Wichita Mind Control and the Plural of Lasagna

I was at a party last night with all these Johns Hopkins oncologists. (I did not crash; I was invited. I brought apple granola as a hostess gift, even though Charlie was the one who took the afternoon off from curing cancer to make the super yummy white sauce lasagna.) But so anyway, apropos (maybe) of your last post, I got to talking to these folks, and they were really nice and humane and I liked how they talked about their kids and they were enjoying the wine, and everything like that. And then in three of these conversations it became clear, to me, that what they were casually doing was working out this argument that the practice of medicine can be largely replaced with a series of algorithms or logic shrubberies or something. That in a way the doctor doesn't even need to be present.

Which I don't dig, because it seems--as I stupidly said with my actual mouth in the first conversation rather than by tensing my shoulders or looking momentarily ceilingwards as I ought to have--like a defense of the practice of spending five minutes with a patient, locating them (the plural pronoun as a gender-neutral will prevail, so let's just practice getting over it) on the appropriate logic shrubbery and heading to the next roomlet to avoid eye-contact with the next (he or she or they, hope, still, despite waiting in this tiny room with the cross-section of the human throat and tongue and sinus emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company and a copy of Red Book) patient by consulting the next chart. I'm willing to keep being patient if the doctors will keep practicing; otherwise, no. But so I said to the really nice and smart man who teaches Medical Inference--which is kind of awesome--I said, said I, that as undeniably useful as the statistical understanding of medical causality is, long may it ride, statistical understanding also seems like the cause of lots of missed or partial diagnoses, and it also seems a philosophical defense of spending only five minute with your patient because, after all, for purposes of healing they're just a set of symptoms to be divided as neatly as possible from the total set of personal phenomena.

He seemed a little hurt by that. Do I get to get hurt if someone suggests that most education is actually dyseducation? I sort of wish that people would say that to me more often. And of course I hadn't meant to be aggressive, although clearly I was a little, at this party with the multiple yummy lasagnas and the Chiantis that didn't change my mind about Chianti and the talk of children.

But so a couple things. One is that it seems like a problem if long practice and even deep competence make us skip the first step of open observation. Not scanning for the most obvious things but allowing the senses a moment of soft focus to see what might constellate in that moment: maybe something orbiting around something else in a wholly unexpected way. Maybe the answer to a question one hadn't even consciously framed. Number two is this: we're basically herd animals, and although it's hard to see, we spend a ton of time and energy achieving consensus. We're pushing each other around or running the personal edition of the deep-consensus software all the freeriggin' time. The fact that I can't spell consensus but change it when the spellcheck thingy tells me to is the tip of the assberg. (There goes my neighbor Rob in dad jeans. These are not the right jeans. And so forth. Serious, those jeans don't look good, and his hat is pulled own too far, and what's he going to do with that folding chair?) These good people were standing around at the nice party telling me politely to believe a particular thing about the medical product I'm supposed to gratefully buy.

So much militates against the sort of openness you're describing. But I think that something like What Is Perceptible When You're More Open to Data That You've Ever Been Before is my version of God at the moment.

So I never got to Wichita Mind Control. It was Bruce Conner's phrase for the feeling when he first sat listening to Harry Smith's deeply weird and centripetal Anthology of American Folk Music in the Wichita public library. For the first time, he said, " I was sure something was going on in the country besides Wichita mind control.” Statistically, in some distant galaxy a Sophia Lauren who will never leave Rome is making an unheard-of type of lasagna with a vegetable that tastes like chlorophyll butter and the smell of ambergris. A 14 year-old Keith Richards is fiddling with the dial of his radio at 2AM to hear Muddy Waters through the staticky surf of G.I. radio. And a doctor is sitting down to an excellent meal in expectation of a two hour conversation during which he will seldom speak.

My Own Personal Vast Middle Way: a Proposal

Me, I'm working on triangulating a middle way between Cartesian "fact" and personal opinion. Since everything in the universe is connected, you just cannot be taking narrow observations and drawing big-ass conclusions from them. Not without your consequences getting all unintended and such. You may be in the phlebotomy business or whatever, but you can't just sidle up to the circulatory system and define it per se. It has inputs and waste products and "issues", as you know, and it is connected to everything obvious and not so obvious, your location relative to the equator, for example, which has just about everything to do with vitamin D3, the lack of which may explain my current lethargy or at least let me off the hook of billspaying work today. Then you got your quantum-mechanical mysteria, in which matter seems to have no ultimate existance as such, and may not even have suchness, as such, except in our interactions with it. You do the math and bingo! you're standing there square in the middle of what you're supposedly observing, and you start knowing how a particle is just about equal parts energy and gestalt, and not even locatable except in what is commonly known as a "probability cloud". In all likelihood the little blighter is right at the center of that cloud, right at the peak of the bell curve, but then again maybe not. You can't know for certain. As it turns out, you can even walk right through your wall and most likely never collide with anything except pure potential, and that, my friend, is not a reassuring bit of news for those of us who still owe the bank. However, if you stop paying your mortgage, it may be reassuring to note that the street you end up sleeping on or even the thick walls of debtors' prison can no more constrain you than an old family penchant for, say, rage or martyrdom or whatever. Back to that middle way: so, on the one hand, you have Cartesian "fact", which is basically the set of mechanical explanations for how things appear to function in isolation. It doesn't allow for infinitely complex interactions with everything in the universe. It's very useful, but it also tends to lead to a bad case of engineering, in which every problem, perceived in isolation, has a solution, perceived in isolation, and no time is wasted complicating things. Then, when the culture gets tired of grand projects and more or less raping the planet, we move on to personal opinion, eschewing objectivity, and adopt a new religion of identity that values above everything else, even that fresh-showered feeling, a bunch of comfortably self-propping notions that in the old days were always preceded by 'mere'. As in: mere taste, mere fashion, mere pop, stuff like that.

This is what I'm getting at: 'fact' is always so narrow that it's dangerous, and opinion is always so exclusive of the shared human experience that it creates illusions of identity, self, and isolation that all but disallow the sufferer to experience tragic one-ness. [By the way, the disenchanted terrifying oneness of the universe is what modernity is trying to avoid, bracing scientific-heroic rhetoric to the contrary, IMHO.] So: in light of this, I hereby urge myself to be humble about my own observations and 'knowledge', and to focus on shared human experience, like comfort in food, people, and shelter. Ok.

Here I sit in Camelot
Sher having drunk alot
And really sloshed is how I feel
Cuz rose-ay is the real deal which really rimes w/ onion peel.

Massive are the beams that sway
and undergird my new sashay
and due to them I list and stray
Into the headache of a brand new day lying in bed w/ Doris Day

Or at least someone who looked like her
When on Hallows' Eve I looked at her
Accross a wine-dark dance floor
Upon which the wretched poor were bouncing to Justin Timberlake

Which I see is not a proper rime
But at this point in thyme
I really need to watch a movie
and I got Rushmore from Netflix today and she looks real good.

The end.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

K's Writing

K does high/low very well and this works because it mixes funniness with poignancy. You always laughweep because it's barely bearable tragedy.

Not Necessarily a Design Methodology

If you stand anyplace and block out the noise for a minute you can feel a sort of tug that suggests a best orientation, a best direction to face. And if you walk around with this kind of attention you will notice that some places and orientations are better than others. It is hard to explain why. There are some easy explanations of the social-evolutionary kind: we stand most comfortably with our backs to walls, facing open space, maybe responding to a survival instinct that co-evolved with our forward-facing vision; we enter dark enclosed places with some trepidation, maybe because apes who didn't didn't live long enough to sire our line. But why is a chair on a porch best oriented just so? I've noticed that if I pay attention closely I feel very small tugs right and left, up and down, sunward and shadeward, and that if I don't heed them I feel slightly off, maybe slightly misaligned, and this sense of wrongness grows until I feel agitated. And I've noticed that people tend to place themselves more or less predictably, given the chance. These subtle forces are not purely spatial, they are also social. If you're sitting on the porch oriented comfortably and a friend [or an enemy] comes out and sits down, near or far, the forces respond as a planet responds to the orbit of a moon. Everything, actually, has its own gravity. We sit with our back to the wall, but if the wall is plaster or wood or stone we notice a gravity that has qualities that are very hard to describe.

When I have the luxury of designing for myself, I try to take the most direct route to rightness, and this involves very detailed, complete, three-dimensional mental images of a place, to which I return over and over until everything feels right from every point in space. Then I take this mental image and transpose it to paper. Sometimes I have new clarity as I draw, but mostly the drawing is just a record of what is already clear in my mind. This process takes concentration in the form of disciplined day-dreaming, in which I mentally enact many daily activities inside my mental model: I walk down a passage with my hand dragging on the wall, I cook, I sit by a window, I reach for a book, etc. And as I do these things I make adjustments: I roughen the stone of the passage wall, I raise a table-top and thicken it, I lower a windowsill and move a stack of books onto it. As the image evolves and solidifies it becomes less and less conceptual, more and more tangible. Architectural ideas, no matter how dearly I hold them, tend to weaken, compromise, and dissemble. The house becomes an aggregate of many small local decisions based on what I can feel about their rightness. I loosen my grip and symmetries, symbolism, fashion, and all the other forms of conceptual prejudice tend to fall away, leaving an artifact that is in many ways accommodated to its site, the way worn shoes accommodate to the wearer's foot. These mental models are intensely dynamic. Every time I put something in a place, the place changes, and the object responds to the change that its initial presence precipitated. There is a kind of diminishing echo of influence between the place and the objects I place in it, and the echo finally dies in perfect accommodation between place and object. Following this metaphor, an object that is placed without regard for the site creates an undiminishing noise, and will always feel incongruent and wrong.

Everything in a place has its own gravity. Even small things can be set at odds with their place, as noticeable as a thorn. This is not to say that meticulous design and thematic integration create right places. In fact, the best places seem to be more or less provisional and hodgepodge and contingent. There are so many reasons we can love a thing that things that are supposedly unmatched can be beautiful together. I have a beautiful Japanese rectangular bonsai pot, glazed pale green, sitting on a very rough Burmese sideboard which sits in front of an almost chartreuse wall. This serendipitous arrangement seems about right, and I like it, but recently I set down an orange bag on the sideboard and noticed that the whole room seemed to have found a new center, as though these beautiful objects had been waiting for something. It's hard to come up with a social-evolutionary explanation for this. Maybe we primates love to see an orange fruit in the green canopy of a tree? So why don't I get the same sense or rightness when I place my orange highlighter on this green sticky note? No idea.

It is good to be right at the edge of what I have words for. The words like a wall at my back, and the open space of not knowing spread out before me.