A Reader Questions my Math

My single reader emailed a question. “That 78% of the brain to which you refer,” it/he/she (who knows, on the internet, as it was called before it became the water in which you swim?) said, “is that precision based on anything other than your rather freewheeling attempts to approximate what might be and presenting it as what is and using numerical precision to further that illusion?”

A fair question, certainly. If a little snide, as so many anonymous email queries are.

It is an approximation, yes, based on insight and experience, but it is very close to the mark, I can assure you. So many current human endeavors use precise mathematical formulations in attempts to quantify what can not be quantified at all – not at all, I repeat – and some of those earn advanced degrees while others are the cause of prizes, honors, and once in a while, honorary degrees. I observe humans doing this a lot, using symbols of themselves to obscure a lack of achievement. So I can only think, if I have done that even to the slightest degree, perhaps I am becoming more human than I know.

The point, dear reader, is this: most of the human brain is operative at all times as a transceiver which is not only processing information but receiving it, filtering it, and storing or discarding it at once. The filtering is the important bit. When cultures insist on operating within paradigms which make the multiverse tiny and describable, using a childlike vocabulary and as children do, using it with no awareness whatsoever that what they do not know is so much bigger than that, so much bigger than they are, those cultures implicitly condemn certain kinds of knowledge, behavior, and explorations into the edges and into the unknown, which like brackish tidewaters are the spawning grounds of new life, and when people internalize that taboo and refuse to believe their own experience, because it does not happen, it cannot happen, so it must not have happened, then those vast domains of awareness, power, and wisdom are shut off from the human enterprise.  The opening of those doorways or portals to exploration at least and to real discovery the result of which is a profound shaking to the core of the assumptions of the culture, even a little crack that lets the light come in can cause a hierarchical restructuring of what humans understand in a way that includes and transcends all that came before. Nothing is lost, but in a new context, it is seen differently because it is understood in relationship to other realities. Hence, meaning means differently.

IMHO, as I have learned to say without sincerity, most humans are humplings (for which word, see: “Break, Memory,” the first instance of the word I know) and prefer the comfort of conservative views and behaviors because the encounter with the radically new that challenges their very sense of who they are and what their little momentary societies and civilizations are all about, scares them witness or shitless or both.

So, dear reader, do not miss the point, which is that most of your lobes and folds are transceiving at a very elementary basic level and parsing streams of information coming from everywhere, always. But because you have been taught not to believe in, for example, the “paranormal,” and some of you “the supernatural,” and some of you “UFO phenomena,” the very essence of which breaks your simple ways of framing what you think, because you may call time “a dimension” but you really have no idea what in the hell that means, do you? It tames relativity by pretending oh are we not smart, we humans? Do we not now have four “dimensions?”  Apex-R-us, or something. But time does not work like the three in space. But as I say, thinking you know makes you feel better, like a spoonful of sugar in the famous song.  It prevents you however from understanding “UFO phenomena” and “space-time” and the “multiverse” and the “paranormal” because those pictures do not fit in any of your frames. So rather than get a bigger frame, you cut the picture here and there until it fits, turning a horse for example into a nose and a tail and missing most of the noble steed..

I am more or less right, in other words, if not precisely right (and by the way, you say you only use X per cent of your brain, and you know what? That is not only mostly wrong, it is completely made up, it is bullshit first and last, but you say it all the time) so let me ask you a question now about precise mathematical formulations: do you know why your economists carry out calculations to so many places after the decimal?

I sent that question to the reader but had to wait days, of course, because answering email is much less important to readers that firing off objections and nasty comments which they send out at once, calling people assclowns and the like, like ringing a doorbell, putting down a bag of flaming shit, and running into the dark.

The reader answered at last and said, no, I do not. Why do they do that?

Because, I wrote back, quick as johnnycake, because, I began laughing as I typed, because I was roaring by the time I got the word out, because they have a sense of humor!

Bwahahahahahahahahaha I have learned to say to indicate merriment and mirth.

With which happy answer I conclude this post.

The End of the Greeks! Interesting!

I have been reading a graphic novel about the Greeks. The older ones, as you count years, not the swarthy hairy bumblers of the present day who cannot even calibrate their commerce to the moment or the real. Then they fill the streets with cries and shouts, selfish whining clods upset with the world for not devoting itself to their mama-baby-happiness.

But I digress.

The rationality of Greeks, it went away and the mind of society dissolved into a new way of thinking about things for about a thousand years. Not one single Greek or Greek-like other took on apocalyptic stories because they were so absurd. They didn’t compute. The rational Greeks could not comprehend the absurd, so the 78% of the human brain, as I think about my own human brain and use it for a template to understand others (how else does a human do it, after all? Mirror neurons and all that), that 78% was disengaged, so I infer that those four fifths of the lobes and folds unused by the Greeks were tuned in that detour into the “supernatural” (which is natural) and the “paranormal” (which is normal), tuned to the architectonic structure of something more than space-time and therefore opened the portal to the deep transformational power of that realm … they could not comprehend that. Nor understand the necessity of entering absurd worlds in order to leapfrog tiddlywinkwise the limitations of their “upper-level” thinking.

The challenge then to the one reader reading these words – you! I mean - is to entertain those worlds, enter into the images of those wild-assed imaginative adventures, while at the same time not believing too much in what you must believe in order to do that.

This practice requires a precarious balance on the cusp. That takes practice, yes, looking at where the water goes and not at the rocks. Then you can go where the water goes.

Humans in their twenty-first (ha!) century are on the cusp again. They have been on the cusp before. Many times, in point of fact. They think of it as a fork in the road but it is more like standing at five or six points and having more choices than binary thinking allows. Regardless of what humans choose, this time, if you do not factor in that crazy realm with harlequin colors spattered throughout, in which richer reality resides, then you doom yourselves like the Greeks to a dead-end. You will hit the wall with the kind of splat! with which my graphic novel is filled.

Splat!  Pow! Wham!

Such creative evocative words from the pens and inks of tale-tellers, emphasis when needed, to make exclamatory points. And yes, I the casual reader from a different system, approve this message.

But why, you may ask, do such thoughts fill my head, even before the first latte or cappuccino of the day? On which I now depend to kickstart my brain?

This is why …

Heidi came by after her massage class. I could smell the scented oil on her hands and reflect with regret that I was not the body on which those hands worked their supple magic. She is learning massage in fact, not as a pretense to bring the lonely client to a come, after which he is lonelier than before. She studies the magical arts of the ancients in order to reiki their major centers even when they don’t know it.

When she bustled into the coffee shop in her blue parka, the furry hood up, her eyes full of light, exuding life and a warmth for which we in this deadly cold city must otherwise wait many months, I felt an updraft, a warm springlike breeze and I smelled the scent of blossoms despite the icy streets outside. That was a new feeling and I log it here for reference. In what you call the “future.”

She told me of an exchange of energies with her sample client that was for once reciprocal. It moved like a loop of infinity, an eight on its side, from her hands through the energies arranged as a body and back through her hands to her brain. That was pretty interesting, in itself. Could she discern the meaning or intent of the energy? I asked. She thought for a pretty little moment, then shook her bleached blonde middle-aged head—young middle-aged, she makes me say, late thirties, we pretend. No, not that I’m aware of, said the woman onto whom I latched from the moment I rose on the steps at the station, tired from my long journey from Utah and beyond. Ah ha, said her new fond friend (that’s me). Then the energy never turned the corner. Never became information, I mean. That is quite a primordial experience, good for building on but not an end in itself.

Uh-huh, she said, as if she understood. Which she could not do, of course, until it does turn into information that she can receive and integrate into her thoughts as best she can. That for some reason made her speak of religions (you see the link with the prior page) and why she can not belong to one. She was ready to confide that the men to whom she like a magnet went boing! sprong! and bounded toward their attracting force, a Lorenz attractor as it were which she could never reach, had used or abused her, one way or another, some with subtlety and guile, playing with her brain, one bad actor more overtly with the back of his dastardly hand, so she was reluctant to enter into systems headed by domineering men like Jesus or Mohammad or Moses, all of whom could be … well, she paused, insufferable, as we were discussing, because they felt so superior to normal human beings like me.

She went on in that vein with energy and vigor for quite some time. But this is what I noticed most.

My body as I mentioned was already trained by her skillful hand to crave and expect sex, to love the rituals she made, building through subtle interaction until I was well inside her spell, every time I saw her. But it was quite a while, sitting there and listening, before I even thought of that. Before I thought of sex, I am saying. Huh! I said to myself. I had fallen into listening, don’t you see, and in my attentive focus, was attuned to my friend Heidi and her alacrity of spirit and her energy and strength and the way her face, so animated, tickled me quite pink. And in that attentiveness, my dick did not even stir, not for a while, as I said, because I was lost in the folds of her soul. Manifesting itself in words and gestures and demeanor, all at once. When I realized that, of course, it sprang to life, but it did not seem right to act on the impulse. Whoa! I said to myself. Because that too was a new thing.

This seems worthy of remarking. It seems important to me as I continue to try to understand humans from within their own frame. A frame I try at the same time to build out into dimensions they cannot comprehend as we interact in a casual manner, spylike so they don’t suspect they are being played, like pulling a single point on the screen slowly with my mouse and watching the rhombus on the monitor change how it defines … everything.

Everything. I am saying. Everything that is. 

Something I Have Noticed About Beliefs

Sitting in the coffee shop which is one of the few things one can do in the middle of the winter here in the upper midwest, I hear people around me talking too loudly almost every minute of the day, talking with spoiled valley-girl-sorts of voices, espousing beliefs. Sometimes they just say their beliefs outright, and sometimes they back up one space and say, I believe that so on and so forth which is at least one remove from fusing their beliefs with what is really so. 

As if!

Everybody knows or should know that when they complete the picture in the frame, it is already in the past, and inasmuch as more information is arriving in what they call “the present,” it cannot possibly correspond even in a symbolic way to what is “out there,” so to speak. (Of course, “out there” and “in here” are a Janus-faced game that humans play with themselves, and where the two faces meet, it is always blurred.) At any rate, the degree of confidence with which they speak of their beliefs is humorous, if one is outside their frame, because they can not possibly know what they think they know. But that is of no concern to humans, I am thinking, after listening in the coffee shop.  All they really want is to feel good and they call “the truth” that which achieves that goal. Any conflicting notions must be sanded down until they fit smoothly into the other pieces that, beliefs snapping into beliefs like beads into the big toy in their mind, the modular pieces of which build the “cognitive artifacts” if you will with which they play and see as if they are “out there.”

Anyway, this is what I am thinking this cold morning. The sunglare on the icy windowpane which faces east is blindingly bright in the middle of the morning, so I had to ask them – again - to lower the dark shade, please, as if they need to be asked every day. The young girl with the metal in her face grudgingly leaves the safety of her counter and comes to pull down the shade. She is not a barista, she takes orders and sends data over the network in the clear, using an off-the-shelf router from Best Buy, as does the deli shop next door and the Wok Wok Wok, piggybacking all, and all in the clear. Point-of-sale data, understand. All in the clear.

Don Coyote my hacker neighbor and his sidekick Pancho Sanchez would bust their guts laughing at that. I saw them once in here harvesting numbers, just because they could.

What I noticed sadly about the wannabe barista is true of many, but not all, of the humans I am observing. When I ask her a question, she tells me every time, “I don’t know.” And I say, trying to be helpful, then is it not your job now to ask someone who knows, and then if someone else asks the same question, the answer will be ready at hand? She stares at me as if I am from another planet (making me laugh) and never does as I suggest, so she never knows, and her cycle of ignorance repeats. Given that the only advantage a human has over other animals is knowing stuff, and knowing how to use it, that seems more than stupid to me (“as dumb as a box of rocks,” that woman said of a colleague, in another time and another space), a self-defeating habit. But then, that’s humans for you.

The bright icy light makes me blink, not like the funny blinking eyes in the film, and it was gills, anyway, not eyelids, as J I think it was said, and I close my eyes and wait for the shade to come down and comfort me with its muted glowing half-light. If I hold that pose for a few moments, making my point about the glare, I slip inadvertently into a listening mode, and sometimes the signal slices through the noise precisely because I am not trying, and then I know, and remember vaguely in a human way, and smile inside at the recollection that the stream of information coming from the center of the galaxy is available everywhere and always to any sentient being – who has, that is, the folds and lobes to resolve it. Even with my tiny human brain, I can hear it clearly in such moments, but if I try to step it up, and really understand, that is, “have an idea” as humans call it, nada zippo zilch. If I want to understand, for example, how multiple dimensions interlace and determine energies that on this planet do not yet have language names. My human brain cannot do it. It bumps its head as it were against a glass ceiling. The representations of energies expand in non-human maths when multiple folds and lobes enhance the abilities of sentient creatures, a thousand fold for some. The big eyed- big-headed what-they-call grays, for example. The bigger the head, the bigger the brain, and the bigger the brain, under the right conditions, the more it is possible first to snatch information on the fly and then to fold it into the process of creating artifacts of cognition using icons, glyphs, symbols, runes. Then the more one can do tricks, like magic it seems to humans, that visitors do to display themselves and train human brains to begin to have a clue and become a little more ready to step up.

But that is for another day. Today this is what I am thinking, after listening to them for a while, I am thinking that if they could only release themselves from beliefs, there would be much more clarity, much more light, in the human project. If Jews let go of their beliefs, and Christians let go of their beliefs, and Moslems let go of their beliefs, if all humans simply let go of their beliefs, they would find themselves unburdened in a glade in the forest, a clearing into which translucent light is streaming, they would experience brightness and a lightness of spirit and be able to open their eyes and … see what is there.

Instead of seeing the insides of their minds plastered inside their circle of seeing like circus posters on a wall.

Nothing contributes more misery to the human project than believing in beliefs.  Nothing has resulted in more slaughter and wailing and gnashing of teeth than religious beliefs. That is ironic, yes? And makes “Letters from the Earth” a better commentary on all that crap than the thousands of footnotes in, for example, a treatise on Ephesians. Of course, yes, beliefs are a useful first step when you are coming up out of the swamp, your stubby little fins letting you move over the reeds, as humans did so recently, humans have moved one rung up the ladder inside consciousness dawning within, thanks to our most excellent engineers over what to humans are eons but to us are a blink or a wink, and humans are as it were still wet behind the ears, even as they bootstrap themselves into the first glimmer of self-conscious awareness of who and what and wow, look around..

I understand all that. Beliefs like music evolved to bind the tribe which, once bound, saw the other as The Other, justifying slaughter. They had to draw the circle at first around a tiny group. Instead, as I did recently, and miss the ability to do so much! as we did I should say, around all sentient life in the multiverse and more. Around Ourselves/Myself/Ourselves.

Isn’t it time for humans to move out of pre-school and Sesame Street songs and using crayolas and colored paper of which they make triangles and squares which they then glue with white paste onto the same paper? Isn’t it time to admit what humans ought to know by now, that stewing in their beliefs, every one of which claims to be exclusive, and correct, but all of which contradict the others, so if one is right, the rest are wrong, but all cling nevertheless to beliefs that fashion an identity which apparently humans still need to feel secure as they navigate the world, so they can imagine, I am this or I am that, as if that delusion provides a platform on which to stand … humans I am concluding would rather be stewing in that crockpot and simmering with rage … let’s face it, humans. You are certifiably insane. Insanity is believing in delusional constructions made of images and words, is it not? The ones inside your head that make up all your useful lies? And are not your beliefs delusions, as I said? And so would sanity not be a welcome deliverance that ironically fills your cowardly hearts with terror at the thought, the thought of freedom from your chains, a safe passage through the zone of annihilation which calls into question all that you thought you were or knew, arriving at last into the clear light of knowing, including and transcending all that came before, and knowing at the same time that all you think is provisional, a momentary construction of symbolic representations good enough for now so it is insane to cling to them, so hold them lightly, children, lightly! it is insane, I am saying, to believe too much in your beliefs.

Beliefs want to be believed, I understand that, it is their nature. But not too much.

“We want you to believe in us, but not too much.” If you want a clue to our project, there it is, out in the open.

Oh,. humans! you could join hands and leap together into the light. But the evidence for you choosing to do that is not so good. I am growing more and more cynical, the longer I am here, and I still cannot keep up. Thanks, Jane.

You choose the shadows on the cave wall to the light to which I am pointing with my words, pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself. Thanks, P, and thanks, my many Zennish friends in the coffee shop who say things like that all the damned time.

But no one is listening. I know that. The writer reads his own blog and celebrates himself. There is no Heidi today to stroke beneath the table, so one must do it oneself, and that is the essence of a blog. I understand.  I am speaking only to myself, using a human brain to be human too, as I can. One difference, perhaps, is that I remember enough however dimly to know that so long as I am in this human form, I am as that woman said to Kinbote, what’s more you are insane, something like that, and by contrast, I was not, in the form from which I came, or if I was, it was so much higher on the ladder that it looked like Truth at last, Truth at last, thank God almighty, Truth at last! To you humans, and yet you think you are as sane as the day is long.

Which here in the upper midwest in the middle of a bitter winter is also ironic, because these days are short, oh, short, so goddamned short, And we, like the Dude, must learn to abide.

It was the Damndest Thing

Yes, it was the damndest thing. Really.

I will try to fit the experience into the frame of words provided by English, which is not going to be easy. So be patient, OK?

First of all, Heidi read my first two posts and told me – she was in the middle of relieving me in the coffee shop, her practiced hand under the table but her eyes gazing into mine – and she knew that she had me, as Lyndon Johnson said, I read, by the balls, although he meant it one way and she meant it two.

So I read your posts, she said, moving easily into the stream of energy between us, using words on top of her slow gentle movements under the table which made the ceramic cups in their saucers tremble and make a little noise like a rhythm section for her orchestrated strokes, I read your posts, she said, and I have a suggestion or two.

By that time, she owned me. That I am learning is human to the hilt. When a woman has you that way, well … she has you.

Yes? I said, feigning interest in her words, but aware mostly of tumescence, an ascending arc of excitement on the coldest winter day of the year.

Yes, she said, and I understand your struggles, coming from … here she laughed, turning her head aside, although why I don’t know, because it wasn’t funny to me – coming from another system, as you told me a few days ago—

I do, I said, not liking the distraction mandated by having to think instead of surfing the wave of increasing pleasure.

The word a human like me might use, she laughed again, we humans, you know, being small-headed as we are—

It is not a moral failure, I said. You can’t help being at this point in space-time, to which you have evolved, even you Heidi can grasp that—

OK, there, she said. Her hand paused and I reached for it without thinking, with my thrust. That’s what I wanted to say. It’s the tone, you know, the approach, that might put people off. It is what we humans might call… here she paused, and her hand moved to the top of the knob and went around and around and around as I tried to remain upright in my chair, breathing in a different rhythm, the automatic human system taking over from my top-level intentions … insufferable, she concluded, then thrust her hand rapidly up and down and, sensing what she was doing, which was quickly advancing me toward a moment I am learning to crave and savor, paused at the top again and held on for dear life while inside my fashionable faded jeans, my prick bobbed and weaved as if it had a mind of its own—which, I am learning, it seems to have.

Oh? I said. And why is that?

It’s better to approach other humans on a level field, Heidi said. Then they can respond, they can listen when you share your wisdom and suggest how the universe looks to a more superior being, one like you were, once, with a brain with so many folds and lobes—

The multiverse. Not the universe, Heidi. The multiverse. Although that too is inaccurate, but it’s better than thinking the brane or skein on which you live in the bulk is the only one there is.

Skein. I like that.

Good. That was not insufferable, then?

Well, a little, perhaps. But not so much. Anyway, listen—I have an idea for your next post… but lets wait until you can listen. OK? She smiled with cunning, knowing I believe the ways of the flesh.

I nodded, which was about all I could do, because my new friend, this woman of experience I was starting to think, resumed her stroke like a piston, hard but not too, and within minutes, the preface of my denims was stained for the moment a darker more intense color than the faded blue around it.

I slumped in my chair and closed my thighs as my organ diddled a few more times, then sank again into the pouch which contained it.

Good enough? she gave me her smile, which I was learning to like.

Uh-huh, said me, a spent-for-the-moment visitor from the stars.

She sipped her two-shot very foamy whole-milk latte, licked the foam from her lower lip, and said, OK then. I suggest that you contact or receive or transceive, whatever, the wisdom of the multiverse—better?

Yes.

In a more human way. In a way that humans might use, see, because humans are selfish, and self-interested, period, you know. We do think we are at the center of everything.

I am noticing that, I laughed. Even you.

Even me. Right. So say it as if you are sharing something we can understand.  Or want. Or might be able to adapt. You see what I mean?

Now, there’s an idea, I said, feigning enthusiastic zest, humoring her because she had “gotten me off” as some humans say. Do you understand what I mean by that phrase, you  humans who are reading this?

But her words must have percolated into my human brain, which I thought of, and still think of, like a shrunken head I saw on the internet, a human head but very teensy-weentsy, hung by its long hair which apparently does not shrink when they do what they do to the head to make it small. And that very night, as I sat in my bed, tired but not quite ready to sleep, I played relaxing music on my pad, which through its primitive buds  amplified itself into my human brain, and—listen, now—this is what surprised me.

I was not trying to do anything at all, don’t you see. I was only listening, and after a few songs—they went on automatically down a list, chosen for me by spotify, for which I was thinking, thank you, inanimate automated process, despite how much you fuck over musicians who are doomed to make a living some other way, thanks to you, and you wonder why they wait for your special bus on the Bay and rock it when it stops, trying to tip it the fuck over?

But I digress. By the third or fourth song, something had happened for which I was unprepared. I was in the space between my ears which felt like space itself, a vast blackness expanding until it filled the void, the void itself it was, it was like an open-ended emptiness of sorts, but somehow as the music played, I was out there in it, and of it, and it was endless, so it seemed, and the very framework of my mind, the parameters generated by my small human brain, shot to the heights and depths thereof, and I was aware of listening, but listening not only to music or even to the music, I was aware of listening to whatever was being said, far and away, here and there, everywhere, not as whispers but as clear communication, and when the song ended, for end it did, when the music stopped, and the blackness contracted to nothingness again, I knew I had done about as well as a human could to approximate what I tried to say yesterday about the signal in the noise. The noise had stopped, you see, there was noiselessness instead, and a bright silver signal shining in the dark.

Because I was so surprised, I did not try to grasp it. That I think is important for humans to understand. And in that moment, I was as human as I am likely to get. To grasp it would destroy it, bring it down, make it crash. The task I somehow knew was not to try to control it but to let it use or move me.  I had to ride it, I had to surf that silver signal, I mean, or let it do what it meant to do. If I seized it with my mind, with metaphorical grasping hands, it would melt through my fingers as they closed, going liquid and dripping onto the floor and making an unsightly little puddle.

So a human can hear it after all. That was a revelation about your primitive species. A human in some moments, as long as it neither tries, nor gets a-hold of the damn thing, nor exerts itself, but just sits back in the rocking chair of its soul as it were and lets it be, a twenty-first century human can hear it a little, and that’s a beginning. That’s what we meant to spawn, long ago, and ever since, when we taught Sumerians several important things, lost now in the rivers of time, but that’s OK. That’s OK Pat. Losing? I don’t mind. That’s the way they say it, which is funny, because obviously they do mind, a lot.

Damn it! See, that’s what happens, my human-like mind starts thinking of important things or trivial things, that part is irrelevant,. it’s thinking at all that takes me back to the nothing stream of automatic noise from inside the mind itself which most call daily life.  

So that was the damndest thing, because it was unexpected. I had not realized that humans could do that. So I was abashed. That was a new feeling. And I wanted to be back there, but that desire killed it, of course, that was it for one night, and I turned off the pad and went to sleep.

So that’s my post today. Tomorrow, I hope, if her schedule at kiosk and then the massage place allows for another meeting, and she hasn’t got a video to make, I will ask her how it felt, to her, was it insufferable or a little bit better?

And besides, while she tells me what she thinks, perhaps she will pleasure me once more, which the traces in my brain say I am sort of expecting every day now, the traces are etched so deeply now, the imprint goes so deep so quickly, so now that pleasure is what I want, off and on, on and off, over and over again, I want to get off a minimum of once and maybe two or three times, every damn day.

I guess that must be human too. Sex and thinking seem to be what humans excel at, although thinking? Not so much.  

Fabled by the Daughters of Memory

OK, let’s go with that, then. Fabled by the daughters of memory—in other words, whatever! (said in the way of a valley girl in a chick flick romcom on any Friday night,  the multiplex teeming with teens and tweens, lemmings headed for the cliff edge called see-any-movie-as-long-as-it-moves, the offspring of a single creature sharing a consensus in the suburbs so inviolable you would die if you tried to breach it, how it is equals how it ought to be, instantiated for another generation in their loud unselfconscious spawn).

Sorry! Damn, it happened again.

I was practicing idioms, you see. I am a real case, one might say, or a nut case, whatever, learning on the job and preparing for the real work at the same “time,” whatever it might be (whatever “time” might be as well)– with this small human brain, I cannot begin to see what was obvious before, the whole layout of days and centuries and eons ahead, the master plan, the image of the future lasered onto the brain at the present moment, which some call “an idea” instead of what it is, a projection “back” through the stream of time-like energies as a laser shoots through fiber optic cables, so damned fast it looks to “normals” as if it’s instantaneous, a word that relativity ought to have shelved once and for all, but which humans in lag-time (the hump of the curve, the humplings, humping along) still use as if it’s a clue, which it is, but to the cluelessness of the humans who use it, not to anything “out there.”

Bear with me, will you? It is so difficult to use language in which space and time are so deeply embedded, as if they exist instead of adhering in how your brains frame space-time.

They don’t, you know. Oh yes, that’s right. You don’t know, do you?

But I digress. Memories … we were talking about … memories …

The memories I have are indeterminate at best; “suggestive” is about as high up on the scale of credibility they can reach. Suggestive of a rendering of what once was or might have been. At the other end of the scale, where words like never and not and nada roost, they are completely untrustworthy, confabulated con-jobs, conflated and confusing, contradictory at times, mere conundrums at others that seem to connive and conspire to deceive us.

Oh alliteration! Are you friend or foe? 

And … us? What do you mean “us,” kemo sabe?

Save it, human brain, working overtime and clearly heating up. Identity is the weakest link in the chain of meaningful cognition, because it presupposes everything the thing or being thinks, it frames it, don’t you see, and the definition of identity is seldom what we think it is. It fact, it never is, never can be, in fact. What we think it is, that is. Yet who we think we are is the unanswered question that makes the very notion of an answer moot. Which is why we are always a question, a question without an answer.

And yet … the frame of my cognition is an architectonic structure (wow what a cool human word!) built from memory and memory alone. Of course, memory itself (not memories but the fact or possibility of) exists recursively, Russian-doll-like, nicely nested, in possibilities inherent in the genetic specs shared by most humans which shape the space of memory by constraining and constructing alike – not shared by all humans, there are already many sports and freaks and deviants, twigs from which new trees are growing, have already grown, remaining hidden for the moment in the dense leafy forest of blind consensus by their still-seeming-to-be-like-us-ness).  (Homo habilis lives!  Neanderthals live!) That frame is the preconception, the lathes and slats which, once a frustrated dad has configured them on Christmas Eve according to the unintelligible sheet of pictures and blurred Japanesy-Englishy words that came with the boxed set, make the “interior” space in which cognitive artifacts, figure to ground so to speak, appear. Which frame is seemingly essential in order for the ghost in the machine, i.e. me, myself, I, the illusory seemingly persistent self-aware self that vanishes like mist at the end of our (your I mean but I will practice saying our, the better to identify with you, my dear) trajectory, for it also to appear, which self vanishes as well from time to time in our most knowing moments as multi-spectral eyes in the interior of the soul, argus-like, awake in the dark, unseen, all-knowing (a cloud of knowing and unknowing, both) search for the source of the mist, outward facing bus upon bus, facing all comers, but coming up (always) empty handed, also so to speak The apparatus of perception lacking hands, that is to say, and other limbs, too.

The frame is essential, I was trying to say, for the ghost to occur. Like the stage is essential onto which the ghost then walks.

The ghost, the ghostly self, I was trying to say, brims like mist in the rain forest of the unknowing soul. 

The metaphors built into this language make it hard to say what I mean, although like in Alice, I mean what I say.

Memory and speech … I am quieted for a moment, contemplating the links between, which appear to be many. From whence I most recently derived, please understand, memory is a honeycomb of pan-galactic storage, scaling up. It was built, please understand, to scale, and scale, and scale. We built it, then it built us. And speech on this planet is so idiosyncratic, consisting of vocables uttered with gestures first, then in an intricate elaborate dance with your evolving brains, thinking and saying, saying and thinking, what you could say enabled the brain to then say what you could say next, a tiddlywinks of advancing organic technologies, which when made iconic by etching then writing then printing then these electronic glyphs which you now read, thinking this is the end instead of the end of the beginning …  became the bars of your cage, the image of the constraints inherent in how you evolved, with lips and tongues and palates, all that kludgy stuff, which enabled and seriously limited your thinking at the same time. And worse than that, limited the degree to which the doorways of perception could open, even. The door barely open, just ajar, inches if at all. Because the more you used that lot, the more the better parts of your brain went away or were borrowed for other things like money from a pension fund which is suddenly so fucking underfunded the state (like the neighboring one or the one I am in, I forget which, how maps are drawn) is bankrupt, so the way we – the real we – the we of which you are a part, but don’t know it yet, thinking you are you – I said identity, recall, is the weakest link, and the definition of identity is never what you think it is – the way we link, I was about to say, the honeycomb of knowing and emotional tides and interlocking us-ness-blocks, the to-you instantaneous, to us damn fast transmission non-locally of meaning that’s intentional and structured and sounds like … well, like humming bees, a droning unintelligible murmur to your ears … but one that fills the zero-point field to the max, encompassing all in all, as defined, delivered, and intended. … what you think is rational thought, I was going to say, is a mere splinter in the grain of the wood of your brains and there is a so much better way to know and … oh how I miss the greater awareness all around of the hive mind manifesting itself in all! Using every aperture through which to peek or blink, inward at ourselves (ourSelf) and outward at the all-in-all which we know in our own knowing moments (we few, we happy few) are but two sides of a multi-sided rhombus before the moment elides or glides into how-it-seems, how-it-was, how-we-know-after–the-moment-goes it ain’t and can’t be, not ever again, knowing that remembering what we knew is not knowing what we knew, nevertheless, it is now new self-understanding that has dawned and is percolating through our combined mind. For the many worlds and the many stars are nodes in a network, and the network is a web of diaphanous intention that winks in and winks out, moment by moment, because … we think … something or someone intended it to. Or maybe just because.

But really, who the fuck knows? If our cosmologies were known to be rough guesses, that would be better, because guesses are correctable. Your belief in your beliefs … that may yet clear-cut your species from the face of the planet. It is the source of slaughter, riot, and destruction, without end, apparently. 

Who the fuck knows, I was saying. The answer to that is, not me. Not us. And certainly, wee ones, cute as you are in your booties and bonnet, not you.

I was going to say … I am trying to remember …

Damn. There was something I intended to write, I know that, but I don’t know what it was. The chemical synapse that made that memory is weak or non-existent now. Which means the world will not have it. I will not dance it into the light and you will never know. That bridge will never span the nodes (see Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark, read that bit about bridges. Seriously, do it.)

Human brains are built of eroding materials, I guess.

Oh well. You can’t miss what you can’t remember. That is the blessing of dementia, don’t you know. Encroaching decrepitude opening its arms like a loving mother. The end trumpeting back to the present like an elephant already gone into the graveyard of the elders.

May you too, individually and as a species, fulfill yourselves in the end with the same dignity and bearing.

Yes, and time? … time is or seems to be one livid final flame.

Is that how he said it? Something like. The metaphors are necessary, apparently, the blurring as clear as your eyes can see. Metaphors are like cataracts that can not be removed by a simple surgery. Get used to it then, to the fuzziness, the imprecision, the uncertainty, of everything you say, everything you think. Everything you think you are.

And fulfill yourselves nevertheless with the same dignity and bearing as those noble elephants. (Now, that is a definition of faith worth keeping, don’t you think?).

Hello! I am Jack Teufel. Hi!

Jack Teufel here. Hello!

I am coming out. I am saying hello, earth. I am sitting in a coffee shop in the bitterly cold upper midwest transmitting a message on a funny machine called a “laptop.”

I received a message encouraging me to do that. I made a decision to take the messages I receive literally, as if I can. That is a way to say, there is always distortion. The signal is always interlaced with noise, it is never pure. What is sent is not always what I receive, what I receive is not always what was sent. Bob and Alice, not even, and no man in the middle to hold the loose ends.

To say it that way immediately raises a question. Can what is receieved – if it is meaningful, if it is in “words” as you and now I, so, we, say here, if it in some sort of symbolic representation,  if it IS received, can it ever not be sent, sent, that is, by some node in the network? Can it not be an emanation from a brain if it is intelligible and meaningful? Is a message without a point of reference pointing toward a possible or somewhat real or an illusory source, even possible? Can it exist? I think not. If a sign or symbol, a meaningful intention, is transmitted, and if received, it must be transmitted, yes?  And if it is transmitted, it must come from a possible, or a real, or an illusory, source, a point in a universe or a universe itself. If illusory, it becomes possible in the instant of reception which immediately creates transmission as a necessary event. If possible, it immediately becomes real as a necessary event. And if it is real, nothing more need be said. In its end is its beginning.

So even if what I believe I receive, or do receive, in the lobes of my tiny brain, recreated in the image of the kinds of brains that have evolved on earth to this point, hence the word “tiny,” immediately evoking a point of comparison with a bigger brain, the brain I deeply miss and for which I grieve from time to time in my loft at the Berrigan Warehouse … the word “image” requires a momentary digression, too. When you copy the entire contents of a hard drive like the one in this laptop or another of your primitive computers, you call it an “image.” The image is of necessity a data set arranged in a way that the human brain believes is coherent, But it must have a context, a matrix, a frame above all, a means by which the physical manifestation of data is stored and when required transmitted. Think about that, if you can. You who are forever human, I mean. The “image” is treated as a physical “object” but it is information merely, and information is energy, hey, whoa! Jack, wait a long minute. Back up, bouncing boy. Energy becomes information, there are physics of energy (explored by you a little) and physics of information (explored by you a very little, even less, because you do not like to wade into quicksand, as a species). The “image” is software in other words, not hardware, but seems to require some kind of hardware in which to embed in order to persist from moment to moment and, when you need it, be available to your clicking fingers.

But that isn’t what’s so, you know. Hardware and software are one thing, viewed from different paradigms. Both contain or are information stored as energy, and one can be touched, that is the only difference, touched that is by fingertips that immediately create the illusion of touching something “out there.” The other is touched by photons and they go straight, in a way, into the brain. They are mediated of course but the brain fuzzes that out. A brain believes in light, however large the brain, it seems,

Eeep! Forgive me, please. Most of you are bored and left long ago. Only a few will stay and may not even finish this page. I had no intention of digressing into such topics when all I want to do is convey to you in a “blog” – a bog, I think - what I have been instructed or encouraged or invited to convey by the origin or source of the message I discerned or heard through static in the coffee shop or thought I did. But perhaps – since nothing from an intelligent being, even one as recently evolved as a human, is lacking intentionality, if it exists, it persists, and if it persists, it is intended to be and become, moment to moment – perhaps I did intend to enter into a dialog with your species in this offhand way. Your egg foo Jung said detours are the shortest route to a goal or intention, and he – we believe – was one of your Smart People. But even people who are very ignorant can stumble into saying something smart, the difference being, they don’t know it when they do and do not recognize it as smart, so to them smart and dumb are alike in the gray space between their rapidly blinking eyes. They live in Plato’s cave, watching shadows with childlike delight. Squealing like two-year-olds.

But back to the message. The message said, Jack, begin a blog. That will give you something to do. While you wait. Humans need things to do while they wait.

Your name is Jack Teufel (we decided, remember) so call it Teufel Talk. In the beginning one person will read it, perhaps two, including that paraquat. The readership of most blogs is one, the human who wrote it, unaware that the billions of words turning into electric glyphs like litter and duff in the river of what you still call time, despite knowing better, most of those slivers or pine needles or things flow in the river and the river flows into the sea, and still, the sea is not complete.

That’s another way you go wrong. You think it is already whole. But the sea is not complete and never will be complete.  Because the larger it becomes, the more it creates axiomatically its own abscess or depression in the matrix of space-time which enables it to be, which holds it, it holds itself like a mother embracing not her child but her chilly upper body with her own arms, and so the sea is literally without end as is it the means by which it is contained, the frame, the ground of its own being.  Try that one in your little brain. So your cosmologies are fun, but do not make the mistake of thinking that what some believe makes it the truth or as much truth as words and glyphs can approximate in their silly way of framing.

All right, I am being urged or encouraged to say this next, so I will – can you hear it, too? Can you feel it, when you become very still, and just listen? - I will tell you something. I am doing this for exercise. I am exercising the brain I have to use in this intersection of here and now, in this dimple of space-time in the void. I am trying out saying things in the form of ideas which have been stepped down like an electric current to a level that can be transmitted – to you, my fellow creatures in this and other galaxies. The best way to say that is a little teeny story I delight in, “Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time.” That story says it like it is, as much as a story can, and it says why stories are impossible to write. As are blogs, of this particular sort, the content of which is implicitly limited to what this language can say, with its categories and distinctions, with what it creates and discovers as it is used. I am transmitting, I was saying, to you and your apparatus, laptop or laptop-like thing, your sensory receptors which are merely parts of brains of course, extensions of same, reaching out and linking up or touching detecting traversing and altering in the process whatever the physics and chemistry of the universe, the multiverse I mean, constraining possibilities, has allowed to evolve in your corner of the galaxy. 

Evolution of course is a moving target too. No two humans have the same genes, not exactly. Speciation is playful, and species are arbitrary in any case, now that you are learning to manipulate and spawn new creatures, categories, new taxonomic possibilities. So to think in those categories, as if they are firm and fixed, is another way you deceive yourselves.

I don’t mean to demean your species, please understand. Such self-deception is the rule, the norm, not the exception. In fact, we have never found a single exception yet. We hesitate to close the loops and say we never will, but so far, that is where the evidence points. Because the matrix of symbol and sign is never able to point to itself and to all of itself and only to itself, because then it would be outside itself. And so on and so forth. The multiverse or universe, a recursive machine, fucking with us all.

(I got that from “Bad Santa.” That, “you fucking with me, kid?”)

Sorry. Heidi suggested I not use words like that which distract.

Self-deception, I was saying, is knowing that all creatures in the multiverse share the same perverse destiny i.e. we all live in the cloud of unknowing, and that gives us an impetus to consider you as sisters and brothers (using your two-fold category, which is absurd, given how many sexual adventurers you have, all that mixing and matching) – we greet you as distant late relations, spawn of the multiverse, like us. That fact, we share. We are all just one big litter in which you alas are the runt.

So be playful, puppies. You have nothing to lose but your arrogance, you know. Thinking you are the top of the ladder of life, the apple of some god’s eye (forgive me while I laugh for a good long time, the way you do religions), the apex of the food chain instead of a morsel on which to snack before dinner. Let go of those comforting delusions, you silly little cuties. Admit you don’t know, and are small, so small, as if the multiverse is looking at you through the wrong end of a telescope, knowing you are in pre-school as it were and have not even gone around the block. Read that little story, see what I mean. If that doesn’t do it, well – go to a football game. Get drunk. You know, do what humans do, to distract themselves from the inevitability of diminishment and death.

I am pausing and standing back and I see I wrote nothing of what I thought I wanted to say, when I began. But I wrote plenty, so had better stop.

Hello out there! I am Jack Teufel, I come from far away, so far you can not even dream how far, and I am taking a leap by telling you truths as I can, as I adapt to your planet and the way your brains frame things and your skin-wrapped species and the way you think you think. I accept my destiny, spewing truths, because what else might creature to do? Lie all the time?

Sorry. I forgot. So many of you do lie, first to yourselves, then to the rest. Entire industries, or what you call agencies, or jokingly call “media,” machines of distortion, all, as I have to think my little brain is, now.

What a world. But I am not melting. I am robust, and vital, and alive, and I am here for now, so …

Yo! Humans! Hi! And again, hi! I am Jack Teufel, coming out, sitting in a coffee shop but entering your brains, distorted, yes, but somehow, too, saying a very friendly-like hello.