THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN

David Whyte reading “Sweet Darkness” for On Being is beautiful.

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN

I picked up Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe yesterday and I’ve just been plowing through it. A passage from early on in the book:

The earliest memory I have of my own dad is the two of us, sitting on my bed as he reads me a book we have checked out from the local library. I am three. I don’t remember what the story is, or even the title of the book. I don’t remember what he’s wearing, or if my room’s messy. What I do remember is the way I fit between his right arm and his body, and the way his neck and the underside of his chin look in the soft yellow light of my lamp, which has a cloth lampshade, light blue, covered by an alternating pattern of robots and spaceships.

This is what I remember: (i) the little pocket of space he creates for me, (ii) how it is enough, (iii) the sound of his voice, (iv) the way those spaceships look, shot through from behind with light, so that every stitch in the fabric of the surface is a hole and a source, a point and an absence, a coordinate in the ship’s celestial navigation, (v) how the bed feels like a little spaceship itself.

People rent time machines.
They think they can change the past.
Then they get there and find out causality doesn’t work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn’t mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn’t have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.
That’s where I come in. I go and get them out.
I tell people: I have a job, and I have job security.
I have a job because I know how to fix the cooling module on the quantum decoherence engine of the TM-31. That’s the reason I have a job.
But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his worst moment, over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too.

THREE HUNDRED AND TEN

Anonymous, found in James Boyle’s “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.”

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

From Douglas Coupland’s Escaping the superfuture.

Lately I’ve been experiencing a new temporal sensation that’s odd to articulate, but I do think is shared by most people. It’s this: until recently, the future was always something out there up ahead of us, something to anticipate or dread, but it was always away from the present.

But not any more. Somewhere in the past few years the present melted into the future. We’re now living inside the future 24/7 and this (weirdly electric and buzzy) sensation shows no sign of stopping — if anything, it grows ever more intense. Elsewhere I’ve labelled this experience “the extreme present” — or another label for this new realm might be “the superfuture”. In this superfuture I feel like I’m clamped into a temporal roller coaster and, at the crest of the first hill, I can see that my roller coaster actually runs off far into the horizon. Wait! How is this thing supposed to end?

…

It’s hard to accept that our new superfuture mind state is permanent and that it’s not going away — how could it? Our devices that cause it aren’t going to go away. They’ll just get better and faster and we’re going to embed ourselves in the superfuture ever more deeply.

It makes me wonder if the most important thing we could invent right now would be a technology that takes away our bottomless fear of missing out, our need to read the latest news update, our latest hook-up or our latest upgrade.

What kind of technology would that be?

THREE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

When I was a kid, my mom used to take me on “listening walks” and this interview reminded me of her. From The Last Quiet Places: Silence and the Presence of Everything.

MR. HEMPTON: Yeah. Oh, grass wind. Oh, that is absolutely gorgeous, grass wind and pine wind. You know, we can go back to the writing of John Muir, which he turned me on to the fact that the tone, the pitch, of the wind is a function of the length of the needle or the blade of grass. So the shorter the needle on the pine, the higher the pitch; the longer, the lower the pitch. There are all kinds of things like that, but the two folders where I collected, I have, oh, over 100 different recordings which are actually silent from places, and you cannot discern a sense of space, but you can discern a sense of tonal quality, that there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat.

And then my quiet folder is a folder which is a step above that where you cannot distinguish any activity. You can’t hear a bird, a cricket, you can’t hear a ripple on a lake, you can’t hear any of the wind going through the pines. But you do have a sense of space and each habitat also has a characteristic sense of space. These are the fundamental — to relate this to music, these are the fundamental tones that everything else is built up upon so that, when we listen to a place on planet Earth, we very quickly realize that Earth is a solar-powered jukebox.

…

MR. HEMPTON: I get so many comments when I give presentations and lectures of people that come up to me afterwards and they say, “You know, my child just doesn’t listen.” We’re all born listeners and I always say, if there’s one thing you want to do as an adult to become a better listener, take a preschooler, someone who hasn’t gone to school and been taught how to listen by focusing attention, which is actually controlled impairment, but a preschooler who’s still taking in the whole world. Hoist them onto your shoulders and go for a night walk. They’ll tell you everything you need to know about becoming a better listener.

And if you have the good fortune of going for a walk up a nature trail with a child, the younger they are, the more pointless it seems to go any further because the miracles are right here. Let’s just sit down, don’t worry about the exercise or the goals, the expectations that you brought into the experience, and let’s just really be here. That is often the big challenge for adults when it comes to silence, because we’re so busy being someplace else that when we’re in a silent place, there are no distractions. We finally do get to meet ourselves and that can be frightening for a short while. It can be frightening. It’s practically fear of the unknown.

 

THREE HUNDRED AND THREE

Umberto Eco on DOS versus the Macintosh:

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions…..

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.

THREE HUNDRED AND TWO

From Sine Cosine Tangent, Don DeLillo in this week’s New Yorker.

“My mother had a roller that picked up lint. I don’t know why this fascinated me. I used to watch her guide the device over the back of her cloth coat. I tried to define the word “roller” without sneaking a look in the dictionary. I sat and thought, forgot to keep thinking, then started over, scribbling words on a pad, feeling dumber, on and off, into the night and the following day.

A rotating cylindrical device that collects bits of fibre sticking to the surface of a garment.

There was something satisfying and hard-won about this, even if I made it a point not to check the dictionary definition. The roller itself seemed like an eighteenth-­century tool, something to wash horses with. I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define “loyalty,” define “truth.” I had to stop before it killed me.

The ecology of unemployment, Ross said on TV, in French, with subtitles. I tried to think about this. But I was afraid of the conclusion I might draw, that the expression was not pretentious jargon, that the expression made sense, opening out into a cogent argument concerning important issues.

When I found an apartment in Manhattan, and got a job, and then looked for another job, I spent whole weekends walking, sometimes with a girlfriend. There was one so tall and thin she was foldable. She lived on First Avenue and First Street, and I didn’t know whether her name was spelled Gale or Gail and I decided to wait a while before asking, thinking of her as one spelling one day, the other spelling the next day, and trying to determine whether it made a difference in the way I thought of her, looked at her, talked to her, and touched her.

It was the most interesting idea of my life up to then, Gale or Gail, even if it yielded nothing in the way of insight into the spelling of a woman’s name and its effect on the glide of a man’s hand over her body.