Critical Mass (2012 Mike Freedman): Interview with the Filmmaker

In mid-July 2012 I blogged on John B. Calhoun and his experiments with rats and overpopulation. A documentary filmmaker read the post and contacted me, because he liked that I was addressing Calhoun and he'd just made a film about him, but the main topic was world human population. He sent me a password so I could watch his as-yet unreleased film. And I was impressed.

This interview was conducted at the end of 2012; I was waiting for an alert from Freedman about the official release date, and I must have missed it. I've been meaning to get this out, and Earth Day seems like as good a day as any. The film has done very well so far. (HERE's the trailer.)

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OG: Where were you born and raised, what are/were your parent's occupations, and were intellectual ideas discussed around the dinner table?

Mike Freedman: I was born in New York City and raised in London.  My father is a playwright and director of theatre and my mother was in banking.  Family dinners were a fixture, and ideas were very much discussed - questions were answered, words were defined and looked up in the dictionary.  More broadly, although my parents weren't lavish spenders on "things", they were always of the belief that money spent on books was never wasted, so visits to book stores always yielded prizes.  We were also a family that attended theatre, concerts and films and then discussed them afterwards, and as children we were allowed to have an opinion and encouraged to frame it and defend it intelligently.  Disagreement was not discouraged, so I grew up in quite an aggressive environment intellectually speaking - if you had an idea, you had to be prepared to defend it and clarify it, and taking offence at being called out on something was looked down upon.

OG: When did you first get interested in sustainability, and human survival on the planet? I saw EF Schumacher's name near the end credits of special thanks, which listed your family first, if I remember correctly. Schumacher's books on "buddhist economics" were a big deal for me along these lines, way back when I was 18 or so.

Freedman: In terms of how I viewed the genesis of environmental crises or human conflicts, I recall always seeing them as byproducts of humans competing with one another or being crowded together.  I never thought of myself as an activist, but I suppose my intellectual curiosity about the complexity of these issues simply led me to the rational view of our planet as a holistic system of which we are a part, albeit a part currently engaged in some rather systemically disruptive behaviour.  There were three books in particular that gave me the vocabulary and intellectual framework with which to navigate and share this view: The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris, The Soul of the Ape by Eugene Marais and Small is Beautiful by EF Schumacher.  Honourable mention must also go to Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal, a fantastic book.  As an aside, I should say that my interest in human survival on this planet is the same as everyone else's really - I suppose I was just raised and educated in a way that helps me to filter out the cultural programming and status-seeking noise of our social and economic structures sufficiently that I can see where this road leads if we continue down it.

OG: The footage of Calhoun was mindblowing, and you and your editor inserted the clips in very effective points in the narrative. I was reminded of something William Gibson said about narrative, that it was about the "controlled release of information." Your film does this masterfully. Say a little something about how you found the Calhoun footage and the process in which you chose to use it: simple story-boarding? 

Freedman: Calhoun's work was done using public funding, and as such the law places the films of his experiments in the public domain.  This was a very big help for us.  John Rees, the head archivist at the National Library of Medicine, was an absolute angel in terms of tracking down his boxes and tapes, and then of course finding a way to get me copies of the footage.  Without that man's help, this film would still be in my head for sure.  In terms of how we use the footage, it was always intended that we tell Calhoun's story as the main arc of the film, but with almost 200 hours of interviews, cut-aways and archive I got bogged down pretty badly.  I ended up at one point with a pretty lumpen chapter structure which the editor discarded and then strung the information out along the length of the film in a much more dramatically effective manner.  No story-boarding - after I'd logged the footage and snipped out all the tidbits I knew I wanted (which resulted in a ridiculously self-indulgent 3 hour cut), the editor and I sat down and spent our first day together discussing the structure of the film. After that, we just worked to the plan and kept grinding it out until we had it done.  The key was to allow visual breaks that still delivered information even if the audience felt that they were getting a rest.

OG: The main reason I think you have a winner here - beside the fact it's so well-put-together - is that Al Gore's power point An Inconvenient Truth film was so well-received. Now, that may have something to do with the power of Al Gore, but your issues encompass his. We shouldn't denigrate global warming, obviously, but the issues your film discusses a much larger set of pressing concerns. Gore covered global warming, and it seems you've covered everything else! The problem with films like yours, for some viewers, may be that the information is so scary and overwhelming (and this issue is addressed in your film, I know), that viewers may react with a sort of paralyzed anxious passivity, which Calhoun himself foresaw. But the film isn't all doom and gloom. There are rays of hope, a way out. What are some of the things that you have done to personally now that you have such a high level of awareness? What do you think the viewers can start doing the moment they walk out of the theater? What are some of the best organizations they may want to pay attention to? I LOVED the link to the books on the website; I've read about 60% of those and want to read the rest now.

                                  documentarian Mike Freedman

Freedman: Well, when we were making the film we knew that there was a very fine line between scaring people enough that they feel they must do something and scaring them so much that they feel there's nothing they can do.  In terms of what can be done, I would suggest three main levels of action: the individual, the community and the political.  As an individual, you have a certain range of choices that you can make, and by making certain changes you not only show others by your actions what it is that you would like them also to be doing, you show yourself that you are capable of change and capable of exerting will over your own life and actions.  The latter cannot be overstated - so many of us feel either powerless, or entrenched, calcified, not only knowing what we can do but not even feeling that we can do it.  Doing something, no matter how minor, is a step, and as the saying goes, a single step is where the journey begins.  The more you work on yourself, the more you prove to yourself that you are capable of will, of change, the more will power you gain and the more changes you can make.  The individual level of action is not only the primary but ultimately, in this wild and mysterious world, the only level of true action.  At the community level, you can work to know your neighbours, to source your food and energy not only sustainably but locally, to build genuine resilience and democracy.  I'm fond of saying that democracy functions best at the local level, municipal and at most state.  Much further than state democracy and the people who are governed are too far removed from their leaders and vice versa.  How many people from Nebraska can or will go all the way to DC to protest or deliver a petition?  So how can a Nebraska representative at the federal level truly represent his people if he never sees the majority of them, or speaks with them or lives among them.  That's why federal officials serve the interests they serve - they work with the people who are there.  In a sense, everyone else simply isn't real to them in any meaningful way.  Which brings me to the political level - certain changes can only be made structurally to our system as a whole.  Personally, I believe that we have certain flaws in the system itself that absolutely must be addressed if we are going to collectively do anything about these issues.  The money creation mechanism, the economic imperative of growth because of the debt-based nature of our financial system, the gutting of education to extract creativity and critical thinking (and also to focus purely on the intellect at the expense of the emotions and intuition of the child), the crushing ubiquity of consumer marketing and PR pablum which makes genuine civic discourse nearly impossible, the corrosive effect of money on politics, the rise of multi-nationals operating beyond the realm of national law, the Bretton Woods institutions, the homogenisation and monopoly of media production through mergers and acquisitions...the list goes on and on.  Second verse, same as the first.  These issues can't be addressed only with community gardens and blue-sky thinking - it's wrong to suggest otherwise.  But it is also true that the political level is the furthest removed from the individual's sphere of influence, and yet exerts an undue impact on the range of decisions that individual is able to make.  So if I were to recommend organisations to your readers, I would suggest looking into Positive Money in the UK (www.positivemoney.org.uk) and the American Monetary Institute in the US (www.monetary.org). Ultimately, without a complete redesign of our monetary system and economic priorities, no other structural factors will really change.  So as I said earlier, the best and most immediate thing you can do is change yourself.

OG: One things that's very impressive is the sheer number of knowers you have in the film, and how articulate and animated, interesting and passionate they are. For some people - like Desmond Morris, Jon Adams, and John Michael Greer - I imagine they were ready to give you good stuff from the start, for their varying reasons. But is there anything you do to work up an interview subject so that they become as animated as they were? What I mean is: there are a lot of "talking heads" here, but they're never boring. 

Freedman: First of all, thank you.  That was always a concern and luckily, the passion and charisma of the people we interviewed shines through.  Those people are just like that - I can't take any credit for their engagement and their excitement about their subject matter.  If I did anything, it was only preparing for the interview by familiarising myself with their work so that they could speak freely without feeling that they were dealing with someone who didn't know who they were or what they really did.

OG: Tell us about your previous work, and how long it took from gestation to finish this film. Were there any particular films that influenced you to make Critical Mass?

Freedman: Critical Mass is my first feature documentary, and also my first feature-length project.  Previously, I'd made some short films, music videos, the usual.  Although I obviously was interested in the subject for a long time, we shot the first interviews for this film in June 2010, so it's been almost exactly two years in the making.  As far as influence goes...when I was about 13, we watched excerpts from Koyaanisqatsi in a poetry class and I later tracked the full film down and it is still one of my absolute favourites.  I watch it about once a year, and it's the gold standard of pure cinema - music, montage, technique, framing, social observation, political statement, environmentalism, poetry, history...like Network, it's even more powerful now than it was then because all of those things are still happening.  The Corporation is another documentary I have a lot of respect for, and the work of Adam Curtis at the BBC is also a pretty big deal for me.  And of course Peter Watkins - I actually tracked down the editor of The War Game, Michael Bradsell, and he came and sat with me a few times to discuss cutting and structure for the trailer and for the film.

OG: When I finished watching, I thought, "Finally! The Exponential Function has its film!" I just want to thank you for this. But why isn't this stuff better-known? Why can't we think from a systems view better than we do? How come my educated friends have never heard of John B. Calhoun? 

Freedman: Okay, so one question at a time.  First, the exponential function isn't better known because it's actually very difficult to internalise.  Even making an animation of it was nearly impossible, because the numbers of little people got so big so quickly that the animator was freaking out trying to make it look good instead of just confusing.  There's a theory about human evolution that because we developed in small hunter-gatherer bands with small family units, we actually can't really picture numbers much higher than three.  There's one - me, two - me and my mate, and three - me, my mate and our baby.  Much above that is just fog to the mind since there's no corollary to latch onto. So up front it's important to say that the exponential function is very hard to get your head around. 

As to our lack of a holistic system-view, I suppose there are many reasons for that. The impact of economists in lending academic legitimacy to the destructive growth narrative we are programmed to believe in cannot be overstated.  Counteracting a dominant establishment belief will always take a lot of time and effort, and come at a great cost - if you want to know how receptive the academic establishment can be to new information about the world, look up a man called Ignaz Semmelweiss. He tried to tell doctors that they should wash their hands before delivering babies in the late 19th century and their response was to tell him he was crazy. He died in an asylum and a few decades later, Pasteur and Lister proved him right. Nowadays I can't eat an apple without my wife yelling at me to wash it first. Economics is only really now, and barely at that, starting to acknowledge the existence of the natural world as an important limiting factor on growth.  Our planet doesn't come with a manual telling us what the thresholds and limits are, so as long as the prevailing mindset is one of 'progress', i.e. growth of human numbers and material throughput, the lack of a line in the sand allows for the excuse that since we don't know what the limits are we can get away without worrying about them. That argument obviously is as attractive to politicians as it is to economists, and that helps dictate the narrative structure of our society and therefore what we grow up knowing about the world around us and our role in it.  The overtly non-holistic nature of Western thinking also has a lot to do with it. Our educational and financial systems, our industrial capitalist ideology, our advertising and creative landscapes are worlds of components, of isolates. Factor in the denigration of emotion and instinct in favour of the intellect and you have a recipe for a society that does not see a world of intimately connected life-spirit-matter-energy engaged in a constant feedback from all parts to all parts.

Why haven't your friends heard of Calhoun? Calhoun retired from NIMH in the early 1980s; a new director was appointed who changed the focus of their work from understanding behaviour to medicating behaviour. Calhoun saw the writing on the wall - it was clear that NIMH was focused on targeting behaviour with drugs rather than understanding and working with behaviour in a more organic way. His work, which is all about complexity and nuance, didn't fit with the new idea that there should be a pill that solved the symptoms and therefore there would no longer be a problem. That might explain why his behavioural studies were de-emphasised in academia from that time on. There's also the over-simplified interpretation of his work, i.e. crowding causes violence, which when put in those bald terms is not a defensible assertion; that reduction of his work was used to 'debunk' him in the minds of some sociologists, such as Claude Strauss-Fischer, with whom I exchanged a spirited series of emails during my research on the film. His experiments and his broader viewpoint on where humanity might be headed and what we could do about it kind of fell in the memory hole. This was a man who predicted the internet as we know it today, including tablet and handheld devices (which he called 'new information prostheses'), in 1970. His ideas on evolution and the future of our species were and remain to this day not only remarkable but unique. I suppose it's inevitable that he's largely unknown. He didn't invent anything of immediate potential for commercial exploitation by the establishment and as such he remains less famous than the guy that came up with the Pet Rock. Go figure.

OG:  What do you anticipate will be the main lines of negative criticism from Big Biz reviewers who would feel threatened by the ideas in Critical Mass? I think you have massive Truth on your side, but I'm scared/disappointed by how Monsanto et.al. were able to sway Californians from saying yes to the labeling of modified foods...as merely a minor example.

Freedman: Criticisms:

1. Environmentalists in general and population concern in particular is really just misanthropy - they don't like people, they don't want them to have nice things and they're wrong.

2. Any talk about the subject of population is really just an undercover attempt to encourage eugenics, sterilisation, genocide and coercive population control.

3. People aren't just a mouth to feed, they have two hands to work, innovate and create, so net production is higher than consumption.

4. Everyone on the planet could fit into [insert name of small country] shoulder to shoulder, so there's plenty of space.

5. Tertullian thought the planet was overpopulated almost two thousand years ago and he was wrong, so any assumptions about carrying capacity are pointless.

6. Everything is fine now and therefore always will be, and Chicken Littles always make plenty of noise about whatever.

7. We've always managed to produce more food than we need.

8. I'm an agent of the Illuminati hellbent on the eradication of 80% of the world's population in line with the suggestions made on the Georgia Guidestones by our lizard overlords.

Responses:

1. It isn't and we're not. I like people and I want them to have nice things like clean air, drinkable water, healthy food, personal space and mental/emotional wellbeing.

2. Population concern did originate in its modern form out of some rather unsavoury eugenics movements during the early 20th, and terrible things have been done in the name of eugenics and coercive population control. I am not in favour of coercive population control, I think that the manner in which current coercive policies are enforced is barbaric and as an asthmatic bespectacled Jew with allergies whose wife has scoliosis and had a full blood transfusion at birth, I can assure you that I am not remotely advancing a eugenic argument in any shape or form.

3. Physically true, arguably specious but largely irrelevant since the theme of the film is crowding and its impact on us in a qualitative sense.

4. I've heard this many times and all I can ask is: if we're standing shoulder to shoulder, what do we do if we want to sleep or poop? Another semantic point which ignores the truth of our situation.

5. Tertullian did think that, and for the record the empire he was living in collapsed, but let's leave that aside for now. I don't use the word "overpopulation" if I can help it, and I personally don't argue about 'too many people' - what matters to me is the quality of the individual human life experience and a kinship to other living things. We are not talking about carrying capacity per se, but what limits (crowding included) can or will do to us and our life on this planet. I don't think that's a pointless conversation.

6. Someone will always be convinced that the world is about to end. However, it's equally true that someone will always be convinced that it won't. Watch the sinking of Hy-Brazil from Erik the Viking and you'll see what I mean - http://youtu.be/d8IBnfkcrsM.

7. So far that's been true, and don't get me started on the inequity of food distribution in the world, which is a serious problem of economic and political power rather than genuine supply.  However, the uptick in food production in the 20th century was largely due to the work of Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work - he's credited with being instrumental in feeding over a billion people. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Borlaug said (and you can check Nobel's website if you want) that no advances in food production would make a difference in the long run if we didn't also look at population. In fact, if you took that excerpt from his speech and sent it to your average 'concern debunker', they'd probably write him off as a hardcore Malthusian rather than the guy that saved a billion people from starvation.

8. I'm nobody's agent and I'm not hellbent on anything, least of all eradication of anyone. I can't even stand up without grunting these days. Georgia is a lovely state (and also a very cool country), but I've never been to nor read firsthand the inscription on the Guidestones. I receive no endorsement, funding or creative input from reptilian extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings. Fact.

OG: When is the film due for release?

Freedman: Good question! I'm talking with distributors now, and our best case scenario is looking like six to nine months for securing broadcast/theatrical/DVD. No date fixed as yet.

OG: Are you showing it at any festivals or special showings in large cities?

Freedman: We've been invited to a festival in Canada in May which I can't disclose yet as we're still talking with them, and we've submitted to several festivals throughout the world that, if we were accepted, would be happening over the next four to six months.

OG: What's the distribution looking like right now?

Freedman: At the moment our strategy is looking like educational only for six months, then commercial release once we've placed it with a theatre chain or broadcaster, followed by DVD and online. Nothing fixed yet.

The earlier the better, or just before it comes out and generates a buzz? What are your ideas?

I think that at present, anything we put out there would be buried in the Yuletide snowdrift. Best to wait until there is some sort of event or announcement, either a distribution date or festival appearance. If that's alright with you.

OG: "New Documentary Film Critical Mass Will Do For Human Population What Al Gore Did For Global Warming"

Freedman: I like the ring of it and the sentiment, but two concerns occur to me, both of which might very well be me being over-cautious.

1. Al Gore is a dreadful hypocrite.

2. Al Gore showed that global warming was bad, so would that mean we're saying people are bad? Or can we be confident people will understand that you mean raising awareness?

OG: When you approach financial backers, what's the short explanation when they ask, "What's it about?"

Freedman: "Critical Mass is a feature documentary about the impact of human population growth and consumption on our planet and on our psychology." 

That's the elevator pitch. I've got it down to the point where I can reel it off in one breath.

OG: How do you feel about being compared to Al Gore?

Freedman: Well, on the one hand it's encouraging that people feel the film does for population what he did for climate change, but on the other, as I said above, he's a dreadful hypocrite, so hopefully they mean the comparison in relation to his film and not to his behaviour.

OG: I loved the stuff about the empowerment of women, near the end of the film; it reminded me of Bucky Fuller. 

Freedman: Thank you. Interestingly, when we showed the film in the US there were cheers at that part. In the UK and Europe, not so much. So perhaps Americans need to hear it said out loud, or perhaps Europeans are more numb. Who knows?

I'm a fan of Bucky Fuller - I actually was reading Critical Path in the run-up to making the film. And I tried to have a prototype of his fog gun shower built as part of the 'solutions' section at the end, but there weren't any available working blueprints for it.

OG: I saw that you interviewed Derrick Jensen and and Aubrey de Grey, but they apparently got cut. With Aubrey, I imagined it was because the problem of living to 200 and the environment was too much for a film already brimming with ideas and possible future scenarios? How was Jensen? What do you think of the life extension people like Aubrey?

Freedman: Derrick and Aubrey didn't make the film for two different reasons.  Derrick was actually interviewed over the phone for what was meant to be a podcast, but the line was bad and the sound was unusable. However, the conversation gave me so much food for thought that I felt he deserved a credit. Aubrey was interviewed on camera, but our conversation was much more future-oriented and the film deals mainly with how we got to this point and what the present situation is, meaning there wasn't room for adding in his particular brand of futurism. Both Aubrey's and Derrick's conversations with me are now chapters in a book that I'm putting together which (fingers crossed) may be available soon. I just need to transcribe two more conversations, write the conclusion and do the endnotes.

Derrick was inspirational to put it mildly. He's not a man everyone will agree with, but he speaks with straightforward honesty and passion (and compassion) and that is truly inspiring.

Aubrey would say that he's a rejuvenation biotechnologist, not a life extension guy. I'd say that consequence and mechanism are not that easily separable in his field. I think that if he (or one of the other labs working on it) is successful, the timeline of how things unfold will be much less egalitarian than the way he perceives it. 

OG: Do you have an opinion on Jared Diamond's book Collapse? 

Freedman: Jared Diamond is the only person I contacted who declined to be interviewed for the film. Two others, Mike Ruppert and Robin Dunbar, simply never got back to me, but Diamond said no all three times that I asked him. That moved his book off my immediate list of reading because I had to read the work of the people I was meeting, and because of that I haven't read it. What I do know is that I interviewed Joe Tainter who wrote The Collapse Of Complex Societies and he is quite unequivocal about the fact that he finds Diamond's scholarship in Collapse to be dubious. The way he put it is that Diamond's thesis is the basis of the book rather than the evidence of how collapses actually unfolded. I couldn't possibly comment as I haven't read it.

OG: Are there any others that have come along recently that you'd like to share with my readers?

Freedman: After a hardcore two years on a non-fiction diet, locking the picture on the film drove me to seek refuge in fiction, ironically dystopian sci-fi to be precise. In the past year I read (among others) The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth and The Death of Grass by John Christopher, a book that I now desperately want to make into a film (although it was adapted - in a typically 70s hack manner - by Cornel Wilde). I've also been reading material for research on two other docs I'm developing, as well as quite a bit of Ferlinghetti's poetry recently. I also read Black Elk Speaks (the annotated anniversary edition) last year - there's a passage in there where Black Elk describes his people as an ever-eroding island in a sea of white men which I found quite affecting. Next on my list of dystopian fiction is Paolo Bacigalupi - several of my friends have gotten religion about his work, so I'm going to check it out. 

As an aside, you reminded me that I only put non-fiction on the reading list on our website, and there are two fiction books (not admitted by the authors to have been influenced by Calhoun, but nonetheless thematically consistent and from the same time period) called Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison and Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner that I need to add. I got in touch with Harry (who lives here in the UK) about interviewing him for the film - he's still very much of an opinion on population, but we never found a place to put it in the structure so we never shot it.

Regarding The Great Bay, I'll look it up - it reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine about Arizona Bay, the coastline formed when California falls into the sea. If I'm not mistaken, that was also an Edgar Cayce prediction?

Again, thank you so much for your passion for the film. It's very encouraging and I'm proud to have you as an ally.

Metaphysics and Overspecialization: A Meander

Woody Allen once talked about the time when he was expelled from college because he was caught cheating during the final exam in Metaphysics, when he "looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

Aristotle
The subject of metaphysics is something I will never truly understand, but I'm cool with it. It's a blast to try to understand. There are many, many metaphysical roads to take from Aristotle, who is generally credited with being the first to tackle metaphysics as a "science" or a topic in philosophical thought, even though he didn't use the word, apparently. Along with a lot of hand waving and trying to field answers from students about "ultimate things," he variously called what his translators have labeled as metaphysics: "theology" "first philosophy" "first science" and "wisdom." When I read him, he wants to get at the "first cause" of things. He wants to talk about ontology, or the Being-ness of stuff. (Kant put epistemology as the "first philosophy" but I'm getting ahead of myself.) The part that has most intrigued me lately is the search for that which does not change. Given my understanding of physics, I'm not sure there "is" anything that does not change, but it's an interesting idea to think with, and I guess Aristotle was influenced by Plato here, at least a little.

The semantics of "metaphysics" among non-professional philosophers (like the OG) has always seemed a mess, but as I get older, that bothers me less and less. Just think of what metaphysics implies: thinking about things that are above physics. Or beyond physics. It's supposedly a topic that addresses those things that have no mass, no atomic or subatomic structure and no energy. I usually see the topic as what Max Stirner called a "spook": we humans can make up all kinds of things and ideas that simply don't exist, and then reify those "things." And yet, as some sort of humanist type, this notion of metaphysics goes back so far...it's a part of us. And therefore, it can't be negligible, even if it's just made out of words.

Aristotle's origin of all things was with the Prime Mover. For a good time over the next month, mentally insert "Prime Mover" in place of "God" every time anyone says it or writes it...or you think of It. Report your results! ("For Prime Mover' sake! Put the toilet seat down once every blue moon!")

Words
I remember where I was when it happened. I was sitting in a room a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, near the Los Angeles harbor. I was half-awake and listening to some scientist answer questions on the radio. He said something about language and neuroscience and I started to perk up and listen attentively: it turns out that language, our words, have physical status. It's hard to pin down, but neural imaging, studies of brain damaged people, and our understanding of synapses and learning...the words we use are all tied up with larger neural clusters (made of atomic goo and having some weight and mass)  that have to do with our being human beings with bodies and living in a world with language...but the words themselves have some physical, ontological status, even if it's hazy and difficult to pin down. They're taking up neural space. It made sense: language does not Speak from On High to us. It's not "out there" and emanating from some Superior Being. It's a biological property, and for abstruse evolutionary reasons we developed it to a very high degree, compared with our other-ape cousins. And a lot of it seems localized in the brain - language, that is - and it's so enchanting to other parts of our brain that most of us seem to think that language "really does" reflect "reality." It "actually" maps anything "out there" into words, in a perfect fit. If we're stunned and "can't find the words to express...," it's only due to some temporary imbalance. Possibly of the humors. Or not enough coffee. Too much wine. Not enough sleep. You're freakin' stoned again?

Topics
What are our thought-chains that lead us back to privately pondering the origin of matter, what happens after death, whether there's a superior, even transcendent intelligence inhering somewhere, or a perennial favorite: why is there something rather than nothing?...or why we find ourselves getting all worked up over other peoples' answers to these questions? For me, often: mortality thoughts. And, especially in groups of friends and acquaintances of "curious, breathing, laughing flesh"(Whitman), we're already outside our ordinary "reality": drinking some wine or other inebriant accomplices, jousting with witticisms, stoned on weed, euphoric in music, coming down softly from a whirl of flirtation. I know these states get me going on some metaphysical topic, but often I keep it to myself. Although I do like to hear where you stand. And why.

                                                   Habermas

Jurgen Habermas (and Marx)
I see Habermas as the Noam Chomsky of the European Union, committed to rationality and saving Europe from monied interests. (To my German and other European readers: I apologize in advance for the paltry riffs on Habermas I'm about to play.) Habermas, now in his 80s, is still fighting for something saner. He's made splashes in legal theory, political theory, sociology, psychology. (Here's a blogger-champion to read on him.)

I first became interested in Habermas when I heard a lecture about his idea of an "ideal speech situation," and this seemed to come of his historical views on the rise of literacy and media, coffee houses and newspapers. Everyone should be allowed to speak their view, without fear of recrimination. Metaphysical appeals are the wrong way: we should talk about what's demonstrably "real." Only rational thought will save us. With enough of this massively democratic speech, the better ideas will out. I'm making this too simple to an absurd degree.

Anyway, since the early 1980s - when Habermas was advocating no metaphysics in public speech about our life conditions - he's gradually softened up. He now believes that the discourse of religion has its place in public speech in his massively democratic ideology. Even though he confesses he's "unmusical" when it comes to religion (borrowing a phrase from one of his biggest influences, Max Weber), Habermas thinks there's no getting around the impulse to religious thought. Even though he still seems to be an atheist, he's made amends with religion while trying to maintain his Kantian-Enlightmenment rationalistic ideal speech situation idea.

Peter Berger, reviews Habermas's slow move toward allowing religion/metaphysics. I agree that Habermas is like Edward Gibbon's magistrate, who finds the various religious beliefs of the populace, "useful."

Being a carrier of the Critical Theory tradition (even though he had some cogent critiques of Adorno, Horkheimer, et.al and their opposition to "instrumental rationality"), Habermas is thoroughly steeped in Marx's ideas about religion, that it was "the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions," and that it was the "opiate of the people." Marx: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up on a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." - Contribution To The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843.

A common reading of this goes something like this, thumbnail: Religion is a conspiracy, mostly by the Ruling Class, to conceal from Workers the actual reasons for our unhappiness. I think anyone pondering Marx (or The New Atheists, for that matter) ought realize the ambiguity here in Marx. For he might also be saying, religion has the correct insights in that our suffering must be overcome and what we really desire ought to have satisfaction, but  in looking toward religion we make a fundamental error in thinking of deriving our happiness through metaphysics, and not the nitty-gritty mundane, materialist world, which will require knowledge and action.

Anyway, one of the most renowned thinkers in the European Union had at the center of his social ideas the rejection of appeals to metaphysics as a basis for rational understanding, and now he's allowing metaphysics into that program. Which now seems primarily aimed at saving the idea of a relatively sane Europe.

I've often wondered, in the years since I read Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (I read volume 1 and only thumbed through volume 2), that the ideal speakers in his ideal democracy might need to know more than about what they've specialized in, because I've been in rooms with far too many well-educated specialists who can't understand why the other guy ain't seein' it all from his angle. About which more later below...

Very Brief Take on Philosopher Kings
I still get a charge out of the far-more ancient-than-Aristotle Chinese view of metaphysics in the Tao Te Ching: "That which is above matter is the Tao." Hey: it's a decent take. Or at least it makes it for me.

There was a time when the Schoolmen, the Scholastics, doing philosophy as theologians, were The Cheese intellectuals in the West. When they decided to hold the Renaissance, starting on January 1, 1500, some Humanists, artists, engineers, poets and political philosophers began to get a piece of the action. By around 1860, Natural Philosophy (AKA "science") began to rack up win after win. And this held sway through the Roaring 20th century.

Richard Rorty said the Philosophers had always insisted that, no matter what others thought, theirs was The Cheese all along. They had constructed a bunch of elaborate systems that placed something between the individual and the world: Mind. Language. History's Laws. But theirs was the discipline ne plus ultra.

Whatever, it had always been assumed, says Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, that the role of philosophers was as meta-cultural criticism and the assumption that only philosophers had a "God's Eye View" on all the other sub-disciplines and fields of study. It was even up to philosophers to tell the lesser historians or economists or psychologists or anthropologists to do more of this, less of that.  We're never going to arrive at a One True Real Copy of Reality if you keep doing that sort of fieldwork! Do something else. The very picture of Plato's Philosopher Kings. As the renegade Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner called it: a Platonic Complex.

Rorty says, enough with the idea of achitectonic disciplines: the true role of the philosopher is to live up to its name: love wisdom. And we do that by being Generalists: we read about popular culture and wonder what it means for sociology. We talk to some historians about medicine and get some ideas there...how can this all "hang together...?" We read the philosophy of science and then about actual conditions in labs and see if we find something there. We look at marginalized discourses and books and authors and then make conversations about what they may have to offer that is being missed by those not being marginalized. We wonder about happiness and political power and economics and language and quantum mechanics and Dark Matter...and how it all hangs together. Or might.

Rorty says: enough with the Philosopher King role. It never worked and was pretentious and it alienated philosophers from a more valuable role: as messengers between disciplines. Generalists.

(Right now witness the Third Culturalists trying to assume the role of Philosopher Kings, and attacks from the traditional Humanities and other places. Maybe start HERE. How much of it has to do with funding and prestige?)

Contra people like Pinker and Dawkins and (what I see as) their sophisticated scientism, I do not abide by the idea that there exists any meta-discourse, anywhere. (As of October, 2013)

                                          rendering of Margaret Fuller

The Fascinating Case of Buckminster Fuller's Metaphysics
Talk about a Generalist! And yet, as I parse Fuller's books, I always got the feeling that, as much as he paid lip-service to economics, sociology, poetry, and the humanities, he thinks (he died in 1983, but his ideas are still alive for me) Science is a meta-discourse. And metaphysics actuates science.

So what is metaphysics, according to Fuller? Scientific laws that express a tremendous amount of generalization from a dizzying welter of individual cases. Or, an example in Bucky-speak:

Humans are unique in respect to all other creatures in that they also have minds that can discover constantly varying interrelationships existing only between a number of special case experiences as individually apprehended by their brains, which covarying interrelationship rates can only be expressed mathematically. For example, human minds discovered the law of relative interattractiveness of celestial bodies, whose initial intensity is the product of masses of any two such celestial bodies, while the force of whose interattractiveness varies inversely as the second power of the arithmetical interdistancing increases.
-Critical Path, p.63

Fuller thinks that humans, constantly looking into Nature, using their Minds (different than the brain), discover generalities expressed in the language of math. As time goes on, these generalities get honed and become evermore exact and interaccomodative. (<----I just used a word that I'm not sure even exists, but every time I study Bucky I get infected with his unique verb-ifying language style, so I say what the hell and let 'er fly.)

But this bit about the Mind not being the same as the brain? Well, first let's get to Fuller's conception of God:

Acknowledging the mathematically elegant intellectual integrity of eternally regenerative Universe is one way of identifying God. 

Ohhh...another Platonist. Hey, whatever floats your Dymaxion House!

God may also be identified as the synergy of the interbehavioral relationships of all the principles unpredicted by the behaviors of characteristics of any of the principles considered only separately. 

Recall: Fuller is the grandnephew of American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. There's something genetic. Nevertheless, Fuller seemed Leonardo enough for the 20th century.

Oh yea: Mind does not equal Brain:

Brains always and only coordinate the special case information progressively apprehended in pure principle by the separate senses operating in pure mathematical-frequency principle. Brain then sorts out the information to describe and identify whole-system characteristics, storing them in the memory bank as system concepts for single or multiple recall for principle-seeking consideration and reconsideration as system integrities by searching and ever reassessing mind. 

Okay, this brain sounds pretty impressive to me. How can anything be better than that? Well, here's how Bucky conceived mind:

Only minds have the capability to discover principles. Once in a very great while scientists' minds discover principles and put them to rigorous physical test before accepting them as principle. More often theologists or others discover principles but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special-case testing before accepting and employing them as working-assumption principles.
-pp.159-160, Critical Path

The mind, unlike the brain, is weightless, massless, colorless, and not detected by any instrument that I know of. Furthermore, for Fuller, the physical principles that actually work to run our world of technics and know-how, are also weightless, massless, odorless, colorless, and they don't take in or emit energy, etc:

Mind and general physical principles, generalized, are metaphysical entities. And their synergy runs the world.

Fuller, in book after book, is able to think about our lives and educations and be somewhat dispassionate about the way we were trained to think of inquiry and knowledge as being separate entities. At other times he sees this as something like a conspiracy theory against Mind by powerful interests. Why so much at stake? Because, specialization gets you extinct. And we need as many people to think in creative, generalistic ways as possible if we are to avert catastrophe. Think of his God, his idea of Mind, your Mind. Does it make sense? In the introductory chapter to Synergetics he sees specialization as fostering isolation, futility and confused feelings. Humanity is "deprived of comprehensive understanding." Understanding based on the soundest metaphysical principles. Because most of us in the West were educated to specialize, we tend to abandon personal responsibility for thinking of the Big Picture, and taking social action. We let others deal with the big stuff. He doesn't say it, but he seems to equate specialization with marginalization. "Specialization's preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy."

Fuller sees art, science, economics and "ideology" all as having separate "drives" and "complexedly interacting trends" which could be understood via synergetics, but hardly anyone "in" one of those fields seems to believe this. This is threatening to the survival of the species. Giant pandas only eat bamboo. When the bamboo is gone, the panda is gone. 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct (or a like number; it's not good news), and not all extinctions were due to specialization or overspecialization, but there have have been enough extinctions, presumably, due to this short-sightedness. And we're supposed to have all the tools! We live at the equator and near the Arctic Circle, in rain forests and deserts, savannas and at 10,000 feet above sea level.

Related to this, here may be one of the brainiest conspiracy theories you'll ever read:

We have also noted how the power structures successively dominant over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a "specialization" upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided - ergo, "conquered," powerless. The separate individuals' special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary flow of total knowledge and its power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-humanity-advancing potentials. Thus the few became uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.
--p.162, Critical Path

In a slim and criminally underrated and under-read book by Fuller, GRUNCH of Giants, he goes into the history of this conspiracy by the very few to use the "wizards" for their own control of wealth and power. And if you can get with the prose style, you might find it very rewarding.

With this I abandon my typing with the idea that we've specialized too much; we've been marginalized, the survival of our species is at stake, and the deepest synergetic nexus of survival and real wealth is metaphysical know-how. I had no idea I'd end up here. Adieu!

P.S: Not long ago I was delving around in the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, and in 1948 he seems to have thought very much like Fuller on these topics. I wonder if Fuller influenced him, or Quine influenced Fuller, or this is another of those convergences that Charles Fort described as "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time." In 1948, in an essay, "What There Is," Quine said that our best scientific theories "carry an ontological commitment" to objects whose existence is incompatible with nominalism.

                                                 Buckminster Fuller

Euclidean Quotidian: 90 Degree Angles and the Semantic Unconscious

Ten Scattershot Ideas, One For Each Finger and Two Thumbs

1.) Supposedly the medieval Europeans thought Euclid's works were the same as the one we know as Eucleides of Megara, so olde books about geometry in Europe were by "Megarensis." They weren't the same dude: "Megarensis" was a contemporary of Plato; the great Euclid of high school geometry was closer to being contemporary with some of Plato's early students.

The Arabs got hold of Euclid and thought the name was made of ucli (the key) and dis (measure). At any rate, his Elements was the model of rationality ne plus ultra, and I'm writing this piece after pondering Euclid's influence on two philosophers, Vico and Spinoza, who were not the first to mimic the potent rhetorical form and structure of Euclid.

2.) In Peter Thonemann's review of three books for the TLS, note the story of the Malawi girl, who charged with learning how to set a dinner table English-style, experienced a steep learning curve, because the world she grew up in was curvilinear; there were no right angles. We had to learn the "order of things" we take for granted as "the way things are done."  I also thought it interesting that  with the Romans rolling through the peoples of Europe, they brought right angles and rectangles and ideas about straight lines and order with them, the Irish being the last to "convert," and it went along with Christianity.

There's a question of the "reading" of artefacts from the long-dead: if they built with right angles, was their social structure more authoritarian? Some think so. Others think what matters is the initial posit and then iterated forms that grew from there. Mikhail Okhitovich, Soviet sociological thinker of the 1930s, asserted that right angles originated with private land ownership, then extended to architectural forms, and represent a non-communistic mode of thought; because of this curvilinear forms in architecture were the best and most egalitarian form.

Before rigid hierarchical forms of State, what was often found were circular forms, which have a center but seem to resist hierarchy...on some level. Do Euclidean forms give rise to a form of thought that permeates a culture, and if so, is this idea mostly unconscious, part of the paideuma?

Many non-communist Left-ish thinkers have assumed that dwellings based on rectangles and 90 degree angles were somehow metaphors for artificiality, non-organicism, or simply convention, and living in "boxes" tended to encourage conformist social ideas and a stifling of creativity. Look at any fat book on great 20th century architects and buildings. Look at Buckminster Fuller.

3.) A pop kulch example of a leftist strain in American thought is found in this folk song: "Little Boxes." Boxes and conformity. Boxes and restraint. Boxes and the suburbs, Levittowns.

4.) The distaste for "boxes" runs in countless intellectual and aesthetic fields. While Nietzsche lays out with this probe: "Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude," and we are left to wonder, our contemporary Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his Bed of Procrustes, "They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; the go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidean, smooth boxes." (p.31)

5.) Art critic Jed Perl wonders about the state of painting and painters in today's art world. At one time the rectangle frame of the painting was a given. The artist played an outre role in society. But now practically all competing media are either rectangle shaped (iPod/iPad/iPhone?), or text is read within a rectangular-ish frame (the screen you're using now?); further: images in the most popular media are dynamic inside a rectangular frame: TV, films, the camera frame. Could it be that the "degree of stabilizing supremacy of that rectangle has been undermined by the technology that surrounds us?," Perl asks. He knowns painters. It's his milieu. And Perl asserts that today's painter, because of the static image inside a rectangle, has been forced to go on the defensive or offensive, which presents a new hindrance. At the same time, Perl asserts that painting is not dead.

6.) In what appears to be an untitled poem, Tony Quagliano:

I read this poem about geometry
or shadows
or was it poetics, or
some analogy among the three---
that sounds right
a poem about science and art
itself some artful connection
opting for the poem of course (being a poem) slyly
saying math's impure
or at least not pure enough
for one geometer not impressed by Euclid
or more impressed by non-Euclid
or some such twist
and what gets me, why I mention this at all, is
that the poem was good

though no one bled directly in it
words were clean, scientific
stitched in artful lines for the anthologist
and while a slashed wrist would have to wait
this poem of shadows, or math
or some connection in the courtyard of art
this fragile suture, poet to geometer, takes life
over your dead body
and mine

and it was good
which is why I mention this at all.
-p.65, Language Matters: Selected Poetry

7.) I remember reading about some hotshot engineering students - probably at CalTech? - and the problem of stacking oranges at the grocery store. Because of their roundness, there's far more non-used-up space (AKA "air") between oranges. How to maximize the number the oranges stackable? Well, you obviously make square oranges, using the Lego-mind. Easier said than done.

I hadn't thought much about shipping containers and how they have made the world seem far smaller and distance irrelevant until I read Andrew Curry's fine piece in Nautilus not long ago. "Invisible to most people, (shipping containers) are fundamental to how practically everything in our consumer-driven lives works." As for packing as much stuff into a space as efficiently as possible, it doesn't get much better than shipping containers. ("Invisible to most people...")

Score one for rectilinearity.

8.) One of the Prophets of Euclidean space and modern consciousness, Marshall McLuhan, in 1968:

The visual sense, alone of our senses, creates the forms of space and time that are uniform, continuous and connected. Euclidean space is the prerogative of visual and literate man. With the advent of electric circuitry and the instant movement of information, Euclidean space recedes, and the non-Euclidean geometries emerge. Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician, was perfectly aware of this change in our world when he took Alice through the looking-glass into the world where each object creates its own space and conditions. To the visual or Euclidean man, objects do not create time and space. They are merely fitted into time and space. The idea of the world as an environment that is more or less fixed is very much the product of literacy and visual assumptions. In his book The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics Milic Capek explains some of the strange confusions in the scientific mind that result from the encounter of the old non-Euclidean spaces of preliterate man with the Euclidean and Newtonian spaces of literate man. The scientists of our time are just as confused as the philosophers, or the teachers, and it is for the reason that Whitehead assigned: they still have the illusion that the new developments are to be fitted into the old space or environment.
-p. 347, Essential McLuhan, from an essay, "The Emperor's New Clothes," originally in Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, co-written with Harley Parker. McLuhan asserted in 1968 that "the artist is a person who is especially aware of the challenge and dangers of new environments presented to human sensibility." McLuhan thought artists were subversive because society expected the replication of existing orders and forms, but artists violated these expectations.

Three thoughts:
a.) In 1968 McLuhan may have been far more prophetic than he thought: not only are scientists still trying to come to terms with non-Euclidean findings in astrophysics, materials science, microbiology, subatomic physics (but I do see some inroads), but going back to Jed Perl's essay on the "state of the art" in painting 45 years later, McLuhan's "with the advent of electric circuitry"...and I think maybe painting, contra Perl, may be, if not dead, in the ICU, condition: critical.

b.) When I do that mental yoga which allows me into McLuhan's thought-space, I realize how intensely Euclidean my assumptions seem, as based on the idea of Gutenberg Man and the space of the literate reader of texts, for hours every day, decades on end, eyes decoding 26 symbols with punctuation, left to right, linear left to right, left to right (THIS), left to right, punctuation. In my conditioned assumptions of quotidian reality, objects "really do" fit inside of space and time. I want them to create space and time themselves, by power of their sheer Being, capital be. But most of the time: no. I have to work on it. How do I get out of Gutenberg Euclidean head space? Cannabis, film, walks in nature, animation, humor and surrealism, reading Joyce or Pound, get into the Korzybski-Zen level of the phenomenal event-level, pre-language, observing without hypnotizing and misleading "woids," and then careful consciousness of abstracting, watching myself abstract until It all melts, or something strange in science. You have your ways.

c.) For such a overwhelmingly "straight" Euclidean man, Prof. McLuhan's (whose personal politics were a sort of conservative Catholic with tinges of anarchy?) mind was, to me, reliably non-Euclidean and psychedelic. His deep immersion in James Joyce and Ezra Pound was probably a significant influence here, but there was so so so so much more. He was an absolute virtuoso with playing with metaphors and combining those ideas with others, if only just to see if they were thrilling and made anyone else want to think about some idea in some new way. I find this an anarchist strain in McLuhan's thought. (How about I take catholic idea about the senses and think about the new electronic media, like radio of TV? I can add ideas I copped from Thomas Nashe, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Harold Innes, and anthropologists. And Finnegans Wake! And mythology, Poe, Einstein,  and painting's figure/ground and the rise of the Renaissance's vanishing point? And then: Vico! And commercials and comic strips!? And Walter J. Ong...and and and...)

9.) Robert Anton Wilson's extensions of Timothy Leary's ideas of the evolution of "circuits" in the human mind drew heavily on Euclid for the first three "domesticated primate" aspects of all of us: the oral/biosurvival circuit is about approach/avoidance and is represented in Euclidean metaphor as "forward-back." The second circuit stage of development (according to the theory, we "imprint" all of these circuits), the anal/territorial circuit, is about up/down, and represents the deeper levels of any thinking about politics, whether within the family, local city, national, or international. Notice up/down fits well in Euclidean space-thought.

The third circuit is about right/left and for mammals like us, based on the bilateral symmetry of the body and the nervous system, which nature has seen fit to encourage a dominance of one side over the other, most people's left hemisphere's motor cortex encouraging right-handedness. Conceptual thought and left-right equations (think: algebra!) and logic all fall under the third circuit.

Although neuroscientific ideas about hemisphericalization in evolution and discrete modules of each of the brain's two hemispheres has moved away from a once-popular notion of the "holistic" right hemisphere and the "linear" left, these metaphors still seem to resonate. For Wilson, right-handedness and math and literacy in symbolic humans indicate a left-hemisphere domination (the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body) which has unconsciously biased "linear" and hierarchical forms in human history, which begins with writing. The right hemisphere, relatively "silent" and seemingly subdued by assumptions about "reality" made by the left hemisphere (especially in industrialized Western humans), has yet to harness the intuitive genius housed in the right hemisphere.

So much ink has been spilled over these ideas, once extremely popular but now seemingly in a slow descent. Nevertheless, these ideas live, as you may have noticed from a conversation within the past few months. Why?

Well, I think it's because there's still some truth to the right/left brain modularity-of-function idea, although it's not as simple as those who popularized the findings of the Sperry and Gazzaniga "split brain" experiments. Also: I think Wilson was on to something: "Right-hand dominance, and associated preferences for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determine our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.' It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows the either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid's geometry, Aristotle's logic, and Newton's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs." - Cosmic Trigger vol 1, pp.199-200

For Wilson (and Leary) there were relatively "new" circuits that have appeared in human evolution over the last 11,000 years or so. And they seem non-Euclidean, more organic, curvilinear, and more inclusive of a holistic, total-floating body sense, as if we were meant to move through space/time.

To be clear: Euclid and his forebears the Pythagoreans wormed their way into our paideuma due to the natural evolution of mammals on a rocky watery planet with an atmosphere conducive to carbon-based replicative life forms under the purview of a energy-source star at a Goldilocks distance. We got Euclidean forms because that's the way we evolve. Which may Beg the Q, but it's one of my favored narratives, and my entire brain, both hemispheres, seem to harmonically resonate with it.

[Further extrapolations from Wilson on this complex of ideas: see Illuminatus! Trilogy, pp.793-795; Prometheus Rising, pp.97-100; Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, pp.342-347.]

10.) I grew up in boxy architecture, and when I first encountered this idea - about rectangles and 90 degree angles and conformity - I also found out we forgot how we did it, but at some point we had to learn to see in 3-D spatial terms. Supposedly some cultural anthropologists had gone into deepest darkest rain forest Africa and lived with and studied pygmies, whose complete environment was always giant trees and vines and moving through those living breathing green spaces, always canopied by jungle thickness as "ceiling."And when they were taken to a clearing at the edge of the forest and the anthropologists pointed to a man and a jeep far off in the distance, the natives thought they were seeing a tiny man. They had not learned to see over vistas of "open space."

So, I lay in bed and looked at the point where the ceiling meets the walls. Two walls meet at the "point" of the ceiling. And I tried to remember what it was like to not see that as a point in space. It's akin to many visual illusions or the Necker Cube you've all seen. It was fruitless. Until, one day...O! Such little things that thrill me. Aye: the corner was on a flat plane. And then it pointed out toward me...

I attest, I assert that when I enter buildings of a non-Euclidean build, my consciousness is altered. An inventory of memories and anecdotes would bore you and me, but I wonder if you have felt the same? I love round rooms. A spiral staircase can really get me going. On and on. But here's the thing: if I grew up in a non-Euclidean house, I strongly suspect that entering a Euclidean "tiny box" house would alter my conscious also. Because I think these represent the unfamiliar structure of space...

I hope I didn't come off like some un-hep "square" in this blogspew.

Where The Hell Am I?

Often, when meditating whilst sitting quietly or even walking alone with "my" thoughts, I often use the gimmick of thinking about the Bohr Model of the atom (leave aside that it can be viewed as a "flawed" model for now), and how we're made up of atoms, which have a tiny nucleus with neutrons and protons "inside." And inside that are just all sorts of quarks and other surrealist "material" shenanigans.

And I read once in some popularization of quantum mechanics that the nucleus is so small relative to the electrons buzzing around in discrete "orbits" or "outer shells" that, if the nucleus were an orange put at the center of the 50 yard line at the Rose Bowl, then the electrons are whirling around - relatively speaking - outside the entrance gates, all around. What's "inside" all that "space"? It's empty! (But it's probably "really" not...no time to get into it now, here.)

Hell, every-thing else on this planet seems subject to the same laws of physics, and as Stephen Dedalus said, we are "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." (Ulysses, p.697, "Ithaca")

[Interestingly to me, Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1915-1922; it was published in 1922. Quantum physics would show there was a physical basis for this poetic line, but not until 1925-27 or so.]

And therefore "I" am mostly empty space. "I" just seem solid because "I" can only make investigations with the sensoria Nature gave me: clunky stuff. Gigantic, really. And seemingly a plenum of bone, skin, blood, lymph, viscera. But - and "I" still think on one level this model "is" legitimate - "I" seem really quite ghost-like. "I" only bump into stuff because the stuff "I" bump into has roughly the same levels of non-emptiness that "I" have. What a world!

Usually this has served me well: thinking of myself, as Bucky Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb." Yea: what's not all about the empty space seems more about electrons and energy exchanges between "me" and my surrounding environment. I meditate on this physics and get outside of my (mostly empty?) "self."

I end up summoning some picture of myself as a cloud of energy, with a module near the top that seems to want to make everything into some solid "meaning." But that module seems utterly foolish and but one of the modules that make up what Marvin Minsky called The Society of Mind: what's going on seems a "booming buzzing confusion" of energies, everywhere and everywhen. When I do this I've entered what the phenomenological sociologists call a "finite province of meaning." This particular province of meaning seems about blissful meaninglessness, and it's a second cousin to being stoned on cannabis, only it's still legal. For now...

Going "Up" One Level
But lately - say, the last 24 months - I've been trying to understand the human genome. It turns out to be  absurdly complex, for the OG. But it's abecedarian compared to what I found out about epigenetics. HERE's an amusing short explanation about some of what is entailed by epigenetics. He does it far better justice than I could; I'm afraid I'd bore you with my explanations about methyl groups and histones and how your grandmother's smoking habit effects your health. My favorite metaphors so far for the genome and the epigenome are this: the genome is the hardware; the epigenome tells the genome what to do with its information, and when. Talk about complexity!

So getting back to trying to find out where "I" am: who and what I seem to be is not only atoms and the void, but information inherited roughly 50/50 from mom and dad, plus the environments I've accidentally been born into or found myself in, the choices I made about what environments to go into (and "environments" here means something closer to what McLuhan meant than saying "I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County"). Although geography does seem to matter quite  a lot. But what my parents worried about, what they ate, what their parents experienced...and just an enormous amount of CHANCE occurrences seem to be a lot about where "I" am.

Then I found out something wonderfully disturbing that makes what I've mentioned so far seem trivial.

Going "Up" Another Level
In the 20th century, modern medicine finally arrived. O! The things we learned! About surgery (lots of insanely brutal war wounds provided ample practice), and what worked and what didn't, and doctors caught up to the washing their hands dealio. And we began to merge our physics (harnessing light) and chemistry with technology and imaging, and...we're on our way! We even found out we'd been acting like superstitious fools for millenia: if we wipe out bacteria, we'd live a lot longer, and healthier. And so: antibiotics (miracles!), antiseptics of all sort, cleaning products in every modern home. But we were wrong about bacteria: we need Them to maintain a healthy immune system. And oh wow: just sooooo much more.

You know this "I" that I'm trying to find? Turns out "he" is part of a system that's not only genome and epigenome, but microbiome. 90% of the cells in "me" are bacteria. And I'm healthy! "I" took a long bike ride today, got all kinds of work done, had some Big Laffs. But if "I" am 90% bacteria...I'm not sure what to think. And it turns out bacteria in my gut influences what I think and feel.

Who is running the show here?

Preliminary Ideas About Where the Hell "My" "I" "Is"
I understand the history of modern "self" hood had to do with rationalistic ideas about agency and law and responsibility. It was a convenient fiction. If some crime was committed, we want to gather the evidence and convict that rational actor for his wrongdoing and make that person "pay" a debt to another convenient fiction: The State. Or "society." But if we're driven by things our ancestors did and we're mostly empty space or bacteria, as the kids say, WTF?

At this point I take a deep breath and remember what Robert Anton Wilson said, in generalized account of what the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics: every model we make to account for some aspect of "reality" tells us as much about our own minds as it does Nature, or what's "out there." As we grew up, toddling around some environment, as mostly empty space, our genes being played by histones and methylations and other Damned Things, we were constantly ingesting atoms and incorporating them into our "selves" without knowing it. Most of us still seem blase about the whole schmeer! And even then we were mostly bacteria. And if our parents found out this fact, they probably would've killed us. Literally. With antibiotics and a lot of scrubbing.

We're toddling around and our brains are receiving signals and ignoring others, setting up our nervous system to perceive the world a certain way and - this is crucial - not other possible ways. But some kid on the other side of the world was making grooves in his brain, connecting neural clusters in a different schema. That kid was "learning" a different language, for one thing. And language, being part of the world, also influences further how we'll "see" the world, and take action. (Sorry anti-Whorfians! You're on the outs, now.)

And yet: many of us grow into adulthood and enjoy enduring alliances and deep, satisfying relationships with someone from a remote (relative to "us") region of the world. We're terrifically malleable, plastic. But not infinitely so. Yep: I was born in LA, grew up there, lived in Colorado for a a few minutes, then moved back to LA, lived in a few areas in the vast sprawling metropolis around La-La Land, then moved to a different state within the state of California, a place called "Berkeley." And yet: I have friends who speak Chinese, who are also mostly empty space and bacteria. And it's good.

Okay, okay. I'm starting to feel better now. "I" accept my verbishness, my existence as a dissipative structure, and don't really care all that much where "I" am. Because, not being a solipsist, I assume you're reading this now, and you are enough like me, so what does it matter? How do I know I'm not being dreamed by some gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft? I don't. Hell: maybe YOU are dreaming all this? And "I" don't care. This seems like a cosmic funhouse to me. All of it. What the hell: I'll just assume we sort of exist, and that it matters, bacteria and all.

This Is The Week That Is: Crazy?

Humanity: if you break it, you bought it.

Some poet wrote in some whacked long poem edited by Ezra Pound that "April is the cruellest month..." Okay, I'll bite: why?

Oh. That.

Now that Dzhokhar (friends called him "Jafar" according to some social media stuff I've seen) Tsarnaev has been apprehended - after half a state was locked down to search for an (admittedly dangerous) - badly wounded 19 year old wearing a hoodie, I was reminded that the Columbine shooting happened on 4/20 too. That's a day we should all be getting stoned LEGALLY, listening to music, talking wild speculative philosophical talk, reading poetry, and having transcendent sex.

April 20: it can be more than Hitler's Birthday and Columbine. Really.

No, but seriously: not to get all teleological on yer asses, but the goddess put cannabis there to help prevent people who'd listen to a little Loudmouth with a funny mustache...from taking him seriously. Sure, the Treaty of Versaille was a bum deal and we've dealt with an epically lousy economy, but dude! Get real. I don't like the way you say "lebensraum." You've got a malicious vibe goin' man. Chill.

Oh and the Oklahoma City bombing was on April 19th. And so was the Unistat government starting a fire and burning some religious nuts and their children alive, near Waco.

[Readers who do not live in Unistat: forgive my relatively selfish non-cosmopolitanisms here. It's a fair bet some really heinous things have happened in your neck to the planetary woods between the dates 19-25 April. For example: if you live in Rwanda I'm honored that you're even looking at this, but you must be rolling your eyes already. There are many more examples. Like this next bit.]

21 April: Nine years ago, in southern Iraq, in the place often cited as the possible "real" location for the Bible's Garden of Eden, Basra? Fallout from the Unistat war which was started under false pretenses: five suicide car bombers, in a coordinated attack, targeted police stations. 74 were killed, 160 wounded. And Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bush...are still free men. Which I take as a very ominous existential fact.

Are there any historical forces from this week that may be working to oppose..."all that"? Aye, viz:

Earth Day is April 22nd. Albert Hofmann, one of the most brilliant chemists of the 20th century, sampled an ergot from his lab at Sandoz, thinking it a very small amount. He started to feel odd, so decided to ride his bicycle home. Turns out the lysergic acid dose he'd ingested was a very large one, for humans of any size. This bicycle ride took place on April 19th, 1943. On a human historical time scale, nuclear fission - which could eventually make ending all life on Earth possible - happened a mere few seconds from the time Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD. Coincidence?

Stewart Brand was on LSD in San Francisco, thinking about a talk Buckminster Fuller had given, about how we're all inhabitants of one spaceship: Earth. If we could only get a picture of Earth taken from space; if only people could see the Pale Blue Dot they live on, their spaceship as seen by the rest of the cosmos, maybe enough of them would think differently about their perspectives, and we could avert catastrophe.

                                                        Reminder

Brand successfully obtained that picture. It was very widely disseminated. That pic proved a major force in getting the first Earth Day going.

What is it about this week? Or am I just stoned and cherry-picking my sources? Who is the Wizard Who Makes The Cannabis Green?

If you're keeping score, here's how I've voted. How about you?

Period of the Year: one month into Spring in the No. Hemisphere, April 19-25

• Shakespeare being born on April 23: Yes
• Hitler born on the 20th: in this universe the outcome was bad: No
• Earth Day: getting in touch with everything outside your own skin, AKA "the environment": Yes
• Timothy McVeigh and the way he handled his "patriotism": No
• cannabis, celebrated on 4/20: oh hell YEA
• overkill, literally: The State burning humans alive near Waco, seemingly because their religion was weird: NO
• the Tsarnaev Bros, and the symbolic "brothers" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Boston Marathon bombing and Columbine school shootings, respectively), and the way voters and Authority responded: I'll go No on the violence and we really need to think about the responses.
• Bicycle Day: Yes
• all the other desperate acts of violence I haven't covered here: No
• Unistat government under Neo-Cons and everyone who did their bidding in order for them get away with it, unspeakable levels of human misery and sorrow, a $3,000,000,000,000+ war (according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) that was based on a series of lies: No
• Buckminster Fuller's idea that the human species needs to notice the "omnidirectional halo" and get their act together in order to not end the Human Experiment on Earth and to become a "success in universe": I'll go with Yes
• sex, music, poetry, wine, laughter, trodding more lightly on Our Spaceship: as the Poet has an emanation of the Goddess say, "yes I said yes I will Yes."

                                                        No

                                                        Yes

EXTRA CREDIT EXERCIZE:
Pick any one of the events mentioned above and, using your imagination and research (your ingenium), close your eyes and meditate on "This event happened because of this and this and this." Then think of what may have led those things to happen. Go back in time and, even though this is a "fiction" think of possible causes. If it turns out that the 1939-45 World War happened because someone wasn't getting enough love in France in 1473, so be it. Charles "The Hammer" Martel and 732 CE? Easy. If Alexander the Great hadn't sneezed in 326 BCE "all this woulddna happened"? Someone saying "knife" and someone else heard "wife" in 1608, and this led to a pogrom in Russia? Metternich felt much better that day of negotiation - no indigestion for a change - and the Cold War never would've happened? A servant girl caught a nasty bug and Henry VIII's immune system did not fight it off, and he died early on? Just think! Stranger things have happened. Maybe. Counterfactuals. But what really might have happened? If Yeltsin's and later, Putin's people advised him to just let Chechnya go to Chechen rule...do we get the Boston Marathon bombing? How and why did your parents meet? What if someone's car didn't start "that day" and they stayed home instead and watched "I Love Lucy" re-reuns? This may sound like a fruitless or even "stupid" exercize, but you may surprise yourself. Report your finding, 'cuz, like, heck, ya know? I'd like to get to the bottom of some of this stuff too.