do not go gentle into that goodnight

Run, gypsy! Don't go gentle! I heard a Beethoven quote on the radio a few weeks back, flying over the Berkeley hills three inches off the pavement, to the effect of: "Resist the tyranny of Fate; fight it to your last breath." THERE you go. People drank COFFEE back then, goddamnit. We queue up for death like Russians in a bread line. The Family Of Man gathers around the photon campfiring squad, present and accounted for Sir! with Lean Cuisine microwaving across our synaptic gaps we march -- but no one marches anymore, we ride in comfort and affordable style to designated seats in designated pens for designated funds to spend on designated items, the laser crosshairs of the Great Marketer in the Sky no longer on our foreheads (he's sleeping at his post, and why not? the prey is long since shot, there's nothing but a gristled stump where the head was) and the CD mantra "I, Ronic" we downloaded off the web somewhere in the eternally returning past is infinite loop-locked between bytes, is frozen-embryo enhanced smoothie food in the processor and it bathes us, blueberry banana paste permafrosting seratonin reuptake, Prozacking our raveled sleeve of care, sleep, silly Wabbit, Trix are for kids ...

An extremely skeptical cat

If Aristotelian theology was the infancy of western philosophy, extreme skepticism was its adolescence: angry, reactionary and ultimately as absolutely metaphysical as the theology it sought to undermine. Descartes first expressed the sentiment in the form it would subsequently take, but did so ironically (and isn’t that ironic), invoking the skeptic specter only to trump it with the theological myth again. But Schrodinger's Cat was out of the box, and the next few centuries would show that it was no easier to refute an absolute negation than an absolute assertion. Eventually, heroes like Russell and Wittgenstein and Popper quit the foolish fight and went on to lead philosophers into useful enterprises like the analysis of language and the refinement of the scientific method. A few philosophers insisted on staying outside, pointing at stones and denying their existence; these went on to become Deconstructionist literary critics. It’s a thankless job, but it pays well.

That cat was boxed up for a long time. He got loose in the western world at large not so long ago. We started winking at ourselves in the Age of Wit; we’ve done it so much in this century that you’d think there was something in our eye. Every wink, every new story, every lifted veil is a meow, and when that cat sees that there’s nothing but winking and stories and veils, then he really gets to yowling; he’s yowling at himself, on top of everything else. He’s made a caterwaulic locked loop: this is nihilism; this is extreme skepticism; this is infinite ironic regress. As Bertrand Russell observed, there’s no end to it; extreme skepticism can’t ultimately be refuted. The only thing to do is open the window and throw an old shoe. Change the subject. Tell a new story. So everything’s hollow and nothing’s ultimately anything -- fine, that’s a wrap; next story, please, and how about something with a Love Interest?

No one complains anymore about the fact that the planets probably don’t turn in solid crystal spheres around the Earth. Boy, they used to! Eventually, the cat won’t yowl at the sound of his own voice.

On dogs and myths in a non-metaphysical sense

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples
raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

-- E. M. Cioran

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a
great deal of it is absolutely fatal.


-- Oscar Wilde

Metaphysical beliefs are taking their time to die out and slip away from human thought. Obfuscations, misapprehensions and plain old wishful thinking have coalesced into popular superstitions and myths, have mutated into religions and theologies and have been transmuted into centuries of Western philosophy. Zeus, Baal, El, Yahweh, nirvana, God, Christ, the Ideal, the noumenon, the Absolute self-thinking entity, the powerful present intuition and countless other proper names have been assigned to refer away from -- never to -- human attempts to comfort and control. To be human is to be a complicated cognitive animal, with a neural mass that dwarfs other animals by comparison, large enough to accommodate a complicated (compared, say, to that of dogs) language social structure and, subsequently, complex enough to give rise to a staggering palimpsest of cognitions that we subsequently and variously characterize as emotion, consciousness, intuition, mind, love, fear, faith, thought, creative impulse -- ad infinitum. The trillions of neurons arranged in the human brain in a staggeringly complex, interconnected fashion make the most powerful supercomputer on Earth look like an abacus; but to a man who’s never seen anything more complicated than an abacus, a computer must look temptingly magical.

Society is a learned convention, and one enjoyed by far simpler species than we. A social “drive” could be hard-wired, but it hardly need be; the wildebeest separated from the herd gets killed; society needn’t be a necessity to be hugely and generally preferable. Species far simpler than we communicate, and traffic in convention. We humans socialize in our uniquely complicated way. Dogs sniff each other’s tails. We do that too, and write novels. To be human -- after more than a hundred thousand years of socializing and language development -- is to be a creature that has developed understandably complicated social habits: a creature that thinks, that dreams, that talks, that lies, that flatters, that loves, that serves, that schemes, that tells stories, that seeks to understand.

Did you buy the kibble at the grocery store? Did you bring it home in the trunk of the car? Is it sitting in the garage by the back door? What does the dog believe? Does he believe you made it yourself? Or does he simply perceive its coming into being? Who paid for it? Does the maid feed him? There’s a physical reality that surrounds the dog and his food. Maybe he makes up stories to approximate it -- like we do.

Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man
should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course;
but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the
same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a
miracle tells a lie.

-- Thomas Paine