As I mentioned in a recent message to subscribers, I am not expecting to add essays here that often. The idea I’m presenting today has been knocking around in my head for a couple of months, and I found a few hours to get it down… so here it is! For all you new subscribers, you may be interested to know that I’m presently focused on another Substack called Dovetails, which is about nature, ecology, landscape design, and permaculture. I encourage you to stop by and check it out. I also encourage you to peruse analogy further, since the work presented here is often philosophical, interconnected, and hopefully intellectually liberating.

Language has a magical quality to it that we generally fail to appreciate because we use it so often for mundane affairs. The quality I’m speaking of has to do with the metaphorical aspect that is the baseline subject of analogy magazine. What I mean is that all language is fundamentally metaphorical since words are both written symbols and sound symbols of objects and ideas. So language leads us into a symbolic world even when used for mundane communication. The further we drift into the representational end of communication (think philosophy and science), the further we enter a paradigm, or worldview. For example, if we consider the phenomenon of the sun illuminating the sky following the night, and express that as “sunrise,” we are applying a metaphor of rising to the sun. That metaphor then becomes embedded in our minds as the phenomenon itself. In other words, we forget the magic of metaphor and actually conflate the phenomenon with the model we’ve imposed upon it. When, one day, some scientist comes along and says, “Umm… so you know how y’all are saying the sun rises, well, I have news for you: that’s not what’s going on at all. The sun isn’t moving. The sphere we’re standing on is rotating in such a way that makes it appear as though the sun were rising”—when someone comes along and points this out, he’s pointing the way out of a kind of psychic prison.

It may feel like enlightenment, and perhaps it is. But we must always guard against locking ourselves into the new paradigm because all perspectives are ultimately incomplete, and there will always be a new horizon and a new enlightenment. What’s important is that we regularly experience new revelations, and regularly undergo transformations of consciousness. No one who learns the new way of seeing things will ever see the world the same way again. Such an experience can be euphoric, but I caution against cultish commitments.

Anyone hearing a new idea for the first time—that the sun doesn’t really rise, for instance—will think these are the utterings of a madman. The rising metaphor is so fundamental to their worldview, they are essentially locked in. It’s like looking at a Necker cube and getting stuck on the image pointing down and to the left and not being able to view it pointing up and to the right (or vice versa). In other words, metaphor can be a kind of trap or prison unless we learn to use its magic to our advantage.

I’ve explored this subject before from the perspective of idol worship, and I’ve examined things like probability math, and discussed the tyranny of models imposed upon phenomena. This time, I’m coming at the subject from a different angle to show how analogies can completely lord over us and shape our experiences and even our destinies (or certainly the qualities of our destinies).

The most obvious trouble we’re experiencing with this metaphor magic today has to do with what’s become known as the echo chamber. This term is a metaphor that arose from social media behaviour, and expresses how folks tend to create social silos by blocking out and selectively curating sources of information and opinion. These echo chambers actually trap us in worldviews.

As I pointed out in a previous article, this behaviour carries out into the real world where folks get triggered by contradiction. Dialogue is essentially dead. What we get instead are mic drops, opinions simply stated like a text message. If one doesn’t “like” said statement, one is an avatar of an enemy echo chamber. The reaction is outrage. The ability to open a dialogue on whether the sun actually rises becomes impossible. How often have I heard a friend say, “Oh, I hate that guy,” referring to some influencer or other in the echosphere. Anyone who echos the hated guy is an avatar of all followers and likers of that guy.

If I am not me, but an avatar of an echo chamber, and if you are not you, but an avatar of an echo chamber, then how can we ever dialogue as one individual to another? How can we ever truly connect? I think we’ve all experienced this inability to connect when trying to engage with others on controversial topics. I’m hoping that by drawing attention to this dynamic, we may be able to get a handle on it.

Of course, this behaviour is not exactly new, it’s just that social media has enhanced and amplified the phenomenon, which I have referred to elsewhere as the will to incorporation: i.e. the instinct to bring all minds under one paradigm, whether via religion or scientism. What I have been at pains to elucidate in analogy magazine is how on the one hand, a paradigm can be productive, while on the other hand, it can imprison our minds. Exposure to new perspectives is therefore paramount if we ever hope to understand the nature of knowledge as organic in its own way, and to keep ourselves from over-committing to a worldview.

If we’re talking about climate change, for instance, and we’re committed to the notion that atmospheric CO₂ from fossil fuel emissions is the cause of global warming, then we are likely to view contrary ideas as offensive and even dangerous. If, however, we believe that rising atmospheric CO₂ is primarily a symptom of soil degradation and loss of biomass, we are likely to find proponents of the former view as offensive and dangerous.

The same happens when considering virus theory and terrain theory. The paradigms determine our approach to the world, indeed shaping our experiences and our destinies. One who believes CO₂ equals global warming will be ready to endorse all manner of measures that actually cause soil degradation (wind farms and massive solar farms, for instance) because the person committed to the paradigm is as convinced of the presiding metaphor as our friend from earlier was convinced of the rising sun. These worldviews are difficult to break free of in their own right; add social media behavioural training and the whole psychological mess gets worse. I have met people in the social justice sphere who are locked in misery because their focus is on injustice, inequality, hate—and especially on what others have that they do not.

All of these worldviews have ruling metaphors the same way astrological signs have ruling planets that lend character to one’s experience of the world. It’s not always a bad thing. I repeat, incomplete or even untrue paradigms can be productive. The proponent of CO₂-driven global warming often enough shares with his opponents a desire to promote ecological health, and this can be a way of bridging the divide. A lot of the actions being taken for the sake of CO₂ reduction have some merit in the eyes of one who believes the reasons motivating those actions are misguided.

It’s interesting to observe too that one who rejects virology and subscribes instead to terrain theory will likely have a predisposition to embrace ideas regarding soil health and to pursue activities in permaculture and regenerative farming. These paradigms frame a way of life. That’s where one’s destiny figures into the magic of metaphor. I suggest that it’s worth considering which worldviews are healthier whenever trying to determine which is the wiser path. One of the implications here is that being in possession of the one true Truth is not what knowledge is about: knowledge is not about being right; it’s about dialoguing with new analogies.

Poetry has the power to teach us this flexibility, this ability to transform consciousness, which is why poetry has been a feature of this magazine. A poem can guide you through so many surprising transformations, that it can confer its creative magic, if you’re paying attention. I’ll leave you with a poem on the subject, and I’ll let you puzzle over the magic of our minds engaging with the ever shifting Logos manifesting through the various phenomena of life, death, decay and the whole cosmic dance. If the poem looks familiar to some of you, that’s because I shared it a few months back in this article.

Release

I climb like I’m climbing out of my skin, climbing out of my own hair
as I climb out of traffic, away from thundering machinery.
I climb past joggers and cyclists snug in their spandex.
I bolt through woods, bound rocks, teeter across mud-locked logs.

The fine drizzle sizzling over the ground is the tearing sound  
as I come loose, a stone dislodged from peach-flesh or apricot.
Once out of the pollutiosphere, even the bird chatter is thin.
I inspect a feather, an acorn, a vacant web, and each time,

kaleidoscopically, the whole world pivots on the axis of a new design. 
What is a park in darkness or in rain when it no longer serves?
When the purpose departs a field, an old wheel, a clawfoot tub,
what does it become—when it slips the syntax of our hands?

I pick a button from the grass; the lawn bares its chest to the sky.
Let go the strings of constellations, the stars fly back to themselves.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine. He has turned his attention to landscape design and permaculture, and is presently focused on another Substack entitled, Dovetails magazine, which you can find here.

The burden of cancellation levied on the infected shall not be abridged on account of race, gender, or degree of victimhood.

Amendment I, Permanent Safety Code

The “Blue Death” had finally ravaged the country by the third or fifth year of lockdown. No pandemic in human history had ever been so contagious, or so depressing. Boredom was its nature and its course—the blueness and the monotony of boredom. During the first several waves of mass infection, there were sore throats, runny noses, fever, fatigue; some vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach aches; and then a few deaths—mostly the elderly and infirm—followed by collective hysteria, nation-wide safer-at-home orders, and the economic devastation of mass unemployment with attendant bankruptcies, declining mental and physical health due to a steep rise in poverty, drug abuse, domestic abuse, depression, suicide; and an acute scarcity of toilet paper. Many in the cities, convinced that the strictness of the confinement measures far exceeded the dangers posed by the pestilence, chose to live as normally, or as recklessly, as possible, congregating at parks and backyard barbecue parties, where they didn’t wear masks or socially distance, and in extreme cases, touched and kissed each other. Such heartless, selfish behaviour triggered the pest ban which cancelled them from the culture of their fellow settlers—even before the catastrophic mutations the virus underwent in subsequent waves necessitated even sterner security measures than the ones originally put in place.

These horrifying mutations brought about the Age of Permanent Safety, when the Blue Death was, the health experts informed us, still very little understood. They arranged their data to present, nonetheless, a frightening image of a steadily rising mortality rate, which helped persuade the public that the virus had evolved to attack not the immune system anymore, but the emotional and reasoning centers of the brain. New symptoms appeared first among those who still had friends and families, when they gathered illegally inside each other’s homes to eat and socialize. They used the same utensil to dole out food to one another, and they laughed. Laughter had been prohibited because it spread contagious droplets over unacceptably long distances and with such force that they easily penetrated the protective layers of a mask.

But even more pernicious symptoms arose among the infected in the form of public outbursts of virulent rage, in which they dismissed the pandemic as a “hoax.” They disseminated wildly delusional conspiracy theories about the secret motives of the state and its corporate administrators in Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the Mass Media, conveying the naive belief that, instead of protecting the public health, our leaders sought only to stoke fear so as to keep the masses cowed and compliant—all to increase their own power and wealth. The virus was, above all, a shrewd adversary, a skilled organizer—brilliant, even diabolical—for somehow it convinced people that it didn’t exist, and that was when they became the most contagious. Around this time, Prime Minister Kim Jong Laurendeau signed his highly popular Permanent Safety Code into law, and in doing so, he saved countless millions of lives. He was a great leader. Under his aggressively progressive system, when the infected organized public demonstrations or took to social media to claim that their righteous anger wasn’t a symptom of the virus itself, but of what they deemed the state’s disproportionately extreme, authoritarian response to it, they were confined in remote Safe Spaces overseen by the Disease Rehabilitation Council—in accordance with the second amendment of the PSC.

So, while at first the virus infected mostly the old and frail, and yet killed a mere fraction of one percent of them, soon the most vulnerable became the young and healthy, and a mere fraction of one percent of them survived. Those who had robust immune systems and, curiously, those most enamoured with the idea of freedom—the most critical, so-called “free-thinking” minds in society—became the most susceptible to an infection almost certain to be fatal. The health experts, a team of doctors drawn from the humanities and social sciences departments of the country’s most distinguished universities—not medical doctors, mind you, most of whom had by then succumbed, regrettably, to the Blue Death—emphasized that due in large part to neocolonialism, white supremacy, racism, sexism, transphobia, and The Patriarchy—though mostly due to anthropogenic climate change—more and more pandemics, and more unpredictable, even deadlier ones, would be an inevitable consequence.

It was, in fact, within these DRC Safe Spaces where the latest, most ominous mutation of the virus occurred, which from there soon after spread across the country. Within a few months of their forcible but necessary confinement of indeterminate length, the infected began their rapid descent into the bluest depression verging on catatonia—they became rigid and unresponsive, seemed to give up on life, and only on occasion, usually during their weekly bath, when, watching the ripples of water expand and vanish, they could be heard to mutter, “But I don’t feel blue . . . But I don’t feel blue . . .” Actually, during the final seizure and termination of the disease, which were the incidents of a few minutes before dissolution, the skin all over their bodies—but especially around their mouths, concealed by the masks they were required to wear at all times—turned dry and brittle as parchment, then cracked open in lesions from head to foot, through which their flesh, which had partially liquefied, oozed out in streams of livid pus.

It was said a long time ago by some dead white man of the Western canon that ignorance was the nutriment that helped evil to flourish, but in truth an excessive preoccupation with freedom was the true cause of malevolence. Freedom was a quaint idea, but that’s all it was—an idea, and a childish one at that—for in the real world of responsible grown-ups, one’s freedom necessarily ended where the safety of society began. So many, however, still wanted to be free, as if the human brain wasn’t little more than a data processing machine through which the unconscious expressions of various social and economic inputs—rather than conscious expressions of an autonomous will—were transmitted. The pathology of the virus, then, wasn’t mysterious at all, but of their own making. Clearly the greatest obstacle to permanent safety was an elitist, cultish obsession with individual sovereignty, promoted by legions of fascists who, caring only about themselves, never considered the superior moral virtue of being a good neighbour. The virus wasn’t to blame; the infected were. An abiding faith in “free will” was the true contagion. There was something really wrong with them that needed immediate correction. I was excited, I must admit, that the Blue Death, though at great cost, might finally rid the world of these people.

I might have ended up as one of them had it not been for Rachel, my beloved ex-wife. I still missed her very much, and the child we had lost. She was incredibly smart and beautiful. She always explained to me with such eloquent precision how wrong I was in all my opinions—and yet her calm grey eyes appeared magnanimous above her bold, prominent mouth shaped like the trumpet of a wild daffodil. Her beauty seemed all the more vivid to me because I knew I wasn’t especially attractive. True, I was tall and lean and, despite being middle-aged, had a full head of hair, but my head was too large for my body, with a rounded cranium flattened at the temples; I wore square-shaped glasses that magnified my beady eyes. At the time I would have never admitted to nurturing the narcissistic desire that I had always wanted to be a father, and to raise a family. Then as the years of the pandemic blended together, I came not only to repudiate my former longing, but to resent it, both in myself and perhaps a little more so in others. Still, I found my enduring affection for the family I would never have both touching and pathetic, for in the very heart of the plague, the solipsism of love had enabled me to preserve a sense of indifference that cushioned me somewhat against the general distress. It also hardened me to the difficulties of my latest career. Working as a security operative for the Disease Cancellation Directorate, I gradually became inured to observing the infected scream with their last gasp, “I’m not a disease!” They left me feeling a kind of bemused incredulity. There was nothing I could do for them, resistant as they were to the virtue that their sacrifice for the public good was signaling, so when I left their homes, though I could still hear their screaming in my ears, I felt a certain inner peace.

At the same time, the nature of my work helped to change the way I regarded my fellow human beings, especially white people like me. Reduced to abstractions, they became dearer to me than ever. I wanted to save them from themselves. So that’s why—shortly after the virus had evolved to corrupt the mind before the body—I was grateful to be called on by the Ministry of Radical Health and Well-Being to redeem myself by adding my exceptional inculcative skills to the nation-wide effort underway to re-engineer society into one exponentially more diverse in every component but speech and thought. I was given the choice of either having my divorce sentence upgraded to the maximum penalty—a permanent marriage ban with installment of an internet-enabled ‘smart’ chastity cage—or becoming a DCD agent; and if I chose the latter, my alimony would be reduced to 50% of the income earned in my new profession. I understood almost immediately that it would be foolish of me to refuse the ministry’s offer.

My life had come full-circle—my future no longer a terminus, but the start of a personal revolution in the wider context of the cultural revolution accelerated by the Blue Death. Living in a permanent state of emergency in which the city was sealed off and movement restricted to one’s neighbourhood, I had never felt safer or more in my proper place. This new Great Depression would go on forever, an epic struggle against calamity that every generation had to suffer through. It proved to the survivors that the infected were dead wrong when they had earlier insisted that public acquiescence to the state’s so-called “draconian safety rules” during the initial outbreak was evidence that we were a weak, coddled society that hadn’t been through the kind of suffering people in earlier ages had, like those in the last century who endured the barbarism and privation of two world wars. At last the survivors understood that if they wanted to stay alive—but more importantly, if they would just wash away their petty egos and consent to merging with something far greater and purer than themselves—then all they had to do was obey the PSC amendments and submit to the New Normal.

Long ago, it seemed, during the Old Normal, I had worked as a high school history teacher. I taught postcolonialism, and served as Head of the Right Side of History Department. Then, about a year before the media started reporting the first cases of infection, I was fired for what amounted to a hideous misunderstanding, which, though a reasonable decision on the part of the administration given the circumstances, had banished me forever from the teaching profession. That only made matters worse, for I was already penniless, lonely, and utterly bereft of hope. I mean, I still had hope for the future of the country which, I believed, was making some progress toward greater justice and equality for its historically oppressed and systemically marginalized peoples; but my personal future I had all but given up on. You see, I had recently gone through a divorce. According to Section 16-C of the Diversity Code, the Extraordinary Tribunal for Struggle Against Heteronormativity had awarded Rachel an alimony allowance that equaled 75% of my annual income. They based their judgment on the truthiness of her accusation that, because of me, she had developed severe gender dysphoria. The emotional trauma I was guilty of subjecting her to, furthermore, had left her no choice but to get an abortion. Her affidavit detailed the psychological abuse I inflicted on her during the long process of my silent accretion of new beliefs in which my sense of the role I played as a cisgender white male in the subjugation of women, for example, had finally revealed to me that when I thought I was “making love with” my wife, in fact I was raping her. I thought that I had become what she always wanted me to be, but instead I gave her posttraumatic stress disorder, or at least that’s how the tribunal judges interpreted her closing statement: “Having sex with my husband made me feel like a lesbian.” This was ironic, of course. Our politics couldn’t have been more different when we first started dating, but the reasons why eventually I brought mine into accord with hers, I believed in retrospect, pertained not only to the white guilt that she slowly proved to me I should beat myself up over during the many political arguments we had had over the years—but also to my enduring love for her. I couldn’t wait to help bring someone else like Rachel into the world.

So, what happened on the day I got fired was, as I said, simply a grievous mix-up. My error hadn’t emerged as a result of, and wasn’t directed toward, any one particular student of the thirty or so seated before me at the time. That morning I had a terrible hangover, and hangovers, for some reason, had always raised my libido. Standing in front of all those students perched at their desks in rows, their heads at my waist level, I held my arms akimbo as I usually did while reciting the same lesson I had given so many times that I could do it in my sleep—and I was, in fact, half-asleep—lecturing them on the urgent need for every non-aboriginal settler to immigrate to their ancestral countries and return to their rightful owners the unceded First Nations territories that constituted the whole of our illegitimate country—all the while absorbed in a day-dream about raping my ex-wife. Only one student filed an anonymous complaint about the bulge, but that was enough to bar me from ever teaching again. I fell into a morbid depression, had nightly drunken fantasies about hanging myself, and bought a dog.

It was on an evening toward the close of the thirtieth or sixtieth month of confinement, shortly before curfew, and while the Blue Death continued its rampage across the country, that I took Onco, my toy poodle, for a walk under a moonlit sky with a halo of blue radiance around the moon. Before the lockdown, I had never taken much notice of the moon, or the sun or the sky for that matter, and I wondered if the blue halo wasn’t a phantasm, a symptom of my servitude to the vast indifference of the plague. That night the moon beamed over the rooftops, and everything in the neighbourhood lay naked to the dazzling impact of its light. It turned Onco’s curly brown fur a pale yellow, and as he proudly trotted along beside me, his head held high with its bobbed hairstyle resembled a sheaf of freshly cut wheat. The moonlight stalked us along every sidewalk, and crept into every silent, empty nook of the listless houses. Here in the suburbs little was left of the usual animation between the long, narrow streets and invariable rows of circa-fifties, red-brick, semi-detached homes. Ordinarily at this time of year in late spring, back in the days of the Old Normal, my neighbours would spend the evening chatting on their front lawns and imbibing the warm, fragrant air, while their children chased each other up and down the sidewalks, screaming with joy; but now every door was shut, no one was to be seen, even the blinds and drapes stayed down, and I couldn’t tell if it was the moonlight or the virus they were trying to shut out. The soft noise of distant traffic from the highway, already surprising given the economy had long been ground to a halt, startled the otherwise silent spaces that Onco and I traversed, for in the light and the stillness and in my own troubled heart, even the slightest sound—be it a woodpecker nearby or the far-away honk of a horn—had a heightened significance. The unvarying brightness of the moonlight, the very smells rising from the soil that signal the change of season, had the same sinister import in my thoughts as the Blue Death itself. The virtual extinction of all movement around me might have been due as much to the fierce moonlight as to the pestilence, and there was no knowing if the air had grown heavy with menace or merely gotten warmer. The trees and hedges along the street all shimmered, and the rustle of leaves sounded like water streaming over pebbles. The balmy, lucid air made the sidewalk underfoot feel oddly supple—though perhaps what added to the ground’s suppleness were the draggled rubber gloves and cotton masks which had covered over every lawn, street, and sidewalk.

In such a soothing lunar ambiance, I had an eerily outrageous encounter with one of my neighbours, a woman in her early thirties whom I hadn’t seen since the start of the outbreak, but before that, we would occasionally run into each other on the street, though I never asked her name. She had a dry sense of humour, and was graceful and genial once; but now she looked unwashed, haggard, perhaps a little dead-looking, and she very nearly came upon me just as Onco was evacuating his bowels under the hedge that lined the front of her property. Her liquid eyes trembled nervously; her pale skin looked ashy grey and her shiny black hair metallic. I had been so lost in reverie that it seemed she had come out of the blue, so to speak, taking short, shuffling steps as though in no hurry to get home before the curfew minutes away. She carried in her arms a carton of milk, a loaf of bread, and several rolls of toilet paper. Wondering where she had acquired the toilet paper, since for many months there had been next to none available in state-approved corporate retail outlets, I noticed too that the mask she wore was like one I had never seen before. It was of a design so ludicrous—so extraordinarily improbable—that it seemed to have come from another world. In fact, it didn’t look real at all. It looked like a 3D image projected onto her lower face from some invisible realm. Considerably larger and thicker than the latest 12-layer mask authorized in the forty-third amendment of the PSC, her mask protruded bulbously from her face, had a grey surface marked with yellow speckles and orange clumps, around which stood a cluster of sharp red spikes that formed a sort of halo—or corona. I gazed at it in astonishment, though only momentarily, for then she had the audacity to pass me at a dangerous distance of exactly four-and-a-half metres—and I was an acute judge of such matters because my work required me to know precisely how far anything short of the amended nine-metre safe distance measured. Her mask was enormous but I could still hear the ragged wheeze of her laboured breathing, and then a vague odour of grave soil came drifting into my nostrils. She may be infected, I thought. Seized with terror, I reached inside my coat, lurched backward into Onco, who yelped, and stepped on his pile of turds. Though it had become almost impossible to hear what people were saying through steadily thickening masks with layers corresponding in number to the latest wave of infection—and so conversation, the sound of human words, had all but vanished from the public sphere—I felt so triggered by her reckless contravention of several PSC amendments that I stabbed a finger at my shoe. “Look what you’ve done!” Then I waggled my finger at her. “Don’t you understand? For your own health and safety, keep nine metres away!”

She stopped in her tracks—exactly nine metres from me. Dropping the milk, bread, and rolls of toilet paper on the ground, she turned and stared straight into my eyes. Her moist, glaring eyes outshone her greasy forehead in a way that reminded me of a circus sideshow freak. She raised her bony, rubber-gloved fists in the air like a boxer ready to fight, her face blanched as if to the point of fainting, her skull damp with fever. “My health and safety? What about yours?” Her voice groaned and rattled like the hiss of a startled serpent, and it seemed to emanate not from her mouth hidden behind that ridiculous mask, but from either side of me.

I shuddered and felt my skin crawl. Inside my coat, I tightened my grip on my state-issued, life-saving weapon holstered there. “Miss!” I started backing away from her, Onco pressed against my leg, barking and trembling. She kept pace with my steps, however, moving forward at just the same speed that I was stepping backward, maintaining always nine metres distance between us.

Then she placed one hand on top of the other over her heart and, chuckling, her voice a gravelly rasp, said, “I was only kidding.” This time I heard her voice directly behind me. I turned around. Nobody was there. I turned back and she had shortened the distance between us by half. She stood there erect and motionless—a deadly four-and-a-half metres away—her hands now raised above her head, as though she were waiting to be arrested; and her mask was gone. I gasped in inexpressible horror. Her lower face resembled the inflorescence of some kind of blighted hydrangea: a cluster of tiny sores, reminiscent of buboes, bloomed around her mouth like the interior of a flowerhead, in the middle of which her teeth were glimmering white in a rictus grin, the lips rotted away except for a few tatters of flesh. On her nose, chin, and cheeks were huge blisters shaped like petals. The ghastly blossom on her face seemed to pull at my consciousness—just as the moonlight seemed to pull the sounds from the air and bury them within its warm, bright softness. “I’m not a disease!” She screamed, but what was left of her mouth didn’t move, and I heard her voice come out of my own.

I pulled my taser gun out of its holster—set by DCD engineers to a voltage at which the heart was guaranteed to fibrillate, causing sudden cardiac arrest—and fired two electrode darts into her chest. Her body convulsed and wriggled, and the look in her eyes changed from one of defiant mockery to an expression mingled with shock, disappointment, and a profound sense of betrayal—which reminded me a lot of the look in Rachel’s eyes that I had made the mistake of noticing on the rare occasions when we still made love in the late stages of our marriage. Finally it collapsed backward to the ground, and though it continued twitching for a few moments, that feeling of being sucked toward it went away. Its eyes stared blankly at the moon, the white grinning teeth all agleam, around which a viscous, livid discharge dribbled from every swelling onto its bed of moonlit rubber gloves and cotton masks. Onco whimpered and took a few small, cautious steps toward it, until I yanked him hard by his leash back to my side. I regretted making him gag and choke like that. He was my only family.

I notified Disease Sanitation Services about sending a truck to pick up the body, and to unlock the door of its house, since one of my duties involved inspecting the former homes of the cancelled to determine whether any useful goods remained there to be expropriated, disinfected, and redistributed by the state to those who belonged to identity groups that had been most oppressed through history by white supremacy. I carried Onco home, which was a few blocks away, put on my hazmat suit, and returned to the house of my former neighbour, all the while feeling depressed again because the penultimate look in its eyes had conjured up that memory of Rachel.

Once I had entered the house, though, to my surprise I heard the soft, nasally sound of a sleeping child, and the hum of its slow, regular breathing quenched my whole being. I tiptoed through the hallway but the wooden floor crackled so loudly that the child woke up and started crying. A gloss of moonlight gave the air in its bedroom a gauzy whiteness, the window stained with fingerprints and dried saliva. It was a girl no older than four, perhaps a little younger, I recalled, than our child would have been if Rachel hadn’t cancelled it. The girl was sitting on her bed, curled up in a ball, shaking, clutching her stuffed rabbit. She was trying to swallow her sobs. She had a little, fresh, round face with green eyes and long, blond hair curling at the end, like a golden playground slide. Remarkably, my presence as a total stranger—dressed, no less, in an aluminized hazmat suit that made me look like a martian—didn’t seem to frighten her. Quite the opposite, in fact. She stopped crying and stared at me curiously, as though I might be someone familiar. Instead of fear, her eyes conveyed wonder, perhaps even a bit of hope. “Daddy?” She said.

Transported by a sudden feeling of being outside myself, I thought I heard someone else instead of me reply, “Hello, my name is Gordan.”

“Where did you went? Mommy say you never come back.” Almost unconsciously, I felt as if I were observing myself huddle beside her on the bed and stroke her back. With her chubby little index finger, she pressed on my hazmat suit, its outer plastic crinkling. “Daddy, did you came from the moon?”

“Sshh, little girl. Go back to sleep.”

Her thin eyebrows fluttered like wings, her lips quivered, her glance trembled. “But . . .,” she muttered, “but . . . I want to sleep with Mommy.”

“Mommy’s asleep, sweetheart,” I said, stroking her chest, and as she resumed her weeping, I stretched straight out on the bed. “I’ll stay for a moment.” She begged a second time for her mother to no avail and lay down next to me, sniffling. “Sshh,” I whispered. Soon enough her tears had ended and she stared at the ceiling, scratching the marble eye of her tattered rabbit cradled in her arms. I listened to her softening breath and, somehow through the layers of rubber and plastic, felt her heartbeat relaxing. I watched the moon turn her hair and face entirely white, wondering instead if the light emerged from within her by the touch of my gloved hand. Then a sudden joy seemed to carry me away to the frontier of a vast, uncharted realm beyond the physical. I found myself in a deeper state of unreality where it felt as though I could remove my mind from my body. I had been gazing into the girl’s eyes, and sensed that I was being pulled outward toward them, when suddenly I thought I had entered into a dream she was just beginning to have as her eyes glazed over and her heavy eyelids began to droop. In the dream we were lying in her bed, facing each other. There was pale morning sunlight, a breeze whispering through her open window, and the steady patter of someone showering. The little girl wrapped her arms around my neck and pressed her forehead against mine, rubbing them together until her hair was thickly curtained between our faces. “Daddy,” she said, “I can’t see you!”

“Well,” I said, “that’s because you’ve got all your pretty hair in my face!” She laughed at my reply with such insouciant delight that I started laughing along with her. Amid the smell of urine rising from her diaper and the sound of Rachel taking a shower, for a while our daughter and I laughed and laughed, blowing the scalloped curtain of her hair between our bright crimson faces.

And then, without warning, the scene became itself again. I was back in my hazmat suit, lying next to the little girl who had since closed her eyes and appeared to be asleep. With a strangely reluctant sense of relief, I got up off the bed, but then she woke up again and pressed her finger into the rabbit’s eye. Gazing drowsily at me, she murmured, “Thank you for sleeping with me, Daddy.” I stood in the doorway a few moments longer, until she drifted back to sleep. And before I went away to inspect the contents of the house, I called a friendly associate in the Children’s Disinfection Society.

Marko Sijan is the author of Mongrel (Mansfield, 2011). His stories and essays have appeared in magazines, including Geist and Canadian Notes & Queries. Sijan lives in Montreal.

Some years ago, probably sometime in 2018, I stumbled across the Electric Universe theory and was deeply intrigued for a host of reasons: for one, it pushed back against the most extravagant claims of Relativity theory, but probably most compelling for me was that the approach promoted an electromagnetic reading of how the universe operates instead of a mechanical reading. The machine metaphor is tired by now, and, as I see it, we need a new paradigm if we are going to take a proper next step in cosmological science. I got in touch with the lead scientist promoting and developing the theory, Wal Thornhill, and in 2020, we published an astounding article on the subject, which you can find here.

I should warn readers that the Electric Universe theory is deemed “fringe pseudoscience” by mainstream cosmologists and astrophysicists. There are good reasons for this, the most obvious being that a century of physics would wind up in the trash and a lot of reputations would fade and be destroyed, not the least of which would be Einstein himself.

There are other good reasons to be sceptical of the Electric Universe model, namely owing to its origins with Emmanuel Velikovsky, who shook up the world in the 1950s, through the 60s, and into the early 1970s with his claims that the solar system was not as stable as we’d thought and that humanity had witnessed deeply traumatising celestial events that were recorded as mythology and forgotten as our ancestors sank into collective amnesia. His claims included ideas like (a) our original sun was Saturn, and (b) Venus is a relatively new planet ejected from Jupiter. When Venus came into being, it flew by Earth at a close enough distance to cause all manner of horrifying upheaval, displacing Mars and precipitating immense electrical phenomena that carved out canyons and other geological structures that have been attributed to slow erosive forces.

On the surface, stated baldly like that, one can understand why this avenue of thought has been relegated to the crackpot bin. But if one suspends disbelief and hears out the argument, it’s not nearly as nuts as it sounds on a first, superficial pass, largely because what the Electric Universe offers that present day cosmology and astrophysics does not is laboratory experiments that illustrate the main concepts in play.

Now, I’m not saying Velikovsky was right about everything; what I’m saying is his ideas are visionary, inspired, and inspiring enough to have set the stage for a whole new paradigm. A number of the things he proposed have proven false, sure, but some of his ideas have proven productive. One of the biggest objections to his work was that he proposed (in his famous book Worlds in Collision) that some of the most outlandish tales in the Bible could be verified and explained by these equally outlandish cosmic phenomena that had corollaries in the histories and mythologies of cultures across the globe.

Those familiar with the Velikovsky controversy also recall how poorly the scientific community reacted. The behaviour displayed by scientists was downright nasty and unprofessional, to put it mildly. To give one example of this behaviour, a group of scientists started a campaign to pressure his publisher (Macmillan) to quit printing and pull the book from the market. Despite Worlds in Collision being a best seller, Macmillan capitulated because of threats that universities would go elsewhere for their science textbooks. This was Macmillan’s bread and butter, so they broke the contract.

The real fear was that Velikovsky’s book was paving the way back to creationism, the big bogeyman of modern science. The campaign against Velikovsky included more than threats against his publisher, but I’m not going to get into the details here. I direct those curious to learn more to read The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael D. Gordin. Indeed, the campaign against Velikovsky was so unhinged that it eventually prompted Carl Sagan to admit as follows:

“The worst aspect of the Velikovsky Affair was not that many of his ideas are in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas.”

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly alright: it’s the aperture to finding out what's right,” he further explained, before concluding, “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science.”

See Real Clear Science “Science Should Not Suppress Ideas, No Matter How Crazy”

I provide this background information so those new to the subject have a fair introduction and understand that they ought to proceed carefully. There’s probably a lot wrong with Electric Universe theory, but there’s quite obviously a lot wrong with Relativity. As I said above, at least proponents of the Electric Universe and Plasma Cosmology can refer to lab experiments, where Relativity can, too often, only refer to math. Moreover, Electric Universe theory has come a very long way since Velikovsky and I don’t think the claims made in Worlds in Collision have much bearing anymore on this developing area of scientific speculation.

Now to my actual subject: the image of a black hole that hit the news with a bang in 2019.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, once TheScience™ has produced an image of something, one can no longer claim that no one has ever seen it. Last time, I was looking at electron microscopy; this time, we’re looking at the macro scale through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is as much a telescope as an electron microscope is a microscope: neither provide direct observations in the sense one expects when hearing about these “scopes.” In the present case, we’re talking about a three-year-long observation, resulting in a data set assembled into images, using an algorithm to fill in gaps. In other words, the output is a composite image built up by a biased platform overtly seeking to confirm the phenomenon in question. In other words, the whole system is designed to “see” it through computer modelling. Seeking confirmations is not science. Science is supposed to seek falsifications of its own hypotheses, but this critical aspect of science has been lost over the past century or so.

Those who recall the hype will remember typical headlines like this April 10, 2019 one from New Scientist: “First ever real image of a black hole.” The word, “real” is a bent truth, if not an outright lie. This article from Universe Magazine explains that the image isn’t a snapshot as lay readers have been led to believe, that it is, in fact, a composite, part fabricated, part incomplete image that may very well be misleading. I’m sure the hype, however, netted the desired grants and funding those involved needed to keep running their programs. It’s not exactly a hoax, but it’s not honest science either. My point is that the public now believes that black holes have been confirmed by direct observation and that they therefore truly exist the same way it believes coronaviruses exist. Some scientists put together an image, enhanced it, pointed at it and called it “virus” or “black hole,” and there you go: seeing is believing. Anyone can now google “real image of a black hole” and find it. It’s irrefutable, see?

I direct readers to the Thunderbolts Project channel on Youtube. This is the Electric Universe video information channel. They’ve recently produced an excellent “Misconception” series of videos narrated by David Drew. Number 2 in the series focuses on our subject today and is about 15 minutes long. Drew suggests that the image in question is likely a plasmoid, and shares the image below. I remind readers that the ferrocell images of magnetism also reproduce a “black hole.” Simply being aware of these phenomena gives pause, since they can explain the image (composite and half-baked as it is) without resorting to black holes. David Drew reminds us that even Einstein believed that black holes were mathematical aberrations without grounding in reality.

To add to the ridiculousness of blackholology, the European Southern Observatory shared the following, further enhanced image.

The accompanying explanation reads:

“A view of the M87 supermassive black hole in polarised light”

“This image shows the polarised view of the black hole in M87. The lines mark the orientation of polarisation, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole.”

From the European Southern Observatory, here.

As the ferrocell image above demonstrates, the “shadow of the black hole” isn’t simply “related to the magnetic field”—it is an essential property of magnetic fields and has nothing to do with gravitational singularity as defined by the Relativity paradigm.

As I keep pointing out, the sciences are in a sorry state across the board. We’ve entered a pseudoscientific age in which the most absurd hypotheses are being promulgated as fact and verified via confirmation bias. Science culture has entirely lost the thread and slipped into scientistic superstition characterised by fictional entities and tall tales. The whole apparatus is being fuelled by over-specialisation, which functions as a blinder along with financial incentives to futz the findings. In addition, we have a whole culture in thrall to “the science” in an unquestioning manner. Nothing could be more unscientific than present-day science.

My suggestion, as always, is to reintroduce philosophy, metaphysics, and an understanding of analogy and its role in scientific thought. How to achieve such a thing in the present hyper-materialist phase of our civilisation is hard to imagine. Too much money is on the line and too many reputations are fully invested in tired paradigms strutting about as “the science.” Worse, it’s become politicised to the point no one who wants to be taken seriously can challenge the status quo. The West is now provincial and puritanical, i.e. small-minded and afraid to question itself. How long this state of affairs can continue is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the human soul knows better. The inner world cries out in the wilderness and eventually breaks from its bondage. We can already see the glimmering seeds of this future scientific revolution as the heroes of the next chapter of the Science story fearlessly speak out and lay the groundwork for new paradigms.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Attempting to understand the climate change subject has been a challenge. Something has always smelled off about the claims surrounding carbon emissions and cow flatulence. That CO₂ is the control knob for global weather control is absurd. CO₂ is, in fact, an important fertilizer, and the amount produced by human activity is negligible. Indeed, carbon is the basis of all life. Placing the blame on cattle emissions is equally silly and ought to raise anyone’s eyebrows in disbelief. In addition, the hype and politicisation of the issue makes it all the more suspect. The idea of “climate denialism” feels engineered, making the subject unapproachable for discussion, resulting in childish demonisation of anyone who questions the paradigm.

Meanwhile, climate scientists at the top of their field like Richard Lindzen have explained that global warming is not really happening. If it were, we’d see a significant increase in temperature at the equator. He has explained that the notion of global mean temperature is fallacious, since weather is always changing and going through cycles of various time scales. Elsewhere, one discovers that these mean temperatures are influenced by the placement of thermometers, often in microclimates like urban heat islands or other similar spots that don’t represent what they purport. As readers of analogy are well aware by now, so-called “scientific” models can be misleading and subject to confirmation bias. I’ve covered a lot of the reasons for scepticism regarding the anthropogenic climate change claims in the resource paper Climate Heretic, where you can find a number of papers and arguments countering the notion that humans are causing global warming by driving their cars, heating their homes, and eating beef. (If you’d like to read papers by Lindzen and several other scientists and climate researchers, you can find them on the Climate Heretic page.)

Trouble is, most of us are indeed witnessing various forms of climate change. Is it just weather? Some folks will look back and check data to see for themselves whether we’re truly experiencing unprecedented heat. What they find is… not really. In response to this DIY behaviour, activists have begun reporting surface temperatures instead of air temperatures. Surface temperatures are measured at the soil level, while air temperatures are measured at two metres above the surface. Do you recall the 2023 summer reports about Europe reaching unprecedented temperatures of above 45°C? During the same period in Ontario, we were experiencing an unusually cool, wet summer. An acquaintance who sees himself as knowledgeable in these matters claimed we were in “a bubble.” The idea of climate bubbles in this context is so full of science, I am left speechless. The truth was that those extreme temperatures were surface temperatures, while the air temperatures were in the normal low 30°C range. As Julius Ruechel explains in his book Plunderers of the Earth, “they were leveraging the old trick of impressing people by frying an egg on black asphalt” (198). Talk about misinformation! Most people are still convinced that these unprecedented heat waves cannot be denied, since data doesn’t lie. And while it’s true in a sense that data itself doesn’t lie, one also needs to be aware of how data can be bent into a lie. This sort of outright manipulation is fraud, and this sort of fraud isn’t the only instance. The whole field of climate change alarmism is thoroughly corrupt along these lines. Remember the climategate scandal? Not enough has been made of the corruption that was revealed there.

Meanwhile, we are experiencing often ruinous changes in climate. But it’s not being caused by CO₂ or cow flatulence. Instead, what we’re seeing are the results of expanding urban heat islands and general mismanagement of water tables, ecosystems, and biomes. Clearcutting for industrial development, mining, and housing has immense impacts on local environments. So what we’re witnessing are essentially micro-climate changes that have spreading impacts. And these sorts of environmental impacts are reproduced globally since countries and municipalities around the world are going about land development in the same ways.

Happily, I came across a series of articles on a Substack called The Climate According to Life that provides a wonderful case study, and I’m going to share some of the conclusions while encouraging readers to read all three articles in the series for themselves (here, here, and here). The focus is on a researcher by the name of Dr. Millan, who was Head of the Mediterranean Center for Environment Studies, and held degrees in Fluid Mechanics, Industrial Engineering, Aerospace Science, Atmospheric Physics and Spectroscopy, Synoptic Meteorology and Weather Forecasting. No slouch. He set out to answer the question of why afternoon storms “were disappearing throughout the Western Mediterranean Basin, with rivers drying up in their wake.” The following is a long quotation from part two of the series:

A classic example of how badly things can go wrong is found in the nearby province of Almeria. In the 1850’s its dense oak forests were clearcut to stoke the furnaces of lead smelters. The collapse to desert was so profound that the area eventually became a film locale for spaghetti westerns. Millan has come to believe the entire Western Mediterranean Basin is at such a tipping point, on its way to becoming an Almeria style desert, a point from which it is very difficult to return. “Once you hit rock,” he says, “you’re done.”

Early in his analysis, he uncovered a key detail. When the morning winds came in, their water content was 14 grams per cubic meter of air, not enough to form clouds, which under those specific conditions would require a moisture level of 21 grams water per cubic meter. The rest of the moisture, 7 grams per cubic meter, would have to come from somewhere else, which brings us back to the land.

At one time, that same sea breeze passed over vast coastal wetlands stretching miles inland, gathering the water vapor rising off of them. Then, proceeding toward the mountains, it would gain even more moisture from the great oaks, each a water tower in its own right. By the time it was climbing up the last high ridges it was saturated not only with moisture but cloud condensation nuclei. One can imagine the thunderheads billowing up, stacked plumes rising two miles in the air, releasing their latent heat to dissipate high over the mountains while dropping cold rain back on the land, rehydrating the vegetation and recharging the aquifers and marshes.

Now, however, rather than marshes and oaks, the sea breeze encounters concrete, steel and degraded landscapes. Not only is it deprived of the moisture it needs to make storms, it’s buffeted by the heat rising off the man-made materials, gaining 16^oC before reaching the mountains. What finally reaches the hills finds shrubs and scattered pinions, skeletal remains of the ancient oak forests. Not only is there too little respiring life to provide the missing 7 grams water per cubic meter air to make the rain cloud, but the intense heating of the air mass means it requires even more moisture to produce rain clouds. The pattern now is a few clouds gather in the late afternoon, rise, spread, then wisp away. The warm, moist, now-polluted air, instead of releasing its gathered heat and dropping rain on the land to replenish the system, merely flows back over the Mediterranean Sea.

This roughly explains the loss of summer storms, but the process doesn’t end there. The moist, polluted layers of air pile up over the Mediterranean Sea, layer upon layer, day by day. Those layers, soupy with powerful greenhouse gases like water vapor and ozone, steadily warm the sea below, so that by the end of summer the warmed sea begins supercharging coastal storms, as well as storm tracks that curve down over the Mediterranean on their way back up to central Europe. These storm tracks gather up the warm, moist layers and become supercharged as well, contributing to the devastating floods in Eastern Europe.

So where did the summer storms go? They left with the forests, soils and wetlands. Why are the coastal storms getting worse? In part from a sea-body warmed by the hydrological effects of ruined forests, soils and wetlands. Where are the drenching central European rains coming from? In part from moisture picked up over the Mediterranean that should have emptied out as rain over the inland mountains. What to do about it? One, stop ruining forests, soils and wetlands. And two, start restoring forests, soils and wetlands. Or as Millan puts it in his own imaginative way, start “cultivating storms.”

I will leave you with that as food for thought. This sort of dynamic study provides a window into the true nature of climate complexity. It’s not the sort of thing you can fix with EVs, windmills, and solar arrays. In fact, these projects will only exacerbate the problem because they generally entail more of the sort of land use that lies at the heart of the trouble: more clearcutting (or certainly no effort to restore soils and ecosystems), and more destructive and often toxic mining operations. I further encourage folks to read Julius Ruechel’s Plunderers of the Earth for more on this subject, since he exposes a lot of the fraud rampant in the climate racket and examines in some detail how the phenomena being blamed on climate change are in fact issues of land development and political mismanagement. The encouraging side to the climate story is that despite the complexity, the basic issues are pretty straight forward and essentially fixable. Moreover, owing to carbon-zero targets, industries, countries, and municipalities are making changes that will have a positive impact on soils and ecosystems. Perhaps in due course, the truly legitimate research like that of Dr. Millan will have the influence it ought to enjoy, and we’ll be able to turn this ship of fools around.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

So I’m visiting a friend and she starts talking about one virus surfing on another, relaying this in all seriousness and presenting it as science. Before I know it, I’ve blurted out, “You realise no one’s actually ever seen a virus.” She was scandalised, as she ought to have been, of course, but not in a good way. She had a full-on attack of leftbrainitis and raised her voice, citing a litany of evidence all having to do with her having had virus x and y and z. I think she may have stamped her foot. Somehow the subject of artists’ renditions of viruses entered the conversation, and her son explained that, yeah, he was aware that the covid images weren’t real. He followed up by showing me an image on his phone of covid under an electron microscope.

I replied that one has to understand how electron microscopes work. You can’t witness living activity; it’s all processed and frozen, and so the impression you have of such an image can be misleading. Thing is, an image truly is worth a thousand words; while my brief response was just an argument, and no one has ever been convinced by an argument (well hardly anyone). In any event, the problem is that he could easily call up a picture of something I had claimed that no one had ever seen. (I’d like to see surfing viruses one day; it would likely explain a lot about how static images can be read into narrative structures.)

Having witnessed the most common research process practiced today, I think we can better understand what’s going on with the information/misinformation axis, and why it is so many people are convinced of and dedicated to unverified ideas; indeed, why it is they become believers in various notions about the world.

Essentially, the internet lends itself to confirmation bias. When you perform a search, it’s generally not merely to explore or truly browse; you do it to find more information about some subject or other. I don’t recall ever looking something up and getting a critique of the subject, unless it had been politicised or classified as “misinformation”—which means it was “fact checked” and represented in a biased manner, often out of context and misleading in its own right. That’s the essence of politics after all: to take a clearly decided stance on a subject, to represent one side of a discourse and lead a band of enthusiastic believers.

When it comes to science, however, or the search for knowledge, another approach is called for. True research requires three main, foundational practices: (1) researching the author or authors of any image or text, (2) seeking out primary sources, original documents (including images), and (3) seeking out critiques, refutations and counter claims. The internet, in its present form, discourages these avenues of discourse owing to bias-confirming algorithms, and the all-too-human propensity to be content with easy answers from authorities.

In this case, the search was for a microscope image of covid. “Seek and ye shall find!” Arguably, the electron microscope is not a microscope at all, and the fact that it is so called is misleading. The whole point of a microscope is to be able to directly observe minute phenomena. The electron microscope, however, introduces all manner of secondary phenomena and mediating technologies, and, therefore, provides only indirect observations. In other words, the phenomena observed are no longer themselves, but instead futzed with and contaminated by the processes inherent to the instrumentation. I encourage readers to look into the various forms of electron microscopy (and there are a lot of them!) to confirm what I’m saying here.

It gets worse. With the introduction of computer modelling, the images produced by these machines are taken up into narrative frames to render representations and animations of processes that exist only in theory and that no one has ever actually witnessed. By its own magic, however, the representations become seen. In effect, we can no longer say that no one has ever seen these minute phenomena. We must be very specific: “no one has directly observed such and such” and this qualification takes a lot of steam out of the argument.

The instrumentation enhances the same processes by which we see, goes the assumption; and this assumption flows logically from the fact that the device in question is called a “microscope.” While it is indeed a way of imaging at minute scales, a basic trouble arises from these minute scales being beyond actual illumination. Instead of light, electrons are used to render images. What does this mean? Essentially, that energy is focused on an object and refractions are registered to provide an image, much the way light behaves in the world when it hits our retinae. It’s a clever workaround except for all the contaminations introduced to provide a sample that can be imaged in this manner. Often resins and metals are introduced to samples, for instance. No doubt, these devices are excellent for observing certain kinds of phenomena and for helping produce fantastic new superconductors and maybe microchips, but this technology does not suit all samples equally. To be used correctly, the limitations of the device vis a vis the phenomenon in question must be appreciated.

Returning to the research problem at hand, ask Google to show you an un-enhanced microscope image of a virus and you will get just that—though all such images are technically enhanced. To find out enough about the image, however, you must chase it down, find the primary source, the research paper attached to it, consider the controls, the authors, their other work and affiliations, their critics and the critics of the subject under investigation. Only when you have completed these tasks can you say you’ve researched a topic. Simply googling for an image of covid or proof of global warming is not research.

If the internet is ever going to overcome its present divisive sense of information and truth, we, as a society, will have to come to the understanding that misinformation is generated by the notion that Truth is a kind of multiple choice quiz or a binary matter to which the answer must be 1 or 0. To remedy this problem, we need a new kind of search engine made for research rather than quick reference, one that renders an array of avenues for the three fundamentals listed above: (1) providing leads on authors, (2) leads on primary sources, and (3) critiques, refutations, and counter claims. The sensibility that would arise from such a search engine would radically change the public, political, and scientific perception of information and knowledge as right and wrong. It would turn to a dialogical rather than a monological approach. It would put folks on alert to the deficiency of over-confident claims, and the deficiencies of their own claims to having “researched” a subject. It would introduce a healthy scepticism to a discourse that has been growing ever more divisive by the day.

I direct those interested in learning more on the subject of electron microscopy and virus imaging to view Dr. Sam Bailey’s video Electron Microscopy and Unidentified “Viral” Objects. She shares some images and discusses the main issues at play when these visual renderings are engineered and interpreted. The chief problem is that the particles we call “viruses” still haven’t been proven to behave like parasites, and so even if one identifies a biological particle associated with a specific illness, it is unclear what the role of that particle is, simply because no one has, in fact, witnessed the process of viral infection, and replication through hijacking living cells. For all we know, the particles found in electron microscopy are a kind of cellular debris—i.e. the way a cell breaks down when subjected to a given corruptive agent—or the arrival of other biological agents meant to clear the dead cell.

This subject is probably even more controversial than global warming. It is a wonder that such is the case if only because of the inconsistencies of virology and immunology. We seem perfectly happy with the falsifications we have all witnessed with regard to the idea of viral transmission as cause of illness, since we’ve all been privy to instances in which no illness results from proximity, or in which a healthy individual is deemed to be a “carrier”—an unclean person, as it were. At this stage of the game, it’s essentially understood that we are all carriers, which ought to water down the whole paradigm. Calling carriers “infected” is among the more dubious notions floating around. And the whole thing would be silly were it not for the lockdowns and UN Pandemic Preparedness Treaty hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

When I learned that Aristotle had described biological conception as resembling the curdling action of rennet on milk, I was pretty amused. What a poetic flourish! The reasoning process is both analogical and analytical, with deductive logic that follows from his metaphysics. The language is a mix of figurative and scientific, using curdling imagery and the terminologies of biology, physics, and metaphysics:

When the material secreted by the female in the uterus has been fixed by the semen of the male (this acts in the same way as rennet acts upon milk, for rennet is a kind of milk containing vital heat, which brings into one mass and fixes the similar material, and the relation of the semen to the catamenia is the same, milk and the catamenia being of the same nature)—when, I say, the more solid part comes together, the liquid is separated off from it, and as the earthly parts solidify membranes form all round it; this is both a necessary result and a final cause, the former because the surface of a mass must solidify on heating as well as on cooling, the latter because the foetus must not be in a liquid but be separated from it. (De generatione animalium, Bk. II, 739b, 22-31)

Aristotle’s method of consideration is both convincing and thorough in a way that reaches well beyond our present scientific way of observing and considering the world. In a short paragraph, he takes us through various levels of speculation, from mundane cheese making to the metaphysical notions of “necessary result” and “final cause.”

Owing to the completeness of the text in this regard, his entire paradigm is on display. These days, science takes the metaphysics as implicit, essentially, because such matters are deemed philosophical and unnecessary to the practice of science. Consequently, the premises of reasoning are lost from the logical structures, and the most fundamental errors are, therefore, obscured.

Since the lockdowns, many began to consider the problem of correlation and causation, which is, at heart, a metaphysical problem. Was it covid that killed people, or the poor treatment and lack of treatment that killed people? Was it the unmasked and unvaxed who killed people? Or was it the lockdowns, the fear mongering, the isolation, and poor medical protocols? Among other shenanigans, hospitals were incentivised through payouts to conflate death with covid and death from covid—upsetting this fundamental relationship between correlation and causation.

Despite the present-day hype that science is omniscient and the bastion of the one true Truth, there are many things that we glaringly don’t know. The idea of curdling milk as a model for foetus formation seems quaint to us today. But what will our own ideas look like in the future? The present model is immensely analogical: the ovum, or egg, is the necessary kernel for most biological life, and the fertilising of this egg is the work of some form of biological material that activates a process of cellular division and differentiation. What we don’t know is how this differentiation takes place. That’s a pretty massive gap in our understanding, wouldn’t you say? Without that knowledge, what does fertilisation mean?

Aristotle was actually trying to explain the phenomenon. We, on the other hand, stop at a surface description and pump our long guns in triumph like the primitive sand people from Star Wars. Our conception of conception in the ever-so-advanced twenty-first century is that babies are made with magic dust and magic mucus when they come in contact with an egg. We have some microscopy videos to give it that sciency flavour: you can observe the sperm race for yourself, see? And we have some great sciency (descriptive) words like mitosis and meiosis at the ready to make it sound like we’ve solved one of the great mysteries of creation. See the cells divide under the microscope? But fundamentally, it’s smoke and mirrors, obscuring what we don’t know. Distracted by the instrumentation (microscopy in this case), we forget the question we were asking in the first place: to explain the phenomenon. That’s the state of enlightenment we’re at. Some may be surprised to learn that DNA research has brought us no closer to the answer. Since identical DNA is in the nucleus of every cell in one’s body, DNA research brings us no closer to understanding how a cell knows it’s a muscle, neuron, heart, or bone cell.

Of course, biology, medicine, epidemiology, and virology aren’t the only areas where this sort of trouble arises in the sciences. I’ve previously written about our casino model of the universe, and how we perceive too many phenomena in terms of probabilities. I’ve pointed out that these probability models pertaining to phenomena as varied as evolution and quantum physics are logically broken, since they must assume a game with possible and meaningful outcomes. No such models could exist without design, the very thing these naturalist disciplines reject. Since the metaphysics remains implicit, scientists in these fields (and the credulous public) can go about their business unaware of how deeply flawed, inconsistent, incoherent, and incomplete their notions about the world truly are. Given the branding of science today, the authority, money, and socio-cultural capital afforded its lab-approved representatives, we find ourselves in a world where it is widely believed that only stupid people ask questions.

At the heart of this matter is our cultural blindness to the metaphors that form the substrate of our perceptions. If we hope to evolve and advance scientifically, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually, we’re going to have to acknowledge the role played by analogy in all forms of reasoning, not to disparage and dispense with it, but to leverage it, and, thereby reach that understanding toward which science has been pointing, which is true uncertainty, humility, and the partial nature of knowledge. We can laugh at Aristotle’s milk-and-rennet analogy, but we haven’t even replaced his explanation with a better one. All we’ve provided are scientiphysized descriptions, sciency jargon, and sciency imagery. And we too will be ridiculed.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

When I look at the night sky, I see constellations. Since taking a course on plant identification, I see tree shapes according to the tree-shape chart above. The more I learn, the more conventionalised my perceptions become. I am educated into a kind of stupor. Things are what we call them and that’s that. There’s no denying the charts and tables, no denying the stats. Questioning such things is either stupid or disingenuous, goes the reasoning. It would seem that this sort of commitment to our models has been troubling me for a long while. I wrote the following poem sometime before launching analogy magazine, before the lockdowns, while still living in Montreal.

Release

I climb like I’m climbing out of my skin, climbing out of my own hair
as I climb out of traffic, away from thundering machinery.
I climb past joggers and cyclists snug in their spandex.
I bolt through woods, bound rocks, teeter across mud-locked logs.

The fine drizzle sizzling over the ground is the tearing sound  
as I come loose like a stone dislodged from peach-flesh.
Once out of the pollutiosphere, even the bird chatter is thin.
I inspect a feather, an acorn, a vacant web, and each time,

kaleidoscopically, the whole world pivots on the axis of a new design. 
What is a park in darkness or in rain when it no longer serves?
When the purpose departs a field, an old wheel, a clawfoot tub,
what does it become—when it slips the syntax of our hands?

I pick a button from the grass; the turf bares its chest to the sky.
Let go the strings of constellations, the stars fly back to themselves.

I mention that this piece predates analogy magazine by a significant period because it strikes me that it anticipated the premise of this conceptual space. Clearly, the idea that our models obscure the phenomena had been knocking around in my head for quite some time.

I’m on the lookout for new ways to communicate this notion, since it’s by no means obvious until one grasps it; and then, of course, one sees it everywhere. My intuition is that equipped with this new and improved Windex, one may rub away a little circle of clarity amid the greasy film of education smudged over our windows on the world. This window metaphor predates “Release.” The following poem is from a chapbook called Etymologies (2016).

Speculation

Looking like one who wears his eyes
with crow’s feet, likewise,

I looked around her like a tracker 
for signs of passage and telling scat.

Entirely absorbed in looking, like a traveller
looking down the road; rapt

as a child peering through a window;
I looked forward beyond the reach

of my eyes with images already in mind,
till I could no longer look her in the eye

and had to look instead inside, looking
at the world through a film 

of the world: the shadow of my desire 
flickering against the ghost of being.

When Plato famously suggested, through his allegory of the cave, that our perceptions are shadows rather than realities, he was getting at the same trouble. I’m not claiming to be an innovator. But I do think our culture has lost sight of this fundamental truth. We’ve become particularly good at obfuscating phenomena with conventional, institutionally approved, models. Worse, whatever is at variance with these conventions is being deemed “misinformation.”

Unfortunately, these considerations strike too many in our society as “metaphysical,” which there’s no denying; but the word metaphysical also strikes folks as too highfalutin to be of practical use. Thing is, we’re at an infection point, culturally and historically. Our neglect of the metaphysical substrate to our reasoning is having real-world impacts: from pandemic response to climate change policy to freedom of speech and censorship and even to the ethics of our private thoughts and conversations.

Perhaps the worst of it is our emotional wellbeing. According to the mechanical-accidentalist view, there is no value to suffering. Why should we have to feel so much emotional pain that we cry, when, instead, we can take some approved pharmaceutical that numbs us out? Why feel pangs of guilt or shame and the accompanying anxiety when we can pop a pill instead and carry on like nothing happened? It’s a recipe for psychopathy.

I’m reminded here of a wonderful video on the subject of how lobster’s grow. Essentially, the shell has to get so constrictive and difficult to live in that the lobster must work to remove the old housing. The world’s reactions to us and our reactions to the world absolutely must cause us suffering or we won’t grow. Instead, we remain stuck in a narcissistic state, a state defined by being unable to empathise or connect in any meaningful way. It doesn’t get more practical than that.

But that’s all inside, mushy stuff. What about the things that matter, like vaccines and carbon emissions? We’ve all seen the stats on the effectiveness of vaccines, right? They cured smallpox and polio. And what’s more, when folks refuse them, we get resurgences of these diseases. Stats don’t lie. Similarly, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas that causes global warming. Just look at Venus with it’s high CO₂ atmosphere and temperatures above 450°C! Numbers don’t lie.

I have no intention of entering these debates today. What I’m after is how these perceptions become conventional, and once in the conventional bloodstream, as it were, they become fixed. I have had plenty of in-depth conversations with folks who tell me they are fundamentally sceptical and that science is always uncertain, only to have them declare at some emotional moment that they “believe in the science.” The emotional moment is invariably a symptom of leftbrainitis, as the left brain must be right, and how can it be right and uncertain at the same time? So it recruits the notion of believing in a certain paradigm, and remains oddly blind to its own manoeuvres.

The remedy to this predicament is poetry, especially anything that’s truly surprising in its formulations—poems that make you see the world afresh, poems from which you turn away and the world is no longer quite the same, poems that break one’s conventional and cliched views. Ultimately, the goal, as I see it, is to escape these paradigm lockdowns. I want to be able to look at the night sky and see the stars on their own terms, if that’s a thing—or at the very least, on new terms. I want to be able to look at trees and just see that tangle of trunks and limbs. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with one more poem:

Natural Resistance

How the trees resist the winds, are shaped by them, 
and in turn give them voice and form. Shakespeares all, 
they lend themselves to and resist the tastes and penchants 
that would twist them fashionably one way or another. 

They stand starkly engaged in their magic:
ponderous, monumental, waving their gnarled wands
clutching at the sky as though channelling lightening,
thrust deep in the plasma of the heavens, 

or like shivering neurons relaying the feelings 
of sky to earth and back, the pillars of reality.
What happy mystery how they forever draw my gaze 
with always some renewed fascination,

as though through their patient calling forth to life
—from bronze-scalloped bud to green leaf, 
to prestidigitous clutch of petals held in the shape of a flame,
a drop, a hand bringing its fingers to an essential point

before opening to a blossom flushed and fragrant, 
to fruit-locked seeds and stones packed with the flavours of perpetuity
to abject loss and total, skeletal grief, and back to bud and leaf—
as though through this endless cycle, they have come to know 

to the core and convey to the heart of one who stops 
a moment, arrested by the cathedral of their limbs, 
the ever-novel ways in which a single thing may be forever recast.
How they reach forth always, holding out their offerings.

More than ever—this bitter spring, when I have lost all touch 
with the earth—I need their wooden gestures. Today, 
the sun shines brighter, it seems, than it’s shone
in I don’t know how long, but surely longer than a season;

as if the terrestrial precession has brought us,
this spring, closer to the celestial fire than any spring
I can remember in a good many rounds of this
pugilistic match we count in years. 

All we’ve been stashing under the snow is out,
seeping from the receding frost-line, wafting 
their terrible odours like an ancient penitent in ash 
and sackcloth crying out in guilt and shame,

for all this fishy mortality, the coiled peels of corruption, 
the festering inkblots of mildew brown and incarnadine 
afflicting the waste while the icy remains of snow 
unconsciously fidget at fringes of lace

where the grass of last summer shows, slick 
and matted as a newborn, the shape-shifting snow 
everywhere revealing in its own way a lost world,
sopping and indefinite knits, vestiges of things lived-in,

hats, gloves, scarves, now manky, mangled husks, 
ragged corpses, untouchable castoffs, the remnants 
of shady intercourse trammelled and crushed 
beyond recognition by albino elephant feet of snow; 

the snow now turned artisan, making do with what’s left 
of itself, drawing fanciful maps with filigreed boots and fjords, 
and glazed-over flats, in desperate denial of the advance 
of a new season, spiked in reluctant retreat 

along its last-ditch crystal chains, still heaped 
behind chevaux de frise. The shabby bark of a honey locust 
hangs loose, patches are torn from the trunk of another. 
Surely these know what it means to be separated from themselves, 

pulled at by starving teeth or by the carefree hand 
of a passing drunk. How they resist even the gentrification 
of their space, the anthropocene scheme that plots them 
at polite distances, the violence done their dramatic, 

passionate limbs that they may be rendered picturesque, 
safe according to the standardizing eye of the insurance underwriter. 
And yet, see how one swings its hip dangerously out of line,
dancing at a pace that mocks the rhythm of human designs.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Analogy magazine is nearing two years of age, and I thought it time to revisit the start of this enterprise and see how the mission is going. The whole thing began with an explosive concept, a paradigm-breaking, consciousness-transforming idea that science is relational, that science relies on analogies to establish a framework of understanding. These scientific frameworks apply instrumentation to establish measures that are then said to be “facts”; and these facts are taken for discoveries when, in fact, they are inventions that emerge from analogies. These analogies arise from the relationships between the instrumentation and the phenomenon under observation. Understanding how metaphorical play is central to science turns the conventional view of science on its head. After all, according to the prevailing view, science is objective and the only real and true way to frame the world. It’s got nothing to do with poetry and storytelling. Well, analogy magazine has news for you. . .

None of this was my idea. Scientists and philosophers have been puzzling over this problem since at least the Alexandrian period (circa 300 BC to 650 CE), when a sixth century scholar named Simplicius recorded the notion of σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα, generally translated as “saving the appearances,” but which I suggest makes more sense as “accounting for the phenomena.” According to this principle, science was not occupied with establishing any truth or reality, but instead doing its best to develop predictive modelling. The humility involved had much to do with the shabby state of cosmology at that time. Once Newton (1642-1727) resolved the problem of planetary motion with ellipses, the mathematical analogy could be said to correlate to the phenomena so closely, that the scientific model and the reality seemed to be one and the same thing.

Since Newton (more or less), scientific institutions gradually discredited previous prophetic practices, which were relegated with the old ways: with superstitions, and magic. The Enlightenment ushered in the way of science, blazing with extraordinary feats of engineering, leading to greater comfort for more people at less cost. It is this form of progress that lends science its credibility. In other words, we tend to conflate engineering and science. As we make machines, so the universe is a machine. Who made the cosmic machine? A lot has changed since Newton, who would have answered, “Well, God, of course.” However you answer the question, the machine metaphor guides your thinking. What else do you have to work with? (The Electric Universe, perhaps?)

It didn’t take long before the West lost the cultural thread and turned to the worship of science, which soon referred to some of its practices as “pure.” Presently, the word, science, emanates the light of perfection, the light of Truth: science is the reality; science is the phenomena. Before we knew it, science had usurped the God image. And today, only stupid people ask questions because labs coats don’t lie. This way of viewing the world is a satire of the philosophical journey, and yet it is popularly accepted that science is Truth, plain and simple.

But back to our mutton. What sparked analogy magazine was an email conversation with Jeffery Donaldson which went on for some months through the later half of 2022. I had read his 2015 book, Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution (McGill Queens) some years back, and had been blown away, so I solicited an essay from him for The Secular Heretic (the predecessor of analogy). Especially captivating about Missing Link was Donaldson’s demonstration of how the universe itself seems caught up in analogical behaviour, from chemical bonding through DNA coding and on up through to language and writing.

Missing Link begged an important question: were Donaldson’s correlations discovered or imposed? Did he invent an elaborate metaphor, or were atoms and galaxies truly behaving metaphorically? You’ll have to read Missing Link because I don’t have the space here to explain. What I can tell you is that his book is at once a carefully researched and well-developed examination of the topic, but also reads like a thrillingly surprising science poem—not in style (which is far from poetic), but in how tight and inevitable the argument.

Consequently, one of its chief strengths is that it gets you wondering about the problems inherent to our argumentation surrounding any theory: the relations, correlations, substitutes, stand-ins, and workarounds. . . Meanwhile, once seen, one cannot ignore the notion that the universe is somehow fundamentally analogical, not just among conscious minds attempting to account for the phenomena, but at the heart of the phenomena themselves. The implications are metaphysical and exciting because of an inherent magnetic quality of analogy to join ideas together and make sense of the world.

Or is that not it at all? Is it, instead, simply that mind itself cannot grasp the world without correlations? We invent the world and “go with it,” as Donaldson put it in his essay, “A Bridge is a Lie: How Metaphor Does Science.”

To help get his ideas across, Donaldson briefly addressed the problematic paradigm laid out by the Heterodox Academy, which presents itself as open to new perspectives:

The Heterodoxers are self-declared moderates who want to hear positions from all sides, love to be corrected, open their hearts to being wrong. All good practice, to be sure. Even here, though, I found the axioms of science at work. The only way to fund and nourish the heterodox spirit, they argue, is with “evidence-based fact” and “reasoned argument.” There was that binary again, the one that positions a certain understanding of reality as the correct one. The truth was out there, and a mind disciplined in heterodox thinking, with fact and evidence, would get nearer the mark. To me they are still missing a further underlying intuition (or fact if you like), that “fact,” “evidence” and “reasoned argument” are themselves implicated in metaphoric relations.

What does that mean though? It feels nebulous, requires flesh. Donaldson takes a good stab at it in his essay, which I encourage readers to revisit. But it was also necessarily, and tantalisingly, incomplete. There was so much more to be explored, and so much groundwork to be laid before the “metaphoric relations” could be fully appreciated. The historical links to how we arrived at the absurd conclusion that science is the phenomena had to be unearthed. The monumental claims of science, especially of twentieth- and twenty-first-century science, had to be challenged and dismantled. The storytelling in which science engages had to be defrocked. The correlations between instrumentation and phenomena had to be examined. I had to start with explaining how fundamental storytelling is to igniting the philosophical spirit, and to the very origins of naturalism—the doctrine that all phenomena must be explained using mechanistic metaphors. I had to demonstrate how the machine metaphor was the key analogy of science, and how this necessarily limits its scope.

Since then, the journey has been ongoing. As Henri Bergson (1859-1941) pointed out, matter and consciousness are on a continuum; they are different in degree, but not in kind. The more mind there is in matter, the more organised it becomes. What we call an organism is anything we perceive to be organised and bounded. Upon inspection, where we draw these boundaries can be problematic, almost arbitrary; for who is to say where one ought to start and where stop? Each cell of our body is an organism. There are elements in each cell that are organisms. There are bacteria living among our cells. Each organ in our body is an organism. We are therefore compound organisms. But does it stop at our skin? Or is the family an organism? Isn’t an ecosystem a compound organism? The planet? The solar system? You get the picture.

The same way that mind and matter are on a continuum, so are poetics and science, where poetics represents the fullest presence of the inner world and science, the least. Thing is, we can never actually disentangle one from the other because of the analogical or metaphoric imperative, as Donaldson calls it. Science is lost without poetics. It becomes absorbed in its own conceits, and gets drunk on its metaphors, losing sight of the logical structures supporting its theories. Meanwhile, without science, poetry and storytelling lose internal cohesion (rational argument) and outer correspondence (or relevance). As poet, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) put it: “The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines.” In their purest forms, science and poetry both wind up delusional, and carried away by fantasy.

It all sounds so highfalutin: metaphysics, metaphoric imperative, consciousness, the inner world. But I’m hoping to address an urgent problem. There’s something very wrong with the socio-cultural world we’re living in. There’s a complete lack of spiritual fulfilment on offer in Western culture, except as a sort of sideshow. Even church and temple-goers are generally more interested in the social cohesion that religion has to offer than with the canonical texts or the central doctrines. Those who do take those elements seriously, too often take them literalistically—which misses the point of how these ideas are meant to awaken one to the inner world. Without that awakening, no self-development. . . no inner growth is possible.

Our culture is afflicted by a madness that emerges directly from its unexamined metaphysic. The prevailing doctrine that the universe is an accident, and life just a wondrous freak occurrence in a disinterested cosmos of disconnected phenomena is unsatisfying because it fails to account for the phenomena of human experience. When it attempts to do so these days, it is invariably through evolutionary psychology, which is as far from pure science as poetry and storytelling. It indulges post hoc fallacies to build conceits describing—but never accounting for—things like emotional reactions and moral sensibility. This Neo-Darwinism papers over the reality of the inner world with plausible—i.e. analogically sound enough—mechanisms. From a philosophical and writerly perspective, it’s like proposing the exercise of making all your stories boil down to adaptations to environmental pressure. Of course, we can tell stories given various parameters! (Read a book gaddammit.) The genre is called, “Fiction.”

So here we are at the crossroads where science meets poetics. It might be a tad troubling for science fanatics to draw the connection between these disciplines, but I see it as the only way out of the madness. And I believe that when we do ultimately throw off the yoke of doctrine—in principle (and not just with regard to religion or science or whathaveyou)—we will find ourselves renewed and once again entering a period of truly astounding, paradigm-busting inventions. When we train the imagination and equip ourselves to discover these inventions within ourselves, we will excel at a far more rapid pace than we are now because we will also be more in harmony with ourselves and with the world.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

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A while back, I watched a documentary called Unknown: Cave of Bones, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s about a group of hominins called Homo naledi who lived in South Africa about 250,000 years ago and who practiced sophisticated burial rites. The cave in question is elaborate, involving several stages, leading toward the burial area. Three challenges along the way are striking: the first is a ten-inch high passage, the second is a steep climb, and the third is an exceedingly narrow and steep descent. Ultimately, they reached the final chamber where they buried their dead. It appears they may also have developed some form of writing. The journey would have taken several days, and could not have been completed alone, since one would have needed help carrying the body through such difficult terrain. It follows that they would have had to bring further supplies, such as food and wood for fire. In other words, the burial of their dead was a ritual journey to the underworld and back.

The main point of interest for me is what we might call the objective reality of the inner world. Last time I wrote about this subject, I made the point that we share certain kinds of experiences: things like melancholy upon seeing autumn leaves or upon hearing minor notes in music. We share ideas about myths and symbols. I asked how we might account for the fact that we understand foreign cultures or that we at least find them relatable.

In the case of Homo naledi, my argument is augmented because we’re not talking about other humans: same species perhaps, but different enough to expect something entirely alien. Instead, what we get is a cave that resembles our conceptions of Hades or some sort of underworld so much as to be uncanny. Of course, it seems natural to us that death should elicit lamentation. But this is a whole other level of response. The cave of bones is a manifestation of the inner world projected into the outer world. And to my mind it confirms the proposition that the inner world is not an accidental epiphenomenon of brain activity; it’s a shared experience that has a substance outside of ourselves. If our inner lives were accidental and insubstantial fantasies, we’d see much more surprising diversity in the things we think, feel, and imagine. That we can relate to an extinct group of hominins from 250,000 years ago is revealing about the contours of the collective psyche. Moreover, it pushes back against the notion of social constructs. Sure, much of culture is socially constructed, but these constructs aren’t pure invention; they’re grounded in a shared inner world that even Homo naledi would have recognised.

A further observation is that naledi, being an all round smaller creature than ourselves, had a smaller brain. In our cerebramantic culture this is striking, since we generally believe that small brains indicate low intelligence. It’s worth reminding you here of philosopher Henri Bergson’s proposition on this matter:

The lower we descend in the animal series, the more the nervous centres are simplified, and the more, too, they separate from each other, till finally the nervous elements disappear, merged in the mass of a less differentiated organism. But it is the same with all the other apparatus, with all the other anatomical elements; and it would be as absurd to refuse consciousness to an animal because it has no brain as to declare it incapable of nourishing itself because it has no stomach. (Creative Evolution, 1907)

I can see many a naturalist spewing their coffee at this suggestion, finding it too ridiculous a stretch, but interestingly enough, there are some X-Files-type examples bearing this out. In his A Secret History of Consciousness, historian of the occult, Gary Lachman, relays David Darling’s reports on cases of normally-functioning hydrocephalic individuals—essentially brainless people—in his After Life: In Search of Cosmic Consciousness. Here’s Lachman on this subject:

Darling speaks of two children born in the 1960s who “had fluid where their cerebrums should have been. . . . Although neither child showed any evidence of having a cerebral cortex, the mental development of each appeared perfectly normal.” In another case, a man with an IQ of 126, a graduate of the University of Sheffield with a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and by all accounts bright and perfectly ordinary, had no detectable brain. Identical twin girls with advanced hydrocephalus enjoyed above average IQs. In one case, an autopsy performed on a young man who had died suddenly revealed “only the most paltry rind of brain tissue.” When the coroner expressed sympathy for the parents’ loss, but offered that at least now their severely retarded son had found peace, the parents were dumbfounded, informing him that their bright son had been at his job only days before. Although the paper reporting these cases received some attention at the time, it was subsequently forgotten, its findings just too contrary to the reigning scientific orthodoxy.

Were we living in an honest society, these “freak” instances would be perceived as falsifying nearly the entire field of neurobiology.

Be that as it may, one of our basic understandings regarding the brain as the centre of our nervous system is that it causes a delay between stimulus and response. Unlike a reflex situation, the more the brain steps in, the more choice we have regarding our responses. Perhaps this has something to do with a certain kind of creativity. Rather than just fight of flight, for instance, we may develop other options.

So the brain mediates and consequently interferes with direct experience. It dulls instinct and intuition. No one teaches a spider to spin its elaborate webs that not only span enormous distances relative to the size of the spider, but that require adaptations to each locale. Despite every cell in our bodies having the same DNA, we still have no idea how a cell knows to develop as skin or kidney or blood vessel or whateverhaveyou.

A fascinating, recent study posits that the brain acts as a psi inhibitor. According to the article I’ve linked to, “Psi is a phenomenon that includes telepathy (mind-mind connections), clairvoyance (perception of distant objects or events), precognition (perception of future events), and mind-matter interactions (psychokinesis).” Apparently, researchers “used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to temporarily inhibit the left medial middle frontal region in healthy individuals, observing significant psi effects as a result.”

So who’s to say where that sweet spot is between intelligence and being too clever by half?—so smart indeed that we lose touch with our fundamental connections to consciousness. In short, it’s far from surprising that Homo naledi had smaller brains. As a result, they may very well have enjoyed a more direct connection with and a fuller experience of the inner world.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Some years ago, I went to see a dermatologist for a minor condition, a wee rash on my arm that would occasionally itch. I had to get a referral—a detail I add to emphasise the theatre of present-day medical systems, and the runaround one is put through for the simplest of situations. We are dealing with “the best and brightest,” after all, so it makes sense that us intellectual plebs should be spun around, bllindfolded and guided through a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

It was a challenge to find parking near the clinic, but I did manage to grab a spot and pay for two hours, which I knew would be more than enough time for my visit.

I arrive, and present myself to a surly receptionist, who hands me an intake form. The waiting room wasn’t packed. But it was a large room filled exclusively with women, reading magazines. (Yes. This was before smartphones had gobbled everyone’s attention.)

So I’m waiting, and waiting, and waiting and waiting, and I realise this guy has us all booked at the same hour. Now it’s coming up to the end of hour two, and I’m thinking, Crap, I have to go out and feed that meter. So I approach the lovely personality behind the reception desk and explain my situation, then run out, feed the meter, and rush back to discover that I haven’t missed a beat. I still had another forty-minute wait.

It is not insignificant to point out that the specimen of the Best & Brightest I was waiting to behold was deemed better and brighter than the rest—that is, according to a reputation that was handed down to me from more than one source. I mention this item because you’ve probably heard the same about the various white coats to whom you’ve been referred. My mother’s knee surgeon, for instance, is one of these fellas who never admitted to a mistake, so his reputation is stellar. In her case, the operation was a success, but the patient never walked again. When another MD suggested that the operation was botched, he flew into a rage. Those following A Midwestern Doctor on Substack may be aware of how these undeserved reputations are engineered. I won’t digress other than to point out that it has nothing to do with patient outcomes. In short, how Dr. Betterthan acquired his reputation as better than your average best and brightest has more to do with self promotion and skullduggery than competence.

I’m lead to a room and instructed to sit on a convincing exam table, so my feet are left dangling like I’m a kid. And there I wait another twenty minutes swinging my legs. So I’ve been there for three hours by the time I am finally granted an audience with one of the greatest geniuses in the city (if not in the northern hemisphere). He offers no apology for the wait. As he reviews papers on a clipboard, I make a joke about how it’s like the warranty has run out on my body. Dr. Betterthan informs me that the warranty ran out when I was born. This was oneupmanship, not humour.

He looks at the few minor skin eruptions and tells me it’s too small to tell what it is. He informs me that according to the statistical probabilities, however, it’s either psoriasis or eczema. So he scribbles out a script and says, “Here. Use this cream for a few weeks and hopefully it’ll get worse.” For real. I kid you not: “hopefully it’ll get worse.” I can see why he had such a stellar reputation. The cleverness of the approach was as over my head as his humour. I mean the guy barely looked at me and had zero questions about diet or anything else health related. Clearly, he didn’t need to look at the patient owing to his knowledge of the stats. I said, “Thanks doc.” And walked out quacking and tearing up the script on my way to the door.

It is further worth mentioning that after all the waiting I did, he spent no more than five minutes with me. Since he’s paid by the patient, this too is an item of pure genius: book as many in the same hour as possible and run ‘em through like chickens in the slaughterhouse.

I relate this anecdote because it’s not an unusual sort of tale. In fact, everyone I know has had a comparable experience. . . though plenty of folks wouldn’t have noticed anything especially wrong with what went down. Their feet dangling in front of a stuffed lab coat would have been convincing enough to elicit awe and compliance.

For those paying attention, however, Dr. Betterthan had bent a few essential elements of medical ethics: namely, the notions of Do no harm, and Treat the whole human being (not just a localised symptom). There are other contributing factors than statistics. No doubt, specialisation lends itself to looking at a skin eruption or a bum knee without reference to the person presenting. Specialisation itself, however, comes as a package deal with stats and probabilities.

I can’t emphasise enough that viewing health as a matter of stats is dehumanising. It has its place in analyses of all kinds, and it can be helpful with diagnosis, but in the end, a patient is an individual requiring some personal attention. In my case, for instance, I needed a change in diet. I switched to an alkaline regimen and the problem disappeared. The stats and even the categories of skin conditions were part of a paradigm that obscured the phenomenon.

Regular readers may recall that the Hippocratic Oath is out of fashion and the new oaths omit the principle of Do no harm, since the cornerstone of pharmaceuticals is Some harm comes with the territory of side effects, therefore a statistically acceptable amount of harm and death is A-okay. The most popular, modern version of the oath does, however, retain the notion of treating people rather than symptoms:

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

This quotation is from the oath composed in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, then Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University. I have this information from Peter Paul Rubens, in an article called, “The Oath: Meaningless Relic or Invaluable Moral Guide?” Significantly, Rubens tells us that “some doctors see oath-taking as little more than a pro-forma ritual with little value beyond that of upholding tradition.” Moreover, “fewer than half of oaths taken today insist the taker be held accountable for keeping the pledge.”

So the better part of present-day medical practice is all razzle dazzle and sleight of hand. The patient is viewed as a package of stats and probabilities that allow an MD to run his finger down a chart that informs him which pharma product to prescribe in under five minutes. Essentially, we’re not seeing doctors anymore, we’re seeing pharma reps. Most of what’s going on could be handled by pharmacists. As for the surgeries these days, I recommend you read “The Forgotten Art of Surgery” by A Midwestern Doctor, here on Substack. Robots are doing the work, cauterising scalpels are being used, and patient outcomes aren’t really a la mode. It’s all about doctor success, and the stats are looking mighty healthy.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

It may have been 2013 or 2015 when I first encountered the social damage caused by smartphones and social media. I was throwing a house party, making ice cream or sharing homemade ginger beer, something like that. There was a group of about 12 of us. Some were on the back patio and some were in the kitchen. I lobbed out a humorous remark about how feminism had achieved its goals, and wasn’t it about time our society gave it up? I mean, women are a lot like people, no? This comment wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but one fella took it mighty personal. He was a programmer, hardwired into the latest tech, and I guess he was ahead of the curve. He lost his nut on me. Full on meltdown. He began trembling, raised his voice, and I don’t recall what he said, but he seemed genuinely troubled and enraged. I had never seen that sort of reaction to anything other than a direct insult. I was genuinely concerned, and asked if he was okay, if there was something that had happened to him or to someone close to him. No. It was nothing like that. Whatever it was, I offered a hug and approached the guy to calm him down. I recall him accepting the hug. But he was shaken.

In the years following, I started witnessing more and more of that sort of overreaction to all manner of stimuli. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice a cultural trend, because the term triggered became popular to characterise the phenomenon. Before that, the term existed but was seldom used. In fact, the word triggered didn’t quite mean what it means today. Now it was everywhere all the time in its new incarnation.

As I began using social media and experiencing social media attacks, I learned what it meant to be triggered in the social media sense. Despite not knowing my assailants, I often found myself trembling uncontrollably over the keyboard. Same adrenaline rush I had witnessed that afternoon at my house party. I thought, Wow, this can’t be good. After several such experiences, I quit responding to anything eliciting that sort of reaction. Twitter was the first platform I left, not because of triggerings, but owing to the fact that it left me feeling dirty. It definitely wasn’t facilitating connections with interesting people. And once the lockdowns came along in 2020 and I saw the shameless worst in folks, I finally did what had been a long time coming, and dropped them all.

I suppose Substack is a social media platform, but I’ve rarely seen the sort of nasty behaviour so prevalent elsewhere. That said, I have encountered some ugly activity on this venue that I’d been subject to elsewhere. One is the classic meltdown over a perceived slight in response to a tactful critique meant to engage the author in productive conversation—the sort of thing one might hope for when writing a Substack article. In that case, the fella mobilised his electronic alter ego to bully me. I called him on it, so he quit using that pathetic (but all-too-common) strategy; and it wasn’t long before his band of merry followers began mobbing. It was kinda funny, but also upsetting. It’s not civilised.

Another recent encounter, which just rolled off my back, but is worth mentioning, was a fella who didn’t like something I wrote and so took to the Notes section to name-call using pointing-finger emojis. Again: funny, pathetic, but effective at some level of triggering. I mean, the pointing finger and name calling is very schoolyard, but also very Soviet and common in societies undergoing social revolution. It’s a call to mob and virtually lynch an individual who’s not with the party. It’s also rage baiting. Back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, if a kid or adult behaved that way, he’d probably get punched in the face. Those who get off on taunting—trolls—revel in the oh-yeah?-wachu-gunna-do-about-it factor.

What I’m aiming at is that there’s something clearly toxic about social media. It starts online but then leaks out into the real world. It definitely rewires personal reactivity in the real social world. Often enough, folks acknowledge the polarisation of politics, the extreme positions that people take, and how outspoken they are. Not that long ago in the still (barely) civilised world, it was considered impolite to broach conversations about politics and religion. Now, folks launch nasty political statements into casual chatter regularly. If one spends too much time on social media, one develops an instinct to share indiscriminately and await likes and outrage in response. Of course, outrage is key. When you get outrage and defenders, you can go viral. That’s when you really get attention. You get to be the covid and shake things up! By pavlovian training, one is rewarded into becoming a rather unpleasant provocateur.

Most unsettling is watching folks older than me succumb to social programming, often enough simply through Google News, which gives one the social media experience vicariously. So without having to actually hunt down the outrage for oneself, Google supplies it for you by reporting what is essentially gossip of the sort our elders would have soured at a decade ago because they were raised to know better.

These observations lead me to Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)—the culmination and avatar of social media triggering and outrage culture. Essentially, we’re talking about an obsessive preoccupation. The main symptom is introducing Trump into all conversations, no matter how far afield. You could be talking about a recipe for raspberry crumble or telling someone about your trip to Nova Scotia. Somehow, the avatar of all things bad will slither onto your shoulder.

In a recent conversation with an old friend, I was surprised to hear him admit he was very much worked up about political issues. This was a newly developed aspect of his personality. These things had never concerned him much before. And he certainly had never broached political conversations because. . . he was raised to know better. He’d been emotionally rewired by Google News via doomscrolling habits over morning coffee and after dinner.

When pressed, those with TDS often admit they have a problem, but it’s one they’re all too happy to maintain. Regular readers will recall that neuroscientist, philosopher, pop-atheist Sam Harris admitted he agreed with most of Trump’s policies, but that it was right to subvert democracy to save the democracy from Trump. Harris didn’t admit he had a problem. Instead, he took a lot of time rationalising his irrational position, which though entertaining, was really an education in how a clever man can rationalise his addiction to outrage.

I want to say that this is a bizarre turn of affairs: a person knows they have an addiction, knows they suffer from an obsessive disorder, knows it’s unhealthy, but nevertheless seeks out triggering and outrage. But I’d be missing the bald fact that that’s exactly the definition of addiction. And as with all addictions, destructive behaviours leak out, damaging relationships with friends and family.

The first failed assassination attempt on Trump was revealing of how deep the psychological damage goes. It wasn’t just a few deranged loons who lost their moral compass on TikTok. It was ordinary folks of all ages who experienced a blood lust: they wanted to feel Trump veins in their teeth. The rhetoric was truly, astoundingly ugly. Otherwise normal people were raging that Trump hadn’t been murdered.

This is zombie apocalypse material. We’ve been tilting toward civil war now for quite some time, and the role of social media has everything to do with it. At what point do we, as communities, recognise that we’ve got a serious problem on our hands? that too many of us have become social media junkies? that a majority have become too-easily influenced by these addictive machines and their addictive platforms? and that it’s as destructive as any illegal substance?

Meanwhile, when I raise the issue of social media and smartphone addiction and how the devices and the apps are purposefully designed to be addictive, I generally get a tepid response. I’m told the real problem is kids using the devices. No doubt that’s a problem. But don’t ya think maybe driving nearly every adult half mad might be a problem too? Don’t you think we ought to have developed better etiquette surrounding these devices by now? Shouldn’t the development of addictive substances and devices be illegal?

It’s unnerving to me to see how little folks seem to care about this issue. Many Liberals will freak out at the notion of a safe injection site opening up nearby. But their smartphones and social media, which are tearing the social fabric apart right under their noses. . .? Meh. The analogy is a stretch. It’s really no biggie. To each their own. . . until triggered.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Failure of Stewardship

I promised a while back that I would address the issue of soil rehabilitation and today’s the day. It has been recognised for well over 50 years that our farming methods exhaust soils. Somewhere along the way we also learned that this loss of soil health was leading to low-nutrition produce. The worst of it is that fruits and veggies, our healthiest options—the non-processed foods—are presently poison apples full of harmful pesticides. As if that weren’t enough, these foods are genetically modified for extended shelf life, which is no life at all. All this loss of quality presents itself as a lack of flavour. Our tongues tell us it’s dead food. But our science (following Galileo’s distinction between quantitative and qualitative), tells us that flavour is an illusion. So forget what your tastebuds tell you; the true Truth is counterintuitive. Meanwhile despite TheScience™ cleverly industrialising, modifying, poisoning, and deflavouring our food in an export-friendly manner—supposedly, to keep prices low by the law of supply and demand—food prices have been soaring. We’re now paying unprecedented dollars for the lowest quality foods ever to be coaxed out of the dirt.

The logic of big ag (as with big-corporate everything) is profit directed and therefore seeks its gains at the expense of as much as possible. The ethics of big ag is destructive: it has an opportunistic, exploitative, and extortionistic relationship with both the soil and the end product. This is the sort of institutional decadence that sabotages civilisations.

Enter TheScience™ to save the soil and it’s just more corporate junk. Add the missing chemistry (goes the reasoning) and Voila! Great soil again. Thing is, it’s not working because Nature is more than simple chemistry. (There’s something to be learned about how we’ve been treating our bodies from how we’ve been treating the soil. There are many parallels. And evidently, we are no more a mere assemblage of chemicals than is the soil.)

The trouble with our present methods is that we till the land, which aerates it, kicking the essential microbial life into hyperdrive. The initial results are impressive because those microbes do a lot of work making nutrients available to the plants and trees. Unfortunately, the critter population boom results in a population crash, and before you know it, you need to fertilise heavily. Fertilising organically is expensive, so the tendency is to cook up some chemicals and till that in instead.

In short, we kill the microbial life of the soil and then, to compensate, add the nutrients the microbes would have produced. Call it, farma medicine for the soil. Since the microbes are in a sorry state, the nutrients sit in the soil without any help from these critters to get them to where they need to be.

Moreover, the vast tracts of land cleared of trees and weeds and furrowed for crops is erosion prone because it’s water retention capacity is destroyed by uprooting the biome. Consequently, as we overuse chemical fertiliser, the water doesn’t sit in a healthy water table; instead it just runs off with all the toxins, and finds its way to rivers and lakes and bays and various other waterways. If that weren’t bad enough, wind erosion carries chemical fertiliser into the air with topsoil dust.

And it’s not only agricultural microbes and water tables and fresh air that we destroy through our farming methods, it’s the mycorrhizal element as well—the role played by fungal networks in healthy ecosystems. Through tilling and salting and parching the earth, we kill off the soil life and create a cycle of dependency on farma products. (Anyone recognise this business model?) If I may be permitted an analogy, TheScience™ has been playing oxycodone pusher to agriculture.

Another farming method that causes soil depletion is monoculture—growing one crop in a field to maximise yield of that one product to supply industrial markets, including export. The consequence of raising one sort of plant or tree to the exclusion of others in a vast tract is that pests can sense the area from outerspace. Hence the need for pesticides. Once a pest gets in, there’s no ecosystem to bring about a balance. The natural predators have no habitat. Moreover, the crops lack robustness to fend off the critters, owing to the lack of soil health. The cycle gets progressively worse. The DuPonts of this world get wealthier. And true farmers running small and medium farms go under as big farma steps on their throats. Meanwhile, the public eats poison and gets sick more often, enriching the other big pharma. Great business plan.

Climate Impact

There are further impacts of this sort of deforestation and farming on local weather patterns and overall climate health. Julius Ruechel just published an essay to promote his new book Plunderer’s of the Earth. Here’s a quotation emphasising the magnitude of the damage arising from our lack of responsible stewardship:

“All over the world, our impact on the land is fueling colossal rates of soil erosion, which lead directly to desertification. According to UN estimates, we are losing around 24 billion tons of fertile cropland soil to erosion every year. Over 1.5 billion hectares of formerly productive land have already been lost to desertification... and that number is growing by an additional 12 million hectares per year! But contrary to popular claims, this desertification is not caused by CO₂ — it’s purely the result of how we are (mis)managing the land, which is causing the land to dry out.”

As Ruechel points out by comparing the Sahara Desert to Florida (roughly at the same latitude), the daily temperature fluctuations of the desert are punishing—from extreme heat during the day to freezing temperatures at night—whereas the humidity of Florida keeps a steady temperature and protects the environment from drought. Water vapour is essential to shielding the earth from these wild fluctuations.

Ruechel supplies a case study to illustrate how the loss of local water-holding capacity of the soil can lead to glacier melting:

“For example, contrary to Al Gore's claims, Mt. Kilimanjaro's glaciers are not shrinking because the global climate has gotten warmer, but because the local climate got drier as locals deforested the perimeter of the mountain.”

Meanwhile, rainfall has been increasing. The problem is that massive tracts of land have been irresponsibly developed for both farming and for residential use. Consequently, the water has no home in the soil.

“And so, paradoxically, despite the fact that temperatures and thus global humidity and rainfall are increasing, deforestation and soil erosion are nevertheless causing many local regions to suffer from drought, falling stream levels, and declining aquifers. Our destructive impact on our local ecosystems has damaged the moisture absorbing capabilities of our soils, increased runoff rates as the extra rainfall washes away as floods instead of absorbing into the soil, and increased soil evaporation rates by removing the sod and vegetative cover that once shielded the soil from the Sun.“

from Julius Ruechel’s “The Story Beneath the Climate Story”

Ruechel advises we worry less about global CO₂ and more about local water in our soils and water vapour in our air. And this observation brings us to permaculture.

The Permaculture Solution

Back in the 1970s a couple of Australians, Bill Mollison (1928-2016) and David Holmgren noticed that balanced ecosystems didn’t suffer from all the problems of modern agriculture. They realised that with observation and a different kind of science, we could come up with smart ways of growing our food while improving soil health, restoring water tables, preserving microbial and mycorrhizal life, and even minimising the time and energy needed to make it all happen. In 1978, they coined the term permaculture to represent this new approach, not just to agriculture, but to home and community structures as well.

“Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.”

See Mollison, B. C., Reny Mia Slay, Andrew Jeeves.  Introduction to Permaculture. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1991.

Observation is the cornerstone of permaculture. It’s not intentional observation, but patient, almost objective observation. You suspend conclusions and note down everything about an environment. Light, shade, wind, rain, microclimates, human behaviour, plant behaviour, and animal behaviour. You notice habits in your own home, observe the structures in your front and back yards, the birds and butterflies and bees and bunnies; if you have chickens or livestock, how they behave too. Your purpose is to determine what they like, what they don’t like, how they move about, and how it all changes with the seasons.

Gradually, a picture forms and gradually you introduce structures and gardens in locations that take into account your observations. Those elements requiring most attention, you place close to the house; those requiring less, you place further from the house. In short, you accommodate human habits. The scale is generally individual to family size, but can also scale up to a farm.

Flexibility is another cornerstone of permaculture. The idea is to work with what you have and to address the needs of the situation. Although most permaculture enthusiasts like to grow their own food, there is room for those who simply want to restore the soil and some measure of ecosystem, by harvesting rainwater and attracting butterflies, bees, birds, bats, and other insects and animals.

The ultimate aim of permaculture is to work in harmony with what you’ve got. You only take down a tree if it’s truly the best option, and then you consider how best to harvest it and make use of it. You only add deer fencing if you can’t find a creative way to coax the local deer to one area with food-producing plants, while discouraging them from other areas by planting deer-deterrent vegetation in strategic locations. Same goes for bunnies and insects and other critters most farmers consider pests best managed with a .22 and pesticide.

And the same goes for humans. In its best expressions, permaculture accommodates our situations rather than seeks to remodel humanity according to its diktats. If you live in a city, a condo, or an apartment; if you don’t have time or inclination for gardening; if you need yard space for play or sport. . . permaculture is there to suggest ways to best be part of the solution because at the very least, you can maintain potted plants on your balcony or in your living space. If you’re a home owner, you can be harvesting rainwater and building your house broadside to the sun to harvest the sun’s warmth. You can plant deciduous trees between the sun and your home to cast shade in the summer and let in light in the winter, thereby cutting heating and cooling costs by half. So permaculture is about bringing intelligence to our living designs, mixing old technologies with new ones, upcycling, using whatever we’ve got, and working wisely with our environment to achieve a more balanced relationship with nature.

Now we’re on the subject of housing, I should note that our methods of housing development are mismanaged in the same way. The approach is to deforest a vast swathe, or better yet, get one’s hands on former farmland. Then the construction company strips away the healthy topsoil to sell for its agricultural value. These housing developments, called “subdivisions” out here in Ontario, are not only urban-design nightmares, they kill the soil by clearing out the microbial and mycorrhizal life, compacting the ground, excavating water tables, laying down thirsty sod everywhere, and dowsing it all with lawncare poison.

There are ways to restore soil health. We know which practices destroy the soil, and we know which practices restore it. So long as we continue industrial, monocultural farming, mindless deforestation, and clueless housing development, we’re not going to resolve the issue. So when local government committees come along and start up some inane project to study and investigate and set up a database and start scientiphysizing about it, you ought to raise an eyebrow because it’s just boondoggle and prestidigitation distracting from our lack of responsible land stewardship. We need to rethink our economy and how we live, especially with respect to the role of food at the local level. Bill Mollison pointed out that if only 10% of us switched from being consumers to producers, there’d be enough food for everyone.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

Today I’ll be taking you on a wee tour of a sciency article by Dr. Ethan Siegel on wavicles. I urge you to click on the link and take a look at Siegel’s self-branding. He presents as Dr. Woo himself, but he comes in a box with the following write up:

Ethan Siegel is a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!" He is a science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. He has won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for his blog, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics.

So he’s not just a science journalist. His blog is called Big Think, and the article in question is “The surprising origins of wave-particle duality”—which you can find here.

I can only scratch the surface by focusing on a few of the blunders in this article that are typical to believers in wavicle theory—which is mainstream and has been so for about a century. I advise you read the article, so you get a full sense of the piece: whether you do so before or after reading my article is your business. It depends whether you want to start with an unbiased read. For those even vaguely familiar with this subject, what Siegel has to offer is old hat. I couldn’t find anything “surprising.”

The overarching flaw in Siegel’s article is its simplification of the history of the development of the idea of the wave-particle duality. This story-telling component of science is something I explored in “Science & Textbook Pedagogy.” The value of examining a piece like this is that it exemplifies textbook science. If you’ll recall, one of the consequences of these false histories is how they promote the false notion of linear progression, where it appears that one idea was worked upon and developed by successive minds who passed along the material one to the next, perfecting it progressively along the way, so that now we have the really finally final Truth. All conundrums, false starts, critiques, fall backs on previously held paradigms, blunders, blind gropings, accidental discoveries (which are actually surprising) are erased and replaced with the myth of science as a linear accumulation of facts that lead to an inevitable, unquestionable conclusion.

For those who could use a quick primer: the wave-particle duality hypothesis proposes that energy and light sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle. What does that mean exactly? Siegel’s article is helpful to newbies, so take a look because the images are useful. To make it extremely brief: left to themselves, the phenomena of light and various energies propagate like waves with various wavelengths; when we measure them however, they behave like measured quantities (therefore “quanta” and “quantum”).

As I keep pointing out—and Newton warned about this problem in his “Principia”—we must be careful not to confuse the measuring device with the phenomenon. Clock time is not Time:

“those violate the accuracy of language, which ought to be kept precise, who interpret these words [time, space, place, and motion] for the measured quantities. Nor do those less defile the purity of mathematical and philosophical truths, who confound real quantities with their relations [analogies] and sensible measures.”

Our arbitrary metrics are not space. If you find ways of measuring instrumentation-directed units of energy, you shouldn’t be surprised when those units behave like instrumentation-directed units. If the results are productive for engineering purposes, then great, but we needn’t get carried away and conclude that we’ve understood any metaphysical truth about reality.

Let’s say you’re watching a river flow or watching the interference patterns on a lake. If you take a drop of water out of that context and start breaking it down into smaller and smaller droplets, you’ve changed the context. Now you’re looking at particles. Should you really be surprised that when you broke the flow down into bits it started to behave differently? Do you now go around promoting an absurd metaphysic about a wave-particle duality? The duality is a figment of the experiment.

So that’s the basic issue here. There’s another critical element in play and that’s the problem of the aether—something Siegel conveniently omits from his tale of “surprising origins.” Modern physics makes the claim that light is a wave with no medium. How can a wave exist independently of an element that is disturbed into waves? It’s essential that you consider the absurdity of this concept. A wave is the disturbance of a medium—whether propagating through air or water or mud or sand, a wave is a shape that rises and falls and undulates through a medium. We call this “propagation,” and we call the speed of its movement, the “rate of propagation.” If we’re being accurate, it’s not “the speed of light” or “the speed of sound,” it’s the rate of propagation of light or sound. Without a medium, there can be no propagation, no wave. . . because, well, what is it that’s waving? But modern physics has declared that there is no medium—no aether. Indeed, aether physics is now considered bunk.

To deal with the nonsensical woo world of modern physics, Siegel invokes the concept of “counterintuitive”—a standard move in modern sciency discourse. The suggestion is that since it’s common sense to perceive the Earth as fixed and the sun as rotating about it, and since that instance of common sense proved wrong, science is all about debunking common sense conclusions. The best science, it is felt, is counterintuitive. In fact, the less sense it makes, the more scientific it must be. As quantum physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) put it: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” If you look online at the explanations for this statement, they read like priestly interpretations of some biblical forefather. Feynman, we are told, was communicating “pure knowledge”—something too subtle for mere mortal minds to comprehend. Apparently, there’s nothing mystical about “pure knowledge”; it’s something only scientists working with math can understand. I refer readers to the Pythagorean mysticism of mathematics (which I discussed here), which is where our modern worship of math as pure knowledge comes from. Essentially, it’s the belief that the physical world is an illusion, while the mathematical world—the world of forms—is the really true reality. This premise contradicts naturalism (the paradigm modern science is supposedly working with), which presents itself as pragmatic and grounded in physical phenomena.

Note the following graphics:

This is the standard textbook view of the photoelectric effect that according to Einstein establishes the quantum side of energy and light. From this experiment, the photon (or light particle) was born. You’ll note that instead of interference patterns, the cartoon gives us representations of lozenges and spheres, which represent quantum packets of energy. See here for a decent beginner’s explanation of the thinking involved. It boils down to the claim that since increasing either intensity or duration of light exposure doesn’t displace greater measures of electrical charge, light does not arise from a fluid medium. If it did, the fluid would, given enough time, fill up and inundate the experimental material (a metal sheet) and expel energy; or alternatively, with an increase in the amount of light, the material would likewise be flooded with one energy and expel another.

These were the predictions made by the aether theorists. But these predictions were wrong. Since the concept of a fluid medium like water and air failed to account for the observed phenomena, it was dropped and replaced with the quantum paradigm in certain cases. Since wave-particle duality accounted for more of the appearances mathematically, and since a philosophical trend became popular treating math as metaphysical Truth, this duality became a cornerstone of the modern sense of reality—a reality that is fundamentally counterintuitive and nonsensical. But what if, instead of shutting the door on this issue, it had been left open as a puzzle begging for potential resolutions?

It is of interest that Max Planck (1858-1947), who came up with the math to help account for energy phenomena (blackbody radiation theory), originally saw his math as a useful workaround, a kind of nifty trick or heuristic device that helped with calculations. He did not confuse the math for the reality itself (until that view became popular).

We’re back to the problem of sciency idol worship, a theme to which I keep returning: confusing the model with the phenomenon. The Electric Universe group has raised some intriguing challenges to this physics, but they’ve been vilified as pseudoscientists and there’s no conversation to be had.

As one probes the math, one inevitably finds probability calculations at work, and I finger this device as the nub of the problem if one is attempting to understand reality. . . as opposed to merely accounting for the appearances. Moreover, as with the Robert Millikan oil drop experiment, the hypothesis is unclear because the purpose of the scientific work is to establish a measurement—that is, it’s meant to quantise energy rather than test a proposition. In other words, analogically, the point of the experiment is to isolate drops and droplets from a river. Of course you’re going to discover the phenomena you’re creating in such circumstances.

I personally do not find it difficult to imagine various alternative explanations to the quantum solution to the photoelectric effect or the constant used to measure blackbody radiation. The aether is fluid-like—analogically—but not in the way we thought it was. Is that so extraordinary? Clearly, it has properties we don’t yet understand, and since we’ve defenestrated the concept altogether, we’ll never know. In the meantime, present physics has had to introduce the fictions of dark energy and dark matter to rescue a broken model. As I suggested last week, a house cleaning is in order.

I mention gaslighting in the title of this article because there’s something deeper I’d like to point to, which is a problem inherent to the notion of counterintuitive. The idea that one’s intuition is not to be trusted lies at the heart of all gaslighting. Indeed, the very point of gaslighting is to disrupt the inner conversation between one’s heart, gut, and brain. If you can convince a person that they can’t trust themselves, you can manipulate them. They become putty in your hands. As a consequence of this popular idea that the deepest insights are counterintuitive, our culture is a gaslighting culture—one that tells you that you can’t trust your gut, and you can’t trust your heart, and you can’t even trust your mind. . . because your instincts and intuitions are an accidental epiphenomenon of neural activity. True knowledge, pure knowledge is to be found in the mathematics, and it needn’t make sense. Therefore, you must believe in and trust TheScience™.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, this whole paradigm is absurd, and even sad. Math was invented, not discovered. It was invented to help us manipulate things and predict outcomes. Now we’ve given it a life of its own so that it leads us rather than the other way round. We are meant to use our tools, not be used by them. Moreover, if our minds are so unreliable—since they are a mere accidental epiphenomenon—then mathematics itself must be part of the fantastic illusion those minds have fabricated, and all our science babble is utter nonsense and chasing after the wind. This is a sad conclusion because it implies, Why bother? Any honest consideration of the present paradigm must end in laughter because it’s so clear how far we’ve fallen from the investigations of natural philosophy, and how caught up we are in a glass bead game.

Next time you hear the term counterintuitive or are tempted to use it, stop a moment to consider what you’re hearing or saying. Make it a topic of conversation with friends and family. It’s time we quit deploying the term because it’s damaging. It’s disrupting our self-reliance and making us slaves to any dubious ideas that claim the imprimatur of science.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

The idea of statistical significance has played a vital role in confusing our sense of reality. For some reason, the concept is felt to be scientific despite its highly abstract quality. Moreover (as I will explain shortly), when we use statistical significance as an interpretive tool, it is always an indicator of uncertainty. Owing to its usefulness as a brain-baffling device, as well as to its promiscuous applicability, those managing the 2020-2023 lockdowns deployed the notion of statical significance to rationalise just about any decision, no matter how antidemocratic and unethical. In the area of health care and medicine, the problem with this metric has turned out to be acute and in urgent need of redress.

As I pointed out in “The Lab Leak Contagion Fraud,” the whole germ theory of illness and disease is pseudoscience. As Mike Stone has indicated in “The Germ Hypothesis Part 1,” the main issue with germ theory (and virology in particular) is that viruses were never proven to actually be a phenomenon: in other words they’ve never been proven to exist. Worse, the hypothesis has been falsified over and over again. Moreover, and this follows logically, they’ve never been proven to cause illness; another hypothesis that has been repeatedly falsified. All of this boils down to the scientific method being entirely abandoned by the field at its inception and to this very day.

Let’s review the basics of the scientific method. I found that Mike Stone used this approach very effectively, and I’d like readers to benefit from some of the same reminders. Let’s start with this quotation:

What this means is that a hypothesis must be designed and written in such a way as to “prove” whether or not a predicted relationship derived from the natural phenomenon exists between two variables: the independent variable (the presumed cause) and the dependent variable (the observed effect).

[All quotes are from the above-mentioned article from Mike Stone’s ViroLIEgy Newsletter Substack.]

Ideally, there should also be a control variable or even several controls. Here’s a handy infographic that Stone shared:

Stone proceeds to walk us through Science 101, since we’ve clearly forgotten the fundamentals:

Once the hypothesis has been established, a proper experiment can be designed in order to test it. According to American philosopher and historian of science Peter Machamer in his 2009 paper Phenomena, data and theories: a special issue of Synthese, the experiment should show us something important that occurs within the real world. The goal is to ensure that the aspects of the observed natural phenomenon that originally sparked the hypothesis are “caught” in the design of the experiment. In this way, the experiment will be able to tell us something about the world and the phenomena studied. Thus, it is critical that the hypothesis is tested properly through an experimental design that accurately reflects the observed natural phenomenon and what is seen in nature.

When every germ contagion experiment has proven that viral illnesses are not transmitted via proximity, breath, sputum particles, phlegm exchange, sweat, or blood. . . like. . . that should be it: you close the book on that hypothesis. Even if—and this is not the case, but an example of how exacting authentic science truly is—even if 9 out of 10 experiments confirm an hypothesis, it only takes one well-designed experiment to falsify it. In other words, even if contagion seemed to be conclusive in 9 out of 10 experiments, it would take only one well-designed experiment to falsify the rest. Let’s recall that scurvy was once considered a contagion.

Now imagine you put 10 people in a room of the sort you might find in most cafes, and you just let them behave as they would normally in that environment, but you put one with full blown flu symptoms in the room and then you followed them up after a few days to find out how many caught the flu. Even if 8 out of 9 got sick, that one case that didn’t get sick renders the whole experiment inconclusive.

Ah, but there’s immunity, you say. Well, that’s an interesting, even compelling, tale—I mean, the immunity hypothesis. I guess we’ll have to come up with an experiment to test that notion. We are now, however, two removes from reality, since we came up with the immunity concept to back up the unproven hypothesis that a tiny bogeyman is afoot. In fact, the notion of immunity to a virus is being used here to dismiss inconvenient data. We have now successfully invented a fictional world to support an initial fiction. We are no longer in the realm of science here: this is makebelieve, scientiphysized art.

To be clear, the numbers I’ve presented regarding viruses and contagion are inverted. In fact, all efforts to infect a human being or an animal with a virus by the means we claim contagion works—breathing, sneezing, coughing, touching each other, embracing, kissing, touching shared surfaces, sharing towels—have failed.

Let’s be rigorous with the application of our principles. If 1 or 2 out of 10 in a shared space did get sick, does that prove that so-called “contagion” is a thing—an actual phenomenon? In other words, with which side does the burden of proof lie? Important to keep in mind that it’s the hypothesised element that bears the burden to prove itself. Is there truly a wee dibuk jumping around and possessing hosts or is that just a neat idea that turned out upon experimentation to have been false? I don’t have to prove that dibuks don’t exist; if you believe in them, and no one’s ever seen one, then you’re the one who has to prove it.

My point is that statistically significant outcomes are not a scientific tool. They are, in fact, the reverse: the reasoning is counter-scientific; it’s a workaround to circumvent scientific rigour and to slip falsified ideas into our heads as TheScience™. Every time I examine how we misuse stats and probabilities, I find some new area of misapplication.

To give the notion its due, let’s see where the use of statistically significant outcomes might be appropriate. You give 100 people the same medicine, and 30 get better. Thirty-percent recovery might be an indicator. So you say, well, let’s try a placebo trial and compare. If the outcome is similar, you may decide, Hey, 30% wasn’t especially promising to begin with and this clinches the matter. That’s honest science. If, on the other hand, 70 patients recovered with the course of treatment, while only 30 in the placebo group. Now we’ve got something to work with. If the so-called “side effects” are minor, it’s worth a shot! What we’re doing here is applying pragmatic workarounds (heuristics) to navigate an area of uncertainty and to rationalise the application of a course of disease treatment.

Since individual biology is idiosyncratic, we expect inconclusive results when it comes to healing, especially owing to the so-called “placebo effect”. . . (which, let’s face it, ought to be the focus of medical science, as it’s clearly the key to human health). In other words, patient outcomes are unpredictable. So what do we do when something’s unpredictable? We turn to statistics and probabilities and dress up our ignorance in scientiphysizations; throw on a % or two and voila!—here’s some sciency chatter to distract you from the BS. But it ain’t science. It’s a method of working around the loss of authority that would come with having to admit flat out that you don’t know and cannot predict outcomes. Even the most narcissistic of MDs must admit, when pressed, that they really can’t promise anything (likely because insurers are finicky about lying to people). Nevertheless, our culture relates to Western medicine (pharmaceutical medicine) as though it were an exact science.

In simple language, you can’t declare that because something works sometimes or often enough that it’s going to work in any particular case. So we turn to stats and probabilities to help us make a choice in circumstances of uncertainty. That’s when it comes in handy; and that’s what it’s for. What statistical significance cannot do is tell us whether a phenomenon exists or whether a given agent is causal. Indeed, in circumstances that call for certainty, one can be sure that the invocation of statistical significance indicates a falsified hypothesis.

At this stage of the game, I’m not sure how our science culture might go about the serious house cleaning required. We need a renewed scepticism: a school of scientists whose job is to review all our so-called facts, every Nobel-Prize-winning idea, and to communicate their findings to the public. Let’s call the group the Special Committee for the Restoration of Science. In an ideal world, the committee would include folks with a solid understanding of analogy, rather than the usual dismissive ignorance of the subject we encounter in science literature today. The group would have two main goals: (1) to distinguish between what we actually know from what we don’t know with the purpose of overhauling our research priorities; and (2) to flag bias-confirmation practices and curb their usage.

As I see it, persons trained in literary studies (that is, folks familiar with fiction, story-telling, and poetics) could help cut through a lot of the sciency nonsense that arises from a lack of familiarity with this side of thinking and communication. Historians and philosophers could help a great deal as well on the special committee I have in mind. Unfortunately, with the corporate control of science, such a consideration is baseless fabric. For the time being, we’ll have to make do with being stuck in this dark age of sciency chimeras and the priestly fact checkers who let the dibuk loose upon us when the corporate barons signal.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

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It is unfortunate that since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions science as a cultural phenomenon—what I’ve been referring to as “scientism” and “TheScience™”—has doubled down on the notion that science can be a settled thing, that ultimately, scientific models are the phenomena instead of useful and productive heuristics doing their best to account for the appearances, to make predictions, and to engineer useful technologies. One would have expected that following Koestler, Kuhn, Judson, McGilchrist and those science historians who have added to the project of debunking science myths, the public (and especially those in government) would enjoy a more sober view of science as a deeply troubled sociological and anthropological activity. What I’m calling a “sober view” is, after all, the one we arrive at when turning an objective and scientific eye on the practices of science.

Since the launch of analogy magazine, I’ve been puzzling over how this state of affairs came about in the first place; how a bad religious perspective (afflicted with dogmatism and appeals to scholastic authority) has found expression in popular attitudes toward The Science™.

No doubt the corporatist-consumerist context is paramount. The commercial incentive to market-brand has caused tremendous distortion to our relationship with science. Films, television shows, documentaries, Youtube channels, kids’ books, ads with actors wearing lab coats claiming the imprimatur of The Science™, a plethora of high-production-value astonishments. We’re talking exotic locations and hidden cameras; moving dramas about wildlife narrated by avuncular actors with sonorous and convincing voices; musical scores; scripts full of settled facts and emotional appeal; animations rendered so convincingly, how could you doubt a wavicle?

There’s been a brainwashing effect to this commercial activity. But the commercial side of the equation doesn’t account for all the appearances. It accounts only for the receptive public. How could science itself become bad religion? This question asks that we drop the false myth that science and religion are oppositional forces: the history of their relationship demonstrates an intimate link between the two. With this misconception out of the way, the analogical mind is free to perceive the common ground and the shared problems—the tyranny our ancestors fought to be rid of: an orthodox world of dogma, heresy, book banning, idea banning, and excommunication.

I’ve discussed the will to incorporation as playing a major role in bringing about the demise of science. Briefly, the will to incorporation is the instinct to eat played out analogically on the social scale; it’s the instinct to internalise a grouping of functions, to then close them off, lock them in, and defend the grouping against corruption from outside influences. We can observe this behaviour at the level of chemical bonding, at the level of cellular organisation (the walled cell), at the level of the organism, the family, the tribe, the religion (consider the eucharist), the walled city, the nation, the solar system, and so forth.

Kuhn contends that we are faced with a necessary evil: closing off and rigidification are essential for system productivity. When it comes to science, this state of affairs engenders a problem: that of mistaking the heuristic for the thing in itself, which I correlated via Barfield to idolatry. And along with idolatry comes the subjugation of both the individual and the collective to the doctrines of the model. In other words one comes to serve the model instead of the other way round. That is the defining feature of idolatry after all. The result is an occlusion of the inner world (a kind of emptying out) as followers are forced to conform to (i.e. obey) the figurations.

Many embrace a cult (or severely dogmatic religion) because it relieves them of the trouble of having to manage and navigate life according to their own lights. The appeal of a cult is that it promises to manage your inner life for you. Those who are analogically oriented however find the prospect horrifying.

Were science somehow immune from the process of locking in and closing off, it would be free of the encumbrance of idolatry. As things stand, however, if we are to do justice to ourselves and to science, we must carefully limit the authority of science and promote, via all means, a sober view of science as an evolving, ill-defined enterprise. We must also work to shift our popular attitudes toward and representations of facts and truth. We must turn away from final revelations that demand a sacrifice of our intellectual independence, what Max Weber designated, if you’ll recall from a previous essay on the this subject, “das intellektuelle Opfer”—“the surrender of judgement to the prophet or to the church.” We may now add “. . . or to any pretension of final revelation.”

Another set of appearances I’ve addressed via Iain McGilchrist and Ted Hughes has to do with our left and right brain, our inner and outer worlds, how they are out of balance owing to the pressures of the cult of scientism. The consequences of left brain dominance include irritability, an inability to self-assess, egotism (along with a belief that one is superior), a need to be right, a proclivity to go to great analytical lengths to be right, employing styles of argumentation that rely on irrational strategies mostly meant to demean or insult, and the social complications arising from such behaviour.

Meanwhile emotional lives are hollowed out, one suffers an inability, as J. S. Mill expressed, to inwardly connect with and participate in the world in a fulfilling manner. One comes to reside entirely in the head and the world recedes. How sad to forgo a whole dimension of experience. I wonder how many—being raised in this sterile environment—have never been moved by a sunset. But more urgently, how dangerous! For as we’ve seen (and as Carl Jung pointed out), the archetypes do not go away; the inner world does not shrivel up and vanish; instead it takes on new flesh and finds a means of expression. Unaware of what they are (owing to neglect), we project them into the new paradigm. And they attempt to command us like the gods of old but with renewed vigour, wearing the costumes of their modern appearance as facts and true realities.

The primary thesis I’ve been working to communicate has been that resolution to these sorts of problems demands the application of the analogical mind, a faculty that not only compliments the analytical, but that precedes it. The analogical mind perceives the terms of correlation and delivers it to the analytical mind, then the analogical mind studies the analytical hash and finds new correlatives for exploration. The action is circular so it may be impossible to determine actual precedence in any particular situation, but what we can conclude is that given our present circumstances, it is essential to promote the analogical faculty while at once turning down the volume on the analytical. Exercises in this domain will alleviate much of the suffering and anxiety experienced by those who have been inducted into the probability cult of safety and compliance marketed by TheScience™.

The way of analogy is better than the way of analytics because it can synthesise, build bridges, perceive alternatives and because it refuses to become a slave to the plan. The way of analogy sees many plans where the analytical way wears blinders and studies one plan to the exclusion of others, compartmentalising and perceiving strict difference when in fact there are connections and correlations. Sure we could use the dedication of believers in the plan, but we should be evolving past this sort of philistinism. The commitment demanded by our beliefs ought to be treated with some humour.

The whole idea of secularism is to encourage many plans. Imagine each system we design is not only a tool, not only a model, but its own creature, it’s own sort of spider, projecting its analytical web over the world. Let it not be one beast alone, but rather an abundant garden sustaining many varieties. Only in that way will humanity continue to thrive and to truly evolve.

We can likely all agree (well, nearly all) that systems permitting of evolution are better than ones that seek stasis. Our agreement on this issue rests on the implied freedom and progress entailed by evolutionary processes. Most look forward to development, to growing up, setting goals and pursuing them. The perspective does not have to account for all the appearances for us to know that evolutionary systems represent positive progress. For those who nevertheless hesitate to agree that evolution is inherently positive or good, surely they appreciate that it is good in contrast to one paradigm stamping out all those that threaten its hegemony.

To give Darwinism its due, it has managed to popularise the concept of evolution. (And let’s keep in mind that Darwin did not invent the concept; in fact, he kinda messed it up by denying an internal driver or tendency; and let’s remember that he did not believe in self help and self improvement either.) It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in Darwin’s time, the culture war had much to do with the evolutionary metaphysic competing with the religious metaphysic of a static creation. In the latter paradigm, an unchangeable humanity saddled with original sin was repenting, praying, and purifying itself for salvation, whereas in the evolutionary paradigm, we were adapting to changing circumstances and progressing toward a better humanity. In other words, evolution provided the potential key to a secular morality. A shame the neo-Darwinists had to muck it up with so many misconceptions, especially with their selfist denial of altruism.

If we roll back the unfortunate missteps of Darwinism and perceive human evolution as busying itself with the development of various tools and forms of instrumentation; if we see the human enterprise as one that busies itself populating the world with its own creatures (paradigms, figurations, and models), each with its own creaturely (spidery) perspective; if this is what our evolution is truly about, then our responsibility and ethics must turn upon the ecology of our creations. We must make a point of learning in which environments they flourish and happily reproduce; in which they fail; and in which they seem to succeed, but through toxicity; how they compete; and how we are to manage all these appendages we’ve grafted to ourselves. To ply the language of archetypes: What garden must we build to contain them in a harmonious and fruitful manner?

We live in a growing world and we’re going to need room for many more brainchildren. But I believe that if we recognise our situation—that the lab creatures have escaped (and covid has been let loose, so to speak); and if we recognise that instead of locking down and becoming slaves to the plan, we must open up. . . there’s a chance of cultivating something rich and truly diverse—an already nascent vision far richer than the one we’re entertaining presently in the popular forum. It is the way of analogy.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.

Having reintroduced poetry to analogy magazine two weeks ago with samples from David Solway’s marvellous new chapbook, From the Sommelier’s Notebook, I thought I’d take a break from the cerebral stuff and follow up with a few poems of my own.

Man Floating on a Mattress

Floating upon an air mattress  
in the fiery blue chlorine again,
Andy has found Hell.

Looks staged, like an ad for deluxe 
wristwatches, tequila, sleek automobiles,
and the cultured, industrial man.
 
He doomscrolls through Google headlines,
always from that floating cushion that creaks
and quacks him into its plastic embrace.

A sandwich-board by the pool’s cracked lip
with “The World Is Burning” writ large
casts the image for a postcard.

From this vantage, adrift in a corner
of the all-inclusive, he has seen the world, 
dreamed of nothing, living the dream.

Things could always be better. 
Adversities have no place here
at the summit of evolution. 

Sunlight, glaring off the water, 
tears up the eyes; or is it guilt? 
He rubs in sunblock with conviction.

Blame is a soothing balm in this heated climate.
Facts are facts. Only stupid people ask questions.
The inflated raft is narrow, easily upset.

Andy risks spilling his appletini, tipping
over completely, getting wet. He knows
he could drown in just an inch of water…

and his is such an easy boat to rock.
It takes gentrified courage to shift his ass.
Over his face, he fastens a mask.

The Rain Keeps No Appointments

It had been a long time coming.
We stood on the highroad, the poet and I, 
looking down, shaking our heads
at the scene of devastation sloping away. 

Massive trees heaved over,
their longstanding roots like medusas 
opening above the dark caverns
where they used to drink and feed.

The way they branched in fractals 
at both ends, it looked like a neural network
ripped out, all its schemes laid waste, 
or perhaps its forecasts realised.

Broken limbs were strewn around
among heavy stones dislodged
from their ancient sockets
and rolled to unsteady places.

It was all mud and tangled heaps;
a malingering odour of something dead;
the air aswarm and buzzing;
a forensic spirit picking at the bones.

“What’s going on?” the poet asked.
It was a rhetorical question. The rain 
keeps no appointments, arrives by and by
in its own good time—hard and fast.

It overwhelmed the spillway,
wiped away the berms, broke the levee,
just like we knew it would some day;
the waste land, crying for renewal.

It had gotten out of hand: so many
cracked notions about the world
had taken root and lodged themselves
in common sense. I mean,  

it all looked natural; it all looked true. 
But not knowing your heart from your brain?
It got so folks were afraid to breathe.
Metaphors played shadow theatre in the dark.

“There’s a mosquito on your knee,”
the poet remarked. “I don’t mind,” I said,
swatting at one whining by my ear. 
“She has an emptiness to fill.”

Invitation to the Masquerade

You are invited for your own sake
on pain of fine and social exile
to a display of kindly care.
It is our intention this event prove fun
but above all, safe, socially distant,
faceless, preferably mediated by text message.
Our goal is to minimize exchange of particles 
as Lucretius would have advised.
You will copulate only when authorised.
Looking another in the eye is unsafe,
and embraces under the influence violate.
Restrict yourself therefore to the legal pleasure measure.
Hard liquor will be served at 6PM;
a limited buffet of state foods at 7.
Your dinner companion will be a mannequin.
Expect tracing chips and virtue badges 
as party favours. Imagine the door prizes! 
Please mark below if you are a visible minority
or of indigenous descent or are a survivor 
of any disability or adverse experience.
You may opt not to answer of course,
but weigh advantage against forfeit.
The remote band will play at 8.
You will dance alone at the silent disco.
You will repeat: “This is the new normal.”

Since it’s August, I thought I’d share the following despite its departure from the foregoing mood: a little less heady, no sardonic sting, a bit sentimental. Hopefully I’ve captured that familiar quality of light and air and time of year.

August Sun

This early August eternity of sunlight
bronzing the world like a pair of baby shoes;
from four in the afternoon 
pouring its lazy, 
slow preserve 
till eight in the evening.

How distinct, that angle of light, 
that familiar, warming hand, 
never searing or severe, 
each day sadly with us a little less;
sorry to go, 
dragging its golden feet 

through that narrowing corridor
between summer and fall 
like a big old kid
who lately leapt around a splash pad
thrashing up rainbows, 
who now shrinks 
from the creeping shadows.

This light with an aura so manifestly transitive 
(and so damn heavy with wishes 
now camp is coming to a close,
now loves are unwinding 
like the song of the cicada) 
is locking memories in its glow
like bugs in amber.

This great gleam 
full of winks and glimmers,
slips out a shoebox of memorabilia,
every year delivering its troubling keep of drifting ducks,
its unhurried breeze 
easing through the leaves,
full of promises
and unpicked fruits.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

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At long last, analogy magazine has some poetry to present. The occasion today is the release of a chapbook of David Solway’s wine poems, From the Sommelier’s Notebook. Of course these poems are not merely about their overt subject matter. Instead, wine tasting and winemaking serve as metaphorical pretexts to celebrate the heart life. If you’re looking for a gift for a wine lover or a poetry lover or a lover, consider getting this book. It has a lovely design with images from art nouveau master Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) decorating the interior.

Analogy readers will note as well that we’ve added a tab to the menu so you can view previous poems that have appeared here without having to dig through the archives. All poems are available to free subscribers.

                                             6.


“Thou art a vinyard,”
wrote King Demetrius to his people,
“newly blossomed, young, beautiful,
growing in Eden.
Here are the qvevri for the cellar floor,
for fermentation and storage,
for the red Saperavi.
You are my people,
History’s best vintage,
here in this vinyard
where even rocks ripen in the sun.”
 
He made no account
for the blight of mildew and phylloxera.
That came later.
Everything bad comes later,
sometimes before.
Everything bad comes one way or another.
Even the qvevri cannot keep it out,
even here in this vinyard,
home to the aphid
and blasted by mildew.

                                            8.
Life is too short to drink bad wine.
                                          - Goethe


The vintner knows
to celebrate the poorest soil
where peat, sand and limestone come together,
where decomposed sea life, fossils, oyster shells,
and chunks of chalk diversify the terroir.
A flat vineyard
with more clay and alluvials in the soil
gives oozy fatness to the grape and a canopy of green
that we do not want.
But a poor soil forces root
to dig deep into substrate
for food and water
and gives a hardy grape.
The struggle is good.
Happy vines make leaves,
sad vines make grapes,
turning the berry into cups of wine
and grains of sand into a rich cuvée.

                                             10.


This one, says the expert,
smells of coffee grounds and mocha,
that one of potting soil and warm plums,
another of dried flowers and lavender,
and yet another wafts of blackberries, chocolate and Seville oranges
with a wink of paprika and tickle of pepper.
And so on.
The one I most prefer
commands its own bouquet,
smells and tastes of wine,
unmetaphorical wine,
wine of no analogies,
untranslatable and unique,
just wine,
the wine that it is.

                                          12.


Chardonnay leaches sugar
from the wood of the oak barrel.
A creamy white, all vanilla and butter,
sometime pumpkin,
too much, you can ladle it up with a spoon.
It is also known as Chablis,
unoaked,
somewhat more lean and elegant,
less caramel on the palate,
a trace of salt, a touch flinty.
Either way, 
Chardonnay and Chablis are beautiful names,
one for your daughter, the other for your son,
enough to stimulate a taste for the exotic
if not the transcendent
though one means thistle and the other, deadwood.

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David Solway is a Canadian essayist, songwriter and poet. Winner of several Canada Council and Writers’ Federation Awards, the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, and a lifetime achievement award from Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, he has published over 30 books. Solway’s writing extends to the fields of travel, translation, education theory, and politics, including Canadian non-fiction bestseller The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. Previous to From the Sommelier’s Notebook, his most recent volume of poetry was The Herb Garden (Guernica Editions, 2018). His political book, Crossing the Jordan: on Judaism, Islam, and the West, appeared in 2023. He has also released two CDs of original songs, Blood Guitar and Partial to Cain. Solway lives in Vancouver with his wife, author and video content creator Janice Fiamengo.