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

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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.

determined to have fun

When I started working I decided that I would do something to please me and at the same time would not try to analyze why it pleased me... Mostly it’s a visceral - the inside reaction... I just listened to this voice and the voice said “I’d like to do that” and that was the end of the conversation.

Getting to know Ed

Ed Emberley, Children's Book Illustrator | by Ed Emberley

View this entire course and more in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

I wish that I had about a hundred hours of Ed Emberley just chatting while drawing with marker pens because this is very pleasing.

I crave, covet, pine for that sentiment I extracted from this video and posted above. Nothing feels further from the truth of my present situation. No idea how to go about finding a road between here and there, how to "find out how to find out" as someone advised me in a rather random exchange.

If you lost the knack of listening to that voice that tells you what you'd like so long ago that you can't really remember being able to hear it, what then? This line of inquiry is very depressing.

Weigh, hey, and up she rises

Well there is some stuff for sale below that is not for sale otherwise but I'm actually shortly going to transition all commerce links to This Page.  Which, if it's before August 29, 2013 there's a sort of fundraising campaign going on.  That I could sure use some help with.  Anyway I'll fix all this mess after everything to do with that gets shook out.

Finally reorganized the shop. Check it out, anchor tags...

Graphic! Novel!

Digital Audio Data!

An Actual Shirt!

Matthew 25:21

Is this thing going to become about the petty depredations I am subjecting myself to trying to keep the wheels on the wagon, clinging to our place among the ranks of the not yet foreclosed? I've been thinking contingencies so long I don't even know where it all really stands any more, which is a ridiculous thing to say considering the number of exhaustive spreadsheets I'm running on a regular basis. The dogs are in no wise at the door but the overhead is high and there are no reserves to speak of. So it is all speculative but at the end of the day money is money.

Well if I am so what. Who is it for besides me. It isn't read by my brother or my wife or my best friend (whoever that would be, I haven't a clue anymore, don't really have one). It isn't read by anyone, or if it is, well, you don't complain much, do you, Jack? You don't say anything.

The work, this extra work, this paperwork in the purest sense of the term, the thing is that there is enough of it it seems, for now, to fill any amount of time I should care to turn over to it, and I'm scared about the future, so I give it all that I can bear. The thing is that it leaves an awful lot of headspace open, once I get it rolling and the minimal allotment of grey matter necessary to the task has dug into its groove. I can do math in my head, calculate what the last 20 minutes of drudgery will net me and compare this truly paltry sum to, oh, any stupid thing I've wasted my money on, I won't dig to the bottom of that set any time soon.

Or I can just drift and listen to John Darnielle raise every hair on me singing Matthew 25:21 and try to figure out for the nth time - God knows how many - why he is so god damned much better than I am.

and I'm an 18-wheeler headed down the interstate - and my brakes are gonna give and I won't know till it's too late... tires screaming when I lose control - try not to hurt too many people when I roll...

He is four and a half years older than I am which doesn't really cut it at this point. I think of seeing him play at, what? Twenty four? Twenty five? How much older than me that seemed then. But I am not getting better that much faster, lately I don't feel like I am making any sort of progress at all, except perhaps in the reliability with which I slog along. Lately I find myself wondering if I am not regressing, or if the pendulum is winding down, coming to rest at some dismal steady state. On the other hand I know from experience that I can never judge what I'm going to end up liking while I'm writing it, I always think it's all awful and I always find a few gems after a few years have passed. On the other hand I've already got like five careers worth of material, it's not as if lack of material is my issue.

Well there is always writing, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

All work and no play, kids.

pulling

Nobody is reading this, correct?

Correct?

I take extra work on the side, pulling staples out of human resources documents for $13 an hour, among other things. The "why" of this isn't relevant... suffice to say that in a particular context staples represent entropy, and I am eliminating this entropic potential.

On one hand I imagine there is a specific, significantly non-zero number of individuals in the world of now who would leap after this opportunity, as indeed I did. Hard times make this easy, from a variety of perspectives, money.

And then on the other hand there is the real of it... Fifteen minutes concentrated effort represent a kind of eternity of staples, page after page and folder after folder. The mind is already colonized by staples and the mechanics of their removal, and I look at the clock, at last, and think: three dollars, 25 cents. Not much, and the only way to make anything of it is to keep after it, and the hours add up to a whole other head space of specific but terribly similar events repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

With an iPod shuffle loaded with a curious assortment of odds and ends, mostly the product of a longish and recently terminated association with eMusic. New Orleans rap and Sufjan Stevens and what selections of compilations of chill-out music the random spits out. Backed by VHS tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion on mute, mostly unwatched, flash of images, something to keep the eyes focused as fingers feel for elusive sneakers, hidden teeth, entropy's tiny army I am armed to fight with a set of metallic snake jaws. Not what I was looking for, I try to avoid thinking on it too much, not what I signed up for. But it is work, and it is work I'm wanting. And so it goes.

feuilletons

We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seemed to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer", but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors.

Among the favourite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870", or "The Composer Rossini's Favourite Dishes", or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans", and so on. Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries", or "Psycho-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather", and hundreds of similar subjects. When we look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, "service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.

In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Zigenhalss devotes a separate chapter to these. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and even drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives hundreds.

As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation - it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.

Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles" describes the phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

For there was also a good deal of lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of the feature article. Both specialists and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was present. There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassbourg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords. People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning.

Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel 1943

It has been an embarrassingly long time since I read "real" literature (I will punt on providing a definition of such or what qualifies it's level of reality, I, ah, know it when I read it). The kind of book where it is a virtual guarantee that for every ten pages I read I will have to go back and reread at least three. The Glass Bead Game is reminding me why this is something I once voluntarily did for pleasure. Lately I have been feeling like my brain has been suffering from neglect. Getting softer. Time to get back into the jungle. Start talking about religion next.

Hasen

Another walk in the park, another year: my companion is smaller, and considerably less mobile and articulate. Up the hill where the railroad tracks run we encounter a rabbit, a normal occurrence, except that this rabbit is dying. As we walk past its hiding place it explodes out of the underbrush with the usual headlong pelt, but its running is a horrible, listing, splay-limbed parody of a healthy rabbit’s gallop. A dozen feet from us it loses it completely and wipes out in a rolling tangle, back feet still pumping uselessly, a jerky scrawl that suggests profound neurological decay.

Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.

Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.

But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies

end history

I will post one more from the archives of the Spirit of Salt blog, I think... I was going to put the whole archive on, but the essays seem progressively less relevant or interesting to me as they process into the further past. Or maybe I'm just sick of it or maybe those mean more or less the same thing. Having erected this site purely to host "the store" it seems to be exerting some inexplicable force on me to fill it with text, but that impulse is on the wane at least for the moment. If I'm feeling compelled to dump some by the by textualizing in public that does not fit over at Freelala I guess I'll leave it here. Hopefully I have now developed sufficient resources online to contain my wretched addiction to generating strings of written verbiage. Though I tell you, the way I feel right now, it may all (aside from the fairly secret songblog) mire in stasis in whatever state I leave it in today for a good long while. But of course I've felt done with it all many's the time past. I mean, why write this? Who gives a fuck? And yet here I am. Enough, anyway, for now.

With a gun

What I first take to be a squirt gun turns out to be a relatively complicated spring-action pistol of the type that fires those 6mm plastic pellets which frequently irritate me due to their ubiquity as outdoor litter.

A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.

My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.

“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”

I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.

“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”

Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.

At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.

Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM

*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.

Sentiment

Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;

It treats all things as straw-dogs.

The sage is not sentimental;

He treats all his people as straw-dogs.

Between Heaven and Earth,

There seems to be a Bellows:

It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;

The more it works, the more comes out of it.

No amount of words can fathom it:

Better look for it within you.

Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)

I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams.  In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window.  I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’.  I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is.  He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything.  I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing.  But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers.  I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out.  But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.

I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense.  I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations.  But I don’t know.  I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time.  And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system.  Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.

But where was I.  The spirit.  The breath.  It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us.  And when it’s gone, we’re gone.  Only the shell left behind, uninhabited.  That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.

I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual.  I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently.  As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises.  But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says.  Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions.  He writes:

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some).  I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.

And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing?  Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?

I have issues with the idea of the supernatural.  It is a tricky, muddy concept.  In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic.  If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural?  But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge.  Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.

So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions.  I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience.  The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument.  I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.

The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.

So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.”  Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM

stop kidding myself, wasting my time

A depression in three parts.

I.

A comment on the last one  sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink.  Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth.  And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff!  In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline.  It’s way too easy to fake it.  In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect.  What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”

The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos).   The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead.  Res ipsa loquitur.  All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!

II.

I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships).  A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was.  In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still.  The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all.  I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.

Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic.  It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once.  I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see.  But I don’t quite make it.  I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale.  Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.

Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print,  and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.”  Ain’t that just the way.

III.

I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you  produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?

In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter.  I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art.  Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what?  What good do they really do?  Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses.  I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses.  We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous.  He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working.  He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death.  As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.

We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day.  But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging.  I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime.  Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM

Is there such a thing as an Atheist?

I decided to soften the title down from my original concept, “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.”  It’s not my intention to be polemical, or I should perhaps say it is my intention to not be polemical.

When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant.  I said “maybe.”

Anyway.

Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.

This is actually going somewhere.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM

forking paths

Shortly after I start crying on my keyboard over Oscar Grant, to my great surprise, I decide that I will in fact have one small whiskey.  I’ve had no taste for the poison since New Year’s Eve.  The project leaves me with some time to kill and so here I am.

I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it.  In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology.  Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat.  But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life.  Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy.  Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off.  I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:

Oh I am tired of this place.

Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted.  Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes.  Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head.  I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse.  Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede.  So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind.  Weak, indolent.  Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?

No sense to that either, good money after bad.  What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype?  Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?

It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM

Have You Ever Been In Communicado

My computer is acting “funny” which isn’t very shocking since it is over seven years old - a veritable antique.  I have been cheating the grim gods of obsolescence a couple years now, but I think my time might be at hand.  If so my communications via computer may be very sketchy for a period of time - including email, blogging, and the various networks and social time sinks.  You can leave a comment or send me an email about what you think about this but, you know, there’s a pretty good chance I won’t see it.  Listen to a little light music while enjoying a brief vacation from my output.  I can’t work without a computer so it won’t last long.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 11, 2009 at 2:40 AM