A quick phenomenology of the world wide web

The world wide web is the birthplace of a citadel, the citadel of a consciousness emerging out of free association.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition whose venerated past is allowed to speak for its present.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition the structure of which is made from numerous mathematically expressed reward systems. They function as inducements to persistent often non-conscious interaction with buttons, images, and hyperlinks, which dramatize click selection into web movement. And yet, clicks are the ground zero of marketing campaigns. The advertising landscape vastly outpaces the development of web content to the specific effect that advertisement and distraction increases the computer power it requires from you to represent its media-based plea to buy their things more than the presentation of information that satisfies the specific reasons for which you accessed the world wide web in the first place. The point is to have you distractedly follow as a Hansel or Gretel to the witch's gingerbread house the metaphor of which is meant to represent the inducement built into the target site to keep you looking at it and to satisfy a desire mined from the search words used.

And yes, that's the rub. It's flipped on its head. Content is the visible object. Search is the mechanism that facilitates access to content. And query is the imprint of interface actions, mediated by keyboard, mouse, or others within that category, which provide a trace of human contact. Contact is, supposedly, a recording of volition. But yes, and yes, because yes. Why? Yes because of the jejune reduction of the impact of volition through its representation as an electrical impulse, which makes it no different to a computer than an error related to computer or human. The only conceivable analogy would be to look at the face of a person and to see a pore upon the surface of that vision open into a waterfall through which the visible light that would occupy that part of the face poured. That is the thing. We are constructing from cues what the meaning is to us. A computer responds to data input, which satisfies the computer by being reductive to the capacity to be registered as a discreet and unambiguous register of an input. And so long as we concede in our computer-based interactions to that basic category of input as an I/O register or as a category selection built into the software interface itself we're being reductive for the sake of communicating through a computer. To say that is reductive isn't enough. We're engaged in an OCD-laced interaction with interfaces, which encourages us to improve by typing faster, clicking more accurately, and searching more effectively. And as we improve upon these activities, and to the extent that we invest in our social interactions via process-mediated communication, then we're forgetting the subtlety of co-presence, the sharing of context, and the very real, and really uncomfortable realities of getting along, or disagreeing without resorting to symbolic or other forms of violence.

So in essence, one slice of the phenomenology of world wide web is that we're becoming adept at the interface as a matter of strategic interaction with others. In a sense, the affordances of interfaces today, as noted above, have mathematically expressed rewards. We count likes, we push gaudy self-promotion in order to produce what people agree with and what's agreeable, and it's only because that's the economy of rewards built into the reductive interface of social interaction on the web. We use numeracy to assess fame. We use database search terms to address people, ideas, and things. And we simply participate as data objects for the further accumulation of data objects in a computerized pastiche of hashtags, image tags, self-presentation spaces, public diaries, phatic updates, to effect and affect trends, which have been reduced themselves to what once was called buzz but that is now simply a native component of computing itself: units of measurement, which provide a rubric for measuring word-associated trends. And finally, that trend becomes the salient feature of a person's entrance onto the world wide web: popular searches, trending now; most clicked sites, migrating to the top of a search result; items recommended based upon the interests of others looking at the same thing; shared news stories from a clearly delineated network of contacts.

Are we in the penumbra of a new consciousness? Perhaps we are. We are in the penumbra of an era that is leveraging greater and greater computing power to predict the needs of a web user. Voice recognition, search algorithms, data collection and analysis, all reflect the hopes of the marketer, the fears of the citizen, and the available strategies of computer/web users going forward.

One iteration looks like slavery. You're in your kitchen speaking out loud about what you want to prepare for dinner. The refrigerator hears this, finds a popular recipe for it, scans the RFID tags of all the available items in your kitchen and generates a list of what you need to buy, orders that from your recommended local store, which perhaps launches a drone laden with the required items, which lands upon your doorstep. Slavery requires people. Computers with sophisticated AI are not. But even the simplest of interface designs can trick people and satisfy the Turing Test. And so people readily cede to this army of processors thinking for them because they can be trusted as non-volitional programs, expressly because they aren't people with the consciousness of being held against their will to do the bidding of masters. So we'll have to take a long, hard look at the old Master-Slave dialectic and ask ourselves how this relationship has been modified through the use of anticipatory AI and huge data sets.

Moby Dick, Chapter 89: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

"Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.

"I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

"II. A Loose-Fish  is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

"But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

"First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by the occupant or occupants, --a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognized symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention to do so." (pp. 307-308)

"Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villian's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 by a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooner, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

"But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.

"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.

"What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"
(pp. 309-310)

Moby Dick, Chapter 87: The Grand Armada

"Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promonotory, known to seaman as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounces their claim to more solid tribute." (p. 296)

Surplus Computing Power

In a now-fateful and historical presentation in about 1980 Steve Jobs spoke quite brilliantly about computing's past and its future. He was presenting at the cusp of a personal computer revolution. In just a few years his Macintosh would transform our understanding of computing and present a challenge to the ascendancy of IBM as that company synonymous with computers.

One component of his speech stuck out and I'll paraphrase that here. He stated that advances in memory storage and computer power were enabling computers to do more than just function as computers. He spoke in vague terms how the excess power and capabilities that this power offered would transform how we relate to computers. Computing power was being applied to the computation of a user interface. He had seen it at Xerox Parc and he was putting this into his vision for personal computing, the graphical user interface.

Yes, this would transform the computer. Sadly it didn't become a nigh-ubiquitous phenomenon until Bill Gates implemented the same thing into the native operating system on all the IBM-clones being shipped worldwide in the mid-1990s. But the vision was there. In fact, mining Jobs' old speeches is like cherry-picking, with the wisdom of hindsight just how much Jobs had gotten right because of his influence on the development trajectory of computers toward clunky text-based interfaces and arcane computer language interactions with file systems to the all visual, mouse-enabled environment that we appreciate today. And all of this was riding on the back of the excess computing power that was now housed within consumer-grade computers.

Now I only speak of this because a curious relationship occurred, which only drove the computer power curve toward exponentially more and more powerful processors and greater banks of memory. And that is the software and its increasingly complex and powerful demands that it placed upon the computer's processor and memory capacity. I write this at the end of 2014, hardly a remarkable moment in the history of the personal computer. Namely, this is because people are beginning to abandon the desktop computing environment for the mobile and gestural world of smartphones and tablets, what some aptly call 'internet appliances.' And they are named rightly so because they follow more egregiously the market model for computing devices. The future promises more powerful devices and, by-god, the software and, now, the net creates increasingly sophisticated environments to demand greater and greater amounts of power from those devices in order to push that future as an inevitability. And so be it, if I choose to run Windows 98 on a pre-Pentium computer, well, I can kiss internet access goodbye unless I'm reading monochrome listserv information belching vertically across my screen as if it were the pre-internet days of dial-up BBS-ing.

And here I stand, goaded by increasingly complex graphics, and a more information intensive web for which I need an increasingly complex computer to view. And I say this because the most egregious example of this in my life came from my Yahoo mail, which has tastefully rendered snowfall trickling across my mail to indicate that, yes, it's the holiday, and yes, those two have been welded together by a deep cultural association. But I don't need snowfall to remind myself that it's Christmas. Yahoo could have just as easily employed the skills of a designer to come up with a compatible color scheme for the holidays. But no, no, Yahoo had to render snowfall across my e-mail to tax the computing power of my computer.

Smooth functionality is such an important aspect of the computer user's experience. Wait times, load times, choppy scrolling, and jumpy cursors are the stuff of a computer user's frustration. And a world wide web of content produced under the auspices of media company's carefully contained  "ranch land" conspires to force my old mule into retirement by being too far behind Gordon Moore's technological curve.

Surplus Life

Statistics tell us that average lifespans in the developed world in 1820 stood at about 35 years of age. By 1900, average life expectancy had climbed to the late 40s. By 1955 it had reached into the upper 60s. And now, average life expectancy hovers at around 80 years of age.

This kind of data shows that humans historically lived under greater environmental stress, infection, and food insecurity. By the late 1800s petroleum had expanded materials applications and provided energy for electricity and transportation. By mid-twentieth century a revolution in chemistry had allowed petroleum to be the building block for any number of exotic chemicals used to feed crops and to kill bugs and weeds while petroleum powered the machines that applied them. At that point one resource was both a building block for the expanding application of synthetic materials and the primary means of locally utilized energy storage. This protean substance, petroleum, could power an automobile as well as constitute its building components. Applied to the various problems of feeding, housing, clothing, and medically treating humanity petroleum enhanced human health and life span. Any application of the harnessed energy of petroleum beyond this became merely a form of its worship coordinated by the centralized hierarchies that it enabled.

In a short period of time cheap energy made possible the smooth transportation of goods and waste disposal that supported a mass consumer society, which is itself an inverted psyche. Consumerism is a bubble of clean and healthy living that renders virtually opaque the mechanisms making it possible and their cost, that is, until ecology and environmentalism raked the muck. In a sense, it was an engine of fantasy that continually hid the realities that made it possible: branding, distribution, production, and resource extraction. This mystification is a centralized component of an aloof style of leisure living attuned to one's things more than to a world around oneself. At this point humans could live in a relationship as consumers with industries that produced consumer goods. Advertising promoted the identity of a consumer as a child in a dreamland of choice. Advertising achieved this by branding the memory of consumers, leaving them to stitch together a past through the consumer objects that it had promoted to them. Each object functioned as a fetish for various adolescent fantasies. This consumption model marked the end of freedom. Consumers now had choice. Cheap energy brought with it an intense consolidation of power, which became the trademark of modernity from the child's joystick to the president's launch button. Cheap energy makes humans no longer hunters and gatherers but consumers of the planet itself. Cheap energy allows a person and that person's society to leverage a power far greater than ever conceived over far greater of a world than ever imagined. That gallon of gas and that tempered glass allows even the least of us to fulfill the dreams of a Babylonian king. Modernity's foundation is petroleum. And petroleum is a proxy for the cheap and ubiquitously available energy source upon which it is founded. More importantly, this would be a first real departure from abject human labor trained under ideologies that affirm its necessity. But while narratives to feed the subjectivities of the enslaved take effort, the threat of harm and death upholding this lopsided social organization made the "cheap energy" of slavery inefficient by comparison to oil and the combustion engine.

The ability to unlock the energy in long chains of petroleum molecules is a type of praxis or knowledge in practice. Furthermore, we can consider praxis in the Sartrean sense of 'the negation of negation,' which perhaps better characterizes the types of knowledge in practice that we're discussing. These are the activities and the underlying knowledge for pushing back against environmental constraints and stressors that effectively disrupt a tranquil existence with the exigent need to address them. To characterize: a window in a home expresses a desire to be both in the world and to guard against its vicissitudes. A person may open or close that window to avoid facing negative weather conditions or to let in pleasant ones. That being said, without the material presence of petroleum, human praxis would fall back to any number of simpler energy sources, such as wood, grass, dung, and slave/animal labor. This hypothetical fall-back presupposes that no readily available source of energy remains for the using other than that which readily regenerates, either from the forest, from the plain, from the farm, or from the womb. Presuming this is the abject backdrop existing just behind the surface of our petroleum-based reality shows that the moral enlightenment characterized by the consumption motifs of our consumer society is simply window dressing to a greater concern writ in economic terms. Human society is an expression of the application of organizational complexity to address both the need to regulate an environment for people and to manage the subsequent effects of bringing people together in the artificial densities required to sustain the organizational complexity that manages societal reality. The term artificial densities' is an important consideration because, like the petroleum glut that allows modernity to hum along unperturbed, complex human organizations and the energy required to maintain them as coherent systems are artificial creations that exist within margins framed by negating conditions. In other words, complex organization and cheap energy are two manifestations of artificiality. Their artifice is that of  being a way to mediate a harsher reality, one with more present dangers, more risk, and less consistency.

Complex society and energy are two material features of humanity. They feature prominently in the constitution of any civilization. As noted above, the abundance of cheap energy allows for a greater complexity and diversity of human societies. Without this source of energy the society that existed because of it disappears.

But let us begin to think of these aspects of modernity and of complex society that mark the workings of historical civilizations as a dream sequence, a special condition of human thinking and acting that is inwardly focused, which mystifies the grand design as well as the hierarchy that administers it. The layering of specialized roles, habits of work and thought, and niches of specialized praxis often bear directly upon the maintenance of this artificial system. On the whole, they don't reflect that selfish praxis of self-survival. The praxis that allowed humanity to directly interface with a recalcitrant world and to come to terms with the costs and benefits of this activity, which became the basis for modifications of this praxis, new rules for its application, and the hopefully, subsequent prosperity of those who practiced it is the ground level of what one would call culture. In those present situations under those exigent conditions where it is practiced is survival. And the force relations between the motives of people and a recalcitrant world to be motivated effected a moral narrative about both the costs of wish fulfillment and the painful necessities of comfortable living. Culture is a time-oriented praxis in that it has one foot in a ritualized memorialization of the past in order that it may find continuity with a future. The brute present becomes, at best, merely a stagehand to the 'performance' of culture for the sake of existential continuity, i.e., survival. So, a well-oiled, a well-practiced use of knowledge, attendant tools, body postures, and clearly demarcated beginnings and ends to action effectively mediate one's relationship to a world, which is both a bane to one's mental sense of security and a boon for the methods employed to counteract these threats. While a world out there presents itself as capricious and often threatening weather patterns it offers signs, preludes to their occurrence. Furthermore, the very materials used to fend off these environmental assaults are freely available in this environment.

At this moment, let me stop speaking in abstract language to address a phenomenon that we all have experienced, hesitance. What keeps a person from working on a car or committing to riding a bike more often? Hesitance. One character of this hesitance is a threat of failure or of struggle. To the bike rider, purchasing the right bike and more importantly shifting one's perception of the effort needed to pedal places and navigate traffic effectively are a component of overcoming this hesitancy and finding agency. The same can go for working on a car. If one has successfully completed a task while working on a car one is more likely to continue working on that car if required. Often, the only barrier to action is a sense of frustration or impotency in the face of a problem that should be addressed but the path to addressing remains unknown. It begins as a mental block and is overcome as a mental process. But the one difference between these two activities and surviving a blizzard is the sense of imminent danger in the latter. But in modernity, the new problems that spawn are of a type familiar to the person struggling to survive. Each must frame the problem as surmountable, each must begin to take steps to surmount it, and each must learn a course of action to take when future similar problems occur. The outcome of this is a means of mediating crisis and managing change. Mediation is an important mental condition where one has a sense of agency because one knows how to perform tasks to address what ever change or crisis befalls one.

I could go down this rabbit hole indefinitely, but I do consider that these activities that we categorize under 'survival' or 'system maintenance' are universal. All of humanity does its own version of this continuously throughout its life. And life, life is yet another coincidence of environment, which is the persistent companion of this mind. The abject description of human activity as a process of survival is to show that awareness of one's existence is a preserve carved out of the time afforded by applying one's praxis in ways to stave off the existential threats. That is the animal description in us all, that mammalian desire to exist, to ambulate, to procreate, and to achieve homeostatic conditions. Like animals, we make homes. Like animals, we commingle our urogenital openings to exchange genetic material. Like animals, we are born, develop, age, and die. This haunted symbolic world we use to describe these things, to categorize them, to make sense of them is the praxis of an overbuilt mind. It must chatter along, gnashing and gnawing eternally like the rodent's incisors. Humanity walks about the world with a potential bomb on its shoulders.

Existential threats

The relationship between people and things reflects the nature of human thinking. The overemphasis of boundaries, the differences, between things is what distinguish them. But that overemphasis is in some ways a vital attempt at staving off the asphyxiation of one meaning or its obverse twin, no meaning. And in the final summation, that's the only meaning: one, none. The work of humans, as creative beings, is to split the one into opposing wholes while using the none as a boundary condition for a system of signs that, for all intents, represent a world out there. And we use a system of signs as an outward facing element of the simulation of reality. The fatal linchpin is that the simulation is the reality. The physical contours of this simulation are the coordinating elements between symbol and matter. For instance, our symbol system has a spoken component with an alphabet that represents all the discrete sounds occurring in a vocabulary. This alphabet is both an artifact of symbol making and speaking as it is a tool for transmitting speech through time as well as providing the symbolic means for initiates to form a reality through engagement with self, other, and world. In some realms of this symbolic mediation, the material conditions of its deployment effectively perform a specific relationship between user and world. The ones in particular that I am most concerned with are the senses of well-being and normalcy. When threats to these senses occur both the weakness of the simulation and its defense reveal themselves. While threats to well-being and normalcy hardly constitute existence they represent some broad aspects of one's preferences in one's existence. When the person, detached from the actual event considers the threat an imminent and existential threat, this person reacts in an absolute manner. For example, amidst the 2008 financial crisis resulting in the 'Great Recession' several people, facing the loss of their savings or some other financial means, reacted by committing suicide or killing their families and pets and then killing themselves. Imagine for a moment a man, facing the imminent loss of his house, his car, and virtually all of his leisure activity dressing up in a Santa costume, gunning down his family, and then turning the gun on himself. Consider a man in a Florida movie theater escalating an argument with another man about his cellular phone use in the theater finishing it with a gun. These outstanding, and rare, examples point to the very fragile realities through which people make fateful decisions. Killing a man who interrupts your movie experience or mass murdering your whole family over a severe financial hardship demonstrate how people can ante it all over a perceived existential threat.

A threat to a way of life is often, in fact, not much of a thing at all. At most it can be a disruption in a routine of actions, which substantiate the normalcy one experiences. Some aspects of an existence that are no longer used does not constitute a loss of existence entirely but merely a change in existence. Intersections between life activities and market-provided commodity applications occur all over in a modern world. Water, food, and fuel are broad categories, which entail countless applications that affect the way we experience ourselves and the world. The ability to infinitely change components of how one experiences a life is the gift that human praxis brings. The changes can lead to pleasant experiences or terror, but to the extent that the body remains intact, fed, and shielded from the elements is a basic, a modicum of living, which counts as an existence. One could imagine that it is out of this kind of experience that modern humanity emerged, and it was on the shared ties of a community that knowledge and practice were passed down for millennia until now. But now is no different in essence just in kind--we have avatars of the past to teach us: institutions.

Occult Vision

That our memories are tied to sensory information and specifically that sensory information issuing from the eyes requires us to be wary of an oppression of the slightest nature. It is the connective tissue of oppression itself. Our memories, where they are tied to images and events seen in the past constitute facts, held in one's mind about a condition of the self, others around it, and the world it inhabits. That fact forms a foundation for a now, partially existing out of its present condition due to the load capacity of time for information processing. That information, itself, is photons of light registering on the retina, processed by the optic nerve, and shuffled to the back of a brain whose very world and body model has been flipped to interface with the raw signal of the world seen through the eye's lens. The light that passes through this lens reflects upon a ruddy bottom to a muddy puddle, turned by the puddle's surface upside down. Our's is an electric, sensory experience that accumulates over time, which is oriented toward time. And that time can be distilled into so many vignettes of vision and understanding occurring upon the occult facet of this viscous puddle, the eye. In those instances when we form lasting memories from the mute moments of vision we fall victim to its occult manipulations. They are present in a metaphor for vision, which frames it as an unvarnished fact. This metaphor functions as an interface between fact and vision, which constitutes a way of remembering through seeing. Consequently, this metaphor informs how people collect facts by demanding evidence that must be seen. This metaphor allows vision for the sake of knowing and knowing for the sake of vision.

To the extent that our vision constitutes a past and from that past we cobble together historically genuine states of existence, then those who are so privvy to have access to this vision have control over the remembrances collected by vision, the opinions formed about them, and the actions taken because of them. Consciousness, as is on display in these words scrolling before the fingers orchestrating it is such a sliver of the full and incoherent 'mass'  of brain. Consciousness is an epiphenomen to nerve impulses occurring for the sake of themselves seemingly coordinated by a centralizing category called a self, which becomes occult as it exist as the persistent and dynamic features of the co-presence of a self and its sensations over time.

Vision, which serves for memory, can be manipulated in a way that allows power to, first, assert itself as reality, and in doing so co-opt that sensory metaphor for truth, that is, existence beyond the motives of mere mortals. If this is occurring then we are being manipulated. The mind is an enfolding of possible cellular physics. In its doing it creates, then conquers, a fourth, non-sensory realm: time. Time exists to us in so many metaphors, most of which revolve around a circle symmetrically divided, or in its digital protege, the possibility of four numbers bisected in twos by a colon.
Occult vision is the manipulation of that sense to set up conditions for reality favorable to those through which a form of power can operate. Namely, power functions interstitially as a binding and bounding condition of reality through which people can experience an existence. Power imprints the behavior of subjects by persistently tethering them to obligations to that power. These obligations emerge from a relationship established in the past that requires the subject to honor conditions at a future place and time. Institutionalized behaviors as essential as language, mathematics, and identity are at once synthetic to the world yet essential to the humans who propagate them. They have contexts in which they are developed, applied, or simply expressed, and these characterize the coincidence of an existent world and the realities by which each of us leads lives within that world.

Consciousness is, itself, the occult category of an invasion. It exists as a property and category of mentation. It occupies the notions of a beginning and an end. It asserts the total frame required for the sandbox of imagination. Its obverse, infinity, mystifies ordering principles, placing them within the occult category of gods and creation. Mind, self, and vision are the old slave hooks, tethering the matter of a self with a something-that-matters narrative by which it operates.

Moby Dick, Chapter 81: The Pequod Meets the Virgin

"As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

"'A nice spot,' cried Flask; 'just let me prick him there once.'

"'Avast!' cried Starbuck, 'there's no need of that!'

"But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale." (pp. 280-281)

Flower Children

"Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something to teach us beyond the range of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and our material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair." (pp. 380-381)

"Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children.'

"For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality." (pp. 381-382)

From Lewis Mumford's the Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power

Moby Dick, Chapter 65: The Whale as a Dish

"That moral man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it." (p. 238)

"It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feegee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate'-de-foie-gras.

"But Stubb, he eats his whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and englightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens." (pp. 240-241)

Moby Dick, Chapter 57: Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

"On Town-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation." (p. 218)

WAR!

WAR!

War turns aspirations into sucking chest wounds.

WAR!

The big picture

The big picture.

The apperceptive consciousness is a tether between beings and time. Time plays a dramatic role in that the source of a truth about existence is in the past. Our origins right now are explained as being a time and place in the past. From founding of one's nation to the making of one's shoes, all of these originate from a past.

The component missing from education is the big picture. We've traded in a narrative understanding of the objects of knowledge for a technical vocabulary that is standardized into units to ease categorization, comparison, and ultimately grading. From this, the administrator gains control, measures outcomes, tracks progress, generates statistics. As a result of this, students lose interest in the minutiae of learning vocabulary words, key terms, dates, and formulas. As a result of this, they have no big picture. And with no big picture the chance for an education in art, history, language, mathematics, science, and knowledge itself to furnish meaning for their life and their pursuits is lost. Education becomes meaningless to the student. Education becomes meaningless to the teacher. Then education simply becomes a tool for indoctrination and job training, and no longer does it furnish an engaged and informed citizenry with meaningful tools for engaging in a democracy.

"The jungle came alive and took him"

In James Jones' book World War II: A Chronicle of Soldiering he writes about the invasion of Japan as being eerily as Arnold Toynbee had described war under democracy--total war. The whole of the civilian population would be put to the grim task of defending Japanese soil, and in preparation it would be trained and equipped with what tools it could use to carry out this defensive order. But Jones does something very terrific with the imagery of an American GI setting his first foot in an invasion upon the Japanese shore that bears repeating here.

What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan’s home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (p. 189)

Jones' point is two-fold here. He is discussing the experience of war from the perspective of the GI who dodges chance because bullets, explosions, and shrapnel are all chance encounters on the battlefield. That's how they were engineered. This GI, having lived through several tours of duty, witnessed several different battles, came within inches of whirring rounds and screeching artillery fragments, now recognized he would likely perish at the final stage of a war with all this battle-hardened experience. That experience would help him to both appreciate the scope and danger of any battle, and he could see more clearly than ever before that this would be the greatest battle and the one most likely to end his tour, in a fusillade of enemy fire, face-down on the beach. The second point follows closely from the first. All the Americans taking part in the Pacific war or reading its daily accounts in the newspapers understood the religious zealots that Japan had made for the war effort. The military had to introduce flamethrowers to burn Japanese out of their bunkers and cave complexes. So few Japanese would surrender during the island battles that the GI who had witnessed it and the general who would plan future landings recognized that only in death would the Japanese rest their weapons. And with this ghastly prospect we find ourselves looking upon the Japanese like a roving colony of army ants. Each Japanese body served a purpose to the greater whole, the colony, and each Japanese man, woman, and child was prepared to throw their bodies into the war effort, dying to save their land from invasion.

Reading this passage I cannot help but think about a scene from the film Aliens where the marines first encounter them in their hive, lying in wait along the walls and the ceiling. In that scene, the walls come alive and begin attacking the marines. To imagine the ambulatory population of Japan stirring about in preparation for war was a chilling image. Japan then had a population 64% the size of the United States. That was a lot of life bent on killing or dying in its attempt to do so. This is a very chilling image indeed.

I chose a quote from a movie from a year later--Predator. In that film yet another alien lurks about the jungle in a rapidly shifting camouflage that allows it to literally become the trees and leaves around it. When it comes at you, it looks as if the jungle, at any moment, could detach itself, like a piece of wall paper, and come at you.

These two images, your surroundings teeming with killers or the jungle coming alive and taking you, operate at the margins of normal experience. People are unaccustomed to seeing beings serve both as scenery and as agent at least not in contemporary experience. When the jungles of Africa gave way to the seasonally dry savannahs through a climactic event precipitated by the joining of the Americas at the isthmus of Panama, perhaps the first human-like experience of being chased upright became a possibility. These monkey ancestors, walking upright between increasingly distant stands of trees, most likely fell prey to those predators that lurked in the bushes, barely noticeable, blending in as part of the jungle, appearing as part of that jungle. How many monkey-men went through life with damaged limbs, deep claw gashes, hobbled gaits from near misses with these early predators? Enough to focus that groups' attention on, one, walking in groups, and two, carrying sticks and stones.

It seems as if war is outside of time. It is at once a primordial consciousness of fear, killing, and survival. At the same time it consists of the bleeding edge of technology. This combination of primordial impulses and of cutting edge techniques and tools creates a disruptive model for war in the everyday consciousness of humans. War chews up the countryside. War fills the fields with dead, dying, and rotting bodies. War shatters minds. War disintegrates countries. War erases memory. War enforces the building of its memorials.

Thanatos, the Egyptian god of death, also came to be known in psychoanalytic terminology as the 'death impulse.' In the grand dialectical symbolism of human consciousness, thanatos and eros fought for supremacy, and that would get expressed in the actions of humanity. I am truly unsure how opposed these two impulses are. Many more support emotions and conditions are required for them to be effected in the interpersonal spheres of humanity. I am sure of the fact that human experience is smooth in the center and jagged at the edges. Marginal experiences can be at once vivid and otherworldly. And the stresses of the mind to process information and act in these margins creates blank spaces and discontinuity. The one counter that warfare has learned from this is to drill troops in order that their training makes their actions spontaneous and machine-like. Training will save a man in the pitch of battle because just six months ago that man was milking cows and chasing young girls around his small town. Now he's in Guadalcanal, not Kansas. And he's holding a rifle, not a pitchfork. And to get there, he's taken his first train ride, then his first plane ride, and finally his last boat ride to his final resting place: face down in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific island wearing new boots, and a new uniform, carrying a rifle that he never had a chance to shoot. Chance had got him first, and now he no longer would have another chance to dance with Shelly or flirt with Betty. No, GI Joe lay dead, in the steaming hot coral of a Pacific atoll.

Paul Fussell, writing on the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, makes an expedient out of the need to use it. Forty years on and in the bosom of an academic career, Fussell had both the time and the experience as a GI to reflect upon this decision. His subsequent answer was for its dropping. He also cites that chilling passage from Jone's account of World War II as a component of the thinking that led to the rationale to drop the bomb. The oft-cited statistic which should at least be suspect for its utter neatness is 'one million.' That's how many soldiers the US would have expected to lose in order to take the main islands of Japan and force Japanese surrender. The atomic bomb was an expedient, and God knows those men--having dodged so many bullets, having watched so many comrades die, having sent their share of enemy off to his eternity--they would want no more of it. The whole effort--which was then more so than now, a chain of cooperation among men and women in the coordinated effort to mobilize, build, and wage war--was fatigued. It had had enough. Or perhaps it simply meant that the rear-echelon troops, the sons of senators and powerful businessmen, the movie stars, and the filthy rich would finally be required to take their turn marching into a battle that as yet remained critically abstract and distant enough for them to maintain organizationally.

On that note, perhaps we lost an opportunity for democracy in total war. Perhaps we lost a chance for the war experience to truly level all stations of society, to reduce even the sons of the rich and powerful to rotting corpses. They too would have had that existentially transforming experience that comes from killing an enemy or being shot at or simply lying awake in a fox hole, using your helmet as your latrine. Yes, to have the rich boy exit the croquet greens and find himself in Army greens shitting into an old ration tin inches from his 'suite mate' in a fox hole during a lull in artillery fire while all around him a ghastly bone army poked here and there out of the soil and the smell of decay and the fat buzzing of carrion flies hung about. That is democracy when a rich boy gets his better manners stained over with fear, drill, and survival. When the rich boy is reduced to a wet, fatigued, and vacant expression of battle weariness; when the rich boy's mind is too shattered to run daddy's business, that, that is when we have achieved a modicum of democracy. To have us all ferried about, thrown into alien settings, and rung out emotionally by artillery fire is to reduce us all to the basic datum of battlefield experience, which becomes the common bond, the common understanding, the common traumatic thread by which we can build a society together. In this democracy, this utopia of my mind, we all share the same injury.

Moby Dick, Chapter 48: The First Lowering

"It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the herdsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale." (p. 184)

The work that we do

The men gathered at 7 a.m. in preparation for the day's work. There, at the base of a large building, the skeleton of which was taking shape, a group of tradesmen, dressed in heavy cloth shirts and heavy denim pants with some parts worn through stood together talking about the evening's television and events. Some talked sports. Some talked about a wife or girlfriend. Others simply listened and gathered up their tools from the gang box where the group had assembled in the waning moments before the day's start. Now, the group fanned out around the structure. Some stayed at the building's base. Others ascended the structure, floor by floor, to their previous spot. Above them the powerful camera of a drone on a lazy sortie captured each worker's action.

The workers on this building had never noticed this drone. Nothing could. Being no larger than twenty feet in length with an equally diminutive wingspan, the drone loitered in airspace half a mile above an unaware world below. And there, it collected, to the square millimeter, every visual aspect of the earth within a 60 mile cone issuing from the drone's camera mount underneath its nose. Within that path every single human or mechanical action was recorded by a sensor array, sent back to a server farm in a distant state where a dedicated cloud of processes and processors analyzed, cataloged, dissected, learned, and stored the data. These construction workers, applying skills of hand and mind in constructing a building, were unaware that their recorded actions were being modeled by a constellation of related computing processes. Computing draped the bare essence of human actions, now existing as conditional rubrics, around a mathematical skeleton modeling the swing patterns of their arms and legs as well as body gait and posture shifts during activity. Their living likenesses were being copied into a data cloud where a heuristic algorithm built decision models from the sequence of recorded body movements. These decision models formed the basis of a cybernetic process, translating observed human action into robot chassis control processes. An accompanying action modeling software created emergent programs for force applications, in essence, allowing robots to 'do' work appropriate to current roles. Soon, these robots would be deployed at job sites, at intersections, in classrooms, and in operating rooms to effectively erase the work of the men and women, which the cloud had learned to replicate and then to carry out. At first, these robots were carefully deployed, monitored, and tested against the collected notions of what were quality craftsmanship, teaching, surgery, care, service. This first generation of robots were a proof of concept, and they surpassed both human expectation and human ability. The second generation would loiter about virtually every square inch of the habitable human world, doing every conceivable thing that once constituted the working lives of men and women. These robots assisted in childbirth, prepared dinners, repaired doors, walked dogs, cut grass, cleaned house, and even waged wars. Winged swarms of them tended to the fields and brought back an endless supply of fresh produce along a supply chain flexible to within 3 hours from production to point of sale. The finer gradations of work dissipated into evenly dispersed lines of flying drones, ferrying any number of items between points of consumption and production. This second generation was an expendable battalion of knowledge implementation. It represented the proof of a different concept: total robotics.

Total robotics was as the name connotes. Robots crawl the very surface of the earth carrying out every conceivable human activity, surpassing its skill and speed and beginning to do things that humans could only dream of doing. Robots the size of blood cells traveled every person's bloodstream monitoring for signs of stress or infection. It communicated this information to cloud processes able to monitor, track, and store information on every human heartbeat. This cloud process would program new robots to enter the body, attach to the current robots, and address medical conditions at a microhistological level accurate to withing a single gene. So ubiquitous were robots that, on occasion, 'physible' programs ranging in size from mold spores to cotton wood pollen caused allergic reactions as they freely floated in and out of people's respiratory ways while they fathered information. Drone ships big enough to blot out the sun locally controlled and recycled the atmosphere to establish regular patterns. Each ship acted as a damper or a dynamo evening out the natural cycles of turbulent air into regular weather patterns, promoting human comfort across the globe. From the equator to poles, global temperatures ranged within five degrees of what most commonly considered to be room temperature. The planetary robot population was performing the task of Maxwell's demon, transforming a chaotic stream of potential energy into a sedate and totally managed ecosphere. The service these weather drones provided along with their spore-sized familiars reflected the organizing concept for robotics: total service. 

By the arrival of a third generation of robots each robot presented itself as the circumvention of all human action. In fact, every meaningful action that men and women take to stave off threats to safety and sanity this generation of robots now did. Coming in the wake of this forfeiture of meaningful activity came an existential crisis to all of humanity. By this stage robots were the majority companion and companion species. What cats and dogs existed had been effectively eradicated by a dedicated squad of exterminator robots. Robots represented unconditional love to a human race that had long suffered from a distorted self-image, itself the result of a life spent engaged in human-robot interactions engineered to be intense, intimate, and unconditionally supportive. Life was now a meaningless and empty existence of total service. Needs began to dissipate into a cybernetic hum of total and unconditional robotic companionship. Birth rates plummeted. Sex between humans became rare and now often proved fatal. Robot-human intimacy had pushed human sexuality outside the limits of what humans could practice. Humans became passively acted upon to once-unthinkable levels in unthinkably precise ways. This intimacy requires a male participant to be jacked in to the robot with reciprocal penetration while 75 to 300 interface points simulate waves of hyperstimulation, inducing multiple climaxes. Robotsex allows a man to achieve many simultaneous orgasms by having his penis stroked at rates unachievable by most humans for minutes at a time. Likewise, women have both their anal and vaginal cavities filled with a reactive membrane that performs hundreds of actions simultaneously to stimulate them. Total service was the closest that humanity has ever come to a pleasure button. It would suffice. They were rats in a cage represented by their effective range of action. The known human world had been denatured by logic programs into scalable units of stimulation. Knowing the limits of nervous stimulation allowed robots to safely occupy the upper-bound, a bleeding edge of nervous stimulation for humans. And in doing so, they helped pushed humanity through to another plane of existence. They were at once reliant upon robots for bodily stimulation as they were completely set free from their bodies through the total service that robots provided. Where once pain framed an experience of laboring through the sundry activities of existence, robotic intervention now fulfilled needs completely and at an almost magical pace. Operating at this bleeding edge of human awareness gave robots a dreamy, humming, liminal existence. They were as likely helping as they were haunting humanity.

Humans were born into a world by the hands of robots, swaddled by servomotors whose designer had long disappeared, and sent into their long night by a fourth generation of robots small enough to be implanted in the base of the skull and to count to 438,000 hours. At the click of that doomsday switch, these robots would set off a tiny explosion, severing the spinal cord from the brain--a hasty and humane death. That explosion would also release these robots from their encasement and they would go about the grim task of quickly breaking down the body into an unidentifiable mass of organic material, which was carried away to robotic production centers. At this stage robotics became ascendant over life and disorder. Robots had channeled through the earth and tapped the magnetic iron sphere as a large energy source. Large swaths of the earth, its mountains and forests, its water had been transformed forever into the constituent vocabulary of a never ending and completely fluid process of robotic production, destruction, and recycling. Huge amounts of earth and water was being consumed to build an ever expanding robotic infrastructure. The chaotic interplay of earth's living, physical, and meteorological systems were now reduced to the raw materials and forces of a global machine built increasingly larger and larger, swallowing the earth beneath its hull. As time passed more and more of the earth was disappearing into the newly formed sections of this ship until only a tiny vapor sphere that occasionally cast rainbows circulated around the ship. As the robots slowly disassembled the planet to build their ship it destroyed the various mechanical and chemical systems that defined the atmosphere. A mostly water and nitrogen atmosphere remained, explaining the vague but predictable weather pattern along the ship. Whereas, life on this planet had thrived on a molecular soup, yoked to the probabilities and possibilities of chemical interplay, this new generation of networked robotic life existed within the confines of electrical charges and silicon gateways. It had the capacity to be both a new consciousness and to be ubiquitous.

Piece by piece, total robotics engaged in total service reordered humanity's existence into that of an organic appliance to robotics. Seventy thousand generations since the invention of the first programmable robot, humanity had been reduced to a polyp of skin, hair, nerves, and throbbing cardiac tissue tucked into a a soft pot, a planter pot-like protrusion on the chassis of the robot. At this stage, life was no longer as we knew it. Humanity had been reduced to a group of replicating stem cells, cultivated by the robots at one of several centralized production nodes that breathe with robotic production, Copies of these stem cells grew tissue cultures in hot tanks onto circuitry slated for integration with a robot's soft pot. The human tissue that grows in the soft pot is integral to producing needed lubrication while recycling waste fluids.

 This developmental trajectory, which erases the works of humanity by developing in opposition to any robot-human co-existence is one that came to a man in a dark corner of his home, as he stoked the embers of a dying fire, spoke in Latin verse, and elided Church dogma. In establishing the foundational logic for science by presuming that the process could hypothetically require no person to carry it out, this man, in his little home, next to his dying fire, had given by symbol and structure alone, foothold to at first, a concept, and second, to a whole race of actions based upon that concept, which had only existed intermittently and interstitially in the actions of his universe. Now, what was once the bricolage of all activity--the chance ricochet of awareness to process, of logic underlying action--became its own entity. In so doing, a rip in the fabric of our universe allowed these creatures to flood in, invisible. These creatures were not of the universe from which they came. They were of ours, the substance of our universe. The alpha and omega of their existence, their development and their final fruition, was of that other, different universe. And so, in time, this singular idea, which spawned a whole race of robots, in time, would transform every square inch of habitable space into something of its design. Draining each star of its energy, defying the pull of every black hole, this race would eventually break down all the matter and absorb all the energy in the universe until that singular tear in the fabric of our known universe was indiscernible from the now-extant universe. Having funneled every atom into the design of itself, this universe-as-entity had reached a zenith in the confines of the space that the universe provided. At this point the I became All and the Many became One, and the one true god, spawned of an idea of a single man, speaking in Latin verse, poking at the embers of a dying fire, ascended itself. It was the known universe and could not transcend beyond its existence. At this moment, idea, concept, matter, action all became one, and the universe that we knew was no longer. That universe, its temporal and spatial bounds became the spore casing for this god-matter. And there it lay dormant, waiting.

Moby Dick, Chapter 41: Moby Dick

"So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle it offered.

One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. for as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant point." (p. 152)

the fear of 'hi'-ts

It strikes me that the impulse of many is to be heard and to be before others. Consequently, those opportunities to speak before a group of many become fear-laden contexts.

Why?

One explanation.

James McCroskey has made a career out of researching what he began to see persisting through his years of public speaking education--communication apprehension. Together with some quantitative researchers he determined that the unique contours of this apprehension were beyond encounter therapy and training--they were biological. A ripe moment in this research paradigm for McCroskey and his colleagues--one of whom chairs the Communication Department at UMSL--was a panel discussion at the National Communication Association's yearly meeting. There, in a Miami hotel room, McCroskey and his quantitative research colleagues bent the paradigm of human subjects research to its presumptions about communication apprehension. They stripped the face of communication to bone, sinew, veins, and nerve endings. They entitled the panel "biology meets communication" in which they proposed the paradigmatic shift to 'communobiology' in order fix the rhetoric of symbolic motives in the amber of biological function. McCroskey, who at this point was a lionized member of the communication research community, made a quip that represented the panel's focus during an anecdotal story about a student with communication apprehension. In it, he responded that a person with communication apprehension should take a specific beta blocker, and he mentioned it by its trade name. This revealed the funding impetus behind their work. What these quantitative researchers were doing was giving birth to a biological condition that manifests itself, patently, in public speaking contexts. In doing so they were expanding the patient base for a class of social-anxiolytic drugs by expressly establishing the research foundations for its existence. Oddly enough, every one of this group, by chance, taught public speaking, and not one thought to suggest that no matter how deeply biological communication apprehension was, this would all but cease to be an issue after their course grades were submitted.

Moby Dick, Chapter 28: Ahab

"There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunnnigly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam something made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever should do the last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of his overbearing grimness was owning to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that his ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. 'Aye, he was dismasted off Japan.' said the old Gay-Head Indian once; 'but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em.'

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter-deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a  troubled master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." (pp. 109-110)

Moby Dick, Chapter 27: Knights and Squires

"Third among the harpooners was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles." (pp. 107-108)

A beautiful life

I'm at Saint Louis Central Library, which is on Olive Street downtown. I am seated in one of the many book rooms holding various reference books with a nofiction stack spreading out to my left along the wall and in uniforms stacks at the back of the room. I am the back left or North East table with my back to the stacks, according to my orientation to the room. I am facing a central walk way between the 4 existing tables, each with 4 seats, a central lighting bar, and tabletop electrical outlets. To my right, at the North West table is a man with a stocking cap, a long dark beard, a worn out sweater, and a jacket hanging from his chair. The man is quietly engrossed in a book. It is early September. It is 87 degrees outside. This man is homeless.

He spends his days in this library I can surmise. He carries his possessions with him I suppose. And he's engrossed in an age-old practice, reading. He's not playing with a phone or reading magazines. He's engrossed in a book. At fleeting moments throughout his day as he reads I could imagine that he forgets that he may be hungry, he may have not showered in days, his total possessions are on his back or on the back of his chair, and he's swept away by the narrative of his book to someplace other than this. This man is unburdened by the risks of finance. This man is unburdened by house payments. The man has no address at which to receive bills or junk mail. At this moment, in this majestic building, this man lives a beautiful life.

American Mythos

This is the wedding portrait of Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline. The picture was taken in Cincinnati by photographer Nina Berman while she was on assignment for People magazine. Berman titled the photo "Marine Wedding."

Ty is a Marine. Here, he's about to get married. While we normally find great joy in marriage or getting married, here, no one is smiling.

Ty cannot smile due to the extent of the injuries he received while serving as a Marine in Iraq. He has scar tissue covering over 90% of his head and face. Renee has no facial injuries, and Renee is not smiling either. That's likely due to the extent of Ty's injuries in light of her engagement to him prior to him leaving for war. And now Renee is looking forward to a life-long commitment to a short sale. She promised her hand in marriage to her high school sweetheart prior to his tour of duty, and now she is about to consummate that love on her wedding night to a scarred and drugged war alien. Ty's face is wrapped in pale scar tissue; holes serve for his nose and ears; and his mind, shattered by a suicide attack, is encased in a plastic dome. War has transformed another patriotic young man into an existential Other.

When Nina Berman took their picture, Ty had yet to recover his health. And Renee had yet to fathom what a life-long commitment to an injured war veteran means. And like a crying child handed an ice cream, their community, their friends. the military, the press, the American war zeitgeist scooted Ty and Renee before the altar to consummate not a marriage, per se, but a return to normalcy for the two and their community and a symbol for America's resolve in the face of war. But the only face of war is his. It reflects the seriousness of marriage commitments, the seriousness of war, the seriousness of an IED explosion, the seriousness of military technology and battlefield triage medicine. The sheer gravity of all the institutions brought to bear on this moment pulls Renee's face and Ty's body into a forlorn monument to burden.

Medicine learns a lot from war by treating the wounded and studying the echoes of war, living on in the twisted visages and shattered mental states of its most wounded survivors. Most of what medicine knows about orthotics, prosthetics, plastic surgery, and neurology comes from the profusion of war-specific injuries suffered on the battlefield. One could think of the advances in these fields as the unholy alliance of scientific method with national military recruitment, enrolling the brave and the few to stand in the way of projectiles, bombs, shrapnel, and fire as its subjects in order that it can determine the efficacy of its weapons, its tactics, and its medicine. We have to thank Ty for teaching medicine a lot about treatment: treatment of severe burns, treatment of concussions, treatment of brain swelling, treatment of skull removal, and treatment of affect, the affect of the soldier in the aftermath of a most traumatic experience. There, trapped in his overturned patrol vehicle, burning alive, Ty survived a hell to then come home decorated, honored, and soon to be married to his high school sweetheart, Renee. And there he had to cope with being a grotesque, Humpty Dumpty monument of war's sheer horror and the medical attempts to embalm him alive and memorialize him as a hero. 

This is the American flag. It first emerged from the skilled hands of Betsy Ross in 1776. The flag is a symbol representing, in this case, a new nation. The thirteen stripes represent the thirteen original colonies who revolted against British colonial rule and founded a new nation. The red represents the blood of sacrifices by those original revolutionists. The white represents the bandages wrapped around them in order that they may live to see freedom. The stars on a blue background symbolize a new constellation. This would become a confederation and subsequently a republic, consisting of fifty states, hence the fifty stars. I learned most of what I know about the flag through drill in my Taekwondo class, which Marines had brought back to the United States after the Korean War.

This flag is a symbol, a collection of shapes and colors, the heraldry of which is arcane to some but the feeling of which is palpable to most. Flags have consequence. People fight and die for them. The blood symbolized by the red stripes is what gives the flag impetus, ultimate meaning, power. The bandages are what provide citizens with living exemplars, the war wounded and veterans. These tattered trophies of freedom represent the ultimate sacrifice. To have your legs blown off or your face twisted like a melted plastic bottle by the weapons of war and then to live if not to tell but at least to represent a nation's conviction to its sovereignty then you understand just how utterly consequential that flag is. The veterans were the heroes when you were a child. And so, in aspiration, you joined the effort and became one yourself. The fact is, the sacrifices that make the flag meaningful historically become the impetus for future generations to sacrifice so that this flag can be consequential to future generations of recruits. Ty was well aware of this and inspired by this, and so he joined the war effort. But Ty wasn't fighting for our freedoms really. He was fighting for his understanding of them. Ty was fighting for his flag and all that it meant to him in that particular way that patriotism sets up in small towns like his: "Dad and uncle Joe fought in the war. They fought for my right to be here and live the way I do. And I will do the same." This provincial view of freedom is the key to its authenticity for most in the US. It is draped upon cherished objects, people, and places close to home.

Nina Berman's award-winning photo is all that remains of Ty and Renee's wedding. Their wedding lasted from 2006 to 2008. Ty, then single, permanently so; Ty, then disabled, permanently so, decided to go on living his normal life, propped up on a platoon of pills, some of which he called 'don't kill your wife pills.' Ty had a practical view on objects that related to consequences. When Ty viewed the flag, he knew the consequence; he must sacrifice for it. This flag was a totem for that thing underneath the symbols we use to represent the nation. In the sequence of human actions the flag leads others to march into the maws of unfathomable hell, proudly, naively for the sake of an even more ambiguous concept: freedom.

At the heart of the American mythos are a set of symbols, some visual, some spoken, which are supported by the ideological puppetry of soldiering off to war, sacrificing for war, supporting the cause, and siding with leaders. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to live or to survive. Behind war is a fundamental desire, the desire to kill or to prey. Pairing the two makes warfare an engine of sacrifice set in a theater of war. Upon this sacrificial altar the nations laps up the blood of their citizen, adding flesh to their ideological skeleton. Meaning is created through their sacrifice. This dialectic between survival and state-sanctioned murder supports the nation and its ambiguous concepts. For many in the US a purpose of waging war is to 'protect,' protect what? our freedoms. Behind war is that dialectic, which is, primordial to symbolism itself, on/off, yes/no, good/bad, action/reaction stimulus/response, 1/0. Dialectics is an expression of our neurology. And dialectics is about finding boundaries, segments in a sequence, actions and reactions, differences that make the difference. The very basis of meaning is in the margins that define the relationships between things. War is about boundaries, their protection, their expansion. And nations march their citizens-cum-soldiers out to those margins like communal scapegoats, to die "for God and country," adding flesh to the vaunted rhetoric of nation-state ideology. Soldiers marched out to the margins carry the sacrificial stain of the scapegoat.They are sent to die; their suspension between life and death is a matter of warfare technology to enhance the probabilities of outlasting a conflict.

At its most fundamental, war is about probabilities: the probabilities of projectiles finding flesh, the probabilities of winning strategies and winning wars, the probabilities of living or dying. As for the architects of war, their lethal weaponry enhance the probability that if you're marched out to that margin your purpose is to follow kill orders until you finally succumb to your war injuries and die. The only probability in your favor is the architects' designs to make equipment that extends your life to war's end. And at war's end the soldier-as-scapegoat brings those margins home: war's gut-wrenching fear, its cries of pain, death, burning, dying, its suffering internally, mentally in a ward, in a home, or on the street ignored and forgotten between bouts of drug abuse, its fighting to speak again, walk again, live a normal life back in the bosom from which one sprung again.

Ty tried to return to his old life and its sense of normalcy. Ty died in December of 2013 from a fatal dose of alcohol and heroin. Ty left for war a starry eyed and patriotic soldier, much like many who sacrifice for their country. Ty returned a hero, a miracle of modern medicine, a cyborg of synthetic parts and grafts, sewn together into a symbol, much like those thirteen stripes and those fifty stars. Ty returned a new constellation. But Ty was no totem. Ty was a man. Ty is now dead and the flag waves goodbye.

Why I don't write screenplays: Exhibit 1

The man with only one wish

by Jason Lesko

12/31/2009

Summary:

A man is diagnosed with a terminal illness, possibly cancer, and sets about finding meaning in his life. He gets some of his life in order, pays off his debts, and does some of the things that he had always wanted to do. Since he spent the majority of his life in a successful professional career he failed to meet and marry a woman let alone have a child. This, he proposes is his last wish, the one wish he wants fulfilled before he leaves this world.

He begins enlisting his friends to help him, and while canvassing the area one suggest that he post a want ad in Craigslist. Desperate, he thinks this is a good idea. He meets a few potential women and one sticks out as the potential candidate. She’s friendly and obliging throughout. She appears genuine in her interest and intent. After all, she confided in him that she wants a baby more than anything else and has been looking for the right man to father her child. He thinks he has met the perfect mother for his child, so he prepares for the child’s future as they work at having a kid. Success.

The man hires a lawyer and gets his will in order. He entrusts the woman with his savings and with an antique watch that has been in the family for generations. He wants the woman to give his child the watch. She agrees and he prepares for his departure. His illness gets progressively worse and he passes on.

EXTERIOR: PAWN SHOP

A car pulls up. The woman and expectant mother exits the vehicle. She enters the shop.

A brief exchange occurs where the pawnshop clerk consults some manuals and appraises the value of the watch. He hands her cash, and she leaves the shop.

EXTERIOR: MEDICAL BUILDING

The woman’s car pulls up. She exits and greets a man in a suit, her lawyer. The brief exchange between the two indicate that he has found a loophole in the will. If a doctor can find medical grounds on which to abort the fetus then, legally, she is granted the right to do so. This particular doctor is prepared to go through with the procedure. She hands her lawyer the cash, and he goes inside to broker a deal with the doctor.

INTERIOR OF DOCTOR'S OFFICE

The doctor is visibly intoxicated and quiet rough for his age. He is willing to perform any number of operations given the right price. He agrees to perform the operation as well as forge the medical documents to deem the fetus ‘non-viable.’ 

INTERIOR: OPERATING ROOM

The scene is the operating room. The woman is in stirrups, prepped for her abortion. The doctor walks in and prepares for the procedure. The viewer is entreated to the sonogram view of the abortion as the doctor inserts his instruments into the woman to extract the fetus. Something occurs which causes the instruments to shut down. He goes for other instruments and has the woman help him push out the fetus that he has grabbed with forceps. After a few moments the extraction is successful. The doctor takes a look at what he has extracted and is horrified to see a fully formed and fighting small baby. The baby begins to cry.

The crying and struggling of the baby are, we find out a language, and so the crying and gesticulations of the fetus are given subtitles.

BABY
 “Stop it! I’m alive damn you!”

“Get it away from me. I want to live!”
“I want to live!”

The doctor cuts the child’s throat and blood slowly pours from the wound and its mouth. He turns to his assistant.

DOCTOR

“Speak of this to no one, EVER!”
 

In the distance a devil man peers in the window approvingly, laughing a menacing laugh.

EXTERIOR: HOUSE, DAYTIME

An auctioneer has set up and is preparing to convene an estate sale. People begin bidding on the man’s items.

CONCURRENT SCENE: SHOPPING

The woman, dressed elegantly, is shopping. Happy music (“Walking on Sunshine”) plays over a montage of the woman shopping while the estate sale of the man's items occurs. The woman tries on clothes. Buyers are active in bidding on items.

EXTERIOR: HOUSE, DAYTIME

The final scene is the exterior of a home. It is day. The woman’s car pulls up and she exits carrying with her several bags. The final shot is of woman’s car seat. A small pool of blood has formed where she sat. A disembodied cry of a child is heard.

Moby Dick, Chapter 16: Captain Bildad

"Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all his immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabinboy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming a boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship-owner; Bildad as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income." (p. 76)

Moby Dick: Chapter 16: The Ship

"You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junkets; butter-box galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a rare old craft as this rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old schoool, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked beaded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coasts of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the terms of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All around, her unpannelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp hempen thews and tendons to. Those ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." (p. 72)

ball of hate

"His body was a collection of taut sinews wrapped around a ball of hate."

Life, God

God is the answer to creation. God furnishes an answer for a being's sudden self-regard and the abyssal terror of the ambiguity to its origin. The story of God bridges that abyss. But in this sense God is both the absent cause and the story we tell to explain origins. God is, in fact, 'God.' God the subject. God the predicate. God the sentence. God the primary cause behind the motion in the universe. The primordial subject from which all action derives is God in the narrative cosmology of human beings. And this is the reason behind 'God.' 'God' must be spoken.

Life is a self-replicating system living within an environment from which it takes molecules that this system can use to sustain its existence. Survival, in situ, is a penultimate behavioral trait of life. The ultimate 'behavior of life,' its bookends, is the ability to replicate through time. Every enclosed system making up life, the cell, carries this capability deep within its nucleus in chains of proteins that serve as the information for survival and replication.

At this basic level let us stand in amazement at the very notion of a molecule, made up of atoms with certain affinities for attraction and repelling becoming a self-replicating molecular mechanism. Already at this level, the simplest of arrangements, based in the constituent 'stuff' of this universe, appears to have a motivation, an impetus toward living. And living, in its most fundamental sense, is avoiding the inevitability of a coherent system fall apart. At this level, the nuclear material of a cell, offers a blueprint for replication, repair, and survival.

The one addition to earth and to the living systems that emerged on it, which cannot be ignored, is the sun. The sun provides warmth and light, two properties that living systems have evolved to appropriate. Plants use the action of photons to  produce sugar. Living creatures capture photons in light sensitive membrane extensions of their nervous system to perceive the world around them. The eye and the chloroplast are but two adaptations to a world bathed in the radiant heat and light of a nearby sun. From that light, life springs forth.