« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 30, 2006
Try To Get Your Adjectives Straight, Horatio
Context is everything. Attributes, properties that belong to something are essential to it, and cannot be separated and remain as a reference for pundits and philosophers. The blinding lemon that a lemon is, is a different thing once you propose to deal with it as separate from the object. No longer a property, it lacks the influence of what it was attached to when discovered in the alarming perception. It becomes, this lemon, an incitement, sheer danger, a chimera--whatever you can make of it. You have to keep the context in mind and the situation where things are discovered. Most especially--the motive of who is looking. This apparently obvious truth, however, is smashed in practice. For we are drowning in surface beauty, seduced by appearances, and attracted to novelty of any form. Awash with adjectives; the more misapplied, the more seductive.
I am suffering from an overdose of television crime dramas, though I avoid the hospital dramas. I figure this doesn’t really subtract from my time living. It’s like a meditation, a vacation. This stuff is sensationally mixed up. I particularly like it when CSI's Horatio pauses while putting on his sunglasses; and then again, while taking off his sunglasses. See now! Evidence from a forensic crime lab is used as indisputable proof of what actually happened in a finished event. Okay viewers! The blood left at the scene has the same DNA as the accused, and that gets him.. Both samples leave their identical tracks. Is this what has happened? The newspapers confirm it the very next day, in a similar case from real life. We are to be convicted by the effects. In fact the drama is based on the zealous pursuit of this evidence, and the victory is recorded as one for science. But it was all scenical, and we never knew why it happened; the slaughter, I mean. Then again, it is only television, not part of life. I mean no drama you or I were ever a part of. And the staccato supply of commercials comply, as mini-dramas of their own; with the same societal perpetrators, and the same hapless typecast victims.
Try switching channels, I mean switching focus. Context is everything.! Charting the possible future of a patient diagnosed with a blood condition, the outcome is not, we hope, fully determined. The man is not summarily convicted, and it is not so clear what will happen; because the whole context is unknown, as to whether this evidence is essential to that person, or an attribute out of context.Seems logical to say it that way. Another aspect of that person may have an antidote in readiness to address such a possibly temporary, conditional flaw. This science must know in what direction it is looking, and not assume a trajectory in the future based on what is a seemingly learned inevitability. One would think. Medicine invites further opinion, and admits reversal and miracles even--which are just things not yet able to be put in perspective. It must keep a premise and a promise that the future is not certain. This is wise.
And yet, hospitals ring the city! Modern medicine is failing so badly we need insurance companies, which also sing their illogical jingles on TV. Keep me strong while I study this matter; in the back of my mind I am slightly worried I might ossify in my chair, watching these crime dramas which are not a part of life, I maintain, and do not waste hours of time . . . Your favorite criminologist rests his case on finished facts of evidence. It can eliminate a suspect, or point to one. Blood on the drapes. Poison in the lemon juice (I like that one). It has no choice but to be obsessed with finding out what actually happened from trace evidence. What actually happened! A dire concept indeed. Even if it makes mistakes, its procedures are inviolate, because the conception of the past is that it cannot change. It is finished. Told by the effects, if need be. Maybe some intellectual will explain the general trends going on in this society where the qualifiers have drowned out the original quantity.
Distinctions should be everything! Medical labs and crime labs: These are two different places, using the same data bases but looking in different directions. Which means that one is never fated in the same way that one is guilty. And even if in the world this distinction is blurred, to the point where one is offered and sold a pill that is advertised as being capable of preventing pains that haven’t quite happened yet, as if curing your bad conscience--the person should know this difference. Subtract the drama of existence and there is no difference between a crime lab and a hospital. No distinction between conscience, which treads backwards, and consciousness, which is . . . somewhat blank!. Otherwise--no room to think. And nothing to do but wait for the fatal diagnosis, which is, for all implacable science knows, is the evidence of a crime surely and already committed.
So! We don’t live in a society in which a person with an illness is assumed to be the victim of their own bad deeds, or evil conscience. In the opposite case, we don’t assume a person accused of a crime is suffering an illness. Right. Unless of course specialists in exceptional cases come around to inform us that, indeed, the sick man has lost his mind and that is why he has committed a crime; or, in the opposite case, the guilty man is receiving some sort of mysterious retribution, and we should take heed we don’t follow him in his unlucky sinful ways. We don’t live in such a society! Ah, yes. People don’t secretly think others whom some terrible accident has engulfed has deserved it, after all, the way they were headed for a fall. And they don’t smartly reflect: that can’t happen to me. And they don’t lie in bed strapped down by unreasonable fear so out of context they can only hope it isn’t for them, the fate of others surrounding them by examples too numerous to mention and supplying those crime shows with all their storylines. We revel in watching what is not life at all. We know the difference between what a crime lab does, and a hospital! The chapel is not located around the corner from the Emergency Room. Stop, stop! A clean bill of health doesn’t mean you aren’t busy day and night designing and scheming your evil ways. A full confession, whatever that is, won’t get rid of your doubts which are really signs of utter decrepitude, eventually. Jesus!
Examples are flooding in! Context is everything, or something it is advisable to maintain at all times--I keep thinking. While ambiguity is everywhere, trumping that. If you look out your front window and there are two cop cars parked together, what does that mean? It can’t be good. Or maybe it is really good. All indicators say the society is all focused on quality of life and protecting what we have.. A recent study has shown that the dictionary has exponentially increased in it’s supply of . . . adjectives.
Posted by mortimer at 08:34 PM | Comments (550)
January 23, 2006
A Thousand Denim Jackets, and One Andy Schmitz
It's a challenge to your sense of self if you run into someone you know at Kaufmans Dept. Store. Already drugged by the smell of perfume, weaving through the aisles like a top losing spin fast, you’re halfway into a nightmare and grateful for the fact that in the Men’s section there are racks high enough to lean against and hide from view.. They give you these store credit receipts that you have to spend within the confines of that specific hell, otherwise go home. Having forgotten who you are, or ever were, seeing someone you used to know like back in reality, is not the right coincidence--I have to figure. It isn’t that you question them being there, but that they might say, “What are you doing here!”
But Andy Schmitz of course had his own personal quest. He told me he was looking for the right fitting denim jacket, on the simple theory that there was one just right for his person. I could see Andy had also lost his vocabulary. It was a replacement denim jacket, just like one his father had or something. “I can see you are pretty serious about this,” I had to say. It occurred to me that there were approximately a thousand denim jackets for every one person here. So I said, “this damn store is awash in goods.” How would it look if there was a flood, and we were washed away right now? I wanted to know, but this was no place for a discussion. And Andy did not appear to be nearly as ill-fitting (so to speak) in his humanity as me; he was wearing it alright, though probably he thought the same about me. This is one place we have to hold onto our identities, in this horrid store with its surplus goods enough to dress us all like identical fools.
What is a person? I am thinking almost everyone can immediately relate to that subject. It sort of leaves no room for them NOT to relate. Everybody has a rag-tag self, I’ve heard; and assumed that to be the case even before I heard it; because I was born into a multitude, and always had this piping self, and only later got so very differentiated.
That’s what’s got me looking in mirrors, and glancing back to see if my familiar shadow of a self is still with me. I don’t reckon just being conscious, like giddily aware of the ceiling fans, makes you necessarily a person. Some invisible agency is training us to be too smart and value our own vaunted awareness. This trying to sever and downplay that storyline I have with myself, in which I am able to be conscious and still myself and not have the two confused--this has to stop, man. Not have the one applauded, or rather insulted, for being the achievement of the other; and not have the other . . .
So what if I am inwardly raving? What these legislators say is the self is the triumph of consciousness, completely involved in a person’s gaining an identity. They say it in a thousand ways these days. A person comes to consciousness in order to get this kind of autocontrol over their physical being, and then uses it magnificently to organize their life--until it splutters out in the evolutionary trail and deserts them. It’s a wonderful evolutionary advance, this being a person on top of being conscious. What makes us humans human.
Bosh! I purchased my self somewhere else. This linking awareness to the self is mistaken. And with a dire and deadly program attached. It is calculated to make me lose what little sense of identity I have, in scenes like these! And presumably buy the just right denim jacket--oh, no that Andy’s wondering and adventure. My destiny--hold on now--is forthwith . . . a luminescent green shirt, which I have never clutched from any worldly rack before, and I can report my wife likes quite a bit now that I have safely got it home.
Consciousness is not the supreme achievement of the person, to be then directed to its own ends. Nor is the self of a Schmitz or a Shy located centrally and only in the awareness. I will not be impinged by this false equation. I feel I must be saved as the person I am by greater means than my own capacity for awareness. Hell, this Kaufmans store is blinking. The lights are dimming. Reality is, at the same time, broader and more comprehensive than my sense of myself and my concerns or projects, or immediate plans to ditch this setting.
How do I recognise myself? Is it sheer familiarity? Being always with myself? No. It is an irreducible fact I carry around, sometimes sitting right here at this fantastic language game, but sometimes I have to drive to the edge to meet up with it. Sometimes I go around twice in those revolving doors. It is not the same thing as being awake to the reality coincidentally inhabited. It is not even necessarily there when I am busy with some meaningful exposition on the nature of strange consciousness.
One set of emotions strives to make a book, while the other strives only for personal existence; and these two goals do not coincide. Self awareness is not the same, and doesn’t have the same emotions, as the projects of consciousness that make me continuously interested in understanding the world. Everyone of us has a different refuge in the self they have. Otherwise . . . I guess we all blend together. That is what I was fearing right then!
“I can see you want to hustle out of here,” Andy said, sympathetically. “Yeah!” I laughed. “See you later.” I had run in tandem with my hard luck self long enough around there, to make it funny enough. All I had to do was get through the jewellry department, because I had this one more box of earrings to return--which were nice, but my wife doesn’t have pierced ears.
Posted by mortimer at 02:09 PM | Comments (1730)
January 15, 2006
Evolution: Taking the Location for Granted
When I was writing my first novel I got all tangled up trying to indirectly inform the reader, trying to offhand slip the reader, information as to where my story was taking place. I had the story all figured out, I had the characters ready to begin; but I was confused as to where I should assert it was all taking place. Or rather, I was embarrassed to reveal that it was all taking place where it was: in my home town. For my home town was of no repute; not on any literary map. Even though a large part of this novel was description, though it had fond landscapes and familiar weather, somehow the author of these details was shamefaced. It was an amateur’s attempt to be universal, though what it only revealed was my shyness. Eventually, though, I abandoned this doomed struggle and, like a confident artist, just labelled the place right off the bat.This, miraculously, gained the reader’s attention. And also, I happily realised, put in my bid for my hometown terrain-- as some classic location, or rather a real location--fit for a struggle of survival and mystery. The fact is, if you simply name a place and even falter in describing it, what happens is the reader helps it along.
This might have refined my writing style, but it was instructive in another way. It showed me how little I had reflected on the question itself of how it is the world is a Place. One habit I haven’t refined is, when starting a philosophical discussion, this must be done, how shall I say?-- with some delay, indirectly. Indirectly, but with a sword ready. Careful in your preparations, when you are planning controversy. You have to slide that plate in front of the dinner guest while talking in his ear, on some common subject--so when he looks down he says: How did that get here! To introduce a theme, you have to literally go so far away from it that no one suspects what you are up to--and then sweep in with the topic like you just had a revelation. Walking right past that sign that says: “No Trespassing.”
Turns out that little lesson in writing novels resonates. For the profound, and also comical problem with Evolution--to get to the theme--is simply that for evolution to function it requires a place. A locale. A start-up town where one can take biology in high school, how’s that? The theory of evolution is not, shall we say, natural itself. But a ramrod of an idea. Not that it can’t function, once it has a place. It’s a soporific to the budding scientific mind, once you get that humdrum world, I agree. I mean I offer this only as a theme for discussion. (If we were to talk about it--this is what I would venture to say.) I was talking originally about how I got those descriptions in my novels.
Not that fun-time evolution can’t plunder and dissect all living forms of nature, once it has them it’s carnival glasses. Not that this panacea for an explanation of how anything got here requires a creator or an Aristotilian first mover, to get it going. But what is funny is that it requires a setting for its operational occurrence. This place where evolution happens, and, if you say so, has happened in a stretch-to-fit past, is not accounted for. Hackneyed old nineteenth century evolution, pardon my redundancy, is the process and the description of that process that is supposed to occur in the place where . . . evolution is already the expert process! Yep. It simply begins somewhere, and works forwards and backwards, filling in areas, demolishing all nature in its fury to organise. What makes evolution simplistic, sort of laughingly needful, is that it assumes its own terrain. And in my novels all the localised, dramaticly detailed descriptions defeat evolution right within the language; in my novels I am helping create a world that evolution knows nothing of--for it can only produce uniformity, like bland texts one after the other. It would level the differences of past epochs, smooth out the ambiguous, ringing language I inherit. There can be no historical, local world, and no home town in the universe of indifferent landscapes that evolution has put its reductive seal upon. I am opposed to it in every sentence. I wish only that my vocabulary does not desert me--or my grammar break down. which, frankly, it does at a rapid pace once I get onto these topics abstractly . . .
This is the face of an unsold clock in a department store. Waiting to be placed in somebody’s house. It’s six thirty. Time to make dinner. From which we all infer in unstoppable musing the creation of time and space. Helplessly, we are the child and the philosopher. The world comes out of the past, already manufactured. Location unknown. But not made here; we are in a mystery. Evolution must be a theory for the weak minded. It fails to even think of its location. And if we look at the place it sells as popular science, it is really the same old, fervently lived-in world. Gussied up with an even lower discount assumption that it was always this way. Evolution! It occurs in an unchanging world that is just like the one we live in. Only stripped of sense. Just fine as a playground for idiots. But it can’t make those landscapes and detailed settings in my books.
All you have to do to expose your average placid unthinking evolutionist is let him talk for a while, let him describe what happens in his scheme, historically if he likes, and then politely ask him, once he is flushed and flabbergasted: and so where is all this taking place? Outside, right now? In the cosmos, friend? In a great petri dish in the sky? Eventually he will stammer: “Well there has to be a PLACE for it to happen! Do you think it happens in the mind?” And the answer to that is: in your mind maybe. Only in your mind.
Posted by mortimer at 05:08 PM | Comments (3507)
January 06, 2006
The Theater of Dissemblance
I saw a young man, or maybe a man no longer young, sitting on a rock pile; he was busily throwing rocks of all sizes around, gleefully and despondently, causing rock-slides and chain-reactions beyond the hill where he presided, in the sweltering heat, always keeping the activity going, as if he were required to make noise. He’s wearing shorts and no shirt and picking up rocks and throwing them down, tossing one over his shoulder sometimes, listening to the sounds of the impact and reacting in accord to some deep internal rhythm, intent on keeping sounds in the air at all times. He’s a drummer, I thought--a rock n’roll drummer stripped down in his natural setting and dealing with the elements of his most rudimentary profession.
I saw a man, a hungry, sloppily dressed man, all by himself and working fast, not looking at anyone as he went taking generous and varied helpings from a salad bar; which he walks back and forth like he only had one chance at this, apprising and choosing, teasing with the forks and spoons and scooping now tentatively, now defiantly, needing both hands sometimes, or three hands in a blur and a balancing act just barely within his power, to put together the plate with tasty, harmonious, chordal combinations of fruits and vegetables, with toppings and drippings. I thought: he’s playing the scales, and plucking just the . . . olives. Here’s the man with the piano, if you strip it down like in some Theater of Dissemblance.
I saw a tall, willowy man, with large hands and a way of standing as if he were bending back, while rooted to the spot; he was getting rhythms from the earth. He was steadily sawing down a big tree, right in front of him, sawing until the job’s done, was the impression; but maybe his saw is too weak, so he picks up another saw, an electric saw, a chain-saw. Now he’s fundamental--for they have to get this tree down, just so, in sing-song fashion. I thought: the bass player! He always tends to rule, and must underlay this riff and then; another tree in the progression must come down. I thought, this is all on the stage. Where these musicians are lasting until they have to go back to prison. Let out like some chain-gang for brief liberation. The band is almost realised . . . Whenever I see a rock n’roll band setting up on stage I think it looks like the guys are hired help; but of course this is the band, doing forced labour. And when they start tuning up I always think, these guys are prisoners brought in from the county jail, and forced to play together.
Then I saw a man putting away the dishes in the kitchen. An indelible man in his own time, comfortable at home, putting away big stacks of plates, plates of all sizes, taking them from a steaming dish-dryer and holdings some plates up for admiration, then hurrying them onto the cupboard. He’s working fast but in syncopation, with occasional plucking of cups and saucers, and beautiful trills made by squeaky clean glasses being lined up in regiments or four and five deep. With of course the threat of a huge crash bringing the performance to a dramatic end.
While some older guy is snoozing in a rocking chair. On a front porch, or by a window where a parade is going by. Or isn’t going by. Is he holding a baby? He’s listening to some music in his head, which has been suggested and supported by the steady rocking. Well, no, he is not snoozing but wide awake! He might leap to his feet and start rocking on his heels, swaying back and pitching forward again. Turns out that wasn’t a baby, but a saxophone! And if we add the sixth man, the trumpet player, who we will find as a schoolboy raising the flag on the flagpole, pulling it higher and higher into the blue sky until it unfurls and the wind catches it--then we have the full metaphorical rock n/roll band. I have found their origins, each scene of origin from which they are recruited, or have magically stepped--to form the final dissemblance, in the theater being created.
Each of these people has been arrested for enthusiasm in the act, and sentenced to a life of creative action. One while making a sandwich, one while throwing rocks, another while rocking a baby. Sent to life in prison they are ordered to devise some form of entertainment, because the authorities need a travelling show to go out and amuse the public in bars. Instinctively they create a rock n' roll band, in which each member finds his old self again in the dissembling form of a musician. That’s the way it is--you beggars in the audience.
Posted by mortimer at 03:11 PM | Comments (4192)