So now I'm putting labels on posts. And in the process I am backreading myself in a more systematic way than I usually do. Something occured to me today, something that occurs to me every couple years or so.
All my posts are essentially the same.
When I was a kid I liked to keep my room messy, in part so that nobody else could find anything. A maze, whose hidden treasures were for my hands alone. When I make a new friend, it's my reflex to try and tell them my entire life story, right off the bat, just to see how they react to various things in it. A whole battery of tests, to see which mental contagions they already possess and to which they may be immune. So, too, when I keep a blog, I just dump everything out in no particular order. A smashed pinata, once full of ideas.
Never Cry Over Spilled Guts isn't just the title of my blog. It's part of my philosophy of life. My ideal would be total transparency. To be able to telepathically transmit everything I know, remember, think and feel to anyone I met who was interested. And yes, to be able to receive similar transmissions in return, if people were willing to send them. I want to be able to have total and perfect trust, or to be in such a place where I am comfortable being totally transparent even without trust.
In real life this is impracticable. For example, I can't show this blog to my mom. In posts made in the past, or even ones in the more recent present, I've said things about her which would hurt her deeply to read. Things I don't know if she would be willing to understand or forgive even with a telepathic infodump. And I couldn't have shown it to Dad, either, while he was alive. While he was alive I spent my blogtime complaining about him, and said all my nice things to his face. Now I can't say nice things to his face anymore, and the only thing I can be annoyed at him for is being dead. And I have a couple of ex-friends, or acquaintances with whom I've lost touch over the years, who would probably say I was a self-centered bastard for still coming on here and ranting about myself and my favorite random crap every day.
So with very few exceptions, I actually would want the whole world to know this much about me.
But! I have made the information much more trouble to access than it's worth by making my blog user-unfriendly. This is not just self-deprecation. I've devoted enough of my time and attention and sacred honor to various internet pursuits to know what is and is not likely to get, and keep, people's attention. This blog is the polar opposite of that. It is carefully constructed to be ugly to the eye, clunky and frustrating to navigate, and lacking in any narrative direction or topical cohesion. It is self-referential in the extreme, but without internal links, FAQ, or any other resource to guide the potentially interested passerby.
Now, why would I do this, this contradictory pattern of actions? I'm still not sure. But I have clearly been doing it for a long time, with more things than my blog, and I ought to try to understand why.
Recently I've been pondering this thought: Most people get into poetry as a way to express themselves. I got into it as a way to control myself. To impose order and structure and shape onto parts of myself I didn't recognize, trust, or like. Not much order, you understand. Just enough that I knew more or less where I was, what I was doing. Not enough to be easily explained to someone else. Not enough to turn the hedge maze into a flower garden, turn the nice-but-weirdo chick into a real cool babe who happens to know things about weird stuff.
I have to go home from work now, but I am quite sure I'll have time at work tomorrow to blog more about blogging about my blog. Or write about myself. Either way, I'll enjoy doing it. Which is as good a reason to continue as any.
the story, and who owns it
One of the things Dad did by ending his own life was to give us, his children and foster children, control of the narrative.
Let me backtrack and explain that a bit.
Social units are very fluid today. Most people will have at least three social spheres in which they move--work, family, and friends. And in many cases these three spheres will involve totally different individuals, have different standards and accepted codes of conduct, and expect different things from their members. Each person will usually have each social sphere at a different trust level, of course. For example, a person might feel totally comfortable (at gold) in their circle of friends, but still be careful to remain polite distance (steel) or even refrain from any emotional connection (glass) at work.
Two things bind together any social sphere, and I will speak of the second at greater length. The first is the actions people carry out together, and second is the narrative which gives context to those actions. The narrative may find physical form in things like the family Christmas letter, videotapes of gatherings, or in the reports and task tracking that happens in the workplace. But all of these are merely representations of the narrative to which I refer. This narrative is the shared understanding between people of what it means that they are together. The story that forms inside a person's mind, to give shape and emotional weight to the fact that they and their friends, family or co-workers share space and time and tasks. Each person carries these "stories of us" inside their personality, whether such are outwardly expressed or not--how being a member of this group defines their identity, what pride they can take on or what shame they must bear which reflects their understanding of the group as a whole.
In my earlier post I took pains to point out that self comprises two things: the ability to relate and the power to choose. I believe, further, that the personality is constructed by the use of many overlapping narratives, in the same way that buildings are made of metal and stone and wood and plastic and plaster and fiberboard. There are the stories the child tells herself, of being a daughter and sister and BFF and secret princess, the stories the young man tells himself of being a son and student and hanging-out buddy and future secret agent/president/rockstar. Every person has at least as many narratives of self as they have social spheres--plus one, the internal narrative. Which cannot be shared, unless you believe in telepathy or communication through dreams. In which case it can still only be shared for very brief moments and is usually kinda disturbing, even to people who were expecting it. We are so used to loneliness that we are startled by our own spiritual nudity when even a friend stops by.
Whenever Dad was part of a group, he bent the story. As though his very presence was so heavy that your thoughts curved around and ran back to him, even when he wasn't physically there. Everybody perceived this about him. Dog only knows how he perceived the phenomenon. I suspect that was the form his magic took. He'd studied and practiced more magic than me for longer, and I think focused more on what I call the sorcery side (evoking story-changing experiences in and for people) than on the divination side (being able to recognize what it is that's actually happening while it's happening). Though when he put his mind to divining he was no slouch, either, he had to be reminded to use it--the "put your head down and plow through the obstacles!" attitude came much more easily to him.
But I digress. Everybody wants to bend the story. (Note to self: Yes. You, too, who want to be invisible, yours is the sneakiest ambition, because you want to change the way everybody thinks and feels about everything without anyone being able to point their finger and say, "you, it was you who did that.") Everybody wanted a piece of what Dad had, or wanted him to use it a little differently than he did.
And if he'd been incapacitated, there would have been many who would come to us and say, Well, this is what the story is really all about. This is what's happening to him and what's happening to you and what it means. This is what he meant by it. There would be many who would come to us and tug at the stories we have with Dad in them, tug and pull with the best intentions they owned, to make our stories fit their stories, to make our worlds and theirs a little more alike. And if such people believed they understood Dad better than we did, understood our relationship to him better than we did, they would want us to reconsider. To redefine, to shade our perspectives with a little bit of theirs, to see Dad and all his works a little more as they saw him.
Which is not a necessarily bad thing for people to do. Hell, we all have to bring our narratives and the personalities they build into some form of congruence if we're going to live together as allies, or even friennemies.
But many things change when a person is dead. When a big fish thrashes up out of our ocean into the dog-knows-what beyond, you cannot ride in his wake anymore. Even if someone would love to say to you, "Reconsider, shade your perspective with mine, see him as I want you to see him, and all the things he said, think of them as I think of them"--now they will hesitate. People will hesitate to imply about a dead man things they would imply quite glibly about a sick man. People will not pull and tug on your perspectives of a dead man the way they would your perspectives of a man they don't see or have seen and don't approve of. They would say to themselves, if they thought of such things consciously, "He is dead; he no longer weighs on the story. I do not need to compete with him for control of the narrative, for, dying, he reliquished it. And I have all the time in the world."
In our bereavement people are especially hesitant to interpret. Hard enough to face a death that surprises--there are platitudes for that. Oh, God willed it. Oh, what a terrible accident, gone before his time. Oh, I'm sure that's not how he would have wanted it. But for a death chosen, there are no soothing platitudes to say. There is no recourse to God or randomness or the unfairness of it all. There are only the horns of a dilemma: condemn the dead, or imply one's condemnation of the living by condoning the dead?
Oh, I'm angry with him. As I would have been for him doing any stupid reckless thing while living. But I forgive him for it, too. Because I know him and I know the astonishing levels of pain of all kinds he could withstand. And if he reached a point where it was enough, well. It was beyond a point I myself could have reached, little doubt of that. And if there'd been anything any of us could have done that would actually have helped, even that proud man was desperate enough to have asked. Dayenu, as another dead man I know would have said. It is enough, let it be enough.
Odd thing is, I couldn't even think of names to name if you asked me which people I'm referring to above. But one day soon, maybe you'll have a conversation and feel a tug on a story you treasure--and if you do, remember reading this. Remember, and laugh, and say to yourself, "The more fool they, for this story belongs to me."
Let me backtrack and explain that a bit.
Social units are very fluid today. Most people will have at least three social spheres in which they move--work, family, and friends. And in many cases these three spheres will involve totally different individuals, have different standards and accepted codes of conduct, and expect different things from their members. Each person will usually have each social sphere at a different trust level, of course. For example, a person might feel totally comfortable (at gold) in their circle of friends, but still be careful to remain polite distance (steel) or even refrain from any emotional connection (glass) at work.
Two things bind together any social sphere, and I will speak of the second at greater length. The first is the actions people carry out together, and second is the narrative which gives context to those actions. The narrative may find physical form in things like the family Christmas letter, videotapes of gatherings, or in the reports and task tracking that happens in the workplace. But all of these are merely representations of the narrative to which I refer. This narrative is the shared understanding between people of what it means that they are together. The story that forms inside a person's mind, to give shape and emotional weight to the fact that they and their friends, family or co-workers share space and time and tasks. Each person carries these "stories of us" inside their personality, whether such are outwardly expressed or not--how being a member of this group defines their identity, what pride they can take on or what shame they must bear which reflects their understanding of the group as a whole.
In my earlier post I took pains to point out that self comprises two things: the ability to relate and the power to choose. I believe, further, that the personality is constructed by the use of many overlapping narratives, in the same way that buildings are made of metal and stone and wood and plastic and plaster and fiberboard. There are the stories the child tells herself, of being a daughter and sister and BFF and secret princess, the stories the young man tells himself of being a son and student and hanging-out buddy and future secret agent/president/rockstar. Every person has at least as many narratives of self as they have social spheres--plus one, the internal narrative. Which cannot be shared, unless you believe in telepathy or communication through dreams. In which case it can still only be shared for very brief moments and is usually kinda disturbing, even to people who were expecting it. We are so used to loneliness that we are startled by our own spiritual nudity when even a friend stops by.
Whenever Dad was part of a group, he bent the story. As though his very presence was so heavy that your thoughts curved around and ran back to him, even when he wasn't physically there. Everybody perceived this about him. Dog only knows how he perceived the phenomenon. I suspect that was the form his magic took. He'd studied and practiced more magic than me for longer, and I think focused more on what I call the sorcery side (evoking story-changing experiences in and for people) than on the divination side (being able to recognize what it is that's actually happening while it's happening). Though when he put his mind to divining he was no slouch, either, he had to be reminded to use it--the "put your head down and plow through the obstacles!" attitude came much more easily to him.
But I digress. Everybody wants to bend the story. (Note to self: Yes. You, too, who want to be invisible, yours is the sneakiest ambition, because you want to change the way everybody thinks and feels about everything without anyone being able to point their finger and say, "you, it was you who did that.") Everybody wanted a piece of what Dad had, or wanted him to use it a little differently than he did.
And if he'd been incapacitated, there would have been many who would come to us and say, Well, this is what the story is really all about. This is what's happening to him and what's happening to you and what it means. This is what he meant by it. There would be many who would come to us and tug at the stories we have with Dad in them, tug and pull with the best intentions they owned, to make our stories fit their stories, to make our worlds and theirs a little more alike. And if such people believed they understood Dad better than we did, understood our relationship to him better than we did, they would want us to reconsider. To redefine, to shade our perspectives with a little bit of theirs, to see Dad and all his works a little more as they saw him.
Which is not a necessarily bad thing for people to do. Hell, we all have to bring our narratives and the personalities they build into some form of congruence if we're going to live together as allies, or even friennemies.
But many things change when a person is dead. When a big fish thrashes up out of our ocean into the dog-knows-what beyond, you cannot ride in his wake anymore. Even if someone would love to say to you, "Reconsider, shade your perspective with mine, see him as I want you to see him, and all the things he said, think of them as I think of them"--now they will hesitate. People will hesitate to imply about a dead man things they would imply quite glibly about a sick man. People will not pull and tug on your perspectives of a dead man the way they would your perspectives of a man they don't see or have seen and don't approve of. They would say to themselves, if they thought of such things consciously, "He is dead; he no longer weighs on the story. I do not need to compete with him for control of the narrative, for, dying, he reliquished it. And I have all the time in the world."
In our bereavement people are especially hesitant to interpret. Hard enough to face a death that surprises--there are platitudes for that. Oh, God willed it. Oh, what a terrible accident, gone before his time. Oh, I'm sure that's not how he would have wanted it. But for a death chosen, there are no soothing platitudes to say. There is no recourse to God or randomness or the unfairness of it all. There are only the horns of a dilemma: condemn the dead, or imply one's condemnation of the living by condoning the dead?
Oh, I'm angry with him. As I would have been for him doing any stupid reckless thing while living. But I forgive him for it, too. Because I know him and I know the astonishing levels of pain of all kinds he could withstand. And if he reached a point where it was enough, well. It was beyond a point I myself could have reached, little doubt of that. And if there'd been anything any of us could have done that would actually have helped, even that proud man was desperate enough to have asked. Dayenu, as another dead man I know would have said. It is enough, let it be enough.
Odd thing is, I couldn't even think of names to name if you asked me which people I'm referring to above. But one day soon, maybe you'll have a conversation and feel a tug on a story you treasure--and if you do, remember reading this. Remember, and laugh, and say to yourself, "The more fool they, for this story belongs to me."
how to trick yourself into telling the truth, part 4: it's all about distrust
Dreamed last night.
Most parts of the action are gone. But I remember locations, indoor/outdoor shifts, relative levels of aloneness/togetherness. How bright it was, where there was vegetation, where architecture, where dinge. There are certain types of location which I've come to recognize; upper floors represent conscious mind structures, lower floors unconscious. Indoor locations tend to have to do with how my personality relates to itself; outdoor locations with how my personality relates to others. Patterns like that emerge after writing down, talking about, or otherwise being sure to remember the contents of dreams over a period of years. The longer the baseline, the more information can be gleaned. Just like with science. And other people's symbols are different. You can't use your baseline to interpret someone else's dreams. But you can use your own dream symbol set to understand your reactions to things that happen while you're awake, sometimes.
Maybe my ultimate goal on that score is to develop a map, or at least a legend, of my unconscious mind. So that upon waking or passing into lucidity, whichever comes first, I'll know exactly which parts of myself I've been visiting, and be able to deduce why. Of course this being a personality things are bound to shift; symbols change their emotional weighting, or come to refer to different aspects of reality. But when you have once mapped the structural aspects of a symbol, a change in its content is easier to detect, to track.
It occurs to me that my attitude here is not, and maybe never was, one of joyful exploration. Dreaming is not a retreat to a place of refuge, but a foray into enemy territory. A campaign of self-defense against myself, carried out in the most logical location.
I have always wrestled with my personality, as far as I remember. When I was little and would never have been able to phrase it that way, I was only aware that there were bad feelings I didn't want to feel and was afraid of. Having been taught as a child that these feelings were demons which were evil, came from outside of me, and wanted to make sure my soul went to hell made the struggle that much more grim and unrelenting. (And panicky. Though not so much of that, in recent years.) Of course plenty of the personality structures with which I wrestle did come from outside of me, but only in the sense that they were learned from or imposed by the actions and beliefs of other human beings. Once I figured this out, it seemed to confirm my attitude.
I was often counseled or encouraged based on the assumption that I had low self-esteem. While this was true, it was not complete. I've since met and talked to a lot of people with self-esteem issues, even in my short lifespan. (Birds of a feather, eh?) There is an pattern which occurs in a lot of people, which can be rendered in text as something like,
-> (shh! don't tell!) I want to like myself
-> but I want other people to like me
-> other people don't like me, they hate me
-> maybe they'll like me if I agree with them by hating myself
-> I'll show them I hate myself much more than they do
-> then they'll REALLY like me!
While I definitely contended with the above structure as well, my more central thought process ran something like:
1. My thoughts and emotions cannot be trusted; I find myself thinking and feeling things with which I do not want to agree and of which I do not want to approve.
2. Others do not approve of my thoughts and feelings either--but they object to different things than I do. Some of the things I fear, they want me to feel. And some of the things I want to feel, they fear.
3. When I act as I secretly wish to act, I am punished. When I act as I have been taught and believe I ought to act, I cause and experience shame and suffering.
4. Therefore, the judgments of others cannot be trusted, and my judgment has been molded by others to the point where it also cannot be trusted.
Whether the others involved were human beings or non-physical spiritual enemies was, as far as I was concerned, moot. Who cares if you were poisoned by a rattlesnake or by a spider? You're freaking poisoned! Who cares if Satan or your own unconscious mind that makes you feel as though you're surrounded by invisible bugs which laugh and crawl and try to panic you into rash actions? Whichever is responsible, the invisible-bug-feelings are your problem, and no one is going to help you with them.
Of course the invisible bug feelings are long gone. In my case at least, in practice, it was the very slow process of sifting through my emotional responses and accurately sourcing them which wore away the experiences, robbed them of their power to terrify, until they were only regrettable memories. The secret to success was not to pray to Jesus and have a magical light shine on me which burned away all the nasties and made me happy again forever. Never worked that way. Not once. Speaking in tongues, anointing with oil, fasting, being prayed over--you name it, it didn't work.
The few experiences I've had which approached something like that were not sought out by me, did not occur in a religious context, and provided me with a little perspective and some temporary relief. Just enough to shake myself off and get back to the hard work of hammering my personality into a shape I feel safer inside. Whoever or whatever was responsible for those experiences has earned my thanks. But they/it always seemed pretty task-oriented. Not into groveling or micromanaging, nor much interested in thanks. Like a driver in a hurry who gets out to pull aside a branch blocking the roadway: "c'mon, let's get this crap outta the way so we can get moving again!"
What worked for me, day to day, was to still my rational mind in the teeth of the fear and ask: What is this panic? To which beliefs is it bound? How did I come by this belief? To what extent could it have been accurate when I came to hold it? To what extent is it accurate now? Is it missing important parts of the truth? Then what is the rest of it?
To be fair my method has not worked as well for anyone else I've talked to as it did for me. I don't go around desiring earnestly to share my awesome advice with people anymore. True, imitating me has helped a few people a little bit, which does make me feel pretty good. And sometimes I'm able to put a new perspective on an experience for somebody, a perspective which wouldn't have been apparent to me unless I'd followed my own advice for so long. Which makes me feel great, when it happens.
But it occurs to me now, as it has before, that really my entire quest is based on this attitude of enmity. I didn't get into poetry, for example, to express myself. I did it in order to more effectively subjugate myself. To take things inside me that would otherwise be a real pain to hunt down and skewer on a sentence, and instead net them whole and kicking with a cleverly woven series of metaphors.
Which is a perfectly good reason why my method of self-change doesn't work well as a comprehensive program for other people, only as a supplement to their own personality maintenance strategies. And I could probably benefit from expanding my personality maintenance suite a bit, putting more energy into other things and less into a hunt-and-capture self-analysis based on distrust.
Now the aspect of the quest I'm working on is to overcome the habits of a lifetime and figure out in what these other things consist. And then develop enough trust in the process to actually do them!
Most parts of the action are gone. But I remember locations, indoor/outdoor shifts, relative levels of aloneness/togetherness. How bright it was, where there was vegetation, where architecture, where dinge. There are certain types of location which I've come to recognize; upper floors represent conscious mind structures, lower floors unconscious. Indoor locations tend to have to do with how my personality relates to itself; outdoor locations with how my personality relates to others. Patterns like that emerge after writing down, talking about, or otherwise being sure to remember the contents of dreams over a period of years. The longer the baseline, the more information can be gleaned. Just like with science. And other people's symbols are different. You can't use your baseline to interpret someone else's dreams. But you can use your own dream symbol set to understand your reactions to things that happen while you're awake, sometimes.
Maybe my ultimate goal on that score is to develop a map, or at least a legend, of my unconscious mind. So that upon waking or passing into lucidity, whichever comes first, I'll know exactly which parts of myself I've been visiting, and be able to deduce why. Of course this being a personality things are bound to shift; symbols change their emotional weighting, or come to refer to different aspects of reality. But when you have once mapped the structural aspects of a symbol, a change in its content is easier to detect, to track.
It occurs to me that my attitude here is not, and maybe never was, one of joyful exploration. Dreaming is not a retreat to a place of refuge, but a foray into enemy territory. A campaign of self-defense against myself, carried out in the most logical location.
I have always wrestled with my personality, as far as I remember. When I was little and would never have been able to phrase it that way, I was only aware that there were bad feelings I didn't want to feel and was afraid of. Having been taught as a child that these feelings were demons which were evil, came from outside of me, and wanted to make sure my soul went to hell made the struggle that much more grim and unrelenting. (And panicky. Though not so much of that, in recent years.) Of course plenty of the personality structures with which I wrestle did come from outside of me, but only in the sense that they were learned from or imposed by the actions and beliefs of other human beings. Once I figured this out, it seemed to confirm my attitude.
I was often counseled or encouraged based on the assumption that I had low self-esteem. While this was true, it was not complete. I've since met and talked to a lot of people with self-esteem issues, even in my short lifespan. (Birds of a feather, eh?) There is an pattern which occurs in a lot of people, which can be rendered in text as something like,
-> (shh! don't tell!) I want to like myself
-> but I want other people to like me
-> other people don't like me, they hate me
-> maybe they'll like me if I agree with them by hating myself
-> I'll show them I hate myself much more than they do
-> then they'll REALLY like me!
While I definitely contended with the above structure as well, my more central thought process ran something like:
1. My thoughts and emotions cannot be trusted; I find myself thinking and feeling things with which I do not want to agree and of which I do not want to approve.
2. Others do not approve of my thoughts and feelings either--but they object to different things than I do. Some of the things I fear, they want me to feel. And some of the things I want to feel, they fear.
3. When I act as I secretly wish to act, I am punished. When I act as I have been taught and believe I ought to act, I cause and experience shame and suffering.
4. Therefore, the judgments of others cannot be trusted, and my judgment has been molded by others to the point where it also cannot be trusted.
Whether the others involved were human beings or non-physical spiritual enemies was, as far as I was concerned, moot. Who cares if you were poisoned by a rattlesnake or by a spider? You're freaking poisoned! Who cares if Satan or your own unconscious mind that makes you feel as though you're surrounded by invisible bugs which laugh and crawl and try to panic you into rash actions? Whichever is responsible, the invisible-bug-feelings are your problem, and no one is going to help you with them.
Of course the invisible bug feelings are long gone. In my case at least, in practice, it was the very slow process of sifting through my emotional responses and accurately sourcing them which wore away the experiences, robbed them of their power to terrify, until they were only regrettable memories. The secret to success was not to pray to Jesus and have a magical light shine on me which burned away all the nasties and made me happy again forever. Never worked that way. Not once. Speaking in tongues, anointing with oil, fasting, being prayed over--you name it, it didn't work.
The few experiences I've had which approached something like that were not sought out by me, did not occur in a religious context, and provided me with a little perspective and some temporary relief. Just enough to shake myself off and get back to the hard work of hammering my personality into a shape I feel safer inside. Whoever or whatever was responsible for those experiences has earned my thanks. But they/it always seemed pretty task-oriented. Not into groveling or micromanaging, nor much interested in thanks. Like a driver in a hurry who gets out to pull aside a branch blocking the roadway: "c'mon, let's get this crap outta the way so we can get moving again!"
What worked for me, day to day, was to still my rational mind in the teeth of the fear and ask: What is this panic? To which beliefs is it bound? How did I come by this belief? To what extent could it have been accurate when I came to hold it? To what extent is it accurate now? Is it missing important parts of the truth? Then what is the rest of it?
To be fair my method has not worked as well for anyone else I've talked to as it did for me. I don't go around desiring earnestly to share my awesome advice with people anymore. True, imitating me has helped a few people a little bit, which does make me feel pretty good. And sometimes I'm able to put a new perspective on an experience for somebody, a perspective which wouldn't have been apparent to me unless I'd followed my own advice for so long. Which makes me feel great, when it happens.
But it occurs to me now, as it has before, that really my entire quest is based on this attitude of enmity. I didn't get into poetry, for example, to express myself. I did it in order to more effectively subjugate myself. To take things inside me that would otherwise be a real pain to hunt down and skewer on a sentence, and instead net them whole and kicking with a cleverly woven series of metaphors.
Which is a perfectly good reason why my method of self-change doesn't work well as a comprehensive program for other people, only as a supplement to their own personality maintenance strategies. And I could probably benefit from expanding my personality maintenance suite a bit, putting more energy into other things and less into a hunt-and-capture self-analysis based on distrust.
Now the aspect of the quest I'm working on is to overcome the habits of a lifetime and figure out in what these other things consist. And then develop enough trust in the process to actually do them!
efficient belief (or, how to trick yourself into telling the truth part 3)
The practical distinction between universal conditional suspension of disbelief (which I attempt to practice) and universal skepticism (which I reject without prejudice) is very small. In principle, as can be easily described, they are pretty much opposite:
Universal conditional suspension of disbelief is being willing to believe in anything provided you have not been personally confronted with a good reason not to believe it. The disbelief is always available, waiting in the wings so to speak. But you will not call it out unless you feel it is needed.
Universal skepticism is refraining from belief in anything unless you have been personally confronted with a reason to believe in it. Here the belief is what waits in the wings, arriving only when called for.
It all depends on the location of the burden of proof. You can think of the burden of proof like a boulder which must be rolled aside before a thing can enter. Do you put it in the path of belief, or of disbelief? Which is more conducive to mental health, which is a more efficient use of your spiritual resources--and of course, which is more fun? Making it very hard to let yourself accept, or making it very hard to let yourself reject?
How this plays out in practice is the Theory Stack. You may sometimes have heard me referring to this in conversation or here on the blog. Things like Solar Integrationism and the sock puppet theory of god are high on the stack; things like the Saurian conspiracy and King Arthur's literal return to save England from unspecified disaster are very low. The Theory Stack is in part about what I would prefer to believe, based on the emotional and mental states I can enter into when believing them. But it is also a true measure of what I believe about reality, what kind of a place I think the universe actually is. As I see it, since there are considerably more true things than can ever be known, more illuminating perspectives on a thing than anyone can possibly visit, it is better to err on the side of caution. To err by too much belief, rather than not enough.
Thus on the spectrum between those two possible endpoints, I choose to place the burden of proof more often in front of disbelief by a substantial proportion. Now, I've been pretty sure I understood the implications of this in my interactions with other sapients. On the down side, I often end up behaving in a naive way or finding it difficult to express my true feelings. I take people and situations at face value, fail to realize that someone is kidding until the joke has ceased to be funny. Or I'll find that someone's opinions are so different from my own that I can only discuss a tiny proportion of my own preferred opinions, because anything more would provoke the kind of disagreement in which they would perceive me to disbelieve things in which I'm perfectly happy to not disbelieve. On the up side, I make people comfortable, very comfortable interacting with me. Because whatever they believe, I can believe it; whatever they say, I don't doubt it; whatever they do, I think it's cool--within very wide limits. So I am perceived as trustworthy and friendly and kind and stuff. (At least, I think so. Hard to be 100% or even 80% sure vis-a-vis how others perceive onself, no?)
However, there is another downside that occurs to me now. Has probably occurred to me before, but I will talk about it now. Nyah.
*****
Definition intermission!
I have previously (not sure if it was here, though) made the distinction between identity beliefs and reality beliefs. Yes yes, one's identity and the identities of others are a part of reality. But I think they should be categorically separated because they serve such different functions in the personality.
For purposes of personality construction the following definitions apply:
Reality is all things which in any characteristic or mode exist independent of the self.
Identity is the sum potential within the self to form relationships with beings (especially persons, groups, and valued ideas) which exist in reality, and to choose to act based upon those relationships.
YEAH. I went there.
The only essential qualities of self are the capacity to form relationships and the power to choose. All else is predicated on a relationship: the relationship to one's body, one's physical environment, one's family, one's nation. All action takes place in context--and all context is provided by relationships.
*****
So. I have been thinking of my belief/disbelief/proof situation only in terms of reality beliefs. NOT in terms of identity beliefs. I have not been consciously attending to their transmission in the same way that I attend to the transmission of reality beliefs. At least, not as systematically and not to the same extent.
Do you see how monumentally stupid this is?
At the top of my theory stack for some time has stood the assertion I made in the Anatomy of Trust: that at silver or above operating assumptions and beliefs can be absorbed between people with little or no conscious oversight. So if my anti-unbelief strategy is causing me to treat everyone I interact with (howsoever briefly, publicly, or virtually) as silver with an asterisk, I have been absorbing identity assumptions from everyone. Like asking everyone you meet to sneeze on you in case they're sick. Or if every website in the universe had a big music file that you let upload into your temporary internet files, then closed the webpage before it started playing and never cleared the cache.
The protocols I currently have in place help me to be advertent about absorbing or not absorbing beliefs which have to do with the world outside the self. However I have been far less attentive to absorbing beliefs which relate to the interior of the self. The thing is, when you're mirroring somebody (which is how all beliefs are absorbed), your unconscious mind does all the grunt work. Waaay too much data for consciousness to be able to process and perform higher functions at the same time. So my unconscious mind (maybe yours too, who knows) generally seems not to distinguish targets of identity beliefs. If someone has fears and doubts about me or fears and doubts about themselves which they don't manifest in an obvious enough way to get my conscious mind's attention, my unconscious mind will absorb them and just mix them right in there with my own fear-and-doubt level beliefs. And once the beliefs or assumptions are in my mind, I apply them to my fears and doubts about myself, regardless who or what the original fear was pointed at. Double the negativity, double the fun!
Lately, I walk around all day having beliefs and assumptions in my mind jump up and smack me in the face and say "you suck!" Usually they come along with a recent memory of me and another person interacting, and the emotion-laden memory/impulse will be pushing an interpretation of the interaction which I know to be false and irrational. Happens to me every so often. I get in a condition where mean, nasty, self-critical thoughts like those bubble up continuously in my brain and I make myself miserable. I end up, usually, doing something crazy and self- or other-destructive to hit the reset button in my personality and clear everything out of there.
But what if these thoughts are not the results of insanity or evil, but instead of poor mental hygiene? What if I strove to be as conscious of the beliefs I temporarily adopt for the sake of interest or diplomacy on the identity side as I am on the reality side? That could mean one less thing in my brain to make me sad! I would be able to believe and emote and interact at a much higher level of emotional efficiency!
A muted huzzah, with reservations and quid pro quos. But a huzzah nonetheless.
Universal conditional suspension of disbelief is being willing to believe in anything provided you have not been personally confronted with a good reason not to believe it. The disbelief is always available, waiting in the wings so to speak. But you will not call it out unless you feel it is needed.
Universal skepticism is refraining from belief in anything unless you have been personally confronted with a reason to believe in it. Here the belief is what waits in the wings, arriving only when called for.
It all depends on the location of the burden of proof. You can think of the burden of proof like a boulder which must be rolled aside before a thing can enter. Do you put it in the path of belief, or of disbelief? Which is more conducive to mental health, which is a more efficient use of your spiritual resources--and of course, which is more fun? Making it very hard to let yourself accept, or making it very hard to let yourself reject?
How this plays out in practice is the Theory Stack. You may sometimes have heard me referring to this in conversation or here on the blog. Things like Solar Integrationism and the sock puppet theory of god are high on the stack; things like the Saurian conspiracy and King Arthur's literal return to save England from unspecified disaster are very low. The Theory Stack is in part about what I would prefer to believe, based on the emotional and mental states I can enter into when believing them. But it is also a true measure of what I believe about reality, what kind of a place I think the universe actually is. As I see it, since there are considerably more true things than can ever be known, more illuminating perspectives on a thing than anyone can possibly visit, it is better to err on the side of caution. To err by too much belief, rather than not enough.
Thus on the spectrum between those two possible endpoints, I choose to place the burden of proof more often in front of disbelief by a substantial proportion. Now, I've been pretty sure I understood the implications of this in my interactions with other sapients. On the down side, I often end up behaving in a naive way or finding it difficult to express my true feelings. I take people and situations at face value, fail to realize that someone is kidding until the joke has ceased to be funny. Or I'll find that someone's opinions are so different from my own that I can only discuss a tiny proportion of my own preferred opinions, because anything more would provoke the kind of disagreement in which they would perceive me to disbelieve things in which I'm perfectly happy to not disbelieve. On the up side, I make people comfortable, very comfortable interacting with me. Because whatever they believe, I can believe it; whatever they say, I don't doubt it; whatever they do, I think it's cool--within very wide limits. So I am perceived as trustworthy and friendly and kind and stuff. (At least, I think so. Hard to be 100% or even 80% sure vis-a-vis how others perceive onself, no?)
However, there is another downside that occurs to me now. Has probably occurred to me before, but I will talk about it now. Nyah.
*****
Definition intermission!
I have previously (not sure if it was here, though) made the distinction between identity beliefs and reality beliefs. Yes yes, one's identity and the identities of others are a part of reality. But I think they should be categorically separated because they serve such different functions in the personality.
For purposes of personality construction the following definitions apply:
Reality is all things which in any characteristic or mode exist independent of the self.
Identity is the sum potential within the self to form relationships with beings (especially persons, groups, and valued ideas) which exist in reality, and to choose to act based upon those relationships.
YEAH. I went there.
The only essential qualities of self are the capacity to form relationships and the power to choose. All else is predicated on a relationship: the relationship to one's body, one's physical environment, one's family, one's nation. All action takes place in context--and all context is provided by relationships.
*****
So. I have been thinking of my belief/disbelief/proof situation only in terms of reality beliefs. NOT in terms of identity beliefs. I have not been consciously attending to their transmission in the same way that I attend to the transmission of reality beliefs. At least, not as systematically and not to the same extent.
Do you see how monumentally stupid this is?
At the top of my theory stack for some time has stood the assertion I made in the Anatomy of Trust: that at silver or above operating assumptions and beliefs can be absorbed between people with little or no conscious oversight. So if my anti-unbelief strategy is causing me to treat everyone I interact with (howsoever briefly, publicly, or virtually) as silver with an asterisk, I have been absorbing identity assumptions from everyone. Like asking everyone you meet to sneeze on you in case they're sick. Or if every website in the universe had a big music file that you let upload into your temporary internet files, then closed the webpage before it started playing and never cleared the cache.
The protocols I currently have in place help me to be advertent about absorbing or not absorbing beliefs which have to do with the world outside the self. However I have been far less attentive to absorbing beliefs which relate to the interior of the self. The thing is, when you're mirroring somebody (which is how all beliefs are absorbed), your unconscious mind does all the grunt work. Waaay too much data for consciousness to be able to process and perform higher functions at the same time. So my unconscious mind (maybe yours too, who knows) generally seems not to distinguish targets of identity beliefs. If someone has fears and doubts about me or fears and doubts about themselves which they don't manifest in an obvious enough way to get my conscious mind's attention, my unconscious mind will absorb them and just mix them right in there with my own fear-and-doubt level beliefs. And once the beliefs or assumptions are in my mind, I apply them to my fears and doubts about myself, regardless who or what the original fear was pointed at. Double the negativity, double the fun!
Lately, I walk around all day having beliefs and assumptions in my mind jump up and smack me in the face and say "you suck!" Usually they come along with a recent memory of me and another person interacting, and the emotion-laden memory/impulse will be pushing an interpretation of the interaction which I know to be false and irrational. Happens to me every so often. I get in a condition where mean, nasty, self-critical thoughts like those bubble up continuously in my brain and I make myself miserable. I end up, usually, doing something crazy and self- or other-destructive to hit the reset button in my personality and clear everything out of there.
But what if these thoughts are not the results of insanity or evil, but instead of poor mental hygiene? What if I strove to be as conscious of the beliefs I temporarily adopt for the sake of interest or diplomacy on the identity side as I am on the reality side? That could mean one less thing in my brain to make me sad! I would be able to believe and emote and interact at a much higher level of emotional efficiency!
A muted huzzah, with reservations and quid pro quos. But a huzzah nonetheless.
not important
i don't have a project to distract me from these malfunctioning mental machines, to use up the bandwidth in my brain on something positive. is not an album a project? but i am not working on it as much as i feel i should be. last night dave encouraged me to play guitar, but i didn't play. i didn't. didn't feel like it or something. felt like my bad mood would make the music bad instead of the music making my bad mood better, felt stupid and embarrassed. which is totally irrational considering dave likes my music and wanted me to play. and i would have been competing with what? a house episode we'd already seen the best parts of? just didn't have enough oomph to get out of my chair and say, hey pause the tv, let's go.
so angry at myself. so angry i can't even type the word angry multiple times in a row like is sometimes therapeutic. i feel sleepy all the time even when i get a good seven hours and food and a vitamin. not excited or interested. not important.
dave said last night that i was saying things, but none of them really seemed connected to each other. a bunch of non sequitur one-liners. this was true, and here's why it was that way. because whatever i was watching or doing, inside my head there was the "greatest hits of recent embarrassment and shame" collection. i would keep thinking of every situation where i made someone uncomfortable or embarrassed, every person i could have reached out and cheered up that i failed to, every person in my life with whom i've lost contact or not contacted enough. each of which means to my emotion-reflexes that i've disappointed and failed them. so each memory is accompanied by a guilt pang the psychic equivalent of getting whacked in the face with a rolled-up newspaper, or poked in the stomach with the end of one. not a terrible or overwhelming pain, but one nearly continuous. like emotional chinese water torture.
when this happens, i will often argue with it, in the same way i argue with commercials. of course my comments would only make contextual sense if i could display the memory i was arguing with on some sort of screen, so i cut myself off after the first word. first word always seems to slip out before i can stop it. when i was a child, it was the whole first paragraph. but now i'll be sitting there, get the twitch-thwap of a bad memory self blame thing, blurt out a word, realize i've said it out loud, then convert the word into a quip or quote or reference to something.
and i've been like that for a few days. i'm tired and listless. eye contact with me becomes unnerving very quickly unless i expend effort to emote in pleasant tones. whatever is good in me, i denigrate. whatever is bad in me, i magnify. what the hell? i am running dave ragged trying to encourage me. this is not cool or fair. i should be running myself ragged trying to encourage him, dammit.
this is something i seem to do often when dave has experienced a setback or, conversely, seems about to make progress. i freak out and hog the crazy spotlight. make myself the craziest one so we can pay attention to my problems instead of his.
the things are correlated. the extent of causation is indeterminate enough where motive should not be definitively ascribed. the nature of self-hate paranoia is that any action taken or refrained from can be interpreted negatively. if i do something, such paranoia spins, it is because i was selfishly desiring to hog all the power and glory for having done it. if i refrain from doing something else, it was so i could hurt others or disappoint them by not having done it.
i need to do something. clearly. i would ask other people for help, but what can they do? what indeed is right or appropriate help to ask of others if the thing that's making me sad is inside me?
it's like my brain is an awesome college on a boat, right. and the boat sails the high seas of everything, and below decks everyone's working on crazy art and inventions and new forms of brain-weaponry and armor. but before anyone can come out on deck and bask in the sun and swim in the pool and show off their new invention or creation, they have to get past Agnes Skinner from the Simpsons.
"Seymour, I'm tired! Make them move us to the front of the line!"
"I'm not principal of the line, mother."
"And you never will be."
"Where's your restroom? Seymour needs the toilet. His bladder's full. Full of urine!"
"No driving through tunnels! You know what that symbolizes!"
"But it cuts 90 minutes off my trip--"
"NO TUNNELS!"
so angry at myself. so angry i can't even type the word angry multiple times in a row like is sometimes therapeutic. i feel sleepy all the time even when i get a good seven hours and food and a vitamin. not excited or interested. not important.
dave said last night that i was saying things, but none of them really seemed connected to each other. a bunch of non sequitur one-liners. this was true, and here's why it was that way. because whatever i was watching or doing, inside my head there was the "greatest hits of recent embarrassment and shame" collection. i would keep thinking of every situation where i made someone uncomfortable or embarrassed, every person i could have reached out and cheered up that i failed to, every person in my life with whom i've lost contact or not contacted enough. each of which means to my emotion-reflexes that i've disappointed and failed them. so each memory is accompanied by a guilt pang the psychic equivalent of getting whacked in the face with a rolled-up newspaper, or poked in the stomach with the end of one. not a terrible or overwhelming pain, but one nearly continuous. like emotional chinese water torture.
when this happens, i will often argue with it, in the same way i argue with commercials. of course my comments would only make contextual sense if i could display the memory i was arguing with on some sort of screen, so i cut myself off after the first word. first word always seems to slip out before i can stop it. when i was a child, it was the whole first paragraph. but now i'll be sitting there, get the twitch-thwap of a bad memory self blame thing, blurt out a word, realize i've said it out loud, then convert the word into a quip or quote or reference to something.
and i've been like that for a few days. i'm tired and listless. eye contact with me becomes unnerving very quickly unless i expend effort to emote in pleasant tones. whatever is good in me, i denigrate. whatever is bad in me, i magnify. what the hell? i am running dave ragged trying to encourage me. this is not cool or fair. i should be running myself ragged trying to encourage him, dammit.
this is something i seem to do often when dave has experienced a setback or, conversely, seems about to make progress. i freak out and hog the crazy spotlight. make myself the craziest one so we can pay attention to my problems instead of his.
the things are correlated. the extent of causation is indeterminate enough where motive should not be definitively ascribed. the nature of self-hate paranoia is that any action taken or refrained from can be interpreted negatively. if i do something, such paranoia spins, it is because i was selfishly desiring to hog all the power and glory for having done it. if i refrain from doing something else, it was so i could hurt others or disappoint them by not having done it.
i need to do something. clearly. i would ask other people for help, but what can they do? what indeed is right or appropriate help to ask of others if the thing that's making me sad is inside me?
it's like my brain is an awesome college on a boat, right. and the boat sails the high seas of everything, and below decks everyone's working on crazy art and inventions and new forms of brain-weaponry and armor. but before anyone can come out on deck and bask in the sun and swim in the pool and show off their new invention or creation, they have to get past Agnes Skinner from the Simpsons.
"Seymour, I'm tired! Make them move us to the front of the line!"
"I'm not principal of the line, mother."
"And you never will be."
"Where's your restroom? Seymour needs the toilet. His bladder's full. Full of urine!"
"No driving through tunnels! You know what that symbolizes!"
"But it cuts 90 minutes off my trip--"
"NO TUNNELS!"
the stupid crow
Technology-related issues have made this my most boring day at work ever and my brain feels like a dry sponge. Bleah. At least I got a poem out of it. I'll need to sit on this one for awhile before I know if it's done. Weird that I always revise verse pieces and never edit the prose beyond grammar and spelling. Maybe I just don't take prose writing seriously. That's probably it.
you, girl! you saw a crow today.
he balanced on a lamppost arm
and screamed, "no! look the other way!"
you turned and saw the blue, the day,
clouds harrowed like a planted farm
then clambered in the bus and sat
in back. your eyes, like window glass
smoked on both sides, made dim and flat
what ever you were staring at
brow furrowed as the bus rolled past
I know what gears were grinding then
inside that mess you call a brain
you weighed your hours against your friends
they would not stretch to meet the ends
you'd link into some grand tow chain
as if we're axle-deep in snow
one big machine, stuck in a ditch
with somewhere far away to go.
you think your own two arms can tow
this thing? are you its queen? its bitch?
hell no! and no one says so here
except that constant secret shame
which whispers sweetly in your ear:
"you should, you should have made it clear--
made them all use your rules, your game."
the road's the only game in town.
you've no idea where it will go,
what bastards ran your crew aground.
so roll your smoky windows down
and listen to the stupid crow!
you, girl! you saw a crow today.
he balanced on a lamppost arm
and screamed, "no! look the other way!"
you turned and saw the blue, the day,
clouds harrowed like a planted farm
then clambered in the bus and sat
in back. your eyes, like window glass
smoked on both sides, made dim and flat
what ever you were staring at
brow furrowed as the bus rolled past
I know what gears were grinding then
inside that mess you call a brain
you weighed your hours against your friends
they would not stretch to meet the ends
you'd link into some grand tow chain
as if we're axle-deep in snow
one big machine, stuck in a ditch
with somewhere far away to go.
you think your own two arms can tow
this thing? are you its queen? its bitch?
hell no! and no one says so here
except that constant secret shame
which whispers sweetly in your ear:
"you should, you should have made it clear--
made them all use your rules, your game."
the road's the only game in town.
you've no idea where it will go,
what bastards ran your crew aground.
so roll your smoky windows down
and listen to the stupid crow!
videogame life lessons: The Sphere Grid, or you can take it with you.
My internet at home is still out. Even though I paid AT&T on the 17th (in other words, Friday), the DSL has yet to respawn. The customer service guy told me on the phone Friday afternoon that the delete account order and my payment crossed in their computer system like ships in the night (metaphor mine), and that he'd untangle it and get me my internet back asap.
:p
In part because of non-webness, I finished Final Fantasy X yesterday. And the ending was exactly what I had deduced it would be after having played roughly nine-tenths of the game and then quit only to start over from the beginning nearly a year later, thank you very much. Nyah. I won't spoil it on the off-chance that someone reading this might eventually have the desire to play Final Fantasy X for the PS2 themselves. I beat it with relative ease after about 108 hours of play time. I think I've read elsewhere that it is possible to beat with around 70-80hrs of play. I know I goofed around a lot amusing myself, did a few things long way around instead of taking the game-provided fast ways, and only left one side-quest incomplete. (The one on Bikanel Island.) Oh, and I refused to play blitzball, period, with the exception of having to sit through the mandatory tutorial.
There is a mandatory tutorial for virtually every aspect of the game. Most of them are necessary, to be sure. Blitzball is a completely optional mini-game after the initial introduction, so on my second attempt at the game I felt that that time was absolutely wasted. However, the tutorials on the use of the Sphere Grid, weapon customization, and the menu in general could have been even more extensive and not done a disservice. (For example, I did not know that the party's inventory of weapons can be automatically sorted via the "Sort" option under the "Items" subscreen until my second attempt. One of the major reasons I actually completed the game this time, in fact.) The Sphere Grid is a massive, labyrinthine chart on which upgrades to every attribute, skill and ability are laid out like beads on a string. Each character starts at a different location on the grid. As the characters participate in battles, their experience points earn them "sphere levels", which you, the player, can spend to advance them along various pathways. Take a character in one direction, and they will eventually become a powerful spellcaster. Take them in another direction, and they will eventually gain powerful physical attacks instead.
The key word there, as anywhere in this game, is eventually. FFX is an extremely slow game. You do not sit down to play without at least forty minutes to an hour to spend on it. Ironically, this is especially true of the first half to a third of the game, where the cut scenes are numerous, unskippable, and lengthy. But even leaving cut scenes out of consideration, save points are generally set at opposite ends of large terrains within which you will be randomly attacked by enemies every few steps. (There are a couple of ways to ease this situation, but one is very clunky to use and the other doesn't become available until near the halfway point of the game.) However, if you do have that hour, and the patience to sit through the cut scenes, I believe you will come to appreciate something about the game that I find very interesting.
The Sphere Grid, rather than the actual battles, is the central arena of gameplay in FFX. I walked through every game area to the save point at the other end, walked back to the beginning, then walked forward again, fighting monsters all the way. I did this at least once in every area except for the Omega Dungeon and Inside Sin, where I did it in smaller chunks to avoid accientally Game Over-ing and ruining all my hard work since last save. For fun? Yes, partially. For stealing? That helped break up the monotony, yes. But really, it was for the sphere levels. The most exciting parts of the game for me were calling up that enormous chart of potential powers and attributes, plotting out which ones each character was going to acquire, and figuring out how I was going to get them there. When I opened up the Level 4 Locks around the Ultima ability and "just happened" to have my two best spellcasters within a few spheres of it at the time, it gave me a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when I defeated a major area boss.
By the time I beat the game, every character had all the basic skills of at least two other characters, and some had passed all the way through another character's area and gone on to the basic skills of a third. Which was lucky for me, since it made the last couple of bosses seem like pushovers. Everybody could do pretty much everything, so no one was left in the lurch just because someone else was temporarily incapacitated.
I'm like that with any game which gives me the option. Defeating successively more impressive baddie sprites is fun, sure enough. Having a large, shiny game-world to explore and at least partially tame is a must in its own right. But a game will lose me very quickly if it can't answer me this: How can I make my people more awesome?
I think this is a universal characteristic of games. Every main character of every game is far more badass at the end than at the beginning. Perhaps, like MegaMan, they merely gain the option of using different types of guns, trampolines, and/ or sleds. Or perhaps their very appearance can radically change as they shift from one type of skills and abilities to another. Can't think of a specific example, but I'm willing to bet there are games out there where that happens. Sometimes, as in Heroes of Might and Magic, the synergy of the abilities you choose for your heroes can unlock other abilities which would otherwise not have been possible for them to learn. Even the ancient and venerable Mario can rack up an impressive collection of coins, point and lives.
There is an element, I would say, of this self-improvement theme in any videogame you can mention. I will make a further assertion, which I am going to ask my more videogame-knowledgeable friends about as well. I think that as a game's plot becomes more ambitious and its characters more complex, there is an increasing tendency for success-related upgrades to take place inside the characters, in addition to the changes taking place outside them. In other words, a more complex character will change themselves; a less complex character will only change their equipment. Carl Johnson, for example, is still formidable at the various points in the game where he is stripped of all weapons, or everything but a knife. This is because his strength, driving skill, and other attributes have increased to the point where he can re-acquire the guns and ammo more easily on his own and use them more effectively when he has them.
I think there is a life lesson in this. The universe, the most complex and deeply formulated gaming environment ever conceived, is the model which all our invented worlds strive to outdo. But artifice can only overcome one aspect of nature by incorporating others--in this case, the nature of what draws humans into a quest. We do things, and get pleasure in doing them, for the warm glow of self-mastery as much as the heady tang of just victory.
I keep wishing, I kept wishing all through the game, that there was a Sphere Grid for real people. And that if there were, I wish I could see it.
:p
In part because of non-webness, I finished Final Fantasy X yesterday. And the ending was exactly what I had deduced it would be after having played roughly nine-tenths of the game and then quit only to start over from the beginning nearly a year later, thank you very much. Nyah. I won't spoil it on the off-chance that someone reading this might eventually have the desire to play Final Fantasy X for the PS2 themselves. I beat it with relative ease after about 108 hours of play time. I think I've read elsewhere that it is possible to beat with around 70-80hrs of play. I know I goofed around a lot amusing myself, did a few things long way around instead of taking the game-provided fast ways, and only left one side-quest incomplete. (The one on Bikanel Island.) Oh, and I refused to play blitzball, period, with the exception of having to sit through the mandatory tutorial.
There is a mandatory tutorial for virtually every aspect of the game. Most of them are necessary, to be sure. Blitzball is a completely optional mini-game after the initial introduction, so on my second attempt at the game I felt that that time was absolutely wasted. However, the tutorials on the use of the Sphere Grid, weapon customization, and the menu in general could have been even more extensive and not done a disservice. (For example, I did not know that the party's inventory of weapons can be automatically sorted via the "Sort" option under the "Items" subscreen until my second attempt. One of the major reasons I actually completed the game this time, in fact.) The Sphere Grid is a massive, labyrinthine chart on which upgrades to every attribute, skill and ability are laid out like beads on a string. Each character starts at a different location on the grid. As the characters participate in battles, their experience points earn them "sphere levels", which you, the player, can spend to advance them along various pathways. Take a character in one direction, and they will eventually become a powerful spellcaster. Take them in another direction, and they will eventually gain powerful physical attacks instead.
The key word there, as anywhere in this game, is eventually. FFX is an extremely slow game. You do not sit down to play without at least forty minutes to an hour to spend on it. Ironically, this is especially true of the first half to a third of the game, where the cut scenes are numerous, unskippable, and lengthy. But even leaving cut scenes out of consideration, save points are generally set at opposite ends of large terrains within which you will be randomly attacked by enemies every few steps. (There are a couple of ways to ease this situation, but one is very clunky to use and the other doesn't become available until near the halfway point of the game.) However, if you do have that hour, and the patience to sit through the cut scenes, I believe you will come to appreciate something about the game that I find very interesting.
The Sphere Grid, rather than the actual battles, is the central arena of gameplay in FFX. I walked through every game area to the save point at the other end, walked back to the beginning, then walked forward again, fighting monsters all the way. I did this at least once in every area except for the Omega Dungeon and Inside Sin, where I did it in smaller chunks to avoid accientally Game Over-ing and ruining all my hard work since last save. For fun? Yes, partially. For stealing? That helped break up the monotony, yes. But really, it was for the sphere levels. The most exciting parts of the game for me were calling up that enormous chart of potential powers and attributes, plotting out which ones each character was going to acquire, and figuring out how I was going to get them there. When I opened up the Level 4 Locks around the Ultima ability and "just happened" to have my two best spellcasters within a few spheres of it at the time, it gave me a bigger feeling of accomplishment than when I defeated a major area boss.
By the time I beat the game, every character had all the basic skills of at least two other characters, and some had passed all the way through another character's area and gone on to the basic skills of a third. Which was lucky for me, since it made the last couple of bosses seem like pushovers. Everybody could do pretty much everything, so no one was left in the lurch just because someone else was temporarily incapacitated.
I'm like that with any game which gives me the option. Defeating successively more impressive baddie sprites is fun, sure enough. Having a large, shiny game-world to explore and at least partially tame is a must in its own right. But a game will lose me very quickly if it can't answer me this: How can I make my people more awesome?
I think this is a universal characteristic of games. Every main character of every game is far more badass at the end than at the beginning. Perhaps, like MegaMan, they merely gain the option of using different types of guns, trampolines, and/ or sleds. Or perhaps their very appearance can radically change as they shift from one type of skills and abilities to another. Can't think of a specific example, but I'm willing to bet there are games out there where that happens. Sometimes, as in Heroes of Might and Magic, the synergy of the abilities you choose for your heroes can unlock other abilities which would otherwise not have been possible for them to learn. Even the ancient and venerable Mario can rack up an impressive collection of coins, point and lives.
There is an element, I would say, of this self-improvement theme in any videogame you can mention. I will make a further assertion, which I am going to ask my more videogame-knowledgeable friends about as well. I think that as a game's plot becomes more ambitious and its characters more complex, there is an increasing tendency for success-related upgrades to take place inside the characters, in addition to the changes taking place outside them. In other words, a more complex character will change themselves; a less complex character will only change their equipment. Carl Johnson, for example, is still formidable at the various points in the game where he is stripped of all weapons, or everything but a knife. This is because his strength, driving skill, and other attributes have increased to the point where he can re-acquire the guns and ammo more easily on his own and use them more effectively when he has them.
I think there is a life lesson in this. The universe, the most complex and deeply formulated gaming environment ever conceived, is the model which all our invented worlds strive to outdo. But artifice can only overcome one aspect of nature by incorporating others--in this case, the nature of what draws humans into a quest. We do things, and get pleasure in doing them, for the warm glow of self-mastery as much as the heady tang of just victory.
I keep wishing, I kept wishing all through the game, that there was a Sphere Grid for real people. And that if there were, I wish I could see it.
all honor to the tiny, tiny rockshitters of old
In the midst of the gruelingest week of work this place can provide. Heehee. Still not all that bad; just long hours. Like I said to Dave on the phone last night, Hey, nobody's yelling at me. Plus, what needs to be done never changes. I don't have to switch from paper wrangling to something else to something else again and then back. This is a cakewalk. Though our entire team will, it turns out, be working both Saturday and Sunday. Early and late, most likely.
Right now our house phone / internet service is cut off. Me and Dave talked it over on Monday or Tuesday (I forget which) and decided groceries were more important than internet in the short term. This evening after work I'm'a check the ATM and see if my direct deposit from last week has gone through. Thank dog for the insurance money not being gone yet. This month's rent, I mailed on Wednesday. Shoulda done it closer to the first of the month, but we'd run out of stamps and I took awhile getting around to buying more.
Last night Dave sat with me and watched most of the rest of "How the Earth Was Made", the History Channel special I'd DVR'd more than a week ago. Man, that was good. I got so excited about granite and strombolites I was dancing in my chair. The cores of the continents are granite, which is lighter than other types of rock and tended to stick up near the surface more. Then the strombolites (not sure if I'm spelling it right) coated the granite and photosynthesized like their asses were afire. They absorbed light and shat oxygen and more rock. Layer after layer, countless ages of them. They spent a billion years building the hearts of continents, cell by cell, life by life, like coral reefs building their crazy spires on the skeletons of their forebears. Dave's favorite part was the massive fifty-million-year ice age, when the continental mass (the one before Pangaea, I forget its name--started with a D) blocked the warm ocean currents and the planet froze. First the poles, then everything. "It was so shiny it froze over and got even more shiny," he said. Either my giggliness was infectious or Earth really is that cool. (Hehe. Cool, get it?) For fifty million years! Then the lava roiling underneath cracked the supercontinent apart, and the massive magma outflows melted everything again, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion of life. The graphics of the magma breaking open the crust under the ice reminded me of that awesome line from The Left Hand of Darkness:
" 'There is nothing,' says the Ice, 'but Ice.'
But that young volcano to the north has another word it thinks of saying."
Then it was all like slowed-down "Do the Evolution" footage and they started explaining stuff like how people figured out what happened to the dinosaurs and where the Grand Canyon came from. Which to us was a bit less exciting than the cataclysmic changes the early Earth went through back in deep time.
Ah, Chaos. Beautiful to contemplate...at a distance. Lovely to form in the mind, this vision of the manifest world as an ittybitty fingertip poking out from the mighty stream of chaos, always just emerged breathless from a fluid roil beyond order and disorder, only lightly coiled in the slippery grip of time.
But I bet it wasn't all that much fun for our distant predecessors (ancestors, whatev), doing the unicellular fighty dance for space on a rock in the hot, hot UV-rich sunshine. For me, too, there is only so much rockspace and only so much light. And to god (or gods or God or dog) what matters most is that whatever it is gets done. Not by whom, or even especially when. Just that it happens. If you are born a strombolite and decide not to spew out oxygen and shit rock, then some other strombolite does it. If you are born a door into summer and choose to stay firmly shut, then the cat will go out another door and have its nap in the pretty, kindly, ozone-protected sunshine without your help.
I'm rambling. 'S what I get for interspersing the occasional sentence with piles and piles of paper-assembling. Nuff for now.
Right now our house phone / internet service is cut off. Me and Dave talked it over on Monday or Tuesday (I forget which) and decided groceries were more important than internet in the short term. This evening after work I'm'a check the ATM and see if my direct deposit from last week has gone through. Thank dog for the insurance money not being gone yet. This month's rent, I mailed on Wednesday. Shoulda done it closer to the first of the month, but we'd run out of stamps and I took awhile getting around to buying more.
Last night Dave sat with me and watched most of the rest of "How the Earth Was Made", the History Channel special I'd DVR'd more than a week ago. Man, that was good. I got so excited about granite and strombolites I was dancing in my chair. The cores of the continents are granite, which is lighter than other types of rock and tended to stick up near the surface more. Then the strombolites (not sure if I'm spelling it right) coated the granite and photosynthesized like their asses were afire. They absorbed light and shat oxygen and more rock. Layer after layer, countless ages of them. They spent a billion years building the hearts of continents, cell by cell, life by life, like coral reefs building their crazy spires on the skeletons of their forebears. Dave's favorite part was the massive fifty-million-year ice age, when the continental mass (the one before Pangaea, I forget its name--started with a D) blocked the warm ocean currents and the planet froze. First the poles, then everything. "It was so shiny it froze over and got even more shiny," he said. Either my giggliness was infectious or Earth really is that cool. (Hehe. Cool, get it?) For fifty million years! Then the lava roiling underneath cracked the supercontinent apart, and the massive magma outflows melted everything again, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion of life. The graphics of the magma breaking open the crust under the ice reminded me of that awesome line from The Left Hand of Darkness:
" 'There is nothing,' says the Ice, 'but Ice.'
But that young volcano to the north has another word it thinks of saying."
Then it was all like slowed-down "Do the Evolution" footage and they started explaining stuff like how people figured out what happened to the dinosaurs and where the Grand Canyon came from. Which to us was a bit less exciting than the cataclysmic changes the early Earth went through back in deep time.
Ah, Chaos. Beautiful to contemplate...at a distance. Lovely to form in the mind, this vision of the manifest world as an ittybitty fingertip poking out from the mighty stream of chaos, always just emerged breathless from a fluid roil beyond order and disorder, only lightly coiled in the slippery grip of time.
But I bet it wasn't all that much fun for our distant predecessors (ancestors, whatev), doing the unicellular fighty dance for space on a rock in the hot, hot UV-rich sunshine. For me, too, there is only so much rockspace and only so much light. And to god (or gods or God or dog) what matters most is that whatever it is gets done. Not by whom, or even especially when. Just that it happens. If you are born a strombolite and decide not to spew out oxygen and shit rock, then some other strombolite does it. If you are born a door into summer and choose to stay firmly shut, then the cat will go out another door and have its nap in the pretty, kindly, ozone-protected sunshine without your help.
I'm rambling. 'S what I get for interspersing the occasional sentence with piles and piles of paper-assembling. Nuff for now.
teeth of the storm
you took a look at the wall
when you read what was written there
a slow smile turned your
white face to a skull
you'd be good, you'd be safe, you'd be hidden
you could stay warm
warm
why hold a gun to our head
string a net cross the gate
sound the panic watch the little people
strangle themselves instead
hear the choked little whimper, the only sound
our throats can form
form
you only bended the rules
you only lied to the fools
you only stole from the mass
you only covered your ass
it ain't so hard to discern
just what you're willing to burn
it ain't your feet to the fire
it ain't my place to desire
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down
it ain't political to watch a debate
between the puppets of fear and the puppets of hate
ain't hypocritical to weep for the flag
what a dump, what a shame, what a waste, what a drag
I'd go for violence if you had an address
if we all knew your face, if you talked to the press
you hide behind a pile of consummate turds
who stutter every time they reach for your words
and with no hesitation they loaded your ass
with praise, adulation and cold, hard cash
and you slipped out of town in advance of the crash
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down, ah
bite down, ah
bite down
*****
Oh, thank dog. Finally.
The chorus for that I've had for a couple of years now. Edits are certain to follow. I doubt I know enough guitar chords yet to do this bad boy justice, but I will essay it.
Many prayers of thanks go from my heart to the place the songs come from. And all those nice kitties I saw in my dream which I believe represent unwritten song-creatures. Prayers of affection to them as well and thanks for the encouragement. Thanks especially to Dave for the phrase "praise, adulation and cold, hard cash" which is what broke the dam holding this one back. Also for being way more encouraging than the kitties. When I was bummed about not having gotten the rest of this right away when that three-line thing showed up, he was like, "hey, it's something. You wrote something. Don't bitch about not having written anything, because you totally did." :D
when you read what was written there
a slow smile turned your
white face to a skull
you'd be good, you'd be safe, you'd be hidden
you could stay warm
warm
why hold a gun to our head
string a net cross the gate
sound the panic watch the little people
strangle themselves instead
hear the choked little whimper, the only sound
our throats can form
form
you only bended the rules
you only lied to the fools
you only stole from the mass
you only covered your ass
it ain't so hard to discern
just what you're willing to burn
it ain't your feet to the fire
it ain't my place to desire
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down
it ain't political to watch a debate
between the puppets of fear and the puppets of hate
ain't hypocritical to weep for the flag
what a dump, what a shame, what a waste, what a drag
I'd go for violence if you had an address
if we all knew your face, if you talked to the press
you hide behind a pile of consummate turds
who stutter every time they reach for your words
and with no hesitation they loaded your ass
with praise, adulation and cold, hard cash
and you slipped out of town in advance of the crash
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down, ah
bite down, ah
bite down
*****
Oh, thank dog. Finally.
The chorus for that I've had for a couple of years now. Edits are certain to follow. I doubt I know enough guitar chords yet to do this bad boy justice, but I will essay it.
Many prayers of thanks go from my heart to the place the songs come from. And all those nice kitties I saw in my dream which I believe represent unwritten song-creatures. Prayers of affection to them as well and thanks for the encouragement. Thanks especially to Dave for the phrase "praise, adulation and cold, hard cash" which is what broke the dam holding this one back. Also for being way more encouraging than the kitties. When I was bummed about not having gotten the rest of this right away when that three-line thing showed up, he was like, "hey, it's something. You wrote something. Don't bitch about not having written anything, because you totally did." :D
focusing on the positive
Yesterday afternoon, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" came up on one of my channels. Like "Hallelujah", that song was stuck in my head almost continuously during the few days after Dad died. Unlike Hallelujah, however, I haven't listened to it many times since. In fact I'd never heard the original version, only Dad playing it on the guitar. I did cry, but hid it. Either Luke genuinely didn't notice or was too polite to bug me about it. I suspect the former; after the restaurant I'm good at disguising tears as eyestrain for brief periods.
The meaning I take from the song in connection with Dad dying is different than Dylan's original meaning. But that's what a good song can do. For me there is an encouraging message in it--but I got discouraged anyway. Dad's stories were always interesting and cool, but as I unfortunately told Dad many times, they made me feel extremely inadequate. By the time Dad was my age he was into crazy stuff and had done oodles of impressive things. And of course, lived to regret some of them, and to wish he had not taken such a path. (Of course none of his stupid obits mentioned weapons at all. Dangit. Maybe we should inscribe his urn like he used to jokingly say, "I made it all up.") Nonetheless. Me being insecure combined with him being depressed. Ah, it all came back to me.
In consequence of the above I was in kind of a glum mood yesterday afternoon. Recriminatin' myself and suchlike. For awhile after I'd gotten home I chilled out and did normal stuff, but once the post-work routine started to peter out the bad mood resurfaced.
And then Dave used his magical powers of make-feel-better. We just sat and talked for hours, taking turns picking what mp3s would go on next. Just talking about the present and the past and the future. And he is so damn encouraging. I have been fishing for compliments since I was tiny, before I even knew the words "deeply-rooted, highly annoying insecurity complex". But he says what he thinks, about everything, all the time. He didn't just tell me I was awesome, which he does all the time anyway. He advised me that if I'm really bummed about not using my various gifts, I should go do stuff that allows me to use them. Seems freakin obvious I know. But left to my own devices I wonder if I ever would. I know me. I sit around and read books and play videogames and have inertia. I know what the right thing is to do, but without encouragement, I am generally too afraid.
He said that slowly, gradually, he's been trying to pry open the shell I have around myself all the time. Which he says is possible or easy for him because of how happy I have made him. And that so far all that's come out of my shell is shiny beams of light that create even more happiness. And music and ideas and potentially dollar signs.
:D
I know there's things in here I still don't want to let out. (Speaking of a scene from this week's Heroes I haven't been able to get out of my head. I greatly enjoy Sylar; he's a model villain. But I love Angela. She makes me want to spout poetry and Also Spracht Zarathustra quotes.) And plenty of things I still don't want to let in. But this is the good news that happens that I always have trouble talking about. I'm more comfortable writing about things that make me worry, about the possibility of failure, than about things and people and words and actions that give me hope and even confidence.
Hope is still too precious a thing to be waved about or flaunted. (Or possessed. Shut up! That's a dirty lie!) It's ironic because I know the behavior and reflex patterns I have the most prevalt insecurity and guilt about are the very ones which would vanish with minimal effort were I to eliminate the insecurity and guilt. I know this because I've seen my own transformations over time and I've seen other people's transformations in analagous situations.
I am still using my inner beasties. The process is still almost entirely unconscious. Sometimes I wonder about the level of communication between self and the time, the shape of the time. What affects it, why some times are highly responsive and others stiff and sticky. The time's been responding to Dave's nudgies almost as much as mine lately. I think it's a September thing. The attenuation of the envelope as summer and all that free sunlight and heat drain out of the taig and into space and into the ground makes everything all wobbly.
Maybe that's why we had crappy Septembers before. Unconscious self-loathing spiking up to jerk the magical wheels in our brains towards the road's cold shoulder.
:D Not this time. Less than twelve hours to go.
The meaning I take from the song in connection with Dad dying is different than Dylan's original meaning. But that's what a good song can do. For me there is an encouraging message in it--but I got discouraged anyway. Dad's stories were always interesting and cool, but as I unfortunately told Dad many times, they made me feel extremely inadequate. By the time Dad was my age he was into crazy stuff and had done oodles of impressive things. And of course, lived to regret some of them, and to wish he had not taken such a path. (Of course none of his stupid obits mentioned weapons at all. Dangit. Maybe we should inscribe his urn like he used to jokingly say, "I made it all up.") Nonetheless. Me being insecure combined with him being depressed. Ah, it all came back to me.
In consequence of the above I was in kind of a glum mood yesterday afternoon. Recriminatin' myself and suchlike. For awhile after I'd gotten home I chilled out and did normal stuff, but once the post-work routine started to peter out the bad mood resurfaced.
And then Dave used his magical powers of make-feel-better. We just sat and talked for hours, taking turns picking what mp3s would go on next. Just talking about the present and the past and the future. And he is so damn encouraging. I have been fishing for compliments since I was tiny, before I even knew the words "deeply-rooted, highly annoying insecurity complex". But he says what he thinks, about everything, all the time. He didn't just tell me I was awesome, which he does all the time anyway. He advised me that if I'm really bummed about not using my various gifts, I should go do stuff that allows me to use them. Seems freakin obvious I know. But left to my own devices I wonder if I ever would. I know me. I sit around and read books and play videogames and have inertia. I know what the right thing is to do, but without encouragement, I am generally too afraid.
He said that slowly, gradually, he's been trying to pry open the shell I have around myself all the time. Which he says is possible or easy for him because of how happy I have made him. And that so far all that's come out of my shell is shiny beams of light that create even more happiness. And music and ideas and potentially dollar signs.
:D
I know there's things in here I still don't want to let out. (Speaking of a scene from this week's Heroes I haven't been able to get out of my head. I greatly enjoy Sylar; he's a model villain. But I love Angela. She makes me want to spout poetry and Also Spracht Zarathustra quotes.) And plenty of things I still don't want to let in. But this is the good news that happens that I always have trouble talking about. I'm more comfortable writing about things that make me worry, about the possibility of failure, than about things and people and words and actions that give me hope and even confidence.
Hope is still too precious a thing to be waved about or flaunted. (Or possessed. Shut up! That's a dirty lie!) It's ironic because I know the behavior and reflex patterns I have the most prevalt insecurity and guilt about are the very ones which would vanish with minimal effort were I to eliminate the insecurity and guilt. I know this because I've seen my own transformations over time and I've seen other people's transformations in analagous situations.
I am still using my inner beasties. The process is still almost entirely unconscious. Sometimes I wonder about the level of communication between self and the time, the shape of the time. What affects it, why some times are highly responsive and others stiff and sticky. The time's been responding to Dave's nudgies almost as much as mine lately. I think it's a September thing. The attenuation of the envelope as summer and all that free sunlight and heat drain out of the taig and into space and into the ground makes everything all wobbly.
Maybe that's why we had crappy Septembers before. Unconscious self-loathing spiking up to jerk the magical wheels in our brains towards the road's cold shoulder.
:D Not this time. Less than twelve hours to go.
explosive amnesia (aka: explaining Infinity Plus One? again!?)
I must be bored.
Ain't no such thing as writer's block. Just a scared writer.
Scared of losing the line in to the place things come from. Which can only be severed from the one end, this one. Scared of sucking. Fear of one's own disapproval has stopped more people from writing, drawing, composing, designing or instigating excellent works than all the dictators in hades. Matter of fact the dicators probably helped people get over the hump in an indirect sort of way.
'S like Keokotah said to Jubal Sackett. In the afterlife, he planned to ask the powers that be for an enemy. Nothing but an enemy, he maintained, could keep a man really sharp and challenge him to constantly outdo himself. And how much fun could the afterlife be without a reason to strive?
Demetri Martin had a fantastic segment in a standup routine which me and Dave watched a month or so ago. A little song / monologue / live action thingy called "The Place Where My Jokes Come From." Yes, it was funny, but it was also one of those things that had THE PRETTY poking around the corner of it, in the way that makes me tear up a little. Everything loves to be praised. Especially the place where one's jokes come from.
This morning, for the first time in quite awhile, I took some mental solace in Infinity Plus One. Not any of the dozens of things by that title I got Googling the phrase, but the Reverend Doktor's Medicine Show. It's a goofy little fortune-telling device / non-linear novel created by the makers of KoL. I am about 95% sure these guys invented it themselves as a way to test their text manipulation program. The text manipulation programming in KoL is truly excellent. Each monster you fight, each weapon or spell you can use, all have a number of different action messages. All of which are sensitive to plurality, gender, and a host of of other grammatical rule-changers to which randomized text is not normally expected to conform.
Infinity Plus One is a novel of sorts and a tarot deck of sorts. Of sorts. As a novel it's sort of a cross between cyberpunk and the sort of book Cathy Acker might have written had she been born male. There are a limited number of chapters, twenty-nine or twenty-seven or some such thing. These are mostly narrated by the same main character, though they occur in no particular order and the events across chapters have a rather tenuous, metaphorical-at-best, relationship to one another. Each chapter is symbolized by a card with a name (which is also the chapter title), a pencil-line-drawn picture, and a unique combination of the three symbols infinity, plus, and one. These can be thought of rather like alchemy's mercury, sulfur, and salt. Namely (and respectively): that which analyzes and separates (infinity), that which empowers and synthesizes (plus), and that which stabilizes and brings into fullness (one). The website describes infinity, plus and one as being mind, spirit and body, but I like mine better. The way you know what mystical forces a card represents, apart from its symbols, is by reading its chapter of the nonlinear novel and coming to your own conclusion about the spiritual meaning of the insanity within.
Dave says he doesn't like this thing; he finds it creepy and not useful.
When I think about it, I'm not sure I find it all that useful. Just interesting. The particular way in which is it creepy is very much my wheelhouse. Under the umbrella of one of my hats. I trust this fortune-telling device to a certain extent, as one trusts, say, one of those finger-poking blood test machines that diabetics use. Using it isn't exactly what you would describe as fun. It can only detect a specific type of problem and is silent on all other issues. And if you don't actually need to be using it, doing so is painful, pointless and confusing.
So what the fortune-telling device does is this. Three cards appear face-down on the screen with little text boxes under them for you to add your own starter text. The left-hand one is the "infinity place", the center one the "plus place", and the right-hand box the "one place." You type in each of the three boxen things which express how that aspect of yourself is feeling. (I have found that the more creative juice I expend on this part, the more fun the end result is to attempt to analyze. I will explain the reason for this later.) Then flip over the three cards to reveal the name and drawing of the chapters that have been randomly selected for you. Then click on each card, and a pop-up window appears with the "interpretation."
Now, this is where the text manipulating software comes in. This program takes the starter text you entered in each box, analyzes it grammatically, and combines it in some weird way with the chapter of the card under which that text was entered. The results, which appear in a pop-up window, are invariably even more like gibberish than the original chapters, which were all at least half gibbous to begin with. (Yes, I wrote gibbous intentionally.) And as a sidenote, the software re-interpolates the two bodies of text each time you click the card on the original page. So if you close the pop-up window or click on another card, you can't go back and look at an interpolation a second time. I favor copying and pasting, then posting the interpolated results elsewhere. Because I'm silly like that.
So what good is it at all, I imagine you asking me. Why knowingly use a device whose sole purpose is to mix gibberish with more gibberish in order to produce a third text mangle even less comprehensible than the original two gibberishes? Doesn't that merely encourage mental instability?
To the second question, it surely can, and someone as susceptible as me should use it carefully.
To the first question, the answer lies not in the text, but in the mental and emotional assembly of the ideas around which the text was spawned. Now I will explain why the more "juice" I expend coming up with the text for the boxen, the better results I get. (It seems self-evident to me, but on the off-chance someone else might end up enjoying the use of this thing someday, I should be showing my work.) A metaphorical excursion will help here.
***
Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from a blow to the head and have temporary amnesia. You wake up in a room which contains a large, black box filled with miscellaneous items. After dumping the items out on the bed and taking a quick look at them, you don't immediately recognize any as your own. In fact they are so jumbled that you don't know how to begin even sorting them.
You pace over to the window, and when you look outside, you see a large dog outside. It's dirty and rather shifty-looking, but you recognize it. You've met this dog b efore. You don't get the feeling it's your dog, exactly; you just feel as though it was an animal that might trust you and doesn't espcially mean you harm. (Though it does smell bad and have fleas, that's not precisely the dog's fault.) Thinking quickly, you grab as much of the miscellaneous crap as you can carry and head out the door.
When you get downstairs, the dog looks at you curiously. Being a dog of very mixed experience, it isn't quite sure whether to run from you or approach you in hopes of a treat. Careful not to startle the animal, you settle down on the grass next to it and begin to show it some of the items you've brought.
Some it will sniff and move on without much interest. Others will cause it to look at you expectantly, or wag, or attempt to take the thing from your hand to chew it because it smells like there might be food in it. Any number of different reactions. You can't be sure of anything, of course, since you don't have much context to go from. However, you have some familiarity with this dog. However tenuous it may be in your conscious memory, the place in your brain that stores muscle memory will still be able to observe and react to the dog's body language.
Thus, you have a source of clues, if not actual information. Your existing relationship with the dog can help the dog tell you more about the objects, and ultimately yourself, than you would ever have been able to dredge up just staring at or handling the objects by yourself.
If it perks up its nose and wags when it sniffs an object, looking up at you expectantly, you know the object either contains food or belongs to someone it likes.
***
Just to be entirely clear on how I'm linking my metaphors up:
The dog represents the communication between the "personality" embodied in the novel text and my own personality, which communication is made possible by the text manipulating software. We can picture the things to which I am paying attention and the things the imagined "speaker" of the novel cares about as two circles of a Venn diagram. The place where they intersect is the emotional content carried through into the interpolated text.
The box of miscellany represents the contents of my personality during the time period in which I am composing my starter text. The product of the writing process is words on a screen, yes. But the process involves the whole self. Things alter one's thought processes all the time, things of which it is virtually impossible to be consciously aware. Emotional states, emotional responses based on reflexes both conscious and unconscious, give rise to chemical and hormonal influences on memory pathways which alter conscious access to the contents of memories. Mental processes can be shaped or skewed by limitations and drives imposed by the chemical state of the body--hunger, fatigue, subconscious responses to smells or shapes or other factors in the environment. At any given time the contents of our minds are as much a mystery to us as the chemical composition of the grit under our fingernails. Unless we've been through an overwhelming experience which left distinctive traces all over the place, the multitude of interconnections between every emotion and piece of information we have makes the precise source and significance of any given thing virtually impossible to pinpoint. (I personally feel I suffer from this general confusion of pathways a little more than the average bear. Could be the ADD, could be good old absent-minded professorness, who knows. Or it could be that everyone is equally as confused as I!)
So, as in the analogy above, when I "grab an armful" of the contents of my personality and try to bring it outside, I have no idea what is in that armful or whether it pertains to my goals or the questions I wish to answer. I don't even know if it was in my mind as a result of internal personality forces or of influences on my mind or body from my external environment, physical or social. This is true for anyone, at any time, in any circumstance. Only with hindsight can we get even a reasonably guesstimable picture. The amount of information, let alone quasi-informational slush, that goes into the interactions of any real-time thing with any other real-time thing is orders of magnitude too big to process unless and until one has developed a filtration system.
The filtration system provided by Infinity Plus One can be considered from two sides (Like anything else.): The exoteric and the esoteric.
The exoteric side of the process, the part that can easily be told and is the explicable reason for anything happening at all, is the grammar-shuffling software. This software takes note of certain properties of the words in my text and certain properties in the text of the chapter and tries to smoosh them together in ways that fit. The result is, from this perspective, unlikely to produce any coherent information at all. If a complete sentence hangs together here and there, it's a fun curiosity at best.
The esoteric side of the process is the communication between my state of mind and the state of mind of the narrator in the novel (this communication being represented by the dog character in the analogy). Certain emotional or spiritual things I brought into my text will resonate with the emotional and spiritual contents of the novel text.
Speaking of emotional and spiritual contents, and to be more precise: In my imagination I try to form a sense of presence of the particular chapter, the way you can sense the emotional presence of a living creature which can be smelled and felt, but neither heard nor seen. I can consider this sense of presence and come to understand, just a bit, the shape of this imaginary living creature's desire. What is its emotional vector, what sort of a being is it turning itself into, sort of thing. It's exactly like considering a poem to discern the actual intent of the poet, sometimes in seeming contrast to the chosen words. Except in this case, rather than a human being, you're discerning the actual intent of the spirit of the text, an imaginary entity.
The emotional and spiritual vector of the interpolated text will be the sum of those emotions and desires which resonate with both me and the spirit of the text. To return to our metaphor, these are things which, once the dog sniffs and wags at them, I turn over in my hands and find I vaguely recognize.
Which is what makes Infinity Plus One useful to me.
The finished product itself, the interp text, is mainly a diagnostic. My reading of it tells me how well I have performed the more important, but unobservable, middle steps. Which in turn gives me clues about the relative stability of my mental state and where the likely problem areas are.
These days I only tend to use it when a very unpleasant or dangerously quirky mood overtakes me AND I am in serious doubt regarding its source.
(post finished 10-2-08.)
Ain't no such thing as writer's block. Just a scared writer.
Scared of losing the line in to the place things come from. Which can only be severed from the one end, this one. Scared of sucking. Fear of one's own disapproval has stopped more people from writing, drawing, composing, designing or instigating excellent works than all the dictators in hades. Matter of fact the dicators probably helped people get over the hump in an indirect sort of way.
'S like Keokotah said to Jubal Sackett. In the afterlife, he planned to ask the powers that be for an enemy. Nothing but an enemy, he maintained, could keep a man really sharp and challenge him to constantly outdo himself. And how much fun could the afterlife be without a reason to strive?
Demetri Martin had a fantastic segment in a standup routine which me and Dave watched a month or so ago. A little song / monologue / live action thingy called "The Place Where My Jokes Come From." Yes, it was funny, but it was also one of those things that had THE PRETTY poking around the corner of it, in the way that makes me tear up a little. Everything loves to be praised. Especially the place where one's jokes come from.
This morning, for the first time in quite awhile, I took some mental solace in Infinity Plus One. Not any of the dozens of things by that title I got Googling the phrase, but the Reverend Doktor's Medicine Show. It's a goofy little fortune-telling device / non-linear novel created by the makers of KoL. I am about 95% sure these guys invented it themselves as a way to test their text manipulation program. The text manipulation programming in KoL is truly excellent. Each monster you fight, each weapon or spell you can use, all have a number of different action messages. All of which are sensitive to plurality, gender, and a host of of other grammatical rule-changers to which randomized text is not normally expected to conform.
Infinity Plus One is a novel of sorts and a tarot deck of sorts. Of sorts. As a novel it's sort of a cross between cyberpunk and the sort of book Cathy Acker might have written had she been born male. There are a limited number of chapters, twenty-nine or twenty-seven or some such thing. These are mostly narrated by the same main character, though they occur in no particular order and the events across chapters have a rather tenuous, metaphorical-at-best, relationship to one another. Each chapter is symbolized by a card with a name (which is also the chapter title), a pencil-line-drawn picture, and a unique combination of the three symbols infinity, plus, and one. These can be thought of rather like alchemy's mercury, sulfur, and salt. Namely (and respectively): that which analyzes and separates (infinity), that which empowers and synthesizes (plus), and that which stabilizes and brings into fullness (one). The website describes infinity, plus and one as being mind, spirit and body, but I like mine better. The way you know what mystical forces a card represents, apart from its symbols, is by reading its chapter of the nonlinear novel and coming to your own conclusion about the spiritual meaning of the insanity within.
Dave says he doesn't like this thing; he finds it creepy and not useful.
When I think about it, I'm not sure I find it all that useful. Just interesting. The particular way in which is it creepy is very much my wheelhouse. Under the umbrella of one of my hats. I trust this fortune-telling device to a certain extent, as one trusts, say, one of those finger-poking blood test machines that diabetics use. Using it isn't exactly what you would describe as fun. It can only detect a specific type of problem and is silent on all other issues. And if you don't actually need to be using it, doing so is painful, pointless and confusing.
So what the fortune-telling device does is this. Three cards appear face-down on the screen with little text boxes under them for you to add your own starter text. The left-hand one is the "infinity place", the center one the "plus place", and the right-hand box the "one place." You type in each of the three boxen things which express how that aspect of yourself is feeling. (I have found that the more creative juice I expend on this part, the more fun the end result is to attempt to analyze. I will explain the reason for this later.) Then flip over the three cards to reveal the name and drawing of the chapters that have been randomly selected for you. Then click on each card, and a pop-up window appears with the "interpretation."
Now, this is where the text manipulating software comes in. This program takes the starter text you entered in each box, analyzes it grammatically, and combines it in some weird way with the chapter of the card under which that text was entered. The results, which appear in a pop-up window, are invariably even more like gibberish than the original chapters, which were all at least half gibbous to begin with. (Yes, I wrote gibbous intentionally.) And as a sidenote, the software re-interpolates the two bodies of text each time you click the card on the original page. So if you close the pop-up window or click on another card, you can't go back and look at an interpolation a second time. I favor copying and pasting, then posting the interpolated results elsewhere. Because I'm silly like that.
So what good is it at all, I imagine you asking me. Why knowingly use a device whose sole purpose is to mix gibberish with more gibberish in order to produce a third text mangle even less comprehensible than the original two gibberishes? Doesn't that merely encourage mental instability?
To the second question, it surely can, and someone as susceptible as me should use it carefully.
To the first question, the answer lies not in the text, but in the mental and emotional assembly of the ideas around which the text was spawned. Now I will explain why the more "juice" I expend coming up with the text for the boxen, the better results I get. (It seems self-evident to me, but on the off-chance someone else might end up enjoying the use of this thing someday, I should be showing my work.) A metaphorical excursion will help here.
***
Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from a blow to the head and have temporary amnesia. You wake up in a room which contains a large, black box filled with miscellaneous items. After dumping the items out on the bed and taking a quick look at them, you don't immediately recognize any as your own. In fact they are so jumbled that you don't know how to begin even sorting them.
You pace over to the window, and when you look outside, you see a large dog outside. It's dirty and rather shifty-looking, but you recognize it. You've met this dog b efore. You don't get the feeling it's your dog, exactly; you just feel as though it was an animal that might trust you and doesn't espcially mean you harm. (Though it does smell bad and have fleas, that's not precisely the dog's fault.) Thinking quickly, you grab as much of the miscellaneous crap as you can carry and head out the door.
When you get downstairs, the dog looks at you curiously. Being a dog of very mixed experience, it isn't quite sure whether to run from you or approach you in hopes of a treat. Careful not to startle the animal, you settle down on the grass next to it and begin to show it some of the items you've brought.
Some it will sniff and move on without much interest. Others will cause it to look at you expectantly, or wag, or attempt to take the thing from your hand to chew it because it smells like there might be food in it. Any number of different reactions. You can't be sure of anything, of course, since you don't have much context to go from. However, you have some familiarity with this dog. However tenuous it may be in your conscious memory, the place in your brain that stores muscle memory will still be able to observe and react to the dog's body language.
Thus, you have a source of clues, if not actual information. Your existing relationship with the dog can help the dog tell you more about the objects, and ultimately yourself, than you would ever have been able to dredge up just staring at or handling the objects by yourself.
If it perks up its nose and wags when it sniffs an object, looking up at you expectantly, you know the object either contains food or belongs to someone it likes.
***
Just to be entirely clear on how I'm linking my metaphors up:
The dog represents the communication between the "personality" embodied in the novel text and my own personality, which communication is made possible by the text manipulating software. We can picture the things to which I am paying attention and the things the imagined "speaker" of the novel cares about as two circles of a Venn diagram. The place where they intersect is the emotional content carried through into the interpolated text.
The box of miscellany represents the contents of my personality during the time period in which I am composing my starter text. The product of the writing process is words on a screen, yes. But the process involves the whole self. Things alter one's thought processes all the time, things of which it is virtually impossible to be consciously aware. Emotional states, emotional responses based on reflexes both conscious and unconscious, give rise to chemical and hormonal influences on memory pathways which alter conscious access to the contents of memories. Mental processes can be shaped or skewed by limitations and drives imposed by the chemical state of the body--hunger, fatigue, subconscious responses to smells or shapes or other factors in the environment. At any given time the contents of our minds are as much a mystery to us as the chemical composition of the grit under our fingernails. Unless we've been through an overwhelming experience which left distinctive traces all over the place, the multitude of interconnections between every emotion and piece of information we have makes the precise source and significance of any given thing virtually impossible to pinpoint. (I personally feel I suffer from this general confusion of pathways a little more than the average bear. Could be the ADD, could be good old absent-minded professorness, who knows. Or it could be that everyone is equally as confused as I!)
So, as in the analogy above, when I "grab an armful" of the contents of my personality and try to bring it outside, I have no idea what is in that armful or whether it pertains to my goals or the questions I wish to answer. I don't even know if it was in my mind as a result of internal personality forces or of influences on my mind or body from my external environment, physical or social. This is true for anyone, at any time, in any circumstance. Only with hindsight can we get even a reasonably guesstimable picture. The amount of information, let alone quasi-informational slush, that goes into the interactions of any real-time thing with any other real-time thing is orders of magnitude too big to process unless and until one has developed a filtration system.
The filtration system provided by Infinity Plus One can be considered from two sides (Like anything else.): The exoteric and the esoteric.
The exoteric side of the process, the part that can easily be told and is the explicable reason for anything happening at all, is the grammar-shuffling software. This software takes note of certain properties of the words in my text and certain properties in the text of the chapter and tries to smoosh them together in ways that fit. The result is, from this perspective, unlikely to produce any coherent information at all. If a complete sentence hangs together here and there, it's a fun curiosity at best.
The esoteric side of the process is the communication between my state of mind and the state of mind of the narrator in the novel (this communication being represented by the dog character in the analogy). Certain emotional or spiritual things I brought into my text will resonate with the emotional and spiritual contents of the novel text.
Speaking of emotional and spiritual contents, and to be more precise: In my imagination I try to form a sense of presence of the particular chapter, the way you can sense the emotional presence of a living creature which can be smelled and felt, but neither heard nor seen. I can consider this sense of presence and come to understand, just a bit, the shape of this imaginary living creature's desire. What is its emotional vector, what sort of a being is it turning itself into, sort of thing. It's exactly like considering a poem to discern the actual intent of the poet, sometimes in seeming contrast to the chosen words. Except in this case, rather than a human being, you're discerning the actual intent of the spirit of the text, an imaginary entity.
The emotional and spiritual vector of the interpolated text will be the sum of those emotions and desires which resonate with both me and the spirit of the text. To return to our metaphor, these are things which, once the dog sniffs and wags at them, I turn over in my hands and find I vaguely recognize.
Which is what makes Infinity Plus One useful to me.
The finished product itself, the interp text, is mainly a diagnostic. My reading of it tells me how well I have performed the more important, but unobservable, middle steps. Which in turn gives me clues about the relative stability of my mental state and where the likely problem areas are.
These days I only tend to use it when a very unpleasant or dangerously quirky mood overtakes me AND I am in serious doubt regarding its source.
(post finished 10-2-08.)
another infinity plus one
up to it again. I never even go back and read these. do I? maybe I should start.
INFINITY
Starter text:
The old styles of vision return. Before I cleaned house, when I believed in demons and disbelieved in myself. Now my belief in them is shaken, and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I see that I am afraid for Dave to have power, to have a life, to be independent. Why? Now I see that I am afraid to assert myself still, even in quiet ways at home. Afraid to be vulnerable even to him. Why?
Interp:
Millennium Shakes (8 1 +)
An infinity in the infinity place represents stability, harmony.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator BONE.
Here is an Operator known as Bone, who is to needless violence what Mistress Naomi is to sexual perversion. He is the face of every thug, gangster, hitman ... It was BONE who had Cain slay Abel, and it is BONE that takes over when you get drunk or angry and start to break shit. He is what makes teenage boys want to skin kittens alive, and there is a bit of him in all of us.
BONE: The old styles of this guy, will ya. We got to our man before our man could pull fast shit on here. A quick in demons and disbelieved in and out to be independent. Why? Now I did this guy, will ya. We got no love back to him. We got no room for losers and he got to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. We gotta do they. Real fuckin' funny now! Real shame. I cleaned house, when I am afraid for losers and he just cut out. What's going on here. A quick in myself is strengthened. Now my belief in and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I cleaned house, when I believed in myself still, even tell the belt and he just what the belt and he just got business. The old styles of this shit. Whatcha getting? That's it baby. Ahh baby. Ahh baby. C'mon ... Busted! Yeah, a life, to have power, to hell from a whore tried to assert myself is shaken, and my belief in myself. Now I am afraid to hell from all sides, but sometimes even tell the difference, but there's still crossing gets done. Someone's got no idea what the guy's got. Jinx thinks he's throwing volts across the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah bitch, thought we gotta do. No room for crossers, ain't nobody, but sometimes even in myself. Now I aim to be too cautious around this shit. Whatcha getting? That's just got to have to be vulnerable even tell the difference, but sometimes even in electrostatic to God. Looks like someone got no love back to move on the difference, but sometimes even tell the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah! He's fuckin' funny now! Real fuckin' funny, huh? Yeah, that's right. That's just got us to give a little love of vision return. Before I believed in electrostatic to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. Who? Shit.Looks like someone got lucky. Can't be bunk and out to numerate, then cut out. What's going on? You still receiving? Don't risk it, just got lucky. Can't be too many people wanna get a toothless whore.
Interp interp:
Hell is nearby. The vectors are still out. Two people crossing at once makes it more complicated. A double crossing. Don't be a shit just because you don't know what the fuck's going on. Nobody does.
PLUS
Starter text:
I wake up more energetic, but as I move through each day I find I am frustrated and angry. Getting laid only takes a little of the edge off. I am frustrated and it's maddening. Is songwriting the answer? Writing of prose? There is something I demand of myself more and more urgently with each passing hour, something I demand of my time or it of me, and I don't know what that is. Why not?
Interp:
A Clown Show (1 8 +)
An infinity in the plus position tells you to retreat to your tower. This is a day for tomes and alchemy. An infinity here could also represent an upcoming epiphany.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator WIZZO.
WIZZO is The Clown of Thought; he is alien and aloof. His symbol is . WIZZO's mask is a mask of Air. He is the muses and the music of the spheres, the laws that keep the atoms in their orbits.
WIZZO: I atlithe ay. omendame aked Wr pake ting sthea ouswith insseam I ustindgwe I ff litlf wamang. Iswit'stitling. orofrystt ate I insttlf m lf orge initting. Th a m ofr? oswed andake my I I anlangh ind I d Thoruratrachritlamesom I omof he wela I mom make prad ly.
Interp interp:
Clearly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. But that won't stop me from thinking about it all the time, willit now?
ONE
Starter text:
No longer overdrawn, all to the good. Looking forward to a quiet evening alone at home, even better. Today at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the present. It is only the future that balks me.
Interp:
Greenlight, Go! (+ + 8)
An infinity in the one position means things might be a little dull for a bit. This is a time for waiting in contemplation and reflection. Learn to be your own best friend, read a book you've been meaning to read. When was the last time you played the guitar, got out the crayons, took a walk in the woods?
You are using Telecult Power #1:
Receiving Psychic Power from Beyond
No longer overdrawn, all to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2. Leg/Buttocks Focus No longer overdrawn, all to a quiet evening alone at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2.
Interp interp:
I will calm down and have fun. I should not fear the future, but instead look forward to it. Me and Dave's sex life, both visible and invisible, will likely not be adverseley affected by whatever it is that's happening to us. Me. Him. Whatev.
INFINITY
Starter text:
The old styles of vision return. Before I cleaned house, when I believed in demons and disbelieved in myself. Now my belief in them is shaken, and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I see that I am afraid for Dave to have power, to have a life, to be independent. Why? Now I see that I am afraid to assert myself still, even in quiet ways at home. Afraid to be vulnerable even to him. Why?
Interp:
Millennium Shakes (8 1 +)
An infinity in the infinity place represents stability, harmony.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator BONE.
Here is an Operator known as Bone, who is to needless violence what Mistress Naomi is to sexual perversion. He is the face of every thug, gangster, hitman ... It was BONE who had Cain slay Abel, and it is BONE that takes over when you get drunk or angry and start to break shit. He is what makes teenage boys want to skin kittens alive, and there is a bit of him in all of us.
BONE: The old styles of this guy, will ya. We got to our man before our man could pull fast shit on here. A quick in demons and disbelieved in and out to be independent. Why? Now I did this guy, will ya. We got no love back to him. We got no room for losers and he got to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. We gotta do they. Real fuckin' funny now! Real shame. I cleaned house, when I am afraid for losers and he just cut out. What's going on here. A quick in myself is strengthened. Now my belief in and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I cleaned house, when I believed in myself still, even tell the belt and he just what the belt and he just got business. The old styles of this shit. Whatcha getting? That's it baby. Ahh baby. Ahh baby. C'mon ... Busted! Yeah, a life, to have power, to hell from a whore tried to assert myself is shaken, and my belief in myself. Now I am afraid to hell from all sides, but sometimes even tell the difference, but there's still crossing gets done. Someone's got no idea what the guy's got. Jinx thinks he's throwing volts across the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah bitch, thought we gotta do. No room for crossers, ain't nobody, but sometimes even in myself. Now I aim to be too cautious around this shit. Whatcha getting? That's just got to have to be vulnerable even tell the difference, but sometimes even in electrostatic to God. Looks like someone got no love back to move on the difference, but sometimes even tell the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah! He's fuckin' funny now! Real fuckin' funny, huh? Yeah, that's right. That's just got us to give a little love of vision return. Before I believed in electrostatic to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. Who? Shit.Looks like someone got lucky. Can't be bunk and out to numerate, then cut out. What's going on? You still receiving? Don't risk it, just got lucky. Can't be too many people wanna get a toothless whore.
Interp interp:
Hell is nearby. The vectors are still out. Two people crossing at once makes it more complicated. A double crossing. Don't be a shit just because you don't know what the fuck's going on. Nobody does.
PLUS
Starter text:
I wake up more energetic, but as I move through each day I find I am frustrated and angry. Getting laid only takes a little of the edge off. I am frustrated and it's maddening. Is songwriting the answer? Writing of prose? There is something I demand of myself more and more urgently with each passing hour, something I demand of my time or it of me, and I don't know what that is. Why not?
Interp:
A Clown Show (1 8 +)
An infinity in the plus position tells you to retreat to your tower. This is a day for tomes and alchemy. An infinity here could also represent an upcoming epiphany.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator WIZZO.
WIZZO is The Clown of Thought; he is alien and aloof. His symbol is . WIZZO's mask is a mask of Air. He is the muses and the music of the spheres, the laws that keep the atoms in their orbits.
WIZZO: I atlithe ay. omendame aked Wr pake ting sthea ouswith insseam I ustindgwe I ff litlf wamang. Iswit'stitling. orofrystt ate I insttlf m lf orge initting. Th a m ofr? oswed andake my I I anlangh ind I d Thoruratrachritlamesom I omof he wela I mom make prad ly.
Interp interp:
Clearly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. But that won't stop me from thinking about it all the time, willit now?
ONE
Starter text:
No longer overdrawn, all to the good. Looking forward to a quiet evening alone at home, even better. Today at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the present. It is only the future that balks me.
Interp:
Greenlight, Go! (+ + 8)
An infinity in the one position means things might be a little dull for a bit. This is a time for waiting in contemplation and reflection. Learn to be your own best friend, read a book you've been meaning to read. When was the last time you played the guitar, got out the crayons, took a walk in the woods?
You are using Telecult Power #1:
Receiving Psychic Power from Beyond
No longer overdrawn, all to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2. Leg/Buttocks Focus No longer overdrawn, all to a quiet evening alone at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2.
Interp interp:
I will calm down and have fun. I should not fear the future, but instead look forward to it. Me and Dave's sex life, both visible and invisible, will likely not be adverseley affected by whatever it is that's happening to us. Me. Him. Whatev.
more than four kittens in Ohio
Ever since Pandora first played me "Ohio", I've been listening to it obsessively. Well, what passes for obsessively. Y'see, Pandora's music license doesn't allow it to make songs available on demand, I don't have any portable mp3 devices, and at home I usually let rando player or Dave pick the music, because I like most everything we have. So those are the main reasons I'm not yet sick of either Ohio or "Steam Comes Off Our House." The latter is a beautiful track off of "Ballads of the Book", an album composed entirely of collaborations between Irish poets and musicians.
Said album also has a track which wins my personal award for best song title, "A Calvinist Narrowly Avoids Pleasure." Ah, alcoholism. Like any other vice, it can create great and inspiring verse even as it eats away at a man. Especially the chemical vices, for some reason. Many famous bands have a "heroin album" which stands out among their other work; one band I can mention even has a "crack album."
My continued creative drought has me trying to calm myself by considering the nature of other people's creativity, or creative work in general. In case it wasn't obvious. Of course by increasing my conscious awareness of the machinery of the creative process I'm totally shooting myself in the foot. One of several reasons, not all of which I know, that a songwriter can have a substance abuse album is that abusing a substance erodes one's identity, erodes one's control over the fine operations of one's psyche. And in so doing, drives back into the unconscious much of the mana (libido, attention, whatev) which is often taken up by the concerns of living and trying to stay sane.
I did actually write a song last week, but I don't count it. Its principal use in my book is as an intro to [the only road]. Uses pretty much the same chords as the verses to that song, in fact.
emptiness
at the bottom of the cup
emptiness
on the phone line, pick it up
emptiness in my mind
when I try to divine
what the future holds
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and cold
emptiness
where my father used to snore
emptiness
between the ceiling and the floor
emptiness in my heart
flung it out like a dart
left you scarred
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and hard
emptiness
in the gestures that you make
emptiness
trailing panic in its wake
emptiness in my hand
but the flames that I fanned
gonna burn a long while
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
I am still emotionally wrestling with my desire to be able to forgive Mom for many things. Things I can't remember, things I can, things I've been told about but wasn't present to see. And irrationally, to forgive her for outliving Dad. She couldn't have helped his numerous medical conditions, his stubborn insistence at sticking with a job that got him nothing but stress and disappointment, or his refusal to accept the aid and comfort he continually felt the compulsion to offer, even when he lacked the means to deliver it. The whole decade-long mess of a divorce and the years of rancor that preceded it could only have been prevented by both of them changing themselves radically. Which neither could do--for many reasons, not all of which I know. But I had one parent at whom I was less angry than the other and now that one is dead.
I am not a rancorous or vengeful person, now. But I had a lot of rancor and desire for revenge back in the day. A lot of the sneaky psychological warfare bullshit that she to this day believes to have been Dad's doing was me, in my spare time, easing my own hurt by lashing out at her. Hence the "flung it out like a dart / left you scarred" lines. (I must take a moment here to preen for rhyming "heart" with "dart" instead of "apart." Take that, cliche rhyme.) But my experiences then are what led me to my current views on revenge in general. If it can't change the person's mind about the things they've done, if it can't prevent future harm, and since it sure as fuck can't remedy past harm, then all it can do is give me more memories of having been a beast. And any is too many.
But why did I bring up "Ohio", back there at the beginning of the post? Because I've been thinking about politics more than I prefer. No, I still haven't registered to vote. I know it's gotta be in the next couple weeks or I won't have a chance to vote in November. The evils visited on me, my fellow Americans, and the people of Earth wherever America sticks our greasy little fingers, are a little like the bug bites that mysteriously appear every morning on my body. I'm not sure how it happened, I don't know what I can do to prevent it, and it aches and itches constantly in places where it wouldn't be polite for me to scratch. I can't bomb our bedroom with bug spray. We sleep there. I can't throw out all our mattresses and bedclothes. We can't afford new ones. And I can't realistically get behind the abolition of our system of government, either. I can't think of anything practicable with which to replace it that would be an actual improvement.
But the rust has spread all through the engine now. And I don't have firearms and a country estate and a stockpile of food and clean water. Me and Dave are in the worst possible physical situation for a childless couple in the event of a serious apocalypse. Okay, not the worst possible. But our neighborhood is populous, a long damn walk from sources of water, and about as far from being arable land as it's possible to get in a temperate climate. Not even a grocery store nearby to loot.
Is it terribly cynical of me to leap immediately from contemplating the mess in Washington (or even Springfield!) to a vision of Chicago as a barren wasteland inhabited by vicious, starving predators, most of whom walk on two legs?
Then again, Neil Young read an article about the Kent State massacre, went for a walk in the woods, and came back with a song. A song which points out very correctly that that kind of murderous idiocy "should have been done long ago"; we should have been finished with that sort of thing, moved on to all figuring out together how we can be happy and treat one another well. For dog's sake!
And dammit, with all this richness of misery on the one hand, and wealth of personal comfort on the other, why the hell have I not gone for a walk around the neighborhood and come back with a kickass song?!? What should I do, what have I done that I shouldn't? Ach, my impatience is childish. They will come or not as they choose. Or perhaps they have already arrived and are waiting on me to kick open some rusty little door, to shove aside some finely-wound obstruction...
You see how it is with me. This gnawing little loop is never absent from the back of my mind. I am like a junkie for the music. I haven't had a proper fix in almost two months now. A stinking sonnet and a freaking two and half minute intro song. Maddening, I tells ya. Maddening!
I had a dream a couple nights ago where I met dozens of kittens. I was in a space based on the basement of the house I grew up in (a couple other dreams there lately, in fact), having arrived through one of those portal thingies I never seem to notice in-dream but remember afterward. At first there were only a dozen or so, adorable little fluffy things in shades of brown and black and other colors--predominantly brown. They all wanted them to take me back with them--whups. Freudian kitty slip? Wanted me to take them back with me and be my kittens, but even dreaming I knew me and Dave only had room for a couple more kitties. Three or four, tops. I wanted so much to keep them all, and kept looking from one to another, unable to decide. Then I moved towards the front of the basement, to that tiny room where we stored the never-used camping equipment. There was a rectangular window in that closet that looked out on the gravel and sidewalk which marked the boundary between our house and our neighbors Joyce and Tony's house. There was another kitten there, outside the glass, with a full-grown cat beside it. The kitten looked sick; its eyes seemed too large in its head, its coat was not fluffy, and something else about it seemed off somehow. It looked at me with almost as much longing as the healthy kittens had done, though it wasn't able to muster the same emotion exactly. But I knew there was a reason that kitten and its full-grown companion were outside the glass, that I couldn't let the kitten in, even though I pitied it and wanted it to be my kitty also.
The basement of the house I grew up in was the template for the locations of a couple of other important dreams, a fact I think bears mentioning here. There was the dream I'd had the night Dad died, of a burning man with something terribly urgent to do, then a view of a basement window looking out onto a peaceful scene of green grass and sunlight, then a movement towards the window and a feeling of relief and escape. The images and emotions after that seemed garbled and confused to me, which makes me greatly regret not having made more progress in disciplining my deep mind beforehand. Could've maybe made more sense of it. Anyway. The second important dream in that setting was the one where I learned the demon factory is closed. Off the main room of the basement was the dark and scary boiler room, and through that was the little workroom. Dad had used it as a workshop and reloading room, then when he was out of the house Mom used it as an office. But in the demon-factory-closed dream it was mine, much larger, and totally empty. Unmarked pale blue-slightly-teal paint on the walls, and a rectangular hole in the floor. Through the hole I could see, might as well call it hell, but nothing down there was coming up and I didn't choose to reach through. Couldn't even think of a decent benediction. Which is neither here nor there.
So. No demon factory in my mental basement anymore. (At least that area of it, heh. I've been building that house in my mind before sleeptime lately, and there are other scary areas I've yet to master.) All to the good. And the main mental basement room can now serve as a lost and found for nice kittehs. Wonder what the kittehs represented, apart from perhaps being invisible creatures. Songs? Projects? Beliefs?
I've been leaning towards thinking of them as songs. Mostly because I've got my lack of songs on the brain. I imagine all these songs crowding around me, mewling to be written, and me somehow not able to carry them back with me and give them a home.
Maddening.
Said album also has a track which wins my personal award for best song title, "A Calvinist Narrowly Avoids Pleasure." Ah, alcoholism. Like any other vice, it can create great and inspiring verse even as it eats away at a man. Especially the chemical vices, for some reason. Many famous bands have a "heroin album" which stands out among their other work; one band I can mention even has a "crack album."
My continued creative drought has me trying to calm myself by considering the nature of other people's creativity, or creative work in general. In case it wasn't obvious. Of course by increasing my conscious awareness of the machinery of the creative process I'm totally shooting myself in the foot. One of several reasons, not all of which I know, that a songwriter can have a substance abuse album is that abusing a substance erodes one's identity, erodes one's control over the fine operations of one's psyche. And in so doing, drives back into the unconscious much of the mana (libido, attention, whatev) which is often taken up by the concerns of living and trying to stay sane.
I did actually write a song last week, but I don't count it. Its principal use in my book is as an intro to [the only road]. Uses pretty much the same chords as the verses to that song, in fact.
emptiness
at the bottom of the cup
emptiness
on the phone line, pick it up
emptiness in my mind
when I try to divine
what the future holds
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and cold
emptiness
where my father used to snore
emptiness
between the ceiling and the floor
emptiness in my heart
flung it out like a dart
left you scarred
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and hard
emptiness
in the gestures that you make
emptiness
trailing panic in its wake
emptiness in my hand
but the flames that I fanned
gonna burn a long while
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
I am still emotionally wrestling with my desire to be able to forgive Mom for many things. Things I can't remember, things I can, things I've been told about but wasn't present to see. And irrationally, to forgive her for outliving Dad. She couldn't have helped his numerous medical conditions, his stubborn insistence at sticking with a job that got him nothing but stress and disappointment, or his refusal to accept the aid and comfort he continually felt the compulsion to offer, even when he lacked the means to deliver it. The whole decade-long mess of a divorce and the years of rancor that preceded it could only have been prevented by both of them changing themselves radically. Which neither could do--for many reasons, not all of which I know. But I had one parent at whom I was less angry than the other and now that one is dead.
I am not a rancorous or vengeful person, now. But I had a lot of rancor and desire for revenge back in the day. A lot of the sneaky psychological warfare bullshit that she to this day believes to have been Dad's doing was me, in my spare time, easing my own hurt by lashing out at her. Hence the "flung it out like a dart / left you scarred" lines. (I must take a moment here to preen for rhyming "heart" with "dart" instead of "apart." Take that, cliche rhyme.) But my experiences then are what led me to my current views on revenge in general. If it can't change the person's mind about the things they've done, if it can't prevent future harm, and since it sure as fuck can't remedy past harm, then all it can do is give me more memories of having been a beast. And any is too many.
But why did I bring up "Ohio", back there at the beginning of the post? Because I've been thinking about politics more than I prefer. No, I still haven't registered to vote. I know it's gotta be in the next couple weeks or I won't have a chance to vote in November. The evils visited on me, my fellow Americans, and the people of Earth wherever America sticks our greasy little fingers, are a little like the bug bites that mysteriously appear every morning on my body. I'm not sure how it happened, I don't know what I can do to prevent it, and it aches and itches constantly in places where it wouldn't be polite for me to scratch. I can't bomb our bedroom with bug spray. We sleep there. I can't throw out all our mattresses and bedclothes. We can't afford new ones. And I can't realistically get behind the abolition of our system of government, either. I can't think of anything practicable with which to replace it that would be an actual improvement.
But the rust has spread all through the engine now. And I don't have firearms and a country estate and a stockpile of food and clean water. Me and Dave are in the worst possible physical situation for a childless couple in the event of a serious apocalypse. Okay, not the worst possible. But our neighborhood is populous, a long damn walk from sources of water, and about as far from being arable land as it's possible to get in a temperate climate. Not even a grocery store nearby to loot.
Is it terribly cynical of me to leap immediately from contemplating the mess in Washington (or even Springfield!) to a vision of Chicago as a barren wasteland inhabited by vicious, starving predators, most of whom walk on two legs?
Then again, Neil Young read an article about the Kent State massacre, went for a walk in the woods, and came back with a song. A song which points out very correctly that that kind of murderous idiocy "should have been done long ago"; we should have been finished with that sort of thing, moved on to all figuring out together how we can be happy and treat one another well. For dog's sake!
And dammit, with all this richness of misery on the one hand, and wealth of personal comfort on the other, why the hell have I not gone for a walk around the neighborhood and come back with a kickass song?!? What should I do, what have I done that I shouldn't? Ach, my impatience is childish. They will come or not as they choose. Or perhaps they have already arrived and are waiting on me to kick open some rusty little door, to shove aside some finely-wound obstruction...
You see how it is with me. This gnawing little loop is never absent from the back of my mind. I am like a junkie for the music. I haven't had a proper fix in almost two months now. A stinking sonnet and a freaking two and half minute intro song. Maddening, I tells ya. Maddening!
I had a dream a couple nights ago where I met dozens of kittens. I was in a space based on the basement of the house I grew up in (a couple other dreams there lately, in fact), having arrived through one of those portal thingies I never seem to notice in-dream but remember afterward. At first there were only a dozen or so, adorable little fluffy things in shades of brown and black and other colors--predominantly brown. They all wanted them to take me back with them--whups. Freudian kitty slip? Wanted me to take them back with me and be my kittens, but even dreaming I knew me and Dave only had room for a couple more kitties. Three or four, tops. I wanted so much to keep them all, and kept looking from one to another, unable to decide. Then I moved towards the front of the basement, to that tiny room where we stored the never-used camping equipment. There was a rectangular window in that closet that looked out on the gravel and sidewalk which marked the boundary between our house and our neighbors Joyce and Tony's house. There was another kitten there, outside the glass, with a full-grown cat beside it. The kitten looked sick; its eyes seemed too large in its head, its coat was not fluffy, and something else about it seemed off somehow. It looked at me with almost as much longing as the healthy kittens had done, though it wasn't able to muster the same emotion exactly. But I knew there was a reason that kitten and its full-grown companion were outside the glass, that I couldn't let the kitten in, even though I pitied it and wanted it to be my kitty also.
The basement of the house I grew up in was the template for the locations of a couple of other important dreams, a fact I think bears mentioning here. There was the dream I'd had the night Dad died, of a burning man with something terribly urgent to do, then a view of a basement window looking out onto a peaceful scene of green grass and sunlight, then a movement towards the window and a feeling of relief and escape. The images and emotions after that seemed garbled and confused to me, which makes me greatly regret not having made more progress in disciplining my deep mind beforehand. Could've maybe made more sense of it. Anyway. The second important dream in that setting was the one where I learned the demon factory is closed. Off the main room of the basement was the dark and scary boiler room, and through that was the little workroom. Dad had used it as a workshop and reloading room, then when he was out of the house Mom used it as an office. But in the demon-factory-closed dream it was mine, much larger, and totally empty. Unmarked pale blue-slightly-teal paint on the walls, and a rectangular hole in the floor. Through the hole I could see, might as well call it hell, but nothing down there was coming up and I didn't choose to reach through. Couldn't even think of a decent benediction. Which is neither here nor there.
So. No demon factory in my mental basement anymore. (At least that area of it, heh. I've been building that house in my mind before sleeptime lately, and there are other scary areas I've yet to master.) All to the good. And the main mental basement room can now serve as a lost and found for nice kittehs. Wonder what the kittehs represented, apart from perhaps being invisible creatures. Songs? Projects? Beliefs?
I've been leaning towards thinking of them as songs. Mostly because I've got my lack of songs on the brain. I imagine all these songs crowding around me, mewling to be written, and me somehow not able to carry them back with me and give them a home.
Maddening.
I can't get no dissatisfaction
Really, one of these months or years I've got to stop using this thing as a personal diary and start doing something with it that has social value. Or intellectual value. To persons, that is, other than myself and the handful who know me personally. Politics makes me sad, and angry at myself for how easily I give up on all of them. I see how hard they're trying, yes, but I also seem to see what it is they're trying to do. And none of 'em feel plugged in, as I see them. The things they are required to do, the things a person has to bet all their spiritual chips on in order to succeed in power politics, seem like lies. All lies, in the defense of lies, to cover over yet more lies. Lies which carry the form and name and stamp of leadership and service, and ape those things to a degree. But which, in practice, only take the driven and ambitious and highly visible and turn them into blunt instruments gripped in the hands of beasts.
Contemplating that stuff only depresses me. Which is why I've been thinking about politics et cetera only in short bursts, more out of a sense of civic responsibility than because I feel there's anything at all useful I can do about any of it. Much better to narrow my focus and think about nicer things. Like the present!
Over the past couple of weeks I have lived in a floaty cloud of great happiness. Dave and I have spent our time together either dashing excitedly or ambling contentedly between one enjoyable or useful activity and the next. Even going to the grocery store and taking out the garbage seem worthwhile. This sort of idyll is assuredly what I hear being called the "salad days" of a relationship. Which seems odd to me, considering that:
1. our eighth anniversary as a couple is coming up next month;
2. the salad is not the favorite part of a meal for most, merely the first.
It is more like getting to have an extra dessert between the soup and the entree.
I have often come onto this blog and excised the long list of complaints and whines from the various portions of my stream of consciousness where I found them gumming up the works. Now, at this moment, I really have only two. Complaint number ones: I really ought to become a better person faster in various ways, most of the ways relating to responsibility in the maintenance of social ties and neatness and organization around the home. Complaint number twos: I have written, in I believe the past month, only one lousy sonnet. Though it was a good one. (And thanks to Amber for letting me know you liked! :D ) But writing and composing, or the lack of "enough" of them, is something I always hope to be able to complain about. I forget who wrote it--someone I once knew had it up over their computer desk, and I remember the sense of the quotation better than the name. A famous lady modern dance pioneer. But it declared the crux of impetus towards art is a sort of divine dissatisfaction, something that shakes you up and makes you uncomfortable, a restless impulse that makes you need to create. Or destroy, I suppose, though that's a damn waste of it.
I'm really glad I dug [distance] out of the old folder and arranged it. It's fast becoming one of me and Dave's favorites, despite being somewhat challenging to play well. That dissatisfaction, that creative discomfort is really what that song's about. Holiness lurks within ordinary things, so easy to miss because our skulky selves tend to edit out the uncomfortable from our awareness of reality. The presence of divinity may be joyful, but it is never precisely comfortable. Having passed through the presence of something holy may, afterwards, bring you a feeling of peace and an ability to truly and properly relax that you never before possessed. But in the moment of contact all you can feel is the little wrinkles, the roughness of fit between your own tiny soul and the majesty you dimly perceive. As though your soul is a pillow that's lumpy and you can't fall asleep because it won't settle under your head just right. So you sit straight up, swearing under your breath, and pummel and fluff and knead it until it assumes a different shape. That is art.
Looking back through my blog, the last song I write was [the only road], way back on August 5th. Which is like, a month and eleven days. Yowza! I do believe the most major reason for my creative "drought" is that I have been well and truly comfortable and well comforted. Which is not at all the state I seem to need to be in to sink in my claws and drag the musical creatures out from between the interstices of time. Or skitter so frantically back and forth in front of their illusive hidey-holes that they can't resist the temptation to leap out onto my brain and become literal. I am never quite sure which it is.
Back to work. At last they've found things for us to scan and copy and make ready for filing, or whatever it is these streams of documents are bound for after they leave the processing room.
Contemplating that stuff only depresses me. Which is why I've been thinking about politics et cetera only in short bursts, more out of a sense of civic responsibility than because I feel there's anything at all useful I can do about any of it. Much better to narrow my focus and think about nicer things. Like the present!
Over the past couple of weeks I have lived in a floaty cloud of great happiness. Dave and I have spent our time together either dashing excitedly or ambling contentedly between one enjoyable or useful activity and the next. Even going to the grocery store and taking out the garbage seem worthwhile. This sort of idyll is assuredly what I hear being called the "salad days" of a relationship. Which seems odd to me, considering that:
1. our eighth anniversary as a couple is coming up next month;
2. the salad is not the favorite part of a meal for most, merely the first.
It is more like getting to have an extra dessert between the soup and the entree.
I have often come onto this blog and excised the long list of complaints and whines from the various portions of my stream of consciousness where I found them gumming up the works. Now, at this moment, I really have only two. Complaint number ones: I really ought to become a better person faster in various ways, most of the ways relating to responsibility in the maintenance of social ties and neatness and organization around the home. Complaint number twos: I have written, in I believe the past month, only one lousy sonnet. Though it was a good one. (And thanks to Amber for letting me know you liked! :D ) But writing and composing, or the lack of "enough" of them, is something I always hope to be able to complain about. I forget who wrote it--someone I once knew had it up over their computer desk, and I remember the sense of the quotation better than the name. A famous lady modern dance pioneer. But it declared the crux of impetus towards art is a sort of divine dissatisfaction, something that shakes you up and makes you uncomfortable, a restless impulse that makes you need to create. Or destroy, I suppose, though that's a damn waste of it.
I'm really glad I dug [distance] out of the old folder and arranged it. It's fast becoming one of me and Dave's favorites, despite being somewhat challenging to play well. That dissatisfaction, that creative discomfort is really what that song's about. Holiness lurks within ordinary things, so easy to miss because our skulky selves tend to edit out the uncomfortable from our awareness of reality. The presence of divinity may be joyful, but it is never precisely comfortable. Having passed through the presence of something holy may, afterwards, bring you a feeling of peace and an ability to truly and properly relax that you never before possessed. But in the moment of contact all you can feel is the little wrinkles, the roughness of fit between your own tiny soul and the majesty you dimly perceive. As though your soul is a pillow that's lumpy and you can't fall asleep because it won't settle under your head just right. So you sit straight up, swearing under your breath, and pummel and fluff and knead it until it assumes a different shape. That is art.
Looking back through my blog, the last song I write was [the only road], way back on August 5th. Which is like, a month and eleven days. Yowza! I do believe the most major reason for my creative "drought" is that I have been well and truly comfortable and well comforted. Which is not at all the state I seem to need to be in to sink in my claws and drag the musical creatures out from between the interstices of time. Or skitter so frantically back and forth in front of their illusive hidey-holes that they can't resist the temptation to leap out onto my brain and become literal. I am never quite sure which it is.
Back to work. At last they've found things for us to scan and copy and make ready for filing, or whatever it is these streams of documents are bound for after they leave the processing room.
second day of temp job. wrote poem!
I've done 12-hour shifts before, but never on back to back days. Whoo hoo! Three or so weeks of lazing about, watching television, and consuming various substances was fun. But as time went on I became increasingly restless and mopey from the inactivity. Now I'm exceedingly busy doing something which involves neither icy, skidding patches of ethical dubiousness nor full fledged panicky defense against unforeseen disasters which would have been preventable only by increased vigilance on the part of persons whom I cannot presume to instruct!
Also I decided to write a sonnet. And in the grand old tradition of, "Well, I'm boring, here's something I'm looking at," I decided to write a sonnet and eventually found something to write one about. No title yet. Maybe I can be like Shakespeare and have people just refer to them by their opening lines. Hehehe. May need revising later.
This building's marble planters stand foursquare,
Brimful of blooms which soothe the autumn eye.
They will not stay to taste December's air,
Wilt in its winds--clash with the owner's tie.
The building manager decrees their fate,
Which nature once decided by its whim.
This tile's all right: those flowers, out of date.
Those tenants, well-behaved: these bulbs, too dim.
Why put down roots in cubicles of cloth
When houses made of stone are not secure?
When you fall prey to time, or pride, or sloth
You'll be replaced--of that you may be sure.
No, you've no choice, my friend. Neither do they.
Plants dig for water: we must work for pay.
Also I decided to write a sonnet. And in the grand old tradition of, "Well, I'm boring, here's something I'm looking at," I decided to write a sonnet and eventually found something to write one about. No title yet. Maybe I can be like Shakespeare and have people just refer to them by their opening lines. Hehehe. May need revising later.
This building's marble planters stand foursquare,
Brimful of blooms which soothe the autumn eye.
They will not stay to taste December's air,
Wilt in its winds--clash with the owner's tie.
The building manager decrees their fate,
Which nature once decided by its whim.
This tile's all right: those flowers, out of date.
Those tenants, well-behaved: these bulbs, too dim.
Why put down roots in cubicles of cloth
When houses made of stone are not secure?
When you fall prey to time, or pride, or sloth
You'll be replaced--of that you may be sure.
No, you've no choice, my friend. Neither do they.
Plants dig for water: we must work for pay.
thoughts on life, death, everything, and the universe
There are, in popular conception, two ways of thinking about death. The hard science way, or the religious way.
(The third option, the shamanistic or witchy way or whatever you want to call it, doesn't usually get included in the discussion. The scientific types laugh at it even harder than they do at religion, and the religious types often feel it's the work of the pointy-footed one himself and a gross violation of spiritual law. My feeling is that the whole nature of spiritual laws is that they can't be violated--that you can be exceedingly rude or cruel, but you can't cheat the interface. However, it's a "discipline" where the professionals are likeliest of all to be quacks, and the people who may actually have something tend to let their personality issues get in the way of good data. Since in any case it's something nobody can do for anybody else--at least, not without being very rude--I won't address it further at the moment.)
The religious way can of course differ wildly depending on your religion of origin or choice. If you're Buddhist, for example, I'd imagine the difference wouldn't be that large, because half the idea is to hop off the wheel of reincarnation into a blissful, desireless state in which individual self-awareness is subsumed in a more universal awareness. When I was a teen the topic was one of great intellectual fascination for me, since I believed (still do; it's a hard habit to kick) in a spiritual side to the world but at the time didn't know any dead people. I wouldn't say my interest in the differing geographies of various afterlifes led me to be interested in one over the other back in the day, though. The three people I know well who've died all did so after I arrived at some version of my current belief system, and I have striven to integrate my reaction to those events into said system as it continues to evolve.
Maybe for people weighing the vectors of conversion in the heat of bereavement it's a different story. There is a kind of gnawing, burning need to have the question settled in one's mind. My view is that from a technical standpoint, a personality construction standpoint, the question I'm asking myself is not "What is my father doing now that his body is dead?" but rather "How has this event changed my relationship with my father, and what am I supposed to do with the personality resources which I previously invested in the ongoing maintenance of that relationship?" And whatever your system, when you lose somebody you care about you find yourself leaning on it in wholly different ways. You find out if the shape of your faith will hold up under the strain. Many people find the shape of their beliefs won't hold up under the strain, and they rediscover their religion from a new angle. Or they seek out or construct a new one, in order to get back to themselves after losing somebody.
Now I am not a true relativist--I believe that there is an objective truth and that it is possible, with lots of hard work and an equal amount of good fortune, to stumble across it. I also think that stumbling across verifiable proof of any objective truth on an issue this potent takes generations of seemingly tangential toil, man-centuries of research and development. Which you and I and the listening audience do not happen to have laying around in the back of the fridge, waiting to be cracked open. And much as the germ theory of disease did not seem rational prior to the invention of the microscope, proof one way or the other may not be possible without technological advances which may not yet exist.
However, I do believe that all roads lead eventually to Rome or to Ithaka, wherever home is. So too there is a path to mental health along any belief vector, be it ever so rocky or covered with oceans. The elephants and the oarsmen might not all make it, but the story goes on.
And we still have the necessity to answer that second question above, the technical question, from either the scientific or the dogmatic viewpoint, whichever we choose as our religion. You can choose to believe the accumulated wisdom of a bunch of uppity monkeys in lab coats. Or you can choose to believe in the accumulated interpretive traditions of a gaggle of spiritually crippled know-nothings struggling to digest the merciful revelations of a benevolent yet ineffable deity. But either way you have to leap the same hurdles, process the same tidal shifts in your emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
It's a hard thing to admit just how much of my relationship with any other person takes place inside my own mind. To separate Dad from the ideas I have about him, to the extent that's possible. When someone is alive and you communicate with them from time to time, your ideas about that person are in constant flux as they change their behaviors and their own ideas. But when they're dead or you no longer have any form of contact, all you've got to wrestle with is your memories. When a person still talks with you, writes to you, looks at you, if you have an idea about them that may be a little off, you can perceive something in the way they act or speak that makes you take a step back and say "Hey! I need to change my attitude."
Once communication ends, however, you no longer have that baseline to check yourself against. You are stuck with the fearful thought that it is no longer possible to be sure. More--it is not possible ever to be sure of someone else, of the truth of the ideas I have about them, even when they are standing right in front of me, laying their confidence bare. It is always possible that I have misinterpreted them, that they have expressed themselves poorly or misunderstood their own intentions. In life it is not possible to be sure, only to be reassured. Where, then, can I find that reassurance when someone is dead, and can no longer drag me back to reality with a wink when my mind leads me down a ridiculous bunny trail?
Christianity's answer, seems to me, is to defer reassurance. Eyes have not seen and ears have not heard, but in the future when we are reunited in the next world, all will be revealed. This seems fair enough in the abstract, but less satisfying when I am struggling with burning questions such as "Was I a jerk? Was he still mad at me for X?" I suppose the idea is that it's good to cultivate patience, and to subsume the energy one would have spent agonizing past events into greater faith in God. Who is, by these accounts, the ultimate revealer of such mysteries. And furthermore, is the one who decided that it would be better for us all not to worry about it now, but to forgive and receive forgiveness in spite of the uncertainty. The idea is that the miracle of God's love for us and forgiveness of us is the one sure thing we can lean on in a world of doubt. And that, by faith, we can take that certainty from God and pass it through to others, in a transubstantiation of love far more impressive, to my mind, than that of crackers to flesh or wine to blood.
The main response available to those who trust in science lies not in the future, but in the study of the past. It is hard to separate memory from imagination--especially for someone whose memory is as lousy as mine! Harder still to separate out which of your emotions about a person were responses to them, and which arose from the interplay of forces inside your own personality. And the tangle gets maximally snarled when the person in question was one of your parents who raised you, whose personality provided major parts of the structure and and content that you had available in building your own personality. It's hard and painful work, sure, and easy to get bogged down in what-ifs and recriminations in all directions. The only way to get it sorted out to any useful degree, in this perspective, is to rely on the compassion and empathy of people you trust. If they know you well, they can pull you out of a funk if they can see the problem is coming from your own attitudes. And if they also knew the person you lost, they have their own set of memories to sift through. By comparing notes and reminiscing together, we can get a certain amount of reassurance. Even though we don't know the whole story, there are things we can agree on, truths we can arrive at together and there find strength. The remembered love of the dead, and the commitment to honor what they meant to us, can bind us together and give us new courage in a world full of mystery.
While each perspective emphasizes a different solution, I think a little bit of both are necessary to the healing process. Love, like gravity, travels straight through, across the curves of every dimension and past the corners of every time. You can work your way through memory to arrive at a place where relief and forgiveness are possible. You take a kernel of divine fire and use it to light the way through the winding corridors of your memory to the point where your mind can be settled. But it is the narrow thread of love and hope that leads you through the labyrinth in either direction, it is that which guides you. It is that which matters most.
(The third option, the shamanistic or witchy way or whatever you want to call it, doesn't usually get included in the discussion. The scientific types laugh at it even harder than they do at religion, and the religious types often feel it's the work of the pointy-footed one himself and a gross violation of spiritual law. My feeling is that the whole nature of spiritual laws is that they can't be violated--that you can be exceedingly rude or cruel, but you can't cheat the interface. However, it's a "discipline" where the professionals are likeliest of all to be quacks, and the people who may actually have something tend to let their personality issues get in the way of good data. Since in any case it's something nobody can do for anybody else--at least, not without being very rude--I won't address it further at the moment.)
The religious way can of course differ wildly depending on your religion of origin or choice. If you're Buddhist, for example, I'd imagine the difference wouldn't be that large, because half the idea is to hop off the wheel of reincarnation into a blissful, desireless state in which individual self-awareness is subsumed in a more universal awareness. When I was a teen the topic was one of great intellectual fascination for me, since I believed (still do; it's a hard habit to kick) in a spiritual side to the world but at the time didn't know any dead people. I wouldn't say my interest in the differing geographies of various afterlifes led me to be interested in one over the other back in the day, though. The three people I know well who've died all did so after I arrived at some version of my current belief system, and I have striven to integrate my reaction to those events into said system as it continues to evolve.
Maybe for people weighing the vectors of conversion in the heat of bereavement it's a different story. There is a kind of gnawing, burning need to have the question settled in one's mind. My view is that from a technical standpoint, a personality construction standpoint, the question I'm asking myself is not "What is my father doing now that his body is dead?" but rather "How has this event changed my relationship with my father, and what am I supposed to do with the personality resources which I previously invested in the ongoing maintenance of that relationship?" And whatever your system, when you lose somebody you care about you find yourself leaning on it in wholly different ways. You find out if the shape of your faith will hold up under the strain. Many people find the shape of their beliefs won't hold up under the strain, and they rediscover their religion from a new angle. Or they seek out or construct a new one, in order to get back to themselves after losing somebody.
Now I am not a true relativist--I believe that there is an objective truth and that it is possible, with lots of hard work and an equal amount of good fortune, to stumble across it. I also think that stumbling across verifiable proof of any objective truth on an issue this potent takes generations of seemingly tangential toil, man-centuries of research and development. Which you and I and the listening audience do not happen to have laying around in the back of the fridge, waiting to be cracked open. And much as the germ theory of disease did not seem rational prior to the invention of the microscope, proof one way or the other may not be possible without technological advances which may not yet exist.
However, I do believe that all roads lead eventually to Rome or to Ithaka, wherever home is. So too there is a path to mental health along any belief vector, be it ever so rocky or covered with oceans. The elephants and the oarsmen might not all make it, but the story goes on.
And we still have the necessity to answer that second question above, the technical question, from either the scientific or the dogmatic viewpoint, whichever we choose as our religion. You can choose to believe the accumulated wisdom of a bunch of uppity monkeys in lab coats. Or you can choose to believe in the accumulated interpretive traditions of a gaggle of spiritually crippled know-nothings struggling to digest the merciful revelations of a benevolent yet ineffable deity. But either way you have to leap the same hurdles, process the same tidal shifts in your emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
It's a hard thing to admit just how much of my relationship with any other person takes place inside my own mind. To separate Dad from the ideas I have about him, to the extent that's possible. When someone is alive and you communicate with them from time to time, your ideas about that person are in constant flux as they change their behaviors and their own ideas. But when they're dead or you no longer have any form of contact, all you've got to wrestle with is your memories. When a person still talks with you, writes to you, looks at you, if you have an idea about them that may be a little off, you can perceive something in the way they act or speak that makes you take a step back and say "Hey! I need to change my attitude."
Once communication ends, however, you no longer have that baseline to check yourself against. You are stuck with the fearful thought that it is no longer possible to be sure. More--it is not possible ever to be sure of someone else, of the truth of the ideas I have about them, even when they are standing right in front of me, laying their confidence bare. It is always possible that I have misinterpreted them, that they have expressed themselves poorly or misunderstood their own intentions. In life it is not possible to be sure, only to be reassured. Where, then, can I find that reassurance when someone is dead, and can no longer drag me back to reality with a wink when my mind leads me down a ridiculous bunny trail?
Christianity's answer, seems to me, is to defer reassurance. Eyes have not seen and ears have not heard, but in the future when we are reunited in the next world, all will be revealed. This seems fair enough in the abstract, but less satisfying when I am struggling with burning questions such as "Was I a jerk? Was he still mad at me for X?" I suppose the idea is that it's good to cultivate patience, and to subsume the energy one would have spent agonizing past events into greater faith in God. Who is, by these accounts, the ultimate revealer of such mysteries. And furthermore, is the one who decided that it would be better for us all not to worry about it now, but to forgive and receive forgiveness in spite of the uncertainty. The idea is that the miracle of God's love for us and forgiveness of us is the one sure thing we can lean on in a world of doubt. And that, by faith, we can take that certainty from God and pass it through to others, in a transubstantiation of love far more impressive, to my mind, than that of crackers to flesh or wine to blood.
The main response available to those who trust in science lies not in the future, but in the study of the past. It is hard to separate memory from imagination--especially for someone whose memory is as lousy as mine! Harder still to separate out which of your emotions about a person were responses to them, and which arose from the interplay of forces inside your own personality. And the tangle gets maximally snarled when the person in question was one of your parents who raised you, whose personality provided major parts of the structure and and content that you had available in building your own personality. It's hard and painful work, sure, and easy to get bogged down in what-ifs and recriminations in all directions. The only way to get it sorted out to any useful degree, in this perspective, is to rely on the compassion and empathy of people you trust. If they know you well, they can pull you out of a funk if they can see the problem is coming from your own attitudes. And if they also knew the person you lost, they have their own set of memories to sift through. By comparing notes and reminiscing together, we can get a certain amount of reassurance. Even though we don't know the whole story, there are things we can agree on, truths we can arrive at together and there find strength. The remembered love of the dead, and the commitment to honor what they meant to us, can bind us together and give us new courage in a world full of mystery.
While each perspective emphasizes a different solution, I think a little bit of both are necessary to the healing process. Love, like gravity, travels straight through, across the curves of every dimension and past the corners of every time. You can work your way through memory to arrive at a place where relief and forgiveness are possible. You take a kernel of divine fire and use it to light the way through the winding corridors of your memory to the point where your mind can be settled. But it is the narrow thread of love and hope that leads you through the labyrinth in either direction, it is that which guides you. It is that which matters most.
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