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February 23, 2006
And What of the Population of Ghosts?
The ghosts in this city don’t get much credence, I must say. People rashly judge them to not exist--they don’t believe in them, outright, end of discussion. Or they personally snub them as inferior beings, and do not help them solve their problems--which only prolongs the ghost’s stay. And this is a city where death is openly merchandised, life insurance is sweet-talked, funerals are big business, graveyards are tourist attractions! So it isn’t like death is discouraged--no death is fine, and widely considered to be inevitable. There just seems to be a bias against ghosts, as representatives of dead people. I think part of it has to be that ghosts don’t have enough social (and literary) cache; they aren’t in fashion, are not cool, it's like they have lost their lustre. No longer scary, no longer funny, an otherwise bonafide ghost as I said, does not appear to be credible, and his or her all-important material presence is disregarded. He is forced to wonder who he really is, and forget who he was--which is, shall we say, worse than fatal. Somebody needs to start over with the whole construction of the ghost, work out the mechanism of the ghost, and a write an ideal novel where the main character is a ghost! Tell it from his point of view, to get the ghost back on solid footing in this society. For while the the old saw that “everyone dies” is highly dubious, it is less dubious that everyone will be, at some point, a ghost.
Ghosts exist, and are running around here night and day. The problem in this city is that everyone feels free of their charms, and their threats. Your average sad sack ghost now doesn’t even post a moral challenge, and people don’t believe he is a physical challenge whatsoever. Movies have done alot to discredit ghosts, of course--and that show on television, "Ghost Whisperers", is downright slander. Popular culture is ignominiously at war with reality on this front, it’s goal apparently being to cheapen the whole business to the point where people, who as I say are all potential (or existing) ghosts themselves, feel free and can laugh at the idea. Definitions of the true ghost are wanting!
To begin with, a ghost is a person unable, or unwilling, to take his or her leave from this world, in an orderly, inconspicuous manner. Instead they are hanging around, and never far from the scene of the crime. (Loosely considered, life is the crime.) They haven’t yet gone to the place others have assigned them in their religion. Ha! Existing still between death and a former life, something must be at issue, with a ghost, something unresolved which is preventing their exit. It isn’t like they just missed the boat, and are waiting for the next one. They are here for a purpose--be it recognised on your calendar, or scheduled in your thoughts. Consider this: somebody living is scheduled for an encounter, a date in a restaurant say, even a meeting in a dream, if you prefer, with every ghost. Ghosts are after somebody. And if you consider that one thing a ghost , who was a person (keep that in mind, please), has a little experience with, is death; it isn’t a stretch to believe what they are hanging around for involves somebody else’s death. Did I say that painfully slowly enough? It’s kind of a relay race. Ha! How about reviewing your own situation, visa-vie your old friends and relatives, sirs and ma'ams. Do not be weirded out that I address you in this florid manner, either, for it is as to get you ready for a formal affair. I figure at the average wedding there are at least twenty percent ghosts in attendance, and at funerals, well if people would just look around . . .
Some people are invisible, unless you look for them. Everyone is travelling with a potentially unused return ticket. The question is this: Is it possible anyone can die, and NOT in fact be in the position of a ghost. Which is strictly defined as: having unfinished business. Avowals and apologies never made, debts unpaid. Does anyone die on a dime, perfectly scheduled, and perfectly completed? Are the people they lived with ever satisfied, and do they not mostly hang around with the dead one (popularly coined as “loved one”) themselves, keeping them in their thoughts, and acting themselves, for all intents and purposes, as if that person is still--let’s see, how shall I put it, watching! Just sort of like in the other room, but within earshot, away on a long trip, but coming back someday . . . in the great hayfield in the sky. And if we can assert that a “loved one” is still among us, we are clearly dealing with them, probably dealing with them more any one else (those reliably moving still in three dimensions).
Here is the rub. To what degree are our actions influencing some ghost’s fate. Never mind about how emotional we are, or aren’t. The question focuses on our actions and how they must look (from that hayfield.: Are we displaying a woeful coutenance, still acting for that person and tugging at them for attention? Are they not being kept here, dragged back to earth, pulled at like the paradoxical kite string in the fable . . .
This is to bring back, or clarify for the first time, the real stature of a ghost. For stature, and a dramatic fate a ghost must have, a dire and final story he is in, as regards a life now accomplished. He is on that course where he is being wrapped up and reassigned, and what we do in regards to him may effect his fate--and ours. Surely we know we die a little ourselves with every loss . . . We should each of us seriously consider and worry and exalt over the possible fortunes, all the time, of the dead. Or are we finished with them? To say so is as culpable and immoral as to say any dealing with the living is free of morality. It is not ended when a person dies, not for them or for those who know them.
“Quote the contrary!” as a famous quarrelsome ghost once said. It is the person who is left in life, that often feels stranded; and ends up marvelling at the newly received sense that the person who died has . . . lived! They are impressive in this regard! As having been here, and achieved it, a thing which the rest of us cannot exactly claim! For individually one is always wondering how he or she rates on that scale, and if we have, actually, proven to be human yet.
Quite likely, some ghost doesn’t even know that he is dead. It hasn’t quite hit him, so to speak, and he certainly has not comprehended the fact that he no longer has any business in this world. Which makes me think: maybe he DOES have something to do; after he accomplishes that, then he can face up to his condition. But no matter how strangely or rudely, or ignorantly, people are treating him, until he achieves peace and is reconciled with his life, he is going to stay at it. For if we assume that he does have a memory of being a person--if we give him that (and any reader who has followed me this far, must surely be in sympathy with that notion); and if we look at the obvious fact that he is still operating in some fashion in the world, so it must be he is acting somehow in regards to this past. Still concerned about that old self--how touching is that!
Oh no, I think. Anyone who is killed is cut off from a set of future plans, which they to some degree have invested in. And this is part now of the ghost’s past: what didn’t happen, but was imagined. Very subtle, these distinctions, when you put it from the point of view of . . . a ghost.
In my construction he is capable and fully determined to live out all the scenes that he has expected. Perhaps he appears in those scenes, and is nowhere to be found otherwise. This means that other people, depending upon their knowledge of his death and/or their conviction in regards to the reality of ghosts, are going to witness those scenes; and also are liable to see him falter and actually disappear when his fuel, so to speak--his own expectations-- runs out. Yes. It very well could be that there are many ghosts around. When you start to consider the idea--it grows on you. This could explain the apparent population explosion in this city. How there appear to be way more people around than there used to be, while yet statistics say this city has less population than it did forty years ago. Yet everywhere you go, crowds! Traffic jams! What about those people who pull up and grin at you from the safety of their cars? People are living longer, they say, but apparently they are moving away faster too--otherwise the local population would grow, wouldn’t it!
But no, only the population of ghosts is getting larger, by the minute.
Posted by mortimer at 04:05 PM | Comments (3781)
February 14, 2006
Technology Is Nature
It seems to me technology is a phenomenon of nature, with no author. It grows rapidly precisely because nobody is in charge of it, or has a means to stop it. Instead, they argue with it as if it were listening to their questions. They frown about it, and exalt in it; make claims for it, even doubt it with absurd philosophic rigour. But they are talking to a stranger. Technology is a deaf, dumb, and blind beast of nature. And when faced with it one has to reckon with the idea that there can be, at the heart of nature, some spirit so wholly experimental. One cannot vainly think it is a human creation to begin with, just needing control at the moment. But technology is a noxious flower, or a type of gleaming alloy, which will eventually rust. Compare it to a mushroom, an insect, or a determined fungus. Realize its alliance with electricity, which was never invented, but discovered. And then gleefully used, taken over as if it had been invented, bragged about by junior scientists, who always celebrate novelty as if it were progress. We have photography, copy machines, computers; all these processes are aspects of nature. Just because technology brings temporarily stunning adaptations of machines, brings frivolity and artifice into the world, doesn’t mean it isn’t, at root and all its branches, nature. Primitive, hard-driving nature!
And I almost despair of delving into this subject. It seems impossible to make it upbeat, as if the very examination of such a thing drags one into its negative charms.
Technology is also a game of chance. A gamble. You can’t get around technology, because it outruns conceptual thought. I knew computers were essentially a primitive form of nature, when I heard they were based on the binary number system. It is one hundred percent identical with its applications, which are immediate, obviously random, and inevitable. All you can do is cut it back. Fence it in. (Throw the cellphone in the mud.) Thousands of bees in a hive all working can produce endless honey. Thousands of workers in Silicon Valley don’t need a central boss when they are functioning on base instincts, and each has a task that is part of an unknowable system. The fact that the very latest computer intelligence has its sites on biological systems as a pattern to imitate, shows the instinct at work. This just requires work. At the end of work, we get a red line and a beep like a on a hospital monitor. We get death. We have just sat back and let the computer grow, because no one has the language that defines it. Just the guttural sounds to express amazement at it’s current size. For lack of any weed killer, the giant weeds take over.
I think one has to be willing to be the adversary of technology. For it is science without use. Science which has turned the corner into rank unlicensed discovery--of dangerously alien powers in nature. We have to realize a new set of juxtapositions,with a fundamental conscious recognition that technology is: nature. Key terms in the discussion of the relationship between nature, and thought, must be employed. Here is where I hear the admonition from the coward-- and the voice of a witless general public. “People are part of nature, too” I hear them whining. But here one must be strong. And say no, when faced with the specter of the spectral beast. No, people are not covered by the tag: nature. There is something in us that is NOT of the world of nature, and that is instead traceable to the mystery of conscious existence, and the world of thought.
One against I long for the levity in my old prose style, and the otherworldly beauty of those verses I wrote, when I was a carefree poet. I opined as in a colloquy of like-minded ones; I used to say, thought has created the idea of the past, and influenced all the content that has ever gone into the history of the world. It has built everything that survives in the present world; and it was not idle passing time that allowed this creativity, but synthetic understandings that have always included humanity (shall we say) in their constructions. But technology, ugh!, as a form of nature, can only build illusions in the illusory temporal space provided by the one aspect of time. It’s hour-glass shall run out. It is mindless, indifferent, scornful: it has exactly that mood about it--producing drastic effects everywhere. Yes, and it has products, new perfumes to cover a smell of something rotting . . . The technology of the present has no past, it is wholly a fabric composed of elements of burgeoning, seductive, even spectacular, aspects of nature. We get only to argue with it by systematic reference to what happens in the present. Must we accept this kind of gift?
You can easily see senseless replication. It seems like there is infinite space to create, or play, but the trash is actually mounting up, and the fatigue has set in. There is duplication, and worse: there is duplicity. Smooth talking technology, with its base in the most primitive of all logic systems, literally a switch, producing a circuit, produces a simulation, and an engine which recognises information solely on a hierarchy of its own making. It feeds and rewards itself. Information is not knowledge; but it is . . . power! The ghost at the heart of this machine is a pig with an appetite, and it can threaten to swallow all appearances. The engineers who organise these computer systems have no idea of any whole of what they are working on. They are all slaves. And there is no whole--that is the problem with nature. We think of it as limitless, but that just means we don’t have the truth. That is part of the puzzle in life--and you don’t solve a puzzle by making more pieces.
Man has long thought that he had escaped some of the scary parts of nature, that is supposed to be what civilization is about; and technology in the average person’s life is advertised as bringing them comforts. Technology is a just that tiny pill. A new shawl made of that new fabric. But watch it closely; that new make-up, those pills, all synthetic, are new living fibers. For nature is inescapable. It is only deceptive because we have lost associations with the primitive forms of nature, and can’t see their reincarnation. Now I reach a fever pitch! Technology is like the reincarnation of idol worship. A left turn around the corner from history, and into the face of . . . the pagan gods.
Less hysterically, I defined technology as “science without use”. Ah, but that is way too gentle and academic. It lets it off the hook. It, this base instinct in nature, has gotten a free pass under the rubric and reputation of science, as if it were part of the scientific revolution that, even a poet admits, involved rational thinking. But science was born in a citadel; this new creation is out on the plains and in the sewers, in air conditioned cubicles by the millions. The dread form of nature that science cannot control, and which art is attracted to like candy. The white filmy stuff that you don’t recall getting on your hands, like riding the escalator, and which no soap can wash off. The popcorn you got at the multiplex cinema that makes you throw up. Have I said too much? What else is in the gaudy pleasure gardens, I mean the potted plants, of technology? Maybe a little something intravenous.
Posted by mortimer at 06:55 PM | Comments (2257)
February 07, 2006
My Main Topic: "The Thought of the Past"
Given the opportunity, I will always give the same speech. I will summon the topic left out of the million haphazard discussions in life, and using all my accumulated repartee, using any indirect tactic or leaning on any fortuitous association, happily rail non-stop. I am unchecked. It’s like there is some unfed beast, or imprisoned old man kept in the cellar; and given the freedom I will open the cellar door and let this other life into the kitchen--where we can discuss what he is, why he is starving, and how to reconcile him.
It is the main subject, the big speech I was giving Theo the other night, when my wife and Diane were in the other room looking at her paintings. I should set this scene just a little, before I shock another audience, this time of untold numbers. This big speech where I had Theo pretty well trapped in the kitchen, between me and the threat of the cellar door, it seemed. This is the speech in which I reveal the base of my thinking. It is about how the thought of the past has nothing to do with time. Sounds contradictory on the face of it--but the more you think about it you have to question: where did this association arise between time and the idea of the past?
I was about five years old when I set my mind on solving this dilemma, and not only haven't I solved it--but the dilemma is becoming . . . more explicit. But I say that all people have a thought of the past first, before they know almost anything, like a breathless commentary supposed in their fragile awareness, and put it up as a promise for long adventure, a poetic life. They think it up, the category of the past, and then try to fill it in. Nature itself seems old. Thought itself has this complex origin, and retains this structure. When the schoolboy hears about History, he figures at first and innocently that is the same thing, or close enough. He doesn’t suspect it has been co-opted by some opposing theory, about how it is just there as a result of passing clock-time. For what does time have to do with the first sense of history? I say nothing--if I get the chance to speak.
“History is right before us, like the sequel / In the story of fabulous rare exhaustion... ” (The Modern Epoch, E. Williams, 1986) The past is visible in the yard, from my perch in the tree, through the very medium of the air. The first task a child has is looking back, like into the origins of a mystery. For we are in a mystery; is there some doubt about that? Or do you think the great arbitrator of hard science is about to clear everything up? People get literally smothered out, and forget their original idea. The details, old books, cathedrals, get moved from one category to another! But you had the thought of categorical difference! Many things in the history of the world seem to belong there, all the stranger things are immediately invited up from the cellar! There are old men with crutches living down there, and also an tunnel that connects with the old subway, and out onto the meadows. Like in that movie I saw . . . or that dream I had. Believe me, I don’t just make this stuff up. And if anything miraculous was historical, it would have to be truth. Repeat: if the past has a miracle, or six or seven, in it, it must be truth. The third time is the charm: miracles are going on in the present all the time, it is just the past we have prohibited them from. But you didn’t imagine it. You got the category of this “past”, just sitting in a tree, or marching through the intersection, and glancing back at the world. The thought of the past came before the revelatory content that fills it up. And incredibly . . . still does.
Why am I so sure of this, when I can’t get a single other person to agree with me on it? Oh, I get small victories; I get looks, even looks of pity. Talking with Theo it seemed he must see at least that I had this sustaining conviction of my source in remembered sequence from my childhood. Yea, maybe that’s the way you remember life, but memory is faulty, I think he finally said. Well, my wife, she understands me! at least while I am talking to her; and from the application I have made of this thinking in my writing--which could go either way in a defense, like at that trial I attended in my novel, Alien Construct. My wife and I are all tangled up in a number of fidelities. She might believe me as a matter of faith, or as a kind of investment in eternity. She doesn't appear to require this truth as badly as I do, though.
But I am not quite done with it. This thought of the past is a deduction, made from being in the world; it isn’t an abstract notion, or a fanciful imposition come up with out of the blue and then put upon reality, at all--but it is a childish opinion, an idea gained from experience, brought about by staring at the world: that this place has a secret, something it is not telling us--which is as good as saying: a history. It is the extension of a personal concern about being in a mystery. And the first aspect given to that mystery: that it is not revealing of the whole story.
And is not about to reveal itself, like in some philosophy class, or by the gross analogy with the passage of time. This other story does not immediately locate itself anywhere in time. It could, for all the naive, mystery-ridden, observer knows, be a matter of location, like maybe the solution is just over the horizon; maybe it requires a shift of focus, or another thought! It is not given that the secret history of the world is impossible to find. But it is also an immediate impression of the world that it (the world) is a totality. How is that! A totality that excludes the truth? Well this just creates unbelievable interest and tension in life. This is my big speech I always give--when given the chance.
People just let me say this for them, I think. They are afraid of being arrested or something. But I have everyone’s attention: so I can state it simply. It’s that one gets the first idea of history itself from the place. And if we look at the content of this idea, this deduction from looking at the world, we can see it is not the idea of time. The idea of time comes from other experiences entirely, I venture to say . . .
Posted by mortimer at 06:46 PM | Comments (3375)