IDENTITY INVERSE

February 15th, 2021

It’s always a bit of a knock to realize you’re wrong about something.  Some people even take it personally.  In fact, some people are so tied to these things that delusion and denial arise to fend off the notion of the world somehow being different than previously thought.

Identity is, in the face of a mysterious world, a rather fragile thing.  While knowledge and identity may not at first like the most correlated topics, the connection brightens when it’s pointed out that most identity is a function of how we categorize the world, and we do so in order to try and make sense of the way it works.  What better definition is knowledge than an understanding of the way things work?  The two major group identities of conservative and liberal are both perspectives about how we should run our big group experiment.  But both of these identities and their perspectives about how things should work, has embedded within it a presupposition about how the world currently does work on a subtler plane, one that the proposed way of doing things would be more inline with.

When reality sends a shock up through either of these identities, it is because our categories fail to describe the world accurately.  And we take it personally, because, well, that’s what an identity does.

Strangely, education, or rather raw learning, is a function of discovering weaknesses in our understanding.  Learning is literally figuring out exactly how you are wrong, and often it’s a surprise just how wrong we are.  In this sense knowledge is the inverse of identity.  The more tightly we hold on to a particular identity, the weaker our ability is to learn.

Perhaps this what we seem to be talking about when we say someone approaches things with a childlike spirit: such a person is open to something new because, like a child, identity isn’t much of an issue.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: RAIN GAIN

February 14th, 2021

Lucilius smiled, and sighed.  He’d just figured out a crucial component of a project he was working on, and as he basked in that content sense of accomplishment, his gaze focused and the current time suddenly became readable.  His smile dropped.

“Oh crap,” he stated.  He realized he was running late for work.  He stood up and looked around in a flurry of thought.  He’d have to take a shower at work, he figured, but calculating the time left again, he realized there wasn’t time for that either.  

There was only enough time to hoof it on a bicycle to make it on time.  Lucilius absolutely hated commuting and for that reason he’d made sure he lived close to work.  

He hadn’t done laundry either, he realized, and now he was really getting irritated. He briefly huffed a sarcastic laugh at the idea that such petty and stupid details were combining to create such grief.

He reassessed and grabbed yesterday’s clothes and sniffed them.  They were fine, they’d have to do, he figured.  He dressed, grabbed his bike down from it’s ceiling hooks and opened his door.

“Just enough time,” he muttered to himself as he saddled the bike and stepped a pedal to start, but then it hit him right on the shoulder.

A drop.  He looked at the wet spot and then looked up, realizing how tense and warm the air smelled as the rain began.

He retreated back through the door and watched as the summer rain suddenly filled the air.  Lucilius closed his eyes with mounting frustration.  Calling a cab would take too long, especially now with the rain, everyone would be hailing cabs.  He suddenly hated his job, his projects always getting squeezed around it’s blocky, greedy schedule, disembowelling his days of time, over and over.  A sense of embarrassment started to heat up his face, realizing how tedious this whole process was, how moronic it felt to be trapped in such a dumb puzzle of circumstance.

He breathed in, and for just the slightest sliver of time he couldn’t resist enjoying the smell of that summer rain.  

Then Lucilius eye’s brightened, searching rapidly from side to side for a moment.  He let out a genuine laugh, leaning the bike against the door frame.  He ran into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, then he took off his clothes, wrapped them in the towel and stuffed all of it into a backpack.  Then he opened one of his dresser drawers and pulled out a pair of swim shorts.    Next to them were some goggles he used at the pool.

“Why not?” He muttered.

He put on the swim shorts, the googles, and slung the backpack around his shoulders and went back out into the rain with his bike.  He smiled, looking up, feeling the hot rain on his face and smiled. 

Seems like he’d still get his shower after all, he thought, as he rode off into the rain.

SOUNDS OF MEANING

February 13th, 2021

Foreign languages to which we understand not a single word are more akin to music.  It’s a fascinating experiment, even a kind of meditation to try and hear one’s own language as just a set of sounds, consciously divorced from their meanings.

The task might be quite impossible.  As an occasional pet experiment, it has never yielded fruit.  It’s either impossible or simply difficult in the extraordinary to hear words without their meaning spiking in the mind.  At least, it cannot be done on the fly while listening to someone else.

However, if one simply repeats the same word over and over and over, there reaches a point where the meaning falls away and the raw sound is so present that an unsettling feeling can arise when the meaning of such a well-used word cannot be immediately grasped.  As an aside, I remember being about six years old and turning to a classmate to ask what the word ‘was’ meant.  I’d just spent the last few minutes saying it quietly to myself several hundred times and could no longer place it in a sentence because of the exercise.

Strangely, it’s as though we have to get closer to the words, or the sound at least, in order for the meaning to drop away.  Learning a second language is replete with similar oddities: noticing that certain words sound the same or build off one another in ways that native speakers never realize.

It may in fact be that the meaning of words gets in the way of hearing the sound for what it is.  Before we have time to register the music of the sound, we have already retrieved the meaning, which now stands front and center of attention. 

Still, it’s an interesting meditation exercise at the very least to try and listen to that native tongue and try to hear it like a foreigner, if only to wonder: is it beautiful?

REPRESENTING THE FUTURE

February 12th, 2021

It’s impossible to be sure if a memory is true.  How would you ever know?  All you have to rely on for a representation of the past is, your memory.  And yet despite plenty of instances that prove the perennial fallibility of memory, we often swear by it.  The statistical likelihood of veracity is certainly not being taken into account when we do things, though, we swear by things more often on the basis of emotional conviction, not facts.

Some dreams can be so realistic they spur the dreamer once awake to ask those who were present in the dream if what passed was real.  All of us have suffered this glitch of memory, though once past childhood we are duped less often, though still duped - just not by dreams.

Presenting the past again, or representing it, is the real business of memory, but it is always done so in the context of a new situation - the present.  The past becomes recast, tinted, and often skewed through the lens of intervening time.

This does not just happen on an individual basis but also a cultural one.  Histories get rewritten, sometimes as we discover more about the past, but just as likely because we simply have different opinions about what happened.  Films get colorized, and memories take cue from fantasy.

Now we try to filter the present, altering reality, representing what is already in front of us.  But of course, we’ve been doing this since we first applied paint to our own faces.  

Strangely, what we often have a hard time representing is an idea of the future.  It remains a dull haze, an average crash of our common efforts and distractions.  Even delusions of grandeur remain so, always unrealized.  The disservice we do to the past is best applied to the future.  Tomorrow will always turn out to be a dull recast of today, unless of course we can imagine something radically different.

THE CONTEXT OF METAPHOR

February 11th, 2021

Analogies and metaphors aren’t perfect, and that’s by default.  There’s criticism lobbed at these cognitive tools for this lack of fidelity.  The argument follows that if a metaphor is needed than is the original core point all that clear in the first place?  Why can’t it translate?

Increasingly context is becoming more and more atomized.  Individually and as a culture our focus is becoming more narrow.  The result is that what comes into focus gets pulled out of context.  Such is one of the dangerous underpinnings of cancel culture.  The warriors of such a movement, while likely well intentioned and often bringing up fair points, are still all too willing to be very sloppy with the context, cherry picking details to collage a particular picture that best serves the movement.  Orwell is most certainly rolling in his grave, perhaps with laughter.  This sort of context-cut-and-paste was formerly only the sin of powerful tyrannical governments.  But now the diseased treatment of context has spread like a plague through culture and publications  that were once held in high regard as the clearest and most honest word have, within the last decade morphed into massive opinion pieces, tailored to grab attention instead of offer the truth.  

It’s an unfortunate monster of a game where short rounds might be won by those who play, but it’s a game of war that has an aim to consume every player regardless of who seems to be winning.

And along with this storm, the old tools of analogy and metaphor have been swept up.  Once the jewel of poetry and the indispensable tool of explanation and education, metaphor is now trusted less, which perhaps makes sense considering the assault on context.

A metaphor functions like a bridge between contexts.  Analogies too, straddle the border between contexts, and this is exactly why they are useful.  As tools they expand context so that one context can be understood in terms of another, and by doing so, those two separate contexts join, like bubbles merging to grow larger.  While the current trend is to narrow in until we’ve atomized every last bit of life so that we can no longer identify the meaningful connections between the pieces we’ve ripped apart, metaphor offers a chance to backtrack the dangerous path, like an anchored point of yesterday to which we still grip the rope.

The context of metaphor itself, is a lack of understanding.  When the point has failed to get across, and mere vapid description falls short, we take a step back and try to see what might exist in the context of those we seek to reach that might function as an isomorphism - as a way to translate the information of our point into the terms of another’s perspective.  And from such a zoomed out position, we inhabit the larger context and seek shared images and relationships that mirror what we know narrowly.

It’s a strange tension that we maintain, between zooming in to the specifics to gain deep understanding, but also to step to understand how the minuscule context of a detail fits into the grand scheme of things.  Without a well-oiled zoom that enables both pictures, we are easily lost, but most definitely lost if we are stuck zoomed in on details that are bereft of context, by default.  It’s the difference between trying to navigate one’s way through the city by looking at a square inch of ground at a time, and taking the elevator up to the observation deck in order to get a better view of the lay of the land.