I've been trying to declare (while discovering) who and what I am since before puberty, at least since the middle of grammar school. Society's reaction, my own family's reaction, is to bat it aside. Considerations unwelcome.
Through 1990 I endeavored to publish my declarations, to make them public, to share: all to very little success. Getting online on a regular basis in 1995, I've devoted much of my home page to telling about the preceding half-century. Now there are a couple more experiences where dialogue shows partial matches, signs of communicational success. (1990 to 1995 I'd given up on publishing, was retired from the effort: retreated to my diary.)
My experience to date indicates that communication is rare, swept aside by the ever rising tide of self-promotions, self-deceptions: disinformation. So. It may be that neither friends (I used to have a couple) nor public is willing or competent to consider pk theses. It doesn't matter whether I say it well or ill; you won't hear it. god will be able to show the public, once it's dead, once its attention is enslaved, that it was told again and again and again and again how to live, what to avoid.
Of course my intended audience is 99.9% kleptocrat: people screaming about property rights on stolen land, people screaming how Jesus is going to save them: after clones, earlier in history, people just like them, killed him.
I summarize examples, chronologically, already developed at Knatz.com:
- When I was ten or so my Sunday School teacher asked me what I intended to do with my Christianity. I readily answered, to his discomfort and dismay, that I would test my thesis that all religions were One: that our difficulties were problems of translation, of interpretation ...
His reaction forecast to me that I would never get any help or understanding from my church.
My point isn't that my thesis was true, or remotely original (though at the time I thought it was both); rather my point is that adults recoil from anything not a clone of their training. It isn't true merely of the cannibals; it's equally true of the missionaries. - I want to stop torturing Jesus after two thousand years of it, finally take him down off the cross. I wrote a story about it. I submitted it to the major magazines. At least the Atlantic had the decency to confess to tears at its rejection.
- In the mid-1960s I started hearing people talking about quantifying information by counting storage bytes on a disk: as though English were efficient, as though data and information were synonyms ... Nonsense, I thought (not knowing that Norbert Wiener had been there before me): There's more information in Shakespeare's "My salad days, when I was green in judgement, cold in blood" than there is in the Manhattan telephone book.
Nearly a half-century later I'm not aware of a single person who properly apprehends the implications (of Sentiens being entirely composed of information) (and nothing but information): even as I develop some at Macroinformation.org. - I didn't develop Macroinformation in the 1960s: because I was busy noticing correspondences between the Fair Love and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's oxymoron-raddled sonnets, the Experience / Authority dichotomy of Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and the theological-cosmological-epistemological controversy between Scholastic Realism and nominalism that was spreading since the Eleventh Century.
Neither did I see that both theses were really the same: complex information manifesting in multiple dimensions.
In any case, the evidence mounting that NYU had understood little of what I'd said since matriculating, NYU additionally exhibiting a belief that it had no obligation to listen even as it bankrupted me, having teamed with Ivan Illich in his quest for conviviality in 1970, when my doctoral orals committee simply interrupted and dismissed my Shakespeare thesis in 1971, I abandoned the academia that had never not abandoned me. - Ivan Illich analyzed civilized institutions as coming to serve ends opposite and incompatible with their charters. Priests block messages from God, schools enslave us while making us stupid ... The solution would be for the public to network itself, keep its own records, obviate government, media ... What the world needed was a non-managerial librarian, someone who would keep records without judging or censoring them. And that's what I volunteered to do. Let the public tell whatever lies it wanted, but don't elevate the lies, merely record them: and also publish feedback so the wash might wash itself. Maybe filth would settle to the bottom instead of rising to the top.
The internet I offered in 1970 would keep records of Who, What, When, Where ... and no one needed a computer to use it (so long as the library itself was tied to a mainframe). The public was invited to fund its own freedom. It didn't.
Bankrupt myself, I was now bankrupting my wife (and her family) waiting for the public to funnel resources to its library.
The library, as a potential, still lives: in my mind. - Much of my best thinking of decades went into my fiction. Art can punch through defenses that thought can't penetrate. I couldn't afford the postage to mail it. Publishers held the manuscripts for unconscionable periods: only to return copious misunderstandings. My story about an ineffective-looking guy who notched the deaths of many a mugger onto his knife came back from Playboy, from Esquire ... Lo & behold: Death Wish pops out of Hollywood a year later. Is there (in a kleptocracy) any lawyer who would even understand my complaint, let alone work pro bono to sue? How about the same lawyers who worked pro bono for the Mohawk to get their land back?
When Harpers finally decided to publish my best story, the entire editorial staff was fired, all decisions reversed. (It's was Norman Mailer's excellence, not mine, that triggered the new avalanche of publishing cowardice.)
more illustrations coming
This theme continues at pk.
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