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.

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

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.

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?

Incidentally

I feel like I just whined in public. Bad blog ettiquette.

What I'm thinking about:

I've been trying to identify the common metaphors people use in talking about what the Internet/computing will be like in ten-fifteen years.

So far:

The Neuromancer Model:

The Internet becomes a virtual reality space in which people interact with each other and representations of various entities through personae.

Gibson's model has physical sensation being piped into the individuals in some cases, but that's not strictly necessary. At it's most basic, this model is Everquest or The Sims Online with the existing marketization of those games dramatically extended.

I read recently about a Korean site that was a cross between The Sims and MySpace or Friendster. People decorated virtual rooms and went to visit each other. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies set up shop in the same way.


The Gadget Model:

Computer chips keep getting smaller and wireless broadband becomes more and more widely available. So data production and checking becomes embedded in everything. The paintings on your wall are flat-panel TVs searching the internet for high-resolution images that are similar to paintings you tell it you like. Your car is constantly aware of the location of the nearest gas station and may suggest detours to stores you might like. Historical markers relay information to your iPod about what happened here. Life becomes overlayed with a layer of information.

If in the Neuromancer model the Internet turns data into virtual space, here it becomes a sixth sense. Being disconnected from the Internet already feels a little odd. A Wired article I read pointed out that you often Google things multiple times rather than just remembering them. In this model, the internet becomes, in part, our memories, our means of communication, and a way of richening what we learn about the world.

The technology piece of this will happen. What makes this really compelling, however, is if we can improve our algorithms for finding the right information.

Collaborative filtering, for instance, lets Amazon predict books you'll like. And Page Rank, ideally, means Google can find the webpage you want, rather than all the junk. As these processes develop, we might do better and better and predicting kinds of information than can be pushed unintrusively onto customers. So your iPod goes and finds songs you'll like. And your house goes to the temperature you prefer given the weather. And, a touch creepily, stores track your behavior and purchases and recommend that you buy things that you actually want.

The Brain Model: This metaphor still captivates me. The basic principle is that the connected-node structure of the internet maps rather nicely onto the similar structure of a brain. Just in the way that an ant hill is a super-organism that performs relatively complicated operations despite the simplicity of its fundamental units, the Internet may yield highly complicated or even intelligent behavior from its traffic.

At its most ambitious, this metaphor suggests that we may generate a meta-mind. More coolheadedly, that there will be interesting effects emerging out of the way traffic flows through the internet. Maybe these effects will be at the memetic level--different schools of thought encounter and respond to one another*--or maybe higher--the way people think changes, in a sort of feedback loop.

*One of my favorite lines in /Kaddish/ occurs when the author wishes that the Buddhists and the Jews had encountered each other a few hundred years earlier. Think of the disputations, he says.



I don't like any of these metaphors, and have my own to suggest. But this is enough for tonight.

hmmm

the terrifying thing about breaking up with someone is that suddenly your whole palette of emotional responses and reactions is wrong. everything has changed, yet that change hasn't seeped into the soil.


in the quetico, portions of the wilderness have had fires go through five, ten, fifteen years ago. the newly fired land looks burnt over and desolate, with the tops of a few trees surviving. but after awhile, the burnt over land fills with trees, because pine cones survive fire and thus a whole crop of trees has room to grow. so you look out over a whole forest of trees, all exactly the same age and therefore the same size and shape. and over time, those trees get larger and start crowding each other out.

so at the edge of the water, trees jut out at an incredible angle, because when they were young trees they grew out over the water to get sunlight. and of course, as the trees on the shore grow, the trees at the water have to stretch out further to catch the sun. but pushing out further throws the tree further off balance, so it falls closer and closer to the horizontal until eventually it dies and falls into the water.


this is the way i approach problems.

Chefs play this game, where they ask each other, “What would your last meal on death row be?”
--an ad

I suspect this game is just an exercise in culinary one-upmanship--(fois gras omelette? oh yeah? i'd have it with PLATYPUS EGGS)--but I can't help wondering what mine would be.

Probably a bowl of Lucky Charms and a glass of 1/2% milk sitting by myself at a table somewhere. It's been the official meal of loneliness for me for a long time. Late at night, in Austin, once my parents fall asleep and I give up on the Internet, I can sit upstairs at the dining room table, eat Lucky Charms, and read. It's comfort food for the same reason that I listen to sad songs when I'm sad; it doesn't jar with my sensibility and it's somehow soothing.

Gee. Juxtaposing this entry with the one before last makes me seem all melancholy and LiveJournal-y. I ain't; but I've had neither the balls nor the brass to write the long entry cycling through my head right now. Maybe when I get home.


From NY Times:
In the meantime, all the attention being paid to temperature and laboratory precision has pushed chefs in more creative directions. When Grant Achatz built his new restaurant Alinea in Chicago, thermal circulators from PolyScience, a laboratory-equipment manufacturer, were part of the kitchen design. To these, he has added a 40,000-r.p.m. homogenizer (what Philip Preston, the president of PolyScience, calls a ''coffee grinder on steroids'') -- for making the world's most emulsified vinaigrettes and confections like carrot pudding made with carrot juice, cocoa butter and grapeseed oil -- and an entirely new mechanism they're calling the Antigriddle, which has a surface that chills to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), allowing you to freeze food in the same way you would saute it. A dollop of sour cream becomes brittle on the bottom and stays at room temperature on top.

This reminds me of my brother and I, freezing various things (orange juice, chocolate, a banana), in order to make popsicle thingies. And we kept opening the freezer door to see if they had frozen yet. They never had. I really wanted a freez-o-wave that would work like a microwave.

I Need To Build Something

Things change quickly. A week ago, I felt like I was accomplishing things. Nothing of importance, really, but life felt cumulative: each book I read contributed to my total amount of knowledge; each project to my competence and resourcefulness and ability to achieve my goals; each grocery bought or towel folded or walk taken or conversation had seemed to move me along in my motions towards something. A successful life. A good day. A high score, or something. I don't really know more than that I felt like I was always knowing more.

Now, on the other hand, nothing amounts to anything. Nothing aggregates into anything bigger. Life doesn't sum. What I thought of as setbacks a week ago are now failures, inadequacies. I keep turning my failures into self-critiques.

The other night I worried that I was the kind of person who doesn't brush his teeth enough.

It's because I'm not making anything. There's no story of my life that I can tell, even to me: I've worn the narrative of Matthew-goes-to-grad-school into inarticulate hopes. I want, a little, to Peace Corps myself to Zambia or Benin or Honduras, but I want to send the resourceful intelligent me, rather than this one.

There's a Mallarmé quote that's something like "Alas, my flesh is sad and I have read all the books." Cara would know exactly what it is. But it sure feels like I have, and the grand projects of three weeks ago are preposterous.

Cindy says happiness isn't something you chase after. It's probably not, but what I had said before that was that I felt like I could see my vision of happiness receding over the horizon, and I do think like happiness is something you shouldn't lose sight of.

C.S. Lewis thinks all desires are partial, fragmentary desires for whatever is True, and that all earthly desires when satisfied turn into disappointment. This rings true with me, a little, although I don't think I buy his next step. Mag says that happiness is in itself a state of transition, before the serotonnin can be absorbed by the nerve. This rings true, too, but I can't believe that the next 40 years of my life are going to alternate between elation and this sort of minuscule despair.

Despairillo.

I don't particularly want joy. I don't need elation or ecstasy. I'd like to feel like I'm moving.

Sometimes, when I was most lonely in Memphis, after my parents moved, I would just get in a car and drive in big circles, around town or out the interstate, and listen to loud depressing music. And sometimes, I wouldn't be able to do that. It'd feel pointless, like it'd remind me that all there was for me was big empty circular motions leaving off just before they began.

I'm terrified of that kind of paralysis.



--
Hofstadter, in Godel, Escher, Bach talks about a particular sort of wasp, that will sting a cricket, to paralyze it, then drag it back to its cave, where it lays its eggs in the bug's midsection and then reseals the front of the cave with mud. The young hatch and eat the living but paralyzed cricket and then bust out of the cave.

The amazing thing about this wasp, for Hofstadter, is that before it drags the cricket into its cave, it goes into the cave and checks to make sure that there aren't any harmful critters in there. This seems, he points out, to show an astounding amount of foresight on the part of the wasp.

But, then scientists tried a simple experiment on the wasp. While it was inside they'd move the cricket about an inch. The wasp would come out, fly over to the cricket, drag it an inch back to the cave and go back inside to check for harmful critters. The scientist would drag the cricket an inch over again. The wasp would come out, drag the cricket again, and go back in to check again. No matter how many times it had checked before, it had to check again whenever it got back to its nest.

I feel worse for the wasp than I do for the cricket.

--
(a Robert Creeley poem, stolen from Mag.)


I KNOW A MAN

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

puzzle pieces

(this probably won't make sense if you haven't read the previous two entries.)

Aristotle:

"Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.b. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."
--Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle believes we become good by acting good, over and over again, until we become habituated. I hated this idea in CC, but it makes more and more sense to me. I know that's how I become brave, is by braving things. And how I become more friendly, by befriending.

I'm convinced, in general, that the human brain is fantastic at precisely two things: learning behaviors (that is, connecting a behavioral pattern to a future reward) and abstracting behaviors (open box, get cookie -> buy a box of cookies, get cookie -> earn money, afford a box of cookies -> get a job, feel accomplished, etc. etc. etc.). That is, both behaviors and pay-offs get steadily more abstract as we build on the incredibly complicated patterns of behavior we've learned. And of course, at any sufficiently complicated degree of abstraction, the levels start crossing: eating a cookie makes us satisfied because it's sweet, but also because it reminds us of our childhood, and maybe because it makes us feel successful (if it's a particularly luxurious cookie). sometimes the pay-off reverses; i hug my parents because it makes me happy, i hug my parents because it makes them happy, their happiness makes me happy. all of this is way too simple. but at the very basic, it's Aristotle. if we can train ourselves in the simple things, in the basic strictures of our morality, we can exist as moral beings.

more: being good grows out of doing good. that's what i hear in the second part of the prayer of St. Francis. In his call to seek to console rather than to be consoled and to understand rather than to be understood, i hear a call to do good out of one's own brokenness.

right now, i hear in that prayer a call to dig out ruts of morality in one's life, so that at the very least, in the face of sadness, one can travel the same path one always does, by rote and blindly, until sight returns. Kaddish is at heart a book struggling with the idea of ritual in the face of skeptical about the ritual cosmology, and ultimately it seems to come to rest at least in part in the idea that ritual is a staging ground, a home for the mourner, an opportunity for understanding to grow out of repetition.

wieseltier at one point says that sadness is singlemindedness and that it is opposed to multiplicity and to engagement. st. francis's prayer calls us precisely to engagement with multiplicity. dumb chiasmus. what i mean is that in demanding that i be kind to others, it forces me out of my self-absorption for long enough to let me take a look back at my sadness as another piece of self-absorption.

and it works very deliberately right now. i pray it now, when i'm overcome with that egoistic sadness, and it prompts me to pull myself back into the world. i sink back out, into my sadness, and sometimes i pray it again. i startle, i get distracted. i get sad. i get angry, i get upset, i punch things. i may pray again.

but i hope with long commitment to make the prayer a practice, to see if i can live by a commitment to that wisdom. i'll still be angry and hurt, but maybe my first response will be to understand rather than demand understanding and to sow love rather than ruin my fields digging for it.

i don't feel the same way about repeated prayer in general. i've prayed too many times as an unbeliever to put much stock in it. what it does do, though, is keep your spiritual tools sharp, so that when you next have an opportunity to use them, you only have to remember how.

where the Divine comes into all of this, for me, is in letting me acknowledge what i perceive as my own worthlessness in order to celebrate myself and delight in others, and to bring forth solace or understanding or forgiveness or love from this celebration. i acknowledge that i am powerless, but i believe in a Higher Power. i cannot ben-franklin my way out of sin. in striving to be better, i get caught despairing over my failures. i am loved. let me spread that love in the world.



a scary passage, growing up, was the discussion of the unforgivable sin in Matthew (12:32): "And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

Lots of bullshit about this, but I've always learned that the unforgivable sin was despair: believing you were beyond saving. I had trouble with that, too. But what if, the unforgivable sin is despair, precisely because while despairing there is nothing one can do. Despair is precisely the state of being beyond salvation, because it is precisely a belief that one can do nothing. And if goodness lies in doing something--not, incidentally, in "works"; i'm not that Catholic--then the paralysis of despair is its opposite. there is nothing that can be forgiven in one's despair; it is entirely internal and passive.

what can be done, then, is to acknowledge that one is powerless. and set off in the ruts one has carved for oneself. despair cracks under the weight of ritual and tradition.


i want all my books in one place.

usage difference

consider what part means:
"part of a team"
"part of a whole"
"part of myself"

finished kaddish. man. it's been a long time since i've cried three times while reading any book. wow-oh-wow. and there'd be all these places where i'd just catch my breath.

things i'm thinking about:

"The rabbis famously say those who cannot pray for the sake of praying should pray anyway, because it will bring them to praying for praying's sake. I never liked this statement. It is behaviorism or it is opportunism, since it finds a religious utility for faithlessness, and thereby steals the thunder from belief and unbelief. Anyway, it is obvious that many people who pray do not pray for prayer's sake, and do not bring to prayer the philosophical propositions on which it must be premised. Are there times, then, when philosophy does not matter? Of course. The world would not work if it waited on philosophical understanding. Tt is a good thing that people act in the absence of reasons, or of clear reasons. Thoughtlessness is a lubricant of life. And yet it will not do to say that we are muddling through and that is the end of it. It is always possible to muddle through less complacently. Even though one may act without reasons, one should search for reasons. Even though one may pray without meaning it, one should mean it."

I have lots of thoughts about this, but there is dried fruit to pack.

Another couple of paragraphs, that relates in some way to what I was thinking about this morning:

"It is not precisely the case, as the religious existentialists and the philosophers of a tragic life and the theologians in the age of totalitarianism have all asserted, I mean the Jewish ones, that the Jewish tradition is "immanent," and enamored of finitude, and unburdened by the belief in the perfectibility of man. No religious system or moral system can do without the belief in the perfectibility of man. The moralists in the Jewish tradition, too, insist on compliance with the highest standards of conduct, and they base those standards on metaphysical absolutes, and they scold harshly. What else are they to do? Values do not wink. Finitude is not an exemption. Quite the contrary: only finite beings may be ethical beings.

Forgiveness, not forgiveness.

The task is to distinguish between human perfectibility and human perfection, and to recognize that perfectibility is a greater condition than perfection. The animals are perfect, insofar as they are always what they must be; but we are never what we must be. We are the ones from whom moer may always be demanded."



--
Today in the Austin airport, I had just finished Kaddish and was a little sad, in the way that airports often bring me near tears, and once again Christian music popped into my head, to enable me to be sad but to be sad towards something but this time it was not the old songs, but the Catholic liturgy that I am just begining to know. I was both pleased and sad. Some things end, others begin.

Maybe I'm trying to answer Mag's question. Why am I going to church if not for her?

written inna nairport

the problem with staying friends with someone you're breaking up with is finding room to mourn. it's easy to find room to be ecstatic and to worry and to be scared, but i at least am having trouble remembering how to be sad, not for myself but for this ungainly hatchling thing that has landed in my life and just as abruptly has flumped off somewhere else.

i'm a little bit lost; my army has disbanded; i'm wandering the same terrain but without the wind at my back and the roads turned to mud and nowhere can I find the wide plain stretching with tents. but see?

the majesty of an army isn't being part of a team. it's being part of a unity, an identity, a whole. i am these. the branding of cults book describes the end of marines training and i'm caught by the image of the exhausted recruits coming over the top of their last mountain and down the hill towards the sun rising over the pacific ocean and becoming aware of hundreds of other marines cresting the same rise and the ones near by and beginning barely to cry and their commanding officers addressing them for the first time as Marines.

made me want to be a marine. heck, that book made me want to be a lot of things. marine, mormon, member of various cults, a Harley Davidson rider. it's that sense of membership i'm after. i haven't really felt part of something bigger in that way in a long time--i feel very out-for-myself even when i'm working towards what i think will be best for the institutions i care about.

maybe that's why i'm going to church? because i see in that church (and in that ceremony) a chance for the kind of membership i miss from Balmoral and even Lake Travis? i'm not entirely sure that i believe that. maybe mag and me at that church feels like my own little family. i know there's something there that i need to need.

cheap trick: i want you to want me

during my last serious brush with faith--or rather with my unbelief--i could only come to terms with two prayers. one was "lord, I believe, help my unbelief" and the other was the prayer of the sinner beside the side of the pharisee in the Temple in one of the Gospels. I can't even remember its words. over the past few years, those have slipped away from me; i'm not Christian in any sense and I lost my ability to pray them meaningfully.

since then, i've gained prayers, too. Once i tried the prayer in /Franny and Zooey/ for a few days--"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy in me"--trying to pray ceaselessly to see what it was like and its remained something that my mouth does when i'm at my most afflicted. similarly, the hymn "sanctuary" has been a solace to me, just in its sounds, because i associate it with such happy thoughts. and junior year, when i wanted so much to be cared for, the Prayer of St. Francis took over my heart.

but none of them have meant much to me religiously. they've been mantras or invocations, summoning-ups of mental states and tools to regulate my brain processes. i haven't had even that belief that allows one to pray to an imaginary God. (this, presumably, only makes sense to those who have had the feeling.)

also--and probably unrelatedly--i've become entirely egotistical. ben franklin has become a symbol for me of relentless self-improvement backed by a limitless self-regard, like a fashioning of self out of the materials of ego--i feel very ben franklin.

to bow my head in that church (everyone else kneels; i'm not Catholic) and repeat to myself "I recognize that I am powerless" from something the priest said was somehow transformative. i recognize that i am powerless to defeat sin on my own. i am constantly striving to be good and constantly failing. i mistreat the people i love; i am selfish; i think hurtful thoughts that i don't believe; i benefit from a position of power and privilege that i have not earned and am not doing anything to redeem; i sin. i recognize that i am powerless to fix myself on my own. there's no ben-franklin-ing out of this one. i can and should and must strive to be better, but i can't fight egotism with more egotism. i recognize that i am powerless.

that last paragraph doesn't really manage to say what i'm trying to say, but i suspect that i'm going to keep trying to say it for awhile. i've always thought christianity's views on sin are HORRIBLY wack. i'm skeptical of any moral philosophy that believes that people are fundamentally bad or that encourages guilt or that tries to replace the hard work of repairing the world with some sort of spiritual balderdash. i think religious wars are monumentally stupid. i can't buy any of the mythology.

but sunday i was struck by the fact that i can't fix myself. i'm trying to change my tires while driving. and maybe the idea of the Divine gives me room to be broken and the energy to love myself while i set about the work of being who I want to be and maybe a space where i can offer others myself rather than a fabrication for public consumption and maybe the peace to love others in their brokenness.

sometimes this seems enlightening and sometimes this seems like words.

O Lord, make me an instrument of Your Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.

Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

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.

Does God Play Chess With the Universe?

wikipedia's definition of emergence:

"Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. This can be a dynamic process (occurring over time), such as the evolution of the human brain over thousands of successive generations; or emergence can happen over disparate size scales, such as the interactions between a macroscopic number of neurons producing a human brain capable of thought (even though the constituent neurons are not themselves conscious). For a phenomenon to be termed emergent it should generally be unexpected and unpredictable from a lower level description. Usually the phenomenon does not exist at all or only in trace amounts at the very lowest level. Thus, a straightforward phenomenon such as the probability of finding a raisin in a slice of cake growing with the portion-size does not generally require a theory of emergence to explain. It may however be profitable to consider the emergence of the texture of the cake as a relatively complex result of the baking process and the mixture of ingredients.
There is no consensus amongst scientists as to how much emergence should be relied upon as an explanation. It does not appear possible to unambiguously decide whether a phenomenon should be classified as emergent, and even in the cases where classification is agreed upon it rarely helps to explain the phenomena in any deep way. In fact, calling a phenomenon emergent is sometimes used in lieu of any better explanation."

i'm trying to pin down a definition of emergence that points to why i'm fascinated with it. more to the point, i'm struggling to come to a metaphor. ants and brains and cities are great, but they're too high-level. they're almost the wrong end of the problem.

i'm interesting in the fundamental unit of emergence. Gene, meme, rational actor, cellular automaton, etc. What are the rules that lead to emergence?

A stab at it:
1. Units (emergeons, for the sake of ridiculousness) have a limited degree of data about the world immediately surrounding them.
•Rational actors know prices, basically. And possibility local availability. (note: a value function is not actually a part of this rule.)
2. Units change in response to that data, in ways that are readable to nearby units.
•If no nearby cells (in Conway's "Life") are on, the cell turns off.
3. Units can be arrayed in complex structures, certain of which are stable, and act in predictable, semipredictible, or unpredictable ways.
•A bunch of random buying and selling crystallizes along a supply/demand curve. A bunch of ants builds into an ant hill.
4. These structures are subject to second-order forces, that cause them to function as (emergeons) themselves.
5. Similar pressures push these structures towards hyper- or in-significance.
•(this needs more explanation)

all of this seems simple. i wonder if this helps with my problem.

Brains are Analog

Well, I don't entirely buy the research--it seems awfully crude to be making this sort of claim--but I like the result: New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer.

A key couple of paragraphs from the article (Slashdotted this afternoon):

42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as "candle," and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.

"When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn't know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn't move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey. "The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."



Now I'm not sure anyone actually believes that minds are digital at this level of input: hell, I can write a Perl script that takes input in chunks and responds to it as it goes. And so the really interesting part of this to me is this quotation, attributed to Michael Spivey:

"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."

I'm not sure this is all that 'recent'--it really doesn't feel different from what Hofstadter has been arguing for a long time and /seems/ to reflect the theory behind neural nets and even projects like Cog. But what a cool recognition.

Emergence.

(a tangent: been thinking about emergence in terms of social justice work and activism. need more processing, but hmmm. this idea has eaten my brain.)


EDIT: Just read the slashdot response to the article. Lots of "Well, Duh"s. One of my favories:

"The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.

Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?"

Thoughts

"80 I Believe that the ur-Subject of the Romantic was Nature, the ur-subject of the Victorian was culture, the ur-subject of modernity was urbanity, the ur-subject of post-modernity was media, and the ur-subject of digitality is emergence."
(from http://www.bopnews.com/archives/003834.html)

Emergence, eh? That's terrifically exciting. And makes sense, given what it seems like is in the air. It seems to me that various branches of knowledge are increasingly realizing that complexity comes from large numbers of simple, interrelated processes, reactions, or actions.

Just before school got out, I had a conversation with Michael about how cities and brains were alike, using Hofstadter's metaphor of the anthill (in /Godel, Escher, Bach/), to talk about the way that particular forms of complexity emerge from simple patterns:
A new coffeeshop opens; it changes the way that you and I and many others walk to work; a nearby store starts doing better business and renovates; other stores open up; rents go up; people move in and move out; the character of the neighborhood changes; different politicians are elected; different institutions prosper. Each step is the logical result of lots and lots of small independent actions, but the net result is unpredictable and complicated and interesting.
A week later, Michael saw a book on computers, brains, and cities.

I can't help but thinking that most ideas are simply mutations and recombinations of existing ideas. I suppose that's just a repeating of memetics, but I've never felt so clearly that key ideas are pre-determined by the sum of currently relevant existing knowledge. (Which is, of course, a similar process of local joke-telling and story-relating and idea-delivering made many times more complicated by webs of reading and commenting and responding.) I keep thinking of Hegel's idea of the World Spirit becoming cognizant of itself...


Of course, I've never read any Hegel.

A related idea: emergence has something to do with the relationship between analog and digital. Must think more.