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Threeman the One I'd Sailor

The parent, child and holy ghost, the ego id and superego, the I and the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex. The rule of threes.

How much of our perception of the world comes out of the war between the reptilian brain and the prefrontal cortex? How much comes out of those two parts (on the one side) and the singularity of the first person nominative singular pronoun?

One “I,” two brains. One I to rule unruly both. Two selves warring from which to produce a single unity. One I’d sailor.

Even God is three: Parent child and holy ghost. Freud claimed that the self was three, ego, id and superego. All these overlapping threes.

I sometimes think I’m most myself when I’m deepest in love. But that is when I’m least human, if human is what separates me from the other fauna of earth. I’m least in my reasoning brain. I say I can’t control myself. I must be my pre-frontal cortex, myself must be my reptilian brain. My ego can’t control my id.

If I am my I, I am not myself (said Alice). Myself am not I. But if my I is something I own—if it’s mine, it isn’t me. Nothing I own is me.

But that’s just words. That’s just the language and the structure of my language, which so often fails to organize being as being really is—assuming there is (which I doubt) any organization of language that would be able to map it. To me that is the fundamental fact. There is reality, which even to name “reality” is to misrepresent, and there is language which (among its several tasks) represents it, maps it, grids it.

Which tells me I have it wrong but doesn’t help me get it right. Who am I, myself? And who are you?

Laughing at Evil

Evil itself provides no challenge whatsoever to God—the existence of or the belief in. This may seem like a small, semantic point, but I think it’s actually big and essential. Evil implies God. This is not to say that God is evil but that evil cannot exist if God does not. Without God, “evil” is just a hyperbole for events that leave us feeling very sad or very scared. We may want to say “for events we can’t understand,” but without God these events are perfectly plain—whether they be the extermination of millions or the torture and slaughter of a single child, a hurricane that wipes out a whole tribe or the man-caused heat that burns a living planet to the ground. Without God there are only things we do or things that happen. Such events are in the total calculation of the universe random events, no different than the formation of a star via the coalescence of gasses or the massacre of a tribe of termites by a tribe of ants.

But I do not believe that humans can experience “evil” events this way—as meaningless. And I don’t think that this is because we find these events really really sad. The truth is that the murder of a child doesn’t just feel incomprehensible—it is incomprehensible. Despite the fact that, without God, it is easy to comprehend, it is experienced as something that should not have to have happened. It is experienced with the same deep affect which accompanies (although I’m saying this backwards) the literary form known as tragedy, which Aristotle famously characterized as “pity and fear” but which I would think better understood with that italicized phrase: It should not have to have happened. Of course with the murder of any individual child or with any “evil” or “tragic” event, looking at immediate causes, we can always see ways it might have been avoided. Every individual event is contingent and therefore, in theory, avoidable. Pulling back, however, we have to see that from what we know about the universe such events in general are unavoidable. Given the moral and physical structure of the universe, such events must be possible, and therefore, to paraphrase Derrida, whatever can arrive must arrive.

The question we are left with is whether the moral structure of the universe is really an amoral structure—which is to say, does not exist at all. Put another way, we are asking whether our reaction to Oedipus the King or the murder of Sally Jones is something we should take seriously or ignore, something we should believe in, or something we should pass off as an illusion founded in the chance wiring of our common circuitry. It seems to me the burden of proof is on those who contend that the profound experience of injustice or tragedy is not to be taken seriously, that whenever we are tempted to say or feel it should not have to have happened, this is mere apophenia, we are imposing a Darwinian impulse onto a random set of data—that our reaction to such events is in fact so out of proportion to the events themselves that any truly rational species peering down at us through their telescopes would be laughing.

Just Sayin

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the plastic they use to make the backs of TVs.
If snow is white, why then her skin is sort of dun colored. And if snow is brown
Or yellow or grey, her skin is still sort of dun colored.
If hairs were wires
That would be weird.
Her cheeks are skin colored. Her lips are lip colored.
I grant I’ve never seen a goddess.
So that isn’t relevant.
And I do like music. And I don’t agree with the destruction of coral,
literal or metaphoric.
I do love my mistress, always,
Even though she sometimes pisses me off.

 

 

The Poetry Teacher’s Final Assignment

I said
You’ve been studying poetry for fifteen weeks and now
To show me what you’ve learned
You have to write your own original poem.
Show me what you’ve learned.

Ben wrote
     Life is good
     more often than it is bad.
     Death sucks.
     Even though everyone is unhappy a lot of the time
     in almost every life there are moments when you realize
     it’s better than being
     dead.
     And even though death takes you away from all the parts of life that suck,
    Death still sucks worse.
    Life is still better.

I said
“You’re just saying it. You have to make me feel it.”
He painted it on a rock and threw it through my window.
He was aiming for my head.

More Poems More Poems More Poems

it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt
Elizabeth Alexander

People give things many different names. But in themselves, they have no names. When you are thinking, all things have different names and different shapes. But when you are not thinking, all things are the same. There are no words for them. People make the words. A cat doesn't say, ‘I am a cat.’ People say, ‘This is a cat.’
Zen Master

I should stop there. I should let the tensions between those two statements do their common work. I should let the apparent differences fade in their untruth, and let them, in them, mingle like male and female into the child of your thoughts. But I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you to see it. And I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself to see tomorrow what I see so plainly today. I don’t trust time; I don’t trust the mind to ripen and the reader—you—to see it when you ready. I don’t trust you to be ready. It’s so much better when I can point to the picture that changes form when you stare and merely invite you to look, to see if it if you can, not to see it, not yet, it if you can’t. That patience is better. That trust is better. It’s better if you don’t explain the koan or let the listener know it was a koan that passed like smoke from pipe you won’t recall you ever smelled for years and years until you smell it again returning you to this moment, proustian.

But we don’t live in a monastery. We live in time.

And you might miss it. You will miss it, most of you. And what if you never do small it again? It’s better to have the koan explained than to miss it altogether. We teach minds and fertilize plants because we don’t have the time not to and time would not be enough. And those who did not have to be taught have already stopped reading.

The only way past language is through it. The only way to silence is talk. The only way to dissolve the name is to give it. More poems, more poems, more poems. The old texts, endlessly glossed. The “it” we don’t have because it is not haveable. The airborne soap bubble you lose by reaching for. The same thing said over and over in new words is something else.

On Abstraction

The editor of a Ricoeur collection suggested, I’m sure knowing he was being simplistic, that the author recognized the old equation of fiction with the type and history with the facts. There are any number of reasons ultimately to reject that notion. But the suggestion will not go away, and should not because it’s not entirely false. Fiction is more like the general than it is like the particular and history more like the particular than the general on the whole. At the same time the whole question of the particular and the general—in whatever nuanced pairings these concepts appear—will always remain open, will always be to be explored and never be finalized precisely because, in good Derridian fashion, language itself is thoroughly entangled in the question. One might even wonder whether the very distinction “general/specific” is not itself a dubious metaphor driven by the observation of natural phenomena and the needs of language to abstract facts into classes in order to say something about them. You can’t give every tree its own particular name. And it’s true that in the observable world there are observable groups with an historical and ontological status that obviously justifies classifications—although the criteria of classification is not always and everywhere made by an appeal to history or ontology but are also made with reference to use. So there are trees and there are maple trees and oak trees—with all their subclasses. And every maple may be different from every other maple but any maple is more like any other maple than it is like any oak. And there are men and women. But, as we have more recently seen, the categories of “male” and “female” are far from obvious and can be rigorously maintained only with an great effort, one that in certain circumstances becomes unsustainable or no longer useful. It may also be other abstractions, just as justice, liberty, beauty (etc) take their substance from an analogy to the natural world and are maintained at great cost. We want to believe that beauty exists, and something certainly exists to which humans tend to respond in uniform (if not universal) ways—ways that are taught and maintained but also have to be understood as being to some degree “natural.” It would be hard to set up the experiments that would lead to definitive results, but some work is being done. And we know that although our dogs do not respond to music, some birds do. They have the brain for it. But is beauty just the shape of the brain? Is it those brains that produce these chemicals when faced with these things that create the illusion of beauty? This is not irrelevant even if, as I hope and expect, it’s not going to be the whole truth of the question. If we did not have eyes we could not see. Would landscapes still be beautiful? Perhaps they would, but not to us.

This casts us back to the one great Romantic insight, what Wordsworth refers to when he says, “both what we half create and what we perceive.” “Half” is an imprecise fraction. No one knows the proportion, but the insight is valid: there is no perception without creation. The question of objectivity is irrelevant. It does not exist as such to us or our reckoning, not even quite (I suspect) to our math—though math must come closest to it.

On Knowledge in an extra platonic sense

Preliminary thoughts:

It seems important to bring into question, almost whenever possible, the inherited notion of knowledge as the ability to inscribe into language, the ability to say, to paraphrase, to translate either what is not language into language or what is already into language into more language. This is certainly an indicator of a type of intelligence. An important and indispensable skill. For it is only one way to think about knowledge, advancing the platonic hierarchy of personhood that makes a metaphor of the fact that the head is higher than the heart and the heart higher than the stomach. It is, I believe, the prejudice that leads, eventually to Bertrand Russell’s negative critique of Romanticism that turns to feeling when argument fails.

In general there is no hierarchy of intelligences or knowledges. As with all other things, value depends on the moment, on the particular use to which one wishes to put the thing, on what, on short, one is trying to do.
Any athlete, musician or creative writer understands, in particular and diverse ways, the notion that has pervaded our culture since before the days of Plato and which we call “inspiration.” (What is called “inspiration” in poetry may be called “hot hands” in athletics and by various names in the performance of music. In all cases one is “in the zone,” which may last a minute or stretch on indefinitely.) What each one knows is that if he/she took even a split second to think—to invoke the right-brain centers of language—they would fail. Each has to “let it happen.” I myself have always been an athlete and have never been a particularly good one. Nonetheless, I know that in those moments in which have been good, when I have succeeded spectacularly, I was not, consciously, thinking. Good coaches always tell players to react not to think. Good players show wisdom in their choices. It’s not just that in the heat and smoke of a contest there is no time to think. Rather it’s that thinking—in that platonic sense—is an impediment to doing. But this doing proceeds from knowledge (not something we should brush back by calling it “instinct”). The ball comes to you and you know where everyone is and you know what to do with it and you do it. (Steven Gould notwithstanding.) There is a sense, afterwards, of “I can’t believe I did that.” At least there is with mediocre athletes who slip into the zone. But there is no sense that you didn’t do—that it just happened.

I once thought it would be easy to be a writer. Just study writing. Find out what writers do. Analyze good writing. And do that. And so it baffled me that, after achieving a certain level of intellectual accomplishment, I noticed that there were a number of very good writers who, in my opinion, weren’t any smarter than I was, weren’t even as smart as I was. Who didn’t know as much. Who pronounced, in their conversation, logical absurdities no one of their stature should fall for. I thought.

But writing too is a gift. It does not come from the same muse who gives her gifts to the philosopher. She is not a lesser sister, just a different sister. Even in language, what counts, traditionally, as intelligence is not mere intelligence and what stands as knowledge is not mere knowledge. Jazz would not be possible if music were not a response to knowledge and if playing were not an intelligence. Nor would any music.
Where are we going with this? What are the implications?

We often hear of “emotional intelligence.” Such terms are probably bandied about into nonsense quite often, but behind it is, apparently, something real, valid, something that would be to a significant degree misrepresented if we did not use the word “intelligence,” which comes from an emotional knowledge that I do not want to call “instinctive” but rather “deeply learned” through experience and because of a predilection. I would say there is also a spiritual intelligence. I can’t prove that. But it stirs me to note that spiritual awareness is not quite correlated with intelligence, in the platonically derived sense. Very “intelligent” people are, today, less likely to be “spiritual,” (people like Russell who felt the need to distance himself from Christianity but also much more recently like Dawkins). I think this is more a matter of ego than anything else. People who put all their stock in that platonic version of intelligence can’t possibly subscribe to a knowledge that requires some alternative notion of intelligence for support. Nonetheless when I’ve heard such famous atheists speak I hear so many simplifications, so many faulty premises, so many things that are, by any definition, simply stupid, that I have to wonder why they are talking at all or who they think they are talking to? Because, the point here, faith in fact does not quite correlate with “intelligence.” A lot of smart people are atheists. And a lot of people much smarter (on that scale) than you and I not: philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, and scientists and great thinkers in every academic field who have the capacity of spiritual intelligence and, having it (as perhaps everyone does to some degree, as even I, now and then, can impress far better players on a soccer pitch), don’t feel the urgency to suppress it in favor of what they have been told is the only true measure of intelligence.

My Coffee Grin

I’m rich. I’m filthy stinking goddam rich.
My coffee tastes better than your coffee.
I pay a lot more for it—a lot—
And it tastes a little bit better than yours,
Almost enough to justify the exorbitant cost.
I’m a lot richer than you are,
I have money
I can’t find
anything to do with.
So I buy this filthy caffeine from this specialty
farm the mountains of Columbia
where the sky spills just enough photons every day
and where when it melts
snow drips continuously over the shallow roots
with the regularity of sand
in an hourglass
shaped like a woman's torso.
It makes me happy, happier than you.
Just a little bit happier than you.
Wipe that grin off your face.

Where Meaning Lies

We don’t live at the place where meaning is.
We live in the space where meaning happens,
where meaning vibrates like potato flakes
on a stereo speaker, configuring and re-
configuring, always settling, never
settling, or flakes that would melt
if ever they stopped hopping.

The Fundamental (Mis)conception (DRAFT)

Out of which all problems arise.
Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity.
Particle and Wave.
My, myself, and I.
Same and Different.
Language and Writing.
The two that are two and are one.
What is and what is perceived.
Selfishness and Altruism.
Nature and Nurture.
Versus, and, or, either.
Free will and Determinism.
Truth and fiction.
You and your twin.
Reason and Poetry.
Poetry and Prose.
Men and Women.
Law and Freedom.
Living and Dying.
You and I.
We could go on.
The problems of arrangement.
The problem of the pairings
That encompass as they exclude.
The limits, the borders and boundaries
Without which we cannot think but which
We cannot cross
Because they don’t exist.

The Meaning of Meaning

Probably the seminal moment of my Ph.D. work: I took the conservative position that words have meanings—I called them primary meanings—that writers can play with as they wish but not erase. “No,” I was told. “This is not true. Read Derrida.” I read Derrida, and Barthes, and Lacan, read about the sliding of the signified over the icy surface of the signifier. I understood. Words have no meaning not only because they do not exist (what is a word but the idealized sewing together of signifier and signified) but because what does exist—signifiers on the one hand and signifieds on the other—can never remain bonded. Meanings never quite settle; postcards never quite arrive. This is how meaning is. This is how it works. This is the metaphysical state of meaning. This is not however how words are experienced. Words are experienced as though they exist and as though meaning is something they have. And in any language the meanings experienced by person A are likely to coincide deeply with those of person B. It’s what makes the effect of communication via language possible. This “as if” must be kept in mind whenever one pursues questions of meaning. Words do not have meanings but they have histories. Or rather, "having" being impossible with signifiers, each of us has a history with each word we have encountered, histories of which we are never more than partly aware of. Each word bumps against that history like a steel ball in a pinball game lighting or unlighting all the bumpers.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was curious about how OzHouse would do under the microscope of this author. It offers another modern twist on fairy tales. I'd say it would do okay.

Warner lost a little credibility with me by getting the name of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum wrong (she calls him Frank L. Baum), but as a history of the Fairy tale, the book does a good job. It has to be a selective history, in this case lacking little in breadth but a lot in depth. It skims over everything. It starts slow and obvious, but becomes interesting and even informative about chapter 3. The tone is lighter than one might expect or want, as though the author isn't convinced she's doing serious scholarship, which, really, she isn't.



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Last Night's Dream

Last night’s dream

Was too strange to tell.

Freud would have loved it

But Freud would have been wrong about it

But Freud would have said that my saying so only proved he was right.

What a bastard.

The Day of Sad Consolation

Is the universe alive
and does it know what it’s doing?
 
Are the forces we measure
its brainwaves, its heart beat?

Is expansion a breath?

Are black holes cancer?

And are we a part of it

or do we just look at it?

Can we use our computers to help it to learn what it is?

And why does all poetry require the parts

we say we would like to get rid of

all that death stuff?

 Did the universe wake up one day

and call itself God and only then perceive a nature

bigger than its own that could not be gainsaid

that told it there was no other way

they will have to have the power to kill

and they will have to die

and they will have to love

and lose everything they love

if they are ever to have anything

if they are ever to know anything

 if they are ever to be at all?

Human Arrogance

We are often astonished that our little brains on our little planet evolved for no other purpose than survival could have the capacity to comprehend the universe. I find it more likely that we can’t. That astonishing as it is that we can perceive and deduce as much as we can, we know no more than we have senses for and brain to imagine. The truth about reality more likely requires hundreds of senses we lack. That dark matter is transparent to those who have the senses for it. Those things that are not matter or energy surround us like water to fish. But we lack the apparatus to perceive or imagine it.

Petitionary Prayer

They say that silence is prayer
sometimes, that attention is prayer
or can be, or music, but we grow up believing
that prayer is only asking God for things.
I live in a world in which small children
are torn apart by bombs, burned to nothing
by cigarettes dropped on couches, where
sinkholes open and swallow them whole
before they learn God’s name in any language.
Lost, they freeze to death; they fall
from the sky like rain. People shoot them or
they shoot themselves in play. You can ask
God for anything you wish. I ask only for this:
understanding, calm in the storm of my soul,
a way to believe the rules were set for ample reason, and
for eyes and heart and voice to look
to listen, maybe
someday
to sing.

How He Died

My friend reminded me, as we were having lunch
and I was forking a great big leaf of lettuce
into my awkward mouth on the first pleasant day
of spring after the longest winter on record,
that his brother had died.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “killed himself, wasn’t it?” Just then
 I imagined I saw Patty at another table,
Patty who left me with such longing.
But Patty would have been much older now
than the woman who pulled her hair behind her ear
in precisely the way that Patty always did. And my friend
was still talking. “How did he do it?” I said,
cutting the lettuce with my bread knife
into a more chewable size. Thinking back now
I believe there was some silence I did not notice.
The odor of hyacinths caught me
by surprise, pulling my eyes to the brick plaster planter
deep with soil by the walkway. My friend
decided he’d been secretly troubled for years.
 
Don’t you just hate berries in a salad?
 
                                                                     My friend’s
brother –something about a wife and a daughter
and an impulse too strong to resist but nonetheless
guiltily regretted, he stuttered.  And then
the woman turned around
to look for something in the red leather purse
she’d hung from the back of her chair.
I held up my hand to tell my friend
to pause. But I was right. It wasn’t Patty.
And I raised another spurt of lettuce toward my gaping mouth
and caught my friend’s eyes, staring back at me in pain
at how I’d left him hanging.

Autopoiesis

Poetry and biology, rules and chance, order and freedom, centrifugal and centripetal forces

The DNA passes on mechanically and varies unpredictably the genes (of all history)

The poet uses all language forms and varies programmatically, open to channel the visitations of chance.

The government’s laws. The need for courts. The invention of society and culture against the backdrop of tradition and principles.

This is the fundamental pervasive structure of being. This is the one God wanted.

The chance event in order, the bad poem, the genetic failure. Most poems are bad; most mutations are useless. People are ruined; they die stupidly.

Our lives rest on this principle; it is the principle of death as well as life.

He Said

What is contradiction if not the manifestation

of language's inability to encompass being?

He said

We are on the earth to love,

Whether we have been put here or not .

He said

That is our job.

That is our joy.

There is no contradiction.
The rest is gravy.

I said
What about self-actualization?
What about becoming?

He said
Until you are someone, you cannot love.
You can only need.