Isolation and connection

We are thrown into the world with no rhyme or reason, say Martin Heidegger (Being and Time) and the existentialists. Presumably, this arbitrary and inscrutable “thrownness” is a big source of the anxiety and isolation that condition our existence. Gloomy lot, these existentialists.

But is there an antidote to the gloom? If so, maybe it comes from hippie philosopher par excellence, Alan Watts. The idea that we “come into the world” as “isolated egos .. who confront an external world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange” — all of that is a hallucination, says Watts. And we can dissolve the hallucination with one simple fact: “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree” (The Book).

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Nietzsche, Kant, and Trump

I don’t get the fascination with Nietzsche. I just read Beyond Good and Evil, and it is entertaining for the over-the-top bravado, but it seems all attitude and no substance. Or what substance there is comes in a kind of rambling teenage blog – this and that about philosophy, a dozen or so pages devoted to witty but dubious generalizations about race and nationality, occasional 2- or 3-page romps into witty but dubious generalizations about women, a sudden chapter on music. If you enjoy the bullying wit of a Simon Cowell or a Gordon Ramsay (or Trump for that matter), Nietzsche is your guy. But I can’t figure out how to take him seriously as a philosopher.

When he does venture into critiquing previous philosophers, it again seems all attitude and no substance. In sweeping dismissals, he attacks Kant, Plato, et al., not with argument but with attitude – as if being critical with enough attitude, enough wit and passion, will, in the absence of any real argument, bully people into agreeing with you for fear of your ferocious wit – your ill-natured “will to power” (if you will). It’s like Trump mowing over his opponents by name-calling and verbal bullying.

This approach might partly be explained by one of Nietzsche’s well-taken points – that psychology is the hidden key to philosophy and other quests for knowledge. “Every great philosophy up to now has consisted of … unconscious autobiography,” in which the philosopher “creates the world in [his] own image” (Chap. 1).

When Nietzsche turns this shrewd analytical model on his favorite nemesis, “old Kant” as Nietzsche flippantly likes saying, some elements of Beyond Good and Evil become clear to me. Regarding Kant’s categorical imperative, Nietzsche says: ”Apart from the value of such assertions as ‘there is a categorical imperative in us,’ one can always ask: What does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it?” (Chap. 5)

Two things here. First is Nietzsche’s dismissal of the cornerstone of Kant’s ethics, the “categorical imperative” – not because he has any argument against it, but merely because a universal ground of ethics is anathema to Nietzsche’s pet theory of one morality for the master class and a different morality for the slave class. Kant’s universal ground of ethics – basically behaving in a way that is universalizable – the way that you would wish all people to behave in similar circumstances, irrespective of any ‘interest’ you may have in the situation – this might lead one, in Nietzsche’s words, to treat “public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy … as the peculiarly human virtues” (Chap. 5). Of course, for Nietzsche these are NOT human virtues generally but virtues that apply to the slave-morality, to we everyday sufferers who would value sympathetic relations with our fellow sufferers. For those “destined to command,” a different morality applies, a morality that values “certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise … revengefulness … rapacity, and love of power” (Chap. 5). These qualities, which were considered good in the old heroic age and are now considered “evil” in our debauched age of democracy and mediocrity, need to be restored as applicable for the “higher orders of men” (Chap. 3) while the great mediocre majority sticks to their slave morality of compassion and so forth. On this issue, I’ll take Kant over Nietzsche  – not only because Kant at least takes the time to make a logical argument for his case, but also because a Kantian world where people treat each other as they would like to be treated just sounds better than a Nietzschean aristocracy equipped “to accept with good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments”; i.e., an aristocracy whose “fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves” (Chap. 9). It sounds a little bit like roaming gangs in the service of strongmen plundering the rest of society at will. It seems this has been tried, e.g., in medieval times before the great monarchies rose to establish widespread law and order, albeit through absolutist rule, or in more modern times, the battling warlords of Somalia, each following his own “will to power,” believing in “rank and NOT in equality” (Chap. 1) and rising above the “shallow-mindedness” of “equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations” (Chap. 7). I am as amused as the next reader at Nietzsche’s bracing bravado, but forgive me if it all sounds a little dystopic if taken seriously.

The second takeaway from Nietzsche’s dismissal of the categorical imperative arises from his psychological focus. “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography” indeed. Nietzsche’s rejection of the categorical imperative, though no argument against it, reveals Nietzsche’s own attachment to his double morality for master and slave classes, just as his grounding of human nature to the “will to power” says more about him than about human nature generally. (Might not others be driven by a will to love or will to harmony or Nietzsche’s much-maligned will to truth?) One suspects that as a child he was chastised to obey the rules of good behavior and not throw tantrums to put his own will above the rights and well-being of others. Consequently, he devoted his life’s work to justifying his own impetuous will to power. Good for him. But don’t drag the rest of us into the same dark and narcissistic space. (One similarly imagines Ayn Rand being told as a child not to be so selfish and hence devoting her life’s work to a justification of selfishness.)

Nietzsche’s autobiographical/psychoanalytical caveat may further explain his appeal. Most kids want to be “in” with the bully who exhibits the most bravado in the schoolyard. And most do not outgrow this with age (witness Trump’s popularity). The masses have no interest in systematic argument. They prefer an autocrat’s withering derision of “the idiot masses,” as it (1) makes them feel aligned with the autocrat’s power, and (2) makes them feel that they themselves are superior to “the masses.” #1 might at first seem to support of Nietzsche’s view of the primacy of “will to power,” but — sadly for “old Nietzsche” — it is specifically the “lower order of human beings,” not his “higher order,” who get suckered in on #1. D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, a death-bed plea for a spiritual and cultural rejuvenation, shares much of Nietzsche’s world view, but Lawrence is much clearer about this latter point — that the “will to power” crowd are not the cream of the crop, as Nietzsche presumes.

Let me pause to say that there are parts of the book I appreciate. The willingness to defy convention and carve your own path – e.g., the push to liberate sensuality from conventional moralities – is certainly admirable to me. Some of the historical looks at morality are good. The emphasis on the psychology behind philosophical systems is indeed enlightening and still underworked as far as I can see in my limited view of modern philosophy. Some of his critical points about religion and the soul seem well-taken, though they don’t require much heavy lifting intellectually. But even the solid points suffer from the megalomaniacal side of his thought. E.g., that untruth (as well as truth, one might say) is a condition of life (Chap. 1) is an interesting and solid point, but that “a philosophy which ventures to” base itself on that proposition “place[s] itself beyond good and evil” is a huge leap in logic, although Nietzsche treats it as if the one follows seamlessly from the other – a willingness to play sloppy with logic that you would never find in Plato or Kant.

Along these lines, the emphasized “will to power” seems all too often to simply mean that bluster is sufficient, without logic or evidence. And indeed, his critique of other philosophers is largely just that – bluster without argument. It’s like Trump giving second-grade name tags to his opponents – fallacious at best, but a good way to hook the masses. Most Trumpian/Orwellian of all, Nietzsche reviles Kant’s pride – here, in the midst of a book that opens with a breathtaking dismissal of all Platonists, Stoics, Kantians, etc., as idiots who stand to be corrected in this volume!

When he does seem to make an argument against Kant (though not mentioning Kant in this passage), his argument seems an almost childlike misunderstanding of Kant. “Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs. But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs … reductio ad absurdum” (Chap. 1). One would have to misunderstand the relation between noumenal and phenomenal worlds in a very fundamental way to think this is a critique of Kant.

The same with cogito ergo sum. He mocks those who say “I think” presupposes an “I” (Chap. 1). His point that too much, post-Descartes, has been presumed about this subjective ‘I’ doing the thinking and doubting may be well-taken and yet his adolescent need for bluster takes the reins, and here too he lets what could have been a good argument devolve into an exercise in attitude. To give Nietzsche his due, bluster gets ratings with the masses, whether it’s the bluster of Simon Cowell, Chef Gordon Ramsay, or Donald Trump. These public figures may have bits of good as well as bad to offer, but it’s the bluster that gets the ratings. In the case of Nietzsche and Descartes, the idea that even if I deny reality exists, I cannot dispute that ‘I’ am denying it – in terms of reasoned argument, this idea seems more convincing than Nietzsche’s mockery of it.

A common defense of Nietzsche on this issue is that he is deliberately unsystematic and should not be judged by the terms of systematic philosophers like Plato or Kant. I am unconvinced. This is like a student in an academic writing class saying, “I don’t believe in systematic reasoning so you can’t judge me on whether I actually support my claims with logic or evidence.” I suspect that would not fly, even in Nietzsche’s own courses in classical philology. So why do people tolerate it in Nietzsche’s philosophy? Because people tend to give a wide berth to the schoolyard bully. And then they find a rationalization.

It may be that how we choose to define philosophy is what’s at stake here, so let me be clear. To me, philosophy is (1) partly defined by the kind questions you ask — not what is the speed of light but questions about the nature of reality, of human experience, of ethics, knowledge, values, etc.; and (2) partly defined by the process you follow. Even if we grant there’s no absolute truth, philosophy should be reasoning things forward, drawing upon logic and evidence to get closer and closer to a more accurate or useful endpoint. So, yes, for me, Plato and Kant are definitive philosophers; Nietzsche is just a blogger before his time. (Nothing against bloggers — I am a blogger myself — but if you want to disregard systematically supporting your claims, just admit you are a blogger and not a philosopher — you cannot compete with Plato and Kant on their own turf.)

Returning to Nietzsche’s caveat, “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography,” I believe that is indeed the keynote of the book. Nietzsche is perhaps more of a psychoanalyst of philosophy than a philosopher himself. And when one turns the psychoanalysis back upon Nietzsche, the rest of the book does make more sense. It is by using himself as a standard that he concludes that the “will to power” is the cardinal instinct of humankind (Chap. 5), that as one of “the higher class of men,” he has a RIGHT to ramble through generalizations about nationalities, women, music, whatever, and no need to justify any of it to the mediocre masses of the slave morality (presumably, us).

It is demagoguery in the manner of Trump. For the noble man, “morality equals self-glorification” (Chap. 9). “Egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as ‘we’, other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves” (Chap. 9). You can’t find a better definition of Trump narcissism than that.

And if the bravado of these quotes seems over the top, there are plenty more.

“A man who has depth of spirit … can only think of women as orientals do; he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined to service ….[The problem today is] she is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who ‘unlearns to fear’ sacrifices her most womanly instincts … she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children” (Chap. 7).

“Resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression … exploitation” (Chap. 9).

These passages sound an awful lot like what we would today call social media trolling.

I suppose the clearest counterpoint to the ethical base of Beyond Good and Evil is the Dalai Lama:

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Ah, compassion! The bete noire of Beyond Good and Evil, the lynchpin to the democratic forces “threaten[ing] a new Buddhism” in Europe, with their belief “in the herd … in their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers” (Chap. 5). Sorry, but as with Kant above, I’ll take the Dalai Lama over Nietzsche on this one.

And at the end, a curiosity. The final passage of the book throws in a disarming bit of humility. “I, the last disciple and initiate of the God Dionysus: and perhaps I might at last begin to give to you, my friends, as far as I am allowed, a little taste of this philosophy? In a hushed voice, as is but seemly…” (Chap. 9). After a text of breathtaking arrogance in its dismissal of all previous philosophers and of equal rights for all but the master class, it is hard to tell if this humble bit is tongue-in-cheek or a revelation that the real Nietzsche is not the pompous bully who just delivered the book-length harangue but a companionate fellow traveler who was just bantering us the whole time. I tend to favor the “pompous bully” theory, but the trolling nature of the outlandish rhetoric gives me second thoughts. Maybe he was just trolling, bantering. Maybe the whole thing was ironic. I don’t know. For one thing, I haven’t read other bits and books by Nietzsche in many years, so I’m just giving my own bemused reactions to this one. Some of you Nietzsche supporters and scholars can reply with chuckles, clarifications, or merciless attacks. Anything to liberate my readers from the now-public quagmire of my own thoughts.

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Regifting for Brittany

In expectation of the holiday season and in worshipful honor of the incredible Brittany Whittenberg, here is a link to my near-famous manifesto on Regifting and Post-Technological Ethics.

May the wisdom therein carry friends, lovers, and followers into the forthcoming post-partisan, post-technological, post-capitalist, post-materialist, post-racial, and post-everything-else Age of Aquarius 🙏

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The consciousness question

Scientific American recently ran this article called “Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe.”

My sometime dialectical combatant, MT, asked my opinion — whether to honor my perspicacity or lead me into an ambush is yet to be seen. But I will take the bait.

My initial thoughts are this. If you keep the distinction between subjective reality and objective reality intact, and attribute consciousness to the objective cosmos, it smacks a little of superstition. But if you are a hippie, you recognize through your LSD experiences that at some point objective reality and subjective reality fold into one and the same thing — on a cosmic level — and from that point of view, panpsychism becomes almost tautological (as expressed in the ebb and flow of Ragman’s inner monologue in lucky Chapter 13 of my excellent novel, Hippies 😊).

“Consciousness is energy received and decoded by a structure. There are as many levels of consciousness in the human body as there are anatomical structures to receive and decode energy.” (Timothy Leary)

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Detachment and compassion

What does it mean to live a good life? The question has run through philosophy since at least the ancient Greeks. The 1960s was a period of foment for the question, as the hippie movement saw a burst of energy around the idea of redefining human fulfillment, with such fuel as the sudden abundance of LSD, anti-war and other resistance movements hacking away at the established order, the rise of self-sufficient communes and movable music festivals, etc. One feature of the movement was the infusion of ideas from Eastern religions and philosophies, led in part by figures like Baba Ram Dass and Alan Watts.

There are lots of ways to look at how that infusion from the East affected Western ideas, at least in the counterculture, of what it means to live a good life, but for today’s bold lecture, I want to look at two elements that seem to generate some tension between them: detachment and compassion. From Ram Dass to Watts to the proliferation of New Age books, there’s a lot of talk about how our attachment to the material world keeps us bogged down in the ego, impedes spiritual growth and happiness. If your happiness depends on material possessions or pleasures, you’ll never be content. There is always the next possession or pleasure to be pursued. For spiritual growth and deeper happiness, you need to detach from the world of the ego’s dependencies.

But what about compassion? Per the Dalai Lama: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.” Compassion is a big deal in living the good life, as it should be (sorry, Ayn Rand). But isn’t compassion a form of emotional investment? Isn’t it attachment? If you get better and better at detachment, wouldn’t that make you less and less capable of compassion?

Paradoxically, the opposite is true. The philosophers in question speak not only of compassion but of unconditional compassion. Applied to the political dissent of those countercultural hippies, Ram Dass says, ““You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.”

There is nothing wrong with emotional investment in a loved one. But compassion channeled in that way is of a local form. It is a form of attachment. And attachment always includes an element of self-interest. You have an “interest” in the well-being of that person. Nothing wrong with that, but such an emotional investment is local, is conditional. Wherever you have an “interest,” your judgment or your feeling is not universal, is not unconditional.

Since I am now in full-on lecture mode, let’s go all-out pedantic and bring in Kant, imho the most important philosopher since Plato. Kant goes on at length about how for a judgment to be universally valid, it must be “disinterested.” Applied to beauty, “a judgment about beauty in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and not a pure judgment” (Critique of Judgment, 1790). This makes sense to us when talking about beauty or art. Someone with a material interest in an art work is likely to have their judgment swayed somewhat by that interest. Someone with absolutely no material interest in the art work is likelier to form a judgment that is more pure, untainted. In Kant’s terms, because this viewer is “disinterested” (not in the sense of apathetic but in the sense that they have no vested interest one way or the other), their judgment is likelier to be universally valid.

Back to our terms about compassion, let’s swap out “disinterested” for “detached.” A “detached” viewer of the art work is likelier to see its beauty from a purer, less tainted (more universal) point of view than a viewer who has some attachment or interest in that particular work of art.

When we shift from beauty to compassion, the application of these terms is less intuitive but the truth still holds. Where compassion is linked to our “attachment” to or “interest” in the beloved person, it is limited by the condition of that interest. This is not to say that it is bad or selfish, just that it is conditional. Only with detachment can we transcend the conditions of this or that personal connection and manifest an unconditional compassion.

Perhaps is it for a reason such as this that Plato put romantic/sexual love below what we call “platonic” love in that ladder of love he builds in The Symposium. It’s worth noting that Plato doesn’t denigrate romantic/sexual love as if were somehow sinful – no, we can leave that for the Christians who would come thereafter – nothing wrong with sexual love in Plato, it is simply a more limited, less fulfilling form of love than “platonic” love. In Plato’s terms, that highest form was the love of philosophy, but for us, today, in the context of this post, we might just call it “transcendental” – a form of love or compassion that transcends the interest, the ego, the attachments incumbent upon surface lives in the everyday material world.

Me, I’m not so sure. I can see how my own discourse has unknotted the paradox of how detachment is a prerequisite for unconditional compassion. But this dyad – with conditional love (say, romantic/sexual love) on one side and unconditional love/compassion (detachment-based) on the other – does the dualism really hold? I’ll make a final reference to D. H. Lawrence to deconstruct my own argument. In Lawrence, that romantic/sexual love is itself transcendental – it brings us beyond ourselves into some eternal connection to the cosmos. In a kind of paradox very different from the one with which I started this essay, sensuality IS transcendence for Lawrence; sensuality is the pathway to the cosmic, the eternal, the infinite, the transcendental. Get rid of all that abstractness, all that intellectuality, and tune in – sensually.

So, if I were invested in what we normally call “spirituality,” I could unravel the paradox of how detachment is the precondition for unconditional compassion/love, with a little thought and a little help from Plato, Kant, and ideas from Eastern religions/philosophy. But then, if I were a romantic at heart, I could sidle up to D. H. Lawrence and say that what we normally call “spirituality” is just the dry, abstract crust of the truth, that we need to rediscover the flesh and blood, the sensual as the transcendental element. Or finally, to keep the name-dropping going ad nauseum, if I were a Hegelian, maybe, just maybe, I could see these two contrary positions as thesis and antithesis and push the dialectic toward some new synthesis. But the new synthesis would just be the thesis of the next cycle, and my neighbor just invited me over for a handmade Negroni, so I think I’d better end here.

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Moving through time

My blog entries about different ways of conceptualizing time (e.g., Three takes on time and The tree ring model of time) are all fine and fun, but what about the more personal anxiety that many people have – anxiety about aging and death. I’ve largely escaped this anxiety – maybe from reading the ancient Greeks at an early age, maybe from robust health and a good knack for living in the moment. Or maybe it’s my meditation in the park. Aging there seems peculiarly irrelevant. As I tune in to my surroundings, it’s clear that there is no ‘I’ growing old – it’s ‘we’ growing old – me, the grass, the old oaks, the little lizards, the sky and the universe – we’re all moving through time together. The idea that ‘I’ am aging relative to the world is an illusion. Somehow this perspective removes the anxiety.

Something similar, but not exactly the same, comes up in a weird episode of my speculative novel, Alice, where Alice makes a discovery in a shuttered museum. Here’s an excerpt for your amusement and edification.

Xxx

Alice proceeded as quickly as seemed decorous, given the solemn aspect of the place, to the arched doorway at the interior end of the room. The next room was equally desolate but spacious. Four columns topped by groined arches ran down each side of what seemed the great hall. Concrete debris littered the floor. A dire-looking chandelier hung at the center, and under it was a simple folding chair and a large table. The table held some kind of old machine, and so what could Alice do but approach?

She sat in the chair and looked at the machine for a minute. Someone had been here. There was a wet circle on the table where someone had placed a glass or cup recently. There was a box of batteries at the far end of the table. The machine itself had a circular device with a button next to it, attached to a cylinder of some kind. Alice pushed the button and the circular device began to spin. She pushed again and it stopped. Three plastic discs lay between the device and the batteries. Were they pulled from a larger collection? Were they intended for some purpose? Or were they supposed to be hidden? Was Alice trespassing? Stirring up more trouble as everyone seemed to think she was doing just because she was a New Arcadian?

The last thought emboldened Alice. She put the first disc on the device and pushed the button.

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A monk sat on a bench, engaged in a daily practice of reflection. Another monk approached and sat on the bench next to him.

“I am here, Brother Anselm,” said the second monk. “If you need me.”

“I know, Brother Hector,” said the first. “Thank you.”

Brother Anselm continued his practice, controlling his breath. Four breaths per minute. Three breaths per minute. Duckweed on the pond in front of the bench drifted like bits of green plastic clouds, forming slow shapes at the water line, breaking apart on the surface. Two breaths per minute. Drifting into transcendence. Time crawled to a stop. Alice could see all this happening on the wall-projected image. She could feel it. The gentle rat-a-tat of the machine continued.

But then she saw his anxiety. Time had stopped for the practicing monk. The rest of the world went on. There are things he should be doing. In his meditation, five minutes seemed like an hour. His mental images flitted across the screen. That was an hour that he could have spent baking bread with Brother Joseph or helping with the school play. Sometimes it seemed that the deeper the meditation, the slower his metabolism became, the more frantic he became that the world was flying by while he was idling.

Gradually, the whole thing flipped. The idea was not to slow oneself to a pace of contentment while the world rushed along in its course. In meditation, one could slow the world itself. When he slowed, his life slowed, the trees growing around the pond slowed, everything in the world slowed. He was not slowing down relative to the world; he was slowing down the world and himself within it. Alice could see it in the film. The eternal goalpost became more and more distant as time slowed. Like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. And then, as when one hits the horizon, time stopped and eternity was here.

Brother Anselm smiled. Alice could see in his smile that he had solved the problem of meditation as disengagement. It was not disengagement. It was a shaping force of reality. It had taken Brother Anselm many years of meditation, an enormity of reflection, to bring the world to pace. For Brother Hector, on the other hand, everything came in a flash. Alice could see into his mind. He didn’t need to think about things first. He didn’t need to go through all the hard work. He moved by quantum leaps.

“Funny thing about quantum leaps,” said Brother Anselm out loud. “No one can say ahead of time if they are in the right or the wrong direction.”

Then the camera panned back and Alice noticed something strange. The pond. It was her pond. A different time. Her pond. Mab’s pond. Maggie’s Hollow. But time passed. The monks disappeared. At the far end of the pond, a woman with long brown hair stood with her back to the camera. Then the rat-a-tat slowed to a tat . . . tat . . . tat.

The disc had run its course. Well, fair enough, thought Alice. No one has to know everything all in the same minute. She started the second disc.

* * *

God and the devil were walking in the Himalayas, jagged peaks and plains of ice, bamboo and stone below.

“I never knew why you did it,” said God.

“Did what?” asked the devil.

“Damned Adam and Eve.”

God gestured and the devil followed him into a small clearing behind the rocks. Strewn about were costumes of Greek gods and goddesses.

“I didn’t damn Adam and Eve,” said the devil, indignant. “You damned them. I was only trying to help.”

“Help? I gave them a pure soul and you ruined it.” God tossed a centaur costume at the devil.

“No,” said the devil. “Too obvious. You take the centaur costume. I’ll be Zeus.” He smiled at the thought.

God shrugged and fingered through the representations of Hermes, Hera, Hades, and a few others.

“You told them the soul was inside the body,” said the Devil. “That was a lie. You told them to look inward, forbade them the fruit of the outer garden, the joy of the senses, the senses that are always reaching outward, desire pushing them ever out into the world to discover its joys.”

“But those sensual joys are not the joys of the soul,” said God. And as if tripping over his own severity, God slipped, slid several feet below the clearing, almost into a small stream running down from the peaks. His antagonist caught him by the arm and helped him up. But in the combination of helping and laughing, the enemy slipped his own foot into the icy waters and let out a high-pitched yelp.

“Damn,” cried the Devil. “Not used to this cold water.”

The Devil then mocked God in a sing-songy voice of sarcasm.

“But those sensual joys are not the joys of the soul,” he mimicked.

Then he returned to his own voice and looked at God in earnest.

“You’re falling for your own tricks,” he said. They hobbled back to the clearing and to the weighty decision of costumes.

“The soul was always outside the body,” continued the Devil. “The joys I speak of, found in the world through the desiring senses, those are exactly the joys of the soul. The soul is not inside the body. The body is inside the soul. The soul is the universal body. And it must be explored. Your trick – trying to capture the universal soul, seal it inside the bodies of those poor creatures, Adam and Eve – it was just a trick. It couldn’t last. Sooner or later they would break the seal and rejoin the great outer soul. I just sped things up.”

They both stood and headed down the mountainside. The Devil had finally chosen the costume of Prometheus and God had settled upon Athena. They had crossed the tree line and were surrounded by rich vegetation.

“Ah, well,” said God. “A philosopher-devil. How comes it then that you fell from heaven while good ones stayed behind and lived in inner peace?”

“Relativity,” said the Devil. “I was rising up from the pit of heaven. From your point of view, it looked like a fall. For me it was a discovery.”

God aspirated in disgust, and the Devil gave an impish grin.

“You should join me, God. Before the festival. You have your costume and I have mine. Get away from all that nasty inwardness. Get out and explore the world, feel all the reflexes of the great outer soul.”

They paused to rest against a great rock, and God seemed to consider the Devil’s proposal. Then the rat-a-tat-tat slowed to a stop.

“Sorry, God and the Devil,” said Alice smartly. “One more to go.” And she put on the third disc.

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Wormholes / series / writing

Fantasy. Paranormal. Suspense. Popular genres today all seem to trend toward series writing. Maybe with changing technologies in publishing and reading, that’s where the market is. I’m not sure because marketing is a mystery to me. As a reader/writer engaged in the world of lit sans marketing, my opinion is that good books might well come in series, but great books are almost always standalones. Now that I have a few books out there (links below), let me ponder how, if at all, this opinion applies to my writing.

I don’t write series. Nor do I stick to one genre. Although I do believe genres can be useful tags – e.g., setting expectations that can help readers predict whether something suits their taste – best to treat genres as cloudy approximations. “Existence precedes essence,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously said. Similarly, the book precedes the genre. Leaving aside for now pulp fiction, which is written specifically to fit a preset genre, works of art, including novels-as-art, develop organically according to their own aesthetic, and once manifested in their own terms, it is the bookseller’s choice to more-or-less randomly determine which genre tags will best guide readers.

So my novels. I undertake each novel as a self-contained work of art, like a standalone sculpture. The concept of series just doesn’t fit my aesthetic register (not that my register is better than anyone else’s). Does this mean no threading between the (currently) five of them? Well, no. Take the latest, Alice. My previous novels blurred the lines of literary fiction, historical fiction, regional, magic realism, with one possibly cross-categorized as young adult as well as adult. Alice, though, is more of a post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale – my first to occur in a fully imaginary setting. This put a new kind of pressure on me as a writer. Because the opening frame is like a weird, hippie fairy tale, one thing I needed was a population of characters who were individualized people and yet archetypal enough to match the fairy tale setting. So Alice’s little hamlet is populated by the rain king, the kleptomaniac, the sweeper, the mapmaker, the white witch, etc.

Besides the characters, though, another thing that holds the magical setting together is two kinds of wormholes. First, there are wormholes in time within Alice, enabling Alice to interact with a series of young women like herself – just coming into early adulthood – from different time periods. Different eras of history are, in effect, stacked up together and connected by wormholes. A lot of the metaphysical or philosophical elements of the novel, and Alice’s epiphanies, if you want to loosely call it a coming-of-age novel, come through these wormholes in time to other characters and settings.

In addition to the wormholes within Alice, wormholes thread into my other novels as well. I didn’t really plan it this way, but just as she interacts with characters across history, she interacts with characters across my writing corpus. Those characters carry their own baggage into Alice, but it’s not like you have to read the other novels to get this one. And it’s certainly not like a series, where you have a fixed setting and plot lines that continue more or less coherently across the books. It’s more like a character from another novel will pop up as Alfred Hitchcock popped up in his movies, but retaining the personality and baggage of the other novel. Again, each novel is a coherent, standalone whole and can be read as such, and yet there are these wormholes, these reverberations. There are touches of this in four of the five novels, sometimes working backwards (as in a character from the first novel, Mr. Robert’s Bones, might pop up in later novel, and the meaning that character acquires in the later novel reverberates back to the first).

The idea of independent novels with a connected underlay might bring up images of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. My wormholes, however, are different. Faulkner and Anderson each use that shared setting as an integrated space for their stories. My novels are not different stories transacted in the same space, but totally different spaces with wormholes randomly connecting them. And my wormholes don’t necessarily follow laws of space and time. Whereas in Faulkner you might get a collective setting that is realistic, integrated, coherent, my wormholes are almost a mockery of realistic coherence from the point of view of imaginative license.

This might sound outlandish, but if you think about it, this is not as unusual as it sounds. The history of literature is essentially a series of hyperlinks or wormholes, where all these novels and ideas and characters are continually building on each other, casting different lights and relevance on other novels. You don’t have to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to understand Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar or vice versa – I pick those two because they are both quite separate influences on Alice. Indeed, on the surface they are unrelated novels from different countries and eras, and I don’t even know if Brautigan read Woolf. And yet, when you do read both of them, you start to see how each can illuminate something about the other – just like the fool in King Lear can illuminate a character in a Camus novel, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate aspects of 21^st-century culture, just like anecdotes by Marx or Freud might cast a new angle of light backwards onto Shakespeare or Jane Austen, just like my Alice might make you want to go back and re-read Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It’s really wormholes everywhere. You can see an example of this in my own wormhole study of works by Umberto Eco and Bob Dylan. The history of literature is the history of all these continually interacting texts reverberating meaning off of each other. If literature has depth as well as surface, these wormholes are an essential part of the underground structure. And the organic development of wormholes across the landscape of literature is a fundamentally different activity than the deliberate production of novels in series.

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Ethics of Regifting

Time for my annual regifting post. Here it is:

Regifting and Post-Technological Ethics

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Zeno’s paradox revisited

Sitting in Tokyo over an innocent bowl of sake, my philosopher friend from London brought up Zeno’s paradox. Damn philosophers. Always something. He knows more about ancient Greek philosophy than I do, but let me have a go at it from the poet’s side of the field.

Space

I guess Zeno’s paradox (5^th century BC) comes in various forms, but I think of it in terms of space. Paradoxically, mathematically, motion is impossible. To move from point A to point B, we have to cross midpoint C. But to move from point A to midpoint C, we have to cross midpoint D. Etc. But since simple geometry tells us that there are an infinite number of points between any two points, we can never get to the nearest midpoint.

Or forget about midpoints. In order to move we must cross an adjacent point. But there are an infinite number of points between us and any adjacent point. In today’s computer programming lingo, we’d have to execute an infinite number of tasks before reaching the adjacent point, which is impossible.

There are only two conclusions I can draw from the paradox. Either it shows us that motion is truly impossible or it shows us the limits of logic – that logic can solve a lot of local problems but there are points at which it fails as a conduit of knowledge and results in an absurdity.

Time

My tipsy interlocutor pointed out that the paradox works along a time axis as well. The idea of a linear flow of time is equally impossible, as we’d have to move past the adjacent moment, which is impossible. However, conceptualizing it along a time axis opened a different tangent of thought for me.

My more devoted readers will note that I’ve looked at the following William Faulkner quote HERE as a way of theorizing time:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Requiem for a Nun, 1951).

Pondering the Faulkner quote led me to consider that our conventional way of looking at time – with the past as a thread disappearing into some distant place that no longer exists – is actually counterintuitive. Doesn’t it make more sense to see the past as something very much still with us, but at a depth, providing the real-time substructure of the present, just as the rings of a tree do not disappear as years go by but rather continue to provide the real-time substructure of the tree? In the same way, the “past” is not gone, but is right here, at a depth, providing in real time all the folds and substructure without which the present would collapse.

So if Zeno’s paradox suggests that we cannot move along a linear path of time, does the tree ring model of time show us a way out of the paradox? On the one hand, it seems to do so, as it shows we can conceptualize the manifold of time without requiring a linear flow. On the other hand, we still need some kind of wiggle room, as time, though not extending backward into some now-absent past, does recede to the center (of the tree) or the depth (on which the present stands). Would Zeno be able to grant us so much without giving up his precious paradox? To untie this further knot in the fabric, we need a to add a third category to space and time. And here it comes …

Imagination

Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), speaks of the dynamical and mathematical sublime, and makes a rigorous case for the power of human reason as the sublime human faculty. In the mathematical sublime, for example, we might look up on a starry night and imagine how many stars are up there. The imagination, however, can only stretch so far and is overwhelmed by the sheer numbers in the scenario at hand. Reason, however, can step in and calculate numbers beyond what the imagination can fathom (estimating that there are something like 10²⁴ stars in the universe). It is reason that inspires the highest awe in Kant.

Now let’s use Zeno to turn Kant on his head. Reason leads you down the rabbit hole of Zeno’s paradox, and there you get stuck. No motion. But where reason folds into absurdity, imagination steps in and liberates us. We imagine ourselves in motion. We imagine ourselves moving through time. And if reason can’t back that up, that’s reason’s problem. And if the flow of our experience into the future is an imagined flow, so much the better. Without imagination, perhaps Zeno’s paradox would hold. Reason is trapped in what is; and what is, is fixed. The world as a static object of knowledge. But imagination is the one faculty that allows us to project and manifest all manner of possible futures. Imagination creates destiny, and imagination is what moves us toward that destiny.

So philosophers and scientists, keep up the good work but go to the back of the bus. Poets, artists, and mythmakers, move forward.

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon” (Patti Smith)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world” (Albert Einstein)

“Artists are here to disturb the peace” (James Baldwin)

Now for my real poetry, click the book cover below.

mountain lantern light
breaking through bamboo and ice
a thousand angels

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The Language Matrix

When you ride the subways in Tokyo, it might strike you that the signs and the books passengers are reading require special language skills. The signs are sometimes written in Kanji, sometimes in Katakana (the two Japanese writing systems), and sometimes in English:

無料配達
むりょうはいたつ
Free Delivery

Sometimes they seem to mix Kanji (the one that looks like Chinese) and Katakana in the same message:
‘
とは? 使い方や敬語表現

Also, the books are typically read in vertical lines, top to bottom, right to left, but the newspapers seem a fairly even mix of horizontal and vertical text passages.

I know little of Japanese languages and culture, but let my thoughts run wild for a minute. Learning from infancy to be equally comfortable in all these language systems – vertical readings, top to bottom, right to left; horizontal readings, left to right; Kanji and Katakana, separately and mixed; and English text and Western numerals as well – this must affect how your brain gets wired. It’s like language is a layered matrix with all these synchronized modes operating (or rapidly engaging and disengaging in the brain) at the same time.

Here’s a hypothesis. As I said, I’m a novice at Japanese culture, so my hypothesis may have some empirical support, may have no empirical support, or may, to the legions of easily mortified souls in today’s debauched intellectual climate, merely prove me an unregenerate racist. But it seems that if you learn language from the start as this kind of many-tiered system, your brain wiring will be really good at “matrix thinking” – math, manifold arrays of logic, etc. Rigorous might be the right word. A people raised in this kind of multi-dimensional language field should, by my hypothesis, be good at math, programming languages, etc. (not universally, but on average). When it comes to more chaotic, creative, rule-breaking, outside the box thinking – people in the US (in the aggregate) might have an edge. To wit, wiring your brain via language requires less rigor in the US, which means you’re wired less for rigor and more for open-ended thinking – more mistakes and more creative tangents.

Of course, none of this is meant to indicate universal traits but just a tendency on average to lean a little bit this way or that in your signature strengths as a culture. (Western Europe, in my experience, would be in between the Japanese and US poles, but maybe closer to the US side. I am not a psycholinguist. I base this on the purely anecdotal evidence of three years’ residence in Europe, 12 countries hitchhiked in Europe, and the half-baked ideas flowing through my brain as I sit here in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo.)

If you think this is bad, you’ll hate my psycholinguistic foray into Mexican vs German and English language students.

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