Time Travel--evolved thoughts

Actually the problem with time travel (I know, what does this have to do with Language, Poetry OR Gardens?) never seems to be discussed at all--though I'm sure it HAS to have been broached somewhere. It's this: Matter cannot be two places at the same time. A body is nothing but a sack of molecules. And every molecule in your body already exists at any time you would want to come from or go to. You see the problem? A body cannot come back in time because IT'S ALREADY THERE--not in the person who exists (perhaps) under the same name, i.e. not in a younger self. That's the least of the issues, since his body won't necessarily have very many of the same molecules (a little out of my league with that claim), but because the molecules that make up the body in 2056 exist in loaves of bread and the bark of trees and the guts of whales in 1972. If I go back from the one time to the other, where am I going to get the molecules? These are not copies of those molecules. They are the same molecules. I don't see a solution for this problem.

The History of the Nude in Art

After each veil comes off there is a

pause. A moment for memory. A

moment for art. Still life skin

flushed against colored silk, the azure,

the orange, the crimson, the gold

diaphanous the aureole’s pink browned

through the green of the final veil the dun

curved flesh alien tinted from the upraised arm

to the hip, the bumps of the spine like thumbs the black

pubic hair the round rump—and then the skin and then the skin

too unwinds to the white bones then the bones curve and bend like

branches or rivers like love and like tears over contours of earth like wind

that runs over outcrops and drop-offs the bones yearning for a shape

that will voice the bodily essence static and eternal whose essence is

only

motion.

A Straight Christian's Ruminations on Gay Marriage

I am constantly stupefied and bewildered over the church’s opposition to gay marriage. Like many others, though still a minority of those who profess Christ, I hear echoes of what is among the most embarrassing and revealing episodes in the history of the church—its centuries of support for slavery. Clearly now the church recognizes it was on the wrong side of history then, and it’s on the wrong side of history now. The difference is that then—by the nineteenth century at least—the church was in a meaningful way at least divided on the issue. How long before the church truly divides over this? How long before the church crosses over to the side of empathy and compassion and moral defensibility? When will the church stop being a vehicle for conservative, reactionary “decency” and truly take on the challenge and mantle of Christ? And most importantly, why does it always take so long?

                The church should be at the forefront of this issue. It should not lag and wait coyly. It should not wait until the real work of justice is done before it decides to jump aboard. The constant, historical reluctance of the institution to occupy the position at the forefront of history which is proper to it does incalculable damage to the gospel.

                Those who wish to deny the honor of marriage to people who are not straight love to quote St. Paul in the book of Romans. I have to say that it’s not surprising that a first century Roman Jew would have an unenlightened understanding of human sexuality. I don’t think the reasons for this need to delay us. The problem, for so much of Christianity, is that the words here spoken are in the Bible and like the bible’s endorsements or seeming endorsements of slavery and patriarchy and so much that is unenlightened, it’s hard for people whose faith is in the Bible instead of the God of the Bible to let go of anything it says or seems to say. If they did, they’d have to think. They’d have to use the spirit to interpret the law. But this is of course just what the Jesus of the Bible so often castigates the religious leaders of his time for failing to do.

                Moreover, in the same Bible, by the same author, we also read this: “But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

                Is the passion of a gay person somehow less intense, is it easier to control that the passion of a straight person? Can a homosexual find sexual satisfaction in the bed of a straight person? And is it right to ask him or her to do so? Do we really believe we are following the scripture and supporting “biblical marriage” if we say to the straight person, “if you cannot control your passion you should marry” but to the gay person, “if you cannot control your passion, good luck”? If, as the church maintains that the sexual act is only proper within the confines of marriage, then the church’s opposition to sin is tantamount to condemning a minority of God’s people to a fight it acknowledges they have not chosen and will not be able to win. The God that made them gay will not grant them the gift of celibacy merely because their society refuses to recognize their sexuality.  We know this.

                Gay marriage is morally and biblically the equivalent of straight marriage. The church has a religious obligation not merely to endorse but to be on the forefront of the movement to have it legalized and blessed. The failure to do so condemns not the gay people who ask for acceptance among the people of God but the church itself. It undermines the moral authority of the church—already so terribly damaged by its insistence on standing firm on the wrong side of history. And it drives good people—straight and gay—out, in search of alternative institutions or religions of greater moral authority, or way from all such voluntary institutions altogether. It is not enough that there by a few socially progressive churches that tolerate or even endorse gay marriage.  Any church that wants to call itself Christian and which professes to learn its faith in any part from its scripture needs to stand foursquare behind this issue and these people, these children of God.

Why Stephen Hawking Is Wrong about Time Travel

Hawking tells us that if time travel were possible someone from the future would have come back by now. Time is fragile. It is so fragile that whenever anyone from the future does succeed in going back in time all of history from that moment forward is erased. As soon as the time traveler sets foot in the past he ceases to exist. He’s never been born. If he has never been born, however, he can no longer go back in time. And as soon as a history exists in which he does not go back in time, all history is restored. Does this create an infinite loop? Not from the point of view of the time traveler. The forward pressures of time are such that though this all takes place in a millisecond, at the expiration of that millisecond he is already past the time wherein he returned to the past. His only experience is that he has failed. He is still inside his time machine, and he is still in the present. And it does not matter how often he does this. Thinking he has failed, he may build and rebuild his machine. Whenever it works it will seem to have failed, because time is self-correcting. The moment of return and restoration is marked by a pause in memory, the forgetting and remembering of a word.

                What happens to all those new histories? Nothing is lost. Each of those trips to the past creates a branch that continues, diverges from the restored time, growing forever in a new direction.

Naming

We sit at the edge of time and watch the needle push
through the material, then disappear

then poke itself back through,
rising and turning like a breaching whale

plunging again,
rising again,
pressing again.

Nothing exists until you name it, then

the name is the bane of the thing.

The poem insists, the poem
erases
until it’s present

until it’s gone.

With Nothing to Say

By a flutter of wing on a scale minute in a minute world

the mosquito hitches a ride on a raindrop then hops

to another; this is how she keeps from being squished

in a squall. And you, you stand within the garden in the yard

grossly taking in through every sense the fullness of it all,

naming nothing, perceiving no particular, no shade, no color,

no scent, not even the feel of the air as it vibrates the nerves

deeply beneath the surface of your skin.  

The Urgency of Poetry, a draft

How the biggest mistake most people make, and they make it virtually every moment of their lives, is to believe that their language is both truth and adequate. (Is this one mistake incessantly made, or an infinite number of iterations of the same mistake; the mistake repeated endlessly?) A language can be true without being adequate and adequate without being true. No language can ever be both true and adequate. (As in particle physics we can have speed or location. Never both.) Adequate to what? True to what? To reality. A language can be true if it is partial. If it wants to be true to a contingency. Never to the thing itself, never to its totality. A language may be adequate in that it leads to the desired goal, even the perfect goal. An adequate language will get you through the maze into heaven. But it will deceive you if it leads you to believe you have understood the maze. It can tell you to love but it cannot tell you in this moment what action of yours is love. We can have contingent truth, contingent adequacy.

How reality is NEVER a given, always mediated, always a perception-through-language.

How our self is dependent upon language—how our first memories coincide with our development of language.

How words co-create realities: examples (illimited), courage/cowardice, Nature/culture. Word/thing. Human/animal. Man/woman. Adult/child. Adolescent. Disease. Sanity. Freedom. Homosexuality. Democracy. 

How poetry (and art) enters and challenges reality.

How one either uses language to shore up one’s prejudices or one uses language to see past them, i.e. to take them down, to constantly paint and paper and build and remodel and tear apart and replace and return. To sell and to buy. Never to stop. Never to finish.  

Word and/vs story. Words are concepts, concepts words. Worlds are rooms; worlds are stories.

How who we are is literally the words we use and the stories we use those words to tell.

Fact, Opinion and the Warming Globe

One of the most important skills a citizen of an enlightened society must have is the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion. And yet, facts, the hardest facts of all, are the conclusions of a discipline (science) that is founded on the assertion that there are no facts as such--only evidence, only the best possible conclusions based up the evidence. This quibble, this little instability at the core of the structure, may contribute to the particularly modern, endemically American belief that the conclusions of science have no more force than opinions--that "what's the best restaurant in Kalamazoo?" and "is global warming real?" are questions about which we are equally entitled to weigh in on. An astonishingly large portion of the American public, without a scrap of expertise or training, without the most fundamental prerequisites for understanding how to address the question, assert without irony or embarrassment their conviction that global warming is a myth. The ignorance is mind boggling. What can we say? "I am not an expert. You are not an expert. The question of whether the globe is warming, by how much and in response to what causes is a question beyond  my ability, at present, to answer. I have not the time or interest to get the vast training in math and science that are required for me to have, on my own, the ability to make an assessment on the question. And there is no need for me to do so. There are clearly experts on this issue out there, genuine scientists who with careful and expert research address this question every day. And among them there is no controversy regarding the basic facts: the globe is warming. Human activity is a significant contributing factor. Global warming is dangerous. If we act now, we can do something about it. Scientists disagree with one another whenever possible. Scientists are by nature as well as by profession necessity skeptical. Yet no meaningful number of experts. It is prudent therefore to defer to the experts in such a case." We can say that. I do. But people who cannot see the truth will crucify a savior so they do not have to listen.

The Applicability of the Tragic to "Real" Life

1) We die. We are fated to die. The best, the brightest, the strongest, the richest, the ablest--all die. No effort to prevent it is ultimately successful. We can no more outrun our fate than Oedipus can his.

2) The knowledge we need to make the right decision, on those occasions when such knowledge may be said to exist, is always attained after the decision has been made, when, right or wrong, it is too late.

3) The decision that leads to self knowledge--which can thus lead us to an understanding of, for example, the best way to spend one's life--is always different from the decision that leads to the best way to spend one's life. Does one choose to give one's life to art--forsaking job, family, security, reputation for the sake of art? Then one will always attribute one's failure to the market, to time, to history. On the other hand, should one choose to be an art historian, then one might come to the realization that one never could have been an artist--that one didn't have "the stuff." Enlightenment! One should have pursued science.

Math and Metaphor

I don’t know much about math. But it has always astonished me that those who do can sit down with pen and paper and calculator and work with numbers and learn from the numbers the facts of the universe from the atom to the whole shebang. The way the numbers work reveals the way the universe works, which observation either confirms or challenges. I see here an analogy or perhaps something much more than an analogy, a co-form, a second side of the same coin, a co-pattern, the same paradigm (I know there’s a word for this, sym-structure) with metaphor. Metaphor reveals the nature of the universe, the nature of the psyche, the cause of action. It too however must be tested and confirmed.

Sad News for Mr. Lincoln

Capitalism, in some form, may be the most suitable economic system for a democracy. It is not, however, democratic. Capitalism prefers plutocracy. Anyone who needs to have that proven to them is perhaps not intellectually capable of understanding the proof. It’s self-evident. Capitalism cares nothing for people, nothing therefore for equality or justice--or for ideology of any kind. Money makes money. Money uses people to make money. If allowed, money will use whatever system if finds itself in to make money. Whenever capitalism and democracy live together, one will dominate the other. Whenever capitalism dominates democracy, democracy disappears. Democracy becomes plutocracy, as is evidenced today in the United States of America. That country fancies itself a democracy for the single simple fact of universal suffrage. (And yet today even that is subtly or not so subtly under attack under via what is euphemistically being called “voter i.d.” laws.)  I have no interest here in detailing how this depressing state of affairs has come to be. It’s not hard to trace the economic and technological “perfect storm” that has coalesced to wreak so much havoc in so short a time. But what matters is that something be done about it. Democracy must become, again, the dominant partner in this relationship or we will have to declare the experiment a failure. We will have to report to the spirit of Lincoln that a nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal cannot in fact endure.

On Plotted LIfe (a la Ricoeur)

On Mimesis_{1, 2 and 3:} Life is preplotted—i.e. plotted before it happens by those who live it (cf. Barth and Kundera et al.). Because we live in a world of signs to which we ascribe meanings—though their meaning varies from degree to kind from person to person, moment to moment, ever threatened, ever shifting—we “always already” exist in an unfolding, unstable plot (Mimesis₁), which we make (if we are active and to any degree free) in cooperation with the available narrative materials. The writing of our life (Mimesis ₂)i—.e. the telling of our story—functions to stabilize, or, better said, to reduce the play of our lives. We use in fact all stories to reduce this play—other people’s stories, fictions or nonfictions, (it doesn’t really matter) as well as our own. We use other people’s stories to become better equipped to tell (i.e. to construct) our own (Mimesis₃). 

Spreading sand

Young Apple Tree

More sand

Salt 'n' Pepper

Garden 2012

Where it starts...

Sand and stone to come

Distant forsythia arch 

Stumping

Earth yawns 

The Limit of Human Happiness

A thought experiment.

I do not know how we would measure the upper limit of human happiness or even how we could determine from signs who is most happy—and that’s not because, as Hamlet knew, signs can be faked but because different people express their happiness in different ways. His smile may for all I know mean so much more than her laughter. I do know that there is an upper limit to human happiness. I like the expression “totally happy.” If you are totally happy, you are as happy as you can be. Anyone can be totally happy. No one can be totally happy all the time—or even most of the time. Some people can be happy to have a strip of bacon on their cheese and tomato sandwich. Some people cannot be happy with a 100 foot yacht on the dock of their Mediterranean villa. It seems to me that the former are the luckier.

Emily Dickinson observed,

Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh

There is a conspiracy not just in our culture but in our genes to make us discontent with our lives. As yawns and laughter are contagious, desire and all emotions, stances, points of view are contagious. There’s nothing more natural than jealousy—biblical covetousness. Like everything else, it is in itself morally neutral. Like alcohol, surrender to it leads to unhappiness. The realization of this leads to religious renunciation or Nietzschean sublimation.  It is hard to be content with one’s life when both the culture and the DNA work against us, and when death keeps reminding us it’s drumming its fingers and holding the door. But it is possible. One can be on the constant lookout for new and more. One can spend one’s limited time piling up more unique experiences and more things. The action in itself is morally neutral. It may make one person fuller and more content; it may make another person emptier and more desperate. One can also understand that every moment is infinite. One can go deeper and deeper into being in the cloister. For one person the neck of a guitar is too big to ever hope to fully understand; for another the whole world and all its riches are too flat and too shallow. It seems to me the former is the luckier. It seems to me that the mind is infinite and deep or trivial and shallow. 

A Swan

Or was it that the boy was so beautiful

she called him a swan

though he really was not a swan

as she’d made them

as they were willing

to believe. He wasn’t

a swan and he wasn’t

a boy. He just looked like a boy

innocent and harmless, someone

you could handle if you had to.

It was just better to say that something divine

entered an innocently beautiful creature grazing

the tender shoots of soft grass on the banks

of the infinitely flowing river, better to believe

a curious deity knowing she would come this way

violated an innocent beast and that

the violated beast raised its head

with double seeing

and drove this god curious for beauty before he knew

it was happening to the crest of the hill until

even a god
became victim

of a swan’s
desire.

Winning

He pulls a card from the stack.

Without looking at it he slides it into an envelope

seals it

puts it back.

They know the rules.

They play the game as well as they can

scoring as many points as possible

until time runs out.

He unseals the envelope

to reveal the criteria that will be used

to declare a winner.

It may be the points.

It may be who scored the most before time ran out.

Or it may be who had the lead for the greatest number of minutes

or plays

or who ran the most plays

or who had the ball the longest.

It may be any number of other things too.

Someone objects:

We should always use the same criteria for deciding who wins.

We could do that, he says,

but then we’d start to think we know

what winning is.

The Necessity of Regulation for a Robust Culture and Economy--The Case of Copyright

Copyright is a form of regulation. If I spent five years  and a million dollars whittling a tree into a toothpick, that toothpick won’t be worth a penny more for all my work than any other toothpick. But if I spend five years and a hundred million making a movie, that movie, says the law, should be protected. According to the market, it should be worth what you can get for it—which is nothing. It’s easy to copy and distribute for free. You’re spending a fortune to create an object which in the free market is worthless. Only regulation gives it any value. This falsification of the real market value of a movie is necessary however. Without it, no one would make movies. And movies are valuable to the culture in ways that have nothing to do with money.

Value is not limited to economic value—that’s merely the simple metaphor by which we understand (imprecisely) the notion of value. Regulation may sometimes stifle the market. At other times regulation creates and releases value. The value it creates may be frankly economic—as in copyright. The value it releases transcends the whole economic paradigm. 

The Constructed Self (a post enlightenment idea)

"I achieve self-consciousness; I become myself only by revealing myself to another, through another and with another’s help. The most important acts, constitutive of self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness (a “thou”). Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are the basic reasons for loss of self….. It turns out that every internal experience occurs on the border, it comes across another, and this essence resides in this intense encounter…. The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate….. To be means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself, man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking with himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other….. I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception). Justification cannot be justification of oneself; confession cannot be confession of oneself. I receive my name from the other, and this name exists for the other (to name oneself is to engage in usurpation). Self-love is equally impossible."                                                        --Mikhail Bakhtin                                                                                                      

Groping Toward Nietzsche I

Tentative initial remarks after a great deal of reading:

Walter Kauffman won’t allow me to suggest that Nietzsche was toying with insanity when he composed his Genealogy of Morals, and Walter Kauffman is much smarter and more knowledgeable than I, and do make this suggestion would only serve to avoid the text that must be engaged, so I will not make it. At the same time, I do hold in the back of my mind the feeling that if I’m taking seriously the words of a madman, I may not be putting my time to its best use.

                Well, there are all sorts of reasons for taking Nietzsche seriously even if he was pulling the wool over our eyes by imitating sanity so convincingly.

                Still, if we allow ourselves at least a little of the irony, just a little of the sarcasm that Nietzsche allowed himself, what defense does he have? I am in a bad position. If I reply mock for mock, I will be accused of disengagement, of private ire, in short of resentiment.  But if I respond with good sense and sober judgment to the man who mocks me, I run the risk of looking all the more worthy of mockery.

                Despite his mockery, despite his sarcasm and his own blinding resentiment, one cannot help but have great respect for Nietzsche, even great sympathy. (Nietzsche noted that “true Christians” always read him with sympathy.) His insights were profound and important, and he did work out real cracks in the foundation of his opposition. He found real fault lines, and these made his job possible. Christianity’s real shame made him possible. If we see this, we can move forward. If we do not, we are stuck with the same duplicitous, the same two-sided agony that is the cornerstone of our shame.

                Nietzsche asks the essential question: “What light does linguistics and especially the study of etymology throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?”

                The answer is, not much. Linguistics can reveal the moment at which such concepts entered language and the development of our understanding of these concepts (“development” is an apter word than “evolution”), but it cannot say a thing about the viability—in brief, the truth—of such concepts. “Evil,” “good,” and “bad” have histories. Those histories are either histories of understanding or histories of establishment and adornment—or they are, as I believe they are, a single history of a non-Hegelian dialectic of tension and struggle. In short the words either apply to “real” things unrelated to contingent history OR they are human inventions, created and developed to serve specific historical purposes and no more. The fact that they arose in history does not of itself prove that they are confined to history.

                By way of analogy: A small child learns the word “fair” before she develops a concept of fairness (as either each according to his deserts or equal shares for all). In her first deployment of the word “fair” means only “good for me.” “That’s not fair,” means “I didn’t get what I want.” (You can all come up with your own examples.) Later, when the child is matured and corrected, she comes to understand and, we hope, accept the notion that fair means that you may have to give up some or all of what you have and want and that not just to keep the peace, not just to avoid the war of all against all, but because it is fair. And on an even higher moral plane, she might even want to give up her excess because she desires fairness above her hoarding personal benefit.

              The concept “fair” arose in this child’s history as “good for me” but developed into an abstraction that means “best for all.” Etymology may likewise tell us that “good” comes from a concept of “good for me” and “evil” as “bad for me,” but that while it is certainly history working on these concepts, so sanded out “good for me” (or “good for the king”), being “bad for you” (or, or “good for the people” or “bad for the king”) to “best for all.” But this does not mean that the concepts “fair” and “just” are stuck in history. They may be. But the judgment is based on the a priori judgment regarding history, not on observation derived from history.

                The question had to be asked, and its answers are of some value, but are not of the value Nietzsche suggests. 

Sinkorswim

Let us use another name. Let’s not say spirit. Let’s change the metaphor from Air to Water. In the dream of life you are in the water. You cannot ask the water to teach you to swim. But you do not need to do so. You know in the code of your flesh just enough about water to keep yourself at the surface. But you cannot stay where you are. You can dip your nose in the air to stay alive. It’s in your DNA. If only like an infant you had no fear, you would do more than drift on the waves. You would swim. You must not ask the water to teach you to swim. Your infant body will teach you to swim. You will teach your body to swim. You will cooperate with the water. You and your body, which are neither two nor one will, one-like, ease you to land.