Category Archives: Biography

Taste in scales

Biography, Philosophy

Jan Zwicky speaks of resonant relationships among wholes. These wholes are not clarified through analysis, nor are they built up piece by piece through synthesis. In my preferred vocabulary, I would say that they are wholes conceived as given. Their meaning comes not from the atomic bits that compose them, but from the articulate whole that comprises them. The articulations that relationally differentiate participants-within-wholes interpenetrate and crisscross all that is, producing a complex field of possible likeness, each a resonance, a taken-together given.

In the past I have visualized the relationship of the synthesized truth with the conceived truth — of the composed world with the comprised world — of the systematized with the articulate — as an overlaid top-down and bottom-up triangle.

*

This week I have been revisiting an old theme connected with service design: altitude and granularity.

One of the formative intellectual developments of my generation was chaos theory. We came of age when computers became capable of visualizing fractal geometric figures, and when James Gleick’s Chaos was published. For many Gen-X nerds, nonlinearity, the butterfly effect, and scalar self-similarity became part of our basic conceptual equipment at the precise age when nerds self-equip.

So for me, with hours of playing with the Mandelbrot Set in my memory, zooming in and out and noting what wholes and parts come into prominence within a visual field as it is magnified or reduced, altitude and granularity are experience-near concepts and I see them everywhere in everything. And I am seeing them in Zwicky’s observations of resonance.

Every altitude of inquiry produces different salient conceptions.

Imagine specificity and generality of a subject presented in different kinds of text. Compare a detailed ethnomethodological study with a book about ethnomethodology, with a sociology textbook. Each looks upon its subject from a particular altitude, and handles ideas of particular types (a particular case, a specific method, a general field of inquiry), putting them into systematic or articulate relation, each with a certain grain and texture and tone.

I’ve found that my own mind responds well to some altitudes and granularities better than others. They are very precise — I like to understand things up-close and at an interpersonal level. Sweeping histories that do not anchor in individual experience feel unreal to me. But great social trends that can be shown in terms of artistic style are real. I can absorb an aesthetic style and sense the enworldment that produces it. But discussion of social forces and policy conflicts — again unreal. Grand military history — meaningless. Geography defined by ecosystems or by societies subsisting on various natural resources — nebulous and vacant. A survey of the world’s religions — now the entire world is colorfully mapped. Stories of particular people in particular places. Borges snd Casares made Argentina real for me; Ben Okri, Nigeria.

It seems nothing in the world is real to me unless it is refracted through another person’s lived experience. Only enworldments enworld my world.

If information is presented objectively, out of reference from some particular person’s enworldment, it means nothing to me. The only science I care about is the science a real human scientist did — Robert Boyle, Ben Franklin, Lois Pasteur — so, thank you, STS. I cannot see science apart from the stories of people in laboratories or observatories, or working at desks, interacting with equipment a\that provides them obscure clues in the form of messy data, which they, like me, struggle to bring into persuasive order. The persuasive order — the “science” — that is no foundation for making sense of this world we inhabit!

Years ago, Nietzsche consoled me by painting this portrait:

The truly efficient and successful scholars could one and all be described as ’employees’. When in their youth they had perfected their skills and crammed their memories, when hand and eye had acquired certainty, they were directed by an older scholar to a place in science where their qualities would be useful; later on, after they themselves had become accomplished enough to detect the gaps and faults in their science, they posted themselves of their own accord to where they were needed. These natures one and all exist for the sake of science: but there are rarer, rarely successful and wholly mature natures ‘for the sake of whom science exists’ — at least that is what they themselves think — : frequently unpleasant, frequently arrogant, frequently wrong-headed but almost always to a certain extent bewitching men. They are not employees, neither are they employers, they avail themselves of that which these have laboured to ascertain and do so with a certain princely composure and rarely with more than a modicum of praise: as though, indeed, those employees and employers belonged to a lower species of beings. And yet they possess precisely the same qualities as these employers and employees do, and sometimes even in an inferior state of development: they are, moreover, characterized by a narrow limitedness foreign to the former, on account of which it is impossible to appoint them to a post or see in them usable instruments — they can live only in their own atmosphere and on their own soil. This limitedness proffers them all of a science that ‘belongs to them’, that is to say all they can bear home with them to their atmosphere and dwelling; they fancy they are collecting together their scattered ‘property’. If they are prevented from constructing their own nest they perish like houseless birds; unfreedom is phthisis to them. If they cultivate individual regions of science in the way the others do, it is always only those regions where the fruit and seeds they themselves need will prosper; what is it to them if science as a whole has regions untilled and ill cultivated? They lack all impersonal interest in a problem; just as they themselves are personalities through and through, so all their insights and acquirements in the field of knowledge coalesce together into a personality, into a living multiplicity whose individual parts are dependent on one another, cleave to one another, are nourished by the same food, and as a whole possesses its own atmosphere and its own odour. — Natures such as this produce, with their personality-informed structures of knowledge, that illusion that a science (or even the whole of philosophy) is finished and has reached its goal; it is the life in their structure that performs this magic, which has at times been very fateful for science and misleading for those able and efficient workers of the spirit just described, though at other times, when aridity and exhaustion have reigned, it has acted as a balm and like the breath of a cool, refreshing oasis. — The name usually given to such men is philosophers.

Free

Biography, Ethics

Anything of great importance is pristinely voluntary. We can conceive its truth or we can leave it unconceived and inconceivable. It is entirely our choice.

Even acknowledging the importance of importance is voluntary. Anyone who wishes, can see only unimportance.

We all have our reasons, and it is important to give each their own.

*

At first I expected every decent person to engage with me in philosophy.

Then I expected only my good friends to engage with me in philosophy.

Then I expected only my good philosophical friends to engage with me in philosophy.

I now expect only those who freely choose it to engage with me in philosophy.

Anyone who doesn’t want to is free not to.

I think I even feel this way, now.

Let’s see if it sticks.

Uniquely qualified

Biography

Each of us has our own good reason to believe we are uniquely qualified to teach the rest of humanity about reality — not least of which is the fact that each of us can truthfully say: I was born into the center of existence and have experienced reality from that privileged vantage point my whole life.

This is why — though many other people know many different things — when it comes to what really matters, what is most relevant, what gets to the heart of it all, you are the authority. You concentrated on the one thing needful. This is why wise people come to you for wisdom.

Embracing abnormality

Biography, Ethics, Ideas, Love, Politics

A friend of mine sent me an online autism test and asked me what my thoughts on it were. It inspired a pretty decent email:

Here’s where my mind went: I want a test to measure organizational autism. Back in the early 00s I used to say that UX is a cure for corporate autism, until I got worried that might upset someone. But it is true! We impose rules on organizations that require a level of explicitness that cause them to become mind-blind behaviorists. These rules are important, of course, but they come with tradeoffs that we should be aware of and weigh against the benefits.

And I guess that brings me to a second thought: I think we have become too quick to diagnose difference. We live in really strange times, where we’ve forgotten that normal isn’t necessarily good and abnormal isn’t necessarily bad. When I was a kid I was into punk rock, and we thought abnormal was the greatest thing ever. I’m pretty sure a lot of what I was into was aestheticized autism, OCD, and other quirks, all of which were mined and made beautiful or at least intriguing. If you ever want to watch a touching story of redemption, watch End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, and get ready to cry.

Everything on this Earth is tradeoffs — every room in this palace of life is furnished differently — there is no single standard of goodness. I think some of what is plotted on the autism spectrum I’d prefer to call an inflexibly quirky personality, not a disorder. And when inflexible quirks are put to work generating technical or artistic innovations, that becomes a feature of a personality, not a bug.

So, that challenges my first thought. Cure for corporate autism? Maybe some organizations ought to be aspie. Some people ought to be aspie. Therapists and designers can help individuals or organizations make tradeoffs toward empathy, where “get organized” self-help books (like Checklist Manifesto) or OE/Six Sigma consultants can help people make tradeoffs toward more autistic virtues. So that’s another thing.

I guess I want to relativize mental health and most other social norms so people aren’t so freaked out and obsessed with being called normal. I want us to get back to the Gen-X perversity of treasuring precisely our abnormalities.

Rivendell

Biography, Design

After 20+ years of intense yearning I finally got my ultimate bicycle, a Rivendell.

I love beautiful objects, especially beautiful useful objects. This is why I am a designer.

But the most beautiful and most useful object of all is the bicycle. Inconceivable amounts of intelligence, love and effort — heart, and soul and strength —  have been poured into perfecting the diamond frame bicycle by innumerable passionate people.

The bicycle is the ultimate object. And the Rivendell is the ultimate exemplar of the ultimate object.

 

What makes Rivendells so special is the old-school fabrication, which uses lugs to join steel tubes together. The artistry is stunning.

But the significance of Rivendell goes even further. The bicycle and the words of the bicycle’s designer,  Grant Peterson, gave me my first deep reconception of an object.

It was a conversion experience. Before, the conversion, I wanted a minimalist bicycle fabricated from the highest tech materials. But then I read what Peterson had to say, and Non-Rivendell bicycles were magically transformed into variously deficient approximations of Rivendells. Rivendells became symbolic of what I care about.

My overall aesthetic changed. My preference shifted from pristine, unadorned euclidian mind-forms to symbolically-ornamented heart-forms. A beneficiary of this change was Susan, who was suddenly liberated from modernist austerity, and freed to transform our house into the odd, colorful, semi-psychedelic warmth cocoon it is today.

This experience gave me my first glimpse of what design can be and do, not only with physical forms, but with conceptions. Later, many of the key ideas Grant Peterson demonstrated were articulated by Christopher Alexander as life-changing general principles of design that guide my practice today.

———

Here are some of the more memorable things Grant Peterson said that got into my heart. 

This:

We love lugs. We don’t build frames without them. We like the look, the art, the way they’re made, and we like designing smart, beautiful, and unique ones. We also like knowing that a Rivendell, Atlantis, or Heron frame is unmistakably itself beneath the paint, because the lugs identify it. Fifty and even a hundred and fifty years from now, when all of today’s frames have been retired or repainted or rusted away or whatever, a dumpster diver will come upon a paintless, decal-less Rivendell or Atlantis or Heron, take it to a bicycle historian, and there won’t be any doubt what kind of frame it is. That notion may seem silly to you, but it’s a small part of what makes lugged frames special for a lot of people. They have a face and a personality that is unique. No big deal, maybe, but it’s there.

And this:

“Form follows function” works for nature, but too often with people, it’s used as an excuse to rush to market something that’s fully functional but still not so good looking.

(Have you noticed that old things usually look good? Manhole covers, typewriters, ’50s station wagons, chairs, hand-saw handles, buildings, bells, letter openers, kitchen appliances, almost anything. They were designed slowly, on a real drawing board, by people who were part industrial designer, part artist, part engineer. When you mix those qualities with manual involvement and patience, what finally hatches usually looks good.)

When it comes to bicycle frames, we like them to look low-key from a distance and interesting up close. Lugs look good to us, and a little fanciness is fine, too. We want a Rivendell frame to be recognizable, even if a robber steals it and repaints it, and our signature lugs guarantee that.

It’s hard to dwell on points such as appearance without coming off like a snob; and rest assured we do see the beauty in rusty, homely, utility bikes that get ridden and help Save the Planet, etc. But at some point in the design and building of your frame, we make some decisions that affect aesthetics, and although we aren’t the final arbiters of good taste, we know what we like, and always look after the frame.

 

Highlights from Susan’s and my weekly conversation

Biography, Enworldment, Ethics

Every Saturday, Susan and I have a deep conversation. This week’s was short but momentus. I want to list some of the highlights.

  1. Susan asked about Vipassana (Buddhist insight meditation) and how it relates to her Jewish faith. As happens so often, she drew an explanation from me that simply did not exist until she made space for its existence through the intelligence of her questions. I advised her to think of the concentration she would develop and maintain for maybe no more than a few precious minutes out the  hundred-plus hours she’ll spend seated in meditation as Genesis 0:0 – the preconceptive divine spark that existed the moment before Genesis 1:1, before “God began creating heaven and earth,” when “the earth was void and desolate,” and “there was darkness on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters.” From there, she can witness regenesis.
  2. We discussed the two most common enceptions, which tend to project as metaphysical objectifications, materialism and idealism. She asked if either was more likely to be sociopathic. I don’t think they are more or less likely, but the form of sociopathy differs. Idealist sociopaths tend to become solipsistic and to believe the meaning they experience is the only one that exists or matters. Materialist sociopaths tend to become nihilistic and to believe there is no meaning, that nothing is true and anything is permitted.
  3. I finally caught the deep connection between everting objectivism and the idea of reenworldment. This is extremely unlikely to make any sense, but I’m recording it here just to mark the insight: Those intermediate conceptions where our differing understandings of the world are found are anchored at two points and suspended between them. One one end is the primary conceptions that give us our concrete experiences of reality (our primary givens), and on the other is the ultimate enception that gives us our sense of reality as a whole (our ultimate given). As long as these two points remain anchored, the intermediate conceptions that bridge primary conceptions with that enception are held firm, and are unlikely to change at any depth. Conceiving ambinity – not just having a synthetic grasp of it, but really spontaneously, immediately intuiting it – is our best opportunity for loosening and dissolving intermediate conceptions and their givens, so they can be reconceived.
  4. In ambinity, we are no longer required to subject primary conceptions to the standards of any one metaphysic. They are permitted to simply be primary. If we see something and experience it as good, that is what makes it good, and an account that justifies its goodness according to a theory of morals is not necessary.
  5. I repeated an old idea, that today seemed new: “Things are not your fault. But you are responsible. You have response-ability. That is what obligates you, not some debt on a moral balance sheet.”

Stephen Savings Time

Biography, Enworldment

I’m falling back two hours and setting my biological clock to Stephen Savings Time so I can do writing as a near full-time job. This means my evenings will start winding down at 7:30pm so I can be up and ready to clock in at 4:30am.

Until I get this done, I will be saying “no” to a lot of invitations. Please do not take this, or the rest of my monomania, personally.

*

Writing this book is inspiring me return to many older ideas, to recall them, recollect them, and to reintegrate them into a clearly conceived unity. The process is forcing me to prioritize what I include, and, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, make exclusions. This pruning and shaping is cleansing. I’ve accumulated a lot of ideas and associations, some fully comprehended and internalized, some only synthetically known about, but not intrinsic to how I think. Writing is forcing me to make distinctions between what is essential, and what is dispensable, and I am feeling it not only in my mind, but in my heart and my body.

*

Much of what I am recollecting is from the early days of my life-changing encounter with Nietzsche, so he is freshly on my mind. His words are especially resonant now, especially these:

Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

Reflections on Vipassana

Biography

Susan has been accepted into a Vipassana course, and now she is contemplating what she has gotten into. She keeps trying to imagine what it will be like.

I keep telling her it is impossible to imagine. The first time I went, in 1997, everything I anticipated was irrelevant to what actually happened. It didn’t even occur to me to imagine what turned out to be most important.

But strangely, what is most important in the experience seems impossible to remember.

I know this only because, registering for my second course, I tried again to anticipate what it would be like, this time with the benefit of experience, but, once again was shocked at how different the reality was from the anticipation, and additionally shocked at my inability to anticipate. The third time, I tried to factor the shock into my anticipation, and that also failed. It was the same with all subsequent courses.

The actual experience of Vipassana is never anything like even the most informed anticipations of it.

Perhaps our memories record only certain aspects of experience.

*

Another strange thing about Vipassana concerns time. Time behaves extremely strangely when you are deeply absorbed and have no visual and few auditory reference points. The passing of fifteen minutes is difficult to discern from an hour. The impulse to look at a clock and to get reoriented within time can become very distracting.

My Jewish view on this is that eternity can be very uncomfortable before you get used to it.

*

The strangest part of Vipassana is the question of agency. I sit down determined to observe my breath for a full hour, to keep my attention focused solely and entirely on the sensation of in-breath, out-breath. I’m observing it, observing it, observing it – then I’m not. And not only am I not now, I haven’t been observing for some time. Who stopped observing? Where was I? I was not there.

This insight hit me hard at my first course, and it arrived with a depression. I’d wasted ten days of my life, doing everything wrong. It took a day of intense meditation, observing the physical sensations of depression, for it to break apart and dissipate.

Eventually, I adjusted to the insight that our own being is intermittent. We pop into and out of existence all the time. 

This is easily explained away if you need to. Our default objectivist orientation is amply-equipped to subdue every trace of the profound strangeness of existence with materialist just-so stories. But I know what it’s like to be dead.

*

Susan asked me: Do you suppose you got more from Vipassana than you know?

I think I did. But what I gained was not primarily information. It was something quite different.

What I got was an inclination to notice things about our own subjectivity that doesn’t play nice with how we normally think.

For instance, I was able to observe that when we are around some other people, aspects of our subjectivity dissociate from ourselves, and connect up with corresponding aspects of another other, so that there is more subjective cohesion between two people than within either person. We notice this most in love, but it happens all the time.

When we become jealous, we can feel the cohesion we have someone else – someone with whom we are someone – being strained by an interfering coherence they are forming with a stranger. We can feel in our hearts an existential threat, because this other with whom we are ourselves, is becoming estranged from us as they become someone different with this stranger. Part of the ground of our very self quakes and shifts, and we feel jealous.

Viewing this situation from an objectivist perspective, we must explain away jealousy as an attempt to possess another person. But when we understand subjectively, we can see better that we are only trying to maintain our own conditions of belonging.

Subjects are not what we think they are. We are not what we think we are.

Anatta: not-self. 

*

Before I went to Vipassana, I had a lot of ideas about what might I might undergo, what it might be like, and what might happen to me.

After going several times, I let go of many of these things, but I had nothing to replace it with. I still found it impossible to conceptualize what might happen, and so I could only participate and try to remain receptive.

It took many years to see that this concept-suspending participation was itself a mode of understanding – an alternative to objective comprehension.

Constantly translating the uncanny experiences of Vipassana back into the terms of the objectivist philosophy I held at the time, in order to make them comprehensible and compatible with conventional thought would have filtered out precisely the strangest and most consequential insights.

I could have said “Yeah, I keep forgetting how hard this is.”

I could have said “Yeah, you really lose your sense of time sitting there.”

I could have said “Yeah, we are just so absent-minded and so distractible.”

I could have said “Yeah, love makes us lose our minds.”

But I didn’t. I did my best to do full justice to what I experienced.

I reformed how I conceived truth to accommodate my experiences, rather than forcing my experiences to fit inside my existing conceptions. Rather than taming my strange experiences with conventional scientistic or spiritual explanations, I gave them a new environment.

At dawn, my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams
With no attempts 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
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

Conceiving inconceivability

Biography, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Symbols and diagrams

Any form of participation in a whole experienced solely from within (in which the participant participates as a part) of which we have only partial knowledge is, in itself inconceivable. Withinness topologically thwarts comprehension.

We cannot conceive the whole, but we can conceive the fact that we are participants in it, and we can conceive many characteristics of our participation. For instance, we can conceive things we might do or think or feel in response to our immediate encounter with fellow participants or parts within the whole. We can conceive that the whole exists, that we are situated within it, that it environs us, and we can understand how we participate in that whole as a part of it, even if we do not comprehend the whole in the conceptual way we comprehend objects in our environment or other kinds of things we can wrap our minds around.

We might even try to map what we are able to conceive from within and try to make what we are within conceivable.

For instance, if we are trapped in a labyrinth, we might draw a maze map that represents, from the outside, the space we are inside, so we can better comprehend it as a whole instead of as a connected series of situations. We transpose the multiple interior positions to a single exterior form. We evert it, and what remains inside now views an exterior representation of its situation and mentally re-situates itself outside.

We might even get so absorbed in the maze  that we forgets that it we still located in some space within the labyrinth and not on some dot marked on the maze, in the same way as we forget that our brain is something known by the mind, not the other way around.

*

The first all-consuming perplexity I experienced reading Nietzsche resolved in an image of a mandala.

At the zenith of the mandala was a point I labeled “Solipse”. At the nadir was another point labeled “Eclipse”.

Next to Solipse I wrote “World-in-me” and drew a little circle with a dot at its center, with a caption “Ptolemy”.

Next to Eclipse I wrote “I-in-world” and drew another little circle with a dot on the periphery with a caption “Copernicus”.

In solipse, brains are found inside minds, along with every known thing. In eclipse, minds are produced from brains which exist at points in space.

This was the origin of my topological sense of understanding.

The perpendicular points between solipse and eclipse marked inflections between these two everted ways to situate self and world, moments where both situations become conceivable, perhaps together in ambinity, and for a time neither fully dominates, but co-exist in all-everting multistability.

From these two points we can see most clearly how the inside of an oyster shell is an everted pearl, Pandora’s box is everted Paradise, and Eden is the everted fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Here we can conceive both ultimate eversions simultaneously. We can use maps without forgetting where that map really is, but also move around in space and allow maps to deepen our understanding of our situation. Our minds are improved with knowledge of brains, but our knowledge of brains is improved knowing that all knowledge is mind-product.

Much later, moving along this wheel, at one of these ambinity points where inside and outside exist within one another, I intuited a beyondness of both, a ground of soliptic-ecliptic eversion that is both and neither. From that point on, I was religious.

*

At the beit din before I went into the mikvah a rabbi interrupted me in the middle of an answer to one of their questions, and asked “Do you even really believe in God?” I said, “Yes; but in a way that is extremely difficult to explain.” She said “Very Jewish. Fair enough.” Fifteen minutes later I emerged from the mikvah a Jew with a new Hebrew name, Nachshon, after the general of the tribe of Judah who, according to legend, waded into the chaotic turbulence of the Red Sea all the way up to his nostrils, just before Moses split the waters into two halves, permitting passage from one shore to the other. Adonai eloheinu; Adonai echad.

*

I need to think carefully how I might use the word “participate” in my topological conceptive vocabulary, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is built around con-capere words.

Participate shares the same root as concept, conception, conceive: capere “take”

part- “part” + –capere “take” – to part-take.

con- “together” + -capere “take” – to together-take.

 

 

My MacBuntu

Biography

I bought an old MacBook Air from my daughter and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could experiment with a (mostly) non-Apple platform. I am happy to report that writing on this MacBuntu is the next best thing to typing on a typewriter, in terms of distractions. Ubuntu’s lack of integration with messaging platforms is the furthest thing from a drawback.

From need to greed

Biography, Enworldment

I take it as a very good sign when my motivation for writing shifts from a need to articulate something to intense greed to own the book I’m writing. This happened with Geometric Meditations, and it is happening again with this new longer book. I just added a glossary of terms that has crystallized the entire book for me. It is clear,  coherent, comprehensive and diamond-hard.

By the way, I am entertaining a new possible title: Topology of Conception.

h

Biography, Ideas

Some of you may not be aware of my pioneering work in qualitative mathematics. However, my obscurity outside my field of specialty will be coming to a dramatic end in the near future. For I am preparing to publicly announce my discovery of a new qualitative number, the Hysterical Number, or h, which is the unique sequence of numbers that overlaps with no sequence of digits occurring in any other existent irrational number.

Fictive Midas

Biography, Ethics, Love, Metaphysics

I want to define and describe a human type. It is a personality frequently found in the creative classes, especially among writers, but it is also common in religious communities and ideological movements. I am calling this type the Fictive Midas.

*

Everything a Fictive Midas touches turns to fiction.

The Fictive Midas inhabits a memoir, an unfolding story toward which they are both intimate and dissociated — intimate because it is their own creation about themselves; dissociated because they a character in this story they are telling, while also existing in the background as the one telling it.

This dissociative intimacy pervades their lives, inner and outer.

The inner life of imagination, ideas and emotions, of course, predominates.

For them, there is nothing peculiar about it, because this is the only existence they know. But for those around them, especially people attuned to the self-transcendent reality of other people, a Fictive Midas is unnerving, and the closer they believe themselves to be with them, the more disturbing they become.

This is because, to the Fictive Midas, the outer life is important mainly as source material for their inner lives, and other people are part of the outer world. This causes them to relate to people and things with disturbing disregard, the kind of disregard authors have toward the suffering of the characters they invent.

*

A friend of a Fictive Midas might from time to time get the feeling that they are not actually fully real to them. Nor is the Fictive Midas really present in the relationship.

There is an alienating barrier — a membrane that separates self from self, and keeps each respective Me in strict parallel, precluding any participation in mutuality, in shared being, in any We. In relations involving a perceptive Fictive Midas, this membrane might develop increasing precision, nuance, even insight — but this is only advanced character development, not interpersonal intimacy. Whatever closeness there seems to be is only a closeness of resemblance between the Fictive Midas’s rendered character and the real person sealed outside. The membrane is impermeable.

This truth hard to conceptualize, and can cause pain and anxiety in those who mistake a Fictive Midas for a friend.

And it only gets worse once the alienating membrane is noticed. Anyone who presses against it too hard or tries to puncture it, by appealing to the Fictive Midas’s humanity will find themselves repelled and expelled as a nobody. The character and the person peel apart, and the Fictive Midas keeps the fiction and discards the person, letting the reality drop over the horizon into the outer void. The Fictive Midas is uncannily unconcerned, incurious, almost hostilely indifferent to the divergences between the person and the character. The person finally knows — feels in their soul — the fact that they do not and never did exist to this stranger.

*

Ruthless people are said to leave a trail of blood. Heartbreakers leave trails of tears. Fictive Midases leave trails of emptiness.

Susan says we call it “ghosting” when a person exits a relationship without resolving it and providing any closure, because we are haunted by the absence. The absence is peculiarly present, much in the way the recently deceased are with us after they die.

Those of us who experience the world pluralistically — that is, those of us who feel that their sense of truth is only part of the bigger story and who want to complete our understandings of important things with the perspectives of others — experience the void created by Fictive Midases intensely painful, an aching phantom limb that cannot be treated, because it is a nonexistence, despite being a real part of us.

Pluralists tend to seek reconciliation with others as a means to reestablishment of shared friendship, or failing that, closure, so the relationship can lie peacefully in its grave.

The Fictive Midas, however has no such need, not because they feel none of the pain we feel, but because this pain is all they know. They dwell among their fictional characters, experience their fictional satisfactions and gratification, nurse their fictional grudges, all the while starving of loneliness, isolation and unreality.

Like Midas, they hoard their treasures, and deprive themselves of all nourishment and love.

Only their pain is something that intrudes from outside themselves, oppresses them from without, despite their attempts to defend themselves against it. But no matter how much they keep the cause of their pain — other people — outside, and the source of their happiness — their truth — inside, somehow the loneliness, alienation and envy gets inside and torments them, anyway.

*

It is tempting, when one is written off by a Fictive Midas or written out of their story when the story undergoes a heavy edit or rewrite, to retaliate and return the treatment — to write them out or write them off — and to make up a story where we have done this successfully and no longer care about them or what they did to us.

But this is only to become infected with fiction, and to succumb to the Fictive Midas’s condition ourselves.

And if we are honest, isn’t it true that we would never have fallen into a Fictive Midas’s snare, or worse, stayed there, if we weren’t already doing some significant fictionalizing ourselves? If not, why didn’t we notice the relationship we imagined ourselves to be in was largely imaginary?

It is better to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the voids, while maintaining hope that reconciliation or closure might actually happen someday, if they find their way out of their isolating enworldment.

Meanwhile we can be more alert, and more aware of the reality of others, and more dedicated to reality, however elusive, so we can cultivate real mutual relationships with people capable of mutuality.

*

I have invented the abstract type of the Fictive Midas as a therapeutic effigy — a theoretic fiction of my own — as a general phenomenon onto which I can shift the weight of loss. I’m not going to reduce any person to this type, but I will regret the fact that this type can overtake a person and obscure and their personhood. It is a regrettable syndrome, not an archetype that manifests through regrettable people.

Fictive Midas is the superset containing not only my estranged friends, but the pandemic of ideologies sweeping the world, of epic stories where fictional identities oppress other fictional identities but then rise up and stage a revolution.

*

I believe John Milton knew this type:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

Co-marveling

Biography

Helen and I built our relationship on sharing experiences. It began with cooking together, then mountain biking, and then listening to music — and then marveling to music.

This is very different for me; I’ve always seen relationships in terms of conversation, and most importantly, exchange of ideas.

But from childhood to late adolescence, Helen absolutely refused to connect intellectually. I was forced to find some other mode of relating to her, and finding it changed everything for me. To share the experience of marveling — to have a similarly awestruck response to beauty — connects us to each other and to the world. It is communion.

Then, after pointing me to the world beyond language, Helen became obsessed with linguistics, and now her knowledge is so deep, intricate and technical it defies my comprehension.

*

Exchange of ideas remains my primary mode of relating to other people. But now, the ideas I’m most keen to exchange are ideas that affirm the reality and the importance of reality outside of what words capture — the realities to which we relate through art, through religion, through wordless interaction, through sharing nonverbal experiences, through the exchange of gifts.

*

Language itself can grow solipsistic if we don’t perpetually reintroduce it to what transcends language. Yes, language and reason is reality but in a very important sense it is also with reality. Reality involves but exceeds the word.

*

I am still reading Michael Fishbane’s Sacred Attunement. My current section is examining a passage from Genesis from four multiple hermeneutic modes, called Pardes:

And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’ And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-el, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. — Genesis 28:10–19

For Jacob it was a space, marked with an anointed stone.

Why can’t it also be music?

Hounds of Love

Abbey Road

The Green Bus

On screenplays

Art, Biography

The compulsion to resolve conflict with others through dialogue is natural and good.

But some forms of conflict arise precisely from an incapacity for dialogue.

The problem might be the fault of one party or another, or both, or even neither. The problem might be specific to the relationship, a peculiarity of the chemistry of two misfitted personalities, and not attributable to any conspicuous shortcomings of anyone. The conflicting factors might be distributed between the conflicting parties and deeply engrained in the history and habits of the relationship, out of the direct control of either side, and in certain circumstances difficult or impossible to effectively address.

In these cases, attempts to resolve the conflict are unlikely to succeed, and are more likely to create even more conflict and more need for resolution.

And that is actually fine.

These reconciliations are not emergencies, and when they seem to be, things might not be as they seem so self-evidently to be.

*

Sometimes our urgent need to resolve things with another person is not actually for the sake of the relationship at all — but, in fact, for the sake of restoring our own self-image, damaged by contact with real otherness. We are not trying to heal the relationship, or even heal ourselves, but rather to heal an image of ourselves, our morality, our sense of omniscience, our artistic vision of life.

If we manage to mature as people, sometimes life shows us that our efforts to reconcile — sincere efforts, too! — were really just attempts to persuade the other person to stop being so other, and instead to submit to performing the role of the person we need them to be. — All this so we can return to the comfortable self-satisfaction of playing our role in our movie.

Or, more accurately, our roles, plural.

We forget how many roles involved in creating movies are not acting roles.

In our own movie we are not only the star actor — we are also scriptwriter, producer, director, and editor. We may also be promoter, red carpet gala and paparazzi. Some of the more eggheaded of us are also film critic. All of us are audience.

Depending on who we are, we may root our selfhood in any of these roles, and what is at stake in many conflicts is not the on-screen drama but the off-screen creative differences.

The worst of these creative conflicts are those where one or both artists refuse to allow the other to be anything but a moving image on their screen. The real stakes are not the colorful shadows thrown on the screen, or even in the bright bulbs of the projector, but up out in the sunlight of reality, out in the source of these projected visions and self-contained realities, overlapping, clashing divine sparks — the jewels-within-jewels, jewels-within-nets, nets-within-jewels of Indra’s Net.

We may live our whole lives and die without ever catching ourselves in the act of relegating others to the confines of our screens. If so, we will have been one of the blessed ignoramuses who were right all along. Most of us fail to ever notice that we are not God.

Relationships are less like movies and more like improv. Each actor has a tentative vision of what is going on, but also intuits and responds to what other actors are doing and envisioning and intuiting, and the action transcends them all, while being immanent in each of them and all of them.

Only here, in the sunlight of improv, is reconciliation possible.

Reconciliation is not scripted, not directed, not produced. And despite popular wisdom, forgiveness is not a matter of editing or rewriting a script.