…the Number 1 bit is a real intervention. It is not a real test of *radical* utilitarianism. It is a Humean drill that Gill runs under a Benthamite banner. That mismatch is the interesting part.

What the scene actually is

At Daily Provisions he hands someone ticket “1”. They light up. If there is time he names the delight and asks, lightly, what it says about the species that we all want to be Number 1. He reports a small turn inward: “a more reflective stance.”

Three things happen in that second:

1. A pleasure is made visible (the grin).

2. The pleasure is redescribed as a species habit, not a private win.

3. Other people in the room become part of the picture. Henley supplies the line: *there’s lots of other people here too.*

That is moral-circle work, but the circle that actually opens is the other humans in the café. Not the Roosevelt conservation brief Lynn is about to clock into. The move is: from I am first to we all want to be first, and that is a bit ridiculous.

Score it against Gill’s own doctrine

Yesterday’s “radical utilitarianism” was not “be a bit nicer in line.” It was:

- multi-species, not human-only

- long-horizon flourishing inside planetary boundaries

- risk-sensitive about extinction and lock-in

- every cent a vote

- design against human foibles because we will be lazy and tribal anyway

So as a “practical test of the radical theory”, the bit fails. It does not enlarge the set in the utility function. It does not change a trade-off. It does not constrain a harm. A customer can laugh, feel briefly seen, take their flat white, and remain exactly as speciesist and short-horizon as before. That is what the exchange at the register means: a witty reframe that may leave the payoff matrix untouched. However, a seed may be planted.

It does, however, pass a narrower test Gill also cares about: can you interrupt the house of mirrors for a few seconds without preaching? On that test it works, and he has a second data point. The estate lawyer who heard “It is hard to see other people” stopped and said he would have to think about it. That pause is the product; a hitch in self-absorption.

If radical utilitarianism is a criterion of rightness (what would make the world better), Number 1 does almost no work. If it is a practice of attention (how a limited animal stays less monopolized by itself), Number 1 is exactly the right scale. Gill’s essays keep sliding from the first to the second. Today’s post is the slide in pure form.

Hume against Bentham, in Gill’s terms

He is listening to Hume while driving Lynn to a conservation shop. That is not random radio. The two philosophers split on the exact question this scene raises: What actually moves a person from “I am Number 1” to “other beings are here”?

Bentham treats pain and pleasure as both the engine of action and the external yardstick of right. You ought to count each for one because that is what the calculus requires, and you can check the calculus against “some external consideration” so you are not just blessing your own feelings. Sympathy, for Bentham, is caprice unless it is yoked to the aggregate. That is why he thought Hume’s moral sense collapsed into the “principle of sympathy and antipathy”: sometimes it tracks utility, sometimes it does not, as it may happen. The reformer’s job is to build law and incentive so private grins line up with general happiness.

Hume says the opposite order. Reason does not pick the end. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” Moral distinctions are not deduced from facts about the world; they are sentiments of approbation in a spectator who has managed, for a moment, not to see only himself. Utility matters for Hume too — he is one of the people who taught Bentham to take “usefulness” seriously — but utility pleases us when we take the general view. The work is to get someone into that view. You cannot infer an ought from an is. You can only train the sentiment that already knows how to approve usefulness and resent cruelty when self is not shouting.

Bentham heard Hume, said the scales fell from his eyes, then spent a career trying to replace Hume’s inner spectator with an adding machine. Gill quotes the adding machine (“greatest happiness of the greatest number of species”) and then *does* the spectator.

Look at the toolkit in “She Said Something…”:

- a light remark, not a lecture

- meditation as a way to “shock ourselves awake”

- watching the passing show

- “connection” as the condition of writing

- practice and discipline instead of success or failure

- Hume on the speaker while the day begins

None of that is a felicific calculus. It is Hume’s claim that you change the moral situation by changing what the spectator can feel. The Number 1 line is a compact sympathy pump. It takes a pleasure the customer already has (winning the queue) and briefly couples it to a wider picture (everyone wants this; that is odd; other people are here). If it works, it works the way Hume said moral education works: not by proving an ought, but by giving the passion a new object.

That is also why Eris showed up yesterday. Eris is the Humean veto on Bentham’s next step. Once you have a model of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number of species,” the temptation is to impose it — to treat the biosphere as a system you may optimize. Hume’s is-ought gap plus his distrust of reason as sovereign says: you do not get that permission from the facts of climate, sentience, or biodiversity. You get approval, sometimes, from a trained sentiment. You do not get a mandate to run the farm. Gill’s “ought we control what ought not be controlled?” is Hume spoken in myth.

Does the bit expand the circle, then?

Among humans in a room: a little, sometimes, for a minute. That is not nothing. Status hunger is one of the foibles RU said we must design against. A queue number is a clean probe of that foible because the stake is tiny and the feeling is loud. Naming it without humiliation is better pedagogy than a sermon about factory farming at 8 a.m.

Across species and time: no. The language even retreats. Yesterday the unit was species on the planet. Today the unit is “other people” and “us as a species.” Henley is about inconsiderate humans, not coral. Conservation is in the car with Lynn, not in the joke. If the radical claim is that the circle must not stop at *Homo sapiens*, this practice never leaves the shop.

There is a charitable reading that saves more of the theory. Singer’s expanding circle was never only a change in *belief*. It was a change in *who you can picture as a patient*. Hume would say the picture has to be felt. You will not get someone to count chickens by handing them a paper on sentience. You might get them there by a long series of small shocks that make self-absorption look silly. Number 1 is then not the circle. It is calisthenics for the muscle the circle needs. On that reading the bit is not a test of RU’s content. It is a test of RU’s psychology. Can this animal be trained out of first-place trance at all? Gill’s answer is: yes, briefly, if you keep it light.

The uncharitable reading is simpler. When the theory gets expensive — other species, trade-offs, control — Gill drops Bentham and picks up Hume. When he needs a slogan, he picks Bentham back up. The café is where the slogan is safe because nothing has to be sacrificed. No one loses their pastry so that another species can keep a habitat. Radical utilitarianism that never costs the person in front of you is just courtesy with a manifesto.

The verdict in Gill’s own tension

He already built the tension. Radical utilitarianism says: maximize across species. Eris says: do not appoint yourself the optimizer. Hume says why Eris is right about motivation: the optimizer is a passion wearing a spreadsheet. Bentham says why Eris is dangerous about standards: without an external count, “seeing other people” will track whoever is attractive, nearby, or in your café.

Number 1 takes Eris’s side in method and Bentham’s side in rhetoric. That is why it feels both pointed and slight. It is pointed as anti-narcissism. It is slight as planetary ethics.

A stricter practical test, if he meant the radical claim, would look like this: a choice at the counter that reallocates a bit of welfare beyond the room — default plant option, a supplier rule, a price that encodes a vote, a sentence that makes the customer picture a nonhuman patient, not only a rival human in line. Until the bit does some of that work, it is a good Humean counter and a failed Benthamite experiment.

The honest synthesis, which I think is what Harrowings is actually doing even when it denies it, is this: Bentham names the horizon; Hume names the only engine we have. You may not get to the horizon with the engine. You also cannot skip the engine. Gill’s daily practice is the engine. His theory is the horizon. Today’s post is him noticing a connection and refusing to pretend the engine is the horizon. That refusal is more rigorous than the slogan.

And here is what landed from out of the Pleroma:

Onward!

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I believe it may have failed in some ways, but then again, what do I know? What do I care? The work is not about failure or success. It is about practice. It is about discipline. Listening now to a talk about David Hume, I’m also getting ready to take my wife into work at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. I saw a note from my career coach, , a short time ago and it reminded me of my own work at Daily Provisions where I often give a number to folks having their fare to stay. Getting the number “1” unfailingly delights the recipient and, when I have time, I sometimes mention how this does delight us and then call into question what that might say about us as a species. I keep it light, but I note that this observation often results in my customer taking a more reflective stance on what it says about us that we all want to be “Number 1.” What does it say?

From my perspective, it relates to what Don Henley sang in the tune “Nobody Else In The World But You” on the album Inside Job released in 2000, a year that formed a turning point for our culture in so many ways. The refrain states:

“It is hard to see other people.” I made this remark to a lawyer who would eventually get the business of doing the estate planning for Lynn and myself. The lawyer had paused on hearing that and said, “Hmmm…I’ll have to think about that!” I knew I had made a connection with my cryptic observation.

Shocking ourselves awake by meditating is helpful, I find. I step back and watch the passing show. I bring you all along with me from time to time. Most recently, it was on my walk back from work to home. This ongoing body of work continues:

It is a practice. It is a discipline. It is a service provided to generations that follow, provided these electrons survive on the storage media that exist. We are so young as a species. We are evolving so quickly. We need to be awake and aware of how our actions impact each other and all who will follow.

Onward!

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Le Guin later named this the founding move of science fiction as she practiced it. In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness she defined the genre as thought-experiment, not prophecy: “Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory… and see what happens.” The moral complexity of the novel is not to be sacrificed to the gadget. Shelley is the ancestor because she asked what happens after the spark, when the maker will not be a parent.

The anarchist household

This is not an accidental family resemblance. Mary’s father was William Godwin, the first philosopher of what became European anarchism. She dedicated the novel to him. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft. Her husband was Percy Shelley, the poet Le Guin listed with Kropotkin, Goldman, and Goodman as a source of Odonianism. The air in that house was Political Justice: institutions deform; reason and sympathy can remake the human; government is a standing insult to adult responsibility.

Frankenstein is what a daughter of that air writes when she does not quite believe it. Godwin thought you could calculate the general weal. Victor performs a grotesque version of the same calculation: he will not owe this being because he owes “humanity.” Shelley will not let the general cancel the particular. Responsibility, in her book, is not transferable to a committee, a species, or a future race. It attaches to the one you woke. That is already Le Guin’s sentence—one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice—written as a horror story because the chooser absconds.

Victor is the man who walks away from his own Omelas and leaves the victim holding the city. The walkers at the end of Le Guin’s story refuse to live on a locked child. Victor refuses to live with the being he locked out. Same motion of the feet. Opposite ethics.

Le Guin after Shelley

Le Guin’s anarchism is, among other things, an attempt to answer Shelley without giving up Godwin.

Anarres is what you get if the creature’s demand is taken seriously as politics: no one should have to exist as an unclaimed experiment. Mutual aid is the opposite of Victor’s laboratory. You do not spark a life in secret and vanish. You post work, share bread, raise children in common as well as in pairs, and you say “true voyage is return.” Odo’s revolution is the long refusal of Victor’s night.

That is why Le Guin is harder on the happy city than on the ugly moon. Omelas has heat, music, and a cellar. Anarres has dust and no cellar with a child in it—only the slower horror of custom becoming a wall. Shevek’s crime, in Anarresti eyes, is to reopen contact, to be responsible beyond the moon. Victor’s crime is the reverse: contact made, then denied.

Ged in Earthsea is the anti-Victor. He looses a shadow by naming too early, then has to go toward it and call it by his own name. The Promethean error is not knowledge. It is knowledge without the return. The Lathe of Heaven is the same lesson in another key: Haber will save the world by force of dream; George Orr knows that forcing the world is how you get monsters. Shelley’s modern Prometheus becomes, in Le Guin, a Taoist warning against yang making. Do not animate what you will not accompany.

The Omelas child and the creature are not the same figure, and Le Guin knows it. The child is the cost a society agrees to hide. The creature is the cost a single maker refuses to claim. One is systemic. One is intimate. Her fiction needs both. Anarchism without the Shelleyan test becomes a committee that means well. The Shelleyan test without anarchism becomes a lonely tragedy that changes nothing around the lab.

Paglia after Shelley

Paglia reads Romanticism as the moment nature, sex, and the daemonic flood back through the Enlightenment’s thin floor. Wordsworth wants a kind mother. Coleridge and Sade know better. Percy Shelley, in Sexual Personae, is a feminine psyche chasing a masculinity it does not have; Prometheus Unbound is lyric titanism. Mary’s novel is the book in which that titanism meets the thing it made and cannot love.

On Paglia’s terms, Victor is doing what men do when they cannot bear the mother: they try to make life without her. The laboratory is an Apollonian womb. The creature’s hideousness is the chthonian leaking through the stitchwork. Victor’s nausea at the bedside is not a moral failing she would psychologize away. It is nature arriving on schedule. You cannot invent a person in a garret and expect Rousseau’s smile. “In the beginning was nature.” The yellow eye is that beginning, unpretty.

This is why Paglia and Shelley are closer than Paglia and Le Guin. Shelley does not think a better committee would have solved Victor. She thinks the problem is the fantasy that reason plus voltage can skip embodiment, kinship, and the female body that actually makes life. Paglia radicalizes that suspicion into metaphysics: culture is always a defense against the maw; the Western eye cuts form against ooze; sweep the hierarchy of fathers away and you do not get Anarres, you get a different predator. The creature’s violence is not only learned. It is the species remembering what it is.

Where Paglia parts from Shelley is tenderness. Shelley gives the creature Goethe, Plutarch, and a request for a companion. She makes you hear him. Paglia would not deny the speech, but she would not build a politics on the hope that speech is enough. Nature does not negotiate. Society is the force that keeps the crime in check, not the crime’s author. Victor failed as a father. He also demonstrated what happens when Promethean will meets flesh. Both facts stand.

Three ways to leave the room

Set the three endings on one table.

Victor leaves the laboratory, then spends the rest of the book chasing the consequence he would not raise. He never becomes a parent. He becomes a hunter. The Arctic is the last version of the locked room: white, empty, two figures who will not let each other go.

The ones who walk away from Omelas leave a city that works. They refuse the terms. They do not free the child. Le Guin will not invent their destination. The ethical act is negative and solitary. Odo is the next chapter: walking away becomes founding. Founding becomes, on Anarres, another set of walls. The work does not end.

Paglia does not walk. She stays in the museum, the movie house, and the street, and says the cellar was never a secret. Civilization is the festival plus the dark. Pretending you can annex the dark to mutual aid is the last Rousseauist charm. Freedom is the unregulated body and the uncensored image, not a moon without money.

Shelley sits between them, which is why she still organizes the argument. She is Godwin’s daughter and the woman who watched a made thing open its eyes. She does not believe in Victor’s solitude. She does not believe in easy perfectibility. She believes you owe the life you start—and that nature, grief, and other people will collect if you default. That is narrower than Le Guin’s anarchism and less glamorous than Paglia’s paganism. It is also the test both of them, in different keys, still have to pass.

Le Guin’s question: can a people live so that no one is the unclaimed experiment?

Paglia’s question: can you look at what life actually is and still talk as if a charter will hold it?

Shelley’s question, older than both: you lit the spark. Will you stay in the room?

The creature is still at the foot of the bed. The child is still in the cellar. The walkers are still on the road. Comparison does not close any of those doors. It only shows that they open onto the same house.

• Think about future generations.

• Be a good ancestor.

• Money is energy and every cent spent is a vote for the world that we are collectively co-creating.

• Every choice we make puts us where we are.
  Be where our feet are.

• Our senses are limited and filter out much. Be awake and aware.

I imagine a world where we have lived up to the word “sapiens” and shown ourselves to be wise. I imagine a world where our technologies are integrated and optimized to achieve what I call “radical utilitarianism” - the greatest happiness of the greatest number of species on the planet overall. I imagine such a world but my anima, the Goddess Eris, knows that such a vision involves attempting to control that which ought not be controlled. While we could impose our collective will upon the cosmos, ought we do so?

When I think about the cycle of life and death, it occurs to me that I ought not be the judge of what is right and wrong in matters of life and death. I ought to think about how my actions impact the whole, however. I ought to be awake and aware to the way in which one thing leads to another. I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me and I could be wrong. Still, while breath is in the body, I cannot help but make an impact. Our lives depend upon the living and the dying of countless beings. This is part of why life is harrowing.

I’ve spoken here of generalities, however, there is real life to be lived. I’ll step out not long from now and take up my role as a part of the Front of the House staff at Daily Provisions. I enjoy the work and the opportunity to interact with the hundreds of people who come in. I like the relative invisibility of the role too. It reminds me of how our society is structured today.

As readers of my notes will know, I’ve recently been musing more about what Harrowings actually is, as a project, and I think it really comes down to a kind of immortality project - of attempting to leave a mark. Around this time in 1994, I first got email and I recognized how exceptional it was to be able to carry on a conversation for next to nothing with someone at great distance. Before the Internet and email, it wasn’t possible, without great expense or hacking, to do this. I realized too that the bits and bytes were being stored and could be accessed as storage and processing power increased by Moore’s Law. We were clearly on an upward curve in our ability to gain access to knowledge. It was going to be transformative. It has been.

Now we stand at another point in history. Our ability to process information has again increased wildly. Not only can we, but also our machines, appear to be able to say anything about anything anytime and anywhere. We are deluged with words. Words set us at a remove from reality. That’s why I believe it is essential that we wake up and become aware of how all of us are responsible for the world we perceive.

It is important to realize that perception is not reality. In fact, I believe we humans have very little access to reality. By dint of our cognitive abilities, we have set ourselves apart. We ought to strive to reintegrate ourselves. I believe that much of what people call “the spiritual search” is all about this reintegration of our Selves with the Cosmos. We are one.

Last week, on Monday and Thursday, I had conversations with and we were joined by her partner, for the latter talk. Much of discussion spoke of resonance and vibration in music and the Cosmos. It is clear that there is much that we do not yet know but that we intuit. We feel this sense of being separate from the One and also feel ourselves returning to it. I recall how Bertrand Russell stated that one’s interests should become less personal and more universal as one ages.

As we look out, I hope that we’ll all be thinking of how we can be good ancestors to those who are coming. I like to think in longer increments. We’ve only been able to communicate through writing for a comparatively short time. Building on this has made us into what we are today and it’s a very different world from what we inherited. In my case, I came into the world sixty-three years ago last February. Kennedy was president and the world had just passed through the Cuban Missile Crises. We still sit under the shadow of nuclear annihilation to this day. It’s insanity that I see played out on the world stage. We are participants in that insanity. We can do better if we will awaken to that fact and think constructively on how it can be better. Some have. I try to find those and amplify their signals through the void.

Last night, I watched this:

It encapsulated much of what I have been saying in this essay. Let’s keep on harrowing our imaginations and see what sprouts.

Meanwhile, I’ll use this as a mantra today:

I hope this reached more than a few of you. It’s an ongoing part of the work to write these little missives into cyberspace along with the “Live with Hal Gill” documentation of whatever falls into my lens during “The Passing Show” as I call it. If you have the time, I recommend catching the recurring podcast that and conduct on a weekly basis. Here is last week’s:

Be the change that you want to see and remember, every cent spent is a vote for the kind of world we are co-creating. Here’s one way to support my work with some pennies:

If you’d like to do more, a paid subscription entitles you to a seat on the Board of Directors of the Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC. Click the link below:

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I don’t know. I just know how the things that I churn up from the humus of life seem to me. I’m sharing my perspectives with all of you.

Digging through my Facebook memories is part of my practice. They now go back 16 years to 2009 when I was about to join ’s AGI 09 conference near here. It was held in Crystal City and I remember the discussions of the development of large language models along with the skepticism that this was a path to Artificial General Intelligence. I still have the proceedings of that conference somewhere nearby.

If this is a digression, let’s keep on the theme. I was unable to participate as much as I might have wished due to having been diagnosed with a case of pneumonia. This was a misreading of an X-ray showing the damage from a 1996 infection that had nearly done me in. I’d been pulled back from the brink by the administration of intravenous antibiotics. It took a long time to recover and I was forced to slow down and stop attempting to over-achieve. This relaxation resulted in a much better final year of my studies. I may even say that I came into my own. 1996-1997 was a fine time in my life. As it came to an end, I embarked on a new path through life. It’s led here, eventually.

If there is one message in this that I’d like the reader to take away, it is that every choice we make in life leads us to where we are. Decide wisely. That’s my guide for the coming day. Yesterday, I wrote:

It started out to be about Catzandra. It ended up being about inspiration intent.

If you’d like to support my work, here’s a way to do it:

Here is another:

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So the ladder was pulled down and I climbed up to set eyes on Catzandra for the first time. A kitten about six months old, it was thought by the vets who fixed her, she’d been apparently calling down to me from the crawl space into which she came and went. I didn’t want a cat at the time, so I put the cat out. She was so skinny though that I also put out a little tin of tuna on the back step that she could eat. Naturally enough, she was back the following night. I put her out again. She was back the same night. I bought cat litter and cat food.

This came up because I was wondering what might have posted lately and found this:

Jesse Paris Smith

The Kitty

Hello everyone. I hope you’re having a great day today. On Tuesday I posted about the Lion’s Gate portal and symbolism surrounding the lion. We shared related stories and feelings connected to these ideas, and explored the meaning and feeling of lion energy. Today August 15, is a celebration and remembrance day of another special Leo lion from our lives…

Read more

2 years ago · 371 likes · 87 comments · Jesse Paris Smith

It was posted over two years ago but restacked not too long ago (on August 15, I believe.) I’ve missed reading Jesse’s posts on Substack as I always find some depth and reality in them. Not everyone resonates with me this way.

To return to Catzandra’s story, she traveled with me as my companion over the next few years. We moved from that rowhouse where we had met to an English basement level apartment a few steps from Eastern Market on Capitol Hill here in DC. I lived with her there until the summer of 2007 when I took her to live with my parents. Lynn and I had met on May 3, 2007 at the bead store, “Beadazzled,” and I’ve been bedazzled by Lynn ever since. It was a sign of true love that I suggested that Catzandra could live with my folks. As it turns out, she would be their last pet, finally leaving this mortal coil on September 16, 2023. That night, I attended a concert by Jesse’s mother, , at the Anthem and thought of Catzandra’s spirit. It would be a week later that Patti and Jesse lost Cairo who figures in the article. It made me feel a kinship in shared grief.

We don’t talk that much about our shared suffering in this world but it is what binds us together, I believe. At Harrowings, I like to share about that and help people understand what motivates us to do the projects that we engage in. What is it that brings us joy in our awareness of our essential mortality? I believe it is love in all its forms. I want to inspire others to feeling exuberant about not only life as it is happening now but also about all the things that we have loved and lost as time moves on at its pitiless pace.

Thinking of others is important. I want all of you to take a minute and think of someone from whom you might not have heard in a while. Think of someone that helped shape who you are today? I have so many to think of…and am rich in this ability to remember. I’m so grateful for all of my experiences, including my suffering and pain. If one can bear one’s pain with pleasure, then one is assured of having lots of pleasure. It may seem to be a grim realization, but there is much release in it.

I could go on and often do, but for now, I think I’ll just serve up a little something that has come to be one of my go-to uplifting texts:

Ten seconds of silence…

…

…

…

…

…

I hope that more than a few of you got something out of this.

Catzandra was one of those beings who loved me into being here now. I appreciate the reminder that getting curious provided. I’m so grateful to all of my human friends too, of course. I do what I can to send little missives about this into cyberspace. My intent is to inspire others as I have been inspired.

There’s much more to come, if body and breath stay united. If not, it’s been a good life and this dispatch from “the front lines” of my life will wrap up today’s offering from Harrowings:

Onward!

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…or just click here to “buy me a coffee”

I contributed my own perspectives. On hearing that he just wanted to do something to “close the door” on the situation, I asked if he might be in an airport? No need to announce my departure from something that I was leaving. I’ve never really tired of practicing the principle embodied in the statement of a Buddhist Yorkshireman in Kuching, Borneo: “Don’t just do something, sit there!” He got a lot out of meditation. I added my own practice of “keeping my fingers out of the machinery” meaning that when I am not actively meddling in a situation, the world has a way of rotating on its access without me spinning it. Things unfold without me having to manipulate relationships with my fellow passengers on this spaceship called Earth.

A good writing prompt in any case and I still don’t know what the actual issue was!

I find these general suggestions to be sufficient. When practiced on specific issues that I encounter on my way from dawn to dusk and back again, they tend to work.

Now I am thinking about some of my friends on Substack with whom I have not recently interacted. Many have been guests on “Harrowings Podcast” in the past.

I don’t know how it is likely to unfold, my relationships with others on Substack or even in my day to day travels. Live with Hal Gill is the series that captures my quotidien trivialities. Together, the two broadcasts tend to form a cohesive body of work.

The Ghost Light hangs over the stage of consciousness. It just glows:

It’s been a great joy of mine to promote the work of artists such as these. The concept of the Ghost Light hanging over the empty stage appeals to me as well as the light of my own consciousness keeps the ghosts that haunt me company.

The Ghosts

When I speak of the ghosts that haunt me, I’m fairly certain that I am talking about aspects of mySelf. I capitalize Self with intent. I am composed of the persona, Hal Gill, along with my anima (the goddess, Eris, often stands in this role), the shadow of my persona exists as well, and then there is the shadow of the anima. At least five points of consciousness. The Ghost Light hanging over the stage is the Self itSelf.

So, I am a ghost-ridden creature walking the earth. I have to take good care of the vessel in which we travel!

The next tune has surfaced from the Pleroma:

Red light, aglow in the room

Owl watching closely on you

Mouse in the corner waiting for the

right time to run

Dig a hole and find a way out

Midnight follows in the day’s steps

Chasing the prey to the web

Follow the drumming tune of becoming

free from the fear

Dig a hole and find a way out

What keeps you safe may also keep you down

It’s not impossible

Though the road is long

You know our blood runs deep

And the lock is strong

Messages pile up through the ongoing rush of information coming into formations. Earlier today, I ended up talking a good bit with and about the mathematics that underpin our perceptions:

It was an interesting hour and I hope more than a few of you get something out of it.

We cover a lot of ground from the harmonics of planetary orbits. I didn’t open up the issue of astrology but I have an interest in this area due to my study of the work of Richard Tarnas. I leave it to the reader to dive down that rabbit hole as they will!

Regardless, I think that Bono and U2 were onto something in this composition. I recall it was one of my Danish friend’s favorite songs. We saw movies together in Copenhagen, Denmark over the course of 2001 through 2002. I was so grateful for her company in those days. I spent 9/11/2001 over at her apartment reviewing the horrifying news of that day. At the time, she was the Webmaster for the International Council for Exploration of the Seas. She left that career to pursue life as a professional photographer and she’s quite good. I cannot recommend her work enough and what a very kind person, as well.

One of our shared experiences took place at the Betty Nansen Theater where we took in Woyzeck, the libretto of which came out as Blood Money:

Again, I leave it to the reader/listener to explore this at your leisure.

The Pleroma has seen fit to serve this up:

Up until the advent of a resuscitated King Crimson in the early 1980s, we thought that this was the last statement from that band. I’m grateful that it was not. Its last apparition in North America, however, was probably on 9/11/2021 at the Anthem here in DC. I found that an oddly appropriate way to mark the twentieth anniversary of that evening in Bodil’s apartment in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I note that the first “bonus track” here is an Improv called “A Voyage to the Centre of the Cosmos” and, as I view everything from that still point within, I know this to be within me; this “Centre of the Cosmos.” It is within you too as we all are the center of our own universes. How we interact with each other creates the worlds that we perceive. Each of us sees things a bit differently due to this issue of perspective along with limitation of our sensory apparati.

This all puts me in mind of a book that I purchased a few years ago called The View from the Center of the Universe. The link here on the title goes to a review of the book. I recommend it highly. We all need to think of our place in the cosmos and what our purpose in evolving to this point actually is. Its my thought that we have a special purpose in the evolution of consciousness of the cosmos itself. We better not screw it up but we are showing a propensity to do just that. I feel that things are some what precarious right here and now.

Among other things, later today I’ll be getting together with and to discuss Simulation Hypothesis. I believe we are going to be looking at it through the lens of Nick Bostrom. If you’d like to tune in, here’s the link:

For now, I’ll wrap up by saying, as always, that we are the ones we have been waiting for. If not us, who? If not now, when?

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