joculum: (in a dark wood)
2023-03-10 05:46 am

Because I have essentially abandoned this blog...here is a post originally intended for Facebook

I’m afraid that my recent transient Facebook post about the wildly shifting reputation of once-celebrated writers got me to thinking about how, except for a handful of the genuinely great (who come from all walks of life and genres and are not at all the same thing as “the elite”), most intellectuals and creatives deserve to be remembered for perhaps five per cent of their production, and frequently much less of it than that. The problem is that there comes a time when they are not even remembered for that, and their reputations have to be re-evaluated and sometimes outright rescued, for the sake of that utterly wonderful five or four or one-tenth of one per cent that constitutes their contribution to the world’s cultural inheritance.

This happens to a good many public figures in their own lifetimes, as I have been thinking while trying to do inventory reduction on my ridiculously oversized library. Only the ones who struggle assiduously to stay relevant to their current decade really manage to have their other, usually better work properly assessed, and sometimes even that is not enough, as I have been thinking as I realize anew that it has been a full year now, and I still have not been able to extract and celebrate the really wonderful parts of Nathaniel Tarn’s strangely constructed, sometimes compelling memoir, “Atlantis, An Autoanthropology,” because Nathaniel Tarn is one of those many, many out-of-the-mainstream writers whose diverse accomplishments are so idiosyncratic that it is hard to explain to the previously uninterested why anyone living in the maelstrom of 2023 should stop to consider their oeuvre in the first place. This is why I love the idiosyncratic writers of whom I can say, “Here. You have to read this one. Don’t start anyplace else with their work.”

If I were writing this for Summations, I’d go on citing cases, but I’d rather not. There is something depressing about encountering forgotten examples of the moments when the people one admires were having an off-day or off-decade. And anyway, I have to go back to writing the March iteration of Cullum’s Notebook.

I had thought that I should maybe offset the bleakness of this with a delectable, preferably lyrically fragile photograph, but there seems to be no way to upload the one I had intended.

What came into my mind just now was the absurdly excessive aphorism “Only beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky (talk about someone who…no, let’s not go there, “there” being somewhere I would rather not revisit right now). Although I don’t believe my modification of the maxim, either, what comes to mind as an alternative proposition is: Only beauty will justify the world. And even then there are lots of other things that will justify it, for mutually exclusive reasons that reveal more about the psychology of the person writing the aphorism than about the relative or absolute truths of the planet.
joculum: (Cullum reads poetry)
2021-08-21 05:09 am

two of my poems from 2001 that are partly about Afghanistan

The Voice of the Turtle: Reverential Notes Towards a Definitive John Fahey Discography, or, A Lenten Meditation at the Atlanta Botanical Garden

For J, again


Rain smashes the petals of a reluctant Spring:
the weather, as usual, provides endless parallels
to psychological processes. You pays
your money, and you picks your metaphor.
Random walks in between mundane errands
do more to clarify one’s personal absurdity
than hours of deliberate introspection.
This has given rise to my idiosyncratic habit
of visits to organized Nature in those rare places
where clouds and rain give rise to reflection
instead of, say, to hours of brooding or
pointless addiction to crossword puzzles
or games of Scrabble. All of which are,
in many houses I have known, venerable
family traditions. I prefer to walk.

“And now, we’ve seen it all.” So one vivacious retiree,
and later, to a less ambulatory companion,
“Well, you simply have to keep going, just because
there is no other way to get you out.”
What are supposed to be the lessons of age
are so often instead only literalizations
of Samuel Beckett’s wry, bleak visions
of ultimate immobility. This is how it is.
We remain utterly laughable.
We age. We decay. We can’t
go on. We fall, or fall in love.

They are blowing up the great stone Buddhas
of Bamiyan province, a few miles west
of Kabul. Revolutionary Afghanistan
is drowning in self-devouring rancor.
Iconoclasm thrives because stone statuary
is decidedly the oldest surviving manifestation
of the birth of human imagination, twenty or so
thousand years ago. The Ice Age sculptors
already scratched marks on stone, but not just
any rock. What they hacked and scratched fit the hand
as snugly as any useful object ever did,
and the so-called Venus of Dolni Vestonice
was formed in fired clay as a finely proportioned
object that also begged to be cradled or clutched
as though our earliest ancestors already lived
in symbols cast far beyond the merely functional.
All men and women are born servants of the True Way,
and only later turn to their own perverse opinions.
The human heart, John Calvin said, is a factory of idols,
a psychological observation perhaps more piercing
than the anti-aesthetic of other cultures of the Word.

In general, the pain and pathetic repetition
of desire and destruction continue.
Babies die of starvation, small children die of cold
on the endless road of flight to Herat. Philippe
de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum
begs for the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
It is spring, sort of, and all types and conditions
are entrapped in their usual, predictable fashion.
The petals fly in the wind like ridiculous symbols
left over from a previous century of emotional excess.

John Fahey is newly dead, who recorded American roots
decades before the Coen Brothers reinvented
the music of the nineteen-thirties. Years ago in California,
in love with young women three thousand miles away,
I listened to Fahey’s re-creations of old blues classics
and longed for a South that I knew was already lost;
not the Lost Cause, but the fragile chords of family memory
kept by some widowed aunt in Tennessee or Miami.
The downfall of the Adelphi rolling grist mill, or
the transfiguration of Blind Joe Death; Fahey’s
personal mythological transmutations
made sense of a South that had long since lost itself
in downscale auto racing and crappy imitations
of Nashville’s overpriced Grand Old Opry.

A tale from Townes Van Zandt, also gone early:
“The other day I heard my aunt singing ‘The Rivers
of Texas.’ Figuring
that here was a chance to learn the truth at last
about the methods of Folk Transmission,
I asked her, did she remember where she learned that.
She said, ‘Well, Townes, I heard Uncle George sing it.’
So I asked Uncle George, and he learned it from Cousin
Scott, and Cousin Scott learned it from his brother Jim,
and his brother Jim learned it from me.”

This is how, after enough passage of time,
shrines are born, and legends of sainthood.

The Japanese garden at Golden Gate and the
one at Atlanta’s botanical garden
are both echoes of an absent original,
like faint, flickering, barely cast shadows
that may for that reason be better teachers of
an elusive, yet ineluctable realization :
life is literally fleeting, and in some vague way
stone and water and twisted evergreens
reflect its essence. Whether we go out
through the bamboo gate or the moon gate’s exit
all is tangled in desire, even if only “le
dur desir de durer
.”
Non omnis moriar;” but, regrettably, survival
exists only as random tags and scraps
written once by…God alone knows who,
after a sufficient number of generations.
I shall not wholly die? I shall not wholly live, either.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan, like the Central Asian frescoes
destroyed in the bombing of Berlin’s museums, exemplify
their master’s teaching: even monuments of stone
are subject to transience, suffering, and brutal death.
The iron laws of history are as hard on poems
as they are on statues and paintings. Nothing endures.
How often love, as Schopenhauer pessimistically noted
decades before Charles Darwin, has rested on such accidents
as the fortunate arrangement of subcutaneous fat.
Women have been drawn more to well-defined muscles.
The shape of Cleopatra’s nose, Blaise Pascal observed,
was probably responsible for the deaths of entire armies.

The later Romans, curiously,
didn't think this sort of lunacy could happen.
When Saint Augustine, creator
of the new, grim cultural paradigm,
cited an old-fart elderly landowner
who ran away with a slave girl,
they scoffed and called him
“novus medicus,”
an upstart theologian contradicting
the considered opinions of the era's
most distinguished physicians.

The fallen petals of the Japanese magnolia
are squashed to slippery mush on the concrete sidewalk.
It is the old battle between Winter and Spring,
and this year, winter is winning most of the rounds.
The spring wind screams like the shouts of deluded souls
who think that anything can be gained or lost for good
in the endless ocean or garden of becoming,
whichever metaphor suits your illusion.
Midnight in the garden of good and evil,
or, more likely, twilight in the ill-kept yard of neither.


February 26-March 12, 2001



“How it is” is the title of a Samuel Beckett novel, and “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is a line from another Beckett text. The story of the destruction of the world’s largest statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, is available from many sources, as is the plea for their preservation by the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice was briefly on display in Atlanta, where a Czech curator hauled the two pieces of the statuette out of a padded box to show me how it was apparently designed to explode in the kiln (how they know this, given the ways of ceramics and ceramists to this day, is beyond me). The line about servants of the True Way is a universalization of the Muslim belief that all babies are born Muslim and only later educated into religious errors. Where John Calvin said that the human heart is a factory of idols, I cannot say, though the theologian Gabriel Vahanian may have provided a footnote in the book in which I read it, either The Death of God or Wait Without Idols. The Coen Brothers re-invigorated “old-timey music” in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? “The Anti-Aesthetic” was the title of a mid-80s Hal Foster anthology published in Britain as Postmodern Culture. “The Downfall of the Adelphi Grist Rolling Mill” and “The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death” are, of course, titles of John Fahey compositions. The Townes Van Zandt story may be recorded on the two-LP set of live performances, but I heard it first from the man himself. The moon gate and bamboo gate sound tremendously symbolic, but in fact are only the two alternate gates of the Japanese garden in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, with, as far as I have been able to learn, no symbolic meaning. “All is tangled in desire”: the Bhagavad Gita. The passage is cited in longer form in “the ego and the body in northern Georgia.” “le dur desir de durer,” “the hard desire to last,” is the title of a book of poems by Paul Eluard. Horace’s “non omnis moriar,” “I shall not wholly die,” was once learned by every schoolboy (not necessarily every schoolchild) in the English-speaking world. The Buddhist frescoes from western China were destroyed by aerial bombardment in Berlin’s New Museum because they had been cemented into the wall, considered immovable in spite of having once been sawed out of the solid rock on which they were painted; cf. Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. I don’t know where Schopenhauer made his remark because I encountered reliable versions of it in a New York Times Magazine story designed to depress romantics on Valentine’s Day. Blaise Pascal made his wisecrack in the Pensées. The original, which I have expanded poetically, reads, “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé.” The Saint Augustine story is presumably told by Peter Brown in The Body and Society, since the book covers the same territory as the lecture in which I heard it. The Battle Between Winter and Spring can be found in any number of books on ritual performances and folklore. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is, of course, the title of John Berendt’s bestselling book on Savannah, which should not be taken to have anything to do with this poem. As with many another reference, it is the resonance of the words, not the contents of the book, that brought the phrase to mind.


Sleepwalking to Kandahar: An Elegy in Time of War for the Remembering of Howard Finster

Humphrey Bogart: Sam, it’s December 1941 in Casablanca. What time is it
in New York?

Dooley Wilson: Uhh…My watch done stopped.

Bogart: I bet they’re asleep in New York.I bet
they're asleep all over America.
—dialogue from Casablanca (1943)

We are all asleep in the outward man.
—Jakob Boehme, German mystical writer
during the Thirty Years’ War

Man is asleep. Must he die before he wakes up?
—the Prophet Muhammad (oral tradition)

i. 2001

First sharp rain of the cold fall; more than enough to flatten
the tiny, defiant Stars and Stripes on Johnson Road
that droop and more or less forlornly wrap
tight round their cheap sticks. This is all going to last a lot longer
than most folks ever would have figured.

Americans don’t like interminable epics. We like quick sequels
or else fresh edits: Apocalypse Now Returns
or Gulf War 2, featuring previously unreleased
scenes greatly improved in the director’s cut.
Colin Powell flies off to Central Asian conferences
in a reprise of his most popular starring role.
The flags flutter gallantly as the rain subsides
and wind gusts suggest brutal shifts in the seasonal
average daytime temperature.

Autumn asters surround the box where the morning paper
announces the death of Howard Finster. Nation shall rise against nation,
Howard wrote on his wooden angels last winter. These are the final days.
“The Last Days of Mankind” was Karl Kraus’ sarcastic title
for his bitter satire of patriotism, profiteering, and self-delusion
in Vienna in the First World War. Twenty years or so later
he wrote, wearily, “I can’t think of anything at all to say
about Adolf Hitler.” The second act
is not, as Marx implied, always farce. Sometimes
the first act was just the set-up for the tragic finale.

Bombs fall on Afghanistan. The supermarket
bags groceries in plastic bearing the United States flag
and the noisy slogan “Proud to be American!”

We are all asleep in the outward man. Cold air
comes as a surprise each winter in these warm latitudes.
Howard made cutouts of the ant and the grasshopper
which were happily collected by fledgling entrepreneurs
secure in a slew of dot-com stock options.

Special op boys from Kansas or Fort Benning, Georgia
comb the caves of the north in quest of Al-Qaida.
Central Asia was once the place where yesterday’s occultists
parked their favorite fantasy Masters of Wisdom.
Monasteries somewhere in the middle of Nuristan province
were almost as good as Shangri-La or forbidden Lhasa.
Now exile Tibet has a text and textile outlet
on a small cul-de-sac on Atlanta’s northside,
and Afghanistan, also sold locally, is an easy first runner-up
for the title of Most Thoroughly Demolished Asian Culture,
after Cambodia managed at last to give up the top spot.

Afghanistan and Appalachia:
Mountain cultures enjoy hard simplicities
like hunting rifles and folk religion.
They also, in the right extraordinary circumstances
spawn not prophets, but meetings with remarkable men
who dream dreams, as in the Book of Joel, and see visions.
I, who grew up in a place about ten feet above sea level,
took a much longer route to the foothills of Mount Analogue.

The post office box reveals that our national colors
are very popular for autumn fashion. Sale catalogues
scramble to update their holiday covers. Cocooning
and cozy Americana are in vogue. When we hunker down
we tend to do it in unison, celebrating the home front virtues
while the air war creeps through Herat and Kandahar,
hitting the same Red Cross storehouse twice despite best intentions
because someone simply forgot to take it off the target list.

We mean well. Afghan opposition soldiers
note that this measured response looks really wimpy.
The Russians, they say, plastered everything in sight.
These are, as Howard wrote, the beginning of sorrows.

Someday all this will end, just because it always does.
Changes, as Heraclitus noted some little while ago,
happen whether or not you want or expect them.
Nothing will ever be the same again,
but only—and not simply—because it never was.

The history of terror or the terror of history; in Santa Barbara,
while bomb-laden bicyclists destroyed Saigon cafes, we read Eliade
on the fate of small, poor nations, and how it was that history
was a thing that was feared by peasant populations
located on major rivers or mountain passes.
We didn’t understand a word of it;
some wanted power to the people, and
all we are saying is
give peace a chance.


When 13 year old Jawad awoke as the only
surviving member of his Afghan peasant family,
Muhammad Razi lied compassionately, “All is well.
You were walking in your sleep,
and you fell down the well next to your house,
and I rescued you.” The last few words were true.

Regrettably, real life all too frequently imitates
the stereotyped tragedies of the supermarket tabloids.
On the side of farce, a reported prototype of urban legend
woke up at ten on a September eleventh workday,
long blocks away from his job at the World Trade Center,
and thought, for a while, that he was in serious trouble.

The terror of history or the history of terror.
As Howard most likely quoted on some vision of other worlds,
Beloved, it is high time to awaken out of sleep.

For now is our salvation nearer than we believed?
Howard believed it. We who, as they say, are left behind
stretch to read the signs of things to come
less confident in our gifts of interpretation.

To be continued.



The epigraphs are all quoted from memory, and I have no guaranteed source for the sentence from Boehme, which was used as an epigraph by Robert Bly in Silence in the Snowy Fields, his first book and certainly one of his best. The identification of Boehme with the Thirty Years War, though factual, derives from a short poem by Kenneth Rexroth. The hadith is often cited by Sufis and occultists but I have never troubled to find out if it actually exists. “always farce”: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte again; “Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Since this poem is being written year by year (to be continued, as the published version of this was, for a while), I had no idea that there really would be a Gulf War 2, though there was reason to believe it would happen. Nuristan: See Peter Brook’s version of Meetings with Remarkable Men and O. M. Burke’s Among the Dervishes, re a region that obviously can hold more than secret monasteries. The Tibetan text and textile outlet subsequently moved elsewhere. “The terror of history” is Eliade’s best-known phrase from Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. The stories reported as fact in the New York Times may, of course, have been fabricated. The lines from St. Paul about waking out of sleep are quoted from memory and are not quite accurate.

These poems are excerpted from the copyrighted volume Unfinished Ventures: Selected Poems 1977-2005 and the standard courtesies of copyright are requested, even though in the age of digital reproduction such niceties have become increasingly fluid and open to fruitless query.
joculum: (Default)
2021-06-01 01:20 pm

wise fools and other foolery

The wise fool….

There are several different traditions about “fools,” who are sometimes “tricksters” and other times are simply not capable of adapting to the social circumstances in which they happen to find themselves. Sometimes such fools are “wise fools,” differently intelligent, genuinely skilled within parameters that the local yokels don’t quite understand (I love mashing up the divergent idioms of different linguistic and generational subgroups like that, because it grates on the sensibilities of the persnickety). And other times the fools are simply committed to goals that their communities affirm superficially but don’t take seriously, in which case they are called “holy fools,” whether they call themselves that or not.

I don’t talk much about either of them, because the most articulated forms of the traditions happen to come from countries that are indisputably on the outs with the native land that I love and in which I happen to live. Only a fool would cite sources from such countries unambiguously instead of appropriating their resources circumspectly and obliquely.

The fools' relativism, which is a politicized cuss word that ought not ever to be used, comes from their awareness of their neurological peculiarities (and therefore also of the peculiarities of their neuronormal neighbors) and/or their serious attention to topics that their differently wired neighbors tend to downplay except when using them as tools to wage conceptual combat with rival communities.

As is the case with all people everywhere, anything they have to say needs to be translated into terms that make sense to the people who are trying to understand them.

I wish that we could recognize that every human community is appallingly, almost unforgivably wrong about something or other, holding some misapprehension or passionately defended belief that is destructive to themselves and/or to other humans and/or to the planet as a whole. And then lean hard on the “almost” part when trying to repair the damage. But no one but a fool would express a wish like that.
joculum: (not the angel of history)
2020-06-05 09:25 pm

being blown backwards into the future

I hope to spend the next year completing projects that have fallen by the wayside as the world sinks into a crisis more comprehensive than anyone expected to commence as early as the year 2020. If this goal remains utterly unfulfilled, I feel that at least the inchoate beginnings of these perhaps intrinsically unfinishable ventures can be found in the fragments I have shored against my ruins in this successor to my LiveJournal of the same name (and overlapping contents up to the point at which I abandoned it). Unfortunately, the errors and wrecks that lie about me are also incorporated into this exploration of all the ways i once thought were ways out and ways I never fully understood that, for that reason if for no other, also proved to be dead ends.
joculum: (asleep)
2019-08-12 08:45 pm

supplanted stories: a simple reflection for an increasingly simple-minded epoch

The antique cartoon strip I have long used to sum up my life is one in which Good Ol’ Charlie Brown is rebuked by Peppermint Patty for not understanding anything, and says to himself in the final cartoon panel, “I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand.” (Chuck’s problem is that Patty has been rehearsing all the details to herself, but doesn’t pass them along to the subject of her reflections.)

One of my favorite fatuous lines in ancient rock’n’roll songs comes from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”: “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” which actually is a fairly profound summary of the political standoff that the song is describing.

Some moments of the world are so entangled with overlapping conflicts that, indeed, nobody understands them. Those who think they understand them are the most self-deluded of all. Usually, it all ends badly.

I have the terrible feeling that this is one of those moments, but since I don’t understand it all that completely, I desperately hope I am wrong.

In any case, the only way to proceed is to act as if there were a way of fixing it all, or at least some of it. (The “it” consists of too many overlapping problems to spell out here, but you know what they are. Don’t you? One of the problems is that no two of us are likely to list exactly the same problems, much less the same suggestions as to what is to be done about them.)

Works of literature sometimes seem to sum up our dilemmas. I am wondering which books or movies or online series do that for people reading this. I suspect there would be a lot of non-overlapping answers.

At different points earlier in my life, I had certain books that I thought offered pointers regarding the way out. I now realize that in fact they portrayed the insoluble aspects of the dilemma (the real answers lay somewhere else) and that because they portrayed a past that was forty to sixty years gone when I read them, I wasn’t understanding them the right way, either.

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished novel of which only the first three volumes were available in English translation when I read it, more than once, forty-plus years ago. I was convinced that Musil had hit upon the answer in the many different drafts of the fourth volume, and had only failed to choose which option when he died much sooner than he had anticipated. By the time the fourth volume of fragments was translated, I had decided otherwise, and have never read it.

Musil was writing the novel while Europe was drifting through ever worsening catastrophes, sliding towards a second world war while he wrote about an immense cast of characters who were cluelessly stumbling along in a world that was sliding towards a first one. Everyone thought they knew what to do about the crises of the day, from spiritual anomie to prison reform, and nobody understood the biggest crisis of all, which was far from apparent to their political leaders, either.

Some of us resonated with this novel (some of us to the point of being obsessed with Vienna 1900 in general, since so much of the art and literature spoke to where we were in America at that very moment—and still does, actually). The problem was that we were incapable of seeing that not a single one of the characters was right, even Ulrich the man without qualities with whom Musil clearly identified. He couldn’t finish writing the novel because he couldn’t get his main character out of the overwhelming existential dilemma that the times had created even for someone who thought he understood them, or was on the way to understanding them.

Ten or twelve years earlier in my life, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land had been the touchstone of my experience, to the point that when I first visited London fifty years ago, I sought out the geographic points that had haunted me for the previous half dozen years: Magnus Martyr, St. Mary Woolnoth, King William Street. The remnants of the Blitz amid the heavy concrete replacement structures added to the layers of history in a city in which I was also resonating with Mods and Rockers.

Eliot’s poem was actually a perfect reflection of the condition of a hopelessly neurotic American adrift in a collapsing culture in the wake of the most disorienting war since the Napoleonic upheavals a century earlier. The times were a mess, just like the Sixties, I thought, although the mess was actually much larger, and Eliot’s response to it was to portray some of the social situations he didn’t like very much, and symbolize the bloody confrontations on the Continent he could scarcely make heads or tails of, because nobody else could either, as the First World War was succeeded by five years of internecine warfare in the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, resulting in the misshapen birth of “faraway countries about which we know almost nothing,” to misquote Chamberlain about Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich conference fifteen years later.

Coming out of smalltown South with few frames of reference, I was convinced that Eliot’s superimposition of the Grail legends as mystery cult on top of the mess of a crumbling culture represented a real way out for the alienated world of 1964. Or it would if taken onward to the world of the Four Quartets, from Burnt Norton to Little Gidding. But by the time Eliot died in January 1965, a new world was coming into being with its own different messes, and different books in which the writers’ implicit solutions were only reflections of their own bewilderment.
joculum: (Default)
2019-03-07 10:42 am

A brief note on Donald Keene

In one of those coincidences without further meaning, just before reading recently about the death of the noted translator of Japanese literature Donald Keene, I rediscovered Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, which I had bookmarked to a page regarding the difficulty Japan’s nationalists had in overturning the popularly supported globalist perspective of 1931 that led to Tokyo’s being awarded the 1940 Olympic Games in conjunction with an accompanying World’s Fair. Both were cancelled in 1937 when the nationalists, who had by then dominated the government, asserted that the two projects required too much of the raw materials needed to conduct the newly launched war with China. We know the rest of the history.

Donald Keene had read Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji as a university freshman shortly before Pearl Harbor and become enamored of the “beautiful and distant world” (his words) reflected in its pages. So it is less surprising than it otherwise might be that he volunteered to study Japanese to act as a wartime interrogator, and between the direct experience and study of a box of bloodstained personal diaries recovered from the battlefield, emerged from the war with such an empathy for Japan and its people that he became the foremost postwar American translator of Japanese literature.

Philip Kapleau, who became the Zen roshi of a number of my college friends, gained his empathy for Japanese culture while serving as translator at postwar trials of some of the nationalists who had squelched Japan’s prewar manifestations of multinationalist outreach.

Tooze’s book has the distinction of offering a vertiginously global version of the dozen years following World War I; just opening the book at random again, I encountered a description of Argentine disorder as indicative of the wave of far-left activism of 1919-1921 that resulted in the counter-rise of fascism in a few countries and a “return to order” in the rest as a result of what Tooze terms “the Great Deflation” creating a few years of economic stability that lasted until the Great Depression. I recall having bought the book in 2014 with the feeling that it would completely alter my vague impressions of the world between the wars and its relevance for today, but now I feel like I really need to read it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/obituaries/donald-keene-dead-at-96.html
joculum: (Default)
2019-01-20 04:46 am

A Prolegomenon to a Proposed Series of Essays, with a Passing Reference to Jean Toomer

I am increasingly interested in the position occupied by would-be synthesizers in moments of cultural change when everything is falling apart at the seams, and the freshly separated parts are doing their most damnable to wipe out the parts from which they have separated. In such messy circumstances, literal as well as metaphoric violence is often the order of the day, or more accurately the disorder.

The synthesizers recognize that things will never again be the way they were before, and they try to invent ways to stitch the parts back together in a different order, which they hope will be a better order. All too often, the proposed New Order is a worse solution than the existing disorder, and proposed New Disorders are not much better in practice. Yet sometimes the least plausible of proposals turns out to be the best possible solution in a world in which the best of options is barely distinguishable from the worst. Burkean conservatives’ assertion that the existing order is always the best one because all alternatives are worse has more truth in it than proponents of radical revolution believe, but it is a false assertion on balance, nonetheless. (That modifier, “on balance,” is also what is lacking in the us-vs.-them dynamics of moments of social and cultural change, when things seem to be either black or white, one or zero, or any other binary system you care to use as a metaphor. Which side are you on? The lines are clearly drawn in a case like Harlan County where the labor-organizing song asked that question; not so clearly drawn in faceoffs where the best answer would be “neither” or “both.”)

Depending on the starting place and personal conditions of the would-be synthesizers, they end up being martyred, or degenerating into crackpot theorizers when they weren’t that from the beginning, or being brought down by the personal instabilities that made them want to reach for impossible outcomes in the first place. Usually the best outcome is that their legacy is re-evaluated by theorists who try to cram it into the rigid categories the synthesizers were trying to overcome, often by separating the legacy into the parts that can contribute valuable insights to the existing order and the useless parts stemming from personal trauma. The possibility that the combination of traumatized thinking and remodeled versions of existing thinking might itself yield hitherto unnoticed insights, ones that were unavailable to the synthesizers themselves, is rarely considered. When it is, it is usually considered by yet another would-be synthesizer, so the needed combination of unconventional perspective and psychological stability is once again not met. The world needs more stolid close readers of impossible visions in order to expand what is considered possible. This obviously does occur for particular modes of thought on a regular basis throughout history, but it is quickly regularized into a linear story of thinkers ahead of their time who had the same thoughts as their successors, only sooner, or who were misled by their surrounding culture. If Sir Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy and Biblical interpretation, it is considered an unfortunate byproduct of his immersion in the presuppositions of his era, rather than as possibly the only, ultimately futile, approach Newton could take to ensuring the preservation of a universe that was not entirely “Newtonian.” Newtonian physics may have come from the beginning with an asterisk noting its non-ultimacy, but it is probably not worthwhile to pursue what may be an undecidable question.

For that reason, I am trying not to get bogged down in the details of failed synthesizers, just to extract a very few commonalities en route to considering, but not answering, more productive questions. Probably the best we can do in any generation is improve the questions, against the forces that are forever impelling us to ask the wrong ones. “The rest is not our business,” to quote a boundary-pushing conservative who failed to perceive the full implications of the boundaries he was pushing.

That reference to T. S. Eliot illustrates the depth of my problem, or perhaps the problem of any re-reading that brushes history against the grain (to quote Walter Benjamin) in these troublous days. The dislodging of once-sacrosanct reputations is such that any attempt to re-examine them ought to come with a trigger warning. So many areas of investigation have turned into conceptual minefields, to mix metaphors in a fashion worthy of Thomas Friedman.

I know far too little about Jean Toomer to express a responsible opinion, certainly not to go up against thinkers whose judgment I respect more than mine (Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example), but this New York Times article doesn’t seem to quite get the implications of Toomer’s search for a new type of humanity that would mutate out of ill-considered racial and social stereotyping. He obviously wanted to live his life as freely as possible, but he seems to have hoped to find what it would take to shatter the “mind-forged manacles” (my use of the Blake allusion should not be taken literally as implying influence) that had created an oppressive society—a goal that would require more than simple political revolution on the one hand or “passing” as a less exalted practical alternative on the personal level. Rudolph P. Byrd wrestled with Toomer’s stint with George Gurdjieff, and I need to re-read his book on the subject, especially since Byrd co-wrote with Gates the afterword to Toomer’s novel in which the subject of passing for white stirred such controversy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/books/review-cane-jean-toomer.html

Since writing this, I have discovered a very newly published Paris Review essay that does more justice to the problem of Toomer’s self-identification, and have perused some indignant refutations of Gates and Byrd’s essay that were published when it first appeared in 2011. I can’t safely venture an opinion, but these writers can (Marcia Alesan Dawkins, for example, or Ismail Muhammad, here):

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/01/14/how-jean-toomer-rejected-the-black-white-binary/
joculum: (Default)
2019-01-18 08:15 pm

as promised, new entries will follow, starting now with "the survival of the beautiful"

A feature story in the January 13, 2019 New York Times Magazine deals with the questions in evolution posed by beauty, or what a book of a few years ago called The Survival of the Beautiful. The elements of what many of us humans call the beautiful in nature are not only in excess of what ought to be required to attract a mate, they are frequently maladaptive to the point of dysfunction (i.e., they diminish the likelihood of the individual’s physical survival long enough to reproduce). So: why beauty? Why superfluous excess of one sort or another when utility dictates something less complicated?

Of course some of the reproductive attractors in nature are what many humans would call grotesque, just as the full range of human sexuality is such that anyone perusing its history will find it impossible to identify with all the possibilities that human beings have evolved for successive mate attraction or simple sexual arousal (and in fact, the conditions for the latter in many individuals have often militated against success in the former). But given the assumption that evolution proceeds by random mutational accident, that some trait emerges and survives purely because its payoff in terms of reproductive success outweighs its dysfunctional qualities diminishing survival, why is there so much of the sheer excess? Granted, in sheer numbers and overall body weight, self-evidently functional mutations in swarms of unnoticed insects probably predominate on the planet, but each genus and species is working autonomously, so that the sheer size of one species’ plain-vanilla successful approach to reproductive strategies has no relevance to the extravagance of the wide variety of species that go to spectacular, seemingly superfluous lengths to accomplish the same goal. (That’s the problem: on some level, this type of superfluous accident at least doesn’t do enough damage to be selected out of existence, and seems to recur again and again and again. Beauty, or superfluous complexity, gets selected for rather than against a lot more often than we would expect if random survival were really just a brutally efficient mechanism for picking the least complicated winners. It is, at the least, a brutally inefficient mechanism.)

Also to the point, why do we have aesthetic responses of pleasure and/or disgust when we encounter what we call beautiful or grotesque aspects of nature? Even if it is what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, an accidental feature of a functional evolutionary stratagem, it is a very strange spandrel. Working with Gould’s metaphor, many spandrels are just left blank. A few are filled with paintings done in a shape with which most artists would not choose to work, given an isolated canvas. Why do we try, and what varieties of things do we choose to put on our spandrels, having evolved them as an architectural feature?

All of this implies a multidisciplinary book, and if I ever find time to work through all the books about “beauty” that appeared a couple of decades ago, I am sure I’ll find passages discussing all these topics. These are just the ones I made up off the top of my head, based on past reading of sources I have totally forgotten.

As usual in meditations of this sort in my weblogs, the real point at which I am getting is not the problem of the beautiful but the problem of the New York Times article. At the moment at which I expected it to be getting down to the real issues, it ended, having made no more than one or two points about why evolution is more complex than we have thought, and there is lots of research and debate left to be conducted.

I am constantly being reminded of the diminished attention span of readers who have an immense number of things to skim through. As they say in abbreviations, tl; dr. (“Too long; didn’t read,” for the benefit of those who will read this post from the time when that abbreviation is no longer in use, which, given past internet practice, should be no more than six or seven months from now.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/behind-the-cover-beauty-and-the-beasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront
joculum: (sarai and i)
2018-09-16 04:10 pm

The Return of Joculum, At Least for the Moment

You will recall that this historically overlaid, weirdly repetitive Dreamwidth account was expanded in the wake of the sale of LiveJournal to Russian commercial interests who established new operating rules under the laws of the Russian Federation, rules for which the English translation was not to be regarded as definitive.

The original purpose of the account, however, was not to serve as the repository of everything in the original LiveJournal account (which it now is) but to be a new beginning, an attempt to summarize what then seemed the valid parts of joculum.livejournal.com and move their insights onward towards something closer to a definitive conclusion about the human condition.

As a visiting philosophy professor whom I despised used to say in his seminars in my long-ago days as a doctoral candidate, “Good gosh, what rubbish.” I am still determined to make some sense of our fast-changing models of the human condition, and to dissent from them in ways I deem appropriate, but I must accept that I shall appear like, and perhaps actually be like, the legendary autodidact who ran a used bookshop out near Stone Mountain, a regional geographic feature that he regarded not as the site of an immense, aesthetically dubious bas-relief homage to the Confederacy but as the repository of nothing less than the Akashic Records of theosophical fame. I acquired a copy of his rare, memorably confident self-published book defending this thesis, and am going to get around to reading it just as soon as I finish reading a host of more intellectually fashionable but possibly not any more defensible disquisitions on the nature and destiny of the human species.

But since it seems time to move some of my speculations out of the realm of Facebook, where I have been keeping them in friends-only seclusion against potential assaults by the world’s increasingly violent trolls, Joculum (Grady Harris’ sobriquet for my online presence, derived from my old artpapers.org address of “jcullum,” and a Latin word meaning either “little joke” or “I’m kidding,” depending on whether it is read as a noun or a verb) is back.

Mr. Harris, of whom little has been heard since he was subsumed into the localized artworld in which I earn my infrequently compensated living, used to encourage me to temper my speculative bent by reading genre fiction, which I still mostly do not do. I believe, however, that Mr. Harris had it backwards; genre fiction at its best is a way of positing opinions that the writer actually holds but has no way of subjecting to empirical tests, or opinions that the writer deeply suspects may be true but would prefer not to advance as actual hypotheses. At its second best, of course, genre fiction of the misnamed sci-fi or fantasy variety is a way of having erudite fun, with no deeper purpose in mind; but the beauty of what we know about the unconscious mind (a concept that has come back into seeming plausibility in recent decades) is that fantasy is often a way of creating defenses against a model of reality that the writer is unwilling to admit may have more to it than she or he wishes to contemplate. The problem is that even after this realization by the reader, this sort of fiction tells us nothing more than the state of the author’s own unconscious mind; even if it resonates deeply with our own, its intuitions probably need to be tempered by a skeptical reading of other people’s off-balance serious speculations, whether those speculations are autodidact booksellers pondering material repositories of immaterial akashic records or New Atheists pondering the just-so stories of evolutionary biology. Otherwise we go off the deep end in bodies of water in which we are ill equipped to swim.

That said, I hope to post here some of the leftover fragments from my upcoming fulfillments of editors’ assignments for the various magazines and websites for which I still write from time to time.
joculum: (not)
2018-05-24 09:35 am

Many snarky titles for this have occurred to me. I choose none of them.

I suppose that the folks whom I have christened the New Agnostics take seriously the antique maxim, “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that no one is plotting against you.” The cognitive value of hallucinatory states may be close to zero, but if such states sometimes yield verifiable perceptions that should not be possible, there is a set of data that these people deem worthy of investigation. The fact that the investigatory field is already clogged with cranks, charlatans and self-deluded innocents does not preclude the possibility of developing a methodology that will stand up to critique from all directions, like any other analytical method.
joculum: (Default)
2018-05-23 08:19 pm

I'm going to put this right here because this is the place no one will think to look for it

In 1988, I curated my first exhibition (for Untitled Gallery, a little space in Atlanta’s Little Five Points, on the appropriately or ultimately inappropriately named Euclid Avenue, the straight main drag of one of the least straight neighborhoods in the ATL, in several senses of the shifting idiom). “Angels and Erasures: A Show About the Possibility of the Sacred” was full of bodies illuminated by their own light, sort of reflecting the mysticism of Scotus Erigena that I had learned from Ezra Pound and from the Troubadours he revered and reversed, for his blend of sexuality and disembodiment was a different animal in every respect.

There were a couple of unconventional pro-Christian paintings by Lyn Miller, one of a guardian angel hovering over a mother and child (but there was something disturbing about the relationship of the Bodiless Power of Heaven and the two bodies peacefully embedded in slumber) and the other a portrait head of Jesus framed in sharp shards of broken mirrors. But by and large, through my own choice, the mood was more of flesh becoming light and transcending its own embodiment. (I could say more, if I could locate the images of the paintings themselves, which I am sure I can track down if I keep at it.)

The relationship between the light-infused or effusive bodies in my exhibition and the Rainbow Body of Tibetan Buddhism or the Transfiguration Body infused with the Light of Tabor in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a topic to which I hope to return. For now, I want to move on to contemplate “All That Is Holy,” a 2018 exhibition curated by Christopher Hall for Blue Mark Studios.

What strikes me about this exhibition (I omit from consideration Hall’s own immense oeuvre of drawings incorporating variations on the world’s iconography of all possible traditions) is that except for the sculpture of Deborah Hutchinson, there is no real consideration of the possibility of transcendence in this lifetime, of moments of transfiguration in which the flesh is immersed in a marginal experience derived from beyond itself, although what that “beyond” is can still be kept fruitfully in question. I made no effort to define it in my own show, only to present it in its assorted manifestations.

Most of the artists in “All That Is Holy” appear to be concerned with burlesquing or unmasking the conventions of Christian religious practice, revealing the sordid sexual underpinnings of pretentious images of piety or affirming the possibilities of a sexuality detached from the repressions of a churchly upbringing. One artist, Elyse Defoor, deals with the symbolism of marriage in which female sexuality has historically been bridled as the putative virgin becomes the bride, and the gorgeousness of fabric turned into a symbol of hoped-for happiness that is seldom fulfilled in the male-female relationship that follows. Once again, religion is a this-worldly device for managing unruly energies, and lights from above on the road to Damascus or robes shining brighter than the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration are experiences relegated to the lives of Paul and Jesus, as out of the question for would-be believers today as the New Testament’s raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead would be for modern believers and skeptics alike.

And yet religious history is full of what I and a few other folks have termed Really Weird Shit. The prevailing assumption is that not one word of this type of tale is true, for human culture is full of folktales and whoppers, and lying and dissimulation is one of the marks of civilization as we know it. (Uttering conscious untruths is, anyway; I question whether dissimulation is strictly a human trait; when Wittgenstein wrote “Why can’t a dog lie? Is he too honest?” he was correct in assuming that the ability to speak an untruth is a distinctly human trait, but if lying depends on language, dissimulation does not, as anyone knows who has witnessed a canine fearfully trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with the catastrophe for which it expects to be punished.)

The narratives are doubtless exaggerations, or interpretations after the fact, squeezed into the categories inherited from the experiencer’s culture. But strange things have happened throughout history, and those who have experienced them often have no categories that quite fit the experiences they have had. Some of the more imaginative and/or systematic of such experiencers have been the founders of religions that then were taken on faith, and misconstrued in good faith, by those who never had such experiences but were prepared to believe the ones who told of them. And generations later, art history would analyze critically the farrago of symbols of sick sexuality that are lampooned in “All That Is Holy.”

But the question of what, if anything, lies out there on the margins of consciousness is a topic that has come to fresh contemplation in the era of psychedelics and the neuroscience of mystical experience, and Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions is a text with which I have been struggling for over a year. There is an essay to be wrested from a confrontation between Terry Eagleton’s acerbically revisionary survey Materialism, in which the New Materialists are skewered as gleefully as the Old Transcenders, and Kripal’s opus, which sums up the conclusions he reaches in half a dozen previous books regarding the validity of marginal experiences and the likelihood that we are not what we think we are, at all.

Right now I can’t get further than this preliminary note, which I am posting for the sake of having it out there alongside my other numerous failures and false starts in this department. I am intrigued by the lack of interest in the whole question, or outright hostility to it in an era in which fundamentalism or heavyhanded literalism reigns in religion and systematic skepticism alike. We are not good at doubting our own doubt or our own belief, since if we could see our own errors we would not be making them, but rather making up spur of the moment explanations for why they are not errors at all, but paradoxes, or subjects for further investigation.
joculum: (asleep)
2017-03-22 09:42 am

A Census of Hallucinations: or, another subjective thousand words written before breakfast

The Paul Nash exhibition just concluded at Tate Britain is a visual summation of some of the great traumas and struggles of the twentieth century: the fundamental disruption created by the First World War, obviously, followed by the exploration of what Gerard Manley Hopkins had already called the “cliffs of fall” in the human psyche that made possible not only the deluded self-destruction of 1914-18 but the even more delusional destructiveness that led to the same thing, only worse, in 1939-45.

Nash turned all this into landscape considered as psychic projection, from his paintings of the eerily devastated forests of his paintings immediately following the First World War to his dead ocean of wrecked warplanes in Totes Meer. His photographs, which initially he thought of as visual notes for details of paintings, today seem like some of his most profound work: the Monster Field series of distorted-looking fallen trees, when juxtaposed with his studies of uncanny aspects of the built environment, suggest that human beings continuously find themselves in an interpreted world in which they are not very securely at home (to paraphrase Rilke’s line from the Duino Elegies).

The insecurity of interpretation is something that Friedrich Nietzsche made much of in the nineteenth century, but so did the Society for Psychical Research. I’ve been paging through Alen Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, years after I first acquired it, and am reminded that while theosophists were off making visionary astral journeys to distant planets, F. W. H. Myers and the Society he co-founded were engaged in anything but what today’s skeptics like to call “woo”—they simply assumed that there was a reality at the margins of normal consciousness that we do not understand, and took it as their responsibility to approach that marginal experience with all the empirical rigor they could muster. (Whether they could muster enough is in dispute, as noted below). Accordingly, they undertook, among many other investigations, a Census of Hallucinations. Myers made assumptions about the structure of reality that semiotic philosopher C. S. Peirce, for one, regarded as based on embarrassingly insufficient evidence, but Myers was using what he regarded as empirically available data to construct his models of the several possible selves and the invisible interconnection of selves with other selves. He was not depending, like Madame Blavatsky, on inwardly perceived revelations from Tibetan mahatmas, however dubiously metaphysical his own conclusions may seem to us today.

The publication in 1899 of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was the inaugural salvo in an assault on what Freud called “the black mud of occultism,” an assault in which, nevertheless, Freud refused to exclude the possibility of telepathy, and indeed worked it into his theories about the nature of the Primal Horde at the beginnings of civilization. In subsequent decades, while Freudians battled it out with behavioralists about the nature of the body in which consciousness might or might not be an accidental epiphenomenon, Myers’ speculations based on collections of data ran up against a singular difficulty: that the marginal experiences under investigation proved as difficult to replicate under laboratory conditions as, say, moments of innovation in the writing of poetry (not to mention ballet, mountain climbing, or gymnastics). Moments of creative insight, of course, can be considered heightened examples of thoroughly mundane processes; the thesis of Myers’ successors was that the so-called paranormal is likewise a heightened instance of mundane lesser processes, processes to which we do not pay attention because we believe that they cannot exist.

Myers felt obligated to create hypotheses to explain “genius” as much as to explain telepathy and precognition, a reminder that the 1890s represented the efflorescence of many strands of thought that the intellectual mainstream thought of the twentieth century would dismiss as intrinsically unworthy of serious consideration. Most of the decade’s cultural manifestations were irrational in and of themselves; the efforts to analyze and explain phenomena perhaps wrongly associated with irrationality tend to be forgotten.

Written towards the end of his life, Oliver Sacks’ recent book on hallucinations cites a few cases that go beyond his glancing reminder that we are prone to impose meaning where there is none. Sacks doesn’t censor these cases; neither does he offer hypotheses, in contradistinction from his accounts of neurological disorders in which the categories that our perceptions and our language construct become hopelessly muddled.

Owen’s book on occultism and modernism also examines Aleister Crowley’s empiricist approach to appropriating magical practice, another case of a skeptical intellect determined to discern the factual basis underlying imaginatively constructed ancient interpretations, and, if possible, to make use of their practices. Crowley’s theatricality makes it difficult to decide just how much he shared with the S.P.R. researchers the knowledge that the consciousness of the practitioner creates a scrim of illusion that makes perception of the reality being encountered particularly difficult.

The twentieth century became so aware of the scrim of illusion that by the twenty-first century the predominant assumption was that the notion that there were any invisible connections among individual selves was as absurd as the assumptions underlying magical practice., not least because there was no self and no perceiving embodied consciousness that could not be reduced to uploadable algorithms. For those who took note of the embodied nature of consciousness, making it not reducible to mathematically based algorithms, the very nature of embodiment meant that there could be no invisible communication between bodies other than the physically limited effect of ordinarily imperceptible materials such as pheromones.

Those inclined to believe otherwise have to accept the fact that they are in the position of a Galileo asserting that “eppur si muove” without having something parallel to Galileo’s theory to explain why it moves. Their only comfort is that Joseph Campbell’s assertion seventy years ago that “[humanity itself] is now the crucial mystery” has proven more true than he ever believed, as nearly all theories have been called sufficiently into question that the only way to construct a comprehensive theory of human existence is to truncate large parts of it by declaring it out of bounds. It would be possible, for example, to explicate the roots of large parts of Paul Nash’s oeuvre in terms of the origins and cultural shaping of the emotions projected into his visual structures, but the transhumanist movement would ask why anyone would want to waste their time on something like that, and quite a few other bodies of theory can present reasons why this is not a line of investigation worth pursuing, or even a valid line of investigation at all.
joculum: (Default)
2017-03-15 12:32 am

On George Steiner, Lou Reed and Nico, and other cultural diversions of the preceding century

I’m aware that my most recent Facebook posts have been making elementary observations that would elicit pitying smiles among my few academic friends, so possessed are these observations of what academicians regard as “a firm grasp on the obvious.“ But the obvious is exactly what nobody seems to have much of a grasp on in today’s America.

One problem, of course, is that my “obvious” is not your “obvious,” and vice versa. I just realized that 2017 is not only the fiftieth anniversary of the album The Velvet Underground and Nico, it is the fiftieth anniversary of George Steiner’s Language and Silence. The two had a more or less equal impact on me at age twenty-one; the one showing that it was possible to create astonishing songs about heroin and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, the other introducing me to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Ernst Bloch, and Georg Lukács, all of which was pretty heady stuff for a boy from a little town in Florida who was also absorbing that year’s release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, from which “White Rabbit” became an anthem of the Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love.

All this comes to mind because yesterday I read the 115 pages of George Steiner’s A Long Saturday: Conversations (with Laure Adler, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan). In these conversations, Steiner evinces a familiarity with Alain Resnais’ classic films and regrets that he never engaged in systematic study of cinema alongside his magisterial grasp of European philosophy and literature. He also expresses regret that he has never been able to get his head or his emotions around popular music from rock to hip-hop and beyond. (And yet he was one of the first to grasp the implications of the shift in consciousness that accompanied the ubiquity of electronic media that would eventually become the digital revolution, and pretty much had all that figured out by age forty. The fact that he was only five years older than Leonard Cohen left me feeling that I was going to have to run as fast as possible if a kid from Small Town South were to catch up with modern and contemporary culture before age forty. Leonard Cohen’s first album also appeared in 1967.)

Although I didn’t know it at the time, 1967 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Paul Valéry’s epoch-making poem "La Jeune Parque.” I just read that poem in translation for very nearly the first time a few months ago, and was flabbergasted to discover that although it tackles the big issues of love and death, it is also a poem about a young woman trying to figure out how to avoid becoming just a decorative status symbol for a husband. Given that he spent four years writing it while the First World War was going on, it makes me want to go out and read a biography of Valéry, who was even more of a polymath than Steiner.

I dwell on this because the translation in the new book of conversations calls the poem “The Young Park,” and while “Parque” does mean “park,” here it refers to one of the Parcae, the Three Fates. The poem is always cited by its original French title, because “The Young Parca” sounds silly and “The Young Fate” isn’t much better.

I know translators don’t get paid much for their largely unappreciated job (Steiner published an entire book about translation, After Babel, so he would sympathize). But I feel like someone translating a book so steeped in European culture should know a poem that is considered one of the two or three greatest French poems of the twentieth century.

Of course, nobody can know everything, although Steiner has done a good job of giving the appearance that he does. One of the refreshing things about these conversations at almost the age of ninety is the extent to which Steiner admits to the things he doesn’t know. Some of us felt back in the day that George Steiner and Susan Sontag were all we needed, because everything Steiner didn’t know, Sontag did, and vice versa—but both of them gave the impression that of course they knew more than they were writing about, they just couldn’t be bothered to address the topics.

In practice, we needed a number of writers about popular culture as well, because popular culture was already as arcane as, say, the visuals of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, to understand which one has to know both Pipilotti Rist and the orisha Oshun, along with a good deal of African-American and feminist thought and imagery.
joculum: (Default)
2017-01-02 03:49 pm

new illusions and new confusions

For reasons too complicated to bother to explain, I have had to import my LiveJournal blog entries into my Dreamwidth account, thus creating something of a hash.

The advantage is that everything worth saving is now in one secure location. The disadvantage is that a great deal of incidental dross has come with it.

Apologies to anyone who has been following the few Dreamwidth entries, which were originally supposed to provide a clearer path through the labyrinth. I no longer care much whether I find my own way out of the labyrinth and thus cannot claim to be providing much of a way out for anyone else, either. There are ways out, but I cannot follow most of them or teach others how to follow them.
joculum: (an ordinary evening in new haven?)
2016-03-04 11:51 am

publishing for the historical record

Am feeling melancholy about the various LiveJournals likely to disappear in the not-so-foreseeable future, some of which (not just mine) were designed to possess a degree of permanence. I should think the desirable outcome would be a version of public posts in which all the irrelevant or no longer relevant posts would be reset to private and the remainder produced as a downloadable e-book and/or print version. For now, I have simply moved them to Dreamwidth for later editing.

I have concluded that I am not going to produce the definitive explanation of our historical moment (or even my confused version of same) and have now restricted myself to topical posts on counterforces.blogspot.com and joculum.dreamwidth.org, and was thinking of writing some notations about such topics as St-John Perse's poems fifty years later, and what is and is not relevant in what has lately been termed The Age of Earthquakes (regarding which, see my review essay on Counterforces), but these proposed LiveJournal posts have now been consigned to the realm of might-have-beens.
joculum: (mughal virgin and child)
2015-12-22 11:52 am

(no subject)



Yesterday was the Feast of Saint Thomas the Empiricist (a.k.a. Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic), although many church traditions have moved his feast day to a season less bound up with the Incarnation.

Which is unfortunate, since the foundation story of Thomas has to do with the nature of the resurrection body, and thereby with the body itself, and thereby with consciousness. You know, Michael Murphy Esalen Institute kind of stuff.

Every year I find myself returning at this season to a 1976 book by Geoffrey Ashe titled The Virgin and finding myself astonished by the questions one can ask if one simply suggests that the texts reflect some actual happening on which people have hung their best guesses as to what it was that happened. Ashe insists that oddly disturbing questions arise if we start from the empirical evidence of what was said about the Virgin Mary in successive generations, much more so than if we start from the easy supposition that someone made up something out of no evidence whatsoever for anything. He eventually argues that forces within the Church were constantly going against the Church’s express logic to the point that it took quite a while to bring these disruptive energies into line, but that isn’t where he starts; he starts with the question of whether we can know anything about the historical Mary by taking seriously the idea that mainline scholars would dismiss out of hand, the notion that the most mythic-sounding elements of the Gospels reflect different fragmentary strands of reports of real events that happened to real people in real places.

Ashe’s just-so story to make sense of this hypothesis, which he never claims to be more than his own must-have-been narrative to put alongside the must-have-been narratives that later gave rise to Marian doctrine, makes an interesting moiré pattern when overlaid on a just-so story like James Tabor’s over-the-top opposing hypothesis in The Jesus Dynasty (Tabor has quite a lot of fun with his discovery of the existence of a Roman soldier named Pantera who served in the province of Syria at the right time to be the Pantera whom Jewish polemicists identified in the fourth century as the real father of Jesus, while Ashe finds it curious that it took four centuries for a calumny to come to light that should have put paid to the birth narratives straightaway—but both writers hang their opposing hypotheses on the prospect that there was some peculiar sense of expectation surrounding Jesus’ family lineage that makes sense of why a peculiarly well-versed intellectual from a nowhere mountain village would have been taken seriously in some quarters, even though as the Gospels themselves assert, others scoffed that nothing good ever came out of a dusty little burg like Nazareth and still others of Jesus’ close associates thought he was completely insane.)

In the end, Ashe and Tabor have to be placed as opposite outliers in the competition to establish the historical Jesus (and thereby the historical Mary), but it is intriguing that Bart Ehrman, skeptic among skeptics, is slowly coming round to the notion that something strange must have sparked the conviction of the bodily resurrection, so that the story of Christianity is from the beginning a story of disruptions in ordinary consciousness, albeit also involving competing interpretations of those disruptions.

This seems to be a rising hypothesis in religious studies at present, and it is good to see scholars puzzling over the possibility that there are real experiences encoded even in those present-day new religions that were expressly made up by their founders to bamboozle the credulous. (But those religions tend to be litigious about such assertions by outsiders, whereas the ones I find most intriguing are the ones that assert the reality of the experiences and that the credulous need to learn to be less naively credulous.)

Charles Williams, about whose foundational flaws we have learned a great deal more in recent decades, wrote that such poorly explored realms of altered consciousness were quite real, and prone to misinterpretation by those who encountered them and came back “windy with a graph or a gospel,” and also that the Church ought to find room within its boundaries for a Society of Saint Thomas Didymus Skeptic.

The society seems to have formed on the ill-defined meeting ground of neuroscience and the humanities rather than in the heart of a Church ever less inclined to intellectual speculation, but it seems appropriate to remember this long-ago declaration by a singularly speculating Anglican layman, even if I post it on the birthday of Kenneth Rexroth rather than the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle.
joculum: (mughal virgin and child)
2015-12-05 04:31 am

"It is a terrible thing to see a world die twice...." [K. Rexroth, "Un Bel di Vedremo"]

I let my commentary migrate away from LiveJournal (and, for that matter, languish on Dreamwidth, as I note in the edited version of this 2015 post) because the conversation I started with myself seems to have been evolving in parallel strands in the worlds of academia, and since none of the other scholars clawing their way up Mount Analogue ever read this journal (and if they did, I invite them to e-mail me to that effect or private-message me on some other social media), it is difficult to continue to bore my handful of friends with my usual topics. The friends-only summary I offered of my essay for a European university press met, as I expected, with zero response. (It doesn't help, of course, that it was so tedious in its condensed version that I myself couldn't get through it.)

I find essay-length posts on my friends page that cry out to be collected into an eminently publishable book; but as Basar, Coupland, and Obrist write in The Age of Earthquakes, their update for the digital age of McLuhan and Fiore's The Medium Is the Massage, "Your blog is now one of seven billion blogs." Which is a witticism, since it only seems like every human being now alive on earth has a blog. In fact, some of them only use Snapchat.

I have been somewhat more active on counterforces.blogspot.com, which people tell me they actually follow (and thank me for).
joculum: (Default)
2015-05-19 09:52 am

a greatly delayed cross-posting from a friends-only post on LiveJournal

T. M. Luhrmann has an extraordinary capacity for redefining issues about which folks have been muddled for generations, if not centuries. “Faith Vs. Facts,” in the April 19, 2015 New York Times ( see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/t-m-luhrmann-faith-vs-facts.html?ref=international&_r=0 ) clarifies fifty years of muddle by redefining religious behavior versus religious content; once we suspect that holding beliefs religiously is not the same thing as believing in a divinity of any description, then of course Communism and atheism and vegetarianism and environmentalism and free-market economics are religions. Ordinary language already knew this; we do things “religiously.”

So if in fact “sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives,” and “sacred values may even have different neural signatures in the brain,” as Scott Atran and his colleagues* would argue, then the mysteries of mysticism are suddenly clarified; why mystics are so often at odds with their religions, to the point of having no interest in dogmatic tenets and traditional practice alike. They are taking a completely different approach to relating to the forces that govern their lives (never mind what those forces really are) because they are not religious. They often aren’t “spiritual,” either; they frequently take something like what I have been calling a (w)hol(l)y agnostic stance, operating empirically and rationally within their definitions of reason. (“Mysticism” being one of those cluttered categories in which we park everything that doesn’t fit into some other category, rather like “genre fiction,” there are of course mystics who are totally emotional and anti-verbal as well as ones who are so concerned with the limits of language that they might as well be Ludwig Wittgenstein,, who seems to have understood in the Tractatus what mysticism really is.)

But this means that we need to discard the concept of mysticism even as we apply the term “religion” to any set of beliefs in which total identification with particular god-terms (see, we’ve had the concepts for two generations, we just haven’t known how literally correct they were) is more important than fidelity to demonstrable fact—a position that is easily defensible, since ‘fact” is so often mediated by social position and psychological predisposition. We’ve known for a very long time that being a rationalist is frequently the opposite from being rational, but now we have better grounds on which to argue that. As with so many false binaries, the opposite does not apply; being an irrationalist is not the opposite from being irrational, although there have been ample numbers of writers who have devoted considerable rational analysis to demonstrating why abstract reason just doesn’t cut it when it comes down to cases.

Getting back to those folks who don’t have much truck with god-terms and a great deal of truck with what some people call God but those particular folks often don’t—we have no terms with which to distinguish belief-inclined agnostics who both think and believe that there is something out there but we don’t quite know what (one species of mystic) from emotion-based believers who, however, don’t have much use for religion as opposed to direct experience. As good ol’ Ludwig would say, “Don’t say they must have something in common or they would not both be called ‘mystics.’ Don’t think, but look!” How do they behave, and why do they behave that way? What is their relationship to that imperceptible thing we like to call reality? (College dorm exchanges of conceptual nonsense really do have a grasp on fundamental problems; the more we look at everyday reality, the less real it appears to be. We survive because we don’t ask ourselves how we navigate through this mess of physical circumstances that our self-aware primate species has been handed.)

Is there a bumper sticker that says “Anyone who has a firm grasp on reality is delusional”? I seem to recall something similar from the ‘60s, when nobody had a firm grasp on much of anything, but everyone of all political stripes believed passionately that they did. (We can thank the transgender activists for forcing grammarians to declare that “everyone” can now be construed as plural rather than awkwardly singular, by the way.)


*Luhrmann, who is a professor of anthropology at Stanford, doesn’t bother to identify the anthropologist Scott Atran, and as so often in web searches, an effort to learn more turned up something else, an astonishing book of essays from Edge edited by John Brockman, titled This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works—wherein a variety of academic professionals answer the question posed to them by Steven Pinker, “What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/22/this-explains-everything-brockman-edge-question/ But as always, you don’t have to fill up your bookshelves to read the 192 answers, all of which are published online: http://edge.org/annual-question/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation

As so often in such matters, Dr. Atran’s explication of his ideas makes me feel more uncertain of their validity rather than more convinced, illustrating how much one’s choice of rhetoric determines the plausibility of one’s opinions.
joculum: (cupid in the tropics)
2015-02-25 08:45 am

Another couple thousand words nobody has time to read, and that nobody really wants to read, anyway

Melancholy Reflections on the Rapid Demise of Vehicles of Information


I should start, as a certified Old Fart, by paying homage to antique academic proprieties (George Steiner would once have started such an essay as this with such a meditation) but my heart’s not in it. However, since I just read an essay by the founder/editor of the online journal n+1 surveying the onetime range of Partisan Review while bemoaning the decay of the idea of the public intellectual, I’ll begin (sigh) by noting the assorted print quarterlies that have come and gone over the decades, and mostly gone as the twenty-first century has come on apace.

But in fact my subject isn’t quarterly print journals, which I peruse these days via Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) when I seek out their contents at all. Academic libraries are hard to get into for people outside the university, the public libraries carry few such titles, and the surviving magazine stands in this part of the world stock a dwindling number of such journals. I am astonished, or was astonished as of a few years ago, to find that some of my favorite topics are now covered by new specialized journals, which keep their contents online firmly behind Jstor walls, as do a growing number of the surviving general-audience intellectual journals—if that isn’t an oxymoron, which at one time it wasn’t, there having been many “general audiences” in the sense of what was once meant by “middlebrow.” Today there are more niche "general audiences" than ever, many of them quite scholarly in pursuing their own particular obsessions, too. “Lowbrow” is a field of intellectual activity with its own hyperserious publications, galleries, and online discussion groups. There is also an online publication that proudly calls itself Hilobrow (hilobrow.com), which is singlehandedly passing on the information once provided by middlebrow quarterlies of various sorts, although not the sorts in which the New York intellectuals published their pontifications on public events (he said Peter-Piper-ishly).

There, I got that out of the way. And I got, however obliquely, into my real subject, which is a typically meandering complaint about the condition of rapidly evolving digital information sources.

I don’t know why I should be bothered. In the bygone days of print, “little magazines” were launched and died after a couple of issues, and did so with monotonous regularity, and most of them were even harder to locate than the most interesting online information sources—which is typically one reason they died off so quickly. A more common reason was that the editor lost interest or surplus income, which also is the reason that a good many online journals disappear completely. The difference is that as far as I know, some of the online journals genuinely disappear—when the servers that held them are wiped or the accounts are deleted, semi-decayed back issues are not offered for sale on eBay. One once-popular repository of photographs was recently completely obliterated, after a decent interval in which individual account holders could recover their own material if they saw fit. Presumably something like that will happen to Flickr someday, and to Instagram after or before it. (Snapchat has figured out how to self-destruct, or rather pretend to self-destruct, moment by moment.) The deletion of blog or photo hosts is not like shutting down a magazine; it is like burning down a library, only the library is the equivalent of the library Richard Brautigan once imagined, in which unpublished authors deposited the manuscripts of their unpublished books for perusal by library visitors. In the era of print-on-demand, we can foresee similar events of destruction—growing numbers of image-heavy books and periodicals depend on online publishers, which means that instead of such titles being available in the future from booksellers for one American cent, as is the case today with many secondhand titles for which there is only a small market, the half-dozen hard copies of some print-on-demand titles will be worth thousands of dollars. This is, by the way, already the case with recently published hard-copy exhibition catalogues with a short press run and no digital availability—there appear to be only two copies of one such catalogue for sale anywhere on the planet, both of them going for a few thousand dollars to whichever library or well-to-do connoisseur was too negligent to acquire them two years ago before the supply was exhausted.

This is a tedious topic, but I am struck by the fact that it appears to be so tedious that no one is paying particular attention to it, at least not in widely distributed discussion groups. There are ample numbers of library sites, I'm sure, that write about it all the time.

I continue to badger publishers to produce at least PDF-format versions of out of print books (e-books migrate among incompatible platforms, which is why I am happy that some people produce pirated online editions of books that were published in now-defunct electronic formats—bad for the authors’ royalties, but good for the accessibility of books that otherwise can’t be acquired, period. So far, the PDF has been a lasting multi-platform format.) —I continue to do that, I say; so I am not completely averse to the digital revolution. In fact, I have benefited from it beyond my wildest dreams, in terms of the coming of the universal library, and to the point that I feel deprived when I can’t locate some obscure title at least among the lists of the world’s antiquarian booksellers.

But I am disturbed by, among many other phenomena, the thoughtless wiping out of things like the popular websites of 2005. I’m sure they exist on the backup servers of entities that I shall not enumerate, but scholars can’t get at them. There is quite enough on the internet that its creators wish could be wiped out, but which cannot, not quite, so “the right to be forgotten” has become a popular topic. But things that ought not to be forgotten are also sent down the memory hole, as those who grew up on George Orwell's novel are wont to write.

Arts & Letters Daily is such a useful aggregator that the academic community stepped in to maintain it when its wonderfully opinionated editor died. (But of course it provides links, not copies of articles, and the links go dead.) And perhaps the ephemera of popular websites are too voluminous to be kept accessible over the long term; some years ago, the now-endangered film company Kodak established a program to collect donated home movies, snapshots and snapshot negatives, but most family photo albums end up in antique shops when they aren’t hauled off to the dumpster, and home movies simply decay beyond recovery, like digital information on 1980s diskettes. Historians of social trends would like to have access to every letter ever written, but few archives have the space to collect them en masse. The difference is that as far as I know, it has never occurred to a public archive to copy everything on Flickr or Pinterest. (If there is such an archive, I'd like to know about it.)

But archiving is, as is usual for me, not what I intended to grumble about, although I am glad I downloaded certain essays while they could still be downloaded. The fact that ten years from now I may find them as impossible to open as certain essays I wrote and stored on obsolete media in discontinued programs—that is a separate topic, also.

Actually, I am writing this because the modes in which information is produced are shifting so rapidly that it becomes difficult to know where best to look for it, or it is not being produced at all in the formats and lengths in which it was once produced.

Facebook is excellent as a crowdsourced aggregator, for people who accumulate the right sorts of Facebook friends—a whole range of links to essays in specialized topics appear in every hour’s news feed, and that makes it worth wading through the posts from otherwise highly intelligent friends obsessed with the strange habits of their cats. We all have our kinks, and now all of us can let the whole planet know about them.

But people’s Tumblr accounts are usually merely frustrating; Pinterest is an intermittently excellent if insufficiently catalogued visual resource for many things; and many excellent specialized blogs still exist on Blogger, a few on LiveJournal, a few on Wordpress—overall, so many of them that even when I discover them via someone’s link to a specific post, I can’t keep up with them and doubt that I could even if I put them all on RSS feeds. I don’t open many of the innumerable press releases I find in my inbox, and I don't look at a good many blogs I should be reading.

So I am not grumbling about lack of information per se (“at last he is getting to the point,” you say, but I have been covering, as usual, points I had long intended to make about other interconnected topics). I am feeling melancholy about the shift in our modes of attention themselves.

It’s a Twitter world, and unless it was an ironic aside in an advice column that seemed too genuinely earnest for that, someone’s not having a Twitter account is regarded as a major plus for certain millennials when it comes to making initial judgments as to who might be worth pursuing for more than a hookup. (One of my Facebook friends writes for Bustle and summarizes lots of stuff, but usually the satire is easier to tell from the real thing than it is on political websites.)

But for those of us who are a generation or so behind the curve, Facebook seems to have become as good as it gets for the mix of ideas, information, and images that blogs once gave us in greater profusion than they currently do. So many LiveJournal friends, and I myself, now limit themselves to random outbursts where once they would have gone on for pages (or very long scrolldowns) in far greater depth. Some have apparently said what they had to say in this format, and moved on to the immediate gratifications of posts in which they know from the sheer lack of “like”s whether it has gone over like the antique metaphor of the lead balloon. LiveJournal statistics don’t indicate whether a post was read by an interested person too busy to compose a comment or by a bot searching for a place to park an irrelevant spam message written in a Slavic or East Asian language.

I have moved or copied some of my most serious posts to another site (joculum.dreamwidth.org) that I try to keep clear of offhand remarks like this one, but I miss what once was a profusion of similar ambitious but not-ready-for-prime-time lucubrations by people who have given up on such pursuits because they get their spur-of-the-moment ideas out elsewhere. The elsewheres are too transient or quick-paced to be entirely useful; I sometimes remember to click through to someone’s Facebook timeline to see what I missed while I was having a life or writing for publication, but more often I forget, and more often what I missed consists of an enigmatic paragraph instead of a few thousand interesting words. (People increasingly write entirely for the people whom they private-message or see on a daily basis, making their posts unintelligible to 90% of their actual audience.)

Perhaps all this bloggy meandering, the written equivalent of thinking out loud for an audience, always was a bad idea. But I am feeling its absence severely, as my LJ friends feed has shrunk to almost nothing. The more so in that many of them never post to Facebook, either, and I refuse to migrate to Twittr even though the ill-chosen and ultimately unretractable 140 characters is the wave of the (near) future, or rather of a future so short-lived that it is already mostly becoming the past. (Don’t try to remind me that this has always been the case—as has recently been noted in some essays linked to in Facebook, the future is arriving much faster than it used to, which means the past is piling up at an accelerated rate, also. The ruins viewed by the Angel of History who is being blown forward by the storm from Paradise get bigger with considerably more rapidity as the wind picks up.)
joculum: (Default)
2015-02-24 04:37 am

Workpoints Towards: Tipping Points in the Anthropocene Era, Part Four

Workpoints towards “Tipping Points in the Anthropocene Era, Part Four”

There are no workpoints yet for Part Three, about human interaction and human creative practice. The problems are almost impossible to phrase correctly, never mind keep in mind simultaneously. Despite the common pressures imposed by globalized economies, human beings differ in background, environmental situation, and a multitude of other factors. It is easy to point out how minimum-wage discount-store employees in a Midwestern American city might have some financial stresses in common with corporation-employed copra dryers in a Pacific coral-atoll culture, but difficult to explicate the anxiety-provoking similarities and equally crucial differences between landlord-owned housing threatened by high rents and worker-owned housing threatened by rising sea levels literally lapping at the foundations. A particular minority-religion group in parts of Central Asia is being assisted into modernity by a global foundation, while members of the same minority group a few hundred miles to the south are threatened with physical extermination. Members of relatively disempowered ethnicities in advanced industrial societies are currently pointing out that the same structures of privilege operate throughout the social order: historically oppressed ethnicities receive only adequate rewards for doing the same work for which historically dominant ethnicities receive disproportionately great rewards, for example—even though all of them receive compensation that the less well employed of all ethnicities can only envy. There are disputes as to whether these ethnic disproportions deserve more recognition than gender-based disproportions, which are also a matter of historically disenfranchised and historically dominant categories of human beings. It is very difficult to talk about all these things at the same moment, while keeping in mind that environmentally caused cancers and lung diseases also affect different parts of the social order in different degrees, just as rising sea levels have a more immediate impact on those who live by the water—who on some coastlines are very rich, and on others, extremely poor. Discussion of these variables is rendered even more difficult by the inevitability of emotional turmoil over perceived offense, and even the workpoints for later discussions become unwieldy. So we are going direct to workpoints for Part Four, that part that is intended to address some of the problems discussed in Parts One through Three.

No one of the phenomena described in these twelve workpoints plays out in isolation, as is implied by the contortions of Parts One and Two as previously posted and the probable contortions of the as yet unwritten Part Three. It is useful to separate them out, however, for the simple purpose of achieving a bit of transient clarity before plunging back into the fatal muddle that is the labyrinth of the world. There are many permutations that could turn into further workpoints, but that would land us back in the middle of the labyrinth instead of in the—well, not quite the paradise of the heart, but hopefully something of which Comenius might approve. —Jerry Cullum, still asserting some version of Creative Commons right of ascription of authorship in this text’s subsequent uses



1) Under ordinary circumstances, we are not adequately equipped by our bodies’ biological wiring to consider concurrently all the tipping points in the anthropocene era, and how they interact with, alter, reinforce or diminish the impact of one another.

2) Even if we can learn how to expand both the length of our attention span and number of topics we can keep in mind simultaneously, we still run up against the problem of the fields of knowledge in which we simply aren’t any good. All of these fields need to be deployed together merely to understand the interacting tipping points—never mind do something about them that doesn’t suffer fatally from the law of unintended consequences.

3) So we need to figure out how to coordinate our collective information in a way to which our ordinary condition does not predispose us. If we entrust the task to machines, we need to know the consequences of how the information was presented to the machines, which at this point is determined by the human beings writing the algorithms that input and analyze the data. As we know from the websites that recommend books and merchandise and vacation sites to us, algorithms and programmers do err. (That’s a joking reference to Martin Luther’s “popes and councils do err,” by the way; which piece of information illustrates a subsequent tipping point of communally shared knowledge that must be dealt with.)

4) Machines can understand the world, but the point is to change it. (Can a machine be altruistic? Can a human being? Points for debate currently.)

5) The cultures within which we operate are not particularly capable of changing it in the ways it needs to be changed not just to maximize human happiness, but to ensure human survival.

6) The cultures within which we operate are currently under stress from the increasingly random collisions—for many different reasons—of populations with no more than semi-compatible value systems. While hybridity seems possible because it has been the way of the earth for millennia, right now in many situations a sophisticated hybridity is the exception, and uncomfortable accommodation the rule when there is not outright mutual rejection. This is a simple empirically verifiable reality regardless of what we wish were the case. What to do about it is the question that must be answered if we are to maintain societies in which most human beings would want to live—and there is a wide variety of opinion as to what sorts of societies particular human beings would prefer to inhabit, once we get beyond a few very widespread preferences.

7) A tiny minority of humanity is engaged in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs that are unsettling habits formed over millennia even more thoroughly than the technological breakthroughs of the previous hundred and fifty years put together. Yet the system within which these technologies are being deployed randomly and uncontrollably is governed by economic maxims developed a century and a quarter ago and applied as though they were immutable universal truths. The tension between the two forces is creating a level of social and economic insecurity among the vast majority of humankind that is giving rise to demodernizing movements, xenophobic mythologies, and other pathologies that occur when human beings are pushed to their limit culturally, financially, and environmentally, and mostly all at the same moment.

8) The stresses of global industrial society, including industrialized agriculture and resource extraction, are leading to mass extinctions of species, intensifying already existing cycles of climate variation and thus creating destructive alterations in food production and survival of natural systems (a.k.a. ecological networks), and also creating urban environments that perpetuate personal stress among an already socially and financially beleaguered global citizenry. This is so whether the governmental entity within which the stresses are being generated calls itself capitalist or socialist, whether the form of global capitalism being practiced is corporate or state-controlled and regardless of the philosophical background of the putatively socialist economy.

9) The vast majority of human beings are too busy with other matters to absorb even a stripped-down understanding of these problems, and even if they did absorb such an understanding, many would be inclined to reject solutions that are anathema to the crumbling cultures in which they were brought to adulthood.

10) The rapidity of change increases the level of incomprehension not only between cultures and generations, but between individuals. Fewer starting points than ever are available from which to analyze and choose among the possible outcomes of global difficulties.

11) Specialized subgroups of professionals whose collective body of knowledge comes as close as we can get at this point to solving the planet-wide crisis of our epoch hold each other in mutual contempt most of the time, and misunderstand each other’s points when they overcome their contempt long enough to attempt collaboration.

12) What is to be done?