The Path to Chaos

I hope you had a nice Father's Day.  Mine was blessed with the gift of multiple cheeses...what more can you want besides perhaps beer?

I've been thinking a bit more about "the mind of god/mind of man" issue that has been bouncing around in my head due to discussions about Louis Agassiz and perhaps Transcendentalism.

It has seemed to lead logically into Arendt's thinking on Totalitarianism.

Monocultures and Monotheism.  A reaching after domination by a single idea and a single species.  Knowing the mind of God; The mind of god is the mind of man is the mind of the universe is the highest being, etc.

I just finished reading a short book called The End of the Wild by Stephen Meyer to support my show on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (what exactly can that "legacy" be when it seems to have only spawned partisan economics?).  The End of the Wild points to the fact that all species which are surviving are only those "fitted" to live in man's orbit or wake.  The environment continues to be reduced and will become a sameness.

Chaos is sameness, rather than what I think is the common misconception of it as crazy randomness (that is a better definition of fecundity, of life!).

The Bible is a testament to monoculture as well as monotheism.  It is a giving up of all randomness to serve a single idea.  The single idea is arbitrary but serving it is deeply logical.  This leads to the rightness of murder and extermination of whole peoples and cultures.  The Nazi idea of a "master" race logically justifies extermination of the lesser races primarily to try to guarantee a "clean" bloodline.

That is Arendt's Totalitarianism.  This is the human perception of the human species.  Dominion and Mind.  The Bible seems to me then a description of the human mind as it comes to understand its arbitrary capacity for dominion.  The IDEA is all that's needed.

Perhaps this terrifying logical outcome is unavoidable in the human: the chaos of the human as monoculture.

This, I think, is the drive to be entertained by vampires and zombies--we all know that we are superfluous when it comes to the IDEA and the arbitrary application of Power.  Monocultures are not about individuals, not about freedom, not about rights...(neither are monotheisms by the way--that would more properly apply to the fecundity of pagan cultures).  Just think of the words to realize the direction we're taking--monocultures lead to sterility.

What can we do if our "masses" are "superfluous" and their "belonging" is engaged by a terrible ideal?  This seems too easy, easier and easier, in the daily "chaos," the sameness of experience encouraged by our tech-media cultures.

What is a "like" button and what does it serve?

Walking: A Reconciliation

It is likely impossible to untangle the mass of errors that have brought humans to this place of global destructive potential.  Yet...

Sitting may be the basic problem.  It is a posture for receiving.  A defenselessness.

Done in solitude as in meditation, as a release from irrelevant modes of constructivism...as a silencing of the "blocking" signal that is our daily noise, then we might call it a good.

Sitting in the Western cultures isn't resting, it is a kind of ending, a quietus.

Walking is a vital opposition.  I can't think of a better one.  But I say this as a foundational proposition.  Walking leads to a kind of contemplative thinking in bodily action and this seems to me the best way to reach a harmony between the body as it is in time, in its material becoming and ending, and the mind as a capacity to travel in endless spheres of speculation, backward and forward.

The body keeps us located, the mind will dislocate us.

The two must be wed.

We are realizing the consequences of the modern separation: a creation of the irreconcilable.

Rudderless

Imagine that we are always and only contextual.

It's easy enough to talk about ourselves as beings who often have good and bad things happen to us as organic creatures. An illness that may kill us is bad; apparent health is good. Certain bacteria promote healthy operations within the system that is our body; others promote disease, death, decay. This seems "bad".

However, these are simply natural processes and only the mind that speaks and considers itself a discrete, unique entity that values life (continued living) AS a discrete, unique entity (mind) will be wont to assign a valuation to a measure of health or well-being. Sick is bad; not-sick is good.

Life happens (but is not necessary); death happens and is necessary. I find this statement endlessly fascinating.

However, once we start thinking along these lines we must try to reduce this unique being that has a self-obsessed mind to something more common and natural. After all we are only another form of mammal.

So, like all other organic life, our discrete, unique self as a body/mind must expire. This is not a unique occurrence and in fact is so commonplace that it must be one of the oddities (weaknesses?) of the human that the contemplation of it unhinges so many of us.

Still, if we think of ourselves as "like" all other beings we can also consider ourselves as "like" all other planetary "metabolisms". If the planet is our primary organic being (this is Gaia, yes?) then perhaps we are only a species of metabolic action. If so, the planet, if it has a "mind", might label us "good" or "bad"?

The point, moreover, is that humans measure all things by human standards--and these, sadly, tellingly, are short-sighted (just like the duration of our lives, so our common interest) and have only self-preservation as a consideration.

The real error as regards how the human fits in with the planetary comes in the form of the mind itself--or the self-regarding mechanism that creates the discrete idea of unique human being. Mind sees "me" as highly valuable and my selfish desire for my continuing existence is necessary to me. However, as regards planetary systems, wherein species come and go (and lovely is the rose) a billion times over, this is a gross error in understanding "one's place".

As philosophy is simply a backwards attempt to assign meaning to the meaningless so do we attempt to create meaning in our ecological and environmental organic "uniqueness" among our planetary brethren.

And as long as we exist (in our minds) "outside" of the natural planetary parameters of "duration" we will continue to simply create master-narratives that allow us to continue the mass delusion of our unique species.

Until we are no more.

Where Do We Find Ourselves?

Emerson asks, in 1844, in his essay "Experience", "Where do we find ourselves?"

In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Here! I at least am here! But "here" says nothing, really, does it Bob?

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

It was dark a long time ago, Bob. We are lost even while our machine-age magicians profess we are on the road to truth. Sophocles, in 422 B.C.E. (and this is the "chorus" of Antigone compressed a bit by Amelie Rorty), is most assuredly expressing an already ancient wisdom:

In the meshes of his woven nets, cunning of mind, ingenious man...
He snares the lighthearted birds and the tribes of savage beasts,
and the creatures of the deep seas...
He puts the halter round the horse's neck
And rings the nostrils of the angry bull.
He has devised himself a shelter
against the rigors of frost and the pelting rains.
Speech and science he has taught himself,
and artfully formed laws for harmonious civic life...
Only against death he fights in vain.

Brilliantly portrayed here as a double-trap, what, in the face of the most particular of particularities, keeps us in these "woven nets" by which we expect one day to escape the truth of death while dreaming within the limits of human mind?

World Enough...and Time?

Two from A.R. Ammons that might work to focus our thinking after yesterday's post: the first "World", seems a thumbnail ecology (yet inclusive of all); the second, "Peak", diagnoses our dilemma as human mind within that ecology of "actual trees" and "high tides"--humans desire a place/time "beyond" the world in the poem "World" and the result...well, the final two lines could not be a more ruthless truth.

World

Breakers at high tide shoot
spray over the jetty boulders
that collects in shallow chips, depressions,

evening the surface to run-off level:
of these possible worlds of held water,
most can't outlast the interim tideless

drought, so are clear, sterile, encased with
salt: one in particular, though, a hole,
providing depth with little surface,

keeps water through the hottest day:
a slime of green algae extends into that
tiny sea, and animals tiny enough to be in a

world there breed and dart and breathe and
die: so we are here in this plant-created oxygen,
drinking this sweet rain, consuming this green.


Peak

Everything begins at the tip-end, the dying-out,
of mind:
the dazed eyes set and light
dissolves actual trees:

the world beyond: tongueless,
unexampled
burns dimension out of shape,
opacity out of stone:

come: though the world ends and cannot
end,
the apple falls sharp
to the heart starved with time.


["Peak" should have indents at the 2nd line, 5th line, and 11th.]

Food for Thought

I can't think out of this particular box...ready?

Part I

The (human) Self (Mind and Representation) is outside of biology while being contained by biology.

The Self is a creation of mind as receptive organ.

The Self is an individual in space and time--local and family "geography".

The Self as Ego requires defining characteristics. The "I am" is not enough. The "what" is necessary.

The Self lives a fiction.

Part II

The Brain (where Mind lives) is organic material.

The Brain works biologically.

The Brain acts of necessity. As the heart beats the brain sends and receives electrical "pulses".

The Brain interprets these first biologically--needing X to continue to exist, to not be dead.

The Brain may USE the Mind as necessary.

Part III

However, Mind does not understand this.

Mind desires to be out of time and hence out of body, out of brain...to be eternal.

This is a "fiction" of living (not dying).

Mind creates mythologies.

Our history, our literature, our science is a creation of MIND outside of time.

Mind is forever struggling against the truth of the organism...it is very basically, food...humus.

The Gun Inside of Us

**Update below

It's too easy to argue with so much intensity about this object and not really think much about it. Or rather be open to thinking about it without a knee-jerk "political" response or "defensive" response. I think I mean defensive there in both ways.

For some reason I've begun to think that really, everyone, EVERYONE, feels that a gun is an error of the human imagination. Many things are "mistakes" of imagination. This was the teaching of the myth of Pandora's box, and really, I think the core of the story of Adam & Eve in the garden--expulsion for knowledge "too soon". Human minds touch the ineffable--it's there within our neural networks--the ALL and the Abyss ("Nothing" is not quite the right word here as we don't really know how to think about it)--and in this way we can imagine everything. In this way we are susceptible to self-destruction in the manner of Icarus. In our very foundational mythologies we are given the whole truth. We have no capacity for wisdom on the whole. Wisdom is slow and comes with age probably only truly comes with death.

We imagine and we create without wisdom. Wisdom is knowing the ALL and the Abyss lives in everything we do and touch. Without the understanding that is wisdom, that is knowing finality, of death as the just and proper conclusion to this living, we bring out of ourselves only the Abyss. We carry it into our lives through fear of death.

A gun is abysmal.

**Update

I want to clarify a bit. The abysmal [correction! is NOT] "bad"--it IS. A gun, hell probably everything we do that attempts to define us against our surroundings, is a response to the void. And pulling the trigger confirms the fear of it and inability to confront it in ourselves with the wisdom of the ALL (which I might argue is simply acceptance of what is "given" in nature).