Mistakes, Dreams and Creativity

I propose that person’s dreams have two functions. Their primary “duty” is to relieve the person’s cortical neurons of stored energy that would otherwise make those cells excessively prone to out-of-context daytime activation that the person would experience as “mistakes.” I also contend that by causing a person to experience mixtures of highly incongruous data while he sleeps, dreams promote creativity. To account for these results, I postulate a mechanism that causes a portion of a person’s cortical neurons to become spontaneously active during REM sleep to produce the bizarre memories that, I claim, make up dreams.

Over the centuries, there has been much study of sleep, the state in which dreams normally occur. Many attempts have been made to assign some function to it. Most modern thinkers on the subject have suggested that sleep is the way the body conserves energy during times of low-activity, and gives the body, including the brain, time to repair or otherwise fine-tune itself, all of which makes perfect sense to me. There have also been numerous attempts (not reviewed here) to understand the nature of the dreams that have been shown to occur in birds and most mammals including man during a phase of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Biochemical replenishment, rearrangement of data, and the communication of “subconscious” messages have been most often cited as the function of those dreams.  This paper will sketch one more such attempt.

I go along with previous theorists, Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison (Nature, vol. 304, 14 July 1983, pages 111 through 114), in believing that “in viviparous mammals the cortical system (the cerebral cortex and some of its associated subcortical structures) can be regarded as a network of interconnected cells which can support a great variety of modes of mutual excitation,” and that “Such a system is likely to be subject to unwanted . . . modes of behaviour, which arise as it is disturbed either by the growth of the brain or by the modifications produced by experience.” Like Crick and Mitchison, too, I postulate a mechanism other than conventional forgetting that is used by the brain to detect and counteract such unwanted modes of behavior—at least those resulting from modifications produced by experience. (I will not be concerned with unwanted modes of behavior caused by brain growth, like involuntary fits, which seem to me outside of normal human psychology.)

In what follows I first describe certain key assumptions of mine about the brain and memory. Next I postulate and describe the central mechanism of my theory, and how it differs from that proposed by Crick and Mitchison. Finally, after briefly discussing its testability, I trace some of the implications of my theory.

Preliminary Assumptions

First assumption: the existence in a person’s cortical system of “knowlecules”–neurons, or neuron-clusters, each of whose activation is experienced by the person as a discrete, unified image, idea, feeling or the like such as a visual image of a cat, some general idea of what a cat is, or the word, “cat” (an idea going back in experimental psychology to Penfield).

Second assumption: that each knowlecule can receive energy (the form of which is not relevant to this discussion) from sensory cells, other knowlecules, or itself, and that it stores such energy (in some form) until its supply reaches some pre-set threshold that causes it to become active. Third assumption: that remembering occurs when one knowlecule receives enough energy from other knowlecules (and/or itself) to become active (or re-active). The basic rule followed in this operation is simple: every active knowlecule divides a pulse of energy (which I call “k-energy,” which is short for “knowlecule-energy”) among all the knowlecules that have ever previously been active immediately after it.  So if knowlecule A is active during one “beat” of brain activity, and knowlecule B is active during the next “beat,” A’s later activation will cause it to transmit to B, and if it does so sufficiently strongly, or with sufficient help from other knowlecules, it will activate B as a memory.

There is a great deal more to the process than that, of course, particularly with regard to the manner in which context influences what percentage of its output of energy a given knowlecule will transmit to a second knowlecule (or itself). For the purposes of this paper, however, it is only necessary to know that a given active knowlecule transmits to a number of other knowlecules (and, possibly, itself) once active immediately after it.

Mistakes

If one grants my assumption that a knowlecule (or the equivalent) can store energy (in some form) with the potential to activate the knowlecule, it follows that an inactive knowlecule containing a great deal of stored energy can, upon receiving a very small amount of k-energy, become active. When, as sometimes must be the case, the activating k-energy is out-of-context (in a manner that should soon become clear), the resulting more or less inadvertant activation of the knowlecule will be experienced as a mistake. For instance, suppose one is asked, “In what city in Maryland is the U.S. Naval Academy located?” One might know very well that the answer is Annapolis, but what if one’s knowlecule for “Baltimore” has a nearly full store of energy? This might be the case if one had earlier read an ad for the Biltmore Hotel, say; and seen a picture of an oriole (if one is enough of a baseball fan to know of the Baltimore Orioles’ baseball team); then
talked to a friend named Al (if one has a friend named Al who lives in Baltimore, as I do). “Biltmore” might cause a little energy to go to the knowlecule representing the similar-sounding word, “Baltimore,” but not enough to activate it; ditto the oriole and the friend named Al.

In such a case, the small amount of energy the knowlecule for “Baltimore” might get from its association with “Maryland” when the person is asked where the Naval Academy is could be enough to activate it. If that happens, and at the same time—because, perhaps, the person is tired—the question doesn’t quite cause enough energy to go to the knowlecule representing “Annapolis” to activate it, the person might wrongly say that Baltimore is where the Naval Academy is.

Other psychological processes will no doubt quickly apprise the person of his mistake but they aren’t important here. What is, is that mistakes of a certain kind are sure to occur, given my assumption that knowlecules, or their equivalent, store energy without becoming active.  This idea of how mistakes come about, of course, is a speculative commonplace among cognitive scientists—though couched in sundry terminologies and unconfirmed by experiment. But it hasn’t been proved invalid, either, and it makes sense.

It also supports Crick and Mitchison’s model of dreaming, which hypothesizes that “the function of dream sleep . . . is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex,” by showing how those “undesirable modes of interaction” might arise, and why they would be considered undesirable. However, and this is the main point of this paper, I propose a mechanism of “knowlecule-flushing” different from Crick and Mitchison’s “reverse
learning mechanism,” for mine, among other things, does not result in the weakening of dream- traces, as theirs does.

Knowlecule-Flushing

The knowlecule-flushing activator (k-f activator) is my equivalent of the “dream-state generator” postulated by Hobson and McCarley, and on which the Crick/Mitchison model of dreaming is based. Hobson and McCarley place their mechanism somewhere in the pontine reticular formation from whence it causes both rapid eye movements and periodic dreaming. My similar mechanism also causes dreaming—but (probably) not rapid eye movements, which I believe dreams cause, by giving the eyes visual material they reflexively follow. In the course of
this paper I will offer no (new) empirical evidence to show that the k-f activator exists (as I define it) but hope through common sense arguments from long-established empirical data to make the possibility of its existence something worth serious consideration.

The k-f activator, in normal circumstances, can only operate during sleep. A person’s arousal center brings about that state when the person’s brain-activity reaches some pre-set low level. The person’s arousal center then slows his body down, to put it simply, and isolates most of his brain from the rest of his nervous system. That is, transmission of stimulation from the periphery to the cortex and vice versa is suppressed. The person completely relaxes, in the process shutting his eyes. Or so my theory has it, and I believe both common experience and the authorities in the field would agree.

Once asleep, the person will eventually experience REM sleep, in normal circumstances. This, I hypothesize, is caused by the person’s k-f activator, which joins every knowlecule in his brain. The k-f activator becomes active more or less reflexively, after a certain amount of sleep, I suspect—but with the length of time it takes to do so probably dependent on how full the person’s knowlecules are. Thereupon it causes all the knowlecules in the person’s brain that have more than some set amount of energy stored spontaneously to become active. The conditions thus set up (probably through dispersal of enzymes of some sort that increase knowlecule sensitivity to stored energy) also prime other knowlecules to become active whenever they, too, contain the new lowered activation threshold amount of energy.

The spontaneous flush of knowlecules by the k-f activator starts a dream, and the increased sensitivity to their stored energy of the rest of the brain’s knowlecules, as well as of the just- flushed ones, will keep the dream going. Its contents (as common experience and all previous research has shown) will be scrambled, weird, surrealistic—which follows from the knowlecules that initiate them dream’s being activated out of context. That is, they aren’t activated “logically,” but simply because of the amount of their stored energy.

They are therefore experienced as mistakes, many of them happening at once (in the safety of the periphery-isolation that prevents behavior based on them). Normal rationalizing behavior ensues, of course, as the person, in effect, tries to make sense of the data exploding in his mind. And his memory puts new matter into the dream taking place just as it puts various matter into his waking thoughts. That is, remembering occurs the same way in dreams that it does during waking hours. Just as a certain name heard at work might make one remember Cousin Jane, the same name heard in a dream might make one remember her. I won’t be discussing remembering further here, except to point out that there’s no need to hypothesize some kind of special remembering that a person uses only while dreaming.

Once the k-f activator sensitizes a person’s knowlecule to its stored energy, the knowlecule remains sensitized to the same degree until a k-f inhibitor that I also hypothesize turns it off when the person wakes up.  That doesn’t mean the person’s first dream of the night will last the entire night. On the contrary, just as common experience suggests, and dream experiments seem to verify, each dream, or dream-session, tails off and eventually ends within two hours at the most. The reason for this is simple. At first many knowlecules will become active due to their increased sensitivity to stored energy. They will transmit to other knowlecules to activate them, and those will in turn cause more activation. Eventually, however, no knowlecule will get enough energy from anywhere to become active, even with its activation-threshold reduced. Being isolated from the environment insures this.

A person’s first dream of the night won’t likely be his last, either.  According to researchers, people normally have more than one dream a night—five, on average. To explain this, I claim that a person’s k-f activator goes through a nightly cycle during which it five times enhances his knowlecules’ sensitivity to stored energy, each time making less energy able to activate the knowlecule storing it. Hence, the first dream-cycle might reduce the amount of stored energy capable of activating a knowlecule to 80% of what would have been needed to accomplish that during waking. The second, ninety minutes later, say, might reduce the activation-threshold to 60% of the daytime norm.  Later cycles might reduce it, respectively, to 40%, 20% and 2%.
(These, of course, are just guesses, no experimental data being available for any kind of precise estimate, or likely to be for a while.)

All this is based on the simple idea that, to avoid the build-up of mistake-potential, brain-cells (the components of knowlecules) need to be cleaned out, as in the Crick/Mitchison model. But because, unlike Crick and Mitchison, I believe that the energy flushed is re-distributed throughout the brain to other knowlecules (and, in some cases, back to the distributing knowlecules) rather than otherwise disposed of, the flushing I hypothesize cannot take place all at once—by an immediate reduction of knowlecules’ activation thresholds to 2%, say— because
the resulting dreams would be too dense. A person’s brain would be overloaded—so much so, in fact, that the person would probably wake up. And the “creative” juxtapositioning that I credit dreaming with making possible, and will describe later in this paper, would be overdone, and yield not creativity but confusion.

In any case, research indicates that dreaming generally goes through five stages much as I’ve described. Interestingly, the later dreams are generally described by those having them as more bizarre than earlier ones, which makes sense since more inappropriate data would be
brought into consciousness; that is, many knowlecules minimally ready for activation would contribute material to a person’s awareness during his last dreams.

If the Crick/Mitchison theory of energy dispersal rather than redistribution is accurate, by the way, it seems strange that (1) dreams last as long as they do—why couldn’t all the cells with stored energy be emptied all at once? and (2) why would we have more than one dream a night, many of them involving similar material—that is, cells one would expect an early dream to have cleaned out seem to participate in later dreams? I also wonder why we should experience dreams consciously at all, however sometimes fleetingly.

The Value of Dreams

Since Crick and Mitchison believe dream-traces are lost permanently unless the dreamer wakes up during a dream and thinks about it, dreams for them would seem to have no evolutionary advantage except as a way of getting rid of unneeded stored energy. This flies in the face of much cultural opinion, however unscientific, as to the value of dreams. I won’t get into that, but will try to present more hard-headed arguments for believing dream-traces are treated the same way that other memory-traces are. One of my arguments is that it would make no biological sense for a human being to evolve a system for getting rid of brain-energy if re-distribution of it through mechanisms already in place could accomplish the same thing—as it does in my model, in which “excess” stored energy in brain-cells is reduced to almost nothing, wit  to dump quickly, what to keep? And wouldn’t such a mechanism take up room comparable to the storage space required for simply storing the material? I say that it makes biological sense for a person to store everything, and let his remembering mechanisms decide what to return to according to what later becomes important rather than give him access only to what is initially thought to have the potential for importance.

The Crick/Mitchison concept of dream-forgetting goes against common experience, too, for all of us seem to remember dreams. Such memories are anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but vivid. I even remember seeing things in a dream and, while in the dream, recognizing their having been in other dreams—from days or months before.

Creativity

My main argument for our remembering dream-matter, however, is that it would allow for creativity-enhancement by allowing us to refer back to the arbitrary, “mistaken” connections we make in dreams and use them if they turn out to have some value, as any mistake can. Daytime mistakes are probably not as bizarre as dream-mistakes. Indeed, certain connections occurring in dreams would be close to impossible in daytime. At least in theory. A dream could easily allow a Kekule (who discovered the shape of benzene) to experience a snake-image at the same time he experiences an image of benzene if his knowlecule for “snake” happened to have the right amount of non-activating stored energy, at the same time his knowlecule for “benzene” also did. But nothing in his waking hours, unless he happened on a snake while thinking of benzene, would meld them. Even in the latter instance, he would think of benzene, then see the snake, rather than mentally experience them both at the same time.

I’m not saying creativity via a dream is what happened with Kekule, just that such an occurrence would be possible if my model of dreaming were accurate, and it wouldn’t be if the Crick/Mitchison model were. Since such juxtapositionings would seem to be of value, particularly if they were made undangerously, during sleep, then revisited more or less at liesure during waking hours, Nature should select for their storage as memories. And, I contend, has.

My theory’s Compatibility with Research and Other Theories

Like the theory of Crick and Mitchison, mine seems broadly compatible with a large amount of experimental data—and with everyday experience, as well. And it explains as effortlessly as Crick and Mitchison’s model both the need for dreaming in adult life and the large amount of it that occurs pre-natally (which I attribute to the propensity of the knowlecules of a developing brain for distributing k-energy willy-nilly and thus causing partial storage of k-energy to be
relatively wide-spread, it taking the brain time firmly to establish datapathways).

My theory, like theirs, is also compatible with the hallucinoid nature of dreams that all researchers, and non-researchers, remark on. Unlike theirs, my theory does not contradict Freud’s, but augments it, for it allows lessons to be recalled and thus learned from dreams, in keeping with Freudianism. It also permits repressed material to be popped into consciousness as Freud hypothesized, through the lowering of “repressed” knowlecules’ activation threshold. This agreement with Freudianism I mention only as an interesting feature of my model,
incidentally, not as an argument in its favor, Freudianism still not having been experimentally verified that I know of (and, in my view, 90% hogwash).

The effects of REM sleep deprivation certainly do not contradict my theory, though they don’t emphatically support it, either. That subjects of such deprivation sleep more when allowed to after their period of deprivation is what my theory would predict. That REM sleep deprivation in humans sometimes produces irritability would follow from my theory, too—because the mistakes a person makes as a result must irritate him once recognized, and because, as deflections from “right reasoning,” they will tend to strand him mentally, which would be conducive to irritation. This deflective property of mistakes would also explain the inability to concentrate experienced by some subjects of REM sleep deprivation, mistakes breaking their focus.

That feelings and wishes that he would ordinarily keep out of consciousness might intrude on a REM-sleep-deprived person’s thoughts, as some research indicates would happen, would be in
keeping with my model also, for knowlecules prevented from dreamtime activation would tend to build up stored energy until they had enough for waking arousal. Internal fantasizing should for similar reasons tend to increase among the REM-sleep- deprived, as has also been shown to be to a small degree the case. As for the possibility considered by some investigators that those deprived long enough of REM sleep would experience hallucinations, my theory is  noncommital.  According to it, REM sleep deprivation should yield just increased susceptibility to mistakes, as defined above—only, probably, after more than a few nights of deprivation, I might add.

My theory cannot account for the lack of any readily-observable detrimental effects from the complete blocking of REM sleep that certain monoamine oxidase inhibitors and other drugs cause. However, I believe that the drugs, which are anti-depressants, reduce people’s
anxiety about the mistakes they make, which makes those mistakes less noticeable. I believe also that the drugs energize those who take them, allowing them to power their way through their mistakes, before they multiply. A third factor would be the probably great length of time it
would take for any significant psychological deficits from any form of neurological deprivation to show up. The way the drugs involved no doubt interfere with normal distribution of k-energy must be a factor as well. My bottom line here, though, is the same as Crick and Mitchison’s concerning the same research: that it’s too small a factor to overthrow a theory so little contradicted elsewhere.

Testing My Theory

To prove or disprove the existence of my knowlecule-flushing activator would require much more knowledge of the brain, and much better brain -investigating technology now seems to be available. Crude tests of whether REM sleep deprivation will indeed increase a person’s
propensity to make mistakes, as I define them, or decrease his ability to come up with new ideas are perhaps possible but would not likely be very persuasive one way or the other. If we ever are able to pin down precisely what kinds of proteins or other substances are manufactured during the creation of memory traces, we might be able to compare the amounts of those substances produced during dreaming with the amounts produced during waking thought, and thus get a better idea of the likelihood of the data of dreams’ being stored or not.

Since my theory of dreams flows directly out of a (more or less) simple model of inter-cellular energy-flow in the brain, it could probably eventually be modeled by a computer program that could be used to check its plausibility. All my thinking on dreams is, in the final analysis, speculative, however. But since it is all based on a notion of the material make-up of brain-cells and auxiliary physiological mechanisms, it is all ultimately testable.

Possible Implications

If my theory of dreaming is close to being valid, it should help us understand and reduce (or increase, if desireable) the occurrence of mistakes, and appreciate and nourish creativity. It should provide some insight into the etiology and nature of certain kinds of psychoses, as well, some forms of schizophrenia being surely due to waking dreaming. Since in my model, dreams are accessible to remembering, the model’s validity would also suggest that perhaps dream-analysis in certain forms of psychotherapy might be of value, after all. It would certainly suggest that the high regard in folklore for dreams and what they say is not misplaced.

Viva dreams!                                         

.                                                               Bob Grumman

.             October 1997 (but based on my work in the early seventies)

26Apr14–38

2June14–64, a surprise

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Online Game and DVD Rentals

31 July 2011

I’ve decided to be considerate to my few regular readers by limiting my discussion of what I’m now calling “The Urceptual Crew” to this side-bar.  I need to do a lot of exploratory writing about it that will take a while to achieve even semi-coherence.   I strongly feel that now is the time to work it out, though.  For one thing, Michael Shermer’s book, The Believing Brain, indicates the empiricists are catching up to where I was 30 or 40 years ago, so a book on the subject may just get noticed.   But it seems to be my main interest at the moment.  Which is unfortunate because what I really need to work on is my theory of temperaments, for inclusion in my Shakespeare authorship book.  I don’t think I’m too far from finishing with what I want to say about that for that book, and once I am, I can put the book in print.  With the anti-Stratfordian movie, Anonymous, soon to be out, now it the time for my book.

It probably doesn’t matter which part of my psychology I most feel like working on considering how weary I always feel.  I’m barely able to type these few words.  I’m typing them because it’s too early for bed, and I can’t think of anything else to do.  A few hours earlier I finished reading the latest pot-boiler I’ve been reading and have no others to switch to.  Meanwhile, I’m continuing to read Ruled Britannia, which stars a Shakespeare I am finding quite believable.   But I’m not in the mood for it.

All I want to do here is get a good starting point for my understanding of the urceptual crew.  I know what I want to say, but I’m afraid I’ve just run out of gas.  I’m so out of it.

28 July 2011

I say my brain is still working, although the rest of my body isn’t doing all that well, because The Urceptual Judge

I’m writing here of my verosophical ideas. I feel like the ideas I have for new poems (and I’ve come up with two new ones of those the past two nights, too!) are something else, although I don’t see why they should be. Anyway, my latest brilliant verosophical idea is that among the innate Jungian “urceptual others” that I posit neurophysiological exist in the brain, is one representative of the Tribe. “The Urceptual Judge,” I tentatively call it.

It is the most complicated of the urceptual others but could be beautifully explanatory of a lot of questions I’ve been trying to answer for quite a while, including exactly what a person’s internal “god” might be. I’ve always considered the urceptual authority figure to be the basis of that, but not see that it may be a combination of the authority figure and the Judge.

It will take me a while to get all this straight, but I came up with the Judge when thinking about psychopaths. The authorities go along with me in believing such people simply to be those lacking empathy–which for me would be those lacking urceptual others. That got me thinking about altruism, which the authorities again agree with me in taking to be based on empathy and biologically advantageous for the tribe, if not for the individual, not that it can’t be for the individual, as well.

I’ve always had trouble making altruism the sole way an individual can turn collectivist. For some reason, last night, it hit me that another way an individual can work for the good of his tribe in spite of its depriving him of many individual happinesses is the way I keep thinking I do, by working for a sense of making an important cultural contribution. That led fairly quickly to the question of how, neurophysiologically, would an individual experience such a sense of cultural accomplishment, a valid sense of it?

It took longer for me to sort that out, but not too long (if not yet with any thoroughness): his Judge tells him when he’s done good for the tribe. So, do psychopaths lack a urceptual judge, too? Or are there two kinds of psychopaths, each with a different deficit? I’m unsure. I sometimes think that almost no one has a urceptual judge, but that’s silly. I think that because so few have one as extreme as I feel mine is–i.e., while I need to have outdone Beethoven and Aristotle both, most people are satisfied with having raised a family, and helped a reasonably valuable business, or the equivalent, going for a reasonably length of time.

Let me say here, before I forget, that my theory of urceptual puppets, is not the clearest part of my overall theory of psychology. I’ve never worked out a description of it I’m even half-happy with. But I think it worth doing a bad job of describing than keeping to myself until I have a better grasp of it. So here goes try number one to delineate the Urceptual Judge.

He begins before birth as one of an individual’s many urceptual others, each of them a sort of stick-figure puppet with connections to the Primary Urceptual Other and (perhaps) to the Urceptual Self. I’m not sure what I’ve said about this before, so may well contradict myself. Probably have before.

I think I think that the Primary Urceptual Other divides into . . . three? urceptual others, one good, one neutral, one bad. The good one tends to imitate via one’s Urceptual Self’s neuroconnections to it. The bad one either attacks or flees from, unconnected to it. The neutral one, if it exists (I just added it to my crew now), connects to each of the other two Others, but is inhibited from using those connections until its stimulus (some real other in the external environment) proves itself good or bad, which will open the appropriate connections.

Seems to me I’m saying the neutral Urceptual Other is the Primary Urceptual Other.

Anyway, the Urceptual Judge will have neuroconnections to the Good Urceptual Other but not to the Urceptual Self. Damn, to get this right, I really need to establish just about all the members of the urceptual populace, and I’m not up to. But one important Other is the authority figure, which is a good other with neuroconnections to the Good Urceptual Other, but distinguished from it by the cues it picks up from its stimulus to the Self recognizes as authority cues, signals to obey. The Judge sort of secondarily rewards the Self when the Self does obey.

Meanwhile other drives interfere, other others demand attention and allegiance. The judge takes from them, too, emphasizing to the self that making other respect one is important. Eventually one learns what others in general will consider valuable contributions to society and develop a habit of trying to make them regardless of feedback. Through reading about others who made great contributions in spite of winning little or no positive feedback from contemporaries, or inspiring negative feedback, one may overpower the Judge and turn him into a second self. The danger, needless to say, is solipsism. But that seems to me no worse than the danger of respecting judges who call for deadbrained conformity. Better, to tell the truth. But one should be aware of it. And will be if one has the right genes.

Okay, someday I’ll do a better job on the urceptual populace. I hope what I’ve said is at least interesting to anyone capable of being interested.

Miscellaneous Notes from Preceding Writings

September 22

Most, or some, of us have a child in us and put aside our adulthood when reading books like Rowlings, or watching movies based on them.  I can even quite enjoy picture books intended for 3- or 4-year-olds.  I think I’m probably two or three adult readers of different ages, too.  My final adult does sometimes comment on entertainments one of my other readers is engaged with, but rarely upsettingly, unless the other reader agrees with his low view of the entertainment.

I haven’t yet described the thought I had that may be unusual.  It is that each of us, or many of us, has chronological awarenesses with appropriate selves.  Remember, I conceive of the brain as, in effect, a huge mansion of many rooms, one for mathematics, for instance, another for social interactions, and so forth.  I’m now considering the possibility that each of these, or some of these, may have a smaller rooms in it for different periods of a person’s life.

This is the first time I’ve written about this, after having had the idea within 24 hours, so I can’t vouch for the coherence of what I’m saying.  Wanna get it down before trying to get it right.  The basic idea is what if the brain is programmed to recognize changes in kind of maturation, and reflexes seal off sub-awarenesses that thus become limited to the period they’ve been active in–while each is replaced by a newly opened replacement sub-awareness that will cover the next stage of maturation?  A person could still remember things out of the sealed-off sub-awareness, or earlier age, and use them in later-age awarenesses.  But, as I see it, the present-age sub-awareness would be the default sub-awareness, any earlier-age sub-awareness unavailable unless defenses against intrusion break down, and appropriate stimuli help.

One example of appropriate stimuli would be fairy tales.  One could not be a rigidnik for these to put you in your child-sub-awareness.  Unless ill.  Or drugged.  When in the child-awareness, your adult sexual awareness would have to be turned off, I should think.  Critical analysis, too, since that’s adult.

What I propose is that one in one’s child-awareness will become a child rather than feel a child.  Albeit not completely, usually.  I’m sure there’s an adolescent sub-awareness, too.  Perhaps an infant sub-awareness that few of us  ge exclusively into.  One point: that in one of these, one will experience mostly memories laid down in the period that the sub-awareness was active.  So  will lose touch with “mature” thinking, which must be based on later memories.  But when in a adult sub-awareness, a different problem crops up–loss of contact with childish thinking.  This is a problem because childish thinking, for most people, will be more spontaneous, sensual, simple (and thus able sometimes to cut Gordian knots adult thinking can’t).  One who can visit different age-based awarenesses frequently, should have an advantage over those who cannot.  Just being able to escape adulthood into a book like the latest Harry Potter is a not unimportant one.

* * * * *

JEHOVAH

September 23: Today, I’m hoping to define God.

My definition of Him issues from my theory of psychology, mainly from that portion of it I spoke of yesterday, and in other entries during the past year or so.  I consider Him to mainly be simply the cerebral Authority Figure I believe we all have–the internal Father.  My first problem is to show how he differs from human authority figures.  I suddenly feel like I may be able to pull off an interesting essay about him after not quite feeling I could for the past twenty years or more because of an idea I had that seems laughably dumb: that we reflexively attribute all movements in the external enviornment to some conscious being.  Of course, our reason more and more overcomes that reflex as we mature.  Still, its contributions always underlie our final understandings.

THE GOD WITHIN

For many years I’ve been arguing with people who believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.  I began because (a) I liked the idea of a self-educated commoner’s becoming a great writer (as I, a self-educated commoner, hoped to do) and (b) because the evidence for Shakespeare and against all those put up against him was huge.  There was also (c): my belief that I could make a name for myself by permanently ending the Authorship Controversy, as it’s called, in Shakespeare’s favor by arguing it better than anyone else ever had.  Needless to say, I never came close to accomplishing (c): my arguments never made any kind of impression on any of the “anti-Stratfordians,” as they’re called, and they are still very visibly amongst us–witness, for example, I Am Shakespeare, the recent highly publicized anti-Stratfordian play by Mark Rylance, famous Shakespearean actor and recent artistic director at the Globe Theatre in London, and the similarly highly-publicized “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” on the authorship of Shakespeare’s work signed by a number of wacks, including Rylance, Derek Jacobi, and several professors.

Although I soon realized the anti-Stratfordians were undefeatable, I continued to argue with them (and still argue with them) because of (d): I like to argue.  But also because of (e) my interest in the question that quickly became more interesting to me than who wrote Shakespeare, the question of why so many people who seemed sane, and were generally intelligent, likable people, could believe in something as nonsensical as anti-Stratfordianism–in something, that is, for which there was no direct hard evidence, and which required all kinds of mental gyrations to accept, such as a belief in the existence of the incredibly implausible conspiracy theory they all ultimately had to believe in.  Consequently, when I finally wrote a book about the authorship question, Shakespeare and the Rigidniks, its central subject was my explanation of what I described as the “psitchosis,” or “psituational psychosis” of the anti-Stratfordians (although I also spent 170 pages or so of it demonstrating that Shakespeare’s authorship of the works ascribed to him is beyond reasonable doubt).

Another controversy I’ve been interested in since I could reason at all was the one between Christians and non-believers.  I was a fiercely partisan member of the latter group during my late adolescence and early adulthood, but quieted down substantially when I found how much my view of religion bothered others (much less than my views on Shakespeares).  I don’t have the personality to be a Madalyn Murray or even a Richard Dawkins.  I tend to keep my political views to myself, too.

My interest in what I came to view as the religion versus materialism debate continued, however.  But its central question soon evolved the same way the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy later did, from a question about people’s belief to a question about the people rather than the belief, in this case from “Does God Exist?” to “Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational, intelligent people believe some sort of God exists?”

One such person was the very Catholic William F. Buckley, Jr.  He was one of my idols way back when–for his libertarianism and style.  Strangely, it was he who provided me with what still seems the most important constituent of my understanding of religious psitchosis.  It happened when he described his first meeting with Ayn Rand (in a memoir or on a talk show, I’m can’t now remember which).  He was laughingly describing Rand’s first words to him, a question as to how a person as intelligent as he could believe in God.  I believe he was too surprised by what he took to be Rand’s tactlessness to reply to her, but his remembrance of the event led to his answering her question.  He said something to the effect that he was born with a mechanism in his brain that made him able to perceive God.

I probably thought that silly at the time that I read it, but as I developed the theory of psychology I’ll soon be discussing here, it began to make excellent sense.  For my theory included the existence of something very much like such a mechanism, something I’ve come to call, “the Jehovacule.”  The name comes from “knowlecule,” which rhymes with “molecule,” and represents a molecule of knowledge.  In simplest terms, the Jehovacule is, in effect, a little man inside each person’s brain whose actions can be interpreted as the actions of an external god.  A more sophisticated way of putting it is that the little man is a Jungian archetypal Other.  But I posit him or it to be something material in the brain, an arrangement of brain-cells, not something fantasized.  Details to follow.  First, though, quite a bit of introductory material is necessary for any kind of understanding of what I’ve talking about.

Perhaps the best thing to start with is the . . . ANTHROCEPTUAL DICHOTOCEPTUAL SUB-AWARENESS.   Here dwelleth the Jehovacule.

September 23: Today, I’m hoping to define God.   My definition of Him issues from my theory of psychology, mainly from that portion of it I spoke of yesterday, and in other entries during the past year or so.  I consider Him to mainly be simply the cerebral Authority Figure I believe we all have–the internal Father.  My first problem is to show how he differs from human authority figures.  I suddenly feel like I may be able to pull off an interesting essay about him after not quite feeling I could for the past twenty years or more because of an idea I had that seems laughably dumb: that we reflexively attribute all movements in the external enviornment to some conscious being.  Of course, our reason more and more overcomes that reflex as we mature.  Still, its contributions always underlie our final understandings.

I had a couple of breakthrough thoughts today, one is that what makes people worship anything suddenly became my question, replacing what makes people worship a god.  My subject, in other words, is the instinct to worship rather than the instinct to follow some god or gods.

I also recognized a truism, which I nonetheless think worth restatement: 90% or more of a solution to a problem is the recognition and detailed description of the problem.  Define the problem and it’s almost always easy to solve it.  Truth is something you have to name your way to–with interactive names.  In the case of my god theory, today’s problem was that whereas I believe acceptance of a god is instinctive, I realized that my theory could only put a potential god into the environment; the only explanation my theory had for a person’s surrender to that god was that someone told him to surrender to it.  Religion was taught, not instinctive, which contradicted what I was trying to demonstrate.

Once I defined, the problem, another breakthrough thought solved it (I think): the possibility that we each instinctively recognize and find out appropriate place in a hierarchy.  From this, and the fact that we instinctively obey our parents (as authority figures), made it easy to hypothesize that we instinctively obeyed any entity that was an authority figure for our parents–a political leader, say . . . or the unseen entity who causes storms that kings fear.

All day I had a god who resulted from animism, and the god a person’s father generally is, and no way to connect.  Instinctive recognition of hierarchy took care of that.  As for the instinct to worship, that may simply be the instinct to obey authority.  I’ll have to think more on it.

But wait.  I should back up and let you know that, according to my theory, the brain is divided into ten general awarenesses, or semi-independent cerebral subdivisions, each with its own way of looking at things and/or processing data.  They have a lot in common with Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” but too much not in common with them for me to use his name for them.

The ten awarenesses are:

1. The Urceptual Awareness

2. The Fundaceptual Awareness

3. The Behavraceptual Awareness

4. The Evaluceptual Awareness

5. The Cartoceptual Awareness

6. The Objecticeptual Awareness

7. The Reducticeptual Awareness

8. The Sagaceptual Awareness

9. The Anthroceptual Awareness

10. The Combiceptual Awareness

The fancy names are not intended to impress halfwits but to indicate their meaning as clearly–and as inter-relatedly–as possible.  They all derive from the word “percept,” which means, “an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses,” in standard English, according to my copy of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1994).

1. The Urceptual Awareness

Where innate knowledge is stored–what a human face looks like, for instance, for instance.

2. The Fundaceptual Awareness

Where we experience all the stimuli we encounter in either our internal or external environment.

3. The Behavraceptual Awareness

Where we sense what our muscles and glands do, and where our voluntary motor actions are initiated.

4. The Evaluceptual Awareness

Where we experience pleasure and pain caused by our other experiences, and evaluate the latter on the basis of the ratio of pleasure to pain that results from them.

5. The Cartoceptual Awareness

Where we experience our sense of where we are, up/down, forward/backward, east/west, then/now, chapter 2/chapter 9, etc.

6. The Objecticeptual Awareness

Where we experience specifically those stimuli in our internal or external environoment that are inanimate objects, or seem to be such.

7. The Reducticeptual Awareness

Where we experience numbers, numbering, concepts, words (spoken and written)

8. The Sagaceptual Awareness

Where we experience out sense of destiny, of going somewhere meaningful, of life as a narrative, or saga.

9. The Anthroceptual Awareness

Where we experience ourselves as beings separate from the rest of existence, and other human beings–and as social beings

10. The Combiceptual Awareness

Where we experience everything we are aware of at any given instant–in other words, our consciousness

Each of these is divided into sub-awarenesses, sometimes many, that I won’t go into here except for the dochotoceptual sub-awareness of the Anthroceptual Awareness since it is pivotal for my explanation of why intelligent people believe in a god of some sort.

SELF AS                                 OTHER AS

child/slave                        father/master

father/master *                 child/slave

nonconformist                  anti-model

conformist                        model

befriendee                        friend

friend *                            befriendee

vicariant                           hero

mother/nurturer **           child

child                                mother

combatant *                    enemy

pet-owner                       dog/cat

male or female                 sex-object

anthroceptual dichotoceptual awareness: SELF versus OTHER

anthroceptual dichotozones, one for each of the ten specialized versions of self-versus-other

The theory is outwardly simple: our brains have little men in them, each a puppet with strings connected to our behavioral centers.  Execuceptual.  Let’s take that first.  Again, simple.  That part of the brain–really, those interrelated parts of the brain–in which all the physical acts that a person can to do are initiated–via muscles, mostly (glands seem to react to what’s going on with the rest of a person, not to commands from theis center)–are located.  The center of voluntary behavior.  In effect, a gigantic mechanical replica of the person with a control panel that can make a hand form a fist, or extend a forefinger to push a button in the environment, and so forth.

The Execuceptual Self.

* * * * *

ANTHROCEPTUALITY

Self-Consciousness, Empathy, Antipathy, Subordination, Dominance, the Mating Drive, the Friendship Drive

The anthroceptual awareness has to do with an individual’s concern with other beings and even things as persons.  Its function is to simplify existence by making of it a collection of people (as opposed to the ideas the intellect translates existence into, or the objects that the sensual awareness makes of it) to embrace or war against, depending on their behavior.  In other words, anthroceptuality personifies, starting in infancy with what we consider the appropriate personification of parents and siblings and continuing to the not-so-appropriate personification of rugs that trip us, corners that bump us and electric light bulbs that shock us later in life.

I used to enjoy playing with the baby daughter of friends of mine.  She was less than a year old but seemed quite bright.  One of our little games consisted of my doing something like clapping her imitating what I’d done.  It didn’t surprise me that she was easily able to clap as soon as she saw me clap, or make a fist, or cross her arms, or the like after see me do one of those things.  But she was as easily able to copy my making a fist and then hitting myself in the nose with it.  How could she do that, I wondered.  I could understand her clapping because she could see that what her hands were doing in the process were the same as what my hands had done, and she could see that her hands were more or less the same as mine.

Similarly she would be able to imitate me making a fist and my knee with it.  But how could she copy my hitting my nose with my fist?  She couldn’t see her nose and know that it was the same as mine in the way that she see the sameness of our hands.

On thinking about it, I considered the possible effects of simple learning: that she could have learned that everyone’s hands were similar by seeing them, feeling hers and others’ hands, and hearing all hands called by the same name, and gone on to learn what a nose in general was through the sense of touch and verbally.  I wasn’t satified with my reasoning, though.  The copying seemed too easy for her to have required such a complicated background.  Moreover I had read that infants start imitating adults very early–long before they seem to have any language function.  It is also known, I eventually found out, that the brain apparently recognizes faces as faces.  That is, a child doesn’t slowly learn that oval shapes with dark curves near the top over dark circular shapes in sideways small white ovals, etc., are faces; he automatically registers faces as faces–the brain is hard-wired to register combinations of eyes, eyebrows, noses and mouths as faces.  In any event, certain kinds of brain-damaged adults lose their ability to recognize faces but remain otherwise visually more or less normal, and can recognize other kinds of objects from their visual appearance.

Be that as it may, I eventually concluded that we are each born with a face-center in the brain which contains Universal Faces.  The first such face’s associated m-cells are activated by sufficient stimulation from the r-cells reporting on the presence of any face, and simply identifies it as a face.  This is the Innate Objective Face.  The second universal face is the Innate Subjective Face.  It is connected with r-cells responsible for the feel of one’s facial muscles and also to facial r-cells responsive to sensual stimuli such as warmth or tactile pressure.  In other words, the Innate Subjective Face is the main way one perceives one’s own face.

I propose that there is a third Universal Face in the brain which is actually a sort of double-face.  It consists of a duplicate of each of the other two Universal Faces–inter-connected in such a way that the objective’s part concerned with what the eyes of others look like, say, activates, when it is active, the subjective’s part concerned with one’s own eyes.  So a child seeing his mother’s eyes automatically registers: (1) not-me eyes and (2) a sense of his own eyes being repeated externally.  That is, he recognizes his own eyes in his mother’s eyes. Ditto with noses, mouths, ears, and so own.  Ditto, too, I’m sure, with the entire body.  If my hypothesis is right, we each have a whole body crudely sketched within us which stands for all human bodies, and another which stands for his own, and a third which connects his sense of body-out-there with his sense of his own body.  And the details link up in a similar fashion in more detailed objective/subjective areas–for noses, hands, feet, etc.

So the child I played with, seeing me make a fist, would weakly feel her own hand make a fist.  If she then wanted to copy me, she would simply let the feel of her own hand making a fist build up in energy until it activated behavior appropriate to actually making a fist.  And seeing me strike myself in the nose with my fist, she could easily copy me, for she would recognize my activity as being the same as her own behavior v89 (hitting oneself in the nose with one’s left fist, say), and carry out v89, if she wanted to.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that such hard wiring exists.  It would explain how animals without language teach each other various non-instinctive behaviors, as they surely do.  It would explain the common experience of picking up something much faster when it is demonstrated than when it is explained.  And it would mean that learning would not be as intricate as it would otherwise have to be.

Later I found still more areas it seemed nicely to explain.  Particularly the seeming need, sometimes pathological, to be like others.  And, of course, empathy–the ability to put oneself emotionally in another’s place.

Indeed, the idea of objective/subjective linkage centers in the brain led eventually to my development of the anthroceptual awareness.  That is where we perceive people as people, and as human objects, and as ourselves repeated.

It explains why most people, even children, vicariously feel the pain and joy of others.  This leads to what some call altruism–but also to the joys and miseries of being a sports fan.  And of our ability to so strongly identify with characters in books or on television.  This vouyeurism, which is at bottom felt in a way no learned experience in my experience is, is another indication of the validity of my suppositions.  Observe the people who watch game shows, observe their joy when a contestant they’re rooting for wins.  (I myself hate game shows because I feel they reward trivial cleverness and luck more than brilliance is EVER rewarded, so eny blots out empathy for me.)  Surely those spectators are feeling what it means to win, not just recognizing all the things they’ve learned to associate with material success and through them remembering similar experiences of their own (which many of them would not have had), which is the only other way to explain the situaiton that I can think of.

Further thoughts on conformity.  The Inner Self and the Inner Other are interconnected, as already stated (I think).  The outside of the Other’s stimulus’s actions are felt by the Self as described–but the Self’s actions are also projected to the Inner Other.  For example, if I see the outside other salute, my inner other will salute as a result, and my linked inner Self will have an urge to salute as well–will feel the salute as though it were doing it.  In reverse, if I salute, I will automatically transmit energy to those cells in the inner other concerned with saluting, and “make” my inner other salute.

Thus, if I salute and the outside Other does not, a contradiction will arise–Non-conformity, in other words.  My background and the situation will dictate whether it is his fault or mine.  In the first case, he will become a non-conformist or Stranger and I will be angry with him, or fearful, or both.  In the second case, I will be the inadvertant non-conformist, the fuck-up, and feel embarrassment.

Many further remarks to make.  One is that all this conformity need not be very visible or consequential.  Much of it, particularly one’s own part, is “subliminal.”  That is, one carries out one’s imitations in a token, partial way by making the initial cerebral acts only, but inhibiting their actual manifestion in true behavior, or perhaps doing them only so minimally that they are too weak to become true behavior.

Another point: much of social behavior is not just conformity of one person to another; it is alternate, approximate conformity.  There is a golden compromise–one no more wants the over-expected absolute mimickry than one wants total refusal to conform.  It is like any other situation so far as plus/minus goes.  Just as a song is irksome if too unfamiliar, pleasant if neither too unfamiliar or too familiar and boring if too familiar, so it is we an other’s behavior, or our own with that other.

Conversation should given the gist of what happens, as I theorize.  I talk with you.  I say something–and @$you repeat it in your mind, you copy my words@%.  This you do subvocally and quickly and so immediately after hearing my words that you don’t notice it.  But you effectively conform while listening.  But, of course, you probably don’t listen intently and therefore don’t perfectly conform.  But you hear syllable one and it activates your cells for saying syllable one, but they don’t make you say syllable one aloud (usually) because you are in a listening mode–which inhibits speech.  (There is probably a mechanism which compares the activity of one’s passive auditory speech center with one’s motor auditory speech center, and inhibits the latter if the former seems dominant.  But other systems, awarenesses, come into play.)  The cells active in you for saying syllable one would prime but probably not activate the cells for hearing syllable one (again), incidentally.

Anyway, social custom and other considerations would finally require me to stop talking and listen to you, so I would then become the conformist, you the one conformed to.  Actually, we would be sharing a route to which we are both conforming.

One could consider the talker the dominant personality, and the listener the subservient one, though.  In most cases, that would be untrue–as I just said, people usual compromise on a route, neither dominating.  But in many situations one person @$is@% dominant.  Further, I think that most people are designed to be dominant or subservient–as other commentators have speculated.  In my theory, it’s possible that the Inner Self might be fashioned so as to send comparatively more stimulation to the Inner Other than the Inner Other sends to it.  Thus one would be inherently predisposed to want actual others to conform to him than the other way round.  The extra stimulation he sent to his inner other would cause comparatively greater pain if an actual other failed to do as expected than would his own failure to act as the actual other directed.

The reverse would be true of a natural serf, or subservient person.  His Inner Other would be stronger than his Inner Self, and so he would be predisposed to conform to others.

Which reminds me of something else: that we are too large, have too many awarenesses, to be the slaves necessarily of our anthroceptual awarenesses, so needn’t conform even if we are natural conformists.  And as previously indicated, our conformities may be very superficial.  It’s a matter of doing approximately and just sufficiently what another is doing.  He sings one song, maybe it will be enough for us merely to sing.

Still another point: we probably vary from context to context, and from mood to mood, in the ratio of our inner Self’s strength to that of our Inner Other’s.

More about dominance/subservience.  It depends on two things: the ratio of self-to-other strength, which sets “natural dominance,” and which I suspect is low for most people; and one’s awareness hierarchy–how strong each awareness is to the others.I’ve already touched on both these points.  About the second, I could be a natural conformist but only weakly anthroceptual.  If, say, I’m highly intellectual I could then push on to something like . . . this theory, which does not conform to yours, and not change my mind on it however vigorously you attack it, even though you might be naturally much more dominant than I.  Or in that case you might convince me to back down because I’m a serf–but you yourself recognize the validity of my theory after all–and force it back on me.  The awarenesses influence each other, in other words, so your intellectual need for truth might overcome your anthroceptual need for domincance in this case–perhaps even if your anthroceptual awareness is much more important to you than your intellectual.  The latter might still be strong enough to defeat the former due to the overwhelming correctness of my insights.

There is another factor: mentality.  This is interesting.  In earlier models of my system, I took mentality to be the determinant of servility.  A low Taurus Factor would cause others’ opinions to swamp one’s own.  One would have to be other-directed: percepts would cancel retrocepts.  High Taurus factor would do the opposite, would cause one to rigidly adhere to one’s one perceptions regardless of others’ views, valid or not.  My new thought is that these would influence the equation.

Here’s something: if I have a weak Self but high character, I might activate my self so strongly that it would in effect outperform my inner other–lots of weal singals versus a few strong ones.  Generally, though, I think high character/ low dominance would make one a very rigid conformist.  Maybe tradition-directed–conforming inflexibly to remembered others.

Which reminds me of something else of importance: that often anthroceptuality takes place when one is alone because of remembered people.  We obey laws in part even when alone because of our conscience, which is our inner other activated retroceptually.  And we might conform to such a retroceptual other against a perceived outside other if the actions of the two conflict.

Consider how many normal social behaviors are copying rituals.  The hand shake, for instance.  The Salute mentioned.  Dancing–which women are so fond of and I’m not–because, I now hypothesize, I’m not that big on conformity, from either side of it–because not anthroceptual.  Consider also religion–repetition of prayers, chants, songs, etc.  Marching.  So much doing things with enjoyment simply because one is doing them more or less in rhythm with someone else.

I want to emphasize the shared quality of the best of all this.  It is probably accidental who starts a chian of conformities between two friends–but once the chain starts, they conform to it not to each other.

Back to the effect of mentality on conformity.  Flexible minds (due to mentality) will naturally be flexible in thought and behavior, and thus flexible about conforming and not conforming, despite natural tendencies.

Being high in Aries Factor will allow one to plow through natural conformity; being low in it will cause one to be dominated by someone low in dominance while he is using a high Aries Factor even if you are high in dominance.  When one is under the sway of one’s Pisces Factor, one will be naturally subservient in all awarenesses despite one’s dominance factor.

Passive conformity is watching someone do something and not then doing it but doing it in a minimal internal way–conforming to it.  As in the conversation I described.  I watch someone play tennis and feel what he is doing, and enjoy it–or perhaps no and again am bothered by it because it is wrong.

The Inner Stranger comes into this.  There might be two of these: the innocuous Inner Stranger, and the Dangerous Inner Stranger.  But no, the former would be a weakly accepted Universal Friend–because one could identify with his nonconformity.  I’m thinking of a foreigner whom we accept even though he can’t speak English and thus does not conform vocally because we identify with being that kind of stranger ourselves. And usually he must conform in other ways to make up for it.   He still bothers us slightly.

One might be naturally dominant but fail to get others to conform to one’s directions because of other considerations–being too different, etc.  When one is anthroceptually dominant, one has a need for social power.  When one is cerebrationally dominant (high in character and/or brilliance), one has a need for intelligential power, which is different.  Of course, one might have both or neither.  I feel I have the latter to a strong degree but very little of the former.  I might be a natural conformist I now for the first time think.  But conformity works against all the best things in life–e.g., perhaps I’m anthroceptually desirous of liking best-seller novels because everybody does but that works against my sensoriceptual need for good novels, and the latter is stronger in me.

But I doubt that I’m very conformist, naturally.  Probably just average–neither conformist nor non-conformist.  But tensions can develop in a person whose mentality clashes with his natural dominance level.  In my case the clash, if it exists, might be what makes me less social than most people: I don’t want social considerations interfering with what to me are higher pleasures.  But I could be both naturally dominant and cerebrationally dominant, and avoid social situations because the latter must make me original and thus a non-conformist people have trouble with, and the former will make me very upset with that.  The point of all this I hope is clear: it is that many things interact in determining where one is on the serf to tyrant continuum.

Additional thought: probably mentality would not alter natural dominance for high character would make the inner other as much stronger as it would the inner self; the ratio should remain the same between the two regardless of the cerebration level.  So high character/low dominance would make one a strong, loyal serf; low character/low dominance would result in a shiftless serf–a non-conformist due to incompetence; high character/high dominance would make one a strong manager; low character/high dominance would result in a weak manager, I would guess–one who needed to dominate but was incompetent at it.

Yes, low character would tend to cancel high dominance.  The inner other would be strong due to perceptual activation while the inner self, stronger due to dominance, would nonetheless be retroceptually weak, so that the outside other would tend to dominate.  But that contradicts what I said about high character/low dominance.  I need to think this over more.

If the Other says A.B.C while the self, exposed to the other’s A and thus repeating it (regardless of dominance level or character), tries to say X.Y, what will happen?  If one has high character X will occur with B, Y with C.  Otherwise A.B.C will result.  In the first case, if one also has high dominance, B.C will be weaker for the self than X.Y will be for the Other.  In the first case if one has low dominance, though, the opposite will be the case, so one will remain subservient despite one’s high character.  (In all cases X, Y, B and C will be equal retroceptually.)  But the self will continue the chain begun by X.Y and so tension will continue, for a weak attempt to dominate will continue in force.

In the second case if one has low dominance one’s weak attempts to activate X.Y will be even weaker translated into an attempt to activate one’s inner other’s X.Y, and the Other’s activation of one’s self’s B.C will conquer.  If one has high dominance, however, one’s weak attempts to activate X.Y will mean, possibly, that one’s self will not experience anything: low retroceptual energy will prevent either X.Y or B.C from occurring.  Meanwhile one’s other will experience B.C perceptually, and X.Y retroceptually (if the help of dominance in raising its energy is sufficient, in which case let us simply define less than that sufficiency low dominance, meaning low in this context), X.Y will be a stronger force on the Other than B.C will be on the self, so low character/high dominance will cause an attempt to dominate.  But it will flicker on and off because the self will not be able to keep X.Y going.

High/low and low/high thus compromise.  It’s fuzzy.  But what if A.B.C does not try to make the self experience B until the third event of the sequence, while A.X.Y does not try to make the inner other experience X till the same event? High/high and low/low are unaffected, but high character/low dominance will mean the self will experience A.X.BY–but all will be as just described.  But low character/high dominance would be significantly different, for X would be prevented by low character from occurring for the self, so the self would have no instructions to pass on to the other and thus, despite its tendencies, would be forced to serve.  But that again is as before.  Ah, I think what would happen is that whatever retrocepts (or percepts) formed in the self would be “forced” on the other–even if they originated from the outside other!

The highdom/low character would try to manage but arbitrarily, foolishly, and superficially, content to seem to force his will on others.  The kind who will do anything you tell him to so long as you convince him it was his idea.

Call this type the beta managerial type, or b-manager.  His self will have weak self-direction but also weak other-direction so will not be very servile.  His inner other will have strong directions coming from his self.

Now a thought strikes me.  Let high dominance be defined as stimulation from self to other which is stronger than that from other to self (as already stipulated) but also stronger than that from other to other.  Ah, let high dominance equal self to other stimulation being higher than current retroceptual stimulation (or both other to other and self to self).  Let low dominance equal other to self stimulation being higher than current retroceptual stimulation.  Call high dominance simply dominance and low dominance subservience.  Why?  Because one could be the new definition have both.  Call the interaction of the two assertiveness.  If one is higher in dominance than in subservience, one is high in assertiveness; if one is lower in dominance than in subservience, one is low in assertiveness; if the two are equal one is neither assertive nor unassertive.

Okay.  High in C and A equals high in assertiveness.  Low in both equals low in assertiveness.  High in C and low in A means still high A because other to self stimulation will because of low A be higher than self to self while self to other will be lower in comparison to other to other than other to self will be in comparison to self to self.  In other words, the other will have a stronger effect on the self than the self will have on the other, so one will remain subservient.  This is again the same as before.  How about Low in C and high in A?  Self to other stimulation will be higher than other to other stimulation while other to self will have comparatively less effect on the self, so one would remain dominant.  Ready because of low character to be pushed around but more ready to push around because of high assertiveness.

This is confusing.  I still haven’t worked it out.  Of course, there will be all kinds of levels of dominance, but other things being equal, a person having higher A (the difference between his D and S) will dominate a person having a lower A.

(Extraneous note: one mustn’t forget pseudo subservience, the ability of gifted manipulators to suppress their natural dominance until they can use it to the full.)

Latest thought (24Sep89): The self-to-other (dominance) circuit meets the other-to-self (submission) circuit in a center which compares the strength of the stimulation of the first with that of the second.  If dominance energy is the greater by some amount, then the person goes into his dominance mode.  If the reverse, he goes into his submission mode.  If neither, he remains in a neutral mode.

In the dominant mode, his other-to-self transmissions are inhibited (completely); in the submission mode, his self-to-other transmissions are cut off.  In the neutral mode both transmissions are cut off.  (But both self and other continue to transmit to the dominance/submission center.)  All transmissions allowed to continue continue at full strength.  That full strength will be great (per cell) than the person’s retroceptual level.

Therefore, high character/high dominance and low character/low dominance are as previously described.  High character/low dominance is also as before since high character will boost both self and other transmission to the center equally, but low dominance will reduce the self’s tranmission.  Thus, other things being equal, the other will win out and the person will go into the submission mode.  But his high character will keep his stronger retroceptual options active and so he will have more of a chance of changing to dominance than other low dominance types.

A person with low character but high dominance will be predominantly dominant.  His low character will transmit his self’s options weakly to the center but the other’s input will be equally weak.  Meanwhile his high dominance will raise the comparative strength of his self’s material, causing it to come out stronger than the other’s at the center, all else being equal.  So he’ll be a managerial type, but an unstable, impulsive, foolish one.  His low character will mean his directions will come from any old where while his dominance will try to enforce them, despite reason.  The bossy woman is typical of this kind of person–has no real goal but must have her way at all costs anyway.

Note: in deciding on the center and its nature, I wanted, of course, to make my system work, and work in a simple way.  But it wasn’t all arbitrary.  It seems to me reasonable to assume Nature will wants things simple since simplicity means less expenditure of energy.  In this case, too, Nature would strive for social simplicity.  It would not be biologically efficient for the self-to-other and the other-to-self transmissions both to occur at the same time and then the self and other fight each other confusedly for a long time to determine one’s dominance/submission mode.  Better a quick either/or.

This would facilitate social interactions, too, by allowing a short minor dominance superiority on the part of one person (in a situation where it was important to determine a leader) efficiently to knock a rival into a submission mode.  In any case, this kind of “Darwinian” thinking is important and helpful in deciding whether some element of theory makes sense or not.  It should always make some kind of sense biologically: a hypothesized trait must be something Nature could logically have selected.  And it ought to obey Ockham’s razor because Nature tends to, in biological matters.

* * * * *

A brief thought about how the selves I hypothesize function in the evaluceptual center. Possible chapter-length explanation of the natural evolution of morality there, I now believe.  How, in particular, we don’t need a God to tell us not to murder to develop a natural disinclination to do so.  I should probably try to write up just this chapter as it should be pretty self-contained, and not hard–even fun–to write.

Owner-Self?  And an urcept having to do with ownership–and the territorial imperative.

Cartoceptual Awareness has an Ur-Property Urplex containing a property urcept, and a Cartoceptual Self and Other, or Owner and Trespasser.  Or maybe this is in the Carto-Anthroceptual Association Zone.  The property urcept automatically accompanies anything one’s eyes show to be within a foot, say of one, wherever one is.  It is one’s personal space, in other words.  It travels with one.  It strengthens for a given location the more one is in that lacations–and for what stays in that location.  It establishes one’s “direct property.”  Society can establish one’s “indirect property” by means of rules.  Natural versus aritificial Property.

Complications.  The objecticeptual awareness identifies objects in a property space as primary property.  The anthroceptual awareness identifies persons as non-property, by inhibiting the property urcept and stimulating the not-property urcept which is also in the ur-property urplex.

The Authority-Figure will reverse connections in a property zone to the degree it is strong compared to one’s self.

Pets will be part property to the degree they are objects, as all partly are.  Other people will be part object, too, the more so they are subordinate to one.  In everyday situations, this means, roughly, the younger they are compared to one.

One’s fundaceptual self is property, too.  And one’s actions.

* * * * *

THE ANTHROCEPTUAL AWARENESS

The anthroceptual awareness is also an abstracting awareness, for it abstracts the urceptual man out of the environment.  With the help of the evaluceptual awareness, it goes farther and derives an urceptual enemy and an urceptual friend from every image of u ceptual man it processes.  The appreceptual awareness, which controls pain and pleasure and thus can be said to decide whether a thing is good or bad, simply attaches sensations of good or bad to each urceptual man a person experiences and thus makes him friend or foe.  This, of course, allows the person quickly to react–to flee from a foe, for instance, for he will be stimulated by a simple archetypal figure of emnity rather than a difficult and ambiguous particular enemy.

The origin of this, I believe, is ancient–possibly back with the protozoa we came from, with their recognition of what to flee, what to pursue (and devour, if possible).  Our anthroceptual awareness, I’m sure, contains animals and insects, some of which are tagged enimical, and from which women automatically shrink–snakes and spiders, and so on.  But one need not be the slave of one’s instincts.  One can learn, for instance, that spiders are good people, mind their own business, and keep down the population of whiney, annoying bugs.

More important than dividing friend from foe is anthroceptuality’s social adhesion properties.  I divide the anthroceptual awareness into four zones: the dominance, the empathy, the subordination and the autonomy zones.  The urceptual man dwells in all four–along with the urceptual self.  The urceptual self is very important in one’s self-image.  It is a twin of the urceptual man, but is connected, literally, to one’s own body.

Here’s how it works: certain representative musclaceptual and viscraceptual sensors are hooked up with the stick-figure urceptual self in such a way that when that self moves and arm, say, one musclaceptually experiences the movement as his own arm moving.  Certain of one’s voliceptual sensors are also hooked up with the urceptual self so that when one wills one’s real arm to move left, say, one will also will the arm of one’s urceptual self to move left–and be disturbed if it doesn’t.

What does all this mean?  It means, for one thing, that one can objectively view oneself, one can experience oneself both from the inside, and as a stick-figure external to oneself that one controls.  The existence of the urceptual self also makes possible the four zones I listed.  In the dominance zone the urceptual self connects to the urceptual man the same way one’s body is connected to the urceptual self–that is, the self’s limbs are connected to homologous limbs of the man, and so forth, so that when the self moves a leg, so will the man. The self thus tends to force the man to copy him.

The opposite is the case in the subordination zone.  The same connections are made between self and man, but going the opposite way, so that everything the man does (based on some human being in the actual environment–or remembered) the self will attempt, as the man’s subordinate, to copy.  There is more to it than that, needless to say.

The Urceptual Foe

The Urceptual Foe’s stimulus is first any stranger, including a wild animal–or even a thunderstorm or something else inanimate. But mostly, especially at first, a stimulus suggestive of a man. It becomes a foe when it has carried out activities sufficiently threatening: loud noises, snarls, baring of the teeth, and looks formidable. And not-human, an animal being almost automatically considered a foe.

21 August 2011

A Sudden Simplification

(Note, one of my flaws is that I’m as interested in how I think as in what I think so constantly complicate my discourse with asides about the former. This will happen often if the following material.)

For a long time I thought each of us had Urceptual Personae in our head, each more or less resembling a human being, and connected to an inner puppet representing a self-image I call the Urceptual Self. Very complicated. Well, suddenly last night I junked all the personae as puppets but two, the Urceptual Self and the Urceptual Other.

The Urceptual Self is a puppet crudely resembling its subject (i.e., the person in whose brain it dwelleth). It tends to copy all its subject actions, and is taken by the subject as the subject’s “me.” When I type and think, “I type,” I’m really expressing my knowledge of what my Urceptual Self is doing (except in not common circumstances when I actually see what my body is doing).

I claim that the Urceptual Self is connected with the equivalent of puppet strings both to its subject’s body (puppet finger to real finger, puppet nose to real nose, etc.) but also the the Urceptual Other, a puppet identical to it.

The Urceptual Other also has puppet strings to an Urceptual (innate) inner picture of a generic human being which is activated by any human being in the external environment. When activated, the picture tends to use its strings to the Urceptual Other to make the Other copy its actions, which are duplicates of the actions of its stimulus. The Other at just about the same time uses the strings to the Urceptual Self it controls to make it carry out the same actions.

I used to think that environmental cues would cause the Urceptual Other to transmit to many other Urceptual Personae which would have various effects, but last night I saw that it didn’t have to. Why: because I could replace those extra personae with simpler urceptual bundles, each sensitive to environmental stimuli indicating the environmental presence of a particular kind of consequential living being, such as a child, a cat, a femal human being, a bad man. . . . The stimuli that I hypothesized turned on the various urceptual others, or casued the central urceptual other to turn on. They would now turn on not puppets but urceptual tags.

But they would all turn on the Urceptual Other. So a subject’s little brother would activate his Urceptual other and urceptual-child-tag. The latter would cause him to carry out big brother actions (assuming other instincts or needs were not complicating factors). He would form a small knowleplex representing his understanding of his little brother which included the Urceptual Other with a child-tag to make up the equivalent of an urceptual child, plus all the unique specifics about the little brother such as his name, favorite dessert, etc. Thereafter, simply glimpsing his little brother would activate his urceptual instincts concerned with taking the role of a father toward the child.

The child-tag would activate his Urceptual Other plus his father-tag. His accelerance would be stimulated to push his cerebral energy high enough for his self to dominate the Urceptual Other. ???

He becomes a father-figure.

Urceptual Self plus father-tag dominates Urceptual Other plus child-tag. He instinctively carries out father activities with little brother as their object.

He can identify with father-figures, which is to say with the knowleplex for one or more of such figures, each of which will contain a father-tag and Urceptual Other.

For one thing, there are certain urcepts that mean authority, certain ones that mean submissiveness, just as in the dog world when a certain kind of bark means I am king here, and lying on one’s back means I submit to you.  In the human world tallness, depth of voice, and certain other masculinities probably mean authority, and genuflection, etc., mean submissiveness.  The combination of authority urcepts with the urceptual man tend to push a person into his subordination zone while submissiveness urcepts combined with the urceptual man will push a person into his dominance zone.  In the first case he will tend to do submissive things, in the latter he will tend to act dominant.

Moreover, when in his dominance zone, his mental energy will increase and he will become literally more assertive while the reverse will have in the subordination zone.

Of course many other factors will determine which zone, if either, he goes into in the presence of another person.  People who aren’t particularly anthroceptual will probably not go into either zone.  Strong-minded people–that is, people high in character–will be hard to force into their subordination zones, hard, in fact, to knock out of their dominance zones.  People low in character will spend most of their time, if they are also anthroceptual, in their subordination zones.  Not necessarily unhappily.  But very superior people may, if anthroceptual, also become subordinate relatively easily if they have high accomodance, and are in a situation in which accomodance is called for.

Submissiveness and accomodance are the basis of learning–social learning, that is, and learning from others, which is the most important way we learn, probably.  So we are all submissive at times, even past childhood when we are more or less programmed for submissiveness (however rebellious at times we can get).

Now I also spoke of the empathy zone.  There, as in the subordination zone, the urceptual self is linked up with the urceptual man in such a way that what the latter does the self will attempt to copy.  The only difference is that authority urcepts have no power in the empathy zone. Hence, when one is in his empathy zone, one’s mental energy is at its normal level.  He submits–or his urceptual self submits–or attempts to copy the urceptual man–but only up to a point.  If the copying pushes the self into disliked paths, and with the self, the person himself, linked as he is to the self, and predisposed to do as the self does (when anthroceptually active), one can easily refuse to imitate further.

Hence, one mainly experiences the other as one’s self rather than as an authority to obey.  One lives vicariously through the urceptual man, and empathizes with what happens to him.  If he hurts himself, one truly feels it oneself.  This is the source of the cliche the parent tells the kid about the spanking hurting the spanker more than the kid.  It is true, because the spanker’s urceptual self is being spanked as surely as the kid, who is activating one’s urceptual other in the empathy zone.

I also spoke of the autonomy zone.  Here there are no links between the urceptual self and the urceptual man, hence now dominance/submission struggle.  The two are more or less equals–mainly because no authority or submission urcepts are present.  Here the person feels represented by his urceptual self in alliance with an urceptual other.  They share the world.

All of this is far more complicated than I have made it, but I’m trying here merely to suggest what my theory is all about, and–I hope–get a few people interested in it.

Further thoughts

I now posit that the stimuli activating an urceptual tag will also activate the urceptual other if appropriate, and influence the Urceptual Self in appropriate, as well–to be responsive or unresponsive to the signals of the Urceptual Other.

The Archetypal Example would involve the mother tag that a mother will activate in an infant.  She will also activate the Urceptual Other–and, possibly, the child’s anthroceptual awareness, and its accommodance.  Once in its anthroceptual awareness, the child will be sensitive to the mother, and the urceptual other activated.  It will turn on its Urceptual Self–or, more likely, bring it more strongly into its consciousness.  Its accommodance will lower its cerebral energy so that will not resist the “orders to imitate” the Urceptual Other, once active, will automatically transmit to its Urceptual Self.  There will be no Urceptual Mother, just an Urceptual Other acting as an Urceptual mother because accompanied by a mother-tag when active.

This combination of tag and Other will have a second important effect: it will tend to double the strength in the child’s memory of the mother, because that memory will consist of the record of the environmental stimuli entering the child as “mother” plus the record of the Urceptual other and the mother-tag (which will be added as automatic memeries to the memory formed). 

 25 August 2011

Now for a little controversy: my discovery of God.  I thought I’d sneak it in here where no one would see it.  Just the surface of it at the moment, but I think I have it pretty well mapped out.  It’s tricky, and I’m ungainly at exposition, so be patient.

1. I posit the existence of a Urceptual Father that consists of the Urceptual Other plus a “father-tag.”  The Urceptual Father’s stimulus is an human being revealing dominance signals and strength in comparison to the subject.  The subject will tend to do the Father’s bidding, and imitate him, to the degree that the stimulus activates the father-tag through various cues.  The subject will record a memory of the Urceptual Father’s stimulus and a vaguer memory of his internal Urceptual Other, to the degree that he imitates, as that puppet’s puppet, the actions of the stimulus of the Father.  In time, the subject will build a memory of an authority figure consisting of his memories of the Urceptual Other plus the father-tage always with the Other when it is activated as a father figure, plus various stimuli who perform as authority figures–the subject’s actual father, an older brother, an uncle, a male neighbor, etc.  Females, too, although to less of an extent because females’ cue are mor nurturing than authoritarian. 

Result: the subject will gradually build an inner representation of an Urceptual Father with few clear specific features–a figure much like the Judea-Christian God, in fact.  What priests and other elders indoctrinate the subject with will strengthen this internal God who must be obeyed.

Oh, the Urceptual Other and whatever tags are activated with him when he is activated are retroceptually stronger than most other matter that we remember–by which I mean that that result in stronger memories.  So a memory of one’s father telling one not to kick one’s little sister will make one’s memory of the event stronger than  one’s memory of a pretty flower.

2. Meanwhile, there is the Urceptual Judge whom I posit.  The Urceptual Other plus a judge-tag.   The judge causes (if need be) one’s memories of one’s deeds that the judge favors, generally moral acts, almost always acts having to do with other people, to be pleasurable, or more pleasurable if they’d be pleasurable without his assistance; his has the same effect on one’s deeds he is against, except that he makes them painful or more painful.  In other words, he encourages us to be good.  His stimulus is sometimes the same stimulus of the Urceptual Father, but can be any human being the subject acts morally or immorally to.  Various elders will stengthen his judge-related actions, as eventually will characters he reads or hears about.  His Urceptual-Mother (and actual mother) will likely be more important in this area than the Urceptual father.  So, an internal God who bestows rewards and punishment–and is vague the same way the authority-figure is.

3. Various instincts make animists of all of us–that is, we think thunderstorms have intent.  We tend often to attach an Urceptual Other to animate objects in the environment, to give us memories of them with a bit of the Urceptual Other in them–legs and arms, for instance–certainly a mind.  Ergo: a God who is everywhere, but immaterial (since being in the sky, ocean, trees, etc., will cause his material identifying characteristics to fade–except for hints of the Urceptual Other than will always be aroused to some degree.

Conclusion: the Urceptual Father and the Urceptual Judge and innate animism will combine to form in most of us a natural anthropomorphic deity that priests will exploit, and the majority will accept–because everyone else does.

Is there an escape?  Sure.  Innate general intelligence.  Perhaps more important, strong abstract intelligence than social intelligence.  Life experience that gradually makes reason stronger than instincts.  Much else.  Complicated topic.  A meagre start here, but I did better than I thought I would.

Oh, and this god will be a part of most conspiraplexes, I believe–even those believed in my agnostics or atheists–many of whom believe in the state, or some other secular god.
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Holiday Inn Hotel

Another Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art

Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 3/4, March/April 2012

the bleed.01
Editors: Mara Patricia Hernandez and John Moore Williams
Volume 1, Issue 1, June 2011. 90pp; Avantexte Press, Oakland CA,
http://www.avantexte.com/thebleed

Webzines featuring visual poetry and related artworks are becoming much more frequent of late. Among the best of them is the bleed, subject of my last two columns, and my subject once again. Fortunately for me, it is available as a regular hardcopy magazine, for I was unable to read it on the Internet–due, I’ve been told, to my still being on dial-up.

In his introduction, Editor Williams describes his discoveries during his first year “in the bleed”: “that the world is much larger, and more full of fearlessly creative souls than (he’d) ever imagined; that bringing the work to light takes much more work than (he’d) expected; that there are days when (he wished he’d) never started this thing in the first place, and, in a secret corner of (his) aorta, that (he had) come to resent doing it; and that another day comes when (he sees) a submission and (realizes) that (his) eyes have been skinned wide open, (his) cranium levered back with a gut-wrenching crack, and how happy the world makes (him).” Which certainly brings me back to my own days as an editor/publisher.

There are all kinds of works in this issue of the bleed, with interesting accompanying commentary by both Williams and each individual artist. First up is Amanda Earl, with a three-piece suite of concrete poetry (i.e., producing a viso-aesthetic effect through the use of typography only). Based on passages of “The Song of Solomon,” it begins with one consisting of a set of three stacks each of which contains the words, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feeds among the lilies,” in alphabetical order, and three more with the same words except for “am” and “the” in the same order. These latter are perpendicular to, and on top, of the other set. Trust me, the resulting gestalt captures–and renews–all that the original song celebrated. The sequence’s two other poems are equally effective.

Already I have a problem–I’ve only treated one poem out of the many here worth discussion but used up more than a third of my space. I’ll have to be stingy with my words from now on, starting with the visioconceptual non-poetry of Rosaire Appel–wonderfully resonant 3-D blueprints of the shape of poems; Marton Koppany’s finding a way to make his minimalist treatments of (1) the word “or” (its o a white balloon) and (2) a combination of a dash, quotation marks, a wavy line (indicating water) and a comic-strip balloon both very funny and lyrically expansive; Vernon Frazer’s masterful textual collages, one of them with a rectangle inscribed with “the centurion/ of the broken/ codes reaches/ a dark footing,” to wonderfully contradict the geometric rigor of the graphic design it is in (i.e., poetry versus engineering, to the enhancement of both).

Also, some absorbing deformations of a page of print in sudsy water by Michael Justin Hatfield; four gorgeous 3-D constructions with text present or implied of the sort he’s well-known for by Peter Ciccariello; a four-part blur and swirl of words by Andrew Topel; four arresting non-representational images with texts printed on top of them by Berne Reichert, the graphics and texts bouncing off each other into interesting new locales; three inimitable all-word poems by John M. Bennett, the first half of one of which is (approximately, as I can’t duplicate the fonts used here) “elimination of the gnatss a lun/ ching ear fooaam my rabb/ bbit coughs an stre/ ams beneath th/ e gate your f/ lash==olight/ sunk nost/ ril can/ of f/ –=O=–/ rks . . .”

Yes, that last one takes a long while to get an understanding of, but it does eventually unclear into the kind of sensually sensible loud mood/situation the best poems, and almost all of Bennett’s, do, given patience and sufficient mental surrender on the part of the engagent.

To continue, we have “border again border,” by Aysegul Tozeren, which is not in English, so I can’t say much about it except that it looks interesting. After that, five poems by Willem van den Bosch, the first of which is “The Anxious Prince”: “be or not/ to be or/ not to be/ or not to”; four terrific images by Carlyle Baker, one of which I described at my blog as “simultaneously some sort of alchemical diagram, a map of a section of an archaeological dig, a frame from a film of a dream, a ‘careworn and coffee-stained map’ of a lost country (as John Moore Williams described it), maybe even a piece of square currency from some mystical secret nation . . .” Then 2 pages of what seem like found combinations of text and graphics by Sean Burn (I think–the design of the page combines too many disparate items for me to be sure what’s what in it, but “Sean Burn” was the only name among them); some provocative computer-distortions of text by Mike Cannell, and some fascinating microbiologalizations of isolated letters by Nico Vassilakis; also five conceptual poems by Eric Goddard-Scovel that caught my fancy, especially the one called “eleven!”: “!!!11!!!!11!!1111!!!!11!11!!!!!11!”

Finally, there is an essay, “On a Letter Sufficient for Visual Poetry,” subtitled, “A Report, with a Fantasia,” by Iain Macdonald Matheson–12-pages including a page of afterthoughts and two pages of footnotes, one of them citing a poem of mine at Mad Hatters Review, so you know the thing is of the highest seriousness. My immediate off-the-top-of-my-head impression of this after only dipping into it here and there was that it was “brilliantly (and valuably) philosophically irresponsible.” I was “pretty sure I was understanding it, but didn’t think its author cared too much whether or not he was understood. The French School.” Derrida and the other relativistic French writers on literature of his time are, for me, entertainers, not verosophers (my term for serious seekers of the truth). Not that I consider entertainment of less value than truth. And it can sometimes annoy a reader into valid insights–just as the search for truth can sometimes entertain. Of course, said writers considered it an absolute truth that truth did not exist. But don’t let me get going on that. Bottom line: I extemefully approve the appearance of essays like this one as part of collections of poetry of any kind, but particularly of oddball poetry. I think visual poetry’s greatest problem is lack of them.
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Register Domain Names

Another Summer Vacation

Small Press Review,
Volume 33, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2001

The Atlantic Center for the Arts
1414 Art Center Avenue
New Smyrna Beach FL 32168
The Atlantic Center for the Arts

My opinion that the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, does more to advance the arts in this country than any other institution should probably be taken with at least a few grains of salt since it is the only arts-related institution in the country that has ever done anything for me, personally. I think that few will believe I was wrong to publicize it here when they’ve finished this column, however.

According to a book about the center, The First Decade, it was dreamed up and founded in 1977 by Doris Leeper, a distinguished visimagist (i.e., painter/sculptor, in my special lingo), its purpose being to give “talented artists at mid-career the opportunity to work with outstanding Master Artists . . . (in) a uniquely open workshop atmosphere unencumbered by preconceived boundaries or expectations.”

So, starting in 1982 with poet James Dickey, sculptor Duane Hanson and composer David Del Tredici, two or three “Master Artists” have conducted residency programs at the center every two or three months–with up to ten “associate artists” (the artists considered to be in mid-career) working with each master artist (and getting free room and board). Many well-known poets have done stints as master artists at the center such as Dickey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Philip Whalen, John Ashbery, Amy Clampitt, Robert Creeley and Jonathan Williams.

So far as I know, Williams was the only otherstream poet invited to the center as a master artist until my master artist, Richard Kostelanetz (and even Kostelanetz, however still under-recognized by the powers-that-be in the surface of American Culture, has had an immense number of books published, many of them by establishment publishers, and has gotten previous grants). It would be pleasant if there were some organization in this country that identified rather than merely re-identified (or, in the case of most of them, misidentified) master artists. But, the ACA must be commended for bringing in the likes of Kostelanetz.

The scuttlebutt is that Edward Albee, second master artist at the center, and now chairman of its national council, was instrumental in allowing Richard to scoot in. Be that as it may, Albee seems to be equaling James Michener in helping out other artists, the center being only one of many enterprises with that aim that he’s a consequential part of. So, if he weren’t already on my list of Important Cultural Figures for his incontestably major accomplishments as a playwright, he’d be on it for his nurturing of the arts.

For the most part, Kostelanetz, understandably, chose friends in visual poetry as his associates: me, Kathy Ernst, Scott Helmes and John M. Bennett; the younger associates–Josh Carr, Pat Greene, Fred Young, Hesse McGraw and Michael Peters were mostly people recommended to him by friends. In short, it was the standard who you know game. We had to fill out application forms, though. Still, Richard did pick one or two associates from among submitters he didn’t know, and Kerry James Marshall did likewise, I’m fairly certain. (He’s the excellent painter who was the only other master artist present during my stay (a composer having disappointingly dropped out for some reason). So it’s worth writing the center or going to its website, to find out how to apply for either a residency or an associateship.

Physically, the center consists of interestingly blend-with-nature buildings emerging out of dense palmettoey Florida vegetation, planked walkways of the kind associated with beaches connecting them. It includes a library (with computers and Internet-access), field house (which was the Kostelanetz group’s work room), painters’ studio, sculptors’ studio, theatre, dance studio, recording studio, computer room, administration building and dining hall, plus clumps of very nice motel-like rooms for associates, and three cottages for master artists.

I spent the best part of my ACA time in the field house or at a computer (Kostelanetz supervising me and the rest of his charges beautifully, via encouragement only). While in the field house, I worked on poems. I spent my time at computers learning Photo Shop from Ernst (with lots of help from other associates) and applying what I learned to turning out new visio-mathematical poems, and–later–finding out how to make computer videos from Young, which enabled me to make a crude short on what I’m trying to do in my long division poems.

This I presented at a show&tell thing at the end of our stay that was open to the public (in conjunction with an exhibit of our work). An unprolific poet generally lucky to do three new poems in a year, I got ten new ones done in my three weeks at ACA, three or four of them major (for me), plus three collaborations with Bennett (no one escaped collaborating with him!) that I also deem important, and parts of some quite intriguing group efforts.

I spent a lot of near-best time gabbing with and viewing the work of fellow artists, including those in the very talented, if not as wacked-out as we, Marshall group. The food was super-good, too, though not fancy. And we even had a field trip; it was to the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive in Miami, which had lots of terrific visual poems and related matter not there when I last was. The only negative of my stay was that no bigtime arts patron took a gander at my work and decided, on the spot, to become my Prince Ludwig II. But, hey, visibility is starting to seem more and more not totally impossible for us visual poets! So, watch out, world!

You kids showed such good creative use of the idea of making mathematical poems, that I thought I would show you another kind of arithmetic you can use to make a poem: long division.  The above is an example.  To understand it all you have to do is treat it as a long division example that uses words (or pictures) instead of numbers.  That means it is telling us that if you divide “BIG” by “little,” your answer will be the sun–with a remainder of “Hi!”  It has a remainder because the sun times “little” doesn’t quite equal “BIG,” it equals a “smile” (or so I say!)  A smile, the poem says, needs to have “Hi!” added to it to equal “BIG.”  Okay, it doesn’t really make sense the way proper arithmetic does, but my hope is that it will give those who see it a happy feeling of a smile as something little that has been multiplied by the sun, and with a friendly greeting added to it become BIG. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my long division poem as much as I’ve enjoyed your addition poems, and that some of you will go on to make more mathematical poems.

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By the way, if you think you may be interested in the nutty way I think about long division, click HERE.
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Staples.com Coupon

Comprepoetica BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY of Contemporary American Poetry

This file was begun 12 October 1997.  Some of its entries, condensed and perhaps otherwise modified, will eventually appear in the Comprepoetica Dictionary of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetics & Poets.  Both those entries used in the dictionary and those not will be kept here for the life of this site.

Note: some of the entries here consist of the raw materials of biographies only; due to the sitemaster’s not getting around to finishing them.  For this he begs the reader’s indulgence.  He would very much appreciate being informed of any mistakes any entry contains.

Index of Biographical Entries

Charles Alexander
Chris Alexander
Kit Austin

Maura Alia Bramkamp
Michael Basinski
David Beaudouin
Thomas Bell
Ken Brandon
Janet Buck
Bill Burmeister
Harry Burrus

Brandon Carpenter
Joel Chace
Blaise Cirelli

Dark Poet
Catherine Daly
Michel Delville
Debra Di Blasi
Thomas Downing
Joseph Duemer
Patrick F. Durgin
Patrick Thomas Durgin

James Eggeling

Eliza Jane Farley
Annie Finch
Chris Flink
Sely Friday

Tim Gilbert
David Gitin
Henry Gould
Bob Grumman

Crag Hill
Michael Helsem
Jan D. Hodge
Jenny Houston
Louise Huebner

Jo
Pierre Joris

Scott Keeney
Michael Kelleher
Karen Kelley
David Kopaska-Merkel
Richard Kostelanetz

Ralph La Charity (bio missing)
Pete Landers
Geoffrey Lavelle
Billy Little
Brent Long

Bill Marsh
Courtney Maxwell
Errol Miller
Sheila E. Murphy

desiree niteowl

Mark Ostrowski
Danielle Oviatt

Clemente Padin
Mark Peters
W.T. Pfefferle
Mark Prejsnar

dan raphael
Rochelle Ratner
Johnathon Reinier
Rebecca Reynolds
Harland Ristau
trace s. ruggles
Laura Ryder

Joe Safdie
Brian A. Salchert
Tony Seldin
David Shohan
Alan Sondheim
Douglas Spangle
Harvey Stanbrough
Hugh Steinberg
David Stone

Aviva Vogel

Irving Weiss
Bobbie West
Laura E. Wright

Daniel Zimmerman

Biographies on the above can be found in separate files, each for poets and critics whose names begin with a given letter of the alphabet.

The State of North American Vizpo, Part Two

Small Press Review,
Volume 41, Numbers 7/8, July/August 2009

      Poetry, Volume 193, Issue 2, November 2008
      Edited by Christian Wiman
      100 pp; 444 N. Michigan Ave., Ste.1850,
      Chicago IL 60611. $5.50 ppd./copy.

      po–X-cetera
      Webmaster: Bob Grumman
      http://comprepoetica.com/newblog/blog01758.html

Because too few poetry critics really tie into a poem they’re discussing, and just about none that treat visual poems, I’ve decided to interrupt my overview of what’s going on in the precincts of current visio-textual art to zero in on one of the pieces in the Poetry gallery I wrote about in my last column, Scott Helmes’s “haiku #62″ (which is on view at my blog, URL above). It’s a great piece, for one thing, as good as any current visio-textual art I’ve seen. But it should also allow me to say a few things about the non-verbal aesthetic value of text in visual art that I don’t believe anyone else has.

At first, I thought “haiku #62″ entirely non-verbal–“asemic,” as those making averbal textual designs call it. It has a few words and word-fragments, but they didn’t seem to mean much, aesthetically. It was a portrait of a standard American haiku, because its title said it was, it consisted of three “lines” like such a haiku, and because it had text, if not significant words. Moreover (and this is something else I overlooked at first), its text is entirely oriented as literature–all its letters, that is, are standing straight up.

Now, however, I see that its employment of pure text plus non-representational design as the 5/7 of a traditional haiku makes a word in its third “line,” “place” aesthetically important for naming where it is as both strongly a visimagery place (“visimagery” is my newest coinage for “visual art”), but also a textual place (with linguistic potential). The “sq ft of” in the 5/7 portion suggests (lyrically and amusingly) that measurement, definition, something not haphazard, is required to make the color and shape of the third line create a place. So I now classify it as (barely) a visual wordwork.

To go on, it is superb even if taken as purely visual. Fonts, letter-sizes, colors repeating and varying and contrasting all over it–with a haiku delicacy and serenity; its three main shapes suggesting fragments of autumn, things afloat or in flight, and the momentariness that haiku so much represent, but also clearly out of the bright brittle of High Commerce.

The text, as pure text, does more–and here is where, I hope, I get meaningfully into the question of what attributes of non-verbal text can carry out useful functions in visual art. So far, I’ve found five such attributes: (1) it’s recognizable; (2) it’s tonally significant; (3) it’s auditory; (4) its elements have direction; (5) it is symbolic.

(1) That text is recognizable, or familiar, is particularly advantageous in a nonrepresentational work of visual art by acting against disorientation or alienation, giving an engagent spots to rest his eyes in–and landmarks to use (cartoceptually) in traversing the piece. Text will make what it’s in to some degree comfortingly resemble a printed page, too–the way the circular forms I like to put in my non-representational visual artworks suggest moons or suns to give what they’re in the look of landscapes. This seems unarguably true of “Haiku 62.”

(2) That text can make a significant tonal contribution to a visual artwork. Cursive results in a tone much different than print does, and various fonts can express many different tones. In the Helmes piece, it provides a sharp Madison Ave. contrast to its over-all haiku ambience. Tonality is important, but I can’t see how it can ever be central.

(3) That text consists of elements that for the most part can be pronounced, or partially pronounced (and which most people will automatically sub-vocally pronounce, however slightly) will add an auditory dimension to the artworks it’s in. In some cases this can be exploited to major effect. The auditory effect of “Haiku 62’s” text seems to me minimal–which is one reason I find it very close to the borblur between poetry and visimagery. On the other hand, the escape it seems to be making from language into more ethereal realms is not minor. . . .

(4) Closely related to (1) is text’s having direction–letters face right (for the English-speaking), thus acting as unobtrusive arrows. Hence, text can be used to guide an engagent’s exploration of what it’s in more dependably than anything else other than actual arrows (if that’s what the piece’s creator wants). Its having direction also gives a piece a tone of going somewhere, of having purpose, and motion toward a goal. At the very least, it gives a piece a greater feel of location than the piece would otherwise have–or, another expressive element for its maker to work with–as I feel Scott Helmes did to excellent effect in his piece, albeit very possibly unconsciously.

(5) Most obviously, text adds a symbolic layer to a work of visual art it’s in. Freshness, since visual art is generally . . . visual. Vivid contrast, as well: something wholly abstract next to (and/or containing) something wholly sensual (color). More than that (according to my theory of psychology, at any rate), an egagent will not (really) see the text, he will read it, or try to. So the piece with have a sort of “underscore” of symbols. It will be much weaker in an asemic piece than in something with significant verbal content, but it will still be present, and the engagent will still experience it in two different parts of his brain, his visual and his conceptual awarenesses. If he does this both at once, he will get into Manywhere-at-Once, as I called it years ago, naming it the most important destination of poetry.

A Little on Cyber-Lit, then Cycho-Lit

Small Press Review,
Volume 34, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2002

American Book Review.
Volume 22, Number 4,
September/October 2001; 32 pp;
The Unit for Contemporary Literature,
Illinois State University, Campus Box 4241,
Normal IL 61790-4241. $4.

The Chair on the Way to the Fire.
Martin Koenig. 30 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $5.

I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun.
Al Ackerman. 103 pp; 2001; Pa;
Popular Reality, Box 73, Schenectady NY 12301. $8.

I got semi-excited when I saw page one of the September/October issue of American Book Review: it announced a special focus section on “codework,” or “the computer stirring into the text, and the text stirring the computer,” as Focus Editor Alan Sondheim put it in his introductory piece. At last, thought I, a not-entirely-invisible publication is covering a school of poetry I myself haven’t yet come to grips with! The first discussion in the section that I read, which was by Talan Memmott, disappointed me, though. Memmott presented a good brief over-view, I guess–with links to people doing valuable work in the field, notably Ted Warnell. But he failed to suggest that anyone was doing anything very new. Sure, some people, like Brian Lennon, are making formal poetic devices of e.mail devices, like headers, to good effect, and I much like the faster-than- page-turning clicked steps of some of Warnell’s pieces, but such innovations seem minor to me (as innovations). Nor does Memmott succeed in making a case for poets like the talented Mez’s finding “new uses of textual symbols” that result in a new “form of conductivity.” He seems unaware of that such pre-computer infraverbal poets as E.E. Cummings were using punctuation marks expressively, and achieving coinages constructed like Mez’s “e-rrelevant” and “distinct[ure]ion” (both of which I much like) years ago.

Memmott and the other contributors to the focus section, McKenzie Wark, Beatrice Beaugien, Belinda Barnet and Florian Cramer, are well worth reading, particularly for the poems and excerpts of poems they use to illustrate their discussions. I haven’t space here to treat them a hundredth as fully as they, and “codework,” deserve. I do believe they are closing in on something of high value; I just am not yet convinced that it is in any important way yet new. Kudos, anyway, to American Book Review for clearing the way for the discussion of a kind of literature it will take the mainstream at least another ten years to get to (and another ten to do so penetratingly).

Now for another plug for Popular Reality, putting out books again after the revival of the zine of that name a couple of years ago. Its latest two titles, The Chair on the Way to the Fire and I Taught My Dog To Shoot A Gun, are terrific. The first of these consists almost entirely of purposely crude-seeming line drawings sans details (e.g., faces with no eyes, hairlines, eyebrows, mouths except in profile, etc.) and their banal, completely pertinent but somehow disconnected captions. One of the drawings shows a cigarette-smoking deer with a man’s body behind a diner counter; it is labeled, “Would you be a deer and work nights at a greasy spoon?” Another, perhaps my favorite, shows some kind of bird in profile speaking to a creature that’s nothing but a head-sized shape with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty’s crown in outline, from behind, and two lines angling away from the shape to suggest a cape. A few horizontal lines cross in front of the peculiar couple. The highest has a few jags in it to suggest leaves or sunrays; two others make partial boxes or curve one way or another to suggest who knows what. The caption: “Sometimes these things work themselves out.” Many of Koenig’s pieces, like the latter, somehow resonate with archetypal feelings of dislocation, and are thus–for me–poetic; they are also very funny about taking any part of life seriously, in the tradition of Glen Baxter, B. Kliban and Gary Larson.

As for the Ackerman title, it does nothing to disabuse me of my opinion that Ackerman is the funniest writer I know of in this country. Certainly he is as good at portraying total nuts’ incredibly creative (and logical) schemes to wrest beauty and meaning out of life than anyone who has ever written–though Flannery O’Connor at her best comes close to him. He is a master of funny drawing, too: as a depiction of one of his gap-toothed loons, de-focused into at least two faces, and in ravishingly-vivid color is on the cover, and several of Ackerman’s drawings in the books interior demonstrate. The stories–well, here’s a brief taste: “And I (a girl named Suzy) think that’s exactly where fortune turned around for me, opening its arms and welcoming me to a whole new vision and ball game. By the end of the week, once I had put Blind Ka and the garage firmly behind me, I met a wonderful new man, who was part-owner of a used bookstore and knew how to have fun and be sociable and could even play a musical instrument (the snare drum), but who, so far as I could tell, never felt compelled to cover his face with anything more exotic than his own boxershorts, which came hand-picked from the Goodwill,” and this found ad from Popular Mechanix, 1951: “OH BOY .. . mom says there’s going to be a TELEVISION set in our NEW REFRIGERATOR!”

Drat. I wanted to talk about Tundra, an excellent newish magazine of and about short poems, and american poetry (free and how), Igor Satanovsky’s excellent new collection of very funny textual who-knows-whats and weirdly emotion-stirring mergings of lines from famous poems and graphics from who-knows-where, but I’ve run out of room. You’ll have to wait till next issue to find out more, I’m afraid.

The Ever-Visible RK

35 Years of Visible Writing: a Memoir.
Richard Kostelanetz. 54 pp; 2004; Pa;
Koja Press, Box140083, Brooklyn NY 11214.
http://kojapress.com. $23.

As everyone reading this should know, Richard Kostelanetz has been a leading otherstream poet for a number of decades. His general mode of working as a poet is to find some feature of words that few if any other poets have exploited, and build several thousand poems exploiting it. Well, maybe only a few hundred. Anyway, 35 Years of Visible Writing contains many of the best of them, with a valuable commentary by the author on his practice and philosophy as a poet.

Making the book by itself close to a visual poem is its design by Igor Satanovsky, who provides just the right images of Kostelanetz’s work in just the right places not only to near-perfectly accompany Kostelanetz’s commentary but flow interactively into a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts, to use an expression Kostelantz says in the book is a main aim of his as a poet. Nothing stunningly brilliant, just a lot of things elegantly and sensitively applied. For instance, Satanovsky alternates white on black with conventional black on white pages throughout much of the book. The first exception to the alternation is a . . . minimalist canvas, I’d call it, filled with “69” over and over in black on a white background. The constant op-art reversal of the “6” (or is it the “9?”) is given an extra charge by the sudden white background where black was expected. Elsewhere, a lefthand page contains one of Kostenetz’s “corner poems,” as I guess I’d name them, in which the corners of the page is occupied, respectively, by “WORDS,” “VECTORS,” “VIBRATIONS” and “POEM,” in white, each oriented in a different way (i.e., perpendicularly upward, and the reverse, and horizonatal, and upside-down). On the facing page is a variation of the same poem that consists of the same four words and orientations plus twelve other “inter-resonant” words that form four smaller corner poems. That it switches to black letters on a white page makes it seem like a jump from night into day.

Satanovsky does all kinds of other things with different-sized type, text going up and down or in circles or elsehow, shaped swatches of text, and the like–always enhancing Kostelanetz’s discussion and works, never intruding on them.

Among Kostelanetz’s works are several of the cut-up and reassembled specimens of a photograph of Kostelanetz from his Reincarnations that Satanovsky has deftly scattered through the book to constantly break a face into the otherwise rarifiedly hyper- conceptuality of the book. Reincarnations differs from most of Kostelanetz’s work here (and mostwhere) in being wholly averbal. But it is typical of that work in its sequentiality, its anti-conventionality (though others using the same ploy over the years have cost it some of its original impact), its constructivist minimalism (each frame being made up of 80 rearranged squares), and–at its best–its focused aesthetic wallop.

A page from Kostelanetz’s well-known and popular East Village series of 1970-71 is here, too. Each of these is a little map of some portion of the East Village, but with little squares of hand-written prose description, commentary or simple naming replacing buildings and streets–and placed in such a way (diagonally, for instance) as to make a highly connotative poem of the result rather than just a map.

“Disintegration” is here, too–one of Kostelanetz’s earliest and most-antholgized visual poems, no doubt because, in simply showing the word “disintegration” disintegrating visio-onomatopoeically, it doesn’t take much on the part of a spectator to appreciate it. Many others of the best of Kostelanetz’s word-games are here. There are photographs of his work in holography, too, with more of his discussion concerned with that than with anything else.

The book ends with a description of the 2001 installation he collaborated on with HyunYeul Lee, a grad student at MIT, as part of a group exhibition titled ID/Entities. It sounds like something that should have been captured on film. Here is what Kostelanetz writes about it: “I offered autobiographical texts which she incorporated into an extraordinary multimedia installation that was faithful to my esthetic in nearly all respects, ambitious in using several projections, and rich in the use of my verbal materials. Into a setting that resembled a writer’s study with a desk, typewriter, and a wooden chair next to a simulated window on the left side and a fireplace on the right she cast several kinetic projections of my words and only my words.” As critic Barbara Pollock wrote, “. . . words–animated and projected–replace the writer. . . . lines of text dance across (his) desk, jump in and out of (his) inkwell, and rumble across the window in traffic patterns. . . .”

Kostelanetz’s commentary is always informative and fluid. I don’t know why he considers some of his poems visual, though. His strings–poems in which meaningfullyricalinkingots go on for scores or hundreds of words–are purely verbal, as far as I’m concerned, for example. He considers them “visual” simply, I take it, because his removal of spaces is a visual act. But so is writing a letter. He also considers such of his InSerts as “GrasShopper” and “CrumBled” visual because “capitalization is essentially a visual enhancement.” But so is underlining, bold-facing and italicization, so I consider it a textual operation, and would give Kostelanetz’s InSerts my own name for such texts: “infraverbal,” since they depend primarily on textual manipulations going on inside words rather than inside sentences, as is the case in traditional poetry.

I also think some of his poems are better described as prose. I’ve written about that in my blog, beginning with the entry on his “circular poems” that I posted early in January at http://www.reocities.com/comprepoetica/Blog/OldBlogs/Blog00337.html. Whatever they’re called, though, the best of them are among the best and most important we have from the past 35 years, and Kostelanetz more worth arguing with about poetry than just about anyone else around. (But WHY did he have to say at the very end of his book that he favors “black and white as the sole colors indigenous to art, believing that all other hues belong primarily to ‘illustration?’”)

Breaking into Micro-Zine Publishing

Small Magazine Review, Volume 1, Number 3, August 1993

       stained paper archive, #1 April, 1993; 8pp.; 1792 Byng         Road, Windsor, Ontario N8W 3C8 Canada. $1.            Found Street, #2 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; 14492 Ontario Cir.         Westminster CA 92683. $2.

    
    Recently two new zines have come out that nicely demonstrate a  favorite theme of mine: the ease with which someone without  official credentials can become an active participant in the world of  experioddica.  Indeed, the editor of one, Gustave Morin, is only  twenty, and first learned of poetries beyond the merely textual just a  year-and-a-half ago.  Now, having made a dozen or so contacts  through the mail, as well as a few in person, he has published his  first issue of stained paper archive, and with it brought himself  up to the level of-- well, Me!     The word, "stained," with its suggestions of both taintedness and  stained-glass windows, nicely fits Morin's zine, which is both  inexpensively thrown-together and chapel-serious in its devotion  to Art--if you can conceive of a chapel with a sense of humor.  Production-wise it is interesting, as it is made of sheets folded  in half and stapled together--not, as expected, along their folded,  but along their open, edges.  The resulting pages are thus doubly-  thick, which gives them not only extra opaqueness, but a feel of  substance, of archive-level durability.  At the same time, the staples,  the use of xeroxing for printing, the size and lack of exact  uniformity of the pages, and their being open at the top and bottom,  adds an appealing content-before-packaging vigor to the zine.     One of the issue's three pieces by Morin, a few lines of nearprose  about a "man/ with hair/ in the palm/ of his hand" that the  protagonist "cannot pull (his) eyes away from," is somewhat weak,  but saved, I think, by its title: "two freaks" (my italics).  His  other two contributions are collages.  In one a man is shown using a  pole to try to put some kind of indecipherably-inscribed plaque into  an enormous mouse-trap where cheese would ordinarily go.  The other,  whose title is "virus," depicts a number of a's crossing a gap  from one enlarged cross-section of skin tissue (or the like) into  another.  Language as means of snaring the monstrously unknown  (God, say), and as ultimate, infectious utterance of human cells. . . .  So run my first thoughts toward "solutions."     The issue's other pieces are, like Morin's, deceptively simple-  seeming.  One, by Greg Evason, features the image of a fork  without its handle--but, isolated (and black), it takes on eerie  tooth-resonances (sharp black teeth going up, blunt white ones  descending), and hints of archaeology, with its emphasis on bone-  fragments.  It also suggests something of the power of Motherwell's  imagery.  Sharing the page with the fork is the near-word, "nife."     Evason is also represented by a full-page text rendered nearly  illegible by over-printing--except at the bottom where the words,  "gonna die," fall free to indicate the only unobscurable certainty any  life can contain.  A fascinating Klee-like "Y bird" by Daniel f.  Bradley and an amusing if slight poem by jwcurry about light bulb  shards complete the issue's contents.     Tomoyasu, an LA visual artist who's been involved in experioddica  for only two years or so, began publishing broadsides, and his full-  scale zine, Found Street, last year.  This hasn't gotten him fame,  but it is a form, however marginal, of cultural exposure, and  that is something no serious would-be artist can afford to disdain.     One thing I particularly like about Tomoyasu's second issue of  Found Street is that it contains work by people I'm unfamiliar with.  One such, the minimalist Brooks Roddan, is represented by two pieces.  One consists of the bar code, price and other commercial data dot-  matrixed onto the record jacket of a recording of a Bach standard  ("the Goldberg Variations") by Glenn Gould.  Its title says it all:  "The Genius of Glenn Gould."  Roddan's other piece is even  simpler; indeed, it could not be more simple, for it is just an  upright black rectangle.  But, from its title, "Rebellion," we know  that the rectangle is also an I, isolated from the many but squarely,  resolutely, and broad-shoulderedly committed to itscause.     Tomoyasu himself contributes a fine full-color cover drawing called  "End Art," in which a Shahnesque man is shown running out of a  mixture of music-score and verbal text with a grandfather-  clock/coffin under one arm.  Elsewhere in the issue is a typical  Tomoyasu illuscriptation consisting of the words "Jesus Door" and  the image of an upside-down headless doll.  There are many other  intriguing works in this issue of Found Street, including a droll  pair of cartoon faces (or awkward mittens, or cow udders, or who-  knows-what) by well-known mail artist, Ray Johnson; the two faces  or whatever are identical except that one is labeled, "Ray Johnson,"  the other "Jasper Johns."     I would consider Found Street state-of-the-art experioddica,  and stained paper archive inferior to it only in quantity of  contributors.  Neither required much money to publish; both  accomplished things of cultural value outside the interests of  pricier magazines.  Both make me proud to be a part of the  nearly penniless but thriving and open world of experioddica.