Monday, December 14, 2009
Competence
God, order ... law ... These are ideas that humans have without the competence to contemplate them well.
Friday, December 04, 2009
Culture
Culture is a faith-based phenomenon: evidence gets ridden over roughshod. Americans believe (as they're told) that they're "free" (while the government has its hand in all pockets, while school is compulsory ...), Christians believe that they're "saved" (while Jesus' disciples still get arrested ...), "scientists" believe that they're "rational" (while whatever ...) (Once the FBI lab has been caught falsifying evidence, why is there still a funded FBI lab? Why once university labs have been caught falsifying evidence are there still university labs? Why are there still governments? schools? (and universities?) Why are there still churches? Cheats from the get-go.
Culture, that's why.
Human cultures typically believe that they are competent at theology, science, history ... How many of those beliefs would bear testing? How are we going to stop God from being objective in his tests at Judgment? What percentage of God's messages have penetrated the culture to reach the target audience? Some? Any? Certainly not all.
I believe the answer is Some. Very few. And none that I've been involved in. The crazy thing is: the culture's soldier ants – cops, teachers, bureaucrats – don't even see what they're doing. They think they're "right"!
Knatz.com had many modules on culture. The above blurt is merely today's. I'll be restoring the earlier modules here at IonaArc as I can.
Culture, that's why.
Human cultures typically believe that they are competent at theology, science, history ... How many of those beliefs would bear testing? How are we going to stop God from being objective in his tests at Judgment? What percentage of God's messages have penetrated the culture to reach the target audience? Some? Any? Certainly not all.
I believe the answer is Some. Very few. And none that I've been involved in. The crazy thing is: the culture's soldier ants – cops, teachers, bureaucrats – don't even see what they're doing. They think they're "right"!
Knatz.com had many modules on culture. The above blurt is merely today's. I'll be restoring the earlier modules here at IonaArc as I can.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Finch Bump
I tend to think of myself as "always" having been a teacher, and a great one, but this morning I recalled an incident from my adolescence proving that any such impression is far from true: an early attempt at teaching was ill-advised, unsuccessful, and turned brutal.
Pre-teen pk was always doing the neighbors' gardening, had a big newspaper delivery route, had a drawer full of money: and few expenses, very few vices: I'd indulge in malted milkshakes and Clark Bars at the worst. Generally the only other things that I bought were jazz records, a few of those weekly, but this memory involves an exception. I was in a pet store. One cage was active with tiny birds, "half" of which seemed to be in the air at one time changing perches. They were colorful in a pattern and of a combination of hues I wasn't familiar with: subdued grays, yellows: harlequins of subtlety. "Finches": $n.nn each, the sign said. I wanted that activity, I wanted to own it, to have it. I bought a cage and one of those finches for it, took it home, and hung it in our front enclosed porch.
The solitary finch was active I suppose; but nothing like the crowd of finches had been. Already I felt let down. But I didn't dwell on my disappointment, I had plans: I was going to train this finch. I was going to train this finch to perch on my finger. But my hand in the cage drove the finch crazy. Now the finch was hyper-active, didn't alight for more than a moment. A solution occurred to me: the finch will fear the wooden perch less than my finger: train the finch to the perch that I'm holding, then train the finch to perch closer and closer till the finch will perch on my finger.
But of course twelve or thirteen year old Paul had no experience with training anything, had no concept of time passing for individuals and populations. My finch was fleeing the perch I held just as manically as it had fled my finger in the cage. The poor bird was wearing itself out and was losing agility. I decided that we needed a break in our training. I topped up the finch's seed and water bowls and left it alone.
The next session went no better. But I had another idea. The bird might learn more to my satisfaction if the perch I held for it were longer, further away from the me he hadn't yet learned to love and trust. Sho nuff, I had a dowel in the basement. I had a dowel of a diameter the finch could grip. I got the dowel. Now we needed more room. The cage was too small. I closed the door between the porch and the living room to confine my circus to the enclosed porch and let the finch out. Immediately the finch flew as far away form me a possible and clung to a curtain at the top of a side window. No, no, train yourself to ME, I beamed my thoughts at the terrified bird. I approached the finch, holding the long perch out for it. But the dowel poking near its belly just drove the finch to the other end of the porch. This was not going at all the way I'd hoped and planned.
In a word: now I was getting tired. The bird would cling to the curtain top at the north end of the porch, but flee to the south end as soon as I re-crossed the porch near the middle. And something else was happening: the bird was beginning to poop all over the porch in its desperate flights. Paul's circus rehearsal was out of hand.
My grip on the dowel tightened. Had my face enough age to show a little character I'd start to look more like Bogart and less like Alan Ladd, more like Lillian Gish's father in Broken Blossoms and less like Lillian Gish, more like Wiley Coyote and less like Tweety Bird. I approached the center of the room. The finch saw me coming, and flew past me, high up near the ceiling.
I didn't plan it. I didn't see it coming. My action showed me that I didn't know myself at all. I swung the dowel like a saber. I slashed at my poor new pet.
Luck was against us, in the extreme. I connected. The little finch was knocked cold, clean out of the air, and lay on the carpet. I was heartbroken. What had I done? I picked it up, cradled it in my hands, blurted that I was sorry. Like a balloon the finch's finch beak inflated into a bump that seemed bigger than the finch. Did you ever see a bird with a bump on its beak? A bird that was all beak to begin with?
I put the bird back into its cage. The bird came to, and reclaimed a spot on a perch. But not for long. The finch fell to the cage floor. Before long it expired. I threw the corpse away, moved the empty cage to the basement. I'm not sure what young Paul learned that day; but old pk learned something: because just recalling the story this morning I realize: I'd forgotten completely about it! I learned that I hadn't learned to teach in one I'll-tell-you-whether-you-want-to-hear-it-or-not session.
Pre-teen pk was always doing the neighbors' gardening, had a big newspaper delivery route, had a drawer full of money: and few expenses, very few vices: I'd indulge in malted milkshakes and Clark Bars at the worst. Generally the only other things that I bought were jazz records, a few of those weekly, but this memory involves an exception. I was in a pet store. One cage was active with tiny birds, "half" of which seemed to be in the air at one time changing perches. They were colorful in a pattern and of a combination of hues I wasn't familiar with: subdued grays, yellows: harlequins of subtlety. "Finches": $n.nn each, the sign said. I wanted that activity, I wanted to own it, to have it. I bought a cage and one of those finches for it, took it home, and hung it in our front enclosed porch.
The solitary finch was active I suppose; but nothing like the crowd of finches had been. Already I felt let down. But I didn't dwell on my disappointment, I had plans: I was going to train this finch. I was going to train this finch to perch on my finger. But my hand in the cage drove the finch crazy. Now the finch was hyper-active, didn't alight for more than a moment. A solution occurred to me: the finch will fear the wooden perch less than my finger: train the finch to the perch that I'm holding, then train the finch to perch closer and closer till the finch will perch on my finger.
But of course twelve or thirteen year old Paul had no experience with training anything, had no concept of time passing for individuals and populations. My finch was fleeing the perch I held just as manically as it had fled my finger in the cage. The poor bird was wearing itself out and was losing agility. I decided that we needed a break in our training. I topped up the finch's seed and water bowls and left it alone.
The next session went no better. But I had another idea. The bird might learn more to my satisfaction if the perch I held for it were longer, further away from the me he hadn't yet learned to love and trust. Sho nuff, I had a dowel in the basement. I had a dowel of a diameter the finch could grip. I got the dowel. Now we needed more room. The cage was too small. I closed the door between the porch and the living room to confine my circus to the enclosed porch and let the finch out. Immediately the finch flew as far away form me a possible and clung to a curtain at the top of a side window. No, no, train yourself to ME, I beamed my thoughts at the terrified bird. I approached the finch, holding the long perch out for it. But the dowel poking near its belly just drove the finch to the other end of the porch. This was not going at all the way I'd hoped and planned.
In a word: now I was getting tired. The bird would cling to the curtain top at the north end of the porch, but flee to the south end as soon as I re-crossed the porch near the middle. And something else was happening: the bird was beginning to poop all over the porch in its desperate flights. Paul's circus rehearsal was out of hand.
My grip on the dowel tightened. Had my face enough age to show a little character I'd start to look more like Bogart and less like Alan Ladd, more like Lillian Gish's father in Broken Blossoms and less like Lillian Gish, more like Wiley Coyote and less like Tweety Bird. I approached the center of the room. The finch saw me coming, and flew past me, high up near the ceiling.
I didn't plan it. I didn't see it coming. My action showed me that I didn't know myself at all. I swung the dowel like a saber. I slashed at my poor new pet.
Luck was against us, in the extreme. I connected. The little finch was knocked cold, clean out of the air, and lay on the carpet. I was heartbroken. What had I done? I picked it up, cradled it in my hands, blurted that I was sorry. Like a balloon the finch's finch beak inflated into a bump that seemed bigger than the finch. Did you ever see a bird with a bump on its beak? A bird that was all beak to begin with?
I put the bird back into its cage. The bird came to, and reclaimed a spot on a perch. But not for long. The finch fell to the cage floor. Before long it expired. I threw the corpse away, moved the empty cage to the basement. I'm not sure what young Paul learned that day; but old pk learned something: because just recalling the story this morning I realize: I'd forgotten completely about it! I learned that I hadn't learned to teach in one I'll-tell-you-whether-you-want-to-hear-it-or-not session.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Shakespearean World
A world in which Shakespeare is revered, preserved, assigned doesn't spawn more Shakespeare; it spawns academic dreck. The "Shakespearean" world is chock-a-block choked with dreck writing: writing by the trained, by the certified.
(Did you ever read a document written by a school board? or by an English department? (Not by an English teacher; by an English department? (or a math department, or a history department ...?)))
(Media then save us: till media are saturated with media dreck.)
(Did you ever read a document written by a school board? or by an English department? (Not by an English teacher; by an English department? (or a math department, or a history department ...?)))
(Media then save us: till media are saturated with media dreck.)
Superstition
That we've outgrown superstition is the principal superstition today.
I don't believe that Alan Watts had any greater title than The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who We Are. That taboo applies as much today (if not more) than it did the day Watts' book was published.
What could be more pathetic
than a people who've replaced sexual terror
with an AIDS epidemic thinking that not
instantly jailing pornographers from the wrong
social station means that there are no taboos?
than a people who've replaced sexual terror
with an AIDS epidemic thinking that not
instantly jailing pornographers from the wrong
social station means that there are no taboos?
I don't believe that Alan Watts had any greater title than The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who We Are. That taboo applies as much today (if not more) than it did the day Watts' book was published.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Secular Absolution
"Te absolvo," says the priest to the sinner. "I absolve you." The Church spreads this idea that God can forgive sin and that God delegates his powers to the Church and the Church passes the miracle along to the priest.
That was once upon a time. The sinner could exploit the peasants, starve the workers, rape the virgin ... give a coin to the priest to help build St. Peter's Basilica, and the priest could say, "I absolve you." God was supposed to have to make good on it. (Who do you sue if he doesn't? The priest is personally without property: the Church owns all the property. Besides, you're dead before you realize you've been deceived: and of course the Church doesn't believe its own lies, or it would realize that all the defrauded souls would start howling.) (Besides: starving workers wasn't "sin"; sin was sacrificing to Baal, or eating pork, sacrificing a lamb with a a flaw, a mark on it, ... sin was holding your dick with your right hand ... failing to observe some taboo, failing to be precise in some ritual ...)
But now God isn't God: now the State is God. No one gives a shit about divine grace. No: we want secular salvation: from our secular god, the State: and the state buys our love with secular absolution: we steal a continent from the natives, Washington forgives us as we do it. We waste God's grace: Washington forgives us.
The State is the kleptocrats' proxy thief. DC steals cybernetic networking of the public from Jesus-Illich-pk, but perverts it into the planned obsolescence already reigning. But then the kleptocrats' thief absolves the kleptocrats. The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth: or pretends not to.
more, smoother, later
That was once upon a time. The sinner could exploit the peasants, starve the workers, rape the virgin ... give a coin to the priest to help build St. Peter's Basilica, and the priest could say, "I absolve you." God was supposed to have to make good on it. (Who do you sue if he doesn't? The priest is personally without property: the Church owns all the property. Besides, you're dead before you realize you've been deceived: and of course the Church doesn't believe its own lies, or it would realize that all the defrauded souls would start howling.) (Besides: starving workers wasn't "sin"; sin was sacrificing to Baal, or eating pork, sacrificing a lamb with a a flaw, a mark on it, ... sin was holding your dick with your right hand ... failing to observe some taboo, failing to be precise in some ritual ...)
But now God isn't God: now the State is God. No one gives a shit about divine grace. No: we want secular salvation: from our secular god, the State: and the state buys our love with secular absolution: we steal a continent from the natives, Washington forgives us as we do it. We waste God's grace: Washington forgives us.
The State is the kleptocrats' proxy thief. DC steals cybernetic networking of the public from Jesus-Illich-pk, but perverts it into the planned obsolescence already reigning. But then the kleptocrats' thief absolves the kleptocrats. The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth: or pretends not to.
more, smoother, later
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Monopoly
Say "monopoly" and we think "industry": or "markets. We think economics, money.
As I think the term money definitely applies but as secondary, far secondary, to power, to influence: to control. Social control, the control of the minds of the subjects of a kleptocracy. It doesn't just apply to the west but we westerners think the west is the world: our exposure is western, our schooling is western ... like Judeo-Christianity.
There: Judeo-Christianity: a set of religions of monopoly. One Temple, One Church, claims that One God created, owns, rules all. Monopoly.
The one Church claims one orthodoxy: no discussion allowed. Or, if there is discussion, the discussion is faked. This Protestant once sat in on a confraternity for Catholics. A priest gave us the dirty on what was wrong with the movie Martin Luther. He asked if any of us had seen it. I said I had. I asked if he had seen it: he hadn't. Yet he was lecturing us: from ignorance. Ignorance as authority: that's monopoly.
In the one US the government monopolizes the gold: and the schools, and the taxes, and the law, and the justice ... and the jails ... Oh, pardon me: control may be fought over among the federal level, the state level, and the county level ... When I was in jail I watched in stitches as the state cheated the fed while the county cheated the state.
This could extend in any of many directions. No doubt I'll be back: if I live, and can still see, and have fingers.
As I think the term money definitely applies but as secondary, far secondary, to power, to influence: to control. Social control, the control of the minds of the subjects of a kleptocracy. It doesn't just apply to the west but we westerners think the west is the world: our exposure is western, our schooling is western ... like Judeo-Christianity.
There: Judeo-Christianity: a set of religions of monopoly. One Temple, One Church, claims that One God created, owns, rules all. Monopoly.
The one Church claims one orthodoxy: no discussion allowed. Or, if there is discussion, the discussion is faked. This Protestant once sat in on a confraternity for Catholics. A priest gave us the dirty on what was wrong with the movie Martin Luther. He asked if any of us had seen it. I said I had. I asked if he had seen it: he hadn't. Yet he was lecturing us: from ignorance. Ignorance as authority: that's monopoly.
In the one US the government monopolizes the gold: and the schools, and the taxes, and the law, and the justice ... and the jails ... Oh, pardon me: control may be fought over among the federal level, the state level, and the county level ... When I was in jail I watched in stitches as the state cheated the fed while the county cheated the state.
This could extend in any of many directions. No doubt I'll be back: if I live, and can still see, and have fingers.
Embracing Injustice
I embrace injustice.
Injustice is all I've gotten, all I'm gonna get. I might as well embrace it: I've got to embrace something.
Could that be what Jesus meant by loving your enemies? On the cross did Jesus love those who were crucifying him? If his need for love was desperate enough, he'd have to: because the mortal agony was all he had left!
Injustice is all I've gotten, all I'm gonna get. I might as well embrace it: I've got to embrace something.
Could that be what Jesus meant by loving your enemies? On the cross did Jesus love those who were crucifying him? If his need for love was desperate enough, he'd have to: because the mortal agony was all he had left!
Friday, November 20, 2009
Dancing Thoughts
Cha Cha for the Hands
I'd been taking requests all morning at my line dancing class when I announced that we'd do the Special K Cha Cha: I reviewed the sequence of steps and selected Marc Anthony's I Need to Know on the CD player.
Highlands Senior Social:
Ahn, Paul, Barbara, Jean
I love the dance, and I love the song. I love Marc Anthony's polyphonic composition and his precise performance. I enjoy dancing with the core of dancers who were on the floor with me at the moment: Nancy, Isabel, Barbara, Joyce. Others would join us but not yet. At the end of the number Isabel and Barbara were conferring on something:One said, "I've got the steps, I'm trying to learn the hand movements."
"There are no hand movements," I said. "Do what ever seems natural."
(And Jim Clark, setting up his guitar amp for the ballroom band that would begin playing at 10, volunteered, "My utilities guy says, 'Do whatever spins the meter'.") There was no time at the time to make sure that my point was clear (or to make sure I'd heard them right) (my hearing being none too reliable these days) (so I'm not even sure they were talking about the Special K, the dance we'd just danced). But my thoughts for the rest of the class were teeming with associations, clarifications ... analogies. I share some here:
Whole Body
There isn't any part of Michael Jackson's body that wasn't part of the dance he accompanied his "singing" with. Every digit of every finger, his ears, his ear lobe, knew exactly where each sixteenth beat was. It would almost seem that simultaneously every follicle of his hair knew as well where each third of each beat was. Fred Astaire was in total command of his body and was wholly at one with the swing music: as Michael Jackson was one with the funk. And it isn't just dancers: back in the 1950s I loved to watch Horace Silver while I listened to his music. Different parts of his body pulsed with each of the several variations of the rhythm he was exploring. His left foot was tapping one rhythm while his right foot was beating another, his head was nodding with a different emphasis while his elbows made rude comments: all while playing the most unbelievable funky piano accompaniment to his band. Charlie Parker's drummer told of the immortal saxophonist demonstrating rhythmic independence for him. Bird took over the drum set, his alto sax still strung from his neck, and kicked a Charleston beat on the high hat, a Dixie beat on the bass drum, beat triplets on the snare drum with one stick while accenting quarter note triplets on the tom tom with the other. That's the sort of rhythmic juggling the saxophonist can do! Each digit is alive!
For line dancing the choreography may cover only the feet (the body necessarily following) but the dance welcomes the whole body, mind, and spirit.
If the women had been referring to the Special K, and liked what I was doing with my hands, good, let them do something similar: or something different. We're all dancing, all dancers. (And it helps if the body has natural resonance to music (and is trained into mastery of some of the subdivisions of time). We're not the Rockettes, identical in as many details as the Roxy Theater can control; we're free: within a prescription.
Let me narrate an analogy:
Analogy: Skiing
I didn't ski till I was twenty-two or -three. Once I skied I became mad for it. I injured myself almost instantly, but didn't stop. By my third trip I was skiing expert slopes with names like Hell Gate. But it was several years before I skied those expert slopes well: well enough so that lifetime racers at Tuckermans Ravine accepted me as one of them. I remember a watershed moment which transformed me from not-really expert to expert enough. My best ski buddies at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine were instructors there. Hubbie was a German professor at Colby during the week and Herr Skimeister on the weekends. In all our time together Hubbie never "instructed" me in anything: till one day. He said he bet that if I cut a quarter of an inch off my ski poles it would help me get my weight forward for the pole plant. I did it. With my new shorter poles I made sure that each turn commenced with me coming forward to plant the pole tip right by the tip of my ski. It was magic. I was transformed. I instantly became a better balanced, more dynamic, more graceful skier! (And more courageous! (I was already far more daring than suited my wife (or my employer).))
Then I realized that the length of my poles had nothing to do with it; the essential point was I wasn't getting my weight far enough forward in initiating the turn. Skiing safety depends on turns, and turning depends on alternately weighting and un-weighting. The weighted ski resists turning; the unweighted ski finds resistance unnoticeable. As long as I returned my weight forward for each change of edges I was rescuing myself from the natural tendency (natural cowardice) that causes intermediates to hang "back" on steep slopes: putting sludge into their turns, and inviting overturning. No, no. You get on top of gravity. You ride it. You keep your upper body in the fall line: while you swish your skis from side to side, like windshield wipers. We fall off the saddle every time we lag. Suddenly, even on the steepest slopes, where it counts most, I was skiing with my whole body.
It's a paradox: where the danger is the greatest, you throw yourself into the danger: then you dominate it.
Same applies to dance. Same applies to everything.
Lesson
Meter, Rhythm
Meter is the predictable side of the rhythm. The dances that I do are all either common time of waltz time: either 4/4 or 3/4: four beats to a "measure" or three beats to a measure. The music that I love to listen to, sing, or play may be in 5/4 time, or 6/8 time, or 2/2 time, and I wish I did encounter dances in those times (in 6/8 time especially, I do love 6/8 time) (and maybe some dances, like the polka, are in 2/2 time); but trust me: the line dances I encounter and the ballroom dances at our social are basically 4/4, with the occasional waltz thrown in. That's meter: meter declares what the rhythmic regularity is; but it ain't music till it becomes irregular, unpredictable. That's the rhythm: the part that's different, a part that one may fall in love with.
I find I Need to Know to be rhythmically fabulous: salsa of the highest sophistication. But though I also love the Special K Cha Cha, there's one thing about the dance I find week: its juncture between choruses. I would like to see it re-choreographed with a better turn around.
Juncture
My dance training consists of a two week course in the sixth grade, and some line dance participation in this my seventy-first year. I don't know if there are dance theorists who use either term; but they've got to have the concepts. I develop them by analogy from linguistics and from music. Juncture here is the border shared between two distinct things: like a sea shore; like the ending of chorus one and the beginning of chorus two ... Here's an example from linguistics: consider the phrase "night rates": now consider the word "nitrates." The phonemes are identical; yet in the one case we all clearly hear "two" "words"; while we hear one in the latter. The difference is one of juncture. "Night rates" separates the /t/ from the /r/; "nitrates" links them: blurs them.
I am not crazy about how the Special K cha cha recycles itself: how count #32 junctures against the next cycle starting with count #1. I think the juncture could be improved. Whereas I love some of the junctures we had just danced: Amos Moses, for example: of The Electric Slide. (Details may follow.)
Turn Around
"The turn around" is a musician's phrase: in jazz music, in pop music. Let's say you're playing a twelve bar blues. The song displays a harmonic and rhythmic pattern over twelve measures: that's the first chorus. When it's your chorus you play the same progression of chords, but your solo should "comment on" the melody; not just repeat the melody. (Miles regularly improvised counter melodies. That's why Bird was in love with the raw kid.) And no matter whose chorus it is, when the last two bars are arrived at, bars eleven and twelve, use chords that point at the final tonic chord; not the tonic chord itself. In other words, if the blues is in G, not only do you use a lot of 7ths (and maybe 9ths and 11ths and 13ths) (that's what makes it "far out"), your final measure will be G (or G7), the tonic, giving a sense of closure, of finality: but while cycling through the choruses you don't want it to close, you want to keep it open: so you substitute chords that "point at" G: Am7 / D7, for example. The Am7 / D7 chords turn the chorus back on itself: a final G will finish it.
Analogy: Writing
Here's a different analogy, from writing. Edgar Rice Burroughs ends a middle-of-the-novel chapter with Tarzan trapped in the pit with the lion: that keeps the narrative open, ongoing. Having him marry Jane is how Burroughs might close the last chapter: the end of the story.
Analogy: Ballroom
Analogy from ballroom dance: I dance a fox trot. I use my slow, slow, quick-quick step; I sense the tune ending: I put my partner into a spin: and we bow / curtsy to each other on the final beat. That's the tonic, the cadence, the closure: all before is ongoing: turn around.
Illustrations: Juncture
Line dances are all a given number of counts. The counts don't have to match the beats in the music. They typically don't. Pop music is often based in a sixteen measure pattern. the number of beats in a chorus is therefore four times sixteen = sixty-four. Line dances are typically sixteen beats, thirty-two beats, thirty-six beats ... It doesn't matter: 4/4 line dances will come out fine with 4/4 pop music. Never mind where the musicians' measure is; synch with the count of the dance.
I criticized the turn-around of the Special K ChaCha: I'll illustrate in a moment. First I'll set it up with an illustration of a turnaround, the juncture between repetition one and repetition another: in the line dance Amos Moses. Amos Moses is only eight counts. On 1 you place your right heel forward; on 2 you bring your right foot back beside your left, transferring your weight to your right foot. On 3 you place your left heel forward. On 4 you bring your left foot back with your right, but turn it one-quarter turn counter clockwise. If you started facing a north wall, you're now partly turned toward the west wall. On 5 you swing your hips square with the west wall as you bring your right foot into a step to your new right, the north wall. On 6 you step your left foot behind your right foot, a kind of a "vine" move to the right (north at the moment), transfer weight. On 7 you move your right foot further right (or north), but start to twist back clockwise (soon to face east), as on 8 your left foot follows your hips around to square with the east wall.
That's the "chorus": eight counts: eight counts with a quarter turn left and a half-the-hall turn right. You start out "north"; you end up east: after turning west: all in eight counts. But now here's the thing: you continue the dance. You recycle. Count #9 is a repetition of Count #1.
By itself, one 8-count cycle is cute. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. 5, 6, 7, 8 turns around into 1, 2, 3, 4. And the juncture is funky. Even a dancer with good balance will have a time maintaining an erect neutral posture from which to resume the right heel forward, right heel back, left heel forward, left foot turn ...
There a natural, an inevitable lag between your feet and your hips. Funky, man, move those hips. Come on girl, push that tush!
continues in a sec
I'd been taking requests all morning at my line dancing class when I announced that we'd do the Special K Cha Cha: I reviewed the sequence of steps and selected Marc Anthony's I Need to Know on the CD player.
Highlands Senior Social:
Ahn, Paul, Barbara, Jean
This pic is not of the class
but of a line dance during the regular morning session.
It looks to me like we're at
Count #13 of The Electric Slide.
but of a line dance during the regular morning session.
It looks to me like we're at
Count #13 of The Electric Slide.
I love the dance, and I love the song. I love Marc Anthony's polyphonic composition and his precise performance. I enjoy dancing with the core of dancers who were on the floor with me at the moment: Nancy, Isabel, Barbara, Joyce. Others would join us but not yet. At the end of the number Isabel and Barbara were conferring on something:
"There are no hand movements," I said. "Do what ever seems natural."
(And Jim Clark, setting up his guitar amp for the ballroom band that would begin playing at 10, volunteered, "My utilities guy says, 'Do whatever spins the meter'.")
Whole Body
There isn't any part of Michael Jackson's body that wasn't part of the dance he accompanied his "singing" with. Every digit of every finger, his ears, his ear lobe, knew exactly where each sixteenth beat was. It would almost seem that simultaneously every follicle of his hair knew as well where each third of each beat was. Fred Astaire was in total command of his body and was wholly at one with the swing music: as Michael Jackson was one with the funk. And it isn't just dancers: back in the 1950s I loved to watch Horace Silver while I listened to his music. Different parts of his body pulsed with each of the several variations of the rhythm he was exploring. His left foot was tapping one rhythm while his right foot was beating another, his head was nodding with a different emphasis while his elbows made rude comments: all while playing the most unbelievable funky piano accompaniment to his band. Charlie Parker's drummer told of the immortal saxophonist demonstrating rhythmic independence for him. Bird took over the drum set, his alto sax still strung from his neck, and kicked a Charleston beat on the high hat, a Dixie beat on the bass drum, beat triplets on the snare drum with one stick while accenting quarter note triplets on the tom tom with the other. That's the sort of rhythmic juggling the saxophonist can do! Each digit is alive!
For line dancing the choreography may cover only the feet (the body necessarily following) but the dance welcomes the whole body, mind, and spirit.
If the women had been referring to the Special K, and liked what I was doing with my hands, good, let them do something similar: or something different. We're all dancing, all dancers. (And it helps if the body has natural resonance to music (and is trained into mastery of some of the subdivisions of time). We're not the Rockettes, identical in as many details as the Roxy Theater can control; we're free: within a prescription.
Let me narrate an analogy:
Analogy: Skiing
I didn't ski till I was twenty-two or -three. Once I skied I became mad for it. I injured myself almost instantly, but didn't stop. By my third trip I was skiing expert slopes with names like Hell Gate. But it was several years before I skied those expert slopes well: well enough so that lifetime racers at Tuckermans Ravine accepted me as one of them. I remember a watershed moment which transformed me from not-really expert to expert enough. My best ski buddies at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine were instructors there. Hubbie was a German professor at Colby during the week and Herr Skimeister on the weekends. In all our time together Hubbie never "instructed" me in anything: till one day. He said he bet that if I cut a quarter of an inch off my ski poles it would help me get my weight forward for the pole plant. I did it. With my new shorter poles I made sure that each turn commenced with me coming forward to plant the pole tip right by the tip of my ski. It was magic. I was transformed. I instantly became a better balanced, more dynamic, more graceful skier! (And more courageous! (I was already far more daring than suited my wife (or my employer).))
Then I realized that the length of my poles had nothing to do with it; the essential point was I wasn't getting my weight far enough forward in initiating the turn. Skiing safety depends on turns, and turning depends on alternately weighting and un-weighting. The weighted ski resists turning; the unweighted ski finds resistance unnoticeable. As long as I returned my weight forward for each change of edges I was rescuing myself from the natural tendency (natural cowardice) that causes intermediates to hang "back" on steep slopes: putting sludge into their turns, and inviting overturning. No, no. You get on top of gravity. You ride it. You keep your upper body in the fall line: while you swish your skis from side to side, like windshield wipers. We fall off the saddle every time we lag. Suddenly, even on the steepest slopes, where it counts most, I was skiing with my whole body.
It's a paradox: where the danger is the greatest, you throw yourself into the danger: then you dominate it.
Same applies to dance. Same applies to everything.
Lesson
| No matter the steps, the part prescribed, the part your feet have to do and do in synch with the others – Dance with your whole body. Use your arms, your hands, your fingers – not just for balance, but to express the rhythm, the dance, the music, yourself! |
Meter, Rhythm
Meter is the predictable side of the rhythm. The dances that I do are all either common time of waltz time: either 4/4 or 3/4: four beats to a "measure" or three beats to a measure. The music that I love to listen to, sing, or play may be in 5/4 time, or 6/8 time, or 2/2 time, and I wish I did encounter dances in those times (in 6/8 time especially, I do love 6/8 time) (and maybe some dances, like the polka, are in 2/2 time); but trust me: the line dances I encounter and the ballroom dances at our social are basically 4/4, with the occasional waltz thrown in. That's meter: meter declares what the rhythmic regularity is; but it ain't music till it becomes irregular, unpredictable. That's the rhythm: the part that's different, a part that one may fall in love with.
I find I Need to Know to be rhythmically fabulous: salsa of the highest sophistication. But though I also love the Special K Cha Cha, there's one thing about the dance I find week: its juncture between choruses. I would like to see it re-choreographed with a better turn around.
Illustrations in specific line dances will follow below.
Juncture
My dance training consists of a two week course in the sixth grade, and some line dance participation in this my seventy-first year. I don't know if there are dance theorists who use either term; but they've got to have the concepts. I develop them by analogy from linguistics and from music. Juncture here is the border shared between two distinct things: like a sea shore; like the ending of chorus one and the beginning of chorus two ... Here's an example from linguistics: consider the phrase "night rates": now consider the word "nitrates." The phonemes are identical; yet in the one case we all clearly hear "two" "words"; while we hear one in the latter. The difference is one of juncture. "Night rates" separates the /t/ from the /r/; "nitrates" links them: blurs them.
I am not crazy about how the Special K cha cha recycles itself: how count #32 junctures against the next cycle starting with count #1. I think the juncture could be improved. Whereas I love some of the junctures we had just danced: Amos Moses, for example: of The Electric Slide. (Details may follow.)
Turn Around
"The turn around" is a musician's phrase: in jazz music, in pop music. Let's say you're playing a twelve bar blues. The song displays a harmonic and rhythmic pattern over twelve measures: that's the first chorus. When it's your chorus you play the same progression of chords, but your solo should "comment on" the melody; not just repeat the melody. (Miles regularly improvised counter melodies. That's why Bird was in love with the raw kid.) And no matter whose chorus it is, when the last two bars are arrived at, bars eleven and twelve, use chords that point at the final tonic chord; not the tonic chord itself. In other words, if the blues is in G, not only do you use a lot of 7ths (and maybe 9ths and 11ths and 13ths) (that's what makes it "far out"), your final measure will be G (or G7), the tonic, giving a sense of closure, of finality: but while cycling through the choruses you don't want it to close, you want to keep it open: so you substitute chords that "point at" G: Am7 / D7, for example. The Am7 / D7 chords turn the chorus back on itself: a final G will finish it.
Analogy: Writing
Here's a different analogy, from writing. Edgar Rice Burroughs ends a middle-of-the-novel chapter with Tarzan trapped in the pit with the lion: that keeps the narrative open, ongoing. Having him marry Jane is how Burroughs might close the last chapter: the end of the story.
Analogy: Ballroom
Analogy from ballroom dance: I dance a fox trot. I use my slow, slow, quick-quick step; I sense the tune ending: I put my partner into a spin: and we bow / curtsy to each other on the final beat. That's the tonic, the cadence, the closure: all before is ongoing: turn around.
Illustrations: Juncture
Line dances are all a given number of counts. The counts don't have to match the beats in the music. They typically don't. Pop music is often based in a sixteen measure pattern. the number of beats in a chorus is therefore four times sixteen = sixty-four. Line dances are typically sixteen beats, thirty-two beats, thirty-six beats ... It doesn't matter: 4/4 line dances will come out fine with 4/4 pop music. Never mind where the musicians' measure is; synch with the count of the dance.
I criticized the turn-around of the Special K ChaCha: I'll illustrate in a moment. First I'll set it up with an illustration of a turnaround, the juncture between repetition one and repetition another: in the line dance Amos Moses. Amos Moses is only eight counts. On 1 you place your right heel forward; on 2 you bring your right foot back beside your left, transferring your weight to your right foot. On 3 you place your left heel forward. On 4 you bring your left foot back with your right, but turn it one-quarter turn counter clockwise. If you started facing a north wall, you're now partly turned toward the west wall. On 5 you swing your hips square with the west wall as you bring your right foot into a step to your new right, the north wall. On 6 you step your left foot behind your right foot, a kind of a "vine" move to the right (north at the moment), transfer weight. On 7 you move your right foot further right (or north), but start to twist back clockwise (soon to face east), as on 8 your left foot follows your hips around to square with the east wall.
That's the "chorus": eight counts: eight counts with a quarter turn left and a half-the-hall turn right. You start out "north"; you end up east: after turning west: all in eight counts. But now here's the thing: you continue the dance. You recycle. Count #9 is a repetition of Count #1.
By itself, one 8-count cycle is cute. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. 5, 6, 7, 8 turns around into 1, 2, 3, 4. And the juncture is funky. Even a dancer with good balance will have a time maintaining an erect neutral posture from which to resume the right heel forward, right heel back, left heel forward, left foot turn ...
There a natural, an inevitable lag between your feet and your hips. Funky, man, move those hips. Come on girl, push that tush!
continues in a sec
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Get Down
Soon after we married Hilary wanted a kitten. Soon she wanted a dog: to keep the kitten company. (Then she wanted a baby: just a little one, please.)
Hilary wanted a scottie, which we'd named Angus in advance. (Imagine our surprise when the pup we brought from Macy's puking all over the subway was a German shepherd.) I determined that I'd become a good dog trainer. When Angus chewed my slippers I spoke harshly to him. From then on Angus chewed only Hilary's slippers. I trained Angus never to get up on the couch. Thereafter Angus vacated the couch as soon as he heard us coming home: or at least as soon as he heard me coming home.
Once when Hilary was pregnant and walking Angus he pulled her down and dragged her. That time I ignored the book's admonition to make sharp noises near the dog, especially near the dog's snout, but never to actually hit the dog. I did hit Angus that time. I beat Angus. A lot of good it did. But someone clued me in: "How old is the dog," that person asked? "Is he two yet?" "No: a year and a half." "Never mind," he said, "Be patient. Until he's two he's a puppy: un-trainable. Once he's an adult you'll see your training take effect." Wow, was that true. Once Angus was two he proved to be the most amazingly intelligent and well behaved dog. I've already told some Angus stories elsewhere. The Fed in censoring my AgainstHierarch.org domain knocked all my domains, all three thousand of my text files off line and my couple of thousand graphics. Gradually I'm remounting some of the modules, but thus far I don't think any Angus stories have been resurrected. But I tell this Angus story for a different reason. Actually it's not an Angus story at all: it's a Paul story: a Paul and his society story.
You see: the one dog training lesson I got from the books that actually worked and worked almost right away, long before Angus was two, concerned training Angus not to jump up against people: pawing at their shins, thighs, and crotch. The book said to deflect the dog with your knee: wait till the dog is half way launched, where he can no longer see your knee coming. Then just stick your knee out and deflect the dog from landing against your legs or body. The book "explained" that the dog would eventually give up. Eventually the dog would assume from his failures to land on his target that human beings simply can not be jumped up against. By golly, whether or not that reason applied, the technique nevertheless worked. Angus stopped trying to climb people.
And now I see how very well the same technique should have worked on me, would have worked on me had I had any sense. All my life I've tried to explain things to my society: how to live like humans, how to be less shameful, less illegitimate, less foolish, less deadly ... I've devoted my talents to writing my messages as stories, as myths, as jokes ... as art. But the society doesn't want me jumping up against its vulnerable parts: so it just puts its knee out. No matter what I say, no matter how humorously I weave the matter, the society doesn't want my paws in its sensitive parts, and it deflects me. The stories aren't published, my professors all play Peanuts' Lucy and pull the football away before I can kick it. My novels aren't published. Finally my domain modules are outright censored.
But look: here I am: stupid me: still trying to communicate!!!!
Hilary wanted a scottie, which we'd named Angus in advance. (Imagine our surprise when the pup we brought from Macy's puking all over the subway was a German shepherd.) I determined that I'd become a good dog trainer. When Angus chewed my slippers I spoke harshly to him. From then on Angus chewed only Hilary's slippers. I trained Angus never to get up on the couch. Thereafter Angus vacated the couch as soon as he heard us coming home: or at least as soon as he heard me coming home.
Once when Hilary was pregnant and walking Angus he pulled her down and dragged her. That time I ignored the book's admonition to make sharp noises near the dog, especially near the dog's snout, but never to actually hit the dog. I did hit Angus that time. I beat Angus. A lot of good it did. But someone clued me in: "How old is the dog," that person asked? "Is he two yet?" "No: a year and a half." "Never mind," he said, "Be patient. Until he's two he's a puppy: un-trainable. Once he's an adult you'll see your training take effect." Wow, was that true. Once Angus was two he proved to be the most amazingly intelligent and well behaved dog. I've already told some Angus stories elsewhere. The Fed in censoring my AgainstHierarch.org domain knocked all my domains, all three thousand of my text files off line and my couple of thousand graphics. Gradually I'm remounting some of the modules, but thus far I don't think any Angus stories have been resurrected. But I tell this Angus story for a different reason. Actually it's not an Angus story at all: it's a Paul story: a Paul and his society story.
You see: the one dog training lesson I got from the books that actually worked and worked almost right away, long before Angus was two, concerned training Angus not to jump up against people: pawing at their shins, thighs, and crotch. The book said to deflect the dog with your knee: wait till the dog is half way launched, where he can no longer see your knee coming. Then just stick your knee out and deflect the dog from landing against your legs or body. The book "explained" that the dog would eventually give up. Eventually the dog would assume from his failures to land on his target that human beings simply can not be jumped up against. By golly, whether or not that reason applied, the technique nevertheless worked. Angus stopped trying to climb people.
And now I see how very well the same technique should have worked on me, would have worked on me had I had any sense. All my life I've tried to explain things to my society: how to live like humans, how to be less shameful, less illegitimate, less foolish, less deadly ... I've devoted my talents to writing my messages as stories, as myths, as jokes ... as art. But the society doesn't want me jumping up against its vulnerable parts: so it just puts its knee out. No matter what I say, no matter how humorously I weave the matter, the society doesn't want my paws in its sensitive parts, and it deflects me. The stories aren't published, my professors all play Peanuts' Lucy and pull the football away before I can kick it. My novels aren't published. Finally my domain modules are outright censored.
But look: here I am: stupid me: still trying to communicate!!!!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Self
Everyone thinks "only" of his self.
("His" there is of course a [sic] joke. Language contorts us before we even begin to model experience.)
But understand: the self is an idea: an idea which always (the older one gets) includes others.
A mother's self will include her baby,a lover's self will include the beloved,
a soldier's self may include not only his buddies but his enemy.
As pk is always saying, there isn't anything in human consciousness that isn't an idea. Our only "contact" with the cosmos is through signs, symbols, information. The mind (an abstract) is based in a wetware of electrical switches. There are no concrete things there. None. (Except the wetware itself.)
("His" there is of course a [sic] joke. Language contorts us before we even begin to model experience.)
But understand: the self is an idea: an idea which always (the older one gets) includes others.
a soldier's self may include not only his buddies but his enemy.
As pk is always saying, there isn't anything in human consciousness that isn't an idea. Our only "contact" with the cosmos is through signs, symbols, information. The mind (an abstract) is based in a wetware of electrical switches. There are no concrete things there. None. (Except the wetware itself.)
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Dummy Tackles
An article online this morning reminds me of an old conundrum of mine. NFL teams drill their players in running, blocking, passing ... but all punches are pulled in tackling practice. They practice everything hard: except tackling. They don't want to injure their own stars. Come Sunday each team's stars can waltz through the other team's punch pullers.
Kids grow up playing Bang Bang, You're Dead. I did. And I was steeped in cowboy movies with their bar fights, John Wayne taking a punch, shaking it off, and powing the other guy. At the end of the cowboy movie Gary Cooper would shoot umpteen bad guys so he could finally go one on one against Frank Miller and kill him dead, Grace Kelly then forgetting her Quaker foolishness and giving him a kiss. Real gun fights really killed people; Hollywood has only one Gary Cooper: so Hollywood chairs crumble to sawdust when crashed on his head, Hollywood haymakers just miss: and the actors playing the heavies get to sue big time if they sustain a bruise from practice with Jean Claude Van Damm. As a kid my Christian training made me resist enjoying the general culture's training: one hour of love and tolerance on Sunday has a hard time standing up against 24/7-1 of Hopalong Cassidy getting hit with sawdust chairs. I refused cooperation in following John Wayne and Gene Autry. It wasn't until I was at college and started going out of the general way to watch Akira Kurosawa's direction of Toshiro Mifune in chopping off heads and cutting people out of their kimonos with his katana.
I discovered that I loved the violence: violence with a heavy moral always. Then I'd watch Mifune go one on one (or one on a dozen) in any director's samurai flick. But by that time I was an adult (of sorts: do any of us ever really reach adulthood?) I loved art, including cinematic art, but I loved science too: Darwin, evolution, Bateson ... And I thought and thought: how can it be good for the species for "our" hero to kill "their" hero? (Or for their hero to kill our hero?) If the Yankees beat the Dodgers every year, why were there still Dodgers to beat next year? (I never doubted that the lords of Flatbush wanted to raid the Bronx (or beter yet, Manhattan) and rape and pillage, leaving none alive.)
If Gary Cooper shoots every other six footer every two hours, how can there even be one six foot Gary Cooper?
Now, restate the problem: if the NFL players really played to tear each others head off, how can there be more than one NFL player left with a head? And if all punches are pulled, if all is Hollywood, how come there are real fatalities in real wars? Are there any real wars? The NFL doesn't mean to practice fakery, but that IS what they practice. Come Sunday heads get torn off only by accident: and then everyone howls.
Why howl for blood, and then howl if there is blood? (Is that what it is to be human these days?)
Once upon a time wars were to kill enemies. But then war changed. Now wars are to kill a few so the surviving bulk can be ruled: as passive consumers. The Romans killed the Celts to take over their salt mines without paying them any royalty. Modern Romans (like us) kill as few Celts as possible: so we can own the salt mine, paying surviving Celts peanuts to work the mine: and then sell them the salt!
Ah, I've wandered into related areas. I meant to stick with the one point: lions competing against hyenas on the savanna can kill the hyena without much visible harm to the lions, but the big male lions can't kill all the other big male lions without harming the lions as a whole.
In the wake of worshipping Kurosawa's costume flix I heard about martial arts tournaments where the combatants could break bones, maim, and maybe kill each other, all scrambling for the one top spot. Musashi doesn't just beat Kojiro; Musashi kills Kojiro. (And Kojiro doesn't mind: he wanted to discover whose bushido was better: and Musashi shows him).
I'll develop this further later.
Kids grow up playing Bang Bang, You're Dead. I did. And I was steeped in cowboy movies with their bar fights, John Wayne taking a punch, shaking it off, and powing the other guy. At the end of the cowboy movie Gary Cooper would shoot umpteen bad guys so he could finally go one on one against Frank Miller and kill him dead, Grace Kelly then forgetting her Quaker foolishness and giving him a kiss. Real gun fights really killed people; Hollywood has only one Gary Cooper: so Hollywood chairs crumble to sawdust when crashed on his head, Hollywood haymakers just miss: and the actors playing the heavies get to sue big time if they sustain a bruise from practice with Jean Claude Van Damm. As a kid my Christian training made me resist enjoying the general culture's training: one hour of love and tolerance on Sunday has a hard time standing up against 24/7-1 of Hopalong Cassidy getting hit with sawdust chairs. I refused cooperation in following John Wayne and Gene Autry. It wasn't until I was at college and started going out of the general way to watch Akira Kurosawa's direction of Toshiro Mifune in chopping off heads and cutting people out of their kimonos with his katana.
I discovered that I loved the violence: violence with a heavy moral always. Then I'd watch Mifune go one on one (or one on a dozen) in any director's samurai flick. But by that time I was an adult (of sorts: do any of us ever really reach adulthood?) I loved art, including cinematic art, but I loved science too: Darwin, evolution, Bateson ... And I thought and thought: how can it be good for the species for "our" hero to kill "their" hero? (Or for their hero to kill our hero?) If the Yankees beat the Dodgers every year, why were there still Dodgers to beat next year? (I never doubted that the lords of Flatbush wanted to raid the Bronx (or beter yet, Manhattan) and rape and pillage, leaving none alive.)
If Gary Cooper shoots every other six footer every two hours, how can there even be one six foot Gary Cooper?
Now, restate the problem: if the NFL players really played to tear each others head off, how can there be more than one NFL player left with a head? And if all punches are pulled, if all is Hollywood, how come there are real fatalities in real wars? Are there any real wars? The NFL doesn't mean to practice fakery, but that IS what they practice. Come Sunday heads get torn off only by accident: and then everyone howls.
Why howl for blood, and then howl if there is blood? (Is that what it is to be human these days?)
Once upon a time wars were to kill enemies. But then war changed. Now wars are to kill a few so the surviving bulk can be ruled: as passive consumers. The Romans killed the Celts to take over their salt mines without paying them any royalty. Modern Romans (like us) kill as few Celts as possible: so we can own the salt mine, paying surviving Celts peanuts to work the mine: and then sell them the salt!
Ah, I've wandered into related areas. I meant to stick with the one point: lions competing against hyenas on the savanna can kill the hyena without much visible harm to the lions, but the big male lions can't kill all the other big male lions without harming the lions as a whole.
In the wake of worshipping Kurosawa's costume flix I heard about martial arts tournaments where the combatants could break bones, maim, and maybe kill each other, all scrambling for the one top spot. Musashi doesn't just beat Kojiro; Musashi kills Kojiro. (And Kojiro doesn't mind: he wanted to discover whose bushido was better: and Musashi shows him).
I'll develop this further later.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Satan
Satan is God's prophylactic glove: so God doesn't have to touch diseased souls with his bare hands.
Honesty
Science invented honesty. Science accelerates technology. Kleptocracy, dishonesty/hypocrisy incarnate, monopolizes science, reducing it back to technology: honesty submerges back into the infinite potential of the void.
An honest society would repel dishonesty; a dishonest society, this human society, repels honesty.
Honesty will fare in human society about as predictably as Jesus fared with the Temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who expects us to welcome Jesus the next time may as well expect phosphorus to lie inert on water.
The above statements were written a day or so apart from each other. Only then did I notice that they sort of go together. I add more such statements in a scrapbook form: though of course any of these could expand to an independent module.
Cheating: the orthodox excuse their own cheating as being on the side of the angels: it's OK to cheat For God.
An honest society would repel dishonesty; a dishonest society, this human society, repels honesty.
Honesty will fare in human society about as predictably as Jesus fared with the Temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who expects us to welcome Jesus the next time may as well expect phosphorus to lie inert on water.
The above statements were written a day or so apart from each other. Only then did I notice that they sort of go together. I add more such statements in a scrapbook form: though of course any of these could expand to an independent module.
Cheating: the orthodox excuse their own cheating as being on the side of the angels: it's OK to cheat For God.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Jesus in Siberia
Siberia is a region of Asia which has come to symbolize a wilderness far from civilization where Big Brother can exile dissidents. Stalin can send messages into Siberia; the exiled cannot send messages out. Indeed the exiled can barely communicate among themselves. Starved and tortured, an exile can barely communicate within himself. The English have an expression that the nonconformist has been "put in Coventry": same thing, though without the Stalinist extreme of the late Soviet. (Americans don't have quite so handy a term for it that I can think of. We have "sold down the river": but that references individuals who were slaves in the first place, no one cares how well they can communicate.)
Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)
Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.
In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)
Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:
In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)
But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."
What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?
How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?
When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.
Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."
I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.
Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.
Jesus is a name for the entity that Christians claim is the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Jews. Etymologically the name seems to mean "son of the father," blessed of God ... or a series of such meanings (as do also other Semitic names.) (Barabas, for example, also means son of the father: in Arabic too). Christians (and others) have used Jesus to symbolize someone who's virtuous (while everyone else is sinful), someone who's right (while everyone else is wrong) ... I'm going to put the two symbols together into an oxymoron: and see what they do. (First I set a comet tail tangent for our entrance, referencing a fictional entity related to Stalin's Siberia.)
Stephen Hunter, one of the most wonderful of all male-oriented fiction-weavers created a character in his novel Tapestry of Spies, that he then recreated in his novel Havana. The guy has been a loyal Commie all his adult life, a brilliant assassin and strategist and spy for Koba, committing brilliant crimes for the sake of converting society into an absolute tyranny of bureaucrats claiming to serve anarchism. (We real anarchists, we independents, hate that crap.) The trouble with being a crook for Koba is that soon Koba will fear you and send you to Siberia. (When I was in the federal prison at Jesup, arrested by the FBI for accusing my graduate school of fraud and pretending that once I was flat broke, utterly helpless, old and starving, that I was actually going to do something about it, I met prisoner after prisoner who testified that they'd been an assassin for the FBI, or a coke dealer for the CIA, or a go between for FBI-CIA-HellsAngels assassins and pot farmers. The Kobas of the US betrayed them too. Me they merely betrayed all my life, sending me to school, lying about how free I was. I'm their natural enemy, because I conspicuously never bought it; they, my fellow federal prisoners, in contrast, had been loyal crooks and murderers for US: covert versions of the uniformed soldiers we seed around the world.
In Havana our spy is thrilled to catch and eat a cockroach in his cell: a rare bit of protein for the deracinated genius. But a moment later, Koba's Siberia thugs come and drag our genius before some higher level Koba thug, and guess what? Koba has another self-sacrifIcing task for his exiled master mind. Will the master spy cooperate? Will he again suffer and sacrifice himself on behalf of Koba and world Communism? Of course he will. Or at least he pretends to agree. (The master spy in Tapestry may have had something else up his sleeve as well: like stealing a few hundred million dollars from Koba and the Soviet!)
Now: notice some of the parallels possible to draw between Jesus, God's scapegoat, and the long-suffering Commie spies of Hunter's fiction:
In the first case Jesus cooperates in being arrested, kangaroo'd, and tortured to death because it's the only way Christian assumption has it that God can figure out to save human beings from sin. Now: according to the Gospels, Jesus got resurrected: into immortality. According to Christians Jesus is alive again, with a real body. He spent three days in hell to singe away his own trivial little tad of sin, but his permanent residence is heaven, where we can think of him as interchangeable with the father: like Hamlet and Hamlet. I like to think that Jesus is alive, body or no body, and can travel wherever he wants: back to earth, back to Jerusalem ... back to hell ... where he can seek out his tormentors and piss in their mouth. (I like to imagine that I'll be able to do the same, with him, or without him, once I'm finally dead.) (Oh, please.)
But meantime, imagine this: Jesus is resurrected. Jesus goes back to Jerusalem. The again living Jesus gets treated exactly the same the second time as he did the first: sees he'd be treated the same to infinity. Jesus thinks, "Hell": learns how to dance, meets a bunch of nice Jewish girls, and takes turns among them rewarding himself for a change. Or: Jesus is still locked away in the same prison he was first locked in: his spirit can go to heaven on occasion, but not his body. And God comes to Jesus in prison (or sends an angel) and says, "I have another mission for you: man still isn't saved. I want you to go out and let them mis-try and crucify you all over again."
What will Jesus say to God the second time? Will Jesus say "Yes"; but then go and steal a few hundred million-trillion dollars in gold and move it offshore-off-planet to Aldeberan? Will Jesus say "Yes," go to Cuba and try to save Fidel Castro from Earl Swagger?
How much sacrifice should Big Brother expect from his master spies?
When God whispered to me about secrets of literature, secrets of Shakespeare, then about summoning the global village via cybernetic librarianship of the planet seen as a network of independent communities, free of Big Brother everywhere because a vigilant mankind refused to tolerate any more Big Brothers, I said "Sure": and conceived of my doctoral thesis (1965), then founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970, NYC. And so forth and so on.
Now I'm deaf and blind and half-impotent, subsisting on welfare while other fed and local services are denied me by bureaucracy after bureaucracy: some of the bureaucrats mere amateurs, mere receptionists. What will I do if God comes to me now? "Paul, I have here a solution to human survival even more profound than an anarchist internet. Are you ready? I'll even buy you a hamburger: and maybe a hearing aid. While we're at it, we'll take care of that cancer on your ear."
I don't know. I fear I'd do it. Though I wish he'd ask Jesus first. Or Koba's spy.
Would I steal the hundred million dollars? I'd seriously be tempted.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Angels
Is there anything more absurd in human society than the belief that a god can communicate with a human culture, directly, one-on-one, the communication successful in reaching the entire cultural group? Yes: the idea that a god can use an intermediary, a messenger, an "angel," and get the same results.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Notice: my statements don't imply the nonexistence of the god; neither do my statements deny the existence of communication, and absolutely they do not deny the possibility of communication between a god and a human: or a god and an angel: or an angel and a human; my statements are skeptical in the extreme that a chain of such communications is possible in a human culture. The god may speak to the man, or the angel, or the woman, or the child: the angel may speak to the man, or the woman, or the child (or the other angel — or the other god; but it is the plural of man, the society, the culture, the religion, the nation, the republic ... that I'm denying sentience to. God can talk to Moses, but can Moses talk to the Jews: AND be understood? Jesus can die, for man or for any other purpose; but will mEn be able to get it? to communicate it? to set up theological seminaries that get it?
Not in my experience. Not in my experience as a speaker, a writer, a messenger, an angel ... I testify that I heard the god. I testify that I heard my own imagination. I testify that I translated the message into speech, into literature, into art. And any god can show, contemptibly easily, that none of the message, none of the literature, none of the art penetrated beyond this or that individual. No "group" of receivers ever formed. There was this god, and that man, and that woman, this and that angel; but no host of angels. No sentient society.
I said so. In speech, in art, in literature. And they arrested me, jailed me, branded me ... But I'd long been branded. Hadn't been not branded since ten years old.
I've lived my life believing that there is a way: though as I age I believe it less. (Hope diminishes, despair waxes with experience.)
Meta-communications communicate in statistical fractions: if a termite drops a grain of sand and no other termite in that generation of workers drops another grain of sand next to it, that doesn't mean that no termite sand column will ever erect there. Jesus getting crucified for suggesting that we behave ourselves doesn't prove that the messages of an Nth Jesus will succeed in communicating zero between the god and the society. On the other hand the cosmos may never reach an age adequate for the necessary learning to take place. Evolution may go "up," and then "down," but never arrive anywhere.
How would we test my claims? How could we be scientific about this?
Now the only rational way to test either idea would be to find some perspective from which all gods and all societies, all cultures, were accurately included, and start counting. There is no such perspective to be found, in my experience, in all cultural claims that I know of, or in my own personal imagination, my imagination either social or divine; so, we're limited to thought experiments: test the imagination the best we can.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Grab the Redhead
Escorting a cute red head back to our table I found the aisle blocked by a single wide body. I skipped holding her chair that time and let her go around by herself. But the guy turned out to have been lying in ambush. He grabbed Red and squeezed her.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Red didn't seem flustered. She sat down and said to her friend sitting across from her (next to me), "I just got a grab."
I was frustrated because I'd been elaborately courtly to Red all day: bowing at the end of a dance, offering her my arm as we walked, holding her chair ... and Mr. Wide's heterosexual aggression I already found boorish. I'd allowed myself to be finessed out of the action and was frustrated and tongue tied. But Red's friend didn't say anything either. The rest of our table seconded our silence. But back home I posted a report immediately, an early draft of this here: and asked the following ethical conundra:
What should Red have done or said? What should I have done or said? What should our friends have done or said? What should our senior social have done once I told our CEO?
But something happened as a result that puzzles and annoys me even more. A more complex account will be told as a Paul Knatz story at Redhead Revisited.
Two years later another chapter perhaps explains some part of what went wrong: and right: Red Alert.
Monday, October 19, 2009
K. Conundrums
This section of posts will parallel my K. Symbols section, spread around Iona Arc over the past several years (while concentrated at the censored Knatz.com in the Teaching area.) The pk conundrums are minor K. symbols, long salted around K.: here I merely repeat and summarize:
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?Cosmologists imagine a universe which came into existence roughly fourteen billion years ago in which the earth and our sun came into existence as "the solar system" around four point six billion years ago.
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years." How can you have a mile when there's no earth?Same problems Certainly you can have time, you can have units of time. You can have extension, dimension ... units of "length," "width," "depth," "duration" ... but I don't see us having "years" or "miles" prior to having a solar system. In fact I don't see it prior to English being spoken: specifically modern English: My English!
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
How can you have a year when there's no solar system?
So: I see there the earth has had "years" for four point six billion years, not for fourteen billion years, and certainly not for any period of time longer than fourteen or fifteen billion "years."
Thus time may be infinite, the cosmos may be older than the universe, the universe is older than the solar system, and the solar system is older than the English words "time," "solor system," "earth," "mile" ...
The same way you can have an infinitely powerful, infinitely old God create the universe six thousand years ago using an already fourteen billion year old universe (in a cosmos of which we have no ideas of age, direction, originality, uniqueness ...)
Homo Sapiens Moronsis
I know it's silly to think that names describe the thing named. Is Prudence prudent? Is Honest John, the used car dealer, honest? is Faith faithful? How tricky can Tricky Dick be relied on to be?
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
In Linnaean classification and its derivatives human beings belong to the Genus Homo and to the species sapiens. Modern humans, we who talk a lot, are additionally classified with an extra "sapiens," indicating the "modern" "race" of humans: Homo sapiens sapiens. To "man" gets added "wise": to wise man gets added wise wise man.
For decades pk mocked the taxonomic redundancy, publishing such among his modules, comments, jokes ... online since the early 19990s at Knatz.com and its related domains. Today I wish to propose a new name: Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat
"And God said," according to the Latin Bible by which Christians interpreted the Jewish sacred tradition, "Fiat lux." That's a lot of languages, a lot of mythology, and a lot of iron age, bronze age, cosmology/theology we pass through before we get to the English interpretation of King James's scholars:
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:Money emerges from a human market place, then specialized organs of the market such as banks invent bank notes to substitute for horses, cowrie shells ... or gold: then government emerges from the welter of the market with its specialized organs (conceive "market" roughly as property, products, vendors, buyers, public, banks) takes over and, "borrowing" substitute "money" from the banks, issues its own money-notes. The governments next step in "borrowing" everything is to subtract the gold from the money: leaving government with all the property, all of the gold, all of the land, all of the resources ... and the public and the banks and the vendors with a lot of paper: fiat money.
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value. Here today I wish to make notes for further development extending the metaphor of fiat-this and that to other preposterous contemporary fiats, especially hidden fiats: fiats not examined in the over-developed but school-addled forebrain of over-populated Homo sapiens moronsis.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Let there be light.
"Lux" is "light." So what's "fiat"? Make, create, come into existence ... Who knows? Literal translation is very iffy between incompatible world-views: the old gods, the old myths don't translate one-to-one: not to contemporary schooled persons who think that jobs and health care is what society is about. But never mind: I'm not after literal meaning, I don't believe in literal meanings anyway: only metaphorical interpretations, macroinformational re-interpretations: of the kind that got Jesus crucified. And I want to start a new section among my blogs, sort of parallel to my Knatz.com symbols posts, where the concept "fiat" gets extended as well as examined.
Fiat Money
First: the idea of fiat money, a phrase that's been around for a while, has been stated by pk at and around Knatz.com over the past decade. I'll remount that module following this post (or ASAP thereafter), doing so before I rewrite it as well as it needs, just to get the idea on record. Other people's expression of the idea can be sampled in economic literature on-and-off-line. In brief here:
The market had "made" money out of human value decisions; the government takes it over, sucking out the value.
Fiat Innocence (/ Fiat Guilt)
coming next (this was my original stimulus to come on line and to blog this.)
(In a word, beyond a certain density, society becomes infected by institutions that exempt themselves from the standards they uphold: the government supervises the law suits but you can't sue the government: except by the most unlikely confluence of improbabilities: such as, you need the government's permission to sue the government!
Thus, in all essential things, the government is innocent by fiat.
I love James' Genesis where God gives his first command in a passive voice. In Latin, "fiat lux" sounds commanding: now there's a general in charge of the troops: a BIG magician. In contrast, "Let there be light": who's doing the letting? Is God the magician? and the cosmos the sorcerer's apprentice?
According to BigBangers, the universe first existed without light. Is that what James' Genesis means? Fourteen billion "years" ago (how can you have a year when there's no solar system?) energy had flashed into existence, matter precipitated out, and now the system was ripe for some energy to manifest as visible light, radiating in all directions from all possible sources and propagating at c. velocity: c, being roughly 186,000 miles per second.
(And it was upon penning that last that I decided I had to add a K. Conundrums section.)
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Kingdom of God
One important difference between earth and the Kingdom of God, certainly at least as I imagine it, is that on earth the reigning kleptocrats don't have to listen to the charges their victims make against them. The Christians may get to accuse Caesar, but not to his face. Hitler's bureaucrats can refuse to grant an audience to the rabbis: especially once the rabbis are jammed together with all the other Jews, minus their geld and their gold teeth, into the concentration camps. Nixon, prior to his resignation (and seldom after it), did not have to sit still for the world's litany of his crimes.
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
In the Kingdom of God on the other hand, as Jesus is depicted as having painted it, when God speaks, the universe will listen, not merely leave the room.
just starting, more to say of course
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
CommunicationN
The possibilities of success for a message vary with the number of communicants involved. There are several meta-levels – quantum leaps as it were – involved.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
The Jews' literature tells us that God spoke to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses. God's success rate in that literature fell off abrupty as Adam tried to communicate with Eve, Noah with his neighbors, Abraham with his son, Moses with the Jews. The Gospel of Mark had Jesus unable to communicate with his disciplines let alone with you and me: or did, before early Christians rewrote that gospel, changing the ending.
Jump to the Twentieth Century: I was unable to communciate my thesis idea to my thesis advisor, certainly not to my satisfaction (and I can't imagine to Shakespeare's satisfaction either!) But under those circumstances, what was the probability of my success in communicating my reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets to the graduate English Department faculty? to a peer review publication? to the bookish portion of the general public? to the public as a whole?
I've never failed to communicate some messages one-on-one. My success rate drops off precipitously if a third party is present. My communication ratio where crowds are involved remains close to zero. They understood enough to invite me, then knew better than to let me actually speak, or to listen if I spoke anyway.
But:
I believe God's success rate is little better. I believe Abelard's, Darwin's, Mandelbrot's is little better: and they have the advantage of (now) having famous names, where an extra person or two might pay attention.
I've published a great deal about communication over the decades, said a great deal more over the past half a century or so. The fed knocked down my AgainstHierarchy.org domain, and my other four domains fell with it, no one helping to catch while I was in (or out) of jail. (There: that's another factor, one the censors understand very well): if the censor can label a prophet a criminal, then the prophets message, already not receivable by the majority, has an even steeper climb against the grade of human inertia.
more coming
This is a first draft. I didn't write that at all well above where I said that Noah didn't communicate well about the flood with his neighbors. The story has him not trying to warn the neighbors: not warning the neighbors was part of God's message to him. Rewrites will follow. Bear with me in the meantime.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Religion
Religion reflects human imagination concerning the cosmos. Organized religion restricts human imagination concerning the cosmos.
I yesterday started pkTheo, a theology blog. The above statement is duplicated there, related posts are being moved there.
My post on CommunicationN will say more on the same theme before I add more here.
My current thinking emphasizes the difference between individual and group. The proposition that there is a God who speaks to a Moses (or a Jesus) (or a pk) does not necessitate any proposition that that God therefore speaks to the Jews (or to the Christians) (or to Americans).
Every Christian faction believes that they've got God right (says Bart Ehrman). I say that those factions are wrong: so they put me in Siberia, ignore-while-censoring my theo-cosmologies. I am sustained by imagining a Judgment in which God merely shows people their actual behavior – as distinct from their wishful image. Not in eternity! Time itself is infinite. Merely after we're extinct will suffice.
And I iterate my point from my one article actually published, long ago in 1971, that universities (and all socially-compelled Western schools) derive from Christian monasteries: not thought fettered only by truth; no: thought control.
The orthodox don't listen to the heterodox, will break all their own rules to avoid hearing. Universities have as much academic freedom as monasteries have philosophical tolerance: the same amount of "free speech" that Americans have in a media-ruled market: where the media depend on advertising revenue, and advertising revenue depends entirely upon Pollyanna.
2009 11 16
I yesterday started pkTheo, a theology blog. The above statement is duplicated there, related posts are being moved there.
My post on CommunicationN will say more on the same theme before I add more here.
2009 10 26
My current thinking emphasizes the difference between individual and group. The proposition that there is a God who speaks to a Moses (or a Jesus) (or a pk) does not necessitate any proposition that that God therefore speaks to the Jews (or to the Christians) (or to Americans).
Every Christian faction believes that they've got God right (says Bart Ehrman). I say that those factions are wrong: so they put me in Siberia, ignore-while-censoring my theo-cosmologies. I am sustained by imagining a Judgment in which God merely shows people their actual behavior – as distinct from their wishful image. Not in eternity! Time itself is infinite. Merely after we're extinct will suffice.
And I iterate my point from my one article actually published, long ago in 1971, that universities (and all socially-compelled Western schools) derive from Christian monasteries: not thought fettered only by truth; no: thought control.
The orthodox don't listen to the heterodox, will break all their own rules to avoid hearing. Universities have as much academic freedom as monasteries have philosophical tolerance: the same amount of "free speech" that Americans have in a media-ruled market: where the media depend on advertising revenue, and advertising revenue depends entirely upon Pollyanna.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sport
I love sports. I love to ski, and to fish, and to play tennis; but that's not what I'm talking about when I say I love sports — I mean spectator sports: seventy thousand people filling Yankee Stadium and screaming at Joe Dimaggio, I mean a nation glued to the radio late at night, my sister and I eavesdropping from the top of the stairs, as Joe Louis pummels Max Schmelling, the whole world paying attention, I mean hundreds of millions of people transfixed in front of their TV as Michael Jordon, aging, wounded, goes up for the winning J as time runs down.
I love who good writing about sports is swiftly immortalized; while good writing about theology, cosmology, homeostasis, information, kleptocracy ... must pass a gauntlet of pummeling morons: elders opposed by nature to improved theories, unwilling to pass hypotheses that make them nervous: elders from church, from universities, publishing houses, network executives, answerable to pharmaceutical companies, to big tobacco, to Chrysler and GM ... to the BOD, to the alumni ...
The screaming about Babe Ruth was encouraged once it passed a certain number of decibels. The screaming about Josh Gibson was muffled before it ever approached those decibels. Still, despite Gibson, despite Cassius Clay getting persecuted as Muhammad Ali, what I love about sports is, spectator sports, is thatSports are where the society actually allows the map to sort of fit the territory; unlike politics, business, religion ... the competition is sort of fair, the playing field is sort of level, the judges are sort of honest ... The rules actually make some effort at clarity ...
Today's sports news has an unusual item: Serena was playing Kim Clijsters in a semi-final at the US Open. I cite what I just emailed my son, bk:Serena vs in the US semi
Serena already had a warning, abusing her racket against the post.
In match game against her, she faults, then throws in a foot fault, bring up match point against her. So she screams and threatens the line judge. The line judge does according to the theoretical instructions, report the abuse to the umpire --every one had heard it, but the ump isn't allowed to officialy hear it till it comes through chanels, and the ump awards a penalty point to the receiver. and Clijsters wins the match.
a warning plus a penalty = a point against.
Serena said that foot faults hadn't been called against her all season. Note she didn't say that she hadn't foot faulted. You can't win at that level if you don't almost foot fault, sometimes actually foot faulting.
I was in Madison Sq Garden decades back, Rod Laver playing.
A foot fault was called against the Rocket at an important point late in the match.
Rod spoke up, was heard in the back rows. Oh, no, Shut up, Rod, I thought.
But Rocket said, "How many of those have you called tonight, Ref?"
and the place roared. with delight.
Rocket resumed serving, and won, of course.
Serena offered to shove the ball down the lineswoman's throat.
Tennis would be a different game if official Tennis had penalized Jimmy Connors or John Mac by suspending them when they were still 14 years old.
And really socking it to them when they were "adult" pros.
The great Jack Krammer was announcing radio for a big match decades ago, Mac or someone was carrying on, and Krammer's cohort in the booth said too bad these punks don't have smooth tempers like you, Jack, and Kramer said, No, no, he had a terrible temper.
Huh? We never saw it.
Jack said, Maybe you never saw, because past age 12 I was careful to hide it.
He'd been having a tantrum on court. The officials were indulging him, not exercising the rules. His father came down from the stands, approached the umpire. The umpire announced the match for Krammer's opponent: Jack's own corner, his own FATHER! volunteered him as DisQ!
I love who good writing about sports is swiftly immortalized; while good writing about theology, cosmology, homeostasis, information, kleptocracy ... must pass a gauntlet of pummeling morons: elders opposed by nature to improved theories, unwilling to pass hypotheses that make them nervous: elders from church, from universities, publishing houses, network executives, answerable to pharmaceutical companies, to big tobacco, to Chrysler and GM ... to the BOD, to the alumni ...
The screaming about Babe Ruth was encouraged once it passed a certain number of decibels. The screaming about Josh Gibson was muffled before it ever approached those decibels. Still, despite Gibson, despite Cassius Clay getting persecuted as Muhammad Ali, what I love about sports is, spectator sports, is that
Today's sports news has an unusual item: Serena was playing Kim Clijsters in a semi-final at the US Open. I cite what I just emailed my son, bk:
Serena already had a warning, abusing her racket against the post.
In match game against her, she faults, then throws in a foot fault, bring up match point against her. So she screams and threatens the line judge. The line judge does according to the theoretical instructions, report the abuse to the umpire --every one had heard it, but the ump isn't allowed to officialy hear it till it comes through chanels, and the ump awards a penalty point to the receiver. and Clijsters wins the match.
a warning plus a penalty = a point against.
Serena said that foot faults hadn't been called against her all season. Note she didn't say that she hadn't foot faulted. You can't win at that level if you don't almost foot fault, sometimes actually foot faulting.
I was in Madison Sq Garden decades back, Rod Laver playing.
A foot fault was called against the Rocket at an important point late in the match.
Rod spoke up, was heard in the back rows. Oh, no, Shut up, Rod, I thought.
But Rocket said, "How many of those have you called tonight, Ref?"
and the place roared. with delight.
Rocket resumed serving, and won, of course.
Serena offered to shove the ball down the lineswoman's throat.
Tennis would be a different game if official Tennis had penalized Jimmy Connors or John Mac by suspending them when they were still 14 years old.
And really socking it to them when they were "adult" pros.
The great Jack Krammer was announcing radio for a big match decades ago, Mac or someone was carrying on, and Krammer's cohort in the booth said too bad these punks don't have smooth tempers like you, Jack, and Kramer said, No, no, he had a terrible temper.
Huh? We never saw it.
Jack said, Maybe you never saw, because past age 12 I was careful to hide it.
He'd been having a tantrum on court. The officials were indulging him, not exercising the rules. His father came down from the stands, approached the umpire. The umpire announced the match for Krammer's opponent: Jack's own corner, his own FATHER! volunteered him as DisQ!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Corroborate, Please
The Jews say, through their Bible, that their God said that The Jews are God's Chosen People, that God intends for the Jews to have this land, that destiny ...
If I arrive at Ellis Island with a book under my arm, and that book, written by my brother, describes the Trump Towers on 57th Street, and says that the God who created the universe loves me and chooses me and intends for me to have the Trump Towers ... should Donald Trump and his lawyers move out, signing all papers over to me? Wouldn't Donald Trump and his lawyers want to meet this God, to question him on his supposed creation of a universe, or his authority to love me, or to give Donald Trump's Towers away?
The Christians say that it's them, Christians, that God loves, that we're no good, but it's OK, because God loves us so much anyway that he finagled a trick against himself whereby we torture him to death, and he just loves us to pieces because of it. Now we can firebomb Dresden, nuke the Japs, napalm little girls in Vietnam, drop bombs on Bagdad ... lie, cheat, and swindle, but God gives us the right to steal from the Mohawk, defrock his priest Ivan Illich, interrupt his messanger pk, arrest him, jail him, railroad him ... but he rewards us with eternal bliss anyway: all we have to do is say that we believe that Jesus loves us.
If some woman traipses all over Times Square saying that I love her, shouldn't someone ask me for corroboration?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Jews say?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Christians say?
No one allows pk to corroborate anything that he says: but how about at Judgment? What if there is a Judgment?
How are the Jews going to control what comes out of God's mouth then? What will the Christians do? Interrupt him? Crucify him again?
If I arrive at Ellis Island with a book under my arm, and that book, written by my brother, describes the Trump Towers on 57th Street, and says that the God who created the universe loves me and chooses me and intends for me to have the Trump Towers ... should Donald Trump and his lawyers move out, signing all papers over to me? Wouldn't Donald Trump and his lawyers want to meet this God, to question him on his supposed creation of a universe, or his authority to love me, or to give Donald Trump's Towers away?
The Christians say that it's them, Christians, that God loves, that we're no good, but it's OK, because God loves us so much anyway that he finagled a trick against himself whereby we torture him to death, and he just loves us to pieces because of it. Now we can firebomb Dresden, nuke the Japs, napalm little girls in Vietnam, drop bombs on Bagdad ... lie, cheat, and swindle, but God gives us the right to steal from the Mohawk, defrock his priest Ivan Illich, interrupt his messanger pk, arrest him, jail him, railroad him ... but he rewards us with eternal bliss anyway: all we have to do is say that we believe that Jesus loves us.
If some woman traipses all over Times Square saying that I love her, shouldn't someone ask me for corroboration?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Jews say?
Who asks God to corroborate what the Christians say?
No one allows pk to corroborate anything that he says: but how about at Judgment? What if there is a Judgment?
How are the Jews going to control what comes out of God's mouth then? What will the Christians do? Interrupt him? Crucify him again?
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Text / Telephone
| Text | / | Telephone |
Merely thousands of years ago text didn't exist; now it's ubiquitous. (And anything overly familiar maybe hard to think clearly about.) Animals have used sounds for a very long time. Animals have also used visual cues for a very long time. Humans developed speech, modern humans developed complex languages, both natural and artificial. (You mother calling your for supper is using natural language; the salesman talking about hooking your car up to the computer is using artificial language, as is the doctor telling you about your embolism: I here am writing a mixture of both natural and artificial languages.)
Telephone is the name of a game that many scientists are familiar with, and that we all recognize the truth of the moment we hear about it. At a party form the members into a line: so they're organized like numbers, serially: 1, 2, 3 ... The game leader writes a word on a slip of paper, then whispers that word to the person in position 1: at an end of the line: the beginning of the line. Person 1 whispers what he hears to Person 2: and so on and so forth. Person N whispers it to person N+1 until Person Last is reached. Person Last then writes down the word that he hears. Finally the game leader displays the two pieces of paper: 1) the message sent, and 2) the message received. Rarely will the messages match.
Now put those two ideas together: Text + Telephone. Conclusion: there is frequently noise on the phone: the information sent is not always the information received.
Jesus is supposed to have given us advice. The evidence is not clear. Now we're supposed to believe that we have his text: pure, clear, saving! Not likely: except by miracle.
Now, after a lifetime of dealing with text, and criticism, and scholarship, including textual criticism, I jot this little note, touching on an array of problems concerning information.
The other day I mentioned some textual problem to my date. "Well, what does the manuscript say," she asked, in all innocence, her naivete just brimming. That's the problem, exactly. For important documents from the past, we don't have the manuscript. We can't check what the author wrote: not God, not Moses, not Homer, not Sophocles, not Jesus, not Shakespeare ... and even among contemporaries, not necessarily with pk: so many of my manuscripts have been lost, stolen, borrowed and not returned, interfered with (by the FBI among other parties!)
I have a number of things I want to sketch here, and I intend to. Bear with me as the balance of the post develops scrapbook-style.
What pop icon do you remember the first appearance of in your lifetime? When Elvis performed Jail House Rock there was only one version that go a wide hearing. A millennium before Elvis would have been like anyone else: his song could be heard only by those within range of his voice when he's signing it. The mother nursing her baby may have only half-heard it, so too the lovers nudging each other in the dark. But by the 1950s things got mass recorded, mass broadcast ... the public got used to the delusion that there could be one version of something. "Toscanini, now that's Beethoven!" "Nonsense! Wilhelm Furtwenger! Now that's Beethoven!"
In the 1960s we heard the Beatles on the radio. Then we heard them in the movies, and everywhere. Now we hear popular Beatles tunes as "classics": we hear them on the elevator: is that "I Give You All My Love"? Well, it ain't the version from the 1960s. You can follow I don't doubt my point about Elvis and the Beatles. Maybe you follow my point about this or that recorded performance of esteemed classics: such as some symphony by Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mozart. Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to Shakespeare?
Are you ready to see it illustrated in relation to the New Testament? How about the Old Testament?
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Male / Female
| Male | / | Female |
Ask the couple coming out of the church if they can tell the difference between right and wrong. Of course they can. They'll also assure you that they can tell god from devil, sacred from profane. Their youngest child standing on two legs will likewise assure you that they can tell not only good guy from bad guy, but man from woman! So when Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis shoot the scenes in drag for Billy Wilder, Marilyn Monroe sharing the camera time, everybody is shaking with laughter, with disbelief.
We'll come back to that in a moment: show the kindergarteners a still of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Conan, ask them if he's man or woman, all the kids will answer "Man," and answer right away. Even the retard will be only slightly behind the main crest of certainty.
Do the same with the pic of Marilyn from The Seven Year Itch with her dress blown up over her um, er female central.
They'll all say woman! or female! or dame! or blond! and they'll say it right away. Now show a picture of a robin, ask what kind of a creature it is. They'll all answer "bird" readily enough. OK: in your Arnold, Marilyn sequence, show a picture of Paul Reubens in his Pee-Wee getup. In your robin sequence show an ostrich. The kids will still say "bird," but the answer will come slower. Robin will get a quick crest; ostrich will get a slow crest: fuzzier. The same is true in your Arnold-Marilyn-Reubens sequence if you slip in a picture of Fran Liebowitz. Or Amélie Mauresmo.
Try a picture of world champion South African runner Caster Semenya, the one in the current gender row.
When her performances were mediocre, no one bothered her; when she got better, and got better fast, uncertainty, doubt, hostility blossomed around her. That article offers a sad litany of gender doubt over a series of athletes, all supposedly female. The article just linked tells stories of school athletes who had to have a teacher accompany them to the bathroom to check their genitalia.
Guess what folks, most teachers are not qualified to judge gender even with a gander behind the briefs.
Read Jared Diamond on the subject in his great book Why Is Sex Fun? I'll summarize a fast word, but I mean it, read Diamond, savor the whole argument:
Without the male gonad pumping out male hormones a human body will develop as "female": smooth face, broad hips, pronounced breasts ... With testes, male! but if the testes malfunction, the technically male body will also mature as female! "He" will "be" "male" but will appear to be "female."
2009 09 11
Update: A Reuters article just confirmed exactly that result in Semenya's case:PS: Don't you just love Conan pictured above, Arnold in his shoulder-length hair? far longer than Marilyn's!
2009 09 12
The latter points in the above relate well to pk points developed for decades (and at the censored Knatz.com since 1995), but under Linguistics: specifically under the fork between natural language and artificial language. In this case, once again, scientists, using artificial languages as well as natural languages (biology, zoology, physiology ... within "English") make clear distinctions (only one distinction is needed: if there are testes, it's male, whether or not the testes are visible or functioning) and the rest of mankind, not rehearsed in physiology, getting heated over ambiguities. Politicials, legislators, lawyers ... may use artificial languages, the law, for example (legal English has its own, separate, history) to generate heat while shedding no light.Note: I am not automatically and wholly on the side of "science." The South African politician who defended Semenya's trophies by pointing out that she had been accepted in the races as "female" and had won the races makes sense to me. By the physiologists' standards, "she" is male; by the rules of the track her having been accepted as female should not be held against "her." The poor hermaphrodite should not be victimized: the non-scientists should be wailing and gnashing their teeth over their own fuzziness, their emotionalism, their prejudice ...
I believe that mankind would do well to learn a little science, but I try not to confuse my "ought" with something accomplished. I do not want bureaucrats labeled "scientists" to restrict future meaning or discussion. I do not want natural languages controlled, supervised, by experts claiming to represent artificial languages.
On the other hand, if the public doesn't voluntarily smarten up and smarten up fast (by achieving some command of artificial languages like "physiology"), we should not be surprised or complain too loudly when we spin down extinction's drain.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Religion / Science 8.24
| Science | / | Religion |
Religion and science have one thing in common — a huge thing: they're both thought systems. That is to say they are both human thought systems.
Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
We imagine, seeking evidence, that the hunters were trying to order their world: to their own advantage, with lots of fresh meat. Science tries to leave the magic out of its ordering: but still wants lots of fresh meat, a generous share of scarce resources.
Magical explanations form a big characteristic of religion. Advantage to your home group is another. Here's still another, key to what I'm here aiming at: religion (remember, a thought system!) assumes some nearly magical ability on the part of the faithful: to send or receive messages from the magical realm, for example; to be able to distinguish the holy from the ordinary: Monday is ordinary, the Sabbath is holy ... Science is much more modest in its assumption that sometimes some humans can be responsible some of the time and that that responsibility can be bequeathed to some group for preservation: a university science department, for example. (I'll share that assumption, but only to a very minor extent!) (The decay rate of intellectual integrity should itself be a major focus of science, but don't expect honest cooperation from state-funded institutions.) (And don't expect an Iona-like monastery to receive many tithes from a public.)
But here now is a characteristic distinguishing religion from science that started this ball rolling this morning, stimulating me to begin this post:
Both religion and science try to predict events, but religion repressed new thought in order to insist that it's got it right; whereas science, at least in theory, is supposed to keep doubting, keep testing, to never be sure. (But of course scientists know better by the time they are weaned than funding will not come without a great display of Certainty!) (Tell everybody, while wearing a Doom-sandwich-board, that the sky will fall tomorrow, and somebody may give you a dime; say, Of course we need fresh testing, always, and they'll take their dime back.)
There, I don't think that's bad for a first draft. It makes a couple of points. Many more could be developed at leisure, but I just want to arrive at one of the key points I'd aimed at without wanting to put it in the first sentence. I've just been through a struggle between the General and the Particular: I wanted to make universal generalization, yet get get to a few specific illustrations. Here:
Prediction
The Bible told the Jews what had happened, supposedly: what they wanted to believe was their history. (It's an unusual bit of self-hypnotism because the Jews don't merely flatter themselves in the portrait. Of course this may well have largely been an attempt by their priesthood to control the general population. (Regardless, it established a tendency which I, pk, leap on: blaming priesthoods, with precedent! for not hearing God, for failing to convey messages! Exactly what my life, my history (my mythology,) has been about!)) But then the Jews also slipped in a few imaginings about their future as well: there would a a Judgment, in which the God of the Jews would judge the other nations, the Gentile Goyim, enslaving them for the comfort and convenience of the Jews. Imagine the Babylonian Prime Minister having to buff the toenails of the humblest Jewish extra daughter.
The Christians magnified this tendency big time. The Jews' Genesis was about origins; the Jews' Exodus was about Jewish guilt as well as Jewish Chosen-ness; but Christian Revelation is about what's going to happen to everyone who doesn't swallow Jesus as their magical savior. Hence, Christianity has filled the human world with book-thumping illiterates who are Right, regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ...
(See? Now I'm Christian, in background, if not in specific dogma: and I'm Right! But not "regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ..." On the contrary. Still, the rhetorical style is Christian.)
These days though I follow Prigogine, chastising science, urging us to disabuse ourselves of "scientific" as well as religious Certainty. Quantum Thermo-Dynamics kicks the habitual hubris of Newtonian calculation into the dustbin. (Don't blame Newton! He never said that solving one or two two-body problems justified human arrogance on all possibilities!
Well, Shut Mah Mouth!
Above I "quoted" myself: "Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle." I hope it's obvious that I don't mean that literally. I mean it literarily.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Arrow of Blame
A key reason I don't believe that humans are intelligent or honest enough to survive our own impact on the environment has more to do with viewpoint, with perspective, with psychology than with IQ: no matter what happens, while our minds function, we can blame something external for our misfortunes: The tobacco company made me smoke.
John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"
Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!
Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...
Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)
Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!
No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!Notice: I don't exempt myself. I don't claim that my administration, had you made me your Stalin, would have been exempt from the laws of the universe: exempt from homeostasis, for example. No: we all try to preserve what we perceive as stability. Human groups don't listen to science either. One primary way we do that is to get some craven bully of an institution (like government) to fund additional delusional activity which we then mislabel science. In no time science will answer to the preference of the ignorant stupid lazy slob majority. We use universities the same way we once used churches: to pretend that we're interested in learning, in free speech, in free inquiry, in intelligence, in imagination ... while in fact we punish, torture and kill manifestations of it. My attempts to testify against my church, against my school, against my family went merely ignored until I actually did something courageous about it: offering to network people cybernetically in 1970, joining Ivan Illich to help lead his "deschooling" movement.Deschooling: I hate that term. I have always hated that term. Illich didn't like that term. Illich didn't invent that term. But we're stuck with it.
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.Illich loves "the church" of Christ-love. (So do I, though I don't call it a church.) We both hate the Church of coercion, of authority, of arrogance: of hubris. The group did what the group typically does: it shoved me onto a social side-rail, barely able to feed myself, until it found a way to plagiarize my decentralizing tool into another centralized-and-centralizing monopoly for the hierarchical authorities. The government (and government science)'s internet serves not diversity, not freedom, but authority: big corporations can swamp the dot.comers (but the dot.comers were already plagiarizing Christ-Illich-pk! paying no royalties.)
I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.
Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"
John Belushi reached one of his several pinnacles of comic excellence in the mind of this consumer when in The Blue Brothers his character is confronted, in a sewer no less, by Carrie Fisher's jilted bride: the slob has stood the cute girl up at the altar. Belushi rants a series of excuses: He ran out of gas, he was kidnapped by Martians ... climaxing with this narcissist screaming, "It Wasn't My Fault!"
Compare disgusting individual slob Belushi with the character of any human group, infantile narcissists all: nothing is ever our fault. All frustrations are always attributable to the previous administration, to the last generation ... America could expand to infinity, raping open the Gates of Heaven, if only it weren't for the Indians, or the Liberals, or the FreeThinkers, or the Communists ... or Hitler ... or the Women, or now the Terrorists!
Everything in the Jews' history would have been wonderful ... except for the Gentiles: the Philistines ... the Babylonians ...
Everything in God's universe would have been wonderful ... except for Lillith, for Lucifer ... (for narcissists other than that god himself.)
Cultures magnify their own immaturity(s) through their institutions: churches pretend to worship god, to defer to god, to study god's nature; actually they stifle all thought, all communications, except those they recognize as Given from the cradle. The myths central to Judaism emphasize this: Adam didn't listen (though he could blame Eve), the Jews didn't listen (though they could blame ... a list of things) ... Christianity doubles the ante: the Jews didn't listen even when it was God's Son who was doing the talking!
No one listens to pk because pk has always pointed out this pattern but without blaming any one but OurSelves!
The trouble is: it puts what we were trying to de-emphasize, school, right in the center of things. Freedom fighters is what we were. We opposed coercion. We opposed vertical authorities.
I don't say that all imperfections are my fault, or your fault ... or the fault of the Chinese. But the arrow of blame ought to be able to swivel in any direction as we try mental hypotheses. And when it comes to institutions, one solution might be suicide.
Imagine Ronald Reagan saying, "We want the government off our backs? Hey: how about I nuke DC!"
Friday, August 07, 2009
Faith
within the circle of the faithful.
Faith was an important subject at Knatz.com (and its sister domains). I'll try to repost the main modules on the subject here at IonaArc, but today I start with a new statement, one just penned:
Falsity in a faith cannot rationally be investigated within the circle of the faithful. The falsity of this or that church cannot well be investigated by that church. Harder to see for moderns is that secular institutions block out the light as surely as any stone age temple.
American Democracy, the American Republic ... schools ... are our church: blinding, dumb making, incompatible with intelligence, with optimal learning. That's why there always has to be more than one church, more than one god, more than one epistemology, more than one science, more than one philosophy, always a metaN to metaM.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Advertising: Three Types
One of my favorite jokes in Bedazzled came when Peter Cook's Satan was issuing juvenile mischief to random folk passing him and Dudley Moore, the love-sick burger-flipper about to be tricked into selling his soul in new bit of juvenile Satanic mischief. Moore tells his long-time stage partner that his evil is really stupid. Satan confesses that he agrees: "The Seven Deadly Sins?" drawls Peter Cook: "I though them up in a single afternoon: the only thing I've invented since the Twentieth Century though is advertising!" The audience I was amid gave a good roar, me roaring in its midst. Unlike the bulk of my follows however I've written (and posted) some sharp comments on a smorgasbord of advertising evils. Today I regroup and synthesize:
First I assure you: I am not against advertising per se. I am against one modern degenerate form of it.
We need to distinguish among at least three different kinds of advertising.
1: Information: Identificaion / Location
The whale makes a sound that more than a few other creatures of the sea recognize as a statement of identity (and of location): I am a male sperm whale, basking around the surface of my summer waters, approximately such and such latitude by such and such longitude (and I sure wouldn't mind running into an accommodating female).
The elders place a crown on the head of the individual they believe (or hope to convince others) is magical, a useful tool to the people (and the elders). Those seeing the crown understand: that individual is the group's king: a symbol of the enduring qualities of their culture.
Hi, My name is Paul. I'm a writer, teacher ... sometimes lover ...
Those example advertising as simple declaration of identity and location. Here's a fourth example, a commercial example: Sol's Stationary, We sell office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234.
I am as much for Sol's Stationary being able to say who he is, what he does, where he's located, and when he's open for business as I am for the whale to be able to declare himself ... or a yard-full of lightning bugs to flash chemical luminescence on a summer evening.
2: Misinformation: Misidentificaion / Mislocation
The Hidatsa sneaks up on the Mandan camp making a sound he hopes will be mistaken for the call of a screech owl.
Sol's Stationary says Sol's Stationary in all the ads, implying that what Sol sells is stationary. and though Sol does sell statinoary, some, just enough to maintain the pretense, his real product is cocaine.
Hi. I'm a priest. See my robe? I sell masses, hear confessions ... (But what I really do is have my eye on your wife, your daughter, your son ...)
Those example advertising as false advertising, declarations for the purpose of deceiving. I believe that it's a waste of time to tell a biosphere as full of misidentification and of identification that messages should be truthful. I wouldn't mind living in a society experimenting with honesty as long as the experiment were very cautious, ready to pull back into familiar dishonest at a moment's notice: risking that a moment might be far too slow. The thorough conservative wouldn't dare experiment with ANYTHING! In any case, both kinds of advertising are familiar: and both predate the birth of human beings: by more eons than we know how to count accurately.
Caveat:
Don't assume that distiguishing Identification from Misidentification is easy. More on that later.
But now we humans have introduced a third kind of advertising. First we'd have to identify it, then try to date it. There might be precursors in nature: study is too immature to tell. But here:
3: Irrelevance Confusion by Association:
Sol's Stationary says "office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234: but also adds a carefully edited digital portrait of Brad Pitt: shaking water off his hat in Legends of the Fall, smiling, a few blond hairs loose in the sunlight. Sol has had liver-spots for a decade now, on the best day of his life he didn't look anything like the Brad Pitt. Sol is sending a signal confusing himself and his service with something he doesn't possess and that has nothing to do with the service of selling stationary. It's precisely like when the Lucifer of legend offered to trade knowledge of good and evil with Eve (and Adam). Did Lucifer possess what he was offering in trade? Really? Wasn't that supposed to be God's province?
Aiyaiyai, I just realized: I posted a reflection of advertising 2005 01 09 called The News as Advertising. I then edited it, moving it to Knatz.com. So far so good: but then I deleted it from Iona Arc! Now it's gone! I'm afraid I did that with dozens of posts, trusting the internet even though it's plagiarized from my work with Ivan Illich (and Jesus Christ)!
Now I know to restore it. I'll remount it immediately.
And more coming in this one too.
First I assure you: I am not against advertising per se. I am against one modern degenerate form of it.
We need to distinguish among at least three different kinds of advertising.
The whale makes a sound that more than a few other creatures of the sea recognize as a statement of identity (and of location): I am a male sperm whale, basking around the surface of my summer waters, approximately such and such latitude by such and such longitude (and I sure wouldn't mind running into an accommodating female).
The elders place a crown on the head of the individual they believe (or hope to convince others) is magical, a useful tool to the people (and the elders). Those seeing the crown understand: that individual is the group's king: a symbol of the enduring qualities of their culture.
Hi, My name is Paul. I'm a writer, teacher ... sometimes lover ...
Those example advertising as simple declaration of identity and location. Here's a fourth example, a commercial example: Sol's Stationary, We sell office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234.
I am as much for Sol's Stationary being able to say who he is, what he does, where he's located, and when he's open for business as I am for the whale to be able to declare himself ... or a yard-full of lightning bugs to flash chemical luminescence on a summer evening.
The Hidatsa sneaks up on the Mandan camp making a sound he hopes will be mistaken for the call of a screech owl.
Sol's Stationary says Sol's Stationary in all the ads, implying that what Sol sells is stationary. and though Sol does sell statinoary, some, just enough to maintain the pretense, his real product is cocaine.
Hi. I'm a priest. See my robe? I sell masses, hear confessions ... (But what I really do is have my eye on your wife, your daughter, your son ...)
Those example advertising as false advertising, declarations for the purpose of deceiving. I believe that it's a waste of time to tell a biosphere as full of misidentification and of identification that messages should be truthful. I wouldn't mind living in a society experimenting with honesty as long as the experiment were very cautious, ready to pull back into familiar dishonest at a moment's notice: risking that a moment might be far too slow. The thorough conservative wouldn't dare experiment with ANYTHING! In any case, both kinds of advertising are familiar: and both predate the birth of human beings: by more eons than we know how to count accurately.
Caveat:
Don't assume that distiguishing Identification from Misidentification is easy. More on that later.
But now we humans have introduced a third kind of advertising. First we'd have to identify it, then try to date it. There might be precursors in nature: study is too immature to tell. But here:
Sol's Stationary says "office supplies: 123 Main St, 9-5 M-S, 555 777-1234: but also adds a carefully edited digital portrait of Brad Pitt: shaking water off his hat in Legends of the Fall, smiling, a few blond hairs loose in the sunlight. Sol has had liver-spots for a decade now, on the best day of his life he didn't look anything like the Brad Pitt. Sol is sending a signal confusing himself and his service with something he doesn't possess and that has nothing to do with the service of selling stationary. It's precisely like when the Lucifer of legend offered to trade knowledge of good and evil with Eve (and Adam). Did Lucifer possess what he was offering in trade? Really? Wasn't that supposed to be God's province?
Aiyaiyai, I just realized: I posted a reflection of advertising 2005 01 09 called The News as Advertising. I then edited it, moving it to Knatz.com. So far so good: but then I deleted it from Iona Arc! Now it's gone! I'm afraid I did that with dozens of posts, trusting the internet even though it's plagiarized from my work with Ivan Illich (and Jesus Christ)!
Now I know to restore it. I'll remount it immediately.
And more coming in this one too.
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