the riderless horse, the horseless rider

Remember If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him? Peter's favorite book, in Fringe--the one he tried to share with his romantic interest, Olivia?

"I've been thinking... I want to get that book," I said to my partner, a couple days after we watched that episode. I didn't have to say which book.

He smiled. "I already ordered it. It will be here tomorrow."

I promised I wouldn't steal it (I mean borrow it early). He bought it for himself, after all, and he doesn't gobble at books like I do. Or... he does, eventually, but he tends to let them sit on his bedside table for a few months before he gobbles them. Sizing 'em up, I guess.

But I flipped through it, snuggled in bed. One hand turning pages, the other massaging his neck.

I do have to be conscious of the need to treat it delicately, since it's his. I am trying right now not to bend it too far and risk creasing the spine. The last two books of mine that I read are now covered with pencilled notes in the margins. One might have a few drops of an extremely bitter beer on the inside cover--or are those tears? (Who's cutting onions in here, right?) Our bedside tables themselves are the opposite: his is covered in the sundry paraphernalia of the past eight weeks; mine is so sterile, so empty, you'd think no one lived over there at all.

Quote time, from If You Meet the Buddha:

The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that's all there is.

...

It is as if we are all tempted to view ourselves as men on horseback. The horse represents a lusty animal-way of living, untrammeled by reason, unguided by purpose. The rider represents independent, impartial thought, a sort of pure cold intelligence. Too often the pilgrim lives as though his goal is to become the horseman who would break the horse's spirit so that he can control him, so that he may ride safely and comfortably wherever he wishes to go. If he does not wish to struggle with discipline, it is because he believes that his only options will be either to live the lusty, undirected life of the riderless horse, or to tread the detached, unadventuresome way of the horseless rider. If neither of these, then he must be the rider struggling to gain control of his rebellious mount. He does not see that there will be no struggle, once he recognizes himself as a centaur.

The DFW bio has read like a warning to me. That, above, is how he died: complications of the struggle for control over the rebellious horse. Near the end of his life he was in communication with at least one Buddhist practitioner--ostensibly for the purposes of research for The Pale King but you get the feeling it was about more than that--asking questions on meditation and concentration, trying to break down the unbreakdownable into discrete, precise instructions, each part with a logical connection to the next and a specific, ascertainable purpose. "Just sit," his friend urged him. He could not. He wanted to know how to sit, how to breathe, how to think, whether or not it was permissible to scratch one's arse in the middle of it all, how to be the perfect practitioner and get an A+. It's not like he did this blindly, either--I got the distinct impression that he knew what he was doing "wrong", but he couldn't stop.

And then there was the abandonment of his medication, which was done partly in hopes of getting a clearer head, so he could concentrate better on the project at hand and life itself... but also partly in order to be pure. To be strong. To be beyond the reproach of even the most fundamentalist of substance-eschewers.  (God... do I know that feel, bro.)

Yeah...

So....  I originally wrote this post on the 25th but I never posted it. I keep making the ending just a little too clever and tied-up-tight-with-a-bow. Then I get disgusted with myself, for my glibness or else for my lengthy exactitude, for my urge to present a kosher conclusion. I can't.

I will just let it remain unfinished. I am out of time. The essence of the beginning is important enough to post now. And what's left undone is important enough to take utmost care in the crafting--which means it will have to wait.

For now, I sit.

east coker - excerpt

From T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

II.

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns

  That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebitude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

  The houses are all gone under the sea.

  The dancers are all gone under the hill.

happy sexyween

My life is pretty much over at this point because I am never going to recover from the stinging inadequacy I now feel at not having been the inventor of this spectacular Halloween costume:

SEXY HULK HOGAN

Yeah.... 

Next year, I am totally going as Sexy CM Punk. It'll be like regular CM Punk, but with boobs (if you can call them that....) and heels. And a dress. See, according to the rules for Sexy Halloween, regular CM Punk is not sexy but I, dressed as CM Punk, would be sexy.

And why?

Why?

That's right. Because I have a vagina.

I don't hate you, John. I don't even dislike you. I like you a hell of a lot more than I like most people in the back. I hate... this idea... that you're the best... because you're not. I'm the best. I'm the best in the world. There's one thing you're better at than I am, and that's kissing Vince McMahon's ass. You're as good at kissing Vince's ass as Hulk Hogan was. I don't know if you're as good as Dwayne... he's a pretty good ass-kisser... always was and still is. Oops... I'm breaking the fourth wall. [waves to the camera.] I am the best... wrestler... in the world.

Also: yes, it's true. I have a favorite WWE wrestler. Who knew?

I have no breaking point, and all you have to do is look in my eyes and realize I have laughed in the face of temptation time and time again. I have never tapped out to society's attempts at peer pressure. You try to stick a beer in my hand with the same commercials that have hypnotized all of you people, and that sell you all your narcotics and things you're addicted to. Well, I'm harder than any alcohol you can drink, I'm straighter than any line you can snort up your nose, and I certainly can hurt you a lot faster than any pill you put on your tongue.

You know, I hate the word "humbling" because people are always using it wrong. Here is a PSA for stupid musicians and actors: one is not humbled by winning an enormous prize. But I am definitely humbled by CM Punk's straight edge speeches. He is like a caricature of me at my best/worst. Except with more muscles. And taller. And.... less.... clothing...

Q: How does one Sexy-Halloweenify a figure who already struts about in go-go boots and leather briefs with dangly fringe, and who makes a living touching oiled men all over? 

A: If we take Hulk Hogan as an example, apparently one actually adds more square inches of cloth to achieve increased sexiness, in addition to the addition of the requisite vagina, of course. 

Clearly this overturns all previous attempts to conceptualize the Sexy Halloween costume paradigm.

And I know, trust me, it's hard being straight-edge, it's hard to live a straight-edge lifestyle. It's extremely difficult to be me, but what concerns me now is that none of you realize how much more difficult it is to live the life... that you all live. I'm positive nobody in here takes into account the long-term consequences of alcohol on your liver. [Smattering of cheers from audience] See, and you cheer that. That's nothing to cheer. You drink because it's fun, right? [Audience cheers a little louder] Eventually, it's not gonna be fun anymore when it spirals out of control and its no longer... it's no longer fun. Sooner or later, you're just drinking to feel normal. And then there's the smokers. You know, I don't know what's more disgusting–is watching a smoker pollute his/her lungs with over 4,000 foreign chemicals, or having to listen to the smoker convince themselves that they can quit whenever they want to. It's... it's hard to quit, I know, it takes a very strong person to quit, but an even stronger person never would've started smoking in the first place. [Audience boos] I didn't want to come out here and be the bearer of bad news, but let's face facts: chances are pretty slim that any of you here will ever get the monkey off your back. You'll never be able to pry the cigarette from your lips, or find the self-control to pour your drink from your glass, or the self-respect to take the pill out of your mouth. See, it starts, and it can't happen without learning how to say "no" to temptation, and that's why I'm out here. I'm out here to challenge you before it's too late. Please, learn how to say "no" to temptation, learn how to say "no" to your vices, learn how to control yourself.

I especially like the story (posted on his LiveJournal, mind you) of how CM Punk was pulled over by the cops, who then wanted to search his car with a drug-sniffing dog. Punk goes ballistic at this perceived insult to his drug-free history and and starts shouting "WHAT DO MY KNUCKLES SAY? WHAT DO THEY SAY?????"

CLOSE ENOUGH

october in pictures

Cleaning the desktop, filing shit away. Here's what I found or re-found this month and saved, in rough chronological order.

(I always find this kind of thing amusing. It's fun to think about what comes out between the lines, with an assortment like this.)

click to enreaden

Oh, and a song. I saved a song:

The Mountain Goats - Cry for Judas

speaking of confirmation

Little-known fact: my not-so-secret Catholic name is Jane Frances de Chantal.

She was/is my patroness. (Expecto Patronus!). I chose her myself, which is a comfort to me. I still like her an awful lot, which means the me of now is not so very different from the me of then, even if our trappings are disparate.

Quotes from her:

"I write because I cannot refrain from doing so; for this morning I am more wearisome to myself than usual. My interior state is so gravely defective that, in anguish of spirit, I see myself giving way on every side."
-Letter to St. Francis de Sales

"What do you want me to do? I like sick people myself; I'm on their side."
-Upon being criticized for accepting old and sickly people into her order.

"Should you fall even fifty times a day, never on any account should that surprise or worry you. Instead, ever so gently set your heart back in the right direction and practice the opposite virtue, all the time speaking words of love and trust… after you have committed a thousand faults, as much as if you had committed only one. Once we have humbled ourselves for the faults God allows us to become aware of in ourselves, we must forget them and go forward."

six songs - part 5: the funeral song

Q5: What song would you want at your funeral?

This feels like a bit of a silly question. Or an arrogant one. Who I am to dictate what other people listen to in order to do whatever it is they're trying to do at whatever gathering they may or may not have after my death?

Still... I think I've had a strong "Ohhhh, play that at my funeral" urge about two songs:

1) "Tsukamori no Taiju" (The Huge Tree in the Tsukamori Forest) from My Neighbor Totoro. I prefer this version over Path of the Wind, actually.

2) "Comptine d'un autre été: L'après-midi" (Nursery Rhyme of Another Summer Afternoon) from this scene in Amelie:

I was happy that someone else separately picked out that second song for me as well. It is always nice to be seen--even if momentarily--as you think you are.

...but, ultimately, it's hard to predict what people will need to listen to after someone's death. Those are songs that make me think about my own death, not necessarily appropriate songs for you, afterward. After the most tragic death in my family, we listened to "Crocodile Rock" and danced crazy like kids, laughing through that peculiar combo-haze of pain and endogenous opioids--who could have foreseen that? Who could have known that's what we'd need, in that moment? Well, I wouldn't have seen it coming, personally.

After another death in my circle, I spent a lot of time alone watching this video:

Dave Gahan - Kingdom

I still watch it a lot.

If anybody wants religious music, I always liked John Michael Talbot. Esp. Lilies of the Field, The Pleiades and Orion. Or Holy Darkness by Dan Schutte. I still need tissues for that one. (Remember crying in the pews, Mom? Pew-cryers forever!) Or the Golden Sequence (Veni Sancte Spiritus), the Taize version. They play that one at Confirmation, as well as Pentecost and Easter Vigil--to my recollection.

But if I had to pick just one song to dedicate to those remaining, right now I'd pick this:

Loreena McKennitt - Night Ride Across the Caucasus

in a simon belmont mood

Still taking a needed break from more meaningful things. Here's some serious nostalgia-botting:

"Dance of the Holy Man" from Super Castlevania IV (Level 1-2)

Favorite parts: climbing the collapsing stairs, the clock tower, the haunted library where some flying books attack you and other flying books provide a platform for you to stand on.

This game got too scary for me about halfway through, so I'd have my big brother play and I'd watch. Aaaand that's how I learned all my swear words.

KONAMI!

the end

In the back of my mind, I spent the last half of the book practically praying that DT Max would not finish this on a hopeful note.

Just let him die, Max. 

Or rather:

Let him just die.

I didn't want any "Wallace may have passed away but his work lives on forever in the hearts and minds of all the lives he graciously touched." Can we let a titanic figure sink without inflicting on ourselves the dysphoric juxtaposition of Celine Dion in tulle crowing claptrap over the wreckage?

Max delivered.

Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.

backing off a wave and going to the city instead

I'm holding off on publishing my other explicitly DFW-related ramblings for now. I keep noticing new bits to incorporate or else deep flaws in what I've already written... and I don't feel ready for sharing.

Also I am considering taking another extended computer-retreat (as in, retreat from the fucking computer), as I did around this time last year. I would not begin this right now, but soon. Stupidly, it only just occurred to me today that this is the season when the worst of the Bad Thing occurred (or it has occurred to me before and I've only forgotten it). The similar sights & sounds, smells in the air all combine into an icky tincture that fills me on the sly with a frenetic, angry energy that would be better used as fuel to drive honest work than to swim in circles on the interwebs.

---


Misc. thoughts from the past couple days:


1) Sometimes the right way out of a bad pattern is just to do something--anything--different. Have an opposite day. When the spirit says "GO"... maybe dig in your heels, suspiciously, and say "No."

Unless that's what you always do. Then you should do something different.... er... consistent. :-)


2) If you were ever religious, you were actually God that entire time.

I mean... let us for our purposes here define "God" as a being that offers you psychic strength, succor, and increased verve, under certain prescribed conditions.

Given that:

A) There is no scientific evidence to suggest that God or any other such being actually exists as a spiritual entity outside the imagination of human beings.

and

B) You did subjectively feel the "presence" and comfort of God, in your mind, without the aid of any foreign substance, and you did receive the aforementioned psychological benefits.

...then

C) Your mind itself possesses (or possessed) the capacity to "simulate" the effects of "God" under certain conditions.

Furthermore we observe that this potential can be locked and unlocked in the same individual.

What, precisely, is the key? Is it just a set of personal behaviors? The right combination and you're back in? Or is it dependent on environmental factors that are not within the individual's power to control?

Not a new idea or anything. It's been on my mind for years and it has been on our collective mind for centuries. But I haven't actually tried very hard at tinkering with it in my personal life, as least not with sustained effort. So I've been doing some conscious research into other people's attempts. And now I'm trying out a few things of my own fabrication. Which I will never again mention if they are all failures, of course.


3) Along the same lines. Is it possible to simulate belief in God effectively* without also simulating the promise of heaven or some other form of continuation or non-obliterational endgame?

Furthermore, is the distinction (between the presence of God and the promise of heaven) actually even important, in the practical sense? I am thinking it might not be, with the right behavior set. But I don't know.


This looks like a high-flown runaround, an empty exercise in bullcrap, I'm sure. Don't mistake me for a purist, though, or a snob. If I were personally able to approximate this end through easier/conventional means (I have tried--long story), I would no longer waste my time on the question of how to live without crutches. The idea would still intrigue me, I admit... the notion is a pretty one. But I think I've reached the point at which one recognizes--in this case, with a jolt--how vital it is simply to get better, stat.

Speaking of pain...

Earlier this year I was hospitalized for an emergency body-part failure and surgery. It's not really important what failed, just that I'd be dead right now if it weren't for modern medicine (I'd have died already as a kid for similar reasons, like so many of us, so now I'm doubly not-even-supposed-to-be-here-today).

Dante's lament

Anyhow, in the hospital I found out that I don't respond to morphine (this isn't very unusual; I just found it an interesting experience to go through); it doesn't actually decrease pain whatsoever for me, just makes my skin crawl and my already-rock-bottom BP drop off a cliff. For reasons I don't understand at all, I do respond well to hydromorphone, though (Dilaudid). I'd never taken anything like that before, so I was shocked when the injection actually removed all my pain--not just the physical, but the psychic pain as well.

My first thought was "So this is why people do heroin..."

My second was "So that's how much I carry around, all the time."

It wasn't until the omni-present burden was lifted momentarily from my back that I realized I am not just a wuss, that it really weighs a fucking fuck-ton.

Man, that was a shining hour--one I'll remember for the rest of my life.

The next dose wasn't so powerful. And the third barely worked at all.

I mean, I don't wanna get all Terence McKenna on your asses here. A great many substances just aren't worth the risk and shouldn't be messed with (in my opinion as a callow watcher-of-many-dabblers). But the only answer to the "great question" is that life is comprised of a series of--ultimately--meaningless stimuli, a great many of them painful. And that pain is magnified according to the perceptual and analytic acuity of your noodle.

So.

Waste it in pain, or do what you gotta do and live.

---

Without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?

     -St. Augustine, The City of God

---
*By that I mean to hack yourself into functioning as if you believed in a real God or god-substitute via conforming to a set of behaviors meant to approximate the benefits of religion/spirituality, while remaining actually unconvinced/non-believing, AND that this mimicked/approximated belief results in sustainable increases in joy, motivation, childlike/mindful contentment, as well as decreased negative affectivity. Apologies for the ungainly sentence. I am going to go eat a sandwich.

the urge to rearrange

JK Rowling today on Charlie Rose:

"The urge to write often comes from the urge to rearrange reality, the world we're in."

(I scribbled that down on the fly, will have to check for precise accuracy later.)

I don't often like to comment on physical appearances, because they don't mean the same thing to me as they seem to mean to other people... but I think Rowling is just exquisitely beautiful, inside and out, especially the older and wiser she has gotten. Obviously the blonde color is fake, as are the soft, elfin curls she's wearing today on the show... but it's all just a pageant anyhow... costumes, beauty, clothes, the way we present ourselves. It all feels false and drag-like to me, everybody's self-presentation. I just like the way she's doing it. It suits her personality so well (sharp, brilliant, lovely).

I've spent so much of my life chameleon-like, playing different roles while wearing different costumes. Watching her makes me feel even more solidified in my wish to find the skin that really fits me, and finally play myself.

Haha, first world problems.

more consumption-spurred ramblings: joy division, dfw

This album art is actually graphical data from "80 successive pulses of the first observed pulsar."

I first found Joy Division by entering the word "disorder" into a file sharing service at age 19, while in a major funk. I downloaded* the resulting song and it stuck with me. It was exactly what my whimsical fingers had ordered. Appropriately enough, it was the first song on their first ever album.

I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand, 

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man? 

These sensations barely interest me for another day, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away. 

It's getting faster, moving faster now, it's getting out of hand, 

On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it's a no man's land, 

Lights are flashing, cars are crashing, getting frequent now, 

I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, let it out somehow. 

What means to you, what means to me, and we will meet again, 

I'm watching you, I'm watching her, I'll take no pity from you friends,

Who is right, who can tell, and who gives a damn right now, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling, 

Feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling.

I didn't learn that Ian Curtis had killed himself until 2008--several years after that little file-sharing foray-- when I had an older acquaintance who was really into Joy Division and went rattling on with band facts whenever he was depressed, which was increasingly frequently, especially after another mutual acquaintance of ours actually went and offed herself.

There's no particular well-thought-out point I'm winding toward in delivering this random life history factoid. I guess JD lyrics--especially combined with the dysphoria of the accompanying music--remind me of the way DFW wrote during certain periods of his life. And he and Curtis did die by pretty much precisely the same means, I guess, although that juicy bit wasn't really on my mind when I started out writing this. Maybe it's just that when I get to thinking about mortality and shit I tend to gambol around with mini shades-of-Proust until disappearing with them into my own belly button.

Anyway.

I never got to be a big fan of Joy Division specifically because of that aforementioned dysphoric feeling--sometimes it's just too much noise on top of the noise I've already got going on, especially at the life-junctures during which those types of lyrics most appeal to me (New Order is far more accessible--probably a common fan refrain). But I always felt that their songs were a good approximation for how it felt to be me, inside my own poor head.

This part (p. 60) of DFW's bio reminded me of that feeling... the feeling conjured up by art that strives to recreate in the consumer/patron/user the feeling of the original, described experience:

Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what it was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquility. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life--indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme than anyone knew--this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.

Bolding mine. I love that phrase: "unease recollected in tranquility." Good job again, Max. You're a stand-up chap.

That impression of bombardment--or total immersion in disorder--is certainly present in Infinite Jest.** It is just more tolerable to me because it isn't auditory, that's all.

Joy Division - Disorder

---

* WHOOP WHOOP HELLO INTERPOL!!!

**Especially in the parts regarding the Incandenzas--particularly Hal and the tennis school--which are (to my recollection) also the parts that Max suggests may have been thought up or even partially composed around the period discussed in the above passage. I guess it's there with the Ken/Kate saga as well, but I don't actually feel that overwhelmed at being bombarded with everything I love (and a half).

excerpts from ELSIAGS: speechlessness, addicts, irony

I've now reached the part where we're the same age. :-)

Page 144:

"...he explained to Franzen, he was no longer an artist:

The problem's details are at once shameful to me and boring to anyone else. I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how 'hard' writing was, and how 'blockage' was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983, I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I'd not dared hope for from anything.

"He added, "I have in the last two years been struck dumb. . . . Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic. It's more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams."

---

Page 156:

"America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied."

...

"Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say.... But irony got dangerous when it became a habit... He continued:

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing... [I]rony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

"That was it exactly--irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony's most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars."

[My note: See again the essay "The Joke's on You" by Steve Almond, to which I linked on 7/23; this reminds me of it.]

every love story is a chicken story

"He was still battling to make a movie 

when snapshots were all his newly-sobered mind was offering."

It arrived two days ago in the mail. If I hadn't been so busy, I'd have made it mine on the day of its release.

I can't attest to the quality of the whiskey book, but all the rest are--at worst--decent enough.

When I read it (present tense: reeeeed it), I read it with iPod in hand, looking up all the references and words I don't understand, wondering why, exactly, it was that my father always discouraged my reading Derrida. Off and on listening to Brian Eno. It's a testimony to the book's wholesome and satisfying denseness that I am only on page 142 after two days with it in the house. I read Infinite Jest itself much faster than this.

DT Max, ya did good. Your love for the subject is evident on every page and I have not a single complaint.

Brian Eno - Everything Merges With the Night

I've been waiting all evening

Possibly years I don't know

Counting the passing hours

Everything merges with the night

I stand on the beach

Giving out descriptions

Different for everyone I see

Since I just can't remember

Longer than last September.

"The Big Ship" is far prettier, but I couldn't resist the lyrics and title of the above, which seem straight from my dreams of late--especially a certain long one I've not yet shared with anyone, but may.

On an unrelated subject (but not really), I was tickled by David Sandlin's anxiety art on Monday in the Times. 

Click here to see the rest. It's well worth the jump.

Judging by the comments, a lot of people didn't like it, found it depressing. Fuck them, this is hilarious!

I remember once an older woman confronted me about my writing and by extension my personality, called me "lugubrious" and said I brought down all the people around me, who would all be so much happier if only I would spontaneously begin instead to chirp merrily "like a well-fed chickie." Possibly she hadn't actually seen many real life chicks, because I'm pretty sure they chirp more out of hunger, loneliness, and distress, not with the warmth of contentment as she supposed. Furthermore, one really has to wonder about people who tell other people that they ought to behave as if their empty tummies were actually full. I have noticed that such individuals almost always self-conceptualize as kind, nurturing types. Curious, that.

But, really, who's to say I'm not laughing as I write this nonsense? Sometimes I rightly am. And this comic cracks me up. I want it on my office wall. I'd laugh every day.

Well, until it seemed trite.

the warehouse where we store the parts to build our hall of doom

I've been slowly, slowly reading bits of Thomas Carlyle's Characteristics over the past couple weeks. I find his style a wee bombastic and his conclusions at times altogether wrongheaded. Perhaps those bits are the satire and I'm only misunderstanding them--I am uneducated, after all. But he does deliver me clear-cut diamonds again and again, when I am willing to wade through the haze of windbaggery and the trappings of religiosity (which I mention because generally I am unwilling and that's why I've had this tab open part-time since early October).

Once I've waded in, though, I don't even see the windbaggery anymore, only intriguing ideas packed in lovely, orderly sentences--sturdy and economical where need be, gilt in all the right places. Very Scottish, I suppose. (Or very just-about-anything you'd like to stereotype as such, conveniently enough.)

Underlining is mine. I'd prefer bold, but it doesn't show up as well in my blog as it does in the feed (as viewed with black on white, that is), and I don't want to do a redesign just for this!

How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said, the Divinity has withdrawn from the Earth; or veils himself in that wide-wasting Whirlwind of a departing Era, wherein the fewest can discern his goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic Action is paralysed; for what worth now remains unquestionable with him? Aye the fervid period when his whole nature cries aloud for Action, there is nothing sacred under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of free Action are all but undiscoverable. Doubt storms-in on him through every avenue; inquiries of the deepest, painfulest sort must be engaged with; and the invincible energy of young years waste itself in sceptical, suicidal cavillings; in passionate ‘questionings of Destiny,’ whereto no answer will be returned.

For men, in whom the old perennial principle of Hunger (be it Hunger of the poor Day-drudge who stills it with eighteenpence a-day, or of the ambitious Placehunter who can nowise still it with so little) suffices to fill-up existence, the case is bad; but not the worst. These men have an aim, such as it is; and can steer towards it, with chagrin enough truly; yet, as their hands are kept full, without desperation. Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom. For such men there lie properly two courses open. The lower, yet still an estimable class, take up with worn-out Symbols of the Godlike; keep trimming and trucking between these and Hypocrisy, purblindly enough, miserably enough. A numerous intermediate class end in Denial; and form a theory that there is no theory; that nothing is certain in the world, except this fact of Pleasure being pleasant; so they try to realise what trifling modicum of Pleasure they can come at, and to live contented therewith, winking hard. Of those we speak not here; but only of the second nobler class, who also have dared to say No, and cannot yet say Yea; but feel that in the No they dwell as in a Golgotha, where life enters not, where peace is not appointed them.

So in Carlyle's view you can be:

1) A calculated user of religion, miserably oscillating between a devotion to a pure lifestyle and repeated descents into hypocritical failure.

(Perhaps he is saying that's the best you can do at religion when you do not truly believe it can deliver you? This is a clever hypothesis, and one supported nowadays by a heap of psychological research.)

2) A semi-hedonistic absurdist. Different from a straight-up hedonist, due to the knowing wink.

3) A glorious, beautiful, eternal... angsty waffler! (More like a principled fence-sitter, here in Carlyle's imagining... but we all know what that amounts to in real life, played out.)

"You", here, are the person who is both smart and sensitive (one without the other, really, and I think a person's good to go--not precisely happy, but fine enough). You are not capable of viewing the universe as a warehouse or bazaar of pleasing possibilities for sating your animal appetites. You have another appetite beyond those ones--an appetite without object(ive)!--an accidental byproduct of natural selection, the possessor of grotesque, perverse exaggerations of the curiosity, pattern-recognition, and problem-solving drives that allowed us to depart, as a species, from monkeyhood.

The Hall of Doom

You are a freak, in short. But just barely. People not so very different from you have emigrated over mountain ranges and driven armies, at least, and thereby spread their seed. They've amassed security for their progeny in the form of large fortunes won through a few shrewd maneuvers combined with a painstaking vigilance over the underlying structure of their chosen game. But you, you're a step beyond that. You've been twisted so far, you've bent and coiled over yourself like a snake and begun to eat your own tail.

"You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real 'Waller': 

an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit."

-David Foster Wallace, letter to a friend

---

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

 -Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

---

"But you didn't get that because you already got it
And you do not understand
Take a drive
Black hole talking about nothing
You can't get the chicken or the stuffing
Going around and you think you're tough
When you can't kick ass"
-Modest Mouse, "The Fruit That Ate Itself"

You are an errant protein, folded wrong. You are sickle cell anemia, the thing that happens when a person has too much of a quality previously found advantageous. Your kind will be weeded out unless the winds themselves change their nature and come to support your strange wings. This is in part why Nietzsche himself--an angsty waffler of the highest order--said his Superman wasn't you or any other like you, that the Übermensch is more like a conniving, politically-minded cardinal than any holy Percival. And then he collapsed in his own footprint with schizoid grief.

We are weeding ourselves out, really. That is transhumanism, maybe the real revenge of the nerds (even if unwittingly, subconsciously served up). Disguised as mere technological progress, designed only to serve us, our continuing advance doubles as an admission that we cannot continue as we are, nor return to where we came from. For us there is no right place in either scenario. We must become as gods or perish. And truly, the transformation is a death unto itself. We are either a transitional species or else we are extinct in just a few more generations.

Radiohead - Everything In Its Right Place

Which is funny, you know. Our "selfish" genes are selfishing themselves right out of existence. They don't know any better, poor little things.

"And the Serpent said unto the Woman: 

Ye shall not surely die. 

For God doth know in the day you eat thereof, 

then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, 

knowing good from evil."

I am not optimistic about this, make no mistake. I am no Kurzweilian, awaiting the rapture of the scientifically-minded. I only acknowledge that, unless we are prevented by a shortage of necessary resources, we will almost certainly engineer ourselves into something else, because we have already engineered a non-trivial portion of humanity into something ill-suited for our present AND ancestral environments.

(Not to mention the fact that we have simultaneously engineered our environment to be ill-suited for the majority of humanity, which is another interesting subject.)

Shit, I wanted to talk more Carlyle. But that's clearly enough for now.

look on my works ye...

"Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds,

and I have come here to destroy all people...

all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain."

A recurring theme in my dreams is the appearance of an old man who lectures me. Usually he is a monk of some Eastern tradition. Sometimes he is a wizard or a priest. Once he was Ted Kaczynski, another time Gregory House.

Last night, he was Walternate from Fringe. AKA Defense Secretary Walter Bishop.

Walternate could time travel and he took me to the far future. We were merely observers and thus exempt from the effects of time, but I was forced to watch everything and everyone I knew waste away and vanish. "Time destroys all," he kept repeating.

(((Side note: that part reminds me of Raistlin Majere, from Dragonlance, who was cursed by the head of the mages guild and thereafter had pupils shaped as hourglasses. He could behold no beauty in anybody, as he saw everyone as the dried out husks they would one day become.)))

She apparently needs to pick up a copy of He's Just Not That into You.

"Time will destroy everything you love," Walternate continued, in the dream. He took me to the far, far future next, and I could see time whittling away at the mountains, drying up the seas.

In my pocket I had hidden a ring with a bright center stone like a diamond in the shape of a star, surrounded by tiny red and purple gems that reminded me of ripe currants. The ring felt very important to me, and I clenched it tight in my fist to keep it away from the effects of time, and from Walternate.

Nonetheless, as he wound forward the clock, I could feel the metal band of the ring begin to disintegrate between my fingers, the bond between the stones vanish, the stones themselves come loose like milk teeth and fall into the creases of my palm. My heart sank and my stomach clenched.

Still I kept the stones hidden, thinking to myself I would reset them in another ring, once Walternate released me from this terrible demonstration. But he smiled at me, knowingly, in a chilling way. And the stones themselves began to shrink and rot from the core at once, as if they were merely sugar crystals under a stream of water.

Stars flickered out in the distance.

"Everything," Walternate stressed. "Everything."

SECRETARY BISHOP: Do you know what it's like... to wake up and just for a moment... think that everything is as it was? And then to realize it's not... that the nightmare you had was real. Soon everyone here will experience loss the way that all those over there did. Air, water... light, even. But you... you will experience loss the way I did.

I don't know... 

Sometimes I miss just showing up to classes in the nude.

if you meet him...

Fringe spoilers follow, up to 3-12ish. They start out subtle and then get very spoilery indeed. Just to warn ya. I'm not rot13ing this stuff, either. Deal with it.

I would ask that potential commenters not spoil anything beyond this point. Please, please, please.

---

So many reasons why I love this show. I'm currently partway through season 3. Alas, I have a life... or else I'd have watched it all in an obsessive marathon and be caught up by now. 

I keep meaning to post about the character Olivia's background as revealed in season 1, too. Major identification with her origin story.

I am not a big Olivia/Peter romance supporter, though. They have a lot in common but I'm not feeling the chemistry between them at all (which is funny, given it's supposed to be the crux of the show). In spite of being an ex-conman, I actually think Peter is too polite for Olivia. In her present state, she is making self-defeating choices that are the opposite of what she actually wants, and unless she spontaneously learns how not to do that on her own, she would need her potential love interest to pierce through the bullshit and call her on it. My opinion is that, given what's been revealed of her character so far, Olivia is unlikely to open up emotionally in any visible way unless provoked by someone who already has a leg in by intuitively understanding things about her that she did not intentionally reveal (though she appears to be inspired to be more outgoing as of late....so, who knows?). 

So, I'm rooting for mystical bowling alley guy, even though I know it'll never happen. Or I was, until last night's reveal in 3-12 (Sam Weiss as author of the books about "die ersten menschen"). Seems far less plausible now. Probably a bad idea to date someone you've threatened with a gun, anyhow. Haha.

I guess all the confusion and mixed good/bad choices are what make the drama appealing to watch. 

---

My seven year old was watching an Arthurian legends show for kids yesterday (he picked it out). At one point he came running to me from the living room. "MAMA! This show is maddening! Everybody keeps doing stupid things, over and over, and then they say they don't know what to do about it, but they do know what to do. They're just not doing it!"

"Do you want to turn it off then?" I asked. "You can turn it off, you know."

"No. I gotta see how it ends."

*ten minutes later*

"GAAAAH. I feel like kicking the television! These PEOPLE!"

(Cracked me up that he actually said "maddening". I guess he picked that up from us grown-ups.)

---

Anyhow. This scene (the first half, I mean) really struck me. In how many shows these days do characters bond over books? And not just that.... but interesting books that actually seem worth reading in the real world?

Chapter list from Part II of the book:

Tale of a Man Against the Gods
Tale of a Spoiled Identity
Tale of a Discontented Disciple
Tale of a Quest for Love
Tale of a Power Trip
Tale of a Mad Knight
Tale of a Descent into Hell
Tale of a Search for Belonging
Tale of a Holy Warrior
Tale of the Eternal Jew
Tale of a Journey into the Darkness of the Heart

...'bout sums it up, huh?

And a quote (something of which we can't do without around here, lately, if you haven't noticed):

And remember, too, you can stay at home, safe in the familiar illusion of certainty. Do not set out without realizing that "the way is not without danger. Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things." It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.

The quote within the quote is Jung. Which was probably as bleedin' obvious to you as it was to me, if you've read him before. His own unique personality shines unmistakably even after the rough indignity of being translated to foreign tongues. (Just watch--I'll be proven wrong now after saying that, though an initial Googling said I was right.)

---

Olivia's plight is striking, too, in a metaphorical way. Somewhere in the past few episodes, I recall that she came right out and described her alternate universe version of herself (Fauxlivia) as "better". Fauxlivia did not lose her mother and was not subjected to abusive psychological experiments and so is "quicker with a smile" than "our" Olivia is. She is more sociable, more capable, more flexible, more talkative, more loving, and even prettier, due to the fact that she is more comfortable tinkering with her appearance through different styles of dress and makeup. And what's our Olivia better at? Well, she has a very narrowly focused super power that is in most situations utterly useless, and she has a better memory. Wow.

This makes me think of how we have ourselves and our idealized, hypothetical version of ourselves. As Kate Harding famously wrote in her blog, that's the version of you who struts down the beach not just looking decent and acceptable but making men weep as you pass by. This may be our residual self-image in some cases, our admittedly never-realized wanna-be-self-image in others.

Olivia is literally in competition with herself, with Fauxlivia, for the guy she wants--and her other self actually does, objectively, measure up better on a lot of counts. The things that Olivia herself is better at are mostly qualities that the world doesn't find very useful. Frankly, she is mostly just better at being a heavily scarred version of Fauxlivia. But maybe we're all in competition with our other better selves... the selves that we think would actually deserve our mates, our jobs, our friends, our houses, our only chances.

I got nothin' past that. No answers. Just thinking.

where is the crossed signal?

From Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch, (Section: "Obstacles and Openings"; Chapter: "Vicious Circles"):

Some habits may appear in both addictive and nonaddictive (normal) forms. Some habits may seem addictive, such as physical exercise or practicing a musical instrument, or doing some other labor of love, yet we may consider them to be positive and beneficial. There is a fine line between the pathological and the creative, between addiction and practice. What actually is the vital difference between "I'll just have one more drink" and "I'll just try that Bach fugue one more time"? 

Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom. In practice, or in creative reading or listening, we obsess in order to find out more and more, as in the Twenty Questions game. In addiction, we obsess in order to avoid finding out something, or in order to avoid facing something unpleasant. In practice the act becomes more and more expansive; we are unwinding a thread outward and building more and more implications and connections. In addiction we are folding inward, into more sameness, more dullness. 

Habits are addictive if that mysterious acceleration factor is present, when enough is never enough, and what was enough yesterday is not enough today. Habits are addictive if the reward and the work are inverted. Samuel Butler joked that if the alcoholic's hangover preceded the intoxication, there would be mystical schools teaching it as a discipline for self-realization. So practice is the reciprocal of addiction. Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions; therefore it is sometimes painful. 

Addiction is what computer programmers call a "do-loop." Self-regulating beings, whether animals, people, or ecosystems, spend much of their time performing repetitive routines. Built into the structure of such routines are end-conditions or exits. We keep performing the routine until the end-condition indicates that the job is done. Pouring tea, we monitor for the condition "Is the cup full?" That condition turns off the act of pouring. Eating, we continue until certain autonomic signs (stomach bulk, blood sugar, and so on) feed back the message that we are full. Normally, we then stop. But it is possible for the end-condition to be omitted, misplaced, or for the signals to be switched, so that the routine is carried out indefinitely, compulsively, until all sorts of disorders, explosions, or breakdowns bring the whole system to a halt. 

If addiction is a form of do-loop, from which there is no exit, procrastination is a don't-loop, which consists of nothing but exit. In a circle of addictive feedback, we believe "The more the merrier." Under stress, such a belief can accelerate into a do-loop, which drives us into an explosive runaway, such as an eating or drinking binge, a population explosion, an arms race. In procrastination we believe "The less the safer." This, under stress, drives us into a don't-loop, a cycle of compression or blockage, like a muscle spasm, writer's block, sexual impotence, depression, anomie, or catatonia. In this kind of vicious circle the exit condition fires off continuously, never allowing us to maintain the activity. This state gives rise to procrastination, and all the other inverse addictions, the addictions to not-doing, the blocks, the allergies. 

Procrastination is the mirror image of addiction; both are disorders of self-regulation. We are stuck in these cycles unless and until we can find the crossed signal and switch it back again.

Goya, Figures dancing from Los Disparates

---

I like typing out passages from books that I want to study. With my fingers moving, constantly checking up on whether I'm accurately transcribing a given sentence, I am forced to pay closer attention.

Also, Wood Mouse, if you ever do read this, here... I love you even more for your having loved and dog-earred that page long ago. :-)