Thursday, October 31, 2024

ON WHAT MEAT 

 I had a long, entirely unnecessary call with a customer contact yesterday.
Because of the peculiar reason for the call and the fact she was very forthcoming about the obvious fact what we were discussing and the reasons she had requested the call were entirely irrelevant and uninteresting to her, we were on the phone far longer than either of us anticipated and discussed and shared matters completely irrelevant to our dubious and improbable relationship.
She told me about her adult son who has some undisclosed disability. Her relationship with him has defined her purpose in life and shapes her expectations, plans and fears.
Random fact: She stopped going to parent-teacher conferences when he was in second grade because it was too much. He is now twenty-five.
Another son also just had another grandchild. They just keep having babies, those two. This all takes place in Kansas.
Memory came up in context of what we were actually on the call to discuss. I mentioned that experience of going into another room and forgetting why.
She got excited and stated she was interested in studies of psychology and had learned that the physical boundaries like doorways were prompts for memory.
She didn't say it like that. I am interpreting. I of course then added to her superficial knowledge and my own by sharing the free energy principle and the idea our brains create models of the external world.
During the longer course of the conversation as I shared more and more stuff I have been cribbing, she asked a key question.
We learn these things and can repeat them, but does the information translate into anything useful we can act upon? Does learning influence behavior is another way of putting it.
She is a reactionary person, fascist adjacent if not openly fascist. I am interpreting again from my interactions. Only fifty-four, she seems much older.
I answered her question with an example in sports, testosterone's influence and how a coach, knowing how T causes overconfidence, undervaluing others' input and impulsivity, will use drills and rules to curb young players' behavior in the game.
It was not the best example but it was what I could come up with and factually on point.
What I want to highlight is her ambivalence to learning, to her own evinced interest and enthusiasm, and her skepticism of the value of knowledge and the implied doubt of her own interests in other respects.
Here we see in the wild the origin of doubting science, of devaluing learning altogether, and of how we can at times act against our own self-interest.
At one point in the conversation, without conscious intent, I brought up my education degree and how it had served me in contexts outside teaching.
She has an MBA. She had started the program dubious of its worth and of her own interest in it, but the studies had then gone on to define her life's passion.
These discussions did not come up as conscious rebuttals of her skepticism. The sequence was disjointed. Only this morning did I start to make connections.
Humans are fascinated by things, and curious. But then our biology and social relations retract for practical reasons from what seemed relevant and then later pales and stales in light of other priorities real and imaginary.
We descend the heights too quickly having enjoyed the view too briefly to understand coherently what we glimpsed and, all too often, fail to integrate the insights into who we are now and going forward.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

The Dog of the Car That Caught You

 A new myth if it is to be grand enough to be the myth of the time and place must take in all the pieces and put them in place.


The universe, all that is, ever was, and ever and never will be, started and remained a singularity. There was a question that triggered infinite questions, a sound, a word, a note, a chord, etc.

In the parlance of our times, the Big Bang, let us humor the science, and, skipping over the distraction of opening credits, let's get to our entrance.


Why matter? Okay, then why life?

Things were clean without organic stuff all over them. From what we know now it is but a little spill. We keep looking for other possible patches but haven't found much yet.

All the energy was together. Then it spread and the energy levels went down in places to allow for our messiness. The early creeping gave rise to a more peripatetic process, an intentional tension of then and now, here and there, back and forth.

Now we look back to see the beginning, but why? The answer is here, in what we do.

It occurs to me even as it occurred in the first place.

Let us make a mirror of our minds and reflect back, from the beginning to now, and in so doing, we reverse engineer the processes which begat us (and everything else) here.

But now is also yet forever and never (is, was, will be). To do what we do we have to recreate the universe in our thoughts and in our little chatter. We even talk back to our beginning, in our thoughts and prayers.

In this sense, what we make of everything by our processes out of universal processes is the second coming.

Saturday, July 30, 2022

You Had to Have Been There


I was hungry at work so I went
Across the street to the
Sandwich place there and
Got a six-inch cold cut on flat bread and
Didn't want it heated but the person said
It's really stiff without heating so I
Got it heated and
Had American Cheese and
Black olives, lettuce, onions, mayo and
The rest of the process at Subway and then I
Walked back across the street and
Saw Sam my coworker smoking
At the place everyone's supposed to
Smoke and
I walked up and asked for
Some secondhand smoke and
Started eating my sandwich while
He smoked and we
Talked and
He made some kind of joke mentioning something which
I can't recall but I do
Recall saying it's a
Poem I'll write on Facebook later and
Now I can't remember what the thing
Was but I remember every other thing.

KLK
7/30/14

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Not Letting This One Get Away


I think it was my friend the comedian TK who first brought this to my attention. In the movie To Have and Have Not, loosely based on the Hemingway long short story with the same title and pretty much nothing else in common, the piano player character Cricket played by Hoagie Carmichael not to be confused with Stokely Carmichael warrants more attention than most including me are wont to give. He has for black and white film the peacock flair in his haberdashery and his mannerisms and almost mystical intuition about the other characters to make him a veritable chick magnet in the real world if not in the childish world of film's conception.

Now there are some who object to using words like chick or bird or broad for women, and others who might ask, Why wouldn't Old Hoagie be attractive to men also? Wasn't it a man who pointed all this out to you? I don't know a lot about the man Hoagie Carmichael, and next to Bogie and Bacall, I have to confess I hadn't noticed him consciously until he was pointed out to me in detail, the striped shirt and arm garters, the subtle smirks and soft-spoken Jedi spiel. Who was he to Hecuba, and Slim to none?

Nevertheless he was a chick magnet, and when I think about it, he improves other films. The Kirk Douglas movie Young Man With His Horn is certainly a film worth watching much because of his, Hoagie's, presence. But getting back to the whole inappropriateness of some words and behaviors, I just want to add I have never been able to forgive the fact Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemens did not appreciate, no, hated the novel Pride and Prejudice. What kind of human doesn't get that Jane Austen is likely the greatest genius in literature and Pride and Prejudice bears evidence to the subconscious miracles of human creativity and insight into human nature? How can anyone not find and follow that?


The evidence is also there in the song featured in To Have and Have Not, a song, I believe written both tune and words, by Hoagie, Am I Blue, which starts apparently in a heterosexual world from a woman's persona and then presumably switches to a man's: "...if each plan with your man done fell through" to "Now she's gone away, rooo! baby, am I blue!" Some day I shall sing this for you, and you will be impressed because I do a beautiful rendition.

But frankly I would like for Mark Twain aka Sam C. to be alive so I could tell him what I think and then slap him not unlike my older nephew's longing for dinosaurs to be alive so he could hunt them, though less lethal. Neither of these desires in any way undercuts the excellence of either the dinosaurs or Twain. I feel having violent ideations towards extinct creatures is permissible. It is not only possible but demonstrably so that a person, moi-meme aussi (or is it Aussie?), can admire what is noble and great while also decrying and even in petty moments belittling what is not so great in anything including a person or a species. In fact, as was so well put by another, The good men do is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Shakespeare.


I have lost track of where I was going with this but I do hope it encourages others including those reading now to look in your library and write. That is, get thee to a repository of information and review or see for the first time firsthand things I have referenced here likely beyond your ken and draw your own conclusions and come to other notions of your own, and if I had my druthers, I be there looking over your shoulder figuratively the whole time until you felt inclined to slap or even hunt me, living or extinct. I'll put another shrimp on the barbie and slip into something more comfortable like a carb coma while I wait somewhere stopping for you if my present gift is not fetching enough for your coming attractions.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

El Gato Negro


 

 

Young crows appear invalid, even mangy,

Strutting their stuff into the street,

Just like a couple of cowpokes, rangy

With stilted steps, as they gawk for tidbits to eat.

Around the corner on a slab of concrete lies

A form epitomizing night

Until it unfolds itself gazing with a guise

That shows surprising poise and light.

But it is all a ruse arousing only passing

Attendance from pedestrian

Neighbors whose ignorant ways

Miss the details of what is too familiar in

The furniture of their perambulant daze.

Yet these set pieces failed escape of glassing,

Although contorted by the lens of borrowed stays.

 

KLK

8/22/20


Saturday, July 18, 2020

Star Trek Reflections, Warp One




Mr. Spock, Get Us Out of Here!

Even as a child I could see problems with the original Star Trek, particularly in terms of social and psychological concepts not only in the characters but also in the narratives and assumptions about progress. Technology had made amazing breakthroughs. Social relationships were, however, more than stagnant. They seemed to have gone backwards.


Hierarchy was the most obvious example. Why were there still ranks and titles and some above others, others expected to be subservient? Sex roles also seemed set in Victorian stone. The 1920's had more aggressive exploration of gender than any of the worlds, let alone the star ship milieu. Even in episodes in which these relationships and identities were questioned, the questions were posed less aggressively than, far short of, the questions being posed by people in the streets of the real world. What could have happened in the time between to humans and extraterrestrials to make them less assertive of equality than the real world of the 20th century? Why were they less aware of identity and how arbitrary definitions do not always allow individuals to express who they genuinely feel themselves to be?


A far more disturbing quandary for my child mind came up, and it still persists to irk like an irritant grain in my sensitive craw to this day, inspiring me at last to write these things out. I am partly ashamed of my fellow human beings for not having more sense. I was reflecting on how unbearable most TV shows and movies are and wondering why anyone watches them, let alone loves and extols these ill-conceived representations. There are sufficient good examples to raise the question, Why not more like that? But the disturbing question, although it might have been about the lack of intelligence and discernment being brought to bear on what serves as entertainment and particularly creative, fictional fare, was actually focused on the character Spock and further implications about the human mind.


Spock is half Vulcan and half human. He is the offspring of an Earth woman and a Vulcan man. The extraterrestrials in the original and even subsequent Star Trek series and movies are almost all merely shifted representations of human racial and ethnic groupings. Indeed, the races and nationalities represented by the crew of the Enterprise are only slightly removed from 20th century stereotypes. The presence of a black woman whose original language is Swahili, a Russian man as part of the Federation, not a Cold War adversary, and a Japanese man, a Scotsman with a pronounced accent as if we are to believe the noticeable impact of broadcasts on language would not persist in the future to eliminate such superficial and readily changed features of speech. In the central cast of characters, Spock is the lone non-human. He stands as prominent in casting as Cosby did in I Spy, a ground-breaking role for an African-American. Spock fits right in, and he was accepted by the audience including myself as a wonderful second fiddle to Kirk's prima donna. He's always still a likely target of the humans' amusement, the way WASP-minded Americans still often look at other ethnic, religious, or racial groups. Think of the typical ethnic joke (if you are of an age and can recall them). That's the attitude embodied in Spock's relationship with the wholly human characters. His quirky logical limitations - Oh, those Vulcans! So much like slavishly overly seriously adolescents! - serve as the focus of this bemused secret superiority all the humans feel about his alienness, despite the display of his enormous advantages, physical and mental, over the dominant Earth humanoid group members.


But that was less apparent to me as a child and less questionable than this: How could Spock be half human and half Vulcan, the progeny of an Earth woman and a Vulcan male if these two groups were not the same biological species? Even as a child I understood the fundamentals of evolutionary biology. Apparently the writers on the show did not. Leaving out the expressed differences in actual biology - organ placement and blood composition - the idea that different creatures could breed together is something out of a previous time, but not surprising, really, that it was there, like a sore thumb, on this innovative, sci-fi show. Science fiction is always actually about the present. How could it be otherwise? It is a projection of now onto an imaginary future which is really just the present revealed, stripped of illusions and apologies for its failure to live up to potential. Technology and other changes, whether utopian or dystopian, are comment on the present state of things. Why don't we have cars that fly and women who are still sexy to a 14-year-old boy but also nerdy smart and lethal?


The mid-twentieth century existed culturally and intellectually as a holdover hybrid of Victorian and medieval ideas. Concepts of race and sex were still patriarchal and Caucasian Eurocentric; battles for changing mores and struggles for equality were being waged on a 19th century battlefield along lines defined in the late 1800's at best. The 20th century arguably began in the 1980's, when certain understanding and awareness translated into actual behavioral changes and a shift of values, and consequently resulted in a resurgent backlash against those changes. I'm limiting this to the United States, although arguably the rest of the world was and is still behind, whether we like to accept that or not, in these attitudes.


But getting back to poor Mr. Spock, consider his character and unscientific origin. Is it not just a transfiguration of the dominant human attitude toward the familiar other? Spock isn't an Asian. He's not a Jew or a black fellow. He is like and unlike us. We like him because he's our Vulcan, almost like a pet. We can unleash his amazing capabilities, the nerve pinch, the mind meld, his savant-like abilities to calculate and draw conclusions and also build things on the spot from flotsam and jetsam and wee bit of otherly magic. It's just amazing what those folks can do with stuff!

All of that occurred to me as a child but it did not broach my sense of indignity until later. My incredulity that the creators of the show could miss the specifics of biological accuracy, and also could have technological vision without concomitant social change, dominated my childish impressions. I was just stuck on the fact that hierarchy is portrayed as immutable. Antagonism of groups based on physical and cultural difference, as well as rival power structures seeking to be the top dog, remains inevitable. Well, perhaps you have to address the audience where it is first in order to get them to move somewhere further along. Sure, and shucks, let's all be morons, which, of course, apparently when it comes to this stuff, we are. And yet the examples also remain, the great works that almost by magic flash insight about human nature in the way the characters in full human dimension leap off the page or screen. How can we be blind to those stark contrasts, or do we just set aside the memory of better fare because we are so hungry for anything at all, something novel, that we settle for a quick fix after the indignities of our day?

I don't have an explanation for why most of us, if not all of us, do not see the obvious and make constant leaps of innovation in our own lives, let alone why we watch these horrible and depressing shadow plays, the food for our own hypotheses and frames, our lenses on ourselves, others, and the universe. These obvious distortions in fictional characterization and narratives are in a sense mirrors for our own idiocy. Like the ideas we embrace and reject in our actual lives and choices, in our attitudes and behaviors, what piques our interest and tickles our fancy in entertainment reveals what's genuinely going on in our minds and helps delineate our active psychology.


Finally, I think of Spock making a radio out of junk and being able with the touch of a hand on the face and head to get into the mind of another. That's a metaphor, a magic moment of imagination, for this whole meditation. Why can't we be more like Spock not only in the choices we make for entertainment, but also in our lives and the way we go about understanding the actual world in our own creation of reality that serves as our vision of now and what we can be? I still prefer Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice remains the greatest miracle of human character presented on the page, with all its limitations. Too bad perhaps the author did not have a more fantastical inclination. But we have to meet our authors and the audience at the place they are, even if we might imagine further along where they, and we, could be.

KLK
7/18/20  

Live long and prosper...




Thursday, July 2, 2020

THE RED WHEELBARROW VARIATIONS




The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams


so much depends
upon


a red wheel
barrow

 
glazed with rain
water

 
beside the white
chickens.

 
Variation I
by Careless Carol Walloons, Waitress


so much depends
on a plain

 
omelet no potatoes
on the plate

 
chicken salad san sans
butter and mayo

 
bread toasted and
chicken held between your knees.

 
Variation II
by Carla Willis Collins

 
nothing really depends
on anything

 
because without
anything

 
everything would be
nothing

 
beside itself about
the lack of chickens