The Evolution of the Quantum State

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Potters bake the molecules of earth together to reform as manmade rock. Any potter longs to deepen that connection with fire, and the energy of life.

Amateur making of ceramic ware has in the West almost universally been taken over by the electric kiln. It's a toaster, you switch it on. It controls the temperature. Exactly. The fire it gives is universal fire, ie. heat from it's 'elements'. But alas, the flame is gone. So is the smoke, and the crackle and roar. The electric kiln supplies heat,  but alas the love is gone.

But it need not be the case. For the electric kiln is an invitation to potters everywhere to deepen their understanding of fire, of energy, and where it comes from and how it's made. We must know that to get that kiln to heat up, a fire is burning somewhere, in boiler supplying steam to a giant turbine, which turns the generators powering our city, or a nuclear reactor, or even our own sun producing the rainfall that turns water pressure into electricity.

Fire must be sought out, in a civilization that is afraid of flame.

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At the other side of the world,
where light is a different color,
the sound of a bell may be larger,
than a giant submarine
Don't doubt that beings watched as each of us died.

You fall without complaining
past the skirts of something new,
and leak a bit of it as love,
radiation to feed my soul.

-:-

Technology, mathematics, and science functions as reins of a slower moving coach, that of our social organizations, and the state.

We have seen how the digital revolution has inverted notions of privacy. Today the average person is happy to share personal photographs and data, with any person on the globe using Instagram.

We've noticed how the digital revolution has affected our system of elections, exposing them to electronic hacking from across the globe.

We've observed the digitization of money, and how the true value of trusted stores of wealth, the dollar, the pound and others, have endured runaway inflation, interest accrued digitally.

We know the wealthy retreat into fearful isolation, into the counting house of their personal computers, where they measure wealth in shares of companies, with a very abstract total in dollars. Yet the dollar, and the stock in corporations are all fictitious wealth, less real than trees or fresh air, or a drink of cold water when it is hot.

Despite these drawbacks, it is also clear there is no turning back, no readmission to a pre-digital world, despite our laments for a rosy hued era of manual typewriters, of quill pens and ink.

Each of these changes to our media, towards pen and paper after impressing information on clay tablets, has brought about a own corresponding stress and change to our systems of government, to our cherished philosophies, and art. In short change is just that, change, and it disrupts everything. The disruptions are difficult, but we long for progress.

The pre-digital age took us to the frontiers of space, it saw the birth of the most terrible weapons of mass destruction, and World Wars without precedent in which the death tolls were in the many tens of millions.

We've seen governments unable to comprehend protests of it's people. When fairly elected officials, such as Macron of France, is the object of ridicule and is promised to be overthrown by the very voters that put him in power months after he's taken office, despite a record faithful to the campaign platform that elected him.

I've spent my life interested in how new forms of thinking are ushered in by new technologies, and newfound knowledge of nature, and am going to propose in this essay that a series of radical, perhaps violent, perhaps not, revolutions are about to take place, because of one simple fact. The machinery of the state, of systems of rule in Western Democracies and former Socialist republics both, is broken, and beyond repair.

I hope with the observations made here to be able to offer an understanding of the forces facing modern man on the face of a very crowded, very polluted and seemingly overpopulated planet.

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For quite some time I've felt that my attraction to ceramics, actually an attraction to clay itself, was due to something fundamental and physical, as if all the physical laws governing matter have conspired to make it impossible to invent beauty.

Or soul.

The soul of mankind may be independent of our bodies, and similarly, the beauty we perceive in the natural world, and sometimes in objects of our own design, may not actually be something we ourselves invent at all.

It may exist, not necessarily pre-made, not necessarily in a Platonic, other invisible world sense, but in the very plausible sense that if nothing cannot exist, then all existence and all existences must exist also, and with it all manifestations of soul, light and beauty included.

We and what we make are there as a natural expansion to our exponents of having soul. That which accompanies our material bodies through life must by virtue of that exponential power, create things which are beautiful and independent of matter themselves. Soul begets soul.

This postulate I wish to test against several aspects which usually accompany such accolades as beauty, perfection, and life. To do this we will need to perform a number of thought experiments

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I'll have to sweep up the ashes
Can't you see?

Ribbons are on tour,
You see, mine his everyone's
There isn't a place where I could show you what's really happening?

Al these questions, so futile,

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Can Darwinian Mechanics account for the Complexity of Conscious LIfe?

Examine a virus . . . it’s fairly obvious how a virus grows and reproduces. Yes it mutates, but it’s a survival of the fittest situation, and thus viruses and bacteria (less so in my opinion) are perfect subjects for applying the principles of Darwinian evolution. Whole populations come into being do their simple one way ‘script’ of infecting or whatever and then die. But it’s a kind of xerox machine where the copy has a coat.

But a more complex machine than that will evolve many programs with steps, just as our cells and organs have many well learned programs that they run continuously that keep us alive.

How the hell science ever thought that the simplest bit of science applied to a virus could account for all the rest of life .  . . no way.

That is why the defense of Darwin in itself is sounding like a religion.

Complex organisms have achieved some amazing and breathtaking evolutions, that I don’t believe Darwinian mechanics, ie theory of natural selection, fully describes the evolutionary process.

The red flag to Darwin, is the exceptional evolutionary speeds of consciousness/costume/charisma . . . . and by that I mean consciousness is a paradigm that simply CANNOT be produced computationally by a one way kluge like the virus, that simply reproduces dies reproduces according to a one-way script without feedback loops.

I’m suggesting that according to POTTER MECHANICS our DNA represents the code for a truly complex biological computer that is calculating, yes calculating outcomes by changing our metabolisms, our conscious and cognitive abilities, as well as the composition of our gametes.

Another example: The incredible SPEED with which birds evolved feathers and very unique feather and behavioural displays that are intrinsically linked, suggesting in some way that behavior has some mechanism by which it effects our offspring’s genome.

We just assume that our gametes reflect in a Medelian sort of fashion, our DNA. But who has counted the genes in our sperm, not just one, but millions to see if the percentages are the same as they would be with a virus. I don’t believe they are, and I think the only way our bodies could computationally ‘favor’ a mutation on one area rather than another is by some trick of protein folding, and that that process, viewed from the perspective of the entire organism, is a computer.

There have to be other computational functions performed by our DNA other than the protein production and reproduction mechanisms of classical genetics. Our DNA is funtioning as a computer, and all that junk . . . . is code.

See the virus represents a one way machine. It is a bot making more bots. But even in the virus there has to be some bio-feedback mechanisms at play. They just have to be discovered.

I’m saying that if we admitt our DNA to be a computer of sorts, if we accpt a data model of biological life, then that model has to admitt that complexities of a very high order are at least going to be many magnitudes more complicated than the most advanced computers.

Yet to be more complicated, to respond to the environment, to environmental change particularly quickly enough to sustain the high cost of a brain and a conscious mind, that to do that our organisms need an ability to change themselves far more quickly than Darwinian Mechanics would predict.

In short I’m saying that evolution is too simplistic, and too mechanistic to be able to evolve a species at the rates we see. Billions of years to get photosynthesis and then all this in just microseconds, off a mechanism that relies entirely  on such simplistic mechanisms as those proposed by Darwin.

Yes they are there but our bodies have to have a way of recieving data from the environment and making changes to the genenome, or essentially speeding up the process in the same way that a breeder speeds up the acquisition of certain traits.

Yet more complex organisms have the opportunity that only complex organisms have, and that is to run a kind fo full feedback loop between the environment and mechanisms of reproduction.

 . . .  but there have to be some ‘tricks’ of protein folding that essentially use the ‘data’ in our genome run a script. This is logical, because that’s what happens when proteins are made. The script I’m talking about is something much more fundemental and is exploiting the computational protential of all our DNA to essentially ‘stack the odds’ when it comes to gamete creation. I’m not sure how this is happenening, but something like it has to be happening. In other words our DNA is a form of computer, more advanced than we’ve credited it to date, that using the body as a host machine. I don’t need to be proven wrong, because if this is not in the news in the next few years I am wrong, because definititionally for my idea to work there’d have to be bio-feedback from the environment to the computational potential in our DNA. I’m not saying genes because we haven’t mapped genes everywhare on our DNA. And nor have we taken into account what happens when proteins and DNA folds, unexpectedly.

IIf a simple automobile can have a status report printed out at the dealer, then from an organism as complicated as a human being you would expect something more than just assembly line evolutionary methods.

f you had a car, that was as complex and incredible as say a human being . . . it would certainly be able to run a status report on itself at any time. This is logical. No organism of such complexity can emerge without information flow back from the enviornment. Yes we have it in ‘Mommy I feel sick’ and those sort of system notices. But what happens to our gamete production when we actually get sick. And what happens when we exhert ourselves in long distance running. Wouldn’t it be absolutely logical for the gamete production logic to get a message that ‘whatever you’ve got in the metabolism improvement category time to run that one now!” and this doesn’t just speed sugar uptake, but rather it changes, albeit slightly the gamete composition. It is not random and Medelian.

That’s my theory. . . . . and all I have to suggest it is the incredibly rapid evolutionary progress of complex organisms. How is it that humans evolved much more quickly than the reptiles . . . . in an extinction event it’s the survivors of those that can change the characteristics of their offspring that have the best chance of passing on yes I’ll say it . . . . genes and much more than genes.

Metaphor for a Poet

A poetic woodworker might carelessly attempt to build a shelf out of jello in order to bring a change  in mind, a sartori to a young child for that is looking on:

A shelf of jello? Only words make such constructions, the phrase is metaphoric imagination.

         An old silent pond...

         A surprised frog jumps in . . . 

         Plop! Then silence.

                           Matsuo Bashō

Haiku are edgy, one can’t deny they pack a wallop. But haiku hasn’t time to dwell on a inner personal voices, or character development or any of that. It has to get right to the point. This famous haiku by Basho has metaphor only in the simple fact that the wallop of ‘plop’ or 'splash' is not an actual frog going in the water. It’s a word going into your brain

Metaphor is probably most misunderstood as a poetic 'device' when it reality metaphor is the stuff of poetry itself. What's not metaphoric, isn't poetry. By definition it's prosaic.

A  poem must be pulled away from stated subject. If anything the subject of a poem is the surface of a river. It is a fiction, yet it is all we see. It is not the water itself, but it's appearance and it's appearance only from one point of view. The river itself that is it's current, flowing eternal, vast deep is filled with fishes and plants and crustaceans and things you cannot see. Or is it the bedrock, the bed of the river that holds the flow, even if the river dries up in the summer before the rains.

A friend wants to write about divorce, and in her poem there is the word 'divorce'. And this part of the poem is like a legal brief. It is purpose driven. But hidden at the end there is this piece about dividing up common property in particular some sculptures, made of wood, one is of a loon, another of a bear.

Did the beautiful living branch want to be carved into a bear?

There’s the metaphor. The wood giving up wood-ness for loon-ness.

        So crazy to take a branch and strip it
        And make it agree to become a loon.

In almost every piece of writing there is the kernel of a metaphor that could fly to unforeseen heights. But in almost every instance that metaphor is buried, imprisoned, caged, a leopard pacing in a zoo.

A thousand Buddhists on a lake whisper in unison. Some grunt, some make clicking noises, others chant the letter 's' others short bits of 'a' or 'o' or 'p' or b. The sounds all fuse into the echo of a human voice speaking from the mountains.

That’s what a poem is. The Greeks defined this in their early theater experiments. They used voices speaking and singing behind masks to set up a reaction in the audience’s mind. It was more vivid than cinema. People had heart attacks, vomited, passed out and committed suicide the day after. It was scary stuff. Dionysus was there with all his terror. He could evoke war, battlefield hell, love, intimate love, ecstacy. . . . and did it all by not being specific, but instead setting up that echo. Behind masks!

Words take off their clothes and leave the imagination behind,  a desired effect once we’ve forgotten . . . 

Preparing to Fire

Spent today cleaning up glaze that splattered everywhere. I've calcined many clay ingredients, this should allow some glazes to remain thicker without crawling. The downside of calcining is that glaze spills turn to a dust that is very toxic. So I clean up with a lot of mopping, water and sponges.

Yesterday I finished loading the kiln. A few of the glazes inside are still drying, soda ash crystals migrating slowly to the surface. I shut the kiln door, and every so often took a break from my work to peek in.

I'll probably light burners Monday evening, and fire on Tuesday the 29th. It's Mars' day, a day for warrior spirit.

My pre-firing mind turns archaic. I consult the I Ching, analyze phases of the moon, positions of planets. This is what farmers do, when so much energy is invested in a project, when there's uncertainty about the future. You rely on older modes of thought.

The I Ching gave me this concept to mull over:

"The things most apparent, those above and in front, are embodied by the upper trigram Chi'en (Heaven), which is transforming into Li (Fire). As part of this process, strength and creativity are giving way to brightness and warmth."

I turn to the moon. Many scientifically minded people will say that this matters not a whit, that the moon's gyrations have nothing at all to do with life on earth or the timing of men's affairs, and to this I say, "If you are scientific, then how could you possibly ignore the moon, which is so massive, moves all the oceans on the planet up and down every day, times nature's blossoms, fruiting and birthing, so why shouldn't an artist in any medium listen to lunar rhythms?"

The gravity of moon and planets has greater effect than any additions of fuel or energy. No farmer with argue with this. We are now in the third day of a waning gibbous moon. This means the moon is diminishing in size, rising later each evening.

I am planning to carbon trap most of my shino glazes. This means I'm inviting forces of darkness, of heavy reduction, of back flow, and retrograde into the kiln. A gibbous moon could be ideal. However the forces of decrease might be too strong at the start of the wane, so I've decided to either light up halfway into this phase, but before diminution into a daytime crescent.

The planets offer a similar story. The shadows of Jovian moons Io and Europa cross Jupiter simultaneously on Tuesday March 29th at 7:00-8:24 UT.

Io was a priestess of Hera, who slighted the goddess by submitting to the favors of Zeus. She was sent to wander in the form of a heifer, far and wide. Hera sent a gadfly to sting Io continuously, driving her to cross the world without rest. Io eventually crosses the Propontis, the isthmus between the Sea of Marmara, literally 'Sea of Marble", and the Black Sea.

Marble Shino creamy, but when carbon trapped turns black.

I'm flirting with decrease, with downward slope. Io lives in the underworld as a mythic beast for a time, eventually Zeus makes her whole. She bears his children. I'll make my preparations, be aware of the forces at work, but in the end, I'll go when my dreams tell me to. I always wait for confirmation.

The moon Europa also crosses Jupiter that day. Europa was the mother of King Minos, the progenitor of Cretan culture, rich in art and pottery. Europa like Io, was also abducted by Zeus. By carbon trapping I am in essence taking a conventional fire, and eloping with it to the underworld, abducting a clear flame to a dark realm. This has dangers.

This is also positive, for kilns are far older than the forge. Metal arts, bronze age weaponry in particular, converted worship from agricultural Goddesses, to warlike Gods, from Artemis's Moon, to Apollo, Aires and the Sun. The Oracle at Delphi was overrun by patriarchs from Athens. Ancient Greece converted from Muses to Zeus.

So it will be nice to see the girls again, crossing in front of Jove.

There are pots in the kiln that won't carbon trap at all. It is possible to seal off effects from the carbon environment, or on the contrary, invite the carbon in. This is possible by zone, and by individual pot. One may devise a clay body that will seal itself off from carbon, or a glaze. One can use soda ash which migrates when wet to the surface as crystals, and melts, sealing carbon in, or out, depending on how you use it. I divide the kiln into zones, provide some places where oxidation can occur, and control where the smokey flame goes.

These are the moments when months of drudgery turn to magic. I ready my supply of kambucha. It's a marathon. I plan to cool down after the firing, and hold at around 1900 to promote crystal growth in my glazes. Add another four hours to a ten hour firing.

Glaze firings occur during a conceptual night, with visibility almost zero, a route flown over a fogbound mountain ranges, high in the sky, or low over craggy peaks, screaming fast, or slow almost at stall speed. It may be light and brief, or ponderous and long in duration, rich with fuel, or lean with lots of air. The view is minimal due to the weather, a tiny glimpse of red or yellow suns through two tiny spies.

Yes there's a temperature gauge, and a measure of how things are proceeding indoors. The journey of a pot is metaphoric of a psychic transformation. It's not ceramics that are being worked on, but the soul.

There are many philosophies about the making of pots, and one could say these may be extended to any art, and even to life. One is a safe course, making sure your hard work ends up acceptable to others by adopting a process that is defined, repeatable and exact. To quote Mel Jacobsen, a talented potter from Minnesota . . "If you have total control of your reduction schedule, color can be the same firing after firing. Any potter should try for 100%, perfect firings every time.  . . . no rejected pots."

Another approach thrusts the pots before forces of nature. There will be a lot of rejects, but you may find a door that leads someplace exciting.

Back Formation and our Latin Heritage

"Back Formation" is a grammatical term for describing the linguistic process of shortening and simplification caused by dropping a suffix. Burgle evolved subsequent to burglar and statistic formed after the field of study, statistics. A 'pea' is a shortened version of an older original, in this case 'pease' which was not plural, and meant 'a pea', but now means many 'peas'.

I remember a friend, a salesman who made comic attempts to repair damage caused by back formation. One of his favorite expressions was "It's not rocket scientry", in lieu of "It's not rocket science".

He also took liberties with the middle of words - "That's mathically unproven," instead of, "mathematically unproven." The word science dates from the 1300's and scientific, from 1589. Scientry is not a word at all but I wish it was. I love it.

My boeuf about Latin cognates is this: 

The Romans, via the French and Norman invaders of England, brought a Latin lexicon to English. Latinate roots, sprang from a military regularity of conjugation and syntax, and offered an ability to conjugate all variety of meanings.

Latin was designed like an all purpose tool-kit, an engineer's language, broadly covering such concepts as inside and outside (introvert and extrovert), or before and after (predict and postprandial). It's precise, superb at description.

It's a bridge builder's language developed as a kind of verbal math. The regulation of distant territories, the supply of far-flung armies and the construction of aqueducts and coliseums across the civilized world arose because of the precision of Latin as a language for dispensing military orders.

English inherits two major systems of expression. Latin, which excels at matters of business and government, for example liberty, and the older Anglo-Saxon cognates for poetic expression, for example freedom. These pairs are throughout English, inebriated vs. drunk, tolerate vs. stand.

Notice how in the last example tolerate is quite specific, whereas stand has a huge variety of meanings. The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon roots give English it's power.

"Hasten to the point would you!" I can hear my friends now. What do Latin cognates have to do with back formation?

Latin derived words are are built up of parts, often three or more. But language naturally does not tolerate pointless complexity. Some of those parts need to be dropped, over time. Back formation is the natural process by which English speakers often omit the front, middle or back portions of their words. One could say Latin syntax is ritualistic, a bit like Sanskrit, logical, and repetitive. In a ritual things are added or subtraced at the back, front, or middle. They subtract the same way.

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Onto Celtic and Saxon roots of English poured a new vocabulary, in full force with William the Conqueror. At that magic moment, England inherited the power of Latin, as a language of Empire, through a Gallic filter. The new words conquered, literally:

     con·quer  (kngkr)

     v. con·quered, con·quer·ing, con·quers

     1. To defeat or subdue by force, especially by force of arms.

     2. To gain or secure control of by or as if by force of arms: scientists battling to conquer disease; 

     a singer who conquered the operatic world.

     3. To overcome or surmount by physical, mental, or moral force: I finally conquered my fear of heights. 

     [Middle English conqueren, from Old French conquerre, from Vulgar Latin *conquaerere,

     from Latin conqurere, to procure : com-, intensive pref.; see com- + quaerere, to seek.]

We may have lost the expressive power of Old English, but gained the power to dominate, to control, and to organize.

France and England reacted differently to injections of foreign linguistic power. The French standardized - beginning in the seventeenth century the Académie Française unified, codified, and deciding what was French and what was not. French has gone the way of Latin, dying from too much regularity, and planning.

Perhaps because of the organization imposed by William, the English subconscious became hungry for expressive power that got lost.

British upper classes held onto their irregular verbs, and used them as badges of birthright, and prestige. Language evolved a caste-system unto itself. Scotsmen returned from the Indian colonies, uttering new words like 'curry', 'thug' and 'pyjama'. The empire dispatched them back to their crass speaking realms with a curled upper lip. A similar division divided Cockney London from West End. The Scottish wag morphed into the badge of a servant engineer.

I'm for the power and innuendo of the street. Bring on the life of the word! Put me on the ground where a new lingo is evolving.

And so England's class strata, defined itself with the difficulty of spoken English, and injections of new vocabulary into a new street vernacular. Ports of entry for vocabulary were through the lower classes. New expressions flooded English Central from India, the Americas, Australia, and were shared on the streets of every foreign colony. England's upper crust assumed a select few of these expressions, but to this day reject many commonly accepted figures of speech.

In theory, a new word is English if a) it is pronounceable, and b) it has been used a number of times in English speech. If it bears the stamp of Latin logic, or has been formed by an organic linguistic process, it has an upper hand.  Isn't it true that any new English word has the upper hand?

Meanwhile French is slowly dying as a language, at least in France. The Académie Française is fighting back, by trimming the dictionary!

For centuries the Academy approved or rejected vernacular changes to French. Writers beginning with the Encyclopedists, defined what is French. As a result, spoken French retains little of the imported richness from French colonies in Africa and the Americas. The classic French dictionary, dies of malnutrition.

True, the brevity of French made it a wonderful vehicle for philosophers, thinkers, and existential poetry. But the starved vocabulary does quadruple or quintuple duty due to an overall paucity of word count, and thus excels at expressing abstract concepts. Slang combining existing 'legal' French words grows like weeds. The average French word has more dictionary meanings by far, than the average word English, but less words by far.

So, whether my friend was aware of his role in this process of converting common argot into new expressions, 'rocket scientry', since 1990, is emerging as an alternative way of saying 'rocket science', though he may have been joking, or pleading the scientrist's amendment.

Thoughts on 'Grassness' and Consciousness

 The Westerner defines life forms, in fact everything, with a materialist's boundaries and categories. A human being, a buffalo, a blade of grass. Books about nature display this preconception, the object of fascination, isolated on a white page. Horses, fish, or birds of the Andes, we regard them as defined iconoclastic entities, without reference to the world around them. We see stars separate from planets. Man separate from nature.

The Vedanta is ahead of us on this. Those ancient thinkers recognized no distinctions between the grazing bovid and the grass it ate. A cow was 'grassness', or the essence of grass. Grass included cows, and cows were grass. So humanity inhabits a film of life on this planet. We live as part of it. Bacteria and parasites live within us. The deer is the forest and we are the earth.

Could the subjective experience of intelligence, and sub-conscious forms of intelligence simply be ineffable cross products of material circumstances, for whose purposes our bodies have evolved? Look inside the brain, where there is seems to be little but nerves, flesh, and channels filled with fluid. Yet we intercept nervous impulses, and they do not explain themselves, or their contents. The act of searching for what is conscious is a lost quest, as difficult as locating an electron or computing the exact trajectory of a particular photon. The experimenter intervenes and destroys the experiment.

Other beings might see time much in the same way we look at a landscape. As earthlings we are possessed of three dimensions, aware conceptually of a fourth, time, which is not visible but is for our purposes, measurable. Surely there must exist life forms that directly perceive four, five or six dimensions with a kind of sight, and understand some final dimensionality, as a kind of fiction, much in the same way as we understand time.

We see space (1,2,3 dimensions), we think time (a 4th), but we feel conscious (the 5th)?

Or perhaps intelligence inhabits that fifth dimension, and the subjective self-awareness that intelligence has of itself, i.e. consciousness, could inhabit the 6th?

Asking 'where is consciousness?' is somewhat like looking for time within the three dimensional measurements of a cup of coffee. One may only perceive a cooling liquid if one admits time as a 4th dimension of study.

A 5th dimensional entity similarly cannot be measured by a 4 dimensional space. It can sit there, just as we in our 3 dimensions can park ourselves on a 2 dimensional carpet. Have we been looking for self-awareness in all the wrong places? Is consciousness, rather than a 'substance' which we can't see, is instead a dimension, from which other beings in turn see us?

Cause and effect? . . . Cause and effect are a temporal 'patch' over an eye that cannot see.

The notion of cause is a vestigial necessity for thinking about time, whilst being unable to see it. If consciousness is yet another dimension, then looking for it within 4 dimensions is as fruitless as looking for time within 3.

Suppose consciousness were everywhere and not contained within a 3 or 4 dimensional space-time continuum. It could be bound up within a 5th dimension. Once there, it might perceive us with the same clarity that we perceive a print on a museum wall.

The human mind/brain has no lock on consciousness. Water is conscious. Fire is conscious. Stones are conscious, and so is air. It all exhibits behaviors of consciousness. Infinite detail. Infinite complexity. Fire processes energy. Fire sorts out an infinite number of inputs and produces a result, computes a path, allocates resources etc. Water also. An ecosystem. An atmosphere.

We speak of 'light' from people who are uniquely intelligent A 'star'. But what of actual stars? The universe is a massive computer of possibilities, computing more conscious activity in just one bit of solar surface than all human life on earth.

Such a claim begs for clarification. What is consciousness? Isn't that the question we've been asking all along? Aren't we investigating where it occurs, how it occurs, what creates it, what are its thresholds, its behaviors, its realms?

I say this. . . The subjective "I" that is 'thinking'. . . . it's all real yes, but that's the only thing that is real. No other realities may be confirmed. The tags 'conscious', 'self-aware, or 'intelligent', may now be filed as endorsements by a lower set of vectors, that are aligning votes behind a power they cannot comprehend.

In other words language creates expression for quantities it does not fully understand to begin with. The word 'consciousness' is really only a sign, for an abstraction like 'God' or 'matter' or 'energy', useful only so far as we make them so.

The abstraction "God" has been useful to mankind, even though most in the current generation of scientists contend that the gods are dead, surprisingly the father of archetypal psychology would argue that they are more alive than ever. The most fundamental of man's technologies evolved when the prevalent paradigm of humanity was God fearing. Science was not even born. I'm making the point that paradigms of thought, whether dominated by gods or science, are complexes of behaviors, not self-evident truths.

Science, as the complete evolution of materialism, demands a return in practices and technologies that are useful for our survival. Viewed in this way the paradigm of science may be viewed as a set of conclusions from a thought process. Yet our science is hopelessly locked to the hip of materialistic assumptions. So we are unable to 'divine' higher concepts from our simplistic conceptions of matter and consciousness.

"Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts, not an everlasting truth in itself." C.G. Jung

What IS love?

One might ask, do the reasons for loving even matter?

What are the causes of love?

Where is love? And is the direction of our love real, or just an illusion?

Shouldn't love be something that we do without reason?

Does love go somewhere like the soul or spirit after death? Or does it rot within our perishable bodies? What happens to a love that perishes?

Is love that I feel even mine to begin with?

If love is without reason, cause, locus or direction, birth or death, object, or even subject . . . . then what is it?

Might there be equations that define love? A differential of loving, an integral of attraction?

Possibly yes. But they will only approximate, the behaviors of love just as physics attempts to model the behavior of matter and energy. Light and matter are not the equations that describe them.

Love, like gravity and light, seems to hold some universal quality. Is love like dark matter, that= invisible stuff holding galaxies together? If love is heavy or light, is love governed by gravity?

Love might simply be our animal perception of one of the binding forces that hold the universe together. Love has been called an emotion. Emotions are the study of psychology. Yet in that universe, the science is also inadequate, the psychologist all the names and labels he throws at human conditions, simply mask his lack of understanding.

Like the physicist's model for gravity, or the strong or weak forces of nuclear attraction, love may simply be an emotional model for defining ineffable forces that are much greater than any of us. Yet physics fails, to explain love. The corollary breaks down, dissolves into a myriad differential equations, each without a pulse of life.

We do not know where it comes from, or where it goes when we are done loving. We know it is everywhere, yet we seek it. Love seems to act as an incentive and a reward, but also as punishment, but performs inconsistently at both. Economics won't explain love.

Love can come from anyone anywhere and be directed at anyone, anywhere. While it may be said love is blind, lovers feel gifted by second sight. Does love obey the laws of optics?

We know it cannot be found and yet when it is inside us we know it is there, stronger than we know who we are. The laws of physics of conservation of energy can't explain love.

Love can be empowering, enervating, debilitating, enriching, denigrating, or even fatal. Love can be destructive or creative. Cosmology and astrology can't possibly deal with love's complexity. Yet love always seems true to its own laws.

So what are those laws? Are there any?

I love this or that, this place, that river, this woman, that man, this child, . . .

We do not create it, nor can we. We do not destroy it. Nor can we. We give it to those who have it, and to those who don't. We ourselves may not have it, yet it is possible to give to one who has plenty.

Love may seem similar to water in a glass, in our bodies, or the sea. Sometimes you get a little dose and know it won't last. Yet it is still water. You can horde it, you can waste it you, but it won't be destroyed. You can transform, it break it down, yet it returns, as water.

You can drown in it or die from lack of it.

It can power the world.

Yet if you horde water it will go flat. Sunlight may not be captured, but the energy of sunlight can be. Where does the sunlight go after it's energy has been captured? Physicists have answers to these questions, but about love, they do not.

Love may transform the behavior of water, this has been shown scientifically, but the simile breaks down again. Love and water are not the same.

Yet how we treat that water seems to me to be the nature of love. How do we treat the air? Do we show grattitude for sunlight?

All people cherish love, the thirsty and fallible cherish water in a desert. Yet water seems everywhere except where needed most. If only we could all stay nourished by it forever.

Religions promise oceans of unconditional love. Global warming promises too much water - the icecaps will melt. Can there be an excess of love?

When love becomes doctrine, we lose it. The worst acts of violence, are often conducted in the names of creeds that preach love. 

Love moves freely, independently and in ways superior to all life. It can flee or reappear anywhere, anytime.

Some would say managing love is about managing expectations. Know your love. Don't expect it all the time.

Love seems to demand terms, to flow where and when it wants. 

Know love when it comes your way. Recognize it. Pass it on.

Dionysus and the Muse

-=({O})=-

The Muse hears inspirations mouthed, vocalized, words insisted upon by the Goddess of language. Drama begins as her language, uttered to you.

Language forms this way . . . we listen to masks!

Voices erupt, echoes layered from a chorus. The rituals, payment, prayer, blessing, are uniform, effects close and personal.

Was it mysterious because it was new? Are we to believe Johnson, and subsequently Borges who implies that every word at one time was a metaphor?

From drug-induced congresses with Demeter at Eleusis in Greece, to temple burnings of the Agnicayana, the intrusions of a Coryphaeus in productions by Dionysus, drunken orgies with maenads, all appeals to numinous demiurges, appeals for the boon of genius. He verbalizes what we think. We move and act, he utters a summation.

Character emerges, weather from masses of air.

Dionysus, a Spartan born of heroic Greece, and wine-god on Olympus, populated millenniums of myth. He was hunted by Spartan patriarchs, his sin: teaching viticulture to women. Some say he was captured and torn to pieces, others say escaped to India. Beheaded perhaps, Dionysus lives on a herm, on a column, or a dramatic mask. His terror, humorous or violent, is ever present.

He interfaced with the Goddess, his wild thiasus of maenads, a procession of crazed women and satyrs with erect penises maintain him as the drug-induced bad-dream rock star we all know. Outside his vehicle he is a purveyor of horror, grotesque acts, crimes, and confusion.

Dionysus is Charles Manson, Puck, also Charlie Rose. Agreeing with everyone but himself, disagreeing with everyone including himself. He or she, for Dionysus is also Kali and female, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Baba Yaga, the evil demoness of the forests.

One imagines the subcontinent prior to acculturation by modern Hinduism. No wonder Kali followers count highest in geographic regions destroyed by floods or earthquake. We're speaking of Gods playing the role of destroyer on the stage of existence.

The Muse was acknowledged by Homer as the creator of the Gods themselves. She was their mother, and was said also to have raised 9 daughters. Human arts, history and culture were divided between them. When Apollo's priesthood took over the Oracle at Delphi, the feminine tradition remained firmly rooted in the tradition of the Muse. The sole difference after the takeover by Apollo? The fees collected were sent to Athens.

So male dominance spread throughout all the Mediterranean oracular sites. That ancient debate, culture, the history, intellect, and language of all forms was ceded along with all treasures, to the female side of the psyche.

Since that male/female division of territory, communication with the Goddess became a complicated ritual for navigating densities of masculine myth. It involves drunken mediums like Dionysus, accompanied by troubling or unreliable liaisons with Hermes as guide. Meetings with Delphic oracles opine on subconscious riddles, layers of inquiry are crafted by the chorus and speakers on the Greek stage. One might trace elements from these theatrical rituals into the heart of Catholic mass, or to the cult of psychics who aid modern police in locating criminals.

Metaphor always returns its calls.

The sullen God of wine resented the Muse's carping presence - he is happier with woman who are nonsensical, screaming or mute. One wonders whether antics by Dionysus pleased or insulted the Goddesses of poetry and history. Dionysus is a foil for talent, Pancho Sanza, Robert Frost's neighbor, Shakespeare's Puck, Coleridge's wedding guest joins the meeting where finer things are made. He's the life of the party, also the one who goes too far and breaks it up.

Might we engineer a metaphor, similar to the way a doctor provokes an involuntary response with his hammer, and dispense with all this ritual? Mightn't words disturb patterns of the collective and produce statements from its center, poems structured about a narrative live with a heavy burden? If the thread appears organized, the Muse scrambles that semblance. Dionysus performs what fragments survive, makes sure no shreds escapes without destruction. The vanity of wholeness is abandoned to the complication of storytelling.

This thought leads a poet to temptation, the one offered by modernism. Perhaps no greater experiment was ever conducted as the abandonment of story, Mystery was incorporated into the metaphor itself which lived naked and alone, man-made not God-made, and in so doing, stripped numinous content from any larger meaning.

Joyce, Klee, American abstract expressionists, Wallace Stevens, all produced works unburdened by the requirements of ritual and narrative.  Tired myth flows past us, blossoms on the water that must have been tossed in upstream. The numinous mystery is lost. A rose was no longer needed. Neither were creatures in the wild.

So we wander a corpus, rotting, but of human creation. Are we writers also in the degenerate stages of language, when poems arise from composting earlier poets?. Is there no new metaphor to come from the source?

We seek stories from the other side, but behind the curtain the question always floats forward, what story is ours? What tales come home?


-=:[()]:=-

A Call to the Numinous

-=:[()]:=-

Down the dark arm of a lake in the Adirondacks, I listened in rapture as my father yodeled into the shadowy hulk of a mountain. The forest and still water of the lake rang with his notes. Birds, owls, coyotes took up the call. For me it was magical, I did not reason it was my father's voice I heard.

The poem is the key, the yodel into the blackness of night. It brings back with it a chorus of the unexpected.

To the pre-classical ancients, poetry and metaphor were one, married by a dramatic ritual.

The approach to metaphor was dangerous, propitiously made with offerings. The Muse is capricious, gifted, but treacherous. Dionysus the otherworldly assistant to dramatic performances in a modern world, recruited the sane into his callings and made them mad like him.

Religion institutionalizes the ways and means of madness, integrates a bit of healthy madness for all of us, with our dreams, with what we can't understand.

Approaches to the Gods are fraught with danger, summoning Kali or visiting Baba Yaga in the forest, potentially deadly.  Dionysus's maenads tore the living apart in orgiastic frenzies of horror. Baba Yaga and Kali both drank blood. Vampires all, just as authors are vampires of language.

A writer allows himself to be eaten, but drinks the blood of poetic ancestors. For sound, like light, is vibration and in vibration exists the passage of all that passes from one place to another.

Borrow the ritual from someone else? How long did the source of the Nile evade Western explorers?

A murky understanding may be felt more than understood. It doesn't razor past our pupils in bright light. Darkness covets. The abyss holds secrets.

Sometimes meanings seem clear. For instance with Farsi court poetry, there is so much, too much even. All is there, all readable, all logical. Why do some poems, not others, stir the imagination memory, awaken old DNA? Have Heraclitus and the I Ching become poetry?

I'm not really conscious of what forces me to finish my project on the vampire. At best he may be a metaphor, male logos that has stripped language of numinous content. The vampire has lived rather long don't you think? He's a tired trope. He drains language of meaning. I know things will have to change. Yes, my vampire must die but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps his death is a shift in subject, perhaps the poem is no longer about him at all.

When speaking of metaphor, think source, as in the sources of rivers. Every salmon in the sea knows where that is. It may be easy to grasp, or nigh impossible. But it is sensed. It may be a riddle, has never solved, but left to confound readers with mystery for centuries to come.

-:)/\(:-

Paul, Mark, and Luke - Scoby Notes

I named our first Self-Contained Organism of Bacteria and Yeast, Paul, in memory of the famous octopus  Paul, who lived a short time after predicting the outcomes of eight World Cup Soccer games.

Past feats aside, Paul seemed a good name.

So Paul begat Mark, and Mark begat Luke, and soon kambucha was exploding literally from every vessel at house Potter. I've concocted many superb tasting drinks in this manner, without keeping so much as a pencil scrap of a note about process.

Invention happens spontaneously, when one is not recording results. The recording of results inevitably mire any process in a protracted program of exhausting all possibilities.

One knows this when one follows one's genius around the house, and one's genius in this case is a flat rubbery slimy organism used to ferment tea.

A Kambucha SCOBY represents life, as unique as that of a cow that produces rich cream, or a tomato plant that yields exceptional fruit. This log shall transcribe that life. Here I write everything Paul is fed, everything taken from Paul in the way of harvest, and jot for posterity every note that I can think of to better understand the mysterious brewing process involving bacteria and yeast.

Paul sired a blessed two year lineage in this house, descended from a SCOBY mare supplied by Steven Rodriguez, he has since been divided into three vats.

I'll name his sons Mark or Luke. At times they have all been fed grape, rose liquor, pineapple, blueberry, pomegranate, acai berry, but always the base diet has been a tea and sugar mixture.

The flavors produced by Paul have been so extraordinary that I've reluctantly taken up a blog post to document what I'm doing here, because in reality I have no idea. Steve R. says I'm a mad scientist just mixing stuff together and never creating a record or a label.  We both dally in ceramics. He's very careful about glaze recipe, I'm not.  I contend in my defense that the greatest learning occurs when records have not been created.

So I'm now keeping records but skeptically, knowing myself, not for long.

Imitators will find that duplication of my results is nigh impossible. The SCOBY bacteria and yeast have a memory for everything that was done to them, and they retain genes to digest certain compounds in case they are encountered again. The digestive process then runs as a result of the SCOBY's experience with other fruits and nectars and teas which make up its diet.

It may be possible however to notice that a rose kambucha brewed with Rooibos tea after a diet of blueberry and pomegranate is especially flavorful. That may be the extent of the benefit of this note taking process.

Otherwise, just as I've said, it is a record of Paul's life.

-:-

Language, like Food, has Energy

I breathe air, you breathe air. . is the air we breathe the same? . . . The consciousness/identity issue is something like that . . . we have a 'lease' so to speak on consciousness, a lease granted when we took occupancy of our bodies, of our lives.

Wait, so that implies something that inhabits us, lives within us, is on sometimes, off at other times. It varies, with sleep, wakefulness, how much we're paying attention.

Or does it?  If consciousness is always 'on' what vacillates our subjective perception of it? We've hit some kind of circular argument, consciousness relying upon itself to know it is there. Like attributions to a divinity, could early concepts of "God' simply have been the projections of an elevated form of self-awareness in early man?

Yet consciousness exists. But where? The question asks if there's materiality to something that doesn't possess a material dimension.

Egyptians regarded the heart as the organ responsible for consciousness. The brain, a reservoir of mucus, was removed and discarded before the rest of the body was embalmed for a journey to the stars.

We're looking for where consciousness lives! If consciousness resides somewhere, does it have a locus? A focus?

In an early anatomical drawing by Leonardo of a dissected brain, his note in cryptic Italian reads "Is this where the soul resides?". There's a small arrow pointing to a spot just above the pineal gland.

'Soul' doesn't mean 'consciousness' in the same way to modern psychologists seeking solutions to the hard problem, the subjective "I". Soul doesn't carry an ego-driven 'conscious' label with it; the soul isn't about itself.

Carl Jung and followers tried to caution against Western science's stampede into the conscious sphere claiming that the soul, or subconscious was being overlooked, misunderstood, and frankly ignored at the peril of our very left-brained society. Modern cognitive psychologists for the most part haven't even listened to the Jungian dialogue, representing it as 'artsy', based on myths, and not accessible to the neurologist's probing electrodes. Jung, Hillman and others countered that the greatest hazards posed to the modern world were almost entirely of man's conscious creation, resulting perhaps from his biggest tragedy, failing to know himself.

But whose soul is it? Should we take clues from Jung who introduced us to the collective unconscious? Heightened states of being attained by yogis and Buddhists practice at emptying the mind, clearing it of conscious thought. Doesn't this imply freedom is found away from the subjective conscious experience? Isn't the most powerful 'consciousness' one that is unencumbered, and doesn't require the serial tool of subjective identity?

As always, science has arrived late to a definition of the problem, and even more poignantly, has missed the solution entirely. The West chases a phantom machine, an apparatus lost somewhere in the body of matter.

It may be the soul is everywhere, but that 'consciousness' is fugitive, never setting up shop for more than a few microseconds in one place, characteristic of most illusions.

If we are speaking of a greater consciousness not centered on the ego, where does it disappear to after we die? Is it even ours to begin with? Can it be be possessed, or owned by some other being? These hands that are typing are 'my' hands, attached to me. Without the rest of me they can't work. Man has found ways to transplant body organs, eyes, hearts, kidneys, but not consciousness, not the soul, nor the contents of memory.

If this greater consciousness is fugitive does it elude attempts to locate or entrap it? A. Is the deer in the forest alive without the forest?

The natural root of language indeed produces something useful. Consciousness is language, and one byproduct of that language may be science itself. Science verifies the subjective conscious experience that created it, producing technology, enabling our economy of rising populations, that has made our civilization possible. The Gods are with us, or rather, the myth of science seems with us. For now.

Yet we are in neglect of a greater consciousness, that which we share with all nature. Is our subconscious, our soul, simply a victim of repression by a new sort of self-flattering parasite that has taken over the wheel? We're enamored of the subjective experience, the language using, category creating, diary writing effacer of the earth. Yet what we are, that is a question we do not like to ponder. Is western consciousness, if we dare call it such, a belief based mythos, an illusion, not a truth?

Think of This

Having come to the conclusion that all matter is to a degree conscious, we might ask isn’t all matter ultimately unconscious of its consciousness? If so, then a materialist dichotomy is preserved. Matter and consciousness are separate. If matter is the unconscious mother of consciousness, then can consciousness survive without matter?

Such an argument may at once seem tautological. Matter a vehicle for consciousness, if so, any bit of matter can aid in that process, all of it does or none of it does . . . or . . .  is matter itself conscious? Our notions about matter, and consciousness are completely primitive, limited as it were by the materialist thinkers of centuries ago.

Instead I argue matter without consciousness is the impossibility. All of it may be alive, and the conscious part preeminent, for a thing to exist the knowing of it must be there too.

Is our conscious mind the fisherman, who brings the fish from the deep?

Western philosophical investigations of human thought haven’t established anything. Philosophy at best has imagined a tour of the architecture, neurologists with their probes have poked around, taken voltage readings, mapped neural activity, without encountering any inhabitants. Consciousness remains as elusive as the unicorn.

What cognitive psychologists call ‘consciousness’ may only be a recently evolved and tiny subset of a much greater conscious awareness. In fact the stream of consciousness in language driven humans today may in reality be a distraction from a higher form of consciousness that is repressed.

To accept consciousness on a universal level, one must abandon the ego, the “I”, the self-referencing component to this entire dialogue. Consciousness is not about ‘me’. The notion that a self-divining root of language flits about the mind and pretends that ‘it’ is conscious, while the rest is ‘unaware’, ‘unknowing’ and obscured in darkness does more to persuade the enlightened that the busy mind may really be the least conscious mind of all.

Why do we assume the whole of the world around us, from weather patterns to flocks of communicating birds, to entire galaxies of massive energetic stars, is separate and inert. Only in recent years have we admitted that animals may possess forms of higher thought and might be ‘conscious’. Yet our view is that aside from animal life, consciousness is nowhere else to be found. Our civilization is locked in an infantile fantasy that it exists at the center. Having discovered our own self-awareness, and developed a language to document it, we believe in our own domination of conscious thought.

Such a fantasy may indeed be part of a necessary stage of development in the transition to a higher level of consciousness. When the ego is abandoned and a kind of universal consciousness is finally accepted as a universal property, when Western science has come to realize what the Vedanta has known for millennia, then perhaps our we can recognize consciousness as a universal phenomena, and not something belonging to the ‘I’.

As for sub-conscious intelligence let’s call sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves. For how often have we heard from someone working on a difficult problem, “let me sleep on it”? Indeed solutions to complex problems without language are not the work of the most self-aware state of the mind. ‘Eureka’ moments seem to materialize out of thin air, indeed it is our ‘consciousness’ which has only become aware that the problem has been solved?  Let’s refer to that sub-conscious intelligence sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves.  If you prefer another metaphor, consciousness resembles the mysterious cleverness of nature, the weather, birds, or the mind of a pet, which we can attempt to fathom but cannot necessarily read.

Yet I posit that this subconsciousness, the sub-ego, the sub-self-aware faculty, is the true consciousness that pervades the universe. Our self-aware thinking processes function more as an executive diary, the dashboard of instruments, the servo-mechanism, for executive action, and and the fulfilling of set goals. It believes that it is in control of a much vaster system, but as mankind may shortly learn, that executive in a Tolstoy-ish reversal, works for the greater consciousness without an ego, without the ‘I’. Self-awareness may not be such an advance as we imagine.

This essay has brought the topic of consciousness to a bifurcation, into a self-aware faculty, “I am thinking’, and the part that thinks, arrives with solutions, but hides its methods from the upstart.

What the Western ego has named its conscious faculties, on the other hand, may only be an illusion, an illustration as it were, posted and pictured by a much larger sub-ego operating system below it. What a perfect conclusion to a infantile illustration, a nascent self-conscious mind, operating with a tool called science, believes it has discovered something unique and precious when it becomes self aware.

History Fragment

An inch on a standard ruler is 'created' by the tiny mark engraved 'one inch away' from another like it.

Measurement is a conceptual process.

The mapping, of time, indeed history, incorporates void. A measurement refers to itself, omits detail. History must be imagined. An effort. Re-creation.

The flesh of history, involves all its viewpoints, consciousnesses, colors and molecules, thoughts and physical beings. These 'facts' themselves are dead, but may be brought back to life by a creative act.

What of soul-time? What of unanswered yearnings?

As soul-creators, inventors of fantasies so we are responsible for our present position. Doesn’t this give us the power to re-write history, and set ourselves in a different places and times?

History devours its own tail, or depending how you look at it, is forever shedding its skin. The past, that self renewing myth we carry with us, has but one use, and that is to supply useful context for actions in the present.

Wax sculptures melt, release their energy. Animal entrails give off an aura. There is such power in rotting guts.

Mexico City Notes

Mexico City Tuesday February 23, 1993

Lodgings: the cheapest without risking life. Each morning an ancient woman enters my room without knocking, empties my trash basket, beats the floor with a wicker spanker, pulls covers up on my bed, and leaves four bars of soap behind on the pillow as compensation for all she leaves undone.

I'm alone on the fifth floor of a hulking wreck of a building. The structure was shattered by the earthquake, and most of the property is taped off with barely legible signs "Peligrosa".

A block away in Plaza de la Constitution, the capitol of Tenochtitlan, indigena protesters wave painted signs and shout. Police in plainclothes watch behind sunglasses, murmur into radios, take notes, inform the generals of their actions. Troops wait on the side streets, cordoned in dark green buses, rifles and tear gas ready. 

Mexico knows the bread of paganism embalmed by a yeasty spirit. Corporate industrialism, Catholicism, and native gods vie for control, amidst pretenses of free enterprise, and a myth of democracy.

The clay earth took Spanish seed. Jesus, Mary, the Father and his saints, a receptacle for myths of the vanquished to quench the thirst of conquerors.

Cultural artifacts are exhibited with miniscule captions, stripped of context. Why haven't they been destroyed also? Perhaps one day one relic will answer the question "Who were we?"

Morning sun glints at Rivera murals on the courtyard walls. Officers in dark gateways disappear into a matrix of ancient stones. Order is catechism to a pagan mind. Vanquished by teachers will the pupils one day take over?

The Spanish created castes, crillio, mestizo, and indigena, but these boundaries cemented the people together, but isolated Mexico herself from the world. The conquerors would not ignore the the natives since they were fearful.

Torn temples, carvings stolen, glyphs battered, manuscripts burned. Mexico, a violent assimilation of a European fragment into a native American perfect storm of myth. Europe was trapped as if by quicksand. The army and priests were swallowed by a dark native force. Militant Catholicism, hip deep in a Mexican swamp, was destined to die very slowly.

This does not assuage anger on either side. In Mexico, rooted in the being and history of blood, anger becomes the progenitor of a new myth cycle. Expect riots, expect massacres, expect executions, and more revolutions, but also expect a powerful continuance of native American culture.

Is Mexico really one battle? Does Mexico mean 'battleground'?

Whitlock

My grandfather, as a young man rode a horse each September one hundred miles to his school in Watertown Connecticut, spending the night at two inns along the way. After a long life, he died the year men walked on the moon.

I remember with crystal clarity, him telling me that there was no greater joy than daydreaming, and letting the mind wander while sitting back and listening to the sound of of his horse's hooves on the dirt road.

Mason Whitlock, himself younger than my grandfather, was approaching a hundred when I took my little Olivetti in for a tune-up and new ribbon. The irony was that during my years at college, I never once needed a new typewriter. I changed ribbons myself, and cleaned the type with an old stiff brush.

When I returned Elm City to live, caught in that confused space brought on by the digital age, I found myself longing for the music and dance of typewriter keys.

Yes I miss the sentences that come to my brain when working on a typewriter. A percussive beats out one's commitment to a sentence. There's a jazzy rhythm, a machine beat, a machine gun beat. There's the slow clop clop, of an old work horse.

The typewriter was a percussive instrument, the melody and base instruments are the swim of ideas at the tip of one's brain. There's a beat for every mood, and feeling, every bit of description or dint of discipline. The beat kept thoughts in train, since it was not easy to drop back in and restructure one's ideas. The first draft required discipline and focus.

The mind raced, pounding on the dendritic telegraph keys of cerebral neurons, surveying the terrain of the rail-bed ahead, laying ties, driving spikes, keeping clear sight of the benchmark period in the distance, open to a diversion in root phrase or clause. When a line end was reached, the locomotive let out a release of steam, and brought the train to terminus with a 'bang' to the period key. The trill moment was the end of a musical phrase. The traveller, with scheduled music in mind for all connecting trains, got soon clattering away across the sonorous landscape with nary a care in the world.

It was a form of acrobatics. Yes it was writing, but also a workout. Posture mattered. At some point a particular piece of paper stayed behind as a fossil track, a recording. A skull. First drafts were akin to fresh rushes of a film. Modifications seemed beautiful, ugly, or impossible.

Language leapt into the air as a drumbeat accompaniment to the writer's deepest love. The ear became attuned to the truth of the rhythm. Sounding good? Or did it lack commitment?

Mr. Whitlock kept hours, in a second floor shop overlooking York Street, across from the Hall of Graduate Studies. Here are my notes from the day I visited him, in early 1993.

-:-

Why bother repairing the old? What sort of allegiance is owed to a non-functioning hunk of steel?

Of what significance is my stepping out of time to track this down old man, who repairs machines for a generation caught in their ways, bound to clunky precursors of another age? What bother, what cost? Why hold myself back against progress? I felt a tug of regret. Was I wasting time, indulging in flattery?

Whitlock rambled on. 'Classic little thing. No different than pen or pencil. Taken a lot of pounding. Hasn’t got the weight of say that Royal over there.' He gestured toward a heart sinking heap of ancient machines, elegant, but forgotten.

'What else is broken besides the shaft?'

'Margin release needs a clean. Some tender loving care. I’ll take it apart, clean it. Your carriage lock is broken. Can’t let you strip the escapement gears."


-:-

Consciousness the Messenger

A friend asks, "Is this page alive?"

We notice a fundamental correspondence, instinctively, a correlation between matter, life, and consciousness.

The notion that consciousness has no definite boundaries, and thus is present wherever energy or information is processed is attractive. My friend said page but he could also have meant paper page, web page, or someone reading something aloud, or even words as remembered dimly after a passage of time. What about a bookmark?

Useable conscious product is not necessarily as conscious as the conscious process that creates it. The page is a messenger, yes it has conscious dimension. If a writer were to pass, and all his works locked up in a password protected computer, what happens if his relatives wipe the hard drive?

Does consciousness die?

We're talking about something not unlike the fundamental physics of heat, and entropy. There has to be an expression akin to the second law of thermodynamics, that embraces consciousness as a form of reverse entropy. An alternative to static or chemical order, say for instance the order present in a fully charged battery. Is a battery conscious? The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after 2000 years represents a transference of consciousness - they were only pieces of rotting parchment were they not?

A new Paradigm for understanding Consciousness

To posit that consciousness is pervasive, might mean developing a theory for a new force field from within the corpus of modern physics. We might need to reexamine Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the existence of black holes, as a way of defining the limitations or interactions of a conscious field. While I feel that forays of consciousness theory into established physics will occur, I am skeptical of this approach.

David Chalmers has suggested that what is needed is a 'crazy idea', one that conjectures new groundwork, and possibly a new set of variables. Consciousness he argues simply cannot be modeled with the scientific vocabulary at hand.

A better theory of consciousness will provide an illusion of progress, but it also will keep us on the same side of the problem that we've been stuck in all along. We'll have more more variables and another field to experiment with. But our viewpoint will remain descriptive, and materialist. We'll have a belief system rooted in what we can see, touch and feel, and we'll have equations for everything else.

Rene Descartes dismissed consciousness with his quip, "I think therefor I am" and then devoted no more effort to the problem. Mathematics would penetrate the secrets of nature. Consciousness was a self-evident truth that needed no investigation at all.

There another way to approach Chalmers' 'hard problem'. Believe for a moment that matter is an illusion, that the material world, including sensory perceptions of it, sights, sounds and colors, buildings, rocks, bodies, and heavy pianos are notions made real by consciousness.

This is the Vedanta, the Eastern viewpoint. Matter is brought to life by consciousness. Without consciousness nothing would exist at all. Or put more simply, everything exists because of consciousness. Consciousness creates.

To summarize the Vedantist Indian thinkers, the two 'hard problems' are 'what is the universe?' and 'what is consciousness?'. Science being a product of consciousness, can only fact check, and report back what it has 'observed'. Yet the conscious mind knows of more than science. So science cannot possibly come to terms with consciousness except through a radical manipulation of numbers which that are not real to begin with.

Infiltrate into the camp of the animating spirit, consciousness, and we suddenly become aware that we've set up opposing categories. Dualities, in science as in reality, have a way of crashing down.

So with what perambulation of art or philosophy, shall we approach the call for a new paradigm of consciousness?

Let us rephrase the question: Isn't that call for a new paradigm about consciousness, simply a call for new consciousness? Isn't science pointing out a numeric tool for fact checking certain beliefs about reality are useful for some forms of understanding? But as the child of consciousness, science is a tool; it could not understand what conceived of it in the first place.

For five hundred years, the West has regarded consciousness as a fragile commodity. No hard evidence has surfaced of it wherever we go digging. Consciousness, the subjective experience, has never been located as stuff, measurable 'reality' according to a materialists model for existence.

Suppose imagination and consciousness create matter, not the other way around. Suddenly it's all alive, it's all conscious, it's all aware. The universe is intelligent, our galaxy is intelligent. Photons act consistently and bear consciousness wherever they go. All atoms participate in the grand calculation of possibilities, displaying color, logically interacting with each other to form giant miasmas of consciousness throughout the universe. A galaxy is alive. It thinks. It is endlessly patient and watches a succession of intelligent life forms come and go.

Is there more 'consciousness' in our Sun than on earth? More in the earth than in any of it's life forms? Are we to be democratic and say consciousness is spread evenly about, present to some degree in all matter? Or shall we create rules and laws governing the interactions of consciousness with matter, not unlike the interactions of the basic forces as defined by modern physics.

The simplicity of this question has materialist roots, granting to each bit of matter consciousness according to its size. Yet even our instincts tell us that cannot be so. It's a complex commodity, and perhaps one that all of Western science simply can never come to describe adequately, but certainly not through a quantitative and descriptive scientific method.

Complex and unknowable except through self-knowledge. This is the answer that we receive from the Vedanta.

So consciousness much change, ebb flow, move about, and change lives within matter, its carrier. As the animator of matter it must be the field of all fields. It cannot simply exhibit inverse square relationships with all other conscious bodies, as gravity does with massive bodies. No, consciousness, whether pervasive or universal [Chalmers], is growing in our universe. It is not constant. Consciousness is breaking out all over.

Could consciousness be everywhere you look because it is making everything you see?

Prove to me that something unobserved exists. It can't be done. Yet science insists on a reality independent of the observer.

I don't insist on either answer. The duality itself is a fiction, a product of consciousness.

A very early belief of mine was that Earth as a rock, the Sun, the Galaxy, every body, and thus all rocks, as well as photons individually, are all absolutely conscious. Inexorably and with a very high degree of complexity in the case of the geology of the Earth, and immediately but very simply in the case of the photon, they all display a conscious element.

One of the arts I do is pottery, and when I fire a wood kiln, I'm always of the feeling that the firing of a kiln represents a life, not unlike the life of a candle flame, or a person. When the fire is very large and very hot and burns for a week it is a form of advanced consciousness. The fire seems to make conscious choices. I've written a lot about this in other places on this blog.

The quantum personality of a photon also displays rudimentary decision making and the appearance of consciousness, So do identical twins separated at birth. What is the 'stuff' that keeps them connected as they live their separate lives? As materialists we have measurements of both behaviors, though most psychologists and neurologists will probably continue to scoff at the introduction of a new conscious dimensionality to this study.

The most serious quantum physicists do admit that their mathematical descriptions are objective and limited. Richard Feynman admitted to the unsatisfactory solutions offered by quantum physics to optical phenomena, even complained about it, essentially calling it 'an ugly theory that works'.  Most others would probably express these gripes privately.

If we admit that all systems process energy to some degree, and by definition are not isolated from the rest of the universe, then they'll display some measurable level of a soon to be recognized variable, a 'field of consciousness', not unlike that of gravity or electromagnetism.

What is the universe, but matter and consciousness? Western science has been starved of answers, but it's researches take it closer to the door of psyche. We are creeping up on truths recognized by Shaivism and the Vedanta for thousands of years. The great success of science may be realized at the moment it gives up, in the same manner as Einstein gave up when in a conversation with Tagore with the conclusion, "Then I am more religious than you!"

If we were to formulate a scientific materialist description of consciousness, then we would be brought paradoxically no closer to answers for the current mysterium. Yes, we'll have turned to face the problem. We'll have acknowledged Chalmers' 'hard problem', but simply added more flesh to the bones of a mathematical and descriptive solution.

Describing consciousness such that it could be written on a T-shirt would just drop us at the same bus stop we were at previously, except now we'll have a field of abstractions devoted to describing consciousness, but lack the means, by way of science at least, of seizing and understanding that conscious field. The progress will mimic a Death of Science, and an ebbing of Western thought. At least when getting off the bus, we'd now be facing the palace with a locked door.

Those laws, which I'm sure will follow, will be written off the springboard of scientific materialism which we will have clung to since the early Islamic scientists of the 11th-13th Centuries. We'll have objectified the subject, but will still stand outside our new subject, as we did before David Chalmers gave his 1994 talk.

Is the approach to consciousness a boundary to be progressively fought back? Or to understand it mustn't one in some way infiltrate to the other side of the barrier that stands in our way? I absolutely see the latter approach. We need a top down revision in our philosophy of science that admits our current science as a viable laboratory for testing and verification, but not of understanding.

I believe that while we need to understand a new set of laws, we need to think of consciousness as a manifestation of all systems, ranging from the extremely simple to the universally large and massively complex.

These questions are inherently philosophical, but they ask for scientific verification. Aren't we looking for giant revisions to our scientific philosophy that can be corroborated by our older observational science?

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The Edge of Abstraction and the Voice of the Muse

In an Ancient Dialogue between Drama and Psyche, or a more modern equivalent, between the Artist and his Muse one wonders if it is dialogue, whose dialogue? Who speaks the poem? What is the source of the poetic voice?

Do not these questions about the essence of poetry, what metaphor is, and who it serves?

If I listen for metaphor behind a narrative or expository composition, will it explain the ancient Greek use of theatrical techniques to ritualize confrontations between the conscious mind, and unconscious psyche?

I hope in this essay to parse dialogues of some modern and Romantic poems into dramatic characters.

Reading re-enacts. Poetry is a voice performance. The voice moves in and out of a dramatic space the ancients correctly attributed to Dionysus. In this manner metaphor inhabits a numinous space - the poets make an approach to what is numinous.

Why the overlap in subject with the nine Muses? Here I'll posit a quick notion, and then get on to the substance of my primary argument.

The numinous implies a divinely infused quantity and needn't arise from an accepted canon. For instance, Modern Hindu mythology amalgamates a historically complex pantheon into a simple trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. This implies that the many other named 'gods' in India are now either phases, or aspects or incarnations of one of the three primary Gods. The divine experience that an approach to one of these 'Gods' can bring about, eventually tires, as it becomes reduced by history, when all the tributaries of all the rivers coalesce into one gigantic stream which spills it's essence into the sea.

So the numinous in poetry may arise without a trace and without explanation. Calling the source of Western poetry the Muse is enough. Study of her brings one no closer to her phenomena. The numinous is indeed found upriver, by a rustling brook, or a vital youthful river plunging down out of the mountains.

In poetry we make an approach to something we have lost touch of. A poem is an appeal for direct contact. The mythos of most divine experience degrades into a tired tract which holds little mystery.

The classic Greek pantheon, being more complex than the one practiced through worship in present day India, leaves the amalgamation of simpler roles less complete. The ritual of this worship is preserved, or rather was preserved, through drama, without explanation. As the universe constantly generates stars, so Gods are born. They rise, as characters in a mythos, and are merged into greater bodies, larger longer stories. Every so often the entire mythos explodes, or there is death, and recycling into the Underworld.

In the modern day, this process continues unabated, due to the shadow effect of science, which purports to have put  stake through the heart of any God-like vestige.

For the Egyptian, whether a pharaoh seeking Osiris, or laborer awaiting judgement in the passage of the soul via the Egyptian Theatre of the Dead the Journey into the Heavens, may be seen as an flow opposite to the return of Demeter as experienced at Eleusis experienced through the ingestion of ergot tainted wine.

The practice, the theatre at Eleusis, was in essence group poetry,  a collective approach to the numinous.

-=](:W:)[=-