Why do people insist on defending their ideas and opinions which such ferocity, as if defending honour itself? What could be easier to change than an idea?

J.G. Farrell, 1973

july 2020

You are contacted by another being.

It communicates by possessing you.

It seems it is attempting to find a way to talk to you.

It is a dizzying sensation. You feel faint.

You manage to grab something to eat, you are hungry. You stumble, with a pillow it seems, there tucked into your right arm, around the kitchen counter and into the study.

It is dark in here. You move to sit on the dark couch, Right Arm puts the pillow on the couch first, then takes the food. Meanwhile you manage to avoid the black cat, he seems grateful with a soft welcoming meow, but you can’t respond.

march 2021

well it took me long enough i suppose. 18 years ago i was possessed by an urge to climb mountains, hills whatever. i don’t need to conquer the tallest peaks, but at least those that are around me i wanted to see the top.

there was a hill behind a church that a couple of my friends found back in San Diego. You weren’t really allowed up there but no one was there to stop you. just like right now. 18 years later.

“In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” - Fred Dretske

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, [digital] man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors.”

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

“The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.”

• David Mitchell

On a philosophical level, [the phenomenon of chaos] struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? I always felt that the spontaneous emergence of self-organization ought to be part of physics.

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.

How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give.

If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair.

If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering.

Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.

“Don’t just do something. Sit there!” - Zen proverb

I received the gift of a lovely New Yorker essay from a relative, which blessed me with this opportunity to reflect on and clarify my feelings towards travelling.[1] I was at first reminded of my time spent online dating. “I love to travel” became a clear signal to me to just move on! But why? That essay put words to some of my feelings that contributed to developing that heuristic.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a husband and a happy home and children,
and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,
and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor,
and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America,
and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila
                                     and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions,
and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion,
and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

A lot of hopelessness, I think, comes from amnesia.
The past helps us understand the future.

Somebody said, “What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?”
And… he said, “Stop being an individual.”

I think we’re beginning to recognize that individualism is lonely and we have a deep crisis of loneliness that Silicon Valley, pandemics, et cetera, have made worse… the solution is community, being a part of a community, finding a community, supporting community… I think that people deeply want to be part of something larger.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
          So how should I presume?

T.S.Eliot

behold your dark eyes,
glittering with the knowledge
of ancient wisdom

behold your sleek wings,
divine shields, warm blankets, and
instruments of flight

behold your sharpness
beak and talon fiercely honed,
delicately used.

you seek the wounded,
they beg for transformation.
you sanctify them.

you digest their world.
you purify their remains,
you nurture your kin.

great mother spirit,
beautiful, inscrutable,
behold yourself in full.

Audio sources

Knoll by Nitsua, sonsofu (license pending)

i am the peacemaker.
i do not choose one side or another.
i bend the world to my will to bring us together.
from this world you may choose to step away,
but i love you dearly and wish for you to stay.