Kinda feels like I’m an astronaut who can’t pay attention. Other interpretations welcome.
I’ve been pretty stuck lately, hard time writing, harder time finishing anything. This drawing was just a bunch of doodles that didn’t mean anything, but it kinda shows where my head’s at lately. Lots of activity underneath, not much happening in my consciousness.
There’s a place in the eye where the nervous system meets the retina. That area can’t detect light. There’s a simple experiment you can do that will show you where it is.
What blows my mind is you have to try to see it. It’s not a black spot. It’s a blank spot. Same color as the background. Your mind fills it in with what it assumes must be there.
There are conditions that make it obvious. When I have a migraine (it’s been a while thank God), I can’t see what’s in the very middle. I had a migraine on press day once. Reading words on a screen was excruciating. I could only see the edges of whatever I looked at. Luckily I spent a little time in a dark office and it went away.
The old woman I met on a Greyhound bus once, was an even more extreme example. She said she couldn’t see the middle of anything. It sounded pretty disabling, but she seemed to get a kick out of it.
“I looked out the window at my little weenie dog yesterday and he was just a dog’s head attached to a tail,” she said. “Then he turned to look at me and he disappeared. Haw haw.”
I’ve been pondering what all that implies. First of all, it’s always possible you could miss little things, just because you literally can’t perceive them.
You don’t even have to get into how we can’t see infrared or ultraviolet. There are just… holes in our perception. Our brains hide them from us.
If a critter had been riding on that woman’s dog, she never would’ve seen it.
If you have reasonably good eyesight, it isn’t likely that anything you need to see will be hiding in your blind spot. But it could.
We can only see, hear, feel and taste what our bodies will allow. There will always be a layer between us and what’s truly there.
What else is the mind filling in for us?
Richard Schwartz explains his IFS system.
When I first saw a video in my YouTube feed about Internal Family Systems (IFS), I skipped right past. It’s just me and the missus here and we get along fine.
It wasn’t at all what it sounded like. IFS is actually a kind of therapy for individuals invented by Richard Schwartz.
I’ve watched Schwartz in several interviews and I remain intrigued.
The idea is that you have a “family” of parts in your mind that behave like individuals. If you do things to sabotage yourself it’s usually one of those parts trying to protect you from reliving some childhood trauma.
You can talk to them and they answer. If you talk to them properly you can heal the “exile” and get the protector to relax.
It’s the opposite of what they used to teach about multiple personalities, that trauma causes them.
It’s more that you already have them without realizing it, but trauma makes them more noticeable.
Schwartz divides the parts into exiles and protectors, which can be managers or firefighters. Exiles, being the vulnerable parts we try to lock up to keep from reliving their trauma. Managers arrange your life to avoid triggers. Firefighters erupt when you’ve been triggered, to stop you reliving an exile’s traumatic memories. At the heart of it all is Self, which is curious, compassionate and knows how to heal.
The more “Self energy” you bring to the conversations, the more they will trust you. I think of it as the part of the ego that’s most genuine, most connected to the center that Carl Jung calls Self.
IFS reminds me of Carl Jung’s active imagination, which I’ve also tried with limited success.
My current thinking is that Jung helps you deal with the stuff in your head that culture puts there, and IFS is for all the people you used to be who are in there suffering.
The idea is to heal them and get them working together.
It sounds so crazy at first, but I’ve played around with it and I swear it works.
As an American, it feels revolutionary. We’re taught to repress our painful parts, not make friends with them.
(more…)Divided cities are an interesting phenomenon. You have cities that grow and merge, and cities that split apart, usually because of politics. They differ in their level of connectedness.
For a while we had East and West Berlin, with a wall in between. Until the 1870s Budapest, Hungary was Buda and Pest, with the Danube River in between.
In America, we have a lot of “twin” cities. In Texas we have the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Midland-Odessa.
Usually one of the cities in a “twin” relationship is more working class than the other, but when you come down to it, they’re still American. American culture, American social norms.
In The City and the City, China Miéville writes about fictitious cities Besz and Ul Qoma. The cities are physically adjacent – they have many “cross-hatched” regions – but their societies are kept strictly separated. This, despite the fact that they share streets, highways and railways,
By mutual agreement of Besz and Ul Qoma, a mysterious entity called Breach keeps citizens from mingling and interacting, on pain of arrest or worse. And you never know if Breach is watching.
The City and the City is a murder mystery that develops into an interesting study of society and law. A body is found in a crosshatched area. Did the crime occur in Besz or Ul Qoma and did anybody “breach”?
And could there be a mysterious third city flying under the radar?
Citizens of both cities have to be trained from childhood to purposely ignore any person or thing not of their city. Citizens learn to “unsee” (and even unsmell!) anything that doesn’t belong in their city. There are unificationist groups in both cities, but they are treated as radicals and suppressed.
It’s crazy when you think about it, how much the concept of a border depends on belief. There may be a fence or a wall or a line on a map, but the earth doesn’t care. It’s people who make borders happen.
I enjoyed the murder mystery and protagonist Tyador’s detective work, but the conceptual stuff was especially interesting. Enforcing a border via psychology.
Unseeing. Pretending you didn’t see to the point that for practical purposes you didn’t. Is that really possible?
It got me thinking of anti-memes – objects, creatures and phenomena that use forgettability as camouflage. qntm’s novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, takes that concept to ridiculous and extremes, but “anti-memetic” does seem to be a thing. Can you describe the last panhandler you saw while driving? Probably not. I can’t.
I actually forgot an entire city. I was talking about twin cities and totally forgot that El Paso, where I live is exactly such a city, or half-city. The Rio Grande officially separates El Paso from Juarez, as well as U.S. from Mexico. But the real separation is cultural.
Borders are imaginary until you make them solid, but still in the most important ways, they’re imaginary. Before it was part of the U.S., Texas has been territory of Spain, France, Mexico, itself, the Confederacy and the territory of various native American peoples.
Who will claim it in 1,000 years? It won’t be more than a claim. The earth doesn’t care about lines on maps.
I while back I talked about how “the map is not the territory,” about the fact that you can’t capture reality in words or in art.
It just occurred to me that it’s even deeper than that. Everything is a metaphor. Everything a human being can experience at any rate. Your reality consists of metaphors, not just in the words you think, but in what you see, smell, feel and taste.
It is not a pipe. And the flower you saw in real life was only an approximation of a flower.
When you look at a flower, you don’t see a flower. You see a simile. Something that is very much like a flower. A simulation in other words. Actual reality is a lot bigger than a person could experience, so our minds give us approximations.
We experience an approximation of the world we actually live in. How accurate the approximation depends on more than your eyesight. It depends on what you think is important enough to notice, and what it would you think it means.
All of those filters depend on what you’ve been taught, by your parents, in school and through your culture. Cultures don’t always get it right. They change their minds. At one time the sun went arount the earth. Now we know it’s the other way around.
That’s why if you want to get as close as you can to actual reality, it’s good to question your assumptions.
Dreams can tell you a lot about yourself. If you decipher them correctly.
In fact, I think the unconscious gives us some best guesses about the big questions from time to time. And some of its guesses are pretty good. Unfortunately it’s damn hard to figure out what it’s saying.
I don’t think guides or charts are any help either.
Some dream symbols are probably common enough. I always considered tornadoes to mean, “chaos ahead.” I looked it up on some dream interpretation website and it said something close to that.
But I’m a weirdo. I read a lot of weird shit. I think a lot of weird shit. I like science fiction and trippy movies. The trippier the better. So you never know what my brain is going to throw at me.
I had a bizarre one years ago that I think I understand now.
I was in the kitchen of a house that I wanted to leave. But in the living room was a creature I was told was “the god of the house.” It was around three feet tall, with a gray body shaped like the base of a sea anemone.
I think it may have been sitting on top of a table.
Around it was a blur of tentacles, whipping around the room faster than I could see.
I had to go past it to get to the front door. Its tentacles could touch every book, every piece of furniture in the house. And it could see my every move.
When I stared at the god of the house, its eyes proliferated. When I looked away, they diminished. I don’t know how many eyes it had. I just got the impression of “too many.”
Someone said, “It has no power outside. It is all-powerful in the house.”
I was afraid to run past this thing. Its tentacles might grab me if I tried to leave. In the dream I stayed in the kitchen, but in real life, I did leave, bit by bit.
I think the house was me, and the “god of the house” represented identity. You know, the “you” that you’re proud to show off, to yourself and others. I think it must have been one of those times in my life when I was becoming a different person.
If you’ve ever been through a big change, losing your religion, changing your worldview, you know how scary it can be. Can you leave that part of you behind? If you do, will you be anybody at all?
The “god of the house” must have been the part of me that didn’t want me to change. As long as I remained the same, it could control me. When I became somebody else, it could not.
Here’s a puzzle to think about before you go to sleep tonight. Who are you, who experiences dreams? And who are you, who WRITES dreams? Who’s in charge of your inner world when you’re asleep?
I had a dream the other night that has me pondering those questions.
I was talking to a group of people and one of them said, “Did you know that you’re God?”
“No I’m not,” I said, because I didn’t believe it and the idea made me uncomfortable.
But then I began to wonder, was I God to these people? Where did they come from? It was my dream wasn’t it? At that point I was in a lucid dream, on a knife’s edge between sleep and the waking world.
I thought, “reality is emanating from me.” I free-associated a few important-sounding but meaningless phrases. “Shocking blue paisley.” “Reality is in superposition.” “The structure of the world is the skeleton of the dream.” “Geometry geography.” “Perspective and personality.”
I remembered a previous lucid dream where I was in the kitchen of my childhood home looking at a scarab and noticed ice cubes in the toaster, letting me know I was free to walk around a bit.
I thought, there’s proof. I’m not God even in my dreams, because even in a lucid dream, where I’m free to walk around, I still don’t make the environment. It would not occur to me to put ice cubes in the toaster.
Oh and, after a little Googling, it seems that my dream people are courtesy of Morpheus and the ice cubes in the toaster were apparently Phantasos‘ idea.
Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.
Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”
Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.
As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?
Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.
Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.
Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.
Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.
Just finised Nova Swing, book two in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.
Also loved the first book, Light, winner of the 2002 James Tiptree Award. It feels so nice to lose yourself in a good novel. Doesn’t happen enough these days.
No spoilers. I’m not going to review it so much as talk about what it made me think about. I like books that make me think.
The series revolves around a naked singularity called the Kefahuchi Tract, a black hole without an event horizon, around which incompatible and impossible physical laws are possible.
Nova Swing takes place on a planet where part of the Kefahuchi Tract landed, creating “the event site,” a mysterious no man’s land that both terrifies and fascinates, though people have becoming comfortable living next to it. There is an underground industry of lawbreakers who conduct tours and hunt for treasure.
All forbidden activities, due to the risk of invasion by “daughters,” entities that can turn people into alien goo. Creepy scenario, yet seemingly taken in stride by the society in the story. With the exception of law enforcement, determined to keep things from getting out of the event site.
It got me thinking, this is a trope in science fiction isn’t it? “Forbidden zones.” Places that don’t follow the rules. Places that threaten your sanity. Places that threaten to invade the outside world and make it incomprehensible. Places some are still driven to enter. Places that swallow people.
This one reminds me a lot of the Zone in Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, a forbidden area exhibiting strange properties, where “stalkers” hunt for extraterrestrial artifacts they can sell.
In that book the theme seems to be that some things are just beyond understanding.
Moderat – The Mark (from the Annihilation soundtrack). Would you look into that thing? I think I would.
Vandermeer’s Annihilation is another one. A place that distorts nature, causes cancer and insanity, turns people against one another, and takes away their identities. And still people can’t resist. The drive to solve the mystery is too strong.
I think tropes are important. They tell you something about the writer’s thoughts, as well as those of the readers (or watchers if you only consume cinematic sci fi). If I see it enough, I start to suspect it’s about all of society. John Vervaeke has a theory about that regarding zombies in Western culture.
To me, those forbidden zones represent the unconscious. More specifically, how Western culture views the unconscious. As irrational, fantastical, mystical bullshit. It’s where nightmares happen, voices that tell people to kill, perverted impulses. You don’t want to go poking around in there.
What if you found out you were evil even though you didn’t wanna be? What you’re like a werewolf, a man who becomes a monster against his will? Better to leave that stuff alone, try to be disciplined, stick to the tried and true, be logical, rational, science-minded, modern.
On the other hand, it’s also where inspiration happens, isn’t it? Something from the unconscious has decided to visit you. Everyone dreams of coming up with that one idea that could change everything, make you rich. Assuming you had that idea, would it be good or evil?
I don’t think it applies. Depends on what people do with it. I think we’ll generally be OK “if enough people will do their inner work,” like Carl Jung said.
The thing about ideas that could change the world… People don’t like change. It’s why society generally punishes creative people with original ideas. Some earn respect in their lifetime, but the really good ones tend to be ahead of their time. Most of the time it’s either bully, exploit or ignore.
There’s a line in Nova Swing that speaks to that. “All crimes are crimes against continuity—continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity.”
When I was 12 years old my dad bought me a microscope. Nothing fancy, but solid. I spent hours at a time with my eyeball glued to that thing. I kept a Mason jar full of water from the nearby stock tank or the mud puddle in the driveway.
I looked at all the obvious things first. Salt, sugar, leaves. But nothing was better than a dropful of muddy water. So many little dramas going on that we can’t even see.
What must it be like? One second you’re munching on a protazoan or a blob of algae and next thing you know, you’ve been sucked down some rotifer’s gullet. None of them know about fish, or people, or air, or the stars. Not much thought going on down there, just pure survival.
And the poor things are so tiny they can’t even tell they’re on borrowed time. They’re battling it out in a drop of water and they’re all going to die when it dries up.
I’ve thought about getting a new microscope for years, but it’s a lot easier to watch YouTube videos. Besides, my interests have broadened. I always wanted to be an inventor, for example. Unfortunately, I am the opposite of technical.
But I didn’t give up. A while back I started getting into mysticism and psychology, read a bunch of philosophy books bought a couple of Tarot decks and I invented something: a psychroscope.
It took a long time to come together and it’s still not perfect, but I’m seeing more all the time. It’s like a microscope, but pointed outward, toward the psychic medium. And what did I see?
Same thing I saw in those drops of pond water. Life. Creatures of thought, Unaware of what they are or where they’re going, swimming through unspoken thoughts and little kids’ dreams. Narratives nested inside nested narratives, meta meta meta narratives.
Entities that live both inside and outside of us. Gods or monsters we all create together. Moving images we project onto the world, filtered through our fears and desires. Are they real? Depends on how you define real. If enough people think they are and act accordingly, they might as well be real.
I think they’re a bit like the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about. You might call them “Elder Gods” but they’re not older than us. We made them. They’ve grown up with us. Whether they are evil or benign depends on us.
Late Boomer's Den 
You must be logged in to post a comment.