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.

one thing pretending to be another

(via Gwyneth Jones)

"Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede." --Chesterton

My wife alerted me to an unsuspected backlash to the Jared Leto Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club: from those in the trans community who resent the fact that this character was played by a cis-man. Some even comparing it to "blackface"... Now ordinarily i would say, Let a thousand ressentiments bloom; it's not like there's never any reason to feel oppressed there. But i would think, today, why not be more celebratory, what with even Texas on the road to marriage equality (it seems)--a place whose former motto might well have been: "Uganda, with Tacos." That was very much a sympathetic character. Remember Freebie and the Bean?

This puts me in mind of those who take umbrage at the increasing visibility of autistics in popular culture. They say: why not hire autistic actors, to do it right? I submit that there are two separate issues getting mixed up, to the detriment of both. One is job opportunities. I really think, in acting as in any other field, let anyone play any part. Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet, James Earl Jones played Lear (magnificently), any number of gay actors have been hetero heartthrobs in the Golden Age of Hollywood & after: simply remove the barriers that exist because of prejudice, & let talent prevail. It might even be considered more of a challenge to persuade when coming from a position of non-experience. Michael Douglas as Liberace? He was practically a poster child for straight male privilege--.

The other part is the war of images. A good case can be made that there is usually a sequence of increasingly realistic depictions of any minority, with what passes for convincing portrayal becoming seen as stereotypically demeaning to a later era. This does not mean that the pioneers' efforts were wasted. They were, after all, out there. Personally i do not feel that any onscreen character, even if it directly purports to show something that is part of my regular experience, is really about me or anyone else; it's a commercial product, & it's a fictive creation, in a genre-galaxy of other fictive creations. But many people do use these commercial products to form their ideas about the world, so therefore they are important facts, to be negotiated. Ending stereotypes won't end prejudice, yet when prejudice lessens, using them turns unfashionable. That's how progress is made.

Meanwhile I am looking at the words. If white playing African-American is "blackface" & white playing Native American is "redface" (yes, people do use the term), is cis playing trans "trans-face"? neurotypical playing autistic "aut-face"?--I could get out my collection of exonyms for this-- gay playing straight "straight-face"...? And what's the contrary of that--"true-face"? I have said before that reality television isn't reality, it's amateur acting. Being your real self comes from a long apprenticeship, an askesis, even, in which the self-lies of socialization are progressively removed. This has nothing to do with art, except for the artist's asymptotic journey toward more perfect expression.

"Shadow, not light, is the language of the sun." --George Murray, Glimpse (2010)

abavus niger

(Krull via darklyeuphoric on tumblr)

     "Nor do I care e'en to know an thou be white or be black."

               --Catullus (tr Richard Burton)

As a present for my birthday, one of my wife's best friends (Michelle R.) used her genealogical website memberships to do some research on my own ancestry. She has discovered that, on my mother's side of the family (from Louisiana), i have a great-great-grandfather (the Romans had a word for this: abavus) who was "a black man married to a mulatto"--though their daughter listed on the census as white. Which is funny to me, seeing as how i have so much Scandinavian ancestry (pure Norwegian on my father's side) & i sunburn very easily. But i really would be more surprised if anyone from Louisiana (or the Deep South generally) didn't turn out to have "mixed" ancestors somewhere.

Of course, the concept of race itself, as we now know (or ought to) has zero scientific basis. There are only traits. Still, because i am a word-junkie, i observe that the language contains terms for the various pseudo-mathematical combinations of "black" & "white", leftovers from when that mattered. I thought i would find out what the designation for 1/16ths black would be, & add "sesqui-" (1 1/2), for my 3/32nds... (The official Latin expression for this is: vncia & dimidia sextila & scripvlvm, according to the Latin fraction generator website. Not a useful locution, though they did provide a set of symbols, which i can't reproduce here.) Now i can--8/20--:)

                                    (via)

That proved no easy thing. There was a French writer of the 18c.: Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (thanx, Lauren!), & he apparently invented a racial taxonomy that differentiated combinations down to 1/128ths (over 7 generations), in his travel book on the pre-Haiti/Dominican Republic (the French western half of Hispaniola) (volume one here). The "free people of color" have an interesting history (written about by Anne Rice, among others, e.g. The Feast of All Saints) & include such writers as M. P. Shiel. An article on Wikipedia covers hypodescent, where i also learned that the 1/16th African (Moreau's "mamalouque" which he defines as ranging from 8 to 12/128ths black) was called mustefino or quintroon (i won't even consider hexadecaroon--). Which gives: sesquiquintroon. Nice reduplication there.

I see that these arcane topics are still wrixling some brows.

The deeper significance of this is twofold. First, Négritude--in the broadest sense, would be to acknowledge the Other in one's artistic practice, as much for Language poets to respect Cowboy poetry as for Caribbean francophone poets to adapt Surrealism to their post-colonial experience. And, though you may identify with one particular quartering of the rainbow, there will always be Others whose experience can enrich & enliven yours. Then, the concept of "passing" which exists in autism as well. --Undeniably useful, but is it right? For to benefit from privilege is to sanction the discrimination which is privilege's other face. Perhaps that day will come when the question whether one is neurotypical or autistic, & to what degree (counted in hemidemisemiquavers), will seem as ridiculous as to discriminate on the basis of ear length (long my favorite comparison).

Meanwhile...

lecture on the khazars

to break a butterfly upon a wheel

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be enjoyed." --Proverbs

I saw this on a "whiteboard" & it didn't seem right (too memey); sure enough, it wasn't. It turns up on a list of "God's Little Instructions," whence i'm sure it migrated to the forwarders. There it is referred to Psalms 118:24, which of course says nothing of the kind. Google, though, helpfully offers an alternate concluding phrase: "but a reality to be experienced"--& this is attributed to Kierkegaard. (Alternately, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Or else Jacobus Leeuw.) It does sound like K. in that form... I would like to know what Danish word he uses for "reality" (sandhed?). It's too much like "life" to be a first-rate aphorism.

But i rather know this as something i got from Jung: "...but a mystery to be experienced."(I copied it out myself; here someone refers it to Joseph Campbell, who may or may not have cited his sources.) It may not matter if Jung knew he was garbling Kierkegaard, or thought he was improving on him. The meaning of this he makes typological.

Life-as-problem = Thinking
Life-as-enjoyment = Sensing

[This is not a direct opposition, & it makes more sense to me as intended to valorize the majority Sensing-Perceivers, who are often impugned by intellectuals of less common types. Since it is, alas, quite characteristic of them to pick up proverbs, & not quite perfectly, i imagine that is entirely appropriate for this to have become a Plain Folk mantram.]

Life-as-problem = Thinking
Life-as-mystery = Intuitive

[Jung considered himself an Intuitive-Thinker, & this suggests he found his first preference not as useful as he tended to suppose.]

In my view, of course, there are as many worldviews as types (16, or maybe 256)--none of them more true than the others... Hence the irrelevance of such a blanket pronouncement. (Far better is the Taoist's "Those who say, don't know; those who know, don't say.") For a saktra, or aspie, life is usually very problematic, not all of which problems come supplied with the wherewithal to solve them. Then it is perhaps a tolerable expedient to accept that patience-in-the-face-of-mystery marks one's most intelligent path.

Lojban LE SE DJUNO BEZI'O is how i would translate "mystery". E.g. that which cannot be known. (Or: understood SE JIMPE.) "Knowledge" in the Quran includes this: "And they will never compass anything of His knowledge except that which He wills." (2:255) Thus all lesser mysteries resolve in the single Greater.

.IUNAI

Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky and Me

(via mutha dot com)

Hawthorne wrote staring at the Great Stone Face across whole years; half my life--off & on-- i have had a similar enigma to guide me, or deride me, whatever: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (as Wikipedia would have it, though it remains in memory the other way round--E/R/P).

I was 21 & taking "20th Century Physics" a year before the advent of Raygun. I had been reading all kinds of weird shit: Plato, Gurdjieff/Ouspensky, Jung, Bateson, Patañjali, Wittgenstein, John Lilly. Simone Weil. I wanted to understand.

It's hard now to say just what sort of explanation would have suited me. Certainly the quasi-Hegelian mysticism i ended up with (for a very short while) did not. The truth is, i did not really know how to reason yet. I read the Einstein-Born letters like a correspondence between two poets. (And who was to say it wasn't?)

My college class entirely consisted, no kidding, of endless purple-mimeo sheets of expansions of the Schroedinger Wave Equation (i still have them somewhere), which my instructor laboriously explicated in messy transparencies upon an overhead projector. This led me to wonder just what would have been proven, once we had all ascertained there weren't any errors in the math. And what did it all mean?

I began cutting classes; finally, not coming at all. I had a little bit of mild pot, which i would smoke in a Portobello Road pipe out on the 2nd floor balcony with a view of the interurban sprawl known as Arlington, off in the distance. I had the xerox'd article on EPR from a physics journal i had actually tracked down on my own. It very much appeared that clown-headed Uncle Albert, who had revolutionized the world with a single quinquefoliate equation, was mistaken. --There wasn't any THERE, there.

Sometimes i would think of it as the Yin/Yang symbol. Identity was more like a stain than a circle. More of it lay close by, but some was mixed with the farthest lights in the sky. And all men were indeed brothers. And the stones beneath our feet partook of our very being.

That's rather a lot to read into what was basically a quibble over how to apply only the latest approximation of mathematical truth. I grew weary of overt paradoxes. One day a new, more comprehensive integration would sweep this one aside. The philosoraptors would have to go back to their self-consistent axioms, without the aid of theoretical physics. Strings, dark matter & darkling energy arrived trendily & i remained unmoved. I saw it as part of a publishing phenomenon, a contemporary career requirement. Truth, perhaps, must needs evade such succinct capture.

It was in the late 90's, internet days, that i heard of it again. E-P-R settled for good? After i had seen Jupiter's moons reached & the human genome spelled, 2 (or was it 3?) of the great math stumpers of all time defeated, & Continental Drift go from a controversial hypothesis to scientific orthodoxy, this might not have come as the shock it did. But did i care anymore?

I believe there is more than one possible mathematics, as there is more than one possible geometry. Nothing is harder to see, than an alternative that leads to the same outcome; yet paradoxes like this, which would insist on us subscribing to absurdities, are surely the signifiers of such a need. That's the rational side of me speaking. The other answers with Francis Bacon: "For, if the Grand Architect had acted a human part, he would have ranged the stars into some beautiful and elegant order, as we see in the vaulted roofs of palaces; whereas, we scarce find among such an infinite multitude of stars any figure either square, triangular, or rectilinear; so great a difference is there betwixt the spirit of man, and the spirit of the universe." --On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning IV, iv.

neurotypical privilege

i've always had trouble with people giving me complicated sequences of verbal instructions. early on, i started carrying paper & pen so i could write it down & refer to it (for, the way my mind works, either the later part of the instructions will erase the earlier part, or some new thought of my own will cause me to forget part or all of it), and now, even though i seldom have the same need, i still write a lot of things down that i think most NTs would count on being able to remember.

there has never been a job i've worked at, that did not favor verbal instructions over written. (sometimes they even associate having to read something written down, as punitive.)

--this is just a tiny example--

i won't even go into the massive inequality experienced in school where socialization is mostly not given via explicit instruction, at a time when acceptance is compulsively withheld for infinitesimal departures from the norm. what's weird is how little this situation gets described here in terms of privilege, instead of as a "struggle to fit in" (skin-lightening potions, anyone?). privilege is political, it's politics you can't change the channel from. it's barbed wire & attack dogs.

being naturally adept at lying & negotiating a swarm of variously-sincere statements is like being born with a swimming instinct; then some kid who doesn't know how (doesn't even guess that he doesn't know how) is thrown into the pool to sink or swim--a pool he will remain in for the rest of his life. the seeming adaptation of learning to conceal one's true feelings & opinions is at best a stricture, & at worst a kind of self-deception (they can see right through you, nine times out of ten).

--but the cruellest form of NT privilege is political theater. they use the language of ideas as if they mean something; it's all about tribes & belonging & rivalry, & anyone who wants to actually examine cause & effect in public affairs (look at Dennis Kucinich's presidental bid) is ridiculed & ignored by the media--just like the treatment in junior high.