so i just realized

these past few months, i've been thinking a lot about how the essence of morality is repeated behavior, rather than outlook or belief or decision. i spent this summer sorta fumbling through tiny bits of aristotle, trying to put together a coherent worldview.

i just realized that at the head of k's blog it says:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle"

now you tell me.

nietzsche really disturbs me, sometimes

i was flipping through beyond good and evil as i was trying to figure out that story, and again i came upon one of the passages that really makes me uncomfortable.

he's so good at piercing my illusions. but i can't get a grip on a positive response to his arguments. so i just feel a little nauseous.

in this case it was the beginning of section 194 in "on the natural history of morals." i'm actually not comfortable posting it here; it feels too insightful and personal and painful.

--

polanyi--the epistemologist/chemist i'm reading--raises some information-theory based objections to evolution. i'm not actually to the chapter where he really engages with them, so i don't know if he believes them or not, but they remind me a lot of one of the big mathematical arguments against it recently:

dembski and others argue that the no-free-lunch theorem (""[...] all algorithms that search for an extremum of a cost function perform exactly the same, when averaged over all possible cost functions.""--from Wikipedia, from somewhere else) applies to evolution. that is to say that fitness is clearly some sort of functions (or set of functions) and so arguments for a search strategy that consistently gets to better fitness faster than random (like evolution) are inherently spurious.

the most interesting explanation of why this isn't true that i read that Dhruv linked to from Lawrence's wiki: imagine a topographical map the surface of which is higher for mountains and lower for valleys. If I understand correctly, the no-free-lunch theorems argue that you can't define a function f(x,y) that iterated on a set of coordinates gets you to the highest point faster than random, across all possible such maps. Why? Because every time you try to build a function that's better than random you build information into the function as assumptions that is wrong for some maps.

The argument that I can't remember the author of says that this ain't a great model of evolution. Because most evolution is co-evolution--flowers becoming scented and bees learning to smell those scents--your function actually deforms the map. Fitness isn't really a pre-determined extremum; the organism changes the environment for all the other organisms trying to maximize their fitness and vice versa, with accurate assumptions becoming steadily more accurate and inaccurate ones being dropped.


I keep imagining a similar graph of social behavior. The only ways to become a "better person": change behavior to better match the environment or change the environment to better match the behavior. Reminds me of the role of ritual I kept writing about when I was reading Wieseltier and Aristotle: I was caught up in the image of wearing ruts into the soil that one could follow until one understood again which directions to go. It's the same image (albeit topographically reversed) as with this map, in which by climbing I can make the mountain higher and see out over a more distant view.

Books, today and yesterday

Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters
Franken, The Twenty-Seventh City
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

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But I, I spent it all

There's a line in Nietzsche where he says that the moments of most vitality in one's life are those in which you transform your greatest weaknesses into strengths.

I think I'm rapidly approaching one of those moments and I don't know what that entails. I think, a lot, that now is one of those times in which I need to be unhappy. Purifying fire slaking off impurities, and all that. But I'm well aware that that's nonsense.

Really, I go back and forth between that view and thinking that I must make happiness out of whatever life gives me. I ain't doing a great job.

("The sea of faith was once, too, at the full
And round Earth's shoulders lay like a girdle furled.")

I know that I need to become a writer. Whether that means that I should become an academic or put together speeches or what, I don't know, but writing matters to me in a deep intrinsic sense that very few other things do.

And of course, admitting that scares me shitless. I've never been good at discipline and this takes nothing else.

I met a guy-Bob-last night. He was in human resources at a social services agency, had a wife and a daughter and another on the way. I feel like that was enough for him and I can't say how ready I was for that to be enough for me.

I'm tired of having my whole life before me. I want to be circumscribed without the whole process of watching myself miss opportunities. I think I'm ready to feel old.

Also, I'm drunkblogging. Sheesh.

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Presentation of Self

Really, what I'm writing about is writing as a means of creating a fictional self that you just almost believe in. Part of what pulls me to creative non-fiction is the way good pieces tie together personal experience and historical anecdotes and facts and opinions--and the knots hold. When I think, I use my experiences as a framework for thinking more generally and, Kolb's objections aside, I think that's worth doing in writing, too.

I never told her I had a blog, so I probably shouldn't invoke her as the great dissenting spirit. But, since I am, I think she holds that creative non-fiction is a way of being lazy, of not bothering to weave fiction, of letting the knots amount to enough. And it probably is.

But the Wallace Stevens quotation that sticks in my head is "These are just tentative ideas for the purpose of poetry." He's talking, I think, about "Idea of Order at Key West," but I'm not actually sure. He means all of them. And what he's arguing is that the ideas you put into a poem aren't as important as the thing you build out of them.

I have trouble with that metaphor--"the thing you build out of them"--because Wallace Stevens poems aren't really edifices: they're torrents, chimeras, finely woven rugs. And I don't disagree with him. It's utterly unimportant that he defend his philosophical ideas. But I do think ideas matter. And I think non-fiction can do things with them that a short story simply can't.

And that's probably enough of a defense against an imagined Laura Kolb.

I started this entry talking about presentation of self: the way a non-fiction writer creates a persona that is a lot like him, but very much not him. Put another way, some people are really only themselves through their words.

And one of the things I like about the Elizabethans is that they were constantly constructing themselves in this way. At the very least, most poems had two levels of artifice: that which developed a speaker for the poem out of the statements in the work and that which established the poet as a witty (or clever or compassionate or politically astute etc) writer of poems. One's political standing had very much to do with one's written production. And so coded into all the meanings of the text are a-whole-nother set of anxieties and concerns.

(How does one punctuate infixes?)

And therefore, written into these poems is a set of concerns about voice, tone, and the way metaphors, conceits, and personae work that I find incredibly compelling.

Circles

"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Even though I’m carrying a pen and notebook around everywhere again and even though I’m theoretically working on two articles, I’m not writing anymore. I’m not writing for this thing; I’m not writing e-mails; I’m not writing many of the documents I really should be writing for work. And where two weeks ago the problem seemed to be moving words from my head to the page (hence my purchase of a smith-corona portable typewriter), now the problem seems to be putting words together.

They don’t fit. Nothing I write seems right, and I don’t have the patience to fix it. It’s like I’ve decided that things are inexpressible and given up.

But I really haven’t. That’s why this quotation hits so hard for me: it expresses precisely my own arrogance. At a basic level, I’ve convinced myself that anything I think or experience I can write. In addition to being someone to whom things <i>happen</i>, I fantasize a writerly self who makes sense of it all.

The power to interpret is the power to imagine yourself in control.

And I guess, part of the reason why I’m having so much trouble right now is that in trying to write about the world through my own experiences I can’t help but sound tinny. I hear the privilege in my own voice and wonder why anyone else would bother reading.

And the answer to that is of course to write something worth reading. So I imagine myself doing that. And then I’m back in control.

I’ve wanted for awhile to do some work on the passage after the rape in “Lucrece” where despair overwhelms Lucrece, until she can order her thoughts a little by writing them down. I’d argue that it’s then that she gathers the resolve to commit suicide. In <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, too, Astrophil’s sonnetry is clearly an attempt to get a grip on himself. He’s writing so as to understand himself as a unified self, despite the contradictions between what he wills and what he believes. (That’s the closest my foggy brain is going to come right now, even though it’s not at all right.)

These writers keep using the image of pregnancy, in interestingly different ways. Compare:

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.

--Sidney, <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, Sonnet 1

Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,

Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:

--Daniel, <i>Delia</i>, Sonnet 2

For Sidney, the important part of the birth is the pain and the lack of control, while for Daniel the birth is almost effortless (but followed by pain and a certain patheticness). I can feel myself losing my precision here, as I write about this, but for Daniel, verse seems to be a side effect of his love: he loves, and verse pops out of the side of his head. For Sidney, on the other hand, there’s this enormity of feeling that’s both preventing him from writing and simultaneously compelling him to it. Writing is making him helpless, but it’s also his means of discussing and contextualizing his helplessness. And, this, for Sidney, is a way to begin to talk about the moral role of fictions. I don’t have my copy of the ‘Defense of Poetry’ with me at work, and I don’t have time to search for the right passages, but he’s immensely concerned with the problem of how poetry (and fiction) can function morally.

And I guess I am, too. I want to write this article about books and economics and dematerialization and aura and the internet and reading and so forth, but I can’t convince myself there’s value in it. And maybe the only value in it is in helping me learn to be a better writer, so that I can some day do something of value.

Even that sounds too ambitious. Then again, all of this sounds miserably pretentious.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry…

--Pound

I got soul but I'm not a soldier

So, um, if I believe that social beliefs are determined by a combination of epigenetic rules and cultural practices, how can I believe in any specific system of morality?

This wouldn't be too much, of a problem, except I clearly do judge events by moral criteria: I fairly regularly decide that it would be right or wrong to do something. I can do that because of some system of beliefs (however unsystematic) I uphold. That's fine: I contain some moral knowledge that guides my behavior.

But, I sorta assume that such knowledge is incomplete: that in addition to failures of will (where I know the right thing to do and don't do it) I also experience failures of knowledge (where I don't know what it is that I have done wrong). Which means, of course, that there is some more perfect system of beliefs that I should be holding and that I could more completely emulate.

Of course, if 1) my system of beliefs is in some respect flawed and 2) I by definition don't know the nature of these flaws, how does my own system of beliefs hold any moral authority? And where does this (by definition partly unknown) greater moral knowledge come from? And how can I learn it?


There are a couple of answers. One could claim that all moral knowledge is either inherent in me or knowable through the world. Then my own system of beliefs must be verifiable through some check against the world, and all moral failures become failures of will.

Or one could take the opposite approach and assert that morality arises entirely from this interplay of genes and culture. If this is true, I've been tricked up by a misunderstanding of the word "knowledge." I've assumed that "to know" is like "to see," in bothj requiring a subject--me--and implying the existence of a viewed thing.

When I see, say, a hamburger, I imagine a certain set of patterns and colors, the concept "hamburger" presents itself to me, and I may salivate. At the same time, I know that if I reach out, I will be able to touch this hamburger; I can pick it up, throw it, point to it, etc. When I say that I see a thing, I am also making a claim that such a thing exists in the world. (Of course, there are other uses of "see," but this is an important one.)

When I know what it is to be good, on the other hand, I feel certain impressions and certain images appear in my head, and then I take some course of action. There may not need to be anything that it is that I am knowing. And of course, my epigenetic rules and cultural patterns will account for the images.


I'm not really excited about either option. More than that, I can feel the books I'm reading start to cancel each other out. I've never felt the danger of wrong ideas so strongly; I'm tumbling towards a weird self-contradictory belief in nothing and I'm not sure what to make of it..



A woman came up to me and said
"I'd like to poison your mind
With wrong ideas that appeal to you
Though I am not unkind"
She looked at me, I looked at something
Written across her scalp
And these are the words that it faintly said
As I tried to call for help:

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you,
Be what you're like,
Be like yourself,
And so I'm having a wonderful time
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
There's only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark

A man came up to me and said
"I'd like to change your mind
By hitting it with a rock," he said,
"Though I am not unkind."
We laughed at his little joke
And then I happily walked away
And hit my head on the wall of the jail
Where the two of us live today.

reading: Plato

trying to get a grip on the classics. if i'm going to go to grad school, i need to know this stuff.

if you see a cheap complete works of aristotle, let me know.

I love old literary criticism

So today at the bookstore I wanted to buy "Theory's Empire" to console myself for being so hungover. It's a book of essays critical of Theory, trying to preserve its insights while pointing out some of the worst abuses. But I realized that I'm too susceptible to the arguments I read and hear to buy this book without also reading something from the other side. So I wanted to get the "Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism," too, but that would mean I would be buying 70 or 80 dollars worth of books for the hell of it.

So I bought "Mimesis" by Erich Auerbach. It's fucking amazing. His readings are so fucking spot-on and link together in insightful ways and are incredibly grounded in the text.... I keep reading a couple of pages and then looking up and thinking about it and then reading more; the book feels more than anything like a really good class.

Of course, looking up, when I'm in a Starbucks on 24th street on a Saturday night means dealing with the fact that the world is full of unbearably beautiful people who are not sitting in a Starbucks and reading on their Saturday nights. I don't feel unattractive, per se. The world just seems to be filled with another species of people, who are--in Diana's words--shinier than I am. Which isn't in itself a problem, either, except I don't know how to find more less-shiny people.

And somehow--and I know I'm wrong about this--the decision to become shiny seems to require focusing on surface over depth. I don't really understand my ethics here, but when I think about deciding to work out and dress better and so forth, it always seems vaguely problematic. But I don't BELIEVE in a surface/depth distinction with regards to people! I suppose I'm letting my jealousy turn a specific set of differences into a generic difference: replacing "they are better at x" with "they are x-people." And, defining x-people means classifying myself as y.

I remember Nilo pointing out the difference in meaning between "disabled people" and "people with disabilities."

I feel like my head is full of layers upon layers of maladjusted and problematic reactions. But I want to be a good person! (I'm trying to figure out what Wittgenstein would make of that particular desire. It's clear that this is a unique use of the word "want," but where do I go from there?)

Where do I go from here?

yeah

I haven't longblug in awhile. It's a combination between not feeling comfortable blogging at work and then not having anything to say when I get home. I'm a little emotionally tired and a litttle convinced that all the things I have to say are too small to matter to anyone other than me. Or even, for that matter, to me.

(I really don't like the sentences I write anymore. They feel so flat. Part of the reason I'm blogging is so that I'll write and think but it doesn't help if I stay a slovenly thinker and and sloppy writer. (Slovenly is one of those adjectives that end in -ly. "Homely," "comely," and "silly" are the only others I can think of right now, but I'm sure there's more.) More than that, I'm in one of those moods where my thoughts aren't all that interesting. I'm tired a lot, occasionally hungry, feel at turns loved and unloved. I'm a racoon or a cat or something. So flat sentences.)

I'm going to come back raving about the stars. They're not all that great up there, but they are wonderful. And the splash of the paddle in the water and the eagles and the animals scurrying away from the canoe and the fucking brilliant squirrels and not knowing what time it is and not thinking about email and having your arms feel tired and.... it's a trip out of this world. And, as much as I feel like I have unfinished business here (work and work and work and Mag), I wouldn't mind disappearing for a bit. It's like life stops for awhile and different things matter.

It's actually a lot like listening to jazz, kinda. I won't ever be able to make that make sense, but it's a break in rhythm with new rhythms of its own and a series of surprising repetitions and a source of renewal and a view of life and....


Terrible, terrible sentences. I should run verbal scales. (Nate is playing scales on the piano.)

The cat is in the tree.
The wicked cat is cackling mysteriously.
Words sink like silk coated in Teflon in the ivory sea of my breath's fierce and lovely hands.
Cackle, cats.

Somehow that didn't help.

more pretention (will talk about work soon)

I really like the subway program that puts musicians in the subway. There’s something about hearing 30-40 seconds of music in every train station that breaks me out of my morning-thoughts and puts the world a little more in its place. I used to feel fairly uncomfortable in airports—from the stress, the rush, the weight of bags, my own tiredness, and so on--until I started listening to “So What?” on infinite repeat whenever I was walking through one. I didn’t expect it to work, but it makes me so much calmer. (and now “So What?” gets in my head whenever I think about airports.)

Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.

So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:

Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?

Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.

A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.

I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.

The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.

It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)

All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:

The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.

Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?

hmm.

so at work I'm doing web development and i've found that i can really only think about things by using a legal pad, drawing things out, and then moving to the computer.

and at home, i've started trying to write again. that i can't write down on paper at all. there's something about the way chunking-on-the-fly works in a text editor that feels incredibly natural to me when i'm writing a poem.

i'm trying to figure out what that means. are there really two different kinds of thought processes going on in my head? or have i just learned to associate success with certain tools? (when i write papers, i've started thinking on sheets and sheets of legal paper before writing.)

note: when i say web development, i should clarify that i'm using a front-end program that does all the heavy-lifting. i'm really just setting up content. i've entirely lost any ability i had to hack html and that wasn't much in the first place.

but i've realized that my boss doesn't really know html any more than i do. the computer programs seem to do most of the work and all the random-access knowledge he needs is stored on a bookshelf. it's an incredibly efficient system and one that is steadily getting me out of the computers-are-scary mood i've been in for the past few years.

so i've started to think about the attributes of a work environment that would be designed to help me write poems. kinda like those coding environments that ship with programming languages now, so you can have a language and scripting tools and various other things all open at once.

so what the Matthew-Writes software environment would look like:

to start with, a description of what i use now. i tend to have three or four text files open with lines and ideas and parts of lines. one of these is a main-poem file, that has the text of the thing i'm building, and the rest are gibberish files, with loose lines and stanzas and things.

i work by writing down little snippets, expanding on snippets, and accreting things into the main file. fairly regularly, i'll junk a main-file, move it to the side, start a new main-poem file based on some other snippet(s), and raid the old file for ideas. so at any given point i have something like the following files open: junk.html, junk2.html, index(old).html, index.html, and maybe an index(new).html which may turn into something, but may also turn into another junk file.

So my software environment might have the following "areas":
a workspace: such that i could click on the screen and type in a word or group of words, so that i would be able to write down loose lines as i thought of them.
a tablet: where i would be actively working. that'd be the latest version of the poem/stanza in question. by highlighting a group of lines and then clicking a button, i could push them to the archive (next) where they would be saved.
an archive: where bigger chunks could be kept. sometimes this would hold stanzas that didn't fit in the poem i was working on. sometimes this would hold multiple versions of the same idea, so that i could keep playing with it. the key is to keep my tablet relatively clear. right now i just put things at the bottoms of documents, but then they're hard to find.
a stable version: my current best version of the poem, pulled staticly from the tablet when i decide to keep something, would be accessible at the right.

in addition, i'd want easy look-ups for the bible, shakespeare, oed (etymology), dictionary.com (spelling), and a rhyming dictionary (willful perversity).


all right. enough willful self-indulgence.


current idea obsession: how the tools we use change the job we do.

Blatant Theft

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings." --Anaïs Nin (stolen from a cow)

Oddly enough, this makes me hopeful. For where there is room for weariness, for withering and tarnishing, there's also room for rest and polish and new growth. And where there is a missing source, there may be bold adventures up-river, expeditions and new discoveries. After all, errors are just wanderings and blindness is sometimes just holding your eyes closed against the light.

Basically, I'm a sap.

If I only

I feel a little like I've delegated responsibility for my life. I've put career decisions on auto-pilot, handed off housing decisions to a friend, left my life decisions in the hands of another friend or two.

I've started walking slower, a little behind whomever I'm with, so as to let them choose the direction. Strange as it sounds, I'm a little quieter, and staying out of conversations, some.

That last bit's not entirely true. I still find myself fighting for attention, but I guess I'm just no longer as bothered when I don't get it.

I mean, basically I'm drifting. I suspect that's why I'm writing again, a little. That microscopic rage for order lets me bob aimlessly on a larger scale.

The image I keep getting is that I'm looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, so everything looks tiny and far away, while waves dash my boat this way and that.


Here's a Sir Thomas Wyatt poem. It's not one of my favorite-favorites, but I like the pun in the third line: "mine enemy, alas/ That is my lord..." sounds exactly like "mine enemy, a lass/ That is my lord." I think the sexual imagery continues, through the poem, but I'm sure of the "alas." Writing on this one in Molly Murray's class ages ago made me feel a little ingenious, which is one of the feelings I like so much about writing.

My galley charged with forgetfulness
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain
Hath done the wearied cords great hindrance,
Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain
Drowned is reason that should me comfort
And I remain despairing of the port.