/ Journal /

previous save: 11/20/89
I know I had something special in mind for this familiar set of words, here copies from pad:
control over what’s on automatic & ability to alter the defaults?
vary control, the spotlight of attention, from what’s on automatic to what you’re working on. sea journey.
what a bummer. 600 to 1,000 lines lost with no bak file. read/ write error causing system error. boot and try again. finally deleted. rebaked all other important files. reformatted PKwork disk. old ancient. overused? 2 and a half years daily, almost constant use of the one disk? should I even use it as a bak disk?
one thing to mitigate the disaster, most of the work I did today I did in other files. just old id27 gone.
and I had just moved tons of stuff from a dozen odd notes files into it and deleted the sources as now safe.
It’s not that I go back much to read my id files. It’s just that I want the option. Sometimes I’ll check what I said about xyz when it comes up again elsewhere.
Cinderella: long term and short term.
that’s one line I remember because when copying it in, I knew I didn’t altogether remember what I had meant. oh yeah, genetics and such. at what level and how deeply is Cinderella a preferable future? cause she’s pretty, cause she’s humble, cause she’s a good doormat? what arguments could be advanced that it’s the stepsisters who should breed and rule the civilized future?
it isn’t the extension of markets that i hate: the spread of goods, ideas, etc? terrif. it’s the attempt to control those markets. at home too.
Ayie! I just realized some of what had been in the lost id27, and then also remembered where I had copied some of it! Here:
T: why we wear clothes.
is a naked woman intelligent? unanswerable, anger making, guffaw haw haw, questions which have no answers, or, when someone has the temerity to answer them, can only possibly have answers which will anger, alienate, prompt quick suppression or room leaving (why questions like censorship cannot be meaningfully or rationally discussed with a full deck, (which doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about, accompanied by tons of self-congratulation so long as you’re surrounded only by yourself or by others with your own blind spot(s)), and a lot of name calling: bastard, stupid, chauvinist pig, commie, atheist, scramble brain), but which are just what we should look for if we’re looking for new levels of understanding, new perspectives from which to seek understanding, testing grounds for our theories. They’re where the paint is peeling, where you must repair or may most easily begin stripping. The termite holes in the frame of your house, places where you’ll never know how sound or rotten what’s hidden is unless you begin to look, and look, you’ve found an entrance, a fulcrum, etc.
you can say uh oh and walk away and forget it, you can go crazy and burn your house down before it can fall down, never discovering that perhaps the hole was only a half inch deep and the foundation fine. etc.
if all you want is to destroy your own house, it won’t matter much how you proceed. but if you want to save your house, probe its soundness, honestly, no matter what you find, and repair it, whatever the cost, moving everything out, entirely rebuilding if necessary, always hoping to move back in, always hoping that the frame isn’t entirely rotten, etc. of course the longer ago the frame was erected, the further from your inspection the builders themselves, the more likely …
of course if you believe that the existing foundation is the Platonic original and only possible foundation, and it’s got termites in it, and it’s far gone, then you don’t want to know about it.
the stentorian fallacy of the first paragraph of the Iron Mountain Report. map/territory confusion. Existing US policy promotes The Good. Therefore, existing US policy must prevail, at any cost, or The Good will be lost.
were they licensed? the people who framed our logic? no, they didn’t have licenses then, they didn’t need them. how do we know they were any good? how dare you question your grandfather, G Washington, Aristotle, Abraham?
To me, this noon, just as I was burning my hand on the skillet left over a flame throughout my meal, the answer came, before the question. We wear cloths as a badge, a pledge, made so long ago we’ve forgotten its meaning and can’t even question its necessity, that there are certain termite holes we won’t look into.
Is a naked woman intelligent? No. Of course not. Impossible. She’s an animal. Are animals intelligent? No, of course not. Or they would wear cloths. They would disguise the holes in their epistemology, advertise the fact that they’re covering them up, that they’re in control of their rhetoric, their defects and advantages, how they present themselves to you, not what they really are. That is what they really are: something artificial. That’s what intelligence is. Artificial and superficial. A naked woman is something to be bred. Slavered over. Spurted over. Raped. Vilified. Whatever you want to do. She’s put herself in your hands, resigned herself to your semantics, religion, politics. In fact, if she’s not unclothed and you want to rape her anyway, first you have to take her clothes off, some of them anyway. Make her Vietnam to the United States. A bomb will be fine for the first rent. If she’s naked be begin with, and she’s really a she, then “she” better be a photograph, and not really a her in person. Or she’s made herself as helpless as the biosphere before the gaze and rapacity of the costumed liar. The intelligent man.
Is a naked man intelligent? Huh? That’s not a decent question. You’re asking it anyway? Insisting on an answer? Then why are you running away from me? Ok, um, yes. Why? Because you can look at his face. It’s dressed. No, I don’t mean a beard: we all shave. That’s dressed. You can see character in a man’s face a thousand times more easily than in a woman’s. Look at Bogart. You may see pirate, criminal, madman, but you don’t see animal. Beast maybe, but not naked animal. You don’t see pussy. Look at a woman. Any part of her. All you see is pussy. Some transform of it. Some directional signal. A vast airport, but with only one hangar. Tits? False ass, still the entrance to the pussy. Face? The same. Pink lips, whatever her race, made red. Ah, so she too is dressed after all. But only to be super naked.
Man hasn’t always shaved. We’ve worn clothes for a long time. That’s true. Whatever the climate. On pseudo savanna, we still wear them. Cut down the shade and breeze giving trees and build houses, scour the planet for oil to air-condition it with until you need a sweater in the tropics. We shave to false-advertise our youth. And our uniformity. Our complicity in not asking stupid questions like this. Yes. That’s it exactly. Stupid. Intelligence is going along with the prevalent disguise. George Bush is intelligent. Noam Chomsky isn’t, however much he shaves.
And what kind of an idiot am I? Sitting here, unshaved, unwashed, wearing nothing but dirty shorts, writing into the Toshiba, my food stamps expired, my status in my free campground changed, no job, and the jobs disappearing by the minute, exactly enough cash to pay for postage to mail The Model to Harpers, ho ho, and then …
Yeow! 11/3 I realize what else must have been in the gone id27: hundreds of line on set theory from Chomsky, thank you. hours of hand writing chom.math type notes on a dynamic semantics, a non-linear lexicon, sets and overlapping sets, etc. sort of like my first syn. notes of four years ago, then more hours copying them into 27. At least I now remember what much of it was, whether or not I remember details. I can reproduce if not duplicate.
Abandon fixed meaning along with fixed space or permanent reference. see and appreciate and understand (as well as bemoan and mistrust) the dynamic. find appropriate math models and then reinspect and improve them. and I used the word Man as an eg. from “highest” and most general, most abstract down to particular, particulars. CHAOS SEMANTICS
MAN any conscious, semi-conscious, self-referencing mortal creature (of which our only real, accepted examples so far are homo sapiens (an entity itself not universally agreed on or accepted: eg, pigmies? niggers? women? infants? heathens?)
Man the more or less species
Man the species
Man in history (civilization as part of the requirement)
Man, the male gender
Man, the male past puberty
Man, the male past 18. Past 21. Past 30, 35. A citizen, a property holder, the political animal, “responsible.”
Then linear binarities:
/ \
/ \
inner,core outer,notcore
in this scheme, left is reverse of usual political spectrum. Here left includes the emperor.
Each branch can be further subbranched, indefinitely.

/ \
born naturalized
Mayflower 3rd generation
Brit not Brit
Eng ScotchIrish
Scotch Irish
Prot RC
lacecurtain Paddy
the trees are four dimensional and have vines crossing in surprising places.
Borders are indistinct way to the sides. What circles back invisibly? Enough generations pass and emperors are becoming peons and peons moving up, moving left. Where right and left join, overlap, have passed each other, moving counter.
Then I drew things as sets and over lapping sets. And the sets had dotted, indistinct, unmappable areas. Question: the set overlap and intersect, do the undefineds ever intersect? When? How often? Any pattern? Significance?
Within the set of people, what’s the overlap between set of people enfranchised and set of people the enfranchised care about?
Then there ought to be statistically generated math models, a la robin/ostrich word frequency, core/outer, what leaps to mind/ what has to be stuttered over, stretched for of words.
EG give Man such an amoeba shape. How show it 4-D?
Then each sub-line, each part, its own 4-D amoeba
Logic: every (“synonym”) used: necessitates recheck of relationships. What we’re so good at relying on our not doing. The logic of everyday political scrambling for status, power, prestige, land&resourceuse. Scoundrels should be whipped, MmeMcDuff&Son, communists are scoundrels, Paul is a communist. Let’s whip him. Now lets take his property. Have the trial in his absence, don’t let him talk if he shows up, misunderstand, misconstrue everything he says if he talks anyway.
The elastic responsibility of speech of the enfranchised.
president > President > Nixon
agitates around the overlaps, around the borders.
/ \
C / J \
h/ a ≥
ƒƒa C m ≥
\s h e ≥
ƒI a s
\ s I
ƒ I I
\ I/
N d
i Water r
x gate o
o F
us W post
s W war II
ol II I
i t
ni a
Are revolutionary chaff blown about?
a result of the dynamic of the turning?
a cause of the dynamic of the turning?
Etc. I wish I could remember more. No doubt could go on constructing it. Damn disk. Threw out the two oldest, most used.
Tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth … the robed, wigged, platformed judge demands, not only with a straight, but with a stern, nay, threatening face. And the peon agrees! And the judge accepts his agreement! And then his testimony! We billboard our lies wide as the sky.
Our future intention to manipulate, to use rhetoric more than science, on the social environment, and on any other environment, is the first thing we’re taught as children, as infants. we’re closeted for our bottoms to be wiped. Taught shame. What’s that? drummed in as a reflex? to hide. to conceal. the poker face.
No wonder Cordelia’s honest is also petulant!
Bertram’s honest is also duped.
Helena’s honesty is also manipulative … however devoted and passive seeming. maybe it’s been passive for fifteen or twenty years, however old she is, but not once she’s set her sights. I’m so glad not to have reread AWTEW till 51. Now it’s a favorite.
How can one lie in bed for sixteen hours and finally creak upright with such a head ache? Horizontal at sixish after working since dawn, having read, chessed, etc till that dawn, lying with eyes closed, brain boiling for perhaps an hour of it, but not slept in close to thirty-six hours, not having fallen asleep since the dawn previous. Finally, All’s Well: Act V, WOW, tears over rings, resist beginning MacB, dark, … zzz … up to pee, my dream upon me, a buzzsaw of a dream, me teaching, Brian a student w. split personality, Comedy of Errors type situation, B can’t come on project over weekend, he’ll be recognized in wrong character by friends of other character and by me. waking moment was dream moment when B sees me call him other name, going along with the secondary schiz character, wrinkle of confusion, acknowledgement, and he’s off, able to maintain secondary character, and I’m standing there congratulating myself, amidst other character confusions anyway, up, pee, must return to dream, 11 something pm, shit, didn’t even make four straight hours of sleep, mustn’t let brain get active, up till dawn again and sleep till dark and might as well commit suicide. too late. now i’m awake. hallucinating with exhaustion, but awake.
buzz, buzz, the brain goes crazy. one difference this time though: i let the light stay out (with the exception of brief illuminations to jot notes, immediately following), if I toss and turn all night, tough, you’ll fail to sleep, but you won’t have given up. just suffer, stupid. toss in the dark for hours. aware occasionally that sleep is closer if not actually overlapping a minute here or there. then, the night must have passed, i must have slept at least part of the second stint, what time is it? as all the neighbors talk in my ear. 11 am. ouch. the sewer guy has got his truck just outside: engine running, CB up all the way, broadcasting amplified static, his phone recorder is playing him back all his conversations, and he’s no where around. what could one say to these people?
a gallimaufry of ideas. never keep track. never track a single one, not all the way. try one. dreaming a picture. Escher type thing, god shunning, cursing, banishing devil. look at center and that’s what you see, black and white. enough however of the other to outline shapes. so not pure after all, or you couldn’t see it. flop it over, and its changed, black and white reversed, comp, char, etc. force eye to border and it’s continuous all the way around to the other side. white and black dosido just off borders of human perception. you have to violate human perception to see it. become alien to draw it.
where do you test things, theories, words, people, plans, species, …? not in the center; at the borders. where bird means ostrich, not robin. where the actor hasn’t put on his makeup or the stage lighting been fine tuned. you pull sneak attacks at dusk or just before dawn.
and I thought of human concern, compassion, etc. who gets it? tiny group identified with self. human, smart, blessed .. blind to the borders. try defining any part. you’ve got a whole group ratifying the fuzziness and ready to murder if you try to go beyond fuzziness.
what’s human? mental activity. what’s mental activity? uh, language production. does language have meaning? let’s look closely. no, it only has meaning if you keep moving and don’t look closely. how about other test? and I imagine like geiger counter held to brain buzz, crackle. ok, hold one to porpoise. buzzbuzz, cracklecrackle. sorry, wrong result. no, we can only protect a tiny small family we think is self. ah, but our words, grand, universal, all good, all man, all life, etc.
at 15, The Family of Man knocked me over. How about The Family of Life?
a point in math is an idealization. no dimensions but being there, just location. you can see such a thing only in the imagination. they say that and then spend the rest of their and your life drawing and printing dots and calling them points.
loops. can you ever find the same point twice on the same circle once it’s turned around? you can pass it, you can be sure it’s gone by, but can you find it? no. no more than you could have found it once. you can return to the same mark, but not to the same point. If you think you can, tell me how you can tell.
how about in 4D space? March 1st. Sure, a very general, very large “point.” But still, even a non math doesn’t confuse March 1st 1901 with March 1st 1609, not even at a criminal trial or to manipulate history.
could time be a fractional dimension? both “greater than” and “less than” one.
gov’t looks at free thought. uh oh. steps in. takes over education. destroys it by compelling its factitious govt issue analog, whoops, still universities, takes them over by funding them, then withholding funding. the good DC pusher. The Steppford Wives. Steppford U.
I want a silkscreened tee shirt: Steppford U
I’m sure Hollywood intended us all to look at Katherine Ross, and say real human being. And at the actress making the coffee, making the coffee, and spilling transistors as something nonhuman, inhuman. ??? True, no transistors spilled out of KR. I didn’t see her as less programmed, just more sophisticatedly programmed. I don’t see my seeing is at not programmed. To me, something like instants of free will begin to emerge only at levels of sophistication of programming, zillions of competing and sub programs, at least a little self-referencing in more than a couple of them considerably more sophisticated than you find expressed by Hollywood, Madison Av, or the Pentagon. (Devil Sign, right?)
liberal freedom is for those who feel safe, bravely or foolishly; conservativism is for those who are scared shitless or who feel guilty as hell. who could ever have a rational pattern for either without first knowing how the world worked, evolution as well as politics, physics as well as who knows what science we have little to no notion of.
Macbeth shall be king and Banquo bequeath kings. both generals, both valiant, but MacB has just recently proved how precipitous he is. that’s ok, he was protecting the existing order. McB hears the prophesy & just about immediately proceeds to try to bring about the inevitable. How? force, of course. he’s a human being, and a civilized, political one, right? Banquo is also forceful, civilized, political … but all we ever see him do is be intelligent, perceptive, cautious, resourceful, run away, be murdered. Allegory of evolution? Sure: McB is the present, the pragmatic, the real politik. He’s what we’ve been, as a group, especially recently, acceleratingly these 10,000 years. McB is powerful, honored, doomed. (Any evidence that anyone loved him? Yes, Duncan.) McB is also helpless, haunted (before the deed), active, paralyzed, a baby, his wife’s robot, his wife being just like him. Though not quite: she’s both more and less etc etc than he. But who fathers the future? Just as it said: the murdered Banquo. Practical? Pragmatic? REALP? Sure: you just have to be totally shortsighted.
Time may be a fractional dimension. Or is it the only one that’s an integer (1)? But to creatures and societies, it is perceived only in fractions. McB’s fraction is very small.
(I don’t mean that Banquo fathers the whole future, or is its only father … Step N comes before step Ninfinity. Sermon on the Mount?
witch burning must be one of the best ways for the otherwise raggletaggle group to reinforce its conservativism. what about the witch? what about the witch? you don’t have scapegoats unless you’ve got an extra goat or two.
what if the witch is innocent? huh? how can you have an innocent or guilty imaginary thing? of course the cohesiveness of the group is similarly imaginary. Except when its burning witches.
Reading McB, again and again I remember and marvel at my Camp Drum newsletter. I thought it was great when I did it, I think it’s even greater now. I wrote some army stories a few months back, but I don’t think i did this one. I was drafted, Fort Dixed, Xmas leaved, and assigned to Whitehall St. Berlin was over by the time we got there. Once we ivy league english majors became part of the routine there, it became a relaxed but ugly country club. until Cuba. straight back to hell, but for more than 10 weeks. oh, I don’t compare its hell to DaNang or Korea etc. which is worse, physical or mental torture? depends on that dimension of time again. no doubt physical is worse while its happening. but you can die or heal from that.
So Cuba and as usual I suffered for my virtues, the best, fastest and only accurate form processor they had, they needed me all day and half the night six days a week. Everyone else could go on vacation as long as they had Knatz enslaved. What if I had started making mistakes? Then the others would have started to have to work too. But they’d never forgive me, cause they’d know. or think they know. the others they could only suspect. a mental condition I wouldn’t have suspected until I saw it repeated and repeated. like the “intelligence” test, if you lie 100%, they’ll accept it as beyond their willingness or capacity to test. but you can’t show capable and then show incapable except by their prior definitions: loss of a leg, eg.
so irony of ironies, their map was never close to their territory, all their real workers, officially were designated as extras, dispensable, temporary. the ivy league reinforcements. (only Jake and I were ivy, but all had gone to some college other than SFCC. Phil was Ursinus.) In the midst of Cuba, Camp Drum is about to open for the summer. the 1stArmy looks at its map, not at its territory and transfers excess. Bless me, I was included. Why? They got work out of me, but I was also trouble. They saw my hate, my derision every minute I was there. By WHS I had given up direct insubordination, refusal to obey orders. I had seen the army’s answering tai chi. they didn’t notice, when it didn’t suit them to burn a witch. witch burning must be exhausting or expensive or must depend on some weather beyond an individual. Or, as I most suspect, they were just chicken. Like the guard, who, gun drawn, turned and fled from Brian and me hiding in the Guggenheim. He sought us until he got close. Couldn’t see us. Didn’t know what we had. (nothing but our pounding hearts.) All he had was a gun. Like the drunken SP4 whose threat to kill me was so brave until he saw me looking right at him. He stopped. Stood still. Had to know it was me. And then went on with a pretend search at a very different level of energy.
So Jake and Rocky and I go up to Camp Drum. Real army life. Empty. Nothing to do. Well fed. Suddenly, our $99/mo was wealth. beer & movie money. They even housed us. Show up in the morning and then futz around. One real person’s hour or three of work with three of us to do it. They didn’t take well to our proposal that all three of us could be given our accrued leave if they just left one of us to do the three’s work. Or two of us. One could work, the other goof, and the third be gone. Take turns.
Our duty was to mimeograph what ever needed mimeographing. Which was mostly only the weekly newsbulletin. Some Official gobbledygook at the top, and then Unofficial notices about the px, the movie for the rest. Unusally only one page. As the reserves started actually coming in, it got a little longer and there’d be maybe one person’s six hours of real busy work.
So one evening I write my own newsbulletin, printed it while alone and passed it out onto the beds (the standard mail system for peons) of my own barracks.
I believe I still have one in the warehouse. But in brief:
President Kennedy was disbanding the armed services.
As of some date.
Recognizing responsibility, there would be psychological training programs for those who thought that a career of maiming and killing would be open ended and who would suffer from its deprivation.
Other national powers would be notified and left to do what they would. It being hoped they’d do the same.
There would be a mid-summer’s day turn-your-spears-into-plow- shares weenie roast.
Little Carolyn thought it was a “keen idea.”
Kennedy acknowledged that “like MacBeth” etc.
transforms: recognized and unrecognized. can even god recognize them all? To ask such a question you also have to ask questions about kinds of logic and their uniformity. already, we don’t hold ourselves accountable for making much sense when we talk about him, how much of that is wisdom and how much Machiavelli?)
Can they function, recognized?
Perhaps god would have to think from the same kind of leap of faith that we make: some somewhere a monism is operative. if he’s it, he can’t know it (any more than we can), though he can believe it, intuit it (just as we can). (any more than we can know our own exact dimensions and interconnectedness or discreteness, even with the help of not being solitary.)
binary. switches have no meaning being half on. a switch can be defective or set wrong, a victim of accident, somehow the wires are too close, or a wire is too close to contact with a potential of some sort, and the light flickers. We make a generalization about some analogic, extensional, continuous/discontinuous thing, a thing exhibiting a wide variety of behavior, but still, we have to classify it binary: mother. did the baby come out of that body? did that particular female suckle it? love it for 18 years? longer? send it to college? find some prince/ess for it to marry? assassinate a king in its favor? mother.
or did she throw it in a ditch and somebody else find it? Perdita.
maybe she devoted a life time to hatred and made great show, at home as well as abroad, of calling it love, and insisting it be called love. schiz.
maybe the baby was switched in the hospital.
maybe now there are surrogate mothers.
there’s no surrogate in binary logic. she’s either your mother or she’s not your mother. If she’s you mother, you must: not commit incest, kill her, cannibalize her. Freud’s big three. They go without saying. Not quite so firmly instituted are the cultural values we’re generally semi-conscious of. stuff in the bible. honor, love, obey.
if it weren’t binary, how could strangers (kings, judges, enemies) judge us without knowing anything much about it?
is it life or merely civilization that requires it be binary?
or do they both demand it be binary, each for their only overlapping reasons.
there’s no: she loved me on alternate wednesdays. she nursed me once when the regular nurse was sick. she once said she was sorry after the dons beat me so my skin didn’t reattach for weeks. and there’s Hamlet’s confusion: hey, wait a minute now, who is it that you love, me or him? the thirty year old prolix baby. ok, him sometimes, some way, but now who’s this other him? I won’t tolerate it. scream, wail, mumble.
Wow. reading Sh day after day for the first time, day after day, since 1970, I find myself more and more respecting Chaucer, recalling Chaucer, loving Chaucer, and I haven’t read Chaucer day after day since … 1966? More and more I love and respect the medieval element in Sh: WT, AWEW, RII, and now, never noticed it much before, in MacB. McB would have been a medieval king, but that has nothing to do with what I mean. Ch’s T&C is medieval, Sh’s T&C is not. But then, what I mean as medieval in Sh as tying to Ch is actually the beginning of renaissance in Ch, meaning the pagan bursting back through again and also an attitude toward and use of symbolism not at all ren or modern. Hermione, Helena, Bertram, even Parolles & Autolycus, are alleg. abstractions. ie, REAL. as in Realism. Medieval Realism. Now, as I’ve always maintained, so too is Hamlet et al to some extent, an extent missed by your Sh lit man in the street, the people sitting around you at ShinthePark.
An irony of the med of McB, just the witches, eg, is that it would have been written in the earliest reign of the 8th king begat by Banquo, a scot and very medieval compared to the Eliz who’d gone before, way before, him.
Throughtout all these plays, the CT I keep recalling is the Knight’s Tale. That story gets better and better as the years and decades of my life go by.
What 20th-cen student is likely to care for the more med of what Ch is thrust upon him? Sure we love the Miller’s tale, the WB’s prologue, some of the bawdy and sacreligious Decameron stories. The girls like T&C. But the allegories, the pure abstractions, …?
As a young Calvinist I could never understand why all this pagan mythology was being touted to us, or why Milton was touted as a Xian. who the hell wanted to know all these gods, myths, cosmologies …? if he wanted to talk dirty, why didn’t he just do it?
Even Sh with all his kings. hey come on, i’m an american. we know better than all that shit.
But in any of them there something that grabs you. More than anything else around. Some of us are grabbed by more than others. Learn more, be grabbed by more. Could it be that the perfectly knowledgeable Shian would be grabbed by all of it? Impossible? but that’s the direction it goes in, vanishing …
For myself, I hated Constance etc at first, and didn’t modify that much for some time. Of course I was always behind in the reading. Slow reader, careful reader, not more than a percent or two an obediant reader. I wasn’t there to do well, but to follow the path of least resistance. The KnT was hard for me at first. long. what were they talking about? but as the ironies began to proliferate, yeah, I got into it. Anybody, I don’t care what his religion is or isn’t, has to have some initial response to Arcite’s parading in victory and then the earthquake. but then we forget things. our attention is replaced. unless you’re an Eng maj. and have it keep coming back. or have a lit mind, and it keeps coming back. the more it comes back, the more it comes back. louder, clearer and with more reverberations each time.
I love the two opposing time funnels of its implicit theology. jupiter is older than god. now it’s god, but jupiter is somehow stronger, even dead. saturn is older than jupiter. ditto. “chaos” is older than “ordered” and is more ordered. double binds, chaos solves them. not everyone is happy, but the order of the biosphere reigns, not some xian or feudal crap. and this from a xian whose “sincerity” makes one weep. T&C, the end, eg.
Also predictability vs. random. Really very super modern, but not modern. you won’t find much sypermodern math in Dickens, but it’s in Chaucer. And in Sh. like the binary business discussed above.
there’s something to be said for discipline, even arbitrary discipline. maybe one of the best things I’ve ever done against my will or despite my indifference of dislike, trying to behave, was to read the Faery Queen all the way through. Everyone just reads the first two books if they read it at all (like PL). Finally, I read them. the tenth time they were assigned. grad school. but it wasn’t till several books in, that I began to see it. by 8 or 10, I was finding him to be Sh’s equal. a psychologist, even. a mod doesn’t adapt to the allegorical way of thinking at first shot. now alleg is my main way of thinking. maybe it always was, maybe that’s true to most of us, xians, etc. but fragmented, contradictory, not conscious and deliberate, proud and clear. like some med. and what I hope Model is.
I commonly catch Sat PM tv, seldom Sat AM, too bad, since I’ve never found it anything other than base-mythic. but i’m so used to little george and the dragon after five decades, that i don’t need to pay any more attention than to football. Jang, wow. Skeletal socialization: some school project with teens acting teens acting adults, supervised by those fake adults, teachers, of course, and rehearsing courtship, dating, marriage, child birth, rearing, lying to each other, cheating by changing the defaults without daddy’s aggreement, all such a joke since daddy isn’t anywhere to be seen, these role-daddys all filled only by thoroughly socialized obedient pimply teens. and the women, ditto. when they rebel, they’re reading scripts. I couldn’t believe how priceless. There’s a pretty girl, very pretty, answering the pretend phone when the suitor “knocks” on the pretend door, pretending its location, by knocking two inches in front of her. The acrtress pretending to be Lisa pretends to be a phone machine, and looking distant, superior, wholly within her rights, she “lies” to the air, “Lisa’s not home now, beep …”
No priest comes rushing forward to admonish “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
The male teen, who I think we were supposed to understand to be, his character, really stuck on the Lisa character, stands there, lied to his face, and acts a system runaway between social pretend belief, anger at deception, frustration at the cultural wall very much real between his simply reaching out, grabbing her, and sticking his cock everywhere he likes (that she accepts, of course, even ravishment requiring the female’s special cooperation. let her fail to distinguish between “I’ve gotta get off” or “I’m determined that you accept and bear”, then rushes in, universally understood, opening up and making himself vulnerable, to fuck or ravish, not to be done in. The female’s understanding this context to be social dominance, or procreative, a rehearsal of the gender pecking order, etc, and not survival combat. The funny thing is: in the social context of ravishment: it has long been the female’s jeopardy that she may in fact be injured (torn then or nine months later, etc). Still, the context is to be understood as social/sexual, not fell.
I absolutely don’t mean that we’re clear about such distinctions any more than we are about other logical levels. What mix of deliberate/ and how can you do what you have no capacity for, no organ, no historically rehearsed competence with? may be interesting, but not germane. unless one makes it germane. the law in its purposive/sloppy discretion can say “as bad as …” “should be punished equally with …” etc when it wants to put off the pressure from some group, or may actually ever mean it for the moment. The Medusa group always hoping to be confused with, and deliberately confusing itself with a coherent single independent organism. sure, like Oliver Dragon. What’s operating it is out of focus, nearly off the border, hidden. we don’t see it 99% by fact, but 100% by convention.
Godzilla! half hour later, I’m still trying to remember what I wanted to quick write down, as always am just sketching notes, more and more comes, and less and less is it what I started off to say, and more interference and competition for ideas, expression, attention come in. Godzilla just eclipsed it all. Some japs have been running around acting like primate supertribesmen, all the easier to spot when the cultural makeup isn’t our own precisely, close but not precisely. This flick has been recognizable as monster/horror/radioactivescifi since its mediesres telegraphed first few seconds of my totally inattentive exposure to it. Atten-hut! Ah, here’s the birth of the monster, out of the DMZ waste. out come the tail, birth tail first. Ah, Dr. Paul Bearer just IDs it. Godzilla vs Mothra. Ah, so it’s his show. great. just before, i had been antho/zoo/ological marveling at the superhumansuperacting. close up, actor looking like Mifune, all barbarian, male, aggressive, hissing, threatening, the samurai brows, camera draws back and they’re all worker bees, arranged around some superior, if the camera kept drawing back, the whole group of kabuki peers would gel into one organism, or one of a constellation of petrie dishes. ah, a dozen samurai, and now there the single female, a porcelain doll. But who cares, back to Godzilla: he approaches the technological waste land. there are the power stations, everything erector set, high tension wires, the moon landscape outside the supercity. and here’s the retributive past, the superbiosphere, saurian but walking upright, tiny arms, but 100 feet high, and by god, its casting its eye about like Hamlet, it actually has a “face”. reptiles don’t have faces, but Godzilla does. And best of all, its thrashing its tail around like a cat. or maybe a lemur. What composite creature is this?
the future? the past? what mix human? it’s not Apollo replacing Zeus; is it Saturn? here comes the earthquake? replacing our Zeus?
this is great. now there are two porcelain doll twin fairy goddesses singing, one holding the other by the wrist. the first “human” porcelain doll looks on. the landscape is Dr Caligari out of MidSummer Nights Dream. Oh my, and primitive, spear bearing Sino/Indians, feathers and all, run out of the Sh’ian romance jungle.
Just noticed: it’s dubbed, i’ve been watching it thinking it was in Japanese, since the lip synch is so both non-IE and cheaply done. Much better pop art that way.
I skipped commenting on a scene a moment ago: this is too rich. oh god, and I can’t now. here’s Mothra, a big, protective super pater/maternal social insect. bee? moth? We’re now going to root for the ancient six-legged past over its ancient saurian descendant.
but, thank god, here’s a commercial, back up, and say it was so great, military WASPs shooting super artillery from a ship, the japanesation of America, the WWII and Post US Navy. Rockets heading for the monster. Are we really now supposed to root for cybernetic entropy over a biological organism?
Is Godzilla the US still finishing, maybe the japs deep down believe justly, old Nippon? Or is it ancient Nippon arising from radioactivity and threatening the cyberprotective super Shogun US?
Well, here’s the showdown. WWI landscape. tanks shooting at bare reptile handed Yojimbo. the only thing “individually” recognizable in the scene. now here are the humans, the chorus. camera set a little high to make them look small and groupy. not at all how Mifune was shot. billboard in background. jap calligr with a western “?”!!! Now two western dressed japs wrestling and threatening, rolling on the ground, one has chaplin/hitler mustache. punches out the underjap who wears glasses. oh my, stacks of money, did anything ever look so emplily symbolic of value and so obviously valuless that that shot of paper currency, shovel it ito bag, here comes G, and the bill stacks scatter in civilized entropy. now he’s running like a mailman overburdened with money, ah, the building falls on him!
again notice that the sound track in “English” I don’t think I’ve heard or understood more than three words, and only twice with any consciousness of it. Godzilla knocks down the hanger like greenhouse. oh, sure, there’s its egg, and here comes Mothra. Godzille now has brows. Great yellow kabuki brows. And here’s Mothra, not fair, attacking a creature powerful on the ground from the air. Pearl Harbor? G looks confounded. The tickytacky civ in falling down and blowing away. whoops, the egg is loose. and the chorus somehow has a good seat. M is dragging G from its egg by its tail. M has rinestone eyes. I don’t care if it rains or freezes. PDoll has a box of something. I can’t believe how great this is. G is down. Something is somebody’s last weapon. poison. who? M hovers, dominant over poor G. now G is up and M is fucking the ground. no, false coda, M flies and G falls down a hill. the twins explain that M is going to die, it flies to G’s egg. the chorus runs. uh oh, now man is going to finish G. again false, the cops run. oh, the box holds the twins. I thought it might be Pandora’s. oh, shit, now we’re back to social organization, soldiers looking grouped and saluting each other. I was hoping it was all over for everything. oh shit planes in formation again. we’re to take it I suppose that G having been down once or twice can now be dealt with. here come the machines again. before they look inutile. now, puissant. G is on fire. a hit, a palpable hit. G’s face burns. uh oh. ow he looks mad. there’s a line a couldn’t miss “Turn on the power.” man made lightning all over G’s face. he knocks down a power transmitter tower. fairy duet by egg. M has died with its wing over egg. whose egg is this. i’ve been thinking it was G’s. Any difference? Guess it must be M’s.
Next movie, I want to see the coelenterates and the bivalves fight the insects.
Unblievable, the commercial is for monster trucks “smashing and crashing cars” State Fair Grounds! Priceless.
It’s not MacBeth, but it’s great. Now it PhilRizzuto and money/mortguages. Now its Dr Paul Bearer with a Bud Light banner in the background. Lem should see this. I hope this shows in Poland.
Now Apollo is montaged on the screen. Artificial hair pieces.
Now Kash&Karry, close up of a Clorox box.
Now it’s the Andy Warhol PuffsPlus commercial, only each actor gets only three seconds of common fame.
Ok, now I get it, the egg must be M’s, M is dead, long live M, and G’s on his feet again. The landscape is again Napoleon out of Fellini. Copters drop a net over G, and another. but already, the mythic voltage has fallen way down. collapsed. now its just kill the monster (composite of us and everything around). G’s fire power is being overwhealmed. Now his face is at least as human as a dogs. ordered human chaos. a mob scene obeying the traffic director. it’s basic, but not mythic basic. anthro interesting still.
KingKong like rituals, M’s egg pulses with radiolight. Myan looking glyph god in relief. And … birth! Wow, this face is the most human of all so far. Twin Mothras! Oh shit, now G is only threatening some school children on an island. double shit, guy with money is dug out of rubble.
M’s twin larvae swim toward G. powered? or accompanied? by fairy twins Phil Glass song.
larval faces aren’t human at all now, but sure were at first glim. G beat larv to pulp. But maybe larv bit G. other larv sprays poison all over it. counter blast, but G is hurting, running away. now we’re mythic again as creeping larv gains on running giant. Other larv now sprays too. poison webs G. island starts to collapse.
PDoll in white pants shows as close to cute a jap ass as you’ll ever see. Rhet Chang had a world champion ass though all Chinese. Rose Chang a diminutive but perfect. Webbed G falls to ocean. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble. PDoll smiles. The children are all right. Larvae swim away. Score a ten in the water ballet.
Bravo! The end.
Now it will be pussy time as Lynn Austin follows with Hooter’s Much More Than a Movie. First, Play Ghoul’s centerfold is Giant Frankenstein’s Monster.
Lynne has cut her hair, or is wearing more eye makeup than usual, or is it that she looks shot in daylight? and she has … Ta Da … Red Sonia! What a double bill. “Her quest for justice and vengeance became a legend.”
RedS tell kid to put his sword away while they do something tricky. “Princes to not sneak in on their enemies … like thieves,” unruly kid says. “You do not know much about princes,” Sonia says. Dr Paul Bearer is back, standing in front of a Renoir. No, it’s an ad for a law firm, camera back and shows the rest of the funeral staff.
Sandahl Bergman here, the wicked queen, is your typical tyrant: common denominator: they know no gratitude nor honor nor reward to their subordinates, at least never on camera. How can they keep a staff? Threats only. Real tyrants know who to reward and who to threaten or they’re tyrants no longer.
Even trying to look clumsy, Sandahl Bergman looks graceful compared to Birgit Nielson looking puissant.
Missed his name, the actors, the the evil courtier was played by our Oriental Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Florida Gators postgame talk to coach, just like the NFA, show: interviewing players. They’ve long looked stamped from the same die, now they have the same writer and drama coach. understatement preferred. No doubt we could run back a few years in tv football coverage and find the Abraham of all this. Individual? Composite? Single school? Player? Coach?
Cosby: angrily running over in my mind the shit I’d put up with silently or almost silently as payment due for HWE’s enslaving charity. my mind returns to Dick helping me in a jam, drive me over to JF’s so I can pick up enough money to insure, drives me to agency back via the ghetto, I hadn’t known it was there let alone where anymore than I had as a kid in RVC, till I learned, as a garbage man, the day one of the shit squad was sick and I swung onto the other truck. Then daily, on Joe’s truck and he’d go home for lunch. Dick wants to show the nigger’s lazyass misery, goodoldboy comments, racism expecting to see itself reflected back. What he gets is a little anthropology. “And you believe that,” he asks, growing rubicund, in disbelief and betrayal. Nothing to believe, I lie, choosing the least wrong lie, trying to communicate with an epistemology made up of nothing but lies, one the truth cannot be told to. I’ll borrow the ref back from the library and show you, it’s only a paragraph or two, actually meaning to, until I have time to reflect, I’ll put Desmond Morris under his nose and he’ll see: Card Carrying Terrorist.
And today I’m thinking, what would Dick or any of these dumbcop rednecks, rednecks even if they’re from Indiana, say if I told them that I would guess anterior to the count that if counted a majority of my favorite modern genius, or at least a plurality, would probably be black. What, they would sputter, there aren’t any. And if it went this far, might sputter on about Einstein, and would no doubt mention Edison before they got past three, and would stall before they got to four.
And I start to count in my mind, and I see, with watermelon horror that I’m counting only from “entertainment” fields: Miles, Bird, Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Rich Prior, Monk, Mingus, Bud, … And I think, my god, what has physics, phych, bio, etc lost by our monkeywrench politics, our primate limitation of attention v-a-v status and our insistance that it wear only our costume or not be status.
Now, how about a formal, controlled, modest but “objective” “test” of which explanation is more likely: they’re not there cause they can’t; they’re not there cause they’re not allowed, or not perceived if there.
I think, first committee of anthrops to set up provenance of inventions, +or- accuracy, and map against degree of global/sub- global intertribal rubbing. Did this tribe communication, messages sendable and receivable match 200x remembered generations, 1,000,000y rg, 1,000,000,000z rg? Genius in physics only comes from group 3 after group 3 has had m generations of such exposure. (as with all such things, when you identify something, you also identify it’s negative complement, Fuller’s second square, here you also identify what and who hasn’t been noticed for genius, leadership, status, …
German picks great poets. Schiller, Heine, Shakespeare. Doesn’t mention Chaucer, LaoTsu …
Eng picks great poets. Sh, Ch, Keats.
Doesn’t mention Goethe, Virgil
Ask superpoliticized, angry AmBlack: Hughes, and I just forgot the name of my favorite: “Grass commence a growin”? “Aw da week is ouahs”? PL Dunbar.
You identify yourself just as much by what you leave out as by what you choose. Name the great Victorian Poets. There are eight, not nine or ten, blanks in the field.
Ask Roman, Ancient Rome’s contribution to history:
law, aqueducts, trade, a post&lintel woodenness to art, and a most convoluted rhetoric.
Not: Imperial power reaches its zenith in the power to police, ie support and umpire, a middle eastern tribe’s kangaroo court and execution of God.
Ask X’ian. And you’ll get decadence, horror, throwing xians to the lions.
Though groups mix strangely. how about an Ancient roman become xian? or a modern xian sent to school to study ancient civilizations. he comes out polishing up Athens and Rome.
Sh/sc What I so wish is that my fellows had a smidge of scientific awareness. I mean the process of investigation, thought, test of evidence, thought, etc. If they can’t do it, they should at least know that it can and has been done and that their electric lights and Jaguars come from it before they come from unions, management, capital, and import laws.
But preparing for, wishing for, the apocalypse: and suddenly I’m at the top of the roof the rooster lays an egg on, suddenly miraculously, it’s up to me, I could roll this way or that, if I fall left, all science will be lost, possible forever; if I fall right, all Shakespeare, Miles … I have just enough strength to roll one way or the other, die in this sea or that, wait another instant and the strength will be gone, it will be random, meaning an order determined not by my stomach muscles or by anything in my awareness. god, maybe the god beyond god.
I’ll roll to preserve the Shakespeare. Fuck the science.
Nov 5. Autumn has definitely come to Fl. The other day there’s a pleasant to a-bit-brisk breeze. I look at the outdoor thermometer I inherited. A hair under 80° at 4 PM. Sure enough, a month ago, it wouldn’t have fallen below 80 till after midnight. Sure there were a couple of very cold days last week. Arctic air covering half the US in snow. Yeah, it got to Florida. Oct like Feb for a couple of days. I don’t mean frost, but 40 something.
Today, hot, hot, gotta turn the fan on. I check the term. 80°. Half a degree and a little wind. What a difference.
technique, practing, skill, teaching …
So often I’ve thought: quick write that down, finish washing, shitting, eating, wait till Marino scores or there’s a commercial, wait while the Plus loads, wait to clear the table, here I am … and … blank
or, if not blank, then not quite the point I’d meant.
is it like seeing a woman in shadows, wow, gotta meet her, pick her up, take her home, start to peel her and find the rotten spots, see the garish whore in the garish light.
or you fuck blissfully, drink to the dregs, and wake up to see a perfectly ordinary, at best only a little above average female in bed with you.
OR. it’s not an illusion, but a coordination problem. thinking, speaking, and writing are related, strongly overlap, all of us today have these skills to some extent, but very few are virtuosi at any, let alone all.
What kind of a voice does Michael Jackson have? A little better than average. No great singer, by any stretch. But christ can he put it together: the rhythm, words, syncopation, his body! and because he’s been rehearsing all his life, like Buster Keaton falling down, Chevy Chase will never ever once fall like that, MJ’s also got a team of lighting guys, staging guys, band members, bankers, … and really puts it together. to the point where it even works on tv; music and tv not easily going together as equal partners. put music on tv and normally, the music disappears, fades, is background to something else.
What advantage do non-Eur have in not have to predominantly visual a life-rehearsal in making music? Being drilled to a reflex in someone else ecstasy doesn’t count. If you don’t add to Beethoven, …
Anyway, Miles on records the last thirty years: always perfect, profound. Miles the first ten years. Brilliant, great, full of … it’s hard to say what’s not quite pulled off on the hearer’s part and what’s not quite pulled off on his. Like Bird, I thought Bird was full of mistakes for all the brilliance, my first few years listening. Now I can’t find any. Not even in the same performances I didn’t have enough fingers or toes for to count.
so you’re a talented writer: so what? unless you write as close to all the time as Bird played, the thinking and the writing won’t weave together with what the lay person calls genius. OJ ran the way he did by running against other football players, regularly.
it’s when I’ve written every day all day through exhaustion, frustration, why isn’t it working, that those moments in Beg & Mod & DB can occur. Where the thinking is expressed in the briefest upbeat syncope’d/triplet.
Like the great scientist: the one who’s in the lab when the accident happens. And notices it. Has a fertile theory for it, use of it. Practice alertness, and be in the lab.
Write long enough and the thinking will come too. Think long enough, and the expression for it may never come. Not in a potentially public way. Mine isn’t public, and it isn’t potentially this public, but it is potentially public.
watching football, and thinking more than I’m seeing what’s on the screen about how I used to not know anything about that either. when Phil induced me to accompany him to the Stadium, I knew a dozen or so names on my own, and been repeated been beaten up by Rudy for not being a Dodger fan (therefore, he concluded, I had to have been a Yankee fan, Grr) when I didn’t know what he was talking about or what I was being asked, had even played some sandlot, camp, school, a minimum, but some. Football, I’d played backyard everybody jump on whoever has the ball, but not real football. One day in the 9th grade hardly counts. Gym class football, once I remember running like mad toward some tough kid’s churning heels and thereafter staying away and pretending after I’d been kicked good in the face. This kid’s heel outweighed my upper body. So I was also in my twenties that I started watching Lombardi’s Greenbay, but years after the army and the daily litany of Hank Aaron, Don Drysdale, etc. In particular, I’m remembering being in Phil’s company, and frustrating him, at my non-response, or incorrect, ignorant response to the back page of the Mon. Post. Paul Horning, the ghost in the fog, five touchdowns on Sunday. So? I have/believe the “fact” but it has no information content to me. What’s it different than? How many touchdowns should he have scored? What does the fog have to do with it? Make it easier for him? I had no sense of the averages, the history, and no faith in the NFL’s supreme ability. It’s only now, after a couple of decades of noticing that that’s not typical by Dickerson, OJ, and I guess not by Brown either. It’s not the high point of eternity, but still, some Sunday.
guy talking about house construction on PBS. “load of house goes to discrete “points”, like this one here.” and he points to a hefty beam going down into foundation. a point 2x12x4″. the most carefully defined sciences are still based on fuzzy or false definitions. but not if you understand them as provisional, working, undefineds.
EastGers leaving for W, redcross handing out food. the Red Cross is like a cross between GM, the Church, & the FBI.
reminds me of the time someone recommended FLEX seek help from some newwave theologian. I call him. Meet him at Chemical Bank downtown, where he’s sitting at a little desk, looking like any other schmuck 25 years old bank exec. His cross was to try to be where the real action was: money. priests have long and long decided that. One WGer yells through fence as defecting EGer. Stay and promote the counterrevolution. EGer should say, great idea, here, I’ve been here for thirty years. Let’s trade places for the next thirty. Here, I’ll help you over.
Also thought, CIA guys who want to sabotage party, should go to EGer, USSR, Hungary, etc. And join the party! I mean really join it, like my pragmatic saint. “Sorry, I really sympathize. No one’s more deserving, but we have no money for that; I’m a real revolutionary: I’m where the real action is. And I have to show a profit for the enemy to stay here. And of course accept and keep my middle class income, and seek to increase it. You know, the real action. A soldier of Christ.
What I never understood was why so many people spent so much time sending me on such wild goose chases. They never said, he’s a subway token, $10 rent for the day, $5 for food, you’ll at least be able to tread water while we waste your time. No, it always cost me (Hil) $20 every time someone tried to be helpful.
Had good binary idea, but lost it. Dramatized origin, possible provenance, tributary of propagation. hope it comes back.
images of scale floating around as my head starts to clear. started off with revisitation of IQ spread, 90-110, 80-120, 70-130 … the Fischer of 160 or 180 (where the readings no doubt become all the more wildly inaccurate, rather meaningless, the fucking guy’s a genius and you can’t measure it until you can match him at chess) will seem astronomically superior to someone who can’t play chess but more importantly can’t imagine 125. That cause we’re looking from within the spread. get out of it, far far away and the difference between 40-200 will be not apparent difference at all. Like seeing stars light years apart and thinking they’re one and the same on top of if not inside of each other.
As a child I thought all adults were inconceivably intelligent. Relative to infancy, that was true, we were truly off each other’s scale. But as an adolescent, then as a teen, it was more that they had to be geniuses all to make sense of what passed for intelligent, mature, wise, good, recommended … More and more tho, things were coming to me were I knew something was good, couldn’t be mistaken, Kid Ory’s trombone and creole patter, and saw that it was invisible to almost all adults around me. These geniuses had tiny blind spots where I could see. Then college, where there’s great emphasis that if you’re here, you’re a peer. Not equal, but of a certain level. And some students and instructors seemed impossibly remote in their superiority, with this difference. What interests I had were here noticed and respected, for the first time in my life, and I could see already, specialization like, that I too was the other side of a fence with very green grass. Myron seemed impossibly brilliant: he was 15 and flying while the rest of us were 18 and generally struggling a bit. With exceptions. I sat next to Bob Abrahms for our first all Freshman something test. Asked him something, nosy, getting acquainted, wanted maybe for him to notice that I had been skipped past freshman French or something. Holy shit, I see his form, he’s been skipped past everything. Why didn’t they just mail him a parchment. Stay home kid, save your money. He looked though like such a dedicated grub. Had he every had an idea of his own? He looked unhealthy like a creature created wholly by his immediate environment. And I don’t think I ever saw him again still he started turning up on tv and in the NYT. After a few months, even Myron didn’t seem so remote. To any of us who spoke up about it. Superior, yes. Remote, well, not quite so much.
Then there were the misty infinities of Freshman Eng explication of The Garden or Coy Mistress. Were instructor and poem both seemed way off the scale. Etc, etc. Grad school. That was after the army where everyone looks like a child, more often retarded than not. A bit of that, teach Colby and return to face Harrier, Patrick, et alia. Yes, they know more facts than I do, their bibliographies are “responsible,” but what’s their intelligence? It’s certainly not remote, not superior, except that they’ve obviously been more religious with their homework. They’ve read all these books, why is what they say so pedestrian? Why can’t they understand what I say? The less they understand it, the more hostility I betray in its utterance.
So, image as my head cleared: it’s not that I’m higher up so much as that I’m deeper down into the soil, and can see how shallow and narrow their root system is. Shakespeare’s I can’t even find the shape of, let alone the limits of. Oh, there are shapes, but not total, not final.
T: Dumb Luck; Smart Luck. Backgammon is a game of luck. Whether you win or lose more than 50% of your games to an unequal player (and what two players were ever “equal”?) depends entirely on which sort of luck you choose. Just like life. Just like evolution. With an essential difference: one which makes backgammon a trivial game, and life a profound one: in backgammon, a win is clearly, if arbitrarily, defined (clear and arbitrary can’t be separated in such a situation). In life, … , that’s what it’s all about. Biology knows a great deal about smart luck. But the human intellect, is shielded by the sort of acculturation which still reigns in our world, from any smart knowledge of it.
The Truth: those stories which we believe. We pretend that existence is made up of facts. It may be; it may not be. It may even not be structured around a true/false duality. But all we can see of it, guess of it, are stories. The stories which we believe may imperfectly match experience, but if flagrantly and repeatedly contradict it, will be discarded. Stories which wish to be believed must therefore be flexible and subtle is some respects; command our attention in others.
Presidential Logic. Geo Bush says: “The Berlin wall is a monument to the failure of communism: it must come down.” The Kremlin has hired the US Pres to work to promote their image? He wants a monument to communist failure to be invisible? Did he have a speech writer for that one?
The sin of “noticing.” I think the life of Jesus as we have it, eminently shows that he was a Jew, a serious Jew, but not super worried about Leviticus, etc. Also, a Jew but not touting any particular temple. A Jew, not a JEW. the NT reads well because it is not a work of the Sanhedron, where temples and priests would be named, particular doctrines stressed.
The OT is about civilization and empire. Who is grinding us down? Whom can we grind down? All right with the world when we’re on top.
With Constantine (?) Xity was turned into the Sanhedron. And the church became the Church which became an empire.
We back off. Separation of church and state. Nationalism.
Now the state becomes the State once again, but godless. It’s its own god.
Inner/outer. & Chomsky’s point. We can notice when it’s them; never when it’s us.
In Tom Wolfe’s Me Generation, the husband and wife sin against each other unforgivably. In his $300 suits, people still can identify that it’s he who doesn’t wipe his ass properly. And she kept quiet about it. She knows that it’s a fact that she’s older: her husband’s sin was to notice. A Protestant can see the vanities of the Church, a Catholic raised, even an antsy one, is blind to most of it, and can’t articulate what part he sees. Now today in postWWII US: others are motivated by self-interest, by considerations of power and prestige, by in-group ideas of status, but not we good, pure, innocent USians.
“Cause I want to take care of myself now; not at fifty.” Gogol’s coffee or rolls. I hope someone comes around when this commercial actor is 50, and says, , only cigarettes and booze for you now. You don’t want to lie, do you? , you were lying to begin with? That’s right, that was a script. Now let’s find the script writer and make sure he doesn’t take care of himself.
CBS show on teen sex. Solution. Law against bastards. Bastard must be executed. Pregnancy come to term and then the mother must kill the child. Or be executed herself (and the child also killed, in that case, by the authorities). Money can of course buy one out of the situation. You can keep your bastard at say, double the cost of a legitimate child. Ie, the cost of the child, what $30,000? and another $30, paid to the Bastard Agency. (Should that be Fed? State? County?)
Where get the money? Why, it’s simple. Sue the people who made you fertile too early. Sue the doctors, the nutritionists, the vitamin companies. Sue the state for having put you in a heap with the other sex, all your own age. And most of all, sue the ad agencies. The magazine publishers, MGM and Fox. When they’re all bankrupt, sue the companies who used them. Sue the government, your church, & finally, your parents, all of whom, when they quickened your fertility and supported the slaver inducing culture, also postponed natural relief. The Budweiser ads at birth, horny at twelve; married at thirty. Makes a lot of sense, folks.
But I’ve left out an important thing. How about where the father is known? I don’t believe we have a way of confirming paternity for sure: just the father agreeing that he’s the father, whether or not he’s lying (he could be the father, and still be lying: he could be the father and not know it) should suffice. He can help pay the fines when he wants to.
Or, we could just arbitrarily assign paternity to any likely single male. If he has the money to take away. That would be cheaper than any proof.
But of course all this is nonsense. I don’t see the laws passing. We can’t expect american girls to murder their kids just because the fed tells them. We can’t railroad young men. Especially not if they have money. So here’s a civilized alternative, right in keeping with American tradition: when an american bastard is born, we should make a Vietnamese mother murder her child. Make a Cambodian male pay for the Georgia girl’s lust. Tax the Philippines.
I love Chom’s point about Solzenitsyn. What moral grandeur is there in sympathizing with members of your own group, and having none for others. News magazine: , poor Kitty Dukakas. We should feel so sorry for her. It’s not her fault if she’s a junky drunk suicide. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe nothing is anybody’s fault. But where’s is our similar sympathy for the gook opium smoker?
T: crazy about death
G Keillor’s Flag Day: ss: alien america voodoo
A(!) Nightmare on Elm Street. III. Dream Warriors. It’s great. Symbol systems in competition for reification. The movie’s reality being by normal professional definition, insane. The normal professional definition, clearly being self-serving, don’t think-or- observe-or-test, wrong. Who’s gonna believe a crazy junky chick like you. Says the nut house staff corrupter. What was that German play where the mortals are the patients, and the power nuts the medical staff?
Wes Craven. Is that a non de plume? Robert Englund.
One of my favorite things, is that the apparent theories of the script writers isn’t much different from that of the idiot psychiatrists. The dreams are Freudian, far more than Crickian.
The intern actress is pretty until she tries to act. then her too large mouth becomes really film-ugly.
Young intern has dream supp. drug. She’s a dream crazy too. Young psych sees it. Ugh. But then as soon as she wants to share her drug with the crazy dream kids, the psych is a convert. Of course the older, stupider psych says absolutely no. , please. Well, ok, but entirely on your responsibility. If anything goes wrong, it’s entirely your fault (the symbol system of the insane older governors has then believing themselves to be in charge, in control, when the whole reigning epis of the series is that they aren’t, Freddie is). Ok, all night dream session. Freddie gets one kid “tongue tied.” Another reified literalized cliché. Exactly what the movies are all about.
Gothic always reverts to the unimaginably old, outmoded, consciously rejected Pandora’s box of superstition. Hence all the nuns and voodoo. If you only believe in science, the nun says …
Anyway, of course Freddie gets the kid. Another old psych comes in. Now it’s two old stupid ones ganging up on the young experimenter. It’s all his fault, entirely his fault, they warned him when they authorized his actions. His fault, not theirs. No fingers crossed, no smirk of irony. No acknowledgment that five have died under their control and only one under his. No, it’s all his fault.
The nightmares are all civilized, christian, indoor. all artificial environment. Even hell is a tenement basement. Satan too is civilized. (Never better than in Angel Heart.)
something missing here
…they’ve driving into the junkyard where Freddie is buried. The back of the pickup says Nissan!
And they all turn out to have some sort of magic in their finger tips. razors, hypodermic needles, abracadabra.
Exactly! Freddie is buried in a Caddie. We see the obscene tail fins. Psych forces the trunk with a spade.
The “sins” of the fathers is that they killed a murderer! The one extant pop wears a badge, scowls, looking touch, drinks all the time, but always takes the orders given by the young psych is they’re also given with a smile.
the scene in the animated junk yard. semantic confusions about “energy.” confusions the culture insists upon.
Great curtain revelation. the ghost nun is Sister Helena Kruger: Freddie’s mother.
A basic double bind of contemp story weaving. tv, esp. The authorities are the authorities, we’re not challenging that, yet in key areas, they’re routinely wrong. The tough (meaning abrasive, military mentality) cop lieutenant, threatens the maverick cop about his maverick ways. But it’s the maverick who is always right, gets into big trouble, and solves the case, and humanity, on his own. Still not appreciated (or we wouldn’t have a maverick for the sequel). The young psych & intern in Dream Warriors. etc.
Past politicians were always wrong, but not we’re right.
Past nations, priests, doctors, parents, etc.
But we’re always the exception.
It’s in our fictions, most blatantly in those least “realistic,” ie horror, slash, etc, in which we allow, indeed revel in, a little slant of truth.
what good is an epistemology of witness (the law, eg) in a society 1 which doesn’t trust us & 2 in which we don’t all know each other?
science doesn’t expect to be right, final, perfect. at least not contemporary science. soph. epis. theorizes the impossibility of one to one correspondence between a symbol system (language, thought, description, theory) and the Real. If there one were, we couldn’t know we had it. Like solving a Rubik’s cube by making one move a second. You’d be ten moves past it and never know.
if you want to know the best of what’s what, read great literature; you want to know about us, any contemporary us, consume the popular trash. The Car. Dream Warriors.
We have the point in civilization where wealth and status run counter to each other. We are told we pursue our own self-interest. We believe it. Those specially trained believe they pursue their own enlightened self-interest. We do? Now watch. The rich live in tenements too. Or sure they have country estates. Which get smaller and smaller and more and more unpleasant to get to. The richer you are, the further away your country escape will tend to be, to have any real estate or country air at all. So all the more time spent boxed up in the BMW on the Interstate or in the Lear jet. Your grandfather could ride to market in the time you spend just in a holding pattern or waiting for take off clearance. Ok, so you have a pilot, a chauffeur, there’s a tv in the back, a bar, some status sex whore from Vassar is blowing you. After the nth time, you want to kick her in the teeth and be left alone. You’ve got all those zeros in the bank, all those VIPs kowtowing to you. Buy more Dupont. If those gooks won’t drink as much Coca-Cola as we want them to, we’ll defoliate and depopulate Cambodia too.
No, it’s not about wealth. Wealth would require a healthy and spacious biosphere. It’s just status and money, money and status. A very abstract status. Just as there are few abstractions more abstract than money (just the tiniest infinity of them).
I have run out of the ability both to watch junk tv and to avoid Cheers. So few stations come in, that show is occasionally the only alternative to the news. Also, I’ve gotten used to the blond. Great plus, sometimes it’s not the blond but this Alley gal I fell in love with on Arsenio. Now that I’m used to big jaw just being big jaw I no longer mind him so much. Especially as I contemplate the possibility that he was the lawyer in Body Heat. I’m even probably within a couple of years of forgiving it for employing that professional slob of the old cheap beer commercials. And tonight, I actually record one of its lines. Jaw says to Boor, let’s go out and get crazy. The bar tender invites toward hopping other bars. “Rattle my cage?” Boor asks, shaking invisible bars. . Exactly. That’s what society is, as understood by all of us.
DL playing a pair of chess moves per night vs Gary Kasparov. The audience can’t see the board. Neither convention is used by DL. Kasparov plays and DL answers right away as thought their skills were reversed. DL is so good at playing the brilliant dope, except that here, against Kasparov he really is a dope. It’s dropped that the guys around NBC are spending all day analyzing the positions. . I bet they are. For whatever good that will do. Chess is so great. It is one of those games where, like Realism in Sh’s sonnets, subtlety and combat are the Ur-Heimat. Stripping through the king’s defenses and thrusting home is like seducing a tough chastity case. Defense after defense, flight after flight, a counter thrust here and there, but inevitably: revelation. A thrill to both players. By god, he’s cleaved me from nape to chaps. Not a victim, a beatitude. At the moment of penetration, you both know that that’s what it was all about. The postponement too, sure, but not the avoidance.
Game after game, I play the Chessmaster. Sometimes a couple of dozen games a night. They go fast. I set CM for 60 moves in five minutes and I play lines familiar to me. It’s incredible how many different middle and end games come out of the same initial series. I’ll win in 17 moves once in a blue moon, in 23 or 24 moves occasionally. Sometimes it takes forty-odd moves. And then there are those which go 60 or 70. Half of those I could have won much earlier. Tonight, I disdained a 17 move mate and fought on just to take all his pieces. CM pushed me to 70 moves. After a while, I couldn’t mate when I wanted to: I too have gotten into the rhythm of avoidance. Not satisfying for either. The other day, having playing the same Queen’s Gambit refused for the nth time, I changed the CM’s style of play to coffee house, and boosted his IQ a bit. Only after I was already comfortably ahead. Up a couple of pawns or a minor piece. About to add a rook for a bishop. Suddenly I’m slipping and sliding. Suddenly, whoops, if I do that, it’s checkmate against me! Of course I was still playing halfassed and fast myself. I can settle down and be careful for a series of a dozen or two moves on occasion. Funny, the last two times I played a human being, right away, bang, by the tenth move, I stick out a knight for some gambit and wind up seeing instantly that I’ve blown it. A pawn back is all I’ll get. That last time, I went on to win big anyway. Like Marcie beating me up after I’d gone up a knight. The first time, at EHP, The Tufts football player, I struggled on and on, and he finally squeezed me down and mated me. Best game he’d ever played, his girl later told me he’d told her. Next game, I decided that he was more wily than he looked and I watched my knights. Surgery. I carved him up and skewered him. I got him in a cross fire of bishops with the queen and rooks coming up the middle that he couldn’t believe the devastation. I still don’t know if I gave those knights away subconsciously once I was assured that I was playing a much weaker player. So, sure I like to win. And I get careless and complacent and burned occasionally. I like to win and I like to play fast and I demand that the CM play very fast. I don’t want to wait for him to make up his mind. Though I’ll take all the time I want on occasion. I’ll start to work out the variations and then say of fuck it, move, and see what happens. Whoops, that was wrong. I like to win, but … To see the tide turn, to feel your brilliance flake away like old paint, to see that you’ve been fooled, beaten, that you’re about to get what you deserve … That too is great. What a game. Like the virgin who suddenly realizes, yes, that’s you she’s holding, and yes, it’s her C- (Bowdlerizing K. 2016 07 30) that you’re poised over, and yes, whatever she though she was doing, she’s let you do it. Sorry, honey, this is war. But it’s just as great to be the female as the male! I don’t mean the pleasure of fucking; I mean the thrill of seeing superior strategy beat inferior defense. It doesn’t matter whose was which. You take a great play, and Bobby Fischer could open him like a can of peas. Maybe the Kasparov of today could do the same to the Fischer of today. Maybe he could have beaten him more than a couple of the games then too. We’ll never know. Like Spassky crushing Petrosian. And being crushed by Fischer. The Chessmaster wading through Zargon, taking no prisoners. A Mike Tyson fight. God. I’ve never seen such a blood bath. Not by any of the great ones. What would it be like to be Fischer in his prime and to play God, and to see him stick some piece out in some stupid place, see your favorite line open up, get half way there, and suddenly it’s not going at all the way you had planned.
Samurai Trilogy. Finally Musashi fights Kojiro. They’re on the beach. Mifune as Musashi has carved a wooden kendo stick. Kojiro doesn’t object. If smart ass wants to play games, let him; Kojiro’s got his “clothspole” all sharpened and shiny. What do you think of this move, Musashi? Huh? How come his guts are spilling out of his kimono? Wait now, that felt like a cut a real sword would make. Musashi has outfoxed him. And Kojiro falls with an angelic smile on his enlightened face. Ha so. I wanted to know who was better. I bet it was me. I bet my life on it. And now I know. Beatitude.
potato farmer hoes up all the asparagus. What’s this shit? These aren’t potatoes.
Herod the king farmer want to hoe up Jesus. This isn’t a king.
I can just see US farmers hoeing up Athenian democracy: this isn’t freedom. They haven’t bought a single share of our plan.
there’s a plain difference between Alexander killing his brothers and Nazi’s killing Jews or red ants enslaving black ants or wasps refrigerating a bug for her young. Yes, there are differences among all of these, but the first I’m trying to isolate is: competition for one operating system. How relate god and satan fighting each other? is god MS-DOS or CPM? There really are case where it’s got to be one or the other. No sharing, except by still a third OS.
Too there are similarities and overlaps everywhere. The Jew finds the Philistine in bed with his wife. Kill him. The order comes from god. Listen, Jew; I own your ass. I’m not going to have you waste what’s mine slaving to bring up some Philistine bastard. Right. Kill your wife too. Pussy’s no good no more.
, hold it, Jew. get some pals and kill all of them. Prove that you’ve done it. Bring me all their balls.
fucking asparagus. this is a potato field.
the problem in thought, what i’m always concerned about, where i’m not very good, but i don’t see too many other people, past or present, being aware of it at all: at what level is the struggle? two bucks heading butting for a harem? a lioness bringing down an impala for food, a kitten batting a mouse for practice, …
Or, a man beating his wife because 1) he’s lost the logical distinction between her and A) another buck B) food C) asparagus in the potato field …
Or because she’s lost the distinction between herself and A) a buck … and right away the muddle of possible confusions spreads to a chaotic dynamic. she can hit him, but he can’t hit her? like the Nazi can kick the Jew but the Jew must be discrete in his whimpering? I don’t gotta give him no pussy, no breakfast, no nothing but grief, but he’s gotta treat me like the first lady?
how legitimate are deliberate confusions of the logical type of the purpose of the struggle? Beowulf & team treated fellow humans as head butting bucks. But then there was Grendle. Was grendle a different Order, Family, Genus. Or merely a different race? The Xians treated the Saracens as a perverse and evil OS. God vs Satan. Ditto the Saracens. In other words, the same operating system acting as different operating systems. About to split by meiosis? Or just insane? Or doesn’t know? Improvising. Waiting for the right mistake?
How about where we know that the confusions are systematically generated and disciplined by say one particular banking cartel/international marketing plan, say US multinations corps and 3rd World markets. If the gooks don’t want to buy coke at our price, fucking salt their fields. But call us Good, and them Evil Communists.
tv “the fishermen of X are highly ethical, very moral people, who will not tolerate illegal fishing … because … it cuts into their livelihood.” lies and tells the truth in the same sentence. why is the lie so tortured and redundant?
driving on automatic pilot, especially while mildly apprehensive about something relatively unimportant, like personal survival, is great subconscious think time. perverse, because that’s the hardest of all times to load the Plus?
Escher on my mind. white and black merge trade places. from one perspective water flows down, from another, it has to be up. On my way to check with the personnel director of the community college. it’s not the faculty, not the chairs that hire, it’s him. from the normal human perspective, the supervisor is more skilled, more knowledgeable, read more intelligent, than the worker. The VP more than the supervisor, the Pres more than the VP, etc etc, up and up, toward US Pres, Pope, god … Where it’s supposed to stop. Be the spire. Cultural revolution is always going on. Power shifts around within management. What knowledge is valuable changes. Still, it all seems linear, hierarchical, relatively stable. The brain runs the body. Intelligence runs the brain.
When I was interviewed at Colby, it seemed to be up to Mark. His introducing me to Chappy, the ex Chair, prof emeritus, etc seemed a formality. It seemed that personnel was under instructions, not giving them.
My favorite Columbia story. Ike is made Pres. Greets the faculty. Hi y’all. I want you to know that any employee of the U can walk into my office at any time. Dean of Fac stands up. That’s nice, but you seem to be confused as to whom you’re addressing. The only employee of the U here is you; we are the U.
Ho, ho. not any more. fed funding. state land grants. subsidized tuition … and the state is running everything.
who’s above the state. the people, ho ho. but they always are, really, as Mussolini, etc sometimes learn. the army can kill many, but can’t kill all. not their breadbasket. not and hope to still be the army. gooks, sure, but not the home boys. just enough to terrorize. and occasionally punish for lack of cooperation, like Vietnam.
The view from down here. But what if you have a higher view? Strange things happen. The formality backfires. Like Danny, you get closer in to the Hotel’s soul. And find that the lower runs the higher. Different length leashes, but the leashes are always there. What’s freedom? Not knowing that your leash is there? Knowing how long it is? Progressing to where it’s maybe a little longer? Or shorter? The ascetic. My leash is very short: I stay right at god’s side. How about god’s leash? does he know he has one?
We are constrained by … god; god may be constrained by … bacteria? Molecules? Math?
ss: in which the application for advancement is made routine. the old geezer a formality. introducing the bride to the grandmother. But suddenly, the old one goes berserk. Princess Di? Get that stupid c- away from me. Give Capone three lumps of sugar with his tea. Van Gogh. Don’t give him none. Maniacal laughter. , seely, Joan.
res: Sanskrit seely rel to ME seely? I bet.
scientists use mathematical models. Now chaos. Great. Is anyone working on the topological dynamics of different levels of the intensional? would man be well or ill-advised to have a better idea of the shape within which he behaves? impossible? like entropy? matches kept from children? I bet.
mod type dial: match teacher and student looking at shape. how about if we distort it this way? now let’s look. In and in … then human revolution, teosinte corn … Mussolini’s head kicked through the streets, the forces that draw Danny into the Hotel and then save him from its vortex.
Mr. Bell mocked “give me the bigger half” as though the math definition were older than the word. Ditto Mrs. Dahlberg and “work.” Ling. naiveté, but unconscious purposive. Teachers pawns in Industrial takeover. How many complementary halves are not 50/50? Human male/female, for sure. What shape do they really have? What power? Purposive? How could it not be? So long as you have a stochastic sense of “purpose.” Eg of asymmetry? Symmetry breaking. Creation!
binary -/ analogic
where does your loyalty stick? your party? the pilgrim fathers? the constitution? principle of law? X? J? the rational method, everyone screaming it and no one knowing what it is (except for the guy you won’t let talk). What you would refer to at the stake, that’s how far back your unexamined principles go. (By no means, am I suggesting that all our principles should be or could be examined.) and there will be layers of skin under layers of skin. Binary is the rough sorting. Rational/Irrational too. Sorting between rational and irrational, orthodox and heathen, right and wrong, life and death you will always be throwing some of your own into the other pile. Mixing while separating. God’s got the devil in him. The devil has got god in him. It’s just binary sorting, and binary isn’t a thing, but a difference.
Sh editing. Sorting. You’ve got a few bins and you label the first two: 1) valid Sh, what will appear in your new authoritative edition, and 2) error. After a while you notice differences among the sorts of thing you’re throwing out. (Just as your successors will notice differences among the sorts of thing you replace it with. What editor notices that it’s the Random that he correcting Error from?)
After a while, Error classifications proliferate:
Now you can start sub-sorting the 2nd bin:
Sh’s error
source error
printer’s error
and of course these too can be sub-sorted.
Source error:
F, Q, probable source of Q. actor, scrivener, etc. , that the month that they guy who spoke Welsh misunderstood everything as Welsh, but he did shed light on this line which in fact might have been Welsh. etc.
after a while you can add:
your error.
The one category most significant for never being certain of correct labeling is the Sh’s error bin. Logically, it must contain some. But which? Only the sophisticated will add their own error: which belong there? also not certain. None are certain. thought temporally finite periods will occur where they are not doubted.
It’s through generations of sorters that you begin to see the prejudices, blindnesses, ignorance, special talents of the preceding sorters.
There’s no such thing as a judge who won’t interrupt, cancel, or sabotage testimony. There’s no such possibility as “rational along the entire coastline of one’s logical topography.” And the match between witness and what part of what coastline (or, different dimension of logic, what part of what area) the witness comes from, represents, misrepresents, is imitating, etc … is perceptual on the judge’s part and therefore partly stochastic.
I’ll bet there are many interfaces between Binary/analogic decisions throughout life. Mostly, you’re one or the other.
Draw a picture of a man, an animal. your early attempts will first be best thought successful if they’re seen as schematic. “A”, Chinese Man or Great. Rune. Cave Ibex. pictograph. Finally, you can do enough details that someone thinks the picture realistic. You’ve canceled time. Still schematic. icon/symbol/snapshot/ -/ digital manipulation. algebra. What have you not drawn? Time. Volume. Want to add one? First thing to initiate an appearance of success: distort one of the dimensions you’ve already counterfeited. Foreshorten. There’s volume foreshortening, and there’s action foreshortening. And I don’t doubt that one can be, under many circumstances, substituted, identified, confused with, the other. (When not?)
Draw a picture of events in time. No: forget what existential extension they occupy. Now we’re in statistics and math models. another kind of, illusion of, realism altogether. The newest trick will always best convince, deceive, etc. be realistic. great. no alternative. then, a few in the chorus become sophisticated. Raphael is born among the students of perspective. Euclid is born among the stackers of triangles. Pythagoras. To me: the Mandelbrot set looks perfect, ultimate genius, a realistic portrait of god. what the fuck do I know? and all the baby termites that can play with this new toy come out of the woodwork. the chaos math’s, phs’s.
more and more babies will start finding more and more uses for the new pictures. the apostrophe means possessive. it’s unambiguous. until it means elision. or I use it in dos to mean inclusive. a kind of elision. and the capacity for the binary to be analogic grows.
ancient chom article NYR on schools. should have mentioned it to him. the first i read. pre-Illich. the pose of the public.
oh schools this and that. chom said why have them unless they’re good at something? then analyzed what they were good at. found them to be very good at it. consumer sorting and training as sheep. map/territory. not just map & ter discrepant, but discrepant maps. One for the sheep and another for the wolves. Gee, life isn’t anything like our ideals, that map the wolves gave us of it. That’s funny: it darn well matches their charts for your future.
Past couple of days, I’ve flipped channels and seen moments of the usual tv. Tues pm deliberately stayed awake till 10 to see lapham’s Part IV. Up the entire previous night. Failures to sleep repeated 3 am. 7 am, noon, 5:30 pm, heard neighbor’s tv, fuck it, up myself again, eat a little something, and am remined that in another 2 hours folks, we’ll see the US destroy the world progressively since 1948. I saw more of the Vietname thing in that one hour than I had seen altogether throughout the sixties into 197?. I don’t think I especially avoided the news in those years, just avoidance as usual. Then Wed pm Arnold’s Predator is on. Just static, fuzz, and snow, but once every five or ten minutes I can catch the shape of his bicep. Easier to notice is all the artilliary the characters keep defoliating Guatamala with while blowing each other to hell.
Both shows had warning about the perhaps not suitable for viewing by young sheep. violence on tv, my oh my the deploring is universal. Ask somebody which Islamic saints in particular are the most in error. They don’t know; they haven’t read any of it. Ask what’s too dirty, too violent, too anything on tv, in the movies, which novels obscene, and you’ll get a long list. They’ve seen all of it. Reading “critics” who give give long vilification lists always struck me as so ludicrous: if they didn’t like it, why the fuck did they finish reading, sitting through, etc, it for? Masochists? I’ve finished books I didn’t like, sometimes just to give the author a chance to show me wrong until the last word. If I still don’t like it, I certainly don’t then want to write an article about it.
Why does everyone watch tv if there’s so much wrong with it? Why aren’t the sponsors and producers more amenable to the outraged arguments?
I believe it’s more complex than a simple one to one slum landlord relationship. I make a profit by being corrupt. through direct linkage. Evil. No. it can be class loyalty too. I’ll die and gain no rents, the young baronet knows, but if we win this battle, land ownership and the rent system will be shored up. The peasants will suffer, sure, but they’re sons of Cain. The duke is my 4th cousin.
Human nature is largely sympathetic and cooperative. Just like chimp nature. Human nature is almost certainly different from chimp nature by being more so. But not the nature of civilized man. He must be specially trained to act like the purely fictitious brutes of his brutalized imagination. Brutalized from the cradle in ever crib or palate of straw of every class which is a class. Mowed and mowers. The infant duke has to have his imagination distorted to believe he’s a mower, that god loves mowers. that he’s helping the grass to grow by mowing it. and then salting the ground of any that resist mowing. we’ll teach those gooks to try being independent any way but by being wholly dependent on us.
Lapham’s show was an historical record of what Predator was pre or post propaganda for.
In westerns, you went into the chaos, ie territories not controlled by you or by England. ie no territories at all. indian nations, or spain or france certainly don’t count as nations. no. nations speak english. there you killed the indians and then cared for the poor neglected baby that had somehow survived. you show how moral you are. you kill the mexicans, and then preach sermons about mistreatment under spain. those you don’t kill will still hide out in or sneak back into what’s now your territory, given to you by god and by your virtue, to work for you way below standard wages to pick your fruit off of their trees. ahh, that’s all last century. now you go and blow up Guatemala, just like Vietnam. we did it in Guatemala first, and we’re still doing it. No, we’re the good guys. there are some really bad alien actors in there. monsters. suicide by a mushroom cloud. wow, us magnified. fighting us magnified merely by Arnold.
no, tv is what is civilized for today. what people mean by civil, ie the false map, the wolf’s lie to the sheep, would be no tv at all.
sincerity. the more modern the culture, the greater its emphasis. it had an explosion, as a conscious mask, in the Ren. & went berserk with the Romantics. just thought of an explanation: civilization offers only two choices: unconscious orthodoxy or conscious hypocrisy. no, make that three: or death. not formal execution. none necessary. civilized sanity is to accept the preponderance of lies: the constitution, the NYT. die gedanken sind most frei to the orthodox and to the insane. Survival, Korzybskian Sanity = Civilized Insanity. Catholics will universally believe that the Pope is sincere; since we can’t analyze his brain waves, that must remain an article of faith, even to the catholic atheist. Strikes me that he’s typically an Italian David Rockerfella. We don’t know what he actually believes. The revolutionary, Hitler eg, is probably sincere; the pope you can’t know. Can’t know with Hitler either. The opinion of the genuinely orthodox is no opinion at all, since like Shaw’s Philistine, he has swallowed and/or is comfortable with what drives some of us crazy. As of 15 minutes ago, I believe that our quest for and emphasis on sincerity is an un-semi-conscious need for: oh, please, assure me, somebody must actually believe all this crap, this sheep-map the wolves have given us, labeled Sheep Map, authored by chief sheep. How come the chief sheep were such big land and slave holders, corp scions? Lawyers, for god’s sake.
Illich put his finger on the Ur-Error. Everything admitted into open controversy is some version of a strategy to entrench an elite. Competing elites is legit; no-elite is a thought not allowed to find allies. The “people” ever doing anything in civilization is a pure fiction.
The main rhetorics of industrial, and thus far post or neoindustrial power, whether democratic or one-party communist, the democracies too succeeding in becoming one-party, is the public, the people, the citizens, etc. Am rev, Fr rev, Rus rev: all for the people. So how come they all still have elites? The professional elite in US has succeeded in convincing “the people” that they need whatever the professionals supply: defense, police, justice, commodities, certificates, … all of which turn out to be countereffective. That’s ok, a slight under-calculation, what you need is more of it. Some elite or would be elite is always speaking for the public. The would be elite are often, I don’t doubt, sincere … if they’re naive enough.
Solution:? Ivan’s ahem confidence in some political awakening … I had little to no faith in it when I started FLEX. The point isn’t to win, where winning isn’t possible, but to show yourself among the innocent, the insane, the would be uncivilized sane. We need a benign disaster. Hopefully something less poisonous than everyone losing a nuclear war. A natural disaster. Hopefully not quite of the stature of those of 70 and of 250 million years ago. I hope a few survivors. Few enough and it would make little difference if memory were wiped clean: like a new but genetically human orphan infant. Or if there numbers are much above say 100 million, then some inkling … it was super organization that will do it every time. If you see another tribe, turn and run. If you have the water hole, and they want it, give it to them. Ditto when they have it and you want it. When you see a lion, maybe he’ll leave you alone if you leave him alone.
Our success from the last ice ages is still killing us.


About pk

This entry was posted in journal. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s