800 Words: Monotheism and the Grand Chessboard

If the world is a chessboard, then Israel is the exact centerpiece which does not exist on any game yet played except in reality. Countries like America, Russia, China, are in the proper position to bestride the board like dominant colossi, but the ultimate goal is who controls Israel. For reasons many attribute to mystical properties, the dominant civilizations of the Western (and now Global) world have thus far almost always been those whose policies most favored the advancement of Jews.

The reason for this is not mystical at all, it is simple geography. America, Brazil, Russia, India, and China may be dominant players in the grand chess game. But Israel is the spiritual father to them all because Israel stands at the world’s exact crossroad - this tiny land is the closest thing to a central meeting point for Europe, Asia, and Africa. More than any other culture, it stands in the optimal place for its ideas to spread to many cultures which otherwise have nothing in common. If the larger world was eventually going to evolve from regional pagan superstitions, Israel was the only region with enough fluency for travel that the ideas could spread. And amazingly, as the Western World expanded into the Global World to include China and India to the Far East and the Americas to the Far West, Israel still seems to stand in the world’s precise center.

There may have been many other places where monotheism was thought of before Israel, but Israel is where it took root, and Israel is the center point from which it began to proliferate. Before the development of what eventually became the Jewish people, binding legal codes certainly existed, but such laws could never spread past the immediate city-state or Empire in which they were upheld because they could not take on the weight of immutable Divine Law. The Gods of one region might disavow the laws of another region. Only an invisible and indivisible God; omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, could spread his law past the reach of any army. Only an eternal kingdom requires eternal vigilance, and such an idea could only spread were it to take root in the most fertile area for ideas to extend their reach.

Legal evolution is unthinkable without monotheism. The fact that laws took on the weight of Holy Word is what gave law the power to conquer entire civilizations. Monotheism may have enabled slaughter upon a scale yet unseen (though that’s debateable), but it also enabled feats of organization thus far impossible in eras when values were more relative (and that isn’t). With the quick rise and quicker decline of the Empire of David and Solomon, Israel displayed a rough draft for all the civilizations which came after it. The Kingdom of Israel was a kingdom of bedouin refugees whom in their wanderings absorbed many different influences from the empires of Egypt and Mesapotamia, and that was what allowed it to rise so quickly, and because it was encircled on all sides by those two empires was what made it fall even more quickly. The Israeli Kingdom was so short-lived that its subjects never completely forgot how to live as refugees, and once the reign of Solomon was over and the Kingdom of Israel divided, its subjects had to learn almost immediately following their inception how to live in a world where the influence of others could once again dominate life.

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800 Words: A Rare Word in Praise of Ignorance

Homeless guy sees rich man on the street. He asks for some change.

The rich man says “Neither a borrower nor a lender be. - William Shakespeare”

The homeless man replies “Fuck you. - David Mamet”

William Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare. Edmund DeVere didn’t write them, neither did Christopher Marlowe, neither did Francis Bacon, neither did Queen Elizabeth, neither did Elvis.

People like to allege that William Shakespeare, a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education, could not have written the Shakespeare plays, but the truth is that only a middle class tradesman with barely a grammar school education could have written them. No member of the ruling class would ever be let within any offstage proximity to a troop of tradesmen/players like those in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nor would any nobleman but a rapscallion as great as Prince Hal have any cause to come within any distance of the vagabond posse of Sir John Falstaff's in Henry IV. Furthermore, an aristocrat would have been well-traveled enough to have better knowledge of geography than Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale a character states that Bohemia has a ‘coast-line’, and in two plays separated by twenty years he has characters sail from Milan.

But most importantly, Shakespeare’s frame of literary reference, while reasonably impressive, was clearly a bit limited by the standards of his day. Shakespeare, the world class plagiarizer who pilfered from so many earlier sources, would surely telegraph any scrap of material he read which left any impression on him. And clearly there are eminent writers of former generations who influenced certain works: Chaucer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Trolius & Cressida, Montaigne in The Tempest, Plutarch in the plays about Classical Rome (Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar), Boccaccio in All’s Well that Ends Well, Plautus in The Comedy of Errors. Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus show that he might have read some Seneca and Cicero, and clearly there is no way he’d have written the sonnets without reading Petrarch. But where does Homer show up? Or Aeschylus? Or Sophocles? Or Herodotus? Or Plato and Aristotle? Or Livy? Or Virgil? Or Tacitus? Or Dante? Or Ariosto? Or Erasmus? Or Tasso? Or any other number of eminent writers which any educated aristocrat would be expected to read and quote liberally in Shakespeare’s time. Had Shakespeare read Homer, or Dante, or Sophocles, then surely there be a lot more evidence of his reading in the text. Wouldn’t there?

In any event, Shakespeare showed precisely what he thought of such extensive learning with Polonius, who demonstrates extremely well what an idiot a well-educated man can be. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is at great pains to show that his ‘fool’ characters are often the most sensible people in the show: the Fool in King Lear, Feste in Twelfth Night, the First Gravedigger in Hamlet. If such characters were main characters, there would be no play because they would lead lives too sensible to be remarkable. There are plenty of lower-class characters (far too many frankly) on which Shakespeare heaps contempt. But Shakespeare clearly has as much contempt for over-education as ignorance.

Perhaps if Shakespeare knew better the work of writers like Homer and Dante, they would have overpowered his imagination. No writer too familiar with truly extraordinary imaginations would ever be able to equal their imaginative flights unless he were conscious of trying to do outdo them. In the way that Wagner tried to outdo Beethoven, or Milton tried to outdo Shakespeare, or Caravaggio tried to outdo Michelangelo (or Dante tried to outdo Virgil), we see imaginative works which are almost fried by overstimulation. In order to surpass the genius whose shadow treads so heavily on them, every moment, every emotion, every expression of these ‘later geniuses’ has to be outsized to the point that its epic scale obliterates the influence of what came before. But there is little evidence of such gigantism in Shakespeare - the stakes are rarely ever apocalyptic. Even Macbeth and Iago never killed more than a handful. A sense of momentous tragedy is present in many Shakespearean plays, but rarely if ever does such tragedy obscure the human expression, and in no play does an impersonal sense of ‘world events’ obscure the human tragedy. Shakespeare created a language of human expression, a language upon which human beings chewed for half a millenium. But now that the world has moved past written language, perhaps the world has moved past Shakespeare as well.

For at least two centuries, Shakespeare has been the very center of humanist education. Contrary to popular belief, the list of books which must be read grew ever longer until quite recently. In former centuries, the ‘polymath’ or ‘universal man’ who seemingly achieves all the knowledge of the world was also expected to be a man of action. Aristotle counseled Alexander the Great, Leonardo was a military advisor to Cesare Borgia, Franklin and Jefferson were instrumental in forming the United States.  But by the early 1900’s, the list of ‘Great Books’ was so long that an ‘educated man’ could only be a man who devoted his entire life to his education. How could the world possibly add to the store of great learning in a world where no one who achieved universal knowledge could add to it? It is simply not feasible to make education the highest priority in a world with so much knowledge that no one can possibly accumulate it in one lifetime.

We all live in ignorance of a large majority of what the world has to offer, and as such, the world is a smaller place for us all than it is. In a world where a basic level of knowledge is a given, the world begins anew in deciding what to learn is worthwhile. The twentieth century began a process which we might as well call ‘The Great Relearning” (Tom Wolfe’s term), in which everything began with basics.

If any century before ours took so much pride in exhibiting the same level of ignorance in so many areas of endeavor, in the basics of math and science, of literacy, of the humanities and the arts, civilization itself would have collapsed and we’d still be travelling during the day by horse and wagon so we could huddle around the fire at night. But whether or not we want to ignore them, the achievements of past centuries are here to stay - we are so beset by history, so imprisoned by it, so utterly calcified by maintaining it, that we can’t possibly view it as anything but a burden. We live in a society so sophisticated that we dream of little but a primitive resurgence. None of us consider ourselves whole unless we find a way to go back into nature. We listen to simple primitive music with symmetrical beats and a thousand-word vocabulary on technology which goes from our computer to us via space and its the music we call ‘genius,’ we watch stories of the most basic outline on film that produces twenty-four photographs per second and it’s the films we call ‘brilliant,‘ we go camping and bring with us lights which generate their own energy and we think we’re returning to the primitive. The more sophisticated technology grows, the more we yearn for it to express something more primal. Does technology accomplish that primal emotion for us? Can it?

I don’t think we yet know, or can know, the answer to that question. Life’s rules have been completely rewritten. In the computer, mankind leaped arithmetically, and experienced the most revolutionary invention since the printing press. But in the Internet, mankind leaped exponentially, experiencing the most revolutionary invention since books themselves. Or perhaps the internet may prove still more influential, being the most important invention since the invention of writing. Or perhaps the internet is the most historic innovation in history since the invention of history itself. If human nature changes, it changes so gradually that we can’t possibly be aware of change in the span of a lifetime. But there is an enormous probability that life after the invention of the internet is so exponentially different that life after it will be as different as life was for agrarian societies after the invention of recorded information - with exponential improvements in quality of life simultaneous to exponential improvements in the capacity of destruction. Mankind has entered into a new era with undreamt of rewards and risks. No endeavor without risk is worth undertaking, but a risk is a risk because the endeavor runs the risk of failure.

In this brave new world, we are yet again children - adrift in a world we are only beginning to understand. It is in childhood that the learning curve is fastest, and the rules are rewritten which hopefully carry us into adulthood with a mature understanding of the world. In the meantime, there is still potential for disaster unseen. Steven Pinker may argue that the world is safer than ever before, but he doesn’t account for geological and ecological disaster, multi-drug resistant bacteria, loose nuclear and biological weapons, and finite natural resources. The world always seems to be safest right before undreamt of disaster, but it is unfortunately from such undreamt of disasters that the world learns its new lessons which make it safe again. The relative stability and prosperity of today’s world was forged from two world wars, a great depression, and a half-century cold war-by-proxy. The lessons of the Great Depression have staved off a depression which could have dwarfed it, the lessons of two world wars have thus far prevented a single nuclear weapon from being dropped on civilians, and the lessons of the proxy wars have thus far prevented more than half-a-dozen regional conflicts from turning hot. These lessons were learned at a terrible price, but the lessons learned have thus far prevented the worst mistakes from repeating themselves. Whether in the cultural lessons of Shakespeare, or the political lessons of Roosevelt, or the scientific lessons of Galileo, or the internet lessons of Al Gore, or a baby hitting his head on the floor after his first attempt to stand up, it is only by blindly groping around in ignorance that we gain any chance of doing better.  

...This was originally supposed to be a post about Breaking Bad….

Note: I of course forgot the Player King's speeches about Priam and Hecuba, which are taken liberally from Virgil's Aeneid. Even so, if Shakespeare were better acquainted with a work as monumental as The Aeneid, wouldn't we get a play about some stories from it? Or given his opinion of the Players in the 'Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I' speech, maybe he read Virgil and simply didn't like it. I don't blame him...

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800 Words: The American Utopia: Part 1 - The American Soul

Over and over again, we hear that America is a country without a history - that America’s still making and writing its history books. The experiment isn’t over or conclusive, how can we learn anything about a history we don’t yet know or understand? So who cares if we’re 17th in global education?

But look at us - the declining power with declining cities, declining law enforcement, declining industry, declining political systems, declining schools, and declining press (yes, I based that list on the seasons of The Wire...). How do we now look so close to the edge of a permanent fall? And if we’re at the edge of such a fall, then how did we rise so high? Perhaps America won’t fall at all, but if we don’t, it’s because there will be reforms in place which completely change the nature of this country, and if the nature of this country is completely changed, then there is quite a bit of history to study and understand.

If there’s one country in the last two hundred years that has a lot of history to study... maybe it’s Germany or Russia, but after them it’s us. Some of us do pay attention to little bits of that history. Anybody who can quote Bob Dylan lyrics or lines from The Godfather has their little bits of history which shape their knowledge of the human heart. Some people even know enough of American history (though not enough..) that their souls feel tired of an American culture that’s clearly not working, and therefore fill their cultural life to the brim with the Europe of critical theory, or the East Asia of action movies and anime and video games. But I can’t help thinking that they latch onto such things because they need an explanation of the exhausted culture from which they hail in which they can no longer believe. Critical theory gives them the required armament to explain why we can no longer believe in our institutions. Meanwhile, the stupefyingly complex technology of Asian culture is still very young, with pyrotechnics that well exceed its emotional maturity so far (with a number of obvious exceptions... for just one, rent Grave of the Fireflies...) But unlike so much prominent American content (never mind the underground stuff), Asian culture is exciting - it’s young, it’s exuberant, and it feels completely new. The recent past belongs to America, but the future clearly belongs to Asia.

But when you stay with American content long enough to get past the current tiredness, you see its entire history laid out before you as it never could be in the past - there is a lifetime of soul-sustenance for those willing to find it: classic rock and R&B and country and bluegrass and jazz, classic Hollywood movies and classic TV, classic theater and classic musicals, classic poetry and novels, classic art and classic architecture, even some classic sports games and classical music. At this point, America has its classical canon - every educated American knows what it is, and every American has to either have experienced it or want to experience it in order to be considered an educated American. Once upon a time, Americans were blank slates onto which education from older cultures formed their awareness of their souls. But there should be no doubt, there is now a fully American Soul - educated and seasoned almost exclusively (much too exclusively) by American culture, and possessed of a wisdom that comes from America having grown a culture so large that it obliterated whole swaths of other cultures from around the world.

Furthermore, American comfort is so widespread, and for the moment its responsibilities for earning this comfort so minimal in comparison to most of the world, that there is ample time to immerse ourselves in this culture, to appreciate and love it, to to discuss and debate it, and to cultivate it still further. The ability of Americans to accrue debt may end tomorrow, but until it does, we are at the point of grand summation - the time to understand what it means to be an American at the zenith of world power is right now, because it can’t last forever, and it’s already amazing that it’s lasted this long. Americans are highly motivated people no longer, and if any of us remain highly motivated, we’re fighting an uphill battle to achieve anything that resembles our dreams. So in the meantime, what else is there to do but amble through this glorious museum of the recent past?

The most important year in American history was, of course, 1945 - when we officially ended the Second World War with the Atomic Bomb. It was the defining American triumph, the defining American achievement, and will perhaps become the defining American tragedy. But I think most people would agree that the most important cultural year was 1968. It was the summit of all the American energy generated by the Allies’ triumph. During the Cold War’s height, education and motivation to learn was considered paramount to the species’ survival. The GI Bill made education widespread, and federal grants made education cheap. But all children develop minds of their own, and by the time the GIs' kids went to college, they demanded to follow the paths on which their minds set them. They not only questioned the foundation of America’s moral triumph, they also questioned the foundation of America’s intellectual triumph. They no longer wanted to read ‘great books’ or set themselves up for scientific careers that would advance human knowledge. Instead, they went that most American of ways - they did their own thing, and did so on a scale never seen before. Before the Baby Boomers, Americans upheld a very particular (and slightly authoritarian) social contract based on the continual enforcement of a community’s shared values of tolerance. The contradiction there should be completely obvious - previous generations may have believed in tolerance, but the community obligation was at very least as important as the individual right. If a community felt that the individual right had stretched too far and negated its responsibility to the community, the community felt completely justified in repressing those ‘deviants.’ The result of this was the unity of purpose which saw us through reconstruction after the Civil War and overcame the Great Depression, but it also looked the other way at racial violence and discrimination, economic exploitation, and imperial subjugation abroad. It was not until the Baby Boom generation that the idea of individual rights as more important than community obligation became widespread. In doing so, they caused enormous, and long overdue, gains in freedom for minorities. And yet they may have simultaneously undone the social contract (hardly a beneficent one) which enabled America’s rise. It was a Faustian pact. We are now a freer country than ever before. We’re also a more stymied, dysfunctional one than we’ve been since The Great Depression. The Baby Boomers changed the definition of American culture into the most American possible conceit - the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. And by changing it, they probably defined the meaning of American culture for all time.

Just a few years before 1968, Cold War-era universities were places of highly disciplined learning and bastions of what used to be called ‘value-free scholarship’ (scholarship for its own sake). The idea of value-free scholarship is probably a myth - the US government would never have funded it if it hadn’t felt the need for top-quality scientists in the Cold War so direly. But it was the rebellion against the University, not the University itself, that gave America it’s identity.

Just briefly look at the most eminent figures in American culture. No novelist has had anything like the impact on America which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have had on the Russians. We have a national poet in Walt Whitman, but does he count as our National Writer the way Shakespeare does for the English or Goethe does for the Germans? We probably don’t have a National Writer. Hell, we probably don’t even have a National Book unless you count The Constitution. But if we don’t have a National Writer, we certainly have a National Songwriter. I think a much better case could be made that Bob Dylan already had a larger impact on American society in a half-century than even Walt Whitman has in a century-and-a-half. We have great artists, but no National Artist. However, we have a National Photographer in Ansel Adams, and the impact which Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles have on America dwarves any other visual artist in any medium. We have a number of good playwrights, but not a single one among them ever had the impact of musical theater creators like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim.

The most important American art, of nearly all genres, was made in recent generations; created to be consumed by either the WWII generation or the Baby Boomers. We have national poets, but we have no national novelist, or artist, or composer, or playwright. Except Whitman, our national cultural figures are all very recent. And even Whitman seems almost completely contemporary in the way that he insisted on a colloquial, simple language. Had he lived a century later, you could easily see him learning the guitar to travel the open road with Woody Guthrie or headlining a Beatnik poetry slam with Allen Ginsberg.

But it is this colloquial, simple language, which defines our cultural contribution. We’re like small children playing with enormous toys. On this new continent, we have created technology which so outstrips anything that comes before it that we barely know how to use it. There is 4,000 years of written poetry and roughly 1,000 years of written music, but there are roughly 110 years of movies and only a bit more of sound recording and photography. Education in math and science and medicine is defined by its exclusivity. If you want to study these subjects meaningfully, you have to learn at an extraordinary level over a period of a decade. But the arts are currently defined by their populism. Anybody can write or sing a song, anybody can make a movie, anybody can write a story. No extraordinary ability is asked of our cultural figures, and it’s possible that the most extraordinary thing about American culture is the technology with which it’s transmitted. Don't misunderstand, simplicity is not a byword for mediocrity, but the fact that there is no reward for craftsmanship in the arts in the manner there is for the sciences necessarily means that nearly half of the artistic glories we’re capable of producing go unrealized.

And it’s not just the artistic culture that suffers from this lack of critical complexity. It’s the civic culture too. Since about 1968, so many of us have come to assume automatically that the nation’s founding was cynical, based on economic interests, the exploitation of Africans, and the murder of Indians. Never mind that America is a country with one of the longest democratic traditions in human history, with freedoms that have never stopped growing (however incrementally), and done because of a founding constitutional document which is so simple that anybody can understand and interpret it for themselves. Furthermore, not a single movement which attempted to move the country away from republican democracy ever gained significant traction in the country’s entire history. American democracy is extremely imperfect, but thus far, it’s always been well-supported by its citizens, continually expanded its freedoms, and demonstrated the feasibility of democracy for the modern age. Any person who does not reflect on these facts in awe shouldn’t be taken seriously when they criticize anything about this country.

American values, such as they are, are no longer commonly shared. We no longer agree about what’s good and evil, and virtually all quarters of America are despondent over the fact that this disagreement exists. Half the country seems to hold to traditional definitions of the sacred, and the other half searches for a new definition on which no two members seem to agree. The American Soul is divided, with one half clinging to past - old world - models, and one half searching uncomfortably since 1968 for a new model which no American has definitively found. One side prizes unity, the other, individual expression. In a conflict between the two sides, do the individuals have a 1% chance of winning?

And because no American has established a commonly accepted new model, the half of America which sees the need for one is adrift. Its members are discontent without realizing the basis of their dissatisfaction. Their native intelligence is enough to show them that something has become deeply rotten in the American Soul, but they don’t have the tools to understand why. More than ever before, America is a nation of individuals. No two people critical of America share the same values, and because they lack the same values, they can’t pool their critical thinking together to effectively criticize the country - incompetent in defining the country’s problems, and ineffectual in creating change.

America needs new definitions. New definitions of good and evil, new definitions of the sacred and the sublime which demonstrate the struggle between the two ethical poles, and new arguments for why it’s important to choose between them. The old values of what is good and what is evil, tied up with old notions of God and retribution, clearly don’t have much hold on Americans anymore. Such notions predate America by thousands of years, and even if they were invented in America, they are un-American in every sense. If we don’t provide a new set of values, if good and evil simply no longer exist, what then is worth fighting for?

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800 Words: Depressive Paternalism - Part 2

“We still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset.’ We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”

George Steiner

“And you thought the first part of this was arrogant...”

Evan Tucker

For roughly a decade, I’ve lived with an extensive, Falstaffian, pot-belly. A few months ago, I was told by one particularly grating “Type-A-cquaintance” that I should get myself checked for a hernia. But a far closer acquaintance of mine recently told me, apropos of absolutely nothing, that I should strongly consider bariatric surgery (surgical weight loss). He even prefaced it by saying ‘I know you’re going to be mad at me for saying this.’ Well..., I know I’m fat, but that’s ridiculous. Not even I’m not that fat. I may eat like a swine, but I exercise regularly. I feel physical exertion easily, I live with bodily pain of all kinds, and I sweat a river every day, but I never lack for energy. The time may well come for gastric bypass, but I’m 31 fucking years old with a BMI of "only" 36. I’m plenty worried for the long-term prospects of my health, but I don’t yet have diabetes or heart disease or any other ailment associated with long-term obesity - and believe me, I’ve gotten it checked again and again. I simply need to lose weight rather badly, and there are quite a number of steps which I should probably consider before hacking my body to pieces so I can make it smaller.

This is a particularly close acquaintance of mine, and I’ve been told many many times by many many people that I should simply ignore what can only be termed a long-ongoing campaign of contempt he’s continually at great pains to show me, in spite of the fact that this is a particular acquaintance that can never, ever, be shed. Apparently I therefore have no one to blame but myself for the fact that I care so much what he thinks. But the problem with this solution is that through the years I’ve done what I could to ignore him, and continue to do so. After he uttered this particular imbecility on Thursday night, I called up another close mutual acquaintance and we laughed heartily at his idiocy as we have so many times before. I then hung up the phone, only to discover that I couldn’t sleep. Around five in the morning, I finally nodded off, and within five minutes of my awakening a few hours later, I felt utterly miserable about the hopelessness of my weight problem, which of course led to further miserable thoughts about my relationship with this person, which then led to miserable thoughts about my miserable relationships with other people, which then led to miserable thoughts about my miserable failures in less tangible areas, which led to an almost complete emotional darkness - far too overwhelming to be within my control and a darkness which any true depressive will recognize instantly, but others will inevitably call a self-fulfilling prophecy. As always, I tried to believe that such negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. But unfortunately, it’s almost completely the opposite. It’s the overwhelming desire to think positive thoughts which is a prophecy of negativity. All of my experience with this illness has taught me that a depressive who attempts to will himself into positive thinking sets a trap, which when it snares him will multiply depressive sensations as the realization grows of how impossible it is to control one’s thoughts and feelings. Within an hour of my awaking, I was sobbing on my bed, as utterly miserable as I was convivial the night before.

I have ample reason in my life to be depressed. But those reasons do not dictate the appearance of depression, and at this point it’s far more likely that depression dictates those reasons. Depression is an illness which chooses the person, not the person it. And to tell a depression sufferer that an unceasingly positive attitude can beat this illness, or that a depressive can simply choose to stop thinking depressing thoughts, is every bit as outrageous a manipulation as telling a rape victim that her short skirt caused her misfortune, or a cancer patient to forego medicine for holistic cures. And for a manipulation like that to continually come from a close personal acquaintance is a second wound, nearly as powerful as the first, and far longer lasting in its impact. If civilization continues to evolve to better places, then this sort of belief will soon be considered as willfully naive, as dangerous, as barbaric, and as evil as any of those other medieval bigotries. If such people exist in your lives, then you know that you may love these people, you may be thankful for every single thing they’ve given you, and you may owe them nearly everything. But you can never, ever forgive them for such a belief, and if they do not see the error of their ways and do everything within their power to repent, you know that it will forever be your primary memory of them - the ultimate difference between ‘He was great … even though...’ and ‘He was bad … even though...’ Because at the very time and on the very issue that you needed such people most, they stabbed you in the back.

It’s entirely possible, perhaps likely, that those of us who point fingers like that have sins towards them upon our heads just as egregious, but those unto whom evil is done do evil in return. The war between the depressives and the anxious is a war of attrition which will never end, and anyone caught in the middle can’t help but be collateral damage, their lives suffering from the suffering the two parties inflict upon one another. These two parties may love one another, but they clearly hate so many qualities they see in each other, and they’d sooner tear one another - and everyone in proximity - to shreds than ever concede an inch. It is a stalemate to which there can never be an adequate solution, merely ceasefires until the next battle.

Where did it all go wrong?... What goes wrong in the brain of a child ‘semi-prodigy’ that he spends his entire adolescence, and perhaps his entire adulthood, devoting all his alleged intelligence to a world he never understood? Was my head simply too filled with information too early to develop the proper skills at the proper time? Did the gears simply snap into place too early to understand the world for what it is? Was I lucky that my fortunes fell so early and I’ve spent my young years overcoming the setbacks which perhaps would have been inevitable come middle age had I rose high when I was young?

Just a few more years without these problems might have made all the difference. I could have handled the learning disabilities without depression, and I probably could have handled the depression without learning disabilities. But the combination of the two was, thus far, lethal. Just a few more years, and I could have been confident on the path to a professional violin career without risking a panic attack at the idea of practicing, ten more years and I might have learned the ropes of journalism, twenty more and I could have been a lawyer or an academic or God knows what the limit could have been? But in retrospect, that was mostly impossible. I was depressed because I saw my future all too clearly. I realized that no kid was like me, no school existed for a child like me, and I existed in my own little world. How I was never diagnosed with a condition like Asperger’s, I’ll never know. I’ve been told over and over again by doctors and friends that I do have social skill and read people rather well. By this point in my life, I know the world around me like a map, yet I still feel as though I exist outside of it, in a world which only I occupy. A world may yet exist which can accommodate people like me - perhaps it did in the past, but as of right now, it certainly doesn’t.

In both good and bad ways, I’ve spent most of my life trying to change ‘me.’ So long as I’m breathing, I’ll keep trying to better fit the circumstances of my life. What else can I do? But I think I’ve earned the right to make a little list:

Asking purely as a fantasy, what would have to change in a world I could live in comfortably?

1. Language. Contemporary language is a trafficked drug mule. It is almost impossible for most people to say what they mean, or to mean what they say. So many more people read and write than ever before in human history, yet it has never been more clear that the way in which most people speak or write is either sub-literate, or pseudo-literate. There are more English speakers in the world than ever, yet the result is that language is stretched on a rack. Most people carry with them a faux-populist insistence that every demotic (google the fucking word...) linguistic usage has to be accepted as worthy of dignified treatment, or there is a faux-intellectual insistence on accepting every piece of jargon as worthy of dignified study. The result is that if they so choose, there isn’t a single English-speaker in the world who can’t hide behind the bullshit which language allows us. There are an infinite number of ways to contort language, and the result is that both the public and private realms of interaction are corrupted in ways they needn’t be: politicians and corporations and clergy can affect ethical behavior without ever setting off the alarms of the people they control, while friends and family can lie all too easily to one another. Corrupt lawyers can parse laws into ever more microscopic evasions which can let anyone with money get away with murder, and intellectual frauds can create whole new fields of ‘study’ in the humanities which only study how language can be perverted to say absolutely nothing, and in the process ruin the curiosity (and sometimes the careers) of their smartest students, who eventually realize that nobody is interested in their field of study, nor should people be. The more meanings we accept to every word, the more elisions and evasions we allow. English may be the common tongue for the plurality of the world, but never has the gulf of how English is used separated you from your neighbor so clearly. Perhaps it was always like this, but it doesn’t have to be.

And because language is so contorted, nobody thinks to use it to speak their minds. No matter how much information we share about ourselves on the internet about what we do, there is preciously little content of substance about what we think. The thought that someone would keep a public diary in which he continually speaks his mind, and exposes his innermost existential questions with few aspirations to self-promotion, and absolutely none about presenting a ‘best self’ to the world, is anathema to virtually everyone else but me (and occasionally to me too). There are thousands of blogs on any given subject and sub-subject, read by small communities of like-minded specialists. But how many blogs are there which are about nothing more or less than what it’s like to be human? What does it matter if the internet is tracking you when you have so little to offer of interesting and universally appreciable content to track?

Furthermore, how can people even present a ‘best self’ to the world when there is increasing evidence that there is no ‘self’ to begin with? What does the ‘self’ even mean in an era on the cusp of of mass genetic manipulation, cloning, organ transplant, and personality-altering drugs. Each of us is many different selves, constantly warring with one another for domination. Like so many linguistic perversions, the “self” is long since proven to be a nonsense-concept, and there are no words for all the multiple identities which consciousness can produce at any given time.  The sooner the world realizes that each person has many different identities within their “selves,” the more perceptive and compassionate we all are capable of being to each “self” within each other.

Lastly, we live in an era that values concision. In this era of screens and the images they show, we’ve all apparently decided that we’re too long-winded - we use too many words, we talk too much, we make our lives too complicated when we can simplify them so easily by being more terse. The wrong words get us into trouble, and right words go unnoticed. Every writing program tells you the same thing: never use two words when one will do. But they never tell you the just-as-true opposite: never use one word when two are required. The only concept in the world that does not require nuance is the need for nuance. A picture may say a thousand words, but there’s no guarantee that those thousand words the picture says will be any less vapid. At least with a thousand written words, you might get some context.

For the first time since the Middle Ages, the linguistic gulfs between us grow greater. Every academic field has its own jargon, every region its own particular meanings for words and words for meanings, every social class its own dialect, and every field of interest its own inside information. So many new concepts, many of them beneficial , are created from such flexibility. But if we want to minimize misunderstandings around the world, then the world needs a common tongue. Not just a common language, but a language in which we’re all trained vigorously, in which the meaning of every word and clause can be both rigidly disciplined and free to be flexibly used to make the most difficult concepts simple.

(to be continued...)

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800 Words: The Secret of Abelard and Heloise Parts III and IV

III.

Because I’m weird like that (and so many other ways), the question often occurs to me: Who’s having the best sex in the world?

No doubt, the athletes and actors of the world are having better (and far, far more frequent) sex than I, but I would venture any amount of money (and sex) that there is something about their sex which is too laquered, too impersonal, too constrained by vanity’s baggage - for their activities to contain the release which sex should promise.

It sometimes occurs to me that there must be a late fifty-something married couple in Siberia. Each of them is a hundred pounds overweight with pains brought upon from years of backbreaking labor, innard destroying alcoholism, and lung-rotting cigarette cartons - the husband has terrible BO, the wife doesn’t wipe her ass enough, and both of them have impressive facial hair. And this obvious lack of vanity leads them to have the most uninhibited, guilt-free, spiritually liberating, and orgasmically powerful sex since Odysseus’s first night home.

IV.

Well... what’s the point in concealing it when I conceal so little here? The spur for this series of posts was the passing of yet another one of my ‘relationshiplettes,’ and the most pained passing in quite some time. It’s become a remarkably consistent pattern in the last few years, though obviously with quite a few variations. Inevitably, some girl, far too pretty and smart to still be single, shows interest for reasons a bit past my understanding, and who am I to complain? We go out a number of times, chemistry seems there in google quantity, I manage (or so I think) to display my convivial public self, and conceal from her just what an unstable prick I am in private. But when it comes time for her to define the parameters (since I have no parameters, my life perpetually exists in freefall), it’s inevitably over before it begins, and thus the cycle of humiliation begins anew. I don’t even get enough dates to be broken up with for being the asshole they’d inevitably discover if they stuck around longer.

Much as there is a certain type of man,... there is a certain type of woman.. Some lonely and broken men crave the humiliation of women through sex, some lonely and broken women crave the humiliation of men through emotional attachment. Not all men or women, not even the lonely ones, conform to such pre-determined formulas. And surely there are broken men and women who cross the boundaries of these norms (or stereotypes) - men who too easily withdraw their emotional bond, women who too easily withdraw their sexual one, to those too suddenly found wanting. But inevitably, there’s no end of vulnerable beta males and females upon which they can prey. And prey like vultures they do. They take the emotional validation they need, and vanish without a trace.

If the Madonna/Whore Complex truly exists for the male archetype, then surely there has to be a similar complex for the female equivalent - for the moment, let’s call this female equivalent the Lucifer/Satan complex. Perhaps, just as men raised around difficult women have trouble respecting a woman who’d so defile herself by sleeping with him, perhaps women raised around difficult men have trouble respecting a man who’d so defile himself by being friendly. Her angel exists purely to intercede for support and comfort, while her devil exists purely for forbidden temptation, and surely any angel who so defiles himself by indulging in the forbidden must fall from grace.

Well, if this Lucifer/Satan complex exists, then I must be the least deserving angel in human history. But I have been that angel all too many times, and occasionally was even glad to be him - ... please don’t prove me wrong on that count girlfriends...

But this one, this one hit a far more central nerve than occurs to most women than I possess (double entendre semi-intentional). I don’t doubt I’ll forget about her in a week (onto the next crush...), yet I can’t deny, rarely in my life did I ever feel so betrayed by someone I didn’t even know a month ago. It felt quite as though I’d found, finally, a grand exception to everything I’d ever experienced about women, about relationships, and about my particular and endless reservoir of failures within them.

If only this once in my life (who am I kidding, I feel like this all the time...), I felt myself completely at ease, completely like myself, free to say what I liked, without judgement, and appreciated all the more for my candor about the particularly woeful chapters in the Tales of Tucker (and she didn’t hear nothin’ compared to what she could have...). Inevitably... this resulted in my thinking that maybe, just maybe, I’m not quite as broken as I think I am, and maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for the hyper-dysfunctional to be attractive to the hyper-functional. And if that’s possible, then perhaps it’s even possible for the hyper-functional to willingly take on a helpmate’s role to give some semblance of navigation through this lifelong fog which never lifts for some of us. But all the while, there she was, listening for the few minutes she wasn’t the one doing the talking, and as I disclosed away the smallest hint of my rather cosmic tzuris to this manic pixie dream milf, I was blindly, blithely giving away all that platonic poison to ingest - a mere side dish before the real poison courses, and she was already full - the possibility of something more meaningful already dead. Because I could not prove the lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I was determined to prove the nebbish.

Who knows? Perhaps the passing of this particular relationshiplette was because of something she found on this blog. God knows, there’s enough incriminating baggage on this website to keep me single well into my seventies. But the women I seem to fall for are a dime a dozen, while the internet is forever. Should I reach my dotage, I don’t doubt that the whole story will be here - and there’s already material enough for a lifetime's writing - distributed in bits and pieces over the decades. It’s unfortunately possible that I may, hopefully in the far distant future, leave behind no legacy but this blog. But while I hope there will be many other legacies, this shall be enough. I existed, I lived, and I lived the best damned life I could. My story shall be told.

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800 Words: Neo-Medievalism - Part 2

Who would have thought that a world which only one-hundred years ago seemed so hidebound to rational explanations would not only become in thrall to the infinite, but also in thrall to the infinite because of rational explanations?

In one sense at least, this is the most exciting time in which to live since The Middle Ages. The contents of the world are, yet again, entirely unknown. The perfect harmonies in the Age of Newton and Kepler are replaced by the dissonant anxieties in the Age of Einstein and Heisenberg. And with this age comes the chaos of guesswork - our greatest certainties being not of our place in the universe but in what we see on earth, because more than the Age of Einstein, this is the Age of Darwin.

The Middle Ages was an era of extreme optimism when people joyfully proclaimed their disregard for the agonizing squalor of their world as but a mere trial before the joys of the world to come. This post-modern age is an era when people agonizingly embrace the manifold joys of the moment with the knowledge that those joys may not exist a minute from now, and may never exist again. In both cases, and for diametrically opposed reasons, life has taken on the quality of a carnival or a vaudeville show, in which anything can happen from moment to moment. Nothing in the Middle Ages was recorded, and therefore everything could be believed. Almost all music, all stories, all human thought existed almost completely in oral tradition. Who was to say that one version of a story was more true than another? All stories were equally unprovable, and therefore all stories about the world had to be believed. Today, everything is recorded: everybody’s music, everybody’s writings, everybody’s movies, everybody’s thoughts. Everybody's movements are recorded online, and everything online can be doctored to suit people’s purposes, therefore our instinct is to believe as much in nothing as Medieval Man’s instinct was to believe in everything.

I recently heard an NPR piece about the tremendous upswing in popularity for a pilgrimage in Spain called the Way of St. James. The pilgrims walk across Northern Spain to the monestary where it's alleged that one of the twelve apostles is buried. In the Middle Ages, such pilgrimages were made by foot and with the flimsiest of footwear. A pilgrimage which today’s Christians could do in a few hours would take more than a decade for yesterday’s, and held no guarantee that the pilgrims would survive to return home. A pilgrimage was the ultimate adventure - a trek into utterly unknown woods, with grave chances for disease, violence, death, excitement and adventure along the way. And for those who were not soldiers, it was their only chance for such adventure. Unless people went on pilgrimage or to war, their existence was completely stationary - plowing the same crops, walking the same trails, seeing the same views every day for their entire lives. Existence was monotonous.

Compared to any previous era of human history, our existence is the precise opposite of monotonous. What is today’s city but an urban forest; in which excitements lie in store for us on every corner, and dangers beyond our imaginings await should we stray down the wrong path? We live far longer than our predecessors, and we also die of disease for far longer. We can view every piece of the earth by satellite, we can mechanize every work process, we can ameliorate every irritation.  Perhaps life has grown so exciting, that it’s become... monotonous?

The world is no longer a mystery. And as life becomes less of a mystery, we attempt to find ways to ways to make it so. In order to truly contemplate the mysterious, we have to turn toward things we truly don’t know. So we look to space, or to the sea, or to nature, or perhaps again to the divine. Eventually, perhaps space and the sea will be as well-mapped as the earth. And every time we venture out into the sea or into nature, we have modern provisions to ensure that our experience of it holds nothing like the dangers - and therefore, nothing like the excitement - of our forefathers. All that remains for human beings to revive their sense of purpose in this world is religion, and perhaps the remote possibility of space travel. But who can doubt that even space travel, should it ever happen on a large scale, would eventually be as child proofed as any jungle gym? However, were we to evolve past religion, would humans have the purposefulness to survive even another hundred years?

I would like to think so, and yet I doubt it. No matter what their religion or creed, too many people need a sense that their life’s petty frustrations and deep agonies are undertaken for a purpose. Without that sense of purpose, what reason would so many unfulfilled people have to carry on their struggle to make their lives better? And without that sense of purpose, even the rewards of such a struggle make life nothing more than a series of petty frustrations. It is especially in our era, when so many lives are consumed merely by frustrations and malaise, that the world asks: why do we go on? The people who experience deep agony look at the merely frustrated with seething rage, while the merely frustrated don’t enjoy their good fortune enough to defend it. Decadence breeds war, which breeds rebirth, and the life cycle of human civilization starts over again just as it has so many times before. In the meantime, these Christians will walk the Way of St. James. They're no less decadent than the rest of us, so this pilgrimage will take a week or two. They will fly to the trail's beginning point, without taking twenty years to walk from their country of origin. If they like, they sleep in hotels along the way, or at least sleep in a strong tent next to an artificial campfire. They can take bathroom breaks at very least in a port-o-potty, and they can visit all sorts of gift shops along the way to buy presents for the family members they'll see again next week. But maybe, just maybe, a few of them will truly experience some small semblance of the stillness and illogic which life once held for our ancestors - and if they do, it will be the most exciting moment of their lives.

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800 Words: Neo-Medievalism - Part 1

The Middle Ages was an era of international culture with an international language. It was an era in which only specialists had the education to keep abreast of the latest developments in their fields. It was an era when credulous masses could be made to believe in literally anything of which they were told enough times. It was an era which devised means of war and murder cruel beyond the imaginings of the most psychopathic Roman, and an era which ended with a scale of death so massive that the end times were thought nigh by most observers. It was an era when religion held so powerfully in the minds of human beings that humans disregarded their poverty and squalor as a mere test for the joys to come. It was an era when images supplanted words and those images were controlled by an elite who understood words. This elite absolved the commoners of any and all sins. It was an era so nihilistic that it was full of optimism.  

The medieval world is like our world, but it is not our world yet again. Yet we come ever closer to the Middle Ages, and it may still become our world. In recent generations, we’ve evolved to the point of devolution. We’ve evolved so much that we are yet again beginners in this world. We have realities more proven than ever in history, and those realities have given us a whole new set of uncertainties and a beginning of consciousness at a level undreamt even a lifetime ago.

Like all transitional periods, it resembles adolescence. When life deals with us reliably, we experience transitional emotions - joy and sadness intermingle constantly on the emotional spectrum, and all the grey hues of maturity make themselves manifest. But when life itself is transitional, it is our emotions which are completely reliable - reliably manic; with all the bright colors of primary emotions making themselves known in a succession which completely obliterates the emotion we felt just a moment ago. The only hues which mix in adolescence are those of fear and fascination - the call of the new for which we feel both intense longing and fear no less. When life is in transition, we are again like pubescents newly awakening to the largeness of the world - unable to process anything we see except in the most primal terms, making do with reductive explanations, and experiencing emotion with an immediacy which maturity disavows. We disregard the familiar and search for a new self, we come to believe that which we could never believe before, and we become new people.

The Renaissance era of human history did not end with the Baroque. It ended alongside Old Europe, and all the Renaissance ideals of Western Man as the source of cultivation and human progress ended when Gdansk, Calais, Dunkirk, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Freiburg, Wuppertal, Milan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kobe, Tokyo, Kiev, Minsk, and Leningrad went up in smoke one and all, and became unrecognizable from the cities they’d once been. With them died all the three great ideals of the Renaissance - humanism, rationalism, and empiricism. And just as the greater part of the civilized world seems ready to embrace the Renaissance, the new limits of human knowledge disprove all three. No longer can Man be seen as the center of the world when the technology upon which he’s dependent makes him a mere drone in its hive. No longer can reason alone conquer human beastliness after an age when philosophy and science themselves were used as the justification to kill other human beings. And no longer can sensory experience become reality’s ultimate arbiter in an age when existence can only be understood when we accept that the vast majority of the universe consists of phenomena we neither understand nor see.

We know too much to believe in the Renaissance anymore. We have become so self-conscious that we are no longer conscious, so self-critical that we are no longer critical, so knowledgeable that we are completely ignorant.  No longer is universal knowledge a legitimate or feasible goal in an era when the world’s confirmable knowledge grows by the second. Electronics let us absorb more information, give us more information about more people, create whole new artforms and branches of scientific inquiry, and do all of that at levels that seem to grow exponentially by the year. Will this rate of intellectual growth continue for another decade? Another century? Another millenium?

The Middle Ages was an era which believed in the truth of every lie: every angel and demon, every saint and witch, every legend, every rumor. We do not believe in the truth of every lie, and yet there are theories of infinite multiverses which would have us believe that even if our universe makes such events impossible, there exists an infinity of other universes in which such events not only possible, but inevitable. Furthermore, even if we do not believe in the truth of every lie, we believe in the lie of every truth. The Middle Ages saw realities where there were none, we see unrealities where there is reality. With philosophies of language cognition and deconstruction, we parse apart the meanings of our very words to show that they can never mean what we think they mean. And lest you think all these theories never have no basis in reality, think of everyday professions. What do insurance companies do but posit and evaluate the likelihood of every possible occurrence? What do lawyers do but parse our language to show that the things people say and write may mean something different from what we think they do?

The Middle Ages believed in God. We have yet to know whether God is truly an invention of the past, and that answer will probably not be revealed in the lifetime of anyone yet born. But what we do know is that Atheist belief attained more public fealty in recent years than at any time in human history, and only science could make that possible. In the Middle Ages, God was the axle upon which humanity placed a wheel of comprehension; and all the possibilities, all the multiversed realities of medieval existence were contained within the simple explanation that Lord God made it all. In our world, the most educated believe that science can yet explain all the universe’s phenomena. It certainly has a better chance of explaining such phenomena than religion, but I’m hardly the first to suggest that perhaps one day, centuries and millennia in the future, science will reveal itself as merely another mythology in the attempt of humans to understand the reality in which we live. But like all mythologies, its hold on imaginations which believe in it (like mine) is fundamentally unbreakable. For the first time in over 500 years, life is a true mystery and all things are possible. It's been half a millennium since those who know the most seem to know the least. What will the reinstatement of spiritual awe to the summit of human thought bring out in us?

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