the impotence of being earnest

Feeling that one is outside (BARTU) the process & should be, somehow, included; the desire to be helpful; even, imagining you can fix (CIKRE) something (whether or not it actually can be fixed)--these are illusions or impulses saktra is prone to, & suffers from. Which is not the same as reciprocity. Thus, one philosophizes: when admonishment received would have better served.

A haggard kind of hipster grace inheres in bystanderness. Among, but not belonging to. The cool that is attained, not attributed. Fulcanelli (attributing it to Zoroaster, bad Latin & all) names the Sphingid powers as: scire 'to know', potere [=posse] 'to be able' (oft altered to "velle"--to will--per Uncle Aleister), audere 'to dare', tacere 'to keep silent'--which suggests Joyce's "silence, exile, cunning"-- these saktra mostly purely can imagine. How often must one bite one's tongue, or (most usually) risk the exposure of a ridiculous blurt...

DJUNO, KAKNE, VIRNU, SMAJI. Alchemy doesn't travel.

the loneliest number

I would not say that saktra never feels loneliness, but that they experience both solitude & communion in a uniquely different way. Nirshsaktra-communion is based on a constant flow of subtle agreement-signals. Saktra communion can be triggered by as little as a single agreement (rated on a scale according to how significant the thing agreed-upon may be). If a space alien KESFANGE were also a chess player, i would count them kin.

Solitude for the one is default, as communion is for the other. Thus, as there is a word for the undesirable-solitude ("loneliness") of nirshsaktra, there should be a word for the undesirable-communion ("overcrowding" doesn't quite get it) of saktra. MALKANSA in Lojban, or even 'chaotic being-with' KALSA KANSA.

A principle which the two share: harmony (Lojban: KA SARXE). Even harmony, however, is defined in different ways. For saktra it is non-interference. For nirshsaktra it is single purpose. A group in which each member is in competition with the rest may seem to be defined by their mutual disconnection, but actually they all serve the same end, which is maximizing one's share (compare with a goal of only just having enough for each member).

Struggles for territory (TUTRA TE DAMBA), though often bloody, are universally considered an unalterable state of affairs--in an age of many dispersed groups ("blixen") this takes the form of policing membership-definitions; more radical, & therefore more threatening, is a heresy that questions the basis of the group (SE GIRZU). Here is where authority-basis-principles ("abskrelg" or TE CATNI JICMU) enter in. One can dispute the succession of a lineage-authority, the veracity of a leader-authority, the accuracy of an empirical-authority, or the worthiness of the beloved.

These heresiarchs, therefore, comprise the loneliest of nirshsaktra; & nothing can matter to them more, than to acquire followers. Saktra, adhering to the maxim "Neither a follower nor a leader be," often misunderstands this whole dynamic as a question of ascertaining the "truth." It is nothing of the sort. it is only the intolerable extremity of nirshsaktra in saktra's shoes. --Si eppur muove.

untruthiness & his friends

(pic by Robin Danar via Julee Cruise via Don Stitt via Brian Clements on Fb)

"What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." --Francis Bacon

As in so many things, considering the Lojban expression of this reveals a hidden nuance. JETNU contains two arguments: 'x1 is true according to x2' is the whole of its meaning. Usually we think in terms of so-called "objective" (JETNU RODA, or 'true according to everyone') and "subjective" (JETNU DA, or 'true according to someone') truth, assigning one to hard sciences or other dogma, and the other to the arts or the man in the street. When one does not partake of the assumptions (hidden and overt) belonging to the group, one is liable to have a clearer sense of the truth, even as an individual of emotions and other biases, simply by virtue of having removed the sway of the others (the part which I am happy to now have the word "truthiness" for): this tendency to agree which is imperative in neurotypicals, and absent (or even contradicted) in aspergarians. Actually, of course, there is no mooting this RODA, there is only a ZU'I ('the usual') in that JETNU place; one might even say that 'the usual' consists of LO SIMSA PRENU, 'similar persons' who not only override the otherwise opinions of LO NARSIMSA PRENU JA NARPRE ('persons who are different, plus nonpersons'), they enjoy the privilege of not having to imagine whether these opinions exist.

One can still hope for a science that is JETNU ZI'O--true without regard to viewpoint--but that will hardly come about by the efforts of groupthink, nor by a more inclusive politics that carefully validates minority views without having to answer them. This is not to say that only saktra desires truth, but that the truth they desire resides in insight as well as systematic reasoning, nor does the result of mere reasoning force them to accept a truth they might well have reasons for knowing otherwise. Thus aspergian research--in the arts also, by the way--sometimes fails to be acknowledged (even as attempt) because it does not proceed from the body of established practice. It is not a answer to the questions everyone has been asking; it does not take part in the conversation, except to say: look at this. Hear me out.

It may take hundreds of years for that to happen. I suppose truthiness can accrue, little by little, as the air of strangeness that surrounds an unmooted truth slowly yields to familiarity. Looking back then, we wonder why so many people fought for so long not to acknowledge what seems obvious to us today. We wonder, that is, if we are not among those whose simple insights fall on deaf ears in the perpetual present of JETNU ZU'I.

on the Myers-Briggs (again)

(via cnn dot com)

at least the Jungian system has some ideas behind it. unfortunately, he was also overly fond of quaternities as an intellectual icon. that sort of handicaps the empirical side of post-Jungian typology. there have to be exactly four functions, & two have to be opposites of the other two. and of course, a person has to be this way consistently (if not invariably), so that it can make sense to talk about psychological types as if they were phenotypes. not to mention what factors one's personal history can contribute. none of this is entailed by consideration of the functions themselves, as a scientific theory would require. in that sense it's an ideology.

      i think used with flexibility & a fair bit of intuition, they can help make sense of the infinite complexity of human personality. the truth is, it does have regularities. and i believe it is not only possible to recognize some of these particular patterns in individuals, the patterns even appear in fictional characters. unfortunately the use of this mapping-system has been taken over almost exclusively by a bunch of literal-minded people who think that to pigeonhole is to understand, & a lot more who never even bother to read the books before they start flinging the jargon around. maybe one day a more sensitive mapping (i like to say: "256 personality-types") will be devised, & that too will be a service to humanity--just as long as it isn't built into an app that types everyone you point your camera-phone at!

word-hoard

(pic by Ilene Meyer)

So they may have found Shakespeare's own dictionary. I know he used a lot of words, & even though the English language was probably at its peak then, there's a list of over 1700 words he either coined or was the first recorded user of. This set me to thinking how in writing classes nowadays, they tend to discourage writing with words the average reader might not know. They're going to just skip over them, we're told. I myself have always been willing to look words up, & in fact habitually try to use any new word the next chance i get. I learned whole pages of new words when i read Proust & Pynchon, for example; among poets probably Hart Crane or Auden most (with a special nod to Loy).

While neologizing has split off into a genre & a subculture of its own (one step removed from conlangs), & advertizers vie with scifi writers to see who can disrupt standard English vocabulary more, the poets have mostly not kept up. Two contemporary poets who have are Lissa Wolsak & Kristin Ryling; while Australian phenomenon Javant Biarujia spans the gamut from langue close to macaronics with a special emphasis on Joycean puns.

How many words does a writer need? Besides an unknown number of haphazardly assembled foreign-language dictionaries, from Albanian to Maori, I have as my main resource two unabridged dictionaries, Webster's Second (1934) & Webster's Third (1961), because each has words not found in the other. I've always wanted one of the multi-volume, regularsize-print OEDs--but have never had the money when i ever ran across one (e.g. $1000). The trouble with the latter, however, is its infusion of monkey randomness: it seems like every variant spelling of the centuries between, say, Chaucer & Johnson, has bloated the number of entries to the point where, as in Finnegans Wake, the distinction between word & not-a-word has vanished completely.

When the Internet spawned Google, nobody was gunning for encyclopedias & dictionaries; they just lost out in the info-melee that followed. So if you want to know about a word now, you maybe get an equal number of right answers & wrong answers, with only your reader's intuition to choose between them. Pre-Johnson days, again; & poignant that our store should hap upon a pricey replica of Noah's very own, 1828-vintage, just at this hour (i imagine a sect of dictionary-fundamentalists who hold this as their holy book, & refer to none besides). "But 'spite of thy hap, Hap hath well happed" (Wyatt). The Primordial Soup beckons.

in response to a diagram about different levels of abstract knowledge

what we can map are our ideas about knowledge, not knowledge itself. and our ideas are hierarchical. i remember when i was a kid i wanted to map part of a local park that had a creek running through it. after i had drawn it roughly all over, i kept going back & refining the shapes i drew, ever more closely to the shapes i could perceive. but i got to a point where i realized i could only continue the process on another piece of paper & a smaller scale... but what was i doing really? generating a certain line out of a three dimensional edge. following a cycle of look-judge-record, over & over. was my first map, or a master-map on the largest possible scale, more real than one of the small maps? was it somehow above them? was it necessarily a good thing that i could talk as if i had been over much of that space, when i had actually only traversed a small, narrow portion of it? --and was this knowledge of the park, or was it knowledge of myself in a measuring mood? it was the product of a dance between them. when the dance ended, i carried beyond it a sense of familiarity, perhaps enough to remember it later. what we like to call knowledge is mostly a very complicated set of interlocking topics: because what we want above all, is to be able to keep on talking about things as if we knew them, could know them & keep them by making maps of them. i think it is because we know deep down we will lose them, & that our very selves are nothing but another kind of map, drawn upon a momentary portion of the melting & solidifying earth.

I see dead people on Facebook

(via National Geographic)

I see dead people on Facebook. Sometimes they still post. It bothers me when i realize that i haven't been thinking of them very much. Then i think that one day my own Facebook page will be going on without me. Perhaps someone will happen upon that, & go back & read my living words.