John Shirley Blogthoughts…rants…irony…fiction…observation…

I’m in a time machine that has taken me from the year 1985 to the year 2013; from a thirty year old man to a sixty year old one. It has taken me there at the rate of one second per second. (Lucky for me it wasn’t, say, thirty minutes per second.)

This time machine is stuck on “forward”. The control stick is…stuck. If it went backwards, though, I’d be quite disoriented, backing up through my life. And when could I stop?

I was, yes, in the time machine before 1985. But until then I didn’t know I was in one. I couldn’t perceive it.

Picture lines of people, for the sake of this image one every fifty feet, and pull back, and it’s a grid, crossing lines, endlessly ramifying. And one of the people shivers, and blinks, and then announces, for example, “The Frazmastat is a problem, causing congestion, and should be eliminated.” A visible pulse through the air carries this to the next in line, one or another way, and the next person says, “The Frazmastat is a problem, causing congestion and should be eliminated.” This is not a game of ‘telephone’ so they get the basic info right. Then a pulse comes from another direction and a person announces, “The Frazmastat is not a problem, it’s a good thing.” Someone reacts by repeating the same words, and then another. Then someone else reacts by stating “No, the Frazmastat is a problem, causing congestion, and should be eliminated.” That is passed on. Then the contrary is returned. Eventually the back and forth about the Frazmastat dies down. Then someone shudders, and blinks, and announces, “The Weeblocken is good, though there’s a downside.” Someone else shudders and blinks and repeats this, down a diagonal line. And someone else and so on. A little later, “The Weeblocken is bad, and there’s no upside…” Decades pass. . .a hand comes and unplugs some of the people, and plugs in others. . .

Someone shudders and makes an announcement…

I was sitting on the beach, in an ordinary state of mindfulness meditation this morning, feeling wind on my face, listening to breakers, trying, with intermittent success, to keep my mind in what is called stillness. This stillness, which is alluded to in many spiritual traditions, is not about being in some kind of trance state, or sudden internal deafness. It’s just keeping the mind quiet so it can hear the world speak (not in any supernatural way, in a quite natural way), much the way we stop talking and focus on what the other person is saying, when we’re in a conversation. My visual imagination is strong, and it was stimulated to generate an image of myself sitting on the beach, with the atmosphere streaming around me, on the planet Earth, and the planetary view expanded so I saw (in my imagination) the planet with crisp pictorial clarity, complete with imagined weather in clouds, as if seen from orbit. I was also able to see myself on the beach in all this. Those people who claim to teach “out of body experiences” would say “Oh yes you’d traveled from your body for a moment”. No, I didn’t. My mind stayed in my body, it never left it. It was pure imagination, but it functioned at a high level because irrelevant input from my mind was stilled.

People who imagine OBE experiences have likely worked themselves up into a purely imaginative experience. They haven’t gone anywhere, except within their imaginations…The experience was, though, meaningful in other ways; it showed me my place in the scale of things. It was refreshing.

A number of people who started out rather lefty (David Mamet comes to mind) turned right-wing, conservative or “libertarian” when they accumulated a great deal of money to shelter from taxes. Some conservatives will say, “See? When you’ve got something to protect from taxation, you get common sense!” But not all wealthy people are like that. Warren Buffet is not a right winger. There are many wealthy people who remain progressive. George Clooney, for example, or Stephen King. If they make the shift to the right because they made money, it’s because they never had any real allegiance to progressivism–which is probably because they never had any real *inner compass*. They’re not psychopaths, or stupid–Mamet is certainly not stupid. They’re just selfish and morally shallow. So it was an easy transition for them.

Walking, I often look at the accidental arrangement of objects along the curb, or in an abandoned flowerbox, withered petals, random rocks, dead insects, skeletons of leaves, windblown trash, and think of Joseph Cornell and his Cornell boxes. It was William Gibson who first mentioned him to me. Cornell was a symbolist as well as a kind of abstract artist; found objects became abstract, yet framed in boxes became meaningful again, too. Japanese artists sometimes practice making random dots so they can paint the natural world with more truth. There is an intersection of the random and the arranged: within the theater of the mind. But it’s not just artificial superimposition, that feeling of the arranged in the random, it’s found music, visually represented. The detritus of the world comes alive, then.

Perhaps there’s no meaning but the meaning we create–that’s pure humanism, I suppose. Or perhaps there’s a higher meaning. I think there is–but it’s not a human meaning. It’s better than that. Cornell gives us glimpses.

And there’s drama in debris.

A Psychiatrist is listening to a manic, delusional patient who’s saying things like, “Why shouldn’t I be exuberant, anywhere and everywhere? They send me to talk to you because I glory in life, in myself, because I want to dance on tables? Because I know I can break through the boundaries of the universe? Why not ride exultation to the stars?” The psychiatrist is thinking that it’s ironic, his previous patient was a depressive older man, who’d said, “Life is a waiting room, for people my age, where we wait to be processed for death. We have accomplished all we can hope to, by our time of life; our friends and spouses are dead. Why live? Why go on? People are just waiting for us to go away anyhow.” The psychiatrist’s reminiscence is interrupted when the manic patient shouts, “I’ll show you that I can fly on wings of pure exultation!” And he throws himself through the window, the glass shattering, he falls ten stories…onto the depressive elderly patient, who’d been dawdling in the restroom on his way out. The falling manic patient kills the depressive patient and…survives because he fell on the older patient.

“Look!” he shouts to the psychiatrist! I have flown out a ten story window and lived!” But it becomes apparent that he’s broken his spine and all his bones, is quadriplegic, and he falls into a depression… What a curious synthesis, the psychiatrist thinks…

Maybe I should write it? NAHHHHHHH

When we first found ourselves at the event, we were lying about, and there were faces looking down at us. A little layer, we were crawling. Those who’d invited us to the event taught us to speak. We learned to stand up. Some were better taken care of by their hosts, than others. Some were abused. But the general consensus, when we asked one another what the event was, was something like, “This is a party you’ve been invited to. It began when you woke this morning. It ends late tonight; it ends after a period of grayness, then deepening darkness. Deep in the darkness, this party ends. We find our welcome wearing out. Until then there are many rooms, many things to see and do at the party. Some push close to the buffet; some are pushed away from it. Some create their own buffet…The party wears on. The music changes. Regularly, we lapse into a doze, perhaps on some sofa. Then we wake, though only partly, and wander through the party. We try to discuss its rooms, try to remember its entertainments, the events within the events. Despite rests, we get wearier, as the light grows grayer. The party darkens. Fatigue, and achiness, make it harder to move from one room to the next. We see other weary people at the party vanishing, snuffing out in smoke and ash. ‘Oh there goes Bill.’ …The party wears on, and wears out. Soon the party is over. So it seems to us. To others, it seems that we have vanished–in smoke and ash.”

“They can have my gun when they pry it from my…well, they’ll take my fingers when they pry my gun away because my fingers actually froze to the gun when I was out drunkenly chasing a squirrel when it was thirty below zero out…And yeah I thawed it out but they’re still stuck to the damn gun…I’d actually appreciate it if someone would pry the gun off and they can take my fingers too, they’re not much good anymore…

“Damn squirrel ran up a tree and just laughed at me…missed him eight times. Used up the whole clip.

“It was difficult to type this with the muzzle of a gun.”

I’ve often puzzled over some of the extremely immoral things that fairly ordinary people do. I could come up with examples from right here in the USA but the one that’s on my mind is, in some third world countries it’s fairly common to sell your children into indentured servitude, or even to sell them into sex slavery. It’s done by rather a lot of people, all of whom can’t be psychopathic monsters. How is that possible? Two mechanisms may be at work. Rationalization, obviously: “At least this way someone will feed them. They will survive. And I must think of my wife first.” But I suspect an even more potent cause is the fact that it now passes for custom there. When a few people did it, a few others said, they did it, so can I. And when it became relatively commonplace, that made it more commonplace. People can be quite kneejerk about the “they’re doing it, it’s our way” justification.

There’s something about conformity that helps suppress empathy and conscience. Once the sickness is part of a community, it becomes an apparent “solution” to the family’s food crisis, and the parents, desperate for a solution, tell themselves that this is an accepted solution. And somehow it allows them to mute their feelings for their children, just enough…