Truth and the Transcendent Function

Still preparing to dive into "The Red Book," I reread Jung's essay, "The Transcendent Function," in which he describes the technique that he used for his process of self-experimentation, a method for consciously delving into the subconscious and uniting them, which was also the practice he recommended to patients in order to continue working on their subconscious materials after or outside of therapy.

The method is one of active imagining, and involves taking whatever emotional state one is in and allowing that mood to become more conscious, at the same time writing down associations of that state (in a controlled manner, in order to not go off into other areas of the subconscious), until the unconscious emotion is enriched and clarified. Or, if there is no particular emotion to focus on, one should remove critical attention and let inner images, voices, or movements emerge, taking similar associative or symbolic notes. Once this material has been collected, Jung suggests (here from his own experience, viz. the Red Book), to either subject it to creative formulation or analytical understanding, that is, to give the unconscious an aesthetic form or concrete meaning, depending on one's tendencies towards either art or logic. The important thing though, is not to get caught up in either the form or meaning alone, but to be able to go back and forth between the two, essentially creating an internal dialogue by which the antipathy between the unconscious and conscious minds is transcended.

I have personally had much success with such methods of active imagination, particularly through dreaming (which Jung claims was too difficult to generally recommend as a method) and elaboration as internal fiction, which over the years has put me into direct contact with many of the subconscious forces and symbols that hold play over my psychology. My intention in reading "The Red Book" slowly and through Jung's techniques is in order to return to another stage in my own psychic self-experimentations.

One of the more interesting things I've discovered through becoming more in tune with my subconscious is a decreasing need for such conscious graspings as truth, non-contradiction, and blunt logic (while at the same time being able, ideally, to apply these to a wider scope). As Jung so deftly puts it in this essay:

"One of the greatest obstacles to psychological understanding is the inquisitive desire to know whether the psychological factor is "true" or "correct." If the description of it is not erroneous or false, then the factor is valid in itself and proves its validity by its very existence. One might just as well ask if the duck-billed platypus is a "true" or "correct" invention of the Creator's will. Equally childish is the prejudice against the role which mythological assumptions play in the life of the psyche. Since they are not "true," it is argued, they have no place in a scientific explanation. But mythologems exist, even though their statements do not coincide with our incommensurable idea of "truth."

Of course, one runs into such grasping for truth and consistency almost everywhere you turn, spying every day yet another atheistic rebuttal of belief, such as this article from Alternet on demanding evidence from religious believers (which asks: “Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?”), when the important thing about belief is that one believes without proof, to demand evidence or a truth behind beliefs is to entirely miss the point of believing (at least for me; I will never apologize or condone dogmatism of any flavor). And furthermore, as Jung seems to agree, the important thing is not whether the contents of our belief are true or false, but what those beliefs allow us to feel or do in the real world. The belief exists, and extends beyond truthiness.

I encountered this kind of grasping in my Wisdom class the other day, discussing Berger's concept of the social construction of reality, which my teacher wanted to refute logically, at all costs. Granted, this teacher has applied logical arguments and the principle of truth = non-contradiction to everything we've read this semester, from Aristotle to Lao-tzu, and seems to find all of them lacking as logically consistent systems of wisdom, while I sit there baffled, wondering how logic will ever get you to wisdom, which for me seems at least equal parts belief. Now if this wasn't frustrating enough, the teacher's specific beef with Berger's theory (which I haven't read, so won't comment on myself), was that: to construct reality implies that reality has been made up or fabricated, and as a fiction it is thus false and a pack of lies of no value, etc. And that's the rub, the assumption that fiction necessarily equals falsehood, that things imagined can not convey truth or really effect the world, regardless of if the contents represent any historical, existent reality. Even the too-smart-for-his-britches philosophy major I usually disagree with was aghast, and despite our best arguments the teacher refused to listen to that his "truth" might be wrong.

It seems to me that this perspective is like someone only using the conscious part of their mind, ignoring or fending off the "demons of the irrational" subconscious instead of accepting them as equally a part of who we are, which they are, and if that boundary is transcended then we can begin to enjoy ourselves more fully in the world and more fully accept this world in all its irrational and boundless glory.

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.

The Future of Sex

from H+ magazine [via disinformation]:

“It is important to remember that sexual intercouse is a highly ancient, simplistic-at-its-core activity that we may choose to discard at some point in the future…”

In “Sex and the Singularity,” futurist magazine H+ asks radical techs (including Ray Kurzweil) to describe futuristic “sex after the Singularity.” They envision “more complex activities that generate even more pleasure and connection between people,” and suggest “The primary purpose of the Singularity will be seen, after the fact, to be Awesome Sex.

“There will be exponentially more sex, with exponentially more interfaces, and with exponentially more measures of pleasure.” With “millions of super computer-generated sex fantasies,” one technologist concludes “I love the future. Bring it on.”

“Whether we choose to call it ’sex’ will be entirely arbitrary, but it may bear little resemblance to the sex of today…”

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.

Literacy Narrative

For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:


Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6^th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7^th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

Dreaming without a Dictionary

Ryan Hurd over at Dream Studies is in the middle of a ten-article series on dream interpretation techniques without a dream dictionary, which seems highly useful for more than casual dreamers, as dream dictionaries at best can give you general cultural meanings for symbols, at worst trite new-agey misleadings, and can never give the way symbols are lived for the individual people who experience them (whether in dreams or waking).

This quote from Joseph Campbell sums it up: "I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

The articles posted so far (on dream sharing and keeping a dream journal) are posted in the first article's comments section.

Essentials

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert A. Heinlein


- image by Brandon Jan Blommeart

Religious news: OS Religion and the Dali Lama's woes

"Open-source religion is an amalgamation of two ways of thinking about the world. The first is religion, a common set of practices, rituals, and beliefs. It’s as old as the hills, one of the most enduring traits of humankind. The “open source” component is new, an unforeseen consequence of the Internet revolution of the 1990s. It’s a reference to open-source computer code, code that anyone is allowed to rewrite, add to, or delete. Adherents of open-source religion note that tradition can calcify into dogma, and if there’s one common trait to people who practice open-source religion, it’s distaste for dogma. Some open-source believers want to found entirely new religions, and some merely want to reinvigorate a mainstream faith. All want to change people’s perceptions of religion from something that’s handed down to them, something they receive, and make religion something people do. All religions evolve, of course, but the tinkering inherent to open-source religions can benefit founders and followers alike, Webster says. “When you share what you learn, you learn better,” he notes, “and the content evolves that much more efficiently.”

...

This is contrasted to the Dali Lama, whose Buddhist Foes claim he is violating the basic tenets of Buddhism. And if that wasn't bad enough, the boy chosen as the next Dali Lama turns his back on the order, now sporting "baggy trousers and long hair, and more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than Buddha." Which I suppose shows some of the challenges when one's ancient practices fail to keep up with the times.

Manifestoes from Beyond the Real

Artists from all times have attempted to escape or transcend the constraints they saw in the culturally constructed realities in which they found themselves, often through the penning of manifestoes as statements of purpose for the new realities they wanted to instead create. I have also often struggled with this desperation against the day, in this age against the quotidian, the snarky, the postmodern, the realism that is "just this," when clearly there is so much more to living that can not be contained by pale reiterations of last century's visionaries whose words and worlds no longer apply, at the edge of the future, the crumbling edge of what may be left for us, the necessity of human survival let alone all the possibilities of the imagination, which are vast and untapped except by scattered madmen and genre writers. Despite the beauty of the manifestoes given below though, I have been trying to formulate a new perspective, not against reality or realism, because obviously we do live in the real world, if a limited constructed one, but a sense of reality that contains all that, all the horror and wonder, all the magic, dreams, the future, alternative histories and galactic alignments with the stars spiraling out of all expected orbits, the sense that every day, every moment, is an ultimate moment, reality being pushed to the furthest edges of where we have been, with the realization that we are only now barely learning just how far and fantastic we can go.


"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]

"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]

"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]

"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]

"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto

Upcreation

[from The Technium]

"Upcreation is the term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe. By complex structures I mean galaxies, stars, planets, life, DNA, termite mounds, rain forests, human minds, and the internet. These complexities tend to "emerge" from simpler systems (clouds of gas, pools of molecules, nodes of communication) in a fashion we broadly call self-organization. But in the right circumstances self-organization can often also be legitimately called self-creation. Without an outside agent, the parts cohere into a new organization that brings forth an "emergent" level or self not present before. Since the new emergent level of complexity encompasses, without destruction, the previous "lower" levels of organization, I call this self-creation of higher levels "upcreation." A set of entities lifts itself up to a new level of organization in a new entity. By this perspective, DNA chemistry "upcreates" life, and life upcreates minds, and a mind might upcreate a supermind. Upcreation takes place in smaller increments as well: Honey bees upcreate a hive, protists upcreate multicellular organisms, corals upcreate a reef, shoppers upcreate a market, web surfers upcreate Google PageRank.

But while this emergence usually "happens" in an almost passive way in the past, we humans would like to be able to make it happen on command. We would like to upcreate artificial minds and artificial life. However, much to our dismay, upcreation turns out to be something very hard to imitate. For some goals, like making a human-like artificial intelligence in computers, bumping a system up to the next level of complexity has so far been a total failure. A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?"

Punctuation and Post-literal Communications, or the curious life of !

Recently I have become more involved with sending text messages as a useful and quick form of communication. Usually I prefer face to face communications, or if that is not possible, then long monologuous letters (in an attempt to keep alive that dying art form). I absolutely loathe the telephone, mainly because it gives the illusion of having a real conversations, except that all you get is someone's disembodied and ghostly voice in your ear, but not all the gestures, non-verbal cues, pheromones, that make real live communication so intricate and exciting. The issue of course is the level of mediation between the conversants, which, as our technology and ability to quickly communicate through little boxes increases, destroys the necessity of those heightened modes of articulation inextricable from the meat.

Also destroyed however is any pretense at actual emotion, particularly when you are limited to a miniscule number of character spaces and want to communicate something of such vast importance, or even with an element of friendliness, etc. I find that when I write a text message (and this I'm sure applies to Twitter, though I have no desire to get caught up in that ephemeral epiphenomenon), that if I don't include punctuation and read it back to myself before hitting send, it often reads to me as somewhat dour, or at least, mechanical. How could these few typographical symbols convey anything of the complexity of what I am actually feeling? The easiest solution I have found is simply to tag an exclamation mark at the end of the message, which, though it conveys perhaps even less of what I mean, also conveys (for me, and this is important) a sense of immediacy and positivity that allows me to know that my message will not be read in a negative light.

An article on the history and contemporary use of the exclamation mark suggests that: "The origin of the exclamation mark is uncertain. The first one appeared in print around 1400. The exclamation mark, it has been argued, derives from the Latin Io (which means joy). One day (we hypothesise) somebody wrote a joyful upbeat sentence and to clinch that sense, they concluded it by putting the second letter of Io under the first."

However, "Shipley and Schwalbe are right when they say a sentence without exclamation marks is less friendly than one with at least two. When, though, did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: "I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!" The point is they didn't. They were being IRONIC."

Sure too much of anything makes it meaningless, but personally, I don't find anything ironic about the exclamation mark, for me it is still a symbol expressing io: excitement, epiphany, agreement. But then again, I don't care much for the emotional irony that hallmarks our postmodern age. When I text for example "I love you!" I don't mean that ironically. I mean it more emphatically then just "I love you", where the lack of punctuation is like a cliff you can fall off of into all the ambiguity and sadness of the contemporary world. Granted, there is much good poetry, fiction, etc. that intentionally dis-uses punctuation in order to convey that uncertainty of effect, but once punctuation marks no longer signal what they are supposed to (imagine a period meaning &, or to skip a sentence), then the doors are open for every typographic symbol to become unattached from its accepted meaning or phoneme, with the possibility that any letter in this sentence could actually refer to something else. Granted, this might not be such a bad thing, as that is the basis for cryptographic transmutations, but the whole point of language, particularly written language, is that it is a commonly understood means of communication, without which none of this would make any sense at all!

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Pastiche, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction. According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, these terms often appear in relation to the writings of Thomas Pynchon, as techniques of literary postmodernism. Pynchon is heralded as a forefather of American postmodernist literature, which raises certain problems in interpreting his texts, namely that postmodernism is itself a “weasel word;” as a cultural theory or perspective it seems to have no clear or unified definition. Searching through numerous books and articles on the subject left me even more uncertain as to what postmodernism might actually mean, so I took recourse in the general opinions of my cultural milieu and cobbled together a hazy understanding from the apocryphal heart of the internet: en.wikipedia.org. Postmodernism then “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, or interreferentiality,” and is often characterized by a lack of belief in absolute truth along with the corollary notion that reality is therefore constructed from our perspectives and use of language . At least that’s how I took what I read.

It may seem irrelevant, or just bad scholarship, to refer to Wikipedia, postmodernism, or my own process of grappling with this material, but, I would argue as a writer attempting to learn from contemporary literature, that these are all performances of what Pynchon does in Slow Learner (as well as in the rest of his oeuvre, though we unfortunately won’t get to that) by use of the techniques mentioned in the first line of this paper. Through the engagement of his early stories’ characters, readers, and the author himself with a hodgepodge of texts, cultural references, and modes of storytelling, Pynchon creates what might best be called apocryphal or alternate realities, which in turn trouble the conventional notion that reality is absolute in favor of contemporary models of reality production.

As a literary technique, pastiche is the combining of diverse elements in a text, from styles and genres to cultural levels (such as the blending of high and low culture). We can see this pastiche of cultural levels in Pynchon’s short story The Small Rain, where the staff sergeant Rizzo “would lie in his bunk and read things like Being and Nothingness and Form and Value in Modern Poetry, scorning the westerns, sex novels, and whodunnits that his companions kept trying to lend him” (36). This placing together of various cultural references does not only serve to represent the intellectual climate of the army, but also signifies the protagonist “Lardass” Levine’s conflict in the story. Even though Levine is a “college graduate, [with the] highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33), he still finds himself attracted to artifacts and situation of low culture, as in the sex novel Swamp Wench. Pynchon illustrates this cultural conflict further by displacing the action onto a college campus, and then having Levine encounter a girl in the exact swamp-shack situation described in the pulp he’s reading, whom Levine treats with the “same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels or for the burned out but impotent good guy ranchers in a western” (50). While this attitude might come off as poor characterization, it also shows that it is the characters themselves who are pastiched together in The Small Rain, as representations of the cultural attitudes they espouse.

We see a similar use of pastiche on the walls of Dennis Flange’s room in Low-lands, “walls covered with photographs clipped out of every publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression” (67). This juxtaposition of high and low culture historical figures into a “rogues’ gallery of faded sensation fragile as tabloid paper, blurred as the common humanity of a nine-day wonder” (68), effectively flattens out modern culture into the very newspaper on which it is printed as an example of the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of the postmodernist style. In other words we are shown that reality is something that is constructed through being represented.

While Entropy continues this use of pastiche through its almost constant barrage of classical and contemporary musical allusions, this story extends the technique beyond the mention of references into the intertextual use of borrowed texts from various scientific and historical discourses. Callisto, for example, discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in a third person, autodiegetic, stream of conscious monologue): “He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases” (87). By displaying this scientific discourse alongside other discourses of socio-political power (such as those of Henry Adams and Machiavelli), the character is able to find in the concept of entropy a “metaphor to apply to certain phenomena of his own world” (88), a concept made only more real when we see it played out in the party scene on the floor below. This intertextuality of “real world” dialogues in a fictional world allows the characters to engage in what we generally consider to be the world outside the text. At the same time however, these integrated texts require the reader to engage both with the real texts themselves as well as with their presentation in the story, forcing us to collude with the characters in treating the world in the story as a real world.

Pynchon seems highly aware of this interactional nature of storytelling, so much so that he has his character Dennis Flange in Low-lands muse on the very subject in relation to the telling of personal sea stories as a function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things” (69).

This metafictional foregrounding of the art of fiction within the story itself troubles whatever illusions we might have left that reality is not something created through our uncertain observations and utterances. As Flange finds in the story, his strongly recalled memories of himself as a rogue sea-dog actively screw up his perspective as existing in a normalized suburban reality and plunge him instead into an equally real subterranean adventure. So to might we find that our engagements with and observations of our own lives and historical realities are what create the worlds we live in. Any historian is ultimately a storyteller writing from his or her own perspective.

In Under the Rose, Pynchon continues this metafictional technique by having the spy Porpentine mention that another character could have gotten his information on the state of affairs of Egypt “from any Baedeker” (115). Pynchon himself admits in the introduction to Slow Learner that Baedeker’s “guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major ‘source’ for the story” (17). This fictionalization of historical events or settings, called historigraphic metafiction , serves several purposes in the story. By presenting a wealth of historical detail, Pynchon manages to suggest an actual historical reality in the text, which is troubled by the anachronistic inclusion of the android Bongo-Shaftsbury, who, with similarly realistic description, has a “miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin [of his arm]” (121). This writing of a seemingly accurate historical reality from a point in the future also allows Pynchon’s characters to comment, somewhat prophetically, about the future of their own historical period. Porpentine, for instance, muses: “history was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (107).

This last comment of Pynchon’s on the act of writing, that history is becoming written by “man in the mass,” does indeed seem to be our current cultural reality. Anyone can edit the articles of Wikipedia, anyone can posit a definition of cultural theories like postmodernism, and anyone can tell a story. Pynchon’s apocryphal style of writing, which re-presents reality as something that we construct, suggests that this new, democratic model of writing historical or theoretical documents is perhaps more “truthful” to the way our reality is actually produced: through our engagement with texts, cultures, and our experiences of these things, new realities can be created beyond what we imagined was only possible on the pages of storybooks.


Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Postmodernism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postmodernism (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pastiche,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Pastiche (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Metafiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopdia, s.v. “Historigraphic Metafiction,” http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiographic_metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)

The Small Storm

How disappointing, she thought as she strode down the hall of the National Museum, where Lincoln’s gold pocket watch had just been opened up to reveal a message engraved inside by an erstwhile jeweler on the first day of the Civil War. The miniscule words were not nearly as exciting as the apocryphal version, but then again, she tweeted, kicking her long legs into the shoebox-sized taxi, most of what people say nowadays is drivel too. It was like some anachronistic twitter, a linguistic Kilroy that had taken 150 years to upload. And besides, what gadget was still large enough to engrave something on its surface?

Everything was getting smaller. She blinked in the article on her thumbnail-sized cell phone while checking her bags. Cars, microchips, certain species of mammals, even the lines at the airport were microsized, she smiled, whisking through security, now that the economy’s shrinking. Of course, so are the airplanes. She scrunched up her legs, trying to get comfortable in the clownishly small seat, graciously accepting a complementary peanut and thimbleful of ginger ale. It’s a good thing I’m on a diet, though these bones won’t start shrinking for another few decades yet!

But then, just before they reached Boston, where the technological conference was to be held and she hoped to find something smarmy to tweet about, a tremendous thwomping noise resounded through the cabin. Why, she thought, just before everything went black, maybe it’s one of those mysterious sonic booms that have been occurring up and down the Eastern Seaboard all week I was just reading about on my RSS feed.

Miraculously, she found when she woke up, everyone had survived the crash landing. They were in a deserted grassy field with no civilization in sight, perhaps one of the last places in the country, she speculated, without at least power lines. At least she could stretch her legs now, but just as she stood up and threw back her hair another loud boom sounded, and then another, knocking her over, flattening small patches of grass about the field. It’s like the Tunguska Event, she wanted to report, that whole Russian forest flattened in one fell whoomp, except much smaller, as if the electrons in the air were suddenly all speeding up, popping into and out of existence. It was almost magical, except that she had no wi-fi to share it with the rest of the world.

But then, what should appear, but a team of the new emergency response microcopters, little dust mote sized hotspots battling against the small storm of booming electromagnetic chaos to establish for one moment a local network of internet connectivity. She danced up and down, she could tweet at last, but then she stopped, uncertain and trembling, for how was she going to describe this to anyone, this patently absurd series of events, in 140 words or less?

The Operating Manual

Worried over the global economic crises and wondering where he was going to get the budget to balance the lot, Obama was invited on a personal space tour (which was also looking for funding). Pondering if the ship had an operating manual as they alit up the gravity well, or at least an abort button, he turned to the window and soon money lost its weight. There was Earth, a little cloudier and muddied than he imagined. But, Obama smiled, that’s what made it real. The planet was breathtaking, all sun soaked amidst the embering stars, if not a little on the small side.



I apologize for the lack of posting in the last several months. I have been inordinately busy with school and going through what is most likely my Saturn Returns, attempting to find new perspectives on reality and how I can best approach it in the coming decades without giving up, getting jaded, or going crazy. On the other hand I have become obsessed with the concise narratives of flash or short short fiction, and so hopefully I will post more like the above here in the future as I work out some aesthetic and global theories. I have been particularly distraught over the news that the increased rate of expansion of the Universe will one day mean the vanishing of all the stars from the sky. Of most use in formulating more hopeful positions on life today has been R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (full text online).

In the mean time, I posted a new story called In the Moment on my Goodreads account, a sort of absurdist tour diary of my rock and roll days in which a stolen book of censored songs precipitates the end of the world as we know it. Enjoy!

Dali Lama Unleashes Revolutionary New Reincarnation Techniques

[via]

"Deciding that they should be the ones to appoint all future Lamas, in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the mindspace of the people of Tibet in their struggle against them for independence, the Chinese government recently enacted a law giving themselves full authority over all reincarnations.

Well played China. Well played.

But the Dalai Lama knows how to play the game as well.

In response, at the end of 2007, the Dalai Lama proposed to hold a referendum among his millions of followers on whether he should be reincarnated at all, and, if the vote was in favor, to determine his reincarnation while he was still alive. He cited the example of one of his teachers as a precedent for a lama being reincarnated while still alive. But he also indicated that he would not be reborn in China or any other country which is “not free.”

In turn, the Dalai Lama has raised the possibility to forgo his rebirth, or to be reborn while still alive so that he, not China, can choose his successor.

The Dalai Lama has even suggested reincarnating as a woman.

I find it incredibly interesting that the Dalai Lama, a being who’s existence spans at least fourteen lifetimes, is now reincarnating only in free countries in order to stay free of the grasp of the ancient empire which seeks to trap and control him within it’s borders. That is, of course, unless he chooses not to reincarnate at all and instead transcends to a higher dimension.

I certainly hope they aren’t using Dielbolds to count the votes in that referendum, it would be an easy way for the Chinese to finally remove the Dalai Lama from this level of reality (at least for a while).

What’s especially interesting about this strange game of espionage and rebirth is how important it actually is to the future of Tibet, China, and the rest of the world, as well as to the lives of the individuals involved."