purptuply

Philosophers have sometimes talked about a country of liars, but before James Morrow no one has imagined a City of Truth. This first-rate satire postulates the discovery of a way to condition humans so that even the prospect of telling a lie becomes unbearably painful. Then he adds a secret underground of fantasy-enthusiasts, a child with an incurable, terminal illness, & a father who believes that only lies can cure him. (It's to Morrow's credit that they don't.)

The reader would expect a novelist to come down in favor of fiction. This work, however, offers something more nuanced. "I don't love the lies...but I don't hate them either," is the father's final reflection. It is clear that, as in the abortion-satire film Citizen Ruth, both sides can easily be made ridiculous. Still, from an Aspergian point of view, it would be as wrong to place lying & truth-telling on the same level, as myths & scientific accounts of causality. Ours is a society of lies. One of them is that it believes in telling the truth. Another, that it is not even possible to know the truth. On the one hand, an ethics without probity is empty; on the other, an epistemology without axioms is nonsense.

Such paradoxes hardly perturb the majority of Cretans, who lie at every opportunity & whose constant mutual gazes demand lying in return.

"nocitura toga, nocitura petuntur
militia" --Juvenal, Satire X.8-9

change and tamper monkeys

(via amazon dot com)

It’s true that saktra is all too prone not only to revisit the same restaurant every time, but even to sit in the same chair at the same table, & order the exact same item on the menu. Nevertheless, this is more about an internal sense of the order of the world, than attachment to actual places or things. At odds with this intransigence, seemingly trivial, stands an army of agents of change: sheer randomness, entropic deterioration (resisting this is, alas, not even in favor, often enough, among neurotypicals, who you’d think would like to have their Great Machine run, if not elegantly, at least with unimpaired forward motion--), but most of all by the incessant compulsive activity of a small class of humans i will henceforward refer to as "tamper monkeys".

Their salient trait is an irritation with, not just the rules of the status quo, but its very arrangement. Now, saktra is in favor of any change, even a radical one, so long as it makes the situation better (--or is this just an INTJ trait?...must consider). But why spend hours moving furniture around in a room whose functions & contents will remain unaltered afterwards? Well, the itch will have been scratched. For the moment.

Saktra is apt to feel irrationally persecuted by such spasms. They occur in corporate contexts under the guise of “restructuring” & the like; when not a covert assault upon jobs, pay, or privileges, they often occur when someone who has been undeservedly empowered with such options starts moving colored squares around on a computer screen. Why they can’t be content with video games is beyond me. (Probably it comes from a subconscious realization of being otherwise useless.) Do tamper monkeys serve a real purpose in the scheme of things?

Yes. Because the people with good ideas are not going to be listened to, social evolution depends upon tamper-monkey innovation as the single motor of progress.

The Kludge

The word “kludge” originated in computer programming & remains a useful way of describing the typical company programs that long ago escaped the comprehension of their users, so many have been the hired tinkerers & so scanty has been the window of taking time to figure out the actual relations of every part. A kludge is like a patchwork quilt too big to see all of at once. Supremely inelegant, yet for the purpose supremely essential, even in this form, as long as it works.

It recently occurred to me that not only is the Law—our body of laws—a sort of super-kludge (one where no one understands it all, & the difference between what one lawyer knows & what another lawyer knows may equal defeat or victory), just about any human tradition is as well; & furthermore, that this is one of our core human characteristics (at least as neurotypicals). When a critic examines “The Novel” it is to the super-kludge of the majority of novel-like books written, that he refers. (No one has read them all.) An explosion of originality in one area may trigger unfathomable repercussions all over the entire network… And of course, each one is read, in part, for what it says in its place among the others.

But we seldom actually talk about about kludge-ness, instead of its icons. It would be to add a counter representing the unknown, to the counters in the game of knowns. Then saktra comes to the game, not only not knowing kludge-ness but expecting, what? Things to be done for a reason? You go & play the game according to your own lights. The result somehow doesn’t refer back enough. It needs some of those invisible tokens added.

And knowing that you work—even as an artist in isolation—within a context that will be perceived as the evolving kludge: not saying so, says something you may or may not intend. Something that for many, at first, will be the only thing they hear in it.

bringing in the sheaves

(via via metafilter)

      "A Pavane for Grothendieck

Gray sheaves, their zodiac;
red mathoms from Cathay.

Or a place beyond words
they almost remember.

Hesitant counting stilb
even with the cloud plague.

Nothing from this charade
durable: all is sand.

Incest as cicala
emitting in a jar

Change paths; theremin vugg
keeps watch like a grackle

"Climate science is our Napoleon at Jena, not the world spirit on horseback, but the biospheric totality via comsat. If there is a short list of things calling us to a timely rather than a hesitant thought, then surely it is on that list."

"He showed Malgoire a 200-liter oil drum filled with cinders and estimated he had destroyed a total of 25,000 pages.."

crazy

It seems pejoratives never simply condemn (except in Lojban, which has MABLA, otherwise semantically-empty), but have to map out a culture’s shadow-obsessions, whether excremental or sexual, adscititiously. So now we are starting to talk about “the R-word” (analogous to "N-") 'retarded' --& looking askance at such perennials as 'stupid' (JMIBLE 'understand-weak'—which is not pejorative in Lojban) & 'insane' (FENKI--ditto) as well. Though that may make it problematic, in the heat of the moment, to have to actually think about what it is you are condemning, I say that that is a good thing.

In politics, for example, which is another kind of team sports, I am angered by—what, the opposing team behaving like they always do? (We need a verb for this--. JIKPRO?) Them acting out their fantasies about how the world works (XLALI 'bad' by standard of x3: FATCI 'the facts')? Their hypocrisy? (PALCI 'immoral' covers this--.) Their refusal to acknowledge what I consider to be the real problems? (Something with 'refuse' CPAPRO. 'Problem' NABMI, probably.) These can all be specified, & when they are, I am a bit closer to understanding the motives of my enemy. (And maybe, after all, there might be something they have in common with me.)

Other typical human behaviors, I might as well call: ignorant (TOLDJUNO), denialist, selfish (SEZYSE’U), malicious, materialistic, foolish BEBNA (which is making bad choices that are known to be bad), short-sighted, or mistaken TOLDRA in some other way (causality, anyone?)… If somebody nearly hits me in traffic, I can say they’re not paying enough attention to other cars, or else maybe they expect me to get out of their way (this—entitlemented—accounts for a lot of things that aggravate me). (DUSLEBNA 'excessively-take'?)

Somehow when we want to be extremely condemnatory, or dismissive, it’s always the thinking-ability of the other that is called into question. –Not, say: the poorly chosen assumptions/ misleading worldview/ lazy application of reasoning which might have led to this debacle. It’s like I don’t want to argue, because they won’t be capable of hearing it anyway. The problem, not between two humans, but removed to a location inside the head of one of them.

But if I am turning this interpersonal disagreement into a matter which my very own culture regards as definitely not something blameworthy--indeed, a defense to its highest condemnation, the charge of murder--, isn’t this making my assigning-blame into an empty gesture? What I would want to have said, rather, is more like: "You should be prevented from doing that, even by coercive means if necessary." Because that’s what we do with crazy people: we disregard their words.

Mirrored by the other side, who also disregard these words.

On believing & disbelieving

Part one. To believe is not in neurotypicals intellectual assent so much as it is an affirmation of solidarity with other believers; in this sense even to consider the question of "proofs" would already be impolitic. (For saktra the feeling of solidarity--sobernost--has no compelling force, thus it hardly matters whether anyone else is "onboard" with them or not.) So the fact of tribes of believers itself is important to human society; the putative content of dogmas of belief is not. The former, however, defines itself as "not-politics" in order to nullify the effect of dissent, for no one but unbelievers will pay heed to those arguments (however conclusive). The history of atheism is a story that ever repeats; & ever accomplishes nothing. (Except maybe: establishing a brand.)

Part two. The word "God" is used for an abstract idea comprising various superlatives, an agent without observable activity, a feeling with unspecific antecedents, but most of all as the subject of predicates that are meant to sound loud. It is quite feasible to discuss any aspect of existing religious practices without having recourse to such blurry words (or "fnords"--good only for muddying the discourse), but the greatest incitement to their retention must be simple nostalgia for the tradition of similar arguments. It is one of those venerable games that only those fascinated by the game are still playing. Unfortunately a core part of their conception of the game is that everyone else should be compelled to play.

Part three. Cosmopolitanism was a brief, unstable construct at the best of times. One can hope it is not yet completely over. In fact the vast majority of each tribe of believers does not yearn for global victory so much as for local peace. Nor are most of the people who insist on having a non-secular vocabulary, inherently intolerant. I imagine we would not have arrived at the present revival of internecine warfare without the simultaneous conditions of overpopulation, resource depletion, & general weather contrariness. (America's latter-day imperialist blunders being only the match to that tinderbox.) It does not bode well either for sustained rational discourse or disciplined problem-solving, for the great strength of religious tribal formations has always been their relative indifference to the survival of individual members.

Cosmopolitanism must offer something more than the mere absence of persecution; in order to prevail, it needs to hold on to the humane vision of a world in which everyone, equally, matters. And equality (NU PREDUNLI) is something they should all have been able to agree on, if they but read their book.

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.