong when others wrong you, moderation, directing our actions towards goodness, a true opinion from the gods (or from dreams and omens), a rejection of the body to prepare us for death, a cleansing or purification of the soul, following reason and truth rather than the senses, and a harmony of the soul.

SOPHIA: Well, that is indeed a motley list, what are we to do with it? Surely these are not all different kinds of wisdom?

TAIT: Hardly. Socrates likes to point out that we should not seek the particulars but the generalized Forms behind them (though that might only be Plato putting words in the wise man’s mouth; I’m not convinced these Forms aren’t some abstraction we have made up). But as such these would all be aspects of wisdom.

SOPHIA: And wisdom would be something that contains or expresses them all?

TAIT: Assuming they are all necessary for wisdom. There are perhaps a few I am not sure are so wise, namely where he equates wisdom with servitude, being death-driven, and god-granted. But first let’s get at the Form before throwing out the particulars, otherwise how would we have a definition or standard by which to judge the parts?

SOPHIA: That seems like a sound approach. What do they suggest?

TAIT: Let’s see… it seems that Socrates is suggesting that wisdom is a kind of thing that allows humans to direct their actions towards good or true ways of being in the world in order to prepare their souls for death. Does that sound correct?

SOPHIA: For now let us say wisdom is that. But what kind of thing is wisdom that it allows us to do this? Surely it is not a virtue itself like courage or justice, for as we said those are parts of wisdom, which wisdom helps us direct ourselves toward or with.

TAIT: Socrates does not say. Personally I am inclined to say that in our definition wisdom is a heuristic, a method or strategy for thinking or deciding our actions in an optimal manner.

SOPHIA: Ah! So that those who have wisdom have a method of living more virtuously than those who do not. That would be nice to have. How could I find such a way of directing myself?

TAIT: Socrates does not say that either. In fact, he is inclined to believe that we cannot learn wisdom at all, only recollect it from an earlier life, like virtue in Meno, or find it in ourselves as a true opinion granted by the gods.

SOPHIA: But if that is the case, how is it possible for some people to be wise and others not?

TAIT: Perhaps we are to think that some people do not recollect as well as others, or do not listen to the opinions of the gods as clearly. Others may not even believe in the gods, but that doesn’t seem to mean that they cannot also be wise, or that wisdom should not also be for the forgetful. These are the ones who might need wisdom the most!

SOPHIA: And surely Socrates would want them to have it, even if, as an Athenian, he was privileged with a certain kind of education and lifestyle that allowed him to go around questioning everyone else’s assumptions. He does seem concerned with people in general.

TAIT: He does, but doesn’t say much about them when discussing wisdom. Perhaps then our definition of wisdom is not wide enough, and other attributes are necessary for wisdom to be clearly stated. – Such as?

TAIT: Well, from what we just discussed, it seems that wisdom must necessarily be teachable, to anyone. Perhaps more specifically, this means to me that wisdom must be both practical and practicable, for without clear and direct methods or guides for directing our actions toward rightness or goodness, how are we to know if we are doing the correct thing? This is particularly the case in today’s world, which as we know is often very confusing. It is difficult to tell what is right, and often times we have to make choices between doing what we need to in order to survive and doing things in a virtuous manner. I know that sometimes going to work feels like it is not a right action, especially when it adds to the total amount of material consumption in the world, which I for one do not find virtuous. Yet I have to work in order to live. Whatever wisdom is, it should be practical enough to allow us to know what is the right way to act in morally ambiguous or paradoxical circumstances, not only directing us towards virtues in the abstract but also establishing them as a practice in our everyday lives.

SOPHIA: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that, but it is true. Do I drive my car to see my mother, or not see my mother because driving is bad for the environment? Socrates seems sure that the right action is generally a pretty clear thing, given by the gods, and now it is not the case at all!

TAIT: And it gets more complicated than that, I’m afraid. As we said before, wisdom should also be for those for whom it is hard to come by. I would go further to say that wisdom should be for everybody, in any place or time, regardless of upbringing or cultural values. For though Socrates’ wisdom is most clearly applicable to the society of ancient Greece, it would only be a part of the Form of wisdom if it were not also applicable to any situation in which it is beneficial to act with rightness, goodness, or truth.

SOPHIA: That does follow, and it would indeed be a great wisdom if all people could follow or practice it. But you said this was complicated?

TAIT: Yes, unfortunately. The thing Socrates neglects, perhaps in thinking of his particular culture as the apex of civilization, is that not everyone in all places and times has the same perspective on what is right, good, beautiful, or true. Even we in one place and time don’t know what is always right, and people raised under vastly different circumstances may come at what is right from entirely different directions. Consider beauty as an example. Though there is a Form of the Beautiful, particular things we encounter may be beautiful to one person but not to another, or, depending on our moods or experiences may appear variably beautiful to us or not. The other virtues are no different in being thus subjective. Certainly Socrates in Phaedo warns against finding arguments true at one time and not true at another, but what I consider true, and even feel to the depths of my soul to be true, may not seem at all that way to you, otherwise everyone would always be in agreement, and that is clearly not the case. Perhaps then there are greater truths that everyone could agree on, or greater rightnesses and beauties, and maybe wisdom could lead all people toward these specific, perfect forms.

SOPHIA: But that would be boring.

TAIT: It would indeed. Perhaps wisdom then necessarily has to embrace and respect a multiplicity and diversity of perspectives as to what the aims and means of wisdom are. Instead of believing that your truth is the best truth, it would be wiser to compare it with someone else’s truth and perhaps find a larger perspective in which they are both true. If there is any way of really knowing these Forms, it is through that aspect of wisdom. At the very least it would ease many of the tensions and arguments between people, who fight for not seeing eye to eye and from holding their own truths as absolutely true. As we said, wisdom must direct us to living right in the world, and peaceful resolution of conflicts along with human understanding seem to be right, if we can say anything is. Socrates suggests wisdom is a harmony of the soul, and I would say that when we say rightness or right action, it means being in such harmony or balance, with ourselves, with other people, and with the environment of our world.

SOPHIA: So then, wisdom must be a practical, teachable, and multiple-perspective embracing method of directing our actions towards good or true, that is, harmonious, ways of being in the world? That seems a fairly clear and useful definition.

TAIT: Yes, though you forgot that we also posited from Socrates’ statements that wisdom is not for the living, but to prepare us for death. In fact, Socrates makes clear he does not think it possible to really gain knowledge of wisdom until after we are dead.

SOPHIA: But that is preposterous. Why would we need wisdom after we are dead? How can that help us now, when we most need it?

TAIT: Well, Socrates believed that we are reborn, and can recall that wisdom in our lifetimes, but it seems an assumption to state these as if they are known, true things, when clearly, and even reasonably, we can not know anything while alive about what it is like to not be alive, regardless of what you, or Socrates, wants it to be like. And yet there is still this thing called wisdom, and there is still the need for us to live in harmonious ways while actually living. If it were only for death, why shouldn’t we just kill ourselves, or, like the Christians, do terrible things while alive knowing that what really counts is the afterlife? Certainly it seems wise not to fear death, and to prepare ourselves to meet it gracefully, but it seems even wiser not to fear life, with all its contradictions and material impulses. Any wisdom that I would truly call wisdom must necessarily be directed at directing our actions in this world, for it is only in this world, while alive, regardless of if there is an afterlife or rebirth, that our actions have effects and can achieve a greater harmony, not only in ourselves or in our time, but for all peoples and times to come.

SOPHIA: Amen. Wisdom then must not be some abstract philosophical pursuit, but a real lived concern with real results in this world.

TAIT: If it were not, would people still be discussing Socrates?

SOPHIA: Academics do love abstractions though… but wait; you had another disagreement with Socrates’ specific descriptions of wisdom, something about obedience or servitude not being wise.

TAIT: Yes, thank you for reminding me. I do disagree, not that obedience is necessarily bad, sometimes other people who hold authority over us do have better or more wise ways of doing things than we do, and contrariness for its own sake often achieves little (though I, like Socrates, seem to find some pleasure in questioning everything). My problem is that Socrates seems to suggest that one must always obey, in particular the State, and must continue to obey even if those in authority do something wrong to us or others. Socrates reasons that we have made an agreement and must follow it, but I say, those in authority have also made agreements that they must follow without doing us wrong, and if they did not make such agreements, why are we obeying them? Socrates suggests that if the state does wrong then we can try to convince them to do otherwise, but as we see with individuals who do wrong, they are not prone to listening to wise advice. And where does that leave us, except with that paradoxical choice to do the more right thing, either continuing to serve or rejecting servitude. Neither is wiser and both may be necessary. But the deeper issue is, can any situation where one person or group holds power or authority over another, especially through the threat of violence, ever result in the kind of harmony of the world that we have stated wisdom is directed towards?

SOPHIA: I… don’t know.

TAIT: I don’t either, but it’s not like history has given us that many opportunities to find out. The world is still a violent and disrespectful place, even if pierced by moments of levity. But it seems that if our definition of wisdom includes a respect for a multiplicity of perspectives, this must hold also true across divisions of power. Perhaps a wiser world would not have such divisions, or, when they are necessary, would not place the greater value on those with the greater power and might.

SOPHIA: But what if those with power know best what to do? And if they don’t, who else will teach us? Can we decide for ourselves how to act harmoniously or learn some other way? I feel we’ve created circles around this without even meaning to!

TAIT: Yes, wisdom is not so clear, nor is life. But that is why we must strive for it. I will try to answer by refuting another of Socrates’ points, and hopefully end it at that. In Phaedo, Socrates suggests that wise men cannot look after themselves when free, that their wisdom is god-given in this prison called life, which is to say that they have placed the higher authority, and the burden of making responsible choices, on some force that no one can see and may or may not actually exist. The only agreements made by the gods were in the stories we made up about them, and you would have to look very far to find a deity who was truly wise and harmonious in the world. – But…

TAIT: Yes, I know you believe there may be some higher force than the gods that is truly wise and in such harmony, but such a thing is beyond our immediate kin and rationalities, and any entreaties we make toward it are perhaps only a reflection of our own inner sense of the harmony of the world, which when projected outwards becomes more clear to us. I do not know, but don’t think we even need to posit such a thing, as reassuring as it may feel, in order to live wisely. If we can not turn to the gods, or other wiser men for knowledge of wisdom, then what do we have to turn to but ourselves, that is, our experiences, which when we allow ourselves to perceive, understand, and believe in, seeking always to balance them against our senses of harmony, do seem to grant us better ways of living in the world. That being the case, those most free to experience the world would by necessity be the wisest. That is what I strive for, though admittedly, I have experienced relatively little of what the world has to offer.

SOPHIA: I like the sound of it though. It feels true, or harmonious if you want to put it that way. And what we need then may not just be more of our own experiences, but other people’s experiences, a community of experiencers, sharing our different understandings and harmonies, which can add up, like our conversation here, into some greater sense of wisdom for the whole world! – I like that very much, and hope we may find such a community one day soon.

SOPHIA: But where? Who else here will listen to these wise words?

Faith and the Pattern

Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.

The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.

But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.

The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.

To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.

I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.

But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.

Sex in the Library and the Eye of Eros

I am currently reading Lolita, as I haven't touched Nabokov before and would like to get through at least his most (in)famous works before the publication of his posthumous novel The Original of Laura. While Lolita is scandalous for its content, an aged European's ecstatic affair with a twelve-year old girl, the novel's style is perhaps the opposite of pornography: there is no mention of actual sexual acts (so far), or when they are they are couched in delicate, literary terms that apparently bore most readers, but to my mind heighten the impact of Humbert Humbert's desire.

Contrast this to recently-reviewed love letters from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, suppressed by their grandson because they contain some of the raunchiest, explicit sex acts (anal, S&M, masturbation, etc) as only a master linguist could describe them, including a fetish for farting: "It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and say your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”

Over the winter I was working on a survey of sexual representation for an article called The Eye of Eros for my friend's sex anthology, the Living Room Handjob, an article I unfortunately never finished, that swings from the erotic symbolisms of Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye" to philosophies of sexual perversions to paleolithic sexual cave art to the fascination of sexualized horror in the Ciudad Juárez femecides dramatized in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," showing the broad range of ways that people have expressed both their fascination and discomfort with sexual desire over history and literature:


The Eye of Eros

In 1928, Georges Bataille published “The Story of the Eye,” since considered a masterpiece of pornographic literature. In the novella, two teenage lovers embark on a series of disturbing sexual escapades, opening with the narrator watching his lover sit naked in a dish of milk and progressing through orgies and rape to the insertion of not only a bull testicle but also a human eyeball (of a priest) into the vagina of the heroine. There are conflicting critical opinions of whether or not this work classifies as pornography; Susan Sontag suggests the book is, through its juxtaposition of sex and death and recourse to the transgressive sexual narratives of the Marquis De Sade. Roland Barthes on the other hand points out the centrality and interchangeability of the sexual objects in the story: liquids of milk, blood, semen, urine, vomit, and ovoids of eggs, testicles, the sun, and the eye, suggesting instead that the coherence of the underlying metaphors moves the story away from a pornographic reading. While sex scenes and perversions abound in “The Story of the Eye,” what is most fascinating, most arousing about the text, is that the sexual images are pushed far past the point where they can be considered primarily sexual, sex is pushed beyond standing for just sex, and the reader is left with the feeling that any symbol meditated on in a sexual way can elicit similar feelings of arousal and fascination, the pleasure principle of Eros.

Biologically, human sexuality is little different from animal sexuality, in that its primary purpose is the reproduction of the species. Sex however is also pleasurable, evoking sensations of ludic play over ergic work, through foreplay, masturbation, intercourse, orgasm, and sexual fetishes or perversions. People tend to experiment with a range of sexual activities during their lives, generally settling on a few that they find most pleasurable. The philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that what activities and sensations that are considered “sexual” are culturally and historically determined, that is, what is acceptable sexually is determined by social rules of behavior and the status quo. Societies however define some sexual activities as inappropriate (wrong person, wrong activity, wrong place, etc.). These social rules are referred to as sexual morality (what can and can not be done by society's rules) and sexual norms (what is and is not expected). In the United States for example, attitudes towards premarital sex and the use of contraceptives correlate to religious beliefs and political affiliation. As Foucault points out, society defines what is considered sexually “normal,” and in order to escape this culture-bound sexuality one ought to focus on “bodies and pleasures.” But in an age of hyper, almost obsessive media depiction is it possible to only focus on pleasures and bodies outside of their attendant images and modes of representation?

Sexual perversions, or paraphilia, refer to any “powerful and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners” (that is, any sex beyond reproduction), and are described by the DSM as conditions which "are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." Hundreds of paraphilias are listed in the DSM: exhibitionism, the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person; fetishism, the use of inanimate objects to gain sexual excitement; pedophilia, a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children; sexual masochism, the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer for sexual pleasure; sexual sadism, the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of a person is sexually exciting; transvestic fetishism, arousal from clothing associated with members of the opposite sex; voyeurism, the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities. The DSM also mentions telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine), emetophilia (vomit).

Reading a sex column like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” or browsing for any particular paraphilia on the internet, one almost gets the feeling that the majority of these perversions are now socially acceptable, that it is in fact straightforward, unkinky, heterosexual intercourse that is bizarre or perverse. But unless one is partial to one of these sexual fantasies, what is most likely to result in the mind on hearing of them are the images or objects associated with each perversion: the exhibitionist’s overcoat; dildos, butt plugs, and other insertable, fetishistic objects (including elongated vegetables and statuary); bondage belts, hoods, whips, chains, or soft rope and scarves; young boys talking to older teachers or priests; garter belts, underwear, and high heel shoes; and behind them all, the voyeur’s peeping eye behind a curtain. These images are such a vast part of popular culture and consciousness that it is enough to mention just one to evoke whole scenes and fantasies in an active imagination regardless of ones’ own sexual proclivities. The pleasure or fascination that results is derived from being able to see the experience, and the images of paraphilias add to the uniqueness (and thus visibility) of a sexual experience over other normal or perhaps boring sexual experiences. As such, the insertion of an eyeball into the vagina in “The Story of the Eye” becomes the ultimate fetish, the act of seeing itself sexualized, the witness of sex from the inside of the body.

But what of the body, which is perhaps the most common thing to human experience? Once unadorned, our differences are discernable by height, weight, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, and physical age; generally the options one might find on a typical porn website, along with the previous lists of perversions. As opposed to erotica, which only uses or alludes to sexually arousing imagery, pornography is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is important to note that it is not the sexual act itself that is pornographic but the depiction of the act. With more tolerant social attitudes towards sexual representation, an immense pornography industry has grown, using a variety of media – printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game – depicting not only real human sex but also situations involving fictional, cartoon, and video game characters. Studies in 2001 put the porn industry gross at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year, and the industry is considered influential in deciding format wars in media. The weight of the porn industry, the sheer amount of naked and sexualized bodies available for perusal, has to have some effect on the way we perceive the human body. And this is not even to consider the gratuitous use of sex to sell products in advertisements. Humans are multiplied, catalogued, anonymously masturbated to, in short, objectified beyond all personal experience, pleasure, or identity.

Feminist critics generally consider pornography demeaning to women. It eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Other recent feminists claim that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy. Some researchers interestingly have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between availability of porn and per capita crime rates; that an increase in pornography equates to a decrease in sex crimes. Japan for example, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, though some attribute this to the emphasis on a woman's "honor" in Japanese culture, which makes victims of sex crime less likely to report it. The most shocking case of sex crimes are perhaps the over 400 women who have been victims of sexual homicide over the past ten years in the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which still remain unsolved. In his recently published novel, “2666,” Roberto Bolaño dramatizes these sex crimes in several hundred pages of false police reports, giving the incidental details of each victim’s discovery along with the recurring line, “the victim had been vaginally and anally raped.” Despite the horror of attempting to represent such brutal acts, the act of murder is itself never depicted, and what results is essentially a reduction of sexualized human bodies to a meaningless catalogue of names and images, albeit with the threat that someone still might find this arousing. Someone has to in order to keep committing the crimes, regardless of the amount of pornographic imagery or social sexual norms in Mexico. Perhaps what they find arousing is that they are the only one(s) who get to see the actual act and not just its aftermath. Pornographers and rapists control the lens of the modern sexual spectacle.

If bodies and pleasures have been reduced to dehumanized catalogues, how was sex seen in earlier ages? The depiction of sexual acts is as old as civilization, but the concept of pornography as understood today did not exist until the Victorian era. Previous to that time law did not stipulate looking at sexual objects or images. In some cases, specific books, engravings or image collections were censored or outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper class scholars. The Victorians’ morality and sexual conservatism is legendary, so much so that the earliest psychological analysis carried out by Sigmund Freud focused primarily on sexual repressions, conjecturing the concepts of erogenous zones, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that all culture was essentially a response to cover up childhood sexual traumas, though later it was decided that his theories were based primarily out of his own experiences (while perhaps with a desire to shock his stiff-laced contemporaries).

What would Freud have made of the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings that are the oldest surviving examples of erotica, much less the entire history of human civilization? The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes onto their ceramics; many are famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. The Moche of Peru in South America also sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. There has been a long tradition of erotic painting among the Eastern cultures as well. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented, and the erotic art of China reached its popular peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty. In India the Kama Sutra was written between the 1st and 6th centuries. It was intended as both an exploration of human desire, including seduction and infidelity, and a technical guide to pleasing a sexual partner within a marriage sex manual, and is still popularly read throughout the world. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text “I Modi” was a woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601, Caravaggio painted the "Amor Vincit Omnia" for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. With the 20th Century, photography became the most interesting medium for erotic art, as it made the reproduction of images democratic, rapid, and widely distributable, a trend that has only continued through film to our present media overload. It would now be much more difficult to censor or legislate sexually explicit material, despite frequent governmental attempts to do so. The history of culture is too intertwined with the history of sexual representation to pull their sweating bodies apart. And yet how did we move from the erotic appreciation of sex as beauty to the pornographic selling of sex as spectacle, and what does this human fascination with sexual imagery mean?

The Convergence of the Dynamo and the Virgin

I'm currently rereading, well, trying to finally finish Gravity's Rainbow, before Pynchon's newest novel comes out (a 60s noir novel Inherent Vice) and wanted to share these angles on Pynchon's trajectory and early influence:


"The larger principle of the V, the allegory of increasing death and dehumanization as the Modern world begins the downward slope of the parabola of “gravity’s rainbow,” the parable of self-destruction inscribed in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Distinctions, political and otherwise, disappear, revealing a broader concept, the V, the idea of convergence of possibility into certainty, of diversity into uniformity.

"We discover in “Entropy” the origin of Pynchon’s symbol of the V... "Henry Adams, three generations before [Callisto’s] own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stands as much for love as for power “ (280). Pynchon may have found the title for V--and the concept of the V as allegory--in Henry Adams’s Education. In the novel V, the V is embodied in a female principle of death, the Lady V. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it is the V-2 rocket.

"Pynchon also shows in “Entropy” that he has copied Henry Adams’s historical method and that his novels are “historical” in the sense that, like Adams, he rewrites history to deal with events and signs that conventional history tends to ignore.

[from allegoria paranoia on Pynchon's early short story Entropy]


"But to [Henry] Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel... Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

"[The virgin and the dynamo] were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.

"The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the track of the energy."

(This one also supports what I would call Pynchon's apocryphal use of history and culture) "Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories, or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about."

[from The Education of Henry Adams]

The whole idea of a converging point of history seems similar to Bolano's use of the year 2666, a date set far enough in the future that the meaning of current events is like a shadow leading toward it. A similar concept is the singularity; technological, astronomical, apocalyptic, or otherwise. Pynchon's beauty is setting the horror and sublimity of any inevitable future against the possibility of that future also containing love, Adam's virgin. From Gravity's Rainbow: "The whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Throuh the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."



[from the internet]

The American Hologram

[Highlights rom a speech by Joe Bageant]

"No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.

"This financialization of our consciousness under American style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather just there.

"Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

"So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that we prefer such things as Facebook (don't get me wrong, I'm on Facebook too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box? Why prefer these expensive earth destroying things over love and laughter with real people, and making real human music together with other human beings -- lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.

"And the answer is this: We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

"Now for a national mythology to work, it has to be accessible to everyone all the time, it has to be all in one bundle. For example, in North Korea, it is wrapped up in a single man, Kim. In America, as we have said, it is the media and Hollywood in particular. Hollywood accommodates Imperial myths, melting pot myths, and hegemonic military masculinity myths, and glamour myths. It articulates our culture's social imaginary: "the prevailing images a society needs to project about itself in order to maintain certain features of its organization." And the features of our media mythology are terrifying when you think about them."

The Instant Engine

Struggling to reconstruct the speculative technologies lost when the Great Singularity had collapsed all centuries into one interpenetrating pan-spacetime, they had first succeeded in reimagining the now whimsical Faster-Than-Light and Faster-Than-Dark drives. But it was patently clear in this hyper-connected agelessness that though one couldn’t go faster than discrete energy fields, one, or many, could easily outrace light by already being in the temporality in which the pre-probability waves would shortly quantize. And so the Faster-Than-Now drive was born, called in popular parlance the Instant Engine, or by the retro-fantasists a time travel machine: a small plastic torus set spinning in the belly of a large plastic torus, which was the vessel, and looked like nothing except a large plastic donut, without wings, or any other evident aerodynamic or propulsionary devices.

The team had been assembled with great care and the exaggeratedly patient expediency with which everything was done now that time had been abolished. Scientists of the highest caliber, archeologists, linguists and interpreters, and technicians in case of the inevitable breakdown all stood trembling in the hanger bay, for this was to be (and immediately should already have been) the first attempt to connect the everlasting present with one of the disparate moments in history with which humanity had always been plagued before, an event that would itself be historical if it didn’t already exist outside of such temporally-absurd, arbitrary perspectives. But to be on the safe side, they had decided not to risk all the bugaboos and paradoxes of the extant prophecies – the few remaining pre-collapse science-fictions – and instantize in a somewhere, a somewhen, that would not unduly traumatize the pre-atemporal mentalities of those they might encounter. To this end, a young and already ancient ahistorian suggested they leap to a less unwieldy and potentially awkward moment then say, Hitler’s bunker at the end of the second great war, or Roswell in the late ‘40s, and appear instead somewhere out of the way, but no less rich in historical data. So they picked the Archives of Cologne, just prior to their collapse in what had been considered in the old frameworks early 2009. As all of the Archive’s records and artifacts had been demolished when the bunker, which had been designed to outlast the apocalypse, clearly didn’t outlast much of anything, it would be an easy thing to jump in, pick up some noteworthy pieces of time, and jump back out without causing much of a rift or reversal.

After the brief but interminable speeches by each member of the planetary congress, the crew boarded and began spooling up the FTN drive. There was a pause, a blink of the eye, an almost miniscule yet monstrous gap, on the other side of which the crew might have wondered if they’d gone anywhen at all, except for the epic tearing noises and cascading rustles caused as the Archive’s massive concrete walls and towering stacks of old newspapers and estate files all fell around and on top of them at once, in that one momentous instant when they did indeed intersect history by causing the Archives of Cologne to collapse, through their arrival, half an hour earlier than it had collapsed in all previous spacetimes. From the limited, one-way perspective of most in-timers however, there was nothing odd about this at all: it was simply when this event happened. As for the crew of the timeship, in order to forestall the embarrassment of discovery, they made one last sudden and uncalculated jump, to some distant and farflung spacetime from which they have not yet been heard from again.

Galeano's Political Fables

Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces reads like a collection of politically charged fairy tales. He does this by drawing on the form, style, and tone of Aesop’s Fables (which was essentially the first collection of short short prose fiction) and inserting in moments of magic or myth at pivotal moments in his short narratives, such as the line, “he scoured heaven and earth in vain” (16) in the section The Origin of the World, the title of which also partakes and sets up this mythic scope. But what really makes these fables is the use of historical peoples, times, places, and events as the backdrop for whatever magical event or effect Galeano is trying to get at. Often these historical events detail the terrible political realities of South America, but the horror is tempered through the magical moment, such as José Carrasco becoming a miracle worker after he is shot fourteen times in the head in Celebration of the Human Voice/ 3. These magic moments serve as indications of each vignette’s moral (as every fable has to have a moral), and for Galeano, the points that he is trying to make are about the intersection of language, art, reality, and politics. In short, Galeano’s lessons are about the power of language to create the world and keep it free. The story in The Function of the Reader/ 2, in which an army captain resigns after reading the oppressed poet César Vallejo, perhaps best highlights this theme of the power of language.

The use of historical events to ground the magical and moralizing elements allows these metaphors to become more real for us the reader (as is the function of magical realism), but there is also perhaps a reverse effect too which works against Galeano. By blending into an imaginative, magical sense of reality, these historical events also become less real, more figurative. Part of this might have to do with the 21st Century’s apathy towards images of violence, we are so attenuated to them in movies that the subtlety with which they are portrayed here looses a good deal of their intended horror. What we are left with, the most striking parts of the text, are the miraculous and whimsical non-real moments, though this might also be Galeano’s point, that the horrors of political reality are only real because they have been given power through language previously, power that can be likewise used to create beauty in the world.

Another reason however that I felt the vignettes were less powerful than they could be was that they were vignettes. Only in a few places, like the dream sequences, do we have larger narratives building from the separate and disparate historical events. But otherwise these events are isolated, and as such, can’t seem to add up to more than facets on Galeano’s ideas. They are too readily digested, where a longer narrative, or one with a more continuous structure might build up to a larger and more significant effect. If, as Galenao suggests, we can create reality through language, a fully crafted literary world, as one might find in a novel, might convey that idea on a much deeper level. Of course, if I had already written a poetic trilogy of books on the history of the Americas, as Galeano did in Memory of Fire, I would probably want to move towards shorter disconnected forms as well!

Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

In “Tradition and Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot suggests that it is important for poets to recognize themselves as part of a long literary tradition and to develop a consciousness of the past. This “historical sense” is for Eliot a “feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe… has a simultaneous existence” (Eliot, 115). While Eliot stresses that a work of art changes all the art that precedes it, this simultaneity of tradition also suggests that all these works of art can be present in one work. In “The Wasteland,” and in particular Book III, “The Fire Sermon,” we see a simultaneity of traditions that allows Eliot to comment on modern life through reference to the past.

Eliot suggests that for the poet it is not enough just to study the past. Tradition is another element that, along with emotions, feelings, impressions, and experiences, can “combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (Eliot, 118). In “The Wasteland,” Eliot combines tradition with experience through a large number of references to various literary traditions. He is Just as likely to quote from the Bible or Shakespeare as paraphrase his fellow poet Baudelaire or the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Eliot himself might argue that his radically new poem remains entrenched in the established tradition precisely in drawing so freely from it.

But what is the effect of this literary mash-up, where lines from different times and places are combined in even the same stanza? For some perhaps it is a labyrinthine mess of time, though as Eliot points out, “History has cunning passages, contrived corridors/ And issues” (Rainey, 89). It is precisely this maze of traditions that allows works of art to influence each other. By juxtaposing Augustine and the Buddha in the lines, “To Catharge then I came/ Burning burning burning burning” (Eliot, 15), Eliot is able to illuminate similarities between Eastern and Western traditions that the individual quotes could not have done on their own.

This technique of combining divergent references does not just apply to the past. The situating of ancient mythologies in and against modern settings and actions is the particular genius of “The Wasteland.” Sweeny approaches Mrs. Porter on the dirty Thames and bustling London streets, but they are enacting the classical roles of Actaeon and Diana. Ancient Teresias watches and comments on a pair of modern lovers as he once did for Jove and Juno. And lest we forget that the relationships in Eliot’s unreal cities are doomed to failure, there is the almost nonsensical insertion of, “Jug jug jug jug jug jug/ So rudely forc’d./ Tereu” (Eliot, 12), which keeps Tereus’s rape of Philomela clear in the educated reader’s mind.

So what ultimately does “The Wasteland” say about the age in which it was composed? The answer probably depends on the interpretation of all the other experiences and feelings combined in the poem with the more academically accessible literary references. Eliot’s use of the simultaneity of traditions might at the least suggest that all of these historical and mythological occurrences still exist within the modern age. The inhabitants of London or any Twentieth Century city have the potential of reenacting the tragedy of Tereus and Philomela or the passions of Augustine and the Buddha. The message of “The Wasteland” is perhaps that it is not just poets who need to develop Eliot’s “historical sense.” Unless we learn to recognize the influence of the past and present on each other, we may too be condemned to repeating all the cruel and cunning passages of history.

End Times, by Lydia Lunch

End Times
By Lydia Lunch. [via, posted in full]

“In times of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell

It took balls for Elton John to suggest banning all organized religion because it turned people into hateful lemmings devoid of compassion. And I may be putting my cock on the line here, but I think we need to go directly to the source and simply get rid of God. After all God was the first cop. The original tyrant. An egotistical dictator whose sadism was so immense that he insisted on the murder of his only begotten son just to prove what he was capable of after he condemned us all to rot in eternal damnation like flesh puppets in his own private dungeon. An amusement arcade full of fire and brimstone.

Religion used to be the opium of the masses. Now it’s the crack cocaine of assassins. Millions of addicts tripping on a celestial high. Throwing psychotic temper tantrums like little brats who forgot to take their Ritalin. Backyard bullies screaming MY GOD IS BIGGER THAN YOUR GOD. God junkies — dangerous and delirious. Drunk on blood and bombs and the smell of burning flesh. Painting the desert red in an attempt to appease BIG POPPA, that vengeful War Lord whose favorite blood sport has always been one of violence, torture and retribution.

And excuse me if I feel that John McCain is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. If after five years of being held in captivity and forced to endure relentless tortures, he is simply too twisted to realize what the real price of war is, then we’re all doomed. After all if he could survive such mind numbing cruelty and still want to play war whore, what the hell are the rest of us all whining about?

War is as old as God himself. And the War is never over. The War is never ending. The War is just an orgy of blood and guts masterminded by testosterone-fueled dirty old men that get off on fucking the entire fucking planet. This is the REAL PORNOGRAPHY. An outrageous cockfight fought by gung-ho cowboys who have drawn a line in the sand and will challenge anyone to a duel foolish enough to threaten resistance against the advent of the rodeo mind.

And hold on to your hats because now entering the bullring is a petite pit-bull in lipstick with a hotline to God’s pipeline whose idiotic credo of “Intelligent Design” insults not only science and evolution but the individual’s ability to reason when presented with hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to the contrary.

Man was not created in the image of God. God was created in the image of man so that man had someone to blame his infantile rage on. The need to believe in God is a pathological viral infection that has spread like an incurable disease infecting man’s ability to reason clearly. Belief acts as a psychic buffer against anxiety over the unavoidable reality of impending mortality. Scared shitless and still greedy for more than merely earthly delights, man, that all consuming piranha has wreaked havoc by gobbling up and devouring every other creature forcing predictions that unless a miracle happens even the fish will be wiped out before the midterm of this century. And with rifle-toting zealots like Sarah Palin and her Assembly of God clan smiling smugly and smirking about killing caribou, hunting moose, exterminating wolves and hounding polar bears into near extinction the death count will surely mount.

Only end times apocalypticians are demented enough to dream of a magnificent bounty to be served up in heaven by angels and virgins alike assuming it’s the just deserve of a hard fought battle for the glory of God and Cuntry. In the meantime, the rest of us better prepare to go hungry because soon enough we won’t even be able to afford food anyway.

Am I imagining it or were we a lot safer when the so-called leader of the free world was getting blowjobs in the White House? Isn’t it better to blow off a little steam in the face of a willing victim than to take out your sexual frustrations and pent-up aggression on endangered species or countries half way around the world, blatantly lying about democracy and freedom in a thinly-veiled disguise to suck the juice out of a hole in the ground, while the rest of us are stuck at the Exxon stations holding gas pumps in our fists like big limp dicks that we pay out the ass to get perpetually screwed by?

No one wins in War except the Military Industrial Complex. A Corporate Cabal run from inside the Pentagon’s walls set up to both build weapons of mass destructions and then repair the damage done by them. The astronomical expense of war, at last count $100,000 dollars a minute in maintenance fees seems paltry when you consider the estimated 37,000 corporations who have their hands in the till and are growing fat on the blood and bones of widows, orphans and soldiers piling up in mass graves strewn throughout the desert. An oasis of death and destruction.

A war which has utterly demolished the separation of church and state, is operating secret prisons across the globe, grants immunity to mercenaries and has turned America into a Police State whose own citizens are now under siege. A war in continuum, orchestrated by an arrogant pig-headed son of a military father whose status as head cop at the CIA lead him to believe that America has a divine duty to police the planet as his Soldiers of Christ commit whole sale slaughter in effort to push forth judgment day. Oh closer my God to thee! Holy War! Holy War!

I pity the fool who prays for life everlasting. I want my taste of Heaven and I want it now. I realize that at any moment I could become the next victim of this war without end. And Heaven to me would mean dying with a smile on my face, screwing a half a dozen returning amputee Iraqi war veterans. Hell, somebody’s gotta take care of the vets. Their own government sure as shit won’t. America has over 200,000 homeless veterans of war. Men tossed to the streets and forced to fend for themselves when they were no longer useful as mercenary cogs on the wheel of the world’s greatest killing machine; suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, tricked into a war and conned by doublespeak into believing that fighting will bring peace, domination will bring freedom, and that your Uncle Sam will take care of you after you’ve risked life and limb to safe guard his superiority complex.

We inhabit this vast potential Utopia, which is being destroyed by its abusers. Man has created a hell on earth, turning the world into a ghetto, a slaughterhouse, a refugee camp, an orphanage, a sweatshop, a bomb factory, a land mine, a shooting gallery, an insane asylum, a toxic dump. And the way I see it Mother Nature is getting pretty pissed off. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, mudslides, hurricanes, droughts, monsoons, famine. She is becoming more violent against the men who cause her violence.

And maybe after all, violence is only natural. All Creation bears the molecular memory of a terrible explosion of electricity, energy, matter and motion. A violent eruption of white light and white heat. Violence was the first act of creation. THE BIG BANG. Chaos is the law of Nature; it is the score upon which reality is written. Or to quote Mussolini “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” Same as it ever was.

War is an incurable virus, forever mutating, that travels the globe feeding on man’s fears, spreading panic and terror, violence and death, which until we find a vaccine that finally inoculates the entire population against stupidity, arrogance, aggression and blind faith, we will be forced to forever repeat like stunted victims of Orwell’s Memory Hole.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lydia Lunch is an art terrorist who has been confronting apathy and kicking its fucking teeth in for the past three decades.