The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Every book, novel, play, movie enacts, subconsiously, that thirsty desire/anxiety for transformations — and why shouldn’t it? We were once munchkins after all (cf. theory that the reason we cannot remember our extreme youth is because of size differences, in that we can no longer remember what it was like to be so small.)

Change-Anxiety. While poisoned by purple mushrooms, I would often lay in bed, writhing around and dwelling on which words of the English language were particularly strange and scary, and I would always come back to this one change, change, a) it sounds weird, it has a dynamic mutable sound to it, beginning in one place and ending in another, a sloppy living slickness to it, and b) when one considers, with the mad-mad focus that only hallucinogens can bring to bear on a subject, the actual meaning, that which is signified by this signifier, and we realize it describes a living breathing process — a strange process that does not make sense a priori, that is in fact a strange weird empirical facet of the world that is contingent and not necessary — we realize we are staring straight at one of the fundamental underlying features of this strange universe we perpetually find ourselves in — and this change is constant, unpredictable, unceasing, barrels on with no concern for our preferences and feelings, and will one day crush us, kill us, and leave us by the road. Life begins. Life begins again. Time — time is, but change change transformations kill —

And yet the plus-side sits there too, for somehow, for whatever reason or no reason, we are endowed with minds and wills and thoughts and memories and with these four ichors we can spin together our vanguards and our barriers and by force of these endowments pull ourselves above the tide of time and riding it become the masters of our transformations — the will to power — to choose where life will take us.

We are given a certain number of days and a certain number of faculties, and a natural freedom to make what we will of them, given the social and biological constraints within which we are free to act and choose. So act, choose. How will we choose? What are our choices? We make them. We make this world.

We latter-born children, provided with the full-functioning late capital commodity machine, do not make things, and hence are powerless. Still, the junk is the junk, and the life is the life, and it remains to us to make our lives. Make your own life. Make it. Transform yourself. Recirculate and return to where you began (look homeward, angel) — stand at the end of the city at the end of time and sing joyously into the winds blowing from the last event horizon — look straight up into the heart of the galaxy and count the numberless stars — look into your mother’s eyes — hold tightly to your father’s hand — sleep sleep sleep next to your lover who cradles you and takes you back —

And the changes come and the changes will come and some we ride and some push us under but they come they come unceasingly they come

Novelties

Bringing Wind Turbines to Ordinary Rooftops
By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: February 15, 2009

In these green times, some companies hope smaller wind turbines will soon rise above homes and garages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/business/15novel.html

From December 2008

Man staring up at his wife on the stairs: secret life together — no — Conroy loved her, or loved himself, the great lustiness — “I don’t want to live.” Similarly, we have Penelope’s tapestry, that she sows by day and unplucks by night, the tapestry magically telling the story of Odysseus’ long wanderings — Odysseus who is Sinbad who is an Ancient Egyptian lost at sea —

“Will I return?” he says, speaking to the Goddess Calypso who will not die (fearing the cold hand, his love — true — taking her and not him)

What else did Odysseus find? (Written by Homer’s daughter?) Tale told by an … his death foretold (My death — I can see it — either the quick surprise or the long goodbye) //

The Mad King Time, charmed by Scherazade who spins her tale and leaves it hanging from a cliff — weaving and unweaing her own nightly tapestries — after the touching of soft flesh, the secret glimmer — Oh Conroy — clownish lust? That is your love — the desire to see her breasts — and to steal next to her while she stares out at the great abyss of time, as the cliffs of this world crumble beneath them (beneath us) — looking into her eyes — eyes that will remain the same even as our bodies change — “It was not the face Michael Furey died for” — Oh, but it was — snow falling on the universe — the Pope’s poem, in Latin, about the photograph — write me another about the telephone /farsound /

Like Dante, in the Inferno, we tread on a dusty road made from the ground up bodies of those who came before — no, grass covered, green flowers, bury me in a foot of a tree — when I am sad, I drive on Kerper Street, and stare at the tree my uncle planted, before he passed away — euphemism — say it without saying it — the automaton’s response — jam on — into the next thing — beat goes on — Redneck Charlie and the digital remix, playlist shuffle, shake your iphone, baby, shake your iphone — a Latin poem — Infallibe Popery — Love / Leader / Celebrity / Stars // Stars // Stars // Impossibly far — impossibly far — but out there, somewhere real.

More moderate than last week, from Soho to Chelsea, to Bed Bath & Beyond and Home Depot. Got myself a remote control for my lamp. Walked 2.5 miles in toto. Began the walk with my ipod in my ears, loud, and at first it was awesome, first time in awhile, and as I said, it was loud — but I felt sadly disconnected — too easy to ignore the bums and the pseudobums (cute girls wearing shirts that say Childrens International, asking me for money) — then again, some cynicism makes me feel less bad about all that — I’ve been caught by these bums before and there must be a better way to advance them whatever services they need — I’m living on borrowed money, regardless. OTOH, to he that has, more will be given and other parables of talent —

We are the latter sons of history. We are all Benjamins.

We are the children of the postwar, postboom, postmodern. The world was already here when we got here.

Naturally, we trend conservative, though a conservatism that incorporates some of the victories our parents fought in the culture wars when the world still seemed new —

Now, newness itself is old. Now, we are postnew. We are that which comes after.

History is written looking forward from the past. Our age is the age of exhaustion — where we do not seem up to the challenges that face us. Weimar, someone whispers. Berlin, 1932. Post. Post. s

Art doubles back on itself. Baudrillard’s map becomes the focus. We watch movies to learn how to live. Our lives are rom-coms and then sitcoms and then tearjerkers like The Bucket List. We die in hospitals. We are buried with formaldehyde (new car smell). Post. Post. Post.

A thirty minute drive takes us out of our suburbs and cities and into the last few fragments of wilderness that still persist in this postanarchy — rips in the fabric, chaos theory blooming admist our local stands against entropy.

We know the age of the sun, and our calculations tell us when it will die. The universe too — looks now like it will burn out like a coal and sink into coldness. The scientists call it Heat Death. The Heat Death of the Universe. We are alive. We still live. Obama calls for hope on the lawn of the nation in Washington, two hundred and a score years later but we question. The future is in flux — postcertainty. Postsafety. Sound the alarms. It’s getting hot in here. People are banging at the door. The children don’t read. Postoptimism, postliberalism. Post. After. Next? Post. Postnext, posttomorrow, posthope. Post.

Project: A systematic and organized analysis of Shakespeare’s character of Falstaff (Lokian, the Hanging Man, the Old Fool) though an examination of his utterances and interactions, first in Henry IV, pt. 1, and then in other of Shakespeare’s plays, for the purpose of showing a) how action (of which utterance is a species) reveals, presents, and creates character and b) how what is said can denote what is there.

Why Falstaff? Because he’s fun, strange, weak, etc.. Mostly because he appears to be fully-realized, as one says, and Shakespeare is the master of such fully-realized characters.

1. The growth of things in the ground
2. A strange and foreign language
3. Simple, nonstrenous, daily exercise.
4. Better cooking and nutrition
5. Waking up early and greeting the new days.
6. The simple Zen filled life

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.  — C.M. Street

http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/anglica/Chronology/20thC/Russell/rus_deno.html

Marx without Marxism. The historical pageant of the 19th century, one as horrific and as tumultous as my own 20th — though with the restrospective historical backwards glance, we see that 19th century horrors were merely dress rehearsals for the true breakdown and resynthesis of the strange 20th.

Nevertheless, the Marxist paradise has still not come. (Unless it is here, in America, where the classes contend peacefully against each other, workers of all economic classes striving for solidarity and the good).

1st Thoughts: The utter strangeness of the American and French Revolution to the peoples of Europe — democracy is not better or worse than monarchy, but it might be quicker — allowing a change of government in one’s own lifetime, affording a peaceful means for a society to change course. Absent this mechanism, one gets, not surprisingly, revolution. If that is the measure, how many peaceful revolutions has the United States undergone since our first? France knows this story even better, having had five republics, two empires, and a monarchy since King Louis lost his head.

2nd Thoughts: The new teleo-secular view of history that begins to express itself after the great Rational Revolutions of Washington and Robespierre. (Right and Left? Perhaps — read Burke next.) The Church is mightily dethroned by these developments, both here and in Europe.

3rd: The absolute horrors of the industrial revolution, where men not knowing of the obligations they owed each other, subjected the poor and unlettered to the most abject existence imaginable. Marxism (and its little brother, Social Democracy) are the only compassionate responses to these deprivations. Today, there are similar deprivations, as Globalism (like industrialism a process that we cannot fully grasp and understand) has created a new grouping of haves and have-nots that has created a seething deadly hell for so much of the world. Bono preached about it at my graduation from university. What new Marxism will save and lift up those brilliant shining masses? (I say to Dvora, to anyone, there are two passions, the only two passions of mankind, poverty and environmental sustainability. In solving one, we solve both, in losing one, we lose both. Bill Gates knows. Bill Clinton knows. I know.)

4th: The power of action and the Dialectic, the Dialectic being the abstracted emergent function of individuals pushed by the historical conditions they find themselves in into acting out the required roles of historical progress. The Dialectic does not occur spontaenously but through the choosing of action. We must act — but once we do our choices are to some extent determined by the conditions of the historical scene: in other words, there is only so much we can do.

5th: Marx and Engels and others were always waiting for the time to be right of the socialist revolution. Marx also conceded that in America, in a democracy, socialism might come about through the use of the democratic processs.

6th: Lenin and the Russians. Marx didn’t expect it, but not surprising that in Russia, where the contradictions of capitalism and the authoritarianism of the leadership were at its greatest, and where the bourgeouise were at their comparative weakness, a communist revolution could take place. The riddle of the USSR has not yet been resolved in my mind — how did it go wrong — what they were missing in general that they fell into despotism — is Marxism wrong at its core, denying the liberal rights of liberty and pursuit of happiness? Against Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Jeffersonian stand-in for the more natural property, but which is of course, denied to some) with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity — the second recognizing the importance of the Social, the Primacy of the Social over the Individual >> here is where the American model fails — we live in society, and hence all bear the social costs of individual action — that said, elevating Mill’s rule to a Primary Ideal needs to be supported, cannot be axiomatic, since if the social world is the emergent concerns of all others, it is unclear why the Individual should trump All Others.

Read Next: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula LeGuin.