Murphy's Law and Gun Control

I don’t know the origin of Murphy’s law. I suppose the origin is only a google away, but it doesn’t matter. The law itself states, as we all know, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” with a sometimes corollary, “at the worst possible time.” The corollary is clearly a late add-on, intended to intensify the perceived cynical joke that is the heart of the law. But the law itself, though comically formulated, is in fact a law. Better stated, “Anything that can happen, will happen, given enough time.” It explains why intelligent life showed up in the universe despite the extraordinary chances against it (by the reckoning of some). The universe is that big and that old and given certain conditions it is possible. It tells us also, then, that even if we were to eliminate all causes of death except one—let’s say car accidents—then eventually everyone will die in a car accident. Much could be accomplished if we were to simply keep Murphy’s law more prominently in mind when we do such things as build nuclear power plants and put in place ample safeguards to insure against meltdown. There are not enough safeguards in the universe to insure against meltdown. Or when we argue about gun control: no law (as the right wing always reminds us) will prevent random slaughter. Or when we put locks on houses: no lock will prevent unwanted access. Safeguards and locks and laws are all means of reducing chances, lowering percentages.  That doesn’t mean they are useless.

More on Time and Language and Borges and Nietzsche

Borges’ “New Refutation of Time,” and Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return,” rest on the same thing (for “thing” we could read “fact” or “error”): that the world of language has no way of conceptualizing the world of experience that can fit into itself (that can “comprehend”) time. Our system of concepts as well as our vocabulary is too poor. We simply cannot say what we intuit regarding time in an irrefutable fashion.

A close look at Borges’ essay reveals how tricky the problem is: is it according to experienced that time exists or according to intellection? Experience tells us both that time exists and that time does not exist. Borges walks down the streets around his old neighborhood. One moment succeeds another. He stops at a wall,

I kept looking at this simplicity. I thought…: This is the same as thirty years ago… Perhaps a bird was singing and for it I felt a tiny affection, the same size as the bird; but the most certain thing was that in this now vertiginous silence there was no other sound than the intemporal one of the crickets. The easy thought ‘I am in the eighteen-nineties’ cased to be a few approximate words and was deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt as an abstract spectator of the word; an indefinite fear…. I did not fear that I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity.

It is the same thing expressed by Keats, “Thou wast not born for death immortal bird.” Borges also experiences this eternity, as do we all, he tells us, in music and other “human moments,” such as suffering and pleasure, moments repeated exactly from one person to another, moments, we might add (contra Bakhtin) that are the basis for art and language, when identity fades and different experiences lose their difference.

Time is experienced as successive and eternal, as existing and as not existing. In language it is posited as the only explanation for phenomena and yet it is uncapturable, inexpressible. It must be posited because it cannot be shown to exist at all. (To call it “self-evident” is to say the same thing in a disingenuous way, trying to erase the very problem—not visible to language.) Time’s existence and time’s nonexistence are both part of both language and experience, but as four nonoverlapping circles.

This cannot imply that our experience is true and our intelligence is false. But it does mean that we have to choose which to accept before we can choose how to respond. (How could one stay neutral here?) Let’s choose, provisionally, momentarily, experience over language not for no reason, but only because it’s more interesting to do so. It leaves us more to say.

This problem of the inadequacy of language to its presumed object is of course not limited to the comprehension of time. This inadequacy of language to match experience (subjectivity) or the world (objectivity) accounts for the whole being and frustration of philosophy as well as literature. It’s demonstrable, for example, of the infamous cogito, the so-called foundational statement of modern philosophy. The statement itself has become ragged for all the darts tossed at it: I think, therefore I am. In its favor, it functions as well as statement can to capture the experience of being. But it does not make logical sense—it fails in terms of language. So here’s the point: contradiction is the sine qua non of statement. Go back through these very paragraphs and graph the contradictions.

In his “New Refutation,” Borges makes the marvelous statement that night pleases because it “suppresses idle details, just as memory does.” Reading—in fact any comprehension of language—requires darkness as well as light. All coherence, all meaning, is washed out if the reader comprehends the full scope of every word. Every word is a potential metonymy. And every statement is a riddle of contradictions that must be ignored for the reception of the thread meaning that runs through it under the fabric of noise. All understanding requires the good faith and hard work of the receiving brain. 

Tomorrow was Christmas

Tomorrow was Chirstmas said Mr. Escher yesterday there will be snow.

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

Ambaguam, Beginning at the End

He's not human.

My Dearest John

Please,

stop loving me.

It’s distracting.

Oh, I’m not saying you don’t do an admirable job smiling and chatting

and walking nonchalantly away,

but that smile and that catch in your chat

and those eyes that affix my eyes

so I can’t duck or nod or turn

my head. I want to spend a night in bed

without this stone in my chest.

Is that too much to ask?

I want to walk outdoors on a cool spring morning and feel the world’s effervescence

without howling.

Stop reminding me about Paris. Stop asking

if I’m okay. (I’m not, okay?) Stop telling me you have a free hour

every Thursday after lunch.

Stop running past my window

in your cleverly reflective running shorts

and matching shoes. I’m here,

but I won’t tell you.

Dear John, somewhere

someone has days

she can’t get through

because of what she thinks when she thinks

of you. Dear John,

I don’t care that the past can never be put away,

That what it will have been is always yet to be determined.

I do not care.

This has to end.

Love,

Jane

Redeeming the Past

"The past can never be put away because what it will have been is always yet to be determined."

One theological difficulty I've long had has been the problem of redemption. An event happens, an evil event, how can that event be redeemed? How can the evil be erased? It cannot be made not to have happened. It can't be defined away. What amount of "good" and of what type pays for it? It's not a question of a willingness to accept payment in lieu of justice--as happens endlessly in the courts. Nor is it the idea that "if we do this good thing than that bad thing will not have been in vain." It may be that it was not in vain. But was it ever paid for? Can you ever say "I'd rather have the good that came out of my child's death than the for the child not to have died." The good doesn't pay back the evil no matter how good it is. The whole economic metaphor breaks down because payment is made in an unconvertible currency. The bad thing was evil, the good that it was transformed into was good. But that legerdemot that allows us to substitute "evil" for the event doesn't fool anyone. Much more needs to be said here.

But the next step in thought is what I have quoted above. The event itself has never stopped happening, whatever it was. The past has never sat still. What it was is always changing. And in this lies the hope for the redemption of the past. In principle, if a tragedy can be ameliorated by a subsequent love, then is it possible for enough love to redeem it? The goal is not to make it to have been okay, but to make it no longer to have been evil. If any degree of evil can be erased, then the whole can be overcome. Much more needs to be said.

Language and the NRA

If this is a blog about language, then it's impossible not to comment on the language of the NRA. Two things: the mantra-like argument that makes one's ears bleed: "The problem is large and complex. And these new restrictions will not solve it." A statement of fact--that doesn't address the question it pretends to address. A response to an argument the other side never made. Yes, the problem is large and complex. And certainly new gun laws are, in relation to the scope of the problem, small. But large, complex problems do not often admit of simple solutions. New gun laws aren't meant to SOLVE the problem. They ADDRESS the problem. They are one facet of a comprehensive solution that people of good will, be there such people on both sides, work out together. The only sensible response of the NRA and its supporters would be, "I don't believe this will help much if at all. But it's also not much of a sacrifice. No one needs military weapons. No one needs 100 round clips. If giving these up allows us to move on, we'll do that, because the goal to see that no more people die in these massacres. And if we don't take the first step, we'll never get to the second step. And anyway, no sane person would suggest that these laws make the world more dangerous." But of course they don't. They stall and preach an absurdist reading of the second amendment and make clear their primary interest is not life or law or order but the free right to guns of all kinds.

Second, behind the effectiveness of this childish argument lies a perverse (one is tempted to say insane) reading of the second amendment. No great effort is required to discover that the second amendment exists because Washington and company did not want the U.S. to have a standing army. They wanted a people's army. Because of real threats from foreign powers, the government was willing to risk the dangers of having weapons in the hands of citizens so they could call on those citizens at a moment's notice and not have to go through the trouble or expense of buying guns for a whole army. (There was no factory production of guns in 1780.) The purpose of the second amendment was to prevent the U.S. from having a standing army. It was a backdoor strategy. The very text reveals the forces of contention from which these words emerged.

The amendment in the end is somewhat cowardly and even cynical. Yes, it says, we know that there will be violence out there among the people. Intelligent people are aware that a country full of armed citizens is a minefield. We will lose good people, innocent citizens because of this law. But the trade off is security for the whole nation. And we'll take that--because we do not want an army. We do not want a force that could sweep in and challenge the civilian government.

All of that is forgotten in this debate (which is more a shouting match than a debate). Even the Supreme Court with its "original intentionists," pretend that the amendment simply guarantees every citizen a right to a gun for SELF-defense. The "militia" clause is erased. The intention which in this case is clear and available is simply ignored. And the nation becomes more militarized as it becomes more polarized.

If the people are out buying more and more guns simply because they don't like the elected president, we have a huge and complex problem, not one that can be solved or addressed by maintaining liberal gun laws.

Oz House or OzHouse (never Oz-House)... It's getting hot in there....

http://www.amazon.com/Oz-House-ebook/dp/B008YTUW2U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357867109&sr=8-1&keywords=oz+house+lindsay


Newly published. A fun frolic through fairy stories and lands.

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.

Ancient Chinese Wisdom

If you aim to fail, you're bound to succeed.