Stray Thoughts

While doing some research (digging around my own past communications!) for a novel I’m finishing that I call Papa’s Trial, I came across this entry, which I think should be of interest. As always, grafs in itals are me speaking, grafs in Roman are the person I’m talking to, in this case Hemingway. A background assumptions: that which is in my mind is in the temporary joint mind we communicate with. (Hence, Hemingway is able to watch me watch Star Trek videos.)

Sunday, August 1, 2010

6:30 AM. Not feeling so hot. A combination of too much Star Trek, too late going to bed, too much uneasy breathing, apprehension over the talk I have to give this morning, and general symptoms that so often accompany a sudden cold snap, such as came in with rain last night. Not the best background for communication, perhaps. I was up at six, decided to go back to bed, and here I am half an hour later. Just to preserve continuity? For I don’t feel like much. And yet, as I told my brother Paul, I wind up feeling better as I work, so why not?

How about it, Ernest? Is that how it was for you?

It’s true, work provides continuity. At the most elementary level, just the need to get up and go pushes you to do that rather than to declare yourself out of action. But of course illness comes with a reason, and so you overlook or ignore it at your own risk. If I thought I was coming down with something, I took to my bed and stayed there until I figured the coast was clear.

But you were afraid of drowning in mucus, I gather.

Well — probably I never would have seen the difference consciously — at least, I don’t remember being aware of it — but I put illness and injury into very distinct categories. An injury was one thing. You tried to avoid them, and you cleaned up after them, but they didn’t pose a continual threat. Illness was harder to prevent, and could be harder to deal with, because your body was working against you, or that’s what it felt like. It deprived you of a place to stand, where if you’d gotten injured, the uninjured rest of you could work together to recoup. That doesn’t say it very well.

Maybe because I got distracted by seeing that “very” — which I don’t associate with Hemingway.

There’s writing and there’s speaking, and if you don’t get to revise, and pare down, and select and say it again starting from scratch if need be, it’s speaking even if you’re doing it with a pen — and in somebody else’s hand, at that.

Of course. And it’s coming through my mind, of course. I’ve noticed that sometimes one or the other will seem to get stuck on some verbal tic — like “oh-so-” the other day — and before I’m through both will be doing it.

It’s a side effect of minds in resonance. Don’t worry about it. That’s just one more thing to worry about that gets in the way of doing the work of communicating. And it is work, to communicate, regardless how pleasant you may find it.

Interesting

You keep watching those Star Trek videos and you’ll be saying “fascinating” all the time.

No doubt. While we’re on the subject, what do you think of them?

They were television, and I never cared much for television, though I must say it is better without commercials interrupting it all the time. But it’s still TV in TVs constricting format. An introductory sequence to get your interest, then three or four longer more or less same-sized segments each ending with a dramatic situation designed to prevent you from turning to another channel during the commercials, then a coda like the introduction, not only to wrap up the situation’s loose ends but to leave the watcher feeling good so you’ll want to watch again next time. It’s hard not to be distracted by the constraints of the format. Scott [Fitzgerald] could have written for television. He would have been pretty good at it.

And you?

I could have provided the basis for specials, and Hotchner could have done the adaptations, just as we did do. I couldn’t have worked to order like that. Besides, they wouldn’t have wanted anything real that I could have given them, and anything they would have wanted, I wouldn’t have been able to give them except by whoring. Faulkner could have written for TV too. Anybody who could write for the movies could write for TV. I couldn’t. Too much like grinding out sausages, especially if the sausage has to look good regardless of tasting good.

So what about the Star Trek universe?

You’re coming to them backwards, so I am too. You know the movies, so I know what you know. You never watched the TV show, so it’s all seen in retrospect by you, hence by me. (It would be a different experience, my watching it through someone else’s mind.) So, like you, I see these young skeletally thin actors through the lens of the older, bulkier actors they would become. So we know something they don’t know. We also know of the success after failure of the whole Star Trek concept; we know the interaction and growth of the characters and the increased complexity of the storylines and messages and yet we are seeing them when they didn’t know it themselves. But their non-physical selves did! You see?

That’s how we live our lives.

There’s a continual interaction between physical, living each moment of time, and the non-physical, aware of the overall pattern in ways the individual in the moment can never have the data to share — yet the non-physical will help to physical to greater awareness if that’s part of the pattern. It is in this sense that you can talk about “planning” your lives. Everything people have said about the non-physical patterning of your lives is true from a certain direction — and that direction must come with an awareness of the effects of a different continuing experience of time and the effects of time.

I see it. So — the characters and plots?

Perhaps you can see that the very compromises that made it commercial also compromised the message and made it that much less able to do what it tried to do. Enforcing peace is like spreading non-violence by winning fistfights or laser-gun battles. It’s like the flaw in the premise you saw in “The Day The Earth Stood Still.” The galaxy wants peace so much that it reserves for itself the right to annihilate men, women, children, animals, plants — the whole planet — if they decide that man’s violence is going to spread to the rest of the reality. But they don’t enforce quarantine, or use any intermediate form of policing (which in itself would recognize that peace, like war, is contained within at least potential violence) — they just threaten to kill everybody.

But if a film or if television shows had attempted to dig deeper into the paradox without finding scapegoats such as madmen or villains, the result would have been looked on as theoretical or unrealistic or even as polemical. It is very hard for an artist to get beyond the bounds of the commonly accepted and experienced reality. It’s 20 times as hard — maybe 1,000 times as hard — to get beyond those bounds in teamwork — and what are script-writing teams but attempts to do together what is best done individually, except that the medium makes it impossible.

I see some pretty heavy-handed messages tailored in the early days of the Vietnam War.

Early days in retrospect. But 1968 was after all in the third year of massive involvement. It didn’t seem “early days” to you, did it?

No, that’s true. I was forgetting.

Only in “the future” could certain disturbing messages be even hinted at; and they had to come wrapped in the form of conflict that was accepted as being dramatic. I’d say it was a contribution of Star Trek to substitute intellectual confrontation for violence sometimes, and that wedge — mostly inserted via the logical character of Spock — was as subversive as anything else they attempted.

No point in analyzing the characters, although I gather I’m going to be seeing quite a lot of them.

About 79 or 80 episodes all told, I think. They certainly produce a different mental “feel” than reading your work.

Thank you.

I’m smiling too. But seriously, there is a difference and I don’t think it is only film versus book.

It isn’t only that, but you are out of time.

Yes, I did better than I thought we might do. And I have to leave in about an hour to do my presentation about talking to the other side.

Too bad you didn’t pick a subject you know something about.

After my talk I’ll probably just want to watch more Star Trek.

And that is called nemesis. You’ll wind up subscribing to satellite TV, if you aren’t careful.

All right. I can hear it as a joke, and I suppose our listeners can too. Later.

 

 

My April 2017 column for The Echo

Thinking about the aliens among us

By Frank DeMarco

Did you ever stop to think about the fact that we live among alien lifeforms?

I don’t mean extra-terrestrials. (Not even some of the people who post on Facebook.) I mean non-human lifeforms, as native to this planet as we are, and as different from us as could be.

Your mind might go first to the animals around us, but they are more like relatives. As different as we appear to be, I gather that the differences in our genetics are actually very few. A few percent of the genome, if I understand correctly. Of course, some people find it too much of a stretch to think of animals as relatives. Supposedly there is a great dividing line between ourselves and what used to be called dumb animals. The problem is, the more closely people look for that dividing line, the harder it is to find one.

Language? Who hasn’t heard of the apes who have learned American Sign Language – and taught it to their children! Tool-using? A YouTube video shows a crow using not one stick but two different sticks in succession as it figures out a complicated problem investigators had set. And so forth. If there is a line that separates humans and other animals, it’s difficult to see what it is. Anyone with pets has seen behavior that seems inexplicable if it is not self-awareness.

But beyond our fellow animals, let’s look at plants. When I was a boy it was assumed that plants “obviously” had no consciousness, only a set of reaction-patterns, responding to the presence or absence of light or heat or moisture. But many decades ago, Cleve Backster demonstrated that plants seemed to have emotional responses to threats; that they could divine hostile intentions; that they apparently could learn the difference between a real threat and a sham. In fact, apparently they could detect and react to human thought. Today it is known that plants also exchange information via their root structures, even that they engage in a form of chemical warfare.

Plants, let’s face it, live lives as mysterious as any extraterrestrial. Having no eyes, no ears, they live without vision or hearing. They can feel the sun and move toward it, clearly. But they can’t see it; they can’t see anything. They undoubtedly feel vibrations, but I don’t see how they could hear sounds in the way we do. These two differences alone make their world radically different from the world we know.

Now stretch it a little more – well, a lot more. What if everything we know is conscious? Rocks, clouds, water, air, synthetic fibers, radioactive waste? What kind of consciousness could matter have that had not only no brain, but no nervous system, no organs of perception, no defined boundaries? At first glance, impossible.

There is a way of seeing things, though, that not makes consciousness among seemingly inert matter not only conceivable, but probable; not only probable but inevitable. And that way of seeing things is the assumption that the world is made up not of matter and energy but of consciousness.

Quantum physicists have become convinced that the world is made of thought rather than things. This is not the place to go into the reasons why, even if I were competent to do so. But as long ago as 1930, English theoretical physicist Sir James Jeans said that increasingly, the universe seemed to him not a great machine but a great thought. He wasn’t speaking in metaphor. It was as close as words could come to expressing the mathematical relationships he lived among.

Now assume for the moment that all the world is made of consciousness. In such case, the fact that consciousness exists is no longer a mystery. Instead, it would be a mystery if any of the building blocks of that thought / world lacked consciousness. But different forms of life would have different forms of consciousness shaped to their circumstances. Your cat, sleeping on the rug, has no ability to speak but it makes its needs known, and it recognizes many words and even ideas. The tree swaying in the breeze has no eyes to see the sun that shines on it, no ears to hear the rustling of its own leaves. They live in different worlds. Nonetheless, they live.

English poet William Blake once wrote:

“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

How do we know but that the iron in the earth, and the earth itself, and the fire that smelts it and the water that quenches the fire all have specific modes of consciousness.

Animal, vegetable, mineral: Alien life-forms made of thought, sharing with us a world made, like them, like us, of thought.

 

I know nothing of physics or, indeed, of mathematics. I often wish i did. But the thing in this article that riveted my attention is this statement:

“You can’t really enter into “another dimension” as science fiction would have you believe. Instead, dimensions are how we experience the world.”

That’s what Rita said, too. It came through me, but it isn’t anything I know.

http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/there-are-in-fact-2-dimensions-of-time-one-theoretical-physicist-states

 

My March 2017 column for The Echo

Conspiracies of Men and God

by Frank DeMarco

In conspiracies, as in politics, there are no final victories.

Notice, this is not to say that conspiracies never succeed. Often enough, they do, in whole or in part. Often enough, their effects are disastrous. Nobody who lived through the aftermath of the murder – and the subsequent cover-up of the murder – of John F. Kennedy needs instruction on just how disastrous the effects can be.

But not even the most successful conspiracy can control life.

I know that’s what we fear. In our worst nightmares, we see ourselves entering the dystopias of 1984 or Brave New World. God knows, we see enough signs around us that we are on a slippery slope, and sliding faster and faster. Our feelings are screaming to us that we may be in the last days of the republic.

Well, maybe so. But maybe not. Often enough, strong feelings are less a natural reaction to events than a reflection of our fears. Fear often throws shadows on our nighttime walls, shadows that may be mistaken for reality. It is one thing to know, as a general rule, that conspiracies do sometimes occur, and do sometimes succeed. It is a very different thing to know whether this or that specific allegation is true. Feeling something strongly is not proof that our feelings are correct.

Here’s something to consider. Even if our worst fears are correct, the consequences that follow will be vastly different from what anyone on any side desires or predicts.

For many years, I intended to write a novel showing that people are always conspiring, but that even when a specific conspiracies succeeds, unanticipated effects follow. I was going to call it Conspiracies of Men and God, to express the fact that life is always larger than our ability to master it.

Consider the remarkable career of Charles de Gaulle. When you read his wartime memoirs, what stands out is that, from 1940 onward, his career might be looked at as an example of a benign conspiracy. Beginning alone, with no official position, no army, no treasury, in five years he rebuilt the essentials of the French state. He did it by knowing what needed to be done, and feeling his way toward the means to do it. But the point is, he was no one-man-band. In order to do what needed to be done, he had to attract others to his standard, and had to find necessary resources.

But even that miraculously successful conspiracy – call it that – could only go so far. After the war, politics as usual resumed, and he recognized that his choices were only three: to become a dictator, which would be self-defeating; to allow himself to be coopted into the system, which would destroy the moral authority he had accumulated in five years of struggle, or to retire until his country might call him again, which, in 1958, it did. This man who had rebuilt a state could mold circumstances only so far.

Or, on the other hand, consider the complementary career of Adolf Hitler, the head of a very successful malign conspiracy which took over a state, for a while threatened to take over the world, and then brought itself and Europe into ruin. He was not a one-man-band either. His henchmen, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, etc., planned and executed the takeover of the German state, then, in six years, sowed the wind that first overshadowed all of Europe, and then, in another six years, reaped the whirlwind.

These creatures of hatred knew how to whistle up the demons that lurked in the hearts of the German people following their dreadful sufferings of the two decades following 1914. Once in control of the German state, they whistled up demons in the countries around them, demons whose shrieks evoked fear and trembling. And then Hitler’s conspiracy, like de Gaulle’s, found itself unable to impose itself upon the world.

(Unlike de Gaulle’s conspiracy, Hitler’s evil called forth the forces that would destroy it. I sometimes think that the worst effect of evil is that it calls forth forces that will destroy it. If Hitler had never existed, would we be living in the shadow of the atomic bomb?)

These are dark times, and nobody knows if this is the darkness of midnight or the darkness before the dawn. That there are conspiracies being woven around us seems clear enough, but no one alive can see what the net effect of so many contending efforts will be.

But no matter who dark things get, sooner or later daylight always returns. And no matter how strong the forces of evil, or even of good for that matter, it is worth remembering that nobody ever succeeds in bending all of life to their design.

 

I found this very helpful.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407-story.html

Recently at The Monroe Institute, there was a sighting that was both common and extremely rare.

Common, because turkey vultures, or buzzards as some people call them, can be seen all the time, doing their lazy figure-eights in the sky, looking for carrion.

Rare, because these birds are rarely seen at very close range, and rare in that the sighting, given the context, seemed to mean something.

https://www.monroeinstitute.org/blog/totem-animal-lands-tmi