Nearly a year has passed since my last post (October 2025). Rest assured, I’ve been writing. In fact, it’s been almost all I’ve been doing. Now, a book project has become a multivolume project. I thank the madness which guides me. That is Spirit. After one year, the project stands at 237,245 words, or 950 paperback pages. Some 600 of these will comprise the first volume. I know not exactly what makes up that volume. For now, I keep going. When it feels right, I’ll stop.

Momentarily, that is. Just long enough to get the first volume in print. Then, I’ll press on once more, but not to the point of exhaustion. Exhaustion, after all, is what this project is about: how we get there and what we can do about it. Madness, as Gilles Deleuze somewhere says, is the origin of the realization of the exhaustion that thereafter moves us. We must go mad. Then, we can change. Really change. As Slavoj Žižek says in a recent debate, “I believe in pain. I don’t believe in happiness.” Pain is precisely what motivates. I’ll take it.

Slavoj Žižek looking almost normal. I met him once at the University of California, Irvine, and walked with him up to the lecture hall as he psychoanalyzed the campus signage and scared my daughter with his philosopher’s beard. “Children hate me,” he declared (article linked).

Here, I want to share some of what I’ve been writing, with more mixed in. I’m trying to tell an old story about validation. Those of you who know me, however, know I can never go from point A to B. I don’t have the blood of the five-paragraph essay in me. For that reason, I must circle in on it. Like Heidegger, I must walk the edges. Eventually, without you realizing it, I’ll pull you past the event horizon. Then, you’re really in it. What’s at the Center? That’s for both you and me to find out.

Let’s go back to 11th grade, that terribly anxious time, that border between worlds, caught between the necessary angst of age 17 and a new world order that waits: “adulthood.” Such a terrible time. And beautiful time. Fragile yet resilient, caught on all the edges on purpose, feeling as both a child and adult inside the flat contradiction that is “teen spirit,” as Nirvana’s frontman Kurt Cobain has it (“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1991). Yes, so much spirit in the “young adult,” a term which has no sense. For, it can only be what it is: a nothingness, an everythingness. A no man’s land. An island. Not like Huxley’s Island (1962). Not utopian. But neither dystopian. Just agnostic. Contingent. Yet, unlike adult agnosticism—which is so boring, so pointless—teenage agnosticism about meaning, tragedy, life, and death is “engagingly lost,” as famed author William S. Burroughs said of Cobain upon meeting his ardent fan.

Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs, October 20, 1993 (article linked)

That’s how I felt in 11th grade English class, having wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. “You should be in my advanced class,” my teacher Mr. Olson told me. But I had no interest in formalisms. Indeed, I had no interest in education. I was scraping by with a 2.0 GPA. I’d never read Huxley, let alone Nietzsche. I never bothered to try. Cloaked in black garments we clumsily call “Gothic” (and listening to Marilyn Manson some years after the release of Antichrist Superstar in 1996), my angst was monolithic. Like the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), my angst was uncarved. Not in the Daoist sense. Not in the way of an “uncarved block” (pǔ), which embodies possible shapes, or potential. Rather, my angst was a thick, flat, heavy, solid object. Too stubborn to move. Too heavy to lift. Stopped. But interesting, nonetheless.

Antichrist Superstar album cover, by Marilyn Manson (1996)

What does it take move a monolith? In the film, as Stanley Kubrick directs it, the prehistoric apes are taken aback. They don’t know what it is. It’s just massive: a pitch-black rectangular block that emerges for apparently no reason. The apes encircle it, as do later humans. But nothing happens. It’s almost timeless—this monolith, this opaque angst, this flat Euclidean plane wedged into the planet’s surface. Ironically, it’s the monolith’s stubborn simplicity that ostensibly frustrates the apes into technological evolution, eventually ushering in cosmic transcendence (human space travel). And yet it doesn’t “do” anything. Rather, it frustrates all attempts to do, to know, to uncover—to probe. The monolith’s very impossibility of probing initiates the endless probings of humankind, from microscopes, to telescopes, to autopsies (to five-paragraph essays). The monolith instigates, in its unknowable blackness, precisely the desire to know—to be enlightened.

I think that’s what it’s like to become a young adult. First, you’re a child. Then, as if from nowhere, a black monolith emerges. What is it? You don’t know. It’s alien. It comes from somewhere else. Yet it’s absolutely real. This darkness. This angst. This edginess. It’s in your mind, heart, thoughts—soul. No doubt, in some more than others. But it’s there. This rectangular black hole. This tilted ping pong table knocking off every ball. This obstructed portal. An unseeable cosmos.

Black monolith at varying stages in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

That’s what it’s like to not quite come of age. The monolith is a searching frustration. Frustration is a potion. It transforms your state: moves you. Provided you don’t implode. But there’s something that comes in the midst in you—in me—during that time and age. You want to know. But that desire is not yet calculative knowledge, the kind that feeds artificial intelligence (like “HAL 9000” in Kubrick’s classic film). It’s not yet the spirit of light we’ve been aiming at. There’s still much child in it. Much creation. That desire to know is still mythical, still upright and vertical, not flat and horizontal in the dull manner of “expanding horizons.”

No, you’re not interested in expanding horizons. That’s cruelly boring. That’s typical. That’s flat and not vertical. Rather, your knowledge is feeling. Not feelings “about” things, like surface emotions. Instead, feelings into things, into their being, nature—value (worth). You want to intercept the residue of the uncarved mytharc in you. That is, Absolute Spirit, as Hegel says. I don’t mean the paranormal. I don’t magic and aliens. The paranormal is pedestrian. I mean the mysterium: the mystery, the secret, the hidden rite. What you feel in silence. What you feel at midnight. Inner quiet. Inner voice. Inner strength.

Dave vs. the HAL 9000 AI system in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, article linked)

That’s what validation means. That’s what it gives: strength. That’s the validation I’m aiming at telling a story about when I was 17 (which I will have to get at through another angle, another slant—as both Emily Dickinson and Linda Brodkey have it). Validation is strength. Yet so many around you and us and we are lost in exhausted doing, exhausted thinking—exhausted being. These we call “adults.” As Rilke writes, they blunt the child in us. Too often we miss it, just how it happens, as it happens. It’s not a moment. Neither is it a sequence of moments. Neither is it in between them, like relations. Rather, it’s a slow culmination of movements. The antithesis: a moving non-meditation. One so reasonable, so understandable—so fair.

After all, as you grow older you have to “work.” In work, you’re up against a world of inherited “sin.” All the things you didn’t choose for yourself that you find yourself in. Sin is despair, Kierkegaard says (Sickness 109, 128). What does despair look like? It’s a world of clocks, algorithms, calculations, and—if you’re lucky—adequate compensation. There isn’t much you can do about it. You’re not an intergalactic being. And it’s hard to elude capture. There are so many apparatuses. So many spreadsheets to get lost in. It’s the longest lesson not to get lost in them (especially when you’re making them). To find the initiation hall, the Telesterion—the transformative temple. To take up Asclepius’ rod. To expose the hoax. To become conscious.

In short, to wake up.

Depiction of the Telesterion in Ancient Greece (article linked)

“Wake up,” says the six-foot tall bunny rabbit to you, a 17-year-old. His name is Frank. He shows you “God’s channel.” He shows you the Way. He reveals the portal plunging out of your chest. He tells you how many days you have left. He reminds you. There is time. There is space. There is a channel. Predestined. And you are in it. But you’re not helpless. You’re deciding to follow it. As Althusser asks, is freely submitting to submission truly freedom (Reproduction 269)?

Another paradox. Still, you feel yourself seeing, doing, following it—freely choosing what was chosen for you (yes, like Molinism). Keep going. Ask questions. “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?” you ask Frank. Frank responds, “Why are you wearing that stupid man-suit?” What do you have to say to that? You’re Alice. And this is your Wonderland. This is your matrix. Your simulacra and simulation (Baudrillard 1981).

Wake up.

“Frank the Rabbit,” played by James Duval, in Donnie Darko (2001, video linked)

I’m talking about the film Donnie Darko (2001). A cult classic. Next to The Big Lebowski (1998), on the opposite side of the cult coin, Donnie Darko is a favorite of mine. I watched it when I was 17, several years after its release. Donnie Darko, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is 16 years old in the film. When a jet engine drops through his bedroom ceiling at night, his life is uprooted. Viewers get the sense though that Donnie’s always been a misfit. While not a class clown, he occupies the edges. But he’s smart. Moreover, he’s confident. And he’s not afraid to reveal disingenuousness when he sees it. When bestselling author Jim Cunningham (played by Patrick Swayze) gives a motivational speech in Donnie’s high school auditorium, Donnie asks him, “How much are they paying you to be here?” His next question is a statement: “Are you telling us this stuff so we can buy your book? Because, if you are, I’ve got to tell you that was some of the worst advice I ever heard.”

When I taught at Cal Poly Pomona, I routinely played this clip on the first day of my “Critical Thinking” classes. My point was not to bluntly dismiss motivational speakers or market motives. Neither was it to encourage the abrasive response that Donnie gives to his school’s guest. Rather, it was to get my students thinking about a basic rhetorical question: “Who benefits?” Who benefits from Cunningham’s speech? His advice to several cherrypicked students from the audience boils down to generic oversimplifications of their problems and potential solutions that sound virtuous but help no one. If that’s the case, who benefits other than the cunning Jim?

Donnie Darko vs. Jim Cunningham (video linked)

Does Cunningham’s poor advice validate Donnie’s coarse response? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was an effective clip to get a bunch of teenage freshmen thinking more deeply about influence (before “influencers” were ubiquitous). I wanted them to take their teenage angst seriously, like Donnie does—to employ it where effective. Here, Donnie employs the energy of his angst in the form of critique. Cunningham retorts with his standard spiel: “Do you see the fear, people? This boy is scared to death of the truth. Son, it breaks my heart to say this, but I believe you are a very troubled and confused young man. I believe you are searching for the answers in all the wrong places.” Donnie agrees, but with a twist: “You’re right, actually. I am pretty . . . I’m pretty troubled, and I’m pretty confused, but I . . . and I’m afraid. Really, really afraid. Really afraid. But I . . . I think you’re the fucking Antichrist.” The school audience laughs. Though forcibly escorted out, Donnie wins.

Donnie stutters through his angst but tumbles toward a truth: the hoax of the market man in front of him, the hoax of the polished presentation, the standardized slogans, the glossy book print, the reductive life solutions, the self-help civilization, the dishonest representation, the publicity motivations, the shameless opportunism, the gimmicky guidance, and—most of all—the insane substitution of empty advice for what might have been a risky yet open exercise: an improvisation.

Instead, students get pre-calculated slogans about “fear and love.” Yes, fear and love are important. But Donnie, in another exchange with his teacher Mrs. Farmer (an admirer of Cunningham’s played by Beth Grant), wants the nuance. He wants the “whole spectrum of human emotion.” All of it, like “John the Savage” in Brave New World, not just the easy bits: “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin” (240). Not easy distillations or comfortable substitutions. Other than asking who benefits, that’s what I wanted my students to consider. Nuance. Complexity. In everything. In all facts, events, relationships, and emotions. That’s what I hoped they’d hear when they listened to Donnie’s disruptive comments. Yes, disruption. Irruption, as my mentor Fred Moten everywhere discusses. To “break in,” to change—to challenge.

Donnie Darko vs. Mrs. Farmer (video linked)

That’s what Donnie does, however well. Maybe he does it “immaturely.” Maybe he does it “disrespectfully.” Probably, he does it the only way he can. With angst, stuttering, stumbling, but at least honestly admitting: he’s afraid, “really afraid.” And he’s “pretty troubled” and “pretty confused.” What 16 year-old wouldn’t be? But he knows one thing: Cunningham’s a sham. He isn’t telling the truth. His is a purely market motive. His persona is squeaky clean. His prose are likely chock-full of thesis-driven argumentative essays without nuance or difficulty. Yes, all that again: polished, professional—performative. Donnie doesn’t want any of that. He wants, like Nietzsche, to dig into the depths, to bore into the foundations. Like those poets we discussed through Heidegger reading Rilke, he wants to reach into the abyss and not pull away from it, polishing it out of existence with the likes of five-paragraph essays and nifty artificial intelligences that break down the abyss, level by level, pound by pound, into a figment of our imaginations.

The abyss is real. The child knows it. Especially in darkness. It’s a challenging thing, but also a playful thing, the space of hide and seek, of inspiring dreams. Darkness is a friend. A black jaguar leading you through Xibalba, the land of the dead. A “guiding myth,” like Jung says. Yet the adult abandons it. Explains it out of existence. Enlightens it. Light pollution. That’s what the spirit of light, which is the spirit of this time, gives. And we want more than this. Childhood holds the secret. More so, the point at which what’s secret in the child meets what’s exhausted in the adult. That is where true angst is born: in the in-between, in the not quite coming of age, in the confused relation between what’s going and what’s coming, what’s not quite yet. The angst that, eventually, awakens in us. Awakens us. Makes us—through pain, through suffering—conscious.

To be continued…

Jung knew the spirit of light all too well. In Red Book, he writes, “The spirit of this time has condemned us to haste. You have no more futurity and no more past if you serve the spirit of this time. We need the life of eternity” (202). Han agrees. Ours is an “age of haste” (The Scent of Time 63). It is a fool’s errand to search and hope for technologies that will free us. Our proper relation to technology, Heidegger reminds us, is already long lost. This does not mean that technology only produces a deficit. However, on a collective and social level, it almost certainly does.

Link to article on Carl Jung’s Red Book (2009)

On a personal level, there are ways of navigating technology, revising relationships with it, freeing ourselves from parts of it by erecting boundaries, and so forth, that protect our peace, perhaps even on a local, communal level. But there seems to be no question that at the scale of nations, perhaps cities, and certain globally, our relation to technology comes at great cost.

The more technologies arrive, the greater the threat to our boundaries, time, and space, and thus our peace of mind. The spirit of light spares no space. Everywhere, it penetrates, seeking corners to fill and ways in which to employ the body in chronic work. The body becomes a vessel of and for light, toiling under many suns, literally and metaphorically. With materialist science at its base, its presses upward into the heavens, illuminating the dark. What else can science see? What technologies can it make visible? That is the only question.

One might recall Arthur Miller’s seminal Death of a Salesman (1949), a first-rate critique of the American dream where bodies are not prisons for the soul but prisoners of the mind which disavows the body’s existence. As deeply embodied beings, we need the full scope of our senses—not just vision, not just light. Not just production, not just science. Not just noise, but silence: the silence of the dark.

Why are we afraid of the dark? Why invent fire to scare it away? Perhaps the darkness was our intimate companion all along, intimidating but necessary, terrifying but redemptive. Salvation hides in the dark quiet of night away from the spirit of light.

Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman in the original Broadway production of Death of a Salesman (1949, photo linked)

In Plato’s cave, the philosopher was to escape the darkness of the cave to bring back the light. Indeed, Plato’s line did this all too well. Now, we no longer have darkness. Only light. Darkness’ absence is a kind of presence we can feel, one all too real as the Platonic light cuts through any blinds erected to sustain darkness’ stay.

Darkness need not be literal, although it helps. As embodied beings, we share our “selves” with our environment. Darkness is a “difference that makes a difference,” as anthropologist Gregory Bateson might say (Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972).

Yet one can cultivate darkness in other ways, darkness as an absence-presence that allows the shaping of space into place. Darkness as the free play of what is not yet. Darkness not as void but “pregnant emptiness,” as the Daoists might say, an emptiness full of potential—a creative, expansive space that calls; a space of play antagonistic to argument; a space of wonder and wandering antithetical to arrival; a space of looking and not being seen; a space of saying and not (yet) being heard; a space of the soft and curved, like the darkness of space which bends light with its indentive force; a space beyond and perhaps outside rationality and calculation (for what cannot be seen or heard cannot be calculated); a space beyond Plato’s dialectic, where every question is pursued until responses are divided and subdivided till only “truth” remains.

Plato’s allegory of the cave, by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna (photo linked)

Darkness evades the light of truth in the play of the fast and loose. It wanders. It hides. Like still water, it breaks at touching. You can’t see it. Like the wave function, it collapses upon seeing, its possibilities not amenable to observation.

Don’t look at darkness. Don’t measure. Don’t calculate. Allow yourself to be taken in its play, its unobservable sea of probabilities melting away every Cartesian coordinate.

This is what it is to be truly human: to slip through the grid, to unask every question, making every answer meaningless in the pursuit of curiosity as goal; not for any telos, any Aristotelian end, but for the joy of play as an end in itself apart from every target the technoscientific regime both creates and strikes, captive to its own illusory game.

That’s why I never liked math until quantum theory. They save the good stuff—the equations of relation and categories and mapping and curvatures—for the graduates, and “they” (branches of the technoscientific regime manifested in bureaucrats, administrators, technicians, and the like) feed the rest of us the machinic leftovers of Cartesian grids and solutions for x where x is determinable in the regime of calculation.

Why should anyone study the differential geometry of curves, surfaces, and higher dimensional manifolds when ordinary three dimensional space will do? Why bother to investigate the non-Euclidean curve when the flat Euclidean line is sufficient?

It’s no accident. The system, after all, falls on the flat, cruelly boring grid and not on curves that meander, not on slopes that rise and fall but on the vertiginous plateau of the maddeningly same (insane as in-same).

City of Los Angeles grid (photo linked)

The fastest way between two points is a straight line. But what if I want to wander? What if I don’t want to get there on time? What if I want, like Pirsig, to make good time and not good time?

Bachelard writes that “everything round invites a caress” (Poetics of Space 236). A curve invites curiosity, inhabitation, feeling, dwelling, lingering. For the sharp angle, to dwell is to “loiter.” Sharp angles are gestures to keep us moving, producing, shuffling forward to what is next but never now. For the city, curves are to be subdued at the very least, if not flattened entirely.

The hard coffee shop chair with a right angle is bent on punishing. Foucault knew that society disciplines and punishes but never presences. The intersection of two perpendicular lines at 90 degrees is never more meaningful than when forged against a spine that wants to curve a bit, to sit back and slope, to tarry and dawdle.

Such words—tarry, dawdle, drift, stroll, slouch, mosey, dilly-dally, and yes, to dwell—embody a lag, a slight aloofness not in tension with but just disinterested in time, in moving on, a slight idle in a gait that trails and drags.

For these words, time is mute. Their temporal dimension is more prelude than fugue. For the Baroque, and Bach especially, preludes were followed by fugues. The former are free and improvisational, curved in space and time. The latter are structured and complex with recurring themes, with repetitions that ease. We want security in refrains, in familiarity—the same.

In this sonic analogy, light is the fugue, the illumined, the intelligible, the captured, the apprehended, the perception conformed to pattern, pattern given to perception. The dark is the prelude, the unformed, the open, the spacious, the creative, the enticing yet terrifying darkness of the unknown.

Space and time work this way as spacetime. Space warps time. To space time bends its knee. The reality is in the bending, the soft, incalculable curvatures of an expansive universe hostile—or not amenable—to knowing.

The “known” universe, we say. Finally, a measure of humility. And there it is. You can see it, imagined as it is, one enormous circle encircled in circumference, a perimeter of dark arcs—all light circumscribed in an indefinably obscure orb that hides and is given in hiding.

Observable universe (photo linked); see also Scale of the Universe

And yet we build on the grid, locking it. Gridlock. How convenient for the stoplights that mark off the intersections that join, connect, sever, and structure numeric relations of so many streets: 23rd St., 42 St., as if the infinite tract of the neon expanse could not otherwise be named. Look down and see the particles moving, headlights guided by stoplights, by guiding waves called freeways, to where? To light. To the Center, Main St., where light gathers.

In opposition to the particle, I prefer to be a wave: dispersed, undone, moving nowhere in particular. To the well-defined particle I yield to the unwieldy distribution, the simultaneous potentialities evading captivity in calculation. This is what the wave function means: to be taken, taken along, undulating forth in the froth and foam of a cosmic body too immanent to be seen but visceral enough to be felt.

Don’t look. Feel. Don’t search. Receive. Don’t speak. Listen.

To see what I mean, wander into the ocean. Lie flat. Let it carry “you,” this body absorbed by a body far greater than yourself. Let the thingness of the other become you, where “mutual aid and mutual estrangement fold into and out of one another” (Moten 240). Feel what it’s like to surrender, a flame to be extinguished at any moment, submerged in darkness. You exist, but not for long.

The darkest spaces are cosmic space and the bottom of the ocean. There, at bottom, is the so-called “abyssal zone,” or “aphotic zone,” 3,300 feet below. The Mariana Trench holds such immense pressure that it would crush any human or traditional diving vessel. It’s not uncommon for children, as was the case for me, to dream of becoming an astronaut or oceanographer in order to explore the deepest, darkest regions not only of nature but also of our minds.

Literal darkness embodies the unknown that is simultaneously enchanting and terrifying. In the first of the Duino Elegies (1923), Rilke writes, “Every angel is terrifying” (3). Darkness, as a joy, is a terror (something we might call terror-ific), which we are still just able to endure. Darkness dreams. In darkness, we dream.

Tall hydrothermal vents spill out black chemical bacteria in the depths of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, as seen during a 2016 exploration (NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, photo linked)

How many retain their attachment to and enchantment with the dark? As children we are “afraid of the dark.” Children check dark spaces for monsters, for terrors from the unknown. Technology assuages angst. Nightlights illuminate the dark. Switch on the light and have a look for yourself. Shine your flashlight and see. Nothing is there. “It’s just your imagination.”

It’s no coincidence that children lose both the dark and their imagination, reciprocally. These, we call “adults.” Light permeates the dark. Fear withdraws. Consequently, so does imagination. For, if Rilke is right that “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to / endure,” and darkness is so often a part of our beauty and joy enjoined to terror enjoined to fear as children, the shining of light dispels not only fear but the imagination needed to dream (Duino Elegies, “The First Elegy,” 3).

Darkness is not of the continental shelf, the plateau of dry land we inhabit on the surface, superficially. Off the continental slope, darkness arrives. At the cusp of the basin, where land falls, darkness deepens, rises: the Hadal Zone, the trenches.

To be a trench is to be a “track cut through a wood,” severed by cutting. Yet “trench,” from Latin truncare, originally means being “maimed” (truncat). A trench is a cut, a severance. Severed, cut off, the trench falls, made apart, a place of parting. This is where darkness dwells as that which is maimed, severed by cutting. Set apart, it hides, inaccessible to technology, to sight.

Illustration showing ocean zones and features (Let’s Talk Science using an image by VectorMine via iStockphoto, photo linked).

Naturally, technology doesn’t abide. It wants to penetrate, to see through, make visible. Darkness’ response is always a pressure that crushes. Endangered as such, exiled to trenches beyond sight, it remains hostile to the knife of sight, that sight that severs, cuts, and maims. Treated as such, darkness is insecure to itself, always on the defense, hostile to exploration.

Darkness cannot be achieved or conquered, illuminated or tamed. Darkness has no time, no duration. Darkness is not a thing but a dynamic state, the state of refusal: refusal to be seen, understood, calculated, employed, and deployed. Darkness is an absence, to be sure, but not an absence of light. Darkness is an absence of light’s diametrical twin: sight.

In refusing to be seen, darkness maintains its power to unsettle, disturb, shake up, and terrorize, but also—if you let it, and let it on its own terms, terms that are aleatory and not unknown but unknowable—to enliven, vitalize, energize, electrify, animate, and fortify life itself, life as a mystery to itself. And light is not akin to mystery.

The light of intellect, or the intellect of light, is like this. As we discussed through Plato, it divides and subdivides. In the reality of the grid, or the grid as reality—as block, blockade, and blockage—subdivision is infinite. Asymptotically, it never quite gets there, here. It’s always seeking. Seeking what is right here: the present, the instant. This is the only curve the technoscientific regime allows: the asymptotic slope slouching toward never.

Platonic arithmetic is calloused like this, dividing and subdividing infinitesimally. Infinities should dream, and help us dream. Alec Wilkinson writes, “Augustine believed not only that God was infinite, but that He was also absolute, meaning that He contained infinity. Thinking about infinity led one toward Him” (A Divine Language 2022, 169). Instead, the regime of this asymptotic infinity is infinitely divided against ourselves, each other, and the present.

Vertical asymptote (photo linked)

Similarly, the instruments and revelations of the spirit of light can in fact facilitate the child’s daydreaming, those blissful reveries discussed by Bachelard, Sloterdijk, and others. The spirit of the child is the spirit of the dark, of chasms and abysses, of the bottom of the ocean and cosmic distances, of the speed of light and the speed of sound, of the uncommon underground, of inner and outer space, of a whole dialectics of inside/outside that breathe life into us beyond the screen, the Euclidean flatness, the technoscientific system, the industrial regime. It is a space of difference, alterity, dreams, and nightmares: the beginning of joyful terror.

Engaged rightly, technology can assist the recovery of the inner child, the inner artist, the daydreamer, the forgotten or forbidden astronaut or oceanographer, the oneironaut of dreams, the surveyor of lyrical densities luxuriously incomplete.

Take one example: “TON 618,” a quasar hosting a supermassive black hole billions of light-years away discovered in 1957 as a faint blue star during a survey by Mexican astronomers at the Tonantzintla Observatory.

While the supermassive black hole “Gargantua” is a cinematic creation in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), TON 618 is the real deal. With a mass of 66 billion times that of our sun, TON 618 eclipses Gargantua, depicted with a mass of 100 million times the sun’s. This is where numbers become mirage: almost unseeable. How do you imagine such a mass?

TON 618, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 9 (DR9) via CDS-Aladin Lite (photo linked)

Graphic representation of TON 618

Though calculable, it might as well be a Graham’s number beyond apprehension. It is here where we can dream, recover dreaming, again. Use it as a stellar scaffold, a Tower of Babel to the stars, one without confusion where ascent continually ascends without understanding but in understanding, mounting the stars one by one like steps on the stairs to the heavenly spheres above, over to this little black orb giving off no light but heating up surrounding matter to millions of degrees as it spirals into depths.

It may appear devilish, all this blackness heating and swirling matter, unconditionally taking it in, past the point of the event horizon, where no light escapes. Yet, if you look closer, it’s not so devilish after all, not anything evil or intimidating. It is more like the roundness of a table that gathers with an unseen force. A table means “a whole steadiness,” a gathering appearing (Stein 140). “A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing” (140). That little thing is our attention, our intention, narrowly confined to the small surfaces of screens. TON 618 is a calling, a calling to dream, to widen your circumference, the blackness of your pupils taking more and more in.

Look closer. Move in a bit. That little blue dot on the scope becomes a black hole, not just any one, but a central one, incomprehensibly larger than our sun. Its blackness confronts. Its heat melts away peripheries. It grows by consuming matter and even other black holes: accretion, to become larger, darker, shaping a wider swath of black fabric stretched 330,000 light years across. By the time its freshly emitted light reaches us again, it’ll be the year 322,025 (AD, if you like). Suppose a collapse, a synaptic break, symptomatic of revival, a synecdoche: this part is the whole.

The juxtaposing images here entangle contrasting dualities of the self: a tension of lightness and heaviness, of heaviness wanting to be light, to pop, but often so dense with weight, such as the baggage of past traumas, that it “sucks” everything in its path in, warping relations with others with the density of its tragedies. What if a black hole could help us see through the illusion of a self so loaded down with stories of itself that it should, if it could, annihilate itself due to its own overwhelming growth? Perhaps TON 618 could teach us a thing or two about what it means to let go, to unravel, to dissipate into the empty space of growth.

Such is just one use of the phenomenology of black holes when we allow ourselves to not only “study” but also feel in to things, to feel ourselves as things, entangled. If instead we turn to technology primarily for production and consumption, or scientific study alone, we risk a zone of no boundaries where the spirit of light both pervasively lights and endlessly divides in ways that take us further from the joy of Being itself.

In the achievement society, we miss salvation because we believe it comes through work. We believe it is earned. Science is embedded into this image of salvation. Science as work. Science as self-saving through knowledge and technology. Yet this attitude, as we have seen, intensifies and prolongs suffering. Damnation is a state of being effortlessly experienced here and now with the help of science itself. With science and technology, we work to save. Yet in so doing we often work ourselves to death.

In the 1873 novel Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbachand, Lorenz Diefenbach coins the phrase “Work sets you free,” alluding to Christ’s words in John 8:32: “and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, the phrase became emblematic of mass unemployment in Germany. Finally, the motto came to prominence as the concentration camp slogan, with “arbeit macht frei” displayed over barbed wire entrances to the death camps. Here, one worked oneself to death or else was put to death before endless work could finish the job.

Opening gate to Auschwitz (2008), by Parisa (photo linked)

Herein lies the radical reversal, or dialectical twist: a phrase intended to liberate, “The truth will set you free,” transmogrifies into the motto of genocide. Work doesn’t liberate you. It kills you.

Perhaps this goes too far for us today. It is not so much work itself but our attitude toward work as salvation and liberation that endangers us. In Psychological Types (1921), Jung defines attitude as a preparedness to “react to an external stimulus in a definite way” (414). We relate to work as that which will unburden us. But a preparedness to work one’s way to salvation ensures only death, for surely death comes before salvation is achieved.

Salvation in the New Testament resides in sacrifice, grace, mercy, and forgiveness. As a gift, salvation is received only with the effort of opening one’s hands, allowing oneself to receive and to be transformed by a force greater than ourselves. Salvation absolves us of torment past and present. One’s salvation covers sins before and after now.

Consequently, one may inhabit the present free from past guilt and future fears. Different religions and philosophies grasp that rest rests in presentness. There is no other way. There is disagreement over the path, but not the destination, dispute over the way there, but not the there there.

As Gertrude Stein said upon returning to her childhood home, “There is no there there” (Everybody’s Autobiography 1937). For her, there was no longer place in that space. As a child inhabiting home, there was place, value, dwelling—presentness. However, in revisiting the past, that place had vanished, for it only had value in that present. This is why in revisiting old things we relive memories of there but cannot occupy the there. We are on the outside looking in.

“Nostalgia,” after all, already means whatever was there is gone because it is no longer now. Etymologically, nostalgia means nostos algos: “return home pain.” This could be taken as the pain of desiring to return home and being unable to. It may also mean the pain of returning “there” but finding no there. Such is the pain of home becoming house, place becoming space. We might also call it nowstalgia, nostalgia for a departed now.

Children playing in a water hole near where Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland (1884) (Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room, photo linked)

How then to inhabit now? Not in nostalgia, the memory of the already gone. Memories carry resonances, to be sure, whose effects vibrate into the future. They are present, but they are not the present.

Where is the there there? Simply here. A here not in light of then or there, before or after. In the spirit of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity (1952), we could call it merely here. No more, no less. Not in the context of your accomplishments. Not contoured by memories. Not shaped by desires. Not colored by histories of yesterday and visions of tomorrow. Just here. What else?

It is the view right in front of you that you are not seeing or seeking. Awareness available of and to itself to freely inhabit. Thoughts disperse it. Feelings warp it. Sensations distract from it.

Immanuel Kant writes in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that our sensations “cannot rightly be considered qualities of things, but only as alterations in our subject, alterations which may, indeed, be different in different people” (66). In that spirit, all perceptions of the present alter it. Worse, they banish it.

Thinking in particular “captures” the moment, its qualities, meanings, and affordances. Consequently, the present becomes a past captive to intellect, thereby no longer remaining present. It is no longer the present but our understanding of the present. If understanding apprehends the present, it stands under it—not within it. Understanding is a force of separation.

Most activities and ways-of-being in achievement society are forces of separation. These are forces of more: do more, say more, buy more, achieve more, experience more. Always more.

“More” seems appealing until you in fact do, say, buy, achieve, and experience more. Over time, you realize your present has dissolved into a departed past and an imagined future. Work now, live later. Achieve today, enjoy tomorrow. Though helpful at certain stages of life, this ethos often becomes totality—not a stage of life, but life itself.

Then, in pure exhaustion, the radically less emerges like a childhood friend you had long since forgotten not because it is refreshingly new or different but because it is authentic. Suddenly, the bigger, better neighborhood you pursued with trophy friends and a trophy life seems counterfeit. You are a fraud, but only because you’ve so exceptionally imitated a fraudulent culture bereft of substance. They are frauds because they have done the same. Consequently, culture becomes a “dictatorship of the They” and a “tyranny of the should” (Heidegger Being and Time 1927, §§32–38; Karen Horney Neurosis and Human Growth 1950, 64-85).

Fraudulence is original sin.

Fraudulence is the genesis. Revelation is the exposition of the Wizard of Oz, a little old man behind a curtain of pretense. This is yourself: your ego, your sham life. You should have heeded the God of Leviticus’ warning: depart from the way, and “I will break down your pride.”

Nevertheless, though difficult, the way permits Sisyphean drudgery, for the clarity of fraudulence lays bare Quality’s excellence.

Detail of Krater from Altamura (c. 350 B.C.), National Archaeological Museum of Naples, 81666 (photo linked)

You’ve done all that. You’ve played the game and seen the stage where all men and women are merely players. Now, empty clichés ring true for the first time. Knowledge becomes a way-of-being-in-the-world, as it was for the Greeks. Except that whereas previous ways brought distance, as forces of more, new knowledge brings nearness through forces of less: ridding yourself of vanity, non-things, achievements, safety, and fear. Nearness presences in the now. Now presences nearness. Just now, presence calls.

To where? To here. What more?

The End (…sort of)

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. (1)

Unlike Heidegger, Kaczynski convicts technology itself. His solution is to not use technology except “to attack the technological system” (95). Therefore, he calls for a full-scale destruction of the contemporary technological society “that may or may not make use of violence” (2).

He certainly lived his creed, using technology only to make and send bombs to perceived key participants in industrial society, being otherwise holed up in his Montana shack with no electricity or running water. One may critique Kaczynski for many things. Being a hypocrite, however, is not one of them.

Tangible and visible, technology and industry make convenient scapegoats. Kaczynski embodies the easy rage of those smothered in technologies that seem to back peace up against the wall, with no way out except unconditional surrender, often occupying the in-between of the revolutionary and clinical schizophrenic (Wade Foucault in California, 87).

This summary of the technological situation is partially true. Invasive new technologies make it more difficult to protect peace. Nevertheless, even in secluded Montana Kaczynski found no peace. There was the sawmill up the road with its technological clattering, the teenagers tearing up and down roads on dirt bikes, and the like. Increasingly filled with hatred and resentment, Kaczynski found less and less peace. Finally, the loss of peace of mind broke him, which he attributed to modern technology and the industrial society.

Kaczynski’s story illustrates and elaborates two crucial points we have been discussing: 1) Technology is not the problem, but rather our relation to it 2) Peace is not located outside oneself but within. To believe otherwise is to externalize two problems, both of a spiritual, inward, or psychological nature.

Firstly, technology is a manifestation of spirit, as we have discussed at length. So is peace. Externalizing both problems, Kaczynski misunderstood technology and himself. Consequently, his resentment led to destruction from within and without.

Math professor Ted Kaczynski, then about 25, to this day the youngest professor hired by UC Berkeley, in front of Doe Library at UC Berkeley, CA. The future “Unabomber” taught at Cal for two years before quitting (by George M. Bergman, Berkeley via Wikimedia Commons, photo linked).

Perhaps the last photo taken of Kaczynski before his death in 2023

The contrast in Kaczynski’s photos reflects what an uncritical struggle with the spirit of light may do to an individual over time. It is all too easy to externalize one’s problems. On the surface, the spirit of light seems inescapable. As a matter of practicality, it cannot be avoided, not even in a secluded Montana forest. Even in Joshua Tree, residents and routine travelers complain of the Airbnb crowd drowning out their silence and filling their space of desertion with noise and light. If one locates peace in absolute privacy, one is surely cursed.

If one interprets the spirit of light metaphysically as a transcendent force in the Biblical or similar sense, this breakdown of the individual is more than incidental. It happens not only due to the effects of the spirit of light. It is intentional.

This spirit’s sole purpose is to break one down, to destroy peace, joy, love, and rest. It cannot do this directly, all at once. For most, it happens over a lifetime. It starts with small concessions. You give away your peace, little by little. It happens as innocuously as allowing an app to send notifications. More frequently, you check your email, your social media. You give away your time to things you do not value out of politeness, obligation, fear.

Little by little, light shines through. Without awareness, it overtakes you. Kaczynski resisted, albeit in the wrong way. What you resist, persists. Finally, it broke him too.

Kaczynski’s breakage was dramatic, garnering a national stage. The juxtaposed photos make his destruction undeniable. For most of us, however, the destruction is subtle. It occupies no stage, produces no before and after photos.

Slowly, we change, losing bits of ourselves, a piece of peace here and there, in a moment or two. Finally, we no longer resemble ourselves, the child we knew free of light and full of play (if one was fortunate enough), an empty darkness pregnant with potential, as the Daoists say, with empty space for becoming.

Space is filled with light, only not the light we associate “light” to be. This light is true darkness, the light that crowds out—that blinds. We thus close our eyes to who we might otherwise be.

Lucifer is light.

Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, hauled from Montana to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. for investigation (photo linked)

Kaczynski’s struggle, which is the struggle of those of us who battle the spirit of light, is best illustrated through the Zen parable of the “empty boat” (Nguyen Don’t Believe Everything You Think 23-26). It is the story of a young monk who, in practicing meditation, grows easily disturbed by others fidgeting around him, making noise and disrupting his peace. An elder monk suggests he find a way to not allow such things to distract and frustrate him. Nevertheless, he identifies the people as the problem. Finding a place by the lake, he meditates quietly, but finds himself disturbed the sounds of animals, wind, and the the like.

Finally, he takes a boat out into the middle of the lake to find peace, which he does, at last meditating quietly. Just then, however, he notices a boat headed his direction. He stands up and yells at the boat as it’s about to crash into his, but no one responds. The boat hits his dead on, and now he’s furious.

Upon investigating, he finds no one in the boat. It’s just an empty boat that drifted from shore. Suddenly, his rage settles down. It doesn’t matter anymore. The elder monk later asks, “Do you know what is really making you angry?” He replies, “It’s not the empty boat but my reaction to it that causes my anger. All the people or situations that upset me are like the empty boat. Without my reaction, they don’t have the power to make me angry” (25-26).

It’s our response, our thinking, that shapes reality, especially the force of negative emotion. Respond differently and experience a different reality. The young monk’s responses gave power to the environment, externalizing peace. Since peace was outside himself, he had no control over it, no access to it as long as there were any conceivably imperfect or distracting variables. The more we externalize peace, the less likely we are to experience it.

This was Kaczynski’s mistake. This is our mistake. Perhaps it is more dramatic in Kaczynski’s case, but we all give away our share of power, and by externalizing rest unknowingly lose it.

Link to full parable of the empty boat attributed to Zhuang Zhou (c. 369—c. 286 BCE), or Zhuangzi, one of the founders of Daoism

In his lectures, Eastern philosophy popularizer Alan Watts often illustrated this lesson by way of metaphor (The Tao of Philosophy 1999). Imagine headlights, he says. Headlights shine on the road without being aware of the wires connecting them to the battery. Likewise, we perceive the world with our eyes without realizing how that perception comes to pass. We are aware that we perceive but not how we perceive.

Extending Watts’ metaphor, consider that not all headlights are identical. There are different shapes, sizes, strengths, filters, and so forth. Normally, we perceive headlights as mere illumination. They light the dark, making it visible. But if you look closely, headlights differently light the dark.

The same may be said of our perception of reality. Our eyes do not passively receive the world. They are not merely receptors but projectors. Perception projects as much as it receives. Deeper than headlights, perception projects our experience of the world.

Alan Watts (The Alan Watts Organization, photo linked)

Thus construed, reality receives our projections, which is then reflected back into our perception, seeming real. But it is not real. Reality is never perceived as such. This is why Jung states that the psyche is the most fundamental reality. We experience everything through it and nothing apart from it. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1993, 190), Jung writes,

Then I discover that a tone is a vibration of the air of such and such a frequency, or that a colour is a wave-length of light of such and such a length. We are in all truth so enclosed by psychic images that we cannot penetrate to the essence of things external to ourselves. All our knowledge is conditioned by the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real.

But do we perceive perception as such? Likely not. We move through the world believing that perception passively receives reality the way that headlights shine, illuminating the environment. Reality as we perceive it is not reality but rather, as father of American psychology William James puts it, “a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” (Principles of Psychology Volume 1 1890, 234).

William James, “father of American psychology” (photo linked)

The shifting, relational nature of reality led ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus to famously say, “No man ever steps in the same river twice because it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Nature changes, as do we. Our reality lies in the relation of the two in perpetual flux.

For Heraclitus, flux is represented by fire, construed as the primordial element. From fire is light. Our eyes are headlights in the flux of experience actively altering the real as relation.

Consequently, what we see is not any thing-in-itself, as Kant would say, but rather our relationship to it. A thing is not a thing-in-self and for-itself but a “gathering” of many things, experiences, and relations (Heidegger Poetry, 174).

Seminal philosopher G. W. F. Hegel goes as far to say that, given our phenomenological relation to reality, science is not the study of nature or reality as such. Rather, science is the study “of the experience of consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit 1807, 56).

When we study the world, we are always in turn studying ourselves, so much so that, as Bachelard adds, “We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it” (Psychoanalysis of Fire 1938, 1).

Our own “psychoanalysis of fire”—of light, of energy—reveals that the light our eyes shine on reality is just as important as the light they take in.

Link to YouTube video on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, which is in fact responsible for more headaches than Heidegger

It is just here at the intersection of technology as light and perception as perceived reality that Kaczynski lost his way, as we often do. Those of us not lost or asleep in the technological-industrial dream often find ourselves at war with it. If we are asleep, we feel nothing but lose everything. Our lives go by, unbeknownst to us.

In The Tao of Bill Murray (2016), Gavin Edwards explores acclaimed actor Bill Murray’s Daoist philosophy (note that Taoism with a “T” follows the Romanized spelling of the Wade–Giles system, while “Daoism” follows simplified Chinese pinyin, which is what I use). At one point, Murray moved to Paris after his Hollywood hit Ghostbusters (1984), studying French and philosophy at the Sorbonne. George Gurdjieff caught his attention for the philosopher’s position “that most people, even as they lead their waking lives, are actually asleep on the inside” (21). Murray took it upon himself to wake people up both through his films, like Lost In Translation (2003) and Broken Flowers (2005), and daily life.

Waking up, however, is not easy. What does that mean? How do you do it? Once awake, what then? If only waking up entailed immediate ease, rest, and joy. More often one has the opposite response. No longer in a deep, numb slumber adrift amidst the latest technologies, fads, and superficial achievements, nihilism may follow. Nothing truly matters. All is vain. “There is nothing new under the sun,” Ecclesiastes writes (1:9). Society is décadence, Nietzsche adds. Decadence and collapse into nothingness. We can hardly fault one another for staying asleep.

Bill Murray in Ghostbusters (1984), Moviestore Collection/REX (photo linked)

Another response is Kaczynski’s, often ours, and once mine: resentment. One resents the insanity of “the system.” This system, as the technological-industrial regime, robs peace for profit extraction, subjugating creativity, goodness, and all work to the eternal market machine indebted to rising stock portfolios managed by a select few who are just as unhappy as their discontented subjects. Their motto: always more.

Murray’s career offers a highlight:

The first day you check in to a hotel in L.A. there’s a message under your door. The second day, there’s eleven messages under your door. The third day, there’s thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy messages. And I realized that they just want fresh blood. They. Just. Want. Fresh. Blood. You gotta get the hell out of there. (22)

For most, however, “getting out” is not an option. Often there is no out, only elsewhere in. Or if one gets “out,” one rarely does so entirely. The spirit of light is so pervasive that most cannot even conceive of another option. As “the system,” this spirit eclipses possibility. While that may not be it’s job, that it’s effect.

Some critics point to the zombie apocalypse genre embodied in such films as 28 Days Later (2002) and shows like The Walking Dead (2010-2022) as desperate attempts to imagine an escape from technological-industrial society. Here, the only way to begin otherwise is to begin again.

Attributed to philosophers Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek is the phrase, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” The issue, however, is not capitalism, per se, but the deeper spirit from which capitalism, the market, modern technology, and modern science originate: the spirit of light, enlightenment, illumination, and the annihilation of darkness, difference, and their accompaniments, such as solitude, peace, quiet, rest, and the like.

Ross Marquand as Aaron and Cooper Andrews as Jerry in The Walking Dead (2010-2022, Jace Downs / AMC, photo linked)

Capitalism as we know it is just one outgrowth of “the system” that lone wolves like Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jung, Pirsig, Kaczynski, and others criticize in remarkably similar ways, making them more so wolves with a scattered pack. Many seem content asleep in the system (“seem” being the operative word). Those who aren’t are often driven mad in different ways.

Nietzsche grew severely mentally ill by the end of his life, for which some physicians bake up physical theories (syphilis, etc.). If you sit with Nietzsche, however, reading the evolution of his philosophy, mind, resentment, and the like over his life, you see him writing himself off the edge of “the system” altogether in a brilliantly destructive way which costed him his sanity, some argue, as was the case of contemporary philosopher Wouter Kusters, who was hospitalized with “psychosis” twice as the direct result, he claims, of his philosophical explorations beyond the system (A Philosophy of Madness 2020). This need not be the end of philosophy, but it can be.

Thoreau and Jung seemed to keep their senses in tact, although Jung struggled with mental illness in sporadic, explosive ways, and he credits his psychiatric practice, family, and home life with keeping him grounded, in contrast to Nietzsche, whom he notes had no such roots (Memories, Dreams, Reflections 1961).

The ailing philosopher in the care of his sister (Tagesspiegel / Wikipedia, photo linked to article on the possible role of his philosophy in his mental illness)

Pirsig spent over a year in a psychiatric hospital, finally deciphering a way forward (the pursuit of Quality) despite not being able to change the system, whereas Kaczynski’s resentment grew so robust that he turned to revenge.

Then there is Bill Murray who, despite his crazy antics, friends report, is in fact less interested in being the center of attention in slapstick ways than having “a serious philosophical, intellectual conversation” (Tao 32).

This desire initiated his move to Paris, his study at the Sorbonne, his turn to more serious films later in his career, and his radically Daoist daily life in contrast to the glitz, fresh blood, and theatrical egoism of Hollywood.

The University of Paris, or Sorbonne, where Bill Murray briefly studied (photo linked)

It is no accident that I’ve culled these examples from the vast lineages of philosophical and other thinkers. They are simply those with whom I’ve most identified over and against “the system.” They are those I read, watch, and teach, insofar as they share one common thread: they are Other. In their fields, they are misfits, inhabiting the borders of things in sometimes precarious, dangerous ways.

I don’t simply “enjoy” these thinkers. I am Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jung, Pirsig, and, yes, Kaczynski (without his destructive conclusion). However, as I witnessed my own resentment growing in Nietzschean fashion and found myself uncomfortably resonating with Kaczynski’s life and manifesto, I had sense enough to pull myself back from the edge, to calm the storm, and gather my peace.

Pirsig writes that you cannot change the system without changing the structure which brings that system into being. That structure is systematic thought itself:

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. (98)

Since the system appears too pervasive to effect a wholesale dismantling of systematic thought itself, one damns oneself to try. Rather, the task, Pirsig acknowledges, is to pursue Quality however one can, even in the smallest, individual ways (298). “Individual” need not entail individual choices only, but Quality choices in or by one’s community or scope of influence. Such efforts seem minuscule, but at least they are possible. To not allow oneself peace until the system—the spirit—is reformed or destroyed entirely is to deny peace.

Luckily, Kaczynski is wrong about at least one thing. The problem, it seems to me, is not so much technology, or modern technology, as what lies beyond technology: incessant activity—the effect of the spirit of light.

As we have discussed, this is the purpose of modern technology: to increase activity, which is to say production, and thereby consumption, and thereby production, in an infinite circle—the ouroboros eating its own tail. There is no outside the circle. To attempt to escape is to embark on an endless Möbius strip where one finds oneself perpetually in circuit, no further from the origin point.

It is a Sisyphean struggle against not one but ten thousand boulders. Whatever metaphor or myth you choose, the result is the same: it’s pointless to change “the system.” In doing so, you at best lose the battle and at worst lose yourself in the process as Kaczynski did.

The ouroboros, symbolic of cycles, transformations, eternal return, and more across world mythologies (photo linked)

Paper Möbius strip where all directions are topologically equivalent, and there is no “outside” (photo linked)

Fighting the system or technology, which are in effect identical, is a struggle with quicksand. Yet the resentment is so strong that many like Kaczynski fight anyway. He didn’t send bombs to scientists and technologists because he believed this would change the system. He simply “hated living in it” (Unabomber 2020). Revenge, while sweet, is a surefire way to self-immolation.

Technology or “the system” isn’t the root of the problem. If the problem, as we have discussed, is our relation to technology, this means that peace within technology is not only possible but necessary. For, one can be a Kaczynski and move to a secluded Montana cabin and still not escape technology. It is harder and harder to be a Thoreau, yet even he only stayed in the woods for two years.

Furthermore, his woods weren’t exactly “wilderness.” Rather, Thoreau lived on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s estate just a mile and a half from the Concord town center. That isn’t to demean Thoreau’s project, since for Thoreau the “wild” was simply uncultivated land, whether in the Alaskan wilderness (see the story of Christopher McCandless in the Into the Wild book and film) or one’s backyard.

It is to say, however, that even our great “back to nature” stories are not more than temporary adventures on the outskirts of technology’s dominion, outskirts which are now few and far between.

There is no surer path to self-destruction than to attempt to escape or destroy technology. Even if one were to destroy technology, which technology? Even writing is a technology, one Socrates complained greatly of, as Plato portrays in his immortal dialogue Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), due to its function as a force of separation. Writing separates sound from word, speaker from time period and audience, and so forth. One would have to use no tools or inventions to truly denounce technology, including the sharp stones our ancestors employed as tools some two million years ago.

One can minimize or perhaps avoid more invasive or destructive technologies and can develop a responsible relationship with technology, but one cannot simply avoid or destroy technology itself. One would have to destroy human beings altogether, as technology is an extension of the human spirit.

The fact is that peace resides in technology just as easily as in nature. Pirsig writes,

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a motorcycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. (17)

It’s all too easy to believe that eliminating the endless distractions and vanities of modern life would naturally bestow the “Buddha”: enlightenment, peace, and rest. But this is again to externalize peace in response to a false belief that locates power, and thus responsibility, outside oneself. Thoreau writes of the average man,

How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all day he fears, not being immortal or divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. (7)

Appropriating Thoreau, to externalize peace is subtly to give away one’s power. To believe that peace is “out there,” beyond technology, or whatever it is that one might identify as an obstacle to peace, is to bind peace to circumstance, which is to say radical flux. In such a world, peace is rare.

As Nguyen writes, we do not need permission from the outside to feel peace (51). Perhaps this is an effect of it being easier to blame an external source for our suffering instead of ourselves and our beliefs. “Blame,” of course, is not the right word, but that’s what it feels like when you realize you’ve unnecessarily created your own suffering. It is simply a recognition of what is that realizes the possibility of change.

One possibility of change lies in reshaping a destructive relationship with technology constitutive of the spirit of light. This relationship makes technology and science more friend than foe if technology becomes, as we have discussed through Pirsig, an extension of the human spirit.

For this relationship to obtain, however, we need darkness literally and metaphorically. As pre-Socratic Greek philosophers like Parmenides recognized, there is something enchanting, mysterious, and spacious about literal darkness. It is conducive to free-roaming thought, imagination, and wonder.

Incubation sleep: Asclepius, attended by Hygiea, treats a sleeping woman (votive relief, 4th century BC, photo linked). Illustrative of the ancient practice of incubation, the ritual of sleeping in a sacred space with the intention of receiving a divine message or healing in a dream, emblematic of the sacredness of the dark hours.

Although Plato valued darkness only for its association with leisure hours, he agrees on the importance of wonder for philosophy: “wonder is the only beginning of philosophy” (Theaetetus 155d). Though not exclusively, quiet darkness enables wonder. What is stargazing, after all, but the experience of being itself through a confrontation with scale? “Look to the stars” is not an idiom for imagining possibility for nothing. It expresses an innate relation to darkness as the condition of becoming.

As such, literal darkness is bound up with metaphorical creation and expansion of space. The Big Bang occurred cosmically, but we also experience it inwardly. Too much light, noise, and busyness crowds out the requisite emptiness of becoming.

This is to say that we need darkness to remain more human than machine. Yet, given the spirit of light’s compulsion to dispel darkness in the drive to technology and activity, it is more difficult than ever to find or create darkness. Darkness is a void that light fills.

In our “disciplinary society,” as Foucault calls it and discusses at length throughout his works, especially Discipline and Punish (1975), we must make space for the undisciplined domains of darkness and silence. We must, as Heidegger says, observe “the discipline of keeping silence” (Wade Foucault in California 2019).

Consider the Zen parable of the empty cup. One day, a scholar consults a Zen master for advice about Zen but is already full of thoughts himself, hardly allowing the master to speak. The master then pours a cup of tea for the scholar. When the cup is full, he keeps pouring. The cup overflows, spilling on the table. The scholar tells the master to stop, to which he receives the response that a cup overflowing cannot receive anything more. Come back with an empty cup, the master tells the scholar who is already overflowing with his own ideas and opinions (Nguyen 195-196).

Our disciplined knowledge and ways of being are often too full or rigid to allow change and growth. Keep silent, as Heidegger advises, and see what arrives.

Link to “Empty Your Cup” metaphor in Zen Buddhism

Light fills the cup of darkness, such that we can hardly conceive of a life beyond technology, science, productivity, ambition, ego, work, activity, and the like. Light eclipses possibility and difference, filling silence that would enable us to think otherwise.

Therefore, for those of us awake, or awakening, one crucial task is to erect boundaries against this very spirit of light, of haste, in order to reclaim the degrees of freedom afforded to us by our own centrifugal force against the centripetal force of encroaching light. One may only protect one’s darkness. The task is to not be seen, to hide from the light, to stay quiet, slow, peaceful, and awake.

Perhaps “hiding” is not quite right, however, since “not being seen” by this spirit does not mean avoiding technology (although there are times for that too), but rather allowing its penetrating, invasive ways to slip gently past, like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix (1999). This response includes boundaries to technology, to be sure, some of which are offered by technology itself (like the “Do Not Disturb” or “Personal” modes on your phone).

On the whole, however, it means responsibly reshaping one’s relationship with technology to the fullest extent possible, such that the spirit of light does not entirely illuminate the dark spaces necessary for a thriving, differentiated soul.

To be continued…

Horizontally, we grow. Vertically, we shrink. We no longer feel or hear deeply, powerfully, passionately. Vision as sight has eclipsed our ability to receive. This is the dominion of ocularcentrism, as historian Martin Jay puts it in Downcast Eyes (1993), or life by sight. It is a sight by light that penetrates, pervades, and blinds. A life by the far and wide.

Did anyone stop to think that we need the darkness, the depths? Where can one see the night sky in its full splendor? One must go to an “International Dark Sky Park” like Joshua Tree to “see” darkness. Light is so invasive that darkness must be federally protected, including the national parks that secure the dark. Without it, entire ecosystems vanish.

As does spirit.

Darkness is an endangered species. Naturally, it was Plato who first criticized his fellow philosophers who met in the quiet depths of night. The darkness was sacred and afforded the qualitative space to think deeply and differently, unobstructed by the light that fills, leaving no space in which to wander.

In contrast to his predecessors, Plato valued the dark hours merely because they afforded leisure time from the day’s activities. He couldn’t comprehend the value of darkness in and for itself that Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy, saw so clearly, who Plato figuratively “killed” with his philosophy to the extent that he was accused of patricide (killing one’s father). From there, darkness declined.

Joshua Tree National Park, Lance Gerber/DESERT Magazine (photo linked)

Joshua Tree Night Sky showing Milky Way, or “Silver River” in Chinese, or “Star River” (National Park Service, photo linked)

Herein lies the radical irony. Many would name the “spirit of darkness” today the “devil,” while not professing belief in him. However, this is not the spirit of darkness at all. It is the spirit of light, the “light-bearer,” who extinguishes darkness.

Lucifer is light. Bearing light, he illuminates. He enlightens. He clears up (German aufklärgung, or enlightenment) our heaviness so that we no longer look to the stars, which we in any case cannot see, in wonder or reverence but only to our screens in shallow comfort. Space is a vacuum, but its emptiness pales in comparison to the vacuity of spirit.

Look to the night sky of Los Angeles or any city, and what do you see? Light. Or, better, “light pollution.” This spirit of Lucifer pollutes the darkness that would otherwise teach us to feel, hear, and live more deeply, more deliberately, as Thoreau would say (Walden 72).

Plato and his lineage believed themselves to be drawing humanity near the heavens with their light. Ironically, in many ways they were an instrument of darkness, which is to say the spirit of light, of intellect: the foreclosure of the dark divine.

Light pollution of Los Angeles, CA, an inverted heaven where the only stars are stars of the earth, which are not nearly as inspiring (Mike Knell, photo linked)

As philosopher of science Michel Serres puts it in a resonant conversation on the lineage of modern science, and physics in particular,

Nothing new under the reign of the same and under the same reign, preserved. Nothing new and nothing to be born, no nature. This is death, eternally. Nature put to death, its birth unwanted. The science of this is nothing. It is calculably nothing. Stable, immutable, redundant. It recopies the same writings, with the same atom-letters. The law is the plague. Reason is the fall. (The Birth of Physics 109)

The spirit of science and technology expands our horizons and closes distances while simultaneously closing off vertical horizons of height and depth. We see and know more but feel and live less. We have plenty of information but little meaning. We have infinite data, but no stories. We’re “connected,” but not with narrative.

Ironically, the spirit of darkness, which is the spirit of light, smothers its own capacity to see clearly, for the light pollution of cities cuts off our ability to gaze at the very stars scientists employ technology to study.

As Serres reminds us, the eye sits at the top of the cone of perception, our head (101). Other senses, like smell and taste, are literally and figuratively below sight. I would add that our mind and brain sit atop our bodies literally and figuratively, as well, so much so that we see ourselves as disembodied minds. This is why the suit covers the body entirely, nullifying and standardizing a man’s body, for instance, as nothing but a vessel for the brain of the achievement society in its relentless technoscientific race.

This reality precedes and exceeds technological society today. It was present when Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), in part to critique the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, but also the general state of chronic labor and toil that evaporates presence and joy, regardless of technology, whereby most people are seen “creeping down the road of life” (Walden 5). Witnessing the bare meanness of the lives of his fellow citizens in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau famously concludes,

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book [the Bible], laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. . . . Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. (5)

Whether labor consists of plowing a field or answering endless emails, the result is the same: life unknowingly vanishes in the stream of menial tasks.

AI, they say, will eliminate many such tasks, freeing up time. Of course, this was said of smartphones, email, internet, personal computers, radio, planes, cars, telephones, telegraphs, assembly line, and the like. And here we are, still tirelessly working, and in many places (like Los Angeles) perhaps more than ever.

As technology closes distances in space and time, ostensibly freeing us to enjoy the meaningful things, clearing space, such space is quickly filled by more tasks, a higher workload, more notifications, more expectations, and more communication.

Replica of Henry David Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond in Concord, MA, today a tourist attraction loaded with people (photo linked)

Whatever spacetime technology opens is filled by means of technology itself, and then some. Email, for instance, made communication considerably faster, saving time in the tasks of handwriting, filling out addresses, buying postage, visiting the post office, and so forth.

But this time freed up by technology was reciprocally filled through technology itself. Since emails were faster than letters, more emails came. Hence, we spend more time than ever communicating. Texting considerably worsened this phenomenon. Then, social media. Now, we are always available, always on call, which is to say unavailable to ourselves, to rest. There are no boundaries, no personal space, no freedom, and, hence, no peace.

Given this situation, we do our best. Our response is often one of escape, or fugitivity. At night, we play fugitive from the technoscientific regime. We “entertain” ourselves. Drive through any suburban area on a cool Southern California night and witness the fugitivity captured in the glare of screens caught through bedroom windows. “Bedroom communities,” they call them. Because where else is there to go? What else is there to do? We turn out the lights and escape vicariously through lives more dramatic than our own, more interesting than the repetitive slog of materialism masquerading as progress, as productivity.

Productive for what? For whom?

Typical suburban bedroom community (photo-linked)

Is it fugitivity or captivity to be glued to a screen in an (un)conscious attempt to feel anything other than extortion of one’s energy, one’s energic potential welled up deep inside where one can hardly feel any longer anything other than exhaustion? Fugitivity or captivity? Is there a difference if the outcome is the same? Is there a third way?

Incidentally but not intentionally, this too often invisible (because it is omnipresent) regime affords entertainment as a means of escape. This escape alleviates pressure, allows one to “wind down” to ensure that one is ready to “wind up” the next day. Relaxation is fatefully enjoined to tension, to a doing and undoing that is endlessly taut toward achievement and productivity.

The stress-producing regime offers stress-reducing “activities” to increase maximum imposable pressure, or else the portfolios could not grow, the profits could not expand, and the companies would not yield, embodied as they are in percentages, these single numbers that signal a semiotic transcendence (Kaczynski 71-72).

What is it to yield? To produce, bear, but most of all surrender. What do we do? We yield to this yield, this kingdom of ratios, of relations as number—all our relations enfolded into a relation that yields to the number as Other, the “big Other” of this symbolic order, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would say (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, 56). From here, from there, onward to yet another number, another yield, another domain of the reign. Reign of the same.

The calculative empire rises.

To ask if there is an “end” is to violate the non-consensual contractual agreement of the regime that prohibits endings. Every ending is a beginning to still another end, which begins again. Aways beginning, but never becoming.

One no sooner arrives to a number, product, goal, or “achievement” than one begins. Since there is no time to linger or reflect, awareness of the insanity of the never-ending is no problem. Once one’s feet touch the ground, they rise. But the sweetness of the ground, if only momentary, is alluring enough for ascent to dream of descent, to the always already there but inaccessible, to the incalculable beyond (beyond yield).

If there is a top to this regime, a final plot on the line of annual yields, who will reach it? What resides there? If numbers cease to rise, what then? Perhaps time itself, as the pathological as psychological, which is to say psychotic, time of calculation achieves its telos, its end, which is nothing other than an annihilation ironically imposed by its own delusional premise, its insane game of numbers.

In this regime of knowing, the number is a construct that kills. In suicidal ideation, numbers dream. Their dream is our undoing. Their rise is our fall. Each rise is an inverse descent. What happens when a number cannot rise, when it ungraciously falls? Where does it land? Does it realize it never existed at all?

Yet numbers do not end, so in this game there is no terminal surpassing, no achievement outside of achievement, number outside of number, knowing beyond knowing. One is fatefully braided to the game playing itself through us, bodies upon bodies, added up. Human capital, as it were, the capital of the cruelly lowercase.

The calculative regime from 1950 to present as illustrated by the top 500 companies

Still, we go on. Enter AI.

AI is supposedly making life more convenient than ever, eliminating many tasks. ChatGPT helps lawyers generate much of the content paralegals did; generate code once manually written by software engineers; draft emails for us; analyze, interpret, and summarize our notes in written or even podcast form; interpret data for doctors, from X-rays, to medical history, and the like, recommending treatment plans. The list goes on.

At first, new technologies appear to be a blessing. Cars are faster than horses. Emails are faster than letters. AI overviews are faster than Wikipedia or firsthand research. AI generative content is faster than thinking, reading, and writing for oneself.

Faster, always faster. Always more. Did anyone stop to think that perhaps there is value to the slow and steady, the ponderous and lingering?

Although one can abstain from technologies at first, choosing not to buy a car or smartphone, for instance, soon society is structured around that technology in such a way as to require it (Kaczynski 56-57).

As Heidegger suggests with his concept of “readiness-to-hand,” our perception of tools and their uses shapes how we interact with and (re)construct the world. In some sense, the hammer shapes the hand as much as the hand shapes the hammer. Before we know it, we have an entire “system” that obliges us to engage an enormous host of technologies that crowd out the slow, the lingering, and the contemplative.

Visualization in an article about how ChatGPT works (photo linked)

In What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (2018), Adam Becker recounts how Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said to a colleague, “I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do object when you publish more quickly than you can think” (48).

Faster is not always better. Often, it is worse. It is the slow, lingering stroll through thought that clears space for new ideas, as was the case for many breakthroughs in relativity and quantum theory. If there is no time to linger, Han notes, there is not only no space for peace and rest, but also no space for creation: “Whoever is not capable of stopping and pausing has no access to what is altogether different” (The Scent of Time 104).

Han quotes Heidegger on our “never dwelling anywhere” as a result of the acceleration of life (62). For, “essential existence” is “slow” (63). Without slowness, dwelling evaporates. Without the slowness of being, creation is null. Hence, the modernist poet Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new” becomes void. All we have, as Serres writes above, is “the reign of the same.” Certainly, new technologies emerge, but all with the same purpose and effect: to hasten the age of haste.

“Sharp-tongued” quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli (CERN/Wikimedia Commons/Big Think/Ben Gibson, photo linked)

Slowness and difference aside, the question is what will we make of the space and time allegedly opened up by AI? What will we do?

While we need not be technological determinists, an unthinking response to AI suggests that these spaces will quickly be filled by means of technology itself. Prepare for even higher workloads, more tasks, more communication, and more information. What is cleared by the fast and excessive is just as quickly filled by it.

Let there be no illusion that the spirt of light that illuminates time and space, hastening knowledge, activity, and pace won’t quickly exhaust that space. It is strictly illogical to believe that such spaces and times opened up by the spirit of haste will be filled by anything other than the fruits of that same spirit. That is the purpose of these technologies, after all: not to give us more time as such, but more time for more work. This is the end game of the achievement society: more, not less. It cares not about your time, only your ability to efficiently complete additional tasks.

How is AI anything other than an extension of this same spirit of light, of haste, of the consummate closure of spacetime itself into the radical exhaustion of modernity?

And yet we still go on believing, don’t we, that one day, with the right technologies, the right apps, the right software, time will once again be ours. Do not be fooled. No such time is coming. More technology will arrive, of course, but it will not free you. Quite the opposite. What at first appears redemptive is nothing less than a tighter grip on your time, your space, your life. For you, achievement society bestows technology. In return, it takes your silence, peace, rest, and freedom.

In The Burnout Society (2010), Han discusses our auto-exploitation at length, the ways in which we become our own masters and slaves in an achievement society of our own making. In search of peace, rest, and security, we work. We need no master to enslave us. We enslave ourselves to endless work. Peace never arrives. It never arrives because we create no space for it, as Nguyen observes (64-67). For peace is not pursued but allowed through empty space, through not thinking, not trying.

Yet technology is not a space of the negative but the positive: full and not empty to maximize consumption. It is a porous and not protected space: open without boundaries to expand the flow of capital and production. It is an alienated and not friendly space: isolated and not communal because the communal encourages peace, rest, and lingering (which is to say “loitering” in the technoscientific regime).

In this way, the tragically ironic cliché emerges: we are simultaneously more connected and isolated than ever. Immanently present in digital space, our algorithmic bodies are without borders, constantly in contact, breaking at the seams. As embodied humans, however, we are without touch, touchless—the skin on skin of mother and child replaced by meshing algorithms cybernetically drawn across the smooth encoded plane of alien(ated) networks embodied only in the circuitry of the never-having-been.

To this effect, the U.S. Surgeon General warns of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” citing “social media” 27 times as a key contributor in the major 2023 report. The effects of loneliness and isolation cascade across mental and physical health, since there is no such separation, only a spiritmindbody that is the entangled culmination of our entire way of life.

Many associate such a condition with newer, more invasive technologies like smartphones and social media. Surely, we think, it was different before the world followed us around in our pockets, before our third-dimensional world was replaced with two-dimensional surfaces.

This, however, is not the case. It is not only newer technologies that occupy a prominent role in our subjugation to work, to activity. While Han pinpoints the distinction between the transatlantic slave trade and contemporary auto-exploitation, where each individual serves as master and slave in one, Thoreau observed the same phenomenon circa 1846. At this time, the sewing machine was state of the art, as well as commercial telegraph lines. Telephones didn’t arrive until 1876. Naturally, there was no internet or television, not even radio. Slavery had not yet ended, although the north was ostensibly “free.” Nevertheless, Thoreau writes in Walden (1854),

[T]here are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a norther one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. (6)

Thoreau illustrates that it’s not the type of technology but rather our relationship to technology that kills us, that lays waste to our time, our lives. Our relation to technology is a reflection of our relation to ourselves. Occupied with endless work, we employ technology in such an occupation.

As we have discussed through Heidegger, technology is an extension of ourselves. A smartphone is no different than a hammer in this regard. We build it because we see use in it. The purpose is the cause, not the human agent. This use extends work, reshaping us as we reshape “it” (the hammer, phone, computer, and so forth).

Once built, the hammer, like the smartphone, helps define the possibilities of work. We design further tools that will work well with a hammer, as with apps for a smartphone. Round and round we go. It is thus not technology that is in charge. It is not technology that enslaves us. Neither the hammer, telegraph, nor smartphone makes any difference to the essential spirit. It is the spirit that creates. In turn, it shapes a relation to the world, inclusive of technology.

The truth is in the assemblage, as Deleuze and Guattari call it in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), which political theorist Jane Bennett has done extensive work on (Vibrant Matter 2010). That is, the truth is in the entanglement of human and non-human agencies endlessly shaping each other without a chief agent.

AI is simply another tool. The spirit remains the same, the spirit of the same, of light, reason, logic, calculation, all of which becomes bound to work, production, activity, and the market.

Article introducing Google’s AI Notebook LM, a personalized podcast generator (2024)

Work is not enslavement as such, but incessant activity and production in and for itself is antithetical to peace. As we have noted, our language reflects this economic spirit of enlightenment. Time is spent, saved, wasted, even killed. As Thoreau notes, “as if you could kill time without injuring eternity” (7).

So the spirit sheds the light which illuminates the whole world as “producible in the process of production” (Heidegger, Poetry 114). What undergirds this spirit is thus not particular types of technology but the industrial spirit itself, which is to say not “industry” as such but its etymological roots: to build or spread.

Technology itself is chained to industry. Technology is not an abstract overlord binding us to endless productivity. Rather, technology is permitted to build and spread only when perceived as “productive” by the spirit of light that pervades consciousness, captivates intellect, and excites the ambitious ego.

Returning to Oppenheimer, atomic energy above all illustrates the aforementioned dynamic, where both human being and technology itself are in service to a subtler, more pervasive spirit.

Becker notes how physics funding in university departments, for instance, exploded after the realization that atomic theory could be put to use in weapons development. In the post-war moment, however, once such developments and weaponry were less relevant, “the American Institute of Physics job placement service had 1,053 applicants for a grand total of fifty-three jobs” (210). No longer as relevant, physicists lost funding and employment.

Moreover, the top technology needed for breakthroughs was only accessible at those locations where weaponry was the aim. In The Technological Society (1964), philosopher Jacques Ellul notes that it was only a place like Los Alamos, Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb facility, that afforded physicists the desired instruments. He quotes one atomic scientist who says, “What keeps me here is the possibility of using for my work a special microscope which exists nowhere else” (10).

Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1943 (US Department of Energy, photo linked)

Therefore, it is not particular technologies that enslave us. Neither is it technology itself. It is a certain spirit behind technology, a certain value structure inherent in our relation to technology that binds us to production, to activity.

As long as this spirit lives and dominates our relation to technology, no technology, however convenient or efficient, will free our time and our lives from the endless activity that drives the production of such technologies themselves, and which fills any space or time opened by such technologies with further demands to quench that same spirit’s insatiable thirst for further production and achievement, a cycle within which many of us function as indentured servants struggling to find our way out from a system within which no way out has been given.

There is, however, a way out, an aufklärgung, or enlightenment, when there is a conducive turn to the altogether different. Therefore, Heidegger concludes,

Perhaps the world’s night is now approaching its midnight. Perhaps the world’s time is now becoming the completely destitute time. But also perhaps not, not yet, not even yet, despite the immeasurable need, despite all suffering, despite nameless sorrow, despite the growing and spreading peacelessness, despite the mounting confusion. Long is the time because even terror, taken by itself as a ground for turning, is powerless as long as there is no turn with mortal men. But there is a turn with mortals when these find the way to their own nature. (93)

This “turn in mortal men,” when humans find their way to their own nature over and against a relation to technology as evermore efficient and faster production, affords the “ground for turning,” for change: for every turning is a break from the reign of the same, the reign of the spirit of light toward the glittering dominion of the dark, to the spirit of “dark sky parks,” away from the flat two-dimensional screen toward the geometry of the curve, the non-Euclidean domain, the fractured refrain, broken mid-verse, not amenable to change, destroyed from underneath by an abyssal deep rising.

For, as mighty as the spirit of light is and will be, the spirit of the depths lies waiting, an iceberg for every Titanic. Reportedly spoken at the Titanic’s launch were the words, “Not even God himself could sink this ship.” Deuteronomy 6:16 and Matthew 4:7 read, “Do not tempt the Lord your God.”

Titanic (Bettman/CORBIS, photo-linked)

Scientists mapped the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic’s separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field (Atlantic/Magellan, photo-linked)

Surely, the spirit of light is a marvelous force beyond apprehension. Lucifer, light-bringing, light-bearer, has penetrated the furthest regions of not only the Earth but also the observable universe, his light pollution obscuring the inner light of souls dimmed by the unbearable noise of technological light and sound.

Yet a different spirit waits, an inversion of the same, a spirit to be called upon but not tempted or named, a spirit hidden but awaiting invitation: this is the power of the call, the summoning, the conjuring, the unadorned incantation.

Regarding the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto famously said, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” a resolve that ended with the atomic bombs via Oppenheimer’s project dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Colorized photo of Pearl Harbor attack, 1941 (photo-linked)

Aftermath of Hiroshima atomic bomb, 1945, in part a response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (photo-linked)

Many fear that behind the enthralling humanitarian uses of AI lies a radical reconstitution of our relation to each other and to technology that is less a reconstitution than an exaltation of the spirit of light such that its permeation of life will be nothing less than totalizing. Through each body and individual, an emanation of the light of technology, fissures in every last border, a voice through every silence.

Will this latest instantiation of the spirit of light be what calls mortals to their own nature, perhaps to the pre-Socratic, Parmenidean sphere of the whole, to the Anchoritic desert of the dark soul nourished by the presence of absence and the sound of silence, to the Daoist’s empty mind and empty dark, on the verge of vanishing?

How is this turn to be induced? What is the necessary incantation for the spirit of the depths to rise up? Perhaps it is the breakdown of the technoscientific regime at the hands of its own exhaustive and exhausting making. For, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), a break-down is also a break-through (362).

To be continued…

Today, we excel in safety but lack security. We are less injured than ever and filled with care and concern over injury because of it. In 1846, Thoreau writes,

The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. (Walden 9)

Anxiety and fear consume us in the search for safety. Too terrified for our lives to live, we settle for survival. Obsession with safety conjoined to a litigious culture ready to sue over too-hot tea (Starbucks recently paid a man 50 million dollars to this effect) enshrines the supremacy of safety. Absent security, we lack joy. For, to be joyful one must be without care.

So, where is security to be found? Not in our STEM-safety-achievement society. If not there, to where? “What more?” Tao Yuanming responds circa the year 400, than today. “Get the kids,” he says. “It’s the perfect day for a nice long walk” (27).

In his poem “Form, Shadow, Spirit,” Tao Yuanming constructs an exchange between three aspects of oneself: form, shadow, and spirit. Recognizing the ephemerality and hardship of life, form desires relief:

when we can get wine
never perversely refuse it!

Shadow replies that pleasure is enjoyable, but how can it compare to great works? To achieving?

Wine, as they say,
may dissipate our grief,
But how could it ever
be compared to fame?

Spirit gets the last word, claiming that good works are pleasing but fleeting and thus cannot be the locus of life. Instead, meaning lies in the present.

And in doing good
you may always find pleasure
But no one is obliged
to give you praise for it.

An alternate translation from David Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tao Ch’ien (1993) reads:

And though good works may bring lasting
joy, who will sing your praise? (41)

Spirit continues:

The right thing to do
is to leave things to Fate,
Let go and float along
on the great flux of things,
Not overjoyed
but also not afraid.
When it is time to go
then we should simply go.
There is nothing, after all,
that we can do about it.

David Hinton’s translation renders different poetic resonances:

It’s never-ending analysis that wounds us.
Why not circle away in the seasons, adrift

on the Great Transformation, riding its vast
swells without fear or delight? Once your

time comes to an end, you end: not another
moment lost to all those lonely worries. (42)

So we circle round to the beginning. Life is often lived in vain, and vanity is a hall of mirrors. We look into ourselves, often not liking what we see. In every way, we learn this behavior. From birth, we learn lack. Everyone around us lacks, desiring more. Mimesis, or imitation, is not only how we learn language, but all behavior, inclusive of our relationship to ourselves and others.

Here, the Genesis account rings true. We inherit the sins of our mothers and fathers. However, there is no mystery here, no magic in how sin is passed on. It simply occurs and is then learned.

In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud calls this pattern the “repetition compulsion.” Once enacted, the behavior continues for no other reason than that it has already occurred. Novelty becomes habit.

In court, there is a relevant notion of “precedent.” A behavior or decision is acceptable for no other reason than that it has occurred before. In logic, however, this is the “traditional fallacy.” It must be right or acceptable because it has happened before, repeatedly. In this way, the past reverberates through us.

Calligraphic work for Tao Yuanming (1990), by Tong Yang-Tze (photo linked)

Wanting more, always more, we attend to imperfections of various kinds, those of both inner and outer appearance. The mirror aids us, disclosing blemishes. The skin reveals physical blemishes while the eyes reveal those of ego and soul.

We cover up. Some obsess over appearance. Others work. Form delights in pleasure, shadow in achievement. Both stand corrected by spirit who knows that true security, being-without-care, and thus enjoyment, is found in the present.

This is why God’s name in the Old Testament, as many have pointed out, is simply “I am” (Exodus 3:14). Not before or after, but here, now. The present presences things, gathers things, in the unity of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, wherein space opens up—however momentarily—into place, into value.

To inhabit place is to dwell. To dwell is to be. Here, one apprehends being itself, allowing the distractions of vanity, governed by ego, to fall away. The “monkey mind” (the Chinese xinyuan, or Japanese shin’en) empties and becomes “no-mind” (wuxin or mushin). Devoid of content, it receives the gift of being itself.

Here, there is no fear because there is no future. There is no grief because there is no past. In presentness, spirit emanates. The mind vacates. The body rests. Events pass without concern, for there is no duration—only instant. Duration is a mental construct that torments. The instant is a fact that secures.

Therefore, to be “devoid of ambition” is a Buddhist goal rooted not in lack of drive but value in “Being-there” (Heidegger’s Dasein), which is to say here, now—only now.

In Intuition of the Instant (1932), Bachelard argues this point on the side of Einstein contra philosopher Henri Bergson and many others: the instant is the only fact. We take all else on some degree of faith.

The only task—the only “work”—is to inhabit now as effortlessly and often as possible. Doing this, we enter a state of flow where there is no separation between who we are and what we do (Nguyen 73; Pirsig 242). Citing philosopher William Durant summarizing Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do” (The Story of Philosophy 1926, 87).

Here, the Chinese wuxin (无心) and Japanese mushin (無心) bear weight. The characters are similar, as both literally mean “no heart,” although the Japanese uses the traditional character for without or none (無), while Chinese uses the simplified character (无).

While wuxin isn’t commonly used today, in Tao Yuanming’s time it would have meant “not intending to,” as in accidentally bumping into someone. In English, when saying something careless, we might say, “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” This is helpful for understanding how wuxin and mushin mean “not thinking” in a philosophical context.

In Buddhism and Daoism, both words mean “no-mind,” signifying a mind clear of thinking where being and doing flow without separation. Crucially, wuxin converges with the ancient Greek areté (ἀρετή), meaning “excellence” or sometimes “virtue.” Excellence, however, is the better translation as it captures the state of being in which quality acts and work flow in a ziran (自然, or natural, self-so) state.

Just as a healthy tree produces fruit without “trying,” a person in a state of wuxin or areté bears the fruit of being without effort. As such, effortless action (無為, or non-doing) is the healthy byproduct of the right mind, which is to say the no-mind. Each concept points to Pirsig’s “Quality,” the unity of subjective and objective in the event or relation of existence.

Such a state is the way to peace of mind, which Pirsig notes goes by many names: quality, excellence, virtue, Dharma, the Dao (or Tao), excellence, and so forth (386). Peace of mind does not entail inaction or not-doing-anything. Rather, it entails clarity of mind that enables both peaceful action and inaction in their right times.

“There is a time for war,” so to speak, “and a time for peace”—a time for action and a time for rest (Ecclesiastes 3:8). Wuxin and areté enable the peace which enriches both.

Citing the Shotokan Times, Nguyen describes what this peace of mind looks like:

Mushin is achieved when [the] mind is free of random thoughts, free of anger, free of fear, and particularly free of ego. It applies during combat and/or other facets of life. When mushin is achieved during combat, there is an absence of loose or rambling thoughts. It leaves the practitioner free to act and react without hesitation. He reacts according to all of the study and training that has brought [him] to this point. Relying on not what you think should be your next move but on what your trained, instinctive, subconscious reaction directs you to do. (73)

Mushin is a state of well-trained instinct that reacts with a “preintellectual awareness” free of the thinking that binds and stalls (Pirsig 27). Such is the instinct Nietzsche claims the West has fatefully lost in its long slope of decay (or décadence).

Correspondingly, Pirsig describes the state of areté through historian H. D. F. Kitto’s Th Greeks (1951):

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.

Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself. (387)

A Roman mosaic depicting a maritime scene with Odysseus (Latin: Ulysses) and the Sirens (Carthage, c. AD 200, photo linked)

Opposing this flow, instinct, no-mind, and state of excellence or Quality is the hell of intellectualization, negativity, anxiety, depression, and unrest, all of which flow from thinking itself (as opposed to free, spontaneous, creative thought), which as Nguyen notes is why many religions define hell as “complete separation from God” (74).

Thinking separates us from all things good. Whether it’s Plato “Good” (virtue), the rhetoricians’ areté (excellence), or the Chinese and Japanese concepts of “no-mind,” they pinpoint the fatal flaw of thinking, the flaw that separates us from the good, the excellent, the restful, and the only Truth which is the “I am”—the now, the present, the instant.

Here, and perhaps only here, the True and the Good converge.

The first of these variables, the True, is often construed as a scientific question. What is True? Not just for me or for you (the conditional “true for p” of analytic philosophy that points to truth value parameters), but simply True, independent of opinion or observation. The sort of True that if no one was around to see or know it would still be the case.

The second of these variables, the Good, is often construed today as a relativistic question. What is morally good given some value system, culture, perspective, context, historical conditions, and various contingencies that serve to define what is good, or perhaps what is best, for this time and place.

Here we have what may be one unequivocal union between the True and the Good: they are now.

Just as now is the only objective Truth all can agree on, with both past and future constituting mental constructs (not without evidence, but constructs nonetheless), inhabiting the now is the universally agreed upon way to the Good.

To inhabit the “I am” presences nearness to Being itself, to whatever we consider divine, such that presence provides a natural corrective to the plentitude of our errors. It is not so much how we inhabit the present but that we inhabit the present. This simple action enables a clearing, such as Heidegger’s lichtung (literally “clearing”), that procures perspective. From that perspective follows better action.

All manner of things impede this action. Those discussed here are:

vanity
ego
achievement
ambition
non-things
capital
intellect
thinking
noise
fear
safety

This is the story of God and Lucifer, good and evil, true and false, love and hate, or love and fear, and every archetypal antinomy that arises from the fundamental tensions that, without caution and care, gently break us limb from limb on the quartering table that is life.

The first “Noble Truth” of Buddhism is dukkha: “Suffering.” Life is suffering. For the Christian, sin is original. We begin separated from God. The marga, or “way,” of Buddhism and Christianity may be different. However, many practices of liberation from suffering and sin are strikingly similar, as is their recognition of suffering as originary. Though Christianity depends markedly more on grace without work, both recognize the individual’s capacity to experience peace through surrender and trust in the instant, the now.

Buddhism and Christianity are not alone on these points. However, their points of convergence are especially intriguing. Taken together, they illuminate the ways in which we bring hell on earth to ourselves through thinking. Whether this hell extends beyond the grave is disputed. Hell on earth, however, is resolutely real.

When we think of “Hell” (or Gehenna), whether it be the Christian rendering, the Hebrew Sheol, the Greek Hades, and so forth, images of fire and brimstone surface, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and impenetrable darkness.

If one reads Greek mythology, perhaps Cerberus comes to mind, the three-headed dog who guards the entrance to the underworld to ensure dead souls do not escape. One might recall Dante’s Inferno (c. 1321) and its nine circles of hell, with the ninth circle being a frozen wasteland occupied by the greatest traitors, of which Satan is the first: a traitor against God himself.

Satan trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Inferno, Canto 34 (illustration by Gustave Doré, photo linked)

These images often seem superficial to modern readers who have lost an appreciation for the depth of the darkness of the human mind, or soul. After all, we’ve outgrown “all that.” Such legends make for good entertainment and offer a nostalgic look at primitive minds that still envisaged spirits as animating forces in the world at work in both joy and suffering.

Now, of course, we know better. No such forces exist, we’re often taught. Divine forces in things, even stars and planets, have been replaced with the “true” forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.

At bottom aren’t Leibniz monads, little mind-like entities that compose all things and can only be created or annihilated by God, but atoms and subatomic particles with no spiritual nature at all. Physics for metaphysics. Brain for mind. Body for soul.

Illustration of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monad (photo linked). Leibniz also invented calculus.

It was astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, after all, who worked to show that physical forces and not souls moved planets. In his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), Kepler demystified the heavens, naturalizing our understanding of celestial bodies in motion. Kepler’s move was critical in ushering in physics’ materialist dominion.

Johannes Kepler working on a model of planetary motion (by Granger, photo linked)

Yet, as Thoreau writes in Walden, “You never gain something but that you lose something” (qtd. in Pirsig 387). Certainly, material forces are better explanations of planetary motion than souls. What was lost, however, in giving up on the force of souls, especially the malevolent spirits who transcend the merely inconvenient and disadvantageous evolutionary instincts that hardly seem to explain the scope and severity of human malcontent?

The great poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote in a French newspaper, “One of the artifices of Satan is to induce men to believe that he does not exist” (Le Figaro 1864).

One may put aside the metaphysical proposition of an ultimately nefarious being, for instance, bending the world to destruction and decay, but this hardly means such a spirit doesn’t exist. One way or another, metaphysically or physically, which is to say psychologically or materially, this spirit is real. The nature and source of this being may be in question, but its reality is not. At a minimum, we know this spirit from our own experience.

One need look no further for the spirit of suffering, decay, destruction, fear, and evil than one’s own mind. The irony, of course, is that we have often looked to the stars for proof of such things, but it has been right here all along. Naturally, our thoughts and desires reveal deep suffering, malevolence, malcontent, fear, and the like.

The DENT Neurologic Institute estimates that humans have between 12,000-60,000 thoughts per day. Of these, some 80% are negative. Now, we could attribute much of this to the so-called negativity bias, which states that our brains throw up and prefer negative thoughts, insofar as they are more conducive to survival. After all, if 80% of our thoughts were positive, we wouldn’t worry much. If we sat back content, we may not plan for tomorrow, and our survival may be threatened.

However, such facts seem insufficient to explain the sheer magnitude of negativity and the degrees to which this negativity assures personal and extrapersonal suffering. If the spirit of suffering is not a mere survival advantage with unfortunate consequences, what is it?

Depiction of negative thinking, by Juanma Hache (Getty Images, photo linked)

The spirit of negativity may be best illustrated by Lucifer himself. This is where the distinction between stereotype and archetype is useful. Literally, the distinction is between “solid” and “primitive” types. This simple difference holds. Stereotypes are solid, or solidified, representations not amenable to change. As such, at best they describe certain patterns at certain times, but their rigidity makes them more harmful than useful.

Archetypes, on the other hand, are the primitive or original categories that broadly map and interpret psychological and behavioral patterns. Most psychologists, especially from the Jungian line, believe that archetypes are dynamic patterns that shift over time as society and individuals change. Some archetypes, however, are more primordial than others, and as such tend to change less.

In economics, the “Lindy effect” describes how the longer a business stays in business the longer it is likely to stay in business. If a business has survived 100 years, it is likely to survive another 100.

This pattern holds for a number of reasons. However, it may be applicable to archetypes, as well. The longer an archetype describes our experience of the world, the longer it is likely to describe our experience of the world.

The devil archetype functions this way. However, the archetype’s representational shift is crucial. A once dynamic, powerful, and creative archetype solidified into a stereotype fusing the comical and grotesque. Today, we think “devil” and imagine Satan clad in red complete with horns and pitchfork. This image has been frozen in time, manifesting itself in everything from cartoons to Halloween costumes. In effect, we cannot unsee the devil as stereotype. This stereotype effectively nullifies his existence and thus his power.

Stereotypical depiction of the devil (New Yorker, photo linked)

The upshot of such stereotypes is the softening of otherwise forceful figures. To personify the spirit of evil and suffering itself as a humorous cartoon character worthy of a light chuckle before moving on to your morning coffee not only dampens but dissipates concern over any potential reality of his presence. His appearance invites you to think, “You need not worry about me. Go on with your day.” Put Biblically, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” (Ecclesiastes 8:15).

Many forget that the Lucifer of the Old Testament bears little resemblance to our modern stereotype. In fact, the name Lucifer literally means “light-bearer.” He is described as having had perfect beauty and wisdom (Ezekiel 28:12). “An angel of light,” Lucifer commanded attention and respect (2 Corinthians 11:14). He was the most beautiful of the angels, as rendered in earlier art.

Satan in His Original Glory (1805), by William Blake (via Tate, photo linked)

Satan as the Fallen Angel (1797), by Sir Thomas Lawrence (via Sotheby’s, photo linked)

What was Lucifer’s sin? Pride and ambition. This was the root of his rebellion, his desire to be like God, to go his own way, to take matters into his own hands, to rely on himself, to be his own authority, to desire worship and not service. Ironically, his sin is self-reliance. It is not properly orienting himself in submission and service to what is greater than himself.

It is just these characteristics of our achievement society we have been discussing, where self-help is a virtue and sacrifice is increasingly alien to our vocabulary. Pride and ambition drive us. Perfect beauty is worth tens of billions in the U.S. cosmetic industry alone, not to mention its effect on who we idolize as “models.” Several societies use the term “idol” in reference to those with surpassing beauty who have accomplished virtually nothing.

I ask again: what sort of society has twenty seasons of The Kardashians (2007-2021) but only one of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980)?

Our discussion began with vanity and moved through pride and ambition, which are forms of vanity. Therefore, when Ezekiel writes of Lucifer, “You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty,” he isolates the origin of suffering (28:12). Not in perfection, wisdom, and beauty as such, but in Lucifer’s relationship to these qualities and to himself.

Response and relationality take precedence. While Lucifer has these qualities, which, ironically, were due to nothing he did himself but were gifts from God, his response was not a necessary one. He was not obliged to respond as he did to his beauty, wisdom, and perfection. He held on to them, took responsibility for them, identified with them and sought to expand them. His ambition drove the train off the tracks.

The link is letting go. Letting go of ourselves, our abilities, gifts, capacities, and desires and turning toward what in philosophy, critical theory, and rhetoric is simply called the “Other.” Otherwise than self. Otherwise than being-for-oneself.

We didn’t do anything to acquire the gifts we naturally have. Our interests and passions call us, seize us, as previously discussed. To have a “calling” due to a gift or ability is to be turned toward something that does not originate in oneself. Therefore, to lay claim to it, take credit for it, and seek to magnify it for our own power and gain is to engage the spirit of destruction.

In Christianity, this is the spirit of Lucifer. In Buddhism, Daoism, and elsewhere, this is the spirit of ego. Though different, they apprehend the force that while attractive, persuasive, and compelling serves to annihilate and destroy.

The fall of Satan, described in Ezekiel (photo linked)

Today, our society feeds on this spirit. Furthermore, because Lucifer no longer exists, and ego (or “self”) is idolized, there is no safeguard against the spirit of suffering. It has no boundaries, no limitations. While this has not always been the case, it dominates our science.

Lucifer’s intellect was unsurpassed except by his creator. He wanted to “go further” than God. But, as we learned through Kierkegaard citing the legend of Cratylus, the student always wants to “go further,” to exceed the teacher, or in this case the creator. In this case, it’s science that proceeds with no safeguards, no pause wherein we might consider not only whether we can but whether we should.

Hence, the iconic quote from Jurassic Park (1993): “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Jurassic Park (1993) scene showing what scientists unleash upon the world. We can replace the dinosaur with AI, and we have the same idea: all can, no should.

At least Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Oppenheimer, and others were transdisciplinary thinkers engaged with deep philosophical questions that undergirded their science, despite physics’ fraught relationship with atomic energy. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a physicist with the same depth of knowledge across disciplines that engages meaning, ethics, value, and the like. The only question is, “What can we do?”

In the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, physics was well accompanied. In the so-called “Can You Hear the Music?” scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2024), the viewer experiences an eloquent montage set to Ludwig Göransson’s score portraying Oppenheimer’s mental state. Strewn throughout are influences on Oppenheimer’s life and physics, including modernist Cubist paintings that influenced Niels Bohr, as well, especially the central “wave-particle duality” principle where matter is said to occupy two contradictory states simultaneously.

Philosopher Robert P. Crease and physicist Alfred Goldhaber explore these connections further in The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty (2014), showing influences from the arts and humanities to quantum theory, and vice versa.

“Can You Hear the Music?” scene, Oppenheimer (2024), illustrating Oppenheimer’s influences, set to Ludwig Göransson’s eponymous song (photo linked)

While the clip above is differently edited, the original scene showcases influences like T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922) and Igor Stravinsky’s record The Rite of Spring (1913), making visible how science, and physics in particular, is driven by far more than logic, reason, and empiricism. As Paul Davies puts it in his introduction to Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces (1994),

There is a popular misconception that science is an impersonal, dispassionate, and thoroughly objective enterprise. Whereas most other human activities are dominated by fashions, fads, and personalities, science is supposed to be constrained by agreed rules of procedure and rigorous tests. It is the results that count, not the people who produce them. This is, of course, manifest nonsense. Science is a people-driven activity like all human endeavor, and just as subject to fashion and whim. In this case fashion is set not so much by choice of subject matter, but the way scientists think about the world. (ix)

As Oppenheimer illustrates, “the way scientists think about the world” is shaped by the world itself, constitutive of the whole of ideas, philosophies, cultures, and geographies, as well as the artistic, political, and other moments and movements of the time.

In this way, a mere three minutes of one film captures how a physicist who changed the world was shaped by the world. He was influenced not only by the arts and humanities, but by space itself. Consequently, the scene juxtaposes nature’s beauty with the cityscapes and universities of Oppenheimer’s life, in addition to images of the atomic bomb that haunted him as “the father of the atomic bomb,” ending in movie trailer style with a line about the Greek legend of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods (a scene which opens the film), combined with a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” quoted by Oppenheimer after witnessing the Trinity nuclear test, all of which impressively portrays an entanglement of matter and meaning beyond mere scientific “progress.”

The name “Trinity test” itself makes legible these connections. Oppenheimer chose the name based on his deep appreciation for John Donne’s poetry, which is in many ways undergirded by Christian theology.

“Trinity Test,” historical photograph (July 16th, 1945, Los Alamos National Laboratory)

“Trinity Test,” Oppenheimer (2024) portrayal

As harmful as atomic energy became, newer AI technologies threaten our humanity, as well, despite their utility, in manifold ways that because of their subtlety go unnoticed in comparison to the radical clarity of an atomic bomb.

The spirit of intellect dominates unconditionally. It has no moral compass, no mode of caution. It shines a light. Enlightenment. Its vision penetrates darkness indiscriminately. Lucifer as “light-bearer” reigns.

This is why vision is central in science. The telescope, microscope, and so forth aim (scope) at a distance (tele) and at the small (mikro). We see further and wider and smaller than ever before.

“Galileo Demonstrating His Telescope In 1609” (Science Photo Library)

Our horizontal knowledge slouches toward omnipotence. But what of the darkness? What of the depths? What is eclipsed when we conquer the earth as the whole of producible objects, where humans become subjects to a particular relation to technology that enshrines technology, and “technical necessity,” as the chief agent or purpose in our ecology of relations (Kaczynski 51-52)?

Even “mental health,” as we know it, often takes the shape of “the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress” (52). What happens when the drive to technological possibility as technological breadth becomes greater than the drive to anthropological depth? Is such a human being the Anthropos as archetype?

For Jung, the Anthropos was the unified conscious and unconscious, constitutive of both our rational and non-rational functions: thinking and feeling on the rational side, and sensation and intuition on the non-rational side. Can we truly say that our relation to technology as technical breadth and prowess serves the Anthropos, which is to say ourselves? If not, we should recall Tao Yuanming’s question: “What more?”

To be continued…

I recall the dreadful day I learned I had to take a graduate seminar in English dramatic literature. I’d sooner drink Starbucks “coffee” from a paper cup. Even though I learned to bear and even enjoy parts of the course with a “fake it till you make it” philosophy, I promptly turned my back on these writers after finals week. If I were Orpheus and the British Romantics were Eurydice, I left Hades on the inverted promise that if I never looked back the British Romantics would be condemned to torment under the auspices of better judges than myself.

William Blake (1807), via Wikimedia Commons (photo link)

Years after I’d made a clean break from all things British, dramatic, and Romantic, William Blake came knocking on my door with his poem, “Eternity.” Unlike more famous poems, “Eternity” slipped through my brain’s antivirus program bent on screening out Romantic content. At first, its clichéd rhyme scheme screamed of resolute boredom. However, it called out for another look:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

In four short lines, Blake bakes in maximal lucidity, revealing the source code underwriting despair and joy.

To suffer, hold on. To enjoy, let go.

Earlier, I wrote of the experience of holding on: to accomplishments and achievements as salvation, to things and attachments, to bicycle handlebars materially and metaphorically as symbols of safety. In relinquishing achievements, goals, things, and crutches of safety I began to see glimmers of joy. Even cleaning out a drawer offered redemption. Denying a compulsion afforded rest. Slowing down provided peace. Allowing the past and future to fall off the momentary plateau of the present granted presence. Receiving a compliment my ego would otherwise internalize in an enduring inflation and instead refracting it back through the clear prism that reveals the light of others pouring through me enabled the unencumbering relief of humility wherein the sharp, defensive edges of the ego relented, yielding curved spaces soft enough to inhabit. The long inhale constitutive of a fearful blowfish puffed up in the presence of predators gave way to a rapid deflation that eased.

What a relief. . .

And what a rush.

In the same way, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes, that capitalism accommodates itself to all cultures, ideologies, practices, and the like, the joy in letting go became its own pursuit, its own continual achievement. As Žižek writes in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2011),

The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the real of the global market mechanism. (55)

The dispositif of capitalism operates as efficiently and effectively in a democratic nation as it does in a communist regime, as with the United States and China. It moves and flows as easily in a Christian community as it does in a Hindu one. Like natural selection, its blind market mechanism does not discriminate. It cares not what a person looks like as long as it sells.

Levi’s 2017 “Circles” commercial illustrates that all cultures are equally commodifiable, for capital does not contemplate such things but “merely counts” (Han, Rituals 44). No matter your belief system, Levi’s welcomes you. How ecumenical. How insidious.

Levi’s “Circles” commercial (2017, photo linked)

The achievement society embodies this same dispositif, although it runs deeper than capital. It thrives on value. Value is often economic, but it is also shot through with esteem, respect, pleasure, and the ephemeral but feel-good chemicals that shape the adrenaline response we call modern life.

Adrenaline drives. Its energy motivates and creates, continually revivifying the undead corpse desiring deep rest it believes it cannot have. So it runs. It drives. It looks for the next big thing to reanimate what little of itself remains.

Indeed, it was liberating to rid myself of things. More and more items became anchors to cast off. Each drawer held ropes tying me down. It was freedom I wanted. Freedom from everything through jettisoning every thing. Whereas once all was sacred, now scarcely a thing was safe. Can one be addicted to annihilation? Apparently so.

But when you run out of things to rid yourself of, what then? Fortunately for the shape-shifting adrenaline response, there are many joys to feed on. In this way, one’s adrenaline response is a virus that finds unsuspecting and otherwise unsuitable hosts. Even the act of humbling oneself can be converted into adrenaline, for in that act one feels a certain self-satisfaction in deflecting praise, diffusing credit where credit is due, and raising others up. Much more than self-deprecation, this self-aggrandizing self-overcoming may unintentionally puff you up. How humble can I be?

The same is true for “experiences.” New experiences become possessions of the ego accumulated in the drive toward expansion: expanding my horizons, my perspective, my “self.” Thus, it is the twisted nature of a staunch ego conjoined to adrenaline that converts authentic letting go to the go, go, go of achievement society.

Joy becomes something to have and hold. Pursued this way, joy evaporates. Perhaps this is why some go to great lengths to annihilate ego, such as my English professor Edward Rocklin who started going by “Mr.” instead of “Dr.” Rocklin: a strategic blow to a well-fortified and justified ego.

Like the emptiness of accruing achievements, one soon realizes the vanity of joy apprehended as such. It becomes merely another avenue toward disappointment. For, even if one’s joy eludes the aforementioned traps, just the act of attempting to hold it, Blake reminds us, destroys it.

Happiness, Han writes, is an afterglow (Crisis 16). Its gift is bestowed incidentally to engaged emplacement. It cannot be its own pursuit. Joy is not an object but a consequence or effect of dwelling. Thus, the only way to experience joy is to “kiss the joy as it flies,” as Blake writes—to let it go. This is the way of joy, grace, mercy, peace, rest, and freedom.

The Spirit of Hope (2024), by Byung-Chul Han (photo linked)

This freedom, a correction to the Western concept, is not only freedom to but also freedom from. That is, freedom consists not only of capacities to engage in a range of actions but also freedom from encroachments and infringements on our time, energy, silence, space, physical and mental real estate, and so forth. It is precisely the increasing activity, surveillance, noise, and clutter from the modern world pouring through exponentially exposed eyes and ears that threatens to annihilate inner peace and freedom.

These flows not only disturb us but by pouring into us become us. Just as water takes the shape of its container, the torrential flow of unrest takes the shape of us. After years of turbulent flows, we are carried in a tide that rarely returns to dry land. The mind becomes the flow of capital, adrenaline, value, achievement, production, consumption, ambition, and the like. For this reason we must go to great lengths to barricade our minds and bodies against the indiscriminate flows that submerge rest and drown peace and joy.

“Modern” society is just this: one endless, noisy, hostile flow disturbing peace. Put differently, modernity is one unbroken commercial with no ad-free tier.

The excessive advertising of everyday life (ferrantraite, Getty Images)

Secretively, even joy takes the shape of achievement, enveloped as it is in the achievement society. As Blake reminds us, joy cannot be apprehended this way. For then it is not joy, but more achievement, pleasure, and the like. Rather, only in letting go is joy experienced, however fleetingly. To realize one’s joy endangers joy. Attempting to sustain joy startles joy like a stray cat, scaring it away.

Joy is just that: a terrified animal mistreated and abandoned by society. It cannot be coaxed back directly. Rather, it must find your life inviting, appealing, and most of all unthreatening. Just then, it will emerge from hiding. Just as easily, however, it will be startled away even with a glance in its direction.

I am tempted once more to mention the double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics, but we have covered that territory elsewhere. The situation stands: observation disturbs.

This was my experience with stray cats. One day, my daughter found a litter of three kittens in the corner of our yard. Because they were young and unsocialized, it didn’t take long for them to warm up to us. In a matter of days we could feed and pet them.

The mother, however, was not so warm. If she was merely seen she would flee. Again, observation disturbs. Then, perched on the fence like a bird ready to take flight, she’d descend only when we were gone, searching the soil for leftovers.

It took several months for her to learn she was safe in our presence. It took a year for her to be comfortable anywhere near us and several months more to allow us to pet her, which we first did with great fear, for establishing any relationship, especially with joy, entails risk. In the end, she became more attached to us than her kittens. We had gained her complete, unbreakable trust.

“Mama Cat,” as dubbed by my daughter, and one of her kittens (2021)

Joy is like this.

Nothing is more mistreated today than joy and its siblings: peace, rest, grace, and the like. Joy is disciplined, punished, surveilled, marginalized, restrained, berated, and, finally, abandoned. Nothing is more offensive to the blunted adult than joy, for joy confronts the adult’s reality of lack. The adult balks at joy out of jealousy and resentment. Consequently, joy flees. It does not return easily. Joy is a stray cat yearning for but scared to return. One must take it slow. Once joy has gained your trust, however, it will remain a faithful companion.

Go slow.

As an afterglow, joy and happiness arise when we are not trying or looking. Charles Bukowski’s advice on being a great writer was “don’t try.” This is how joy, happiness, peace, and rest work, as well: don’t try. Just be and do and go lightly. The only trying is in doing less, achieving less, easing up, and relaxing the rope that pulls you forward. To where? Typically, more work.

Charles Bukowski not trying on “Apostrophes,” French Talk Show (Ulf Andersen, GettyImages, photo linked)

Perhaps there is effort even in not trying, but such is an effort worth undertaking, an effort of releasement, Heidegger might say through theologian and Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, or trust. This releasement or trust, as willful abdication of illusory control, presences presence itself.

Ironically, for those of us in the achievement, self-surveilling, self-help society—we Phono sapiens of the panoptic present—“personal development,” as self-worship, stands in for what was once a worship directed outward, offered up. Now, we are offerings to ourselves, encircling ourselves, idols to and for ourselves carved not from gold but from the “experiences” and non-things we collect and display on the screens that contain us, enclosing our souls.

There is perhaps no stranger irony than this: that individuals of a culture ostensibly founded on self-sacrificial values and principles would, in less than a century, turn around to worship themselves. In a swift enantiodromia, or radical reversal, self-sacrifice becomes self-love and self-help. The outward flow of worship and care, hitting a high water mark, flows back on itself, obsessed with itself. Even truth, once beyond, becomes within. My truth. Your truth. Perhaps our truth. But never the truth.

Outside in, upside down, we collapse on ourselves for ourselves, and no one else. Achieve, we are commanded and compelled not only from without but from within, having internalized a social unconscious founded on self as salvation. Produce. Consume. More than ever, we should ask, For what? For whom?

Amidst Alumni Park on the USC campus stands the “Tommy Trojan” statue and mascot, formally known as the “Trojan Shrine.” I taught on the campus for six years before noticing the statue’s inscription. Vertically, the five Trojan ideals are, “faithful, scholarly, skillful, courageous, ambitious.”

“Tommy Trojan,” Alumni Park, University of Southern California (constructed 1930)

In this hierarchy of values, “faithful” is first. “Ambition” is last. Properly aligned, these ideals inform one another. Indeterminacy and lack of control over innumerable aspects of our lives entails faith. Faith finds justification in facts. Facts, though necessary, are insufficient for action.

When one chooses to marry someone, for instance, there is evidence the marriage will be successful (hopefully). However, this evidence stops well short of proof. Rather, it is a “leap of faith,” as Kierkegaard discusses in Fear and Trembling (1843), that drives decision. And when a marriage, or anything for that matter, is under duress, it is principally faith in a better future that drives one forward. Faith in the future means power in the present. As Bishop Robert Barron says through C. S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas, “Faith is the far side of reason.” Together, they forge the path.

Ambition falls dead last because ambition would otherwise drive the train of life off the tracks. Ambition drives, to be sure. Fast. In 1984, American journalist Bob Woodward wrote Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. This could be the title of anyone driven chiefly by ambition (although Woodward was wrong about Belushi). You will likely succeed. Fast. And then crash just as quickly.

Ambition drives with high beams set on goals, casting all else in darkness. Each goal is a hurdle to knock down, one after the other, all falling until you fall from sheer exhaustion. Just as faith needs tempering by reason, and vice versa, so ambition needs tempering by other values and virtues.

As Einstein famously said in his 1939 address at the Princeton Theological Seminary, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” So ambition stands in relation to virtues, Trojan and otherwise.

Albert Einstein speaks to a gathering (c. 1940, photo linked)

The order of their hierarchy determines whether one stands or falls. As life moves, hierarchies shift. We lose sight, balance, peace, and joy as other things, or non-things, weigh us down, or else throw us up. Life is a chaotic universe where energy constantly needs replenishing against the entropic turns of stress, loss, tragedy, and various waves of intensity that flatten resolve. It is this “thrownness,” as Heidegger writes, that constitutes existence.

Beyond choice, we are thrown into the world. Anxiety, Heidegger states, is our very nature. Confused, disoriented, and lost, we navigate tortuous spaces. In chaos, we seek cosmos. There is no time to linger. As Rilke writes in his The Eighth Elegy (1923), “we live our lives, forever taking leave.” We want proof of security, of our secureness.

To be secure is to be “without care” (sine cura), as Heidegger notes (Poetry 120). If only life provided facts that secured rest. It doesn’t. Ambition knows this. Achievement-society depends on it. By achieving, we believe we will be secured in time. Then, and only then, will we rest.

Thrown as such into anxiety, we achieve. We work. We work for security. With retirement comes “social security.” The security of the socius, or “friend.” Yet society is not our friend. As Deleuze and Guattari trace in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the “socius” is precisely what breaks us: “A violence without purpose . . . a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. . . . Desire is agape” (346-7). This is what the socius does to us. We will not find security here.

Neither will we find security in technology and science. These assist survival. They do not afford security. At best, they prolong our generalized state of anxiety.

“General anxiety disorder” is a diagnosis of the DSM-5-TR (2022). Yet, as Heidegger knew, generalized anxiety is precisely the natural state of thrownness. There is no outside. Appropriating philosopher Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967), there is no outside context (often mistranslated as, “There is no outside the text”). This is the context. This is the state of affairs. One may look to science and technology for salvation, but one won’t find it there.

Jacques Derrida, French rockstar philosopher too cool for stuffy British analytic philosophy (photo linked)

On the bike of life, science and technology provide a helmet and, if one wishes, wrist guards, knee pads, and elbow pads. Surely, technological gear offers safety (from Latin salvus, “uninjured”). But it does not save. It does not grant care reprieve.

If this freedom cannot be found in society, nor in science and technology, where else can one turn? After all, society, science, and technology are often perceived as bastions of security. Yet as we have seen, security is not there.

In fear, we wear helmets and pads, the guards of society, science, and technology. Ironically, these actions increase fear. Their very creation and presence proceed from the spirit of fear. For it is fear which creates and sustains them. Han agrees: “A spectre is haunting us. It is fear” (Spirit 1).

What one wants is freedom from gear, which is to say freedom from fear. This freedom secures security itself. To be without fear. Fear, from Old English fǣr, means “danger.” One wants to be free from danger. However, thrownness sustains danger’s immanence, its omnipresence.

Detail of The Scream, by Edvard Munch (1893). Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo (photo linked).

The danger character of fear means that fear isn’t something you have. It’s something there is. One doesn’t have danger. Either there is danger or there isn’t. Because danger is immanent, the only antidote to danger is surrendering to the fact that there will never be no danger.

To be without care (secure) one must not be afraid of fear, for fear is a state of care: care for one’s life, safety, wellbeing, happiness, and the like. In fear, one settles for safety (avoiding injury). One must act despite fear. This is courage.

To be courageous is not to be unafraid. It is to act despite fear, despite danger. To be safe (uninjured) means avoiding danger, which means avoiding action. To be without care is not only to act, but to enjoy action. Action is dangerous, and one enjoys it anyway. Or, perhaps one enjoys because it is dangerous, because the presence of danger signifies an engaged life. Danger and life are synonymous. Danger is a sign of life. Absent danger, one simply survives, where not dying constitutes “success.” And what sort of life is worth living where success consists of not dying? Yet this is too often the quality of life we are sold through society, science, and technology.

Thus, to be secure without care is to enjoy danger itself. Security is joy within danger. It is joy opening to and disclosing itself enclosed by danger. In the face of immanent injury, security enjoined to joy is unrelenting. It does not yield to the threat of injury. It does not sacrifice the joy of being without care for the idle comfort of safety. Freedom from gear is freedom from fear. This is what it is to be without care. As such, safety cannot be first. If anything, it is last.

Joy in danger without seatbelts or car seats (1955/56, photo linked)

Ironically, we accept security where achievement society demands it. Cars are terribly dangerous. Fear is everywhere in a car, for at any moment life may be extinguished in a collision. Yet little to no fear is perceived there.

This goes for transportation generally and many daily spaces. How so? Because such technologies and spaces are tied to work. When work and achievement demand it, we readily step into danger, offering our lives. But when it comes to joy, we are not so generous with life. Safety first. Enjoy, but safely. Hike, but on trail. Ride, but with gear.

Enjoy, but with fear.

To be continued…

In my case, one result was creating and pursuing goals out of inspiration instead of desperation. The former pull and call us with conviction and force, engaging our sense of purpose. The latter push and oppress us with a sense of obligation, engaging our sense of lack. The former come from the self, or, better, divine inspiration. The latter come from the ego (Nguyen, Don’t Believe Everything You Think 78-81). However, the road to hope and recovery seems immense. It is best to start small.

Rather than starting with “society,” or even “goals,” which may still be too large, start with space. Reshaping space is simpler than reorienting your psyche around new goals and inspirations, and it is certainly simpler than “society.” If you wait for society to change, or attempt to change it before permitting yourself to change, you will die waiting, trying, or both. Nguyen writes, “Don’t wait for something outside of you to give you permission to feel how you want inside” (51). Therefore, it is best to start small. In starting small, the big follows. How to recover human space, shaping it into place? Such a start provides clues to recovering storytelling, narrative—home. With the recovery of home, much follows.

One road home is to craft better spatial practices. The children I tutored should have been not only allowed but encouraged to make space their own, to shape space that speaks to them. Since my daughter was young, we read books under a large coffee table atop an ornate, red rug. Even today, at eleven years old, she reads under the same table with an assortment of books and pillows.

Recently, however, she began reading under our grand piano. To many, this is not “proper.” Rooms have their designated purposes. Reading should be done in certain spaces. And yet it was the memory of my fourth-grade teacher asking us to bring a sleeping bag to school and find any spot in the classroom to read that stuck with me (I put mine under a large desk in the back of the classroom). That is how I learned to love reading—not sitting while enveloped in plastic. It’s no small wonder that “society” laments that no one reads. Perhaps we should teach it in ways that resonate.

I loved the piano idea, so I took it up a notch and covered the piano with blankets so they draped over the side and hung to floor, creating a fort. I put my office lamp under the piano, shaping empty space into a reading nook she now enjoys. These spaces are still available to us. We’ve simply stopped looking.

Reading fort under grand piano (the Byung-Chul Han book is mine)

Like Brodkey, I’ve had a troubled relationship with literate space. Libraries bore me. As soon as I outgrew the children’s library, I stopped going. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but now I recall the long, cramped hallways of books pressed together on dull metal shelves arranged by author and not by the world it offered and felt no life there. It was a cold, dead space where books were information to be swiftly consumed in mechanical fashion. I’ve hardly visited a library since.

Today, I shape space into place by an author’s genre and feel. There is no better place to read Bachelard than the mountains. A Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear trip necessitates several slim volumes, including The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) and Air and Dreams (1943). Inside by a fire contrasting with snow is best, or on the patio.

Reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) in Lake Arrowhead, CA

Reading Gaston Bachelard’s Air and Dreams (1943) in Lake Arrowhead, CA

Heidegger demands to be read outside, preferably in the forest or where nature exhibits magnitude and intensity. Heidegger is not light and easy reading, not to any sane soul. One needs a complementary space.

Reading Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought (1971) in Big Bear Lake, CA

The ancient Chinese poetry of Tao Yuanming, Li Bai, Du Fu, and the like are my patio reading, especially during summer as wind carries the chimes and nature comes and goes of itself, mirroring thoughts in the mind (if only I’d taken photos).

On a recent rainy day I sprawled out on a blanket in front of a fire and read Byung-Chul Han. Underlining with such posture is difficult, but one must sacrifice. I’ll choose the psychological warmth of the floor over the utility of the table any day. So much of the trouble turns on the tension between warmth and utility.

Space shapes place.

However, visiting your local craft coffee shop has its own ambience, inclusive of perks for the loyal customer, such as custom messages on your saucer.

Canabru Coffee, Chino Hills, CA

In fact, I befriended Canabru to the extent that the owner gave me her phone number during Covid when they were closed so that we could meet in the parking lot to exchange cash and coffee.

Take that, Starbucks.

However, one should venture out on occasion so that routine doesn’t slouch toward boredom. Craft coffee shops offer unique spaces, colors, ambience, and energy for reading, writing, and dwelling. Occasionally, I take color-matching seriously, although accidentally.

Avva Coffee, Beverly Hills, CA

Verve Coffee Roasters, Los Angeles, CA

Cafe Dulce, USC Village, Los Angeles, CA

However, it’s sometimes best to read on your front porch, whatever the material, and hear the wind drag sycamore leaves across the street with sometimes a lone car passing, stirring them up once more.

More coffee photos included in my two Coffee Chronicles posts, with more to come, including those from my recent China trip…

Shaping space also means ridding oneself of “stuff.” One should own “things,” not stuff, which is to say “non-things.” In Non-things (2022), Han outlines a shift from things to non-things, from ownership to possessorship, where objects are ordered, or enframed (as Heidegger would add), within a totality of “things to be counted” (17). Things compose a “standing-reserve,” Heidegger claims, that threatens our ability to dwell (Technology 23).

Things are not owned as part of an intimate relationship, as philosopher Walter Benjamin notes, whereby the owner is both saver and savior of things, guarding and cherishing and remaining concernful for them. Today, things are not saved. For Han and Benjamin, they are used up (Non-things 15). “Technology is a way of revealing,” Heidegger writes, which can flow from and resonate with our relation to the world in gentle co-responding, as a water wheel, or it can become a standing-reserve of energy in an object- and market-oriented way-of-being that precludes a sense of home, peace, and joy (Technology 14-16).

Such things are non-things, or objects. For Heidegger, they don’t have “thingness” in that they don’t “gather” (Poetry 174). They don’t make meaningful relationships possible. They don’t ground being. They unground being by making light of what is heavy, by tossing aside or using up what might endure. Things cannot be things, in this sense, because they are made precisely not to last—the “planned obsolescence” that assures the smooth, machinic functioning of the market assemblage.

Any such departure or “line of flight” from this calculative logic, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari write, is “captured” by any variety of apparatuses and brought back into the fold, like counter-capitalist music swept up into the market, thereby reproducing the conditions and relations of production, as philosopher Louis Althusser might add (A Thousand Plateaus 218).

Once upon a time musicians and artists were critiqued as “sell-outs” if money took an outsized influence on what they produced. Although not always clear-cut, it’s typically obvious when this occurs, when an artist or band becomes commercialized, losing its unique feel, sound, and effect. While fame might have been prized, commercialism was to be avoided. Few artists and bands could walk the line throughout the decades, but the value of not selling out remained a target to miss. Today, commercialization is the target. “Sell-out” is no longer in our vocabulary, for more often than not that is the goal, one hardly missed.

The cycle persists.

The inverse side of too few things is too much stuff. Relentlessly we accumulate. One would like to think it a collection of things, yet it is more a mound of junk. Check any house drawer to find a hidden heap of stuff, mostly without meaning or memory. The market moves. It has no time, or allows no time, to sort out what truly matters.

There is no time for things because there is no time to linger. Homo sapiens are Phono sapiens who “collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections” (Non-things 9, 7). We collect, but we do not recollect. We buy and sell and produce and consume and use, but we do not gather. We move from house to house but do not dwell.

What does one retain when saving only what truly matters: not much. Things should matter, should murmur with meaning. In “On the Edge of Night” (1900), modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes,

My room and this vastness,
awake over the darkening land,—
are one. I am a string,
stretched tightly over wide
raging resonances.

Things are violin-bodies
full of murmuring darkness:
in it dreams the weeping of women,
in it the grudge of whole
generations stirs in its sleep . . .
I shall vibrate
like silver; then everything
beneath me will live,
and whatever wanders lost in things
will strive toward the light
that from my dancing tone—
around which the heavens pulse—
through thin, pining rifts
into the old
abysses endlessly
falls . . .

Moonlight by the Sea (1907), by Harald Sohlberg (public domain, photo linked)

Things should vibrate and resonate like strings, murmur and wander. Things should embody and extend our lives but also contain life of their own. As “vibrant matter,” things evoke emotions, affect one’s state of mind, or effect an overdue change in one’s life (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter). Things unite the “divine fourfold”: earth, sky, divinities, mortals. Through their “ringing mirror-play,” like wind chimes in a quiet garden, they presence world (Heidegger, Poetry 180-81).

That is, things are part and parcel of the sacred, in building a dwelling, in shaping space into place. “Building is really dwelling,” Heidegger concludes. “Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that which mortals stay: in things” (148). Clearly, this process occurs, however, only insofar as we have things and not objects.

Today, non-things litter our spaces like unwanted but forgotten inhabitants that hide in numerous drawers and crevices we unsuitably call “home.” We keep but do not save. For, “to save really means to set something free into its own presencing” (149). By merely keeping, we clutter space, precluding dwelling, thus obstructing being, or engaged placefulness.

Hence, the aforementioned lines: “I am in the process of deleting my life, reducing myself to ashes.”

I have looked through my things and found numerous non-things. Though minimalism has long been an influence, I’ve accumulated non-things nonetheless.

In my search to de-clutter and gather my mind unto what matters, which is to say dwell, I stumbled across the small book, The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living (2021). Here, Ryunosuke Koike explores certain practices like listening, seeing, and reading and writing in pursuing mindfulness, except that—as spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says—“mindfulness” is a misnomer, as it suggests the mind is full of things. Perhaps “mindlessness” would be a better translation of the Daoist’s emphasis on “empty mind,” though less resonant with a Western audience obsessed with fullness and hostile to emptiness, nothingness, and passiveness.

Koike devotes a chapter to “discarding,” arguing that “the fear of losing things will weigh you down” (72). We keep things and non-things alike because we fear losing attachments. We are bound up with stuff. Egyptian kings were buried with loads of things, believing them to be accessible in the next life (spoiler alert: they are not).

But how much of what we keep will we return to? If we return to it, will it not be for a momentary memory that swiftly passes and is once again forgotten as the thing is placed back into a drawer for how many more years? How many non-things are kept for no particular reason except for lack of time to sift through and discriminate important from unimportant?

Koike concludes that things, and Han would add non-things, weigh us down, occupying mental space beyond awareness that burdens. He advises unburdening ourselves from such attachments to afford clarity and presence of mind, to afford deeper dwelling.

It’s worth noting that Heidegger resonated with ideas in Buddhism, writing of Buddhist popularizer D. T. Suzuki, “If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings” (qtd. in Barrett xii).

Martin Heidegger and D. T. Suzuki (c. 1930)

However, I may have taken Koike too seriously. As it stands, I have so few things that when packing for a trip I simply survey what I own. Nevertheless, in an effort to further unburden myself and reshape space into place—into home—I began an intensive process of discriminating things from non-things, essential from inessential.

Digging through a drawer per day, I began tossing most of what little I owned. With drawers largely empty, mostly furniture remained. Some of that was tossed, as well. What was left was sufficiently useful, joyful, or both. All else was emptied out.

Clearing out things, non-things, memories good and bad alike, mental tensions eased. As Koike writes, mental tension is produced when “you don’t want to part with the item, and you tell yourself you can’t—and that tension stays in your mind for ever” (74). Things and non-things occupy space, and if such things aren’t crucial they prevent space from becoming place.

Why do with something when you can do without it? A key influence on Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity was the analytic and logical positivist philosopher Ernst Mach, who took the task of eradicating the inessential seriously in systems of thought. When generations of scientists had been struggling to reconcile certain elements of physics with a supposed “ether” that pervaded space and time, Einstein remembered Mach, asking whether any such “ether” need be assumed at all. Jettisoning the ether cleared the way for his groundbreaking 1905 theory, which further revolutionized space and time in the form of general relativity ten years later.

Things weigh you down, obstructing levity and clarity. Most paradoxical is how something as easy as letting go, which—technically—is effortless, much like accepting the gift of grace or peace or rest, seems hardest of all. In his fourth poem in Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke writes,

O you tender ones, walk now and then
into the breath that blows coldly past,
Upon your cheeks let it tremble and part;
behind you it will tremble together again.

O you blessed ones, you who are whole,
you who seem the beginning of hearts,
bows for the arrows and arrows’ targets—
tear-bright, your lips more eternally smile.

Don’t be afraid to suffer; return
that heaviness to the earth’s own weight;
heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

Even the small trees you planted as children
have long since become too heavy; you could not
carry them now. But the winds… But the spaces…

Rilke’s poem is incisive on many levels. One level traces the weight of suffering in images contrasting heaviness and lightness: mountains, seas, and trees juxtaposed with winds and spaces. Rilke invites us to let go, to “return that heaviness to the earth’s own weight.” For Rilke, this implies suffering. “Don’t be afraid to suffer,” he tells us before he invites us to let go. For even though letting go is unburdening, it demands suffering.

Why do we insist on carrying “the small trees we planted as children?” They “have long since become too heavy.” Why do we refuse to unburden ourselves, bearing the weight of the past and its nostalgic, emplaced attachments? How freeing is it to allow the winds and spaces to take us?

Still, we resist.

Orpheus (1505-1510), by Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano

Such is a story as old as time. In the Old Testament, God rescues the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Today, Leviticus is a book routinely dismissed by the non-religious for its apparent cruelty. It is also often ignored by softhearted Christians in light of the chilling details of crime and punishment in preference for “the God of love” revealed in the New Testament. However, Leviticus lays bare an essential human plight almost too terrible to recognize.

In the so-called “blessings and curses” chapter of Leviticus, God routinely reminds the Israelites of his deliverance of them from Egypt. After forty years of bondage, God brings them out from under the hand of Pharaoh that they may inhabit the promised land. God states that if the Israelites trust God and follow his decrees, they will experience peace, rest, abundance, and safety (Leviticus 26). If they do not, God will bring down “sudden terror” upon them consisting of disease, famine, defeat by enemies, restless fear, and more (Leviticus 27).

In sum, relying on themselves in place of God ensures disaster. As God makes clear, “If after all this you will not listen to me, I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze” (Leviticus 27: 18-19). Self-reliance is a seemingly reasonable road paved with good intentions that leads straight to hell.

Blessings and Curses, by Yoram Raanan

One need only recall two Greek myths for support, lest one thinks Jews and Christians stand alone on this point. I often draw attention to the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus—in rescuing his wife Eurydice from the underworld of Hades—is allowed to do so on the condition that he doesn’t look back at Eurydice as she follows him. Naturally, in desiring to exert control and maintain certainty during the process, he does this. Consequently, both he and Eurydice are banished to Hades, where Orpheus is ripped to shreds by followers of Dionysus. The consequence of such actions in both Leviticus and the Orpheus legend is not only failure, but also torture and death. To merely fall short would be too easy. One also suffers unbearably.

Orpheus and the Bacchantes (c. 1710), by Gregorio Lazzarini

Then there is Oedipus Rex, King Oedipus. Poor Oedipus. The root of Freudian psychoanalysis, Oedipus, as Greek tragedian Sophocles recounts in his eponymous work, is told by the Oracle at Delphi that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. It is precisely in attempting to avert his fate that he fulfills it. By his own determination, willpower, and self-reliance in the face of powers greater than himself he instantiates his own destruction.

Oedipus and the Sphinx (c. 1806), by Francois-Xavier Fabre

As the Old Testament develops, the Israelites are guaranteed the promised land if they place their faith in God and relinquish control. Still, they send spies ahead to the land of Canaan in an effort to aid their mission. Each time God punishes them. Naturally, they persist. For every day the spies spend scouting, the people spend one year wandering in the desert. On would think that after two or three times the Israelites would get the picture. Forty times makes the Old Testament in part a comedy of errors which is simultaneously the tragedy of human hubris. Over and over, the tragedy recurs.

“Don’t Do the Things!” (2014), via Alex Becker (photo linked)

Today, self-reliance is a virtue, not a sin. Naturally, some self-reliance is requisite. However, the cosmos is much bigger than our egos, so it is best not to tempt fate by shaking one’s fist in defiance at forces that brutally eclipse our capacities.

Often times our attempts to control a situation obstruct a natural flow. We’d be better off not getting in our way. Whether or not one submits to a higher authority or to some broader notion of contingency, or perhaps fate, is secondary to surrender itself. Regardless, you are not in control.

To make light of the heavy, I’ve been learning to let go symbolically. Bike riding is one of my favorite activities. My grandfather was an avid cyclist who road 80k miles. When he passed away, he left me his Masi Grand Criterium, which glides over roads. I’ll never own a Ferrari, but this is my version of one. In learning basic maintenance, I’ve experienced Robert Pirsig’s joy in maintaining cycles, an activity that takes you out of your head and into the quality work of underlying form. Cycling itself does this. However, I’ve found it too easy to drift into thinking, as the body is not sufficiently engaged for the mind to rest. As writer and journalist Gordon MacQuarrie says, “Please the hands and rest the brain.”

When stressed, a friend may tell you to relax. This conjures images of conking out while binge-watching Netflix. To be sure, there is a place for this. What we need though is not relaxation but rest. To rest is to engage an activity that brings you into the present, and into presence, in the fullness of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals above and beyond the heaviness of thinking into the lightness of letting go.

My grandfather’s road bike, Masi Grand Criterium

To remedy the overthinking of mere riding, I recently learned to ride with no hands. On a road bike, this is no easy task, as a glorified pebble can knock you off-balance. However, done this way, the body engages balance fully, affording the brain rest.

When you’re enjoying yourself, you’re present. When you realize you’re enjoying yourself, thinking interrupts flow, obstructing the now. This is because thinking is not joyful. Thinking is antithetical to joy. In fact, thinking actively derails joy.

Some like Nguyen differentiate thought and thinking. Thought is an effortless flow state where thoughts are experienced, coming and going like clouds in the sky, and just as ephemeral. Thinking is a stressful fight or flight state which engages rumination and is negative and limiting. Thought is spontaneous, light, and creative. Thinking is laborious, heavy, and destructive (35-41). Thought is something we have. Thinking is something we do (35).

This distinction is instructive, as it reveals whether a non-thinking state necessitates no thought. For Nguyen and likeminded Buddhists and Daoists, this is not the case. One may experience thoughts, especially since this free state of thought is the source of ingenuity. Examples include Albert Einstein’s reveries, which led to his theory of special relativity; or Henri Poincaré’s, which led to contributions to non-Euclidean geometry; or Werner Heisenberg’s, which freed his thinking around matrix mechanics, the first articulation of quantum mechanics. It’s thinking, however, as ruminating, weighing down, and imposing limits on thought that ensnares us. Thinking creates the blockage that free thought dissolves.

Einstein living his “daydreams in music,” as he said. He often took breaks from physics to play music and unblock his analytical mind, having been particularly fond of Mozart’s sonatas. Photograph by Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo (Alamy Stock Photo, via National Geographic, photo linked)

I’ve had experiences like the following: I’m not thinking and enjoying myself. I realize this. I think, “It’s nice not to think.” Then, I think, “Remember how I was thinking of [insert pointless thought here]?” Now, I’m thinking. Again… With great strife, I may emerge from this loop until, once more, I realize it and drift into thinking.

Repeat until death…

Worse, we often try to solve thinking problems with more thinking. If I have a troublesome thought, I think about why I’m having this troublesome thought. I wrestle with the thought, attempting to “solve” the thought and reshape it. This gives the thought weight. Giving it weight ensures its persistence. Attributed to Jung is the quote, “What you resist, persists.”

Rather than wrestle with the thought, let it go. Do this instantly, as instantly as the thought arrives out of nothing like a particle from the void. Would you debate a flat-earther? I hope not. Then don’t dignify fearful, anxious, stressful thoughts with a response. Even reassurances dignify fear and anxiety, for they attempt to assuage it, thereby entertaining a dialogue, however brief. Wave bye to the thought as it approaches, disallowing its landing, and thus its imprint on your mind. This is how you experience thought without thinking.

Now, when I begin to have troublesome thoughts and observe encroaching thinking, I don’t wrestle with thoughts (on my better days). I get on my bike and take my hands off the handlebars, metaphorically and materially letting go. The brain’s job, after all, is survival, plain and simple. A fearful, stressed out brain will operate on a fearful, stressed out algorithm, so to speak, where everything is perceived as dangerous. What a better way to reshape the algorithm than to engage messages of safety, or security (discussion to come), like a nice ride. Given enough time, the brain learns new patterns. These patterns feed the unconscious. Eventually, quality input generates quality output. Just then, joy begins to emerge.

Nguyen writes, “transformation is not a result to be achieved but a byproduct of letting go to be experienced” (131).

Learning to do this instills great fear. By “this” I mean letting go, whether in life, on a bike, or both. On the bike, the natural inclination is to take charge: both hands on the handlebars, steering intently. This is enjoyable. More enjoyable still is letting go and trusting your body’s response as the road morphs.

Yet when you first take your hands off the handlebars, the brain panics. What are you doing? Take control. This first inclination often wins. The human brain, as the most complex thing in the known universe, is no joke. With 100 billion neurons and one trillion to one quadrillion synaptic connections, its signals seem absolute. Its messages are evolved to be persuasive. Otherwise, why would we listen? Neglect entails risk.

But this is not the case. For philosophers such as dualists or compatibilists who believe in free will, the “mind” is not synonymous with the “brain.” In higher states of awareness, which is to say “above thinking”—in contrast to the “below thinking” of binge-watching Netflix—Zen Buddhists observe themselves having thoughts. These thoughts don’t need to be things we “have” like possessions. They can be contingent brain events we “experience” momentarily and choose to let go of.

The human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe (photo linked)

As I let go of the handlebars, my brain tells me to hold on. A “higher” state of awareness I cannot comprehend or articulate interrupts and responds, “No, let go.” I choose this and, relaxing tension throughout my body that occurs epiphenomenally to perceived danger, I glide. The more I do this, the more my brain learns to trust “me,” the mind, or, if you like, the soul interfaced with mind and body, as dualists say.

Lack of tension becomes customary, a re-membered habit lost in the tension-ridden transition from the play of childhood to the chronic stress of adulthood that induces tension as a persistent defense mechanism against the assault of modernity.

I say re-membered because many of us are metaphorically dis-membered. Our minds and bodies are pulled apart by opposing forces. Unlike Hegelian dialectics, where every thesis and anthesis entails eventual synthesis, or harmony, today disharmony seems the norm. We are dismembered, but in what way?

Take the Middle Age practice of quartering. Whereas a woman condemned to death was often burned at the stake, a man was often hanged, drawn, and quartered. Here, he was taken either to a quartering table or to four horses, where his limbs were tied down and gradually pulled apart by a pulley system or by the horses moving in different directions.

Man being tortured on a rack, by William Hickman Smith Aubrey (1867), illustration from The National and Domestic History of England (photo linked)

What happened physically to the condemned man during the Middle Ages happens to us metaphorically today. This is not to say that there are no physical consequences to mental tension. It is simply not as obvious, initially at least, as the grotesque spectacle of quartering.

As philosopher Michel Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, the spectacle of the condemned simply moved indoors, at first out of the public eye into barns, for instance, and then, today, into the mind. “The Spectacle of the Scaffold” (Chapter 2 in Discipline and Punish) is now more a spectacle of the self. They are merely differently grotesque. “The Body of the Condemned” (Chapter 1) is now the spiritmindbody of the condemned. The first is visible and visceral. The latter is invisible and internal. Nevertheless, both break us from without and within.

I ride to evade or dissolve the interior scaffold of the condemned. I ride to dissolve the internal apparatus of surveillance that binds value to productivity, to undo the “I-tiredness” of a world wired to iPhones, iPads, and i-software and hardware that consumes us (Han, Burnout 31).

The byproduct of small “i” products and programs annihilates the big “I” that is you and me as subjects of our own lives.

Once we were Capital. Now, we are lowercase.

You don’t matter. And neither do “I.” Only the “i” matters. The only way in which we are capital is in the market sense, the human capital of a world reduced “to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers” (Heidegger, Poetry 114).

Much like in The Matrix, our relationship with technology has undergone a radical reversal. We built this technology to serve us. We built it to save us time and energy. For what? Ostensibly, for living our lives. For more rest, peace, and joy, in addition to more efficient and less costly productivity. By offloading tasks to technology, we afford ourselves time and space to live.

The Matrix (1999) scene depicting human beings as batteries for a machine civilization

Yet, as we know, this is not the result. Technology expands space and time, to be sure. It closes gaps, annihilating distance, as Heidegger observes, bringing nearness to things (or objects, as Heidegger would distinguish in this case). Yet this nearness is only physical. Whether it is the older technology Heidegger mentions, like radios and airplanes, or newer technologies like Zoom or AI, technology closes distance (165).

What do we do with the spacetime opened up in return? Spend more time with technology, more time working, and less time resting. One must appreciate the dialectical irony that what we created in part to “save time” further binds us to time-sucking tasks (email being my least favorite) that preclude rest.

Time is bound up with economics. We save time, spend time, waste time, even kill time. We make time, make up for lost time, and so on. Of course, time is money.

The essence of technology, as Heidegger writes, is a “a way of revealing” (Technology 20). It reveals something in nature itself, as the atom bomb reveals a destructive power in nature. In the bomb, technology is “creative destruction,” to borrow a phrase from economist Joseph Schumpeter. In i-software and hardware, technology reveals nature as information. Quantum computing, for instance, puts quantum mechanics to work by revealing the speed at which information can be processed and utilized. Yet in none of these higher profile uses does technology reveal nature as rest, peace, or joy.

Google’s Sycamore quantum computer (2019), via New Scientist (photo linked)

For Heidegger, the water wheel is an example of technology that works with the human spirit as opposed to a nuclear reactor which imposes a top-down order wherein the human engages nature in an extractive manner. In the former, nature is a partner in work toward sustenance. In the latter, nature is exploited for power in more ways than one. The question of technology, for Heidegger, is a question of our relationship to technology more than of technology itself.

What can save us from our exploitative, time-annihilating relationship with technology? Most of us will not occupy a position of power to direct the world stage in this manner. What we can do is change our individual relationship with technology in subtle yet redemptive ways.

Writing is a technology. Here, writing, I am engaged in a more reciprocal relation with technology wherein technology is an active extension of my work. It not only extends my work; it shapes my work. Its affordances influence how and where I write. The software’s features and capacities actively shape the writing process such that these words may have turned out differently on a typewriter or on pen and paper.

A bike is another technology. Its purpose may be transportation to some, exercise to others. To me, it is a small, redemptive act, a way of recuperating energy and spirit amidst daily work, regardless of whether I enjoy the work. As aforementioned, “stress” consists of both eustress and distress, things we do and don’t enjoy. Although we typically only recognize “stress” as the latter, both exact a toll on our minds and bodies. A bike is transportation and exercise but also one way toward rest.

Some days, only the bike saves me. Consequently, this “age of heightened mental tension” that Han describes starts to lose its grip on me. A metaphorical gesture on a bicycle becomes a philosophy of life, or as Foucault describes it “an aesthetics of existence” (Hermeneutics 530).

Michel Foucault pretending that life isn’t fundamentally suffering (photo linked)

As such, technology not only condemns but saves. Technology saves me. “Saving,” Heidegger writes, “does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing” (Poetry 150). Technology does this for me, sets me free into my own presencing, but only insofar as I effectively relate to it. A bike may otherwise be mere transportation in a regime of productivity or “wellness.” What technology reveals thus depends on relationality.

In this way, technology is no mere extension of but a fusion with myself. As Pirsig writes, the aim of a relationship with technology should not be toward an “exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both” (298).

Technology reveals. Its revelations depend on our relationship with it. If reveal means “to make known,” then these revelations are the unknown we risk making known in relation to desire. We share agency with technology. And what we create together dramatically shapes futures we may inhabit. Consequently, there is no simple technological determinism. The creation of technologies do not simply determine history’s unfolding, as if a certain technology necessitates a certain relation. Rather, it is both what we create and how we choose to relate to technology that shapes history.

On my bike, I experience freedom and salvation, if only momentarily. The more I exert control, the more tense my body becomes. Rigidity appears protective. However, it endangers me. Any variation in the road staggers me. Remaining loose and responsive, I adapt to emergence.

As risk engineer and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, it is better to be a “rational flâneur” with a loose plan who adapts to change than a “tourist” with a rigid, inflexible plan that deters instead of discloses life.

The rational flâneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision at every step to revise his schedule, so he can imbibe things based on new information, what Nero was trying to practice in his travels, often guided by his sense of smell. The flâneur is not a prisoner of a plan. Tourism, actual or figurative, is imbued with the teleological illusion; it assumes completeness of vision and gets one locked into a hard-to-revise program, while the flâneur continuously—and, what is crucial, rationally—modifies his targets as he acquires information (Antifragile 170).

As with the Israelites, attempting to guarantee the road ahead threatens the likelihood of getting there. “Sometimes,” Nguyen notices, “you may not want to let go because you believe it’s what got you to where you are, [yet] what got you here won’t get you there” (140). As with Oedipus, it is precisely avoiding danger that ensures it. The most earthquake-resistant buildings are not the most rigid but the most responsive to the trembling earth, moving with it as it trembles. Little did I know that as I learned to ride differently I learned to live differently.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile (2012, photo linked)

In a culture of “safety first,” however, such advice often falls flat. We learn to live the same way we learn to ride: hold on for dear life.

No doubt, technology like helmets, knee pads, wrist guards, and the like make us safer. But to ride with no helmet and no hands, gliding aimlessly down the road, is a joy fatefully conjoined with danger.

Pirsig’s ending to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) makes this abundantly clear. In the last scene, Pirsig and his son Chris ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle. It would be too clichéd to appreciate if it weren’t for Pirsig’s construction of a delicate tradeoff between safety and joy.

As they ride together, Chris takes his helmet off to feel the wind. “You need it for safety,” the narrator says, but allows it anyway, since his own helmet is off (421). Whereas before the helmet covered their ears, preventing conversation, now they can converse and appreciate the environment.

Of course, a fall off a cycle with no helmet could be deadly. Enjoy life or live safely. One cannot do both equally well. Just as in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in relation to the position and momentum of a particle, where there is a reciprocal uncertainty relation—the more precisely you know one variable the less precise your knowledge of the other becomes—joy and safety are conjugate variables of this type. Increasing safety gradually dissolves joy, and vice versa.

Helmet off, Chris stands on the pegs of the cycle. “That’s a little dangerous,” the narrator says, but Chris insists (422). Standing up, he sees the road over his father’s shoulders. The landscape opens up. Now, they’re in it.

Earlier, the narrator expresses his dislike of windshields on cycles because they “close you in” (40). Dividing rider and environment, the windshield becomes just another screen. Car windows function similarly:

In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. (4)

Add phones, tablets, and the like, and you have contemporary life: boring movement through a frame.

And then you die.

Robert Pirsig and son Chris on cross-country road trip (1966, photo linked)

Comedian Louis C.K. says just this. In a 2013 interview with Conan O’Brien, he laments children’s smartphone use. Instead of feeling emotions, constitutive of highs and lows (one recalls Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” lyrics, “high, low, high, low, high, low”), one becomes “kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die.”

Homo sapiens, as Phono sapiens, inhabit the perpetual plateau of the infinitely mediocre, dull, trite, and numb. As “informatons,” we carry and access infinite information in the palm of our hands. But such information is devoid of value. Thus, information becomes meaningless.

Through endless varieties of TV (because most new technology is just more TV), “the Open”—as Heidegger calls it, the ground of Being itself—is screened out, made inaccessible. This threshold isolates the human spirit from the world. In isolation, the vital energy that invigorates is drained by the false light and surfaces of screens.

After all, “television” means to see (vision) at a distance (tele). The very term spells out the crisis of distance. No longer are we near anything. “All distances in space and time are shrinking,” Heidegger writes, “Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness” (Poetry 165).

Television, and thus much modern technology, is an inversion of nearness. We live at a distance, a distance from our environment, each other, and—ironically—from ourselves, rarely being afforded the space and place and community to come to know ourselves. For, all self-knowing demands nearness to the elements that shape us. In Psychological Types (1921), Jung writes,

As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation. . . . If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted. (448-49)

In Dreams (1974), he continues,

That we are bound to earth does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary it is the sine qua non of growth. No noble, well grown tree every disowned its dark roots. (188)

How can we grow near to ourselves if we cannot grow near to the environments, communities, and histories that shape us? How can we shape space into place if we watch from a distance?

Carl Jung’s “philosophical tree,” rooted upward and downward (photo linked)

This is why Heidegger, in his exegesis on Rilke’s “The Ninth Elegy,” writes that we stand not only before the Open, or nature as the ground of being, but “over and against” the Open (Poetry 108). For, watching at a distance does not merely avoid but extinguishes being if normatively sustained. I suspect if Nietzsche were alive he would see a growing climax of our degradation and decay, which is to say our loss of instinct and engaged intensity as we become passersby to being itself.

Yet the fact remains: watching from a distance is safe in the sense that you avoid imminent physical danger. Safety sustains survival, satisfying basic instinct. For a modern society grafted onto productivity, safety also ensures maximal productivity in safeguarding human capital. It is to a corporation’s benefit, for instance, to have happy, healthy workers; hence, the implementation of corporate gyms, healthy food options, and the like.

Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, illustrates this scene in the OK Computer (1997) track “Fitter Happier,” worth quoting in full:

Fitter happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient, better driver
A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (no bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall)
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On Sundays ring road supermarket
(No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
Car wash (also on Sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That’s driven into
Frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics

Here, Yorke describes a tame, safe, mediocre life, the life Louis C.K. describes as being “kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die.” This tames fear and danger but also the affective intensity of life. One is more likely to accumulate a quantity of years (and fears) but not quality in years. One lives longer, but what for?

Joy is sacrificed at the altar of safety, life at the altar of survival, instinct at the altar of intellect. Less is more, but despite this we choose more. Always more. Only the mad choose otherwise. So we go, holding on for dear life.

The fact that we refuse to surrender control is not surprising. “Safety first” is an effect of enduring fear, a fear that follows us to our lowly origins. To let go is contrary to all we desire to maintain, protect, and sanctify.

We fear not only evil but also losing the good. As philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said in his 1969 address at the University of California, Berkeley, “One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” He asks, “Is it not possible to die psychologically, every day, to everything that one has known?”

Jiddu Krishnamurti at University of California, Berkeley (1969, photo linked)

This is true freedom. Only then, in letting go, do we occupy the heights of being, which demands a lightness of being. As Huxley writes in Island (1962),

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me.

In this sense, Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) would be more aptly named The Unbearable Heaviness of Trying to be Light. Ironically, being light—easy as it seems—is the weightiest task many undertake. The heaviness we become is not easily unlearned. Life’s cardinal truths are cruelly paradoxical; hence, the aforementioned Greek and Biblical tragedies. Still we try.

To be continued…

Recent musings have led to contemplations on pursuing deeper joy in life in contrast to the tireless pursuit of ambitions and drives or else ephemeral pleasure. This snapshot of options sketches the basic dilemma: one the one hand, relentless work. On the other, shallow comfort.

It resembles Aldous Huxley’s “World State” in Brave New World (1932) where “truth and beauty” are sacrificed for “comfort and happiness,” except that we still have a few scattered souls in our World State who pursue the former, though a vanishingly small number, especially in mainstream realms of art, music, and film, where what is “popular” is synonymous with what is openly, extravagantly vain (228).

Brave New World (1932), by Aldous Huxley

Whereas many in previous generations attempted to hide this vanity behind a veneer of modesty, now it is dazzlingly proclaimed in its self-inflicted superficiality. No more archetypes of good and evil, hero and villain, struggle and conquest. Look not for the Temple of Apollo, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Land. There is no sacred. Only the openly yet inconspicuously profane.

Look not for tragedy either. For, as Huxley foreknew, we no longer have the soul-searching experience to interpret it. All that remains is the one united shrine to mediocrity. Who can get the most by excelling the least? Who can remain on the surface of the incontrovertibly shallow?

Vanity is a hall of mirrors. Turn from one to find another. From Latin, mirror (mirare) means “to look at.” Ironically, the mirror affords a dual potential. Through the mirror we may stare into the depths of our souls. We may also cover pimples.

On the one hand, the mirror holds, conveys, and maintains a self-to-self confrontation with consciousness, with the most blissful and most terrifying. Here, the mirror is deep. On the other, it magnifies the surface and every minor scar, imperfection, and blemish. Here, the mirror is shallow. A superposition of states, a contradictory yet complementary duality.

Today, we hold both mirrors. We relentlessly face ourselves and our own shortcomings compared to others. Social media accomplishes this feat with ease. Your friends are having the time of their lives. Why aren’t you? Here, social media holds you up to yourself not by projecting an image of you as you are, but of who you would like to be. The vacation your friend took is an image in the mirror you see but can’t experience. The mirror reflects not the real but unactualized desire. In this way, you see what you have not yet become.

As a student once wrote of antidepressants, “Prozac doesn’t give you the life you want to live, but the feeling you’d have if you had the life you wished you did.” In this way, the mirror of social media projects not your life but your wish.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud famously claims that dreams serve the function of wish fulfillment, enacting unconscious desires. In part, dreams relieve and reveal psychic tension.

Sigmund Freud attempting to think of anything other than Oedipus (Bourgeron Collection, RDA, Hulton Archive, Getty Images)

Today, many no longer remember their dreams, or care to. Dreams have been crowded out. There is no time to dream, linger, or ponder our depths. We have abandoned our unconscious minds, our personality #2, as analytical psychologist Carl Jung might say—that shadowy, undifferentiated half that comprises our doubts, lack, and fears, but also our unrealized potential.

As Jung knew, the unconscious represents not merely lack but possibility. Like the Greek god Janus, the unconscious faces both backwards and forwards with revelations each way, betraying a better future in light of the past. As poorly as social media replaces genuine friendship, conversation, and community, it replaces the wish fulfillment dreams once served. This is why “dreams” today are void of meaning, superficial from start to finish. “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. It’s of the next iPhone with still another camera mode.

Furthermore, adapting Freud’s work in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), social media embodies the landscape wherein another’s experiences become one’s “ego ideal,” the object of a yet-to-be-achieved self. Fittingly, Freud’s process shows how an “object” of perception bypasses one’s ego, the conscious self, and becomes the “ego ideal,” or desired self.

We may interpret this “object” as anything from a consumer product to an experience. After all, today we have experiences like we have products. In Non-things (2022), philosopher Byung-Chul Han distinguishes between “having” experiences and experience itself, which is the province of Being (12-13). Often people laud the having of experiences as morally superior to the having of products: “the more I experience, the more I am” (12). Here, having experience augments Being in a way mere products cannot. However, both are objects of ownership accumulated by the achieving self with consumer satisfaction conjoined to the ego ideal as the chief end. The difference consists merely of the materiality of having and seeing. Both are objects to be had and for others to see. One on a table. The other on a screen.

With this framework in mind, consider now a friend who posts about an experience you’d like to “have.” In response, you construct a post that reflects or projects unrealized desires, making fantasy appear real. This fantasy is both the Greek phantazein (to make visible) and phantasia (imagination or appearance). You make imagination visible. You do this more for you than your followers. The phantasm (deceptive appearance) proliferates. Through exaggerated or else fabricated posts, you experience life through an imaginary self. To experience vicariously is to experience life through the other. We do this through film, literature, television, and the like. In this scenario, you live vicariously through yourself, through the life you imagine made visible through the post. Through this mirror of media, you wish. You dream. You reflect. You project.

You do so poorly.

This is why we were never meant to have mirrors. In The Book of Disquiet (1982), Fernando Pessoa writes,

Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible than that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes. He could only see his own face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of seeing his own face. The creator of the mirror poisoned the human soul.

Yet today we have mirrors of all sorts, material and metaphorical. Even if we could banish mirrors of the physical variety, the metaphorical mirrors of self-imposed media readily contort our relations to ourselves and others in ways that exceed the reflected image we gaze into without comprehending.

Incessantly we face ourselves.

Those who turn from vanity in one sense fall into it in another through endless work. On the one hand, Kardashian-esque influencer culture. On the other, a Protestant work ethic gone mad, a serpent chasing its own tale through “goals” and “side-hustles” that multiply the more they are “achieved,” which is to say checked off an unending “to do list” that enslaves more than it liberates. Far less do we believe that achieving a successful career, for instance, is “superficial,” and yet it can be as superficial as standing in a mirror blotting out blemishes.

The difference is the blemish. Of the skin, the blemish is physical: discoloration, unevenness, asymmetry, and the like. Of the career, the blemish is psychological: the desire for praise, respect, approval. This is not to say that blotting out a blemish or gaining a respectful career is “bad.” It is to show what warped motives shape action. The mirror, insofar as it reflects, never lies. It reflects what we project.

Mirror (2019), by Greg Powell, watercolor on canvas

For me, the struggle is personal. It is easier to cast aside the first vanity, that of the physical. Not watching twenty seasons of The Kardashians helps. Incidentally, what sort of society is it where we have twenty such seasons but only one season of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980)?

Yet through the decades I thought that because so many lines on the “to do list” were my choosing, or so I believed, and admirable ones at that, I didn’t perceive them as boundaries to happiness but rather as frontiers toward freedom. Certainly, they were both: degrees, jobs, promotions, and the like. And yet incessant activity became its own slave-like passivity. As social psychologist Erich Fromm writes in The Art of Loving (1956),

Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a ‘passivity’ because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the ‘actor.’ On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be ‘passive’, because he is not ‘doing’ anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence.

Many believe they are motivated by ambition, passion, vision, and the like. That may be true. Yet there is also often a deep insecurity and need for approval and achievement behind the ambition that drives the driver.

As Han discusses in The Burnout Society (2010), we become our own master and slave in one. Although Han reaches this conclusion by recognizing a hyper-capitalist or neoliberal economy’s capacity to ingrain in us a relentless work ethic by which we police ourselves in relation to productivity, or lack thereof, we also work to release ourselves from or escape our own unconscious self-judgments.

If you don’t feel “good enough,” whether it’s your parents or the marketplace or “society” that tells you so, the best thing you can do is achieve. The more you achieve, the more you reassure your self-worth. Endlessly self-doubt and achievement circle each other like cat and mouse. One never catches, while the other never evades. So we circle ourselves, cat and mouse, our own cartoonish tomfoolery.

In our “achievement society,” as Han calls it, the most dangerous thing you can do is relax. You know the fruits of your labor are the continual reassurance of deep insecurity if the act of relaxation puts you on edge, revealing an unconscious master-slave dialectic where you are a slave, or addict, to eternal work that never quite reassures, never quite releases you from the bondage of self.

To be an “addict,” after all, originally meant to be “devoted” (from Latin, addicere). In Roman law, addiction meant the enslavement of a person in accordance with a court filing. Today, we know of “addictions” to particular activities, especially illicit ones, but not so much to activity itself, an addiction encircling or epiphenomenal to a larger addiction to “the self,” to be discussed.

In a society addicted to activity, the worst thing you can do is no-thing. Buddhists call this wu wei, or “doing nothing.” As it turns out, doing no-thing is the hardest thing achievers can do, and thus perhaps the most rewarding, for inside the true activity of nothing you inhabit yourself, or relinquish your “self,” and reaffirm the value of being-in-itself unattached to action. Passivity becomes the highest form of activity, insofar as it offers deep rest, peace, and security in contrast to endless work. It is not tomorrow but today, the everyday, that offers Enlightenment. As Han writes in The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (2002), “Any searching for an extraordinary There leads us astray. What we are after is a leap into the ordinary Here” (23).

Yet, even this language—“What we are after,” “a leap into”—shows how bound the Westerner in particular is to the language of pursuit in contradistinction to allowing, letting go, stopping, emptying, and resting, all of which is “achieved” by relinquishing effort. Living effortlessly, in this sense, is simple but not easy, for it requires unclouding a mind occupied by tempestuous storms. Once clear, the mind dwells. As a verse from the koan from Mumonkan (1228), aptly named The Gateless Barrier, goes,

The spring flowers, the moon in autumn
The cool wind of summer, winter’s snow, —
If your mind is not clouded with unnecessary things,
This is the happy day in human life. (qtd. in Han Buddhism 24)

Meditating Daruma, by Konoe Nobutada (1565-1614), portraying “empty mind”

Yet we go on achieving and pursuing, often reaching only for what tomorrow ostensibly brings, losing the everyday, the now, the instant, which as Bachelard traces in Intuition of the Instant (1932) is all that truly exists, a moment between two voids. That is the long story short of my academic career thus far, one fueled by endless coffee. The number of times I’ve said “I need more coffee” exceeds the number of stars in the known universe. Attributed to Bruce Lee is the quote, “You don’t need coffee. You need rest.” This is true. And I need coffee because the eternal product machine demands it.

Products, as I learned, include not only objects on shelves of supermarkets and malls and wholesalers that spread rhizomatically like crab grass across the global landscape, but also bookstores and printing presses, where words like those in academic books are consumed for much the same entertainment and productive value as smart phones and fast fashion. Books are used up and cast aside like shoes that no longer fit fashion and whim. Style changes, and so do styles of knowledge. The market churns and burns.

At a certain point I realized that my academic desires, too, had been swept up—or “captured,” as Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)—by market forces that were all too eager to supply the promise of approval and security by dangling the carrot of publications, awards, grants, esteem, and the like, with the catch that the carrot was always once more removed. With each publication comes a momentary sense of gratification, achievement, approval, and security, until it is cast afar, further.

Always further.

Many are foolish enough to believe the next publication or award will restore the prize unconditionally. Finally, desire will be satisfied once and for all. The next one is the one: the next degree, job, house, location, event. Then, and only then, will salvation be achieved—through none other than work.

The achievement subject dreams…
Passivity curses. Activity redeems.

This state of affairs also undergirds a whole structure of values where activity is praised and passivity is cursed. It is why we value writing more than reading or thinking; speaking more than listening or hearing, and so forth. Production garners esteem. Reception garners critique. Classes on writing are required, but a class strictly on “reading” is an elective, if a class at all. God forbid we take a class on “listening.”

Link to analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2020), by PlasticPills

That is to say that my world, too, the “Ivory Tower,” is caught up in achievement society and full of achievement subjects who save themselves through work. Perfectionism is the mechanism. Nothing is ever perfect, so there is always work to do. Everything is never done, so there is no spacetime in which to rest. Ambition drives the train.

Right off the tracks.

Quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli knew this. An early pioneer of quantum theory, Pauli never rested. His critiques thundered across his colleagues’ work, gaining him the nickname “the wrath of God” for his brutal genius. Yet he was plagued by alcoholism and nightmares and sought the counsel of Jung, as recounted in Atom & Archetype: The Jung/Pauli Letters, 1932-1958 (2014).

Jung went on to analyze 400 of Pauli’s nightmares, published in Dreams, which shows Pauli rising from humble beginnings driven to fame via a compensatory function which appeared redemptive. The task was to reclaim himself from the razor’s edge of ambition fused with intellect that indiscriminately cut him off from himself.

It is there where one “burns out.” That is, one burns through oneself until only the base remains, the indestructible bone that seeks to bear new flesh. The flame of ambition burns from the head of the flame, the mind, down through the wick of the body until one burns out.

Almost.

How to resurrect oneself, to rise from the ashes?

For years I have related to Pauli and recently traced my own burnout in our “burnout society.” What for years felt like continual ascension began to have diminishing returns. The next presentation and publication offered less and less redemption. The next degree, job, and location promised less and less renewal, change, and growth.

Over time, the poetic expansion of the convex gave way to the radically concave. The infinitely expanding cosmic self transfigured into a tin can crushed beneath the heal of eternity. An inflationary universe began to contract. The centrifugal force of a big bang transformed into the centripetal force of a big crunch.

Geometry is cruel like this, an enantiodromia of opposites: a Nietzsche as enduring antichrist going mad late in life and signing his last letters as “The Christ.” All things become their opposite.

Friedrich Nietzsche in his last days (public domain)

Similarly, psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli describes a process of “psychological osmosis” that may lead, if one surrenders to the process, to a psychosynthesis or reconstruction of self around a new center, one less rigid, narrow, and egocentric, coordinated around developed psychological energies (Psychosynthesis 17, 23-25).

Here, we may take osmosis in the original Greek sense of ōsmos, or “impetus.” An impetus is the force or energy with which a body moves. Like ambition, an impetus drives. From Latin in-patere, an impetus seeks towards. Osmosis seeks toward balance in cells, often helping with waste removal. Osmosis purifies. Psychological osmosis seeks balance around a new center which rids ourselves of our “selves” as center.

But first, the fall.

The poet W. B. Yeats was right. “The Second Coming” comes for us all. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” The center being self, a self oriented around itself, which becomes the nexus of all past wrongs, a collective unconscious collapsing on itself, where each of us is broken by the break that makes us.

At some point this bleak self-recognition awaits us all: “A violence without purpose . . . a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. . . . Desire is agape” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 346-7). Broken by breaks, we break down. And yet, as I trace, this inevitable arrival is both a break down and a break through (362).

Finally, my accruing deliverances fell flat. I “accomplished” things. Yet, nothing changed. Rather, the same dark cloud following me, which I later came to know as a deep insecurity assuaged by endless productivity, covered me. No thing offered redemption but rather served to reinstantiate the penetrating darkness of existential angst. As Han explores, angst, from the old high German angust, originally meant “narrowness” (Spirit 3). Narrowness of perspective, value, and vision.

My angst disclosed itself in graduate school nightmares: dreams of dark spaces, towers, winding staircases into black labyrinths, and a dark monolithic figure which revealed itself in one dream as the “mysterium.” This is where my study of Jung began.

Representation of nightmares and the Jungian shadow, via Sam Woolfe

Dreams within dreams, layer upon layer of darkness, with some dreams becoming so unsettling that I studied lucid dreaming to be able to awake by lying down in the dream and closing my eyes. Even then, at times I would awake into still another dream no more comforting than the last.

What followed was a long process of unraveling myself until only a few threads remained. Buried beneath yards of achievements: joy, peace, rest, content.

O, yes, what was all that stuff about again? Like Pauli, I’d forgotten it was there, although I’d recognized it as something other people had all these years. Not me, of course. There is no time for joy when you’re achieving.

“Unraveling,” however, is not quite right. It is an excruciating process like layers of skin peeled back until only bone remains. What is essential? Not much. What is superfluous, vain, excessive, gratuitous? Most everything. Yet what is essential is life-giving, redeeming, indissoluble.

Democritus was right. All is atoms and void. Strip life to the core, and only atoms and void remain. Atoms reflect their namesake: uncuttable. What in our lives is uncuttable? What cannot be done without?

I’ve previously described that unraveling, which included stopping academic endeavors for a year, having lost faith in their value. No doubt, exhaustion drove both this unraveling and dis-identification with academia. What I have not described is the process by which that same neoliberal work ethic, ingrained in our social unconscious, transferred to pursuing joy.

The tragic irony is that we often take our old, broken strategies into new and exciting situations, breaking them too. Perhaps Jung’s notion of “assimilation” in Psychological Types (1921) fits the bill, insofar as it describes how we learn the new in light of the old.

In this case, however, I approached the new in light of the old. This was more harmful than helpful. For, as Niels Bohr writes in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1957), “The lesson we have hereby received [is that] no content can be grasped without a formal frame and that any form, however useful it has hitherto proved, may be found to be too narrow to comprehend new experience” (65).

The “overachiever” in the achievement society is a dog with one trick: achieve. Achieve at all costs. Your value depends on it. Not only your value to others, but also—more insidiously—your value to yourself.

Since we live our lives with ourselves, unable to rid ourselves of ourselves, a deficit in perceived value threatens a fragile, internal coherence that—although it knows no peace or rest or grace—nevertheless holds together, trembling as it holds, so much so that the title of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) aptly describes achievers’ relationships with themselves.

Artwork for Fear and Trembling, Hertog Foundation

Therefore, I took the achiever strategy to a new goal: joy. A careless but inevitable mistake. The laser pointer of my mind had a new target, a new surface area to pierce with pointless radiance.

The trouble is that joy, like peace and rest, cannot be achieved. It is arrived at with an inversion of focus, with an inattentiveness that wanders, not in the sense of becoming distracted, but of becoming content, indifferent to the affairs of life, and unbothered by the ebb and flow of incessant activity that, while it never comes to rest, doesn’t necessitate your never coming to rest. Joy, rest, and peace happen to you when you stop trying to achieve.

To many this sounds like giving up, quitting, or tendering your resignation such that from here on out you consign yourself to a mediocre, ambitionless life.

This was my view when I took a “World Religion” class. Learning Buddhist philosophy, I believed that the Buddhist’s attempt to be “devoid of ambition” translated to “having no goals.” Of course that would lead to less stress, tension, worry, and the like. But it would also rob life of achievements, goals, challenges, adventures, and thus “success.” Being an undergraduate on the way to the professorial class, voiding myself of ambition was unwise.

My arrival at the Buddhist’s “goal” of voiding oneself of ambition comes not merely because now that I have “achieved” I can thereby let go of achievement. This would entail that being ambitionless derives from overachievement itself. In other words, achieve so that one day you no longer need to achieve. Achieve now. Rest later. At best, as Han writes, rest now “for the sake of work” (Scent 98).

Rather, the shift is not so much in what I’m doing or not doing but in how I’m doing it. It’s about having the right attitudes while doing what you’re doing. “It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard” (Pirsig 423). No doubt, stability in my career means that I may shed pointless pursuits whose only purpose was shaping professional stability, “a revaluation of all values,” as Friedrich Nietzsche might say (the subtitle to The Will to Power before editors removed it).

Casualties of living authentically so far include:

• Meetings of all kinds

• Academic conferences

• Books (quality over quantity)

• Professional endeavors (again, quality over quantity)

• Activities with acquaintances (i.e, “people I care little for”)

• Activities “out and about” (i.e., staying busy because others stay busy, in order that you have things to post and share, in order that you appear to be important and fun and likable and exciting, in order to appear valuable to others, in order to appear valuable to yourself)

• And much more…

Like Empedocles jumping into a volcano, such inconsequential bits were consumed in the fire of purification. But much also grew and magnified in the process:

• Quiet time (the value of silence is scarcely appreciated)

• Solitude (another casualty of modernity)

• Listening (hearing, listening, and being present while doing nothing)

• Time in nature (or what’s left of it in terms of uncultivated land, as Henry David Thoreau might say)

• Exercise (not for staying fit but in-itself and for-itself in relation to joy, especially bike-riding, whose byproduct is staying fit)

• Short day-trips to places of genuine interest, especially to the mountains (where quiet solitude is given), without broadcasting every move to others

• Reading and writing for interest and joy vs. productivity

• Reading literature again, in particular, which I dubbed a “waste of time” in contrast to the “high theory” that academics in my field value more (e.g., Heidegger), hence the name “high theory” or capital “L” Literature

• And much more…

An Eruption of Mount Etna at Night (1787), coloured mezzotint by J. M. Mixelle after A. d’Anna, portraying Greek philosopher Empedocles jumping into a volcano

While there has been much subtraction and addition throughout this process, burning away the inessential to discover what little remains, another key shift has been learning to inhabit space differently. For, any psychological osmosis is not merely “psychological.” That is, it does not happen only in the psyche, as if it were enough to reshape thoughts. As we are embodied beings, this shift must happen in space too. In fact, it must happen in space so that it may happen in mind. After all, matter and meaning are irreducibly entangled, as Karen Barad and other physicists and philosophers who transgress disciplinary boundaries explore. Changing space changes how we inhabit space, changing mind.

Therein lies the problem. Contemporary space and place is so boring, so dull, so phony, so uninspiring, so cruel and inhumane, and so utterly meaningless and vain that we must reshape what little quality space remains.

In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957), great attention is paid to the place of space in shaping peace, joy, imagination, contentment, and the like. Space is the possibility of place, which geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defines as “centers of felt value” (Space and Place). Space is shaped into place when endowed with value.

Gaston Bachelard, probably not Santa Claus (public domain)

How to endow with value? Bachelard examines the house, “from cellar to garret,” as the “non-I that protects the I” (Poetics of Space 5). That is, the house as home, space as place, should be where one feels protected, warm, secure. One inhabits and is inhabited by the house.

Bachelard’s chapters on corners, wardrobes, chests and drawers, and the value of curved space as opposed to sharp angles exhibit how space can be shaped into inhabitable, comfortable, and comforting place.

Take reading. As children we are given “designated areas” to read. Read at the table. Read in this or that chair. Read in the library, but in this or that section.

Further, reading practices are rigidly policed. Read in the right position. Don’t slouch. Sit up when you read, not lying down. Read with the right light. Be quiet. Shhh! The whole practice becomes a set of rigid rules.

Exhausting…

In Writing in Designated Areas Only (1996), English professor Linda Brodkey recounts such rules and literacy practices, illustrating how reading and writing suffocate under the weight of prohibitions, noting the “loss of human space” as she shifted from the children’s to adult library.

Truth to tell, I never felt I really belonged in the adult library, and I wonder now if that’s because the loss of human space figured the even more important loss of books as stories. (36)

Here, Brodkey recounts how the creative space of the children’s library, with sprawling, wide-open spaces to read, and free space through which to move and explore, is replaced by cramped shelves and cramped books, with cramped and little, boring spaces to read “properly,” which is to say rigidly, as she moved into the adult section of the library (36). The smoothness of the sphere is replaced by the hardness of the square; hence, the 1960s “hippie culture” emphasis on “grooviness” vs. “squareness.”

Curved, inhabitable space of children’s library in Aberdeen, Hong Kong

Cramped but cozy and creative book shop: “Michel Foucault’s Bookshop,” Portland, Oregon (my photo, and they ran out of Foucault books…)

Typical, rigid, and boring adult library (almost every place)

Human space is lost. Consequently, so are stories. Stories lose meaning and become information. That information, Han writes, is often anchored to production or “accelerated doing” in a culture of informatons (Scent 7). In other words, “Storytelling is storyselling” (Crisis x).

With such a state of affairs, few give or receive stories, since “storytelling requires a state of relaxation” (Crisis 5). The result of information-achievement society is few stories and infinite products, little quality and endless quantity, culminating in “an age of heightened mental tension” (Crisis 5). Tension precludes relaxation. Absent relaxation, we cannot give and receive narrative, which is meaning itself. In short, Nietzsche’s fragment in The Will to Power (1901), “A theory of exhaustion,” becomes an extended theory of exhaustion, where “poverty of experience” reigns (39; Crisis 9).

I recall a particularly cruel example of the exhausted tension state. As an undergrad, I worked as an English tutor at various levels. I once helped a small group of junior high kids (me with junior high kids? The horror…) with their reading comprehension. They were to read silently for twenty minutes or so before discussion. As they did this around a cheap plastic table on cheap plastic chairs, they quickly grew distracted, uneasy, fidgety, and “lost concentration” (i.e., receptive relaxation).

Similar to the space where the kids were expected to read, and enjoy reading

Since the private tutoring group was led in a woman’s house, with each room serving as a classroom, I told the students to get up and find their own reading spot. They gladly did this. A couple went to the windowsill. A couple others found their own corner, and so on. Suddenly, they were reading. Just reading. No fidgeting. No wandering concentration. They were curled up in spaces conducive to storytelling and receiving.

Then, a knock on the door...

It was the “boss.” And the “boss” had orders: the kids were to read at the cheap plastic table on their cheap plastic chairs. This was the iron fist of the already blunted adult crushing the not-yet-blunted child spirit, the manufacturer of the indistinguishable products of the future smothering the already vanishing but still present joy of youth.

Or something less dramatic…

The children returned to their chairs. Instantly, they lost focus. As these behaviors build up in a plethora of cold, dead spaces, is it any wonder that ADD and ADHD rates are rising? Perhaps it has less to do with “chemical imbalances” in the brain and more to do with the inhumane spaces we increasingly punish ourselves with, especially as in-class tablets, computers, shortened recesses, and dramatically less physical activity prolong the sitting and staring constitutive of the adult’s tepid banality masquerading as maturity?

Is it an attention deficit disorder not to be able to read on a cheap plastic chair at a cheap plastic table? Are “fidgeting” and “lack of focus” here symptoms to check off on a chart or normal responses to an abnormal situation? Perhaps the insane dullness of the adult world—emaciated in spirit—evaporates attention by annihilating inhabitable space.

More intriguing is that at first there was a glimmer of a smile on the boss’ face as she opened the door and saw the children reading. It was almost the smile of a mother seeing her own children cozily reading before the boss persona resurfaced and supplanted a humane with an inhumane response. More disturbing still is that such a response is simply learned and for no other reason repeated. It is merely what a boss does. It is what adults do. In so doing, the abnormal becomes normal.

The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (1952-2022) grows each edition not because we discover new illnesses but because we create them (an intentionally provocative statement designed to stimulate questioning as opposed to making a blanket claim, in case there is any confusion as to how binary statements in rhetoric work, thereby knocking you off your intellectual high horse where you give the clichéd response, “It’s both,” which I’m guessing many of you with biomedical model commitments did—gotcha). Although the “anti-psychiatry” movement may have gone too far, exhibited in Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), it nevertheless gripped truthful roots that reach forward as much as downward.

The massive DSM-5-TR (2022), 1142 pages vs. the 32 page DSM-1 (1952)

The true tragedy is not that the children “got distracted” and stopped reading. Rather, they lost a chance to receive narrative. They lost a chance to be shaped by storytelling, but also to inhabit the world meaningfully. This was the beginning of the loss of meaning in the drive to production and consumption toward ego, vanity, quantity, and the evaporation of spirit.

To be continued…

Coffee may decrease your appetite for food, unless you’re drinking a light roast with utmost levels of acid and caffeine that ensure voracious hunger, but it increases your appetite for life.

This is why I’m dedicating another post to some of the lattes and craft coffee shops that have made life worth living. For, even on a bad day, coffee never lets you down… unless you drink too fast or too much and endure a caffeine crash (something I may or may not know something about).

Let’s look at some of the finer experiences life has to offer through the simple roasting of coffee cherries. As American writer Raymond Carver might say, it’s “a small, good thing.” Let’s start with some homemade lattes by yours truly.

Thesis: coffee is life. Or at least, coffee makes life possible.

Homemade with Maru beans (my sole product now)

Maru again with Tiffany’s fine bone china… because sometimes I play an aristocrat

Maru once more with a taste for crystal (provided that contents aren’t too hot)

But one can’t always make one’s own coffee. Why make coffee when others can do it for you? Invest in a nice machine, and over time it pays for itself. Even Starbucks these days charges nearly as much as a craft coffee shop for a catastrophically inferior product that embodies the brokenness of society. So, when you do treat yourself, and you should from time to time (because coffee is self-care), do it right.

When searching out craft coffee online, look for several things:

1. At least a 4.5 star rating (even Starbucks can get 4.2 stars. O, the humanity…)

2. They don’t serve food (or hardly any). Except on rare occasions, good coffee shops only serve coffee, perhaps with a few pastries. If they’re serving breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and salads, Do Not Enter Here.

3. On that note, steer clear of “cafes.” These are coffee cemeteries. Rarely, a coffee shop can do something else well. One exception is Republik Coffee (4.5 stars), Pasadena, but you’re better off not taking a chance.

4. Look at their photos. Do you see cups and saucers? If the photos are littered with paper cups, you can’t be sure of the quality. If they serve “for here,” you can almost guarantee you’ll get quality. Particularly after Covid, it’s a mark of distinction, as most coffee shops abandoned dishes for the ease of paper (because suddenly Covid made us doubt that soap works). A cup and saucer usually means you’re in good hands. Good reviews, little to no food, but no cups and saucers means “maybe”— at best “probably.”

   1. You’ll see some paper cups in my photos below, alas, but it’s an occasional transgression I avoid unless inevitable, like when I can’t find a seat to linger. Paper and plastic are punishment.

   2. Oh, you like iced coffee and can’t order in a cup and saucer? Stop drinking iced coffee and get serious. Problem solved.

5. Look at the color of the coffee and espresso. You should see a nice crema layer, like a good crème brûlée: a rich, caramel color indicative of quality. If reviews and photos seem based on tasty foam and cream tops, it may or may not be good. Coffee is not about foam tops. This isn’t a mattress shop. Focus on espresso.

6. Other markers from afar without going into the shop include: the espresso machine they use, if one is pictured (La Marzocco is standard, or Slayer); whether the employees look like hipsters (let’s face it: the awkward, aloof, and oddly styled make the best coffee); whether their latte art is good (another mark of distinction and attention to detail); whether it looks like a cafe even if “cafe” isn’t in the name; whether their menu has numerous options, fancy flavors, and loads of syrups (not good); and whether “Starbucks” is in the name (this translates to Avoid at All Costs).

7. Okay, just avoid Starbucks, Peet’s Coffee, Coffee Bean, and the like completely—any chain really with more than 2-3 locations—and you’re already better off.

8. If you’re too lazy for all of this, just look for “Coffee Roasters” in the name. This isn’t necessarily standard for quality coffee, but you usually can’t go wrong with a place that roasts their own coffee, so long as it isn’t a chain.

   ---

Let’s take a look at several of these shops in action. Just check out Starbucks on Yelp sometime and compare what you see there to these lattes and locations. I can assure you that on these points I am never wrong. Rather, I’m annoyingly right… This is because good coffee is hard work, and Starbucks would be much easier. However, nothing good comes easy. Coffee especially.

Cartel Coffee, Palm Springs, CA

Ernest Coffee (Stumptown beans from Portland, which I’ve visited), Palm Springs, CA

Iron & Kin, Claremont, CA (pardon the paper cup… the place was full that day)

Roosevelt Coffee, Irvine, CA

Verve Coffee Roasters, Arts District, Los Angeles, CA

All are such marks of superior coffee. However, sometimes the coffee doesn’t have to be the best if the location is superior. In Big Bear, great coffee isn’t big… A tragedy, to be sure. I suppose hipsters need to conquer Big Bear to shape a coffee culture. Hipsters are our best hope. However, this would be a tragic thing in other ways. Still, the location makes up for a mediocre product.

It may not be the Arts District, but Big Bear’s scenic environment makes up for the steep drop in espresso quality. Plus, there is parking. And parking will be clearly demarcated as opposed to an awkward space that may or may not be parking, where your car may or may not be towed in the meantime, where you may or may not arrive safely to and back from your destination...

Big Bear Lake, CA (where Heidegger is a welcome partner for Being-there)

Last but not least, the king. I have visited numerous craft coffee shops across coffee capitols in the US: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, etc. There is only one I’ve encountered that truly stands out: Maru, Arts District, Los Angeles. Here, you’ll have to park in a space that may or may not be a space, in an area where you may or may not find your way there and back, but you won’t regret it.

Plus, there isn’t a Starbucks in sight, only a confusing, unmarked door into an otherwise unassuming space that functions as a portal to another coffee dimension. To have coffee here is to wake up from the coffee matrix, to undo the Starbucks delusion that warps the world and pollutes the perception of the masses.

Maru, Arts District, Los Angeles, CA

See the color? See the crema layer? See the transcendence of space and time and reality? Okay, that least part may have been excessive… Let’s look at the color back to back, comparing two craft coffee shops that use the same espresso machine, Iron & Kin and Maru, two excellent spots, but with one clear winner.

Without saying it, you can see it in the espresso color, the crema layer that opens your eyes to the possibility of a good life, a life worth living…

I will say that I’m not a fan of the modernist aesthetic and uncomfortable seating at Maru, but you can’t have everything. Typically, unless the accommodations are particularly unpleasant, I will prioritize coffee quality over seating, ambience, etc. Priorities are priorities, and prioritizing quality coffee is an objective value structure that inheres in the mathematics of the universe down to the Planck length.

Or so I maintain.

In conclusion, coffee is critical. Drink it. Perhaps then you’ll experience Heidegger’s “divine fourfold” that gathers in the relations of the beans, water, milk, and ceramic, presenced in the extreme pressure of a high quality espresso machine.

Slayer Espresso V3, $24,394 (Iron & Kin and Maru’s machine)

As always, there are more lattes to come… And remember, a coffee addiction isn’t a problem if you don’t stop. And I certainly don’t plan to stop. Neither should you.

Since my students recently wrote an autoethnography that makes use of a concept or idea with which to interpret an aspect of their lives, consider this an autoethnography that makes use of the concept of “number,” because numbers don’t exist, that I employ to interpret a broad swath of maddening aspects of (my) life…

I find life to be very strange, to say the least... As for thoughts no one else has, I’ve noticed that life comes in phases lasting about 3-4 years. That is, every 3-4 years appears to be a distinct phase of life with its own aura, its own patterns and feelings, sense of self, and so on. Just as I’m figuring out what those patterns and feelings are, what or who that “self” is, and what it all means, the next phase comes along, and then it’s all new and difficult once more. And repeat till my allotted days run out.

This structure of life is modeled in school, for instance. Every 3-4 years is a new phase: elementary school, middle school, high school, college—all about the same length.

College itself is further divided in those phases. For me, 4 years for undergrad, 3 for masters, 5 for Ph.D. One of my favorite authors, Arthur M. Young, writes that “All life is an angle,” or that life is signified geometrically, giving many examples, including a tennis court with players—as opponents—standing opposite one another with the impartial referee in the center: a microcosm of angles and relations. In a poem I published in Chiron Review’s 123^rd issue, I wrote,

i run parallel streets

not approaching

what i choose not to…

didn’t they tell you like they told me

parallel lines never meet

kind of like rhetoric & philosophy

but what if i am A and god is B

and we bend a little?

But it occurs to me that all life is numerical, as well, signified in predictable mathematical phases, some a bit longer or shorter but still tending toward an unnecessary average.

Each number is significant. It signifies. What does it signify? Usually a transition of some type, a threshold between two worlds divided by an unknowable boundary that can only be crossed one way: forward.

To try and cross back through a threshold is to shake one’s fist at the cosmos before being callously blunted by it, for we are not meant to hold on.

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his poem “To Hölderlin,” “We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.” F. Scott Fitzgerald concludes the unreasonably famous novel The Great Gatsby with the lines, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That part he got right.

Rilke notes how January stems from Janus, the Roman God of beginnings, endings, thresholds, doorways, transitions, and time. Janus is two-faced, facing both past and future. There is no “middle” face, no present.

Janus, Greek god of thresholds, doorways, transitions, beginnings and endings

I can relate. So entrenched are we in fighting for the future, or else indulging in nostalgia when swept up by the whirlwind of time, that we fail to apprehend the “present-at-hand,” as Martin Heidegger would say (of course Heidegger slips in, once again).

But do we truly “face” the future? The ancient Greeks envisioned us facing the past with backs to the future (Backs to the Future would be a nice Greek philosophy sci-fi spin-off that no one would see…). This seems more sensible to me.

However, we imagine otherwise, picturing a not-yet-now that at last will fulfill us. What is the right number? When will everything we’re working for be attained? Surely, then, joy will descend upon us, appearing—like Aldous Huxley says of God in one’s old age—“suddenly, as if from behind a cloud.”

Yet numbers do not exist (sorry, Plato), and neither does such a vision. At best, as Slavoj Žižek writes about happiness, meaning and fulfillment are experienced accidentally as one engages with what one finds engaging.

Slavoj Žižek pontificating like a postmodernist

In Being and Time, Heidegger writes, “Being is the being for whom being is a question.” That is, the questioning must continue—must be—for Being to be. Being is a verb, not a noun. It is ongoing, neither here nor there, past nor future. As Gaston Bachelard writes in Intuition of the Instant, only the instant exists. Quoting Alfonso Rizo-Patron Remy, he notes, “Life is an instant poised between two eternities.” Contra Henri Bergson (who disputed Einstein on this point), Bachelard argues that duration, while “real,” is nevertheless a mental construct that more often than not inhibits our ability to be.

Of course, ancient philosophy tirelessly debated “being and becoming,” and which was more fundamental. But even Plato’s Socrates, in the Theaetetus, agrees that “nothing ever is, but everything is coming to be.”

Still… a poet is obsessed with the past, with capturing the uncapturable and unintelligible just as it vanishes. Rilke writes in Sonnets to Orpheus, “be a ringing glass that shatters even as it rings.”

Such is the poet or artist relentlessly seizing the day. Carpe diem, etc. In short, it’s exhausting…

This is why the tension that envelops me is constitutive of the German modernist poet on the one side turning his back to the cosmos and attempting to immortalize himself and every moment, and on the other the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet allowing every moment to fall away with utter indifference. If only there were some quantum-mechanical reality where both could be experienced simultaneously, a superposition of phenomenologies, a radical alterity composed of two faces holding on to and letting go of everything all at once.

Too much to ask?

O, to be mortal and immortal at the same time… I wish everything could last, but I don’t actually want it to last.

The poet is stuck in this way, desiring and full of direction, and directionless, much like the hopeless romantic who isn’t so much in love with a person as the idea of love itself, which cannot be satisfied. The past is now phantasmic, and the future… well, the future will solve all woes, all discomfort, all longing, all restlessness.

There is a number—10 years, 15, 20—where all the Truth there ever was will be revealed and one will want no more. Then, there will be rest. But not here, not now, not yet…

I must confess this was me (is me?). And though I am now a post-me, or trying to be, the numbers added up. Music producer Rick Rubin says that if you spend 20 years trying to achieve a goal, believing that it will solve everything, and work at that goal without resting or relaxing or having any fun, relentlessly reaching for the future, and then you get there, “and nothing changes, that’s when you become hopeless.” He continues, “I like when people like the things I make, and it changes nothing.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke says the same, having achieved instant success with the album “OK Computer,” after which he promptly had a mental breakdown, feeling deeply dissatisfied with his music. This dissatisfaction, however, generated a radical turn in his music, which went on to shape electronic music of the future. But rediscovery of a deeper joy in music arrived only after toiling away for worldly success and believing it would grant everlasting content.

Radiohead, OK Computer (an album worth listening to)

I believe this is—or will be—many of you, as well. For me, such an experience began to emerge upon getting my Ph.D. After the momentous graduation with the fancy doctoral regalia (a cap and gown that costs a mere $1300… I should wear it for Halloween to get some use out of it), I received my diploma and thought, “Well, that was disappointing.” Next…

The academic job market. After moving through several institutions—Cal Poly Pomona, UCR, UCLA, and Berkeley—I settled at USC, but not without constantly, as many of you remember, entertaining other dreams of taking a position in China.

Eventually, I did interview for such positions, including at NYU Shanghai, Chongqing University, and Sichuan International Studies University, and was offered a research professorship at SISU, where I’d teach minimally for their English Ph.D. program and otherwise write.

For several reasons that include having a child (which confounds all things), I ended up staying at USC (I mean, my daughter will get free tuition, which is one thing to stick around for…). Then, there I was, now I am… no other foreseeable “big” thing on the horizon. Not for now, at least.

A second Ph.D.? Perhaps… This is another “big” thing I’ve toyed around with, even meeting professors at USC’s Philosophy Ph.D. program that I might work with and discussing some of the details. On the other hand, it’s a sort of “been there, done that” situation. And, of course, it’s so much… work. Not to mention that a Ph.D. in Philosophy demands hundreds of pages of modal logic, which I enjoyed in the past but am not inclined to commit that much time to. I prefer the wilder European (continental) philosophy than the stuffy British (analytic) genre that suffocates Philosophy programs, but that’s another story...

The key though is that it just wouldn’t be “different.” And it’s that difference, that big newness, that I’ve always sought: excitement, change, otherness, unfamiliarity, strangeness, provocativeness. When things become familiar, I get… bored.

Kind of like when reading Plato, for, as Nietzsche routinely reminds us…

Plato is boring.

But you—and by you I mean me—also become self-conscious, overly cognizant of your finite existence, turned upon yourself as we all were during the pandemic, acutely aware of yourself—including your problems.

“Make it new” was the American modernist poet’s slogan, exemplified by Ezra Pound. But Pound, an “imagist” poet, was inspired by Tang dynasty poets like Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei, and was known for translating Li Bai’s poems from Japanese… from Chinese.

This is where I first encountered Li Bai’s work as I sat under a tree on a hillside that was technically illegal to hike on (by “technically illegal” I mean it was illegal). However, “no trespassing” signs tend not to discourage me because I tend not to care.

So, there I was reading Li Bai, who led me to his key influence, Tao Yuanming, the Shakespeare of ancient Chinese poetry, the revered recluse farmer who influenced everyone and broke everything that would have otherwise been.

Portrayal of “Peach Blossom Spring,” a famous poem by Tao Yuanming

And I came across this line,

Soon that sense of knowing I exist is gone.

That was it. That solved everything. The newness, the strangeness, the otherness—it was all about being absorbed in the flow, about forgetting myself, extinguished in difference. Such is the goal of Buddhism and Daoism with the concept of “empty mind” or “no mind,” of which these poets often write.

Yet, for me such an experience wasn’t cultivated so much in meditation as in adventure. There was always some “big thing” on the horizon: a goal, a destination, a change. In essence, a transition, threshold, doorway—a marker of a new time, order, and way-of-being-in-the-world, as Heidegger would say. A new Dasein, a way of “Being-there.” Where? Somewhere else. Wandering the streets of China and getting lost… on purpose (which I highly recommend).

Until there wasn’t a goal or destination… not that I could see. “Settling” at USC, “settling” in general, is not something I excel at. Adapting to change is effortless and exciting. Staying with the same… not so much. Even China became quite familiar to me after four trips, losing some of that excitement that kept me on edge.

This all goes to say that when there was no clear “number” ahead of me that promised renewal, no obvious transition or threshold toward which everything flowed (and would flow past to somewhere else once more), well, I kind of—like Pirsig, or Phaedrus, in Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—“just stopped.” Stopped writing, going to conferences, delivering papers, going anyplace. Doing anything. After all, why not just take a break? Why not rest for a while?

However, I realized that when you spend almost 20 years with a goal in mind, and then you reach it, you can’t just “stop.” It doesn’t work that way. I had trained my brain very well to keep pushing.

In effect, I experienced the desire to rest, and my brain said, “No.” Relaxation is dangerous. It doesn’t move you forward. It doesn’t keep you safe. It doesn’t do anything. I can barely sit down and watch a movie, not to mention not have a supermassive black hole of a goal that orients time and space.

This will rub some people the wrong way, but take my word: it’s hard to get everything you want. It’s nice, and it’s hard, and it’s a problem most people don’t have. But if all is number, and then there is no longer any number that promises dramatic change and growth and rebirth… what is left?

As a kid, I envisioned being a writer from the age of eight onwards. Then, as a first-year, first-generation college student from a working class background (much like Linda Brodkey, a writer and English professor I relate to on just about every point—and teach in Writing 340), I somehow—for reasons I’m not entirely sure of—dreamed of becoming a professor, inspired by my freshman composition professor who both wrote and taught, living the dream with her dog Baxter who accompanied her to class each day and curled up under the desk, wandering around from student to student as the class went on.

My professor only had a master’s degree at the time... A mere master’s degree? I could do better than that. An ego drive kicked in early in my academic career, perhaps out of necessity. After all, much of academic success—like success generally—is rooted in who can do more, better, faster.

As Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard writes, it’s in our nature to “go further” than our teachers, our parents, our ancestors. Going further became all I ever did. For what? No one bothers to ask.

Similarly, on the subject of increasing longevity, Pirsig writes,

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

As long as you do not question these assumptions, you are “sane,” as far as the social consciousness goes. But to question the value of “going further,” inclusive of living longer, puts you—at a minimum—beyond the range of intelligibility. At worst, it puts you in the domain of the “insane.” Yet, among other assumptions, I question this.

Hence, Madness Monthly.

Go further? Who cares? I’d done that all my life, and it got old, tiring, and pointless. Numbers became pointless. Now, there was only now. And that was terrifying…

No wonder people endlessly engage themselves in the promise of the future. No wonder it is the ultimate and ultimately difficult purpose in Daoism and Buddhism to empty the mind of all the pointless contents flooding and absorbing the present. Especially having a mind like a laser pointer always pointing towards something, what happens when there is nothing clear and obvious to point towards?

How to be now?

Of course, there are always things to move towards. The existentialist like Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Albert Camus on his better days (with fewer cigarettes), would advise me to shape new goals, new “guiding fictions,” as Carl Jung says, to recreate that sense of focus and desire.

Albert Camus smoking away the angst of existence

In many ways, that is in fact what I am attempting to do now that I am in the unique position of not really “having” to do anything… Not anything that captures my attention, focus, and energy the way that those earlier goals did. Although tenure is still two years away, I know I’ve done enough to make that milestone irrelevant. Great, to be sure, but also irrelevant.

Again, a good problem to have in a “choose your own problem” adventure…

However, as good as it is to continue having goals and moving forward, to keep your eyes set on something, it seems to me that to only, or primarily, live towards goals engages an adrenaline function—a fight, flight, or freeze mode—that gradually runs you into the ground.

There must be a different sort of ground, a ground you don’t run in to, but which roots you—a constructive vs. destructive ground. Heidegger writes of our loss of such a grounding: “The roots dig down, but the ground fails to come.”

What constitutes ground? What is good for its own sake without having to be anchored in an achievement, purpose, goal, or the like? What is valuable for its process independent of product?

As the ultimate cop-out, this must be answered by and for the individual. This is not to say the answer is entirely subjective. Returning to Pirsig’s notion of “Quality,” value in this way is discovered, or else created, when one finds or shapes that process wherein one’s “subjectness” dissolves in its entanglement with the “objectness” of whatever one is doing. The product isn’t the point, but rather the merging with something greater than yourself without any clear purpose, other than perhaps joy.

Beauty, Rilke writes, “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.” I believe this also goes for joy, which can be exceedingly difficult to grasp, and which is apprehended in a number of discrete experiences. Which is to say that joy is not necessarily a mere “happy,” bubbly feeling of elation. It also inheres in danger, awe, and risk, like the free solo climber Alex Honnold who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, a 7,500 foot climb with no rope or gear, much of it on sheer, vertical granite (Free Solo is quite the film).

For Honnold, that is joy—climbing a rock for no particular purpose, and certainly not to “get to the top,” but rather to experience an engaged present where his “self” dissolves with the “object” of the mountain, and where no thinking happens—just Being-there.

Alex Honnold free soloing (climbing with no gear) El Capitan in Yosemite

For me, I increasingly feel that it is both in listening to and writing music (but also in nature). I have sometimes played the classical pianist Lang Lang’s performance of Chopin’s “Raindrop Prelude” in class (on YouTube). Here, you can see in Lang Lang’s expressions, movements, and affect that his “self” dissolves with the piano, which becomes an extension of himself (as Heidegger says of all technology in Being and Time) and dissolves with Chopin’s work. Lines between them are impossible to draw.

Lang Lang, classical pianist, playing a Steinway & Sons Spirio piano

There is no single object, no person distinct from the piano and the composition. Everything merges in a process which is valuable and joyous in itself without “accomplishing” anything. To be sure, learning to play such a piece well is an accomplishment. But this is not the point. Rather, the point is that in the process of learning one learns to dissolve into the present and be nowhere else, for nothing else, going nowhere in particular.

This, to me, is Quality—a Quality life. As Pirsig writes, “Quality is not a thing. It is an event.” A relationship. And any “goal” should be to inhabit this thoughtless, embodied, dissolved, and spiritually extended “nonintellectual awareness” as often as possible.

As Pirsig continues, it is an “intellectual disease” that interrupts and interferes with this “preintellectual,” pre- or post-symbolic reality that is in fact what grants and sustains peace of mind, an “inner quietness” that constitutes the state of being at one with goodness. This is aretê, excellence: Quality.

One’s “work” then becomes a “material reflection of a spiritual reality” that one inhabits and projects. You know it when you see it: the true craftsman merging with whatever process it is—from music to art, engineering to math, construction to rock-climbing. The only “trick” is to find where it is, what it is that best enables you to embody this state—and do that.

Do that as much as possible.

You’ll then find, as I do, that you can do other things too with the peace of mind that this process grants: things you normally don’t “like” to do, even hate doing. It replenishes a reservoir of energy that our alienated, unbecoming world constantly saps and draws away for “productive” purposes—industrial, materialistic, etc.—that are in fact the most purposeless things we can do.

Even if what we find joy in is “productive,” that productivity should be a byproduct of the Quality state, not the purpose or goal (this is more in line with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of creative productivity in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Such productivity should never be aimed at, for this is exactly how you extinguish Quality. Trying to be happy is like trying to fall asleep.

Good luck…

Put another way, Quality is “being-gripped” by something in and for itself. In relation to artificial intelligence, Byung-Chul Han writes in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, “The German word for spirit, Geist, originally means being-outside-of-oneself, or being gripped. Artificial intelligence may compute very quickly, but it lacks spirit. For a computer, to be gripped would only be a disturbance. . . Thinking hears, even listens, eavesdrops. Artificial intelligence is deaf. It does not hear that voice.”

Being-gripped may be uniquely human or at least embodied in the human spirit in a uniquely intense way. Lang Lang is gripped by the piano and by Chopin. Pirsig was gripped by something as seemingly mundane as motorcycle maintenance, which became a metaphor for the Quality life, for it is in that being-gripped that one is not “thinking” in the mere intellectual sense but feeling and “being-moved” by the world, as Heidegger would add.

In fact, true “thinking” is exactly that: being-moved, for no thought happens that is not motivated by affect, or feeling. Our thoughts flow from what matters to us and how it matters. The “goal” is thus to do that thing that grips and moves us. Do it as often as possible. All else is peripheral.

Just “why” one thing moves us and not another is less important than you think. Dig down deep enough into your interests and you run out of answers as to “why.” Philosophers call this a “brute fact.” In other words, “it is what it is.” Accept it. Don’t resist or ask too much, as confusion, misery, and disengagement often follow.

In this sense, Aristotle was right. In both his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle gives four causes of things. Take a car as an example. There is a material cause of how it works: the combustion engine. There is a formal cause: the form and shape it takes that allows it to function and accomplish its purpose. Third, there is the efficient cause: the agency that brings it into being, such as the humans involved in design and assembly. Finally, the final cause: the purpose for which it is made. In this case, going somewhere.

Thus, the “why” of things is not so simple. We could explain “why” the car exists by explaining the internal combustion engine. Or we could say that humans built it. But couldn’t we also say that the purpose of “going somewhere” is the real reason the car exists? Didn’t the purpose shape the decision, which shaped the technology? This is a sort of “D: all the above” situation, as Jane Bennett explains in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, pointing out how “agency” is distributed across actors and actants in a network or ecology that shapes the what, how, why, and when of things.

My point here is that “why” we’re driven by certain things is no simple question. I may be driven to write, teach, etc., and could point out several reasons for doing so. Ultimately, I shift the weight to the “final” cause. There are simply things I excel at, for reasons unclear to me, that “call” me to act toward some purpose beyond myself. In both moving into and beyond burnout, I have tried to heed this call.

In Being and Time, our eternal, recurring friend Heidegger—who appears at parties whether or not he’s invited—writes that speaking is already a hearing. The way we speak, which is to say what, how, and why we say it, is already a response to something heard.

Similarly, I may ask the question, what is Being? Yet, as Heidegger points out, this question—in the form of the “is”—already assumes a notion of Being. In some way, it is already a response to the question it is posing.

Hence, my “choice” to speak—in teaching, writing—is always already a response to a discernible yet indecipherable call. This, of course, is why we speak of having a “calling.” Our choice to become one thing or another is not so much a choice as a response. To what? That is a question no one can answer without ambiguity. Regardless, the result is the same: you are called.

This is why Heidegger concludes, in Poetry, Language, Thought,

Mortals speak insofar as they listen. . . . This speaking that listens and accepts is responding.

Heidegger simply calls what we respond to “language,” but what is language? It seems to relate to Heidegger’s notion of the Sacred and Holy. But what is Sacred and Holy? Heidegger himself is not clear (not that clarity is his strong suit).

In this way, Heidegger leaves open the question of the origin of the call, but not the reality of the call itself, which is clear and convincing. Whatever the case, again, the result is the same: in some sense what you do chooses you… if you are listening and responding.

How do we listen? By being still. In a culture terminally taken by talking—which, as I’ve pointed out, is why we all know logos (speech) but not its verb form legein (listening, or considering)—we can scarcely stand “the sound of silence” (a classic Simon & Garfunkel song, one worth hearing).

Simon & Garfunkel (or when mainstream music had quality lyrics)

We tend to think that such relentless utterance is indigenous to Western culture, given its links to ancient Greek democracy. And yet, if we follow the Judeo-Christian influence on Western thought, it was always the command to “hear” the Word of God, for instance, and to speak as a response to this hearing, something that rhetorical theorist and intercampus colleague Daniel M. Gross sketches out in his book Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening.

This emphasis on hearing, receptivity, responsivity, and the like, is essential to rhetorical theory today and to recovering Western roots, seen in these recent titles: Thomas Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric; James Crosswhite’s Deep Rhetoric; Byron Hawk’s Resounding the Rhetorical; Stef Ceraso’s Sounding Composition; and Mary Hocks and Michelle Comstock’s Composing Resonance. Then there is Veit Erlmann’s seminal work in Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, where he examines the role of hearing in shaping culture.

I take you on this sonic, aural, and still-another-Heideggerean detour to inform the history of the call and to sketch out that the answer, regardless of the tradition (spiritual, philosophical, or otherwise), has always been in the direction of Quality.

When you put aside productivity for productivity’s sake, and you put aside—as much as possible—the call of the marketplace, social spheres, familial and other pressures, etc., there is another, greater type of call: the call of Quality (or excellence), the Sacred, the Holy. Its source may be physical, metaphysical, or some strange, entangled coalescence, but its calling seems clear regardless of who investigates it, whether it’s spiritual teachers, philosophers, rhetoricians, musicians, artists, poets, and the like.

It’s not just humanists either. The great mathematician Eugene Wigner, who gained popularity for his essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” noted—as do other mathematicians and physicists—how many theorists are guided by abstract values like “beauty,” “elegance,” and “simplicity” in math that seem, more than anything, to be a response to, and reflection of, the beauty, elegance, and simplicity of the cosmos.

Waxing poetic on string theory, physics popularizer Michio Kaku says, “The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.” Math, in string theory and other formations, is a language that hears the call to reflect and resonate with something more fundamental, grandiose, and all-encompassing than ourselves.

Michio Kaku explaining hard things

Returning to the personal, one of the most hopeful aspects of this calling is that “you” don’t need to worry about it. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes, “The ‘I’ does not need to be in view. It flows with the situation.” Putting aside the resonance with Buddhism and Daoism here, the less “you” (particularly your ego) are in view and are clutching at control the more you allow yourself to respond, or become a response, to the call. Borrowing from Diane Davis’ Inessential Solidarity, we might say that it’s not so much that we respond to this call but that we are a response to this call.

That doesn’t mean that we give everything to the call. The ancient Greeks termed “eustress” vs. “distress” the kind of stress we experience from things we enjoy. I enjoy teaching and writing, for instance, but that doesn’t entail that I do nothing else.

And, in fact, I am learning to do just that: other things, for the “eustress” of the things I enjoy became part of the burnout I experienced. How could I have gotten burned out? After all, I “chose,” or responded to, the call to teach and write.

And yet “eustress” was neither part of my vocabulary or my thinking for all the years that such ventures squeezed out everything else and, ironically, hampered a Quality life, despite caring about my activities and work (for the inverse side of Quality is care, Pirsig notes).

That is why I am learning again to do the things that relax and unwind the tension that comes not only with caring too little, but also caring too much—things that aren’t “productive,” things that don’t “do” anything, especially hiking (again, off-trail and in random places that are technically illegal, which is to say illegal).

In a way, I became so absorbed by the care and the call that I forgot how to be “still,” a precondition of inner peace and Quality. In Non-things, Han writes,

We have abolished all transcendence, all vertical order, that demands stillness. The vertical gives way to the horizontal. Nothing rises. Nothing becomes deeper. Reality is flattened out into information and data streams. Everything sprawls and proliferates. Stillness is a phenomenon of negativity. It is exclusive, whereas noise is the result of permissive, extensive, excessive communication.

Stillness doesn’t “do” anything, isn’t productive, which is why—even in my profession—its value falls flat. Except it is valuable. It refills and replenishes a vital energy which is meaningful in and of itself, but which also better enables and sustains our response to the call. The more I am still the more I can do.

Yet we must be careful not to subjugate stillness to doing. I do not “engage” stillness in order to do more. That simply reproduces the problem we’re trying to remedy (as Louis Althusser would say, it “reproduces the conditions,” and relations, “of production”).

Rather, we engage stillness on its own terms. We occupy that state for nothing other than itself. Maybe it energizes our doing at times, and other times it doesn’t. If possible, this relationship shouldn’t be a thought or occupy our attention but rather be an unrealized kinship where neither side of the equation is attended to, valued differently, or valued at all (in the sense of measuring value).

This is what Pirsig calls “value quietness,” an “inner quietness” that just is. Such a state is simple. In fact, it’s the simplest state you can imagine: just being. And yet for the human it is most difficult of all to simply be.

It is unequivocally the case, however, that the more we “observe” ourselves feeling this way, that way, doing this or that, succeeding or failing, the more we interfere with the flow and flux of life. The more we interfere the more we get stuck, losing the sense of what, how, and why we’re doing something.

Just do. Just be. Don’t think.

As it turns out, not thinking is not easy. Yet not think so much we must, for, as Tao Yuanming writes, “It’s never-ending analysis that wounds us.” Further complicating the matter, Bachelard writes in The Psychoanalysis of Fire,

It is impossible to escape this dialectic: to be aware that one is burning is to grow cold; to feel an intensity is to diminish it; it is necessary to be an intensity without realizing it. Such is the bitter law of man’s activity.

Again, don’t think. Just do. And when you’re doing, don’t realize it (i.e., don’t think about it), or you’ll stop doing. This is a law I’ve always resisted. Like Rilke, I’ve routinely desired to feel and experience the world more painfully and passionately, to be conscious of and conscientious in every moment.

Notice, however, that Bachelard doesn’t say we cannot “be” an intensity. We must simply not “realize” it. It’s that act of self-reflective analysis that extinguishes the flame.

So, while I find myself not quite able to submit to Tao Yuanming’s injunction to “move with change through rough and smooth [so that] life is neither up nor down,” which seems to warn against feeling too painfully and passionately, it’s nevertheless been an incommensurable challenge to “be” such an intensity without realizing it—without analyzing or thinking about it.

Err one way, and you pass through life without feeling. Life is lived and ends indifferently. Not painful, but not pleasurable or passionate either. Err the other way, and the wound of never-ending analysis, bearing the crushing weight of life and consciousness—consciousness of time, memory, life, death, pain, passion—swiftly overwhelms you. You must carry or else be the weight without realizing it.

Gravity, to cite Rilke again on this, won’t hesitate to plunge through you “like a drink through thirst.” Better, as Qu Yuan writes, to “bow to the whirlwind of time”—to be an intensity without realizing it, to accept and move through the flux, fire, flow, and intensity of life without allowing the observing-analytical mind to grasp at feelings, thoughts, intensities, plateaus, depressions, and the like: to experience and be carried along without looking too closely, and without latching on to… well, anything, because it all will pass away, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be experienced fully along the way.

After all, in quantum theory it’s precisely this “observer effect” which collapses the wave function, which contours the flow of quantum phenomena. There is a flow there. It’s happening. But don’t look…

Double-slit experiment revealing wave pattern vs. particle pattern with one slit

The Greeks knew this long before quantum theory. In the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus is allowed to rescue his dead wife from Hades, the underworld, on the condition that he doesn’t look back as they depart. Orpheus sets out to do this and is successful… almost.

He’s in the flow. He’s doing the work. He’s saving Eurydice. But at a certain point he cannot hear her footsteps behind him. He knows not to look back. He does so anyway (more than anything, it is this act against our better judgment that constitutes most human tragedy). Not only does he lose his wife, but he himself is banished to Hades and torn to pieces. His interference with the flow tears him apart, literally.

He was in it. He was doing it. Then his missed it.

Legend of Orpheus and Eurydice

Similarly, when American poet Gertrude Stein was on the forefront of avant-garde modernist poetry, which horribly confused and delighted a growing audience, she was afraid to think too much about what she was doing with language, lest she lose the flow carrying her. Looking at her work too closely would kill the work, as Maurice Blanchot summarizes in The Writing of the Disaster.

What is that impulse that calls us to look at and disturb what we know we’re already doing and accomplishing? Is the analytical mind—Pirsig’s “analytical knife,” Nietzsche’s “intellectual scalpel,” Jung’s and Foucault’s “intellectual knowledge,” etc.—the gift and curse of our existence? On the one hand, it delivers us from the raw struggle with nature. On the other, it incapacitates our ability to simply be and do.

Stanley Kubrick, in his seminal film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, illustrates the moment “we” become conscious and take a tool-driven, analytical, and “productive” path.

In the film, great apes realize they can use the bones of dead animals to defend themselves against another band of apes. One ape brutalizes another… because of course our first act with a tool would be violence (although the first hominid tools were probably jagged rocks for cutting, chopping, etc.).

The ape then throws the bone up into the air. Here, Kubrick cuts to a shot of a spaceship that resembles the shape of the bone, depicting a swift transition from the first manipulation of our environment to an irredeemable technological ascension.

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (a scene dubbed “the 4 million year cut”)

Reason, analysis, and logos as exclusively logic took precedence—as Nietzsche sketches throughout his work—over instinct, feeling, and receptivity. In time, quantity overtook Quality.

Today, we are left with the aftermath of catastrophically fast quantitative and analytical evolution. Individuals, including myself, struggle to “be” in the present moment, insofar as our intellectually driven past drives us to be driven. While much of this problem is blamed on “capitalism” by social theorists of various schools, Heidegger knew that the drive of and to the market was an effect of human consciousness and not the cause of it. Originally, we built to dwell, which is to be. Today, we build to build and forget the dwelling, and thus Being itself.

As I learn to counter this market drive, even with things I enjoy—for, again, eustress can be as much a part of the market as distress—it’s unrealistic to imagine society and situations conforming to my desires.

Rather, I must find ways and spaces of resistance and being-otherwise, what Foucault calls “heterotopias” (literally “other spaces”). I must make the changes that are available to me and live them. As Rilke writes, “You must live your changes” (often mistranslated as “You must change your life”). Doing that, I must, Bachelard compels, “be an intensity without realizing it.” That is possibly the hardest thing of all…

So, perhaps Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher and polymath, is right that “all is number,” that math is the fundamental language of the cosmos (“math” itself comes from Greek máthēma, μάθημα, meaning “something learned”), and that numbers, in some sense, describe and govern everything from the physics of the universe, to the behavior of the market, to our own behavior and expectations of change, growth, and renewal at different numerary transitions in our lives—from what grade we’re in, to how old we are, to what numbers signify at different stages in our lives, and so on. Numbers certainly seem to pervade everything, or at least account for everything (pardon the pun).

At one point, my daughter was obsessed with calculating. She started calculating how many days we’d all lived. It was all fun and games until she started calculating how many days we had left…

Numbers often bore, but they also terrify.

However, this doesn’t mean that numbers must rule your life. Whether it’s the calculative market value of the neoliberal capitalist logic that “subjugates all beings to the trade of a calculation,” as Heidegger writes, “that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers,” or else the meaning that numbers bring on a more philosophical level in their signification of transitions, moments, and frontiers, numbers are abstractions which—like so many figments of our imaginations—can become the wrench we (unknowingly) throw into the gears of a flow that would be better off without our calculative, intellectual interference.

So, you know, just go with the flow…

Perhaps it’s the excessive amounts of caffeine, long periods of isolation from creatures that go by the name of “human beings” (to whom I occasionally relate), or just the inchoate atoms of pure madness, but connections are beginning to begin…

My 340 Natural Sciences students recently wrote an assignment on a “transdisciplinary connection,” which attempts to utilize one discipline or area of knowledge to contribute to a secondary discipline. Consider this venture something of the kind.

After quite some time ignoring it, I’ve been reading the famous physicist David Bohm’s book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm put himself on the map in the early quantum theory in several ways, one of which was publishing Quantum Theory, a definitive text on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which foregrounds relationships or inter/intra-actions, measurement (observation), and ideas like indeterminacy, chance, chaos, randomness, and contingency over isolated stuff like particles, and over a deterministic, clockwork view of nature. He does this to such an extent that he claims quantum mechanics would better be called “quantum non-mechanics” for its sharp divergence from Newton’s classical mechanics.

If you require an example, think no further than coffee (which I mention every now and then…). As discussed in other posts, Martin Heidegger distinguishes between things and objects by the way things “gather,” while “objects” are merely “useful” or productive, used up and tossed aside, etc. Things are of value because they gather “earth, sky, divinities, and mortals.” The coffee cup gathers the soil of the earth which produces the beans, in relation to the sky, in relation to the mortals who harvest and enjoy them, in relation to the experience of perfection (which we might call the Sacred) one gets while drinking the ideal espresso—not so much a product but an experience of the culmination of relations.

Cartel Coffee, Palm Springs, CA

Put differently, things are the things you save from a burning house, while objects are left behind. Things are of value because they gather. Old photo albums gather time and space, memory and relations. A photo album’s materiality makes its usefulness possible, but ultimately it is the immaterial stuff that matters.

Quantum mechanics is relational in this way. The quantum field gathers and makes possible the spacetimes for relations to emerge, relations that are more important than the things themselves.

To take a more familiar example, stem cells can become brain, heart, bone, muscle, or other cell types depending on where they are placed in the body. It is the relationship between the stem cell and the body that shapes reality. Likewise, in quantum theory the individual properties of particles are only meaningful when considered in relation to other particles.

Additionally, each particle has its own quantum field, in which the particle is an excitation or temporary disturbance. Often particles are thought of as “ripples” in this field—temporary but real entities. Sometimes they are so short-lived and not directly observable that they are called “virtual particles.” To be virtual is “to be such as but not actually.”

Basically, the experience of waking up Monday morning, or how I feel once the coffee has run out…

For Heidegger, this “gathering” of the four—earth, sky, divinities, and mortals—is health. Bohm reminds us that the English word “health” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “hale,” meaning “whole.” That is, he continues, “to be healthy is to be whole.” To be healthy is to be gathered and to experience gathering.

Heidegger thinking things that will soon cause others physical pain

This theme cuts across physics and psychology. Carl Jung, a central figure in my Health and Healing course, foregrounds the concept of “individuation,” where the goal is to become an individual by, ironically, grounding one’s “self’ in a “collective soil,” a soil not only composed of one’s family, culture, geography, etc., but the entire history of humanity and of the cosmos itself.

Each self is still a “self” because every such constitution is nevertheless unique. The way the whole comes together in me is different than the way it comes together in you. The relations are different. The result is different.

The astronomer Carl Sagan says in his Cosmos TV series, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” And the cosmos knows itself differently in each of us, which reflects, or perhaps “diffracts” (as Karen Barad would say), different entanglements and relationships.

Carl Sagan being Carl Sagan

This wholeness, Bohm continues, coalesces with the “holy,” which shares the same root. This is what Heidegger claims has withdrawn from our experience: the Holy, the Sacred, which fails to arrive. “The roots dig down, but the ground fails to come.” Today, we experience “the gods failure to arrive.” The Holy, or wholeness, has dis-integrated, hence Bohm’s first chapter in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, “Fragmentation and Wholeness.”

Fragmentation runs from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, Bohm claims. Our entire experience of the world, and our “experience-knowledge,” which—like the ancient Greeks—he entangles, is fragmented. One can feel this not only in the fragmentation of communities, where one is lucky enough to know one’s neighbors, all the way down to the local coffee shop, which often happens to be Starbucks, where the entire process of production is dis-integrated, ensuring a shrine to mediocrity, or, as Aldous Huxley would say, “swarming, indistinguishable sameness.”

When the product is entirely disengaged from the process, with farmers handling one aspect, distributors another, roasters another, all of whom have no stake or identity in the finished product, with automatic machines and automatic employees (pouring into paper cups with petroleum linings…) playing their respective parts as cogs in the eternal profit machine, how can one expect quality? How can one expect wholeness? You’d be better off paying for a Starbucks coffee and then paying someone else to drink it for you. This would complete the ultimate absurdity of modernity.

Incidentally, these ideas of wholeness wholly coalesce with Robert Pirsig’s notion of “Quality,” where dis-integration and the separation of who we are from what we do is immanently present.

Ultimately, for Bohm each part contains the whole. We could call it the (w)hole, which I take from Scott Sundvall’s discussion of “(w)hole rhetoric.” In each of us is the entire cosmos yet also the felt absence of its completion and completeness. We feel we have not yet arrived to where we are supposed to be. Ancient Chinese poet Tao Yuanming ends one of his poems with the words, “What more?”

The reality, perhaps, is that if the cosmos is both being and becoming, changeless in some sense and always changing, or in flux, in another sense, as the Greek philosophers relentlessly disputed (Werner Heisenberg gives a nice account of this in Physics and Philosophy), then to contain the whole in ourselves is precisely to embody this oxymoronic state of superposition—the occupation, in quantum theory, of two contradictory states simultaneously (e.g., wave and particle natures of light).

Can you feel complete and completely lost at the same time?

Adding some humanity to Bohm’s metaphor of fragmentation and wholeness, I’d say that this contradictory state best describes the hope(less)(ful) state of humanity, part of the (w)hole.

I confess this has been my own state of mind not only in terms of “being” in general, but in relation to inhabiting, discovering, or shaping an identity. Plato’s problem (well, one of them) was that rhetoricians were neither here nor there. They could argue all sides of a question equally. They could appear one way in one context and another in a different context (hence, the sophists, or first rhetoricians, were also the first lawyers). What was the Truth, Plato asked. Maybe sometimes there was none, but only convention, as they argued (the first sophist Protagoras famously argued that geometry wasn’t true but only a convention, which was seen as ludicrous until Bernhard Reimann and others invented non-Euclidean geometries, serving as different tools for different purposes).

I suppose I’ve always naturally been a rhetorician in this regard, having a questionable, opaque, and murky substance that fluxes in and out of various forms with no single one feeling like “home.” None feels like the true order (literally, kosmos) of things. Nothing feels authentic except the absence of authenticity. In a world where so many appear at least to inhabit a semblance of a coherent identity satisfied in its own (perhaps illusory) wholeness, I feel rather (w)holey…

Like the controversial clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson says, “I exist on the borders of things.” Borders are exciting places, to be sure, but also tiring for the state of hyper-vigilance they entail. One would like to find a home, to dwell, as Heidegger would say, in the spaces one works to build. In fact, through a laborious labyrinth of etymologies Heidegger discovers that “to be is to dwell.”

Perhaps this is because the poet (and I see myself as a poet first and foremost) is the one, as Heidegger and Rainer Maria Rilke write, who reaches into the abyss, who for the sake of others is never settled but always unraveling and revealing what is missing and being missed.

This is the task of Rilke’s poet, to “imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisibly, inside us.”

Rilke in Westerwede, 1901, Worpsweder Archiv der Barkenhoff-Stiftung Worpswede

This takes reaching into the abyss, which mortals are not keen on doing, preferring to lounge casually with 80 grams of sugar from Starbucks in a cushy chair with a mediocre film from a mediocre culture for and toward a mediocre life (Peter Kingsley calls this the “archetype of mediocrity”).

Who will wake them up?

And yet such is tiring stuff. To be the hole in the whole. It drives you a bit mad... And madness sure sounds romantic and edgy and even fun in a counter-cultural way. Consider, however, how Michel Foucault frames madness in Madness and Civilization, or History of Madness (the unabridged version), as the “absence of an oeuvre.” This is to say the absence of anything to say.

In contrast, the poet, and occasionally the philosopher, operates in the realm of “unreason,” where the dominating and domineering modes of reason and normality are de- and reconstructed.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig’s past self loses his mind—“goes mad”—and is hospitalized with schizophrenia for a year. He had no outlet, no mode of expression, no path of critique, a condition which for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia separates the functional iconoclast from the schizophrenic who is broken by the gravity of normality (schizo-phrenia, a “splitting of the mind”). He just stopped. Completely. Some of us may relate. And some may just not be there.

Yet…

But in recovering from this state, he arrived at a place where he could once again read, think, speak, write—critique. He moved from unreason to madness, and back to a sober unreason, proceeding from hole to (w)hole, from being entirely and “engagingly lost” (as William S. Burroughs said of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain) to sufficiently yet partially found, better capable of reaching into the abyss on others’ behalf.

Most can’t handle the abyss. Indeed, most can’t even see it. What a stupidly blissful place, one devoid of deep struggle but also transcendence and resonance.

Yet, as the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote goes from The Twilight of the Idols,

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

And long have I gazed into the abyss out past the confines of incomprehensible stupidity… In a way, this Substack has embodied precisely the above practice: thinking all the (in)sane things so you don’t have to.

Friedrich Nietzsche staring into the abyss

It occurred to me, however, that even I—with a number of anchors in the “real” world, like family, teaching, and solid coffee, the best anchor of all—was reaching a bit too far into the abyss. I felt the gravity of Nietzsche and others—Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolff, Edgar Allen Poe, and to some extent Jung—pulling me in.

If only it were an exaggeration, and yet in contemplating such things for too long you lose the capacity to sense the point at which you are nearing—or passing through—the event horizon of the capacity to belong in the “normal” world.

Alas… what started as something of a joke—Madness Monthly—grew into a deep isolation from an increasingly broken, soulless, and (w)holey world. If the part contains the whole, it also contains the hole.

No, it’s about more than Starbucks on every corner, the bored and boring green shrine to mediocrity; than the endless, meaningless parallel streets going nowhere; than the glittering, dead neon landscapes of Los Angeles and its global-industrial-mechanical counterparts; than the abandoned warehouse chic that highlights the lifeless undercurrents of a culture going nowhere in particular; than the monotony of well-maintained cars caressing not-so-well-maintained (holey) streets with not-so-well-maintained people inside them; than the obviously oblivious faces plastered with plastic barely capable of curling up into a pretend smile…

More than the dull, lifeless afterglow of late freeways sulking in the heavy red color of worn faces weighed down by the gravity of their discontent; more than the violent separation inherent in and imposed by the isolationist architecture devoid of all but void; more than the broad, blank spaces artificially arranged like wax flowers to appear convincing to the untrained or else unconcerned eye before inevitably melting in the discriminate sun; more than the appearance of essence, the concealment of the authentic, the unconcealement of the unaccountably corrupt, null, and vacant…

More than… Well, you get the idea.

However, dwelling too long in the abyss threatens the capacity to discern the ambiguous arrival of the event horizon whereupon unreason decoheres and descends into madness, speech into silence, presence into absence… For, as Heidegger writes, absence is a presence, but not necessarily one desirable to inhabit.

There I was in so much gravity, which—as Rilke writes in a poem by the same name—plunged through me “like a drink through thirst.” What started in fun wasn’t funny anymore. It was increasingly resentful, as Nietzsche would write, since it emerged from the sense of the world as a life-denying force whose rational order increasingly extinguishes all avenues toward joy.

But… as Pirsig writes, an individual can’t change the world. Sure, occasionally it happens, and perhaps some of us will. But to hinge your happiness (as meaning-in-the-world) on the world meeting your expectations is doomed to disappoint. This is how Nietzsche ended up a Nietzsche, shaking his fist at the cosmos until his head fell off (metaphorically, of course).

Poor Nietzsche, always the case study of how not to go insane, just as Starbucks is the case study of how not to do anything coffee-related whatsoever.

Instead, Pirsig says to start with self. Start with what’s available to you, with what you can have some influence over, and what can bring you joy personally without having to have the world conform to your almighty measure of things.

“Measure,” as Bohm notes (turning back to the sophistic rhetorician Protagoras’ statement that “Man is the measure of all things”), was originally nothing quantitative but rather corresponded to an “inward quality” of harmony or balance. If one’s measure is off, so is one’s judgment and perception and navigation of the world, requiring a “revaluation of all values” (Nietzsche’s original subtitle for The Will to Power before editors idiotically removed it and ruined everything).

For instance, I confess to be a perfectionist. After all, why can’t life be perfect? Is this too much to ask? Why, yes, apparently it is…

It is for this reason that I must revalue my values and expectations, my measure, and settle for perfect espresso alone—an evanescent trace of the gods. For, the gods, Rilke writes in his Duino Elegies, might just “die into a thing,” and perhaps into several cups of coffee for a day here and there. This and a good off-trail hike in the almost-remote wilderness of Big Bear, for instance, satisfies, briefly but crucially, the desire to be otherwise-than-anything-we-typically-are.

A narrative intermezzo

In fact, I did take a recent impromptu Big Bear trip. The fog was so thick in Lake Arrowhead that I couldn’t see 20 feet in front of me and almost stopped. I felt that I should keep going, mainly because coffee in Arrowhead sucks...

So, I forged on, whereupon the fog broke suddenly at the higher elevation. I suppose you can make some cliched metaphor out of this if you like.

I ended up parking by the side of the road and wandering off into the woods for a bit, which was nice. Thankfully, no bears… But I was ready to pet one if so. Or die trying.

Then, I hit two coffee shops. Honestly, the coffee was average but better than Arrowhead, where coffee goes to die (Vegas too), and you can’t beat the scenery. I drove back through the dark in the heavy fog, which was a bit treacherous, but I happen to enjoy danger. I suppose part of that is how danger keeps you fully engaged in the moment. You know, being alive like a person and stuff.

Long story short, grad school and academia fried my brain, and continue to do so, so I’m learning to be a human again. It’s hard to understand without having gone through the treacherous journey that is academia itself, which—unlike other forms of “work” most people face in the “real world”—is a special form of torture.

That is why we must find moments of rest amidst chaos. There is always more to do, now and forever, but it’s good to push everything aside now and then. Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Neither is the “go, go, go” life. Culture says, “Do more.” I say, “Do less.” And I wish I would have had professors who said such things, but most were a monument to production.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say in my position now. But as my professor told me about this very same issue, “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

He wasn’t. I’m talking about Fred Moten, a professor and dissertation committee member of mine who has had more success than most academics dream of, including winning a 600k McArthur Fellowship, and yet here is a guy who has managed to do much of this throughout his career without taking it very seriously and without embodying an ethic of endless work, becoming a master and slave to himself in one (as Byung-Chul Han writes of our contemporary “work ethic” in The Burnout Society).

Fred Moten, by Kari Orvik for The New Yorker (article linked in photo)

So, there’s something to it. In fact, often the less you try the better things go. The famous writer Charles Bukowski’s advice on how to be a great writer is, “Don’t try.” Just “practice your practice,” as Moten says, and “success” in a greater sense takes care of itself.

The mountains have a way of teaching these things… But one must be careful not to expect anything from the mountain. As Pirsig writes, “The only Zen you find at the top of a mountain is the Zen you take with you.” So, getting to the top is not the point. Rather, it’s going, getting lost, and seeing what happens with no expectations…

Conclude narrative intermezzo

Getting lost has a way of renewing life’s resonance. If it is our task to “transform the visible, tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitations of our own nature,” as Rilke writes to his Polish translator, it is our task to find the things that make life resonate, reverberate—move through engaging waves of flux.

Bohm never took the wave function in quantum theory literally, which describes changing states of quantum phenomena, although some “wave function realists” like Alyssa Ney do (see The World in the Wave Function), believing the wave function to physically exist in higher dimensional space. Such theorists believe the wave function embodies Einstein’s “mind of God” and thus captures the essence of Bohm’s wholism in a single equation.

Variation of Erwin Schrödinger’s wave function

Tao Yuanming writes, “Move with change through rough and smooth, and life is neither up nor down.” I never quite grasped this until I had an image of riding a wave in the ocean. Don’t panic… Just move with the wave. Let the random math of life carry you up and down the peaks and valleys.

Don’t fight the flux, Heraclitus advises. Don’t be like Plato and Aristotle and try to pin this flux down, arresting it with intellectual stupidities that quash change and chance with the illusion of solidity. Contingency is real but need not be inundating. Michel Serres writes in The Birth of Physics,

My global body is open, adrift. It slips, irreversibly, on the slope. Who am I? A vortex. A dispersal that comes undone. Yes, a singularity, singular.

Nevertheless, as Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies, “Every angel is terrifying,” and “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.” Flux is terrifying. The (w)hole is terrifying. Reaching into the abyss is terrifying. But from the perspective of the one who reaches, it is more terrifying not to.

So, yes, reach… but don’t fall in.

The point of the cosmic event horizon of a black hole is that you, if you were being pulled in, wouldn’t be able to discern the point at which gravity becomes too strong to escape, leaving you destined for… well, no one knows.

Gargantua, the supermassive black hole portrayed in the film Interstellar, 2014

The fates of such writers and thinkers are many. But then, how to otherwise reach into the abyss? How to look into the hole while still remaining whole?

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung says to stay grounded, to keep joy, stability, passion, regularity, and normality in your life—to anchor yourself in things that nurture sanity amidst a world of abnormal normality, insane sanity. Then, you can peer in without losing your footing. You can stay the course and hear without heeding the siren’s call (if we return to Odysseus). Or we might go further back to the famous lines of Gilgamesh:

Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.

Right… peer into the abyss, to that “other side of life,” which, like the dark side of the moon, Heidegger writes, is constantly turned away from us (death, both “imminent and immanent,” near in both time and space), but it is also our lot to gather joy in what we can. As Tao Yuanming writes, “Build no grave-mound. Plant no trees. Just let the days and months pass away like this.”

That is, be aware of time and space and death, but don’t mourn mortality excessively. Allow the waves of flux to take you. As Qu Yuan, the first ancient Chinese poet on record, writes, “I bow to the whirlwind of time.”

This doesn’t mean to be passive and apathetic, however (Qu Yuan himself led quite the engaged, affective life, with his death being commemorated annually during the Dragon Boat Festival or Poets’ Day in China). Complementing his attitude, Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies,

Here is the time for the sayable. Here is its home.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever,
the things we experience are disappearing,
what forcibly replaces them is an acting without vision.

And this…

Between the hammers our heart endures,
just as the tongue does between
the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.

So, yes, Plato sucks… And “Plato is boring,” as Nietzsche writes. That remains true. And Starbucks remains a curse of the gods upon mankind, condemning us to the shackles of a post-industrial, post-post-post-modern, post-human, post-everything wasteland of an excuse for a society founded on alienation and overwork as salvation that perhaps once many eons ago captured the faint hint of a “(pre)originary togetherness,” as Diane Davis writes in Inessential Solidarity.

However, there is a flip side to the dark side that we should do our best—at least personally—to shape and make resonate. Maybe we’ll have to drive two hours through horrendous, inhumane, and callously monotonous traffic to get there (like Big Bear), but—as with the 30 minutes I experience perfect espresso—the occasional embrace of the divine is sufficient to help us endure more joyfully, to help us be more “engagingly lost,” as opposed to just “lost…”

Copper Q Coffee Shop, Big Bear, CA

Must we get biblical? “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). Such is a common sentiment among world religions, particularly in Buddhism where light doesn’t merely illuminate but dispels darkness.

And so on…

Darkness is, indeed, kind of like Starbucks: it’s on every corner (poor Starbucks… I didn’t anticipate this level of retribution). Darkness is easy, cheap, and tasteless. In our times, it’s much easier to be extinguished by darkness than to take responsibility for illuminating our own corner of the world (Gaston Bachelard has a glorious little chapter on “corners” in The Poetics of Space and lives to be the only philosopher-poet who can write a chapter on almost anything and make it feel like you’ve discovered the tree of life, fountain of youth, and Holy Grail simultaneously).

However, circling back to Bohm, it is the job of the fragmented soul to do so, lest the explicate order fragment and dis-integrate the richer implicate order that safeguards meaning and emplacement in the world.

Such is health and wholeness in a richer sense, a process toward health and healing, a “true science” (from Latin scientia, “to know”) of health, as Thoreau might say, which improves both science and the scientist. Without this process, all we have is empty space. And empty space, as Yi-Fu Tuan writes in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, is place devoid of value—chaos (disorder) without cosmos (order).

Now, find your place… Wherever it is, it starts with a craft coffee shop, a patio with a good vibe, and perhaps reading a few lines… of… Heid… Well, you get the idea. A $9,460 La Marzocco GS3 home espresso machine helps. Bribes accepted...

New York City, NY

I get flak from many on my coffee obsession for a variety of reasons. Some consider it snobbery, pointless extravagance, or a mere addiction. Of course, it is an addiction, and some do worry about starting drinking coffee for fear of becoming addicted, to which I always say, “It’s not a problem if you don’t stop.”

However, I prefer to think of my obsession with coffee as a kind of pursuit of excellence, or what the Greeks called aretê (translated as “excellence,” but which Plato screwed up and morphed into “virtue,” whereas the original notion has no moral dimension, none that is straightforward in the modern sense, at least). The idea was that in the pursuit of excellence you (the subject) become one with the object (coffee, let’s say) in an event or relationship that produces the highest quality (I think Robert Pirsig would agree—just substitute coffee for motorcycle). Often, this quality jumps out at you in the location the coffee is served, which screams care and concern for what the establishment is offering:

Maan Coffee, Chongqing, China

But, of course, such discernment of excellence has to be cultivated. For me, it’s the entire process: the machinery, getting the perfect grind size, the perfect amount of grinds, the perfect espresso pressure, the perfect ratio of beans to extraction, the perfect milk froth, the perfect pour, the perfect flavor, ever so subtle—too subtle for the Starbucks masses to discern because they are accustomed to everything being burned (because, you know, burning coffee standardizes it, annihilating difference, and thus chance, and thus surprise, and thus all novelty and quality with it).

I can taste not just the coffee but the process: whether the coffee cherries were dried before depulping, for how long, and how much so (the difference between washed and honey processes, for instance), how long they were roasted, etc. (to coffee connoisseurs, such things are basic, of course).

I don’t just taste coffee. I taste the earth, the entire ecology, which brings it to life. A Starbucks coffee for me is at least eleven dimensions away from 100% Kona peaberry coffee, let’s say. Let me taste coffees blind, and I’ll tell you every detail just from the flavor and the aroma. The same goes for a good wine, although that’s never been my forte. It’s a “small excellence,” which the Japanese call bonsai—you know, the tiny, cultivated trees or shrubs, or, in this case, tiny, cultivated beans, along with the process that reveals a quality withdrawn from the observer until the fusion of technology and the human spirit reveals their flavorful depths.

Perhaps, for just a moment with just a small thing, perfection is achieved and experienced: the highest quality. Throughout are some photos of my own coffee chronicles over the years, my pursuit of perfection, with a particularly favorite location below:

Avva Coffee, Beverly Hills, CA

So, coffee is an event, a process, and the object is the effect, or response, to the quality of our relationship with the world. The perfect source (Kona, etc.) is just the beginning. It’s everything that comes after that draws out—Heidegger would say reveals or brings to light, which is the essence of technology (from Greek tékhnē, craft or art)—the innate excellence in nature itself (the coffee cherries).

But only a true craftsman with a proper relationship to nature, in a perfect blending of subject and object, can do this. This is the achievement of aretê. And for the rhetorician-philosopher, the desire to achieve aretê in many aspects of life, to be “an excellent all-rounder,” pursuing quality in many areas, is the highest goal (Pirsig).

So, the process is not about “technology” in the modern sense. For Heidegger, it’s about revealing what is already there, an innate potency that technology, as craft, makes visible (or, in this case, tastable). Luckily, here in California, we need not go too far—though we can for quality coffee in every direction—to sample perfection:

Dark Horse Coffee, Anaheim

Dune Coffee Roasters, Santa Barbara, CA

How do you seek out quality coffee? Any place I go I attend to three things before buying (you know, like a five-paragraph essay):

1. Type of espresso machine (a manual Italian machine is preferred; automatic and I walk away—so we’re talking at least a 20k machine)

2. Type of beans (not too dark, which burns off both flavor and caffeine)

3. Speed of coffee-making (if they’re making lattes in less than five minutes I walk away)

La Marzocco GB5 S Commercial Espresso Machine EE (20k)

There are of course other aspects you can attend to, especially the aroma, or other tech being used (type of grinder, etc.), but I wouldn’t want to muddle my perfect five-paragraph essay with additional though excellent points (I have certainly gotten accustomed to the quiet but high pitch sound of a quality grinder though), as my 10th grade English teacher would frown upon this. Of course, back then I only ever had two points per essay, so apparently I’ve graduated to ruining the format in a more complex way… (you’re welcome, Mr. Olson).

Another good way of spotting quality coffee is simply to open your eyes and see what they’re serving. If they only serve in paper cups, bad sign—not as bad as prior to the Covid-19 hysteria, whereby people lost confidence in the ability of soap to kill germs and thereby served primarily in to-go containers, with coffee mugs, and cups and saucers, being pointless victims in the process.

Still, the highest quality coffee roasters have reverted to serving “for here,” which means you’ll enjoy a better flavor—the physics and chemistry of coffee and its container matters. As quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli writes, “As the alchemists correctly surmised, matter goes just as deep as the spirit.” Then you’ll get coffee that looks like this:

Handlebar Coffee Roasters, Santa Barbara, CA

Miscellaneous Quality Coffee, Diamond Bar, CA

Arcade Coffee Roasters, Riverside, CA

Canabru Coffee, Chino, CA

Augie’s Coffee, Claremont, CA

Roosevelt Coffee, Irvine, CA

Miscellaneous (I Can’t Read Chinese) Shop in Chongqing, China

Dulce, University of Southern California Village, Los Angeles, CA

Ministry of Coffee, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

All this has led to a special preference for 100% Kona peaberry coffee, as I often mention—the best in the world, as far as I’m concerned—but a good pound runs $140, or $90 in Hawaii, so it’s an occasional treat, one I’m enjoying right now, actually, to ease the suffering of returning to “normal” after a three-week China trip (where the coffee scene has grown exponentially, making visualizing a life there easier than it always already was). But it does require a home espresso machine, which I of course have, and knowledge of how to operate it well manually (which I of course have). Now I’ve made the snobbery quite legible…

Hawaiian Kona Peaberry Coffee Cherries (Stock Image)

Not that I started out this way. I started as a Starbucks pleb the same as most people in this depressingly dull land. But little by little, growth is possible. When you absolutely must settle for inferior coffee, a cold brew is harder to screw up and generally yields better results. Ordering a latte at Starbucks is suicidal, or at least masochistic. I did feel like a latte in the airport in Hong Kong, where Starbucks was the only option, and ordered an iced latte against my better judgment for much needed caffeine prior to a thirteen hour flight cultivated in the depths of hell. It was ready in ten seconds flat. I almost had an aneurysm…

To develop your tastes, buy your own quality beans and do it yourself with some attention and practice. Even better, let other people buy quality beans for you. Below are some beans students have given me. In fact, I once had a student whose mom was a coffee roaster (two roasts pictured below). Student, if you are reading this, I’m always available to sample more roasts, free of charge:

If you follow the above rules and guidelines, however, a window into the heavens will open, whereby—just for a moment—you will glimpse perfection in the harmonious unity, Heidegger might say, of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, all made present in the perfect shot of espresso, for which one should rightly do the work (or wait five minutes for someone else to do it). God forbid we wait five minutes for a taste of perfection. Most prefer ten seconds for a taste of the dregs of depravity only humanity incessantly unearths.

So, you know… that’s why I like coffee and stuff…

Of course, the only way we in market-driven cultures are encouraged to be unproductive is if that non-productivity is eventually productive (a sort of delayed productivity).

Take the vacation: we get “time off” or a “break” from the cycle of productivity—the almighty academic calendar, etc.—during which we are expected (by whom?) to rejuvenate, recover, recuperate. For what? For work… Vacation is purposeful.

What is work?

If you are lucky, something that is itself rejuvenating and energizing and “productive” in meaningful ways that include but exceed market value. How many apprehend this? How many are awash in waves of productivity for productivity’s sake—making things, new things, endless things? And not, most likely, due to their own fault. Rather, we are pulled into the orbit of the market regardless of inclination or desire.

In Non-Things, Byung-Chul Han writes, “Stillness produces nothing. . . . Stillness emanates from what is unavailable. What is not available stabilizes and deepens our attention; it brings forth a contemplative gaze. That gaze has the patience needed to see the long-lasting and slow. When everything is available and accessible, attention remains shallow. The gaze does not linger. Like that of a hunter, it wanders” (78).

Han not only writes like a philosopher, he looks like one too:

Stillness is easily accessible in the mountains, but not easily achieved. Stillness is not a commodity to be acquired. Rather, it is a skill—or art of life—to be cultivated. An attitude of attention.

We do not attend to things. Objects attend to our attention, seeking it, manipulating it—crafting it. Our attention is a commodity bought and acquired. Whether driving down a freeway, scrolling through social media, or standing in line in any given space, attention is implicitly valuable and exploited. It is an invisible resource made visible through the ads that we have to pay not to see.

Naturally, the market is so invasive that it capitalizes on the desire not to be subjected to the market. There is no outside, only the exterior that borders the insane. For to question the sanity of this system—this way of life—is to be branded an “other,” exterior to the norm, the unquestionable, or, as Aldous Huxley puts it in Brave New World, the “swarming indistinguishable sameness.” Of course, as Edgar Allen Poe writes, “science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”

I inhabit that “mad” exterior, or attempt to. This post is an exercise in attention to the exterior.

One cannot simply inhabit the exterior. There are no easy ways in (though coffee helps). But at the exterior one finds things, real things—dare I say “authentic” things, as Heidegger might say, that challenge a conception of the world as “the whole of producible objects” (“What Are Poets For?” 110).

There are at least two parts to this. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han writes, “Freud, we know, associated the ego-libido with the death drive. The narcissistic subject of performance breaks apart because of a fatal accumulation of ego-libido. It exploits itself voluntarily and passionately until it breaks down. It optimizes itself to death. Its failing is called depression or burnout” (14).

The self produces itself. It is not part of any community. It produces to share, to impress, to manifest itself—not for itself but for others (in only the shallowest and most superficial ways). In producing itself in school, work, and on social media, whether in a corporation or as an influencer (O, to influence—the world is increasingly “the will to power,” as Nietzsche knew, but not in the way he would have expected), one needs things.

Rather, one needs objects.

Heidegger differentiated “objects” from “things” by saying that objects are what things become when put in the service of production. Objects are useful material stuff. Things are not. Things gather. Like the “jug,” Heidegger’s favorite example in his essay “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, things unite. The jug holds the wine, which is part of a celebration, an outpouring, a giving and receiving. The jug is “useful,” but it is not “used up.” It is part of an event: a relationship.

Objects constitute an inverse relationship to the world. They are a relationship, indeed, and one of value, but primarily market value. As Han writes, objects, unlike things, do not endure—do not carry on time, culture, memory. They are used up on the way to something else, ceaselessly in search of “the new.”

It was probably not an accident that famous American poet Ezra Pound’s slogan, “Make it new,” resonated with an increasingly industrialized America, or that “What’s new?” is one of our go-to expressions, Robert Pirsig reminds us, half-joking that a better question would be, “What’s best?”

What’s best?

Han provides something of an answer: ritual. A kind of an inversion of the new, ritual attends to the old, the lasting—the enduring. Old things, old traditions, old symbols. In a society where “ending is better than mending,” as Huxley writes, rituals are stuffy, pointless, and boring. O, yes, one of my favorite critiques: that something (like reading) is “boring,” as if every part of life is designed to keep you entertained… Although these days it is.

A student of mine once remarked that she didn’t like apples because eating them was “boring.” That’s true. A good piece of fruit should do a song and dance for you…

For Han, ritual is in opposition to the relentless pursuit of the new that encompasses both commercialism on the whole and commercialistic practices like “binge watching,” which he defines as “serial perception”—a practice that moves only forward, and that cannot linger or dwell. The entire practice is thoughtless, mindless, purposeless. It exists only to fill the void that commercialism itself creates. At best, it provides respite from the endless cycle of work, alleviating the fatigue of non-dwelling, which is to say non-being (don’t forget that, for Heidegger, being is dwelling).

Having come from the mountains recently (Lake Arrowhead is our go-to spot), many ask what I “do” up there, especially as we visit often. The answer: nothing. No thing. And yet that nothing is thinging in the Heideggerean sense of gathering. We go to the mountains to do nothing, to gather ourselves—to dwell.

Many make plans to do touristy things. Unless that includes a famous craft coffee shop, count me out (be warned: Lake Arrowhead is a coffee desert—bring a good French press and something to kill yourself with should coffee preparations fail).

My daughter’s favorite thing in the mountains? To have a “chill day.” To do nothing at all. Not leave the cabin. Not eat out. Not do any particular thing. Introverts can accomplish a lot of nothing when they put their heads together. Nothing is what we do, and by virtue of it we accomplish the verb “to be.”

To be is to dwell. Like Heidegger in his hut…

Too romantic? Don’t forget that one of the goals of Daoism is wu wei, non-doing, or doing nothing. My favorite goal. You can do a whole lot of nothing with a good cup of coffee, in particular.

We are tired all the time because we do not dwell or linger, apprehending what is around us. But serial perception “is never at rest: it has lost the capacity to linger” (7). It is no wonder, Han thinks, that disorders like ADD have been on the rise in recent generations: “Attention deficit disorder results from a pathological intensification of serial perception” (7). One may ask how much ADD is discovered or produced.

Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, argue that the “schizo” is produced by society, by the “social unconscious,” such that the person who cannot take “all that” (social expectations, work, culture, the market, etc.) is broken, or split (into how many pieces?). Might many of the new(er) disorders of a late capitalist society originate from its underlying logic? Is it simply a coincidence that ADD or ADHD rise in a culture of serial perception, in a culture that cannot linger?

Deleuze and Guattari certainly look like they can linger, arms folded, doing nothing:

This is not to say that such things do not “exist.” They do. The question is where their origin lies—how they are produced.

By contrast, ritual is a form of slowing down, lingering, apprehending, and gathering. Ritual has deep ties to religion, which, Han notes, comes from the Latin relegere, “to take note” (8). By carrying traditions and symbols forward, religion makes things endure.

Again, is it a coincidence that the rise of those who self-identify as “non-religious” coalesces with a culture increasingly bereft of ritual and tradition—of anything that binds or endures? This says nothing of the “truth” of religion itself, but it says a lot, I think, about the character of our ability to linger and carry things forward.

Ritual is not done for ritual’s sake, as many presume, a pointless action carried on as an end in itself. Rather, “rituals bring forth a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm” (10).

Rituals gather and bind.

Again, is it a coincidence that we face an increasingly atomized society bound only superficially by what we “like” and “share?” What is there but surface in the sea of ceaselessly new and pointless things (like phones with never-ending camera arrays—how many can they fit?). Kind of like the Kardashians or any given Justin Bieber album, our relationships are expendable. What Democritus said of nature 2,400 years ago is true of our social fabric today:

“All is atoms and void.”

What to do? Nothing, of course. But the right kind of nothing.

Nothing, as in doing no thing, restores us, deepens us. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han writes, “God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine” (36). The divine is no thing, apart from “factories of human capital” (41).

Thus, in small ways, at least, we must find nothing, do nothing, seek nothing, say nothing—even be nothing. Stop producing yourself now and then. Stop the self-actualizing, authenticity train of optimized potential and “blur with blue cliffs,” as ancient Chinese poet Meng Haoran writes.

Better to blur and fade out than fade in to the endless faces of social media eternally devouring each other in cycles of self-promotion and self-production. Their question: not “what is best?” but “who is best?”

But let that not be your question, your quest.

In Being & Time, Heidegger’s question was, “What is the meaning of Being?” His answer was not “building,” not work, in and for itself. Rather, building, for Heidegger, is on the way to dwelling. To build is to dwell, is to be. What is the meaning of Being?

Dwelling.

Hence Jung’s definition of reductivism, where he critiques Freud, as he does all over the place, because… you know, Freud was a psycho. That’s why he coined “psychoanalysis,” to shape a whole theory of the mind that reflected his own Oedipal fantasies. That’s what Jung claimed (without exaggeration).

Okay… there is some good stuff in Freud, some really perceptive stuff, but ultimately he misses the mark in critical ways. That’s why Jung sets off—breaking his relationship with Freud—to shape a new psychology that focuses, Jung says, on what makes human beings healthy and well vs. focusing on what makes them sick, depraved, and deprived.

Freud aside, here we see Jung trying to grasp the full scope of human experience (although no system can do this), especially with his terms conscious, unconscious, differentiation (and differentiated functions), inferior functions, function in general, and the rational and irrational functions which break down into thinking and feeling, on the rational side, and sensing and intuiting on the irrational side. You’ll see there why he groups these this way, and why he thinks “feeling” is rational (it’s usually anchored in expressible and concrete—thus rational—values).

But there are distinctions. Feeling, for instance, can be “irrational” (beyond the scope of rationality) if “undirected.” Meaning, if feeling is just happening to you, and you don’t know why or how, but are just “feeling things,” as we say, this would be irrational. Again, “irrational” is not a bad thing for Jung. It’s simply beyond rationality. Some call it supra-rational or trans-rational to get at it better.

For Jung, “individuation” is the whole thing—the whole goal of analytical psychology. But that sounds very Western and individualistic, no? It sounds like the whole point is to break away from it all and become your own person, to “be the poet of your own life,” as Nietzsche writes.

That’s not the case. Just look up individuation and differentiation. There, Jung writes that in order to become an individual, we must first take root in the soil in which we are planted, and adapt to it—by that he means culture, tradition, etc. He denounces “extreme” individuality that seeks to break all ties. That produces problems, like Justin Bieber, or the Kardashians—okay, that’s not fair. They are at the opposite end of the spectrum—pure collective beings that are empty shells of the shallowest, most undifferentiated parts of our culture…

Now, where was I… Oh, yes… So, one must reach down to one’s roots first. This leads, Jung says, to “broader collective relationships” (see individuation) vs. separation. So, in fact, individuation is a very communal thing. But not entirely. We have to push the plant analogy. Saplings, for instance, are often indistinguishable. They take root, “learn” their surroundings, and are mostly alike.

But even plants, as they grow and mature, become “differentiated” in some sense, acquiring their own unique characteristics in response to their environment. These unique, effective (I would even say rhetorical, in the Sophistic sense of advantageous) responses constitute their individuality. One must not be fully collective or fully individualistic. Individuation, for Jung, is a well-wrought tension and balance between them, and between the four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting) that describe psychological life.

One can err by swinging too far either way, or by watching reruns of the Kardashians (you can probably calculate the ratio of brain cells that die per minute). Then, you become a “lopsided” person, as Jung writes in Red Book.

Therefore, our “health and healing” are dependent on our attention and effort to this sort of balanced individuation. Of course, one cannot describe the full process because, for instance, developing our irrational and unconscious side means developing, in part, connections to roots that are difficult to understand, perhaps inexpressible, or simply uncertain.

Here I am talking about the spiritual. Jung is not a materialist/naturalist. He doesn’t think the natural world is all there is. However, as a clinical psychologist you can see him strategically avoiding—at least in his psychological texts—absolute claims about the nature of spirituality.

One may disagree with Jung and think that, in fact, such things are not so murky, that we can know them, and so on. I happen to think Jung “knew” these things personally, as well, as evidenced in his journals and interviews. In fact, in such sources you can see him struggling with his “scientific” and “spiritual” selves—what he called Personality #1 and Personality #2 (Red Book).

Many of us do this. We have productive, professional, and conscious sides, and then there are those feelings, desires, and yearnings that are unaccounted for in this persona, that are often not given adequate expression or opportunities. One goes to art, music, poetry, literature, spirituality, but very often there are inadequate avenues in the modern world for such pursuits—I suppose, in some sense, depending on where/when you live. But for Jung, these have to be integrated. There is always tension. Untroubled harmony is not the goal. Rather, it’s productive, well-navigated tension.

Think of the yin-yang symbol, which Jung was fascinated by.

It’s black and white. There is no gray. No in-between. Exact opposites. However, what most people fail to think about are the black and white dots. These dots are inside one another, small but there. That is, the opposites inhabit one another, producing tension.

The interior halves of the symbol are curved, and the outside circular, denoting a kind of movement or ease of radical reversal and turning.

There is no rigidity in the geometry of the symbol. See Jung’s definition of enantiodromia, one of my favorites. There, he notes the patterns of reversal through history, like when Nietzsche—having criticized Christianity all his life, having written The Antichrist and proclaiming “the death of God”—loses his mind toward the end and identifies with, and signs his last letters as, “the Christ.” If you push too hard one way, there is a tendency to compensate (see compensation definition), whereupon a radical reversal occurs, typically in an unhealthy and lopsided fashion.

You can see this in Hollywood films. It’s a cliché in many comedies that the strongest, toughest, most muscular dude in a film—expressing no emotion whatsoever—will, by the end, undergo a radical reversal of personality, often gushing with emotions, crying, etc. This is the struggle for individuation: one must integrate the functions in a balanced way, or else these radical—and often harmful—reversals will manifest.

How to integrate, differentiate, individuate? How to achieve “health” in a broader sense, that is? Part of it is certainly balancing and differentiating these functions in conscious ways. But part of it is also “being true to yourself,” as we like to say. That is something that Socrates made popular. He would stop young men (who would go on to be the politicians) on the streets of Athens and say, “Take care of yourself” (where we get that expression), which meant “Be true to yourself,” which meant, “Be true to your soul.”

What is soul?

Again, in Jung’s psychological literature he simply refers to soul as the personality—a practical way of getting at the sense in which what is essential to us is manifested in our personality. Whether the soul/personality transcends this material world is something that certainly concerns Jung, but in his own psychiatric practice, at least, he leaves the “source” of that soul/personality undefined. Heidegger is the same in the realm of philosophy with the Sacred or Holy (Poetry, Language, Thought).

How to be “true to yourself” and not merely adapt to a collective? Well, tuning into your own personality traits and type is one practical way of knowing the you of you. While we all have certain mutable characteristics in flux, there are certain things that are simply given. For me, that is being an introvert. You couldn’t pay me to attend some loud, obnoxious, superficial, purposeless, mundane, brain cell evaporating social gathering, especially on the weekend. Mindless chit-chat is cruel and unusual punishment for me. “Socializing” to me is a tyranny of the soul.

Certainly, we can adapt and strategically navigate such things. Contemporary Harvard psychologist Brian Little talks about “fixed” vs. “free” traits. And “free trait theory” certainly shows that we can adjust and adapt to such counter-instinctual environments, provided we care about whatever it is we’re doing there—socializing for some cause, etc. Hence, an introvert like me being in this profession… although, except in being with you all, I basically retire to solitude after class and hide from living, breathing things. Minimal interaction with anyone else on campus is mandatory. I strategically avoid social interaction like the plague.

Whoops, untimely metaphor…

But overall, fixed traits are something to tune into. In cases where you can’t change your self, the totality of psychic (psychological) contents—or your orientation or attitude—you change your environment. Jung said in a 1957 interview, “In particular, America is extraverted as hell. The introvert has no place.” Indeed. Welp, see you later…

One way to know both—what is fixed and what is free—is to pay attention to your dreams, especially the images, ideas, and symbols represented there. Sometimes, via Freud’s language, which Jung also uses, there is a manifest and latent content to dreams. That is, issues, dilemmas, and desires manifest in weird ways in dreams, and you have to analyze and decipher the latent meaning of the contents.

Other times, the manifest content simply is the dream content, or “dream wish,” as Freud would say. Like Jung recounts, sometimes you just go to bed hungry and dream of food, and that’s it (I wish I had such simple dreams). But often the most consequential dreams aren’t of that nature. Rather, you have to dig down, contemplate, and analyze what the symbols, images, and events represent. To do that, keeping a dream journal is best (see Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming).

Dreams are terrifying things, especially the deeper you go, and the more you write them down, keep track of the images, think about them, and so on. Then, the dreams becoming correspondingly deeper, more complex. You will find yourself writing more and more. As Nietzsche writes in Daybreak,

“I descended into the depths. I bored into the foundations.”

Or his famous quote,

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” (Beyond Good and Evil)

The unconscious, in part, is a monster you do not want to face—all your undifferentiated functions, and even traumas, as Freud said, but also—and this is Jung’s contribution—those forward thinking and desirous things: all the things you know you should do that, for whatever reason, you are afraid of pursuing, perhaps out of lack of courage, or perhaps out of a struggle to let go of something else in order to pursue something new.

For Jung, the unconscious is not only past-focused like it was for Freud. It is also future-focused and can help show you the way, so to speak, if you’re paying attention and endeavoring to make sense of the images. Deciphering an attitude of significance is a good start.

Notice how as I write this—although this is basically a free write of whatever pops into my head, so I’m certainly not bragging—I’m thinking forward and backward to things we’ve discussed and things we’re going to discuss (in Writing 150: Writing and Critical Reasoning for Health and Healing). But I’m also reflecting on connections from Jung to other thinkers and writers, unifying disparate or separated parts, and attempting to sequence together some rational whole. But it’s a (w)hole—an attempt at unity that is necessarily incomplete.

My writing process for this consisted mainly of reading—lots of reading and thinking over the years, taking notes, making connections, connecting it to my own life, society, and other things I’ve read. That’s “writing,” too.

Don’t make your definition of writing too narrow.

Writing is also “prewriting,” everything that comes before and paves the way for possibilities that emerge and are enacted in process.

For this, I didn’t prepare an outline. I didn’t even sit down with a clear idea of what I wanted to say, just a simply direction: to utilize Jung in drawing together some threads between his text, his larger work, and connections to our thematic, “Health and Healing,” that intersect with contemporary issues in health, particularly mental health. If I had not read and thought as much as I did over the years, I would have had a considerably difficult time not just “knowing” what to say, but “having” anything to say at all.

That’s why, I think, writing = 90% reading and thinking, and 10% of the craft of writing.

But don’t let that fool you. 10% doesn’t seem significant. It may appear to contradict what I’ve said in numerous courses: that writing is not transcription, but creation. But that 10% does a lot. That 10% forges and creates a thread, a link, a story, an insight that makes meaning.

Think of a seed crystal in biology. Take a boring definition: “Crystal seeding is the process of adding homogeneous or heterogeneous crystals to a crystallizing solution to nucleate and/or grow more crystals.”

The point is that that seed crystal, when added to a solution, makes it all comes together. It is the point of work, and of worth in a real sense. This is why Jung says that the “Word is a creative act” (Synchronicity). It brings it all together, creating a pattern of insights.

In our case, the Word comes from somewhere—we must have input, a source, contents, etc. This is where writing happens. But the preparation is most of the work. If we consider the preparation to be writing itself, then the whole thing is writing, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida would say. The world is a text we write.

There is much more that I could say here about Jung’s “Definitions,” but that’s a good place to start—what some of the essential terms are, what their significance is for a practical psychology, what the goal of that psychology is, and how we achieve it.

Of course, Jung wants to have it both ways. He wants to define things in practical ways but recognizes some of the indefinability inherent in some of these aspects, notably the soul, even the unconscious—since the unconscious always remains… unconscious.

Some of these terms are quite specific (introversion, for instance), but some are rather ambiguous placeholders for psychological activities or significances that are contoured but not exhausted by Jung’s definitions (unconscious, soul, image, etc.). In that way, I think he navigates the “scientizing” of these things sufficiently well, at least, and often describes why he defines things in certain ways, while leaving room for ambiguity.

Aristotle, by contrast, doesn’t do this and is sharply against ambiguity, and also contingency (that’s another story). He very often just defines things and takes it for granted. He has three definitions of rhetoric, for instance, including a very strange one: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” This is a strange assumption that carries forward Plato’s approach to rhetoric without thinking it through or questioning it. As Robert Pirsig writes, “Aristotle was never one to doubt Aristotle.”

The last thing Jung says is that “coffee is the seed crystal to initiating the process of individuation.” Okay, I made that up, but maybe I tricked you for a nanosecond…

Yes, with one change: the philosophical risk is precisely more apocalyptic, and real, than the worries of Terminators roaming downtown LA. That aside, this is a different view than all the doomsday paranoia. Don’t get me wrong, with these AI developments we will all surely die tomorrow, but in the meantime think about this.

As my Seminar in Humanistic Inquiry wraps up, with the title “Quantum Rhetoric: An Inquiry into Matter and Meaning,” I find many of its themes running back into my Writing 340: Advanced Writing in Natural Sciences course. There, I blunted the brains of many a student with Heidegger’s “The Thing,” from Poetry, Language, Thought, which—other than ensuring several aneurysms—distinguished between the “object”-ive properties of things (their being as constitutive of merely material properties to be put to use for their “productive,” market-driven capacities), and things as “relationships,” or things as constitutive of the relationships they “bring to presence,” like “the jug” with its outpouring of wine whose essence is nothing material, but rather extra- or transmaterial, in some sense—a giving, receiving, enjoying, celebrating, sharing, etc.

As Gertrude Stein writes in Tender Buttons, a plate is nothing hard, round, or flat. A plate is “the occasion for the plate.” A thing is not an object, but rather an event. Of course, it needs its materiality, however, to presence—or “gather”—the temporal relationships of an event.

Plato didn’t care about any of that. Neither did Aristotle, or Kant. It was always what lasted and never changed that interested them—what remained infinitely the same, along with Plato’s rigid geometric shapes. This is why, Nietzsche wrote, “Plato is boring.” But so is science. Science is boring. And movies too (with a few exceptions), and music, and modern life…

Why? Because of “ordering.”

Martin Heidegger, 2018 Oil on Linen 35x30cm, by Mike Newton

Heidegger haunts anyone who reads him. Like a bad dream, he lurks in your unconscious, waiting to surface, but only because he means something.

I’ve been rereading and teaching Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. It should be read immediately (for tomorrow we die).

Here, Heidegger offers a more in-depth view of his thoughts on technology in contrast to his emphasis on “the market” in Poetry, Language, Thought. In the former, Heidegger claims that technology is essentially a “mode of revealing” (13). Technology draws out nature’s own potential. This is not bad in and of itself, he thinks. Actually, like Robert Pirsig he would probably agree that technology can fuse with nature and the human spirit to become a “Quality” endeavor that unites reason and romanticism, objectivity and subjectivity. But because of technology’s nature of revealing, the “danger,” as Heidegger refers to it, consists precisely in that power of revealing and of drawing out, and specifically, he adds, “ordering.”

So what’s wrong with order? Well, nothing in and of itself, unless ordering becomes “the single way of revealing” (32), kind of like how superhero films and remakes aren’t bad in and of themselves unless they become the only films ever to be made (need I say Spider-Man?)—although Christopher Nolan continuously redeems cinema from, as Heidegger would say, “the completely destitute time” (not that Spider-Man or some such fanfare isn’t always relentlessly there to drag us right back in to the yawning abyss of animated psychopathy).

Heidegger pinpoints how this revealing-ordering contains the potential to lead us away from a relationship with technology that is closer to Pirsig’s “Quality,” the collapse of subject-object into a unified relationship that draws out our capacities and creativity in an annihilation of the ego as we are unified with the work of art—art in the larger sense of the Greek techne, or bringing to light (think Deleuze and Guattari, or else Bachelard, or simply music, art, poetry, as well as engineering and science itself).

The danger is when this revealing-ordering draws us into, again, turning the world into the “whole of producible objects” in a strictly ordered experience, thus turning us away from both ourselves and nature, or the “world”—or “Being” (“Being-there,” Being-present, Dasein), which requires these features of randomness, contingency, and the like, mentioned in the article.

Technology enables us to move too fast and easily to “ordering.” Forget modernism. Forget postmodernism (sorry Foucault, although he rejected the label of “postmodernist” or “poststructuralist,” as all good postmodernists do). Forget Alan Kirby’s “digimodernism.” It is not simply digital stuff that matters. This is a different era.

I thought I’d coined the term “algorithmic modernism,” but—of course—somebody beat me to it and published a book just this year by Oxford University Press by the name of Algorithmic Modernity.

O, the humanity… Scarcely can you think a thought before it’s scooped up onto the marketplace of ideas to be sold as still another commodity in the exchange of “productive” concepts.

The idea: chaos and cosmos, disorder, and order, both have places (yin and yang, and so on). We cannot actualize-individuate with merely one. They must not “harmonize” in any flowery sense, Jung would say via Daoism, but rather remain in persistent and productive tension. The tension of opposites, of particle and antiparticle, energy and entropy, and so on.

Tension goes all the way down.

What looks like harmony is always a well-wrought tension balanced finely on opposing yet complementary forces. This is why David Bohm, in Quantum Theory, defines particles as “opposing yet complementary pairs of potentialities” (168). And this tension creates all things. Harmony? I guess… But not the way you think.

This is interesting because the earlier Heidegger sees something essential in technology itself, in its own nature, that is dangerous. He largely drops this in later writings, along with rhetoric as “the art of listening,” but I think he was on to something.

I told you Heidegger would haunt you...

Order is thus necessary, but what happens when order is all there is? What happens when you go to the theater and there is only Spider-Man 456, which is a remake of Spider-Man 253, which is loosely based on Spider-Man 167, and on and on all the way back? It’s Spider-Man all the way down…

But I don’t mean to keep dumping on Spider-Man alone. The way I see it, Spider-Man is an archetype for everything wrong in cinema and society, trapped as we are in the web of pointless fantasies. Imagination, reverie, and creativity, yes. But not like this.

Ordering and order alone…What happened? Where is the randomness, contingency, chance, and indeterminacy constitutive of life?

One of the reasons I travel is to get lost, figuratively and literally. I’m tired of knowing exactly where I am and exactly where I am going. Of course, order is critical in certain domains. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy gravity. I like knowing that wherever I go I will remain on the ground. As much I enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, I wouldn’t want to be interstellar.

From “A Guide to the Science behind Interstellar” (2014), by Conrad Quilty-Harper

But elsewhere, chaos reigns supreme (or should). This is why I am excited by travel, but not tourism; reading, but not libraries; hiking, but not hiking trails.

Order vs. chaos.

Risk engineer, former option trader, and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb distinguishes between the “tourist,” who has a rigid plan, and the flâneur, who has a loose itinerary but is open to change and new information.

I go further than that, depending on how you define “loose.” I’ll schedule a flight and a hotel, but nothing more, even for a month in China. Then, it’s up to the tea leaves.

Naturally, this entails risk. I was borderline lost in China by myself with no way to navigate back—no phone or other devices, no sufficient way to communicate, etc. And it was thrilling. And dangerous.

And human.

But what’s that modern slogan? Safety first. Scarcely is something said that sounds so reasonable and is so terribly wrong. Safety first, indeed, if you want to survive. But not if you want to live (I refuse to say “thrive”—a word “entrepreneurs” have thoroughly soiled. Even thinking about it makes me feel like I’m drinking dark roast).

All this to say: AI may be the final nail in the coffin of disorder, crowning algorithmic order supreme. Some might contest: aren’t there ways that AI can generate disorder? I think so. Disorder in how people, data, disciplines, etc. come together in unexpected ways.

But this is like STEM vs. the arts and humanities (don’t give me that pandering STEAM stuff). In The Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson acknowledge that romanticism—as a counter-Enlightenment—protested against Enlightenment reason and rationality as an all-encompassing way of life. And lost. Sure, the arts found venues and domains, and have still, but there is no getting around the fact that science, reason, and technology (as “ordering”) rule. Just ask which departments and programs receive the brunt of funding cuts when the chopping block comes out (COVID cuts, anyone?).

Similarly, Spider-Man isn’t the only movie in town. Plato isn’t the only influence in Western philosophy. Nolan has a film here and there that squeaks by the tiring, talentless spectacle that is mainstream cinema, and even the rhetoricians enjoyed a comeback through Hegel, Nietzsche, Pirsig, and modern rhetoricians. But we all know who makes the movies, and who guides the marketplace of ideas.

Order is here to stay. The indeterminate moments that make us feel most human, in our dangerous vulnerability, are being squeezed out. Art is technology is ordering, the single way of revealing.

“Only man dies,” Heidegger writes, meaning that only we confront mortality. But not if technology, “the constant negation of death,” continuously distracts us from the fact, holding us back from ourselves and from the earth as more than a collection of temporarily entertaining, attention-draining objects.

William James associates “will” with attention, effort, and effort of attention. Does that mean that without confrontation of our mortality, and without directed attention, we are neither human nor free?

Fittingly, upon the release of Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, I quote Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Why? The atom bomb. Technology as an ordering-revealing for all-too-human ends.

Oppenheimer (2023), written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Now I am become AI.

Not that AI is an A-bomb. No, AI is much subtler and more insidious, perhaps even more dangerous in the long run. Surely, AI will bring untold advances in science and technology. Medicine, healthcare, engineering—even music and art—will all benefit. We’ll live longer, eradicate pointless illnesses, improve healthcare bureaucracy, and so on. But any engineer knows that you can’t have it all. Every advantage comes with a corresponding disadvantage, every certainty (in quantum mechanics) with a reciprocal uncertainty. To quote Thoreau again, “You never gain something but that you lose something.” What is lost is lost in increments, and sometimes suddenly all at once.

Call it punctuated entropy.

The silver lining, if anything, is to evade capture, Deleuze and Guattari would say—an ever-insurmountable task: to squeeze through the cracks, slip by the cameras, remain an obscure nebula to the algorithmic, panoptic machine of the super-market plotting your spatiotemporal, aesthetic, and ideological coordinates (O, Descartes, the gift that keeps on giving…). No, not just plotting them, but creating them. Forget about Kim Jong Un. Our Supreme Leader is AI—omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, but omnibenevolent?