et fini

I have declared the death of the Age of Blogging.  Res ipsa loquitur.

The Spirit of Salt (Former) Media Empire

extant:

fairly secret: the tower of reproach: each day a song is added to the stack my towering reproach
SICKTARTAR: creative meta-commentary on songs and a marketplace

defunct and/or static:

Phree as in Phreakshow: a defunct casualty of the Death of the Age of Blogging
nude al fresco and al dente: and another
It’s Rome, Baby: now frozen in time: a 20 year retrospective exhibition of text

CLICK HERE to make a donation

It's time for my annual appeal to help The Little Kitchen Food Shelf in Northeast Minneapolis.

The most important thing to know is that 100% of your donation in this appeal (after transaction fees are deducted by the payment service provider) will be spent on food for people in need.  My home church and our other partners cover all operational costs for the food shelf.

We are serving over 1,000 individuals per month.  We are listed with United Way 211 as an resource for emergency food and operate as a no-boundaries, no-restrictions food shelf, meaning for individuals in a sudden resource crisis we often serve as an emergency food source of last resort.

Our annual year-end online fundraising drive, focused on and kicking off with GiveMN's Give to the Max! Day promotion on Thursday, November 14, represents a significant and essential component of our annual budget.  We count on our performance in this fund drive to keep the doors open.

One thing I'm particularly proud of is our many partnerships with other local organizations and our commitment to providing fresh produce, promoting true healthy eating, and addressing complex and interrelated problems of food insecurity, malnutrition, food waste and economic access to fresh quality food.  Partners like the Eastside Food Co-Op, A Backyard Farm, and the Garden Gleaning Project share our commitment to education, harnessing underused food resources especially to provide fresh fruits and vegetables, and pursuing big-picture solutions to hunger that recognize that everyone needs reliable access to fresh, wholesome food year-round.  We have so many other community partners - local churches, businesses, and non-profits committed to the mission of ending hunger in Northeast Minneapolis and the world.

Make your donation here, between now and November 14, with the "Make my donation count for Give to the Max Day 2013" box checked - this helps make us eligible for additional cash awards from GiveMN.

This appeal runs through the end of the year, so if you get to this late please don't hesitate to make a donation through this link anyway.

Elephant

Given the topic of what follows, I'll defuse any potential tension by pointing out up front that, as far as I know, I'm not currently dying on any kind of accelerated timeline.  My dad's death and my own significant but not (as far as has been determined by medical science to date) imminently mortal health concerns have put me more than usually in mind of the topic, however.  Hence this.

What should I consider to be risk

is there any flipside to this mortal disk

The answers seem pretty damn relevant

And maybe there my deficiency is on display

As the noose tightens up on my day to day

This damn room went

and grew itself an elephant

Sucker Bet, (currently) unpublished Song of the Day

For quite a while I’ve had something that I’ve wanted to say, or talk about somehow.  I have touched on it in the past but never really taken it head on.

You would all do me an amazing service if you would entertain the notion that the fight metaphor may not be the most helpful one.  Or maybe it’s not as helpful now as it was in earlier stages.  It’s difficult to change the language around something when it is so engrained.  “Fighting cancer..” “died after a long battle with cancer..”  etc.  But this implies that there are winners and losers.  That if we die we have lost.  But we ALL die.  No one makes it out alive.  That shouldn’t make us all losers.  The most pernicious part of the fight metaphor for me is the notion that if someone dies young from cancer they simply didn’t fight hard enough.  That if someone decides to forgo treatment, they have “thrown in the towel.”

I don’t see any grace in the desperate clinging to life that we call fighting in this metaphor.

Maybe instead I’m having a slow dance with a handsome and charming mad man who has made it quite clear that eventually he’ll have to USE the straight razor that he’s holding to my throat.  I believe him.  He doesn’t seem like a guy who lies.  Why he has to cut my throat isn’t clear.  In the mean time, it’s a warm embrace.  I’m holding him, he’s holding me.  He’s whispering the most beautiful and insane shit to me, all wise, all true.  I’m trying to enjoy the dance as much as I can, trying to learn as much as I can, trying to stay present despite the knife at my throat.   And now he’s starting to cry.  You dig?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a fighter all right.  I have been from the start.  Walking around barefoot with fists cocked.  But this isn’t a fight.

Ezra Caldwell, teaching cancer to cry

That blog, I'll warn you, is a rough trip, but of course the guy making it has pretty much most of us beat, so.  This video is a good place to start with the story, followed by this slightly longer one.

In February 2009 the Minnesota poet and author Bill Holm died: I knew him, a little, maybe about as much as Hamlet knew poor Yorick.  Dad knew him better, and had invited him to a gathering of Minnesota authors he'd been involved in organizing when I was maybe 13? 15?  After Dad died we found a photo of him with Bill, Paul Gruchow and John Rezmerski at this gathering: only Rezmerski still alive now. Dad took me to another reading of his at some other place, I feel like it was maybe the old chapel in the "Pioneer Village" attraction in my home town, I feel like I was younger than at the time of the author's gathering, but it all blurs together and I know my memory is unreliable.

Later Bill and I exchanged a few letters and I went to a couple of his readings on my own.  I had owed him a letter for a couple years.  I was all but vanished into my reality of stay-at-home, early years parenting.  I tried to send him an email at his old college address once which bounced.  And then someone, I think my brother, who knew my connection with him asked me if I'd heard.

It set a hook in me and I'm still not entirely sure why.  I'd gone through the deaths of all my grandparents with greater equanimity.  Certainly Bill and I had a cordial (if mostly superficial and greatly attenuated) relationship but it grieved me as a genuine loss.  A fair theory is certainly that it presaged Dad's death not quite three years later: another heavy smoker with heart disease.  The foreshadowing is not subtle.

And then again maybe it is just that Bill was the closest thing to a real active friendship that has been ended by death in my life at that point, which is something considering I was 37.  I'd meant to get him that letter.  Once in a while I'd think that maybe I'd get in the car and make the short trip to Minneota when I knew he was in the states.  Hell, I might even make it to Iceland some day, see him at Brimnes.  People are potential, until they're not.  All further opportunity is lost.  I wrote the song No Tomorrow.

And I've not lost many since even so, but I knew it then, really knew it, and know it now, as inevitable. Unless of course I happened to disappear first.

Of course all this reaction was nothing compared to when Dad died.

But I'll leave that for another day...

There's nothing like a crisis to make you focus, think clearly, and be able to present what you know in that moment.  I guess one of the things is you get this wonderful gift if you've been, you know, faced with some kind of a terminal illness of learning in a real visceral way that lesson about every day being really important and, you know, living like you could die tomorrow and all that kind of stuff... The problem with that in, sort of, reality, is that you can't actually do that because it's just fucking irresponsible.  I mean, so you have a brush with death or you have to think about dying because you have something that can kill you.  You think that oh, well this gives me, you know, this, this makes me realize how important just, you know, your experience and enjoying life and all that kind of stuff is.  And yet, so what do you do, you buy a motorcycle and a large format camera and go ride around and take photographs and, two years later, haven't died yet, and have no money, and you know, I mean, it's just like, it's the kind of thing where you, you know, it's like oh yeah live like you're going to die tomorrow, it's like well yeah but what happens if you don't?  You know, I mean, that's the reality, is that it's like, well, I haven't died yet!  So I think that's the biggest challenge, is just kind of figuring out how to reconcile the notion that, that I'm very aware that anything could happen, and in order to figure out where to go with the business and with making bikes and everything else, I have to kind of behave as though I'm not going to die next year, I have to behave as though this is something that actually has a future and that, ah and that it....  So that's, that's the thing that, that's difficult to kind of reconcile is just, just how do you, how do you get your head, ah, around that. (Ezra Caldwell, in Made By Hand/ No 5 the Bike Maker 8:25)

(As an aside it took me over half an hour to transcribe that minute and 40 seconds of monologue as precisely as I could... it is amazing how divergent speech is from writing or indeed almost all prepared dialog).

Death is the elephant in every room and how we reconcile that inevitability in our lives in the here and now - not just for ourselves but for absolutely everyone everywhere... seems a topic we barely engage.  God the bustle and the thrum and crash, our elections, our government shutdowns, our protests and police actions, our aggressive drone campaigns, our terrorist plots, our global climate disasters, our stock bubbles, our concept cars, our newly redesigned consumer electronics, our campaigns against obesity, our flawed healthcare rollouts, our fall television premiere schedules...  And I think that maybe all of it, every bit of this... evil, and nonsense is exactly our  reaction to utter avoidance and denial of death.  And how will we ever learn.

On the Fast Boy Cycles facebook page Ezra Caldwell posted about riding on October 19, 2013.  As of this writing, as far as I know, he persists.

Final note, September 7 2014: Daniel Ezra Caldwell died at home on May 24, 2014.  In the nature of things, of course, he still persists.

my boy is eight

So another device made to kill has killed, not surprisingly.  The news picks the bones and picks the bones and picks the ever increasingly picked bones of the nothing that is known.  And hearing that an eight year old child was killed, what else can I think but of my own boy at eight, now.  They are wonderful people at this age, better than we deserve.  A friend, a college professor from long ago, told me his favorite age was nine, that after adolescence, "our kids would come back as adulthood nine-year-olds", and I can see these days what he's getting at.

And I am going to say this, and not post it on Facebook and not share it on G+ and not tweet it or link to it in the latest long pointless comment thread about the horror.  My saying it will change nothing and it's as well that nobody reads it.  But I will say I say this not to diminish one iota the reality of this tragedy but because in my mind it magnifies unbearably, which is how it should feel: there is not just one child grieved because adults believed in the rightness and efficacy of devices made to kill.  Wielded by soldiers, wielded by children themselves, accidentally or given them with the purpose to kill, wielded by those taught their self-sacrifice is a righteous act, dropped from planes, buried in the ground, poorly hidden in drawers.  Our shame should be unending and no adult is innocent.  We accept this world and the workshops that churn out the devices made to kill, if they are a secret workshop of a solitary lunatic or a well-lit factory run by friendly decent people with 401ks, roll on and do not pause a moment for the innocent ones their work will kill.

The Liar

Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory - Olin Miller

So this is a story that fits so adroitly to its subject that I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it was a set-up but it is in fact true for what that assertion is worth (particularly in the context of what follows).

I am always endeavoring to expand my horizons, on my better days out of an allegiance to Truth, Knowledge and Wisdom, failing that out of a relentless dissatisfaction with myself and existence and consequent motivation to “help” or “improve” myself.

In such sprits I recently resolved to work my way through the book Gödel, Escher, Bach which I purchased many years ago and made some headway in and then ran out of steam with. Starting over and completing it has been on my to-do list for a very long time.

As I recently related, I started this book and quickly ran into a situation with the first formal exercise in logic presented in the book for the reader to play with. You can read that essay for a more detailed account of my experience attempting the exercise and reaction to my general failure with it.

Now.

When I approached that exercise in the book I honestly wasn’t looking to make it into essay fodder or whatever. What I did come to it with was a memory. It was a pretty specific memory and it did not remotely occur to me to seriously question it. The memory in essence was of undertaking this exercise, solving it, and feeling good about that.

This was a time in my life (if memory, ahem, serves) when I’d been through some personal and work experiences that gave me cause to doubt the quality of my intellect. I have a very specific recollection of working on this puzzle restoring in some small sense a feeling of confidence in my highest faculties, my ability to contend with the most abstract of human metaphysics, which ability had once got me through the calculus, physics and chemistry, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics with, if not exactly “flying colors”, at least reasonably respectable grades.

So I was genuinely distressed and depressed the other day to be absolutely brick-walled by the little logic game in question. I tried to be philosophical about it but there was a real, grim shadow at the back of my thoughts saying “you know, that’s it - the mind is inexorably on the downhill side”. The best I could hope for is that I was still on the part of that hill where the downward pitch was long and shallow.

But finally I said to myself, look: if you’re going to let that stop you all you’ll have proved is that it doesn’t take much, and my modus is all about persistence these days, so I went back to the book.

Where, immediately, it became clear that there was some fundamental flaw in that memory my whole reaction was based on. It was clear the reader was not expected to solve that puzzle. In fact is appeared it was not meant to be obvious whether the puzzle was in fact solvable at all - and indeed that this was the important point to be derived from attempting it at all.

While I can take comfort in the the fact that my frustration over the puzzle was not a sign of decaying intellect, it’s really just trading one interrogation of my brain’s capacity for another. What in the hell was I remembering? I broke it down into a few possibilities:

1) Had I merely played with the puzzle a bit, given up per the author’s suggestion, and felt satisfied merely with my ability to understand and manipulate the system of symbols and rules? Possible, though it would have been an awfully low bar to clear for forming a lasting memory of accomplishment.

2) Had I played with the puzzle and felt satisfied because I determined to my own satisfaction that the puzzle was unsolvable or at least intrinsically very difficult - and gave it up to have this confirmed in later reading. Equally possible, though this sort of accomplishment doesn’t really fit my memory that well.

3) Did I screw up and falsely “solve” the puzzle by performing some illegal operation without realizing it? This could certainly have happened, although I would think I’d have noticed the discrepancy of subsequent paragraphs that make it clear that a simple, direct solution is not an expected outcome. This interpretation stands out with the possibility that I'm actually getting smarter as I age.

4) Was I actually remembering some exercise from later in the book, one with an actual attainable solution? This possibility alone has at least the prospect of a relatively definitive confirmation, in that I could encounter this hypothetical later exercise and recognize it. Of course it would be hard to fully credit any such recognition in the light of the general dismantling of the memory in the context of the first exercise... And of course this option also raises the specter of going through the same intellectual and emotional wringer all over again.

5) Did I more or less fabricate this memory from a bunch of similar bits and pieces? Certainly I have a large store of wrestling intellectually with tricky constructs and pulling a credible ah-ha moment out of the struggle and feeling good about it.

There’s simply no way to know. And as always in this sort of situation I can’t help but wonder at how much of my memory is suspect: moments and fragments, misinterpreted sensations and misheard conversations, all assembled into narratives by my brain the better to fake there being some sort of sense to it all. It’s a fair point but I can’t see much of a path forward based in continuously dwelling on the fact that the entirety of you memory is suspect in ways that are mostly impossible to verify or correct.

Uncertainty

The essay following was written as it appears: it rapidly became clear to me not long after writing it that that the foundation of this essay was a wholly false premise, which will be clear to anyone familiar with the book I'm discussing. This will be discussed in a subsequent essay tentatively titled "The Liar".

rules
u may be added to any string ending in i
for any x the string mx may be transformed to mxx
iii may be replaced with u
uu may be dropped from the string

exercise: from the starting string mi derive the string mu

So runs, more or less, the first formal exercise in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which brings my progress in the book to a standstill this morning. It’s one of those deceptively simple puzzles, trivial at first glance, impossible on closer inspection, requiring the application of insight outside the proverbial box to crack, and to my consternation, which in an hour has worked a fair way towards frustrated anger, I can’t seem to shift it. The issue is easy enough to grasp... To solve it you have to eliminate i. The only way to eliminate i is to work to a string with some multiple of 3i in it. But the only way to increase i is by the second rule transformation, and this "doubling" transformation can’t produce an (n)i where n is divisible by 3. Fiddling on paper produces series after absurd series of strings that keep collapsing to the same dead ends. My creaking, derelict faculties of math and formal logic offer vague insights about factors, primes, 2 is the only even prime, doesn’t that have something to do with it?


It isn’t the puzzle itself or even my failure with it that is getting to me. It is a familiar sort of frustration, knowing you are overlooking some obvious simplicity you are blinded to by some equally simple yet false assumption. I have in recent memory spent more than a few good hours purposely cultivating a similar state playing puzzle games like Braid or Portal.

What’s getting to me is that I know for a damn fact that I already solved this, in no more than 20 or 30 minutes, a decade, maybe 12 years ago, the first time I attempted to read the book.

Maybe I didn’t even figure it out last time, I think. Maybe I just wandered into the right territory noodling around with the transformations. Far from impossible: just the other day I solved all the levels of a tile-flipping flash puzzle game on the internet without ever really grasping the rules, just a lot of clicking and blindly following intuition.

Even so this explanation smells of bargaining to me. As someone still rather freshly exposed to the experience of grief I know that bargaining comes on the heels of denial and I wonder what it is I am trying to deny.

No choice but to give it up for the time being and get things done. In the middle of laundry half an hour later it occurs to me that I may just end up having to accept that I simply no longer possess the class of mind that allowed me to make short work of the puzzle at 28 or 30 years old. And that this is what is really bothering me.

Hofstadter advises the reader not to worry about whether they solve the puzzle: the intent is only to get the “flavor” of it. Oh, and to “Have fun!”

Fucking geniuses.

-=-

Briefly, nearly twenty years ago, I understood Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By this I don’t mean that I was acquainted with a more or less narrative, prose explanation of the origins and significance of it - something I suppose I still possess to a degree and which I could beef up and give a quick spit shine with an hour or two on the internet.

But during the quantum mechanics section of a tough physical chemistry course series, in the latter half of earning my bachelor’s degree, I was led through the derivation of the actual mathematical expression of the principle, and I understood it. You can talk about the principle but I understood, in that class, that the talking only gets you within a certain vicinity of this level of thought. You can only get to its real meaning through the math. And it was a beautiful thing.

Looking back I suspect that it was also an experience that did away with any lingering ideas I might have been harboring that there was a chance of my personally adding anything really important to science. I was capable of hanging on for the ride as a better intellect than mine illuminated for me the product of mind that had operated on a level that much higher again. But it was immediately evident to me that there wasn’t the slightest inkling of a possibility that I could ever produce original thought like that.

-=-

I have to wonder if I could even work up to the point of being able to follow the derivation of Heisenberg’s principle now. I try to keep up on the science news and indeed still work in the field, but I’m very far from such rarefied stuff. I guess it could hardly be a more moot point at this stage of the game. I will take Hofstadter’s advice and try not to worry, to focus on making the most of what I can manage in the midst of my ordinary human uncertainty.

departures and arrivals

Dad showed up in a dream last night, a thing I've been expecting. First time I remembered, anyway, except for one other where he was a minor presence, sitting silently in a room where other people were, where other things were going on. In this dream I was leaving some sort of apartment. I was supposed to have everything packed but my sparse belongings were still in a partial state of disarray. I was up on a high floor and the vibe of the building and halls was more like a hotel than an apartment but the space was large. No sense of context at all in the dream, of why or when, just there, and going. Dad came alone to pick me up. I had closed circuit cameras patched in through the television, saw the car arriving, saw him coming up and spoke to him at the door. No Jennifer, no Jonah, but the cats were there oddly enough. Did he come inside? I can't remember. I woke up, it was 3 am.

I wonder when the last time Dad came to collect me on his own was? For the most part Mom was always along, and then it has been a long time since I started responsible for my own transportation. Some time in college no doubt; I never had a car and nobody at school was ever going my way. The only time that stands out in my mind though was when he came to pick me up after the freshmen orientation session the midsummer before I started. Smoking with Jack at picnic tables out back of the apartments while I waited for him to come. 22 years.