Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1308261113430.19570@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Now
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 11:15:30 -0400 (EDT)
Now Reading as best I can Weak Chaos and Quasi-Regular Patterns, Zaslavsky, Sagdeev, Usikov, and Chernikov and wondering about those borders that are somewhat permeable, entangled - then listening to Susskind on the firewall problem re: black holes and potential wormholes as a solution. Again understanding as best I can, not so good in either case. The characters on my shakuhachi indicate that Kiyama, who signed it, was a resident of Suifu, a small town by a river which has since been absorbed by a larger metropolis created from a conglomerate. What I am interested in is always marginal, always entangled. I was then reading Bataille on religion and 'animality' and found his thinking wrong-headed, specist, and primitive, although his hysteria informs everything he does, as if there were truth pushed through by virtue of emotional extremity. So I cross that out and turn to Cassirer's writing and that proves hopelessly Kantian in relation to number etc., even with Einstein; the Whitehead and Russell stuff is seen as background - not even Godel had come along by then. So there's a regularity that will soon, within a couple of decades, fizzle out. An article by Mandl warns about software complexity leading to more flash crashes, at least in its nettime interpretation, and we're finding the world economic system increasingly abstract and autonomous - answering to nothing but its porous closure and entanglement with programs large and small world-wide. There's no future for ecological action in the midst of all of this. I can't read an ornithological book for example that's more than 2-3 years old; it's so fast, this knowledge and its management, that it's always on the verge of collapse. Penrose tilings appear in the weak chaos book and there are nice relationships between higher/lower dimensional intersections and resulting, might I say, organic, partial symmetries that go on forever. Oddly, three large books on the archaeology of a Han tomb give examples of similar symmetries where organism appears just as the symmetrical seems to collapse; I'm thinking of a particular chest where swirls are inhabited by miniscule and mythological creatures that ride them, perhaps create or destroy them; the swirls move across the formal borders of the design much like contemporary comic books. Miley Cyrus' incredible performance at the MTV Video Music Awards amazed me; it was incredibly sleazy and seemed to have production values and slickness, closure, on the level of everyone else. But the deliberate sleaziness of her performance undercut that and gave it an edge I didn't see elsewhere in the show. It's these borders where inhabitants appear and make themselves at home; the inhabitants live for the ingestion and production of negation, neither this nor that, not both this and that, anything creating trembling divisions and walls that allow for the appearance of normal life. Maybe gods follow or maybe gods come to roost. They're as subject as anyone else to the catastrophe-theory fragility of good things; Ragnarok can bring them down. The gods quarrel and gossip, and their affairs never go unnoticed. Unlike Bataille they recognize the world-views of animals and other organisms; the world is an ecological soup with local porous barriers, killing fields, and the occasional safe haven. Let's go there, with our notions of detective stories, from procedural to fantastic, and see what we shall find.