Devils and Details

The devil that is in details is not invited, but is almost always created by them.

One tries to do something. The very act creates consequences  One balks at doing anything.  Everything reels in the vacuum, the omission creates.

But what is really happening?  Why is this so?

And if the devil resides in the details, where are the damn angels?

Most people working with intention -- trying to live examined lives, looking for opportunities to help -- come to realize that this play of consequences is always complex.  We rarely compass what we are doing.   Nothing is ever "accomplished" or completed, but it falls apart or entropy savages the working parts. Action is what you "try" to do.  And you cannot just sit there either, just "being".  Because you have no idea where you came from, and you'll get hungry and sleepy.  You'll just be "trying" to Be, and you might as well "try" to do something with it.

Perhaps we should get to know our devils. One reason science has been such a powerful tool is that it is not content with the abstractions of the process, but lays out the steps. By measuring intervals, weights, and dimensions, and by identifying the constituent parts, we are able to control the demons.  Although the devil is still living in the complexity, the scoundrel can be analyzed--pulling apart his parts and appearances.

And notice the relationship between the "abstract" devil, and the details we think of as the perceived reality?  There is this play between what is not real and what is real, where the real things create a piffer in the mind, and next thing you know, your mind is now distracted.  And the distracting unreal thing held in your mind  becomes more real than the things you are holding in your hands.

Remembering...how everything is familiar but little is left.

Journal of Forgetting. September 23, 2008


1. I never forget anything. At the least, I certainly don't remember forgetting anything. What I learned was so small, so skeletal, so spacial. A patch of steam already cooled. The wisp of smoke rising imperceptibly, caught in the lungs with a small cough.

2. I have no regrets. At the least, I have no regrets that I regret. I owe this redemption to the fact that there is so little I remember to regret.

3. The inhabitant within this body is not claiming it; it has not tilled the soil, or soiled its till; it has not homesteaded itself; it has lightly lived, as if free; not formidable, not a threat, and not very familiar. It was new every day, and in every day dream. Within the bounds of its dreams at night, it was a surprise.

4. Most people are a danger to themselves. They raise up a Golden Horde of ghosts against themselves. They fret over each passerby, not realizing, they ARE the passerby.

5. I have forgotten more than I ever knew. There was music – I heard it played, and then it was gone.

6. Why is everything “strangely familiar” and infinitely wonderful? A “foreign exchange student” is always a member of the family living in the house.

7. Why is there curiosity?

8. I vaguely remember everything. Deja vu is a bell which rings across the symphony of my life. As I hear it, I remember what it was and anticipate what it will be, now.

9. I remember, and I succumb. I forget and folly is victorious. I find myself constantly in a victory parade looking neither left nor right, leading to isolation.

10. Between fight and flight, between amygdala and cortex, between perpetual question and instantaneous answer, I remember not knowing.

11. There is a place to sit in every situation, especially when you are mentally on your feet. There is a dance, you can feel it, especially when at rest inside it. You can gather the zone of “interest” around you, breathing into the spell of presence, the attention of attention, appointing the inctus in the morphological space created by the rhythm of conversations and glances. The facial geography opening and closing curtains and continents of discovery and reassurance.

12. What other people think they are thinking is a gong. It waits to be struck. They wheel it out and you can either ignore it and hurt their feelings, make them feel unimportant or irrelevant. Or you can strike it hard and shatter or offend them. Or you can give it an appreciative bong of attention, and they will resonate gently, and lives will go on in this vibration, this “ing-ing” of the gong.

13. There is no such thing as “conversation”. Communication is an abstract and theoretical concept. The worm – the world’s great conqueror – is always stretching, ready to contract or extend, sometimes immediately in response to a stimulus, and sometimes simply as a result of being able to.

14. The key to understanding communication is to not get locked into the ideological trap of dyadism. Understand that the act of speaking and listening is almost never stimulus/response, A interacting with B. It is almost always a tribe encountering another tribe, everything interacting with everything, and nothing being nothing, and the passage of time drawn across the many strings of the bowed universe.

15. Suddenly someone is talking about something. Extraordinary.

16. All understanding has a hard shell and a soft underbelly.

17. Once you define your terms you have defeated any hope for communication. You have begun to spin a web. You are casting a concrete net and you will only catch the lies and flies whose interest is carrion. Misunderstandings will be laid and maggots born. The nibblers will have their way.

18. I remember I have work to do. I am here for some purpose. This is clear to me, and I have surrounded myself with obligations freely undertaken with an informed understanding of the foreseeable consequences. But this gets ugly. Now I am surrounded by the obligations of my purposed commitments, and they imprison me. I am no longer free. And the rut of commitments cut me off from the surrounding possibilities, of which I am no longer aware. I am walled off. My purpose has blinded me to what I can do.

19. I do not know what I am doing, how I can do it, or why I am doing it.

20. A Singularity is always the result of time working on a plurality.

21. I tell anyone who will listen that communication is impossible.

The Gleaners of Faith in the Fields of No God

It cannot be said any simpler: Without Faith, we are not Human. But of course, there is No God. There is only the abundance of Nothing to have Faith In.

In a letter written one year before his death, Einstein wrote: "The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and produce of human weaknesses...". That letter, curiously sold at auction in London on May 15, 2008 for $404,000. Somehow this controversy, and this price, further reflects upon our wont for "childish superstition". We gladly and continue to pay dearly for it.

Turning to another milestone in Faith, the Templeton Foundation published the responses to its call: "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Most of the respondents did not fall upon the sword of their Yes. The more we indulge Science, the more we find ourselves Believers. Ecce Homo. Of course, Science has left no place at all for even a remnant of "the God of our Fathers". That part of what we once took to be real is gone.

Finally, it is clearly wrong to claim that "God cares" or "Science is neutral". There is no tenable position which either supports or finds use for a "divinity" which is moral, or a science which is "immoral". The reality is that "God" is demonstrably indifferent, and that Science has overwhelming moral valence.

Increasingly, we look to Physics, or the science of Volition, for guidance in what is right and wrong. History and Archeology are filled with blind alleys into which our forebears thronged in attempts to "follow" a revenant ghost with a promise of righteousness. That was clearly the wrong track. No moral precepts have survived the practitioners of religion.

There is, and always has been, a rationale for "listening to one's conscience" -- one's body/mind, the sine qua non, the interactive social connectivity of our lips and our cities, our eyes and our judgment, our walk in space and time. Moral fiber is not molded from Olympian spit. The steel of a man, the eagerness of a woman, the bold curiosity of child, the wonder of wisdom across cultures and generations, are all artifacts of being human.

The Walls of the Present

I remain in the generation of my Generation. We are all "here" and "now" in different places and times -- everywhere at all times. When I see someone being here and now, I have to suppress laughter: a human being fools no one pretending to have no history or hopes.

Edmund Wilson (b. 1895), that Red Bank critic born of an attorney who went insane and a mother who went deaf, provides a succinct explanation for Why:

When describing the impact of Yeats, Proust, and Joyce -- his selection of authors was somewhat arbitrary but served the immediate context of his review at that moment -- he wrote that they "break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art."

Wake us. Exalt the trying. Open the infinity of art. Think of origins, middles, and never-endings.