Cicadian Rhythms

Outside in the heat, sweating in the shade after civilizing my swamp (the pool is a bit green after a long repose, lookin’ out fuh gatuhs), and listening to the pulse of the Cicadian choral. It's flags and trumpets and signal fires, ridiculously more efficient and rich than what we've used...though it appears we finally caught up (?) this century. An ebb and flow of collective information passing…”haven’t seen your kind in 13 years, how ya been? Good, wanna mate? Maybe, seen any good food? You bet…just fly screaming in any direction till you hit something...and hey, you need a new wardrobe.” High decibel unmanaged perfection. Good times for Entomophagists; nature’s apology for hard scrabble days.

Makes me wonder…we give and get information in strange new ways that seem more insectile every day, e.g. the Internet as a uniform non-discrete medium for everything the tv/phone/newspapers/magazines (conversations intentionally omitted) could ever do. Some folks look askance on the last things, analog and face-to-face; too much television (aka big monitors) or too much phone (chat and email), but get the same set of requirements met through the keyboard and monitor while also substituting safe-harbor social networking for the brutal realities and effort of visitin'. Cro-Magnon looking down and out at Neanderthals? Maybe, but a word to the EEMH's out there...you're next.

What happens when we start to make use of air/water/food for digital information delivery? That seems to be the 2^nd dream (the first is wireless transmission of power, you know, like the sun); to pass information without stone or wood, dance or voice, keyboard or monitor, to instantly add information to the nervous system with no assimilation requirement through the (antiquated?) sensory apparatus we grew up with. Little mechanical and/or organic bugs swimming in a soup of possibility, sharing via micro in the macro...do the 'Information Age' cultural druthers become as passé as pamphlets and radio? Not implausible considering what we know about the nervous system…I think Kim Stanley Robinson and some others have this fictionally figured out (Gibson and the like have a less plausible mean-step mythology, Tofflerian in its naiveté’ to me, more sexy than real): flood the environment with microscopic elements that form information matrices which communicate in near real-time to us and each other, nanobugs that can go right up your nose or down your throat, pass the blood-brain barrier and drop code directly onto the cortex. Helluva lot more complex than that but neurotransmitters are increasingly teaching us the necessary cant, and while we speak like it like a brain-damaged wildling today, we may learn to compose verse and song in the next few generations.

So consider learning and entertainment, news and knowledge all offered quietly, privately to each individual as they navigate the soup-streams of our over-populated ecosystems, quiet whispers of more and better, latest and greatest seductions, waves of popular and necessary rolling across the mass of us, in cicadian rhythm. The ‘do not call list’ is for Luddite holdouts and the irrelevant, the economics should be…well, the same as economics have always been.  You know that death is the result of information failures at the cellular level right? My guess is the channel focused on that 'ol chestnut will be in some rarefied air indeed. S'under discussion already, sign the yearbook.

A Little Less Light

Hatred…hold on, don’t run off, I have some ruminations about this, but the safeties are on.

I used to think hate was simple; emotional charge around loss, mix in some significance fear, self-pity, and la! Hatred. Just Love’s absence? An empty heart? Love’s twisted visage? Most treatments I’ve seen minimize it that way, marginalize it, neuter it…wishful thinking I feel. Now, a little more well-acquainted: Powerful and motivational, leaches the bearer and destroys everything it touches but oh so seductive, warm balm when you don’t like your outcomes. It has its own living bloom, it’s not like spiteful apathetic hurts or cynicism or contempt or rage or resentment…parts of the whole, but it’s the sum of those that rears up as a composite new driving force. Folk pretend to it, but screaming fear isn’t even a meaningful part of what we’re talking about.*

Driving…soft way to describe the navigation and liberation hate allows, probably its evolutionary purpose. Boundaries? fuck ‘em. Ethics? those too. Limits? suspended, possibilities without fear’s weaker face; all offense, you just need one chance to cut. Consequences? You’re the bearer of consequences, the subject not the object. In the full flood of hatred, a new/different/exclusive fund of power is available…you can deny that if you want, but you’re naïve as hell and are dismissed from any defensive position…if you don’t get this you don’t know what you’re doin’ on the wall.

So take all that, add imagination, focus, strategic filters, capability, and what do you get? A Nightmare trotting forward, waiting for a little knee pressure to drive the charge home. Think of it this way, if you could create a living intelligent tangle of eager hating thorns, bright and black with poisonous horror, edged and barbed to stab/rend/tear, a remorseless/ growing/wrapping/biting/strangling/killing urge that had one compulsion…how terrible would you be when that rooted in the loam of your consciousness/heart/center/soul? Fed and stretching out for what it sees, what it wants? Hungry, willing, cunning, nurturing, patient, explosively energetic…sounds like a winning formula for a horrific trial.

Lots of material out there on this from humanist fiction to lab studies. David Kupelian treats it well, but that stuff is usually about a childhood inculcated religious or social intolerance, anti-Semitism, women-hating, etc…not the intimate personal kind meant here Note: he seems to be a little preoccupied with the Islamic folk even though hate has no language or flag. There is a tacit acceptance of the pleasure-inducing qualities of relaxation during heightened emotional  states hovering around the clinical treatments; if pleasure and pain are the foundations of our behavior…you do the frictional math on Iago's purpose.

It’s a lot like lust I think. Channeling the initial urge, encouraged and supported by dark whispers/visions that visit in fantasy in the deep sleepless night…eventually that urge is a welcome, warm companion, always ready to come to you and burn doubt and inhibition away for a while, insinuating into emotional habits and muscle memory, laying the foundation for a few seconds of unconscious movement that will resolve everything (that seems to matter till you’re done), promising smooth and effective execution of purpose. It’s not easy, not  at all simple to sustain;  you have to avoid collapsing the state vectors early and wasting it, keep the side-effects under wraps (surprise matters)...the key to that old black magic is deliberation, to be deliberate, rituals of exponential 'not' until providence shows her teeth.

Anyhoo, don’t touch yourself there, you’ll go blind.

*“To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.”

-Aristotle

Idle Murmurs

My cheeky blogmother told me once that I should talk about myself here only in a one-sided ratio favoring shut-the fuck-up-about-yourself-you-narcissistic-journaling-hack…well, she said it much nicer than that, but you get the drift. Not much of a cherry-picking current events guy though; until the history worm gets to process factsoil I find it sterile of meaning, even if hubristic need-to-learn-before-you-teach(ers) pretend to have the future sussed out from their little pool of data points and face-against-the-glass perspective. If I did event regurgitation, it would look like:

"Bin Laden died yesterday, slain by a never ending revenge culture (mine, proud),  some well-trained operators (go Navy, doubly proud), and a big-ass reward (hard currency, what it was really about). Now he’s a martyr? Probably. Did he matter anymore? No, but he owed. Good riddance to him and any of his confederates we were fortunate enough to spray with steel-jacketed consequences, hope we didn’t lose a single good man to destroy a bad one…duty though if we did."

Eh...

Have food blogged my way around a bit to add some taste. Writing about food is easy, about all sensual things actually. Immersive experience, sexual charge, the touch of weather, vistas seen; describing the world as it passes through you is usually worth a few lines, though I’ve seen some insensitive mimicry that’s transparently a copied look-at-me rather than an honest look-at-this. It’s hard to share what you've got without getting painted with that brush, so kept down.

Travelogue, sure, the road version of sensual translation. I have a big trip coming up, Uzbekistan by way of Istanbul (Turkish Air, cheapest first-class), Tajikistan, maybe some Iran. There should be enough input to have some pleasant output, and I’m looking forward to the journey. I’m going alone cause it’s dangerous? and adventuring isn’t really for everybody. There’s something about that Silk Road geography that captures me; the endpoints, waypoints, the viaditch that vast streams of wealth eroded into some hard scrabble country. Tamarlane’s hometown, the Beys’ extravagance, the Soviet cotton experiment (the worst of human greed, bye bye Aral Sea)…bread is sacred there, artisans are still more important than actors, and secular Islam lives crossroads cozy with everything else. Uzbeki is Altaic; vowel  harmonies and agglutination…oh, the linguistic conflicts of having the Turskish languages (Ohguz) mixed with Korean and Japonic dialects in one language group? Now that’s fight-fun rhetorical fighting. To learn some glowing glottal goodness, wrangled the only English language Uzbek teaching grammar I could find and some linguistic training usefulness from the good folks at Transparent. 

Languages...never really been a problem to drink them in. I’m no gifted wonder like some, but communicating seems intuitive once you have the rhythm of a speech. Rules and rationales help, but for me needful use makes the mind get plastic over by Broca and Wernicke's areas. Native to romance languages (with barbaric flavors), have some feeling for the sounds of the Chinese, so this language family really rounds me out. More as the trip nears maybe.