The Stylings of Ideas Man, Ph.D.

A Performance Piece Masquerading as a Conference Talk

2012-01-04T16:50:00.000-05:00

I was recently reflecting on the fact that I apparently now only ever right conference pieces which violate in various ways the norms of conference pieces (this is apropos for something about Derrida I'm working on)

I offer the following up as proof: it's an occasional piece, written with the Ancient Philosophy Society in mind (this will be clear from what follows if you keep in mind they met this year in Sundance, Utah and had encouraged pieces that dealt in particular with the topics related to physis.) It is, as will be clear, unacceptable and undeliverable as an actual conference talk. I therefore offer it up instead to the internets. Enjoy. (Here is a link to it as a google doc which may be easier to read)

Butch Cassandra and the Sundance Stranger: On Teleology and Normativity

In Utah, physis comes in two flavors. In the North, there’s the full, piny aromatic sweep of sloping hills surveying valleys that were once rich with brush and scrub, but where the scrub has been reduced to little isolated brown patches surrounded by what passes in the West for verdure, brought to you by the irrigated, tamed and dammed up rivers whose pesky finitude will one day bankrupt the West. Further south, the trace of the human is less remarkable, but that’s not why the flavor of physis is different. The reason for that is in the rocks, whose color runs redder, whose angle tends closer to vertical. The same rivers that quench the thirst of Western megalopoles have been running a much longer show down there, over thousands of millennia, they’ve notched the landscape with scores of deep slot canyons, they’ve polished the rocks into weird, vaguely anthropomorphic shapes, into arches, into stairways. People who don’t look closely enough have called the landscape inhuman. They’re not wrong, but it’s a little like saying humans have vegetative souls. It’s not it’s most distinctive trait. It isn’t just inhuman, it’s positively inorganic, if not quite abiotic.
Let’s call these northern and southern Utah flavors of physis, Aristotelean and Platonic flavors respectively.
Although, I grew up in northern Utah, along the Wasatch Front --- not much more than twenty minutes from here; at this height, you could probably see the house I grew up in if there weren’t a mountain in the way --- although I grew up here in the Aristotelean part of the state, although for what it’s worth, I’m sure Aristotle is probably more right than Plato, I imagine that my affinity for Plato derives somewhat the time I’ve spent amidst Southern Utah’s inorganic, unconsoling beauty.
Sundance Stranger: I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call you on that.
Me: On what?
S.S.: On the tendentiousness of your metaphor.
Me: Excuse me, but what are you exactly?
S.S.: I’m the Sundance Stranger.
Me: Well, Stranger, since you’re not from around these parts, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are unaware of the norms that govern conference presentations. It’s perfectly acceptable to have a short introduction, whose connection to the thesis is metaphorical or illustrative. What isn’t acceptable is interrupting someone at the beginning of the their paper.
S.S.: But I wasn’t calling you out for using a metaphor, I’m was calling you out for its tendentiousness.
Me: How can you know if it’s tendentious if you haven’t even heard my thesis yet?
S.S.: Ok, let’s hear it.
Me: Um, that the inorganic, unconsoling terrain is a mark of what distinguishes the Platonic Good from its post-Kantian re-iteration.
S.S.: No.
Me: It would have sounded better in context.
S.S.: And the context was what, that little piece you opened with?
Me: Among other things.
S.S.: What are the other things?
Me: Well, for starters, I would have explained a little what I meant by the phrase “its post-Kantian re-iteration.”
S.S.: And what do you mean by that little phrase?
Me: It would have been helpful if I had been able to continue situating it. See, I was planning on seguing from this description of the inorganic landscape to a brief discussion of the claim, popular nowadays, that the “absolute” idealism of Hegel and Holderlin inter alia differed from Kantian idealism by its embrace of Platonic realism.
S.S.: I’m familiar with the work of Friedrich Beisser. But I hardly see how that gives any coherence to your thesis.
Me: It doesn’t, on its own. But thinking about what that claim gets wrong about Hegel and especially Holderlin has gotten me thinking about what people get wrong in Platonism, whether the only possible way of embracing Platonism is through Platonic realism.
S.S.: I suppose it depends on what you mean by “realism,” which is I suppose what you are going to claim that that little number at the beginning was going to help clarify.
Me: Kind of, I guess. I hate to keep on getting auto-biographical.
S.S.: I’m sure you do.
Me: But this time I’m at least talking about philosophical autobiography. See, for a long time, I’ve been thinking about the difference between the way in which the ancients seem to have understood teleology and the way that moderns seem to. You know how annoying it is when people summarize the intellectual importance of Darwinism, and they mangle their Aristotle, imputing something like the argument from design to him?
S.S.: As if the ancients were a bunch of good little Victorians!
Me: Exactly. See, when I reread The Origin of Species a while back, I was struck by how much time Darwin devoted to justifying the idea that species (and I mean that here in the broad sense as a Latinization of eidos) need not be eternal, could in fact be mutable. And it struck me that that’s what would have been a bigger stumbling to the ancients than the idea that organic forms required a designer.
S.S.: Ok, I think I see where you were trying to go, then. You were going to try to imagine how it would be possible to temporalize the Platonic notion of Form and I suppose that’s what you had in mind by an anti-realistic Platonism.
Me: No, that’s way too big of a project for such a short presentation. I’ve been working on that in a lot of different ways. Here, I was just going to focus on how the inhumanism of the Platonic good distinguished it from Kantian and post-Kantian teleologies, which depended so heavily on the concept of a normativity fixed by humanism for their understanding of what Plato would have called the good.
S.S.: Alright, I’m starting to see your point a little better. But your metaphor was still a little over-wrought. More importantly, it conflated a lot of different senses of the notion of organicity. You have to recognize that that’s central to the complex of problems you’ve raised.
Me: I guess I do. But, and I”m embarrassed to admit this, I’m not fully sure how to deal with that problem. So I was hoping that we could let that conflation slide.
S.S.: Wouldn’t it be better if we investigated it?
<Butch Cassandra gets up from the audience and says:>
B.C.: Somebody stop them right now. If you let them continue, by the time they’re done, they’ll have made Plato look like Nietzsche.
Me: Did you hear anything?
S.S.: Must’ve been the wind, which can really howl at these heights. By the way, keep your eye out for Butch Cassandra. She’s said to be hiding out somewhere around here. She may be a prophet, but she’s also really annoying. It’s best not to listen to her.
Me: I’ll keep that in mind.
S.S.: You know where you really should have started if you think the idea of normativity is so important? Anaxagoras!
Me: I like Anaxagoras just fine, and I can see where he might be helpful in pushing for a rejection of a humanistic teleology, but that’s because he rejects teleology altogether.
S.S.: And that’s exactly what I think makes him so important to what you’re trying to do. If you look at where he shows up in Plato’s work, I think you’ll find that it’s precisely at those points where what post-Kantians would recognize as the concept of normativity shows up. But I’m afraid it’s going to complicate your little thesis. For starters, it’s going to associate the idea of normativity with Plato’s theism much more strongly than you’re going to want to admit.
Me: Ok, so let me think: there’s the famous reference in the Phaedo. And I guess I can start to see how you might claim that it’s associated with normativity, since Socrates goes on to criticize the idea that you can describe how he got to jail without some reference to the Good. But now I’m going to have to accuse you of tendentiousness. That may be normativity, but it’s nothing like the normativity I’m going to want to derive from the Kantian tradition.
S.S.: That’s only because you’ve missed the most important point.
Me: Which is?
S.S.: Just wait. First, let’s expand the presence of Anaxagoras in Plato. He’s in the Apology.
Me: But that’s just a throw-away reference to the fact that if people think Socrates holds that the sun is a rock rather than a God, then you’re mistaking him for Anaxagoras.
S.S.: You think that’s a throw-away reference? You think when Socrates says that the thing that distinguishes him from Anaxagoras is his theism, that that’s a throw-away reference? And consider the presence of Anaxagoras in the Laws.
Me: Believe me, I have, but that hardly helps us clarify things. I mean, really the point you’re getting at has less to do with the Good than with the fact that Anaxagoras is Plato’s cardboard cutout atheist. But here Plato’s the one guilty of conflation: he uses that cardboard cutout knee-jerk reaction against atheism to conceal the huge difference between his conception of God as the good and the traditional notion of divinity, to cloak his radical conception of the good in the garb of traditional piety.
S.S.: And you don’t think that that conflation is itself significant? What allows him to make that connection so naturally?
Me: I don’t understand what you mean.
S.S.: What does his conception of the divine share with the traditional Greek conception?
Me: Well, lots of things. He’s Greek, after all. But what I consider most significant is the connection between the Platonic notion of eternity and the Greek conception of immortality, which are both aeizoon. That’s actually exactly the point where I think that the post-Kantians will depart with Plato. But the challenge then is to explain how they nonetheless remain Platonists.
S.S.: You’re getting ahead of yourself, but you’re on the right track. Now ask yourself the most obvious follow up question. Is Anaxagoras different than Plato and traditional Greeks here?
Me: No, that’s actually precisely where he and other early ancient atheists, like the atomists go astray. They have to imagine some sort of eternal, unchanging substrate, of course. But even more to the point, they imagine the eternity of form, even if they don’t put it that way. So, for example, in Anaxagoras, he has to have everything mixed with everything to explain how motion makes significant, formal change possible. Or, in the atomists, although they imagine something like natural selection in their account of the origin of life, it’s not a recursive, self-reiterating natural selection. Random parts come together randomly, but the atomists make it sound like those parts are arms, legs, eyes and other organs are randomly cohering, with only the coherent, whole organisms survive. And that’s where Plato and Aristotle get them: because it’s impossible to understand an organ apart from a holistic organism.
S.S.: So they imagine that the origin of life is temporal, but their understanding of the meaning of life is implicitly atemporal.
Me: Right.
B.C.: Normativity is irreducibly futural. But it requires the constancy of the past for its guarantee.
S.S.: Okay, so if Anaxagoras hasn’t shaken the necessity of the eternal, unchanging ever living mind, why is he useful for Plato in making himself seem traditionally theistic?
Me: I don’t understand what you’re getting at.
S.S.: You told me that Plato is making throwaway reference to Anaxagoras in order to lead people off the scent of his radical change in the notion of the divine. It’s a truism that that change is to identify the divine with the Good. So it’s no surprise that it should help Plato introduce the notion of the Good. But notice that, because Plato assumes that Anaxagoras shares certain assumptions with him about the meaning of the divine, it obviates the underlying constancy between traditional Greek theism, Anaxagorean atheism, and Platonic theism.
B.C.: Stop them! Before they cast doubt on sacred idols! They want to make you think that Plato killed God, when we all know it was Nietzsche.
S.S.: <continuing> Now, what name would you give to that underlying constancy? You said “eternity,” but you may as well have said “normativity.”
Me: No, because that’s precisely what Anaxagoras rejects. The point is that he doesn’t think that the eternity of nous requires a commitment to a normative good. And that’s where Plato differs with him.
S.S.: What about traditional Greek theism?
Me: That’s a much tougher question.
S.S.: Go on, give it a try.
Me: Why don’t I just let you?
S.S.: Is it fair to say that what you’re saying is that the Greek conception of physis assumes a metaphysical stance, but that the precise position of that metaphysical stance may differ?
Me: I guess so.
S.S.: Ok, so now you’re ready to think about the significant detail you missed before.
Me: Which is?
S.S. Why is it that, in his central discussion in the Phaedo of the conversion to the good, Plato has Socrates give as his example of a normative claim one with which he doesn’t in fact agree?
Me: That’s debatable. Isn’t the whole point of the Crito that he’s accepting the judgment of the laws?
S.S.: You could argue that he’s accepting their force but not their justice, or goodness. And even if we say it’s debatable, it seems odd that you’d take a debatable “good” as your example of the Good.
B.C.: Normativity and teleology are both bets on the future. That does not mean that they are betting on the same future.
Me (ignoring B.C.): Okay, let’s grant that it might not be a claim about the good that he would agree with. But his point is that you still can’t understand why he’s there without some reference to the good.
S.S.: Or, for that matter, without some reference to the transgression of the Good, whether the fault for that transgression lies with him or with Athens. And the truth is, that transgressive element was there in the example of the Apology too. Socrates is accused of the crime of impiety. He uses Anaxagoras, who is an atheist, to distract the jury from his own strange theism, which might just still be impiousness.
Me: I’ve been known for some crazy readings of texts, but you’re really going too far.
S.S.: Am I? Remember the Laws?
Me: Of course I remember the Laws. There, the Athenian Stranger, not Socrates, throws all atheists into a moderation tank lest they corrupt the state. And he does it with reference to Anaxagoras.
S.S.: <laughs> And how do you know the Athenian Stranger isn’t Socrates?
Me: Because I’ve read the Phaedo and because I’ve read the Crito.
S.S.: So you know Plato’s last word about normativity? And you know Socrates’s last word about normativity? And, not only do you know both of their last words, but you assume their unanimity?
B.C.: All strangers are Socrates. Socrates is a mortal. Nevertheless, Strangeness is immortal.
Me: I try not to indulge in conspiracy theories.
S.S.: Fair enough, but in doing so, you miss the transformative, transgressive power of fiction, even in Plato’s dialogues, even if through fiction they speak of the truth.
Me: So Plato as an old man is indulging in a fictional daydream about his old teacher taking a hike up a mountain with two other old men?
S.S.: Why not? The mountain air can be a welcome change of scenery, especially if you’ve most of your life in a city under siege, a city where the excesses of Periclean democracy have palpably reduced air-quality.
Me: Ok, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Plato has written a little fictional coda to the life of Socrates where he imagines the laws of a society that criticizes the excesses of Periclean democracy, the very excesses of which he takes Anaxagoras to be a figure. So what?
S.S.: Wrong.
Me: Excuse me?
S.S.: Plato doesn’t think that Anaxagoras is a figure for the excesses of sophisticated Periclean democracy. Remember the reference in the Phaedrus?
Me: When he says that Anaxagoras’s wisdom exercised a moderating influence on Pericles? I’d forgotten that one.
S.S.: And anyway, Plato’s relationship to Pericles is far more ambivalent than you’re giving him credit for here, as you know full well. That’s particularly important in the Laws, where the Stranger envisions a mixed comprise between Athenian and Doric constitutions. And, once again, that’s where Anaxagoras is relevant.
Me: Now I’m totally lost.
S.S.: Don’t worry, you’re close to home. Didn’t you tell us it was just on the other side of this mountain that we’re on?
Me: What happened to metaphors?
B.C.: Although Presenter doesn’t want to admit it, he has always imagined the society of the Laws in a strange place, with a topography like Southern Utah.
Me (to the Sundance Stranger, not Butch Cassandra): What happened to the Republic?
B.C.: No one can imagine that as happening in any place at all.
Sundance Stranger (to me): Remember, in the Laws the state of the Republic has been dismissed out of hand, because it would require the body politic to share sensory organs with one another. The golden thread of the laws has been introduced to address this lack. And do you remember what the feature it was that made the laws golden?
Me: You mean persuasion.
S.S.: And does persuasion owe more to the laws Doric or Athenian character?
Me: Athenian.
S.S.: And how does persuasion figure into the examples of Anaxagoras in the Phaedo and the Apology?
Me: It doesn’t. These are both places where persuasion has failed, and force is necessary.
S.S.: Imagine such goings on! In a democracy, no less.
Me: Democracies have no problem with normativity. In fact, if anything, they take their normative claims too seriously.
S.S.: They mistake their voices for the voices of God?
Me: Something like that.
S.S.: And notice here how Plato is critiquing that.
Me: But he still throws atheists into a moderation tank.
S.S.: He does. He doesn’t have much faith in people and he’s worried that they’ll lead them astray from the good. But that doesn’t mean these atheists beyond persuasion, providing they are moderate and provided moderate, wise people talk with them.
Me: Like the Nocturnal Council.
S.S. Exactly. The Nocturnal Council has to defend the Laws, which can’t defend themselves. Because, unfortunately, the Laws, like all norms, don’t really exist. But they defend them in a way that bears little resemblance to enforcing them. The people enforce them on their own. The Nocturnal Council defends their Goodness, which depends on their persuasive power, which is something quite different than their force.
Me: But that’s Kant!
S.S.: Exactly. But it’s Kant without the humanism, it’s an inhuman, nocturnal Kant.
B.C.: At night, they say that Kant defended his human dignity by having himself tied up!
Me: But this is exactly what I was going to argue was distinctive to the pst-Kantian German Idealists. I was going to argue that by distinguishing the rationality of the law from its efficacy, that their notion of a robust normativity in nature didn’t imply a return to Platonic realism but rather allowed idealism to emerge out of a dialogue with the the natural, or the real.
B.C.: You were going to turn Hegel into Nietzsche, and you thought you were so clever.
S.S.: But you don’t have to say that that’s any different than Plato. Plato, it’s true, seems not to have had the vocabulary to imagine fully temporalized ideals. He recognized he needed the notion of the Good. But he never fully expunged the transgressive, fictional, downright mendacious character of that good. This possibility remains in the textual body we call Platonism, ready to be liberated, provided we find a way to understand how fictional norms can nonetheless be efficacious. Heidegger’s innovation was to realize that this was what Nietzsche had done.
B.C.: See, I warned you this would happen. I’ve warned you that they’d turn Plato into Nietzsche.
S.S.: And although he imagines a metaphysical stance from which to talk about physis and although he invokes the gods to enforce that stance, he recognizes that the logic of metaphysics is utterly different in its essence from the language of force. He invokes the threat of atheism to disguise that recognition, but we can recognize the respect beneath that invocation. He recognizes a kinship with the inhumanism of the atheist. I would wager that’s what you saw down in the desert, even if you’re telling us about it from the heights of a mountain.
Me: So, after criticizing my thesis, you’re willing to agree with me. And you’re willing to grant that my metaphor wasn’t tendentious after all.
S.S.: I suppose I am, and I suppose it wasn’t. It turns out you were right after all, though for all the wrong reasons.
Me: But if you’d just let me read my paper, maybe you would have seen that I’d said the same thing, albeit with different words.
S.S.: Well, I’d love to hear your paper, but I fear we’re out of time. So we’ll have to turn to your argument another time.
Me: Yes, we’ll return another time.
B.C.: No, they won’t!

Draft: Ottawa et al.

2011-11-16T21:03:00.001-05:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Hölderlin. Well, I always think about Hölderlin. Also, about the gods, which are of course related.

But lately, I've been thinking about what Hölderlin talked about as the Wechsel der Töne, the changing of key or tonality that characterizes the rhythm of his poetic thought: not the rhythm of his diction, but the rhythm of ideas or, as he called it in good Kantian fashion, the rhythm of representation.

I've been trying to embrace this way of thinking; I'm not wholly satisfied with it; nonetheless, here's as draft of one of my more recent attempts to think about how to change the tonality of ideas, and how the rhythm with which these ideas are presented might characterize a poetic way of thinking.

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Ottawa et al.

During our ceremonies we wear the bells we used to wear,
we call them vermilion, place roses on the chairs
we sit in, sat in.
You think I’m being obtuse.

Hephaistos’s mangled leg was propped atop the chair
of the row afront. His mind sharpened
itself in its forges. He dreamed of a net,
devised its subtle clasps, buried
its leads beneath the leaves that were
falling in the corners of his absent-minded mind,
and on the earth, because it was November.

How can a mind be sharp and loose?
Where do the knife and the sieve meet?
This is a technical problem;it is being invoked
for purely pragmatic purposes here.
There’s something that calls for cutting and binding,
demands that something be found to
make Ares and Aphrodite howl,
call the gods to howl with laughter.

There are ceremonies, the roses which have been
blooming as long as primates, still sometimes
bloom for awhile, and there are ceremonies
that commemorate the length of this blooming.

You think I’m thinking irresolutely.
You say I use words loosely.
It’s tough to talk about nets.
--- Why do you want to talk about nets? Who are you devising to ensnare?

No, it’s not that. We’re thinking about nets,
Not making one ourselves.
Hephaistos, the lame god ill-favored by his parents
Had once devised a peace, it’s true.
Now he sits restlessly. He is sitting above you.
Or he is listening to you think.
You are thinking about the net he made.
It was so fine it was invisible so that
At the proper time it could cover Ares and Aphrodite up,
reveal what they’d wanted to hide.
It was so fine and so sharp it
Cut into their naked flesh even while
It was so strong that it held even the gods
In check, check-mated.

--- Why are you thinking about nets? Who cares about Ares or Aphrodite?

It’s early November, and the Earth is being embraced in a red and orange net,
or else it’s the girdle of Calypso (misunderstood if somewhat loose woman)
or perhaps it’s the leaves in which Odysseus
(cunning, crooked mind / Athena’s ape)
buried himself for warmth after escaping Calypso’s island and Poseidon’s rage.
The ambiguities are multiplying,
You slip into the world only you still believe in.

Perhaps it’s just because you are in a room
hearing words and thinking things and it’s excruciating.
You are tied tight, tethered by sharp, invisible threads
that pull on your heart; occupy your brain.
You’re devising a way out, not in.
The mind loses itself remembering when it wanted to forge a net;
then it sees itself in the Earth again,
mistakes the leaves for roses,
sitting in chairs,
ceremoniously forgotten,
dreams of forgiveness.

A Genuinely Modest Proposal

2011-07-29T08:14:00.004-04:00

Dear Mr. Boehner:

Now that your little stunt has backfired here's what you do today:

First thing, you tell the Tea Party freshmen to go fuck themselves. Then you introduce and work with mainline rank and file Republicans and all Democrats to pass a very simple, genuinely bipartisan bill. Here's what that bill does: it raises the debt ceiling by $1 trillion dollars so that the White House can make the payments Congress has directed it to make.

Here's what it doesn't do: anything else. No spending cuts. No tax hikes. You can address those in separate bills. SINCE THEY ARE SEPARATE ISSUES.

The Senate will pass the bill today; the President will sign it today.

You will have done your job. And then you can have your silly little debate about austerity measures.

It's called putting your country before partisanship --- which is why we can be pretty confident you won't do it.

Ideas Man Returns to the Mythology of Eros

2011-07-26T21:47:00.001-04:00

After the difficulties of Seuss I am returning to the Mythology of Eros. But I figured out how to do an audiorecorder, which I prefer to the webcam. Sorry to those of you who'll miss my handsome mug. Still, you kids who are coming in late should scroll down and listen to the earlier installments.

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V) Lamentation to Maria

O madre dedioso,

O madredolorosa,

You knowthe places that I sleep,

You knowthe comfort that I keep.

If now Iask that you go home,

Know that Iwill not alone.

A grotesqueboast,

To mutterto the mother of the sacred host.

A selfishreason,

To assailthe mother church with treason.

Doctor Seuss Challenge, Day Three: My Music

2011-07-03T15:33:00.000-04:00

Day 3: My Music

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In the faraway land of Deserotes

Young Ammon slaved away amidst the notes

Sang church humns, played piano, viola

Not well mind you, but enough to know a

Pattern when it emerged. He let a groan

Escape against this weary, pious tone.

He had no sense of pop or Madonna

But caught The Cure and was a goner.

The New Wave carried him out, ten years late.

He listened to The Smiths, had nothing but hate

For the retrograde tie-dyes of his peers,

Fled to Mexico in the midst of their jeers,

Chilled in the Alameda, hung with the punks,

Danced to Norteño, punched with the drunks,

Returned to Deserotes, saw the flannel

Knew they'd finally discovered the channel

Where the future played. Still, he had a sneer

As he told them. "I've been listening for years."

But then the Gavin-Rosdale-A-Tron came

(A cunning machine the industry made)

and sucked. It was the death of an era.

Am. retreated again, didn't care a

Lick for rock, took to pop, worse the better:

Spice Girls, 'N Sync, why not Celine Dion?

But then fate fooled him. He read Thomas Mann.

Back to strings, now Messaien, Schönberg
Only then Bach, Beethoven and Schubert.
And then Apple invented the IPod
That was it. It was the end of genre.
Depressed kids music as well as old school
Iron and Wine, also Ladies Love Cool.
Even the pre-punk wasn't all bad.
Sure there was junk like Cream, but then they had
The Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen,
Tom Waits, even Dylan was cool oh and
Bowie. But then you'd always known Bowie,
Ziggy Stardust, the Man from Mars, so he
Should have showed you there was always much more
Than the same tired crap that you'd heard before.
There's music enough. You have ears to hear.
Just don't take the shit they shove at your ears.

31 Day Doctor Seuss Challenge Day 2: Your Love

2011-07-02T16:18:00.002-04:00

You get a twofer because I started a day late.

Day 2: My Love

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This way for Aphrodite's menagerie.
Right through this tent. Oh the birds that you'll see!

The Front Door & Back Door Crunkamathunk
Opens its heart till it hurts, then gets drunk.
(That's a lie. It really just loves itself.
Everything else is a mere prize for its shelf.)

The Splendid Melancholy Gadzooki
Dreams of nothing all day long but beauty.
It can't leave this room. We can't let it glimpse
The traffic of life out there with the pimps.

Here's the Muffled Green Hooded Stravinschick
Which worships only the purest music.
The Delphic bird can't sing no more. It's heard
The sounds of Heaven autotuned. Absurd
As it sounds every Muse it's known has flown
To aesthetic chopshops. Now they're all clones.

What's that? This is about love? Silly me.
Scratch all that. Well then, hmm... Okay, let's see.
Family, friends, other such happy words
Leave all that other sad crap for the birds.

31 Doctor Seuss Challenge: Day One

2011-07-02T16:01:00.000-04:00

So we interrupt my intermittent poetry on the ancients to participate in my friend Dr. J's 31 Day Doctor Seuss Challenge, in which each day we'll feature a different theme presented in Seussian verse.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;BGSOUND src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23109469/Doctor%20Seuss%20Day%20One.wma"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Day One: My Job

Ladies and Gentleman, step right this way.
See the absurd sight of Professor A.
Nobody ever knows quite what he says,
But they think it's whatever comes into his head.

Little do they know of his master plan:
Convert the whole world into Hölderlin fans.
He's at it in class and out on the town,
His shirt always untucked beneath his gown.

He writes words on pages. Pay them no mind.
He's overcommitted, always behind
On the review that's due, his book's precis
the poems he's promised his good friend Leigh.

He says things in places. Give them no heed.
It's just the stuff he wishes you'd read.
He dreams things are otherwise than they are.
Just let him follow this otherworld's star.

Ladies and Gents, we know. What can we say?
It's not much. That's why he barely gets paid.

Part Four: Return of Amateur Webcam!

2011-06-18T18:30:00.002-04:00

He began to wonder if he was insane

2011-04-02T23:54:00.000-04:00

Ideas Man Reads a Poem a Day: Day 2, now with something approximating singing

2011-04-01T22:13:00.000-04:00

In case last night's installment wasn't self-indulgent enough, I've decided to sing/chant/extemporize today's:

Ideas Man Reads a Poem a Day A Month

2011-03-31T22:18:00.000-04:00

It has been suggested to me (and by me) that I should be careful not to be too self-indulgent. I should strive for the right amount of self-indulgence. With this fine aesthetic line in mind, I present without further ado part one of an n part installment, in which I read a poem.

In honor of the newly formed Society for Olympian Ontology, I begin with part one of a seven parter:

Vote for me, Ideas Man fans

2011-03-24T12:14:00.000-04:00

See my smoldering sensuality in action and then propel me to Cannes, where I'll get patrons for Diary of a Seducer.

http://castingcall.stellaartois.com/en-US/video-message.html?v=1861503180005056870000

American Values, Courtesy of Dr. J. (with a brief cameo by yours truly)

2011-03-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

Check out my amazing friend Dr. J's truly amazing paean to American values below.

American Values from Leigh Johnson on Vimeo.

phone

2011-01-30T21:02:00.001-05:00

I can now blog from my phone. Expect my posts to become correspondingly more inane.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.6

pho

2011-01-30T21:01:00.001-05:00

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.6

J'accuse

2011-01-12T17:02:00.003-05:00

I've thought that the masterminds of the right were being intentionally blind. They are starting to behave so stupidly that I'm starting to wonder if it's not just a ruse. I still think they know what they're doing, but we'll see.

Since they are masters of the metaphor, we'll begin with a metaphor.

When the Montague and Capulet boys decided to play at their vendette, they didn't dream of killing Mercutio. Duels rarely end in death (go read your Tolstoy, kids). It's just games boys play in order to play at being men.
No one wanted funny Mercutio, who wasn't even really a Montague, to die. Still, when he slipped onto Tybalt's blade, he died, and he died because they played at vendette.

Yes, those Montagues and Capulets were both to blame, it's true. Still, Tybalt bears a little more responsibility, don't you think?

Actually, I don't care much about blame, but I do care a lot about responsibility. I've been maintaining ad nauseam that I don't care about causation. Causation is a straw man that the right wing is gleeful to latch on to, so they can avoid the question of responsibility.

No one wanted Mercutio to die. Not Romeo, who'd leaped in to stop the fighting, not the Capulets who stood by and watched Tybalt and him fight, certainly not the Montague boys who were cheering him on in their little game, but not even Tybalt, the elegant cat, who knew how to fight a duel, but wasn't interested in a street brawl.

Still, his death was totally consistent with the game that they all were playing.

Tybalt didn't mean to kill him. He'd just been pretending.

But, I hear you object, Sarah didn't kill anybody (except some wolves, but c'mon!) Glenn didn't kill anybody (nor will he unless you are one of the zombies who comes for his gold in the apocalypse he warns us of daily). Sure they used violent metaphors. But so did the other side (maybe not as many, maybe not as cleverly,maybe without the wide, wild-eyed conviction but still..) And, anyway, they were just playing.

I've been attacked left and right (well, mostly right) for being outraged at the Tea Party, for having the gall to think the political assassination, the act of terrorism, we witnessed on Saturday, should serve as a wake-up call for us all. This is cheap political opportunism, I've been told. This isn't a game. And anyway, I lose points for breaking character, for playing the outrage card when I was supposed to play the card of grieving solidarity.

Whether it'll be a wake-up call for the Tea Party (and I use this term to refer to the amorphous constellation of hate that's taken over the Republican party) whether it'll be a wake-up call for them, I don't know. I very much doubt it. I do hope it'll serve as a wake-up call to regular Republicans and conservatives who finally realize that they don't share the Tea Party's violent, apocalyptic and nihilistic world. I'm waiting for them to prove my tasteless joke in the previous post wrong. I fear I'll have to wait quite a while. I fear they're more committed to what they think they are supposed to believe than they to their own human sensibilities, to their sense of human dignity. I don't know whether it'll serve as a wake-up call for moderates and liberals. What I've mostly heard from the left is shock, and outrage, the sounds of slowly waking up. But the Tea Party pundits tell me it's more of the same, more of the old, tired game. And as masters of the game, I shouldn't discount what they say.

They know what they're doing with their words. Except when the dagger slips.

I hear what you're saying --- it wasn't even their dagger! I hear you; I know. I'm sorry. I'm bad with metaphors. I've always thought metaphors work through mechanisms other than causation, more through, for example contiguity, the principle that when two things touch one another, move in the same direction, share goals and tropes, do time together, they come to share the same identity.

"Is this a dagger I see before me, it's handle towards my hand? Come, let me clutch thee."

Ah, Macbeth, you shy, weak fool. You can't quite grab it can you even when it's proffered you, and when you do, you back off, you wimp out, you fucking pussy.

You force your wife to unsex herself. She knows what she's doing. She knows whether the dagger is proffered you or you wield it yourself, it's the same. It's the principle of contiguity, and either way it yields power.

And yes, your desires and dreams can bathe you in blood.

Tybalt weakens, feels remorse, and lets himself die in the game of vendetta he's playing, which Romeo briefly takes up again when he forgets himself or that he loves Juliette (when you're young, forgetting you must love Juliette might be the same as forgetting yourself).

But I forgot, I'm talking in metaphors, which have no relationship to the truth. Not even when those metaphors come true.

We said those things but we didn't mean them.

Didn't you?

If you didn't mean them then, then why don't you repudiate them now? Aren't you so lucky you've had this test run, that you've seen what the America you dreamed about would look like if people actually listened to you?

You are absolutely right. Jared Loughner was crazy before you ever met him, before any of us ever met him. It's not your fault he happened to do what you said. When he does it, that's an action. When you say it, those are just words. And words are weightless and meaningless.

This is proven by the fact that he didn't act on your words. He was doing something else, his own thing, which just so happened to match what your words dreamed.

But that's not what our words meant! Or anyway, we didn't mean the ones that sounded like what he did; we must not have meant that.

Then why not denounce them?

After Ft. Hood, after 9/11, reasonable Muslims could say --- these mad acts have nothing to do with what we value, what we espouse, what we believe. There is no connection between what they did and what we say. They didn't have to say "it's just a metaphor," because there was no metaphor there. Yes, we denounce radical Islam, which is why we've never said things that make it sound like we espouse it.

When James Lee went on an eco-terrorism rampage, environmentalists on the left could say --- that has no connection with the environmentalism we espouse. There's no contiguity. The America of his paranoid fantasy has no relationship to our reality. We reject eco-terrorism, which is why we don't pretend to embrace it.

You'd have to be pretty clever to be able to say --- oh no, we don't reject anything because we didn't do it. Sure, it looks exactly like what we've dreamed of. Yeah, it was our dream. Oh, it was horrifying. No, we won't renounce our dreams.

For the record, I denounce violence on the left and right. I reject violence and I reject demands for violence. I'm not an absolute pacifist; I accept that there are times violence is necessary, but I think this is only to prevent more violence. And I think there's always a strong prima facie case against all violence. I personally reject the more violent fringes of the left (which are frankly far more tiny and far more marginal than their right-wing counterparts), and I've never claimed I didn't. If it turned out that I embraced a form of violence that entailed consequences I didn't' want, I hope I'd have the moral courage to reject my earlier stance.

It's difficult for me to understand what's so controversial about this. Here's a good heuristic rule: if someone refuses to denounce something that seems totally consistent with what they espouse, if they instead deflect blame and ask why they ought to denounce it, if they keep on acting the same way, pretending nothing has changed, keep the rhetoric consistent, maybe it's because they don't actually have a problem with it.

We didn't do it!

Well, why not? You said you wanted to.

But that crazy beat us to it!

Don't worry. You'll still reap the benefits of what he did. You already have, Lady Macbeth.

No, I don't accuse Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck or any of the other Teabaggers of killing 9 innocent people, of murdering an innocent nine year old girl.

But I do accuse them of dreaming about it. I accuse them of considering this an acceptable price to pay for their own dreams of power, their own paranoid fantasies of glory.

I do not accuse them for actions that they did not commit.

But I do accuse them for their words, and for their thoughts.

We live in a free country. We have free speech, ostensibly, no matter how much the forces of violence try to muzzle their critics. We have free thought, ostensibly, though we rarely choose to use it.

We are still morally responsible for what we say and what we dream. Taking that responsibility --- it's not something I or anyone can force you to do. Even if I wanted to use violence against you, it wouldn't do any good. Violence doesn't speak with a moral vocabulary.

But I can, and will use that moral vocabulary to demand that you take responsibility for your words. And no matter how much you conflate those words with your own words of violence, with the little games you play so cleverly, I won't back down.

Here's what I will continue to say:

If we find our dreams coming true, if we say something in play and it really happens, if the thing that we said we wanted horrifies us, if our dream turns out to be a nightmare, then we have a responsibility to wake up.

If the Tea Party and their yea-sayers and toadies are more concerned with their own victimhood then their responsibility, maybe it's not because they are too stupid to wake up. Maybe it's because they are already wide-awake. They see in daylight the dream that they've held in their hearts. They see the world as a violent place. They say "let there be violence." And, lo, there is violence. They are outraged that you demand they pretend not to rejoice. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

They didn't cause it, no, not yet, but they have already dreamed it for a long time.

I can't stop them from spreading their lies, for pretending that they don't know what a metaphor is. But I can wake up, and tell them to stop playing with death. That is what I am committing to.

And you can too.

Ideas Man is Puzzled

2011-01-10T15:53:00.001-05:00

As conservatives have gone on the offensive for the clearly absurd notion that their violent rhetoric has any relationship to the horrifying violence we saw over the weekend, I've wondered why they don't adopt an obvious strategy.

See, conservatives keep on saying "there's no evidence of a causal link" between the things that Palin, Beck et. al. say and the act of this particular crazy. That's true-ish. But that's not the claim that I have been making.

The claim that I am making, and that I've heard most liberals make is: regardless of why this particular assassin did what he did, the part of the G.O.P that has been associated with the Tea Party has in fact invited this sort of violence.

We don't need anymore evidence to know this is true. The Tea Party has been trading in violence since it's magical inception from out of nowhere (except the pockets of the Koch Brothers and the recesses of Fox News) in 2009. It's been violent rhetoric, it's been displays of force, disruptions of civic events, threats of violence, calls for violence since then. We don't need to know anything about causation or motivation to see that this fits in with the violent, apocalyptic and extremist us vs. them ideology of the Tea Party, because that information is already out there.

The truth is, though, that the Tea Party isn't the whole of conservatism. It is very easy to be a conservative and not buy into the ideology of the Tea Party. So instead of adopting the absurd position that there has been no violent extremism in the G.O.P., why aren't regular rank and file conservatives willing to adopt the same move?

So here's the thought experiment I've been indulging in. Please note that this is a thought experiment: it is a counterfactual hypothesis, but there's a point to it.

Let's say Al Qaeda hadn't been responsible for 9/11. Let's say it had turned out to be some other group that may or may not have had any sympathies with Islamic extremism. Nonetheless, it fit in perfectly with the pattern of violence that Al Qaeda had called for and established.

Would we have been surprised to see moderate Muslims (and again, let me be clear --- I mean here the vast majority of Muslims --- bear with me here) say Look, whether or not Al Qaeda had anything to do with 9/11, we personally find Al Qaeda distasteful and disgusting. Their violent rhetoric has nothing to do with our conception of Islam.

So why aren't Republicans willing to say the same thing now and say, "Whyever the assassin did what he did, we don't personally subscribe to the political violence that the Tea Party openly practices and advocates?"

For the exciting answer, go to Ideas Man, PhD's fanpage:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ideas-Man-PhD/336927140278

(Warning, the joke linked to is extremely offensive and in horrible taste).

Poetry in Translation

2011-01-01T20:36:00.000-05:00

In the rivers north of the future I cast the out the nets that you, trembling, weigh down with stone conversant shadows. (Paul Celan --- from Atemkristall.)

Tom Waits Wannabe Reads How the Grinch Stole Christmas

2010-12-19T10:28:00.000-05:00

2010-11-28T18:15:00.000-05:00

The kids are wondering how knowledge quest works. Part of the answer is that it's a work in progress.

If you go to this facebook group (ask to join and I'll let you in), I've posted links to what it has been, but at bottom what it is is an open-ended attempt to extend the reach of the life of the mind online. Rather than re-creating an education, it's trying to rethink how we educate ourselves.

It started as a thought experiment about how I"d make a university from the ground up if someone came to me with a blank check and carte blanche to experiment. My initial thought was that I'd take a handful of professors who were experts in their own discipline (not necessarily interdisciplinarians) but whose intellectual and personal interests were broad and have them meet one on one with students, trying to figure out what it was the students thought they were interested in learning and trying to figure out how to channel that into teaching specific disciplinary objectives (doing something that meets up to the rigors of what a liberal arts education is supposed to be but through a different mechanism. E.g. a kid who is interested in globalization is sent to find the best Korma cook in Mumbai while studying Chemistry, comes back reports who she's learned and then is sent maybe to New Orleans to learn music theory and hanging with the Indian-American community there).

Now, I don't have a blank check (not one anyone would cash), but we do can do any kind of experimenting we want, so I've been messing around with the idea of just having people pose me "fundamental" questions, questions they find themselvesreturning to over and over again (mine is "what's the difference between beings and metaphors" but others have involved superheroes, and it could be something as simple as "why do I date the same person again and again?"

Then I'll send you on a knowledge quest. Report back and we'll go from there.

A Few Words Whispered Out of Calypso's Earshot

2010-11-15T11:42:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

A Few Words Whispered Out of Calypso's Earshot

Entranceless, entranced

circular time,

on the island that each of us

individually is,

bending shorelines, ageless silences.

Dispel this maudlin grist,

these meaningless reflections!

Over the waters,

annihilated by the commotion

of the wind and wave whither its words are borne,

the night spoke to me in a voice

that could not have been my own

as it painted a smile

whose anonymous eyes far outstripped

what I remembered your face

to be.

When I heard those shapely lines,

My self-certitude melted like Descartes' wax.

My memory failed me,

ravaged by time's vicissitudes,

(spent, perhaps, too strenuously elsewhere),

a mute and feeble thing

that holds in its emptied form

only this last recurring theme:

How I long for you to return.

Liberal Arts' Declaration of Independence

2010-09-24T21:47:00.001-04:00

    I think at this point in the history of the American academy, folks in the liberal arts might benefit from old-school privatization. I don't mean the neo-liberal kind, where you replace state funding with funding from multi-national corporations who fund research that they think will be profitable for them, but the kind embodied in the old German word Privatdozent (I recognize that is pretty low down in the old academic totem pole, but that's just a sign of where the academy is today).
   What if liberal arts professors ran their own classes and "bid" to have them fulfill requirements in the course catalog? In my current position, I make about $100-200 a student a course. When I taught adjunct at an Ivy League school it was somewhere nearer to $250 a student a course. But students at my current institution only pay about $1000 a course (so I make a little over 10% of what they pay) whereas they pay a hell of lot more than that at the Ivies (let's lowball it at $6000 which would mean I was making less than 5% of the tuition take). If folks with tenure calculated their rate, it would be better, but adjuncts and T.A.'s would be even worse off.
   I wager that I could put together my own support and bid on a license and still do better. If departments banded together (putting together faculties that cover needed courses, replacing a competitive approach with a collaborative one, getting health insurance, providing a at certain degree of security/stability, negotiating a package license with universities), they could do better still. In fact,when departments are functional, this is essentially what they do. Instead, we in the "service" departments teach lots of classes, put lots of asses in lots of seats, and get paid a fraction of what professors in other departments make. But we're still told that we need to trim back, because we aren't bringing in big research dollars.
   It's true, we're not, but I'd wager that we're bringing in more than enough to cover ourselves. What we can't cover is huge overhead, much of which just so happens to be eaten up by administrative salaries. For the record, administrators don't teach too many classes (that's not their job --- I know). Originally they were hired to "administer" the business end of teaching so that could teachers could, well, teach. Now, they run teaching as a business. Faculty are their employees, and whether they support themselves or not is less important than whether they are operating as cheaply as possible. Now, to their credit, since most universities are not-for-profit, administrators only make inflated salaries, and not obscene salaries. So they have to do what people at any non-profit do.
Spend the money on the raison-d'etre of the institution!
Haha, I'm just kidding. They do what any non-profit does. Spend it on crap and perks for themselves that nobody really needs!
If teacher's can't keep up the tremendous amount of capital it takes administrations to run themselves comfortably, perhaps they should declare their independence.
That, or the guillotine.

Trading Up: Round Five of NPR's 3-minute fiction contest

2010-09-22T12:34:00.000-04:00

Some people swore that the house was haunted. But haunted houses are, as a rule, aged, decrepit, crumbling affairs. There’s a difference between something falling apart and being torn apart.

They were laughing as they entered the first-floor master, near the great room, whose wiring had been ripped out. He had said something hilarious to the realtor, who was laughing warmly. She was laughing, politely --- she was a good sport --- but he could hear the laughter’s sharp edges. He laughed to show he was harmless. They were buying a house together, which means love.

“I can get you a deal on the plumbing. From my brother-in-law, actually.” The realtor pointed through the French doors, four panes of frosted glass kicked out, to the big master bathroom, which had once been tricked out with fancy bronze and copper fixtures. She wanted them to be sure they knew the house was still a steal.

“That’s very kind of your husband’s brother,” he said.

“My sister’s husband, actually.” The realtor’s eyes flicked down to her hands, her ten bare knuckles. He looked at her hands, at her face, smiled.

She turned around, said she wanted to see upstairs. She was debating if she should walk out the front door. But they’d all come together in the realtor’s car, a convertible Beamer, a lot like the car she’d drove when she met him. But she had legs, didn’t she? She’d run cross-country in school.

The realtor caught her arm gently. Her honeyed voice told her she should really see the separate his and hers closets.

She was desperate to flee, imagined the old owners running, shaking the house’s dust from their feet, but she was cornered by manicured nails that were gripping her arm tightly, blanching the skin beneath.

“There was a full-length mirror in here, but it’s broken now. You should put a new one in. You can really see the true colors of things with all the natural light in here.”

The big skylights let the Nevada sun pour in and made the huge clouds of dust look like snow.

The snow was falling on two prone bodies.

Both women shrieked. He came running in, to save them, no doubt.

The bodies scrambled up. They were children, nine or ten, twins maybe, two androgynous, blank faces. They saw the adults had cornered them. They shrank into the back of the room.

“Are you two okay?” he asked, gently, taking ownership of the house that wasn’t yet his. He approached them slowly, carefully.

They said nothing, hugged each other, stared at the grown-ups.

His arm bumped a loose shelf, which fell down, kicking up more dust. In the blizzard, the children’s bodies became silhouettes. Because he was a man, and knew how to behave manfully, he held out his hands, palms up, so they’d see he was safe.

While they were still silhouettes, their outlines began to blur until their bodies were replaced by two outlines of light. The outlines became columns of dust, of air, of light, shimmered, vanished.

He turned around, puzzled, but ready to comfort the two women, as was his wont.

She looked at his eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d really loved him.

She turned and ran, past the scratched-up walls, the hole-in-the-wall-sockets, out the front door. She didn’t stop at the car, just kept running, couldn’t decide if she should run for the city that shone like a mirage in the distance or for the real, substantial desert.

He sighed, but didn’t follow after her.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

Poetry in Translation: Corona

2010-09-18T10:10:00.000-04:00

Corona

From my hand, autumn eats up its leaf: we are friends.
We shell out time from the nuts and we teach it how to move,
But time turns right back towards its shell.

The mirror shows Sunday.
Sleep comes in a dream.
Truth comes from the mouth.

My eye climbs down towards the sex of my beloved.
Our eyes take each other in.
We speak together, dark things.
We love one another like poppy loves memory.
We sleep together, wine in conch shells,
Like the sea in the moon’s bloodbeam.

We stand slung together at the window, they look up at us from the street.
It is time that they know!
It is time for the stone to allow itself to bloom,
For the heart to pound offbeat.
It is time for time to come.

Yes, it’s time.

Paul Celan, from Mohn und Gedächtnis

Imagined Dialogue on Kierkegaard: From Behind Closed Doors, Part Three

2010-08-24T21:01:00.001-04:00

XVIII

Excerpts from a Sample Conversation Between the King of the Counter-Cultural Scene and Elder Burns, Assistant to the Mission President, Reconstructed With the Aid of My Recently Re-Acquired College Notebooks To Help You Understand What I’m Trying to Tell You: Kierkegaard Edition

We join in medias lecturis:
Professor: ... That’s why Kierkegaard writes an ironic attack on Christendom. He recognizes that Christendom doesn’t instantiate Christianity, but without knowing what that would be, he lacks the authority to engage in anything but an ironic attack on Christendom.
Random Goody-Two-Shoes-Student: So what do you think he’d say about the Gospel.
Court Jester <sotto voce, but so that Elder Burns, Assistant to the President and the King of the Counter-Cultural Scene will be sure to hear>: Something ironic, no doubt.
E.B.A.P. : Once you have the Restoration of the Gospel, you don’t need irony.
Prof: Why’s that, Gary?
E.B.A.P.: Because you only need irony were there isn’t authority. And once the Gospel’s restored, you have authority.
R.G.2.S.S.: Oh, is that why Kierkegaard says, he lacks the authority?
K.C.C.S. : Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymous works, right? What’s the connection between authority and authorship?
E.B.A.P. That’s off-topic. Anyway, this isn’t pseudonymous.
Prof: No, Isaac’s right to ask. Remember, Kierkegaard says the key to the pseudonyms is their stance towards faith.
E.B.A.P. But once the Gospel is restored, you don’t need any stance but the right one.
Prof: Ok, Gary, but if Kierkegaard doesn’t know what the Gospel is, how will he know the right one?
E.B.A.P. : The same way we do: through faith and prayer.
Prof: So what you’re saying is that he’ll recognize the authority for the same reason that he recognizes that he doesn’t have the authority.
E.B.A.P. Yeah. He recognizes the apostasy of Christendom and knows enough to know it’s an apostasy, which is all that we can really expect without the light of the Gospel.
K.C.C.S: I’m sorry. I’m still having trouble with the pseudonyms. I mean, what about Anti-Climacus? He’s supposed to be a higher pseudonym, right?
E.B.A.P: So what?
Prof: Remember, he represents, Kierkegaard’s understanding of the perspective of Christ?
K.C.C.S.: But isn’t Kierkegaard’s relationship to Anti-Climacus still ironic?
Prof: Yeah, but it’s a higher sort of irony.
K.C.C.S.: But Elder --- Gary --- sorry, we served on missions together. Gary said there wouldn’t be irony from that perspective.
E.B.A.P.: Kierkegaard isn’t scripture, Elder Smith.
K.C.C.S.: I don’t remember saying that he was. It just seems to me like authoirty is a lot less important to the question of authorship than faith.
E.B.A.P.: So what?
K.C.C.S: Well, for Kierkegaard, faith is all about a secret, inexpressible relationship to God, right?
E.B.A.P: But that’s because he doesn’t have the Gospel.
K.C.C.S.: If he had, he wouldn’t have thought it was so secret?
E.B.A.P: Right.
K.C.C.S.: So what would it have been instead?
E.B.A.P. <sarcastically>: It would have been the Gospel, Isaac.
K.C.C.S.: And what’s that.
E.B.A.P.: It’s what the Brethren say.
K.C.C.S.: And they have authority?
E.B.A.P: Are you saying they don’t?
K.C.C.S.: Of course not, I’m just making sure I understand you.
E.B.A.P.: It doesn’t matter if you understand as long as you understand the Brethren.
K.C.C.S: And what they say isn’t secret?
E.B.A.P.: Of course not.
Court-Jester: It’s sacred.

Daddy and the Date with the Giant

2010-07-07T15:04:00.000-04:00

This is to show the giant. The other picture is seats in the opera house

This is a story that Ideas Girl and I wrote using boggle dice for our prompt:

Daddy and the Date With the Giant

I went on a date with a giant and here's how the story goes. I was putting bolts in some furniture when the giant came and said "May you come and have a date with me?" The giant had brought a present. It was doggy bones because we got a new doggy. The Giant didn't know how to sing his Alphabet so he sang "Ah Be Cee She She Ah Gee Ah Boh Kee Da Owee." The Giant was only 2, but he was still bigger than me.

The Giant gave me and Ideas Girl a quest. We had to go to the opera, where Ideas Girl wore a bunny costume, and I was one of the lions. And there was a car that we rode in at the opera while we sang "OPERA!" While we were in the car, we sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star / How I wonder / What you Are." Then we saw a crow. It was eating the pie for our picnic, and we said, "Oh well, we'll go get another one." So we did. And then we find two gingerbreads for dessert.

There was water that we could have for our drink.

The End.

Knowledge Questors visit the Creation Museum

2010-06-27T14:25:00.595-04:00

(Link to full photo display)

During the first Knowledge Quest road trip, Matt, Jacob and I took what we thought would be a side trip to the Creation Museum. Little did we know how crucial it would be for the whole road trip.

For those of you who don't know what it is, the Creation Museum define itself thusly:

The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.

It was built on the Kentucky/Ohio/Indiana border (in the suburbs of Cincinnati) by Ken Hamm (a nutso Australian who I've written some hilarious jokes about) amid great controversy and has become a flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars in the United States.

Ken Hamm is a young earth creationist. Unlike old-earth creationists, who believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old but that it was "created' by a God using mechanisms utterly different than those that the modified molecular theory of evolution describes, or intelligent designers, who accept the basic mechanisms of the modified molecular theory but hold that the only explanation for these mechanisms is teleological (an "intelligent designer") young earth creationists hold that the earth (indeed the entire universe) is slightly older than 6000 years old and was created according to a highly literal reading of the narrative in the Bible's Book of Genesis.

The primary purpose of our knowledge quest had been to explore the Indiana-Ohio border and figure out how to provoke a war between the two states and this trip to the Creation Museum was supposed to be a lark, a little joke. We knew some of our less ironic friends would be furious at us for even going so we decided we'd atone by taking pictures so they could learn about it without having to go. We thought the hardest part would be keeping straight faces and getting caught. We'd concocted a back story about being youth ministers in training. We'd decided we were "agnostic" about the evolution/creation debate, since we couldn't pull off full-fledged believers. (We later learned that our best bet would have been to bring women and children and pretend to be closeted gay men --- then we'd have fit right in). Little did we realize it wouldn't be hard not to laugh. We'd be too busy being scared shitless.

The ticket taker told us the main exhibit space would take us 20 minutes. It took us about 5 hours. (Creationists are very bad at estimating time).

We ended up taking copious photographs, which I'm linking to here. I think we got almost every display, scrap of text, or what have you. I've included captions and commentary to explain them and make sense of them, but I'll post some general thoughts here.

We are not philosophers of science, although Matt and Jacob had classes with UT's fantastic Dr. M (who is) and I've grown up around scientists and been doing more with the Theory of Evolution specifically because of some work I've been doing on Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger (a project on separating formal and final causes and temporalizing formal explanations that I call Platonism after Darwin). My background is much more steeped in the philosophy of culture and art and social and political context, and that's what I personally have taught to Matt and Jacob. So we're not going to comment as much on the "science" on the Museum as on how it functions as a "work of art."

The thesis that I'll outline here is that the Creation Museum, taken as a whole, is a masterpiece of ideology for the sake of ideology. I'll explain what I mean by that a little bit here, but the full explanation is given in the context of the pictures we took and the captions/explanations we provide. This is also where we'll support this thesis.

Let me offer a brief explanation of what I mean, though:

We had expected that there would be a lot of emphasis put on offering "alternative explanations" of natural history, but this was in fact not the case. I suspect that they take the work they've done poisoning public discourse in America for granted. The sad fact is that far too many Americans think that there is a genuine scientific debate and that the Theory of Evolution isn't particularly well proven. Of course, this is utter nonsense, but we'd expected the Museum to try to make a scientific argument.

In fact, the main argument that was made was "moral," as our friend Danstead had asserted it would be. The Museum relied on setting up a false dichotomy: either CREATIONISM or NIHILISM. Once this dichotomy is established and the need for accepting creationism asserted, the museum then sets up an alternative narrative, which we'll have occasion to talk about below.

The main exhibit dealt with four of what the Museum called the seven C's in their narrative of creation: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation. The first four are all taken from a highly literalistic reading of the first few fifteen or so chapters of Genesis. The last three are taken from an equally literalistic, but now highly selective, reading of the Hebrew Prophets (esp. Isaiah), the Gospels, and the book of Revelations. I say highly selective because they manage to avoid not only the entire social justice message of so many of the prophets and the gospels, but also, for example, almost the entire Resurrection, which is presumably pretty important for most accounts of Christianity.

The narrative, and the initial argument is tremendously, exorbitantly violent. We had been expecting the Museum to be a foray into the culture wars and to implicitly support the socially and fiscally conservative agenda of the religious right. Of course it did this, but not quite as explicitly as you'd expect. And the sheer violence of the narrative was so striking that it seemed excessive for a mere bulwark of an ideology that many people already support --- to say nothing of justifying the enormous price-tag of the Museum. We had been expecting a patchwork, ad-hoc bunch of dinosaurs and people (something like Jesus riding a triceratops). We got some of that, but the presentation went far beyond that and was, frankly, masterful.

Why?

To understand that, let's break down what the trip to the museum consisted of.

Our experience at the Museum essentially consisted in four parts:

1) Our tour of the main exhibit.
2) A highly sophisticated planetarium show.
3) A terrifying little film about the last 3 C's (Christ, Cross, Consummation), called "The Last Adam"
4) A speech by the Man Himself. No, not God. Ken Hamm, who talked to the kids about dinosaurs, and scared the bejeezus out of the rest of us.

To understand how the Museum functions ideologically, it's necessary to think about each of these parts.

But first, let's divide potential visitors to the Museum (and America more broadly) into three groups.

1) True Believers. There are the people who already belong to the Religious Right. They may or may not be familiar with the highly idiosyncratic version of the Creation story that the Museum tells, but they are already to believe it. These are the people we saw reading the signs to their kids like scripture. I think that the bulk of the Museum's attendees belonged to this group. We might wonder, why employ such tremendous violence against your own group? Why traumatize people who already agree with you?

2)The Squishy Middle. These are the people who identify themselves as Christian but don't necessarily consider themselves to be fundamentalists and who are, let's say agnostic about evolution. They might be genuinely agnostic about evolution (far too many Americans are). Or they might accept the story they learned in school but, lacking the tools to explain it, they might believe that there really is another side and simply want to hear it. They consider themselves believing Christians, but they aren't necessarily fundamentalists. They might have a different interpretation of Christianity, or they might not have a determinate interpretation at all. They may or may not go to church regularly.

Members of this group fancy themselves to be moderates, and the press flatters them by calling them moderates, flattering them by telling them that they have common sense (this is the highest praise that the press can bestow). In fact, the principle way in which the squishy-middle's worldview resembles common sense is its amorphousness, and by extension its malleability, its capacity for self-forgetfulness. Socrates already diagnosed the principle weakness of this view in the Theatetus: it's really just opinion, and opinion doesn't amount to much. The squishy middle isn't moderate in that its views fall between the extremes of 1 & 3 (or between any extremes) --- it's moderate in the sense that it's up for grabs. The squishy middle enthusiastically supported Bush for 6 years without necessarily sharing his conservative views because they were afraid of terrorism and *thought* they were afraid of gay marriage. They could equally quickly turn on him after his mismanagement of Katrina made his mismanagement of the economy and the war on terror too difficult to ignore, wondering how any idiots could have possibly ever liked the guy (an excellent question). They could support Obama not because they shared his technocratic pragmatism or slightly left centrism but because they didn't like Bush and were afraid of a depression. They opposed him on health-care because they are afraid of change, they soured on him because the economy didn't immediately improve, and 4 years from now when health care reform has actually proven successful, they will think they were always for it.

It's hard not to be angry with group 2, but lets just leave this as an observation about the non-ideological, open-ended relationship these folks have to their worldview. That'll prove important both to the ideology of the Museum and why I think right wing will ultimately fail with its agenda (I say ultimately--- there may be some painful victories along the way).

Given that this group is going to be at least in principle sympathetic to hearing the creationist folks out, but given their squishy moderateness, we might wonder: why employ such a stringent, violent and uncompromising message? Doesn't this risk alienating group 2?

Finally, we have:

3) The Sinful Liberal Intellectual Secular Humanist Atheist Elite. It's entirely possible that folks in group 3 have none of these characteristics, and they certainly need not have all of them (I, for example, am a sinful liberal intellectual secular atheist, but not unequivocally a humanist and not particular elite -- though I am elitist.) What they have in common is a rejection of the creationist worldview. Unlike folks in the squishy middle, some of whom might not actually agree with the creationist worldview, folks in group three's rejection of the claims of the creationism is hardened, and not likely to change. There might be several reasons for this: it might be that these people don't know much about modern evolutionary theory but they accept the authority of the modern scientific establishment; they also might know enough about biology to have a good sense of why the creationists are wrong; or they might simply reject the moral argument and/or authority of the religious right. I think for me, and for many in group 3 all of these things are partially true. I probably keep up on current developments in biology more than most, but certainly nothing near enough to have any expertise. Still, even if I were talking to a creationist with a PhD in biology, I wouldn't accept their claims because I'd assume that the an actual expert could show me what was wrong with them (I'd make an appeal to authority, and this appeal would be warranted). Finally, I completely reject the morality of the religious right (and on this point I do have a degree of expertise) --- so any moral arguments they make aren't going to have any weight for me.

While group three is probably going to include most non-Christians, it also includes plenty of Christians who a) know their version of Christianity to be incompatible with the Christianity of the creationists and b)accept the authority of the scientific establishment. Take my father: a devout Mormon but also a professor of physics. He rejects any version of creationism or intelligent design; he accepts the modern molecular theory of evolution. After spending over forty years working as a scientist, he believes that he'll learn far more about the mind of God by learning natural history with an open mind than he'd learn while wearing ideological blinders. Correlatively, his view of the moral message of Christianity has very little to do with the message that the creationists push so he's not going to be particularly concerned about whether rejecting creationism leads into some moral morass. I know plenty of scientists in this category.

Of course, from the perspective of the us vs. them message the Museum pushes, there is no real difference between Christians like my father and atheists like me, and that's why I group them together here.

Now, given that folks in group three have reasons for rejecting the views of creationists, we might wonder why the Museum doesn't really try to put forth counter-arguments (this is one of the main things I'd been expecting them to do). Why instead do they employ a violent, dogmatic narrative which won't do anything to persuade group 3? Doesn't this just confirm the prejudices of group 3?

With these three groups in mind, let's look at the four main parts of our experience and see if they shed any light on these questions.

1) Most of our pictures are of the main exhibit (the other 3 parts didn't lend themselves as easily to photography). Again, let me emphasize that the logic employed here is extremely sketchy. The fragmentary logic that you'll see employed in the pictures is concealed by the immersive character of the exhibit. I want to emphasize that one of the reasons we took so many photos is so that it will be clear that this fragmentary character is not a function of the selection process we employed. It's not that these selections are indicative of the logic --- they are the logic.

The best way to understand how the museum functions is to look at the photos. We've described how it functions in the captions. Let me summarize of few of the most significant features of the museum and our conclusions about how they function.

Rather than presenting an argument for the creationist view or to contextualize biology "Biblically," the function of the main exhibit is to impose a narrative, and this narrative is principally mythological. In this respect the Museum is more like a ride at Disneyland (with themed entrance to prime the imagination, use of technology to employ an immersive illusion, and feelings of thrill or terror folded into a story that is already familiar).

What is most striking about this narrative, as I've already said, is its extraordinary violence. The transition between each of the "C's" I've listed above involves some scene of sacrifice, graphically and prominently displayed. Given that this is hardly the traditional, or most literal, way of structuring the narrative of the first chapters of Genesis (which is best understood as being about the formation of the people of Israel) to say nothing of the whole Bible, we might suspect that this decision plays a highly specific function.

In the accompanying photos, we try to outline how these scenes of sacrifice structure the whole exhibit. For now, let's move on to the second part of our visit.

2) After we had seen the main exhibit, we went and saw a show in the planetarium, presenting a tour around the universe "with Biblical insights" or some such catch. It's not immediately clear how much of this exhibit depends on the Creation Museum's ideology. Aside from some boilerplate "the universe as the artwork of God" stuff and one significant foray into ad hoc speculations that I'll discuss below, there didn't seem to be a lot specifically religious about the presentation, and none of the violent narrative we saw in parts 1, 3 & 4 of our tour. Nonetheless, Jacob, Matt and I all had the same reaction which was to be suspicious of absolutely everything we heard, seem it ever so innocent. After we left, Matt said "that convinced me of two things: 1) there's probably life somewhere else in the universe, and 2) the universe is way older than 6000 years."

Even so, I have to say that the presentation was impressive. It's been a long time since I'd been to a planetarium, and the technology has evolved quite a bit --- I imagine that this is a function both of a turn to LED lighting and far more sophisticated mathematical modelling. Two particularly impressive things were their "telescoping" the views of the universe from micro to macro and imagining how the stars shift in position as we engage in imaginary faster-than-light travel.

The only strikingly "Creationist" part of the show was how they dealt with light-years, a problem to their account that I'd never really thought about until they called attention to it, whereupon it is obviously fatal to their account. First they emphasize that the light-year is a unit of distance, not time (technically true, until we take relativity into account and note that at the level of the light-year space and time are no longer wholly distinct.). Then they propose (without explanation) one or two ad hoc theories thought they say would explain why we can see light from points hundreds of millions of light years away when the light year is distance it takes light to travel in a year.

It took me a few days to figure out how this chicanery connected to the narrative in what were the cooler parts of the exhibit, and how they connected that narrative of the rest of the museum). We live in a world that is awash in light pollution. It's probably been eight years since I was in a place where human light didn't significantly impact my ability to see the night skies --- when I was a kid, I spent enough time in the deserts of Southern Utah to see some of the best vistas you'll see in the United States. But even if you go to a relatively dark area a little outside of exurban sprawl, you'll be able to see not only vast distances but vast expanses of time. Leaving aside certain quantum effects, the full significance of which is still being worked out, and effects of the topography of the universe, the speed of light marks an absolute speed-limit, the speed of information itself. So if I look up at Messier 81, a galaxy that is part of the Ursa Major constellation, I am looking at light that was emitted 12 million years ago. If somehow, I were able to transport myself there now, I wouldn't see the sun as it is now, I'd see the sun as it was 12 million years ago. And, because there are such vast differences between the objects I see in the sky, there is no one constant place that light would be coming from. Out in Messier 81, I would be receiving information about the stars that hasn't reached earth, and vice-versa. You can say it's a cool trick to shuttle us around, and I'll agree, but we have to preface it by noting that it's just a fiction. And although I might gain a lot of comprehension with this little imaginative game, there's something very important I lose: the depth of time. When I look at the stars, I see the past: I see the evidence of the vast durations of the cosmos. The little trick here flattens it out, erases the evidence of time from the night sky. The same trick is evidenced in imagining the universe from a "God's eye perspective" - again, fine as an imaginative exercise, but potentially distorting when the model we thereby construct is taken for reality.

Appearances notwithstanding, then, one of the effects (perhaps not the principle one, but an effect nonetheless) of the planetarium show we saw was to use the awesome sublimity of space (identified with the power of God), to do violence to time, to our capacity to imagine the expanses of time. Now, I'm suspicious when philosophers compare some sort of conceptual violence to physical violence, but sometimes that comparison is warranted. As I'll argue below, there is a very real connection between the violence this presentation does to our capacity to imagine time and the auditory and visual violence that structures the narrative of the rest of the museum.

3) The reason why we did the planetarium second was because we had timed tickets. In fact, what is supposed to come right after the main exhibit is a short 20 minute video called, "The Last Adam." This is a weird way of talking about Jesus --- I take it that the most relevant prophetic way of talking about Jesus qua Messiah is as the rightful heir of David. I think I've heard him described as a new Adam (I think Paul might analogize the way in which Christians are "born again" in Christ to the way in which we all, on the traditional creation narrative, are born through Adam). But I'm not sure I've ever heard the term The Last Adam used before. It is, as we will see, quite fitting here, and fits in well with the enormous leap we'll make from the first chapters of Genesis to the Gospels, interestingly skipping over the entire history of the people of Israel, for example.

When we walked in, the theater was about half-full. Rather than sitting next to Matt and Jacob, I sat in front of them. If I had sat next to them, I would have obstructed the view of some kids, and thought that that would be rude, given that the theater wasn't full. It turns out I would have spared them a lot of trauma. What followed was a tremendously violent, disturbing and frankly anti-Christian account of the Crucifixion.

The main exhibit covered the first 4 C's in the Museum's narrative (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion), the film covers the last 3 (Christ, Cross, Consummation). On this narrative, Christ represents the "last Adam" because he redeems the fall, and he redeems Adam's fall on the Cross. This of course is one of the central stories of Christianity, but notice that there's already at least two significant shift in emphasis: the first is in the relative devaluation of the resurrection (which, although averred to, isn't shown and which is generally de-emphasized in the Museum, which emphasized the idea that the Crucifixion is the final sacrifice required, and not that it overcomes the logic of sacrifice); the second is in the total lack of the Messianic element of the story. As it is traditionally understood by proclaiming a spiritual kingdom, Jesus underlined the prophetic heritage of Israel, which had a strong emphasis on social justice, de-terreoralizing and de-politicizing it. None of that here (we might not be surprised about downplaying the social justice themes, but we should be surprised that they don't make more of the frankly theocratic elements of the Messianic story given their love of state power (see photos).

The most bloody part of the film is the representation of the crucifixion, which is sort of an abbreviated Passion of the Christ, complete with anti-Semitism. But I want to dwell on the weird prelude, where we see Mary talk about having to give up her son as a "sacrifice." Here is where our biblical literalists introduce an element that has no textual support whatsoever and which I imagine many Christians would regard as un-Christian.

Did I mention that the exhibit has a weird pro-incest display? I should probably mention that now.

Before we get to the Annunciation, an old Mary, who has just seen her son killed, recalls the following event (nowhere in the Bible so we'll have to assume it was revealed to Ken Hamm in a wet dream):

"When I was a little girl, I remember how our family would look very hard for an unblemished lamb. This is the one we would bring to the priests as a sacrificial lamb. My father made sure my sisters and I watched what happened next. He wanted us to understand how important sacrificing our best was."

While this narrative goes on, we see a man forcing his two young daughters to watch a lamb be violently slaughtered.

We then get an account of the Annunciation which really plays up the "God the Father" and rape-y overtones of the story. "But I'm a virgin --- the Spirit of God the Father will overcome you." YIKES!

Now, the wholly fabricated prelude to the Annunciation becomes the key to understanding all the last three C's: Christ is the unblemished lamb who is butchered on the Cross, which anticipates the violent holocaustic Consummation where some will be saved by his sacrifice and some won't (and therefore will have to be sacrificed themselves, presumably).

4) Yikes! We were scared by then. Maybe it's time for a light-hearted presentation on the Seven Ages of Dinosaurs by Ken Hamm, the founder of the Museum himself! We had missed his earlier presentation and were told that this one would be a little less dark (the other one was on why genesis was important today --- I'm guessing it has something to do with "sacrificing" fetuses) and more geared towards kids. The basic "Seven Ages of Dinosaur" which were absurd may or may not have been but Mr. Hamm made sure that there was plenty of horrifying and dark overtones on the way.

A few highlights:
The presentation begins with some impromptu "back and forth" with the president of the Creation Museum, who is clearly torn between his resentment of the fact that Ken Hamm is the one who became famous and the tight bond that sixteen years of sodomy on the DL have created between them. Lots of jokes about "I've known him for millions of years" accidentally letting slip how many gajillions of books they've sold, etc. We also learn that the museum is situated where it is because it is near the demographic middle of the United States (I haven't checked, but I'm guessing it's near the southwestern corner of the demographic circle they drew). He forgot to mention that it was perched in a zone of low actuality, but maybe that's because he hadn't been on our knowledge quest.

Hamm's presentation included the same mix of violence, sophistry, vaguely "Biblical" claims and conservative politics (including some telling slams on global warming) that we've come to know and love. I wrote a whole series of Ken Hamm themed jokes that I'll share with you later. For now, I'll just note that there is a big emphasis on "competing" with other museums, trash-talking (while showing photos of) various zoos, museums of natural history, etc.

The presentation ends with a five minute live infomercial where he informs us of all the products we can buy from them: including a whole biblically based curriculum "Did you know that most history books say the pyramids are more than 6000 years old?" Well, actually, no. I believe most of the great Egyptian pyramids are 4000-5000 years old, but there are plenty of other structures that are over 6000 years old, such as Tureng Tepe.

We wandered around the botanical gardens for a while before leaving in terror.

Upon leaving the Museum, one will be inclined to ask --- why?

I don't think that it was simply because we were in shock that the Museum didn't really seem to make sense. It failed to live up to our expectations. Another way of saying this would be to say --- it exceeded our expectations.

Let's summarize the basic expectations that we'd had, again:

We'd expected to have sophistical arguments thrown at us designed to confuse us.
We'd expected to have cultural conservativism thrust down us: anti-abortion, anti gay-rights, maybe anti roll and roll, yaddah yaddah yaddah.
We'd expected implicit jingoism, pro-capitalism, yaddah yaddah yaddah --- in other words, the weird amalgam of economic libertarianism and traditionalist populism that marks the ideology of the religious right. We'd expected that to be front and center.

It wasn't that those things weren't there, but they were there weirdly. The presentation was so thoroughly, carefully and sophisticatedly worked out, but it didn't do those things in anything like the way we'd expected and, it didn't seem to do those things very well.

The reason why it didn't seem to do those things very well were the obsessions with violence and sacrifice that I outlined above, and the grotesque fear this gives rise to, the import of which I asked you to think about for each of the three putative groups going through the Museum.

Although this obsessiveness was crucial to the narrative, it didn't make for a very good argument against evolution, nor did it present a very palatable picture for cultural conservatism And although it was compatible with the main gripes you'll hear cultural conservatives make, it didn't really argue for or depend upon them that much.

The Museum didn't do what we'd expected it to do. Maybe it tried to do those things and did them poorly. But it was so carefully constructed and, frankly, so masterful, that we're better assuming that we hadn't expected the right things. It certainly did something.

What exactly did it do and how did this obsessive, sacrificial violence help it do it?

Certainly anyone who was "persuaded" by the Museum would be more sympathetic to cultural conservatism, but there are much better ways to make the case for that and it would make sense to make that story more central (by spend more time railing about Adam and Steve and less time promoting incest, for example). There were throw away bits of jingoism, anti-Semitism, sexism and racism, but they were more reflective of the cultural biases that the Creation Museum had then something it was promoting (as near as we could tell, for example, the Americas were uninhabited until the 16th century or so).

Certainly people sympathetic to that cultural conservatism would be malleable to the economic libertarianism and big business oriented state capitalism that the Republican party promotes. And although we can suspect that this fact helped to rustle up some of the piles of cizash it must have taken to make the Museum, the whole thing would be a bit of overkill --- too controversial to be that effective of an ideological investment for cynical libertarians trying to harness the ugly populism of the religious right.

There were of course, elements of the self-promoting greediness of televangelism and the Gospel of Wealth (for example, in Ken Hamm's little infomercial). But it lacked the touchy-feeliness, the shades of New Aginess that effective televangelists depend upon.

So it did all of these things somewhat, but none of them particularly well or particularly clearly. Was it just an amalgam of these various ideological goals? But then why the obsessive unifying narrative, especially given that this narrative detracts more than adding to any of these particular goals?

Let's ask ourselves, once again, what the museum actually does. If it in fact does something very well and if the thing that it does it does as a function of its central narrative, we ought to assume that that is its primary ideological function. It is from this perspective that we'll understand the Museum as a work of art, an ideological work of art, art for the sake of ideology or, perhaps, better, ideology for the sake of ideology.

What exactly did the museum do?

It scared. It scared us because it's scary. And it's scary because it's supposed to be scary.

So why is it supposed to be scary? How does its fear function?

Let's see if we can hear anything from the horse's mouth:

One of the things that Ken Hamm told us when he was was giving his presentation was along the following lines: "you know, a lot of people ask me why we have such a realistic scene of Adam sacrificing an animal right when you walk into the Corruption room, but actually that's one of my favorite exhibits because it shows the importance of sacrifice. It shows that we need to sacrifice to live after the Fall."

Did you notice the weird shift that happened there?

Sacrifice is an important theme in Christianity, right? Well, of course. After the Fall, we are all mortal and our morality means suffering. Our suffering means loss. Loss means economy and sacrifice. On the traditional account, Christ "pays the infinite debt for us." In other words on the traditional account, self-sacrifice is the redemption of suffering.

That's not exactly how it works in the Creation Museum's logic: there, sacrifice is demanded because the world is a bloody place. We don't see Adam suffering: we see Adam sacrificing. Christ's death isn't taken to redeem the suffering of Adam, it's a grotesque mimicry of the sacrifice we saw him doing. Suffering is passive. Sacrifice is active.

At the same time, Christ isn't Adam. Christ is the lamb that Adam is sacrificing (which makes the Romans or, as the Last Adam says in a bit of Mel Gibsony anti-Semitism the Romans and Jews) the Adams (despite the fact that the museum called Christ the last Adam.)

Ken Hamm also told us that he wanted people to know that the Cross was like Noah's Ark, that if you accepted the Cross, you'd be saved just like Noah was saved. Go back and see what happened to sinners in the Noah's Ark flood diorama. If you are saved, Ken Hamm told us, the sacrifice of Christ covers you. Otherwise, it doesn't.

This is, in fact, the central narrative of the Museum: the world is represented as a battle field. The battle lines are drawn up: there's God's word and human opinion: there's the majesty of creation and abortion, drug-abuse, childbirth and death; there's vegetarianism and carnivorism. But we don't can't just make a battle-field in the middle of peaceful, peaceful America, which was colonized so long ago, "won" from a people who the Museum neglects to mention, how can there be battle lines in the middle of peaceful, peaceful America?

That's where the violence comes in. In fact, the key to understanding the Creation Museum is to realize that it is not arguing for Young Earth Creationism. It is using Young Earth Creationism as a prop, to construct a mythological story.

The thing that I've always loved about mythology is that it's malleable, that you can bend familiar stories into unfamiliar ways. Anne Carson, probably my favorite living poet, does this brilliantly and beautifully. The Creation Museum does it, well, not brilliantly, but very adeptly. And certainly not beautifully. It takes the traditional narrative of Genesis and extracts from it a bizzare and violent account of sacrifice in order to do violence to us.

The Museum-goers undergo that violence. Because the Museum starts by showing us a battlefield: God vs. the World, Museum-goers think that they are seeing the "representation" or "display" of that violence in the displays. But this isn't a Museum with displays: it's an amusement park ride. Amusement part rides, particularly Disneyesque ones, aren't about showing you something; they are about making the amusement park goer experience something.

Under the guise of "learning about a biblically-based account of Creation," museum-goers undergo a certain kind of violence. They are immersed in a world that tries to present itself as real, where a highly ideologized narrative claims to be real. Within the space of that virtual reality, they see repeated displays of sacrifice. They see men of God doing violence to people and animals, and they are told that that violence is an inevitable result of sin (but note, again, it's not the world doing the violence, as in the traditional account of Christianity, it's the men of God). The crucifixion is represented as the apotheosis of this violence. We are told that this violence that we've been undergoing has been prefiguring the Crucifixion. And Jesus, who is represented as the "sacrificial lamb," is given the name of the last Adam, the first sacrificer. Then, we are reminded that, after all, it's our choice: same facts, different interpretations. You can interpret them in the godly way (the way that the doers of violence interpret them) or in the human way (the way that those who will have violence done to them do). But it's your choice. Ken Hamm ended by driving this point home: he told us, after he'd told us about the Ark/Cross analogy that he'd made that he hoped we all would know that we were there on the Ark, saved (presumably because we no longer believed in evolution.)

"Belief in evolution" or "belief in creationism" aren't values --- they are schibboleths. If you try to cross the border and you pronounce the word "river" wrong --- well, you're in trouble. Why evolution? Here, again, I think the totally ad-hoc character of the museum's justifcations and their highly sophisticated use of technology are both telling. They both reflect an element of fundamentalist logic that Derrida called attention to when he described fundamentalism as an auto-immune disorder in the body politic: a willingness to use parts of the whole while rejecting, even attacking, the logic that holds it together. This is what I had in mind when I said that the violence that the museum does to our sense of reason is of a kind with the physical violence represented in the exhibits. Early critics of evolution thought that the notion that we were related to monkeys was an affront to the dignity of the rational, moral human being. And yet the Theory of Evolution is one of the most sophisticated expressions of that reason. And so contemporary moral critics will simply have to do violence to reason, to submit the human body and soul to abjection and violence and undo the marvelous narrative that the sciences are painstakingly putting together.

This is your choice: you can believe what we tell you is literally the word of God or you can believe in the systematicity of the human endeavor. Who are you going to believe? Us, or your own eyes?

Remember, we have guns.

Okay, so this helps us understand what the museum does in a general sense. Let's ask ourselves again how this might impact the our three groups going through here, and let's recall our questions:

1) True Believers. Why use such a violent narrative, such gruesome imagery, and indeed subject "true believers" to this kind of traumatic event at what is billed as a family friendly affair? The answer seems a little more clear now. The point is to provide a central, focal, narrative (again, not the one of traditional Christianity), and to provide an "initiation into violence." The faithful museum goer experiences the violence but then is told, by virtue of their belief, that they are violence-doers, sacrificers, not sacrificees. The Museum subjects them to violence, but by identifying Christ first as sacrificial lamb and next as sacrificer, and by identifying the Museum-goes as Christian with Christ, the battle lines are drawn. True believers experience violence and are given an enemy.

2) Squishy Middle. Why use such violence against the squishy middle? Won't it put them off? Well, it might, but it will force them to see the stakes of their ostensible Christianity. And they are given the option of identifying with the right side. The effect then is to vacate position two and two provide strong reasons for taking side 1. Otherwise, well, otherwise they'll be with our final group.

The Sinful Secular Atheist Intellectual Liberal Elite. The violent narrative might not persuade this group, but it will give them a sense of what's coming. It describes their place in this violent, cosmologically paranoid worldview and lets them know of the violence that awaits them, absent the sacrifice. As the representatives of this camp, Matt, Jacob and I saw the threat quite well and heard the evils that evil, sinful people like us are going to perpetrate (who knew --- I think we're a pretty mild mannered bunch.) Of course, we were also told by Ken Hamm that he hoped we knew that we were saved. Still, we probably blew any salvation that evening during our Louisville Creation-Cleanse (featuring Asian fusion food and bourbon tastings).

In short, we can see that the answer to each of the questions is to realize that the experience of terror, the central narrative of violence is to reproduce itself in the Museumgoer --- to make it a plausible narrative. It's not about Creationism. It's about the ideology of the Creation Museum which wants nothing so much as to assert it's own importance.

Far be it from me to get all Glenn Becky, but this relationship to ideology is exactly the same as the relationship to ideology that leading social theorists have identified as distinctive of fascism. Fascisms invest themselves primarily in creating a fantastic, paranoid narrative and in using sheer violence and power to normalize and enforce it. Although this narrative plays to and borrows from various prejudices, fears and beliefs of reactionary and conservative elements in society and although it cozies up to, and flatters, state power, capital and its justifying beliefs, it really is a different sort of thing. Fascisms essentially double down on the lies of ideology: they take those peripheral stories which derive their appeal from their social role and make these lies the central story, deducing "proper" social roles and rules from them. Thus, the Creation Museum takes various cultural conservative and, to a lesser extent, fiscally conservative (though this would take longer to explain) stories and weaves them together through a central story which is wholly its own invention. It then casts this story in strident terms and insists that everyone: ally and enemy, understand society and history through its lens. Once this story is accepted then they are on their turf: legitimacy comes down to nothing more than control over violence.

As I said, the Museum is quite effective at doing this. It is a brilliant piece of ideology and, when you are emerged in the sights and sounds of the Museum, when you are amongst the faithful, it can all seem quite real, quite systematic. It's only on further reinspection when you have the chance to take the experience apart that its thinness becomes obvious. Because it depends for its depth on its claim to both scientific and moral authority. And it has neither. On closer inspection, the morality proves to be grotesque and the science beyond shoddy.

And this is why I think the Museum, and here I'll speculate more broadly about the paranoid movement that has morphed out of the religious right and become its own weird tea-bagging thing, will fail. They depend on convincing people in the middle that the paranoid ideologues, and not mainstream society, are the legitimate exercisers of state power and moral authority (which they conflate, and which conflation drives their insane, traitorous resentment of current state power). They depend upon the sympathy of the squishy middle, which thinks that it's Christian, which thinks that it's conservative, which thinks that it's pro-family values. It thinks those things, but it thinks a lot of other things too. It's also basically peace-loving, anti-conflict, uncomfortable with open prejudice and quite content with the materialist culture that the tea baggers claim to hate.

The paranoid stories the right tells might win them temporary victories, and those victories might be tremendously painful for rational people everywhere. But absent some huge, demographic shifting event, the squishy middle is going to resemble the Sinful Atheist Liberal Intellectual Elite more and more.

Or so we can hope.

Now, what does all this have to do with Knowledge Quest, with Mad General Anthony Wayne and a young lady named UC Santa Cruz?

That story remains to be told

Knowledge Quest Preview

2010-06-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

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Prelude: Building the Bed of Telamachus and Consulting the Oracle
Part One: Ohio/Indiana Border: Mad Anthony Wayne, Conquistador of Triangula, Zone of low actuality
Part Two: Undeconcealment: The Creation Museum, Ken Hamm and The Fragmentation of Ideology at Actuality's Null Point
Part Three: Recovery in Loiusville, City of Pure Possibility, Bourbon and the Cult of California
Part Four: Mammoth Cave, Tiresias, High Actuality and other Cures for Hangovers
Part Five: Return to Ithaca (or Toledo) and the Propitiation to Zeus

Ten Sets of Innummerable, Unlistable things.

2010-06-13T21:39:00.001-04:00

1. The stars in the firmament.
2. The grains of salt in the sea.
3. The ants between Timbuktu and Tajikistan.
4. The proper names of all the nanoseconds in the history of the universe.
5. The possible names of God.
6. The Valid arguments that can be constructed from self-contradictory premises.
7. People who would have been better presidents than George W Bush.
8. Spermatozoa that have failed in their raison d'etre .
9. False beliefs about the nature of love.
10. Regrets.

This is what you're missing, Wordserve Agency!

2010-06-11T21:31:00.003-04:00

From now on, whenever I get a rejection letter from an agent (and I might extend this to academic publishing houses), I'm going to post the part of the novel I've been working on most recently.

[from the middle of Part Three, more or less in the navel of the book]

So that’s how I ended up spending the weekend flying to San Francisco with Isaac to provide him with moral support while his fearsome older sister Isabella helped him find an engagement ring.

****

Isaac’s father Joseph picked us up at the airport. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d been expecting from him. I think I might have known too much to be able to expect anything. But I was expecting all the wrong things, and should have expected nothing. After I’d moved to the Bay Area and gotten to know Joseph much better, I’d learn that his genius, his charm lay in his small movements. Which I should have expected from his quiet notoriety in Utah, his son’s quiet idolization of him. But I’d built up the notoriety, the idolization too much, and didn’t notice the quiet.

He was quiet, though, while he drove us from the airport to his house, quietly moving his Mercedes through the crowded streets, smoothly pushing it through San Francisco’s hills. Not silent. He spoke. He asked me about myself. He asked me about my parents, listened sympathetically about my mother, asked me about our mission, told me he was the only companion his son talked about. I noticed he didn’t seem to be aware of the weirdness surrounding our companionship, so I didn’t get into it. I was too intimidated to tell him anything but what I expected his quiet expected. Which, I would later learn, was where his genius lay. He asked me about BYU, knew who the professors were, asked me for my opinion, nodded when I gave the opinions he expected to hear, which I assumed where the opinions he wanted to hear. I was anxious though, because I didn’t know if they were the opinions he expected to hear, or the opinions he wanted to hear. I was so anxious, I never noticed I never heard anything about him, not in the car, not at his house over the weekend, not as he generously took time off his busy schedule and personally chaperoned us through San Francisco’s poshest jewelers, not eighteen months later when he personally showed me the best apartments his property holding company owned in the Berkeley area, assuring me he’d be happy to let me stay wherever I wanted, rent free, not until quite some way into the weekly dinners he had with me while I was in graduate school, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with Faye, with Eli or with both. By then, I’d already slowly surmised that whatever it was he was trying to tell me, he was trying to tell his son. I think I might have figured it out a little after I got married to Faye. Maybe.

But that was all a long way and, right then, I was there with his son.

I’ve lost track of myself.

You see? That’s just how Joseph works. He doesn’t want you to know how difficult things were with his son, how palpable the regrets, the recriminations, the bitterness lay between them.

What’s that?

Well of course he’s dead. Yes, Isaac is dead too.

What’s your point?

Families can be together forever.

Antigone in Afghanistan

2010-06-01T12:13:00.000-04:00

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Back in March, I went to the ASLCH (Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities). I was giving a paper on Dworkin's notion of integrity and how his deafness to contemporary literary theory caused him to overplay the importance of authority (an idea my sister and I played with in a less academic, more literary context, here).

What I presented on actually has a little bit of relevance to this post, but not much --- more relevant was a fantastic double panel that I went to on legal theory and the Oedipal cycle. Lots of interesting papers, including a theory proposed that I hope is right that Ismene was responsible for the first burial in Antigone.

Coming out of a paper on reinterpretations of Antigone, there was an interesting discussion of Seamus Heaney's translation of Antigone which, in the context of the Iraq War, made Creon into a George W Bush. Heaney's version has been criticized for this, since for most interpreters of the play, one of the most important things is that one can sympathize with both Antigone and Creon. This line of thinking is tremendously importance in political theory and philosophy, thanks largely to Hegel, who argued that both Creon and Antigone expressed sphere of law that were both legitimating and totalizing and therefore drawn into an inevitable conflict.

The discussion was interesting, but in the light of a broader discussion of the contemporary relevance of the Antigone story, I started to wonder whether Afghanistan might be a more interesting story. In particular, I thought it would allow us to explore an issue which divided the left in a way that the Iraq War doesn't --- not the Afghanistan war itself but what to do right now.

This is what I wrote that evening. I'd meant to refine it, but I decided that if the analogy works it only works in an absurdist obliteration of tragedy, so I've left it like that. I offer it today, in homage to the news today that drones have killed Al-Qaeda's #3 operative.

Antigone in Afghanistan

There is a body on a hill. Antigone and Ismene are just now arriving at the bottom of the hill, each from an opposite side of the stage.

Antigone: You came.

Ismene: I did.

A: Because I asked you to.

I: If you'd like.

A: Well, you're here.

I: If you'd like.

A: And you know why.

I: I'm here.

The hill shakes and there is an explosion. The body is blasted into several pieces.

I: Well, what's the point now?

A: I don't know but it seems that there must be a point.

I: I don't see it.

A: Ah, but it's there.

Antigone points to where the body originally lay.

I: Or else it's there.

Ismene points and points and points and points to the scattered body.

A: Let's get to it.

I: I'd rather not.

Enter CHORUS 1, the chorus of tribal elders.

Chorus 1:

There are many ways a body can die,

It can die in its senescence,

its doddering childhood,

slipping away amid smelly hospital sheets,

choking toothlessly on its dinner.

It can die blue with an umbilical cord

wrapped around its neck.

It can starve, or end infested with maggots.

Bodies can perish collectively,

buried by the earth, incinerated en masse

instantly or slowly.

We have heard that some deaths can be delayed,

That there is a way to die with dignity.

We have heard this.

Some deaths are called meaningful.

Some deaths are called meaningless.

We have heard that there is something called a soul.

We have heard it bears death with dignity.

We have seen bodies die.

Then there is that, there.

When bodies die, the parts

they are composed of stop

working together. They also come apart.

There is no set order in which this happens.

Lately, we have seen metal bodies,

buzzing and whirring.

They buzz and whir and hiss and click.

Sometime later, another body comes.

This too is metal.

It explodes, but it does not die.

Metal bodies do not die.

This is not a function of their permanence.

In fact, there parts also cease to function, and also come apart.

In fact, the function of some metal bodies

is to come apart, to make other things come apart.

This introduces the process of decay into organic bodies.

But what is this that is walking towards these bodies.

You, who are you?

What are you doing?

Antigone ignores them. She keeps walking. Ismene turns around

I: We're walking up the hill.

Ch 1: Why?

I: To bury that those things there.

A (stopping, turning): that thing there.

Ch 1: What is that thing?

A: A body.

I: Or bodies.

Ch 1: Whose?

A: Our brother's. We're here to get it.

Ch 1: Why?

A: That is what you do with the bodies of brothers.

Ch 1: But why here?

A: Because that's where the body is.

Ch 1: I wouldn't go up there.

A: Why not? It's perfectly safe.

Another explosion off stage kicks up dust. The hill, with Antigone and Ismene on it, is obscured in dust.

Enter Creon, on the back of a jeep, with entourage.

Creon: Hello? Who is this? What is this going up that hill?

Indeed, Antigone and Ismene's outlines are becoming visible.

Ch 1: It's two bodies.

C: Whose?

Ch 1: We don't know.

C: I can make them out now. Why --- those are my nieces --- you there! What are you doing there? What are you doing there?

A & I: We've come to bury our brothers.

C: That won't be necessary.

I: Why not?

C: I've already buried one of them.

A: And the other?

I: Others.

C: That won't be necessary. I've forbidden it.

A: We know.

I: But why?

C: That's a state secret.

I: But we all know it -- [she speaks in a mocking, officious tone] the state must have the right to total control over the disposition and disposal of bodies living and dead.

A: But the state has always recognized that this right is limited by the limits of the state.

C: Which are where?

A: That's just my point. Who are you?

C: I'm Creon. Your uncle.

A: And who am I?

C: You are Antigone. My niece.

A: And who is my father.

C: That would be Oedipus, the old king. But I see where you're going. He isn't king anymore. There was another between him and me.

A: You mean our brother.

C: Precisely.

A: Which one?

C: I don't dispute the gist of where you're going, but that's beside the point. The state, you should know, is hardly the same as the king. Kings change, you know.

A: And that's my point, precisely.

C: I see where you're going. You're going to say that despite established order and procedures, the established laws of patrimony were violated. But that's beside the point. Patrimony, like patriarchy, is sometimes subverted. And sometimes for the better.

A: That's hardly my point. I'm talking about that thing you just thought to use against me. I'm talking about the subversions and the breaks. I don't care who the king is. How could I? I care about family matters.

C: Family matters are matters of state.

Ch 1: Then why not leave them in the family?

C & A together: What?

Ch 1: Why not keep it in the family?

C & A: What?

I: They asked, why not leave it in the family. They're wondering why we're hear on this hillside. And frankly, so am I.

C: As am I.

A: You wonder why? You brought us here.

C: No, I didn't. It was your brother. Your brothers. And your father. I'm trying to get us out.

A: I thought you said you all were one and the same.

C: We are, when considered as orderers of the state, when considered as directors of these men here.

He points to Chorus 2, the Chorus of Soldiers, which is entering the stage, behind Creon's entourage.

C (continuing): Who are they but marchers. They need marching orders. And we give those marching orders. It is necessary to maintain the fiction that we are one and the same. Your brother <Creon points and points and points> violated that fiction.

A: And so we can't bury him you say? Maybe he violated that fiction, but aren't you violating it to?

I: But why do we need that fiction?

C & A: What?

Ch 1: Why do you need the fiction, the fiction of a body, a body you need to desecrate? What is desecration? Why do you need the fiction, the fiction of a body, a body you need to bury.

Chorus 2:

We are able bodies!
We are able bodies!

We do not know why we are here,

But we know that we will do

What it is we need to do.

We are able bodies!

Chorus 1:

There are many ways that able bodies can die.

They do not die in senescence.

They do not choke on food.

They are filled full of lead,

They are exploded on roadsides,

They die with opium in their eyes,

alcohol in their veins.

They die repenting to themselves

What they've done to bodies,

Able bodies like their own,

What they've seen able bodies do to able bodies.

Chorus 2:

What we've done to able bodies

Has been done to able bodies

Since before your bodies were still able bodies.

We are able bodies.

We can't worry beyond those bodies,

The bodies of ourselves,

Of our friends and brothers, of our enemies.

We worry ourselves less with desecration

Than with survival, with procreation,

A form of recreation

That disposes of our bodies with pleasant disportations,

before their final disposition.

It's a diversion of sorts.

C: So you see my point. What would happen to their cheerful dispositions if there were disabused of the fiction that your brother violated. Without these dispositions, what good would be their disportations, procreations and other recreations? Which reminds me, you two should be back at home.

I : I wouldn't mind staying here a while.

A : We've business to do.

C: I wouldn't do it if I were you. Guards!

A few members of the entourage walk up the hill, seize Antigone and Ismene. They drive off along with Creon, followed by Chorus 2.

Enter Chorus 3, the Chorus of Dead Brothers.

Chorus 3:

We are the dead brothers!

Our bodies are damaged.

Our bodies were bandaged.

Bandages were hardly enough.

We are the dead brothers!

Why did we come here?

We were promised diversions,

diversions and recreations,

inspiration,

procreations, fornications.

What happened to that?

Our diversions turned to dust.

Our spirits to damaged bodies

went downward, turned inward

were broken.

Ch. 1:

Why did you come here?

No one wanted you.

You talk of dead brothers.

Where are our dead sons?

Ch 3:

Look closer,

You'll see them.

Look closer,

You'll see them.

Here they are amongst our ranks.

Ch 1:

But you're the unforgotten.

Ch 3:

Oh no, we're quite forgotten.

Ch 1:

But we've heard them grieve you.

Ch 3:

We assure you, we're quite forgotten.

The dead are all the same.

Re-enter Antigone:

A: I've slipped away from Creon. Forget Ismene. She's doing the gods know what but there's work still to be done.

Ch's 1 & 3: Are you sure that's wise? Didn't you hear Creon?

A: I don't care for Creon. It's enough I know I'm right.

Ch's 1 & 3: Right about what?

A: About responsibility.

Ch's 1 & 3: We thought that this was about your brother.

A: That's secondary. Far more important is responsibility. We have a responsibility to you.

Ch's 1 & 3: To who?

A: To both of you. We have a responsibility to finish what we started.

Ch's 1 & 3: And what did you start?

Antigone faces audience

I understand my presence is far from welcome,

but listen. I'm quite sincere about why I've come.

My brothers, this is their war,

I begged them, I implored them

not to do what they did.

Ch's 1 & 3: For our sake, we wish you'd succeeded.

A: And for your sakes and my sake, I wish I had to.

But listen, Uncle Creon, he doesn't understand!

He says forget the past!

But how can I forget the past?

The past, it haunts me, its memory haunt me.

I can't but help but be haunted by memories of the past.

I wish it were different.

I wish I could move forward.

But if I can't move forward, then better I understand.

Why are we were?

What was it for?

Surely, it was senseless, was meaningless,

lacking in significance,

And yet it claimed by brothers lives.

Ch. 3: And our lives.

Ch. 1: And our sons lives.

A: And you lives and their lives.

Look, I know what you think.

You think: aristocratic girl with her causes;

But it's much more than that.

It's so much more than that.

I see you <she gestures to Chorus 3>

and I see you <she gestures to Chorus 1>

and I see my brother right there <she points, points, points>

And I ask myself, what for?

Why?

Uncle Creon says: <she pulls a serious face>

"Its an unjust war. There's no reason we're there."

And I tell him, "I know,"

And I really do know.

Ch 1: But our country lies in ruins.

Ch 3: And our bodies lie in ditches

A: And it's my fault that we are here, my desirable fault.

Ch 1: It's not your fault you came here.

Ch 3: We'd want you in America.

A: But yet I feel it's my fault, and I want something more. I want to make things right.

Antigone throws dirt over each of the parts of her brother

A: I hope that that's enough.

exit Antigone. With a grand drumroll and a fanfare, enter Creon and Entourage, followed by Chorus 2.

C: Aha! I thought as much! He's been buried! Against my orders, against my express wishes!

Ch 3: Please bury him.

Ch 1: What's the harm in burying him? And while you're at it, please help us.

C: Silence! Don't you know? This is an unjust war! We shouldn't even be here.

I know what you think. You think:

"His pride is imperious."

You think

"He's just another claimant."

But I really mean it.

I look at you <he gestures to Chorus 3> and you >

And I ask myself, Why?

And I look at the boys behind me, still alive and kicking,

And I ask myself, why?

I ask myself, why?

If it was wrong when we entered, is it wrong not to leave, so I ask myself, why?

Creon turns back to the body on the hill.

But who did this unjust thing.

Choruses 1, 2 and 3: It was Antigone.

C: Who did this thing.

Ch's 1, 2 & 3. It was Antigone.

C: I'll get to the bottom of this if it kills me!

Ch. 1, 2 & 3: It was Antigone.

C: Call Tiresias.

A huge television descends from the sky. Tiresias appears on the screen, a blindfold around his eyes.

Tiresias: Creon is soft on terror! Creon is a loser! Creon is a fascist!

C <ignoring him:> Who buried the body?

T: <ignoring him> Creon is a wimp!

Creon is a commie!

Creon is a socialist!

And Creon wets his bed!

C: Who buried the body?

T: I can't say.

C: Who buried the body?

T: I won't say,

You Lilly-livered pansy,

I was here Oedipus started it.

I goaded him on. And it was the right thing to do.

But I'm not responsible for what happened since then.

I told him it would happen, while I goaded him on.

C: I don't care for your pontifications, I just want your augurs. I want you to tell me, who buried the body?

Choruses 1, 2, 3 & Tiresias (in unison): Antigone.

C Tiresias> If you don't start talking soon, I'll assume it was you.

All: Antigone.

Enter guard with Antigone and Ismene each tucked under one of his burly arms.

Guard: Now listen, Mr. Creon, I don't want you to be angry, but there's something I must tell you if you promise not to yell ---

I was minding my own business, doing something or another <he looks bashfully at Ismene, who smiles back at him> when I suddenly noticed the body was gone! Well, not exactly gone, but covered up with dirt. And I looked and I saw her [he brandishes Antigone] which didn't surprise me, but then I looked back at her <he points to Ismene, who smiles broadly. He nods bashfully and looks away>. And I realized I'd been had!

C : Why did you do this?

A: The will of the Gods is more important than your will.
I: To help my sister!
A: Silence, hussy! You had nothing to do with this.
I: How dare you diminish my role?
A to C: I did this on my own.
C (ignoring A) --- As I have told you, this is treason.
A: This is a family matter.
C: It is treason. Whatever the nature of the original defense, it's unseemly.
T: Creon is soft on terror! Creon coddles criminals! His own niece is a criminal!
C: Take her away.

She is hauled off by some of the entourage.
Enter Haemon

Haemon: Stop! Don't you know I love her?
C: Degenerate!
H: I wish you'd spoken to me before you'd done something so foolish.
C: It isn't foolish to ensure the masses . . . listen.
H: This should have been a family matter.
C: Tell that to him <he points at Tiresias>

H: But why did it come to this?
C: Listen, it wasn't I who tore the polity apart with this absurd war. I'm just trying to end it.
H: I understand that. But consider the consequences.
C: The law applies to all.
H: It's a stupid law
Haemon runs offstage.

I: Let me be with Antigone.
C: We've other uses for you. Antigone will die.
Ch's 1, 2 & 3: For what? For whose sins?
Ch 1: For her youth?
Ch 2: For her brothers?
Ch 3: Her father?
C: It pays to be sure the state is obeyed.
But still in my leniency, I'll not kill her.
We'll brick her up.
Forbid the cameras come near her.
How that'll torment her.
And give her food enough,
The Gods won't say we haven't tried.
I: Oh, let me die with her!
C: We've other uses for you.

The Guard leads Antigone away.

Enter Chorus 4, the Chorus of Women

Chorus 4:
They think we speak with one voice,
That's what they think.
Do we love Antigone.
No.
Well, some of us.
But do we pity her?
Yes, we pity her.
Why wouldn't we?
She's been through the ringer with you.

Chorus 1: Whose women are you?
Ch 4: We are own own.
Ch 2: Can we get your number?
Ch 4: We are one, we are two, we are three, we are four.
Ch 3: We're dead you know. Pity us, too.
Ch 4: We pity you.
Ch 3: Mourn for us.
Ch 4: Don't push your luck.
<turning to Creon>
But listen. We've come to tell you, we're leaving you.
C: Oh no, you won't.
Ch 4: We've come to tell you, we've had it with you.
C: I thought you said you didn't speak with one voice.
Ch 4: On this we do, prick.
C: Shit. What can I do?
T: DON'T LISTEN TO THEM! THEY'RE WITCHES!
C: Shit. What can I do?
Choruses 1, 3 and 4: You must undo what you've done.
C: But I've done nothing. I've tried to undo what they've done.
T: DON'T GIVE ME THIS BULLSHIT!
All Choruses: For once, he's right. You must undo what the state has done.
C: But I can't.
All Choruses: We fully agree. You can't. Nonetheless, you must undo what you've done.
C: But how?
All Choruses: That's what Antigone and Ismene were trying to do here.
C: But they were so naive.
All Choruses: Again, we fully agree. Nonetheless -
C: So what am I to do?
All Choruses: There's the girl.
C: Who?
All Choruses: You know.
C: Oh.

He leaves alone.

Combined Chorus:
It seems so pointless.
Life is pointless.
This is the sort of thing that gets overlooked,
When we think of the suffering that happens.
We want a reason.
There should be reasons, shouldn't there?
We think if it's pointless,
What's the point of not suffering,
When not suffering is so difficult,
We want something more.
We can't accept
Suffering without something else.
We can't stop
Suffering, so we look for something else.
Those who act unjustly.
Let me not be like them.
Let me not think
My deeds are done in recompense
For what has been done.
Let me bee free of the madness
That taints Cadmus's house.
Keep me free of the pride
That pollutes Cadmus's house,
That thinks suffering demands a response
Apart from itself.

There's a cry of pain offstage.

Combined Chorus: What? What's the matter.

Creon runs onstage.
C: I am too late. It was too late.
Ch: What happened?
C: When I got there, she'd already done it.
Ch: Done what?
C: Sucked on the stock of a gun.
She was already gone.
But there was more. W
hen I entered, there was Haemon,
and his eyes, their death reproached me
as they swooned and turned upwards,
went blank, turned stone.
And before that, his last words were so very stupid,
it was like he was already stupid before he went dumb:

"What's the point?
Do you see now?
Why don't you see it?
Now I've finally shown you,
Now you have to understand."

But that was so stupid.
He could have said anything,
He could have done anything,
If only he had.
He didn't need to believe me,
He didn't need to be like me,
He didn't have to bereave me,
To prove he could belie me.
He could have done anything
If he'd just done something.
Anything at all.

Creon runs off-stage

Combined Chorus:
Let me never be like the cursed house of Lauis,
The cursed line of Cadmus.
It think it's not earth-sprung.
The flowers of Afghanistan spring from the bones of bodies,
they cling upon the hillside, grow stubborn and strong.
The sun sets on Afghanistan,
the sun, celestial body, it careens across the heavens,
eccentric Phaeton. But nonetheless the sun sets.

Does it go to America,
The sun, celestial flower?

Chorus 2:
My heart longs for America.
Chorus 3:
Our hearts, they say behind us, grow stubbornly in mountains,
The stones upon the mountains --- they're holding us down.

Combined Chorus:
We'd tell you more if we just could.
There's nothing more to say in fact.
We wish we knew how not say what the Cadmeans said.
But it's too late, so on we move,
the world leaving them behind.
It seems Haemon's right.
And now we're done singing.
The song itself is broken.
And so that's why the corpse remains.
But our song is done.

All leave. The exploded body remains, multiplies.

formspring.me

2010-05-26T19:15:00.003-04:00

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/IdeasManPhd

Why don't more people enjoy philosophy in an academic setting?

2010-05-26T19:15:00.001-04:00

I wish I knew. I've found that when people who are out of school find out I'm a philosophy professor they are either really excited and tell me how much they love philosophy or else they tell me how boring it was and how much they hate it.

I had already read a lot of "philosophy" before I started studying philosophy in the classroom. I'm not sure what my sense of it would have been if I'd first encountered it in a required course.

Recently, I've been using the idea of hedonism as a "hook" into philosophy. Now, lest that sound too heterodox, I should note I stole the idea from Aristotle.

At the beginning of the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that everyone by nature desires to know and the proof is in the pleasure we take in what we see. I've started playing this idea with my students: let's say you just want to be happy. I'm not going to judge you or tell you that's stupid --- I agree --- what I'll do instead is help you see that we need to think about how best to be happy and to see that exploring our curiosity is an integral part of our happiness.

I remember asking my freshman "Why do you like going on the facebook." "To find out what my friends are doing." "Why do you want to know what your friends are doing?" "Because it's fun."

That's the point.

Ask me anything

Why are women so sloppy when it comes to their femininity and expect men to be hyper machos?

2010-05-26T19:07:00.001-04:00

I know just what you mean. This is why I maintain such rigorous standards of masculinity for myself. Just don't tell the lady's I got snipped earlier this week.

This message has been brought to you by SNAG's for male contraception.

Ask me anything

Suppose you have a scholarship to BYU but cannot agree with mormon doctrine. Do you recommend keeping the scholarship and faking it until graduation or just cutting your losses and leaving?

2010-05-26T19:05:00.001-04:00

A good question --- I as in a similar boat, and I ended up staying around to the end. Now, there are parts of my education I really loved --- BYU did, and I think still does, have a very good philosophy department, and I was quite happy with the narrow range of classes I took in depts. like philosophy and comp. lit. But I regret not being somewhere where I was more comfortable and fit in better...I had a great grad school experience, but realize that really missed the normal college experience.

Can you get the education you want there? Are you okay living the lifestyle? Or willing to take the risk of getting caught? Do you have options at schools of comporable academic quality that are financially viable?

The thing that I would emphasize, that I didn't come to realize until much later, is that whatever you decide, it is okay. If you decide that financially and academically, your best option is to go, you shouldn't feel like a phony for faking it --- they're the ones who are placing unreasonable demands on you. On the other hand, you are allowed to go somewhere else if you think it'll make you happier...

This has been Ideas Man's daily affirmation

Ask me anything

Are you right for the religious right?

2010-05-19T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'll bet you've always wondered if you were right for the religious right.

Ideas Man has created a simple test. Take it here

Philosophy Skills

2010-05-14T14:40:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

What skills, ideas, subjects, figures, problems should everyone who has majored in philosophy know?

In Which Ideas Man Writes an Essay in His Professional Persona

2010-05-13T22:50:00.000-04:00

http://www.amazon.com/Fatherhood-Philosophy-DAO-Daddy-Everyone/dp/1444330314/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6

Buy this book Ideas Nation

Stieg Larsson look out! Literary Agents --- Look Here!

2010-05-12T21:08:00.001-04:00

I know that everyone is all into these Stieg Larsson novels, but Ideas Man happens to know (thanks to Wikipedia) that he is dead.

But the world is Jonesin' for more of his books.

Now, I'm not 100% sure what the books are about, but I think I have some idea insofar as I've read the titles of the books.

On the basis of which Ideas Man is willing to offer any interested literary agents/publishers that he'll write any of the following books on spec:

The Girl Who Opened A Can of Worms
The Girl With A Gimp Leg
The Girl With An Overactive Imagination
The Girl With a Heart-Shaped Tattoo
The Girl Who Speaks Fluent Ugaritic
The Girl Who Buys Lots of Flowers [This was Ideas Girl's suggestion]
The Girl Who Knew Just the Right Amount
The Girl With Two Eyes, Two Ears, A Nose and A Mouth
The Girl With A Fantastic Set of Knockers
The Girl With Prosaic Characteristics
The Girl Who Previously Was a Boy
The Girl Who Was a Logical Positivist
The Girl Ohne Eigenschaften
The Girl Who Had Sex With Tiger Woods and Was His Wife
The Girl Who Wrote Songs About Boys Who Sing Songs About Girls Who Are Boys Who Like Boys to be Girls Who Do Boys Like They're Girls Who Do Girls Like They're Boys And Always Should Be Someone You Really Love
The Girl With the Pearl Earring and a Dragon Tattoo. And also a Fantastic Set of Knockers.
The Girl Who Was Catherine Deneuve, Icon of French Cinema
The Girl Who Made Fallacious Appeals to Authority
The Girl Who Did Things and Also Had Stuff.
The Girl Who Was a Figment of the Author's Imagination
The Girl With Literary Pretensions of Her Own, Damnit!
The Girl Who Needs to SHUT THE HELL UP!
The Girl Who is Leaving Your Sorry Ass!

The Ideas Man, PhD. Who Was All Alone.

In Which Ideas Man Participates in Blog Jog Day

2010-05-08T23:00:00.002-04:00

Thank you for stopping by my Blog! Please explore all this Blog has to offer, then jog on over to http://the8principlesofgoalsandsuccess.wordpress.com/ . If you would like to visit a different Blog in the jog, go to http://blogjogday.blogspot.com.

A Brief Introduction to Ideas Man

2010-05-06T15:05:00.001-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

So on Sunday, I'm going to participate in this thingy called Blog Jog Day, and I can only imagine the hordes of people who will therefore be reading these words.

Let me say: welcome. Thank you for taking the time to meet Ideas Man.

Contained within these stylings are innumerable gems of wisdom, gateways to laughter and tears everything you could possibly hope to learn (provided you only want to learn what I've got to teach).

I invite readers overwhelmed by this vast array of wisdom to peruse the tags in hopes of inspiration, or to choose at random, as one might the I Ching.

Alternatively, the reader might consider the following brief guide to the Best of Ideas Man, as voted by our panel (which consists of Ideas Man and his cat).

For the record, the cat (Boo Radley) voted against including any of these --- thank goodness we made it clear I'd decide any ties myself.

Who is Ideas Man?
25 things you didn't know about Ideas Man
Can Ideas Man Sing?
No. But it's mildly amusing to watch him try.
Can Ideas Man Write?
Well, he thinks he can. You be the judge:
A Short Short Story (Pentaccosted).
A Parable.
Poems.
A Trip to Memphis.
A Doctor Seussian view of life in academia.
But is he funny?
Not really, but he is a bit of a jerk.
What's his deal with Greek Mythology?
Good question. He seems to like it. But look how it messed up his daughter.
If Ideas Man wrote pornography, what would it be like?
Not very good.
How does Ideas Man feel about all the attention he'll no doubt be getting?
He has mixed feelings about it.
What else should I read by Ideas Man?
Hate Glenn Beck? Like Dungeons and Dragons? Like Glenn Beck? Hate Dungeons and Dragons?
Maybe you'd like his account of leaving the Mormon Church? (1,2,3)
Interested in politics: Ideas Man's reflections on Obama, Romney and others.
Take the most scientific personality quiz you ever will.
Like adorable stories about adorable kids? Will you settle for mildly amusing stories about adorable kids?
   How to fail as a parent.
   How to try to succeed as a parent but still fail.
   Ideas Boy's Oedipal Complex.
   Curse words you can learning from Nick Jr.
I can't get enough of Ideas Man! Where else can I find him?
You can read the first part of his novel, Behind Closed Doors: A Mormon Murder Mystery.
Buy part one of his memoir for your kindle (Bet you didn't know he knew about your kindle).
Hear him sing a song.
Listen to him recount the Da Vinci Code.
Read a chain novel he wrote with his sister.
Become his fan on "The Facebook."
Follow him on Twitter.

Love him, baby, love him.

Pentaccosted

2010-04-16T12:43:00.000-04:00

To tide you over until such time as Ideas Man has more free time, I present you with the short short story I entered into NPR's short short story contest.

Pentaccosted

Was it just a coincidence that this happened on May 31, 2009? In fiction there are no coincidences except those the author explicitly identifies as coincidences and those the author simply fails to notice. By asking whether it was a coincidence, I have done neither.

Was it just a coincidence that this woman was planted in front of me in line at Starbucks on May 31, 2009? The statistical laws that describe the phenomena of collective behavior virtually assured I’d be behind somebody in line at Starbucks. And simple probability made it as likely as not it’d be a woman.

But I want to understand what it was that made her this woman.

In fiction, we sometimes imply that certain physical characteristics give us insight into someone’s soul, but I’d just as soon not dwell on that assumption.

Alright, I’ll give you one insignificant detail.

She was quite tall.

Then she turned around, and I was immediately confronted with two far more significant physical features:

1) She had the black, blank eyes of a dove.

2) She was gorgeous enough that my spirits sank when I saw a Holy Book in her hands.

“Have you the Spirit of the Lord?”

“Excuse me?

“Have you the Spirit of the Lord?”

At the precise moment she stopped speaking (in fiction, moments can be quite precise), her eyes underwent a transformation. They changed from the black, blank button eyes of a dove to something else entirely.

Well, they remained the eyes of a dove, but they evanesced and raced through every color I know and seven whose names I’d never heard.

They also went from opaque to translucent. You could see her soul glowing beneath.

It is often said that eyes are windows to the soul. And though they may be fictitious, they were certainly windows to something.

It was also at that precise moment that I became quite erect, or what the righteous would call upright.

The law of ecpyrosis is one of the rules that governs causation in fiction. It was discovered by Heraclitus and then adopted by the early Christian fathers. It states that in fiction, one soul can directly affect another soul: a fire goes out from one and sparks a kindred kindle in the other.

In the span of the several moments of her eyes’ evanescence, I could see her soul smoldering. Her soul sparked and a spark went our from her eyes and entered my eyes and set my soul smoldering. Sparks went out from my soul and her soul through our eyes. From our eyes they passed through the eyes of the assembled congregation. And when all those souls were a’smoldering, they all burst into full conflagration.

At that precise moment, all but what was true ceased to exist.

Starbucks ceased entirely to exist.

We transubstantiated. We all became doves. Our souls ceased to exist. The forms of our bodies were transfigured, and took on the forms of doves.

We flew. We took flight into the free air. We beat our wings and pushed ourselves up into the open skies, right up to its dome.

Some indulge in the fiction of calling the dome of the skies heaven.

And though this is all just a trick, I hope you won’t hold it against her that her soul was just a fiction. And I hope you won’t hold it against me that she was just a woman whose body I’d longed to hold against mine.

Because her soul, although a fiction, is not for that reason any less real than yours or mine.

Say a fella has a bit of time this summer, and he'd like to devote some of it to the reading of philosophy: what should he read?

2010-04-13T18:29:00.001-04:00

All of it. Without knowing who this fella is, what his interests are, how much philosophy he's read in the past, here are some suggestions without commentary, justification or interpretation.

1) The Republic, Plato --- also the Symposium and the Sophist.
2) Nietzsche, anything really but esp: Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, and the Anti-Christ.
3) Soren Kierkegaard: Either/Or.
4)Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
5)Derrida, Jacques: Memoirs of the Bling.
6) Foucault, Michel: Birth of the Clinic, the History of Sexuailty
7) Spinoza: Ethics.

Too many others, I'm sure.

Ask me anything

Why do you stand on the shoulders of giants? (Metaphorically speaking, anyway. I wouldn't recommend literal giant-shoulder-standing as a hobby.)

2010-04-11T07:21:00.001-04:00

Because if you try it the other way around, your shoulders will really hurt.

Ask me anything

If you could fall in love with any man who would it be?

2010-04-09T23:50:00.001-04:00

I could fall in love with any man I wanted to, the problem would be whether he'd fall back in love with me (probably not).

Ask me anything

Unless I'm mistaken, Ideas Man is an avowed atheist. Does he see any harm in a Spinozist or Einsteinian conception of God as underlying cause? If so, what harm does he see?

2010-04-05T09:22:00.001-04:00

You are not mistaken. He doesn't see it as particularly bad (well not the Spinozist conception --- I gather the Einsteinian might be more problematic, but I don't know enough about it). That is to say that I'm committed to the idea of the unity of substance, but I tend to think that a) the necessary duality of knowable attributes and b) a reading of e2p7 (the order of things and knowing is the same or something like that) that sounds like attribute parallelism are both bad, and end up reproducing the problems of theism within a supposedly atheistic regime --- think of the philosophes or of the neo-Darwinians.

On the other hand, Nietzsche, Klossowksi et. al. have done fantastic work for atheism through embracing key aspects of Spinozism.

Finally, I do believe in the Greek gods. F'real. And this does relate to what I mean by rejecting a duality of attributes, but why takes too long to explain.

Later.

Ask me anything