Mimesis

Every indi-

vidual yawned, laughed, looked up,

at the sky.

Review of "Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark"

 I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.

A Through Thought

 As I understand your infinite God, he knows and sees and has complete power over all and every etc.

Okay, then. What can an infinite imagination imagine? For starters--everything. 

And what is it like for an infinite imagination to imagine a thing? How is imagining a thing different from creating that thing? If God imagines a thing, does it therefore thereby exist as a thing? I can't see how it can't. To an infinite and free imagination, I'd be as real as I am whether I existed in myself, outside that imagination, or just in it. 

I'd like to set aside the question then of why or whether God actually created me, whether I actually exist as anything other than a thought in the imagination of this God. How could I know? I can't even reasonably speculate--about that.

But I can about this: If I'm right that I am as real to God in his imagination as I could possibly be outside it, some things follow. God knows not just everything I ever did or will do but everything I didn't do and every branch that act would have taken if I'd done it. Every single time any one thing could have gone another way, in God's imagination it went that way, and all the other women I would have married and all the other children I would have had and all their lives.

But this infinite God is much much bigger than that. He knows what lives every stillborn baby would have lived if it had been born alive, and all the paths. And all the aborted babies. And his knowledge is as real to him as if they had lived. 

And all the babies that would have been created if each individual sperm that didn't fertilize the egg in that ejaculation had got there first. And all those lives. And all the lives that would have been created if you'd had sex on Tuesday of that week instead of Wednesday, or an hour later or earlier, and all the infinity of possibilities. Remember, this God is infinite beyond the library of Babel. 

In God's mind every sperm ever created has joined with every egg ever created and has created every baby that could have been created and all the lives they could have lived and all their forking paths.

And not just that. God knows with equal assurance every sperm that could have been created, every permutation of DNA, even the ones that never lead to live birth, in sperm and egg. Every baby that was never actually possible and how they could have interacted with all the other people in every conceivable permutation. 

It would take trillions of universes to play these things out in reality. 

There may indeed be trillions of universes. 

In fact there are, inside God's imagination or in what we like to call "reality" or "physical reality." The difference is immaterial.

Every heartbreak. Every love. Every time anyone of them was cut from a baseball team.  

It's What It's

We can say
It is what it is

But we can't say

It is what it's.

Or

It's what it's.

We an say

What it is it is.

But we can't say

What it's it's.

Or

What it is it's.

What the rule it?

Occam Has No Conductor

It starts as noise—chaos (call it)

bruit. Then, in the sonic miasma, a note

hard, loud, singularly indistinguishable

from the cacophony. And then another

giving shape to what has come before—

a loud dim din of melody. As long as you live there

will always be noise. And in the noise

melody, infinite overlapping

like symphonies on so many together turning turntables.

The joy not of life but in it.

Not the wonder of the universe,

Not the miracle of mind,

Not the blessing of the church 

But the blessings in the church.

Love in a field of indifference.

You say there’s nothing new here. That’s so.

These words still sound within the old vocabulary, within the old old language

and so you miss them if you listen hard.

The opposite of the rattle in the hum of the car.

Tinnitus on top of everything else.

If I suggest that God did not create the universe 

but was created by it and lives here 

have I excluded myself from all religion?

Such a God no one needs.

Such a God explains nothing.

Maybe Occam has another job for God.

Religion is an industry but

in that industry a melody

the managers didn’t put there

and can’t hear. Hear the shrill whistle

issuing order into sounds

confused. The diamond in the carbon deposit.

The possibility that the noise itself is a melody I can’t entertain. 

Zap all the symphonies ever made into space.

Let aliens hear them. And let one clever one among them posit

a conductor. 

Now listen.

I Think

I think. I think

I think. Am I

thinking? I think

I am. I think I am

thinking, thinking I

am I. Thinking,

I am I. Thinking

I am I? I think. Thinking

I am, I am I, I think.

I think I think. Am I?

Leibniz and Voltaire reconciled at last

It occurred to me last night that Leibniz and Voltaire aren’t really so far apart. Leibniz claimed that “Of all possible worlds an infinite and all-powerful God would create the best.” That best world would follow the “principle of plenitude,” according to which it would contain “the maximum richness of variety of modes of being.” Voltaire looking around at our dark, spacious, flawful universe asked, rhetorically, via Candide, “If this is the best, what are the others like?” Well, if, according to the principles of Leibniz God would create the best of all possible worlds, according to the principle of plentitude, he’d create all the other ones as well. If so, we may just be living in what Candide called “One of the worst.” Reward yourself with another coffee.

After the Well Goes Dry

 

Digging a dry well deeper’s not a crime.

Hey, it’s your funeral. Everything that can be said

About the dead’s been said at least a million times.

Your chances of striking water are quite low.

If time itself is dying it’s its time.

 

But then again, who knows, there may be moisture yet

Below the empty coffin bed to fill a garden hose.

Stranger things have happened, muddy clothes

Washed in blood river come out clean. I’ve seen

 

A dead man on a concrete sleeve

After the paramedic crew’s thrown up their arms

Pull desperate balls of air into his lungs and breathe.

 

It’s true. If you ask yourself, and think quite deeply on it,

It may not be too late to write a sonnet.

The Problem with Evolution

The problem with the "theory of evolution" is not that it's false. Being a scientific theory, a conclusion based on upon a certain methodology that structures a certain type of narrative to the exclusion of all other narratives--being, as I say, a scientific theory, it is as true as it can be given the information available and the structure allowable. The problem is that it is bad story telling. It purports to be a true--not a scientific but an actually true--account, i.e. narrative, story--of how things happen and how things have happened. We are story-charged beings. We live on story. We see and experience ourselves and our world and everything in it via story. And this story sucks. It lacks a goal. It lacks even a trajectory beyond eventual extinction, which it gets when coupled with the cosmological story that starts with an event--whether or not that event is still called the Big Bang or gets a better name and more precise description. It allows for no point and no values, nothing worth living for or doing. Nothing. Even hedonism gives us something to want, some way of marking and evaluating progress. Science disavows any relationship to value or meaning even while it serves, more than it serves anything, as the elemental structure of the grand narrative of our time, and that not for a single culture but for the whole earth. Nothing is more certain to destroy humanity than bad story telling. 

NOW

the

O

of

now

the frozen past’s chaotic stasis

threaded through

the opening to all

that will have been

Nietzsche and Borges and Murphy: Fiction and the Empty Universe

Borges added to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return a Library in which all texts return infinitely, but with variation. But if the library is infinite, all texts also returns infinitely without variation. All commas are forever where they belong. And if the universe is structured like the library, then not just all texts but all lives return eternally with and without variation. Every mistake you ever make you make eternally. But you also avoid it eternally. Everyone you ever could have married, you marry. Every life you could have lived, you live. Every mistake you could make, you make. Every mistake you could avoid, you avoid. Everything that can happen happens, happens forever in infinite repetition. And this helps us understand the great emptiness of the universe, an argument against the existence of God. Most of the universe is empty. Most of the library is nonsense. Pockets of meaning are infinite and infinitely rare at the same time. That’s the structure of the library. But it also means that the books we write which are fictions here are realities elsewhere, providing they are possible anywhere. Is there a universe in which flying carpets are real? If there is, there are flying carpets there and Persians who fly on them. If not, not. But Silas Lapham exists with his paint in a universe somewhere. And somewhere he doesn’t gamble on the stock market and somewhere he does.

Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them. 

A Word on Thomas Hardy

 

It seems the first thing one must say today is in response to Hardian pessimism: to the aversion I have to reading novels that beat up on their protagonists. Hardy pulls out fingernails and pushes needles slowly into eyes with what feels like self-loathing, sadistic, pleasure. 

These stories go beyond tragedy, which always has a cause, which always tells us that “it had to be” even when we respond, “it should not have to have been that way.” Hardy wants us to know, “it didn’t have to be that way.” In his works it may be an evil individual, and it may be the arbitrary rules of the social unit (that put so much pressure on who may have sex with whom in its most obvious example of the “it didn’t have to be that way” variety) or pure chance. When the gods condemn us, we just have to submit. When society punishes us for mere natural actions that give us happiness or pleasure at no one’s essential cost, we can change those rules. But when well meaning people doing good are ground down for their virtue, the most natural reaction is disgust followed by despair. That which cannot be altered or resisted or blamed offers no meaningful response. Hardy’s universe is one no one wants to live in. There’s no fixing it. There’s no reconciling oneself to it.

Hardy’s response is “but that’s the universe you do live in. I’m just showing it to you. I’m taking the veil off the bullshit presented to you as food by all previous literature (with the possible exception of King Lear). I’m not telling you what to do with this knowledge, because there’s nothing you can do with it. Accept it if you choose to live in truth; deny it if you choose to live in delusion.”

But is this the universe we actually live in? Of course there IS a force behind the arbitrary destruction of all of Hardy’s admirable heroes. Hardy himself. The manipulating author who keeps good at bay while he opens all the apertures to destruction. That doesn’t however reveal anything about the accuracy of the portrayal. Hardy is Tess’s Apollo. But Tess might have died as she did without any Apollo. People die by chance on their way to doing good every day.

What strikes me as in indication of something deeply false about Hardy’s novels is the reaction of readers. Some of us turn away in disgust. Some of us in satisfaction of a kind. Some cry at the tortured goodness. But no one, I imagine, puts them down out of boredom, at least no one who wouldn’t put down any novel out of boredom. (That’s to say, if anyone is bored by Hardy it’s not because of his plots or his characters but because they don’t have the wherewithal to read.) But boredom is the only proper response to a Hardy novel if Hardy’s representation is accurate. The very idea that something wrong has happened, that some deep injustice has been perpetrated, that there’s something wrong with this indifferent universe may be the effect of centuries of bad storytelling, indoctrination into the myth of meaning. But it may also be from the deeper sense that there is something wrong, something broken in this universe. If Hardy’s right, he shouldn’t have sold any novels. When you hold the mirror up to the reader who sees himself for the first time, there may be an initial shock. But once “that’s who I am” settles in, the shock, whatever intermediary stages of denial and sadness must be made through, comes eventually to resignation and indifference. And we have still not got to indifference.

 

Is

 

Even if I tell you, tell you plainly,

        in the simplest words,

You will not get it.

 

Even if you tell it back to me in new words you picked from the fruit-heavy branches of your word tree so that I understand my own meaning as though you were giving it new to me

You will not have it.

 

But it will sit with you when you lie trembling in your sweat-soaked bed.

It will hold your hand and lay a compress on your fevered head.

And when the fever breaks, many many years from now,

When my voice and name have been composted past shadow,

You will repeat these words again (or others like them) like a prayer, slowly, to yourself

as you strain your thighs to the mattress edge

and shift your weight

and stand up shaking on the cold hard floor.

Then you'll have it; you’ll have got it, you will know.

Amberman

 

I’m told time freezes

It does not end.

Jesus,

What am I to do with that?

A long scope sees all that was or will be.

Determinately free

For all eternity I guess

A prehistorical bug encased in amber

Flapping still its prehistoric wings.

Li Bai Drinks Beneath the Moon

I, alone among the flowers,

Here, with a jug of wine,

Me, the moon, and my shadow,

I raise my glass of wine.

 

But the moon cannot drink,

And my shadow cannot stay.

Still, we must make merry the spring.

 

I dance with my spastic shadow

In the light of the jittering moon.

One wonderful jig and another

Until the wine is gone.

Drunk we are three,

Sober, one.

 

Let’s do this all again

sometime. We must all

do this again

sometime. There

in the river of stars.

 

x

Believing in People

We are each other.

 “If my story can remind you of anything, let it remind you that when you believe in someone, you can change their world,” Ortiz said. 

  The same is of course true if you don't believe in someone. This is how so much potential is lost, so many people ruined.

Lost in Waves

The ravens of night sweep the screen of the sky over the edge of the world.

It folds away in the ocean sway.

Darkness hides the waves and discovers the infinity of galaxies and stars,

A noiseless crashing of waves on the shore of your eyes.

The bright birds of morning recover the sky.

Light reveals the waves and hides the stars.

Short Review of When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom

 The whole time I was reading, I couldn't help but think of Kundera's superior "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." This is an imaginative, alternative, plausible history in which Nietzsche creates Freud's Talking Cure (Freud is a character in this book, but he never meets Nietzsche). The book is written by a psychotherapist, not a professional novelist. And that shows. He's not concerned with creating a work of literature as such. And that's the weakness of the book as a book. In Kundera, Nietzschean ideas are manifest in the very form of the book. They have an affecting role to play in the experience of "Eternal Return" (the most obvious example). This novel is in the realist tradition of the Victorian novel. It's interesting and thought provoking--though I will say the most interesting part to me was the Afterward, but one does have to read the entire novel to get the full effect out of that. Anyone with any interest in Nietzsche's life and thought and the whole, bizarre story, that connects Nietzsche to Freud via Lou Andreas Salome will find this story worth the time it takes to read it. The emphasis in the end is more on the Freudian legacy than the Nietzschean philosophy, which I find disappointing personally, for whatever that's worth. Still very glad I read the book. But if it's a choice between this or Kundera, read Kundera.

Preliminary Thoughts on Natural Signs

 

This may be the problem: In wealthy neighborhoods, the buildings are clean, the flowerbeds are blooming, the sidewalks wide and well maintained. In poor neighborhoods there are none of these simple signs. But signs of what? If they effect of flowers is to make us happier, we must also note that that effect has been commandeered by wealth via its mere sign value, not its animal value. So there are two things going on. We have what is good. We have what you don’t. We’re doing what’s good for us as animals. We’re pounding our chests and thumbing our noses at you.

Foucault likes to turn our attention to the latter. For the school of thought he represents, the other is nonexistent or not important enough to notice. And indeed for the person walking down the street in the wealthy neighborhood, feeling good, there’s no way to separate the “this is beautiful” from the “these people are rich” response to the environment.

But both still must exist. Not every sign is “arbitrary.” Not every sign can be swapped for every meaning.