Archive for the ‘Pronouncements & Blither’ Category
Entry 1754 — Interlude
Monday, March 16th, 2015
The day got away from me, and now it’s almost my bedtime, so just the following for this entry:
A Dogma: For someone to say that he could have been a great poet if he’d wanted to may be true, but it reduces to “I could have been a great poet if I could have been a great poet.” To be a great poet requires having been born with both the ability to become one, and a temperament that compels one eventually to desire being one. Ability, which most people seem to think the only real requirement, is only half the requirement. Ergo, to become a great artist or verosopher of any kind is simply to follow one’s instincts. They will inevitably get one to one’s vocation and all that is needed to be effective at it. Note: I have arguments for this position.
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Just something I quickly wrote but like enough to make sure I don’t lose it: “I almost fully agree, John–but I think effective haiku can be and have been written in the 5/7/5 form. One problem is that so many people seem to think the 5/7/5 form makes a text a haiku. However, to be a haiku, a text needs to include the haiku resonance–or some equivalent of it. My rough idea of that is something experienced due to the resolution of strong tension between two effectively represented disparate (possibly even incongruous) images that puts one experiencing the haiku in (implicit) touch with some universal archetypal truth–usually very simple like ‘time goes by’ or ‘spring can’t be far behind.’ Intensity of experience rather than broadness is what counts. Different but equal.” Something to come back to and expand upon? Maybe.
A further thought: a haiku produces a cliche too unexpected not to be full appreciated viscerally. All archetypal truths are cliches. A major purpose of art is to uncliche them. Note: I’ve never felt I had a good grasp of the archetypal, although I’m sure of some of them. I don’t think I’ve defined it. Maybe I will get around to trying to.
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Entry 1727 — Re: Kinds of Views
Tuesday, February 17th, 2015
I feel I have very few 100% views. I also believe that if I were able to express all my political and religious views, my average view of just about everything would be right in the middle. However, this would be completely accurate, for my median view–
Ooops. I mean the mode, er . . . modal? view. I was best in my 5-unit college class in statistics but, except during the time I took the course, have never been able to remember the differences between “mean,” “mode,” “median,” and “average.” Well, the last was permanently imprinted on my brain by my brother Bill when he taught me what batting averages, and decimal numbers were when I was eight or nine. I will leave the terms alone, but I can barely contain neologomaniacal urge to find better names for these things. I’d dump “mean,” and use “average,” which seems much better known. How about “midvalue” for “median?” Although “median” is fine. “Mode” is the only one that bothers me. “Emphaterm?” I’m not serious.
Back to my views, which are not in the middle of everybody else’s but to one extreme of the other of everybody else’s. (Mostly.) Okay, I am maxilutely convinced (i.e., 99.9999% convinced) that Will Shakespeare wrote Hamlet–although bits of it may have been added or subtracted by others–and therefore maxilutely convinced that those who disagree about this who have studied the matter are psitchotic, fully psychotic, or extremely stupid. I am 57.32% convinced that a few well-placed neutron bombs would immensely improve the world in the long run (i.e., the happiness the survivors would experience over the next hundred years would make up hugely for the unhappiness they would experience over the next ten years, and it is likely that fewer would lose their lives due to war than the bombs killed, although that would depend on the right people’s being sufficiently in power to control the world after the bombing). I use this example (and would add that I doubt I’d be able to order such a bombing as US president, unless under serious attack by some other nation) knowing the knee-jerk reaction to it of far too many in order to exemplify honesty.
Which veers me into cursing the way-too-many who can’t simply disagree with others’ view, but must condemn those holding them as monstrously evil on both sides of the electorate, but most visibly, it seems to me, on the left–probably because they are in control of the media. I’m 80.811% in favor of going all-out to find a way of separating those capable of objectivity about politics and religion and those not, and taking the right to vote or hold office or other consequential government position away from the latter–with certain exceptions, like allowing generals, admirals and police chiefs to have political or religious psitchoses. On this question, as on many others, I feel I would be open to reasonable compromises. I could even convert to the other side on issues I was less that two-thirds convinced of.
The book I had an intense desire to spend all my writing time except emails, Internet exchanges and blog entries for a few hours a week or so ago, and still hope to clear time for a strong effort at would be in part my describing as many of my emphatermic views as possible. (I see the adjective for “emphaterm” stinks. That’s enough to completely kill it. I think nouns should always be easy to smooth into adjectives.)
“Emphanoom”: noun meaning “mode.” Adjectival form: “emphanumeral.”
When I open this space for this entry, I just happened to be thinking about the kinds of views I have–mostly (semi-intelligent, I think) extremist views. I intended to jot that down, although I’ve written about it before, then just kept on going, although eager (thanks to a zoom-dose, or caffeine plus a hydrocodone pill) to get on with my review of Sabrina Feldman’s The Apocryphal William Shakespeare. Now I have well over 600 words, enough to want to hit a thousand for the entry, which is stupid: I should not care how many words I devote to a piece of writing, only care about writing what my topic requires, no more, no less. But shooting for something I can quantize is near-impossible for me to resist–continues Robert as he crosses the 700-word mark . . .
. . . and returns to the subject of neutron-bombs to criticize one of his favorite cultural figures,, Isaac Asimov, for saying, Isaac Asimov also stated that “Such a neutron bomb or N bomb seems desirable to those who worry about property and hold life cheap.” One view of mine that is severely blasphemous (because so many people hold human life as sacred) is that property (other than the bodies people live in) can easily be more valuable than human life, because in so many cases capable of causing more human happiness than the continued existence of a substantial number of people–in ways other than simply removing a hundred people who, un removed, would have killed a thousand people, or the like. But even from a sentimental point of view, what Asimov said was dumb since a neutron bomb would almost certainly be used in place of a regular nuclear bomb, so probably not causing many more deaths than not using it would.
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Hey, I just thought of something I meant to bring up about how my Poem poems differ from the mainstream poems of our time: their flow-breaks are more adventurous. This, by itself, should make them capable of greater expressiveness, but only does so slightly. However, it does make them harder to speed-read, which I consider a cardinal virtue of any poem so long as not over-done (and here, as I guess is the case more frequently than I’ve suggested above, I’m in a neither too little or too much middle).
I’m usually too lazy to spend much time on my flow-breaks (in my solitextual, or textual-only, poems), which are mostly standard line-breaks, but often enough include interior line breaks or infraverbal li breaks (like the one I just made) for my flow-breaks to be noticeably different than the standard ones of mainstream poems.
Here I remembered the Asimov passage I spent some time on above, and crossed the thousand-word mark discussing above. So I can quit working on this entry now, with no entry needing to me written tomorrow., which is especially good, because I have tennis in the morning and a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon (about my esophagus, which may have some kind of obstruction, but I don’t think it does, nor that it will be a serious on if I do . . . not that I’m not worrying about it, as I always do about physical things not quite right with me.
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Entry 1714 — Further Beyond the Decimal Point
Wednesday, February 4th, 2015
Right of the Decimal Point, Part Two
(An Extreme Rough Draft)
Back to Calasso’s text, “How can we know something that doesn’t let itself be known? In only one way: by becoming to some extent that thing itself.” If one accepts my definition of “knowing something,” it is vacuous. Note: I would try to determine Calasso’s definition if I were concerned with addressing what he thinks his text means, but I’m more interested at the moment in what I think it means. Perhaps later I’ll try to understand it from his point of view. I just want to emphasize here that what some writer means by what he said is not necessarily the only its meaning, or even necessarily its best meaning.
For me, Calasso’s first statement is, “How can we know something unknowable?” Answer: we can’t. If the thing is material, we can perceive it. It has nothing to do with whether or not it lets us. I see I may be expressing another dogma of mine: that every bit of matter in the universe acts in accordance with what it is, and no other way. There is no such thing as will, If billiard ball A is hit by a second billiard ball, it will react in accordance to what it is (mainly a sphere of a certain hardness and weight), where it is, and what laws of nature pertain to its being struck the way it has been. It has no say in the matter.
Ditto the behavior of the atoms in an H2O molecule—and the atoms in each molecule of a person’s body. The universe’s behavior is determined by what it is, period. Now, then, if we jump into metaphysics, we can hypothesize a randomizer that can emit chance-rays from time to time that minutely make a few quarks misbehave, so that the universe will be unpredictable, each minute change eventually having extreme effects. But the universe will remain deterministic, but with its behavior determined by laws in absolute effect almost all the time instead of all the time, and to some degree determined by chance.
I can’t see how any piece of matter can have will. How, for example, can a man tell himself to throw a ball to one of two friends and not to the other “freely?” The question for me would be, “how can he prevent what he is from doing exactly and only that which what he is and his circumstances force him to do? There’s an infinite regress involved. Let’s say the man “decides” to throw the ball to his friend Jack. I say that what happened (in effect) is that a mechanism in his behavraceptual awareness will have analyzed the data transmitted to it about what’s going on, and evaluated all appropriate responses to it in its repertoire and activated the one with the highest score. Ergo, the man did what he did because what he is includes an executive mechanism that is what it is.
The man’s brain will cause him to experience a feeling his language will have attached some words like “I am throwing a ball” to, although he won’t ordinarily track down the words for the feeling, just feel he is in charge of throwing the ball as he does so.
In a sense, the man’s arm is in charge, but only because it is what it is, not because it will ever have more than one choice about what it does. What we call free will, then, is most often (or always, I’m not sure which), that which we exercise when what we are determines an event we participate in more than what the other elements part of the event are: when the man throws the ball, the ball goes where it does partly because it is what it is in shape and weight, partly because of the relevant laws of nature, but mostly because of the thrust given to it by the man’s arm—which in turn was determined by a brain state due to the way its machinery chooses behavior.
This is one of the many areas of philosophy that I consider ridiculously simple but have trouble using words to describe. We do what we do because of what we are because of our genome because of some coming together of those genes in our genome at some previous time because of the presence before then of various atoms and molecules, etc., etc., down to because of the what the universe is.
Political free will is everything you can do, or elect not to do, because of what you are versus everything you have to do, or keep yourself from doing, because of what the state is as well as because of what you are. Social free will is a little different. It is what your society rather than the state allows you to do, and includes the ability to ignore the external determinant involved (i.e. society) whereas you lack that ability concerning what the state make you do or avoid doing.
The ability of the state to punish you for disobedience to its rules make it able to curtail the size of your free will, but you can still exercise all your free will if willing to risk punishment or even suffer it. That, of course, depends on what you are.
Yes, I definitely feel like I’m a third-grader trying to teach a very simple subject to first-graders (with sixth-graders making fun of me behind my back).
Anyway, to get back to free will, there are three kinds of will: (1) the will freely to do or avoid doing everything that what you are allows you to do or not do; (2) the will to do or avoid doing everything that what you are allows you to do or not do except that which some entity or group of entities will punish you for doing or not doing; and (3) the will to do nothing except what your external environment makes you do (because of what you are).
Will number two is what religions that believe in free will allow you to have. It is idiotic because you either have to do what your priests tell you to do or be punished, but you have no control over whether you are able to obey your priests: that depends on your executive mechanism, and you were stuck with that, you are the slave of that, you did not visit a shop selling executive mechanisms, or brains with such mechanisms or the equivalent in them before you were born. Or, if you did, the equivalent of a brain you then had, or what you then were, determined your choice. (See what I earlier said in passing about the eternal regress involved.)
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Entry 1711 — Right of the Decimal Point
Sunday, February 1st, 2015
Today, some ragged boilerplate I’ve had versions of here more than once before but am continuing trying to find a way of expressing that might find a larger audience than my writing at this time has:
Right of the Decimal Point
In his review of (a translation by Richard Dixon from the original Italian of) Robert Calasso’s Ardor I’m currently partway into, David Schulman selects the following “insight” of Calasso as “of great value, and moving to read,” “How can we know something that doesn’t let itself be known? In only one way: by becoming to some extent that thing itself.” Schulman describes Calasso’s book as “a reading of the Vedic metaphysical world,” which pretty much explains the quotation. That Schulman himself has written a book called More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India explains his reaction to it. My own instantaneous reaction to it: “Pure Gush.”
By the time, not many minutes thereafter, that I stopped reading the review and began this, I had a better opinion of it: “Rather interesting Pure Gush.” At this point, the review, the book reviewed, and my idea of Hinduism (which I call “intelligently ignorant”) had combined with my innate (intelligently ignorant) self-confidence to urge me not simply to write what I’m writing right now, but to consider it a possible start to a book about my entire philosophical outlook, and the idea that I will be able to make that book something many readers would enjoy.
Be that as it may, my non-instantaneous reaction to the quotation is that I’d have to read Calasso’s book properly to judge it. Instead of doing that (although I may get Calasso’s book), I’m going to describe why the quotation, if incorrectly taken as a statement out of nowhere, is Pure Gush, not to dump on Calasso but to define Pure Gush—and get into my “entire philosophical outlook.”
By”Pure Gush,” I mean, simply, eloquently- and/or intelligently-expressed opinionation with not only no empirical support, but no possibility of empirical suppport. Pure Subjectivity, in other words. Or, generalizing on the basis of what I’d term “post-axiomatic undefinables,” with the proviso that the search for truth can’t go anywhere without undefinables. I believe one of the essential function of what I call verosophy, by which I mean any search for significant truth, as importantly opposed to just science so including fields like history and philosophy . . . An essential function of versosophy is the reduction of the number of axioms dogmatically beginning an understanding.
I define an axiom as any necessary undefinable that, so far as we know, does not follow from any other possible axiom—or cannot actually be defined. The Calasso quotation concerns knowing something, which can and should be but isn’t defined (as I, remember, am assuming although Calosso may well have defined it in his book). I am now going to define it, using axioms I find valid: “knowing something” means “having encountered an environmental stimulus that one’s nervous system has converted to a brain-state one’s brain considers a piece of knowledge.”
The axiom involved in my definition is that knowledge equals perceptual experience of material reality, and nothing else—except mind. A related, necessary axiom is that nothing exists (for me) than my perceptions of material reality—and my mind (and memory of my perceptions of material reality). My over-all philosophical outlook begins with (1) the axiom that something exists that I call material reality; (2) something exists that is aware of material reality that I call my mind; and (3) that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Material reality is the final face of reality; in fact, it is the only possible face of reality. Hence, something called a rock that common sense considers outside us is, for us, only a brain-state caused by a chemical reaction (or some equivalent I’m ignorant of), that was cause by some previous chemical reaction when light from some object the person involved considers a rock hits the eye. All that counts is the final result. Everything else is irrelevant. To babble about the rock’s being a bunch of atoms that are a bunch of quarks, etc., does not change this. The brain-state will remain the rock for us no matter what science finally decrees it “really” is.
My supporting reasoning for what I’m trying to say: there is no difference between a chair that we perceive as a rock and a rock that we perceive as a rock; hence it is what we perceive a thing as being that counts, not any unknowable verity about it.
I’ve just recognized that I have to posit secondary axiom, and call the first 3 “primary axioms.” No, let me call the first axioms “physical axioms” and introduce “metaphysical axioms.” My first metaphysical axiom is that other human beings possess minds that are not perceptible. I accept this as a superior possibility because I like it1, and it makes analogical sense to assume that because my body and my thinking are quite similar to the bodies and thinking of others, they are in every way like I am (although possibly never exactly like I am in any way). Does my outlook have any more metaphysical axioms? Frankly, I don’t know. I expect we’ll find out at some point.
Warning; throughout this text I will be digressing all over the place, for I expect to be compiling notes toward a philosophical outlook rather than anything reasonably unified. I’m an old fart without the time for anything better. While in this digression, let me add that I am beginning at pretty extreme fundamentals, thus saying little that is new and much that will seem, and possibly be, more than a little unsophisticated. Puerile, obvious, null . . . Stick with me, though, and I’ll begin getting subtle, albeit much crazier. (I tend to consider myself both more stupid than the worst famous philosophers and more intelligent than the best of them. Without the latter, why would I be writing this book?)
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Entry 1691 — Another Deep Dip into Blither
Tuesday, January 13th, 2015
Many years ago some broad lured Surllama, as Kevin Non-canonical Kelly was then known, from Port Charlotte, Florida, where I live. He ended hundreds of miles away in some West Coast State whose name escapes me. As a contributer of wacked-out poems to the publication Lost & Found Times, probably the most otherstream publication ever, with two pwoermds in Ampersand Squared, Geof Huth’s anthology of one-word poems (“dwenrch” and “tonguesill:), the broad thus cut the otherstream poet population of Port Charlotte to one.
We’ve stayed in touch, sorta, since then, but his Internet presence seems mostly confined to Facebook , mine to e.mail and here, so we haven’t been exchanging much more than helloes and hilarities of one sort or another.
A week ago, though, he posted something by Jon Rappoport at Facebook that annoyed me. This resulted in an exchange here, which has gotten me tottering ever-so-who-knows-where. Here’s what it said:
From the Things That Make You Go Hmmm file:
“It’s important to understand that the professionals who put the most emphasis on the brain as the source of consciousness are also the people who drug it, sedate it, coerce it, and try to control it. They’re going mad trying to reduce life to purely physical terms. They’re agents of destruction.”
– Jon Rappoport (via Disinformation)
I’m going back to it to present my detailed response to it because Kevin is having trouble with what I’ve so far said at Facebook.
1. I agree that a lot of people with credentials in fields having to do with cognition, psychology, neurophysiology, etc., believe the brain is the source of consciousness. I immediately want Jon to define “consciousness. I can’t respond until I know what he means by it–and how the brain is its source.
My impression is that certified scientists tend to consider the brain the seat of consciousness.At this point I have to distinguish the contents of consciousness, which I’ve begun calling, “consciation,” pronounced KAHN shee A shuhn, from consciousness, which experiences it. I visualize each person’s consciousness (or awareness or soul or mind or ego) as a room that a representative of each instant of a person’s life enters through the front, is experience in some way by the walls of the room, then exits through the back.
The consciousness is not part of the brain, unless you want to call it an immaterial (and thus imperceptible) part of the brain that is somehow stuck to the brain. Its contents, however, are something the brain supplies it with in some manner, one instant after another. Each such instant seems to be some different configuration of active brain-cells.
Certified scientists seem to agree with me on this, only differing from me in beliving the consciousness to be something material that somehow evolved, but it is different in kind from matter, so cannot be comprised of matter, or have evolved from it. That’s an assertion, but I feel I have strong arguments to justify it, but no time now to get into it, because it strays from the text I’m trying to respond to.
2. I think I’ve now said enough to indicate I agree and disagree with Rappoport. I agree that scientists are wrong to think that consciousness is part of the brain, but disagree that they are wrong to consider it the source of consciousness’s content. That content’s nature is entirely due to the material brain, as proven by the effect of material drugs on the brain.
3. What Kevin seems most concerned with probably has nothing to do with what the consciousness is. It is Rappoport’s belief that brain-scientists (let’s call them) are “agents of destruction.” Since they regard the brain as an unmagical physical mechanism, they “drug it, sedate it, coerce it, and try to control it. They’re going mad trying to reduce life to purely physical terms.”
My response is that many scientists don’t know what they’re doing, and those they prescribe drugs for should be wary of them. But the drugs absolutely work much of the time. I myself take synthroid because my thyroid gland doesn’t work very well anymore; without this drug, I become unenergetic and not a happy boy. This is uncontroversial because synthroid is simply a chemical that the thyroid is known to make when healthy, so it simply replaces something the body ordinarily makes on its own. I believe all the other drugs brain-scientists have come up with similarly replace chemicals a healthy body would make on its own, or with chemicals that function as those chemicals would–except, of course, for the many drugs that are attempts to help that don’t work, or work but have bad side-effects, etc.
In short, I see nothing wrong with the attempt to use drugs to try to improve brain health.
The other side of this is the use of drugs, often unconsciously, to control others, hyperactive boys, for instance. Good use and bad use of drugs is a major social problem, I agree. I have no problem with anyone’s thinking it important. But I’m a theorist interested in how the brain works. Hence, what effect certain drugs have on the brain is revealing. I have larger concerns, though: I want to know, for instance, the mechanics of how we solve problems, not the details of what chemicals are involved (however important). Ergo, I’m in another field than socio-political concerns. I just am annoyed that the misuse of drugs is said to have something to do with an invalid belief in the physicality of the brain and of life.
Note how many spiritually-inclined nuts take drugs to esacape their brains and material reality.
My return hmmmmmm to Kevin is about what I have just written. I fear it doesn’t clarify my position, at all.
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Entry 1661 — Fuzzilier Re: Pracsipience, Etc.
Sunday, December 14th, 2014
The first thought here in a continuation of my thinking about day-to-day-thinking I was annoyed into by another lawyer’s making a bundle out of the increasingly complete abandonment by our country of any belief in self-responsibility: a kid got killed by a negligent driver; for lawyers, though, the responsibility in such a case is only that of the individual who directly caused a death if he is the one with the most money who can be sued. Hence, in this case, the party sued (successfully, for over a million) was the church owning the parking lot (because some bushes got in the driver’s view and there’s no reason that should have made him slow down and be extra cautious: those owning any kind of property most make sure it is 100% safe).
That made me think about the pracsipience of the lawyers involved. Is it greater than other people’s? I decided it wasn’t. They are probably in the 60% of the people I believe are quite intelligent in day-to-day living. But they have a special talent for swindling. Similarly I believe that doctors are no more pracsipient than the rest of us, but they have a talent for their vocation (which I admire, as I do not admire the vocation of some, but definitely not all, lawyers).
On second thought, I’m not sure doctors have any special talent so much as they have concentrated some of their pracsipience into becoming doctors. As everyone concentrates a certain portion of his pracsipience. Perhaps a talent is such a concentration of pracsi-pience? (Am I unfuzzying rather than the reverse as I certainly was in my mind when I began this entry?)
On third thought, it seems to me that concentrations of pracsipience are different from a talent. The lawyer suing the church had a talent for swindling whereas my doctor has a concentration of pracsipience in the field of medicine. Of course, many doctors also have talents related to doctoring, as well. The normal academic is all concentrated pracsipiences, or must pretend to be if he is going to make a living in academia.
I forgot about my 10% of those whose pracsipience is a level above the 60%’s: perhaps it’s superior because of those with it are better at concentrating their otherwise normal pracsipience than others. In any case, those who succeed at what most people consider the higher professions like law and medicine are no doubt mostly in the 10% of people of superior pracsipience.
To be reasonably effective in the day-to-day, one needs to have the ability to concentrate one’s pracsipience in some vocation, so it’s part of pracsipience–at all levels.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t said all I want to on this topic but right now I’ve zeroed out. I’m afraid I’ll be saying more on it tomorrow. Sorry.
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Entry 1660 — “Pracsipience”
Saturday, December 13th, 2014
I’ve been thinking about a new way of thinking about anthreffec-tiveness, or an individual’s over-all intelligence. It’s new for me, but I suspect it may be close to most person’s idea of it. Anyway, it’s just a different way of sorting them for me. But I’m wondering if it may have a neurophysiological basis in the existence of a cerebral basement. I like the idea so will stick a “Pracsipiceptual Awareness” into my model of the cerebrum that is be responsible for all of an individual’s “pracsipience,” or practical, day-to-day cerebreffectiveness (“cerebreffectiveness,” remember, being my word for exclusively cerebral anthreffectiveness, which is an individual’s entire effectiveness).
Frankly, I haven’t figured out how it would work. Its mission would be to guiding an individual to maximally effective choices in his day-to-day tactical activities. Making a living, keeping house, marketing, bringing up children, etc. Not writing poetry or music, and designing bridges, etc. Not, that is, strategic cerebreffectiveness, although a person using his pracsipience will often also being using his . . . cerebracip-ience, or what he needs from his mental equipment to go beyond day-to-day living into the arts, verosophy or the other higher human activities, if there are any (right now my mind’s a blank about them).
I now have divided the cerebrum into two sections: the pracsipiceptual awareness and the cerebrasipiceptual awareness. I think of them as one under the other like the cerebellum under the cerebrum, but suspect each is all over the place. My need now is to find a way for only certain “day-to-day date,” whatever that might be, to get into the pracsipiceptual awareness, and higher data into the cerebrasipiceptual awareness. With the former passing on anything that might be useful to the higher awareness to it?
The only thing so far clear to me is that all the awarenesses would be involved with both these two new awarenesses. I must think more on it.
My first interest, though, is in sorting an individual’s intelligences or competences in his pracsipience . . . and the minor and major talents i believe just about everyone has, like the ability to sing or play bridge well on up to the ability to make large-scale scientific discoveries or novels that his cerebrasipiceptual awareness oversees. All I’m saying to this point is that each individual has a pracsipience and talents, which I think is a standard way of looking at a person’s mental equipment: intelligence, and talents. Although the word, “intelligence,” is used (in my view) confusingly too often to mean only ability at academics or the like.
My guess is that a good 60% of us are pracsipient, or effective in our day-to-day lives. Another 20% are just adequately effective in our daily lives, most of them about as pracsipient as most people except for some condition that keeps them always or occasionally . . . stupid: alcoholism, for instance, or rigidnikry (i.e., what I call a theoretical mental dysfunction that makes a person excessively inflexible of mind and cerebraffectively flawed in a number of other related ways) or poor eyesight, etc. . . . or, interesting, excessive cerebrasipience!
A further guess of mine is that only 10% of us (not me!) are an order of magnitude more pracsipient than the average 60%, and another 10% an order of magnitude (or more, in the case of the truly mentally handicapped) less pracsipient than the just adequately pracsipient.
What I’m doing, it seems to me, is explaining to myself the fact that I find almost every one to be “intelligent” (every bit as “intelligent” as I), 80%, in fact, if I count the 20% whose basically effective pracsipience is flawed). I’m also trying to explain the not too common people I know or have known who seem to me gifted in . . . simply, living (but never, so far as I know, having the highest kind of cerebrasipience, genius). but not too many. Finally, I’m hypothesizing that I am right in assuming that what I call pracsipience does not really vary much. Except for those with extreme inborn defects, or who have suffered horrendous damage to the wrong organs, we’re all about as much the same in this characteristic as we are in . . . the ability to eat. Exaggeration–to give my drift.
Now, genius is the one talent that very few have, if you define it to mean something as special as I do. One in a million? Perhaps, although that would mean the USA has over 300 geniuses in it, and my sense is that we have quite a bit less: my friends–ME, needless to say–and what? maybe fourteen or fifteen others. Seriousfully, 300 may be right. But just a few would be have a genius an order of magnitude greater than the best of the others. The only American genius I’m even sorta sure is one, is Murray Gell-Mann; but I don’t understand advance theoretical physics or–and this is important–am not an expert in its history; therefore, I can’t evaluate the importance or originality (this latter being what I need to be an expert in the history of recent physics to determine) of what he’s done. All I can say is that he is definitely a minor genius, at least–a “minor genius” as opposed to a major one being most of thus in my genius class.
I feel certain intuitively that America has a few Beethovens although I’m not sure who they are. Nobody in America since Pollock doing visimagery (i.e., visual art) exclusively is for me a Pollock–but my opinion is next to worthless because I don’t know very much about what’s going on in either art–and the media certainly isn’t any help.
To finish up, the one firm belief I’m considering holding until new data invalidates it is that most everyone is intelligent and talented, which means they have both pracsipience and cerbrasipience (although, as I didn’t mention, some vary a lot in number of talents as well as quality of one or more talents), but very few have a talent I would call genius, and almost none a talent I would call major genius.
It occurs to me that intelligence may be my favorite subject to pronounce and blither about, I guess because the world I grew up in seemed to me to make more of it than of anything else. Ultimately it has to be–by my definition, which is “that which accounts for a person’s full lifetime effectiveness as a human being.” But the “intelligence” made so much of by the world in general is only a small part of that.
In any case, no doubt whatever intelligence is, I have a need to know it well so I can rate myself. But I also think I have simply been drawn to its study out of an innate proclivity to understand myself and others. That’s impossible without getting significantly into a study of whatever intelligence is.
I hope to say more about the loose ends in what I’ve said here. I hope also, as I always do, that a few people will read this with interest. I’d love to get feedback, but don’t expect any.
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Entry 1646 — Pronouncements & Blither, Vol. 2
Saturday, November 29th, 2014
Here’s a first draft of something I wrote today (with enjoyment) that may be a final draft (except for trivial corrections):
Seamus Heaney: “The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who we are and what we are or might be. . .” in Finders, Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001, Farrer, Straus and Girdidoux, New York, 2003.
No one who knows me will be surprised at how loath I am to disagree with a Nobel Laureate in Literature, but I’m afraid I don’t merely disagree with the quotation above, but find it a hairwidth short of being Against All I Hold Sacred. The arts, as I understand them, provide us with the beauty those of us who are supra-reptilian, at least some of the time, need in order to get through this life. They have nothing to do with getting us to “truths about who we are and what we are or might be.” Those truths are worth getting us to, but what I term “verosophy” for the search for significant truths (basically, science, philosophy, history and a few other things) are our means to them, not the arts.
What particularly angers me about opinions like Heaney’s is the implication that, hey, we can get something of value out of the arts, we can learn about ourselves! The arts have a use! They aren’t mere frivolities. Such opinions also imply that learning is much more important than simply enjoying.
My bias goes back to my constantly hearing that Shakespeare, one of my heroes, wrote Great Works because of how much his plays teach us about ourselves. Right, I would never have figured out what jealousy was had I not encounter Othello. Or been able to work out for myself that excessive ambition can be a bad thing—especially if you run into a man not born of woman due to his having been “untimely ripped from his mother’s womb.”
True, literature often explicitly has to do with us. For people like me, however, it was only occasionally an art until Shakespeare and others disconnected it from morality plays, and the like. And when poetry was able to find other subjects of interest besides people. Music, on the other hand, has always been a true art—instrumental music, that is, or music that is music alone. I’m no historian of the arts, so don’t know when music separated significantly from sung literature, but I’m sure it has by now—for, again, the supra-reptilian. The masses need words with their sounds, it would appear.
Visimagery, my term for visual art, only recently disconnected from people, and became an art, albeit not for many. The dance has no way of disconnecting from people.
Am I a hedonist for my views on the arts? Sure. But what those who look down on hedonists don’t realize, there are different kinds of hedonists: (1) reptilian hedonists, the ones who excessively and close to exclusively pursue food, sexual pleasure and those of the arts that require minimal aesthetic intelligence to enjoy, which is what halfwits mean by “hedonists”; (2) mainstream hedonists who have a healthy attraction of food, sexual pleasure, and middle-brow arts, but devote a good portion of their lives pursuing other pleasures: sports, say, or carpentry, or sewing, or religion, or charity . . . Yes, charity. I say that no one does anything unless it gives him pleasure to do it, or at least gives him less pain than anything else he is equipped to do—in his opinion.
Then there are (3) the supra-reptilian hedonists, to get back to the kinds of hedonists there are. These are the uncommon few whose hedonism compels them into the highest forms of Art (highest, because requiring the largest brain to create and appreciate, the way the highest forms of science more clearly do—because they can be translated into I-pods and incredible hallucinogenic drugs and rockets to the moon).
When I began this rant, I only wanted to tee off on what Heaney said—partly, I’m afraid I have to admit, I’m afraid I have to admit because he was so much more socio-economically successful as a poet than I—in spite of? no, because he never tried—no doubt could not try—to do anything consequential in it. Not that he wrote no superior poems. It’s just that he might have written them all, with just a few shifts of subject-matter, tone and outlook, in 1950.
Frost was the greatest such poet I know of. He is responsible for some of the greatest poems in our language, but could have written them all in 1890, with just a few shifts of subject-matter, tone and outlook. We (I mean, we in Greater England) have a fair number of poets like them now, but not one (that I know of) who was like Eliot, Pound or Cummings were when Frost was America’s most popular poet—who has been recognized like those three were.
I may be wrong. There’s the line William Carlos Williams began that may be a true shift of technique, which is what I’m talking about. But I feel he just added a new voice to what Hulme, Eliot and Pound had been doing before him—common language, fewer abstractions, free verse, haiku aims—in short, imagism. The New York poets took Williams’s later “anti-poetry” (in the sense that free verse about trite or near-trite subjects is a kind of anti-poetry) just a little bit further, with Ashbery adding the jump-cut mode of Eliot in “The Waste Land” and following the lead of Stevens by going back, much of the time, to high intellectualism—though Eliot had also preceded him there.
The Language Poets are definitely new the way Eliot, Pound and Cummings were, but none has yet the socio-economic standing of even Cummings. Several have done well socio-economically in life, but as academics, not as poets.
That’s in for this entry. Pretty wandery, eh? I’d love to be able to do five a week like it for a dozen weeks, though. Enough for a short full-length book of musings. I would be surprised if none of the many academics who have a more accurate take on Anglophonic poetry than I would not be able to find more than two or three egregious errors in my ramble. I think I’ve said more of value than any of the correct could, though. If only for some of the supra-reptilians out there. Or so I have to believe.
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Entry 1625 — Autobiographical Randiblither
Saturday, November 8th, 2014
Most people would be embarrassed to post a blog entry like I’m posting today, but I’m not!
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It’s around 2 P.M. A little while ago, I was feeling physically energetic after having done some of my physical therapy exercises, and the lawn had patches of high weeds, so I did some mowing. My mind wandered eventually into the disaster my early adulthood was. The world wasn’t set up for someone like me—a late-bloomer, I now concluded. I refused at 18 to go to college. I was going to become a famous writer right away.
All the advice given me about that turned out correct. I was far from ready to become any kind of money-making writer. I still refuse to believe it was because I lacked sufficient formal education; to this day, I don’t know what I lacked.
One thing surely: contacts. That is clearly the sole value of college: making friends who can help you into some career—friends your own age, but also friends among your teachers. I’m quite sure, though, that I would still have had trouble making us of the friends I would have made (and I would not have had any trouble making them because I’m an Aquarius and Aquarius is the sign of friendship . . . seriously, I’ve never had any trouble making friends, because—I’m sure—I really do like people).
I suspect that had I gone to college, I would have lacked direction. For one thing, my life would have been complicated by the various classes I would have had to take, and the job I suppose I would have had to have to help pay my way. The year or so I had on my own after high school, I did have focus, reading a lot of plays and writing at least three. As a college student, I wouldn’t have had time to do that. I suspect I’d have too many interests, too—intramural sports, probably, and even cultural activities—movies, maybe even parties. . . .
Politically, I would have had problems because I didn’t go along with the politics of college kids and their teachers of the time, which was the beginning of the sixties. Or maybe I would have become a drug-addict. Probably not, because I did later pretty much join the hippie movement for a year or so while living in Topanga Canyon. I was exposed to a lot of drug-use but avoided all but very infrequent non-inhalation of marijuana.
It’s impossible to say how things might have been. What interests me, though, is what may have been best for someone like me. First thought: five years off after high school. Some academics have suggested that some young people should have a break before going on to college, but not anything lasting more than a year, I don’t think. I believe I—and possibly others like me—would have needed more because of too many interests, many of them requiring self-education.
I don’t think I made a serious attempt to begin an adult vocation until I was in my thirties. It was then that I zeroed in on becoming a real playwright. Before then, I’d written some plays—the three or four while living off my parents right after high school, and one or two more after losing four years to the air force—to get my military obligation out of the way, the draft being in effect back then—and then spending a year-and-a-half working two low-paying jobs and living off my parents in an attempt to save enough money to retire at 35, when I would then write full-time, have decided on the basis of a number of rejection slips that I would never be able to earn a living as a writer. (The rejection slips were for plays and a few short stories, but also cartoons and dice-and-board game inventions.)
I stopped working both jobs upon becoming bald-headed because of my weird belief, which I still hold, that the only future worth working for would be a future as a superior person, which I defined as someone not stupid, not unathletic, not ugly, and among the best in the world at something important, like play-writing. My aesthetic standards then and now prevented me from considering someone with a bald head not to be ugly. I still thought I could become among the best in the world as a writer (as far as I was concerned, which is the only thing that counted), but there was certainly no real hurry. I saw no significant different between becoming an idolized bald-headed Major Writer and becoming a bald-headed ignored failure as a writer. Or so I say, for I have to admit I can’t quite fully believe that. I definitely believe I should believe it. (My simple idea is that one should be able legitimately to feel good about his physical capability, his intelligence and his appearance, and be confident he was doing something of high importance with his life. Unluckily for me, I once felt I was physically capable, intelligent and reasonably good-looking; I didn’t think I had yet done anything important with my life but was sure I would.)
I basically trod water for close to a decade after turning 25, a little over half of it spent working at a job of little pay and no interest to me During the decade I saved enough money to retire for five years and begin seriously trying to become a real playwright, writing the equivalent of five of six full-length plays, and spending two years as a student in the drama department of a junior college in Los Angeles. I managed to get the junior college to let me direct a one-act of my own as part of a course in directing I took, and tried to get them to produce a full-length play of mine. No dice. I also joined some San Fernando Valley playwright group that a theatre in the area was sponsoring, but too late to get anything out of it, as the moron in charge, having not discovered another Tennessee Williams in the year the group had been meeting decided to end the experiment.
I’d also twice participated in some kind of thing for playwrights in San Francisco that Sam Shepard was behind. Nothing came of that, I think partly because I wasn’t at all self-assertive, and I think you have to be to get anywhere. I’ve always assumed all one needed was talent. Maybe I was right.
I was preparing to go on for some kind of master in play-writing at another college in California, having gotten a degree in English, when my family needed me as a care-giver for my aging parents, who had retired to Florida. That seemed ideal inasmuch as I would be paid, in effect, and would have plenty of time to keep up with my writing.
My first year with my parents I submitted a few plays to various theatres and contests, getting one nibble from some jerk calling himself a director who phoned me and expressed great interest in a play I’d sent a theatre that have shown it to him, I assume. He had great ideas for improving my play, so I sent him a rewrite, but never heard back from him. I also got a phone call from the Eugene O’Neill contest, and said the wrong things, I guess, so didn’t make it into their program. I wasn’t able to tell them I could immediately fly to wherever they were—because quite surprised and confused by the call, and by then having family obligations. I’m sure I could have figured out a way to go to Oregon, or wherever it was, but . . .
Basically, I then gave up submitting plays, and worked at getting a name as a poet. Once I became well-known as a poet, I should have an easier time getting a play produced. I never became well-known as a poet.
A possible solution to the plight of people like me: find out what genes are required for greatness in some art and test children when young. Then leave them alone. What should happen is agents will sign them up, and market what such children’s genes make them eventually do. As for those without the right genes who develop a serious need to pursue a vocation they are unfit for . . . well, get them some kind of psychiatric help because (I firmly believe) a mentally healthy person will never have any great desire to pursue a vocation he is no good at. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in psychiatric help. Better would be brain surgery, once brain surgeons know enough to be able to do something helpful.
On the other hand, perhaps it would be enough to introduce the person hot to become a poet, for example, but no aptitude for it to some vocation he could be good at, and would like. I suppose it’s possible for someone not ever to learn of a vocation he’d be good at, although it’s hard to imagine.
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Entry 1096 — Contemporary Dead Poets
Saturday, May 18th, 2013
I talked myself into trying to get this blog going again, beginning easily, with a bit of Grumman boilerplate in response to a New-Poetry thread that began with a post about a review by William Logan of two books by British Poet Laureate Carol Duffy in which he derided her use in one poem of the word, “swoon.”)
In one post to the thread, Richard Wilsnack mentioned that he “happened upon this quote in Poetry magazine this past week, and it echoes Logan’s bit” :
[Philip Levine] was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.”…Fake language made bad poems.
—Mark Levine, “Philip Levine,” in Remembering Poets, Poetry (March 2102)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245418
My first thought was about how Philistine Levine is. A poet’s duty, it seems to me, is to use as much of the language he can. But do try to use it freshly.
Later I realized my biased aesthetic cerebral zone had led me astray, not for the first time. More accurately, the lofty reasoning zone in my cerebrum told me I’d gone astray. According to it (and I tend to yield to it more readily than to any other of my zones although I recognize that it, too, has biases), there are many good ways to do poetry. One surely is to use the whole language, but that doesn’t mean the use of only the words in a given narrow lexicon might not enable a poet to do things a whole-language poet would not be able to do. Key words: “focus” and “intensity.”
The classical haiku is an excellent example of the use of ordinary words only.
I suppose I would go on to say the truly greatest of poets would use all possible words at times, but also limit himself at times.
Hey, I may not be saying much, but at least I’m saying! And ultimately the issue involved, critical fairness, is consequential. In the same thread, I expressed the wish that Logan wouldn’t write about dead poets only. One witless participant at New-Poetry quickly let me know that Carol Duffy is alive. “Not by my standards,” quoth I.
I didn’t go on to state my standards, but I guess I ought to. I consider a poet to be a contemporary dead poet if he does nothing of significance (yes, here comes the boilerplate I’ve no doubt repeated more times than any other over the years) that many poets who have been literally dead for fifty or more years did.
An insult to poets like Carol Duffy? Not necessarily, because I truly do believe that a contemporary dead poet can write poems of the highest value! Such poems will still annoy me and make me call their authors dead, which isn’t fair to them, but is fair to the many poets whose work is crowded out of cultural visibility by dead poems, most of them decidedly not of the highest value. The world needs to be told that living contemporary poets exist. There may be a better way than using terms like “dead poets” to get the word out, but I’ve never found it.
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