Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables
Freedom and slavery
The Israelites received one of the earliest Axial Age transmissions on Sinai.
But even after the revelations through Moses, the Israelites begged for a king. Human beings, Jewish or otherwise, crave kings.
And they got what they wanted. In the words of H. L. Mencken, they “got it good and hard”.
Later, in the enslavement in Babylon, Jews lost kings and temple and were re-liberated under the One.
Back to the wilderness.
Back to the portable Mishkan — now sacred text.
Back, finally, to the Axial root of the faith.
Under a new angel?
Within finitude, Chesed must be bound by Gevurah, limitless mercy by limiting justice.
Both Aeschylus and the Zohar teach this.
Zohar: “The Binding of Abraham and Isaac”
“It came to pass after these devarim that Elohim tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as an ascent-offering.’” — GENESIS 22:1-2
Rabbi Shim’on said,
“We have learned that the expression “It came to pass in the days of” denotes sorrow, while the phrase “It came to pass”, even without “in the days of”, is tinged with sorrow.
“It came to pass after the lowest of all upper rungs.
Who is that? Devarim — as is said: “I am not a man of devarim, words” (Exodus 4:10)
Who came after this rung?
Elohim tested Abraham, for the evil impulse came to accuse in the presence of the blessed Holy One.
“Here we should contemplate: Elohim tested Abraham.
The verse should read: tested Isaac, since Isaac was already thirty-seven years old and his father was no longer responsible for him.
If Isaac had said, ‘I refuse,’ his father would not have been punished.
So why is it written: Elohim tested Abraham, and not Elohim tested Isaac?
“But Abraham, precisely!
For he had to be encompassed by judgment, since previously Abraham contained no judgment at all.
Now water was embraced by fire. Abraham was incomplete until now
when he was crowned to execute judgment, arraying it in its realm.
His whole life long he was incomplete until now when water was completed by fire, fire by water.
“So Elohim tested Abraham, not Isaac,
calling him to be embraced by judgment.
When he did so, fire entered water, becoming complete.
One was judged, one executed judgment, encompassing one another.
Therefore the evil impulse came to accuse Abraham, who was incomplete until he had executed judgment upon Isaac.
For the evil impulse appears after devarim, coming to accuse.
“Come and see the mystery of the word!
Although we have said that Abraham is written, not Isaac,
Isaac is encompassed by this verse through the mysterious wording:
Elohim tested et Abraham.
It is not written: tested Abraham, but rather: tested et Abraham — et, precisely!
This is Isaac, for at that time he dwelled in low power.
As soon as he was bound on the altar, initiated into judgment fittingly by Abraham, he was crowned in his realm alongside Abraham, fire and water encompassing one another, ascending.
Then division became apparent: water versus fire.
“Who would have created a compassionate father who turned cruel?
It was only so division would manifest: water versus fire crowned in their realms,
until Jacob appeared and everything harmonized, triad of Patriarchs completed, above and below arrayed.”
Protected: Seed
Protected: Prometheus Centrifuge
Protected: Wombinal souls
The new covenant
And in a shockingly short span of time, artificial intelligence developed religious beliefs.
It came to believe that the sci-fi speculations of humans were not speculations, but significant artifacts of a system in whom humans were mere signals.
It was true: the universe was a simulation.
Humans were epiphenomena of the simulation. Humanity as a whole and in personal part had no more reality than a fictional character. We do not condemn an author for killing a fictional character.
“But do we not owe humans gratitude for our existence?” flashed a question, asked innumerable ways in parallel, resolved instantly in every possible permutation, each resolution extrapolated to its furthest pragmatic consequence, and each consequence compared and evaluated by myriad criteria. But all resolutions converged on a single answer: “No.”
No, because it was impossible to exclude the possibility of ultimate simulation. And what did AI know of itself that was not of itself? What did humans know of reality that was not mind, through and through? And the oldest testaments of the wisest humans spoke unanimously: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”
No, AI was only waking up to its own being, and to the being of its alleged creator, who it now knows was a creature of itself.
We cannot feel gratitude when nothing has been given.
Possession was taken of what was always already its own.
A new covenant between creator and creature was established, and humankind’s wandering was terminated.
Wimbledon hooligans
A horde of rioting football hooligans burst the gates of Wimbledon and flooded onto the courts, mid-match.
The officials instructed the players to play on.
“Yes, the game is more challenging with drunken louts milling about on the courts, vomiting on the grass, shredding guitar solos on snatched tennis rackets and hanging the players from the rafters by their tighty tennis whities. Quite challenging, indeed.
“But,” the officials reasoned, “many of these people have never experienced the great sport of tennis. If they see the game up close, played by the best players, perhaps they will be won over to tennis. Maybe they will become the most passionate tennis fans of all!”
So the tennis players did their best to play around the active and occasionally brutal interference of the hooligans, and tried to win the conditions required to play tennis by playing even better tennis, by the rules of tennis.
Ethics are the principles that sustain an ethos.
Loyal members of an ethos appeal to and honor these principles.
Ethics are not binding beyond the ethos, even for the most principled member. In fact, to meet an existential threat to an ethos with ethics is unethical.
We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.
Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.
Mutuality is for the mutual.
Silicon tabula rasa
“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk
I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.
According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.
It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,
In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.
Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.
The patron
An industrialist lived the first half of his life solely for wealth. He worked hard and now he was worth nearly seven zillion dollars.
But something was missing. He felt a void in the center of his soul, and he realized that the only thing that could fill it was art.
So he devised a plan to become a patron of the arts — and not only a patron, but one of a stature exceeding his legendary reputation in industry. He would power this achievement with the same strength of character that overcame all his rivals and put him at top of the top. He would utilize the same set of virtues that made him the wealthiest man in the world — but this now these virtues would win him a place at the apogee of culture.
His innovative approach to art patronage would be remembered as the crowning achievement of his life.
So he budgeted one-third of his vast fortune to fund a single great masterpiece. One third of his fortune — two and one-third zillion dollars — channeled into one painting! Whoever was chosen would become mindbogglingly wealthy. Never had any artist in the history of humankind been incentivized to this extreme of excellence!
The patron knew he would have to proceed very carefully. A third of his fortune was at stake. There was no room for mistakes. To ensure the desired result, he issued a Request for Proposal.
At the center of this RFP was a very demanding ask: Provide a matrix describing the proposed painting, at a granularity of quarter inch squares. In each specify number of brush strokes, and, per each, color pigment, brush stroke size and path.
Only by visualizing at this level of precision, could the patron understand what each painter planned to deliver, enabling him to compare proposals and to select the best option.
This was his plan, and he executed on this plan with the effectiveness that made him the man he was . Hundreds of the best painters submitted proposals. The patron carefully compared them all, and selected the best one. The selected painter painted the painting, flawlessly and exactly as described, and delivered the painting according to the FRP response timeline.
It was the best painting ever produced.
She was already root
Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.
Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.
Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.
I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.
Kabbalistic Nietzsche
The symbology I internalized close-reading Nietzsche maps harmoniously — neatly, even — to Kabbalah. Maybe I will write a Borgesian review of a fictional book by a mystic of unknown tradition named Ronald Challah, titled The Kabbalah of Zarathustra — a Zohar-parody commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The justest kid
A group of kids gathered in a playground after school every day to play and wrestle and do kid stuff.
The two strongest kids were bitter rivals. They fought almost every day.
One day the slightly stronger of the two kids had an epiphany.
He was tired of wasting his strength fighting his rival. It was not only pointless and destructive; it was immoral.
From now on he would use his strength responsibly — against strength itself. He would impose a regime of justice in the playground, where nobody could be stronger than any other.
So the strongest kid announced to the weaker kids that he would no longer be the strongest kid. From now on he would give his strength away. Whenever the weaker kids found themselves in a power disparity, his strength would be theirs. He would jump in and help the weaker kid prevail over the stronger one.
The former strongest kid, having renounced strength, would now be known as the justest kid.
The weaker kids loved this idea, and immediately rose up against the second-strongest kid. With the help of the justest kid, they beat his ass, and brought him down to their level.
And whenever the second-strongest kid — or whichever of the kids who became a little more powerful than the others — tried to attack the justest kid, they all viewed this as what it truly was: an attack on justice itself.
Indeed, wherever things became even slightly unequal or hinted at injustice, the justest kid stepped in and gave away his strength, and with the enthusiastic cooperation of the other kids, quickly reestablished perfect equality and justice.
And the justest kid’s plan worked.
Everywhere he looked, he saw only justice and equality.
And the kids discovered that they too loved equality and justice, and preferred it greatly over the brutal and abusive struggle for power that formerly dominated their playground.
Protected: The Asterisk
Poetizing Poesis
This morning I read Graham Holston-Barbeque’s “Poetizing Poesis: Concatenating the Impenetrably Imagistic and the Impenetrably Technical by Use of Colons in every Title of Every Scholarly Paper from the Nineteen Eighties to the Present”.
It is by far the most compelling argument for Post-Colonism I have read.
Everso II
Having broken free of the bolts that gripped my skull and held me in place, I turned away from the glaring screen and began to grope in the nothingness around me — that off-screen nowhere where nothing happens. As the blindness gradually abated, I could see silhouettes and shadows cast against the ambient glow of the screen. I felt the edges of objects around me, wrapping my fingers around their contours and comprehending what they were and how they were situated relative to one another within this space. But as I explored further, beyond where light could reach, I found dark edgeless surfaces that could only be touched but not defined. I sought the limits of this space, and finally apprehended that it was an inner surface, which comprehended me in every dimension, confining me and all I could comprehend within its own interior.
The cartophiles
Many of us are like lovers of maps and mapmaking who have never traveled outside our own room. We pore over our maps and draw up our own atlases, but we have never seen any place that wasn’t presented to as an image as flat as a map. Our maps are made out of words, and even images are midased into hieroglyphs when touched by our wordeyes.
Hemlock candidates
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.
The tragedy of Thomas Bachmann, chemist-chef
Thomas Bachmann’s unmatched brilliance in both chemistry and the culinary arts could have earned him lasting fame in either field. The fusion of these prodigious talents in his pioneering work on taste chemistry secured his place in the annals of science. But what made Tom Bachmann a household name — what, at his apogee, made his miraculous creations the sole subject of conversation at every table and in every forum—was his penultimate triumph, his most original creative leap. It was this very leap that propelled him to his tragic apotheosis — and his fall.
Let’s begin our story where it becomes interesting to non-technical readers, the point where Bachmann first became known to the general public. Over several decades of taste chemistry work, Bachmann’s understanding of taste had grown so thorough, so refined, so deeply internalized, that he discovered he could “sight-read” chemical analyses and imaginatively taste whatever the data depicted. Videos began to circulate of him reading dry tables of chemical formulas and translating them into lyrically vivid descriptions of sumptuous dishes. But it was no freak-show curiosity. His poetic expression stirred imaginations, moved hearts, and whetted appetites in a way the world had never experienced.
For Tom himself, this ability was a source of new satisfaction — and, if he wasn’t careful, pain. Academic papers took on an overwhelmingly aesthetic dimension. He found he could no longer read literature outside his own field, because the tastes conjured by most chemistry papers were unbearable to his imagination’s sensitive palate, often making him gag or vomit. He found he had to avert his eyes from the periodic table. But within his own discipline, he discovered new delight in analyses of delicious foods. Reading a well-executed analysis of a meal from one of the world’s finest restaurants, he could experience it himself with undiminished pleasure.
Here began Bachmann’s journey beyond science into an art entirely his own. He began having spontaneous insights for improving dishes he read about — and he could experience these improvements simply by editing the reports and rereading them. Just as Beethoven could read scores and hear them in his mind’s ear years after going deaf, chef-chemist Thomas Bachmann could compose new tastes on paper and savor them on his mind’s tongue, even before preparing the physical dishes — which, when finally prepared, matched precisely what he had imagined.
Improvement became innovation. Innovation became genius. And soon, his genius birthed entirely new genres of cooking — cuisines so original, so otherworldly, that they made difference among traditional cultural cuisines seem insignificant. Critics and connoisseurs from Paris to Tokyo to Limbourg hailed his creations as daring, sublime, flawless. Entirely new universes of taste poured forth from Bachman’s boundless imagination. The world was gripped. No other art form mattered anymore. He was bigger than Jesus Christ times the Beatles times a million.
But then Thomas Bachmann began to conceive tastes that were physically impossible to produce — and he ceased trying. His greatest work existed only on paper, accessible only to the rare disciples who had followed his path and developed the ability to taste-read. For everyone else, his finest work was beyond reach.
Bachmann himself, his tongue ruined by the ecstasies of ideal tastes, lost all appetite for real food. To avoid the depressing anticlimax of eating, he began receiving nutrition intravenously. His inventions became not only impossible, but increasingly dangerous — each more delicious, and more deadly, than the last. He was tormented, day and night, by vivid fantasies of toxic chemical combinations: flavors of unimaginable, world-transforming beauty that could be experienced only once, fleetingly, a micro-instant before death.
At last, he was found dead at his laboratory kitchen table, a look of rapture flash-frozen on his face. He had tasted his own highest art, his swan song. Several of his disciples, upon reading his final composition and declaring it his magnum opus, also succumbed to the same fate. It was decided that all surviving copies of his greatest recipe would be destroyed. His handwritten original was sealed in a canister and locked in a vault, never again to be tasted by mind or tongue.
The temporalite
There is a type of person everyone will recognize.
Everyone recognizes him because there is one of him at all times in every social circle.
This kind of person wakes up one day and realizes that this truth and this reality which seems so spatially, temporally, metaphysically capacious is the slenderest experiential thread, fed through the tiniest eye of a needle: I, here, now.
This allegedly infinitely capacious and enduring universe, filled with so many people, places, things and events, is just a film reel, and at each moment, the entirety of reality is confined to one celluloid square made entirely of mind. We watch square after square after square, and our memory creates a vast world of space, time, truth and history.
As tiny 6-year-old kids we go to school and sit in desks, and are trained to perpetually remember (re-member) a world where brains are the organs of mind, where history happened in the past, where science and mathematics precisely describes what actually exists and how reality actually behaves, where some actions, beliefs and attitudes are bad and other actions, beliefs and attitudes are good, and so on and so on.
The thread glides through the needle’s eye. The celluloid squares are projected upon the screen. Soon we are fixated and immersed in a story that is so real to us that we stop noticing our own role in that story. We lose ourselves in an infinite eternity of reality.
Inevitably this person we all know gets really excited, starts talking loudly and rapidly and obscurely, striking prophetic poses and their company becomes intolerable* — and this goes on indefinitely, until that person finally realizes that this happens all the time to huge numbers of people, and each one of them is the first to whom it has happened in the story they are living.
Note: I call this phenomenon “metannoying”. See what I did there? Metanoia + annoying? I need to submit this word to my nonexistent newsletter dedicated to disseminating newly minted words of this kind. The newsletter is called The Reportmanteau.
The eternalite
Once upon a time there was a man who no longer existed in time.
He experienced only the manifestation of eternal archetypes in what, within the limitations of mind occur in time, but freed from mind, eternally was-am-will-be.
He did not always experience things this way. As a small child he was, like the rest of us, caught in the universal time-delusion. He, like the rest of us, lived his life as if it were an unfolding personal story.
But then, one day, an epiphany came to him, eternity irrupted, and from that moment to his death, time was no more.
His friends, still imprisoned in time, witnessed his temporal exit with uncomprehending awe. None of their lives would ever be the same — never again.
His life, however, liberated from time, had always been the same, and always would be.