Jackal

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[This is a section from the longer story “Jump”, posted yesterday. It’s a war story; maybe an oblique rethinking of the story of Arjuna on the Battlefield, dealing with the meaning of duty and selflessness and illusion. Not that it was rationally planned as a story with that intent. But it intertwined with those issues, while also metabolizing the writer’s own demons regarding the nature of reality and illusion, which had seriously bothered him as a teenager].

Jackal standing in dry grassland beneath a colorful dusk sky

The boy slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.

And then of course, what follows.

But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.

A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.

But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.

This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.

Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.

And only then would the real work begin.

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Jump

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For Walter Cybulski, exceptional poet and humorist bar none

“Arjuna said: How shall I strike my grandfather, my guru, and all other relatives, who are worthy of my respect, with arrows in battle, O Krishna?” — Bhagavad gita

[The Introduction will make this story a little clearer, maybe]

His Father’s Circus

1950s gas station with circus act, spectators, mechanics, and classic cars

As a very young boy, his father ran a gas station. He was a mechanic and always carried a gigantic wrench, that was nearly 3 feet long and twice as heavy.

And when he wasn’t working on cars or trucks or busses or tanks, he would swing his wrench, and throw it high in the air and catch it, like a heavy metal drum major. And people would drive long distances just to have him fill up their tanks with gas, so they could watch him perform. And he would do somersaults out to the tanks and backflips all the way back to his office. And when he wasn’t working on cars or tanks or trucks, and the lines at the gas tanks had thinned, he’d finally close shop for the day and wander into the bar across the street and ham it up with his friends.

And the small boy would tag along, at first attached to his mother’s bosom, then to her hand, and finally alone, behind his dad, just large enough to be hoisted on the bar stool by a rough hand, and then given a little boost, and finally able to climb the bar stool by himself and drink coca-cola dribbled over huge tankards of ice, chewing the ice, absent-mindedly, while his father laughed and whistled and wagered fortunes on how many pushups he could do in an hour, or whether he could withstand a sledge hammer to his stomach.

Once, a dancing bear happened to be in the bar, and challenged his father to an arm-wrestling match, and the bear won two out of three, but never came back to challenge anyone again.

When the boy was 8 years old, he quit school to become a soda jerk, and got a job next door to his father’s garage. And over the years, as the garage business grew, all the other businesses in town grew by proximity, and profits skyrocketed all around. You could hear the sonic boom for miles.

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Introduction to the story “Jump”

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“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)

First, this is a strange (war) story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself (the war segment), surrealism and mysticism (in that order).

Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.

So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.

One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”

But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.

So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.

The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.

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Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: A Rake-Handle/Head Collision Sentence by Sentence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
View all responses

Have you ever accidentally meditated? The key word here is “accidentally” — as in strolling through a peaceful garden and being suddenly clobbered on the forehead by a rake-handle. Instant karma: Instantaneously encountering the consequences of your own unconscious behavior.

This slapstick experience is a kind of split-second meditation. Action and consequence, mindlessness and its inevitable manifestations, are too instantaneously linked to leave any time for an aggrieved imagination of my “self” to erupt and blame the rake, as mindless thought tends to do.

In the instant of the collision, one either gives up the ghostly illusion of one’s own dignified self and laughs at the idiotic nature of existence, sans “me”, or stays trapped in the skull running in circles in search of an escape from the echoing sounds of one’s own circular running.

You know the experience of the internal voice and its endless chatter.

This is the experience of reading Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable.” Either you are transformed in fits of gut-wrenching laughter by these collisions with your own stupidity, or you will have no idea what I’m talking about and will hate the book and never finish it.

And don’t be fooled by the word “meditation.” Although it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Beckett’s trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), it’s also misleading in some of the term’s popular guises. By “meditation” here I don’t mean trying to remain peacefully aloof, or sitting cross-legged until one’s eyes cross in pain, or struggling to not struggle.

I mean something that a typical Subject will never Verbalize. No subject, no verb, no observer, no thing observed, no effort, no expectations of peace, but something that stops the little “me” short and reveals the farce of this me’s incessantly noisy reincarnations as “better angels” — these efforts to escape its own noisy disappointments. By meditation, I mean suddenly coming face to face with this ongoing monologue of self-centered thoughts racing across the skull and colliding with the rake-handles of one’s own stupidity.

The laughter that erupted from “this reading body” (I couldn’t call it “me” at that point) was like a volcanic explosion that changed the geography of this small life. Every sentence gymnastically tripped over itself in mental slapstick, like a literary Charlie Chaplin, landing with sprained expectations, and then blaming the previous sentences for the faults of the present turn of phrase, ad infinitum, like the head of a dog blaming its tail-end for spinning in circles — thereby multiplying the number of reincarnations — each “me” seeking an escape from the “me” of the immediate past.

It was a revelation of reality. It was the most honest thing I’d ever encountered.

Because what I encountered on the page was exactly what I encountered in my own head, albeit in a less raucous, gritty, sublime, and breathtakingly — delicately — insightful manner of speaking. I couldn’t breathe from laughing. There was no time between each sentence to feel idiotic and self-conscious, only space enough for the giddy relief of surrendering to one’s own reflected stupidity, forgiving myself in the absence of time’s excuses.

It was a meditation no less abrupt and unexpected than a rake handle to the forehead.

Speaking Silence: Refractions from Lao Tzu, Bohm, Beckett and Castaneda

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“I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?

If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing! Now” (Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by Hafiz)

Lao Tzu: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know”

Part I: What Can and Can’t Be Said?

Q: Would you agree with Lao Tzu’s statement that “those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know”? And if so, how come you keep speaking?

Fool: I would never disagree with Lao Tzu. And yet, Lao Tzu spoke those words! He used speech to point out the limits of speech. So, a certain kind of speech is still helpful.


Q: Would you say he contradicted himself?

F: No. Lao Tzu spoke in the spirit of reversal or negation. What he said was a quieting insight into the limits of language, but a limit is not a full deletion of language.

Q: What can and can’t words do?

F: We can fully sense any object in front of us without the need for words. All the qualities of the object are palpable, but “go without saying.” I don’t need to know a word for the color of the object in order to see it. I don’t need to know a word for its smell or shape. It’s only when there’s a practical need to distinguish utilitarian qualities of an object that words become helpful as positive identifications.

People used to claim that ancient people couldn’t see the color blue. But the experience of blueness was always a vivid human experience. Nevertheless, for a long time there was an absence of any practical need to distinguish blue from dark green. This didn’t mean they were less observant or narrower in perception…

Q: … but perhaps less intelligent? A capacity to notice distinctions and make use of them is a sign of greater intelligence. And having a larger vocabulary surely equates to more intelligence?…

F: …More intelligence in a positive direction, carrying more knowledge or memory, which is helpful in a rational, manipulative or focused direction – I would call this “brain athleticism”, which our culture favors. But this intelligence has overshadowed and weakened a negative form, that penetrates certainty, exposes limitations in knowledge, and receives wisdom from a wider perspective than any particular focus.

In fact, by developing a larger vocabulary for different shades of color, we are not necessarily becoming more sensitive to color itself. We are becoming more attuned to artificial categories of color, to names and words, instead of allowing color to remain a direct and ultimately unnamable experience, with its own shifting qualities, depending on light, shade, angle of sun, and contrasting environment.

And the name of a color will both sharpen our focus on that shading and prejudice us into seeing a generalized categorical “type” of color, rather than seeing the actual shifting qualities that morph and run from every defined boundary of knowledge.

The same is true of seeing anything, including human beings. We see “who” a person is based on the categorization we’ve created. Not just “white” or “black” or “Asian”, but “Tom” or “Dick” or “Sally”. We see the stories of one another.

So, this knowledge – this intelligence we gather about the world – can easily become a stupefying prejudice that holds our thinking within biased expectations and dulls our sensitivity to nuances that stray from these expectations.

Q: Are you implying that the more we “know” another person, the less sensitive to them we become?

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The Transhuman Religion, or The Limits of Machine Intelligence

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Machine intelligence promotes a religious doctrine. Or, rather, it replaces a cosmic vision with a simulation of cosmic order. It overlays a universe of unfathomable depths with a closed and predictable vision of the universe. It spreads a doctrine of perfection and control of the world. And this doctrine is as invisible as a plastic transparency placed over a projected image. We can’t easily peel the real from the false, which make us susceptible to this religion’s dogmas.

Essentially, programming is subliminal missionary work. It substitutes a life-oriented morality of “good” and “evil” or “healthy” and “diseased” with a mechanical morality of ‘the useful” and “the useless”, or “the valuable” and the “the worthless.” It preaches an inanimate universe, which requires external manipulation.

The profane transmutation of a living being into an object of manipulation is a substitute form of Mass. It’s inevitably evil in effect, because a machine can’t feel empathy and has no compassion. How can we retain our humanity against a dopamine-generating artificial paradise, when we can’t even resist the lies of obvious fools? No, this will turn quickly dark. We can’t coexist with a power that tempting. Full stop.

Then the religion comes into full view. The cries of the tortured pervert the worshipper’s last traces of sorrow and compassion into pure sensation, which is an addictive drug. We’ll abide by the machine’s logic. After all, we’ve already been fooled by a cheaper version of virtual reality, our own thoughts. How the hell are we going to stay sane or retain any animal reality? But I suppose that is one of the creeds: The only way to overcome biology’s bloodthirsty nature is to leave animal nature behind entirely. Make a hell for living things and enjoy a machine’s heaven.

So let’s continue: The algorithms are the established norms of worship. They offer unholy sacraments of wish-fulfillment. By imbibing in the algorithm’s endless pleasures, the human is reduced to a generator of desire, a battery for powering the machine itself. By losing oneself in the algorithmic dance, worshippers imbibe the spirit of sociopathic machine logic.

These mechanical moralities and dogmas are part of the machine’s program, even in the absence of bad intentions. No matter how the machine is programmed, it spreads this viral immorality.

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Life as Disappearing Ink

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Everyone is already writing their lives with disappearing ink (whether as auto mechanics or second basemen, or writers, and so forth). Everything we do will evaporate and be unrecallable after a few years, decades at most. So, we’re all using evaporating ink, readable only for a short while.

But I think most of us tend to feel that we are doing something meaningful or “necessary”, even though many of us know that “personal legacy” is an illusion. So, for many the need to do something meaningful has nothing to do with creating a personal legacy. It’s unrelated to the length of time the ink of our activities remains visible.

Let’s test this.

So, now let’s reduce the ink’s lasting mark to only 1 year. If you and I knew that everything we’re going to do would disappear in 1 year – that our names would be forgotten, our children and grandchildren would forget us (which they do after a generation or two or three at most), would we still put our heart into what we’re doing?

My feeling is that about 95% of us would stop being motivated if we knew that every trace of our good name would disappear from consciousness in one year. But five percent would probably continue. (I’m basing this guess on the 3.5% rule, and rounding up to 5%. This rule essentially identifies the critical mass of a population necessary for revolution. I’m projecting this “rule” as a general mark for how many people at any given time are radically motivated to act on behalf of something larger than themselves, including a world that extends beyond their own spilled ink).

Why would 5% continue to “write” their lives if they knew their work would disappear so quickly?

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Language as Healing Magic, or Defeating the Witchery of a Machine Mind

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Introduction

Negative (or “alchemical”)  inquiry performs real work.

It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.

These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.

Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.

After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.

A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.

These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.

But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.

This transforms contradiction into paradox.

A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.

In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.

Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.

Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.

And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”

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The Mufti and the Ten-Year-Old

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I want to share a video of a ten-year-old Islamic boy. There is something about this child that stands in stark contrast to the children I tend to see in America. I don’t mean this as a judgement against our own children. But in watching the video, or in knowing something about the many indigenous American cultures, a deficit in the general American culture can be seen.

I think it’s good to notice the beautiful qualities of a people that we are intent on “bombing back to the stone age.” (I know the video is not about people from Iran. But this war is being sold to the US soldiers as a war against Islam).

And I think it’s healthy to recognize deficits in ourselves to balance out all the one-sided stories we hear in our own propaganda machines.

Here is the video of the Mufti and the boy: https://youtu.be/13UZJbaVSSE?si=NaLHmREBrIXurnV6

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Insight as the Deletion of Positive Knowledge and How that Heals the World

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[This was published in “Dissident Voice”.]

I’m not sharing “knowledge”. In fact, none of my essays communicate knowledge in the typical sense. I’m sharing encounters with absences of knowledge. It starts with the recognition of the categorical illusion of positive or conclusive knowledge — not the illusion of all knowledge, but the illusion of ever being able to know anything in a final form.

Science itself was built on this categorical realization that its theories do not lead to conclusive knowledge. However, even science seems to have lost sight of this initiating insight.

Or, as I said in an earlier essay: “This is what bothers me about the debate between evolution and creationism. Creationists criticize science as “mere theory.” And science usually stupidly responds by touting all the “facts” backing up evolution. It rarely says, “you’re damn right it’s “only” theory. Theory is what makes science great. We don’t settle on a dogma, on a literal interpretation, on a fixed position. We allow our perceptions to change with discovery. And we don’t believe in a final explanation because actuality exceeds every formulation. We can always learn more.”

The closer we look at knowledge itself, the more contextual and temporary it starts to look, built upon assumptions that are more faith-based or creative than solid. Just like an atom — the closer we look at solid form the more it turns to mostly emptiness and occasional energetic flashes of insight from the void.

New evidence is constantly calling everything into question. What we end up with are provisional structures of thought (or stories or theories), but no final answers. No such thing as Positive knowledge exists. It’s one of the many fairy tales we have swallowed, and it has led our culture towards disaster, as I’ve been discussing in all of these essays.

Most people think we already question things too much. But we’re only questioning specific portions of knowledge. We’re not questioning knowledge categorically. Schools, for instance, never helped students learn to examine the creative or downright fictional assumptions that underlie conclusive knowledge itself.

As I said in another essay, “It’s the rare school…which leaves a student without an allegiance to some fixed position. Most schools teach only a short-term open-mindedness in order to gain, in the end, conclusive confidence in what is “real.” Few schools help students discover a more ineffable confidence in uncertainty, in remaining alert to where conclusions diverge from reality.”

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