Geometry of Murder

Leonora grimaced, as if swallowing some poisonous phlegm. "Major Parker, tell him to--" She glanced at the dark cloud boiling over the mesa like the effluvium of some black-hearted volcano. ''Wait! Let's see what the little cripple can do!" She turned on Manuel with an overbright smile. "Go on, then. Let's see you sculpt a whillwind."

In her face the diagram of bones formed a geometry of murder.

from the short story "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D" in the book 'Vermilion Sands' by J. G. Ballard

Dream: August 6, 2019

I am in a house. A horse has two long hooks piercing its neck on each side. I am not alone with the horse. Another person, a man perhaps, had set the hooks in the horse in an attempt to kill it. The horse is very much alive and is chasing me from room to room. It isn't charging me or being aggressive, but it appears to not want to run from me or leave me alone. The two hooks don't seem to be stopping it from chasing me and facing me no matter which room I enter. I endeavor to finish the process of killing this horse. I finally grab hold of the two hooks and with the unhooked length hanging from its pierce points I pierce the horse's neck. The effect is gruesome as the skin is deformed by the submerged hooks trying to exit the back of its neck. The horse, at this point isn't resembling so much a horse in its stance, nor are the hooks behaving like two steel hooks that would be stiffly hanging from where they were attached to this horse. Nevertheless, the plunged ends of the hooks I have responsibility for are agonizingly exiting the horse's neck and all focus in my dream is on this. The hooks exit, the spine's outline under the skin is evident, the hooks exit. The dream is over.

Dream: August 4, 2019

I had a dream that my father bought me a guinea pig as a pet. It came in a little cage that came apart in a few pieces. I released him and he scurried around the house, which happened to be the house I grew up in as a kid. After literally less than a minute I decided that I didn't want the guinea pig and proceeded to chase after it to put it back in its package. Several times I grabbed the guinea pig and it would squeal an audibly articulate 'please, no' over and over as I picked it up and put it in the tray of its package and put it back together.

Western culture as bedazzlement with material

The conventional wisdom of our time is that European man has advanced by enormous strides since the age of cathedrals. He has landed on the moon. He has cured smallpox. He has harnessed the power in the atom. Another argument, however, might be made in the opposite direction, that all European man has accomplished in 900 years is a more complicated manipulation of materials, a more astounding display of his grasp of the physical principles of matter. That we are dazzled by mere styles of expression. That ours is not an age of mystics but of singular adepts, of performers. That the erection of the cathedrals was the last wild stride European man made before falling back into the confines of his intellect. (p. 250)

from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

Abject survival on the ice

At 3:30 A.M. on the 26th of April 1832, the whaler Shannon of Hull, running before a southeast gale, slammed bow first into an iceberg. The captain ran forward in the darkness and laid his hands to the wall of ice even as it continued past them, ripping open the ship's starboard side. They were awash in minutes. Sixteen men and three boys were swept away. The survivors clung to each other beneath a sail, on a part of the ship kept afloat by trapped air. They were without food or water. They survived, with the death of but three more, by bleeding each other and drinking the blood from a shoe. A man who left their deck shelter to commit suicide spotted two Danish brigs on the 2nd of May. The survivors, save the captain, were all frostbitten. "The rescue," writes a historian of the arctic whale fisheries, "was one of those providential affairs of which many instances could be related."

I think of a final image of devastation: the remnant of several whaling crews found in a frozen stupor behind a sea wall of dead bodies, stacked up to protect them from the worst of the heavy seas in which their small floe rolled and pitched. (p. 218)

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

Aboriginal mindset

Hunting in my experience--and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land--is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are bought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something "means"and to be concerned only that it "is." And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships--fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven's distant voice--become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern--which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and smells--takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration.

The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational, nonlinear comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are normal, is, I believe the conscious working mind of an aboriginal hunter. It is a frame of mind that redefines patience, endurance, and expectation. (pp. 199-200)

from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

The polar bear as object of amusement

The most disturbing and deplorable aspect of nineteenth century encounters with polar bears was a perverse manipulation of the bond between a female and her cubs, a common amusement of sailors aboard whaling and sealing ships. William Scoresby tells of an incident involving walrus hunters who had set fire to a pile of blubber to attract bears. A female and two cubs drew near. The female settled her cubs at a short distance and then started trying to hook pieces of blubber out of the fire. The men watched from the safety of the deck as she fought with the flames. They threw her small bits of blubber, which she took to the cubs. As she approached them with the last piece, the men shot the two cubs  dead. For the next half hour she "laid her paws first upon one, and then the other, and endeavored to raise them up." She walked off and called to them, she licked their wounds. She went off again and "stood for some time moaning" before returning to paw them "with signs of inexpressible fondness." Bored or perhaps mortified, the men shot the female and left her on the ice with her cubs.

Sometimes a cub was taken alive, for a zoo or as a present for someone. In November 1876, a Sir Allen Young shot a female and one of her cubs from the deck of a steamship. The other cub he lassoed as a gift for the Prince of Wales. The cub fought wildly until it was secured with chains to ringbolts in the deck. The female was butchered and the cub wrapped in her skin in the hope of appeasing him. Three or four days later the cub succeeded in tearing free of the ringbolts. He was then placed in a small cage, where he remained for the duration of the voyage. The cub roared for hours on end and pulled at the length of chain still around his neck. He was tormented by the ship's dog, which stole his food and bit his paws. The origin of the meat he was fed can be imagined. By the time the ship reached England, the cub lay prostrate in his cage, convulsing and panting. He died a week later. "Had he lived," wrote Frank Bruckland, reflecting the attitudes of the age, "he would, no doubt, have been an honor to his country and his race." (pp. 111-113)

From Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

interpellation in the era of social media

Interpellation is one of those tricky words that emerges, in my education, from the reading of Chris Weedon's "Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory." Borrowing from Louis Althusser's work, Weedon presents this concept, interpellation, as an ideological process of furnishing a subject for an individual to adopt through power-laden processes of hailing. In the context of Althusser's work, this would be the various functions of a state apparatus to officialize a person's status by any number of demographic categories and the more functional processes that a person goes through as a matter of ageing through the state. Interpellation is the functional front-end of that process. It's the 'hey you' the very act of language, verbal or written, which 'addresses' an individual in a particularizing way, which produces the kinds of subjectivity that a person assumes to be official for as long as this subjectivity is useful in conducting state-official business, economic affairs, and simply living at an address. It's these multiple and overlapping ways and functions of address, which establish a persistent functional subjectivity through which a person engages in the larger society. Weedon further clarifies that aside from the process of establishing a self- and other-recognition through interpellation, it is also a form of misrecognition, that is, the individual "assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity" (p. 30). This will be my jumping off point.

Social media allows individuals to engage with a larger whole of society in an interactive manner. A key to allowing this interactivity, one which sustains its glitter and draw for the individual, is the ways in which a layer of markup language coded onto the content a person shares affords that person the possibility of finding and being found as a result in a search query. The ideological component here results from a potential for 'leveling up' afforded by assuming one of any number of popular categories of existence. One can make or be the content within a vine of any topical significance to a certain strata of taste within the social media's user community. This always ground-level potential that any moment is pregnant with the possibility of becoming famous incentivizes individuals to engage as searchable categories within social media. This leads to two kinds of activity that I recognize. First it lends itself to a self-awareness that in any situation one could contribute to content that others may find entertaining or engaging in some other way. With that and the numeracy of views and the sheer content of interactive responses to what one posts registers by the individual poster as a form of fame. Secondly, this potential for fame has the potential for systematically distorting one's interest for engaging with a social media community through the inducements to become one of any specific trend-savvy categories in whatever context these operate. And with fame comes an added economic inducement to garner advertising dollars as one becomes a brand ambassador or simply a content generator for others' consumption. The power of 'leveling up' rests in this outcome of being a shareable and searchable information object within a visually represented social media space.

The upshot of this is simply that the potential for fame and for having the recognition of others reinforces the ontological condition of the searchable subjects for which an individual becomes, qua content. For example, if a woman gets hit by her boyfriend and she takes a picture of her bleeding nose and posts it on her social media for others to find, share, and spread she becomes content within an ever growing awareness of certain acts, which are categorically sorted, searched, and shared along the faultlines of their discretionary nature as data objects. This image could be one of many examples of #metoo or of #violenceagainstwomen or any number of trending meta-communicative content labels. And what this wider recognition does is carry the potential for crowding out forms of private individuality in dealing with the act depicted by allowing that wider recognition to be the louder voice naming the individual who had become content. This would be a hypothetical yet quite possible current example of that form of misrecognition that comes by way of interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I grant that any one person may find solace from public recognition and at least intelligibility to a larger public in any one of the ready-made content labels, i.e., hashtags, that have currency in a social media environment. What I am trying to tease out is how the affordance of this social media space plus the possibilities afforded by search categories, which lend a sense of category-based ontology to the person posting their content under it, distort agendas for both being and sharing. For example, would a woman feel empowered to be abused by her significant other? Would she feel empowered to challenge others into shaming her? Do gender nonbinaries feel empowered to share their daily struggles through self-revelatory social media posts and even enhance their status as such? Do various racists and mass shooters feel empowered by available communities to engage in extreme acts of violence for the cause they feel they are forwarding? In other words, does social media afford, in the psychology of the individual, a chance for the effects of group polarization to take hold?

Let me explain.

The theory of group polarization posits that two underlying forces lead members of a group to act and think in more extreme ways than they would when alone. The first, social comparison, states that people in the presence of others use their perception of the values and beliefs of the group as a gauge and adapt their behaviors to appear more desirable to the group. The second, influence, should be self-explanatory. For the sake of acceptance and the positive regard of the group, the group can induce individuals to do and act in ways they wouldn't normally. While people are engaged in the time-delayed mediated environment of social media this does disengage some of the group dynamics at play in the theory of group polarization. Nevertheless, the perception of others and their acceptance is likely magnified to an nth degree by a perceived scope of an audience of millions and the potential of 'going viral' with a post. And so in a situation like this one must wonder how social media provides an acutely strong form of perceived pressure to conform to a, once again, perceived peer group. This would be yet another permutation of misrecognition caused by interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I harp on the 'psychology' of web-based social interactions only to suggest that a majority of what happens on-line is purely cognitive, that is, in the 'heads' of individuals. It is their personal perceptions, their star struck feelings for a person talking directly to them, phone screen to phone screen--camera in; video stream out--on a nearly daily basis to a growing fan base that provides an empirical basis for what may be occurring. And any number of topics find a growing fan base for analysis and reactions to any number of things, from games, to vines, to memes, to songs, you name it. Social media may be recreating, in the atomized contexts of one-to-one consumption, the sharing of relevant information about the world from one to many but with a feeling of intimacy afforded by the medium and the consumption contexts.

In the past I have felt that everyone sinking into their glowing rectangle at the expense of the people around them was a pernicious undoing of our culture. I may have to rethink that technologically spun version of the rapture. After all, we are still engaging with others, just in systematically different ways and upon lines rarified by content specificity. Let's just consider that we're losing, potentially, an ability to engage with others a la carte as we increasingly interact in content dependent arenas with others.

hunting a gentle leviathan

"The pursuit of this animal was without restraint. A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right, a 57-foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work." (p. 4)

from Barry Lopez's "Arctic Dreams"

The September 12th paradigm

I remember September 10th 2001.

Then, people hardly stood for the National Anthem or assumed the proper stance during sporting events. No soldiers repelled from the ceilings of ice rinks before the game. The league held no commemorative nights where the players wore partially or wholly camouflage jerseys or some color-coded ribbon to 'honor' heroes.' There were no color guard ceremonies or moments where the whole audience had to get up and salute 'our veterans.'

Dying for a specifically shaped, colored, and patterened piece of fabric that you call a synecdoche for all the things you hold dear, which happens to fall under the governance of that government that flies this fabric is a mistaken association happening when Joe America's ability to lift and repaint his pickup and court Mary America at their town's burger joint is somehow delivered onto us by Joe Soldier's 4-year tour of duty spent at the terminus of a military supply chain on a sand bagged hilltop in Afghanistan where he occasionally exchanges fire and launches mortar rounds at an adjacent hillside because doing that in some way is what kept a militarized Asian religious sect from conquering every aspect of what it is to be free and American, from the church steeple to the last slurp of that malt with Mary.

"I'll stand by joo"

This happens from time to time.
I attract someone from afar.
And no matter what the situation, almost always it becomes another two ships passing in the night.
That's because I don't want to ruin the unique and special feeling that low-information encounters such as these provide me. 

I was walking through the Galleria after a doctor's appointment, trying to make the most of a day off during the week. It was no more than 10 am. I take the same entrance and pass through the same part of the open area to reach a few stores where I shop.

As I passed one of the kiosks I noticed a woman organizing the items she was selling and she noticed me. Our eyes met. It was a lengthy enough look that I got the feeling she liked what she saw. I liked what I saw. Hell, if the woman is half-way decent then I like that she looked at me probably more than anything. Yeah, I'm a vane prick. So be it. I pay my penance for it. I live alone, perpetually so.

I visited the two stores I normally do for clothes, tried on a few things, and ended up spending a total of eleven dollars and ninety-some cents on a 'designer' t-shirt. It's soft. It's the right color, dark blue. Hell, it's a nice cut, although I didn't even try it on; no, just the pants.

As I was wending my way back through a more populated mall at some time before noon, I spied that same kiosk off in the distance, and I noticed that same saleswoman looking at me. She had locked on hard this time. I looked away a few times. The escalation of eye contact was making me nervous.

Kiosks are almost always run by foreigners, mostly men with dark hair, dark beards, and some exotic good looks, too much cologne, and clothing that suggests they drive something foreign and either sporty or refined. Sure enough, a man fitting that description was on the back end of the kiosk. His co-worker, this exotic woman was sitting on a chair at the kiosk.

I almost never stop at kiosks when I'm passing through the mall. They sell things I just don't need. This one was no different although like 300 million other Americans I had a perfectly good reason to. I had a cellular phone. The kiosk? Celluosite. I could have sparked up some neutral topic and chatted with her, smiled maybe once or twice. Hell, I could have even asked for her number. But no; I did not. I just looked at her a few times and then averted my gaze to keep from appearing too interested. What a pussy.

If I were to guess her ethnicity I would put it somewhere on the brown continuum. Perhaps somewhere from the Levant, Lebanon or Syria perhaps? No, she was too 'liberated.' Maybe she was Turkish or Armenian. She was probably just a uniquely un-Serbian-looking Serbian. She was short, thin, had curly brown hair with blonde highlights. She was dressed in gray pants and a dark top. When I did look at her I noticed that she had a fit, young body--good for drawing in cocky men with a few dollars to spend and a desire to expand their sexual portfolio. How fucking presumptuous most men are. But I'm the cunt on the bleachers sitting on my foam "number one" hand because I don't like the odds, nor do I like the players. I'm a poor sport. I'm way too serious. I'm a fucking bore. I would have run out of things to say to her in less than one minute.

And as I passed by her kiosk, she began singing to the song playing over the mall sound system: "I'll stand by you." Except when she sang the lyrics they came out, "I'll stand by joo."

Foreign, yes. Attractive, sure. Availability, unknown. I make a rule of not pursuing women in relationships, but I often make some pretty egregious commandment violations with my good friends' wife no less. But that's a different story, and much like this gal at the kiosk, she led me on, made me think she wanted something to happen, and sure enough I tried to make something happen and nothing did.

And that folks is why I did nothing.

a culture of make believe

"In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantage of schools for Joseph's people. Joseph reliped that the Nez Perces did not want the white man's schools.
'Why do you not want schools?' the commissioner asked.
'They will teach us to have churches,' Joseph answered.
'Do you not want churches?'
'No, we do not want churches.'
'Why do you not want churches?'
'They will teach us to quarrel about God,' Joseph said. 'We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.'" (p. 302)

from "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown

Gawking at dead indians as the talismans of America

"Captain Jack was hanged on October 3. On the night following the execution, his body was secretly disinterred, carried off to Yreka, and embalmed. A short time later it appeared in eastern cities as a carnival attraction, admission price ten cents."
(p. 233)

from "Bury my heart at wounded knee" by Dee Brown

Now they were all good Indians.

"Roman Nose was dead; Black Kettle was dead; Tall Bull was dead. Now they were all good Indians. Like the antelope and the buffalo, the ranks of the proud Cheyennes were thinning to extinction."
(p. 169)

from Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

Sun Dance Chant

"Look at that young man.
He is feeling good
Because his sweetheart
Is watching him."

(p. 142)

- from "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown

What is money

I am unsure why I haven't posted this here. I saved it in a notepad back in November 2016.

Here goes:

"There is a lot of talk about the functions of money, but a clear definition is that it is an abstract claim on society and natural resources represented in a unit of account."

- Tim Dimuzio

like money in the bank

"What Mr. and Mrs. Kesler both learned is that children have a remarkable capacity to handle their own problems when we begin to take care of our own. The work they each did with their own families was like money in the bank for Billy and his two siblings, because children are the carriers of whatever has been left unresolved from the generations that went before" (p. 150).

 - from "The Dance of Anger" by Harriet Goldhor Lerner

I have to ask why sometimes

I have to ask why I do what I do.

Why do I go out alone?
Simply because I enjoy the control I have over myself, alone. Roaming in crowds across a cityscape cloaked in night requires coordination, friends, and concessions to others' needs/desires/schedules. When you go out alone, you time everything perfectly, kairos perfected.

Why do I chase young women?
You chase young women because you think you can. You think you're hot. You think you have a chance. You are easily duped by a 20-something smile and think that your whole life has just come to a head and "This is your opportunity kid. Go get her, champ."

Why do I fail miserably at meeting anyone?
As the above indicate you crave control and one of the ways you can ensure a consistent single guy's experience out on the scene is to ensure you go for low-probability encounters with young women. Game, set, match.

Granted I can ensure that I am not a creep. I would never take advantage of a young woman who was too drunk. In fact, I make a point to never ever try to bed a drunk woman I've just met. That's the stuff that leads to rape accusations televised from within high offices across the land. The fact that men get into this kind of trouble speaks to the kinds of men who become leaders and the behaviors they possess, which are parlayed into aspirations toward leadership positions.

I am soft. I am scared. I play this kind of sheepish man child out and about, always alone, never leaving with anyone, almost never. I'm a wild card. Women want knowledge. They want control. I came to this conclusion before I heard psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson confirm it: women prefer to date men they find less intelligent than them so that they can exercise a modicum of control.

I recall one evening in the early months of 2017. The conversation of my past emerged at this bar I frequent, and the one gal I've had my eyes on since we laid eyes on each other heard about my doctoral education and she audibly said "Fuck." This is the same girl who, that same night, responded to a story retold by my friend about my being play-raped because I had to play Daisy when me and my brother and his friend played 'Dukes of Hazzard' with the comment. "I love that story."

These things speak to women, the children they raise into men, and the kind of world that shapes what will become their conscientious decision making regime, their identity, their notion of what a man should be, a woman's, and their roles in tandem, together forever and ever amen.

That will not be my conclusion because the feminist in me suggests that I am blaming women. Well I am blaming them no more than I am blaming the supervisory slaves who would whip, train, and abuse their kind in order to reproduce an existent social system in the antebellum South of the United States.

I enjoy clarity, but it's a clarity of one, and so far as I try to share that clarity with others it comes off as solitary delusion. Facts, alternative factions, fiction, myth, legend such pocks the road of life that I try to navigate by character-revealing deeds, not words.

And on that note. I fail at attracting anyone outside of a smile, some dimples, a well-shaped skull, a fit body, and some blue eyes. Once those dimples crease and words begin to spill out, I am done, utterly fucking done. The whole facade reveals an ant lion's den a seemingly innocuous oval of sand under which a larval creature awaits to ambush whatever arthropod may cross.

I am not a creep. I am not a predator. I undo everything with an obsessively overwrought self-obsession with the finger-chewing personal audit. In a sense, I am stuck in pause, and the complete lack of confidence revealed by my self-abusive audition undoes any attractive features I once possessed.

prescription drug farts

Fall in the age of climate change

The bottom drops out.

And the obverse applies to Spring.

The unit of exchange

Fuck modernity

Frankfurt school trolling

Sadness is like a shadow

This sadness is like a shadow cast over me.
Its dark and cold umbra is a shroud that I cannot shake.
I take actions, hoping to outstep its cold, dark grasp.
But try as I may this shadow is never far away.