Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. -Benoit Mandelbrot
Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines. -Buckminster Fuller
As above, so below
Thursday, August 15, 2002 -- Charlotte, NC
My life is fractal.
And, true to Mandelbrot's words, clouds are indeed not spheres, mountains are certainly not cones, coastlines are by no means circles, bark is nowhere near smooth, and lightning, well, lightning... Lightning, my friends, traveleth not in any straight line...unless, that is, it happens to be in searchez of moi, your author and companion on this fractal path which has been the cruel circumcisionstance of my risible existence -- plagued, as it has been, with lightning curses, dreams of flying, and the strange events surrounding my rendez-vous with 9/11, that horrific day in Manhattan all those many weeks ago...
You have got lots of good, clean yogurt. Just thought I'd say that. What I really wanted to say was that I think I may have figured out where I want to go with this writing thing, this albatross, this, this self-indictment. And it may or may not have anything to do with yogurt. Some things, you see, are beyond my control.
You see, my dear readers, the is a perfect metaphor for life in these peculiar times, if not, indeed, life at all times. But how freakin' lucky to have had it presented to us in this lifetime! Although scattered and seemingly chaotic...there is still an underlying design, architecture, which, when seen in the right light, shows itself to have a certain beauty, and a beauty which contains seeds of other beauties, and on and on, ad pukeum. As above so befuckinglow. So is it with life, so it is with this tome. Or so I would hope...
I sometimes think that the reason I attract lightning is that I am really the Acid Rainman, sprung full-dazzled from the head of the allmytighty hermself, asabovin' the sobaloney. But I may be wrong, as I was that onanother Tyme. Joyce infection! Joy sinfexion!
I have to apologize for my interior monologue. Like most people I have an inner and an outer self. And frankly my inner life is more richly splathered than my outer miserabilia, in nearly every way, save friends, family, music, words. So far be it for me to exclude my interiority from the record. I should, however, forewarn the editor that my interior voice likes to fuck with tools given it to convey its message, and as such, at least as far as I have noticed, it, like Joyce above it, relishes the tinkerage of langerage, I should say, to convey, by example, the meaning, I wish to convey.
Be that as it may, whatever that may mean, there still stands before us the words by the sagely Laurence Sterne, who says of his masterwork, which Schopenhauer hailed as being among the very best of all time, for its interiority I might add, that:
"[digression quote]"
And indeed, it was the great stony-headed Schopenhauer, in his "Art of Literature", who said that "a novel is great to the extent that it treats of interior things rather than exterior things". Thoughts over reportage.
I don't know, at this point, whether this story will wind up being tilted toward the one or the other. These are such interesting times Lord only knows what sort of fun will present itself as I piece together this time capsule for future lamperkins.
Among the recent events that have already occurred over the past few months what some have called the theft of the Presidency, the 9-11 attack on New York (which I happened, by fate of a cancelled flight, to have witnessed), the global warming floods of prophesy, too much water, too little water, the privatization of the world's water and next, air, the melting of the polar ice caps, the Middle East war, war with Iraq, the market collapse, a thriving eBay and still functioning Salon, yet a moribund Enron and WorldCom, the proliferation of the use of fear as a political tool -- i.e. home-spun terrorism launched on our own people, the death of impartiality, and pink has become the new black. I take my coffee pink. Not really. I just said I did.
In other words, the entire world may change dramatically while I'm talking to you, and you can bet that I will do my best to do my duty to my audience (you three) and report AND think, as best I know how, the goings on, as I, again, piece together these catechisms and catacombs of thought, knowledge, wisdom, dross, lists, and so on, necessary to complete the architecture that waits to be assembled around your mind as further on you read.
My promise to you is that that you will gain valuable, hard-won knowledge from having read this work the requisite three times. Indeed, I will even grant that one reading will give you more tools for daily living than a dozen novels you could find at B. Daltons or Waldenbooks...two places I never have to worry about carrying this work, I might add, nay, subtract.
Useful Pleasantries
Friday, August 16, 2002
I like to collect wisdom. And granted, the quality of one's knowledge is relative to the quality of one's being, and I haven't been the most disciplined evolver of my own being known to Man, OR Dog, and as such some of the knowledge which I have collected, in more evolved beings, might well manifest as wisdom or some simulacrum thereof, whereas in my case, it usually only registers as knowledge or information or nothing at all. A palimpsest maybe. Smoke signals. Bongo Death. One or two slip through though, and these are what sustain me in whacked out times such as these we are now sloshing through.
One of the bits I recently ran across, for example, is that of "useful pleasantries". Or as Gurdjieff, the peregrinative dehypnotist, put it: "Do what is simultaneously useful for others and pleasing to one's self". In that spirit, I will try to construct this work you are now reading. And I hope you find it useful, and that I find a degree of pleasantness in writing it...for God knows I have grown weary of living foot to mouth. My feet aren't as olfactively neutral as I once knew them.
Take the Low Road
"You take the high road and I'll take the low road
And I'll get to Scotland before ye..."
- Loch Lomond (Traditional Scottish ballad)
There is a piece of software over 5000 years old which still works fine, even on today's machines. It is basically an "expert system" which, when used properly, produces, among other things, impartial answers to your questions. The "I Ching" (Book of Changes) is that software. And it has and will have a greater shelflife that any Microsoft can muster.
Compensation
"Why do you think they call it compensation?"
- Surreal McCoy
We've got a problem here. Compensation is its name. It comes in many guises, but it is always a stand-in, an invisible man, for something else. You are a shorty or you have a microshnitzel, so you compensate by buying an SUV or some hotrod or maybe you dedicate your life to compensation, and become an expert at pulling it down, since, in this case, you are so rarely asked to pull down your pants, unless it is for a laugh or to please the schadenfreudists.
The Schadenfreudists
schadenfreude: pleasure at the misfortune of others. (ex: Reckless caccinations when someone trips on a banana, but not by smoking it.)
