The 2 Page Experiments

Luv ya man!

d63tark wrote:

Abstract, love ya man!

Satyr, happy Halloween!

Did you take your son trickery-treating?

I took him in my building. He got a bucket full of chocolates. He was dressed as Bay Man.

My son is entering an existential phase.
He's four years old of November six.

Last week I tell him there is no God and he asks:
"Then where does everything come from?"

What did you say in response?

Satyr wrote:

d63tark wrote:

Abstract, love ya man!

Satyr, happy Halloween!

Did you take your son trickery-treating?

I took him in my building. He got a bucket full of chocolates. He was dressed as Bay Man.

My son is entering an existential phase.
He's four years old of November six.

Last week I tell him there is no God and he asks:
"Then where does everything come from?"

Yes, the sooner you get that across to him, the sooner you rid yourself of having to pay for Santa Clause's supposed existence. I had to go through that when I explained to my kids it was getting too expensive to buy presents for them and that Christmas would further consist of me giving them a 100$ so they could buy what they want. It seems cruel. But it's actually about dealing with reality.

Oh and his birthday is the same day as my mom's. Wierd world.

Efficiency

As typical as it seems, in market based societies, it’s never enough to talk about more and less. We cannot, for instance, rest on the old adage that workers want more compensation for less work, while their employers pose, against these demands, their own requirement for minimal investment at maximum return. It might seem common sense. But on closer investigation, we might see that the two positions are not so deeply entrenched. If they were, the workplace would hardly be worth any amount of compensation, a perpetual battle with management while struggling to stay afoot in the mass competition toward better paying and easier jobs. And from there, the evidence goes all over the place. How can one be so happy at 10 an hour and another so miserable at 20? The janitor whistles, easily, while mopping his floor. He seems entranced, content, as if in meditation. Another man, sleek and muscular from hauling furniture, makes enough to go to the bar, nightly, and wakes each morning to sweat it off. At quitting time, the cycle repeats. And no random piss tests, thank God. Vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients continue to scrimp through their hand to mouth lives. Meanwhile, a white collar manager slumps over his computer, grumbles often, and when he can, steals a moment on Monster.com. He’s hardly afraid he’ll get caught and, sometimes, even hopes. And then there’s us: the intellectually and creatively curious, strange creatures that, in our ass-backwardness, approach the hierarchy of needs from the top down. We neglect basic creature comforts while clinging, often self destructively, to the drug-like addiction of self actualization. And what are we working toward? That is when so many of our heroes, the successful and famous, live public lives of misery, and sometimes kill themselves? Clearly, we need to break it down to individual needs, demands, and desires. We need to penetrate the multiplicity and interrogate the interactions. Furthermore, we need to recognize that it is primarily about expectations and their satisfaction, and that satisfaction (for our purposes) is not binary and digital by nature, but analogue, subjective, and a matter of degree. We need to consider efficiencies.

Efficiency, a mechanical term used for equipment such as pumps, boilers, HVACs, etc., concerns the actual output of a system as compared to its theoretical rating and is a product of the differential between what the designer’s mathematics tell them, what something should be able to do, and what actually occurs in practice. But at a more fundamental level, it can also be the differential between the energy or resources put in to a thing (the input) and energy or resource gotten out (the output). And it is in this sense that we use the term. Only, for our purposes, we will define it in the more abstract sense of that which seeks to maximize itself by minimizing the differential between input and output. But before we go on, there is more we can learn from the boiler room. First of all, we need to understand that there can never be 100% efficiency. Along the way, there is always a loss (heat loss) that can never return to an active or potential form. As any plant-op knows, you can never expect a 100% return on condensate on any boiler system. And like perpetual motion, everywhere we look, we find it equally elusive. Secondly, we must remain mindful that energy can never be created or destroyed, only transformed, eventually ending in its always final form: heat. Therefore, any motion or energy must be taken from something else. The pump must be driven by electricity. The electricity must created by the turbine that, in turn, derives its energy from steam. And steam is the product of heat (remember heat loss?) taken from coal, its BTUs, that sees its efficiency reduced to ash. And finally, it must be remembered that our boiler room is a complex and dynamic interaction of efficiencies, a coexistence in which any one efficiency making too large a demand can steal energy from other efficiencies, thereby minimizing them and causing a breakdown in the supra-efficiency of coexistence. Furthermore, sub-efficiencies can be supra-efficiencies to their own relevant sub-efficiencies while also being sub efficiency to their own supra efficiencies. The pump, an efficiency in itself, is the product of a lot of sub efficiencies (the windings, the armature, etc.). It, in turn, is a sub-efficiency to the supra-efficiency of the boiler room (the plant) that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of the building by either heating or cooling it, thereby maximizing the tenant’s sub-efficiency of being comfortable that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of how they function in the building.

And thus we leave the boiler room with new tools to analyze our initial questions. We now see why the janitor can whistle while he meditates on the movement of the mop: time passes quickly in thought, and he has managed to keep his life within his means. For him, it is not matter of more; it is a question of efficiency. Likewise, the furniture hauler maximizes the efficiencies of his desire to drink and smoke pot without interference from the efficiency of job security. Plus he likes the exercise. Even the vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients make more sense. They’ve balanced their efficiencies by lowering their demands. Meanwhile, the white collar worker struggles daily with the minimized efficiencies of job security, a sense of meaning, and family life due to long hours at the office that do nothing to increase financial efficiency in his salaried position. We further see the minimization of the supra-efficiency of co-existence that can occur when either the workers or employers make higher demands, and maximize efficiency by compromising others. If the employer demands higher profit, that efficiency can only be maximized, that is since energy and resources cannot be created out of nothing, by stealing from the efficiencies of the employees and their sub-efficiencies. And should the worker demand more, this can only take from the supra-efficiency of the company and further the economy by raising prices. Consequently, we now see that the occupy Wall Street movement may not be a demand for more, but a demand for efficiency. It’s not about hating the rich. It’s about hating wealth at the expense of everyone else: the maximization of the large scale efficiencies of the few at the expense of others, and the consequent minimization of their sub-efficiencies. We can also see, finally, how our desire for self actualization can interact with other sub-efficiencies, and how the minimization of those others can lead one to misery, or even suicide. The applications seem infinite, and may well go beyond the issue of economics. The coexistence between the environment and civilization immediately comes to mind. But given our present focus, we might consider the possibility of a new ethical theory that says (complimenting the utilitarian) that those acts are good that maximize the supra-efficiency of coexistence. We might consider our happiest moments and ask: was it a matter of having more? Or was it, rather, a matter of having all needs, demands, and desires, ours and those of others, come together in a state of harmonious co-existence: the coexistence of efficiencies?

Abstract wrote:

What did you say in response?

Keeping in mind his age and the impact any information might have I told him to remember what I said about where trees come from and how a tree springs from a seed and then produces seeds in turn.
I told him all is nature.
I also told him to not speak of these things openly because most people are stupid and would get angry.
I told him it was our little secret.

Satyr wrote:

Abstract wrote:

What did you say in response?

Keeping in mind his age and the impact any information might have I told him to remember what I said about where trees come from and how a tree springs from a seed and then produces seeds in turn.
I told him all is nature.
I also told him to not speak of these things openly because most people are stupid and would get angry.
I told him it was our little secret.

reasonable

"the Occupy Wall Street movement [is not] a demand for more, but a demand for efficiency"

I like the sound of that...

Satyr wrote:

Abstract wrote:

What did you say in response?

Keeping in mind his age and the impact any information might have I told him to remember what I said about where trees come from and how a tree springs from a seed and then produces seeds in turn.
I told him all is nature.
I also told him to not speak of these things openly because most people are stupid and would get angry.
I told him it was our little secret.

Can't blame you there. Camoflauge is perhaps the only defense we have left.

Sound Bites

The problem with intellectuals is that they tend to talk in sound bites….
See what I mean?

On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, public record was made of Cornel West, black philosopher and activist, standing up and ready to throw down with Ron Christie who had made a negative (and in my opinion, snide) comment concerning West’s use of sound bites. “A brother don’t go to jail twice for sound bites”, he snarled as he settled and sat back down. This was, first of all, intriguing and a surprise as West, though a bit excitable, is a consistently buoyant and joyful man. At the same time, it was pathetic in that Christie, a black conservative, had made the criticism after backing his position with a long string of platitudes. Be that as it may, both men had clearly fallen into a popular, yet, questionable understanding of the term. We’ve heard the condemnations: sloganeering, jingoism, cheap commercialization of higher thought. Wanting to stand above the common fray, we snub our nose at the sound bite and fail to even distinguish it from the platitude, which is something quite different and, while usually harmless and somewhat useful, can ultimately prove more manipulative. However, I would argue that the sound bite serves two vital functions, one of which is rooted in the primary functions of language. For one, it is, for better or worse, the primary means by which any philosophy gets to common people and, while leaving them with gaps and misconceptions, at least gives the discipline validity among those for which it would otherwise hold no value. From Descartes’ “Ergo Cogito Sum” to Sartre’s “Existence precedes Essence” to Nietzsche’s, ironically, beaten to death “What doesn’t kill me makes me strong”, the sound bite is the fire brought by Sisphysus to the people and gives access to those who lack the patience, time, or willingness to confront the opaque prose and ideas of philosophy. And though some among us would like to punish the perpetrators in the same manner as the myth, there is still the possibility that, for some, these bite-size nuggets may be enough to encourage further exploration. But more important is how the sound bite can function for the intellectual themselves. I would argue that the sound bite is the poetry of the intellectually curious, or as Frost describes the poem: a momentary stay against confusion. We rise out disorder into order, he further says, I would sooner play tennis with the net down than write free verse. But what he failed to see was that free verse, being a concession to the messiness of reality and the plainness of general discourse, takes on the same ordering function as the more willful structuring of fixed forms. And it is only a short step to recognize that this utility is not exclusive to higher forms of communication, but ubiquitous throughout language itself, and that the sound bite serves as a tentative anchor, a brief reprieve from a turbulent flux of thought, language, and meaning.

But it’s a reprieve that cannot be permanent. And it is imperative upon us, as those who take this common function to a higher level, to encourage ourselves and others to let go, to surrender ourselves to the flux, the creative destruction that, if we let it, can take us to the next reprieve with more experience, better perspective, and greater safety. As Layotard warns, in The Postmodern Condition, there is a human gravitation toward the accessible and easily communicated -the place where sound bites and platitudes can take on a brownshirted arrogance and run amok, oppress, and destroy. Furthermore, we could say as much of language as Deluez and Guattarri does of the book: it doesn’t mirror the world but forms a rhizome with it. And when we fail to make this distinction, confuse language for reality and try to fix meaning, we run into trouble. Tempted by the ease of heuristics, we turn from thought and settle into superficiality. We fixate on appearances and develop an apparent inability or lack of willingness to look beneath the surface. We refuse to leave the cave. We categorize and leave it at that, resort to tags and readymade concepts. Racial slurs fall casually from our lips. The Mexicans are stealing our jobs . Cain admonishes his own race to quit feeling sorry for themselves and go to work. White boys cheer him on. He's better than Obama. Liberal! Conservative! Right-wing! Left-wing! Fascist! You can’t do that, that’s socialism. REEK! REEK! REEK! Death to Capitalism the sign at the rally reads. Heuristic narratives abound. A man works a job for years, is prompt and dependable, and every night goes home to smoke a joint. The company initiates random drug testing, hangs signs that boast Proud to Be Drug Free as if the accomplishment were anything more than an executive decision. After the man tests dirty and is given the choice of rehab or losing his job, the counselor scolds him gently: See what drugs will get you? A professor inquires, What went on in those buildings before 9/11? and is fired for questioning the narrative of America, land of the free, love it or leave it, always number 1, and now the noble victim. How they flourished then, the platitudes and sound bites. And when times get tough, the tough turn simple. Meanwhile, tepid scholars shut it all out on their semantic gerbil wheels, take pride in their mathematical precision, and scoff, smugly, at speculation. That of which we cannot speak, we must not say. There are other ways to shut a discourse down.

We now see how the ordering function of language can turn on language as creation, how sound bites, and even platitudes, once innocuous, can turn to whips, or stones that could crack a skull if hurled just right. And we have to wonder, given the abuse, if we have the right to a mutter a word, much less a sentence. And yet we talk and write. I’m tired of being pissed. I’m tired of myself being pissed. I must look beyond my own clichés; it’s always more complex than “stupid” or “evil”. And still, the narrative beckons me. It will surely get me when I’m weak or drunk. Meanwhile, a child listens to strange sounds passing over their head, plays, mimics, and learns to speak. Later, we evolve in conversation, repeat the lines that express us best, and wanting more, engage in random variations and juxtapositions. Sooner or later, we find a better way. For myself, my mind’s a flux. ( How would I know what I thought if I did not write? The writer says.) But soon enough the sounds will emerge. Mere utterances will gather into a kind of psychic mother-nese, a dancing la langue that sprouts in all directions, and fills my head like vines. They’ll wait for words to bud like so much foliage that, thick and unruly, must be trimmed and shaped and brought to order. A poem is like a good bra,says Donald Justice, and finishes with,There comes a time when reader and poem are equally beautiful. And with that in mind, a goal, and a little effort, the sound bite as such takes form.

Loose Ends

40 days in the desert…. Well, actually, 40 hrs and 5 stepping stones later I return to the conversation not a more enlightened man, but empty as air. I’m not Christ for God’s sake! I’m just a guy who wanted see what would happen. I’m even doing it now as I don’t know what to say or what I’m going to say. I have no idea how to fill this space and get to the money shot. Was it worth it? Yeah…. Sure…. Why not? Am I satisfied? Well, no, not entirely. There’s always a better way to say a thing. And satisfaction was never the only purpose. As with everything I do, it was more about process, the act of becoming, and of seeing what becomes. But to make the becoming worth it, I have to approach it from every angle. It’s the only way I can hope to break through the elastic barrier, the creative hymen that gets me to a further point. And as I once read about art, one of the greatest myths is the notion of creativity as a mystical act. We must approach it as an activity like any other activity –a mere act. And as disappointing as this may seem, as much as it may suck the magic out of the effort, you come to find it’s true. To make it conditional on inspiration, as I did when young, is to paralyze oneself and deny an opportunity to develop craft and sureness of hand. And while there’s nothing mystical in this, there can be moments when craft and imagination come together and the magic actually happens. Inspiration is a little like luck; and it’s like the saying goes: luck is when opportunity meets with preparation. (Fucking platitudes! Not even enough mojo to create a decent sound bite.)

And everyone has an act. The cabinet maker has one: making cabinets. The carpenter has his: building what must be built. The actor has an act in more ways than one. And my act is the act of acting. The rest is up to whim. One must be thankful there are only three ways to approach a thing (swoop, bash, or bleed), that is when there are so many things to be approached. Perhaps too many. Perhaps it’s the source of my ADD, my forward flights of mind. I’m haunted by a kind of postmodern malaise, and find myself the victim of having too many options. Perhaps I was wrong in becoming a generalist. All the anxiety of trying to figure out what to do, that is with a full wish list and, at most, 20 to 25 productive years. Perhaps I should narrow it down. But then I think about that to which I might choose to commit, and what I would have to give up, and, soon enough, I’m back to the old conclusion: never mind.

It’s in my blood, I guess. But at least I still have these: 5 boxes that collected random thoughts and stray ideas. It was as if all the bits and pieces needed to gather, to huddle against the flux in my brain. Even the flux, sensing the safety in numbers, seemed to coalesce into new ideas and pass themselves off as respectable members and colleagues. Perhaps with time, having survived the natural selection of ideas, they’ll make themselves part of the “in crowd”. It’s as much in the same way that sleep produces dreams and that something about the mind that likes juxtapositioning one thing on the other, the random fusing of mental chatter, monad to monad, atom to atom, until the complex and subtle interplay of pleasure and pain, the irrefutable directorship of jouissance finds a pattern. Our dreams repeat it like good sex when found. Beyond that it’s like abstract art: the only meaning to be gotten comes from the discourse that emerges around it. No truth, only interpretation.

And what have I gained from my 5 little dreams? My visions in the desert? Well, for one, I need a vasectomy and Viagra. For another, while I’m good at stringing ideas together, my writing needs work, that I need to plain it down and take Strunk and White’s suggestion that I make strong active sentences the backbone of my work, that the poet in me may be the death of the writer, and that sometimes I’m a little too artsy for my own good –damn that mothernese, that dancing la langue. I’ve also learned that form can condition content, that the form I’ve chosen limits me to three discrete blocks of information, and that it feels good to break things down into smaller paragraphs. It just moves more fluidly. And lastly, I now realize the true influence of Nicole Blackman on my sensibility –all these shifts of mind: a room of moving shadows. Perhaps this is the source of the underlying anger when I wanted to write with the resigned sigh of conclusion. And I cannot say it enough, I’m tired of being pissed. I’m tired of myself being pissed. I’m tired of listening to myself, the rants, the raves. I’m tired of the stupidity. I’m tired of hating people I cannot truly hate. Is this the hazard of making it rock and roll? Or is it just the drink? As Seinfeld jokes: the problem with drunks is that they either really love you or really hate you. Enough said. Luv ya, man! Is my middle the speed smear of these rapid fluctuations? These shifting extremes? Still: I am what I am what I am what I am. It’s a mixed package.

But look at us now! Started with no plan, no idea of what would be included, and here we are. I look to the board like a distant shining city emerging from a haze, and feel the anxiety of wondering what I’ll be when I get there. Much as it was when I took out, I have no plans. I feel different now. But maybe not. Still, I look to it in same way one might look to slipping into wet clothes. I fear the letting go. And I have tried to piece the fragments of myself together for you, but feel I haven’t explained myself. I’ve said a lot about nothing and even have pics. But perhaps it’s not enough. The only thing I can offer now is the money shot, the very assumptions by which I live and breathe:

1. Everything takes its natural course. Even when we intervene it is simply part of that course.
2. Everything must be questioned, including and most importantly ourselves.
3. Assumptions are like promises; they’re made to be broken. (Refer to 1.)

PS: You’re not even there, are you?

Satyr, now that I'm done with this, and before I get back to reading, I'm going to try to get to some of your posts and points on that essay.

Efficiency

At a superficial level, the recent protests would seem to be a simple conflict of quantifiable demands posed against other quantifiable demands: more jobs, more pay, less struggle, and more benefits posed rigidly against lower taxes and higher profits. And as typical as it seems of market based societies, on deeper inspection, we find it’s not enough to talk about more and less. We cannot, for instance, rest on the old adage that workers want more compensation for less work, while their employers pose, against these demands, their own requirement for minimal investment at maximum return. It might seem common sense. But on closer investigation, we see that the two positions are not so deeply entrenched. If they were, the workplace would hardly be worth any amount of compensation, a perpetual battle with management while struggling to stay afoot in the mass competition toward better paying and easier jobs. And how can one be so happy at 10 an hour and another so miserable at 20? Clearly, we need to break it down to individual needs, demands, and desires and interrogate the interactions. Furthermore, we need to recognize that it is primarily about expectations and their satisfaction, and that satisfaction is not binary and digital by nature (it’s not either/or), but analogue, subjective, and a matter of degree. And lastly, we need to consider the possibility that the protests are not simply about quantifiable matters, but qualities the quantifiable should be a means to. We might consider Efficiency.

We start in the boiler plant and recognize, first, that Efficiency is a technical concept and comparison of the energy put in and that gotten out. It’s a measurement of performance. However, for our purposes, we will define it in the more abstract sense of that which seeks to maximize itself by minimizing the differential between input and output. That said, we get to the point using the same principals used in the plant. We first need to understand that there can never be 100% efficiency. Along the way, there is always a loss (heat loss) that can never return to potential form. As any plant-op knows, you can never expect a 100% return on condensate in any boiler system. And everywhere we look, we find it equally elusive. In fact, it’s physical law. Consequently, we must remain mindful that energy can never be created or destroyed, only transformed, eventually ending in its always final form: heat. Therefore, any motion or energy must be taken from something else. The pump must be driven by electricity. The electricity must created by the turbine that, in turn, derives its energy from steam. And steam is the product of heat taken from coal (taken from the earth) that sees its efficiency reduced to ash. And finally, it must be remembered that our boiler room is a complex and dynamic interaction of efficiencies. Sub-efficiencies can be supra-efficiencies to their own relevant sub-efficiencies while also being sub efficiency to their own supra efficiencies. The pump, an efficiency in itself, is the product of a lot of sub efficiencies (the windings, the armature, etc.). It, in turn, is a sub-efficiency to the supra-efficiency of the boiler plant that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of the building by either heating or cooling it, thereby, maximizing the sub-efficiency of comfort that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of how one functions in the building. However, there is one efficiency that must always be supra to the sub-efficiencies of any system: the always supra efficiency of coexistence. This is because its optimization maximizes the efficiency of the system along with the various sub-efficiencies. Consequently, it is inversely true that its minimization, through the overly high demand of any component (sub or supra), can only result in a general inefficiency and possible breakdown.

Now we leave the boiler room with new tools to analyze our situation. We now see ourselves as individual efficiencies with multiple sub-efficiencies, all of which must be balanced into a harmonious co-existence. We can look at our happiest moments and recognize that it was never about more, but rather about bringing all our needs, demands, and desires into a state of harmonious balance, and that achieving this often involved lowering some demands to maximize their efficiency by making the differential manageable and thereby leave more resources for higher level desires. We must also note that while demands and desires are often matters of choice, needs are needs and can only be minimized so much. Furthermore, we now see how someone, if they have found themselves in a situation where the demands being made on them, by themselves or others, are easily met, could be happy at 10 an hr., while someone at 20, with higher demands, could be miserable. We can also see that we are sub-efficiencies to our communities and workplace that are, in turn, sub-efficiencies to a system and economy to which all of us are sub-efficiencies –poor and rich alike. And, finally, we can now assess the source of our resentment: the minimization of our efficiencies for the sake of maximizing the high level demands of the 1%, the increasing demands made upon us with decreasing resources to meet them. We can now see it is not about the quantifiable, but rather a quality of life that is no longer tolerable, that can no longer be fixed by lowering our own demands and desires. And why should we? Clearly, more is at stake than “more”. Freedom perhaps? The happiness that comes from security and stability, or the meaning they free us to give our lives? But these don’t come from more, nor should we need or demand it. They come, rather, from that which can benefit all: the harmonious coexistence of needs, demands, and desires –ours and those of others. And beyond more, we can only desire efficiency.