Fast Forward

No one knows what matter is. Scientific theory provides reasonable hypotheses, and perhaps ultimate matter boils down to circular wiggles of empty space. Space cannot be devoid of properties if it is capable of form, but that’s not the point. And what about the ambient pressure of the bang? Is it possible that like creatures in the depths of some cosmic ocean we have our being in an environment of intense pressure that we have no way of detecting because it is impenetrably ubiquitous? Whatever the yet undiscovered facts of the matter may be, we can say for sure that a haze of subatomic light-speed behavior is responsible for the plodding world of fishes and loaves in which we find ourselves.

Stacks of atoms. Everywhere we look we find mere stacks of atoms in those careless arrangements made inevitable as individual atoms attempt to fill outer electron shields by sharing electrons with some amenable fellow atom. These liaisons are more or less enduring according to the mutual benefit derived, and it is a simple flux of inevitability that gives us this or that molecular configuration. The mechanics of these goings on are so well understood that we now have huge factories that do nothing more (or less) than stack molecules to be pilled or bagged or boxed, and then shipped off to do their inevitable fluxing out there somewhere for the alleged benefit of all mankind. We know a lot about molecules. They are mere stacks of atoms.

But why then should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness? And speaking of conscious awareness what is the nature of, say, sight? The vision of the forest that occurs in this mind as I look out through the forest has a real existence. What is the nature of its exsistence? Some have said that the immediate experience of a given mind is the only thing that it can claim with total certainty to be real. What's with that? But I digress. The question is: why should a mere stack of atoms possess conscious awareness (let alone life)? It has to be something about the way the atoms are stacked, because other than that we are looking at perfectly ordinary molecules. Perhaps it is a field phenomenon created by the behavior patterns of the shared electrons that hold the DNA molecule together. No one knows, but it is apparent that life must somehow inhere in matter.

Plant-animal distinctions start at the level of single-celled life forms. And though these distinctions are sometimes hazy there exist unambiguous examples of what seems to be volition on the part of one-celled creatures. I suppose we could describe the amoeba’s “catch and consume” behavior as a tropism thing or some such; but the fact remains it does not notice, pursue, and consume it’s prey by accident. Primitive nerve systems seem to be the facilitators of awareness and not the progenitors. Fast forward to the human brain.

Whorled Peas

Idea is the currency in which the imagination trades. Ideas are the matchsticks with which mind builds its intricate models. An idea is a specific, uniquely identifiable, construct of the imagination; and regardless of the relative validity or congruity to objective fact: all ideas are imaginary. Any single idea will be found in an aggregate of its fellows in an elaborate tinker-toy structure: a world-view. The fact that world-view is a construct of imagination is not a bad thing. It is the only way world-views can occur. Everybody’s got one whether they are aware of it or not, and even inspiration must enter imagination as idea if it is to make itself known.

A world-view is a complex ice palace of conceptualization. Were that ice to all melt away the objective world would be the same, but we would not. Real is real whether we have an idea about it or not, and it matters hugely if our efforts are to make conceptualizations as contiguous as possible to the real; or if we gloss the real with a paste of preconception. The world-view can be seen as a house of cards: one idea-card supporting another, supporting another, and so on in an elaborate mutually supportive structure. What if some cards are not from the print shop of objective fact? What are the implications if some elements are wholly invented: products of the imagination having no referents in objective reality? In such a case the house of cards stands only with continuous effort of imagination. Should some shock from the real dispel said imaginary element, the whole bit must collapse. Unless said shock occurs in the form of an epiphany.

Epiphany is the lightbulb moment: that moment when under the unseen influence of pattern recognition our conceptualization suddenly finds itself in magnetic alignment with previously unseen elements of the self-evidently real. A light comes on. This real element or potential was there all the time, but its existence could not enter our imagination to work its work upon our world-view as its existence was sub-liminal. Subliminal: existing (or potentially existing) but beneath the limiting horizon of our conscious awareness.

Misunderstandings of every stripe, from world wars to marital strife, are the inexorable side effects of incongruent world-views: of unsympathetic stacks of imaginings. Violence is most usually an attempt at problem solving. And it’s not going to happen: that nations or organizations or individuals will voluntarily subject the complex house of cards, which is their very intellectual existence, to the simple non-imaginary universal inner appeal for dignity and self-determination.

The situation is quite hopeless. And by the time the obvious becomes apparent to the hopelessly occluded the world will be a shambles: chaos. Epiphanies are where they find you, and though horses can be led to water they cannot be made to drink. But if there is any hope for humanity it is that individuals are subject to epiphany. I saw a sign once, painted on the window of an empty storefront in Eugene Oregon. It said, “visualize whorled peas.”


I'm on it.

The Informed

Informed Sources

Informed sources are a criteria of judgment where knowledge exists we have no way of attaining through our own efforts. The Earth is round. Who says so? For most of us the roundness of the Earth is hearsay. We say we know such things because people whose business it is to nail down facts have made determinations, and because anyone with the time and resources to make a determination would arrive at the same informed position. The great body of human knowledge can be accepted as fact because it is is “over-determined.” At a certain point it must be admitted that anyone making the proper effort will uncover for himself or herself that the Earth is round.

Years ago I had a mad-scientist acquaintance in thrall of ideas of perpetual motion. He made drawings and elaborate charts and had pages and pages of mathematical equations. He also built exotic devices that never quite worked. He showed me the math for his latest romantic device which was not quite working. Looking at the math I pointed out to him that he had neglected to factor in time: and with time factored in, his machine showed up as a no-gain system with an immense amount of drag. I said: “You know, two and two equals four; everywhere in the universe, every time.” He looked at me wild-eyed and exclaimed with an expansive gesture, “But what if once in a while……….” Here stood a man not intimidated by over-determination, by facts: in short, a lunatic. Freedom of thought was a defining characteristic of his personality and in time it brought him great grief.

Our faculties are our only source of information. The store of fact accrued by century upon century of serious minded individuals is a powerful magic-wand, and we share in this store in so far as we make it our own. We make it our own by accepting it. We accept the store of accumulated knowledge because we trust the system that produced it. That system could be described as methodical reification: a system of observation and objectivity in an endless feedback loop that never quits checking its notes.

Ultimately we are our only source of information: how are we to make of ourselves a vehicle capable of perceiving the real? My old buddy's imagination always had its thumb on the scale of his perceptions, so his reckonings always included generous dollop of pure imagination. That unperceived, supinely accepted, generous dollop of pure imagination brought to grief almost every thing he ever tried to do, and he was a very energetic man. For all his boundless energy he never paused to consider the difference between imagination and perception.

The Circumvention of Ambiguity


Wood Betony
And tiny blue-green herbs
Amongst the thatch of dry red-brown fall grass


The function of intellect is the circumvention of ambiguity
And the path of affinity is one of truth



Thistle down

Goose feathers

Popcorn

Choices

The Problem with Sex

The problem with sex is, “Sex? No Problem!” In its complex socio-political rise from animal rutting, human sexuality has undergone a remarkable evolution of potential. There exists a spectrum of possibility running from the ridiculous to the sublime.

 

Sex has its roots in the collective unconscious, and even in this august creation, humanity, there it must remain. Rooted in the collective unconscious, sexuality blindsides both the best and the worst of us. Everywhere you find us you will find us two by two: all but without exception every human being on the face of the earth is the product of male orgasm upon the instinctual object of its fascinations. That female orgasm is a more subtle science speaks to the fact that it is not necessary to procreation. That said, without question female sexuality must be the complement in its urgency to that of the male.

Homo sapiens is considered the thinking animal, but there is another way of thinking about this. The frontal lobe is as much a spiritualizing faculty as an image-producing machine, and the distinction might be made that humanity is the spiritual animal. That those who deny themselves the luxury of imaging a God may still confront a spiritually charged mystery speaks to the fact that religious forms emerge from a spiritual incline, and not the other way around. Perhaps religion reduces to collected thought-forms emerging from a spontaneously spiritual creature. And perhaps it is wholly natural that a spontaneously spiritual humanity would put an anthropocentric spin on the mystery that the seed of unknowable matter is the Father of all knowable form in the otherwise unknowable empty Womb of space.

But we are speaking here of sex, and the configuration of human sexual experience. There is no need to delve into behavior. The thoughts, yearnings, and compulsions peculiar to the sexual impulse are familiar to all, and for every individual find their own historically statistical constellation. The behaviors specific to sex are limited; the meaning generated by the exercise of these behaviors is not. Looking at some examples of sexual behavior the thought occurs, “As a thing to do, no one would pick that out of a catalogue.” As in masochism: would an unsoiled being surveying a menu of human potential say, “Yes! I’ll just have that masochist thing?” Someone schooled in the subtle secrets of masochism perhaps (consenting adults and all that).

As for me, give me a sexual existence that is awakened; where the sexual transaction becomes ground for a decidedly spiritual conversation. Until naked spirits intertwine we are ever clothed in personalities and touch only through the burlap of our humanness. Humanness can be seen as soil, which exists that the Universe might grow souls upon it. And the flower of an enlightened sexuality (which can be discovered only from within the fragile prism which is precisely its coming into being) is destined to bear what fruit?

Untitled Love Poem #33

the light reflected from a leaf

and the light from your eyes

are they the same

it cannot be

even as I am

light must be changed

for having touched you

Christmas Past

The New War

War was different than I had expected. I had years of experience on nuclear alert pads in Europe and in Asia. Baby-sitting A bombs: two planes (F-100s, the “lead sled”) uploaded and on the pad. Ready to go when the whistle blew. Three other F-100s we flew daily keeping the bugs out of them until rotation to the pad. It was good duty. The bases were small, tiny even. The food was good. In both Asia and in Europe, alert pads were in rural areas where life carried on as it had for centuries with little encroachment of the benefits and ills of industrialization. I liked it, and I liked working on those war-machines in the open air. In all kinds of weather: subzero cold and a thirty-knot wind, one hundred degrees plus and no breath astir; keep them flying. It was a rewarding robust life for a young man, and one in which I came to realize a world of rings within rings of total nuclear devastation just waiting for the right mistake to be made. I couldn’t imagine the Russians so stupid as to set off the unstoppable cascade of devastation, and I knew that the US would never precipitate the conflagration; but what if…….and what about all those innocent people.

One day word came down that a squadron of RF101's in northern Japan would deploy to Vietnam. They were asking for volunteers to go with them. I had been trained on the system, and what the heck: hazardous-duty pay and check out a real shooting war. It seemed like the thing to at the time.

I arrived in Vietnam in July of 1966. I was 21 years old. I had volunteered. I left the following July. I have never gotten over that year, and I don’t care to. I can't forget the crushing stupidity, the wanton destruction a powerful nation can bring down upon a hapless population emerging from 19th century colonialism. I found out later that Ho Chi Min had fought at the head of an indigenous army alongside the British in the struggle to drive the Japanese out of then French Indochina. In South Vietnam Ho Chi Min’s birthday was a big deal. I asked a Vietnamese acquaintance what that was all about. She said, “You know George Washington? Ho Chi Min Vietnam's George Washington.” I asked, “Then what's this war about?” She shrugged her shoulders. And what about that Pacific-Rim domino theory? We haven’t heard much lately about the irreversible falling of those communist dominoes have we?

Once the killing starts there are plenty of reasons to stay at it. Anyone who is in favor of building guns and bombs rather than textbooks and pencils is deeply misguided. If was spent half the money building schools as is spent preparing to kill people; half the money building infrastructure as is spent preparing to destroy infrastructure; half the time inveighing for dignity and understanding as is spent proselytizing for an at best morally neutral mercantilism, the world would without question be a better place.

I still see the dead. I don’t want to forget the dead. It would be shamefully wrong to forget the dead. The dead I met were mostly enemy dead; shot dead while doing their dead level best to see me dead. And dead is dead and the killing goes on with newly minted enemies and new and more efficient tools of killing. There are no new justifications; only newly killed human beings.

Youth at War 

A youth at war 

I was one once 

Volunteering for adventure, to serve my curiosity 

Adventure’s appetite can be sated 

Not so an inquiring mind 

Bar fights

Fire-fights

Heroes and braggadocio 

For all that I most remember 

An old and naked man 

A skeleton draped with shrunken skin 

Weakly pawing atop a mountain of trash and garbage 

And a fine athletic friend on the Saigon River 

Drenching sampans with the slalom ski 

Haunched in black pajamas they sat expressionless 

Under their coolie hats 

And I remember thieving children 

Running the streets Like packs of wild dogs