Facade and Reflection

Facade and Reflection

The façade pictured in the image at right belongs to the second and third floor of a building on Grant Avenue in San Francisco which I photographed in February 2003. That façade is NOT an element of the lovely Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at which I had the pleasure of helping to staging a conference in the 1980s.

A fun attraction of the Peabody continues to be the twice-daily march of the Peabody Ducks to and from a fountain in the center of the hotel’s main lobby. Another fun but lesser-known uniqueness of the hotel is the “Lead Duck” pin. If you are wondering what a pin made of lead and shaped like a duck could be about you are already leaning in the direction I hope this post will take you.

The pin is given to key folks who are participating in the staging of an event at the hotel. It lets the hotel staff know that the wearer is to be accorded special assistance if requested because they are an event lead…er. Pleasantly aware that “lead” has at least two meanings, and potential humor can arise from a meaning switch, when the hotel’s delightful convention manager presented me with my pin she declared me a “Lead Duck” – pronounced “led” as in the heavy, bluish-gray, soft, ductile metal. I remain very amused.

I love words that can mean more than one thing. From words soulful like tear, to words colorful (another word that also has a couple of meanings) like booty. Which brings me to façade and reflection and the image above.

I think of my own experience of my own experience as a layer-like zone vacillating in a conical space between unconsciousness and consciousness. Imagine on the left side of the screen an immense globe of swirling unconscious material, each mote of which is related to every other mote by a gazillion associative connections. On the right side of that globe imagine a conical space…a transition area the base of which projects from and interacts with the swirling unconscious stuff. And emerging to the right from the apex of the cone is a line of thoughts, formed when the unconscious stuff moves and is processed through the cone into a linguistic-like conscious thread that allows me to purchase a jar of pickles, open it, and tell you about it.

Regarding that conical space, I think of myself as sort of a band or layer that moves back and forth between the unconscious base and the conscious apex. Often hovering nearer the base than the apex. Especially lately since I’ve been willfully courting a state that, with increasing frequency, allows what I see there to linger as images that can be recalled. Images from a depth within the cone that precedes the point where one or another related meaning gets designated as the next bead in the linier conscious thread – from a depth at which differentiation between things has not yet occurred.

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Stewball

Stewball

I often sing while cooking and doing the dishes. For three consecutive evenings in early April 2024 while preparing for and cleaning up after dinner I serenaded myself over and over with a song called “Stewball”. It’s about a race horse and not a particular edifying ditty, but it seemed to have taken hold of me,

I generally sing several songs during each dinner prep and dish-washing session, so by evening three, having sung nothing but “Stewball” I had to ask myself, “Why? Why? When there are so many songs you could be singing, why Stewball?” As I lay in bed that night waiting for sleep the question was still in my thoughts, and it seemed as if the melody was playing softly somewhere nearby.

The next day I rode the J Church MUNI line inbound to Downtown San Francsico. As we entered the underground segment of the journey, I noticed that a pleasant looking fellow with curly gray hair and wearing a well-worn flaxen coat was sitting near the rear door of the car softly playing sort of jazzy flamenco on a venerable guitar. I got up and sat near him explaining that I wanted to hear better. He smiled and played a little louder, meandering through several melodies and then…you guessed it…he began to sing “Stewball”. By the time he got to the last verse I was sufficiently recovered from my muddled thoughts to sing along.

The minstrel does not appear to be a phantom. I have bumped into him twice subsequent to the Stewball encounter, both times above ground and in broad daylight. His name is Jerry. He tells me that he often plays from 1 to 2 PM on weekends at Bird and Becket Books and Records in SF’s Glen Park neighborhood.

If you found what you just read more interesting and/or amusing than annoying I encourage you to check out my 2012 post The Rabbit of Synchronicity.

And for your listening pleasure, The Hollies give you Stewball.

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Dream 1/23/24

Dreaming

The location is a drab, dimly lit, open office interior.  Everything wears a layer of rusty grime.  I can’t see them, but I know others are within earshot.   My boss, a sandy-haired man in his forties, wrinkled long-sleeve white shirt and khaki pants, is standing turned away from me, speaking calmly but loud enough to be heard by anyone on the floor that might choose to listen.   He is berating me.  Stating in well-chosen words that I am not capable of being on the same page with him because I am not smart enough to understand his ideas and what he is trying to do.

I’m sitting on the floor in a dark narrow hallway.  My assistant is sitting across from me saying he thinks my boss is fond of me and the harsh rebuke was for show to make people believe that I am not aligned with him…that he is trying to protect me because he knows his activities have gotten him into trouble and he does not want to drag me down with him.

My assistant reminds me that I was hired because I am a poor subject for hypnosis.  Because when hypnotized the eye of my awareness turns inward and I ignore the instructions the hypnotist gives.

I sense that I have a mental impairment.  Something that inclines me to prefer not to speak.

My assistant and I exit the building leaving tracks in newly fallen snow.  My assistant turns to the left and walks away leaving a trail of footprints behind him.

I see myself, viewed from above and behind my boss who is watching me from a window on the second floor.  I turn to my right and walk away leaving a trail of footprints, but there are no footprints in the snow in the direction my assistant departed.

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Brittle Husks / Hollywood 1973

Brittle Husks

Imagine you and I are having a conversation and it occurs to you that what I’m saying does not seem entirely genuine. Perhaps you find yourself wondering, “What does he really think?” And if you asked, I’d probably try to come clean, but I think that even if I threw myself into the task with abandon and total sincerity whatever I said would be as vapor rising from a vast ocean swarming with life below the surface of consciousness. Strictly speaking, I think I’d only be able to say what I think I think. In other words, I think that much of what I’m thinking at any given time is a feeble work in progress emerging in response to immediate conscious circumstances profoundly influenced by a tumultuous underlying universe of unconscious material.

In the movies we often see a whiteboard to which photos of bad folks have been taped, and lines drawn on the board between the photos indicate who is related to who. And sometimes in the movies we also see a basement or attic or garage where a loner has covered the walls, and perhaps even the floor and ceiling, with photos, news clippings and scribbled notes, connected by a dense web of threads that tie together pieces of an improbable conspiracy. I think both the detective’s careful plotting and the loner’s largely incomprehensible web are different flavors of metaphor for the way the human mind connects mental material, only the web of interconnecting threads within any individual’s mind is millions of times denser, with literally every scrap of mental material connected through millions of hops to every other scrap.

I think a detective’s whiteboard is especially metaphoric of the mental activity of someone who has developed the ability to willfully ignore connections that don’t seem pertinent to whatever conscious task is at hand…especially tasks that involve teamwork and require agreement among the participants regarding the basic details of their shared perceived world and what’s to be accomplished and how.

And then there is the poor devil, often characterized as “a conspiracy nut”, whose ability to ignore mental connections is somewhat limited. For such folks, I think, no matter what is being considered, connections are included to various clusters of mental material that have acquired a sort of gravitational pull. And that pull grows stronger each time it is indulged, which is often. In extreme cases I think even when “a conspiracy nut” is discussing the price of tomatoes their words and actions are leavened with ideas about pyramidal structures on the surface of Mars or the suppression of reports of Big Foot sightings.

I will cop to a certain amount of conspiracy nuttiness since it seems to me my understanding of myself and my relations with everything I’m consciously aware of drifts on a sea of unconscious material, every iota of which is connected to every other iota. Most of the time, like a detective earnestly working a case with like-minded colleagues, I willfully ignore all but a relatively few connections. And those most frequently favored connections find expression in habits of behavior that others perceive as my personality. But at other times, like while working on the image above, I think webs of connections usually ignored find overt expression, in this case through arrangements of pixels that I was moved to set in place to a significant degree under the influence of lots of unconscious stuff.

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Sky Lizard Revisited

Sky Lizard

The 2022 Winter Solstice image at right is my final collaboration with the extraordinary woman I had the marvelous good fortune to share a life with since our high school days in the 1960s.  Throughout the six-months during which the solstice image evolved, she guided the effort with insights and inspirations around color choices, perspective, figure proportion and posture…  All the fine stuff.  And she poked me, mercilessly, when necessary, to eliminate contradictions – anything her sensation instincts told her was not true to the overall unity of the composition.  But dearest in my recollection is her delight when something we’d noodled over together began to manifest on the screen.  That’s what I will miss the most.  Her delight.

The image background is adapted from Basil Valentine’s 1671 “Table of Chemical & Philosophical Characters.”  We thought it would be fun to suggest a point along the arc of evolving human consciousness from which the foreground image might have spontaneously emerged.  The context.  And we tinkered with the parchment tone a lot, looking for a hue that seemed to push the bluish beasty upward.

The foreground image…the Sky Lizard…is a subject that has been writhing around pleasantly in my thoughts pretty much throughout my life.  I wrote about some of my previous engagement with the creature in a 2012 blog post.  I wonder as time passes whether I will be able to feel that with the rendering presented here I have fulfilled my responsibility to bring the unlikely being fully into the world.


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QBrain

CQBrain

I know a wonderful woman, M, who manages a machine shop.  One of her employees, D, who M has known long enough to think of as a friend, frequently expressed extreme annoyance at M’s insistence that all employees must wear masks while at work.  D contracted Covid and got very sick.  She survived, but for many weeks after the primary symptoms subsided, she was super weak and unable to concentrate.   M asked D why she had not gotten vaccinated and had not worn a mask while out and about in the world.  D said she had done her research and was convinced that the Covid “scare” was a hoax, so there was no way that she was gonna catch it.

When I heard this, what especially amazed me was D’s report that she “had done her research.”  What “research” could possibly satisfy someone that Covid is a hoax?  It turns out the authority D had consulted was Facebook.  M is a super smart person, and I’m sure anyone that works in her shop…and especially anyone she regards as a friend…could not be a complete idiot.   But Facebook as the authority for how to respond to a pandemic that had already at that time killed more than a million Americans!!!!!  I had to wonder, is D out of her f—ing mind?  So I also “did my research” and some thoughts that occurred to me follow here.

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Very Bad Judgement

Coverplate

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s tempting to speculate about the motives of the justices who pushed that ruling through. But I focus here upon what I believe to be an overt circumvention of the fundamental function of law in America.

As reported by NPR:

Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”

For Justice Alito to speak of “an abuse of judicial authority” is ironic at best because his participation in the overturning of Roe v. Wade places him radically at odds with the core function of the Constitution, which is, I believe, to guard against tyranny.

I think the American Revolution was necessary to bring to an end the lording of one group over another. And I think the Constitution is a remarkably lucid attempt to establish a foundation upon which a society can evolve that’s primary virtue is that it guards against one group bullying and otherwise tormenting another. (Racial injustice in America remains a monumental societal failing in this regard.)

Above all other considerations, I think the initial gating factor when determining whether something is constitutional must be does it open the door for one group to impose their will upon another, which overturning Roe v. Wade absolutely does. The license to commit acts of aggression against women which that overturning has set in motion is, to my way of thinking, a horrifying example of the general drift in all aspects of human interaction toward self-indulgent sadism.

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Errabundis

Errabundis Cover

If you haven’t already read Errabundis by Carol Budinger, I hope you will consider giving it a go.  It is beautiful, original and very satisfying.  It is also a deeply refreshing counterbalance to the wallow-in-meanness themes that pervade much current epic fantasy.

Errabundis is a love story on personal, social and cosmic levels.  In the face of great peril, through their care and kindness, the core characters discover who they truly are and that what they do matters.  Their actions not only save their world, but also change the underpinnings of all existence for the better.  A fine, timely and comforting work.

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The Errabundis website

Self-Indulgence and Sadism

Coverplate

WARNING: This post contains toxic material not suitable for parents of young children or others who may wish to remain optimistic about the future.

In the last chapter of his marvelous and frightening book “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy”, Tom Nichols observes:

But if we have learned anything in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, it is that people will think hard – or they will convince themselves that they have tried to do so – and still come up with incomprehensible and reckless anti-democratic conclusions … if the citizens of modern democracies were the kind of people willing to engage in the kind of honest reflection that leads to a commitment to political maturity, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

My reading of Professor Nichols’s book suggests to me that he holds out hope that Americans and citizens in other democracies can still decide not to destroy themselves…that we can think our way off the road to ruin.  I’m less optimistic.

The primary reason for my pessimism is that I think human consciousness, like the biological machine that carries it, continues to evolve.  And that an ever-increasing number of human beings are now possessed of a form of consciousness that manifests itself in selfish and fundamentally sadistic behavior.  In what follows I’ll refer to such folks as “self-indulgent sadists”. 

I hypothesize that way back in time the fundamental human experience of itself was as a group, but since long before recorded history the trend in the evolution of human consciousness has been toward increased self-awareness, with the result that now LOTS of human beings experience themselves as entirely individual.  These are the folks I think of as self-indulgent sadists because it is inevitable that someone who experiences everything only through the lens of their own feelings and ideas must live in a state of constant, crazy-making frustration.  They can’t have everything they want.  They are constantly confronted with ideas they don’t agree with.  And a great many of their own ideas form around the day in, day out frustration of their desires.

People who are constantly frustrated, and self-indulgent sadists almost always are, seem to live in a state of perpetual anger.   Since their exclusively individual experience is the only experience they know, they are unable to imagine that others’ self-experience is different.  Consequently, they are certain that whether others admit it or not, everyone else is also deeply, perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment.  This assumption…this projection on others that they are all also perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment…makes anyone who challenges them in any way “a lying, weaselly jerk who thinks he’s smarter than me, conspiring with other lying, weaselly jerks who think they are smarter than me, to try to keep me from having what I want. What I should have!” 

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23.5 Degrees of Sorrow

23.5 Degrees

As I look back upon my own blog posts since July 2016 when Trump was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate I realize how much of my thinking is tinted with ruin, gloom, and a general lack of optimism. The habits of thought that contribute to this grim perspective include my assumption that we make the world in our image, and that the trajectory of the evolution of human consciousness is skewing sharply toward self-destruction.

I think these events are intertwined:

  • Half of America had come to think that an overtly selfish and self-absorbed president was the way to go.
  • The human community knows it is destroying its own habitat and willfully continues to do so.

It’s the behavior of the criminally insane, but a LOT of people are 100% on board with it, passionately endorsing the destruction of institutions that nurture human well-being and the ecosystem that makes human life possible.

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