Category Archives: Biography

Desperate philosophizing

Biography, Design, Existentialism, Trefoil

Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.

For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”

But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”

What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.

Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.

It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.

I have a slide I show clients.

I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”

Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.

They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.

Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.

This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.

My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.

The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.

Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.

But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.

Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.

I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.

I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.

I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.

This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.

My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.

I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.

Confessions of a material misogynist

Biography, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress

As a kid, I was a bad painter.

While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.

Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.

So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.

(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)

But all this is preface to another idea.

The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.

It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.

There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.

But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.

I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.

She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.

I think I will print this new Sefirot.

The plate arrives today.

Some quotes I’ve quoted before:

Bob Dylan:

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden

Nietzsche:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:

We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?

Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

Nietzsche, again:

Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!

A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.

I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.

The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.

Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.

My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.

Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”

Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.

Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.

Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”

ack ack ack ack

One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:

A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”

You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.

My life sucks, and it is glorious.

Perplexity lifeguard

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Overcoming painful perplexities is one of the most rewarding parts of my work as a strategic designer.

Perplexity is incapacity to understand a difficulty, so thorough that the difficulty cannot even be expressed negatively as a problem or question. As I’ve said millions of times over the last thirty years, perplexities induce intense mysterious anxiety in people. It is not “discomfort” with “ambiguity”. It is excruciating and disturbing, and it makes people behave atrociously.

If we are to believe Wittgenstein, perplexities are essentially philosophical problems: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”

But the majority of people are unphilosophical. They lack all awareness of the existence of the phenomenon of perplexity and the language to recognize and diagnose it — much less methods, skills and mindset required to overcome perplexity.

And people are not merely unphilosophical. They are aggressively unphilosophical. Philosophical thought annoys people. It is socially acceptable to disrespect it and anyone who does it. Even open-minded “good listeners” stop listening and tune out if they detect philosophy in a line of thought. And if you press it further, the resistance presses back even harder. The trajectory is very much hemlockward.

Here is the problem: one of the horrors of my job is the everpresent risk of being trapped in a collective perplexity with collaborators who are unwilling to confront and grapple with it for what it is. In such situations, one is a participant in an emergent collective being who transcends each individual person. Each person is immersed in the pain that has gripped the group, but is entirely powerless to overcome it alone.

Overcoming the perplexity requires a concerted and coordinated effort.

But many perplexed people behave like drowning swimmers. Instead of cooperating with the lifeguard’s attempt to rescue them, they instead try to climb over the lifeguard’s body to get oxygen. This is why most of lifeguard training is learning break-holds. Often a lifeguard must subdue a drowning person in order to rescue them. If the drowning person gets control of the lifeguard, everyone drowns.

Perplexed people who lack awareness of perplexity instinctively flail and grope for whatever control over the situation they can get, but whatever control they exert only defers and amplifies the confusion and anxiety. Instead of finding a better way to conceptualize the difficulty so it can be framed as a problem, people desperately try to ignore or bypass the perplexity or bludgeon it with mismatched techniques and expertise — and everyone drowns together.

Being is scalar.

Collective being is just as real as individual being.

Collective beings can be perplexed.

Collective beings can also be depressed, anxious, delusional and psychotic.

Entire classes and societies can go mad. Nietzsche said it: “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Leadership differs from management in that management treats only systematized parts of organizational life. Leadership participates in the collective being of an organization, addressing its personhood from within — as a part.

I would dearly love to work at an organization that would acknowledge and value my philosophical work. My best work is unappreciated, unsupported, unacknowledged and uncompensated at best. If I speak about what I do and how I think about it, the best I can expect is tolerance, but the usual response is vapid or jocular dismissal and disrespect. “There he goes again.”

Nothing, however, is more respectable and more valuable. I know this even if nobody else does.

This whole age is convulsed in perplexity. People will fight wars before confronting and resolving a perplexity.

Resolving perplexity is the work

Biography, Design

Resolving perplexities is the most important work designers do.

Resolving perplexities is not a precondition to doing the work. Resolving perplexities is the work. Again, it is the most important work.

Attempting to ignore perplexities never makes them go away. It makes the work impossible and hellish — and the perplexities compound exponentially as they go unresolved.

Anyone who cannot tolerate perplexities is unfit for strategic design work.

Insight bombs

Biography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

“It lies beyond the scope of this study to deal in a comprehensive manner with the issue of [y]… for a comprehensive study of this matter would require a separate study. But for present purposes, suffice it to say [x]…”

Whenever an author starts a sentence this way, I am on the edge of my seat, because I just know the author is winding up to deliver an insight bomb that I will be obsessive-compelled to put in my insane quotation wiki and/or letterpress print into pulpy paper.

To steal Jerry Seinfeld’s “why don’t we make the whole airplane out of the black box” joke, I would like a whole book made of matters requiring a whole book to study comprehensively.

(And this is exactly what Nietzsche and Borges did in their respective hyperfictional genres! Which is exactly why I adore them both. I read them with an ecstatic part of “myself” who feels entire unborn worlds within a sentence, word or letter.)

Obscurity ensues

Biography, Esoterism, Judaism

There is a time to make sense to others, and a time to make sense for oneself.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

After 14 years of relative stability, I am changing again.

I cannot understand, integrate and develop radically new ideas and translate them into terms accessible to sane, intelligent people. That happens later.

For now, expect relentless obscurity.

Knowing the absence of knowing

Biography, Design, Judaism, Philosophy

I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need.

Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology.

This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is profoundly true. To see beyond the expert’s disciplinary scotomas requires a poet’s originary eye.

These people recognized that they not only lacked the tools and methods to solve a kind of problem they faced, they lacked concepts and language for defining and communicating them. Despite this  conceptual chaos known as perplexity they searched out ideas, vocabulary, methods, tools and logics until they found them in service design.

There are many fine service designers out there who were drawn to service design in undergraduate school. They were presented with an array of career options and for various reasons — interest, ability and opportunity — chose service design.

But having that before-and-after experience of a real-life practical perplexity resolved into a defined, solvable problem leaves a permanent trace in a practitioner — an appreciation that is lacking in people who learned to see both the solution and the problem before they ever struggled without either.

The same is true of human-centered design in general. HCD was not always here to learn and use. It only became self-evident and inevitable only after it was, through arduous work, instaurated as a discipline. HCD was a hard-won accomplishment. People who have been trained in HCD methodologies sometimes speak knowingly about the many methods they have learned and could learn, but this knowingness betrays an obliviousness to the blind chaos and nothingness from which these methods emerged. They cannot imagine looking at a design problem and seeing only an engineering, marketing and technical writing problem. They can’t see how Don Norman did anything terribly impressive, and so perhaps his reputation should be reassessed and downgraded.

It is the same difference as people who lived through the fog and fear of historical events, whose outcomes were the furthest thing from assured, and those who learned the history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and are blind to the blindness that permeates every unfolding present and believe the unknown only hides in darkness.

The study of history is difficult because we are so possessed by the present. It is freeing ourselves from the omniscience of now and reclaiming the unknowing of the past that is hard. It becomes much harder when our “historical fiction” revises history to force it into conformity with contemporary prejudices, instead of alien and much more interesting prejudices of the past — which are the very essence of history. Popular entertainment product like American Girls and Bridgerton exclude history from their contemporary costume dramas, and this is why young consumers of this “relatable” content are radical presentists. Every totalitarianism tries to establish its own year zero, and to lock away in oblivion the prehistory that produced it.

It is those simple world-transforming insights that are hardest to conceive, but then after, hardest to unconceive. Once we see them we cannot unsee them. We cannot even conceive life before their conception. They shape even our memories and our grasp of prehistory.

Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.

I hope Kabbalists recognize me as someone who came to the tradition from the most urgent need.

I was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem in ninth grade:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Biography, Design, Letterpress, Star

Helen and I spent yesterday parallel printing at the Stukenborg Press with art saint Bryan Baker.

I printed a third, more realistic version of the “Tend the Root” print, requested by Susan and several others who missed the realism of my first screenprinted version, and preferred it to the abstracted asterisk version. I still prefer the asterisk, for visual and symbolic reasons.

More significantly, Bryan has, after months of gentle nudging, managed to persuade me to return to manually setting lead type, which has made my letterpress obsession considerably worse.

(Last time I did this was in 1992, when I handset my wedding invitation, framed with a wood-engraved decorative border of pomegranates and dogwood blossoms. Susan and I pulled a literal all-nighter in the printing studio hand-producing the invitations. Before that, I handset the ingredients of Doritos. Legend has it my Grandpa Dave worked as a typesetter in some kind of association with Frederic Goudy. I’m also apparently somehow descended from someone connected with the founding of Charles Scribner’s Sons. I blame my ancestors for the visceral craziness I feel around books and letterpress. I also blame my design professor Richard Rose for waking this weird impulses lurking in my blood.)

I set one of my favorite aphorisms, frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra:

In theory, there is no difference
between theory and practice,
but in practice there is.

This is one of the wisest and most radically conservative and designerly utterances I have ever heard, and I love it. It demanded to be smushed into the pulpiest of papers.

Trees

Biography

Last week we had to cut down the water oak in our front yard. It was unbearable hearing and feeling it come down, limb by limb, part by part, thud after thud after thud.

Water oaks in cities last only about fifty to sixty years. I keep wondering if this tree was exactly my age. It is is strange to remember that twenty years ago, shortly after we moved in, when my friend Blondeau scaled this tree and hung a swing from its main bough, it was only a little over thirty years old. It was not an old tree, then.

Susan and I are coping with the loss by focusing on the tree we will plant in its place. We considered many varieties until we remembered the first story from Richard Powers’s The Overstory, which revolved around the devastation of the American Chestnut in the first half of the twentieth century.

This weekend we went to the Ace in Decatur to look at trees. On our way home we passed what we thought looked like a chestnut tree. We saw nuts on the sidewalk. We circled the block and pulled over to investigate. It turned out to be a Chinese Chestnut. We picked up a handful of nuts and took them home, where we cooked and ate them. They were tiny heavenly potatoes.

We are now obsessing over planting a Dunstan Chestnut. I would love to find a two-and-a-half year old sapling.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Em-dashes

Biography

For the record, I have been overusing em-dashes for over two decades. I picked it up from Nietzsche, whose abuse of em-dashes would makeChatGPT blush.

But now every jackass out there has hopped on the em-dash shaming bandwagon, side-eyeing every em-dash and insinuating if the suspicious em-dash wasn’t AI generated it is probably an attempt to look smart by imitating AI moves.

Well, I refuse to stop. I also refuse to stop using en-dashes with a space on each side instead of a proper em-dash. I know the rule — and I reject that rule. I have my own  typographic taste and that personal taste is what I obey, not the anonymous dictates of style guides

And while I’m making defiant declarations: I will continue proudly enjoying kale as I have since college when I bought it for fifty cents a bunch.

I can’t help it if lemming herds occasionally stampede across my land. And I’m not abandoning perfectly fine property just because it gets a little trampled. Fads come and go, but I, for one, know what I like.

Hieroglyphs

Biography

When we immerse ourselves in drawing, language relaxes, lightens, lifts, and clears; our vision is momentarily liberated from the swarming hieroglyphs that intercept and occlude the myriad unique forms, tones and textures that surround us. When we try to rejoin the world of chatter, it takes a moment to recover ourselves with speech.

Prop

Biography

If you need someone to go into orbit around you—to prop up whatever image of yourself you’re trying to maintain — I’m your man. I have a lifetime of training in that art. I can intuit the persona you’re trying to be, and I’ll improvise exactly the alter-ego most useful for pulling it off.

But sadly — and inconveniently — beneath that useful exterior, I can’t stop being who I actually am. I’ll accommodate you up to a point. But past that point, I’ll break character and act as my unalloyed self — and neither of us will like that at all.

Hemlock candidates

Biography, Fables, myths & parables

One thinker believed he finally discovered the absolute truth, and became a total asshole.

A second thinker arrived at one of many possible conceptions of truth — but it was a conception of such vast scope, clarity, usefulness and inspiration that anyone who understood it was in danger of mistaking it for the absolute truth — and  that thinker became an even worse asshole.

Word torture

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.

This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.

I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.

Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.

But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.

Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.

How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:

His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.

My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”

Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.

Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.

“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”

“Shivah? Kaddish?”

“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!

“Moishe, is that you?’

“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”

“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.

“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.

“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.

“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?

I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”

What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.

It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.

Demurely.

This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.

She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.

The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.

Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.

And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.

They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.

He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.

I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.

Sacrificial offerings to the ideoidol

Biography, Love, Religion

Many of us cling to ideas that make us feel sane, but which, in actuality produce insanity.

The worst kind of idol is mental. Very few of us worship golden idols, but all but very few of us worship ideoidols.

I know parents who were faced with a choice between their ideoidol and their own child. In the wordless depths of their soul, they are placed as a crossroads:

Do I sacrifice this idea I believe in so fervently for the sake of my child, or do I sacrifice my child to this idea?

All but very few sacrifice the child to the idea.

Goebbels shot his own children before allowing them to live in a denazified world.

I know a child who was unable to accept her parents’ fundamentalist faith. When insistence failed they used shame. When shame failed, they had her exorcised. When exorcism failed, they threw her out of their home.

I know another child whose mother joined a cult that taught a great secret. The secret was so simple it was hidden in plain sight: she lived in a world of her own creation, and the purpose of this world was love. Whenever her child said something disturbing or confusing, this was a lesson that could teach her whatever wisdom she chose to learn. The child became a great teacher, who taught her deep truths that somehow she’d already known all along. After that, he was no longer distressing at all.

Today, many parents refuse to acknowledge own children’s obvious psychological distress and instead believe their own ideology when it soothes them with lies: the despair and confusion the faith itself inflicts is just sensitivity toward a worthless and dying world. The ideoidol masticates and slurps and smiles an oily, bloody smile. “Your child’s deep despair is the only sane response to an unjust and doomed world.” As the child dissolves into a formless blob of dark feelings and appetites in gastric juices, the ideoidol strokes the mother’s head, coos and flatters her self-awareness, her selflessness, her deep concern, her willingness to do the work.

Virtuous Bill

Biography

In college I knew a guy named Bill.

Bill saw himself as a values-driven person. Certain virtues mattered a lot to him and he put a lot of effort into living up to his own high standards. He was morally serious, emotionally sensitive, altruistic, literary and pensive. He was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and generally anti-bigot. He was an uncompromising idealist. Everyone knew this about him.

The problem with Bill, though, was that it wasn’t enough for him to live up to his own standards. He wanted to experience his virtues and himself as virtuous; and for that he needed moral foils. People who were morally frivolous, amoral or even vicious made his own morality stand out in relief. It gave his virtues something to do — something to resist or oppose or silently endure and resent. The slight shittiness of slightly shitty people helped Bill experience who he really wanted to be.

Whether he was aware of it or not, he seemed to enlist whoever happened to be around him in his personal moral dramas. In his presence, I could always feel some scene he was acting out, and the role I was cast to perform. And it was rarely a flattering character. I felt pushed and pulled and twisted and pressured into a character only tangentially connected to myself, and I often felt torn between going along with Bill’s game which required some degree of self-betrayal or swimming upstream against the social current Bill was establishing and creating unpleasant and exhausting tension.

I now recognize that Bill was a man from the future.

His ideals perfectly match those of many educated young people today. They match the ideals of many educated old people who prize youth and try to stay youthful by imitating the young. But back then it was much less common, and acceptance was not nearly as automatic as now. Back then it took some vision and courage, and willingness to be scorned by cool people. I believe Bill deserves some credit for being far ahead of trend.

Today, whenever I’m enlisted as a moral foil, which is every day — when I feel myself being someone else’s capitalist, or white guy, or old man, or dirty Zionist, or milquetoast liberal, or suspected closeted conservative, or whatever they’re after — I think about Bill and his virtuousness.