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Rolling around again

Rolling around again

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As the years roll by a bit faster, it’s sometimes easy to miss changes. Whether they are changes in values, beliefs, habits, understandings, goals, or just almost unnoticeable drifts of daily life, the occasions for stopping to assess them just become fewer. No more big moves, no more graduations, no more births. You accommodate to the inevitable, and rise to unexpected challenges, and perhaps gain some insights if you’re curious and observant, but things seem to grey down a bit (to match the hair that now has to be artificially colored). Is there anything of particular note in the last year? At first, I didn’t think so, but then I started having thoughts.

A year ago, I was very frustrated and even sometimes angry about some interpersonal challenges. Those feelings have become much more infrequent, partly because I’ve learned how to disengage from attempted escalations about things that are really not very important. I’ve learned how to respond more neutrally when dealing with difficult people, and not to let someone else’s issues affect my whole day or even week.

The deeper understanding about boundaries of various kinds has greatly reduced my stress level, as well as putting me back on track with some of my talents and strengths. The way I was approaching my work day and the things that needed to be done just frankly took too much out of me (that’s improved too) without being angry and upset on top of it all. Last year, I felt like I was on the edge of some sort of major collapse. This year, I’m tired but I feel like I’m accomplishing much more during my work day, I don’t need to isolate myself so often or for so long, and what I think of as my recovery time has reduced somewhat.

I’ve been revisiting the topic of boundaries and friendships for a few years now, but there have been some positive shifts this year.

I’ve tended to be a fiercely loyal friend, but at the same time I’ve had a kind of economy of friendship in which things were very (almost mechanically) reciprocal. If I was being treated well, I would treat the other well. If objectionable behavior was expressed in my direction, I would hit back at just that level, plus one. Usually this took the form of a verbal response. What was really happening? I was hurt, because I considered myself a good and loyal friend, but I wouldn’t admit that hurt, so it turned into a defensive attack. Then, because I had some frustration and anger hanging around anyway, I took it as an opportunity to respond in just that way because… because… because I can. I’m good at it. Words rarely fail me, and I can rip back pretty effectively. Almost effortlessly, I point out flaws and unfairnesses and points of contention, at a pace (and with a passion) that be overwhelming to others. The behavior of the other person ended up not just triggering my defenses but also gave me an excuse to shine, to myself, just because the things I do best don’t really seem to be called for in most of my environments very often. So in addition to forgetting that this was a friend, and not an enemy, I was losing sight of the fact that it was even an individual. It didn’t really matter who I was talking to, because at some level I wasn’t even really talking to that person as a person. I was just letting loose in the space of words, where I feel most comfortable and at home.

I know this sounds like really basic stuff. I didn’t realize how ready I was to believe that defense/attack was required. I grew up largely distrustful of the world around me. I’m an introvert, and often socially uncomfortable in group situations, and there is a habitual feeling that I need to perform and be amusing so that people might not automatically just hate me. Most people who know me think I’m extroverted. I’m not. A nervous laugh, now toned down but still present, developed as a “please don’t hurt me” strategy when I was still very young. Giving anyone a chance to know very much about me, such that we could authentically become friends, or not, is challenging to me. I have a lot of masks, and I love to try them on. When someone actually gets through to me enough that they are able to offend, upset or hurt me, the second layer is that I’m ready to pounce. Like… immediately.

I’ve found a few real friends who model something different in the way they treat me. Because of this, I have realized how unfair it is to people I care about to have this attack mode as the default response when I feel attacked or hurt or upset by their behavior. There are other ways to respond, after all. A simple naming of how it looks to me, such as I would do in a less charged situation, is a far better option, and asking questions to try to understand what’s going on is usually very helpful. If I’m in a better space with myself, I can navigate through all kinds of difficult terrain, but there has to be a basic layer of trust, and I have to do better with remembering my caring toward the other even when I’m feeling disappointed or betrayed.

My reasons for becoming and staying friends with people has sometimes been far too mysterious; there have been too many circumstantial, historical friendships that I felt compelled to maintain long after their times were past. People with whom I really had very little in common other than similar experience of some kind, people who didn’t actually wish to see me thrive, people who demonized me because of political misinformation (or general misunderstanding), people who were attracted to interactions with me, but for reasons that seemed problematic – all of these were like healing projects for me. In some cases, I would feel a strange repulsion/attraction thing going on, and I would try to gradually erase the repulsion side, seeing it more as a problem with me (my critical side has fairly high standards sometimes) than the other person. After all, you create what there is in the “between.” I would know that something was wrong, something was off – maybe even something pathological – but couldn’t articulate to myself what it was. I would spend time and energy assessing, and then trying to “fix” whatever it was – a very Western view of relational ethics, but I’ve never really been that great at acceptance of all that is. Like the angel of history, I wanted to go back and repair the things that had been broken. I kept thinking that “the cosmos” (insert your belief language here) was trying to teach me a lesson. Maybe it was, but it wasn’t the lesson I thought.

Even radical acceptance of the other has to include the boundaries of self-love; you can accept them as they are, and still gauge the best distance at which to keep yourself. I fear I’m never going be able to offer unconditional love to very many people in my life, much less all humanity. Maybe this is a kind of giving up on that, too. The best I can do, and that only sometimes, is to feel genuine sadness about what I’m observing.

In the last year, really only the last year, I have learned how to allow myself to say “there are some major things about this person that I neither like nor respect, and all the positives that are there are not enough to outweigh this fact.” I don’t need to engage in the push me/pull you game, which always felt vaguely dangerous anyway. I can simply walk away, knowing that it’s too destructive or toxic for me, and maybe I don’t even need to know the reasons why.

I have hesitated to allow myself the power of real choice in this matter. Even after things that were fairly egregious, I would try to talk things through, get back to a good place. You don’t abandon your friends, right?

Now I can ask the essential questions of qualification, and still remain true to my ideals about friendship: “Are we actually friends, and if so, on what basis? Of what value is this?” I’m resolved to trust not only the available data, but also my own instincts. If I sense that this person really doesn’t actually like me or get me in any significant ways, seems threatened in some way by my existence, has some kind of agenda, or is really, truly (as Carlin pointed out), stupid, full of shit, nuts – or all three, then I have to trust myself enough to just step back (or back away slowly if needed). If I can formulate any questions to ask, I can do that, but it’s really not required – not if the instincts are strong and I can’t answer the friendship qualification questions affirmatively. I have always been so concerned that maybe I was just being paranoid or overly suspicious because of hard-wired or environmental influences that I sometimes overcompensated and stopped listening to myself. If I get too repeated flashing warning lights, I need to listen, and act accordingly. There is no ethical obligation to befriend anyone.

I value real and meaningful friendships, and you can’t force that. When I disagree with and argue with real friends, as I sometimes do, I’m at least as concerned about where they are as where I am, and the issues are (mostly, I hope) just the ones before us and not piled high and deep with unrelated dynamics.

There are all kinds of friendships. I also value friendships with a light touch, where there is enough common ground that we have fun and we don’t really need to know each other very fully to enjoy each other’s company and conversation. After all, how many true, deep friends has anyone got? Some overlapping interests and compatibilities will work just fine for socializing, communicating, and learning. It’s also part of the natural flow of things for friends to appear and fade through the different times and spaces of your life. It could even be that there’s nothing particularly wrong, but it’s just not a friendship I’m interested in cultivating anymore. No big deal. As one friend I’m very fond of says, “Whatevers.”

While it is true that even asshats can teach you lessons about relationships and boundaries and personal insights, it’s impossible to completely avoid them anyway, and there is no real reason to let them get close enough to be destructive or to drive you crazy. You can’t fix other people. What you can do is be as authentic as you can with the people you truly like and respect, and the effects of that are mutually beneficial.

Of course, I hold in reserve the smackdown ability for when it’s truly useful and needed, but I could and should channel more of that impulse into something more creative. That sort of thing has not only been a blind spot for me, but it’s also been so energy-wasting and disturbing in my life, now that I look back on it. I have a growing sense of the limitations of the time remaining. Another thing that has objectively changed this year is that our son is taller than me, and I wasn’t a young’un when I delivered him. I need to focus on more of the good parts of life.

Next year, it would be really lovely if I could report that I’ve found a lot more energy for everything I want to do, I’ve lost ten-fifteen more pounds, I can hit E above C again, I don’t even crave a cigarette, my novel is selling like hotcakes, my student loans have been paid off as a token gesture against my lottery winnings, and I’m living on the most beautiful island you’ve ever seen. This is in rough order of probability. I’m putting it all out there in case there’s anything to that set of beliefs around focused intention – from dumping it onto the gods/goddesses to lining up with the mild (or strident) forms of the “power of positive thinking.” I welcome gifts from the benevolents, as always, and I’m totally grateful, but you could maybe tone it down a little on the pranks this year (just a sweet suggestion, especially if you’re hankering for more sage and lavender this summer).

Maybe next year, a few more things will be better than they were before, and the changes might even be in a completely different register – all part of the lifelong journey for curious seekers.

Be well. Be strong. Be kind. Laugh every day. You can dance if you want to. If you need some perspective, revisit the wonder of the starry skies above.

“Stars” by The Weepies

Tangerines are hanging heavy, glowing marigolden hues
Teasing a half-pale moon
And I feel a pull to the blue-velvet dark and stars.
Stars. Stars.

Pink Magnolia, blushing and coy
Savors the sun while she shines
You’ve got yours and I’ve got mine
Together we glide through the blue-velvet dark and stars.
Stars. Stars.

All it takes is a little faith, and a lot of heart
Back and forth we ply these oars
They move in time and get entwined
Green with joy then gray with sorrow
Ripened fruit that falls tomorrow
Filling us with brilliance

Branches are bare with a pulse underneath
Flowering slowly inside
Your hands are warm and my body is wide
To hold all the promise of blue-velvet dark and stars

All it takes is a little faith and a lot of heart
Sweetheart

Spirit-Opening Questions / Reflections

Spirit-Opening Questions / Reflections

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Sometimes the asking is enough. Sometimes the thoughts that resonate or erupt are more important than the answers. Try these – and let your spirit speak to you.

  • In the last 24 hours, what was the simplest sense-pleasure you experienced? Fresh sheets? The smell of rain or fire? Snuggly slippers? A brisk walk?
  • If you woke up with no self-memory, how old would you guess you were?
  • What is one behavior/insight/skill that sets you apart from others and makes you feel special? Is making that a part of your self-identity more limiting or more freeing?
  • What laws would you transgress if you had a context in which it made ethical sense, or compassionate sense, to you for you to break them? What laws would you refuse to break, even to save someone you love?
  • What three things would you do differently if you were totally exempt from all judgment – from anyone – about them?
  • What is something that you have not done, despite a strong desire to do it? Why haven’t you?
  • Can you remember judging something as completely wrong or insane, and later changing your mind? How and why did your view change?
  • When something you have feared or dreaded has come true, what has been the net result?
  • What is one self-limiting thought or behavior that you haven’t yet transcended or released?
  • Who are the people in your life that understand the most about you; who “gets” you? How would you describe your feelings about each? If it’s a mixed bag, why do you think that might be?
  • If you could create your own small community, what would you wish as your ideal location, economy, laws, attitudes? If you could regulate it any way you wished, how would your community treat the people you liked least? Most?
  • What are three moments in your life when you have felt grateful and glad to be alive? How long ago was the most recent?
  • What are three moments in your life that you wish you could more perfectly express in language? If you had to pick only one person, to whom would you choose to express them?
  • What makes your most cherished childhood memories so important to you?
  • With whom do you experience a sense of meaning – in silence?
  • When you think of holding hands, whose hand is holding yours?
  • How have you expressed or accepted love recently? Are there disconnects between the ways you and your beloved express, accept, or share your love?
  • Do you prefer a smiling face or a more serious face? What appeals to you about each?
  • Who in your life is easiest to forgive, and who is most difficult? Why?
  • Imagine sitting on top of a mountain on a beautiful day with the ones you love – each in turn. What differences do you notice in your thoughts and feelings?

Please comment if you can improve the question, or you have another question.

Contraints on Communication Construct More Interesting Truths

Contraints on Communication Construct More Interesting Truths

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I would like to see someone do some contemporary intellectual work on how indirect communication – communication by signals and pointers and gestures rather than direct statement – produces the best art.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. ~ Oscar Wilde

Communication whose style and content is dictated by constraints imposed by the rules of a scene is more creative, even more joyful, even if the realities of the life that produces the thought is very difficult.

Jean Baudrillard did some of this work in bemoaning the loss of the scene itself, which is the stage for the distinction between good and evil that we all navigate. Without the binary antipodes of cultural constraint, do we really find motivation to do anything of importance?

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. ~ Oscar Wilde

Art communicates what cannot be expressed by other means. There is more truth in fiction and in art than in any amount of moralizing speech.

When homosexuality could not be spoken, thinkers and artists – and even politicians – discovered ways to indicate what was already known, and to do it without speaking it. We love to bust these out into the open, but the art was all about indications and play.

It made great art. Plays, paintings, poetry, speeches, philosophies…

Oppressed people can create the most amazing stuff – amazing music, amazing fiction. Think of Russian novelists. Think of black gospel music compared to the dirge-like church music of privileged white colonizers. It’s true that abject poverty can also denigrate people below any ability to create, too, but among them… always a genius, a prophet.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s not at least part of what is meant by not being “of this world.” The rewards of this world – money, power, and so on – are rewards in themselves. They are rewards for now, to be enjoyed now. But that’s all.

The rewards of those who are censored and constrained and even oppressed are, by their very structure and nature, more complex – more insightful – more subtle – more deeply real. When you care enough to work around tough rules of expression, you find a way – like life itself always finds a way.

It will be a marvelous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet, while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one. “Know Thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be Thyself” shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply “Be Thyself.” That is the secret of Christ. ~ Oscar Wilde

The traditions of men serve to stabilize communities, but they also create boundaries that are made to be flirted with – deconstructed. As you toe the line, you doodle all around that line. Without a line, you can’t… doodle.

It’s not brazen. It’s not open. It’s not honest. And yet – isn’t it more truthful to experience? Doesn’t it really address you all the more forcefully?

It does me.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind— ~ Emily Dickinson

“…music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Adobe Semaphore Pynchon

Adobe Semaphore Pynchon

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The semaphore (four rotating disks of light) atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose is indeed transmitting a message.

Never heard of a semaphore? There are multiple meanings. In programming, it concerns methodology for mutual exclusion (see “excluded middles” below), parallel processing, and synchronization.

Predating the electrical telegraph, the semaphore was defined as an optical telegraph that conveyed information via visual signals – towers with blades, shutters, flags and so on.

semaphore

I wonder to what extent the Adobe semaphore might be performing the first function? It performs the second as a kind of street art – well, I think that’s the purposeless purpose, but one can never be sure. And that’s the whole fun of it.

Communication and information processing are inherent to both meanings. I could go on and on on here on topics like entropy and noise and Maxwell’s Demon and so forth, but this is already going to be a long post.

Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo cracked the code of the Adobe Semaphore. The message is the entire text of the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49.

One almost can’t help wondering about the process by which such a text would have been chosen. I suspect it was really just a kind of postmodern viral “resonance” – and yeah, it’s cool – but there is a sinister tone underlying this novel. You’d almost have to close your eyes to the possibility of other meanings in that performative choice. Are they interpeting themselves, then, as the “tower” of the novel? Or the postal underground? Or the command-control, or the shadows, or the lines of flight? Or all, or none?

The 1965 Pynchon novel is a serious satire of the military industrial complex and communication systems of command and control. It’s full of playfulness and paranoia, but the larger theme is the tendency of informational chaos to multiply under the pressure of increasing attempts at control.

Ultimately, the reader is forced into the position of making many of the interpretive decisions; people who limit themselves to literalist readings had best avoid this one. It’s not as good a novel as Gravity’s Rainbow – and in some ways it’s harder to understand – but it’s classic Pynchon, and a good place to start.

My favorite passage from the book (pp. 179-182, only two paragraphs!):

Yet she knew, head down, stumbling along over the cinderbed and its old sleepers, there was still that other chance. That it was all true. That Inverarity had only died, nothing else. Suppose, God, there really was a Tristero then and that she had come upon it by accident. If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raising her head as if to sniff the air. Becoming conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on — knowing as if maps had been flashed for her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing how they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night around her. If only she’d looked. She remembered now old Pullman cars, left where the money’d run out or the customers vanished, amid green farm flatnesses where clothes hung, smoke lazed out of jointed pipes. Were the squatters there in touch with others, through Tristero; were they helping carry forward that 300 years of the house’s disinheritance? Surely they’d forgotten by now what it was the Tristero were to have inherited; as perhaps Oedipa one day might have. What was left to inherit? That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that? She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother’s pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages. She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights without looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. And the voices before and after the dead man’s that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the Word.

How many shared Tristero’s secret, as well as its exile? What would the probate judge have to say about spreading some kind of legacy among them all, all those nameless, maybe as a first installment? Oboy. He’d be on her ass in a microsecond, revoke her letters testamentary, they’d call her names, proclaim her through all Orange Country as a redistributionist and pinko, slip the old man from Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus in as administrator de bonis non and so much baby for code, constellations, shadow-legatees. Who knew? Perhaps she’d be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or a cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the changes once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning or only the earth. In the songs Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard sang was either some fraction of the truth’s numinous beauty (as Mucho now believed) or only a power spectrum. Tremaine the Swastika Salesman’s reprieve from holocaust was either an injustice, or the absence of a wind; the bones of the GI’s at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were there either for a reason that mattered to the world, or for skin divers and cigarette smokers. Ones and zeros. So did the couples arrange themselves. At Verperhaven House either an accommodation reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.