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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
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PART 3: Hoppers
11/26/00 The potential advantage of the hopper: if and when substance is there, any word can trigger a thought sequence. Analogous to a spiraling event (a rotating sprinkler, for instance) notions absent at the start travel tangentially away from the original impulse (water pressure in the sprinkler) generating other thoughts, quantas. Soon, at least occasionally, the politically correct shoots away into the historically fitting, pauses there a brief moment to plunge into evolutionary coherence, and even more rarely might explode into cosmic relevance. You might go from the word "coffee" to the seeding of the cosmos or similia. Surveying a number of such "exercises," one might then form groupings where a thought or a bias runs deep. Soon hoppers of germane lines of thought take form. Fishing them out can then make easier the formation of edifices of intellection. Animism 8/1/94 A reality constructed of emotionally charged entities -- the gods, the spirits, the angels, the benevolent, the malevolent, the transitory, the sinful, the penitent, the possessed, the diabolical, the soulful, the pervasive good and evil -- produces actors, us, imbued with all the destabilizing feelings and emotions one can generate. For such actors, a less-charged reality and a less-charged anima suggest coldness of heart (a pump, by the way). In fact, those charges are the emergence made possible and invented by a much less animistic, cooler reality. The reality of probabilism, determinism, opportunism, and the late Love Project reality. The Love Project is the culprit in the total anxiety of charged things up and down the spectrum of plus and minus, sensitive and insensitive, good and evil, oneness and otherness, temporal and eternal ... This proposes the importance of a" cool" religiosity. A new "theology"? I propose the theology of the (as yet) nonexisting God, an utterly democratic theology but an unforgetting (but forgiving?!) theology based on the "fact" that nothing done can be undone and the necessity of a final condition where the unforgettable (all of evolution) is present and responsibly admitted ... the bouleversement theology of Omega Seed. The first catastrophe (the Fall) can be identified with the Big Bang moment when the nothingness of Nirvana becomes the Becoming-Beingness of the world (cosmos). 1/28/95 I am not a theologian; I am perhaps a technologian, one who is concerned about the technology of Mind (the whole 15 eons of technology of matter becoming Mind). I am not a founder of Religion; I am a finder of Religion and of the CMD paradigm. Religio was founded, now we know, when space-time got Becoming under way. Religion is the possibility of an ontological triumph (Omega Seed) out of a mosaic of individual tragedies, conception- birth-maturity-demise, imbued with the tragic sense of life. The toy maker systematically generating each of them leaves the question of equity unanswered. There must be a Second Coming of each puppet for it to participate in the glory, after having been one of the constructors of it. My resolution is Omega Seed via CMD -- the puppets metaphor and the magic event that will give back to each of them their life and "forever." That at age 50, let's say, you are derailed in the junkyard rail -- be it 10, 20, or 50 years long -- this is intrinsically a private "ontological" tragedy. Add to it the tragedy of the accidental or the tragedy of the pathological (illness). In a noneschatological (self-creating) reality, life's singular individual manifestation is irrevocably dumped, therefrom the utter inequity soaking the process. Reality doesn't have to drop blood to be unfair. It just has to do what it does to be a dump yard. That is why theological deceptions have accompanied life from the very start of consciousness. Deception via the simulation of what we desire: equity via immortality. My hypothesis says that the puppets, all of them, fall into an immensely long slumber, which will be interrupted for good at the clarion call of the Omega Seed, the Second Coming. For one and all of them. The slumber chamber is the past, the only reality. The present is that which produces the past via constant space-time flow. The present is the producer of the past via the manipulation of mass-energy by space-time. The future is a figment of our imagination. Plants and animals do not have a future. Yet they keep generating the past, no questions asked, no fantasies and hopes intruding. 3/16/95 Three great curses of life. Two are the parent curses: the curse of theologies -- that is, the dogmas about an existence of divinities (throughout history); and the curse of greed -- that is, the dogmas about the sacredness of hyperconsumption (throughout history). Instead of one neutralizing the other on the theory that the soul (theologies) will conquer the body (greed), they work in a sort of negative synergy. The offspring is the direct consequence of two dogmatisms not in conflict with each other, but, in the grand manner of self-deception, a "rejoicing" in the self-righteous glow of the Chosen People. The product is intolerance. The God's Chosen People and the "self-made" entrepreneur in tandem. "Self-sufficiency" in the shadow of the "true god," Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. A self-sufficiency in "the" midst of plenty. What is more, theologies are the nemeses of true religion, and theologies are once more in the process of tearing apart the fragile texture of humaneness so as to reinstate the Kingdom of God. Greed is almost the mirror image of such fatal intolerance. It creeps throughout such a fragile texture and has no tolerance for the call of compassion, love, generosity, equity, etc. One tears from above: Zeus and his thunderbolts; the other from within: the opportunism. of the ego on a rampage. Religion means binding (from the Latin religio). Theologies cannot bind since there is no way or sense in binding with those things that do not exist, man and the rest of reality to gods. So the immense and immensely cruel persecution and disposal of the infidels (to save their souls) goes on unabated. In fact, now at a paroxysm of violence, be it contained in the raging "soul" or expressed in deeds. The economic chasms that greed cultivates plays in the "hands" of phantoms, the gods, and the deeds also acted out by the flesh-and-bone-hands of the (chosen) elected. As greed is endemic -- that is, performing through the "rich," potentially and possibly explosive through the "poor," so is the endemic conveniently dressed, love for gods ... Poor humanity. Intolerance is your master. You and the daughters of two bitches, god and greed. G.G. → intolerance. In a Gilbert & Sullivan twist, that is, the tragedy played out in our fundamentalist-revivalist gladiatorial games, God and greed and brethren do not tolerate the gentile, the brethren enemy out there. Find ways of preventing the American Dream going global and its most cherished icons -- single home, automobile, gun -- from becoming part of a planetary iconography. Three billion houses, 4 billion cars, 5 billion semiautomatic weapons ... 7/3/96 Eighty percent of Americans believe in God -- that is bad news, tragic news, even if half of us fake it. What a pity! I believe in man, in his mind, the inventor of God ... Only the esthetic "redeemed" us. But, naturally, it is not redemption, a nonfact, but creation, the esthetic metamorphosis. 10/24/96 Theologies We, planetary specimens, are in the midst of theological wars, as we have been for millennia. Theologies are killing machines history has sanctified and legitimitized. Israel and Bosnia provide only the most virulent episodes of a planetary infection that does not seem to have antidotes. In the name of (my) God all seems possible and anointable. All sorts of intellectual constructs have been encrustations on an invention that seems to sing love songs, but that delivers pain, sorrow, suffering, and death with cruelties of very special brands. The invention is a sad mass delusion and, as such, evil. As killing machines go, theologies have the gold medal. Countless millions have been killed in wars, battles, executions, and personal confrontations. The halo of suffering, anguish, and inequity that go with such slaughtering have been immense and anchored to strands of revenge that remain virulent for countless generations. Persecutions, like viruses and plagues, recur and recur, teaching no applicable lessons. Hate does not forget as it does not forgive. If ever God existed, God should be rolling in seas of blood and guilt of cosmic proportion. 8/3/97 What prodigious flights would reality take once unburdened of animism is the excruciating question. It must be kept in mind that animism is a human invention and occupies the brain as love, science, and the esthetic do. 10/30/97 (OAXACA) Retail animism versus wholesale animism. The retail animism cultivated by medicine man, shaman, witch man, "local" gurus, et al. Wholesale animism is incarnated by the great delusions of the "Great Religions." 1/21/99 Greek mythology rich and blood-stained, blood of God, lesser gods, and mortals, turned out to be the agent for esthetic exploit of first magnitude. From literature to theater to the "fine" arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, plus the artisan and craftsman delights. Christianity, the offshoot of Greek mythology, had followed its stories in a different tonality to construct its own full mythology. We are awash in it. Delusion then, delusion now. The redeeming factor then and now is one and the same: the esthetic act and object. Theologies in function of the esthetic. The esthetogenesis of reality marches on via and courtesy of the animistic delusion converging in it all the anguish of the species. The anguish of Sophocles quite different from the anguish of Fra Angelico, but human anguish just the same transfigured into the esthetic. 10/14/99 Theology and Religion. Theology mandates a hypothetical presence, the gods. Religion is the pursuit of an imperative, binding love. 8/17/00 The sun was very orangy and very large this morning. If we really must worship something, we might as well worship it. If it turned off for just a few hours, the planet's surface would be in trauma, for a few days it would be in coma and life turned into icicles and popsicles. At God's pantheon would be pandemonium. Who of us could do such a thing is the indignant question. By then the whole planet's surface would be an ice-skating sphere. I know, I know, the gods are at the switch. Do not tell, they might themselves turn into god popsicles, god icicles. Life went on for eons without worshiping the pantheon crowds, but ho, ho, god sun was there night and day to nurture it, making some of itself into it. Sun god, thank you. 9/6/00 Experiencing and virtuality. Two worlds apart. The world of experiencing is the body-brain at work. The world of virtuality is the brain at work. The body-brain world is the awareness world on all the good-bad spectrum. The virtual world is the data world disconnected from the real. Animism is the Nirvana of virtuality, the simulation world that constricts its passions around imagining while reality goes by, the reality we interpret and live by with our body-brain. 10/4/00 It might be important, necessary, to establish the boundary of the real as distinct from the imagined. The imagined resides in the brain, and with the demise of the brain the imagined ceases to "exist" -- all along it had been a brain pattern. The real, though subject to brain interpretation, is outside brain jurisdiction. It exists (Becomes) before the brain and it exists (Becomes) after the brain. Naturally the brain itself is for real not only during its brief existence (Becoming) but also as the imprints it makes by its action. Part of such action is the imagining whose presence is there in the brain and nowhere else. In the animistic brain the distinction between the imagined and the real blur and life becomes an endless simulation (exercise). Theology is established when brains pick from one another germane images that soon take on a life of their own. That is how Jesus became Christ and where Christ a simulation becomes Christ the powerhouse. The demise of all the simulatory brains is the demise of Christ the simulated, though Jesus the persona is there in the past, as all other things are. Also in the past is the fraud that Christ is when located in the real by the brains that imagine him. In this "transaction" resides the power of animism: to make for real that which never existed. It is also the domain the Internet has to contend with. The distinction of the virtual from the real. The Internet will never make a fish; only fishes make fishes; nor can Jesus when reinvented (simulated) as Christ, both (virtual) Christ and fishes. Christian brains are a tour de force of animism. It is the "as if" with all its powerful pull and all of it flawed, because it is a chronic misleading used by man the opportunistic animal. Angels could do of Christianity a sweet dance. Man did and does of Christianity a dance often, too often, macabre, as all theologies do, including the "capitalistic" theology. Angels make angelic use of capital; man makes opportunistic use of capital. Unfortunately, angels are a brain simulation while opportunism is built into every cell of our body-brain. These are times of chaos "disciplining" all sorts of initiatives and enterprises. All of it in an almost nonchalant way of casualness. The great causes, brittle and cracking, are giving way to the virtual haphazardness afforded by silicon and hyperproductivity in the process of establishing new causes. In the Internet for instance, the casual meets its own nemesis, the causal its own theology; in the meantime the persona might find itself in the meat grinder of postsilicon intellection to be born again as a fleshless "persona" arguing for a window of opportunity upon the universe at large within the new causal frame of reference. For any causality that is wrong from the start, the rule of a better kind of wrongness applies. Common to all wrong causalities, of which the animistic fallacy is the most embracing, there is weighing for them an optimization of wrongness. Sub-exurbia, the gun, the automobile, gaming, and greed are a few examples. The optimization of wrongness is a nemesis for human and eventually nonhuman as well. 10/25/00 To Venice In saints and probably even more in hermits, the borders of monologue-simulation can melt away. Reality and virtual reality become one and in a state of trance can become a daily occurrence. The great books of theology are documents, often powerful documents, of the genius of man to construct virtual worlds. Often, I guess, they are bazaars of nonsense, extensive mantras like those that sound constructs. Even in sports arenas one can witness the power of similar words, and all sorts of mantras are roared by the large gatherings, not to speak of rock and rap sounded out in the new temples. Then there is the soliloquy of the single brain to itself, the alter ego, gods and spirits being the interlocutor, growing in power by the day and the extrapolation of such lonely pursuit in the idiosyncratic temple of the single brain metastasizing into the great theological structures we eventually have to contend with. Few solitary brain-bodies probably moving along with their nomadic relatives and serfs in deserts and prairies, thousands of years since, controlling, despotically controlling, our lives and shaping our lesser appealing deeds, the bulk of our history. Consider the Israeli-Palestinian exotic and bloody context. The phantom gods be damned, let me say. To regain a pristine purity of Becoming is a false hope if we are unwilling to admit that from the very start of our history we "spoke" to the unanimated and the nonpresence later called spirits and gods, and that in endless sequences of autosuggestions growing in ever larger self-deceptions we have constructed around ourselves structures that now we "honestly" feel and think of as indispensable for the development of our honor, our compassion, our success, and the meaning of our existence. What would be of ourselves without our gods, their injunctions, admonitions, promises, punishments, their love? We ask. Give it a try, I would say. After 3 million years of delusional roaming around, the democratic spirit should be a strong enough injunction. The absentee lords have damaged enough this very genome that could revolutionize reality itself, but we must first undo or at least distance ourselves from those simulations of our brain that pathetically but successfully isolate the r, the thou, and the it from each other via the pastiche of our misdirected imagining. To promise that imminent death is the opening of the gates to paradise might be a charitable lie for the dying person. But the life-long lie that same person was penalized with is beyond the pale, is pure, cruel, life-long deception. 10/30/00 Venice, Monday The causal and the casual. Living nature is predominantly causalistic: Survival and reproduction are the dominant drives, and the performance of individuals subordinated to the performance of the species is highly disciplined. There is an "innate" formalism that is imprinted on the individual and the species it belongs to. There is an obedience of them to the cause, and with the formalities hidden or explicit, the reproduction rituals for instance. That is the causal world, and that is also the causal world of our species. But with the emergence of the individual, the persona, there is a shift toward the casual, the "do as I please" syndrome. The "virtue" of despotism is to retool, one could say, groups of individuals with the engine of causality. Those are causal, formal, ritualized tyrannies, kings, popes, conquerors, professional warriors ... that keep the captives focused, if it takes the real or imagined enemy out there, or the circus, or the systematic murders or the "in the name of kings, country, and God" sacred duty, or an opportunistic potpourri of them all. Most of the grand art was generated by the reintroduction of the causal often purely virtual, see all theologies (the forgery of paradises). For the Christianity cause, a Christian civilization was generated and the Christians were kept in line by enticements, by adulation, by favoritism, by menace, by violence, by mass killings, and by the terror of eternal damnation. With God the creator as causa prima and as a dictator of myriads of formalities, some of the most outstanding works were also generated: under the causal-formalistic cap: architecture, painting, music, sculpture, theater, literature, towns, and cities. Technologies and science were cajoled and alternatively suppressed in that causal domain and were created up to the present and for generations to come. But the present is more and more given to the casual, that casual that can flourish under the technological cap and the despotism of greed. The byzantine mosaic and the frescoes of the early renaissance are imbued with the causal; Christ martyrdom and triumph are in the same key of causalness, and the architectures are imprinted and transfigured in it. God as ferocious causa prima, let no one forget it. Fra Angelico is in praise of God, Giotto in tormented praise of it, Uccello makes a sort of magic colorful intarsio of it at the edge of blasphemy, casual man pulling away from the causal God. Buonarrotti, large ego and fierce will, redefines the esthetic of the newfound Howness opening the gates to the less causal baroque and the next-to-come capriciousness of rococo. God's grand cause is on a losing streak. Praise for the demythologizing but sorrow for the lost greatness of a falsehood made causal in Angelico and Giotto, triumphant in della Francesca, reinstated in Mantegna. The cause of God gives way to the causal of man, giving in turn the key to his eventual inebriation of casualness. The resolution of anguish in romanesque, gothic, and renaissance first period finds its own esthetic resolution on the back of falsehood, the presence and the tyranny of God. The lessened hold of the diminishing falsehood lessens the grandeur of both the godly imposition, the causal, and its esthetic resolution, moving from the causal to the casual, eroding in the process the very magic of the esthetic resolution for the condition of man. The present era is the domain of casualness unless the technological Howness can be elevated eventually to the state of causalness, and perhaps this new potential causa prima is necessary for the opening of the gates on the cosmos. It seems that we need causes, no matter how delusional they might turn out to be. See all the theologically based masterworks of all ages. If you work in great art, work on grand mistakes (at your risk); of all the grand mistakes, theology is the grandest by far, and grandest by far is its esthetic denouement. 11/11/00 The eye, the pleasure principle, the self-rewarding mechanism ... the hedonistic machine. We say that the eye can be explained only if seen as a progression implementing an intended plan. A creative force, the great spirit falls upon the notion that sight is useful for some of his creatures and applies his inventiveness: designs one eye and then implements the design. Coming with a new function, sight, he, she, or it constructs forms that instrumentalize the function; form follows function, and voila, the seeing animal. What if the grand designer never existed and instead a self-designing, self-implementing progression of events, of space events, caused forms to enjoy functions the forms themselves solicited from themselves? I would call it the hedonism principle. The slow emergence from life of desire that in tiny increments blindly constructs for itself a new organ, not according to a blueprint but according to the pleasure principle -- to perpetuate the pleasure of that which eventually is seeing. Not blueprinting by the great spirit but bricolage by space pleasing itself through the enjoyment of becoming progressively "sensible." Automatizing the sequences of the tiny steps so as not to "lose sight," the pleasure rewards of the bricolage bootstrap dance forming for itself added pleasures, uppermost among them the survival pleasure. The natural self-selection of those impersonations advantaged by sight and better sight ... Space is a bricoleur on a trajectory of self-enjoyment at whatever cost, rivers of pain, tears, blood ... What it takes to be able to sing the song of presence step by step enriching itself, the will to live, the enjoyment of experiencing, slowly evolving into the will to know in the escalating surge of complexity- intensity, the ever more minute are the spaces of which the game itself is made: the information-knowledge train of miniaturization. Opportunism seems to be the rule of the living landscape. But opportunism is the child of willfulness, the core of interiorization, that is, of life. Better Kind of Wrongness 12/25/93 The mysterious inability of leaders and the "common man" to connect with reality. I wish the "no free lunch" axiom would sink in and down, from the practice of futility into the practice of reality to which the politicians, not to speak of the technocrats, will eventually have to awaken and respond to with coherent paths for action. For the moment, they steer things in a sort of dense mystifying fog. I said futility, because well-meaning efforts and sacrifices are futile when the spin is on doing the wrong thing better. Hypereloquent in this better kind of wrongness is hyperconsumption as the key to societal well-being. Hyperconsumption will soon be perdition, and even fusion energy will not avoid Armageddon. Consumption is a state of being besides being a sign of power or status ("well-being" plus purchasing power). 12/27/95 The first Utopian "move" of "every body": we ignore or choose to ignore that we were "originated" 10 to 100 eons ago ... from then on it is Utopia all the way: the theological constructs testify best to such Utopia. Taking things for granted, 10 eons of "things" is a great congratulatory recognition of the automat-ization life has achieved. To ignore What, the content, the meaning, and the need for such automat-ization is fraught with "mortal" danger. But this is what we tend to do, this is what finds expression and possibly nemesis in the hyperconsumption, hyperhedonism of the present. We are after the well-known free lunch, and the technocrats are up front on this fogged-up notion. "You can become what you want" adds cruelty to the scenario. But in general what denounces best the Utopian nature of our "realism" leaders and gurus is the dedicated pursuit of better wrongness. The Pursuit of Wrongness Dedicated we are to the betterment of wrongness; see the gun, the car, suburbia, the cigarette, the war machine, greed, theologies (animism). 6/3/96 As long as we are the prey of theologies, we remain inimical to life and Mind within it. Theological structures are constitutionally pernicious: trying to improve on them is the most typical example of a "better kind of wrongness." 3/29/97 ... What comes about is forever and is forever unalterable. This unalterable forever contains evidently also the delusions of the times but for what they may be: delusions. With them also the end of such delusion: First on the list, the theological delusions and their bloodied "progress" through history. This shows how pernicious is the better kind of wrongness. 5/14/97 In the better-kind-of-wrongness triumphal mood, America is gloating about the good time we have and are anticipating. Rearranging the furniture below deck on the Titanic is going on at a frenetic and rewarding pace. Glory to God! I guess the 5 billion not-so-engaged fellows must be kept in the ghostly mode of detached souls moving in a virtual reality outside the consumerist domain. 9/16/98 The discovery and recognition of evolution that Darwin first among others "systematized" has as yet been unable to percolate in our bones. Therefore the coherence I am advocating as essential to our interpretation of things and our action upon them (the Hows of Techne) has no voice in our societies. It is as if we confined our presence to a "palace" made of discarded designs, the animistic palace designed by the gods we invented some hundreds of thousands of years ago. The better kind of wrongness has been effectively operating through our fear, expectations, and despair. The palace is protean but necessarily a delusion, the delusion intrinsic to the animistic engine. History is in large part a document about the displaying of animism on this planet and the document is unequivocal. For a species that "invented" love, passion, and self-awareness, animism is a dense fog obstructing knowledge and creativity by way of arbitrary rules and unproved "facts." 12/21/98 In all societies in all historical periods and in the midst of animistic fog are persons of generosity, compassion, love. They are the redeemers, if redemption is possible, of animism itself. They are the martyred multitudes carrying the torch, the "love thy neighbor" light, and most of the time their worth is measured by their humility. How profoundly sad it is that the animistic delusion keeps them captive of the pernicious lies of theologies. Theologies cannot do without their grace, and faithful to the corrosive milieu of the BKW, theologies are carried on, adorned with self-righteously upheld "saviors" of the Love Project. The profiteers of animism beware, the martyrdom of your innocent multitudes, their metaphorical and their real blood is in your hand. Washing your hand in holy water, the Pontius Pilate trick, will not save that soul you swear by. An additional blood-stained feather in the simulation game of animism. The powerhouse of capitalism, which finds comfort in the larger powerhouse of animism, is insistent, sincerely or not, on a godly supervision of the deed of its own priests. The glory of God-and-country finances, armed by capital wealth. No conspiracy there, just the state of affairs. A state of the arts? Animation-simulation-capital where simulation stands for the animistic pseudodomain that we are unable to shake off. Animism seeks meaning up the wrong alley. The alley of an original meaning, comforting but gratuitous, in fact bloodstained as evolution shows us. If gods ever existed they would be brutal and cruel. Unheeded redundancy within a brutal and cruel reality (from a life-beholding perspective). 2/14/99 Martin Luther, a most powerful case of BKW Predestination and its most cruel indictment of the evil of man are exemplars of the brain's pathologies. That a Protestant theology is "live" and enticing is reason for profound, I mean bottomless, sadness. There is a brutal base to Luther: The only possible God is the God overseeing his creation with intolerant meaninglessness. I, God, created life and despise it, my creation. For all gods this would be the most insensate, and cruel because insensate. 1/25/00 Sharing -- the word has become a sort of tutto fare dipper dripping the syrupy brew of togetherness. Shared mediocrity? 4/2/00 The more I see little elephants frolicking among the pillars of their mothers' legs, the more I feel sorry for their plight. I cannot imagine a human confined to express affection and love via a trunk and arms truncated to the wrists. The brain prisoner of a body whose domain of Howness never had a chance to reach in the subtle realm of expression and of care to the degree accessible via the skills of the hand. Homo faber is the gate and the key to Homo amorensi and Homo sapiens, and the hand, as much as the larynx, is the maker of them all. In the little elephant soon to grow into a large, awkward bulk of flesh, the large brain is like a powerful engine engaged in a frustrating play of running around on four flat tires; and with a probing nose on the tip of it, care tries to transmute into love. Her cruel god keeps her brain in chains, exhibiting, in the extreme adaptation of a mountain of flesh, one extreme expression of a BKW Does that apply to our species? Yes, if at the head of them all was an incompetent genius, God. The greatness of elephants and all is their by-the-bootstraps normative, patient, painful self-creation. And look at the superb spectacle of nature teeming with all those dumb-witted creatures. Animation suffers its own inexperience, moving as it is into the darkness of nonanimated space. Reality, this quasi-infinite reservoir of nonanimated space, is there for the taking if memory can suffer to be called to ever increasing and complexifying tasks. When the lion pride comes to maneuver the stealing of the newborn, elephant, wildebeest ... you can almost hear the mother cry to herself, "If only I could strangle those murderers. But I can only stampede hysterically, trumpeting or gurgling my dismay." On its way perhaps is a mounting tide of BKW The food chain thrives on myriad BKWs. The muda (waste) intrinsic to Becoming, the hypermuda of evolution. That is why the Manicheans and Schopenhauers are so right and so wrong. What separates their rightness from their wrongness is the "unacceptable" bulk of pain and suffering that keeps them apart and near. Reality is harsh, is harsh, is harsh ... and not just because we anthropos think so, but because life "thinks so." Consciousness and reflection just express it. Look at the newborn swiftly eaten alive by the large-sized predator or slowly by the small, invisible predators of disease. But then life goes on triumphantly, the tragico-glorious condition of life Becoming. Gods, the creators, are clever and cruel, just brush them aside. They are only reflections of life's cleverness and cruelty. Reality is the rub, not our subtle and not-so-subtle simulations. 5/22/00 The lasting impact of wrongness. In general, what comes about comes forever. It is inscripted in the past for good. In particular, since there is a motivation for wrongness, as long as the motivation is there, the "improvement" of wrongness comes along in waves of revived commitments. If the wrongness was there initially, all new waves of improvement entail an inflation of wrongness, the BKW formula. In practically all fields of human endeavor we practice the formula, and the price we pay for it cannot be erased from the economy of the species. Sometimes we camouflage the formula: the ownership of people by the owner, enslavement, servitude, incarceration, quarantine, labor camp, or industry's heartless exploitation. 8/30/00 Noble as any effort to alleviate pain and suffering on the person- to-person level is, it is in the monolith of materialism where we find defeat and hopelessness. Going at Mount Rushmore with a toothpick, millions of toothpicks, is pathetically desperate. The real fact is that "matter" wants to go back to "matter," from dust to dust, stardust by the way, so rematerialization is in our bones far more powerfully than dematerialization. That is the Goliath-David relationship. Goliath, the cosmic fury; David, the infinitesimal intellection. Life might not make it, but intellection, her noble offspring, could, ought to. If it does, then the pain-suffering of all and everything will not have been for naught. Not a great novelty that a majority might be in the wrong and that it might stay with it for long, too long. The BKW has the unenviable "virtue" of enchantment. If I am in "love" with something or with a trend, I will feel useful and meritorious for all I do to improve the something or the trend -- that is, to make the wrong, if that is the case, into a more efficient and "meritorious" wrongness. Hitler picked up hatred and worked it into an oceanic vilifying machine. 10/16/00 Misuse of words and the breakdown of values: "love." It has become a vulgar mask we wear routinely. We smear love on everything, and everything is diminished by it. The inflation of the pseudo extraordinary. 11/12/00 The dark side of human history is in the persistent and successful effort of improving the wrong things. The consequences are that we have grown attached to a whole catalogue of exalted wrongnesses and we find it almost impossible to give them up. They are shaping the environment and the very life of the species. The iconization of wrongness is the story of small mistakes acquiring the power of catastrophe. Teleology might well be the mother of all "original sins." Round and round it goes, adding layer upon layer of dedicated intents. Lovers of the wrong thing: leaders of hordes of lovers. Augustus loved the Empire, Attila loved the battle ... Saint Augustine loved theology, General Rommel and General Patton loved the war, Ford loved the car, Charlton Heston loves the gun, Hitler and Calvin loved to hate. The "nature lover" loves exurbia. Attorneys love litigation confrontations. Urban designers love flat cities. Gamblers love gambling. Superstition and hate love idolatry. Pimps love prostitution. They all have one thing in common. They are improvers of their own trade ... perfectionists even in their mediocrity. The mix of the great and the vile in the list is to prove the point: Improving wrongness, big and small, is deleterious and has long-lasting consequences. The Feminine 5/27/98 Shame on the American woman!! You could vote out the (male) savagery iconizing the gun, the killer of your children. You have the power to demythologize the gore and the glory of the self-proclaimed executioners with their arsenals. The closet or the pillow in and under which we rest our guns (and ammunition), more than 200 million of them, belong as much to you as they belong to your mate. Get them out and away, they are the instruments of death by design and by intent. It is the blood of your children that now is spilled by the new generation of young killers ... the sins of the fathers ... You life-makers, you life-nurturers, you "the hope of the world," you must voice your anguish, your suffering, your revulsion. Speak out, chase the madmen out of power. Hypocrisy will do no good and will not save your children's lives and souls. You have to face the 100 million potential killers you are nurturing, for the sake of a life that must overcome the violent drive the remains of our reptilian brain seem to force upon us. Remember this is the 21st century, not the 10th century. Act on your indignation now! 7/27/98 The militia men: Those who do their reptilian best for Cod and country. For God and country is as good as any evolutionary "cul-de-sac" to uphold the notion with guns is a humiliation for the species. Look at the Irish! Growing in their hatred. Women of Ireland, be yourselves, be feminine, throw the brutes out. You can do it; you've got the ballot box as your weapon. I am developing a certain contempt for the female of our species. You must go after the boys, young and old, and bring them into their senses. If you don't, who will do it? The nonsense-mumbling ministers? Mamma mia! The feminists are as opaque as plaster on that one. Why is it so? Because we all come from your belly, we are all nurtured at your breasts, we are all your babies, we, all the infantile men of the species! 9/29/98 We have the feminist movement with its successes and its failures. I think we need to establish the "Feminine Movement." To make such a movement three dimensional, the politically correct has to be ignored, the historical fitness has to be understood in its full prevaricator tendencies. Evolutionary coherence has to explain the origin of the harem syndrome, and cosmic relevance might be able to offer the feminine its privileged place in the domain of the passionate and the compassionate. After all, those are the domains the present reality should grope for with a remote possibility of resolution: grace in toto. Anthropocentric as this might sound, meaning and equity can't escape them. In fact they are made by and of them. 10/3/98 The feminist movement developed by defining its historical fitness, with sufficient steam to also carve itself a place within the politically correct niche. I propose that to do justice to women's causes we may want to start the engine of the feminine framed within the evolutionary coherence domain. Since my reading about the feminist cause is poor, this feminine cause n1.ight already be operational. Cosmic significance would carry the feminine movement into the stars. 10/16/98 The tragic, atrocious, and in the earth context evil condition of man should be the first concern of "the Feminine Alternative." 11/12/98 Capitalism must let the feminine come aboard, and women must become more discriminating and become experts in distinguishing femininity from feminism. The female in designing woman imitating man does not humanize capitalism. In fact, it may make it more strident. It must be the feminine, the more profound awareness of the living (and dying), that finds ways to inject itself into the powerhouse of capitalism. There are rumors about a compassionate capitalism. The male is ill suited as a promoter of it. He does not seem to have what it takes to make the jump from "Darwinism" to "Love," that is, from opportunism to compassion. The spell of confrontation and violence seems to have a grip on him. At bottom, we, the males, are still the merchants of death, only distracted by the accidental task of fathering and nurturing. We "love" the warrior icon, and we invest colossal wealth making sure that the frontiers of our nations under our gods are well guarded. We are paranoid troublemakers. We want our place in the sun via political correctness and via historical fitness. That is the injunction, after all, of all founding fathers, be they historical, mythical, delusory, simulated, or invented. "Let it be evident that we white, male, landowners and pontifice maxima will be guiding our people to the lord, our Lord. Amen." 12/21/99 The lover cares for what things and personae are. The abstractionist (theorist) cares for what things and personae could be. The feminine tends to be loving; the masculine tends to be theorizing. Not a duality, but a complementarity, the stuff of life. Or to put it otherwise, the perfectionist is in trouble. He may be traveling on a dead-end track. Realism deprivation. Why complementarity instead of duality? Because we proclaim it to be so! That is what life has been attempting to do. But life is a ruse also: Il fare prima del pensare. Life, the impulsive and pensive calculator! 5/31/00 To enjoy the joys of others, a virtue hard to come by. The joy of nurturing, a feminine virtue. 10/25/00 La Madre Arcology An arcology whose size can contain all the recent wonders of architecture, none of them a city or approximating one. The colorful orchids are metaphorically disciplined under the mother skirt, as in garment architecture. Those orchids are metaphorically hosted on the mother lap, the forest, the city arcology. The young things clamoring for attention, and getting it, might need "housing." The place that covers the need of those populations that in between tourist-nomadic stunts are citizens of the planet, the dwellers of our towns and cities. The forgotten ones? *** The Piero della Francesca or other image of Mary, her mantel sheltering the known edifices of Piano, Fuksas, Pelli, Gehry ... The orchids and the forest in the mode of an arcology. There are brilliant space makers around the world today, the orchid makers. There are no city makers now or for the thing to come coping with the revolutions we are in. The answer that cities cannot be "planned" is trite, a shield against the too many ambiguities the city presents. But our bodies are ambiguity upon ambiguity, and look at us, the hyper-Urban Effects in flesh and bones. We are cowards and the Becoming passes us by. Frugality 5/9/95 The high price of frugality, that is, of excellence. Excellence does not come cheap. Both excellence and frugality address the imperative of interiorization from where excellence finds food for action, that is, makes public that which must originate in utmost privateness. The "explosive" radiance of frugality is in the mostly unconscious grip of irreducible anxiety, a residual anguish, in each of puny us in the midst of the ungraspable enormity of reality. The radiance is best evident in the esthetic event ... the power-radiance of sounds and tempos organized by a Mozart, a Ravel ... with such radiance the unbounded power unleashed on the listener. Frugality at its best. MCD to be expected is there, the silent engine to empower the deed ... But excellence is a rare commodity. Something democracy must work around if it does not want to get caught in today's quandary of pervading mediocrity, which is clearly originating from the double deception of "you can become what you want to be" and that externalities will "fulfill" your life. That which is not interiorized might at best be good information but never become knowledge. Without knowledge, frugality is dreariness, if not squalor, and excellence is a non sequitur. MCD is in this because the Miniaturization-Complexity demanded in capturing and storing information are of a lower order than the MC necessary for information to have access to knowledge -- that is, to be captured in the intricacies the brain constructs to transcend the anxiety-anguish inseparable from the condition of man, to transfigure it in the excellence of the "art of living." 6/12/97 A great, perhaps the greatest, incarnation of frugality is the brain. It is so because the brain is constructed by way of an immense Miniaturization, which is the indispensable partner to the immense Complexity the brain operates in and by. This indivisible domain of Miniaturization and Complexity makes and is imbued with memory, the indispensable mediator between the now and the past. Memory at its purest is Duration, the potentially resurrectional state of the whole past, a hyper-Miniaturized, hyper-Complex, hyperfrugal, all-knowing Being. 11/2/99 The choice might have to be between the opulent and the lean, naturally under the dousing of the good and the bad, constantly battering at the gate of consciousness. Even with all of its redundancy and waste the living seems to be on the lean side. 11/6/99 Money is a good disciplinarian. The problem is that it needs a firm governor (see the mechanical engine), because it has a "constitutional" tendency toward despotism. A full-throttle money engine goes critical easily. The power to corrupt is one of its concubines. Yet money as a sober price tag has the faculty of measure and paragon. If society is endowed with a hierarchy of values, it connects via evaluation. 6/29/00 Minimalism versus reductionism. It is unwise to do with two that which can be done by one. To our sorrow, we might find out that a world we deemed to be of riches is a world of sclerosis and obesity. Dualism might be the welcome victim of minimalism: body-spirit, brain-mind, past-future, permanent-impermanent, full-void ... The complexity of thought is not inferred by the insistence on seeing or thinking that not only is mind not brain, but that a third agent might have to be found in order to bridge the chasm separating mind from the brain. The minimalist route says that the mind is none other than the brain doing its job in the intricacy of its space alterations. The container (brain), the content (thought), and the ghostly bridge are one: the puddinglike convolutions of space going on in its prodigious dance. The absence of brain is the absence of thought because thought is not what the brain does, but what the brain is. There is no thinking in the absence of brains whose self-awareness is what they (also) are. (The "thinking brain" is also the central station of the body's activities, all those things that Homo automaton does routinely and inadvertently.) The brain-thought is absent or very rudimentary in the animal kingdom, the domain of mindless brains. As far as one can guess, there isn't a domain of brainless minds, the domain, the vast, ever increasing domain of well-meaning animism. Brains lying to themselves, no reason for celebrations, ever. Minimalism turns into ethicism. The search for grace: the most created with the least, the lean domain of Esthequity. Go and tell that to the stars, you (silly) stardust! There is the rub. You don't go around telling everything to anything, stars included. You do it. The how to do it is the minimalist way, the only way? So not the reductionist, not, by the way, from stars to entropy's death, but the minimalist way, from stars to the "Know thyself" (stars and all) radiance, the "grace of the world." Grace? It has to be mined from the fury we call the stars and galaxies. There is no other way (see the Bubble Diagram). The journey from furious dumbness to self-acknowledging reality. How can the journey be spiked, "engraced" by the "light to be"? The paradox of wanting that which is not, of wanting what we do not know to be! We cannot just want it. That is the route to demise. We've got to create it. A Howness of staggering power and of staying the course, determination. By the way, the "Cosa voglio, io?" (What do I want?) of the infant making for the despair of the poor mother: What does life want? That of which it is in want of (stupid!). 8/27/00 One does not go around bragging about the frugality of the Grand Canyon even though rocks, sediments, weather, and sun (temperature) are "all" that is needed (and time, but time is just a measurement of change). But one can go around bragging about antelopes and snakes, spiders and cockroaches, sages and sycamores, frogs and fishes, ground hogs and lynx, worms and bacteria ... and their essential frugality. Think about the frugality of a two-year-old colt winning hearts and races. An infant at age two can hardly stand and cannot survive on its own, but the "potential" of the colt is on the exhaustion threshold; the "potential" of the infant is all in the things to come. 11/12/00 The conversion of hyperconsumption into leanness needs to be physiological, psychological, and physical (environmental). One out of three doesn't work; two out of three doesn't work. The conversion is not for the people of lukewarm persuasion. It needs to reach a threshold of satisfying commitment or it wobbles and collapses. Picking and choosing among the components of the play can only go so far. For instance: I like the lean idea but I am moving into a larger country home. I like to cut down to essentials but I need to have that red Ferrari. I like the spareness of routine but I've got to have my spa hour, my golf hour, my club hour, football, my eros hour, my circus hour, my virtual hours, my gossip hour ... my couch potato hour. Add them all up and you got the dissipation of life: Where did my life go? Howness 8/7/93 The Hand and the Brain As soon as the hand ceased to be solely a grasping, holding, throwing organ and began to be a handling, caressing, and molding organ, at that (protracted) moment a metamorphosis had taken place. The "paradigmatic shift" from opportunism to the Love Project. It was as if the hand began to ask the brain for "more things to do" and the brain teased the mind, "Give me time, please, you are so swift in manipulating things!" This seems to repeat itself throughout human history: Homo faber getting ahead of Homo sapiens. Microchip technology is an example. We are in a position to do more than our knowledge-wisdom is able to generate. In an evolution where, as in a big mansion, the passage from one room to the next is the progression of creation, and once in a while, the next room is not a room and the door is not a door. The room is a "vista," a new landscape, the door is a window. That is the time of metamorphosis. That is time for a caressing pawn, and the next invention reality comes up with is the mind. (A transformation of quantity and quality.) In general, instrumentality antecedes creativity (form before function); technology antecedes the wise use of it. It begins (began) as a "religious" dread. The anguish and the awe of not understanding and as the esthetic effusion that might follow. The panic of reaching beyond understanding by "doing it," and doing it is the true knowledge. See reality in toto revealing itself to itself by "doing it": the evolutionary-creational process. 3/4/94 We do with Howness because Whyness and Whatness escape us. We build our parochial Why and What and forget that they are transitory and self-destructive. We may very well be in a self-destructing Whatness because Howness has been made into "What & Why." 6/8/94 (PENNSYLVANIA) What Why How Where When From life's beginning, How has been the only preoccupation: populations driven by the How where the invention of opportunism is in a superseding mode upon probabilism and determinism. Three and a half eons later life is still at it, but now that the opportunism of populations (species) is superseded in man by the opportunism of the individual, opportunism is a splendor and a curse mixed. The splendor is expressed by the Why-What anxiety generators of philosophy and religion. The Why-What totally alien to the opportunistic food chain and core material for human consciousness and conscience. The curse because personalized opportunism quasi-automatically translates into greed and intolerance. Science is the How forever fingering the underbelly of the tandem Whatness-Whyness. What is it, What is it, What is it ... The esthetic is the self-proclaimed Whatness delivering itself in small parcels, the esthetic events, and exhibiting a certain disdain toward Whyness: I am because I am, because I am ... Techne: How do I do it, How do I do it ... What-when: space-time. The frenzy of Howness we are in is the fruit of individual opportunism quite unable to control greed and intolerance, in fact, being driven by them. Democracy has to face, cope, and at last transcend this drive, or falter and die by the hand of mediocrity and arrogance, the shadows of greed and intolerance. 2/14/96 Is hyperconsumption another camouflage for delusion, bigotry, intolerance, xenophobia, self-indulgence? Beware of the Chosen People. The future will tell. 3/18/96 (STOCKHOLM) The consumer condition vis-a-vis self-realization, ecological limits. The conception-death cycle is, that is coincides with, the consummation cycle of the organism. In time, this consumption cycle has shown a great range among the consumer's needs or demands both in quantity and in quality. For both agencies a critical aspect is Howness; in fact, the How might turn out to be the definer-maker of the What and consequently of the Why. We consumers are therefore, with all other things, engaged in the making of reality here, eventually and ultimately everywhere!? Why the direct link: the How and consumption? Consumption is the fruition of production, which is the process of making something into something else: ore into metal, metal into spoons, seeds into potatoes, potatoes into potato chips, potato chips into flesh, stools ... It is all the way a transformation Techne which covers the whole processing reality is in -- from gluons to stars to Mind. We consumers, agents of evolution, are engaged in the Howness such evolution is generated by in the unstoppable Becoming. Consumption as the end phase of production, the production of waste, for instance, is at the core of Becoming: the minimal-minimalist consumption of Chinese or Indian, the massive, relentless consumption of the Americans. How this widely apart kind of consumption is materializing is how reality itself is materializing. It is the technological cosmogenesis we are conceived, born, and acting in, minute after minute. Something to be mindful of when we dump our produced litter into it. Consumerism has become, is now, the most critical aspect of the human condition. Homo faber the sorcerer if Howness, thanks to brain-mind conspiracy, is at risk of compromising the best of itself, the inventor of love, in an almost capricious drive, into the fields of ephemeralities while massively intervening in the geology-climate- biology balance of the planet. 3/21/96 (OSLO) Mineral-Organic-Mental Homo erectus becomes Homo faber via the brain and the hands (and speech) working in synchrony. Water, bones, stones, wood, fibers, clay, and fire were the base materials. By way of those, the biotechnology of the living stuff overreaches in the new hard technology that shapes and will shape us, our lives, our societies. Homo faber becomes Homo sapiens, and the How powerfully applied becomes the generator of the What within the limited domain of man. The grand What of things remains enigmatic making it impossible to comprehend the grand Why of things. But this Howness, and its mystique, is also the presence that makes the production-consumption cycle so superbly efficient. And there is the rub: the What defined by the How is at risk of being malignant, if not meaningless, if not guided by the coherence and the compassion of the human mind. 3/3/97 With How (Techne) defining the What, three things are evident:
What is also evident is the hold that the scientific-technological revolution has on our Becoming. The How we are so proud of is profoundly reshaping reality (for now only in an irrelevant corner of reality), that is, reshaping the What and exploring in new ways the enigma of the Why (creating it). We are playing God. There is an original What (the media), the pristine reality, and her "natural laws." But it lasts only a tiny, infinitesimal part of a second: the original Being instantly given to the Becoming and at the same instant taken over by the How. Becoming is the How operating on the pristine Being, the present of which suffers the same fate as all presents; it "loses" itself the very moment it emerges. It "loses" itself in the past. The march of space-time, or better, space-reconfiguration, is the Techne of Howness, and it begins at the very moment of Beingness ... at the Beginning ... In searching of self-revelation, reality must adapt and adopt whatever How is suited for the purpose. Reality can do that only when Mind emerges from it and Mind begins to want and begins to discriminate, choose. That is, if turns out that at a certain point silicon promises a more versatile Howness than carbon, the choice of Howness will be unchallenged: the supremacy of an asexual silicon person, ASP Why is the esthetic at the core of it? Because the mind needs to pluck out of its feverish chase some incorruptible nugget of finality, of conclusiveness. It is unavoidable that the makeup of such practices is the distillation of the fundamental anguish intrinsic to the condition of man, and his mind, into the incorruptible esthetic object. The maker and the beholder of the esthetic are the tangible antennas detecting a not-yet-existent condition of grace. They are the "receivers" of that which could eventually be. In this, they transfigure the human anguish into the hyperhuman esthetic. They can do this only by generating esthetic objects. There isn't any such thing as "esthetic" per se. As for instance (here isn't such a thing as "time" per se. Both are contingent upon the stuff of reality: space reconfiguring itself. It can reconfigure itself in a sonnet in a cathedral in an image in a black hole. Of all of them, though, the esthetic is only there where a mind filters the other objects through the anguish coloring its Becoming and when such filtering converts the idiosyncratic into the "universal." 2/17/99 The loop memory and presence is the one that gives context to minute-by-minute behavior. If memory comes roaring down with an avalanche of details, we say we live in the past; that is, our presence is overwhelmed, we have taken leave of our senses, and as creators of more past we are paralyzed. If, on the other hand, our presence is all that there is and memory is reduced to the genetic memory every animal is made of, then we go from present to present oblivious to all the cultural acquisitions that knowledge represents. Without genetic memory we do not exist. Without cultural memory we are brute. As long as reality is Becoming, the creational process depends on a well-honed balance of those two memories with and within the willful domain of space reconfiguring itself, that is, the Becoming itself. 4/21/00 The antiglobalists of today (Seattle-2000 "fest") haven't the faintest (idea) about Howness and about the roboticization of consciousness's base support system. They are demolition experts and construction (void) amateurs. In fact, for them construction is already in the quicksand of order and comprehensiveness (globalization). They feel at home in the climate or limbo of a broken-down vessel as long as the vessel residue still covers their subsistence needs and delivers to them the goodies they reject the origin of but claim the right to. Deprive them of monitors, earphones, or whatever, and they sulk dejected and enraged. They like the fragrance, the taste, the nourishment of fruits, not the luce-tenebra attending their making (the tree). The mega machine of globalization is a flesh and brain grinder on many occasions, but it might be the price we have to face while searching for a bearable and ultimately excruciating emergence into Esthequity. 5/3/00 If there is any joie de vivre in bacteria, then in order of precedence: Howness, the technology of Becoming, a protoliving and for "ever" the maker of reality and its (memorizing) past. And then "hedonism" at the very inception of the living, the pleasure of permanency with its own ups and downs and its undesigned, unexpected hiccups of transcendence. The two oldest professions: Techne and eons later "pleasure," the latter one the forebear of passion-compassion. It is from the inaudible and tiny squeaking of the first pleasure trickles intrinsic to one-cell creatures that the yet-to-come meandering river of passion-compassion is generating: that which could turn out to be the conscience of reality. A protracted miracle of miracles all incarnating in and into our bandwagon of hydrogen. Why such self-creation should need a creator is to postulate the need of a shadowy Rasputin soiling the unfathomable, the astonishing, the light of the world. Let the absentee Lord fade away like an old MacArthur soldier. It has been useful perhaps in the long epoch of animism; it is an encumbrance in a self-animating reality Becoming aware of itself. 5/16/00 There are two sides to the noosphere: the space-Becoming, "tactile," present side in which the subatomic, atomic, molecular, and radiation elements keep company with the tangible multitude of registration, transmission, and documentation devices from stone tablets to books to disks; then there is the nonspace-Being, not "tactile" side, the past side of the noosphere, the domain of memory-Duration, the reservoir of all the Becoming instantly consigned to Being (from the spatial to the durational). Without the "tactile" side, the noosphere is not self-creating and the past freezes. Without the non-"tactile" side, the memory is no longer available and the Becoming ceases. Under such a bi-chambered and deprived condition, the noosphere is like a sort of crystallized cloud, a pollutant segregating intellection from its indispensable groping. A hypermuda at the very core of self-awareness, the core of knowledge, the body-brain united. The noosphere began to outline itself with self-awareness and from there moved out of the automated world of organisms. The noosphere is self-awareness in search of meaning and the possible grace within. The noosphere is the Love Project, yet ambiguous about its aims. We are aware of ourselves, and we are aware of what surrounds this awareness. All the rest is interpretation with the help of that which we invent and use: Howness full steam. 8/24/00 Believing that thinking is talking, routinely talking to oneself, [he richness of thinking is proportional to the richness of language. Moo-ing, meowing, grunting, chirping, squawking, etc., even in their most subtle nuances do not amount to a sufficiently complex language to warrant sophisticated thinking. The how of the larynx is at the base of the how of Socrates and intellection in general. Sophisticated brains do not warrant sophisticated "minds" -- that is, thinking brains -- unless the larynx has offered its own sound (and silent sounds) sophistication. 9/6/00 Logistics and ... conversion. The automobile industry is about logistics. It is now in the bucket-brigade technology. In the best of BKW traditions it comes up with ever more slick, distracting buckets, but buckets they remain. The car industry should be persuaded to adopt a true "logistic science" and convert its own segregated, isolated, obsolete self into a logistical liberator. We as organisms are mostly logistical tours de force. Anything that moves moves according to the logistics fitting its presence. The intricacy of the human body's logistics is stupefyingly efficient. The logistics of the human presence on earth is stupefyingly clumsy, and the gigantic bucket-brigade industries testify to it. The adoption of maglev technology on the horizontal, vertical, and slanted combined with the "arcological revolution" can set up a habitat more respectful of our needs and dignity (plus safety) and of the respect the biosphere is urgently calling for. The logistics-industry conversion from the gigantic and brittle bucket brigade technology, now isolated, short-sighted, and evolutionarily reptilian, can become miniaturized, nimble, fast, quiet, safe, economical, man- and nature-friendly, and make megatons of megamoney. In tandem with it, the reinvented habitat, villages, towns, cities, and hypercities are logistically updated and modestly self-contained. Aviation would keep its own rightful niche for 300-or-so-mile leaps and farther. The local public transportation system, slick and efficient; the bicycle finally getting its due as superefficient and super-healthy; and we, the bipedal animals, would rediscover our mobile, frugal selves. A deflation of obesity, an inflation of leanness. The logistics of today, ideally 5 billion years long, downgraded into gridlocked bucket progeny, will be a curiosity in the annals of evolution. It will be by far the biggest and most fraudulent Guinness record in human history (the record for inhumanity to man). 9/17/00 God is in the details (Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum). In habitat prototyping, arcology for instance, priority number one is not the design quality of detail, staircases, bathrooms, hallways, terraces, etc., but the context they are in. One can apply the best strings in the world to a lousy frame and the grand piano is a failure. In the necessary complexity of arcology, placement, relationship, and fitness in the grand scheme find sanction primarily in the soundness of the grand scheme itself, a determinant of which is its coherence in the far grander structure of the biosphere. *** One would believe it to be indisputable that larger spaces for living entail larger swaths of the marketplace repertory. A 5,000 square-foot home will contain almost twice as many furnishings, appliances, power inlets, outlets, carpets, and curtains, twice as much memorabilia, bric-a-brac, and attention-time as a 2,500 square-foot home. The same prodigality extends to its outdoors, including perhaps one or two additional and larger automobiles. Extrapolate and you are facing a monumental, multilayered problem. Logistical gridlock is a symptom of it; segregation another; inequity, intolerance, and xenophobia in the well-padded materialistic landscape follow. *** ... but then if it holds true that reality is space, then architecture is the field where space is particularly organized to wrap around the things of man, combined with the fact that space never is emptiness, positions architecture in a place "apart." Architecture is emblematic space -- emblematic of reality? -- exemplifying more convincingly than anything else that content identifies as container and vice versa. That might be the reason why some architectural places and spaces are "magical" to the beholder. Space to the power of two, so to speak. Then space as architecture acquires a kind of dispensation by way of which form as function, inside-outside, and ambivalence resolution are precursors of grace ... a doubly bright "future" for space! Space self-expressing, self-revealing ... the city of light?! 10/22/00 Perhaps the cruising ship is the short cut to landed arcology. Now given to leisure and hedonism, the cruise ship is a very miniaturized and very complex system with a certain degree of self-reliance and autonomy. Its ability to move around and spin around makes room for an almost daily optimal relationship to the climate. At a short distance from a coastline it could have the pied-a-terre capable of serving the floating arcology with the daily necessities. If made part of the logistical network "trust," the global transportation systems network, it could become a sort of mobile terminal to the network itself in those regions where a land arcology seems less appropriate. Corbusier had it right when writing about the similarities between ships and cities. We have cruise ships and hospital ships; we might well have university ships, manufacturing ships, summer and winter vacation ships, retreat-conference ships, science-astronomy ships, fishing ships, and greenhouse ships. A sea culture could slowly develop outside of the national boundaries, a sort of sea nomadism first established in large scale by the northern Europeans with their regular aggression against their more settled neighbors along the Atlantic coastline. One thing to get away from, technically, is the rusting ship. Iron and steel will have to go or become immune to rusting; salt water and salty air are demons at that. Nanotechnology will find ways to shrink the behemoths of today. Now we move in streamlined hippopotamuses. Then we will glide like sea birds, penguins, etc. 11/28/00 A "New Science" of Logistics Presented with an impending gridlock syndrome on land and in the air, we have to pay attention to the logistics that keep reality moving. On a theoretical level:
An institute of logistic technology seems a necessary first step toward pursuing a self-regulating quest in the unforgiving presence of logistics in every domain of reality. Transportation (logistics) is the number one task of metamorphosing space, of the Becoming. Reality being space in motion is presented with alternatives: for instance, the smooth and miraclelike running of space in our bodies -- they are 90 percent or so sophisticated logistics, compared with the clumsy gigantism of space attempting to keep people and things running on the ground, on the water, and now in the air. We must emulate what goes on inside our skin to apply similar subtleties in our infra body-to-body logistics. We are now in a virulent stage of segregational modes: rail-road-air battling for supremacy and taking us to the granite wall of gridlock. Persisting in this compartmentalized fashion is folly, and we are tasting how bitter the nature of this folly is. It makes waste into targeted wealth, the wealth of an ecological-human wasteland. Then in parallel to the institute of logistics we might want to develop a "logistic trust" that fosters the integrated Rand D (research and development) application in the geographic-territorial distribution of populations, from village to megalopoly. In a relatively short time we would find surprising answers to the chronic ills of our physical-psychological condition. Rail, rubber, and wings have to find common ground even at the sweet price of Becoming hardly recognizable by the former selves. Space metamorphosing, ladies and gentlemen! At bottom, space dancing itself into greater intellection. The Hows of logistics. The anxiety of our local policymakers, presented day in and day out with mounting problems of traffic and gridlock, is destined to become chronic because as yet we are unwilling to face reality, the reality of a planet burdened by gravity (of all things). Gravity signals, with thermodynamics, etc., how far our adopted logistics are from any lasting coherence with "planetary goings-on." The price of moving things, us included, is an inescapable gravity-thermodynamic tax. We'd rather ignore it naturally at our expense. Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration (MCD) 11/22/95 In a model where reality, immense, secretive, and unloving, is taken as self-transforming via space and time, the search for resolution is auspicious because the indifference of reality becomes loving, thus satisfying the longing that Mind is generating. Mind, as the rare and fragile occasion where reality finds itself becoming conscious of itself. Mind, the unwanted offspring of matter, that very matter that space and time transform unceasingly (via Techne). The only way to go beyond the expedient is to make the contingent into the universal; that is, by the way, what the esthetic is and does. 12/4/95 The planet itself is an MCD product coming, it seems, from an ancestry whose first state was one of hydrogen haze. In one stroke, MCD gets rid of nostalgia, of melancholy, of all the Gardens of Eden once and for all. We individuals are preponderantly biological processing plants and inner-motivated agents. With bioprocessing comes the exotic creation we call the mind. Medicine shows that on unfortunate occasions the body can survive the loss of the mind. The opposite is not true: no body, no mind. That is, if the body is necessary but not sufficient, the mind, strictly speaking, is not necessary for the body to carryon the processing plant function. The brain, though, remains necessary as the indispensable center for biological operations. Why pick Complexification as the most normative and creative of all agencies? Because Complexification offers more feasible alternatives, but also because it offers a richer, unique instrumentation to implement those alternatives. 4/15/96 Reality, the past, is stored away outside of space-time. To retrieve it in full (resurrection) the event has to come, can only come, when-where the retrieving agency exits space-time, and this can come about only at the very end of space-time. Perhaps toward the end, with MCD hyperactive, that IS, the size of reality getting close to zero, the hyperactive mind then just about comprehending reality in toto may leave the residual matter, destined to annihilation in the Big Crunch, and achieve the fullness of Being in all its self-revelational grace, the Esthequity Being. 6/23/97 Miniaturization is the indispensable housing of Complexity. Duration is the document generated by the housed (M) Complexity. While time is purely a useful invention the mind uses to document the reconfigurations of space but does not have per se any concreteness, Duration is concreteness itself and it is the substance nuking the past, the spaceless Beingness of reality. Miniaturization sneaks in again because at the extreme it produces the nondimensional housing of "infinite" Complexity, which is exactly what durational reality (the past) is going to be at the conclusion of the Becoming. To be kept in mind: Reality does only one thing: it builds the past. In the absence of a grace-full conclusion, the wretchedness of reality is beyond "salvation," redemption, transcendence ... 9/8/98 There is no grand or modest design to reality. It Becomes because it is a presence transforming itself with not a scintilla of will, search, quest, anxiety, rage, evil ... But then, courtesy of clustering and bumping into each other, particles of space took the road of Miniaturization and Complexity. Miniaturization and Complexification in an indissoluble tandem generated life in its midst. Still no grand or small design, just drift and chance. But when awareness emerges, then a rudimentary design also emerges. It is then will all the way, and with it the premises of a possible design initiative. The cascade of purposefulness is constitutionally saturated with all the good and all the evil that it is cultivating within itself. The outline of meaning germinating in the embryonic stage of consciousness could not avoid the grand delusion of animism. It didn't. We are the living proof of that. One can imagine this puny fragile unknowing nothing of conscious life imprisoned in the enormity of a senseless presence: nature. It had to invent all sorts of meanings and dress them in all sorts of garments. Animism was born. We are still drowning in it (see BKW -- better kind of wrongness). 12/26/99 It isn't that reality is Capricious and cruel; those behaviors require intent, and reality has none. So it is as if reality were capricious and cruel. Since there is no purpose in its original makeup (there is only one presence), it might be up to intellection to search for purpose, in fact to create the purpose starting with the living as the inchoate will at survival, at self-repetition. A "hedonistic" pleasure at reproducing itself, the pleasure of distinguishing itself from dumbness -- that is, the pleasure of distinguishing itself from the meaningless. Life has been suffering its own genesis. Interiorizing itself into specks of willfulness via the Howness of Miniaturization-Complexity, reality began to act out the problematic of the good and the bad. But good and bad are strictly attributes of consciousness, starting with the very dim consciousness of the will to perpetuity. Such will can work only if nature is caged by its own "laws," the rules that its own nature cannot escape because any presence is a presence of sets of rules -- that is, self-repetition, not self-reproduction, for many eons. The reason the rock falls is because of gravitational rules, rules of the presence of the present universe. But the many rules of the game are not in terms of purpose but in terms of presence as distinct from nonpresence. The past is the repository of the slow process of purposelessness mutating into purposefulness via those granules of interiorization. Parochial initiatives triggered by the also slow emergence of MC. The cause? Space hitting upon exotic configurations not yet willed but quivering in proto-willfulness. The quivering of those specks finding themselves liking themselves, thus working at producing the likes of themselves. 1/28/99 Miniaturization-Complexification-Duration is not metaphorical and/or emblematic; it is "systematic" in the sense of being a system, a procedure, a tangibility, and not a simulation of them. M not only refers to space; it is space in its most intense presence, making so to speak the best use of itself down to its own modest nooks and crannies. C is how much such denseness of space behavior sensitizes itself and is able to broadcast itself, via its own welter of reconfigurations, to the near and far spaces.
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