The Title of the Previous Essay

negativegeographyLeave a comment
Three Riders Fall their Mounts by themet is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Intro:

Anything with the title, “How that Heals the World”, is likely to be read as a spiritual promissory note.

Taken in the context of this inquiry, however, no such positive promise is possible. And yet, the promissory phrase is intentional.

And although it will turn away the more discerning noses of potential readers, the title stands, because it is precisely this misdirection in the word “healing”, which creates the necessary bathos or humorous fall in expectations, which unlocks the meaning of the essay.

Or, rather, that expectation gets shattered during the course of all these essays; not broken down into the mirror opposite of “healing”, which would merely be a competing concept, such as “harming”. But it shatters my own bloated and self-important understanding of what it means to heal. And this turns the essay itself into a kind of medicine. (At least for me).


This Reversal of Expectations Requires a Good Soaking in Bathos

I use the word “bathos” even though it’s uncommon enough to require a definition. But a long definition will miss the Point. The Point needs to be sharpened into a singular sound.

Bathos: “an abrupt, often unintended, and ludicrous descent from a lofty, serious, or emotional tone to the commonplace or trivial. It functions as a form of unintentional anticlimax, frequently producing a comical or disappointing effect.” (Merriam Webster)

“Bathos”:  The sound falls off the tongue as if from lofty literary heights; as if falling from a high horse, and landing with a hard “Baa” that knocks the wind out of the generous reader. And then the echoing thud of “Thosss” immediately follows; which further fades into the soft aftermath of that S stretching into white noise.

And then, the mildly concussed brain flashes with fragmentary allusions to the contradictory nature of this experience. In the one ear, there’s an allusion to the saying, “he sure took a bath on that deal”. In the other ear, I claim to experience the baptism of a new meaning, the splashing S sound washing away the various motes and beams of delusional expectation.

So, the word “healing” in the title was used bathetically, as an intentional misdirection. And also, as a mild reiteration of the more drenching bathos found in the essay posted last week, titled “Original Negative Geography….”

The humor of that essay (and the humorous point of all of them) is functional, not frivolous.

Because, the “solution” or “healing” here only amounts to giving up the search for an anti-dote beyond noticing the absurdity itself. Until this absurdity is met directly as a preposterous fact, we never give up the busy chase; and our brains trip over themselves from morning to night looking for an exit from its own chaotic search for an exit.

Or, as an old Zenn saying has it: It’s as if we’re “riding an ox in search of an ox.”  

Read More »

Insight As the Deletion of Positive Knowledge, and How that Heals the World

negativegeography1 Comment

It’s not my “knowledge” that I’m sharing, but my encounters with absences of knowledge.

That’s how I can remain so confident even though I don’t really know anything. I know what I can’t know, but that’s an eye-opening kind of knowledge, because it dissolves conclusion and reopens the field of inquiry.

After all, if I focus on most of the rote knowledge I “know” it begins to turn foggy and evaporate into immaterial assumptions. Just like an atom — the closer I look at a material form the more it turns to emptiness and occasional energetic flashes from the void.

This generates a greater sensitivity to the disintegrating edges of knowledge, which is eye-opening.

At present, most don’t tend to question Knowledge itself (or examine its fabricated nature). We tend to see through our certainties only in flashes. So, at irregular intervals, holes in the fabric (in the yarns) are pierced here and there by insights. And at present, we seem compelled to re-connect these holes (or dots), in order to restore our confidence in the fabrications and blanket assumptions to which we still cling for security.

But by now, the yarns that filter our vision are patchwork quilts with ragged and disintegrating edges. After each tear in our belief systems, we have rushed to repair the damage. And now all the patches – all the efforts to hide contradictions, hypocrisies and white lies as a way of extending the life of the yarn – are disintegrating faster than they can be repaired.

For many, this can induce a panic at the loss of certainty, and the exposure of an emptiness in our own fabrications of identity. So, some are intent on restoring the “greatness” of the old fabric in some regressive revolution.

Or – and this is even more difficult to notice – some will discern just enough holes in the fabric to propose an entirely new yarn that would resolve some of these problems. Perhaps socialism (my preference, given the alternatives), or religion, or communism or fascism or a new capitalism, or a panopticonic AI state run by a self-described elite hiding in some redwood groves in northern California.

These are all attempts to re-engineer a better fabric of perception to cover the emptiness behind all these best-laid plans.

Maybe what we’re experiencing is no more confusing than what a caterpillar experiences as its cocoon deteriorates. But we’re like caterpillars who keep re-building the disintegrating cocoon of Thought (of rational planning and top-down control) that has (arguably) served us so well in our development till now.

But insights are damaging to any fabric of belief woven too tightly. And we are resisting the insights that would break down these cocoons.

An insight tends to be associated with a “new idea” (a new fabrication). But an insight is mainly an erasure. It’s the negative force that removes a beam from the eyes (which allows new thoughts to form).

But we’ve never had a sufficient insight into the fabric of thought itself; only into particular forms of that fabric. So, we have focused on weaving together new narratives of social organization as a corrective. But so long as we fall for the delusion that thought can be perfected, this amounts to pulling the wool back over our eyes with a new and inevitably beam-imbedded yarn.

So, what is an insight if it isn’t used to fill the hole with a new idea?

Read More »

Original Negative Geography Intro and Part I from year 2000

negativegeography3 Comments
Photo by Alev Dou011fan on Pexels.com

I re-read something I wrote 26 years ago and realized I’d hardly learned a damn thing since then. At any rate, it puts me in the awkward position of being slightly jealous of my younger self, even though I’m still convinced that this older self could show that whipper-snapper a thing or two if he had the decency to listen to me. Nevertheless, the mild and somewhat astonished envy remains, although it burns low because it’s too absurd.

But I was mildly surprised that this younger fellow’s remarks made sense, This goes to show how quickly my opinions of myself depreciate the instant they land in the past, even the immediate past. Either that or it measures the ever-blossoming conceit of someone who thinks he’s always smarter than he was a moment ago.

But the past self doesn’t even exist anymore. So, the courtroom is mine (for the moment). And I confess under oath that a moment ago I actually tripped over my own shoelace on the way upstairs. And now I’m writing about it with calm clarity. Hence, I’m always improving (but never actually getting anywhere, resulting in a hung jury).

Nevertheless, the thing displays something I might have lost a little. And because I’ve returned to the topic of the inner voice over the last few essays, it feels relevant again.

And because otherwise the thing will just languish in the bottom drawer of a desk until the new owners upon my death throw it in the dumpster, I’m giving the thing an airing. (And leaving as it was written, no edits. Not even replacing the generic “he” with a “they”. It’s what it was.

And remember that this is a humor thing, but that’s not the same as being frivolous. Non-frivolous humor. Seriousness without any need for furrowed brows.

[There were five parts, but I think these were the two better parts.]

———————

NEGATIVE GEOGRAPHY:  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ERROR

                “And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life and never understand.”

                                                                                                            — Molloy (S. Beckett)

Read More »

Briefly Touching a Third Rail: Footnote 2 to “What Is Self-Knowledge?”

negativegeographyLeave a comment
Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Now, this is a third rail in society, so let me place my metrical feet carefully here.

I think everyone has a right to experiment and poke and prod themselves and change their genders and do whatever they want to their bodies. It’s nobody else’s business.

But the inquiry into Identity is my business, since I’m a human being in the stanchions of various constricting identities like everyone else. And I am also free to wonder about all this, because identity makes everyone a little crazy, as far as I can see. I’d say that a conviction of identity is the root of all war. And there are obsessions that develop, which can even lead to a psychosis where people insist on removing their own healthy arms and legs, because it doesn’t conform to an obsessive picture they hold of themselves. So even the most intense feeling of conviction isn’t proof of a necessity.

And there’s a lot of conflict in our unsettled relationship between mind and body. To me, it feels like a violence or hatred of myself, whenever I force this body to conform to an image or story of who I am; rather than allowing the disjointed image, story and body to accept their unique and contradictory realities and reunite as they are in genuine self-acceptance.

I think human fluidity in every direction is normal, creative and irrepressible. Hence, I claim we are like octopi or squid.

As I said in the main essay, the sense of Self is very convincing, but it’s not true individuality. The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. Whereas, true individuality can never be pinned down in any objective or conclusive sense by anyone else, including myself. This would be like trying to stuff a bear in a parakeet’s cage. We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.

But in trying to pin down our identities, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom. I don’t see those shifts as fluidity, but as efforts to cage ourselves for the sake of a false security and fake, conditional love.

Maybe we’re all simply afraid of the loneliness of being truly unique.

If this culture loved its children, it wouldn’t make a problem out of natural human creativity and autonomy. Indigenous cultures have no problem with any of this — they don’t tell others how to live. But our supposedly advanced society prefers human beings made in the images of machines, forced to conform to the rigid 1’s and 0’s of an autocratic morality, with simple, categorical, machine-readable identities. We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.

We don’t trust the unique human form we already are. But the honest human being is beautiful, rebellious and good, no matter how disjointed and out of place this unloving society makes us feel.

Now is the time for this powerful being to overthrow the machine.

Love to you.

Empire Falls: Footnote to the Essay, “What Is Self-Knowledge?”

negativegeographyLeave a comment

“A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That’s how every empire falls” — John Prine (“That’s How Every Empire Falls”)

Maybe the scientific revolution (for all its magnificent insights and newfound capacities) re-imagined the human being as a kind of inanimate billiard ball bouncing mechanically along a chain of meaningless cause and effect.

This was the only Grand Narrative that science could offer the individual. A brief, inexplicable eruption from total non-animacy, which ends in non-animacy yet again.

This revolution freed the individual from the biting dogmas of religion, but left the individual feeling like a surplus ball bearing bouncing around in some inexplicable clockwork; which had the effect of leaving the non-scientist (the new lay person) desperate to find purchase in the open-ended abyss of an isolated “me,” which was all that remained in the absence of religion and monarchy (and NO, this is not a lament). But as a result, perhaps the 18th and 19th century citizen (or at least European or American citizen) colonized the world in its need to distract itself from the absence of meaningful identity that the sudden withdrawal of old certainties provoked.

I mean, the 19th century “American” mind was optimistic, because it was experiencing the “singularity” of a logarithmic upswing in personal and national power in the rising tide of colonialism, thanks to genocide and slavery.

As the empire collapses, the urge to regress towards that “old time” faith in kings and gods and tribes grows more desperate, and less euphoric. Hence, there’s a desire to return to the familiar hellscape of genocide and enslavement so as to give those who feel this way a boost of self-esteem.

So, perhaps the “rugged individual”, and the “self-made man” of an eager 19th century America became the resume-building, careerist, self-branding, cynical and self-obsessed tweeting global consumer of today. We’ve all been colonized.

Read More »

What Is Self Knowledge?

negativegeography4 Comments
Photo by Maksim Goncharenok on Pexels.com

1) Self-knowledge as a positive list of characteristics


How do I know myself?

I begin by knowing myself as an objective list of characteristics: Likes, dislikes, opinions, habits, values, skills, professions, political orientations, and every other quality imaginable.

I also know myself reluctantly as a list of shadow characteristics, which others often perceive first: impatience, clumsiness, self-obsessions, talking to myself even when others are in the room, a hypocritical love of boxing, etc.

There’s a necessity for these differently sourced lists of self-knowledge. If I don’t notice a tendency to be selfish, lazy, thoughtless, you name it, then self-knowledge is distorted in the preservation of an illusion.

In fact, I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.

If I’m rolling an issue over and over again in my mind (as I tend to do), then some image of myself must have been made to wobble from its pedestal. Even if I’m self-righteously convinced of my own innocence, the emotional and mental energy dedicated to preserving this image indicates a wobble.

The voice is like a press-secretary and press corps rolled into one. And I hardly notice the exhaustion this causes, because it’s standard practice in this culture: conversing with non-existent people in order to convince imaginary people that this list of qualities remains accurate and impeccable.

Or, call it an effective air-defense system that shoots down any speck of honest evidence undermining the falsely idealized Self it claims to be.

But now and then some honest revelation hits home despite this diligence. And the accidental surrender to reality generates a soft breeze of sanity, which cleanses the air momentarily from the fumes of bullshit that the brain produced during the course of the day.

But almost immediately I’ll start downplaying the impact of this moment of truth, trying to steady the wobble or clean up the damage to the fallen icon. And I’ll employ a clever tactic to do this — acknowledging a portion of the exposed corruption by saying something like, “I wasn’t being myself” or “that’s not who I really am”.

Read More »

A Ramble on How Too Much Identity and Too Little Self-Knowledge Contributes to our Collective Suicide: Preface to the Essay, “What Is Self-Knowledge?”  

negativegeographyLeave a comment

Seen from Mars, it’s as if human beings as a whole don’t care if they themselves survive (or if other species are allowed to live).

Is this mass suicide?

An indifference to our own collective fate is spreading, even among people who are still devoted to their families. The indifference is justified as a form of realism. If we’re heading towards destruction then realism, they say, is accepting our fate (knowing all living things eventually die anyways).

Indifference to life and death itself is being conflated with realism.

And death as a natural completion of a life-cycle is being conflated with a premature murder/suicide of one another and millions of other species.

This isn’t a realistic or mature regard for life and death, but the very attitude of a person who has resigned themselves to giving up on a complete life and committing suicide before maturation. This “realism” is the suicidal impulse itself.

After all, what are the direct means by which we are prematurely killing ourselves? We’re denying the effects of climate change, indulging in fascism and allowing AI to gain total possession of our minds, and suck the marrow out of life itself, to name just three.

These are the self-destructive behaviors of an immature species, an adolescent species, who has set fire to the house, locked itself in its virtual room, and then climbed into bed to watch a movie with the dog. And when a brother bursts into the room, shouting “fire!”, the adolescent mocks him for his overzealous concern, saying, “calm down and be realistic: we’re all going to die eventually anyways.”

Denial, indulgence and apathy are the justifications for what’s happening, not the mature acceptance of life and death. There is a reason why we make a distinction between murder and natural causes.

I believe it is realistic to say that we are killing ourselves and murdering one another.

But it’s not realistic to accept this situation as inevitable.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest that it’s this lack of self-knowledge, this refusal to self-reflect, learn, change and die naturally to who we are, which is the problem. Suicide and murder are not the acceptance of death, but its denial. We would rather be consumed in a fire we started than give up the illusions of ourselves and allow who we thought we were to die naturally.

Read More »

The Two-Edged Sword of Thought and Action; On the Nature of Humor and Sorrow

negativegeographyLeave a comment

Recently, my wife and I drove past a house way out in the country, where 8 chickens were held in a cage that would be small for one. This was just after learning that the killings in Gaza were continuing under the radar; and Trump had just bombed another 20 fishermen for no reason. And Ms. Good had been murdered.

Our efforts to save the chickens became a surrogate attempt to put an end to all that pain and sorrow. In other words, it was futile. We could do nothing but contemplate a midnight raid, which would have caused the poor, ignorant woman in the shack to lose her mind. Because in some strange way she loved the chickens, or thought she did, and had raised them from eggs, she said. And there was nothing the sheriff or the animal welfare department could do under current laws; and we had no place to bring the chickens even if we stole them.

And after contemplating the possibility of losing my mind over an issue that was so small in comparison to what is happening in the broader world, I had to accept the pain. I had to admit that there is no possibility of separating the pain of life from the love of life. And that we live in a world that must always teeter between hell and heaven. And that we have to find a way to move through this border land without sinking into pits of despair or indulging in a transcendence too high for our tears to reach the earth.

Read More »

The Real Revolution Hasn’t Started Yet

negativegeography4 Comments

Photo by William Warby on Pexels.com

“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)


I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.

I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But in a deeper sense, I was noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present) and the unfamiliar reality of himself.

And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.

I also seemed alien. I had never noticed how herky jerky I behaved. I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.

But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.

Sheer forgetfulness may have been the key accident opening this glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.

Read More »

Aphorisms, V.3

negativegeographyLeave a comment
  • As the environmental situation shifts, the skills and intelligence we need also shift, forcing us to lose capacities in one direction while developing them in another. So, every new skill reaches a point of diminishing returns. Every medicine becomes a poison. *
  • There is no evolution without death. For those who change, the old form dies. *
  • Evolution isn’t impressed by big brains, if those brains aren’t capable of changing direction (which requires death). *
  • We like to think that we’re the ultimate generalists, able to adapt to any environment because of our technological gifts. But specialization is a sneaky tendency. The technologies that helped us become generalists reach a point of diminishing returns and begin to narrow our attention spans with too much passive absorption, and by corralling our intelligence (our awareness and behavior) along the predictable ruts of algorithms. *
  • Our genetics are recapitulated holograms of the primordial soup, which can germinate in any form when the immaterial lightning of insight alchemically strikes the fertile ground of matter. *
  • Every shift in shape from Tetrapod to whale could be described as earthly insights, leaps in orders of being.*
  • From a communal point of view, evolution is not competitive or comparative, but measured by whether the whole (or holon) is thriving or declining. *
  • We don’t see the relevance of earth and other species anymore, except as playthings or scenic backdrops to our diversions. We’ve become the only relevant thing, which is a loneliness that never existed in previous cultures. A meaninglessness too, because we have divorced ourselves from the undiscovered portions of who we are, which are rooted in the mystery of our surroundings. We slide along the empirical surface of the world, blind to the immaterial forces, which give shape to that empirical world. *
Read More »