Conjunctions...Lunar Landing 1969

CONJUNCTIONS

The day you said you loved someone else

we were watching them land on the moon.

They kept mocking it up

but we knew the real thing

because it wasn't clear.

Someone else, you said,

I met her walking down the street.

They were wandering around leaving footprints.

In a thousand years of sunspots, meteorites, solar wind,

there'll still be those flat scars.

All of a sudden someone else.

We can't watch the crescent belly out

and pretend a man never touched her.

I knew I should have stayed a virgin:

bare­breasted, hourglass, Minoan,

I would dance alone till

power welled up in me like handfuls of snakes.

I should have stayed outside your touch

like those acrobats vaulting immune

through the lunar horns of the bull.

I'd have seen her first.

We'd have linked arms

you wouldn't see anything,

occulted, our bright light canceled

in double brilliance.

Some meetings are inevitable.

We swing towards each other, can't prevent

the apparent kiss of our separate momentums,

our inevitable onward retreat,

our retrograde attentions.

So what if I saw you dancing

on the far side of the room

as if it was the only place lit?

The universe is swelling,

Nothing pushes us apart.

So what if you said we hurtle together

across centuries of space ?

The moon shines her lie of adoration

always hiding her face.

I learn to die every month with my blood

and rise up, hair like snakes, electric.

The gravity of our attraction

diminishes with the inverse square of time.

Some desire to desire remains like penumbra,

bodies crossing out of the cone of extinction.

We keep our distance.

Any touching is only apparent:

the light touch of the bulldancer at Knossos,

conjunction of bison and arrow on a cave wall.

3 blind mice

DID YOU EVER SEE
 
The beautiful boy who lives in my cabin has the dark unprotected eyes of a wild animal. I find him crouching by the woods road, almost naked, slingshot tensed on an unwary grouse. He tries to hide the slingshot when he sees me. He mumbles that he didn't have permission. Can he have permission. 

By my cabin his cat comes to rub against my legs. The tortoiseshell has one ghost eye which glares like the washed out blank eye of a greek statue. The boy has left water by the door in one of my china plates. Inside, a slough of mud caked clothes is piled in a corner. Every lantern is broken; the mantles crumbled, the chimneys cracked or gone. A stack of books has toppled and been left with split spines and crushed open pages. The battery in the flashlight is a gob of rust.  

The porch he was supposed to build as rent is an outline -- four posts, three sills. I leave a note telling him that if he makes the bed tightly the mice won't nest in the quilts. I straighten the books, then put them back. To stack them would be to comment. Not my home now, I tell myself.    

The second time, I come to spend the night. I have warned him. The cat's not around. The boy has left a note saying he's going under. He hasn't been able to work. The clams are scant. The world is crushing him. He leaves me his breathing apparatus in place of the unfinished rent. 

The bed is made. I straighten the books, folding the pages smooth. When I open the desk drawer to find a pencil to write a reply, an enormous mouse with white eyes raises its head from a toilet paper nest and turns its nose uncertainly from side to side. Blind. One blind mouse. In its dark world it waits for my hidden immensity to move, for the pressure of my presence to stir a hint of my intent. 

I write the boy a note saying I remember nineteen. I understand. He may stay or go, do nothing, as he wishes. I will still respect him. I say I don't need his diving gear. I already have too many tools I don't use.   

I want to promise that it will get better but I know it doesn't. All that will happen is that after a while we get used to the intolerable. After a while even the intolerable becomes our condition, comfortable. Only the eye, which sees, offends. The seeing is his to control.   

If I can't promise a better world, only that he will survive his knowledge of it, should I offer that as if it were reassurance? He would see through that comfort to its threat. I leave a note which says less than I want to say because more would be cruel. He needs kindness more than truth. What he needs most is his own place to barricade himself from truth. 

The blind mouse is still there. Three blind mice, see how they run, memory jingles. What does that mean? Nonsense words. I never saw a blind mouse before. It must be old. What does the nursery rhyme mean? Before Dick Whittington, when people had no cats to catch the old ones, were blind mice tame? How could I save that rhyme all my life as if it said something? A habit of believing that words strung together make phrases, that phrases all mean something. It will be right. I remember being your age. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run.   

I go to the cabin one more time before leaving. The books are as I left them. The boy's clothes are plastered along the new sills like snake sheds left to dry. Sprouts are molding in the sprouter. The diving gear is gone. My note on the back of his note is folded on the table. I open the drawer where the mouse was.   

A handful of half sized mice with dark eye-beads fall away from the blind one like dropping petals. Her sides have collapsed. She waves her head slowly, trying to guess where I am before she moves. The small mice run back and forth. One drops onto the floor. They don't act scared. She is blind and has not taught them how to be startled by things they see. They have to find the instinct for fear themselves and learn how to obey it.    

I leave the boy a note saying he should put D-Con in the drawer with the mice. They will damage the quilts and books.   

I hope he already knows the mice are there. I hope he has opened the drawer and discovered the blind mouse. Maybe he shared his food with her, like a prisoner in solitary. He might have seen the babies at each stage: first pink as shrimp, then purpling over with a haze of fur before they turned neat grey. 

Maybe they don't run because he watches over them. The cat was blind. The boy may have fed the mice. If the cat is gone now because he knows that even a blind cat could catch a blind mouse, he will protect them. He will ignore the note.   

I hope he ignores the note.

-- 
Kala
@wildgardiner.me  @beautifuldreamers.us

Grandmother hypothesis

Women with thighs...Mauritania
Kaleidoscopic Sheela Na Gig

Word Clouds and Narratives

We are undergoing a communication revolution that is shaping a political one. Over our time as a communicating species, we have gone from symbol to story, and now to reality TV. Corresponding verbal artifacts: Word and myth; Verb and story; Scene, meme and word cloud.

Symbol: naming, nouns, things.

Human speech has long been viewed as a key differentiator for our species (never mind that we haven’t done much about our own ignorance of dolphin and ant.) Children learn to name things, actions, relationships. Each word learned is a symbol, a concept that gives us a different way of organizing the world, and that excludes other ways. The story of naming colors (if there is no word for green you have a hard time telling it apart from blue) and the Eskimos’ many words for snow are examples of that. If I learn different terms for wading birds and nesting birds, I notice those traits; if my names for categories of birds are based on size or color, those are what I see. Magic conflates the world by juxtaposing different things based on their symbols—word sounds, numerical meaning, or sensory signatures.

We hunger for meaning, for our place in the world. A child learning language uses it to control things, to assert her connection to others. Language affirms and shields and circumscribes identity—think Shibboleth. Think debates today pro and anti bilingual education. Songs are the pure language of identity, like the bird calls that speak me, me, mine mine. My place among those I can see, smell, touch. Shared truths are polished like stones through constant handling. Myths, songs, epics. Only as much as can be kept in retelling after retelling

Written language allows hierarchical control at a distance by literacy-controlling elites. How to interpret the world can be controlled from one point, transmitting coded instruction. Limited literacy can largely be organized. Elite—often religious –hierarchies controlled though the advantage that literacy gives in the distance and complexity of control.

Movable type knocked down the economic barrier and democratized literacy laying a foundation for religious and then political democracy. When each man reads the Bible, the King is no longer needed to mediate with God. No wonder that it was prohibited for slaves to be taught to read—and literacy is also prohibited to women in some traditionalist patriarchies.

General literacy paves the way for the notion that there may be common truths that exist in the world which can be discovered, in addition to (instead of? O heresy!) divine truths that are created and emanate through revelation. Rationalism elevates methodical observation that incorporates procedures for testing the validity of connections among elements. Jargon for saying, a better way of testing truth. Verbs. Actions. Stories. Science explodes; so do novels. Different people are looking for different kinds of meaning, different ways to explore possibilities and connections. The great American novel: the idea of expressing a national identity through sweeping narrative. But, as critics from Lao Tsu on down have noted, naming one thing makes us ignore everything else.

Now we have tools that let us communicate thickly. A video spot may include language, emotional cues via music, and a mass of visual information that is transmitted directly. The message may be more diffuse yet more powerful. In our single lifetimes many of us have seen a huge arc of development in a new way of creating and sharing information, and our varying competencies at this have been in wild display during the election.

Mass communication via broadcast and news papers created hierarchical models for dispensing interpreted knowledge. TV and movies let creators image a world entire, with symbols, narratives and layered emotionally dense meanings: with the immediacy of seeing for ourselves, yet operating at a distance. The economic base of this new, democratized hierarchy was commodified desire. Politics and advertising relearned fluidity of meaning, possibilities inherent in inventing and then satiating unnecessary needs. The bombardment is effective yet ultimately unsatisfied. We are all addicts, overstimulated, craving more. Things seem to be meaningful yet the meaning is no longer sharp, sequential. Instructions come in other languages. Videos show rather than tell, but there is no one to correct us when we follow wrongly.

One-to-many mass media—broadcast radio and television--have completed their arc of dominance in a single human lifetime. One inflection point was the Hollywood writers strike. When narrators went silent, studios discovered reality television, with a simple narrative arc of conflict and survival, competition and conquest, with just a little pluck and luck to keep it interesting. A good story requires equal competitors, or there is no suspense. When things get too out of balance, behind-the scenes tweaking injects new elements to maintain interest. Girl on Fire.

Now the Internet allows image/word combinations to circulate while the means of production has been democratized. Cellphone videos confront white ignorance with the evidence of how little other lives matter. Fill the feed with Jackass videos of overloaded trucks, deer in headlights, alien invasions. Revolutions proliferate till tyrants learn how to smash portals shut. The pace of learning and counter-learning is immense, the steps visible to all. A meme deploys techniques perfected in advertising/propaganda, like magic, juxtaposing unlike things and creating a new thing with invented significance—compelling yet empty. Cat memes, then Bernie memes.Then more cats.

For people who like words, a replacement for poems, for stories, is the word cloud. Advertising and politics has long used focus groups and response times to measure associations and find the word that hits your brain fast and hard, the words that amplify impact. Their messages are perfected for the echo chamber of your response. Like so many other tools of language and symbol, they can be descriptive or directive. You can conjure up the word frequency from your personal corpus, see how it evolves. Or you can create and inflict word clouds to manipulate your audience.

This election was lost (won) in a word cloud. Trump's pollsters noted the inflection after the Comey letter was released. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/trump-polling-data/?mbid=nl_11916_p3&CNDID=36480033 What followed was a depressed Democratic base and a (re-)energized insurgency. More than a renewal of the narrative of cheating (an obfuscation never dispelled by a campaign that failed to respond to the underlying anxiety about secrecy, privacy and the privilege of having any to protect) this last round was a whole new attack via word cloud. It flipped the poles on the narrative of failed sexuality (his weakness, not assault, was Trump’s great sin on the video.) The word cloud was magical, combining Jewish sexual perversity (Weiner! Who could imagine that name!), Muslim (Abedin, complete with whispers of some connection to Muslim brotherhood, almost but not quite Human,) female intimacy, secrecy, out-of-control technology, fear of the spying outsider telling and distorting our secrets. And no one needed to build a narrative. We have been conditioning ourselves to respond to word clouds, and the image-makers have refined techniques of magic for overlaying and merging. With time the spell wears off, but it takes more than ten days. Too late.

---

PREVIEW of next comments...

By the next election we will have passed through several accelerated generations of messaging techniques.  The winners this time included a cadre expert at understanding and manipulating techniques at the edge.  The nation has never been more divided, as competition is based on sorting and separating, complementarity.  Are institutional changes that allow head on competition possible or desirable? What unifying strategies work post election?

Word Clouds and Narratives

We are undergoing a communication revolution that is shaping a political one. Over our time as a communicating species, we have gone from symbol to story, and now to reality TV. Corresponding verbal artifacts: Word and myth; Verb and story; Scene, meme and word cloud.

Symbol: naming, nouns, things.

Human speech has long been viewed as a key differentiator for our species (never mind that we haven’t done much about our own ignorance of dolphin and ant.) Children learn to name things, actions, relationships. Each word learned is a symbol, a concept that gives us a different way of organizing the world, and that excludes other ways. The story of naming colors (if there is no word for green you have a hard time telling it apart from blue) and the Eskimos’ many words for snow are examples of that. If I learn different terms for wading birds and nesting birds, I notice those traits; if my names for categories of birds are based on size or color, those are what I see. Magic conflates the world by juxtaposing different things based on their symbols—word sounds, numerical meaning, or sensory signatures.

We hunger for meaning, for our place in the world. A child learning language uses it to control things, to assert her connection to others. Language affirms and shields and circumscribes identity—think Shibboleth. Think debates today pro and anti bilingual education. Songs are the pure language of identity, like the bird calls that speak me, me, mine mine. My place among those I can see, smell, touch. Shared truths are polished like stones through constant handling. Myths, songs, epics. Only as much as can be kept in retelling after retelling

Written language allows hierarchical control at a distance by literacy-controlling elites. How to interpret the world can be controlled from one point, transmitting coded instruction. Limited literacy can largely be organized. Elite—often religious –hierarchies controlled though the advantage that literacy gives in the distance and complexity of control.

Movable type knocked down the economic barrier and democratized literacy laying a foundation for religious and then political democracy. When each man reads the Bible, the King is no longer needed to mediate with God. No wonder that it was prohibited for slaves to be taught to read—and literacy is also prohibited to women in some traditionalist patriarchies.

General literacy paves the way for the notion that there may be common truths that exist in the world which can be discovered, in addition to (instead of? O heresy!) divine truths that are created and emanate through revelation. Rationalism elevates methodical observation that incorporates procedures for testing the validity of connections among elements. Jargon for saying, a better way of testing truth. Verbs. Actions. Stories. Science explodes; so do novels. Different people are looking for different kinds of meaning, different ways to explore possibilities and connections. The great American novel: the idea of expressing a national identity through sweeping narrative. But, as critics from Lao Tsu on down have noted, naming one thing makes us ignore everything else.

Now we have tools that let us communicate thickly. A video spot may include language, emotional cues via music, and a mass of visual information that is transmitted directly. The message may be more diffuse yet more powerful. In our single lifetimes many of us have seen a huge arc of development in a new way of creating and sharing information, and our varying competencies at this have been in wild display during the election.

Mass communication via broadcast and news papers created hierarchical models for dispensing interpreted knowledge. TV and movies let creators image a world entire, with symbols, narratives and layered emotionally dense meanings: with the immediacy of seeing for ourselves, yet operating at a distance. The economic base of this new, democratized hierarchy was commodified desire. Politics and advertising relearned fluidity of meaning, possibilities inherent in inventing and then satiating unnecessary needs. The bombardment is effective yet ultimately unsatisfied. We are all addicts, overstimulated, craving more. Things seem to be meaningful yet the meaning is no longer sharp, sequential. Instructions come in other languages. Videos show rather than tell, but there is no one to correct us when we follow wrongly.

One-to-many mass media—broadcast radio and television--have completed their arc of dominance in a single human lifetime. One inflection point was the Hollywood writers strike. When narrators went silent, studios discovered reality television, with a simple narrative arc of conflict and survival, competition and conquest, with just a little pluck and luck to keep it interesting. A good story requires equal competitors, or there is no suspense. When things get too out of balance, behind-the scenes tweaking injects new elements to maintain interest. Girl on Fire.

Now the Internet allows image/word combinations to circulate while the means of production has been democratized. Cellphone videos confront white ignorance with the evidence of how little other lives matter. Fill the feed with Jackass videos of overloaded trucks, deer in headlights, alien invasions. Revolutions proliferate till tyrants learn how to smash portals shut. The pace of learning and counter-learning is immense, the steps visible to all. A meme deploys techniques perfected in advertising/propaganda, like magic, juxtaposing unlike things and creating a new thing with invented significance—compelling yet empty. Cat memes, then Bernie memes.Then more cats.

For people who like words, a replacement for poems, for stories, is the word cloud. Advertising and politics has long used focus groups and response times to measure associations and find the word that hits your brain fast and hard, the words that amplify impact. Their messages are perfected for the echo chamber of your response. Like so many other tools of language and symbol, they can be descriptive or directive. You can conjure up the word frequency from your personal corpus, see how it evolves. Or you can create and inflict word clouds to manipulate your audience.

This election was lost (won) in a word cloud. Trump's pollsters noted the inflection after the Comey letter was released. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/trump-polling-data/?mbid=nl_11916_p3&CNDID=36480033 What followed was a depressed Democratic base and a (re-)energized insurgency. More than a renewal of the narrative of cheating (an obfuscation never dispelled by a campaign that failed to respond to the underlying anxiety about secrecy, privacy and the privilege of having any to protect) this last round was a whole new attack via word cloud. It flipped the poles on the narrative of failed sexuality (his weakness, not assault, was Trump’s great sin on the video.) The word cloud was magical, combining Jewish sexual perversity (Weiner! Who could imagine that name!), Muslim (Abedin, complete with whispers of some connection to Muslim brotherhood, almost but not quite Human,) female intimacy, secrecy, out-of-control technology, fear of the spying outsider telling and distorting our secrets. And no one needed to build a narrative. We have been conditioning ourselves to respond to word clouds, and the image-makers have refined techniques of magic for overlaying and merging. With time the spell wears off, but it takes more than ten days. Too late.

---

PREVIEW of next comments...

By the next election we will have passed through several accelerated generations of messaging techniques.  The winners this time included a cadre expert at understanding and manipulating techniques at the edge.  The nation has never been more divided, as competition is based on sorting and separating, complementarity.  Are institutional changes that allow head on competition possible or desirable? What unifying strategies work post election?

Neither Clinton Crone nor Bernie Bra

I don’t like my choices. I want to have the chance to vote for another Barack Obama, or a Bill Clinton without a zipper problem. I’m not seeing either on the horizon and if the Supreme Court wasn’t so old, political and narrowly divided I might even take a pass on this election. But they are so I can’t.

 

From the luxury of the whitest state in America, one of the most clean-politics, secular places south of the Canadian border, I welcome the insistence on clearly articulated progressive principles. I share the anti-war, pro-equality vision. Overdue. On the other hand, a tempered warrior with incredible span, who has done retail politics in one of the poorest, most rural states and in the state that epitomizes wealthy cosmopolitan urbanity. Who went from being a political outsider , literally married into trailer trash, to defining inner circle in the course of a couple of decades of determined, grinding effort, showing that political position is something that can be created by sheer will. Who has the audacity to unapologetically have a Muslim woman heading up her staff. I should love them both.

 

But I don’t. They feel stale, wrong for the time, not enough. Trying too hard at the wrong thing, not trying hard enough, too soft, too hardened, disconnected, overly connected, zealots, publicans...

 

I’ve been spoiled by living through the reigns (I use the term deliberately) of a couple of the most talented politicians a person could hope for. Both wanted to find a way for America to move ahead together, not in splinters. One took a strategy of looking for a third way down the middle. One tried to help us see ourselves as citizens of the world. What each got for their efforts was their butts handed to them by a party of opposition that defines itself by that opposition, decades of ever more expert division-baiting, and a mushy center that does not hold. 

 

Whatever gifts the current candidates have, both are going to start with a much harsher oppositional face-off. I haven’t heard anything from either that persuades me they’ll overcome that. Clinton’s long demonstrated ability to clench her jaw and swallow ordure isn’t very attractive to people who brush their teeth after every meal. Bernie’s idealism sounds risky to people who have weathered a cliff-hanger loss and subsequent World War III mid-wifed by a third-party idealist and a runaway Supreme Court.

 

What I want and won’t get: Someone who speaks to the center with ringing idealism. A grounded vision of what replaces our relationships of production and value when industrial employment goes away (because industry doesn’t depend on American labor) and when capital arrangements that were the cleansing, accelerant scavengers of a robust system become the corrupt stench of a moribund economy. Someone who can articulate humane and compassionate values that include a wide span of beings. A candidate who demonstrates healing discourse, not identity politics. Someone who makes me laugh and soar by feeling how connected I am with people who are different from me. Someone whose light erases fear’s shadows.

 

Since that paragon isn’t running this time out (and I don’t see her/him waiting in the wings of a brokered convention) here’s what I’m shooting for this cycle.

 

A primary that leaves us strong for the fall, sprinters and marathoners alike. Enthusiasts willing to pledge themselves for the slog even if they lose because the November loss really IS that much bigger. Bernistas who understand that even if they don’t get to overthrow the order, they need to press just as hard to keep it from being replaced by a patriarchal theocracy based on triumphalism, torture and white supremacy. Clintonians who cherish the spark, who delight in the fresh passion of newcomers and take care not to confuse cynicism with caution.

 

Most of all, because without this it doesn’t matter a minute who wins the presidential primary: A powerful push to bring the vision of a good community to seats all down the ticket. Lots of seats in the Senate are in play this year! Dare to dream of recovering the House. State legislatures—where the redistricting lines that create permanently entitled political classes are drawn. County and municipal government—because that’s where we play out whether black lives actually matter.

 

Here are my heroes: people like my Mayor and City Councilors who take on the hard and often excoriated task of balancing mind and heart and open ears for their whole community in the real, difficult daily work of making a small town a shining place. Saunders and Clinton and all their impassioned supporters, but especially the ones that insist that dignity is not a zero-sum game. People who know they can’t see both sides of the moon and so seek out people whose worlds look different from the one they can see.

 

People who keep going even after they realize it doesn’t end here. Especially when they realize it doesn’t end.