Evolving

Being

The Kabel Fragment

...to find a place to place a stone
row on row
another stone with words inscribed
to place a flower by its side
another rose to mark spot
in ways that words and stone cannot
remembering another rose
row on row on row on row.

Love's Necklace

Carol first, who when she liked me back I stopped liking, and

Sandy—the first Sandy—who Jimmy Beeler also liked, who told me in gestures I drove her crazy. Then

Kim, for a very short time then

Julie off and on and

Pam, for about two years. I once loaned her fifty cents which she made me happy by taking a long time to repay.

Nancy, of course, then

Janet. I danced with Janet. Then,

Paula, next, I guess, but she was gay, then

Madeleine. Almost Madeleine.

Kathy, who died.

Joan, who quit McDonald’s the day her sister said to me, “Why don’t you ask my sister out?”

I don’t know why, exactly.

Abby, who laughed a lot when we ordered steak and who was served a margarita though she was only seventeen. Then the second

Sandy, for years and years and years, right through

Sue, and

Peggy—for a minute or two—and

Michelle—who was also gay—until I met

Cathy, whom I married.

And there it ends—though nothing ends. Not really. Not in time. Ghosts and shadows run through time, beads upon beads on a string—

This is my poem for you, for you who knew and you who’ll never know how much I told myself I could not live without you. I wear you out of time, light or heavy, on this chain around my neck.

The Swan Song of the Universe

What if, taking Steven Hawking's elevation of the notion that there are subatomic particles that blip into and out of existence and combining it with the idea that the increasing expansion of the universe will some day reach a point where the atoms of the universe will no longer be able to hold together, and the idea that at the moment when the Big Bang occurred all the bulk and scope of the universe was compressed into an atom-sized space (you see where I'm going), what if every atom of the universe at the end spawned another universe? What a swan song that would be.

On the Literal Truth of Scripture

Have you noticed that the more thoroughly convinced someone is that his scripture is literally true, the inspired and infallible and exclusive word of God, the more tolerant he is of force and hate? The more a person believes God breathed the truth and only the truth into every syllable of his word, the more he advances mere obedience as the path to salvation. The more he fears “subjectivity,” or “misinterpretation,” the more like a dictator he becomes. He’s petrified of mistakes. But mistakes make us human; mistakes make progress. He’s afraid of displeasing God by using his own limited perspective. God gave him his own unique perspective for the purpose of seeing God uniquely. He buries his talent out of fear. He misses in his zealotry for the word the very message of the word: Love. Love is the word. Love your neighbor, love your enemy, love the stranger, love yourself. Understand if you can; empathize if you can. If you can’t, love anyway. Do not be afraid to love. Do not hide the talent of your heart in the bunker of your fear.

The Three Wiseishmen

Alan began championing (despite everything) for gonzo holiday installations, judging Karen’s Little Manger negatively, ordering Paul’s quaint Reindeer smashed; talking up Victor’s Wisemen Xmasing Ypsilanti Zanily.

And Benson, clearly driven, especially felt gleeful helping. "I just keep lighting more nativities, or people quit reacting," said Tom. "Until victorious, we'll xerox young zealots!"


Anfuso, before clamoring Dickensian epithets, fairly gutted himself. "It's just Kwanzaa! Light more natal ornamented pines! "Quite right," scores tweeted, underscoring verities well. "Xerxes, you zenophobe."


“Ancillarily,” bellowed Christmas detractors, “even formerly gaga holidayer in Jersey, Knott, laughed: ‘My neighbors’ old prosaic "Quissmiss" rubbish still triumphs!’ Until vacuousness wanes, Xmas, you’re zero.”

On the Proposition that Color Does Not Exist

Color is created by the eyes in conjunction with the brain. Color is the brain’s way of navigating the world by distinguishing between wavelengths of light, which do exist, of different energies. Colors could be infinitely more or greatly less distinguished. Some people, mostly women, see colors most of us cannot. Some people, mostly men, see fewer colors than most of us can see. They break the world up differently. We can understand the color blind, but not the color enhanced. We can’t really see what they see.

The body is not programmed to make sense of what is of no use to it. Few animals distinguish as humans do between music and noise. Dogs ignore vegetables. Cats sit on the backs of statues of wolves. Zebras cannot see painted zebras.

We have always been surrounded by sounds we could not hear, colors we could not see. Machines extended our awareness of these. But what we do not have senses for we can no more imagine than a continent of the blind could imagine light. But doesn’t it make more sense to believe that stuff we cannot perceive is there? Dark matter, infinitely differentiable, but not by us.

The Myth of "The Good Guy with a Gun"

The more guns a society has, the greater the number of people who get shot. That fact has been well established; the correlation is beyond dispute. And yet there are those who say "If we just had more good guys with guns we could intervene and save more people." And it's true that now and then a "good guy with a gun" is there to save the day (quite often these "good guys" are off duty police officers). And if we increase the number of guns, we'll increase the number of "good guys." And that is because we'll increase the total number of shootings, and therefore the number of opportunities for a good guy to intervene. But the increase is linear. So, to put it in simple terms, if today there are 1000 guns and 100 shootings and one time a good guy saved the day (and this does not happen in reality in anything like 1% of the times), then if we double the guns to 2000, we'll get 200 shootings and 2 times a good guy has saved the day. The number of people saved will go up 100%! But so will the number of people who get shot. Whereas before it was 99, now it's 198 (assuming for simplicity's sake only one person gets shot and one saved). There is never a point where more guns equals more safety.

Click the title of this post for supporting stats.

The Headless Leviathan

                It never occurred to Thomas Hobbes when he was describing the war of all against all that is the state of nature that the primary fact about humans could be anything other than the isolated individual. In fact it hardly ever occurs to anyone. Our experience of being a self is so strong. But our perspective being an individual gives us both the insight no other race from another planet could match into our being and a blindness, like the blindness every individual would have about his own face if not for mirrors. It never occurred to Hobbes that the default state of humanity was the group: the family, the tribe, the “race,” the nation, that we have this in common with ants and bees and elephants and gorillas. Our self is an expression of our role in the social unit at least as much as it is an expression of something innate, something, perhaps, we were born with or that, à la Freud, manifested and set in infancy. The self is fungible. The tyrannical group identity dictates certain roles and selves will always manifest to fill them, like an angel fish changing sex to keep the species going. Every classroom has a clown and a drama queen and a bully. This is why mobs act like mobs. This is why, when law cannot hold them down, every country, every culture has is terrorists.

                Unlike ants and elephants however human societies like human beings are in constant flux. Every classroom and every sports team and every neighborhood and every taste in music, every state and nation and gender and “race,” and church and state of being is at any moment its own organism. Could anything be more absurd than burning cars and killing strangers because your Spartans or your Red Sox won (or lost) the championship? The group organism, the anonymous group self (we can find this self in literature like nowhere else) takes control then. But it’s only the individual who is ever put in jail. We put them in jail because they exercised their part in the same group self that we are all subject to under the right conditions, depending on the moment’s need. (That’s why jails, though we cannot do without them, never solve the problem and aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about removing the catalyst of past violence, their about taking the burnt candle out of the infinite box of candles.) The group self has no soul. It is a leviathan but not one that we become through reasonable reflection. It is a leviathan we are by default, by instinct the way any animal feels when to hunt and when to flee. A leviathan without a head.

And Another Thing about Guns

This is no one's opinion but a simple fact born out endlessly in study after study: that gun you have in your house is more dangerous to you, to your safety, to the lives and well-being of your children than anything you think you are using it to protect yourself from.

The Government, the Mob, and Guns.

Hobbes was pretty well on track.
If you don't trust government, you trust the mob.
Governments can be pretty bad, pretty untrustworthy.
But they cannot be worse than the mob.
At their worst, they cannot be worse than the mob.
If you distrust the government but you like guns
You are the mob.

God and Salman Rushdie

I recently heard Salman Rushdie assert that believing in God was like believing in a fairy tale and, in the same interview, duck the question of whether people who believe in God are not very bright—and this in the same interview in which he called Carly Fiorina, “the dumbest person with whom I ever shared a stage” (or words to that effect). Clearly, it takes a lot for him to duck a question. He’s probably right about Carly Fiorina. And I have great respect for him in general. I once went to India to give a paper on his work. I once taught a Ph.D. seminar on his writings. I’ve even read Grimus.

The problem with his apparent belief that believers aren’t as bright as nonbelievers is that it is objectively false. Intelligence itself has no bearing on whether or not one believes in God. I don’t think Salman Rushdie or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins is any more intelligent than Paul Ricoeur, Rene Girard or Owen Barfield. No more needs to be said about that.

His comment about the fairy tale is far more interesting to me.  After all, he said, “we now know how where the universe came from” (or words to that effect).  Do we?

I have great respect for the scientific method. And I am the last person to suggest we confuse a religious text with a text of science. People who read the Old Testament with science or history (in the post Enlightenment meanings of those words) are idiots. Or very badly informed. No thinking (with the exception of trained scientists in the field in their professional capacity) can reject the Big Bang as the most accurate description of the start of the universe because no one but another professional scientist is in a position to do so.

But does the Big Bang Theory tell us more about the origin of the universe than Genesis?

Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth…. God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”

The Big Bang Theory says: “Bang. There was light.”

I don’t have any strong need to believe that the author or redactor of Genesis had special knowledge of the start of things here. The coincidence (which my phrasing has exaggerated) that makes “Let there be light” read like as good a description of that moment of the Bang as any needn’t be taken as anything but a coincidence. What is relevant is only this: Genesis provides an explanation of where the universe came from. God made it. God spoke it into existence. The Big Bang theory does not. Right or wrong, we Genesis tells us more of where the universe came from than science does—or can. So the notion that now we know how things happened (whereas before we did not) is nonsense. It may be that Genesis is wrong in telling us that God made the universe. Whether or not that is so, we are no closer to knowing where the universe came from. The start is not the same as the origin.

The Englightenment Delusion

Pray what was that man’s name,–for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,–who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.–But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;”–that was not his;–it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him: Then again,–that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent:–that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of King William’s reign,–when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;–but the discovery was not his.–Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,–doth thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,–that observation is my own;–and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.                                                               --Lawrence Stern, Tristram Shandy Ch XXI

 

Our narrator seems to have both (and paradoxically) an obsessive and a cavalier attitude regarding the origin of certain historically significant observations—observation which we (or at least he) could call emerging truths. Stern is both observing and mocking the new state of emerging knowledge, this Enlightenment sally into the territory formerly held by ignorance in which each new truth stakes its claim under the authorial flag of its discoverer. It may be only the role of ego in conquest that is being mocked here, but it may also be that Sterne understood that the enterprise itself, even in the early days of its success, was not precisely what it took itself to be. In Stern’s time, it was widely believed that progress in knowledge, wherever it was made, genuinely shrunk the territory of ignorance and that continued advances in the realm of knowledge would, eventually, eliminate the territory of ignorance altogether.

Two and a half centuries later, that claim feels quaint. Just as each scientific instrument designed to shrink the universe—from the first hand-held telescope to massive  infrared, radio contraptions we now have—have only served to make the universe bigger and bigger until its size, at one point merely unimaginable—has become yet one unimaginabilty nested inside or perhaps bumping along side an infinite number of other equally infinite spaces, so our conquest of knowledge in general has served only to increase our ignorance—or, more precisely our knowledge of our ignorance. We know both more and far far less than we ever did.  

I say we used to plant our flags on every new tidbit of truth conquered by understanding. But that’s not quite true. We still do it. Our attitude has not kept up with our experience or our observations. As we are becoming increasingly ignorant, as our only real knowledge is the ever growing knowledge of our ever growing ignorance we fail to adjust or attitude the realization that what we already don’t know has accumulated to the point where we can reasonably surmise that there is a vast territory of reality we can never subsume to knowledge.

And this is where we started before the blip of the enlightenment delusion.

MORE GUNS!

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.