A few thoughts on Dawkins and Bateson... and being enlightened through visual thinking.

It occurred to me this week thinking back on my reading of Bateson as I read Dawkins that these two authors manage to cover two ways of thinking about the levels of reality and evolution. Bateson exposes as much as he can the confusion of levels of logic type and their relationship to living mechanics and structural morphology; while Dawkins suggests that we're stuck in one level of thinking about evolution and overlook the importance of the smaller level, that of genes. I suggest that by combining these two concepts one comes out with a recognition that Dawkins is only half right and that Bateson's spiral is nearly the other half of the picture, that a cosmically grand however subtle combination of forces manifest themselves as what we describe as a finite molecular and living procreation, and thus delimit us within the biocentric slant of evolution having a purpose.  Genes do not by themselves manufacture life nor are they strictly speaking codes that determine life's eventuality.  Terrestrial molecules have been stroked just as gently or forcefully as any perennial in the garden by a mild or blustery wind—in their own dimension, where no human has been.  What inhibits our understanding is that we do not imagine, nor can we imagine rightly from the point of view of such an infinitely ambiguous dimension. And where these forces meet is where they are perhaps paradoxically one and the same presence in nature.  The concept of the Tao to my mind comes closest to tis idea, and yet no more can we rationally see the duality or plurality of any one origin nor imagine our ultimate fate as anything but that which derives from what we desire out of our confusion over this paradox.  I for one choose to remain in the realm of the arts as I try to fathom these portals to ultimate awareness.

be a gypsy then... free the earth out from under the empire!

I have very often compared our American conditions of existence and civil governance to that of fascism. Sadly I must update this belief by adding another aspect to my description of this.

Think back and recall for a moment that it was not only the Jews that suffered greatly due to the NAZI regime, but also that the Gypsies were singled out as illegitimate and even a danger to the supposed German gene pool, as well as any officially designated “other” such as homosexuals or “degenerates”.  The Gypsies may have been suspect officially because of their foreign origin, but of course this was mere justification for genocide. To offset the weight of the wheel barreled value of the Deutsche mark, human beings were gunned down and wagon loaded to premature burial.

And so it is not just that the murder and marginalization itself were offensive, but more it is alarming that this same wave of repulsion and repression are expressed more and more today in America. Consider for example how having ownership of property—more specifically a home mortgage debt—is so emphasized such that without it, without an official address, one can find little access to employment (“payroll” used to be literally a roll of currency) sustenance or financial representation. None of this is new to most of us though.  And yet our proposition of freedom, is actually countermanded by the stigma of being a gypsy—the same sort of frightening full independence which threatens the banking industry’s hold on everyone else through property. So, we are not really free. Paradoxically we are so free we are cut off and barred from the natural world. Humans rather have a suspended habitat.

Every occupy movement tent then, every subterranean shelter, every figure huddled in a doorway under a blanket, or under the highway overpasses is a reminder to us that life can exist with out the un-natural barrier of the banks (the free-lovin’ days of the “beach bum” have been supplanted by run-aways and children abandoned to the streets and the sex-trade). But it is also a reminder that the elite and privileged don’t want you to be independent of them. They want you in fact to be dependent upon them, while in fact they are just as dependent upon you for their service industry and the maintenance of their gmo lawns and expensive gadgets. 

The engine of the extreme upper class, the ultra-rich sadly need you to not be aware of this. How else would you be inundated by advertisements and messages of what you should want to purchase and possess to glorify your vanity but by having a place to sit comfortably yet only at the expense of being hypnotized and addicted to consumption of that which truly undermines natural living conditions on this earth?! Wake up America! You are enchanted and betrayed by your desire for leisure and pleasure!  This is our weakness through which you are oppressor and slave to the current fascist system of governance which is merely the tool of the global financial hoarding industry. 

Be a gypsy then, and continue to occupy where or when it seems appropriate to make your stand or gain your sustenance; find an arable place upon the earth and the potable water which are the inheritance of all living things and avail yourself. Do not let the privatizers of water and land bully you. Stand your ground until they cannot but see the evil in their means to possess you.  

Free the earth out from under the empire!

a vestigial future

It could be said that contemporary western civilization is kept alive artificially; that, as an example, obtaining "running water" in the home is akin intravenous feeding.  Most of what sustains it in fact undergoes something akin to dialysis.  Survival for western humanity therefore is fiat; and its future is vestigial.

veritably sucked and squeezed

The complexity of the human organism is commensurate with the energy it expends to forestall the entropy of the universe. We think we are advancing to some evolutionary higher plateau because we have “choice”; but the individual will is not logically posited beside selective pressure. They are separate levels of logical type. In fact, collectively,  we are running away from the inevitable collapse of an increasingly fragile stability. That is to say, we do not alter the laws of nature, of physics; but rather collectively exemplify them.  We come together, we gather, we mobilize, we spread, we inseminate, our parts fused for the difficult journey far from the calm into zones of the otherwise naturally forbidden.

One might have asked, are not deceit and avarice selective pressures?  Perhaps... but only in the sense that the tap root is the tree insinuating itself into the earth.  The tree itself does not violate the earth; however it may be envisioned to be a crack entire in the space opening up between the crust and the atmosphere. That is to say atmospheric pressure is such that a selective pressure is possible; the pathway that becomes the way of life is thus evermore a deepening and tighter crevasse into interior space, while at the same time a capsule burrowing into the vacuum of surrounding space. We are veritably sucked and squeezed into this opening we call body.  Deceit? Avarice?  I suggest that every gene, far more selfish than Dawkins suggests, is but itself a deceit and a reflection of this opening—all life is an eddy, a tailwind of the pulsating pressure to acquire new ground—life is a leftover, and what we call "fear" incorporates the reverberation, hunger, the hastening of this our evaporation, and has led humankind to embolden itself, to invent the an entity called ego to stave off the threatening entropy; fear is the unconscious knowledge that truly we have no power over what delimits us. The fearful frontier is but the tail of where we have been coming about to entangle us. 

To further this point I recall a passage in Jane Goodall's study on Chimpanzees. One chimp having been startled away from a cache of bananas (put there by humans so as to gather the chimps for study) discovered he could return to feast himself on the unguarded bananas. I suggest that what this may hint of is the origins of self-consciousness in deceit with associations indeed of avarice. I also suggest that natural selection is misunderstood to be a "process"—as if all events occurred for the benefit of, or in collusion with, living organisms. 

I think it would be best to view all this from further out of the context of "us" and see that living matter is matter attempting to detach itself from what we narrowly perceive as a "natural process."  We by being self-conscious merely have belief we are a superior independent ganglion of matter when in fact we are stopped up, blistering embolisms nearing implosion.  Perhaps we are comforted by the presence of an expansive variety of living things in our temperate and tropical zones being apparently convinced that easy sustenance is good—when in fact it may not be. 

There is no point however in saying we are meant to do this or that; for life has no purpose, but rather an eventuality, that of escape from our present state. There is no more meaning in a human being than in a rock or a tree.  After all it would seem that the trees and the earth now would be advancing our fate for us. It might even be said that the tree, the origin of what nominally matters—that is, what fed, housed, named our villages, transposed and even temporarily deflated civilizations; this coeval structure, the paradisal canopy, a seemingly jealously enclosed and deity-given shelter from the wrath of an otherwise darkly scribed dome has now become the architect himself of a diminishing dominion. 

We sought once to remember where to find the cherished fruitful tree, and from thence carried out this woefully arrogant mandate to protect its whereabouts from others. And having done so, we ultimately denied our progeny the entirety of the surrounding forests. But this is what nature does—its hierarchies are in constant convolution, and yet we presume to have established our "noble" selves. The universe has no favorites nor scapegoats; nor is there need of a terrestrial steward. Humankind will simply recede like any other species might to a new habitat and eventually vanish forever in the tide.

James Agee's spiral (and the dust devil): from the apogee of apologia to the apnea of the plunge

Perhaps some of us may remember how James Agee, after having gently coaxed open a portal for the readers’ trust in the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, immediately thereafter dispelled our equipoise in the first sentence by saying, “The house and all that was in it had now descended deep beneath the gradual spiral it had sunk through; it lay formal under the order of entire silence.”  

What other convention, the form of the spiral, could express such a passage from the without of the readers' world to the interior world of this writer's topic of deprivation, of dire straits? And after so gracefully asking our forgiveness for stringing us along, maneuvering us there in the first place, proceeded to bludgeon us with the shear truth of irretrievable stability, disorient us with an other-worldy view of efficiency or the disturbing glee of terrestrial bedlam. The sound that we hear through the supposed silence is the disappearance of the happy moment, the suck of Wall Street wizardry!

From Pandorina's tail, spermatozoan, to the spirochete, dust devils and the masters whip we are all tacking through endless waves of resistance.

The Sign of the Times: Yeats, Pound and Heartfield

A brief thought about the poets W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound and the public temperament leading up to and during the World Wars.  I don’t believe it to be mere reduction to note the shapes of the symbols of their fixations, the gyre and the swastika. For Yeats (and his wife), they stood aside and perplexed by the vortex of the times and attempted by way of spiritualism and the occult to retrieve some notion (specifically in his book, A Vision) of what was happening historically; he looked at the vortex from without it as if he were not engaged himself in history, but once they gazed into the wheel of it it was all bound up in the complexities of assigning faculties to references to phases of the moon.  Pound on the other hand looked straight down into and out of the gullet of Fascism as if he were himself it’s tongue, and thus directly spun the vortex, a sense for which the swastika was a natural symbol.

There is another notable figure now that comes to mind, John Heartfield, whom also viewed the temperament of his times, but from a true artist/semioticians perspective.  His “O Tannenbaum...” a commentary on the violent absolutist form that fascism took (in the swastika), revealed the torquing temperament of the times by the simple bending of a tree’s branches.  The tree in this instance is a symbol of the folkish and natural origins of National Socialism in Europe. Thus the tree is twisted into a symbol of violent abrupt transformation and the breakneck speed of modernism.  

In these three examples it might be said can be seen the different ways that humans deal with the changing conditions of life or perceptions of truth.  We can stand aside and attempt to draw some spiritual or metaphysical sense from it and engage it safely from a distance or through a glass as if we were in a laboratory. On the other hand we could step into it and let it absolutely control us and become one and lost in it as our only solution.  Or, we could recognize our part in the making of it from the start, and from this awareness of choice in the matter, recreate a new and better solution.

Just as I mentioned in a previous blog about Joel Kovel, teachers would become targeted, as they did in NAZI Germany, for any possible anti-Americanism by the fascist right.  It has now become dangerous for teachers to discuss politics in or outside the classrooms. But just as importantly, teachers have a right as all citizens do to choose a political affiliation without fear of reprisal by their employer or the general public. Indoctrination through fear and denial indeed seems more to be the case in America, than through good faith or social justice and the persuasive measures of our educators.  Do you believe in toting the fact-dismissive Nationalist view of history at the cost of contemporary justice?  Think hard about that one!

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/05/23/489097/anonymous-group-of-scott-walker-supporters-attacks-radical-public-school-teachers-who-criticized-education-cuts/

"circumjacent stupidity"

"Circumjacent stupidity" This is how one vorticist (Ezra Pound) described the source of their angst and aggression; and it also provides a visual counterpoint to the idea suggested by the magazine's title "BLAST," of their explosive psychic response to the general critical temperament (between the wars and at the beginning of modernism). The violent, harsh geometrical lines of the vorticists (and the futurists) was in effect the shattering of the picture plane, the sound of its release from the frame; the border line between representative art and life was at once banished forever then into sentimentality and advertisement. And soon enough everything witnessed by a recursive eye was seduced into the realm of artifact, performance, absurdity, deconstuction and finally "post-modernism".  Art had become like a golem walking the streets, disassembling everything we thought we had set in stone, realigning everything according to the idea that all is unstabile and only temporarily "real".  This first fearful temperament, this angst could only have been expressed by the severity and dynamic force of diagonal and reverberating line.  And no wonder it is so easy to clutch so fiercely to fascist emblem, and to nationalism through the waving of a flag.

the last tear

If I could but pour again into this world

I’d come again as agile pearls

to cushion your morning walks.

If I could but send you softened morning sun

celestial domes of endless mirrors

would watch your moments unfurl.

If I could have reflected the perfection

of your gaze I’d be the river too

that feeds the sun and the dew.

If I could but feed you, I’d feed you the sun

the light that never rests within you

I’d give you the waters’ wheel.

If I could but wield the waters with the sun

Icarus would have no need to know

where the sun-fed waters go.

If I could but know where the sun’s waters go

I’d see the ocean for the stream

I’d feel the wind in the keel.

If I could but bring you back to me dear one

I’d cast you again in bronze or

steel you off for endless talks.

If I could but send away instead the fear

I’d tread by moonlight evermore

where tender flesh truly seems...

But for the clouded skies there’d be no waters

to pour again and again to

restore my last heaven-sent tear.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

I read this Dylan Thomas poem recently at my father's memorial in California. It was at first a difficult choice to make. I had feared that listeners would misunderstand my use of it. Perhaps they would think it implied bitterness or anger. And so I found myself explaining the poem's significance. I wish I could remember verbatum what I said (apparently when one is deeply within the phenomenological it is difficult to replay the events) but the jist was that at the moments near to his final breath I found myself in two places of relations to his passing. I split into two selves so to speak. The one self wanted him to stay and fight the leaving. The other knew he could not help but let go and wanted him to do so; and thereby perhaps relieve any possible suffering.

This duality of being I thought was crucial to understanding the poem, but also for understanding how it felt to accompany my father as he left us. I have yet to put myself back together.

crux of life's problem...

This is a very simplistic graph and explanation. There are many factors involved that are not at all accounted for here. (BTW: x is time and y is no. of individuals) Yet, the point is, it may only take one divergence of two factors such as the above to bring about greater social chaos, which will precede any sustained response to starvation within the upper classes of any nation. To begin with, the planet's total human population has already gone beyond a reasonably sustainable number. To support our species as it currently exists, Americans would have to drastically reduce their consumption of all resources by approximately 90 percent. That's how far gone into consumerism we are. And too many of us can't even manage to recycle much less consume less; so I imagine we are about to experience a world-wide clash. The numbers without access to income has been increasing contrary to what the mainstream media tells you. And perhaps you have noticed too that already the social "collaboration" has begun to mobilize just as the intolerance for individualism is distinctly in the community air. Even "Partnership" itself now seems a shallow cover for the status quo of the establishment; while at the same time "anonymous" reveals the blatant manifestation of a developing revolutionary temperament. Soon enough you will be forced to choose a path: regardless, either road leads to the same massive conflict. In the least there will be no avoiding taking some sort of unpleasant action!

Joel Kovel and the taboo on controversy in America.

Fascism and politics in our educational institutions.

That's what's on my mind. In pre-war Germany they openly cast out Jewish Instructors. Though not as physically brutal, the same occurs here in America. Consider the plight of some who might publish criticism of Israel or speak on behalf of Palestinians or Islam... or even propose non-money-making alternatives to our earth damaging ways. Consider Joel Kovel. who was kicked out of Bard a while back.

Here is a case in point where financial stake-holders control what gets taught, when it should be the rigorous pursuit of critical objectivity. Money in the board rooms eliminates the controversy in the classroom, but it ends up exposing the larger weaknesses of our educational system. If we don't let our students discuss the difficult problems, they end up that much further behind in solving them later. Put controversy back in the classroom!

China Bashing and the big picture. The "Us" of it.

eminent domain in China

dwindling democracy in China?

relocation for water diversion

comrades in self-destruction

the fate of "intellectual property" in China

low-wage strike in China

the familiar face of concentrated wealth... in China

"Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours" Noam Chomsky lecture at University of Maryland, January 27, 2012.

Chomsky answers questions after U of M lecture

China bashing. It's not just about China. It's about what any of us choose to do. For example, you may choose to shop at Walmart to save money while at the same time lament the jobs your family lost to cheaper labor in another country. In other words, you have to choose to look at the big picture, and break the pattern we initiated ourselves, which has now backlashed upon us. Do we all simply choose to want for less then? Maybe. Or force "less" on those who want for more? I'd say, a "Right To Work for Less" movement is a little incongruous with Obama's Rise to the Top, don't you think? So, China vanquished the middle class through abrupt violent revolution; and America is demolishing the middle class through the so-called freedoms of democracy to self-destruct through greed. Which is worse? I don't know anymore. But forget about nominal forms of government as determining the presence or origins of tyranny, and certainly resist blaming cultures or races of people. Either way you look at it, you have to see that around the globe common human beings are being wrestled from their homes due to "progress", "development" and the desire for amassing wealth through land acquisitions. The big picture is an awful composition of eminent reintegration of power. Don't look now but we all are living on a diminishing parcel of earth.

Autism has brought uncanny clarity of vison and memory to some of us and "Why Societies Collapse"

Stephen Wiltshire

Temple Grandin on TED

templegrandin.com

What I'm thinking is that the pace of online networked society is bringing us all closer and closer to this need for speed and isolation in order to feel connected. In this sense we are shedding our real community contact for an elusive one. This is why I say we are becoming societally autistic (perhaps in the same way corporations can be typed as psychotic). We shun a direct contact because we have less control over what happens in realtime face to face relationships. The other thing going wrong with this is that we can begin to visualize better our demise and spread viral dread! Today I will predict that we will see an increase in autism (and ADHD diagnoses) as well as doomsday prophesies. Just be ready to know the difference between the charlatan's wielding the power of the establishment and real visionaries.

An abbreviated version of Jared Brown’s Why Societies Collapse 5 point checklist":

1. human impact: depletion of resources.
2. climate change.
3. relations with friendly neighbors―reduced supportive conditions.
4. relations with hostile societies more embroiled.
5. political, economic, cultural, social factors (citizens’ awareness of true conditions: combination of ignorance and cognizance of the fact that the status quo is unsustainable).

packing a mean logic

If we are asked to accept a corporation as equal to an actual individual human then are we also to believe that the Fed would ask for protection from the neighborhood kitty? Shall the developer claim to be as one with the eminently evicted?

Next we might expect the termite colonies of the world to claim to be no more than one lowly termite―while they in their entirety proceed to consume the foundations of distressed home and run-away factory. Better that we should consider the corporation to be a termite than a person.

And while we are discussing the destruction of our foundations, such a claim as corporation as a person is indeed an insult to our reasoning if not an abuse of the general wording of the constitution. Surely we are not asked to protect the organized hoarders from the victims of the thievery!? It is as absurd as to say one is both partial and impartial (to reference Bertrand Russel on Aristotle's virtue as the mean of two extremes), or as to say slaves are both "living tool" and man―his master therefore can be both his oppressor and his friend. So, too, it is absurd to continue to assert that a corporation is both a group of persons and also a legitimate individual person. One might as well say one heart cell is equivalent to the entire heart or that one tree is equivalent to the forest. Unless one is willing to concede that by Aristotle's virtue of aristocracy the laboring many shall have no equal good nor place beside the oppressor, but rather shall remain powerless to remove by dialectics the chains of obfuscation which bind them all, we shall all continue to be bound by such spiral logic to an interminable opposition.

And who speaks for the forest I ask? Too few―by the evidence of deforestation they are themselves abraded and yet it appears we are asked to protect the Mill from the tree-hugging "terrorists". No, perhaps we should be doing the opposite. But who in fact speaks for the tree in the court room, or for the oceans and the skies?! And how are they to be represented―since we are to give rights to multiples of beings, to groups of entities, let us enumerate the rights of trees and every other entity present on earth?! Again, who shall bare the impossible burden of proving a cataclysmic future from mere words?! Does absolute power negate any vestige of intuition?

My friends, now that the frontier has involuted, the speculators are forced to eat away at themselves, to continue eating for eating’s sake until there is nothing left but an overwhelming gurgle of debt and bloody retribution. Perhaps we would head for the trees but for the fact that to tread in the undeveloped wilderness is now a crime.

Genetic modification = life cycle termination. Gentrification = mortification!

Think about this: all that our biotechnologists have done so far with modified genes is to increase the yield and size of food, including animals. And this in turn benefits not the ecosystem, human health, nor the original organisms. All it does is increase the gluttony of the global corporations that impose these major effects upon the biosphere. We have allowed ourselves to assert that life on earth is a "product" and therefore its manipulation mandated by markets and financial gain.

If genetically modified plants and animals are ultimately sterilized in the process, this is equivalent to genocide and seriously unethical! How does it benefit life to denude its life cycle. And whence will come the life when all procreation is terminated by genetic contamination. The laboratories experimenting with genetic modification harbor not solutions to our overconsumption but rather the final solution for life on earth. This must be stopped!

But what exactly do we stop, by whom, and for what really? Ask who partook in these decisions in the first place? Did You? Research this for yourself and you'll find that during the Reagan administration in particular, there was a conscious decision to deregulate and bioengineer for the sake of American business―not for humanity. No, it was all about being the most powerful economic force on the planet. And to this day this is still unregulated.

So, never mind what happened to the hurried and plundered earth which we fattened ourselves on! The next few generations will pay for this mistake, and I don't mean in simple terms of dollars. I'm talking about the possibility of vengeful response to what the representatives of America, such as Monsanto, have done! Such corporations have brought nothing but shame to our nation. And all the world now knows to what depths of amorality we will stoop to profit from the developing, as well as the other supposed "developed," nations' natural resources and homogenizing otherwise diverse habitats. To my mind we are undermining the credibility of anything we've claimed to have developed! I'm sorry, but, gentrification is tantamount to mortification.

What moves me right now

About myself: I’ve already implied that I am an artist and this is true. I am also very much concerned about the future of our school children and the public school system. Frankly I believe a near revolution in curriculum / instruction is required (if it hasn’t begun already!). No, I do not merely mean to acknowledge that NCLB hasn’t worked. Nor do I merely acknowledge that the arts are not represented fairly in all schools. Nor do I mean to suggest that painting or throwing clay will kindle innovation for tomorrow’s industries. What I do insist is that visual literacy should stand squarely in the center of literacy itself. And that therefore, we can justify saying that in the least visual concepts and vocabularies can play a larger role in instruction independent of incorporating the visual arts as a discrete discipline. Let me state for starters that drawing a simple line is at once an indication of a particular understanding of relationships. Drawing a meaningful line is an indication of a greater understanding that relationships themselves can be seen across all disciplines and not just within the periphery of a picture frame. I contend that we can reinstate a classical sense of graphic skill and visual literacy to their proper place amongst reading writing and mathematics in this very way. Every step we take as educators should be as versatile and flexible as possible... even to the point of following an unanticipated development spawned by students themselves!

I also contend that teachers should not be constrained to a regional much less a national standard of testing. How else can we achieve an exemplary diversity of innovations if not by a variety of methods and passionately engaged unique teachers. The next few decades must become an era of experiment and diversity otherwise all we’ll get is more of the same―the same approaches to the least amount of sterilized content. In other words we need to scrap the constraint of political correctness, both left and right (excluding of course racism or gender bias).

wisdom and mathematics?

“[Plato] was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.” Bertrand Russell

I prefer to define mathematics as a profound understanding of the relationships between things, rather than mere quantification. It would then be more acceptible to say a truer wisdom can be had by this practice. To be fair perhaps we should say the same of the other fine disciplines or humanities? Or perhaps that by study of any one of the disciplines the others become more vividly internalized.

Yet, how can we say that mathematics has anything to do with poetry for example? It can hardly be denied that fine literature is in part comprised of verse, which to a varrying degree is a pattern of ideas if not also lingual attributes. Perhaps by recognizing that mathematics provides templates for understanding these textual relationships we can then agree we are in part looking for patterns, likenesses and comparisons when we critique poetry, and thus perhaps formulate a wiser interpretation of the meaning of the words.

This not to say that these few are the sole criteria for establishing a hierarchy of good and bad poetry, though because it is not by mathematics that we will discover virtue necessarily nor a unanimous sense of beauty. These resonances perhaps we are not able ever to discover, nor should we attempt to give synchronicity to literature or any other human endeavor. Perhaps this Spartan aspiration will ever haunt us though, the search for a sublime order of things and human sensibilities. This is the trappings of socialism, that the unity of a people can reach beyond community for transcendence yet only find bondage in totalitarianism.