ignorance

We die; nothing is going to change that fact. A description of the unknown quality of that fact has occupied the greatest minds of our world from Cave Painting to String Theory with a vast array of assertions and guarantees made; the one thing that seems to be clear, we are not very comfortable with our ignorance. The dilemma is that much of our existence depends on us knowing something which impairs the incentive for getting comfortable with our ignorance; further complicated by those believing we are ignorant; those who want to make us ignorant, and those who remain willing to share their ignorance. I search for the latter, for they are more fun to be with when exploring the world; I feel safer when others don’t hide things, which is not to be confused with someone making declarations of self-importance - a good sign of a lack of self-awareness. Why for example does someone drive slow in the fast lane? It is common sense to not interfere, but like leaving a shopping cart in the middle of an isle in the market is common sense which it turns out is not all that common. I find there is a wide spectrum for reasons for most lapses in common sense from deliberate to oblivious. Oblivious obstruction is more akin to the physics of an avalanche - it do or it don’t; where a deliberate obstruction has the overtone of cruelty, meanness or spite. 

As a young squire these nuances were lost on me and duly believed sharing logic would remake the world. I modeled behavior as one does coming from a family of teachers - opening doors for ladies, making way for others in a hurry. Not extraordinary gestures, more gallantries made quaint by ruling class doctrine and demands that correlate clocks with time. Still the plan seemed manageable and cost little, but my ignorance did not prepare me for the intransigence of the vulgar nor the subconscious demand for cruelty prompted by the media rainbow maker and its illusion that caboose of the “income inequity train” can actually be caught. At that tender age I was still trying to reconcile the noble fictions of youth with the hypocrisy of the “greatest generation” and its ham fisted assault on the sovereign nation of Viet Nam - a nation the size of Delaware. It seems now in retrospect that the armistice of WWII included surrender by America’s bankers to the Fuhrer’s Chancellors in exchange for instruction manuals for the capture of a democracy - but that’s another essay. We’re trying to find a better understanding of ignorance for the danger it represents to our collective future. Today there are extremely powerful well financed individuals/entities spending great amounts of money cultivating adjustable levels of ignorance for the entire world population. Though it has always been thus, it is much easier to accomplish using the internet and people’s natural inclination to want to know, or believe what they know - still a monkey see monkey do world - plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.

Great sages from Socrates to Lao Tzu have stated knowledge is not external but an internal awareness, not a set of laws to be codified and memorized as with “no child left behind” and its reliance on rote memorization or the outcome based model of “teaching to the test.” Yet if the sages were accurate and it is what we each know to be true in our hearts that is important, what of the deadly consequences of our information/secrecy based economy? We have children mathematicians/metadata analysts claiming the capacity to define the deeper recesses of the human heart based on that person’s keystrokes. And we are putting the noose around our necks with many people taking and  believing the results of the ubiquitous internet personality tests proliferating on interactive but not media screen? People wouldn’t be taking the tests if they had been trained to hear their own hearts; the same truism which says the world may only be understood except by observation and that tentatively - “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” How then to merge the perceptions from the senses with the only knowledge we have any control over - our own hearts and minds. I see monster armies bombing families into submission using my tax dollar. I object strenuously to what I see while begging to be corrected with logic - it changes little, but I feel better. I require greater discipline to manage the feeling of futility which result from leaning into such misery. Like the young swain modeling behavior, I want to believe such havoc can be arrested through concerted open discussion, but I am still ignorant if only more so save one lesson that was tattooed on the inside of my skull after not one but many drunken escapades - the only control I have is over myself, and that not at all when allowed in the company of beautiful women - a clue, they are all beautiful. 

Ignorance is hard to explain and impossible to obscure. In my travels I’ve met those who believe their power is baed on knowledge they have and you don’t, which to my thinking makes them ignorant. There are those who seek knowledge by sharing what they don’t know, Michel Montaigne for example developed the concept of essay, which means to attempt or aim. It may be that our world’s current destructive balance is suspended between these two states knowing and not knowing. Lao Tzu said in effect: if you want to enlighten the world, awaken all the parts of yourself, and if you want to eliminate suffering in the world, eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself; the greatest gift you can give the world is self transformation. Using the logic of Lao Tzu someone wishing to hide the truth can only hide what they believe to be knowledge or information - the con (We can’t tell you what we do with what we know about you from our database, because then you would understand how little we know about what we are doing.) - and I know this is gonna piss off some seekers of truth, but (we can’t make graffiti clear, because then you’d know how lazy we are about learning the long history of human-crafted, universe-provided beauty and the real struggle formulate a finer form.) The seeker of knowledge can be recognized by what s/he doesn’t know, not much different than I feel trying to make this aspect of the process for thinking clear; but it boils done to an engineering argument 30 years ago: Russell P____ who was made physically ill by my to-this-day belief that knowledge is infinite rather than finite.

In the final analysis it may be useful to cogitate on a statement by HH the Dalai Lama: “when you believe everything is someone else’s fault you will suffer a lot.” We all know in our hearts, at least those those blessed with empathy ( 99% of the world’s population ) how important love and nurturing are. The havoc of our world can only be attributed to the sad truth we have not loved enough, and I place myself at the top of that list. Writing 5 essays on the Four Riders of the Apocalypse seems a peculiar way to love or transform oneself for the better, yet like deep a consideration of dying will never alter the inexorable decay life, just the act of staring into the abyss is preferable to any nagging suspicion that maybe 70 virgins is like all the other bribes from the hated Mullah, or where the vindictive Vicar threatened you with Hell being same as when he threatened the secretary her paycheck in exchange for sex. My sense is the abyss and terror of death will be like Leonard Cohen’s “something old, but always new,” or even Bob Dylan’s “greasy trail;” whatever form it takes I feel better for having sought some light of knowledge from my own inside as to why there is suffering in a world with so many human beings that know what it is to love and be loved but aren’t. I am as okay as I can be with that choice; unless you are not loving because you have abdicated your heart to a doctrine or abandoned it to the will of another - be that romantic or religious, for anyone that would demand sovereign over the only gage we as humans have for discerning fact from fiction is suspect, and conversely anyone that asks me to looks as deeply into my heart to know the truth of existence is someone or something I will stand by even give up my life to for no other reason than to be safe for just that instant in the continuum.

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hate

I have wasted more time than i am comfortable admitting immersed in the corrosive vacuum of hate, and i’m not a hater. Why would anybody, given the vast array of choices in this human experience, waste time or focus on hate? I maintain that if we don’t find a way to transmute this venomous emotion into constructive heartfelt hard work we’re fucked - some people will hate me for saying that; not the content of the stated idea, but the use of the word “fuck.” I hate that we can be so easily distracted by inflammatory language, and still people will be more offended that I swore than any expression of hatred I’ve made. Anger, rage, ire come upon you like the ocean slamming to shore or trickled like death from a thousand cuts, but it still arises and dissipates like ebb & flow of tidal waters - hate is different because it must be tended with attention, strategy, and justification. Anger is something one can quiet with patience and kindness - hatred has legs and will travel miles or centuries to satisfy its blood lust, for what . ? At least with anger one can enjoy the visceral primeval gut feeling in a world gone numb, however necessary it may be to overcome, transmute, tame, cajole or abandon: whereas hate is a choice you make to preserve it, cart it, dilute, or assign it. Hatred has no substance of its own. It relies on the good offices of its host to share and propagate otherwise it withers and fades unable to attract the life force which anger is an intrinsic part of.

For this reason hatred has never held a place high in my imagination or given much credence in the world I seek. Its adherents tend to be weak-minded and lazy rarely demonstrating much initiative for ameliorating those pockets of pus which hatred holds close to its cankerous heart. However, hatred is also a covert coward knowing it can only take form as a reflection of the life force available to its close companion anger and is often difficult to tell one from the other. Hatred is the more insidious of the two for the simple reason it must be preserved and passed on to be of any use. I cannot fathom how that might be accomplished given the toxic nature of this emotion. It has taken an act of will for me to write on the subject and that only for its destruction or neutering. Which is not to say I’ve lived free of destructive and quite dark fantasies. Someone once advocated that to have any thought is “okay,” the danger is in acting on that thought. For a time it was liberating to be sanctioned for animal thinking, as much a relief from guilt for contemplating the destruction or harm of/to another. There is zero value and great cost to conduct violence of any kind, which should only be resorted to as Lao Tzu has said “with great sadness“ when faced with no other choice - there’s always another choice .  .  

Lao Tzu formulated his ideas when it was not possible to sit at a console in Nevada and blow up a car and family anywhere in the world. Physical violence today is merely an extension of the shrill hateful demands on what you should feel or think which replaced conversations we used to have. I prefer dialogue but in lieu of that social pleasure I resort to the internet or what’s left of it to advocate love. There is a duality to our predicament, and though the choice to love may seem “lofty,” it is more practical. There are cataclysms cascading into our future needlessly for, from and to hateful ends. The level of violence that sits at the end of a joystick is only an expression of our culture’s immersion in hate, and should not be confused with either strength or power. Never in the history of our planet has war, what is now “chronic war” achieved anything except a path to the next war. The talking heads only seem to disagree whether we should be walking in single file, pell mell or scurrying hurly burly. When a creature attacks, you fight or run; but even the destructive capacity of empire is useless against the onslaught of love, for love describes contentment and satisfaction which are anathema to the consumer pimps and their cloying media whimper about how you need to achieve what they have - with my apologies to pimps everywhere.

Yet even in the instance of a sustained attack or grievous injury you are a dead man if you succumb to hate or believe there is any reason for destruction other than to encourage growth. Socrates had said “the secret to change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old but on building the new.” I used an example of a necrotizing spider bite for provocation in an essay on ire, for fear rage and anger are all close cousins. When I understood this creature, or creatures were able to inflict a wound which would cause my flesh to feed on itself it was not hatred for this or any other thing which compelled me to heal, it was love, of life, the power of healing even love for the poor creature bringing me the lesson likely at the cost of its own life. However, there is no lock on fighting hate: “It is not possible to eradicate evil for every solution breeds a new problem” Sheldon B Kopp’s “Eschatological Laundry List.” For example, statistically the mosquito is the most deadly of all creatures to the human race, a fact about to be reversed once Monsanto and Bedbug Inc agree to terms for its hosting the Ebola Virus. The a steep rise in cost for fresh water has created market demand for a more efficient method to cull the herd.

Yes it is true - hatred, my own. Having hosted a bedbug hive, I struggle to excoriate the pernicious venom of hate infecting my heart; monsatan - well, any entity that would interrupt the regeneration of seeds for profit is lower than a bedbug, and you know how I feel about them. Hate traipses through the landscape in camouflage, dressed up as reason and adhered to through coercion but remains no more than an exclamation mark to Bertrand Russell’s irrefutable point - “love is wise - hatred is foolish.“ Buddha said of hate “a poison one drinks expecting someone else to die. Love is not just the antidote to rancor; love is all we have left to echo any frequency of value into the ether. Our ability to become aware of not just our own mortality but also our role in the potential destruction of our species will only gain “legs” through a determination to care for unborn generations whom we have by sins of commission or omission thus far consigned to lives of depravation and torment unknown to the human experience; besides everyone knows the prettiest girls don’t do haters .  .  

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anger

le réfugié - stolen from a Sacramento porch 1994 - please pray for the souls of those who would so such a thing .  .  

My gift, lesson, treasure .  . here on this material plane seems to be an easy familiarity with the pernicious distraction of anger in all of its guises - fear, aggression, disdain .  . what’s not always clear is whose is whose. For example, when I say “all billionaires are putzes” which dynamic is fulfilled: “the human barometer” as my friend Winston describes me, or the anger magnet I feel like - using a different expression, which came first; the chicken or the egg? It has become achingly clear that expecting “noblesse oblige” from the Porcine Billionaire's Club feasting on today’s world is a recipe for planetary suicide and everybody knows suicidal ideation is dead. Nearly as painful is the certain knowledge that anger in any form is not only futile, but costly, distracting, regressive, etc. So where the fuck is all this rage coming from? Could there be a correlation between excess carbon and excess anger, as though the death throes of animals dying for eons is released as carbon emissions wafting a seething ever-present anger into all levels of our personal and public lives, ? I don’t know . . . 

In a "Wartime Prayer," Paul Simon has sung of his want to "cleanse my soul of rage before I'm through. ." Renouncing rage is a good place to begin, yet by accepting the principle of pacifism as an eternal truth, what then of the legitimate outrage sparked by matters of deadly serious neglect to an exploding human population - climate destruction, fresh water contamination or ocean marine life collapse: all debacles increasingly “managed” with the public relations flick of a wrist, or worse martial law? My blood boils just contemplating the scope of stupidity which has brought us to this point in history, and I am an old lion - not the firebrand of my youth. At the beginning of the month I was bitten by an insect which became a necrotizing wound. The 10 day-old welt is beginning to close with the aid of mesquite honey; my 2 year-old-expired-warranty dryer doesn’t dry because it blew an “overheat” diode (my own fault) - the repairman received $60 for the diagnosis (again deficiency in my own knowledge base). It is difficult to know whether i’m angry, frightened or frustrated; or whether my consternation has currency compared to the misery of any war-ravaged child in Gaza or the world; or any African-American living in Ferguson, MO. Herein lies the rub - if I am not able to find a way to be at peace with my own tribulations - it is a certainty, I will have nothing to contribute to Gaza, Ferguson or the world.

According to one of sensai Lao Tzu’s observations, “Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.” By this definition, we are awash in strong people who regardless of station or wherewithal have no real real power. It is all i can do to stifle my own petty irritations much less be of service to others or find stable footing when anger - cultural or domestic - is the Lingua Franca used today for quashing fear. My heroes have always been militant pacifists, and the extremity of what is about to befall our species makes the choice of one’s heroes more vital possibly affecting the survival of our species. Deep inside of myself I weep to know how sad that is, yet am warmed to my core by knowing how deep in our species’ is the historical struggle to provide compassion to each other in times of need. Jesus overturned the capitalist’s carts in the market place and also declared “vengeance is mine” according to lore. He is a hero of mine because his ideas could not be bought - people know chicanery whether it is Mohammadian, Christian, or Church of the Holy Grufyti. What always rings true is what brings you back to what you seek - simple kindness, for with the exception of our planet’s uniquely murderous socio-paths (the “1%” - 3% of the population consigned to the darkest regions of human existence - a life without feeling) the 7 billion others of us are seeking mostly some small kindness - that or get laid, which may be the same thing - I don’t know .  . “get laid” (third-person singular simple present gets laid, present participle “getting laid”, simple past got laid, past participle gotten laid) - now we’re all unsure. 

War is no longer an option and how to staunch the hemorrhaging of the human spirit at a time when our specie’s very breath is imperiled is more than a nostalgic counter-cultural “mirroring” exercise; I mean to applaud you and your undiscovered capacity for “rising” to the occasion. Dr. M.L.King has said “those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war; but weren’t we talking about ire (sounds like tire) anger, rage, fury, righteous indignation - an unfunny subject, prevalent, but not that funny? Nor is “fighting fire with fire” a good option - not when so many faucets today provide water that burns? Retaliation has always been weak from what I’ve seen - a process which included separating broadcast fictions of “manly” exploits by knights, cowboys and GI Joes from the rough and tumble business of day-to-day give-and-take that has characterized human interaction throughout the nearly 25,000 years of recorded history. Today’s media narrative cannot allow you to know this incongruous fact about human relations, and dredges up repeatedly the foundation of whys and wherefores for how we are doomed to kill or be killed; that same media apparatus is so much in control of what you hear or see, it is not inconceivable some corporate flunky or his/her NSA stooge may be deciding whether this essay will be shown to you or not.

Give and take requires a camaraderie that is being broken up into smaller and smaller clusters, gangs, or as they say in Mother Russia, soviets. We, our nation, our planet, our species have been divided and are conquered. The rage this battlefield reality invokes in me is complete and will endure as an existential flavor long after my decomposition into the elements or newly formed molecules for some future/passed purpose in this not-void of our shared emptiness. What I will not cede is the valence of that rage which I believe is a function of what humor, love and compassion I can attract to my anatomy through the food, activity or thought I’m privileged to consume or engage in by design or circumstance. While this discussion may sound like bullshit or gibberish, and it may be, it gives me pleasure which I prefer to anger, any surplus of which I’ve been unable to purge through will or wisdom will be hunted like the dirty dog it is by my lesser self so that my greater self may transmute that vile bile into a path toward kindness which I need and know you seek as well. 

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i was born today - the sonnet

i was born today many years ago . .
i am told it was difficult for ma ;
it may be easier if she let go.
i'm a fine one to talk .  .  i still miss pa.

life's a mystery which deepens in time
- a scent of she who'd give paper to thee
for her portrait so sad it seems a crime
yet whose commission helps one become free.

We are not all liars cheats thieves and swindlers ,
some of us work for a living ; not me -
i play with words, colors, stones and jugglers,
keeping my jugular where you can't see.

where i'm from love's so hard sometimes it hurts;
better that than fakes whose worth clocks in hertz.

jts 17 september 2014

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life before the computer

Regardless of what may be reasonably inferred from the title, I do not completely predate computers making my expertise, like my self, suspect. Aside from the fact that people have been fashioning widgets for purposes of calculation since before cuneiform and the abacus; ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer) made it “online” some 8 years ahead of me - 1946. In one second this contraption could perform one of the following: 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions (not simultaneously and not until the necessary keypunch cards had been properly prepared, collated and mechanically fed into its analog structure). The ENIAC weighed 25 tons and had a footprint of 680 sf feet. Its original task to generate artillery trajectory tables for WWII could have have become the proverbial “beating of swords into plowshares” when after the war ENIAC was harnessed to calculate solar ignition and weather analysis; but along came money and the math requirement for the hydrogen bomb - Go Team National Security by 'anonymous incineration' . ! - the same lame “national security“ argument Armament Inc. uses today to maintain it’s place at head of the line for the public dole.  

note: the original vacuum tube diodes used for logic gates short-circuited when cockroaches crossed at just the right instant giving birth to the expression “debug” to describe repairing a computer "glitch" - more recognized today as (OE) operator error

Barely out of adolescence the inexorable massing of 0’s and 1’s officially penetrated my analog consciousness in a conversation with John H____, father of my Indian Guide boyhood chum Mark; H_____ when consulted with the elder Mr. H____, who at that time was an unemployed aerospace engineer, turned potter, turned Apple distributor while Steven Jobs might still answer the phone: “so Mr. H____, tell me about these computer things.” John H____ fixed me with his ice cube blue eyes; ruddy cheeks; impish grin and chortled in a WC Fields-esque drawl, “Computers will become as important to we puny humans somewhere between the invention of the wheel, and a change of life form for our species from carbon-based to silicon-based.” Take a minute to suss that statement completely . · . Picture being able to get cash at 1:00 am in the morning no longer yoked to bank hours for cash transactions, yet a public library on the other side of the country could now automatically post a notice of delinquency and levy $50 fine for a book you haven’t seem since high school. The first practical cell phone I can remember was with a young couple - neighbors from my 2nd marriage. He busted a hump delivering bottled water and she drove their 280Z. The only thing I could see the phone did for their marriage was to make him that much crazier when she left him and their two girls while she sallied forth to Vegas for a “self-esteem” junket.

The unreality of how much computers have conquered our existence is much like its binary origin - on or off; yes or no; +5v/-5v. In 1994, I sent an email to a brand new website with a funny name - Google; like googol - “a number that is equal to one followed by 100 zeroes.” In my email I said it made more sense for the cursor to default in the Graphic User Interface (GUI) - the next day the window opened with the cursor in the GUI (pronounced gooey), and their email access disappeared from the home screen. The seeming miracle of efficiency for the computer age is nothing compared to what it might have been; not even in the same galaxy. The scientists of Computer Languages pursued an esoteric ideal of a “4th Generation Computer Programming Language" - the ability to program a computer with a spoken language syntax. Google could have made that leap with its search engine, except that as Bob Dylan has described other terrain in our cultural landscape “greed got in the way.” - In 1999 there were a 457 (IPOs) Initial Public Offerings, mostly internet and tech companies; 117 of those companies on their first day of trading doubled their opening value  - an ROI of 100%: return on investment (%) = (Net profit / Investment) x 100

In the BBC’s “Century of Self” the origins and strategies of 20 century business advertising are explained such that Google’s venal orientation is clearly recognizable amidst its “bells, whistles and surging portfolio” however much a pale echo of the dot.com Boom!. The simple venal equation remains the same “how little can you spend and how much profit can you take". The Harvard School of Business model may have been dethroned by the sheer mass of today’s data stream, subverting but not forsaking the value hierarchy Mark Twain once described comprised of “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” One of my favorite numerical accelerations has been the spiral of CEO pay to Worker pay; today that ratio is clocking in around 900% - for each $1 an average a US worker earns, an average US CEO will earn $900. Computer advocates have confused ratios with value or worth; the domain masters believe increased value is derived from Ad traffic, missing the colossal power of what might have been with 7 billion other similarly dynamic, hard-charging entrepreneurial human spirits each making command decisions on behalf of the greater good by providing 4th generation programming power to mankind rather than hoarding the bits and bandwidth like misers of old.

The obtuse narrowness of vision for those designing and effectuating algorithms, so weighted by ROI contamination, the business edifices of today resemble the great pyramids of Giza except for being completely inverted and lacking completely 'brick and mortar' substance - resting on the pinnacles just as leadership presses the apex of its excess into the back of humankind - ‘ole French proverb, “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” The greatest delusion of any sycophant-surrounded domain master is whether the personal expression of the 7 billion other humans on this planet will ever be mute regardless of the filters, or whether a handful of people are even capable of database management on today’s scale no matter how many different ways they slice the barcodes. Leadership mirrors the media fantasy of a more and more homogenous human community, as though the flawed relations of an increasingly hostile world are rendered manageable by a few pretty pictures and some oft-repeated homilies - PowerPoint writ large. The capacity to conjure the virtual, is something out of a bad Gothic Novel. We now have dual sets of etiquette - one for person-to-person and the one in which facebook shares your personal data with human resources, The NSA, IRS, DMV and your ex-wife, but rather than providing a more clear sense of that person each successive data handler snips off what applies to whatever application being used to compile whichever version of your data and in so doing distort completely the answer for any question which may have been answered in simple open human interaction - questions which ought to have been put to the putzes and their AI (Artificial Intelligence) thugs who've created a cascading climate catastrophe using joysticks instead of phalluses, or fallopian Tubes whichever the case may be.

jts 12/9/2014

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∞

9/11 - who'd want this birthday . ? . - the sonnet

How'd it be to have your birthday hi-jacked?
My birthdays for me are sanctuaries . .
So in time, there're fewer to be attacked- 
9/11 - we were all made quary.

I will not give this day over to hate;
To do so, desecrates every sad death.
We ought to consecrate those born this date-
That they be known by their love from each breath.

Your odds are one in three hundred sixty-five 
today is your birthday . Hapy Birtday!
Do not deny this conceit to feel alive,
You, more than many may know a new way .

.  . so for the three thousand and some odd souls
perished, with time - i pray for our new roles.

jts 11 September 2014

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living in a world without love is not an option - the sonnet

What kind of world would this be without love . ? .

friends? yes; hard but doable; without scratch ? .

too fucking many do , . . without a shove . ? .

i've taken wives with whom i was no match . .

.  . that world sure don't work without love in it.

this kind of dark ain't found in a brutha .

where the love vibe "ain't" is not just unlit,

it is the void renounced by the Buddha . .

.  . now sold as "new" hate - the "only" option . ,

or is it . ? reality being "all" that - 

hard on the shores of a rising ocean,

or those looking for rabbits from this hat.

"Dark Matter" may define dimensional

extent, our hearts limit our reach of will.

jts 9 September 2014

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