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.