Better Red Than Dead

I was back in the Cold War not so much pro-Soviet Union as I was anti-American.  I was a teen and scared to death of being nuked.  But I just couldn’t stand those bumper stickers that said “Better Dead than Red.”  First I thought they were just plain stupid; I would rather be alive under almost any conditions (excepting a few); so being Red didn’t seem all that bad to be if I wasn’t Dead.  And without knowing a single Russian person, I felt confident in believing that many of those reds preferred red to dead.

Also I had read a number of novels and short stories, admittedly mostly from the 19th century, that convinced me that Russians were actually human beings and not some sort of moronic sub species.  Those books also convinced me that Russians were in some ways more spiritual than Americans.  They were not really into material things but were concerned with the big issues like dying and what it means to be a human being.  Of course, I also recognized they were not concerned with material things because they didn’t have any.

 Before the Revolution, the serfs lived in abject and utter poverty.  You have to remember too that legally speaking the Czar owned all of Russia.  Every bit of it.  So the idea of not having private property was not an alien concept when the commies came along and declared the end of private property.  As I see it the behavior of the Russian people has far less to do with Communism than it has to do with their very long history as a people.  Their history had pretty much prepped them for no property and autocratic rule by a corrupt few.  And that history now repeats itself:  the people have nothing and are rule by a few predatory, mafiaesque “capitalists.”

I remember a saying about Russian people that goes something like.  These two Russians.  One has a coat and the other with no coat is freezing to death.  So the one with the coat rips it in half and gives half to the freezing Russian.  A capitalist would say, screw you, I am keeping my coat.  I earned it by exploiting the labor power of my neighbor. You freezing guy are a lazy shiftless no good son-of-a-bitch.  The Russian solution, their idea of community, is to make sure everybody is equally miserable.

So they do have equality; the equality of misery. You could do worse than that and we have done so in these United States.  That doesn’t mean I am anti-American.  I am American to the bone.  I continue to believe in the ideals of this country, though daily it seems we move further and further from realizing them.  Who knows, though, maybe I should have been born in Russia.  I have a colleague whose wife is from Russia.  Sveta is her name.  I have given my colleague some CD’s of the songs I write, and he says Sveta loves my droning.

Over there, people write and sing songs about dying, depression, pessimism, despair and futility. And they like them.

Wherewithal

Wherewithal? What the hell is that?

But since his aphasia Brother Dan has started using this mysterious word with some regularity.  I will ask him like what he thinks he will do and he says, depends upon the wherewithal or if I have the wherewithal.

It’s not that I don’t know what it means—wherewithal; it means having the means (including financial) or the ability or the capacity to do something or other.  But he doesn’t say means, capacity, ability or skills.  He says “wherewithal.”  I think his use of this rather uncommon and archaic word means something else too.  “Wherewithal” doesn’t mean simply having the means; but in its mystery suggests also some concern about not only not having the means or skills or abilities but also some concern as to what these skills, abilities, capabilities and means might be.

To get from point A to point B one has various means at one’s disposal: a car, a bike, a motor scooter, or feet.  Wherewithal points to the mystery or variousness of the means.  I think Brother Dan’s use of the term did not just start after his aphasia but is in part an attempt to encapsulate his relationship to his aphasia or of his self to the aphasia.  He knows he once had the means to get his thoughts directly and clearly out; he took those means for granted as we all do.  And we all do because really we don’t know and nobody does the means by which a thought or a notion or an idea gets from the head out into the air and into another person’s ear.  Because he doesn’t know the means he cannot either choose between whatever various means there might be.

When it comes to a malfunction or the simple functioning of the brain, the question of whether the means justifies the ends or not makes no sense at all, because without the means the end simply cannot come into being.

I speculate and speculate only that perhaps Brother Dan’s aphasia involves a mix up or an altered connection between the sound of a word and what it might mean as a means of communication.  Some of his writing has lots of puns in it; I think here of the old “there,” “they’re,” “their”—the same sound for three meanings.  Not that his puns are this dull, but where he means “dispel” he writes “distell.”  There is some connection here too with the issue of rhyming.  Some aphasiacs are able to remember and sing right through a song that rhymes; but can’t talk out a free standing improvised sentence.  So rhythm—the stress of the words is important too.

A good deal more than the pure conveying of meaning is involved in speech.  There’s also sound and the overlapping or potential punnings in that sound, there is rhythm (that comes more to the fore in speech arising from emotion) and occasionally there is rhyme as establishing a pattern for speech (that may also act as an aid to memory).  And at the other extreme, there is something like what I am trying to write here.  Speech stripped of all the elements that make it speech.

Dear Prudence

I can’t say I paid much attention to the idea of prudence, if any at all, until I read Tom Jones, back in 1967, by Henry Fielding.  I didn’t pay much attention to it then, but while I thought the book was mostly about getting laid, I was told that it “really” was about the search for Wisdom, Sophia being the name of the character pursued by Tom, and Sophia means Wisdom, in Greek I think.

But I did notice Fielding used the word Prudence a lot; indeed he writes:

Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also.

Fielding makes Prudence sound like some Machiavellian duty; sure you may be good inside, but in addition, you must appear good, so be prudent.  Of course he was referring mostly to sexual matters—since the book was “really” about getting laid—so it was sort of a warning to young ladies to not only be but also appear chaste at all times.  And he does make a larger point:  prudence is the Guard to Virtue.  More than that Prudence, according to some, is the mother of all virtues.

 Prudence comes from a Latin word, or maybe it’s Greek, that means “foresight.”  That gets to the core of it.  You can’t just let your virtues guide you; certainly they are the principles that must regulate one’s actions.  But you can’t just expect to be virtuous and have everything come out A-OK.  You also have to exercise foresight.  I think the idea of Prudence may have something to do with Kant’s Practical Reason.  Because prudence is about the practice of virtue.

Prudence is not for the young and the reckless.  Or perhaps the young necessarily are reckless and they have to learn prudence by being reckless.  That’s what Fielding seems to be saying: sure, get laid, but be prudent about it.  People don’t expect children to be prudent.  Children have to get up to walk around, then they fall down and hurt themselves or stick their hands in the fire and learn to be prudent.  If children were born with prudence none of them would ever learn to walk because, getting up and walking around, is damn imprudent.

I was thinking about Prudence because I was pissed off.  We seem to live in an age of imprudence.  I am pretty sure parents don’t lecture their children on the value of Prudence.  Today we praise “risk takers.”  That’s a bunch of bull; in fact we praise imprudence.  And what we get is bankers who loan people money without doing a background check to see if they have any money at all.  And we have people going out and buying homes when they know damn well that they don’t have any money.  And just yesterday, the Fed lowered the interest rates so that there will be more money out there to be imprudent with.  Thus the idiotic, reckless, risk taking morons on Wall Street were overjoyed.

Starry Night?

We’ve had a little fracas going on in the condo complex for a couple of years now.  Maybe five years back or so, one of the residents got out of her car and on the way to her condo was attacked, knocked down that is, and had her purse taken.  This was a terrible experience of course.  So she decided to sue the condo association for insufficient lighting since the attack was at night.

She must have won something I guess because the condo association was pressured by the insurance people to do something about the lighting.  So they did and now we have these poles stuck up everywhere with huge bulbs stuck on top of them, so you could sit outside, in the dark, supposedly, if you wanted, read without too much trouble.  Nobody liked these lights much and a couple of the eco-new-age freaks in the complex complained because they said it was no longer possible to see the stars.

That was true and the eco-freaks are onto something because according to an article in the New Yorker, one can now find only a few places on this earth where one can see the night time sky the way, say, any old ancient Roman, or most people living even in the 19th century could have seen it.  Human beings are producing way too much light, and it gets refracted, or something to that effect, and blocks the stars from our vision.

 I realized reading this that it’s been a long time since I have really looked at the night time sky since there really is no point in doing so.  It’s just black—sort of—with nothing floating around in it.  I remember too as a kid out camping in the mountains with Boy Scouts and being astonished at the number of stars visible out in the woods.

 I think human beings are direct products of their environs.  Once the stars were, at least for quite a few people, a source of wonder.  Wow!  Look at that!  What the hell is that!  And even when we came to know what that was, it remained a source of wonder, suggesting the vastness of time and space.  No stars, no wonder.  Gone, a source, since the start of humanity, for idle star gazing and profound pondering.  A whole source of spiritual stuff or of contemplating humanity’s relation to all that is out there is disappearing right before our eyes so that our eyes may see at night.

Now there’s an organization working to preserve the night time sky.  They have gone around the globe ranking night time star visibility.  Only a few places on the globe are as dark now at night as the whole globe was a 100 years ago. No doubt these few places will become, if they have not already become, tourist attractions. Even the night time sky will become commercialized.

On Being Small

As noted elsewhere in my different ruminations on the “death thang,” I first became aware of death or at least of its consequences for me personally when one day walking home from high school I had something like a mystic experience, although I don’t know what that is, or an epiphany, which I think is a sort of poor man’s version of mystic experience.  In any case, it was an experience with sensations of the hair standing up on the back of the neck variety that lasted all of maybe thirty seconds, and in those moments, while I felt the horror of it all, I also felt strangely exhilarated because I felt free.  As I put it to myself in a form of sub-audible articulation, you are free because you are small, oh so very small.

While I have thought about this moment over the years, I have not been able to add much to it beyond the bare bones offered above perhaps because it was a bare bones experience.  I do remember wondering at one time why I was free because I was small.  All that ever came to me was that being so small I might, like a grain, of sand slip through their fingers, the fingers of my tormentors, my parents, I mean.  I also wondered how small my smallness was: the size of a pea or perhaps atomically small.

I had this experience around 1963 I think and just the other day, in 2007, I was perusing the New Yorker and came across the review of the writing of a man, now long dead, named Robert Walser, who had also thought on the issue of smallness;  the reviewer writes:

            It [a particular passage] shows the tightness of Walser’s switchbacks from sweetness to sarcasm and back to sweetness again.  It also offhandedly announces his credo—everything small and modest is beautiful and pleasing—and establishes the depths of his affinity with Kafka.  After all, Kafka…makes the same curious declaration—“Indeed I am Chinese—and cherished the idea of smallness in a similar way: “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so.”  For both writers, smallness implied a drastic aversion to power, the exercise of it as well as submission to it.

So it would appear I am not alone in my speculations on smallness, and indeed, Walser like myself, as the reviewer implies in another place, associated the idea of it with freedom.  The reviewer notes another dimension to the issue, if one may call it that, of smallness, by saying it marks for both Walser and Kafka a drastic aversion to power, to the exercise of and submission to.

I had not thought of that idea.  Having power makes a person vulnerable (to those who want to get it) and having it to use makes those upon whom one uses it also vulnerable.

But poor Walser checked into an insane asylum in 1927 and did not check out again until 1957 when he died.  So far I have not become that small.

Winners and Losers

Back in the dark ages of the mid 70’s when I was in grad. school and learning about something called structuralism, I kept coming across the words “diachronic,” and “synchronic” and for some reason I kept getting them confused.

But today driving home, I thought of a good example that might explain it a bit better.

Take the saying:

Winners lose, losers win.

This seems pretty clear.  No problem.  Actually, the meaning can change depending upon whether you read it synchronically or diachronically.

Synchronically (with in the context of a present), it means people who are winners in this society, at this moments, are losers (see the working class saying: s…t rises to the top), and people who are in fact losers win (see: Paris Hilton).

Diachronically, it reads: over time, history has shown, that winners become losers (see: The British Empire or the USA) and losers (let’s say Japan or Germany) become winners.

 When applied to Bobby Bonds, this may be read both ways at once.

Apes

I had a friend who was sociology major as an undergraduate, but grew to hate the discipline when he began to sense the sociological view of human beings.  It took me a while to figure out what he meant but the more one reads sociology the more one sees that human beings are herd animals.   That overall view is connected to the idea expressed by an early social thinker, Helveticas, who said that human beings are apes of each other.

I have been trying not to think about anything to do with teaching, education, and my job, but I thought about this when I notice an article on the first page of the LA Times: “Obesity is ‘contagious,’ study finds Friends help friends get fatter, a report in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates.”  Followed by:

Obesity can spread among a group of friends like a contagious disease, moving from one person to another in an epidemic of fat.

That’s the finding of a novel study released Wednesday that reported that having close friends who are fat can nearly triple your risk of becoming obese.

First, I have to say, as I used to say, when I taught a research paper class on eating in America.  This idea that obesity is an epidemic—while it may serve to medicalize the problem—is pure nonsense and misleading because it makes it seem the whole thing is somehow a biological problem, which of course it is (and isn’t).  You simply don’t catch obesity like the flu.

What human beings do “catch” and depend on for their very existence is the behavior of other people.  We are in a loop of mimicry.  Don’t know what to do.  Well, do what that guy does.  That’s what we do all the time.  Society has stuff built into it that does our thinking for us. 

But we US citizens have a problem with this whole idea because we have been taught to think we are individuals who prize individuality.  This idea serves to cut us off from seeing the obvious.  We aren’t individuals.  We are not born individuals.  Maybe a very few people become individuals over a life time, but even that’s pretty rare.  Mostly we muck along unthinkingly via mimicry and herd behavior.

Any way this whole business is all tangled up.  When people start talking about individuals and individuality, they are usually talking about “responsibility.”  The importance of this study on obesity is that it suggests obesity is not a “personal problem.”  Which of course does not make it any less of a problem for the person who suffers from it.

For years, as a joke, when students came to my office and wanted to know how to get write an A paper, I would say, “Well, the best thing to do is go and find the people who write A papers and hang out with them—all the time—and after a while, not long really, you too will start to write A papers.”  Actually, this is not a joke.  It’s the truth.

Sean von Utopia

Learn something new everyday, or at least try to.

A couple of students are going to write research papers on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s).  These are much larger online versions of what once were called RPG’s.  Role Playing Games.  The new, huge, complicated games allow one to construct a character or persona out of an immense array of qualities, as well as magical powers, and of course weapons.

 roleplayer

The purpose of these games is to win.  I find on MPogD.com—a clearing house page for a vast variety of games—the following “news flash”: “Round 7 of Worlds of War has now ended, many congratulations to Sean von Utopia (2:2) who made it to the top of the scoreboard.”  Sean von Utopia, probably not the name of the actual person, Won!  Pretty soon Round 8 of Worlds of War is scheduled to start up.

By winning and even if one doesn’t come out on the top, like Sean von Utopia, one scores points.  I believe some of these points may be carried over to the next version of a game, and of course the more points one scores during a game means more power to you in the course of a game.

This points business, as well as the creation of characters that become famous like Sean Von Utopia, has led to a strange practice called “gold mining.”  Youths, apparently located mostly in China, are paid something like 200 dollars a day to mine gold, to contact players, to offer them “real money”—if there is actually such a thing—for virtual points.  The virtual points are then resold (in exchange for “real money”–) to people who want points for the game in progress.

Even more money apparently can be made by the buying and selling of whole characters.  The real person who created Sean von Utophia may be approached by a buyer who wants to be Sean von Utophia and makes the creator of Sean von Utophia an offer he can’t refuse.

My student reports that he met people online who spent as much as a $1000 dollars a month to buy bits and pieces of virtual or imaginary reality for the purposes of game playing.  Most of the buying and trading was done on Ebay which has now however banned the sale of virtual reality on its site.  Too much possibility apparently of fraud when one is selling an object that doesn’t exist.

I find something vaguely and remotely disturbing about this.  I can’t say why exactly.  I think this has something to do with a theory I once had.  That our tools tend to generate conceptions of reality that may or may not be correct.  I believe the computer for example led for some time to a conceptualization of the human brain as computer like.  Decartes for example was in part led to conclude that others might not be people but machines because of clock work like machines made for royalty that mimicked the movements of “people.”  Tools do not simply manipulate a reality; they manifest one.  What is the world of MMOG’s manifesting.

Ipod Me

Reading through the last batch of student papers, one student wrote something that made me think they were asserting that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was the first or archetypical salesman.  I thought that was clever but looking back later over what I thought to be the paper, I couldn’t find a reference to the Serpent so I must have dreamed it up myself.

 

ipodites

 

 

 Whether or not I read it or dreamed it up, I decided to check out Genesis to see if the Serpent did indeed qualify as a salesperson or early advertising executive.  Roughly the setup goes:  God says don’t eat this or you will die. But the serpent says, Ye shall not surely die.  For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

 I suppose the Serpent could quality as an advertising executive because he is an outright liar.  But then comes the “pitch.”  A lie won’t really get buyers unless there is a pitch.  It runs:  if you eat this fruit you will become a god yourself.  This is a pretty simple argument; but one cogent to the world of advertising today.  Many advertisements do suggest that if one buys this object one will come to have god like powers.

The early ads for the Ipod, for example, showed simple images of music or representations of music, flowing and flowing into this tiny device, the Ipod.  The suggestion was that this device was somehow magical since it could contain so many songs.  Of course, songs are sounds and not physical objects.  But the representations of the song in the ad were solid and took up space.  So the Ipod was truly a magical object able to contain and hold in place many larger and fluid objects. 

Of course, having a magical device is not quite the same as being a God, but I think the parallel works.

In later ads, the Ipod continued magical but different.  These ads featured the featureless silhouettes, like card board cut outs, of lithe young figures moving rhythmically in an undefined or unparticularized space.  As they moved, they swung their Ipod about and it illuminated, as with a tale of fire, the space of the dancer and eventually the dancer his or her self.  Ultimately, the suggestion was that with an Ipod one illuminate the darkness.  This too has magical overtones.

So the Serpent was onto something.  And maybe his flat out lie too can be read in another way—as appealing to the grandiose self inside of everybody.  He is not just saying, don’t worry you won’t die, IF you eat this.  He is also saying, don’t worry, if you eat this, YOU won’t die.  Admittedly this is a bit slippery, but in sum: just do it, in either case you won’t die.

Of course, there is still the question with advertising, as with the Serpent, does any of this stuff really work?  Do people really respond to it?  In the case of the Serpent, one has to wonder; Eve doesn’t seem to buy into the idea that she will be a God.  The Bible suggests she thinks the fruit would be good eating.  According to Genesis: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.  True, the wise part is there, but first comes, good food and pleasant looking.  That’s a woman for you, of course.

As for Adam, [Eve] gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.  Adam, for his part, resembles those men in the Carl Jr’s ads who can’t cook and try to make guacamole by tossing a whole avocado into a blender.  Idiots, in short.

Continue reading Ipod Me

Sinister

So I saw my shrink yesterday.  As I believe I have mentoned, she was born and raised in France and immigrated to the US of A in the mid 50’s from North Africa.  She still has a strong French accent.  She has an excellent command of the English, though American slang is not her forte.

I told her I had written a song about my father kicking my mother when she fell on the floor.  I quoted myself:

The old lady fell flat on her back on the floor
The old man couldn’t pick her up no more
She lay there rolling round in her flab
When he walked by his leg she did grab

OOOO  what I irony is this
60 plus years of wedded bliss

Old man don’t you think probably it ain’t right
To be a kicking at your old fat wife
When she’s Down.

My shrink said, “That sounds sinister.”

This is not the first time she has used “sinister” in this way, and over time we have had some problems communicating when a word in English and in French overlap in sound and spelling but have slightly different inflections meaning wise.

The song might be dark, grim or bleak, as I far as I am concerned, but not sinister.

But in French sinister (sinistre) means: grim, deadly boring.  OK, I can go with grim.

But in English sinister means:

·  Suggesting or threatening evil: a sinister smile.

·  Presaging trouble; ominous: sinister storm clouds.

I don’t think the song suggests or threatens evil.  So in French the song is sinister, but in English it isn’t.

Both the French and the English come directly from the Latin.  In Latin sinister -tra –trum means: wrong, perverse; unfavorable, adverse.

So maybe in Latin the song is sinister too since it’s a little perverse.

Sinister, in Latin, also means “on the left hand.”  So left handed people are sinister or at least maybe that’s where we get the idea that left handed people are a little whacky.

I have noted that there are a heck of a lot of left handed actors, more than the norm in the general population.

Come to think of it, I don’t think the song is sinister at all.  I think it’s funny.   That could make me a bit sinister I suppose.