6:00 am EST

"THE FRAIL AND WRETCHED KILLER"

Man is grandiose because he is wretched. If he recreates the world in his own image, then his skin is a gunmetal holocaust -- I guess the microscopes haven't been invented yet. But wait! They have. And people choose to ignore and forget them for want of comfort. They'd rather not be disgusted with themselves... so they project a sense of superiority over what they deposit in the toilet.

Man is nothing what he thinks he is. His true soul is the essence of a beautiful forgetfulness, but his very heart poisons him with the impulse -- the eternal mission -- to title the name no mortal may know. He permits not himself to enjoy what he cannot judge. He wants nature's glory dependent on his own glory, and has not an inkling of responsibility -- at his very best the entire duration of his survival is an act of conscious sacrifice; a reluctant corruption of all that is humble, mild, healing and sympathetic. He knocks on God's door as a tax collector. He wakes fossils from their slumber with the percussion of an oil drill. He deludes himself: to know is to master. With an orbiting satellite he tries to command the morning and screams with hostility at the dawn to know its place. His sufferings are objective things indebted to him; he does not embrace them. His joys are payments; all gifts he refuses. As a mirror he prefers his shadow and bloody footprints. If Christ himself sat down next to him at the bar, man would insist on paying for the drinks. The grass is to be cut so that little ants may not step on and crush frightened man. Every last leviathan he seeks to castrate. He enslaves himself, happily donning chains, for the purification of his ego. The most violent beast of all, his arts are sublimations of his killer instinct. He makes vestigious the facets of his brain which fail his self-deception.

Then finally -- finally! when his suffering is so awesome and undeserved, he finally profits. He wails. He knows the race of his very spirit, and confesses his murders of the meeker gods. He smells the corpse he lives in; the chlorine of his lungs, the vinegar of his teeth, and the dandruff of stupidity underneath his dirty fingernails.

And so then: the man's debt is to run to the store and steal a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for the lord Satan.

"MARY ELLEN CARTER"

(best cover ever)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5UuTW30bEE










She went down last October in a pouring driving rain.The skipper, he'd been drinking and the Mate, he felt no pain.Too close to Three Mile Rock, and she was dealt her mortal blow,And the Mary Ellen Carter settled low.There were five of us aboard her when she finally was awash.We'd worked like hell to save her, all heedless of the cost.And the groan she gave as she went down, it caused us to proclaimThat the Mary Ellen Carter would rise again.
Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend.She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end.But insurance paid the loss to them, they let her rest below.Then they laughed at us and said we had to go.But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock,For she's worth a quarter million, afloat-in' and at the dock.And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remainAnd make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.
Rise again, rise again, that her name not be lostTo the knowledge of men.Those who loved her best and were with her till the endWill make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.
All spring, now, we've been with her on a barge lent by a friend.Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I've had the bends.Thank God it's only sixty feet and the currents here are slowOr I'd never have the strength to go below.But we've patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch andporthole down.Put cables to her, 'fore and aft and birded her around.Tomorrow, noon, we hit the air and then take up the strain.And watch the Mary Ellen Carter Rise Again.
For we couldn't leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.She'd saved our lives so many times, living through the galeAnd the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry graveThey won't be laughing in another day. . .
And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blowWith smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you goTurn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brainAnd like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
Rise again, rise again - though your heart it be brokenAnd life about to endNo matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

4:42 am EST

"THE PIOUS NEPTUNE"

The middle of nowhere is somewhere; that's why it has a "middle". As such, my feeling of being nowhere and going nowhere in my life is indicative of remembering a past, expecting a future, and desiring all the time to discern my identity and purge the illusory from the essential. Maybe my life's purpose is to evaluate the inequalities of importance of the two sides of all paradoxes; the unequal purities of the dichotomies I come to appreciate with age. There are opposites of simple truths which are not themselves false -- however, they depend on qualifications (sometimes complex) derived from the same foundations of the simpler truth.

Suspend your incredulity a moment to consider water. Perhaps nothing in the universe could seem more deterministic than the activity of this wet thing we call inanimate; it submits itself to heat or lack of heat, the gravities of the earth and moon, the appetites of organic life, the chaos of its own cohesiveness, its own power to dissolve other substances; and who knows what else? Water submits to anything -- in theory you could even separate a single H2O molecule from all its brothers and throw it in a jail cell. But is the life of the aquatic really deterministic? Indeed; is it life? Is it animate? To put it poetically, is Neptune willful?

Compare Neptune to ourselves, our corporeal, mortal forms. Not once in eternity has Neptune ever bucked the natural order, or deviated from it; never put up the slightest resistance to the laws of the universe (the same laws granting water its remarkable qualities). Now look at yourself: an aerobic animal who would putrify if you jumped off a bridge to "prove" you had a "will". Neptune's amorphousness is infinite; mine is strictly limited to a wardrobe, hair-clipper, and cremation. The old try to bluff nature with hair-dye and the like -- in vain.

So getting back to the subject of unequal dichotomies... "inanimate" water obeys all -- but is free. The "highest" man obeys nothing but his own intentions supposedly -- but is helplessly imprisoned by the lusts, methods and habits of his involuntary bloodsucking. But man deliberates and calculates, and we call this "freedom". We know this is bullshit. We know we must obey something to liberate ourselves as agents surpassing in intentionality no intentionality at all.

What better place to start than the instinct of honesty?

11:39 pm EST

"MORALLY PROGRESSIVE REINCARNATION"

If we need God to have amnesia, then we need to have amnesia, too. You're the friendly drunk in your old age, shaking hands for what seems like the first time... with yourself.

You reintroduce, he reintroduces, and then both of you decide that the other guy's boring and you go and mingle with others. That's with every self you've ever been.

God is the bartender; everything's on the house.

10:44 pm EST

"... WHAT FOLLOWED A TALK ..."

I had a discussion with an artist tonight.

When the subject came up, I was disappointed to see so little SEM (scanning electron microscope) photography in my biology textbooks. Anyway: a computer may be able to generate random patterns, but SEM is more random, I think potentially. After all, nature is a battle of incompetents. It's more abstract than abstract -- think of the chess implications. So without further ado -- since I don't feel just yet like making an entire post on the relativity of phylogeny -- here are some JPEGs...

9:42 am EST

"THE PSYCHOTIC HERO"

You may have heard stories of schizophrenics or some such individuals, such as Daniel Johnston, who have at times come to believe that they "are" Jesus, or "are" the Devil. This may be, I wonder, because they struggle to dissociate their subjective experience of life from the world in a normal way. Maybe they come to understand themselves as pure forms of supernatural paragons because the only way to dissociate enough to so eat and defecate is to dissociate radically.

The psycho, too, wishes like the rest of us to not harbor delusions. But his credulousness is a reversal. It is the mundane first that he suspects is a delusion, or illusion. He thinks: if the reality of my soul is false, then the natural and physically sensed is therefore false. By contrast, the cool-headed epistemologist starts with the natural as his first assumption.

So the questions upon which a normal man deliberates and ponders are the assumptions of the madman, and his world-view and behavior rest upon faith. If at any time he is uncertain of his supernatural essence, he cannot function. He is reluctant to eat, even; he wonders if his food is a dangerous and corrupting drug.

In other words, it's as if a madman believes that he could deduce the laws of physics by reading the New York Times and searching it for axioms. The scientific method means nothing to him until he acts out, and he cannot see things probabilistically. After all, his consciousness is absolute, either universal or nothing, literally.

And since his subjectivity is his only understanding, it is difficult to impossible to evaluate the salience of a thing or event. Depending on nothing more than mood, his every perception at a time seems either meaningless and arbitrary or existentially profound. He reads books and listens to songs only to arm his agenda. [Sound familiar?] Metaphysical certainty is prerequisite for his conscious behavior, and he wants it one hundred percent certain to proceed with his goals.

Fortunate for this madman if he is literate and educated, because awareness of facts begets the uncertainty he needs to calm his angst and alleviate the feeling he has that the whole universe squarely depends on his heroism. By contrast, ignorance keeps him atop the summit of rabid, dizzying certitude; it is no bliss. Maybe the madman wants to play a friendly game of sorts, but no other human being understands the rules, so his only opponent is an imaginary friend. And it is common for him to ascribe to his imaginary friends undue moral qualities and various potentials. In his most dysfunctional moments, his only two friends are Jesus and the Devil, and he can only act on behalf of one or the other. In better times, angelic and demonic subvassals form a sort of congress in his brain.

The latter situation is less dangerous, in a way, for a violent individual. After all, aside from the profit motive, violence would require moral cathexis he cannot muster in such a state; he cannot hate and he cannot love. But on the extreme end of ambivalence, when one judges and evaluates not at all, one's aspirations become dissipated and the will becomes static.

What's a psycho to do?

8:28 am EST

"CHRIST AND HISTORICITY"

"Jesus the Messiah" -- delusion? how about confirmation bias? The gospels meet the demands of the Bible as a literary volume, a text. Isn't it a bit convenient that the most important man in history, the most important "failure" in history, lived during a recorded period? Yes, you read that correctly. We don't attribute the human faculty of following animal tracks to hunt to a particular individual's influence -- even though the tactic was likely taught or imitated -- because the founder of the practice lived in a pre-recorded time. We don't note the founder of herding or seed-sowing, either, for the same reason. These men do not have identities today.

Jesus founded "irrational altruism". Now, this is a very late development in anthropological history, late enough to be recorded. Jesus stood on the shoulders of giants; the brilliant primeval Homo, the Hebrew writers of their scriptures, even the road-builders of the Roman state. What would he have been without those others? He was a man in the Anthropocene, and I'm sure he thought plenty about that; i.e., the socio-political context of his existence. His self-image surely evolved; nothing in the gospels suggests that he was a pre-cog; he eyeballed, reexamined and reevaluated his reputation and significance as his life progressed.

The situation culminated immediately before the Passion. (John 18:37) "You yourself are saying I am a king." That's Jesus at his most fatalistic, maybe his most arbitrary. The translation of this remark to Pontius Pilate might be "It's true if you say it's true." Or maybe even more ambivalently "Believe what you want to," as it were. Pilate (18:38) responded "What is truth?" -- rhetorically. Were the two men in agreement? on the same wavelength? Jesus offered no counterargument that essential truth exists. Thus the dialogue ended there, as a philosophical self-actualization. Jesus cashed in his chips, maybe. He's a consummation of the past scriptures, or as good a one as you can get, and maybe Jesus knew this, thinking if from this point on there comes a different one, a truer messiah than I... well, then, oh well. Jesus was satisfied enough with his own teachings, his own identity; he didn't think himself a liar or a jerk, so: Let them believe I am the messiah. Maybe I am. And even if I'm not, they could do worse than me.

That's not to say he looked at himself as a default -- perhaps he saw certainly the Anthropocene firmly embedded on the horizon, with its dispassionate businessmen and the like, and decided that it was an ideal time to cement ethical monotheism as a powerful phenomenon. The known world was on the cusp of an early information age, and there was a coming industrial revolution of sorts. Think of today (2013): historical events are too rigorously documented to bear any myth -- contrast this with the falling of Jericho's walls, for example. The only earthly place where the laws of nature are violated is in our hearts and minds. Not in politics, not in ecology, etc. I'll point out that it's not as if the 2013 Israeli government has any plans to add anything to the Jewish scriptures, just like they didn't add anything after the Six-Day War of the 1960s, even though surely another seizure of Jerusalem by Jews would easily be significant enough to make it into the texts were we not living in the Common Era.

At the turn of the CE, the world was becoming more... well, common. Thanks to the Romans, cosmopolitan ethnic diversity was becoming an irreversible reality, along with interracial marriage. Being human, Jesus didn't always extend himself fully to Gentiles, but sometimes he did. He likely had a sense that his faith would evaporate from world history as long as it was the sole property of the Jews. His technique for theological diffusion was to encourage the sense of God on an individual level: personal mysticism. (Our current Dalai Lama faces a similar challenge.) Jesus didn't risk speaking on political matters much; he hedged his bets on spirituality probably because he had a sense of the reality of natural history, something most intelligent people think about when face to face with ethnic diversity. He may have suspected the deep age of the universe and the true indefiniteness of its future. Did he know the Sun will burn out? More immediately, what could any man prophesy about future geopolitical events by Jesus' time? Recording history was becoming more of an exact science. (Compare the early Herodotus to the later Tacitus, for example.) With little to no room for interpolation, the spirit of Jehovah risked succumbing to literalist disillusionment. A final statement about what it all meant needed to be made. Jesus saved the mythical quality of the Scriptures by bringing them to a close. [Please note that in the opinion of this author, the Bible should end with the gospels, and that the apologies of Paul and the like should be eliminated to preserve the volume's formal literary integrity.] By contrast to Jesus, any snake-oil healer of today would be recognized as a charlatan by the educated, whose lamp is very harsh indeed. But the Bible entertains my intelligence and curiosity partly because it requires the cooperation of my imagination. Christian theology would be spittle in the wind if it were born amidst the cheeseburgers and televisions of today.

Personally, I think an invasion of space aliens would occur before Revelations was manifest, but think about how difficult it would be to objectively believe any unprecedented event like a rapture occurred! How many grainy cell-phone videos from how many different angles would it take to not suspect that it was a digital fabrication? And supposing the Second Coming was filmed by the requisite number of iPhones, the result would be so anti-cinematic, the coverage so non-artistic, that there would be no pomp.

Well, so: is Jesus' importance an accident of historical context? I would say that it is. He lived during the turning point from the oral tradition to written scholasticism. He completed the Scriptures just in time to preserve their relevance and vigor. (And they remain vigorous even in paleoanthropology: "African Eve" is a useful term you may have heard of.) Genesis provides insight into the nature of our ecology and species, though it takes thoughtful interpretation. The latter end of the Bible bespeaks of a conscientious and timeless love, and not quite too specifically or dogmatically. Jesus didn't leave the understanding of the Kingdom open to reevaluation just because he didn't know or was satisfied with what he did know; really, he empowered an animal of conscience by securing the mystery of the Kingdom from any microscope of the future.

5:16 am EST

"OPPOSITE DAY: INTERPRETING GENESIS IN 2013"

Before I stopped going to the bar, I had a conversation there with an alcoholic psychology professor which tried my patience and foretold of the vapidness I'd hear him utter through his Killian's of the future. When he told me he taught psychology, I asked him if he teaches classical psychology or neurology; he responded that there is no difference between the two (and apparently not even for the sake of argument) -- thus, the man has a penis and is quite, quite aware of it. Now let's lay him aside.

The classical psychology of Descartes asserted a mind-body duality, if I understand it correctly. You might call it more accurately a soul-body duality, since "psyche" derives from the Greek of the same spelling and meaning -- "soul". Nowadays, thanks to market forces, the mind is often identified as the absolute sum total of brain activity, no more no less. Thusly, the duality is called into question, and consequently the existence of independent consciousness is called into question: is it in fact just something emergent from the material nervous system and a highly evolutionarily useful "trick"? I would advise the dualist psychologist to win over the materialist psychologist by beating him at his own game: water the semantics dry and employ the term "subjective experience". One cannot explain subjectivity because there is nothing to explain. It cannot be measured; its qualifications are crude; and one could not intelligibly assert that it is evolutionarily useful without standing on a bottomless heap of assumptions about the nature (social and otherwise) of its advantages. The suffering it causes can cripple, and yet it cannot be switched off definitively.

The delusion is that a sense of identity is some kind of cognitive, neural achievement. The vain animal looks at a spire in the desert and assumes the spire lacks a sense of self simply because it does not perform a mating dance or courtship display for him. Ironically, the spire pities the organism because the organism is saddled with an ego even in solitude, when shame forfeits all utility and yet stubbornly remains.

My interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures conforms to my animist beliefs and my background in the biological sciences. My corporeal form and my soul are both paradoxical; they are both neither individual nor universal, yet as my life progresses they push forth in both directions simultaneously. I don't necessarily distinguish myself from the desert spire: it rests on geography and I rest on nutrition, sandstone and bran flakes, in this case. Consequently, I don't see biological life as a punctuated leap in Creation; all Creation is living, and it is all infinitely emergent but infinitely original as well.

So henceforth, when I say "brain", please remind yourself that I might as well be saying "bag of amethyst ping-pong balls at the bottom of the sea". And when I say "soul", I have no clue what I am talking about except the clue that I treasure it.

The grand finale: In the beginning, the soul was for a sense of self and a sense of connection with God. The brain, meanwhile, was strictly for pleasure, the pleasure of nature and natural existence. Then the forbidden fruit was consumed. When this happened, the respective perceptions of soul and brain were inverted; all creation now understood the soul's function as pleasure and the brain's function as self-awareness. For the first time in history, it was "opposite day". It's still opposite day today. But some people are catching on.

11:52 pm EST

"THE UNNATURAL WORLD"

What is wrong with this statement: "Airplanes have been invented; therefore I am intellectually superior." For the record, the man who said essentially that to me was attempting to discredit the theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection which would include the evolution of primates. His argument stands as so ridiculous that I am not going to waste my time or yours addressing the issue as a question of science. The basest problem implied by his conceit is the vanity; the narcissism.

Why do the multitudes of "humanity" always want to give themselves credit for the technological innovations of the cognitive elite? This is a consistent, widespread phenomenon; and it exacerbates ignorance with haughtiness and stupidity. Not only could the vast majority (understatement) never invent an airplane -- or even a toaster -- if their lives depended on it; but also the technologies themselves most typically do more harm to the generations than help. I mean, where do I even begin with the examples?

OK, let's try an old invention: writing. Did it improve the epics of Gilgamesh? Beowulf? The Iliad? The Aeneid? Does it surprise you that the Amerindians of pre-Columbian North America were intellectually capable of producing a written language to crystallize their traditional narratives, but did not bother to do so, opting instead for song and dance? And let's take the Bible: have you suspected that the reason for the rise of modern atheism is because people are reacting to a theology that is "official"; brittle, static, religiously torpid; dogmatic? If nothing else, what enables dogma but the written form? By contrast, the oral tradition constantly revitalizes spirituality by adapting to fresh contexts and environments. And to those who would argue that the symbols and images of sacred texts are immutable, I would say: "Put your money where your mouth is and let them be!"

In other words, may the best symbols survive. What is timeless speaks for itself -- timelessly. And a symbol once put under a yoke is no longer a symbol. Likewise, technology ceases to be as such once it is transformed from a tool to a pseudo-organismal host of human parasites. Just as we forfeit our ability to participate in communal spirituality when we defer to a man of letters and stop dancing, we forfeit our right to trek the Americas on our feet when we subsidize the automobile industry and retreat to the treadmill.