Zeno's second paradox or my $60 cup of coffee

"anything but the bottom step of the ladder, it keeps getting higher and higher. Dawn comes soon enough for the working class, it keeps getting sooner or later. This is the game that moves as you play. How does it feel, how does it feel?" - X




I got a traffic ticket a while back. Nothing important, failure to yield and registration. Scheduled a date to appear - show proof. Correction cuts the fine in half. Well that appointment got lost in the shuffle, which apparently upsets the court to the tune of three hundred. I thought I might go on down and plea for lenience since no one was interested in hearing me through the phone. Of course they are only available through business hours, but I am fortunate to have a malleable schedule. The fellow in front of me has a similar problem, yet more exaggerated - a $25 dollar ticket has somehow managed to inflate to $1200. We both figure we can make an honest presentation to the court and pay more reasonable fees. Turns out, the court will not see you until you pay the fee in its entirety...got that. Then what are they going to do? Give it back?
I'm making installments.

Previous to this bucolic bureaucratic experience, I had though to splurge on a cup of coffee (get that - splurge). So I get through my first cup and figure its about time to feed the meter, but first the bathroom and when I return, lo and amazement - a parking ticket. 58 dollars.

Thats all prologue, because as much as all this inconveniences me and my family in our effort to climb out of our socioeconomic status, to surmount that lip of stability that comes from our particular circumstance, ability and life-choices - as much as it helps us maintain the current uncomfortable state of our finances - how is this system engaging those less fortunate. Or even those less able to make the wise life choices which I am so capable?
Consider someone making minimum wage, not to mention those making a more reasonable wage (say $15 an hour, working regular business hours full time as some of my former college educated coworkers did) What can this type of situation do to them?
What if you cannot get off work. What if you can and you lose that pay? What if you cant afford to pay and lose your privilege to drive? What if that's how you earn your income, or now you have to take public transit which adds an hour to your commute both ways? What if you have children in childcare and now have no practical way to pick them up and what does it matter because those extra two hours a day just pushed the cost benefit of childcare/work below water? et.al.

Zeno's second paradox is a situation where Hercules, starting after the tortoise, will never be able to catch it, as he must always travel 1/2 the distance before he can travel the whole, and each half will have its own half unto infinity.
The working person at the bottom, looking up, will find the incline forever and increasingly precipitous as they approach that point of stabilty.

Bible - the return

Job.
About two thirds of the way through the old testament, which could use some judicious editing, for content and redundancy.
According to my New American Bible: Catholic Mission Edition, Job is the first of the "wisdom books: which will also include Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach. (the last two are excluded in protestant bibles so I have not read them, same as the two Maccabees)

It is interesting that I randomly pick it up again after a bit of a hiatus - the Maccabees were like an overly violent film with unlikeable protagonists. I had to take a break.

Interesting because of the following day's Melvillian tone. Moby Dick concludes with Ishmael quoting of the book of Job to describe himself.

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"

Sunday with Melville

My wife left this morning. The baby and I roused ourselves early and went to get the children from my ex. Her partner was outside loading their car. He is a big guy. He knows this and uses it. I am directed inside. Its not my weekend. It’s the wrong day. I am not supposed to be there - a healthy interaction. I drove away directionless. Empty plan-less home. I drive us to church.
She left on a retreat, nothing official, just her and a friend. She planned this trip and then I was informed. Of course I don’t have a problem with it. It is a healthy idea. We have been having our problems. That happens, right? Normal. I didn’t think having a partner would be this difficult. Maybe partner is the wrong word. I should think of a different word, one that works.
My ex has been friendlier than I am accustomed. I get two days a week with the boys. Or they get two days a week with me. It is about their experience rather than mine. Except, they do not spend the first weekend of the month with me. It was decided they required a full weekend with their mom. I would rather they spend more time with us. I have to pay her support for the discrepancy.
We get to church and I take the baby to Sunday school. I walk into a lecture underway on Moby Dick. Captain Ahab represents totalitarianism. Is totalitarianism immortal or not? The preacher in the book sermonizes on spiritual subjectivism. He is played by Orson Wells in the film. He takes questions. Is subjectivism of myth antagonistic to the objectivism of subjective history as agreed upon? Is Melville a Jungian profit of modern geopolitical upheaval? I am disoriented and cannot find the thread of the conversation. I read Moby Dick last year. We leave quickly.

We went on a bike ride with the baby in the trailer. Bring the dog. Pick up some groceries and beer. The full moon rises over the peak. The sun sets over the bridge. We are going to dinner tonight. We are representing our family.

Winter's dying days

Two of my friends have parents dying - one of cancer, one of AIDs. One friend survived a suicide attempt and is coping with alcoholism. Two other friends are mourning a friend who died in a motorcycle crash. I am sure there is more.

We went to the San Bernadino Mountains for Christmas this year; my whole extended family was present. At least twenty people of varying relation at any given time. My grandparents, who are now great great grandparents, are in their late eighties. My grandfather has had a bypass this last year and my grandmother had open heart surgery leading to a coma and stroke. He used to build houses - built the majestic and spacious house we occupied over the holiday, build churches. She was a talent at anything she touched: knitting, quilting, painting, gardening, stained glass…

They are in good health all in all but we can see the end in clear sight - them and I and whomever else would care to. My grandmother, already deaf, is experiencing a progressive dementia. She has replaced a busy creative hand with a wandering compulsive tidiness. You can see it is hard on her. She is sharp even still. You can see its hard on my grandfather - no longer the faultless patriarch, for good and for bad. You can see the loss of self sufficiency challenging him, but the responsibility somehow remain. Somehow he still takes care of my grandmother.

They are like two refugees huddling together out on a cold and damp overhang - only each others’ complaining bodies for comfort, but somehow warm though not warm

My grandmother lays full on my grandfather in his easy chair - something i have never seen, and neither have I seen such contentment in him than at these times.

The life is in them - they are not haggard and pathetic. My grandfather cracks jokes and dons my grandmother’s bra when she has misplaced it. She proudly gives tours of the house to anyone fortunate enough o take the time. She used to show me what she was working on, now she shows what she had done.

Its hard on everyone, this life. They have a lot of faith and I envy them that.




This was the hill over my grandparents’ house. It was recently devastated by wood beetles








Old toad survives the snows

Everyone's suddenly a linguist

I there is the odd coincidence of the mind and consciousness that is causing me a potential sea change of perception. I have been thumbing through this book, Maps of the Mind, which in itself is pretty interesting. "Maps of the Mind is an excellent review volume that integrates and condenses many different perspectives concerning the nature of the human mind. Using the metaphor of a map, the author organizes the work of several prestigious authors and theorists into nine different levels, from the mechanistic and physiological to the paradigmatic and mythological." The pages are laid out in what could be an interpretation of conflict, but in fact each perspective is presented as building on the next.
Well, I was on a job and my friend was reading Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes. I inquires about it and skimmed it a bit because it looked interesting. Later that evening I came to the page in my book on the theories of Jaynes. What is more is that another friend at the same time, came to a reference to Jaynes in a book he was reading. Weird.
If not familiar with his theory, reduced to the point of near meaninglessness is that human consciousness is a recent development (appx 3000 years old), and before that, the two hemispheres of the brain did not communicate so well so that one side (left)could be said to be developing man's thoughts and the other side (right) was interpreted as audio hallucination, i.e. god, spirit, daemon etc. and was a thing that, though it did in fact have individual agency within a person, was to that person, a different voice.
Now, here's where I am amazed. immediately after the above experience, I was listening to a radiolab podcast on words. There was a segment on the fact that thought follows language that holds some water but I didn't entirely buy, and then there was this segment. A woman, a neurologist no less, has a stroke that shuts down half her brain. Her resulting experience is oneness, lack of self - she is having a stroke and does not act, because of the whole immersion. Yet she is not mindless, she is there in the experience and can recall it. Only the coming back in momentarily of her other hemisphere prompts her to act and saves her, yet she says that given a choice - she would return to that state.
I also just read an interesting article on the philosophy of David Foster Wallace, as he riffs throughout his career - mostly on Wittgenstein, but there are others. I opened many tabs to examine things mentioned (fitting, given DFW's footnotes upon footnotes). He was primarily a philosopher.
And of course a primary function of Wittgenstein - and much modern linguistical philosophy - is that there cannot be thought without language. two things strike me as odd about this, aside from experience:
Wittgenstein goes on to say that language is a social construct, which seems obvious. Thought, however, is a more solipsistic process. How can that be reconciled?
The other things, and I don't know the name for this specific logical fallacy, is that we can easily identify thoughts had that are not lingual. I have seen the argument that we could not identify those non lingual thoughts without language, but that is an opaque discussion, much the same as Wittgenstein's claim that all metaphysical (and emotional) language is nonsense.
Feel free to correct me, I am less than even a layman and tend to avoid straight philosophy.

Trees

I have been experiencing some notable synchronicity involving trees. I am reading Ovid's Metamorphosis which contains a few tree stories so far:
Myrrha is transformed to a myrrh tree after her incestuous relationship with her father.
Cyparissus who loved a deer and would walk with it in the woods. Hunting, he accidentally killed it and felt intense guilt and sorrow; he begged Apollo to let him mourn his dearest friend. Apollo granted his wish and turned into a cypress tree - today a sign of mourning and also one of my favorite trees.
Pyramus and Thisbe planned to meet under the mulberry tree, and that is where they died. Their blood stained the white berries burgundy. This story is the inspiration for Romeo & Juliet.
There is another that I cannot recall, but that really moved me. Anyway, I am enjoying Ovid.
I have encountered the story of the man who kills the oldest tree in the world, apotentially the oldest living being in the world - a 5000 year old bristlecone pine. He is an geologist studying climate change and he ends up studying salt basins (because of his deed?). It is amazing to think of accidentally destroying something that has witnessed time since known civilization.
So, this led to other research and baobab trees, as featured in the little prince and the African savanna, are potentially a thousand years older.
More amazing are clonal trees, which clone from pre-existing root systems. These are not so impressive on a mythical scale because they are not individual, but some aspen (as featured in John Denver songs) 'colonies' are estimated at at least 80,000 (& possibly as much as 1 million) years old. What is the consciousness of a tree? What is the consciousness of a tree colony?

I have also happened upon a few poems and songs, but for some reason, failed to annotate them so they are lost somewhere in my mind.
..and from Moby Dick there was something...

So this is an old (rather unfinished) poem from when I wrote poems. It needs a LOT of work, but here it is.

Night –
Night’s single talon wraps low around reaching tree branches-
A stretching Adam across black ceiling: forearm torn, knotted stiff.

Night’s thousand eyes strain to glimpse earth, penned angles -
clambering and falling wingless to ash and dust.

Night’s hemorrhage labors and conceives light –
Supersonic afterbirth of the sun:
Savant offspring, mayfly lifespan.

Night’s death falls staining the sky:
Neck coiled back in rigor mortis,
Red excrement left in the west


The Sun
He is born an orphan – inheritor to murder He
Burns with guilt and indiscretion

The Sun speeds unseen toward one thing,
Pursuing the western star – His own aborted brother

The sun sheds uncounted skins each day
Living off self, possessed by ends

The Sun shows His age in His eyes –
And like a feral dog, climbs
Mountains alone to Death

Trees –
Trees go naked in mourning – pulling hair in agony.

Trees gather bouquets for the dead, but stand
unmoved, unbowed. Only sighing new breath silently

Trees think always slowly
Deliberate and full
Of many questions

Tree reaches to the sky in agony of straight locked arms
Just one longer day and night?



So you've read it. (warning: poem spoiler) It is pretty much a consideration of what the mythology of trees might be, experiencing the rush of days and nights upon each other and the worship of the sun. For some reason, overlaid with analogies from Judeo/Christian mythologies. Don't ask me why. Well you can ask if you want




*****

Finally, there is a smog song, Rock Bottom Riser. At the time, Bill Callahan was dating Joanna Newsom, who lives/ed in Nevada City.I think perhaps that he is singing of or at least metaphorically referring to swimming in the Yuba River. When I see him, I will ask him.

I saw a gold ring
At the bottom of the river
Glinting at my foolish heart
So my foolish heart
Had to go diving
Diving, diving, diving
Into the murk

And from the bottom of the river
I looked up for the sun
Which had shattered in the water
And pieces were rained down
Like gold rings
That passed through my hands
As I thrashed and I grabbed
I started rising, rising, rising

I am a rock bottom riser...

On the Cusp of a Life

My wife is a week past the Doctors' estimation of due date. This would be the perfect time to contemplate the reverberations of loss and gain that accompany this event. I will skip that for the time being and just mark this moment in time.

10 albums to take on my sailboat to nowhere as of this one moment

10 all things must pass - George Harrison
9 honeycomb - Frank Black
8 double gold - Neil Diamond
7 a river ain't too much to love - Smog
6 station to station - David Bowie
5 wild gift - X
4 gp/grievous angel - Gram Parsons
3 surf's up - Beach Boys
2 daisies of the galaxy - Eels
1 its a wonderful life - Sparklehorse

Where does this trail lead?

At what stage does compost traverse the cell wall an become new verdant life?
There is no point - points do not exist. There is continuum.

unity principles

Over Thanksgiving weekend, come Saturday evening, as I finally recovered from the flu, my brothers and I gathered round the dining room table for our little working class Algonquin Round Table. Conversation ranged over a breadth of topics - physics & math from my younger brother 'S', military experience & the wars from next oldest 'C', pseudo-philosophy from all.
I say pseudo because only my youngest brother's friend 'Y', just from an intro to philosophy class, really had any aptitude to reference actual philosophers and he seemed pretty much limited to Plato & Aristotle it being first half of first term. I have heard that everything is just commentary on Plato. Running with that, throwing in modern math/physics and considering all parties' postmodern experiences (& after reading some online philosophical commentary) I feel confident we had a strong layman's base.

First issue at hand was to establish our base of discussion. We arrive at the comforting conclusion that all language is approximate, including math. My brother answers my longstanding question about the nature of the ten based system - clarifying that it is really a one based system and one is the only number that might actually occur naturally anywhere at all. Everything else (but really also 1) is a statement of relativity or an artificial approximate of measurement. This all has the suspicious air of a physicist's obsession with singularities. He also showed me a marvelous trick using the distributive property and the number one that shows you can arrive at something from nothing - on paper.
That language is approximate is comforting to us because we lack the philosophical nomenclature to more specifically discuss what we are aiming at. It also lowers the pedestal of math & science.
The nature of reality is the next item of discussion, mind there is no outline. I'm just reporting. This begins with the so called least reliable evidence - personal epiphany or transcendence. I would mention that the nature of transcendence leads to it being extra-lingual & extra-rational and so is obviously beyond the evidenciary realm of science and more dogmatic philosophies. What is most interesting, we agree, is that personal transcendence is not so rare as Buddha on the fucking mountain top. We all had approximate experiences to share - whether drug, meditation, mental health or otherwise induced and I doubt that makes us all that special. What might make us a little more rare is our desire for understanding. Transcendence for most folks is not a continual state, it is quite human to very quickly forget what is learned or to slide back to comfortable perspectives. What is transcendence that we can approximate it with our language? Saying different things but really the same, we agree that transcendence is the gift of experiencing a further perspective. Some potential results are: universal love of man, or of all living creatures or of everything that vibrates with existence (everything); an acceptance of the futility of action; acceptance of lack of meaning;