In science attraction is well-defined. Among people it can be, well, it can be difficult to parse.
Case in point is a woman who has worked at a local bar for the past, oh, 5 years. She was very young when she started. She got pregnant, had a kid, and still works there, having taken on bigger duties, some bartending, and heading the waitstaff. About a month or so before Christmas she sat down at the bar next to me, and I shared about a dozen words with her. A few months after that I gave her a piece of weed candy. She wouldn't look at me then, and after all these years I wondered if her inability to register me was purely out of intimidation, shyness, et cetera. I've witnessed her on several occasions on dates with what look to be 'pretty boys.' Since they're on firstish dates, I suspect that in some cases these guys are overdoing their dress. Nevertheless, she sat next to me. After that piece of candy she told the bartender that she was going to sit and talk with me for a moment. The bartender informed me of this. We talked briefly. She left. Since then we've exchanged about a dozen or so words, some glances, some hellos, and I've seen her out with other pretty boys. I don't know how available she is, and when I brought my own girlfriend into the bar I half-fantasized that she was pissed by this, but then again, she does have a rather convincing resting bitch face to begin with. Is her hair really blonde? I noticed her dark roots the last night she was working the bar.
Am I attracted to her? I've been thinking of her. Since she talked with me, she's high-tailed it for the door at the end of her shift, not spending a moment to talk with me. She will sometimes talk to a serial loner gay man at the bar like they're old friends. She will often give me this big over her head wave, as I look at her. I don't know what to say. She is probably young enough to be my child, but I am almost single, never been married, never had kids. Fuck. I'm virtually a priest with pedophilia and all to boot. But this girl, well, I think what I am attracted to or more or less observant of is her meaning to me. She's a youthful woman, buxom, blonde, not entirely stupid. She represents more than some date but a potential mother to my own kid, a chance for me to be a dad, and a chance for me to date someone younger than me for a change.
What is attraction? In this case my attraction is clouded by a greater force of logic concerning what she could be or mean next to me. That's hardly a good reason to pursue her, and I hardly pursue her. I need to talk with her more often. I recall a very long, hard stare she gave me when she was all dolled up in her hockey jersey one night. Deer in headlights moment for me. I didn't go talk to her. I have nothing pressing to say other than 'hi.' She blushes when I come over and talk with her. Does she like me or does she like the attention? Perhaps I'm just some vague concept of a stable relationship to her. Her kid in many cases sweetens the deal. I've gone as far with my current relationship as it can go because she's well past any reasonable age to bear children let alone adopt one. Family, fatherhood, these are also vague concepts to me, but damn are they powerful attractors, responsibilities that I'd like to yoke. Is she worth it? I don't know how crazy or irrational she is. The bonus is that she doesn't smoke. But she's getting heavier by the years. Right now she's a black man's wet dream: big tits, big ass, blonde, white. Is that what I am trying to corner? I don't know. I need to find a means of speaking with her. She does her best to avoid me for reasons that are probably as complicated as my attempt to understand what my attraction to her is.
I'll just leave it at that. Two ships passing in the night. And she's one ship I'd like to board.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
The better mousetrap
I rarely get any thumbs in any direction.
Effing social media. A circumstantial democracy.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
A Very Kobain Christmas
No, that's not Kurt Kobain. It's Steven Thorn, who was a musician and lover of music in his own right. Here he sits on the couch next to me. I am to his left, age three. To my immediate right is what could either be my dad or mother. Both had dark hair then. To Steven's left is his father, Pete thorn. On the ground in gray hair is my great grandmother Mildred Zimmerman. Next to her is my brother, Jack, playing the Milton Bradley game, Connect Four. In the left immediate foreground is Alma, a friend of Grandma Zimmerman. Santa needs no introduction.
Steven was probably still in his 20s here, much like Kobain. Steven was an avid music collector, worked at a music store, and even grew up around the members of Uncle Tupelo, notably Jeff Tweedy. He worked with him at a Granite City record store before it became Vintage Vinyl and would get lots of live concerts and footage from Tweedy up until the end. That was Steven's mild brush with fame. Here, he's simply participating in the Christmas events at a late stage in what would become a wandering life. He would spend time in a supermax prison, earn a childhood education degree, raise multiple cats, switch female companions, and ultimately tool around Saint Louis, going to the public library to get his live CD labels printed out. He died in February of this year. Like my mother, his body was riddled with cancer, and it took his life.
He bears an uncanny resemblance to Kurt Kobain here, and that's the only thing worth mentioning for the reader.
A scientific approach to ghosts
We are time's symbiont. Humans have been all along. All of life carries the imprint of time in its purposeful integration of new and helpful genetic information, mutations, new metabolic processes, and greater complexity. Granted this integration makes sense in the face of an environment that divvies up success by the way a life can or cannot maintain itself and, in turn, pass on the genetic and epigenetic information that it has acquired though its life-time to a succeeding one.
To consider the story of earth, from its condensation from a cloud of stellar material, to its spherical compression into a planet, and finally to its development of environmental conditions that could precipitate the kinds of molecular and chemical interactions that are the basis for life, the presence of something outside of mere happenstance is possible. A basic pattern of chaos to complex organization has occurred if we only look at our planet from its birth to its present. Nothing in science, to me, disputes the existence of an existence, a consciousness outside of the fabric of this universe. It disputes the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative of God's creation. More importantly we have to ask why life is so oriented to the violent and acquisitive act of catching other life, killing it, and incorporating its molecules as food through ingestion. For the life of the predator, this act is essential. More generally, for the life of the heterotroph this is coded into its cellular processes. And few, like our biomolecular cousin, the euglena, are capable of waging both war or peace on its environs.
Life is violent as long as we treat the membrane separating one cell from another to be an essential assumption for defining life and defining it discretely so. What that does is establish boundaries, demarcations of one entity from another. But so long as most all boundaries must be transcended for the sake of sustaining any one cell we should question the discretion that we infer when we classify units of life.
Ontological quibbles aside, the presence of ghosts was hinted to above. This notion that time, and especially time with purpose, that is existence, is passed on. Something is so miraculous and yet so everyday to reproduction. Through this process two organisms exchange genetic information. For humanity this occurs inside the female as sperm flagellate toward the egg, penetrate its wall, and begin meiosis. Boring biology class details, sure, but this process is something as old as the hills that creatures have been doing for millennia. And through this process life has marched progressively on, through time, and carrying the wisdom of its survival with it.
This brings me to human culture. One professor described it as 'our instinct.' That is a fitting description for something that, outside of our conscientious deposition or ignorance of it, becomes the self-evident world, the common sense through which we go about our lives. And let us stop just for a minute to focus upon language, speech, meaning. Words and their meaning are learned, and through this we become social creatures, members of a culture, and consequently learn who we are. Through the adoption of language we don't merely pick up a shovel because language is more than simply a tool. It is a mode of existence, through time, and that's the key to my argument concerning ghosts. When we speak, whether we intend to or not, we conjure up ghosts of the past that we have learned to agree with. For Mikhail Bakhtin this tendency in speech to carry multiple voices was heteroglossia. When we speak our speech reflects a history of contention over meaning, various perspectives, sometimes the trauma of a past that has never been felt personally. In my country, the flag, political words like 'socialism' can conjure up very specific and learned emotional reactions that speak to something that language can do. A word, as a learned memory, can carry that long-gone world along with it.
When I say we are surrounded by ghosts I don't speak of those Victorian, diaphanous specters that haunt places. I speak of the living imprint that we carry in our speech, a living imprint when we speak among others, that is simply out of our hands. Interpretations vary. Valences vary. What we say and what we mean, and how we confirm, please, upset, or confuse others is a component of that messy world of speaker-specters that populate our discourse. By saying we are time's symbiont I mean simply that speech and memory are means of gathering and passing time from the past through to the present and into the future. This mode of ferrying time is the actions of consciousness and consciousness is substantiated by time itself. It takes time to reflect upon what or who I am, and it took time, lots of time, to develop a sense of what/who I am, where I am, and what it all means for me. Time is the fabric of our consciousness because our consciousness takes and uses time in order for it to register itself in the material world through speech, meaning, action, ultimately culture. The development of DNA as a blueprint for an organism is, itself, a grand miracle of molecular assembly and association. From a sea awash in a biofilm of molecules of increasing complexity our organisms come. After countless trillions of molecular interactions under varying circumstances a molecule arises that can recreate itself indefinitely. After countless trillions of molecular interactions more these complex proteins for self-replication become hosts inside simply lipid membranes. Shortly thereafter, the membrane-encased self-replicating protein developed into the cell that became the building block for all life. And to look at a newborn child one is looking at a monument to those old oceans, those trillions upon trillions of chance and sometimes molecularly purposeful interactions.
The body, it's an ancient spaceship barnacled by countless other forms of life. It keeps traveling through space and through time, piloted by its long-dead inhabitants who effect action in the current occupants through meaning, identity, worldview. These imperatives, this will to meaning, this drive to survive is the domain of those ghosts of time that influence us.
To consider the story of earth, from its condensation from a cloud of stellar material, to its spherical compression into a planet, and finally to its development of environmental conditions that could precipitate the kinds of molecular and chemical interactions that are the basis for life, the presence of something outside of mere happenstance is possible. A basic pattern of chaos to complex organization has occurred if we only look at our planet from its birth to its present. Nothing in science, to me, disputes the existence of an existence, a consciousness outside of the fabric of this universe. It disputes the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative of God's creation. More importantly we have to ask why life is so oriented to the violent and acquisitive act of catching other life, killing it, and incorporating its molecules as food through ingestion. For the life of the predator, this act is essential. More generally, for the life of the heterotroph this is coded into its cellular processes. And few, like our biomolecular cousin, the euglena, are capable of waging both war or peace on its environs.
Life is violent as long as we treat the membrane separating one cell from another to be an essential assumption for defining life and defining it discretely so. What that does is establish boundaries, demarcations of one entity from another. But so long as most all boundaries must be transcended for the sake of sustaining any one cell we should question the discretion that we infer when we classify units of life.
Ontological quibbles aside, the presence of ghosts was hinted to above. This notion that time, and especially time with purpose, that is existence, is passed on. Something is so miraculous and yet so everyday to reproduction. Through this process two organisms exchange genetic information. For humanity this occurs inside the female as sperm flagellate toward the egg, penetrate its wall, and begin meiosis. Boring biology class details, sure, but this process is something as old as the hills that creatures have been doing for millennia. And through this process life has marched progressively on, through time, and carrying the wisdom of its survival with it.
This brings me to human culture. One professor described it as 'our instinct.' That is a fitting description for something that, outside of our conscientious deposition or ignorance of it, becomes the self-evident world, the common sense through which we go about our lives. And let us stop just for a minute to focus upon language, speech, meaning. Words and their meaning are learned, and through this we become social creatures, members of a culture, and consequently learn who we are. Through the adoption of language we don't merely pick up a shovel because language is more than simply a tool. It is a mode of existence, through time, and that's the key to my argument concerning ghosts. When we speak, whether we intend to or not, we conjure up ghosts of the past that we have learned to agree with. For Mikhail Bakhtin this tendency in speech to carry multiple voices was heteroglossia. When we speak our speech reflects a history of contention over meaning, various perspectives, sometimes the trauma of a past that has never been felt personally. In my country, the flag, political words like 'socialism' can conjure up very specific and learned emotional reactions that speak to something that language can do. A word, as a learned memory, can carry that long-gone world along with it.
When I say we are surrounded by ghosts I don't speak of those Victorian, diaphanous specters that haunt places. I speak of the living imprint that we carry in our speech, a living imprint when we speak among others, that is simply out of our hands. Interpretations vary. Valences vary. What we say and what we mean, and how we confirm, please, upset, or confuse others is a component of that messy world of speaker-specters that populate our discourse. By saying we are time's symbiont I mean simply that speech and memory are means of gathering and passing time from the past through to the present and into the future. This mode of ferrying time is the actions of consciousness and consciousness is substantiated by time itself. It takes time to reflect upon what or who I am, and it took time, lots of time, to develop a sense of what/who I am, where I am, and what it all means for me. Time is the fabric of our consciousness because our consciousness takes and uses time in order for it to register itself in the material world through speech, meaning, action, ultimately culture. The development of DNA as a blueprint for an organism is, itself, a grand miracle of molecular assembly and association. From a sea awash in a biofilm of molecules of increasing complexity our organisms come. After countless trillions of molecular interactions under varying circumstances a molecule arises that can recreate itself indefinitely. After countless trillions of molecular interactions more these complex proteins for self-replication become hosts inside simply lipid membranes. Shortly thereafter, the membrane-encased self-replicating protein developed into the cell that became the building block for all life. And to look at a newborn child one is looking at a monument to those old oceans, those trillions upon trillions of chance and sometimes molecularly purposeful interactions.
The body, it's an ancient spaceship barnacled by countless other forms of life. It keeps traveling through space and through time, piloted by its long-dead inhabitants who effect action in the current occupants through meaning, identity, worldview. These imperatives, this will to meaning, this drive to survive is the domain of those ghosts of time that influence us.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Old contacts
No, I'm not discussing whether or not to discard my disposable lenses. I am talking about old connections, old flames, friends from the past, those people you look up every so often in that old and tattered tome, your yearbook.
Yearbooks. They're a telling media creation meant to substantiate memory of a time in one's life and his/her environs through the portrait studio. Clever marketing perhaps. Essential to memory as well. That we all stand before the camera to capture a representative image is the disciplinary, institutional component to it, sure. But goddamn, yearbooks are (or were) such giddy public displays of self. Hell, they're simply a book of faces, countless smiling, well-kempt faces. And this leads me to my entree. Social media.
Social media, namely something akin to a facebook, is just what it suggests, and it suggestively speaks to that other book of faces mentioned above, the yearbook. This book of faces developed around Harvard and some imposed subdivision of the student body, perhaps by geography (i.e., residence halls). It has taken over or at least its concept has taken over as a means of staying in touch, in effect reaching through that yearbook and speaking to that face as it is now. Strange yes, but media are strange, always. Transcendent, haunting, utterly supernatural media are.
Ah yes, old contacts, that face in that yearbook. I reach back and look for her. But there she was last night, and I almost didn't recognize her. She looked more (how shall I say?) ethnic. Her hair was darker. Her eyes looked darker. She looked vaguely Eastern European or simply Hispanic, that ambiguous other category of whiteness or simply its witness. We made eye contact a few times. The last time I smiled at her. Then she came over and I heard her say my name, and I turned to her. She asked me, "Do you know who I am." I said, "Jill!" "Heather Jill." And she stopped me and said that she doesn't go by "Heather." We made a brief exchange of information and the conversation just died as we kind of nervously stared away. She then walked away and grabbed my arm. I was about to go dance with her shortly thereafter, so I asked the bartender for a shot of courage. And before I knew it she dissolved, first, into the crowd dancing near the stage, and second out the back door, the back gate, and off to an awaiting car where she disappeared for good.
Old contacts. This one was psychically disruptive, not for any simple reason, but for the same conflicted reasons that first befell me when we met back in 1991, outside of the high school. I once asked her to a dance, feeling emboldened by her continuous overtures toward me and the desire to date. Nothing came of it. Nothing. She found her crowd and I, perhaps, visited her home a half a dozen times over the high school years for small parties she had thrown when her mom was out of town. She works down town now, I work construction. This much we shared. I am truly flabbergasted by the encounter. It was on my face and in my odd sentence construction upon our initial meeting. There is no simple reason behind it. We were like two insects trying to mate on a flimsy branch in the wind. I clumsily thrust my sex appendage in her direction. Nothing occurs we each move to opposite sides of the room in a combination of shame and overwhelming sensations too big and jumbled to parse into discreet feelings.
The night ended, and I was moody and sad only because every attempt at contact after that moment failed miserably. The server gave me her patronizing giant wave. Other women absolutely failed to even register my existence. She was there, that one who had smiled at me once before and who had tried to cozy up to me on the dance floor. She fucking hated me. I wasn't there. I deserved that. I didn't register her when she put her neck out. Shame on me. Shame on my shame. Shame.
So the night was a wash. I had a few drinks, broke a button on my new jacket. Chinese high fashion, I call it. I awake at a quarter to 11 with nothing but a haunting vision of the evening and an affect that has since smeared into a million distracting thoughts and activities. I conduct the night's autopsy with my friend Tom, the bartender, by way of a series of self-effacing text messages.
"Some nights I get hurt emotionally."
"I feel cursed."
"Yep. When my mouth opens all the pussies within earshot dry up."
Yep.
Yearbooks. They're a telling media creation meant to substantiate memory of a time in one's life and his/her environs through the portrait studio. Clever marketing perhaps. Essential to memory as well. That we all stand before the camera to capture a representative image is the disciplinary, institutional component to it, sure. But goddamn, yearbooks are (or were) such giddy public displays of self. Hell, they're simply a book of faces, countless smiling, well-kempt faces. And this leads me to my entree. Social media.
Social media, namely something akin to a facebook, is just what it suggests, and it suggestively speaks to that other book of faces mentioned above, the yearbook. This book of faces developed around Harvard and some imposed subdivision of the student body, perhaps by geography (i.e., residence halls). It has taken over or at least its concept has taken over as a means of staying in touch, in effect reaching through that yearbook and speaking to that face as it is now. Strange yes, but media are strange, always. Transcendent, haunting, utterly supernatural media are.
Ah yes, old contacts, that face in that yearbook. I reach back and look for her. But there she was last night, and I almost didn't recognize her. She looked more (how shall I say?) ethnic. Her hair was darker. Her eyes looked darker. She looked vaguely Eastern European or simply Hispanic, that ambiguous other category of whiteness or simply its witness. We made eye contact a few times. The last time I smiled at her. Then she came over and I heard her say my name, and I turned to her. She asked me, "Do you know who I am." I said, "Jill!" "Heather Jill." And she stopped me and said that she doesn't go by "Heather." We made a brief exchange of information and the conversation just died as we kind of nervously stared away. She then walked away and grabbed my arm. I was about to go dance with her shortly thereafter, so I asked the bartender for a shot of courage. And before I knew it she dissolved, first, into the crowd dancing near the stage, and second out the back door, the back gate, and off to an awaiting car where she disappeared for good.
Old contacts. This one was psychically disruptive, not for any simple reason, but for the same conflicted reasons that first befell me when we met back in 1991, outside of the high school. I once asked her to a dance, feeling emboldened by her continuous overtures toward me and the desire to date. Nothing came of it. Nothing. She found her crowd and I, perhaps, visited her home a half a dozen times over the high school years for small parties she had thrown when her mom was out of town. She works down town now, I work construction. This much we shared. I am truly flabbergasted by the encounter. It was on my face and in my odd sentence construction upon our initial meeting. There is no simple reason behind it. We were like two insects trying to mate on a flimsy branch in the wind. I clumsily thrust my sex appendage in her direction. Nothing occurs we each move to opposite sides of the room in a combination of shame and overwhelming sensations too big and jumbled to parse into discreet feelings.
The night ended, and I was moody and sad only because every attempt at contact after that moment failed miserably. The server gave me her patronizing giant wave. Other women absolutely failed to even register my existence. She was there, that one who had smiled at me once before and who had tried to cozy up to me on the dance floor. She fucking hated me. I wasn't there. I deserved that. I didn't register her when she put her neck out. Shame on me. Shame on my shame. Shame.
So the night was a wash. I had a few drinks, broke a button on my new jacket. Chinese high fashion, I call it. I awake at a quarter to 11 with nothing but a haunting vision of the evening and an affect that has since smeared into a million distracting thoughts and activities. I conduct the night's autopsy with my friend Tom, the bartender, by way of a series of self-effacing text messages.
"Some nights I get hurt emotionally."
"I feel cursed."
"Yep. When my mouth opens all the pussies within earshot dry up."
Yep.
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Order, Disorder, and Creativity
I crave order, simplicity, cleanliness, solitude.
My desk looks like smattering of notes about ideas. My desktop takes on a similar hue, reflecting half-baked and overdone ideas on a number of topics.
Somewhere in between this craving for order and its Hyde-impulse to conjure and arrange messy initial thoughts comes a semblance of creativity.
What is it for me? Sharp contrast is my most prominent motif for exploring and expressing creativity. In a course I took my first senior semester a student remarked at the juxtaposition of opposites in my writing. He noted something that I do but had not consciously registered as a go-to way of broaching a topic. Juxtapositions can be provocative. Juxtapositions help to delimit and define the categories in juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is simply another expression of the way I was taught to and taught myself to build my brain, my thinking, my modes of expression. I delve into sanctity and sacrilege. I revel in grotesquery and paragons of all things normative. I call protective parenting rape and protagonize rapist-murders. And everywhere I find these extremes far in the center is a dividing line. I suspect that many allow their ideas and consciousness to loiter about that line and to stray not much further. I prefer the deep end of thinking, evil to saintly, and in either expression I find the extremity of it an obscenity in itself.
If I were utterly orderly in my day, my routine, my habits, my personality, my thinking I may perhaps fall into a stultifying routine of thinking. And with that goes my creativity, so I think. I cannot peg creativity to any sullen impulse or to a sinewy self-discipline. No, creativity is the shards of thought that break off when two poles of thought collide.
My desk looks like smattering of notes about ideas. My desktop takes on a similar hue, reflecting half-baked and overdone ideas on a number of topics.
Somewhere in between this craving for order and its Hyde-impulse to conjure and arrange messy initial thoughts comes a semblance of creativity.
What is it for me? Sharp contrast is my most prominent motif for exploring and expressing creativity. In a course I took my first senior semester a student remarked at the juxtaposition of opposites in my writing. He noted something that I do but had not consciously registered as a go-to way of broaching a topic. Juxtapositions can be provocative. Juxtapositions help to delimit and define the categories in juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is simply another expression of the way I was taught to and taught myself to build my brain, my thinking, my modes of expression. I delve into sanctity and sacrilege. I revel in grotesquery and paragons of all things normative. I call protective parenting rape and protagonize rapist-murders. And everywhere I find these extremes far in the center is a dividing line. I suspect that many allow their ideas and consciousness to loiter about that line and to stray not much further. I prefer the deep end of thinking, evil to saintly, and in either expression I find the extremity of it an obscenity in itself.
If I were utterly orderly in my day, my routine, my habits, my personality, my thinking I may perhaps fall into a stultifying routine of thinking. And with that goes my creativity, so I think. I cannot peg creativity to any sullen impulse or to a sinewy self-discipline. No, creativity is the shards of thought that break off when two poles of thought collide.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Susanne Langer, "Feeling and Form," Chapter 19: Great Dramatic Forms the Tragic Rhythm
"In truth, I believe, the hero of tragedy must interest us all the time, but not as a person of our own acquaintance. His tragic error, crime, or other flaw is not introduced for moral reasons, but for structural purposes: it marks his limit of power." p. 361
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