Michaelmas & St Bartholomew/Nathanael

September 29, The Feast of St Michael and All Angels:

In the Gospel mandated by the Lectionary for today, John 1:45-51, Philip tells Nathanael that "We have found the Messiah... Jesus of Nazareth;" Nathanael replies with what sounds like a proverb: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" When Jesus sees Nathanael approach, he calls him "an Israelite in whom there is no guile." "Where did you get to know me?" Nathanael asks. "I saw you under the fig tree, before Philip called you." This is apparently enough to get Nathanael to exclaim, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Jesus asks: "You believe because I told you, I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this: you will see the angels of heaven ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

This little exchange attached to today's Feast often strikes one as a bit of a stretch at first; the story of Nathanael's call is the main point, and the bit about the angels seems an afterthought. It's widely taken to be an intentional echo of the passage in Genesis 28:10–19, in which Jacob dreams of a ladder or stairway between earth and heaven, with the angels going to and fro upon it; Jesus implicitly declares himself to be this ladder in some fashion, but just what this identity means is obscure.

Nathanael is often identified with the synoptics' Batholomew, (who, like Nathanael, is always paired with Philip), since John and only John mentions Nathanael and only the synoptics refer to Batholomew; but of course this has not kept many (including St Augustine) from thinking there are two people here. I am, myself, a Nathanael=Bartholomew guy, and I'll try to show why a bit later.

There is a hymn frequently sung on Michaelmas: Allelulia to Jesus, Who died on the tree, / and has raised up a ladder of mercy for me, / and has raised up a ladder of mercy for me. The tree on which Christ died, the cross, is itself a ladder between heaven and earth, and as tree it recapitulated the tree in the center of the garden, which is also the world tree, the tree whose roots are in the underworld and whose branches are in heaven. (Sometimes, mythologically, this is inverted). This tree, axis mundi, comes with fruit (of knowledge, of immortality, or both), a woman, a spring, and serpent. I'm not going to list the occasions of this motif; it is ubiquitous, and one does not need to be a slave to pop Jungianism to accept that this widespread occurrence is significant.

Since we are in the matrix of the Hebrew scriptures, the tree which most concerns us is the one in Eden. In Genesis 3, the serpent is called "the most subtle of all the creatures," "subtle" here being a pun (in Hebrew) on smoothness, a connotation which even then bore on the serpent's smooth-tongued capacity to deceive; but it is also a pun on the nakedness of the man and the woman. These two are "smooth" because their skin is exposed; and the snake's smoothness, too, involves its ability to shed its old, rough skin for a shiny, slick new one.

Jesus' description of Nathanael as "an Israelite in whom there is no guile" refers to this entire complex of notions. What is an Israelite? A descendant of Israel, of course; Israel being Jacob, who saw the ladder and all those angels going up and down. Nathanael's name means "God has given," and what God had given was understood above all to be the particular land upon which they lived, a bequest whose legacy we know to this day. It is in the ladder dream that Jacob hears the voice of God declaring this gift for the first time: "the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants."

But what distinguished Jacob was precisely his smoothness; not only his trickery with Esau--a trickery which is turned back on him by Laban--but also the literal smoothness of his skin, which he and Rebekkah must guilefully disguise in order to deceive blind Isaac, in the story immediately preceding the dream of the ladder. "An Israelite in whom there is no guile" is thus (to put the matter no doubt too strongly) a kind of counter-Jacob. "An Israelite in whom there is no guile" is a kind of colloquial rejoinder to Nathanael's skepticism that there could be "anything good from Nazareth."

How this skepticism is broken through is strange. "Where did you get to know me?" "I saw you under the fig tree." "Rabbi! You are the messiah!" What on earth is going on here? I won't claim to provide the answer to this question, but I hope to explicate what I think are come relevant bits of its context, and perhaps to its pertinence to the Feast of St Michael.

The fig tree is perhaps not the Tree (of Knowledge), but it is the only fruit mentioned by name and genus in the Genesis account: "And they knew that they were naked (="smooth"); and they took fig leaves and wove aprons for themselves." The fig tree thus provides that under which one hides one's smoothness. These aprons (they still figure in the LDS Temple ceremony) are replaced later by "garments of skin" given by God. But Nathanael is not "smooth" in this way; he has no deceit, "no guile."

"Under the fig tree," according to some exegetes, also implies prayer and the study of Torah; according to this line of reading, the subtext is that Nathanael was engaged in some devotional piety when Jesus observed him. This may involve angelic mediation, as later elements of synagogue liturgy imply. Jewish tradition is ambivalent about angels, but Christianity is eloquent on them and sees (I contend) the angels as not just mediators between Heaven and Earth but as, in some sense, the very media of prayer or even of theological vision itself; the liturgy is seen as recapitulating or becoming one with the worship given by angels in the presence of God, who are frequently said (e.g. by Evagrios of Pontos in his 153 texts on Prayer) to be the agents of the "energization" of our prayers (see, e.g., text 76).

To be sure, neither Jewish nor Christian tradition is especially interested in angels for their own sake. Evagrios tells an anecdote of a monk who remained steadfast at prayer, even though two angels appeared to him; and the desire to head off any such interest clearly motivates the aforementioned ambivalence of the Rabbis (I believe there is, for instance, not a single mention of angels in the Mishnah). But the image of angels "ascending and descending upon the Son of Man" clearly identifies Jesus himself with the link--tree or ladder--which makes this concourse of energies between earth and heaven possible.

There is a further association, which I mention despite its cultural distance: the Bodhi tree, sacred in Vedic and Buddhist tradition, is also a fig, ficus religiosa; so "under the fig tree" is also where Gautama Buddha attained his enlightenment. This will of course rightly strike many as coming from far afield, but the archetypal emblem of the ascent of awareness from the base of the tree is bound up with the previously-mentioned set of images. It is here that Newagey enthusiasts will rummage about for the kundalini serpent rising from the base of the spine; or (closer to the Judaic matrix of the New Testament) of the ascent from the lower state of the soul called nefesh (frequently interpreted as the serpent in the Kabbalah) up the Sephirotic Tree of Life. These correspondences are indisputably inspired by free-association; whether they ought to be dismissed as "mere" free-association is a different question, but a methodological argument defending them would be a separate blog post.

The last connection that belongs here hinges on the aforementioned identity between Nathanael and Bartholomew. There is a famous depiction of Bartholomew by Michaelangelo in his Sistine Chapel Last Judgment. He is holding his own skin. This is because tradition has it that he was martyred by being flayed. That is, the tradition has preserved a connection between Bartholomew/Nathanael and the shedding skin motif, which thus connects directly to the Genesis story of the Fall. It should be noted that not every version says that Bartholomew was flayed--some stories speak only of his beheading--so there is some reason to think that this detail was intended to resonate with this wider constellation of notions going back to the Hebrew connotations of guile/smoothness.

I might mention, too, that Michaelangelo is held to have painted a recognizable self-portrait on the skin of Bartholomew. Considering the artist's name, this may not just be the painter's exercise of his artistic prerogative. It is possible he knew what he was doing.

The liberal bias of American media

Occupy Wall Streetis a very loose movement initially called by AdBusters, publicized by Anonymous, and motivated by everything from an itch for a moment of spectacle to the desire to see CEOs behind bars. It may be the Arab spring belatedly come to Manhattan; it may be the Invisible Committee's shot across the bow of America; it may be a bunch of naïve wannabes, sorry that they missed the Battle of Seattle, and trying to jump-start another manning of the barricades with a page out of Abbie Hoffman. One thing's for sure, you won't get much guidance from those institutions whose job it is to report the news with their mandated, university-intellectual-approved left-leaning bias. Because chances are you haven't even heard of Occupy Wall Street. On September 23, a full week after the protests began, the famously liberal New York Times managed a piece oozing with condescension. It took NPR, that hotbed of wobblies and fellow-travelers and whatever, nine days to deign to so much as mention the movement, and then only in response to listeners' indignation. This is after over a hundred a thousand arrests, and any number of protesters being pretty atrociously mistreated, including some women who were doused with pepper spray by a policeman who had to walk deliberately up to the barrier behind which they were shouting "Oh my God!" as they watched someone be handcuffed and manhandled. Watch the video; if it doesn't ruin the career of one of New York's finest, I hope it at least loses him the respect of his children.

Are the protests big? (Maybe getting bigger, anyway; see here.) Are they likely to really shake things up? Will it look like Tahrir Square? Will activists flood into New York and make the stock market freeze? Not if the "left-leaning" press have anything to do with it.

[UPDATE 10/1/2011 The first link in this post, for the moment, makes my virus-detection software break out in hives. So someone somehow has either poisoned the OWS site, or Norton is providing a service for the Power Elite. Current comments on safeweb.norton.com offer variations on "WTF?" Ain't live conspiracy theory fun? Stay tuned.]

[UPDATE 10/2/2011 Decent coverage from Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, the NT Times again does a two-step on the Brooklyn Bridge (this is really just a shift in emphasis--the same facts are reported lower down in the article.)]

Like I was saying

If I may be permitted a self-referential moment:

There is a secret link between this fear and the boredom we spoke of earlier: boredom secretes fear as a kind of attempt at self-cure. One can see this quite clearly in contemporary western culture, which has grown more fearful as it has grown more secure, for the periodic upsettings of security become more traumatic and they leave a viral half-life of unsettling phantoms, traumatic enough to drive one back into the arms of a comfortable boredom, in a terrible cycle.

This, a propos last post, where I was voicing my expectation that the blah-banal ironism of the '90s will make its resurgence as the "trauma" of 9/11 fades. This ennui should also serve as a palliative while America dwindles into the twilight of its historical significance.

(Incidentally, some of this feedback-loop has also been described by Lars Svendsen in his The Philosophy of Boredom and The Philosophy of Fear.)

It should always raise one's suspicions when someone claims world-shaking significance for their own field, but I truly believe that philosophy is the cure of this addictive cycle of boredom and fear. It has been fighting the Noonday Demon from the very beginning. It is, to be sure, a homeopathic cure; Socrates' words stun and numb at first.

Irony is Sincerity. ;)

I keep hearing how September 11th, 2001, made irony go out of the world or something. It's true that before, during the first Bush administration especially and then all through Clinton (ever notice how we tend to date things just like Bronze Age chroniclers, "in the second year of the reign of Sennacherib son of Sargon..."?) there was that crippling "hipness-unto-death"*, as some wit called it, spreading everywhere. It made especially TV commercials give off this evil glow of you-love-being-manipulated-by-this, sure-it's-all-lies-but-you're-kind-of-in-on-the-joke, making everyone complicit in their own cooption. One nadir of this, among many, was Madonna's Truth or Dare, the whole miserable glamorama of Yes-I-yank-your-chain, but I'm-telling-you-I'm-yanking-it; look at me, being all honest and forthcoming! Yeah, yeah, (wink), you're not fooled, you clever one.

This meta-meta-metastasizing of culture was often noted by commentators, of course, either applauding it, or resigning to it, or denouncing it, but it was on a runaway course that seemed unstoppable. (The very best, bar none, send-up of it I know is David Foster Wallace's short story "My Appearance", in Girl with Curious Hair.) Then.... then what? Then "the world changed forever"? Then we came "face to face" with some indigestible something that couldn't be assimilated into the snide, the trite, the in-jokey?

Even as the sirens wailed, and the smoke billowed up above the buildings, before anyone even knew just what had occurred, people in the street catching each others' eye were exchanging a secret, a half-acknowledged, dares-not-speak-it's-name recognition: "Something big is happening right now"--(this no matter where you were, Manhattan or elsewhere)--"and I'm here for it." Almost a jealousy of those who were on the spot. 9/11 was the ultimate in-crowd maker. "We are all New Yorkers," the T-shirts declared, wishfully. If you were conscious ten years ago, you are, whether you will or no, in the club of "Everyone remembers where they were when they heard." Later, by a week or so, we divided into camps: "Why do they hate us?" vs. "They hate our freedoms" vs. "Inside job," mutually-incomprehensible languages, but even this schism did not prevent unheard-of popularity ratings for a President who could not competently read from a teleprompter. It took seven more years of shame to grind that inexorably down to the 20-percent basement where it belonged. (Which more or less tells you how significant popularity polls are.)

Amod has some pertinent thoughts on how "never forget" has slowly started to be...forgotten. The fact that 9/11 has begun to "fade" somewhat from the foreground of national consciousness is no doubt all to the good, given the points he makes; but I fear it has not much to do with the balm of forgetfulness. The racism Amod names is still, to our shame, alive and well; so is the righteous indignation; and so is the pain for those who lost loved ones that day or in the wars that followed. But capitalism has moved on, as it must, not without a tear for the lost. What we've seen in the past ten years is the inevitable commodification of 9/11: the digestion of the event into a few stock images and some memes of patriotism, terrorism, "where-were-you-that-day," and so on. It started the moment someone called it "our finest hour" without cringing.

It may be the war that has slowed the resurgence of so-hip-of-you-to-know-it's-a-lie commercialism which went out of fashion for a brief time. It's telling that it arose and flourished as the long post-Vietnam era went on, as wars became TV events and, importantly, as America's economy continued to prosper. But the acidic corrosion of ironism is already picking up right where it slowed down, and it will be a triumph of capitalism when said ironism can flourish in the midst of a war and in the face of record-high unemployment. Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and being borderline culturally-literate enough to recognize (or make) an Orwell reference is a bulwark against tyranny. No, seriously.

* I apologize for the surfeit of hyphenated phrases in this post. Really.

of late

So during a month of "fasting" from the blog, I discovered to my great relief that I could still think with a pen in my hand. Typing words on a screen and writing on paper are very disparate modes of composition for me, more different than I can even articulate. There's something about the instant revisability of pixels that makes composition slower and more unsure, for me. I've found this translates to how I read online as well: on a screen, I am always scrolling down, before I've finished the paragraph; always looking for the bullet points, the money quote. After months and years of this, I began to get the queasy worry that something impatient and lazy had my mind its slovenly den. Would I be able to write anymore? Well, yes, as it happens, yes it is kind of like riding a bike. But the experiment demonstrated something more to me. I'm just plain happier composing on paper. The words covering the page in their indelible lines gives a shape to my thinking that the discrete increments of typing and the cut-and-paste-able blocks of computer text completely up-end. It's plain that this is an idiosyncracy of my own. Others have their own mental and creative hygiene, other conditions in which they can reach "flow," as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of optimal creativity and production; for me, nothing beats a smooth-flowing, extra-fine-point rollerball, on the unlined white pages of a hardbound notebook. The lines are laid down indelibly; I can cross them out but I can't select-and-cut to make them vanish, or scoop them up and replant them three paragraphs later, and these restraints help me produce: without them, I'm just floundering. But of course transferring this to a blog post involves typing and transcribing, which besides being extra work always invites the revisionary demon, the "inner editor," who yes does valuable service but needs to learn how to be a little less pushy. The point here is that my posts will be fewer, not because I'm writing less but because I'm writing more. What I post will likely be shorter and just an indication of what I am thinking about off-screen. Questions are still welcome, more than welcome, because I think best of all when I'm actually engaging with a live person whose thoughts I can't anticipate because, well, they aren't mine.

Hellenism and Hebraism

A poem by Cavafy:

The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

I most recently encountered this poem by way of the explanation offered by The Poseidonian for the name of his blog. He's lamenting the likelihood that America has reached its apogee and is now settling into its long decline, an estimate I think pretty likely to be right.

Now compare this to the story, frequently re-told, concerning the early generations of Hasidim:

When the Ba'al Shem Tov had to accomplish a difficult task, he retired to a certain spot in the forest. By mystical means he would light a fire, and he meditated in prayer; and what he set out to perform was done.
After a generation, his disciple the Maggid of Mezeritz too faced a challenge. He went to the same place in the woods, and would say: "We can no longer light the fire, but we can still say the prayers," and what he wanted done became real.
Again, a generation later, Rabbi Moishe of Sassov had to perform a task. And he too went to the forest saying: "We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the prayer's secret meditations; but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs, and that must be sufficient." And so it was.
But when another generation had passed, and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his chair in his room and said: "We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place. All we can do is to tell the story of how it was done." And the story that he told had the same effect as the deeds of the other three.

This story is all too often mis-told as a fuzzy vignette intended to make us feel good about recounting myths, a comfort to us in the midst of resignation. I do not think this quite captures the meaning. Between these two parables there is an important and subtle difference in emphasis, and it has everything to do with what is at stake in the one and in the other.

Hitting the ceiling fan. Plus, no posts in August.

Whether or no the United States Congress manages to send a bill raising the debt ceiling to the President's desk by August 2, one may yet be tempted to speculate that the dumb-show presages the overt decline of the American empire. If it makes a whit of difference at all, that is. (I am about two-thirds with The Last Psychiatrist on this one.) The center of world politics may have shifted definitively to parts of the globe formerly known as the Third World: the movements for democratization in the near and middle east, the resistances to globalization in the developing world, and the shifting fortunes, ambitions, and concerns of Marx's last stand compromise (China), not to mention the complete stagnation not only of economy but of the currents of social mobility within the United States, all suggest that the animating motives of world history (if there is such a Geist), or at least the interests of the Illuminati puppeteers, have relocated to other climes. Yes, futurology is a fool's pastime, especially when based on today's headlines; but it's hard for me to shake the suspicion that the dialectic has either caught up or gotten bored with us. Will the ceiling fan be hit with a bang or a whimper?

In other news, I will probably post nothing in August. If there are any comments, I'll respond, and I'm working on some posts for the future, but I am taking the month to work on my relationship with my preferred mode of thinking/writing: pen on paper.

The order of the day

In my old hometown, Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in prison. DeChristopher is an environmental activist who, in the twilight of the last Bush administration, grew increasingly alarmed at the government's readiness to sell off public land to the diggers of fossil fuels. One day DeChristopher stepped into a Bureau of Land Management auction, signed himself up as a bidder, and kept on raising his number.

He cost oil and gas corporations hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. DeChristopher's bids raised the average price of land from about $12 and acre to about $125. While he had no money to pay for the bids he made, and initially intended only to embarrass and confound the government and the corporations (who were, he contended, acting in defiance of the law), he and sponsors later raised money for the down payment on his bids and made the offer--which was duly refused by the BLM.

The trial has been cause célèbre for all the right reasons. The auction at which DeChristopher made his fake bids was later declared illegal by a federal judge, partially vindicating DeChristopher's argument that he acted to prevent an illegal transfer of public lands into corporate hands. The informed jury movement got involved (absolutely rightly, by the way) to the great consternation of prosecutors. The courthouse has been the scene of ongoing demonstrations and on the day of DeChristopher's sentencing, over twenty other activists were arrested for civil disobedience.

Two years in prison may seem light or draconian, depending on your expectations. He could have faced up to ten years. On the other hand, it was certainly in the judge's power to assign only community service. To put it in perspective, Will Potter at Green is the New Red puts it like this:

DeChristopher’s two-year sentence is comparable to what members of underground groups have received for property destruction. The court has sent the message that public, aboveground activists, who use non-violent civil disobedience, will be treated on par with underground activists who use economic sabotage.

There is no question that this is what motivated the sentence. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson generously conceded that "I'm not saying there isn't a place for civil disobedience. But it can't be the order of the day." The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Huber, had been adamant: "If a sentence was perceived as too light or inconsequential, it could be seen as a reasonable price to pay to grab the limelight or gain fame." In light of this it is clear that there was concern that civil disobedience not become the order of the day.

You may think DeChristopher misguided, dangerous, devoted to a lost cause, or the great green hope. Of this thing I am sure: he is a brave man and a principled one. As a philosopher, I will add this: I suspect that being backed into a corner, if it doesn't crush you, if you can rise above fight-or-flight, makes you free. It's not a state you can get to on purpose, but this is the secret of all the imponderable and existentially soul-pinning paradoxes from Socrates to Dōgen to Kierkegaard to Gurdieff, and sometimes it wakes you up in a way that makes all the difference in the world, even if it seems to leave things much as they were. I don't know whether Tim DeChristopher considers himself a philosopher or not, but clearly he has thought through where he stands and why. Nor is he cowed by the judicial system's ability to pass sentence. That's not the corner he's in. He believes we are all in a corner already, and most of us are too scared or too alienated to see it. He is right that his example can be enough to snap some people out of their own fear--"if he can do that, I can do something too"--and by the same token the government is right, by its lights, to want raise the cost of such freedom.

DeChristopher's courtroom statement to Judge Benson before sentencing was the only time he was able to make a declaration of his motivations and political positions during the trial (the prosecution had argued that he ought not be allowed to distract the court with these irrelevancies, though it was eager to use his public statements later to argue for a harsh sentence). While not quite the Letter from Birmingham Jail, it is still a noble contribution to the documents in great tradition of resistance to authority; moving, articulate, unapologetic, and damning:

[The prosecution] would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything.... they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between....
[The prosecution] also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law.... The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law....
I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me....I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them....You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away.

Go read it all.

Flavorful mechanics

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.

--Robert Louis Stevenson, "On some technical elements of style in literature".

Some would contend that Stevenson's observations pertain not just to art, but to any object of wonder or delight or even diversion. I have a friend who, like me, has a tendency towards animism. He remembers being fascinated by a little plastic Yoda toy when he was young. One day it forcibly struck home to him that the thing was not alive, was not a little green Jedi master, but was a lump of plastic with paint. "I would swear," he told me, "that after I realized this, its eyes looked dead."

Compare the starker rhetoric of Thomas Ligotti:

Life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would have us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. (Conspiracy Against the Human Race, p. 29)

Or again, Ligotti glossing the work of Carlo Michelstaedter:

To Michelstaedter, nothing in this world can be anything but a puppet. And a puppet is only a plaything, a thing of parts brought together as a simulacrum of real presence. It is nothing in itself. It is not whole and individual but exists only relative to other playthings, some of them human playthings that support one another’s illusion of being real. However, by suppressing thoughts of suffering and death they give themselves away as beings of paradox – prevaricators who must hide from themselves the flagrantly joyless possibilities of their lives if they are to go on living. (ibid., p. 32-33)

The "silent, staring void," a process without mind, behind mind, an emptiness not rich with potentia like the radiant spaciousness of the Buddhist sunyata but blank, accidental, and joyless, an endless spinning of gears and pulleys--this is, we are assured, what the willing dupes called average human beings must conceal from themselves, in order to enjoy this confidence trick called life. But one may espouse a nihilism far less patently abject than this, and still insist, or indeed assume, that life reduces to a play of interacting mechanical processes. I want to investigate (and, implicitly, challenge) this assumption here with reference to games, and I'm going to start with a couple of examples.

Mille Bornes is a game in which players pretend to be driving a 1,000-mile (hence the name) race. It's played with cards marked either with numbers of miles (25, 50, 75, 100, 200), with certain hazards or frustrations one might encounter in a road race (stop signs and speed limits, flat tires, accidents, running out of gas), or with remedies to said obstacles (green lights, spare tires, filling up, repairs). There are special cards which grant immunity to a given obstacle: Right-of-way, Puncture-Proof, Driving Ace, and Spare Tank. One plays miles-cards (or remedies) on oneself, trying to attain (but not exceed) 1,000; one plays obstacle cards on one's opponent.

The cards are adorned with signs that are suggestive of their function: various animals with different cliche speeds (from snail to swallow), traffic signs, and so forth. In playing Mille Bornes, at least with 10-to-12-year-olds (my own significant sample), one does sometimes feel a certain frustration or excitement, similar to being stuck in traffic or zooming ahead with a "so-long-suckahs!" laugh, and one does sometimes provide oneself a little narrative: "Damn! Another flat tire!?" All of this suggested merely by the pictures and the theme of the game, of course; for strictly speaking, there is nothing at all about the structure of the game that has anything to do with a road-race.

Mechanically, Mille Bornes is a play of variables. Numbers and functions and rules interact and are operated by players. Any connotation of miles, roads, speed or slowness, is provided by the players themselves spurred on by the theme of the game. Similarly, a game of Clue unfolds by way of an algorithm of process-of-elimination and a degree of random-number generation (two dice being rolled most turns); but these could operate without any props like rope and revolver or settings like ballrooms and libraries, all of which are, strictly speaking, extraneous.

The murder-theme of Clue, or the race-theme of Mille Bornes, are what one calls the flavor of the game. The rules, mathematics, and so on constitute the game's mechanics. The mechanics of a well-structured game are balanced and give no obvious advantage to any one player. They keep a game both challenging and rewarding. A game's flavor lends a kind of thematic or narrative coherence to it.

My thoughts about the relation between mechanics and flavor were originally occasioned by watching many, many rounds of Magic: the Gathering (MTG, or just Magic, for short), a game which showcases both of these aspects in a small package. A round of Magic is an imaginary duel between mages who cast spells, summon creatures, and employ fantastic objects to defeat their opponents; players (the "mages" in question) make these moves by playing various cards in their deck (the spells, creatures, and so on). Every such move requires tapping a source of magical power called, in the game, "mana." In extremely oversimplified terms, one may say that the more potent the move, the greater the mana cost. Mana comes in one of five colors, and each color has tendencies to align with or oppose other colors. Every Magic card shows, in abbreviated form, the costs and benefits associated with it; the rules show what sorts of targets it can be directed against, what circumstances prevent it being deployed, and so on. Additionally, each card displays artwork that shows the object, creature, or spell it stands for. Many feature in addition a short passage of "flavor text": a sentence or two meant to summon up an atmosphere suggestive of the role of the card's subject in an imaginary narrative.

"Wrath is no vice when inflicted upon the deserving."

"Its diet consists of fruits, plants, small woodland animals, large woodland animals, woodlands, fruit groves, fruit farmers, and small cities."

"He ensures not only whether but also when and where the lightning strikes twice."

"The land promises nothing and keeps its promise."

And so on.

This little snippets of flavor text are both completely superfluous, and absolutely essential to the game in some way. My informal research among enthusiasts of MTG indicates that few if any give themselves a narrative of events as they play, along the lines of "Now I'll cast this spell... Oh no! She's summoned an army of undead soldiers! They destroyed my giant spider!" They are thinking, rather, in terms of scores and rules: "Shoot, I'm down to 7 life." But of course the very term life in this context is a bit of flavor text. Indeed, it's admitted, the game would be no fun at all without the flavor. And, of course; no fun, no game. I even know players who acknowledge that their best decks--the ones that give them the best odds of winning--are not the decks they prefer to play with; they'd rather play with a deck that has a coherent flavorful theme--say, all one color of mana, or lots of flying creatures, or an special types of spells. The flavor is not just why to play, it is in some measure constitutive of the game itself. One could certainly run a fairly simple algorithm with functions and quantities that would be completely isomorphic with a round of MTG, but it would not be playing a game.

Now I am aware that some games are far more "mechanical," in the sense I am using the word, than others. One could argue that a game like Go, or MasterMind, is almost purely a matter of mechanics. But even this would not be completely true, because there is an element of flavor in the tension of a contest between two players, in the challenge of trying to beat one's own record, in the very experience of playing. And indeed, I suspect that in experience itself we find the best analogue to flavor. It is very telling that the word "flavor" itself refers to a subjective experience while the word "mechanics" pertains to the objective aspects of a game. (I would suggest that the mechanical is the meta-level, but in fact this does not get it quite right, for it is of the essence of the meta- that it is about its object, whereas the mechanical in a certain sense has no object at all--it could all happen automatically, without any intentionality whatsoever. It is the flavorful that has an object and in that sense is closer to the meta-level. This is a significant detail but I won't explore it here.)

One may note that my argument here bears a certain resemblance to Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment: imagine yourself in a room with detailed instructions in English for deciding what Chinese script to put in an out-box depending upon what Chinese comes into the in-box. Searle's argument is that one could become so good at following the instructions that from the outsider's perspective, nothing could distinguish you from a native Chinese speaker, even though one may understand not a word. Searle takes this to be a refutation to the claims of adherents of Strong AI; in essence, passing the Turing Test is not a criteria for understanding, for despite my having outputs and inputs that are exactly those of a speaker of Chinese, the characters do not mean anything to me.

What I am calling, in game-terms, "flavor," is here analogous to Searle's "understanding." One of Searle's points is that understanding can be separated from the rules that generate apparent competence: or, more succinctly, semantics does not reduce to syntax. The Chinese room argument does not directly address the question of the origin of semantics, which is a separate issue; it simply underscores the distinction.

One might also compare certain arguments of David Deutsch regarding virtual reality. Deutsch contends that Turing's arguments about universal machines can be extended to the question of simulated realities. The details of Deutsch's argument are beyond the scope of this post, but one theme of his account is that while a virtual simulation can generate any number of physically impossible scenarios, these impossibilities are by definition not actually, physically existing; what exists are physically possible states of affairs, which we then interpret as different (and sometimes impossible) states of affairs.

This, in turn, is just what stage magic (not, of course, to be confused with MTG) is: a set of procedures that results in an simulation of an impossible situation. The object of the magic, however, is not the impossible situation; and it is certainly not the rendering of the impossible event into the possible explanation. Or so argues one of the great theorists of modern stage magic, Eugene Burger, when he writes:

The magical experience is not the experience of a puzzle.... [it] is...in part, the experience of mystery. Mystery operates in magic in two ways. There is, first, experiencing the mystery that [for example,] a human body is here, alive and before my eyes, floating in space. The mere "thatness" of the magical effect--that it is happening at all--is the first level at which mystery operates or is present in magic.
There is however another way...This appears when we confront mystery as something to solve or figure out--as for example in a mystery novel or film where we attempt to outguess the detective and solve the mystery for ourselves. To do this we must transform the mystery into a puzzle to be solved. And to do that is to destroy the mystery! For once the mystery is solved, the mystery is no more.
The magical experience prompts us to ask whether all mysteries are really puzzles waiting to be solved. Is there, in other words, an irreducible presence of mystery in the world that can't be turned into puzzles and, therefore, remains Mystery forever and ever? The magical worldview suggests that there is....
Conjuring, at its best, functions to awaken us to another realm of experience: the magical dimension that points us towards the mystery that lies behind and beyond all experience. (Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning, pp 13, 22-24)

This is coming from a respected and acclaimed conjurer, remember, who knows very well that any number of astounding effects can be produced by strings and pulleys. What is at stake here is not the impossibility per se, but the wonder at the impossibility. It is precisely the flavor of "the magical experience," which Burger insists cannot be boiled down to the mechanics of the trick, even though these mechanics are indispensable for occasioning it.

The difference between the experience of flavor (or vice-versa) and the infrastructure of such mechanics can lend plausibility to two different conclusions: either that everything is reducible to mechanics, and there is, really, no flavor at all ("flavor" is just a [mechanical] label used by one part of the mechanics for another part); or that there is some aspect of things that is irreducible to mechanics, precisely that aspect which is the recognition of the difference between mechanics and flavor--not the difference between explanans and explanandum, but between both of these on the one hand, and understanding of the relationship, on the other.

When my friend realized Yoda was just plastic and paint--where did the "Yoda"-ness go? Where, indeed, had it come from? To say it came from my friend is to beg the question. Where did he get it?

One last, Platonist, speculation: my suspicion is that this issue of mechanics and flavor is isomorphic with the question of the relation between Being and the Good.

incommunicado

Off to the wilderness for a bit, so no posts (not that I am all that regular in this regard anyway); and my responses to comments will have to wait a few days. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just away from electricity and drinking up some cool, green, slow sanity.

McLuhan centennial

Marshall McLuhan would have been 100 today. I am a little baffled over Google's failure to mark the occasion with a special graphic. I call it a case of the anxiety of influence.

But there are plenty of notices online. The official McLuhan site has a huge list on its main page of events happening (both online and out on the surface of the Earth) during the whole year. Graham Harman has a short post here, and Douglas Coupland, whose brief study of McLuhan You know nothing of my work (titled for a line from McLuhan's cameo in Annie Hall), has an article in the Guardian. (A couple of reviews of Coupland's book here and here.)

I won't try to sum up McLuhan or go on about how he saw what was coming. Anyone who reads him can tell he knew which way the wind was blowing. His reputation suffered--like Derrida's later--from people adopting his style and nomenclature, without really bothering to read him. To some degree it's still the case.

One thing that is striking about McLuhan is how much a child of Gutenberg he was. His experiments in form were very much grounded in what was possible on the printed page. He was a Joyce critic, and in some ways his conversion to Roman Catholicism mirrored Joyce's exodus away from it. Eric McLuhan has edited a collection of his father's writings on religion and they are indispensable for understanding his work.

What people often still (and, in my opinion, scandalously) don't seem to get about McLuhan that for all his attention to the way innovations in media were re-shaping human experience he wasn't such a fan of the trends he described. He is frequently writing not straight-ahead description but satire, and he was less than sanguine about what he was satirizing. It may be that people's incomprehension of this point is a function of the very thing McLuhan was addressing. Media does not just impact what we perceive, but what we can perceive.

For all that, McLuhan is not a "technological determinist," as some stupid reductions would have it, but rather, as my friend Alf Seegert once put it, a technological co-evolutionist. We are able to make choices about media, but media will also shape the very manner of our choosing.

McLuhan remarked in a 1966 interview:

Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it, The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. (McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and interviews p 102)

McLuhan believed it was important to be clear-sighted about how those effects happened. Others came along afterward and tried to celebrate what he limited himself to depicting (albeit sometimes with a wicked gleam in his eye). Some of their excesses may have magnified some of McLuhan's own defects, not leat that wicked gleam. I am sure I am not the first to point out the irony that McLuhan's message was swamped by his medium. We are only barely beginning to catch on to what he was saying. And why.

Ismpressionistic self-portrait

There is a strong meta-philosophical flavor in many of my posts. This has its reasons--I am constantly asking myself what it is I am doing here (what is this thing called philosophy?)--but I decided to sketch an outline of those first-order positions I find most congenial, partly because people sometimes ask, so, dude, what is it you believe? and partly because it's good to touch base with one's commitments. I won't be arguing for any of these positions here, let alone spelling out the details; I won't even argue that they are all mutually consistent. It's more or less a list of -isms, and perhaps not all that enlightening, though I try to provide some glosses-- mostly these are the from-the-hip variety, so it's possible that in refining them I will have to seriously revise.

Philosophically:
in method, I am
eclectic (My working assumption is that the intuitions at the root of any position are valid even if the articulation is problematic);
generalist (Philosophy seeks to understand everything--which means in practice it is committed to incompletion);
traditionalist (I am always interested in what the precedents of a position are, and this interest goes deeper than the historical);
skeptical (I always think a good question is "how do you know?" and I cultivate not-having-an-opinion, which is not the same as indifference);
and
irenic (I am less interested in making anyone agree with me, than in how we can both get along).

In doctrine, I am an
ontological realist (the world exists whether or not I am there to look at it). This does not mean that mind is not part of this world, or that mind does not exist necessarily! Ontological realism in the sense I espouse it is consistent with certain kinds of idealism. It simply means that there are constraints upon what we can truly say.
Also as regards ontology, I am a
personalist (to be is to experience, and the conatus of experience is towards personhood);
and tend to be
relationalist (entities, and certainly persons, are, at least in time--in terms of their coming-to-be and passing-away--constituted by their relations).

I am also a moral realist (judgments about whether something is right or wrong have sense outside of who is making the claim). When one says that X is good, one is making a stronger claim than that one approves of X or that X is "good for me."

On the question of science and religion, I am an accomodationist (there is no necessary conflict between scientific and religious stances). I take this so for granted that I do not really consider it a deep philosophical issue--it's almost a more matter of current affairs--but it's worth mentioning.

In political economy:
In my aims I am anarchist (the more distant the relationship, the more intolerable coercion--because the less resistible--is within it);
in my loyalties, conservative (existing goods tend to trump hypothetical alternative goods);
in my reactions, cynical (the question cui bono? always comes to mind);
in practice, localist (the closer the relationship, the less reason within it for coercion).
(This last especially is very from-the-hip.)

I am more swayed by Marx than almost any other thinker politically: the relevant sociological category is always class.

In art: I am both a dada classicist and a romantic modernist. (Huh?) I believe with Warhol that art is what you can get away with; I maintain, with Tarkovsky, Goethe, Bach, Leonardo, and Confucius, that some things are waaay more worth getting away with than others.

In theology: I am a rational fideist (the structure of our experience is aporetic and does require a (Jacobian, Kierkegaardian) leap; but the disposition for this leap can be rationally cultivated and its consequences rationally discussed);
and at the end of the day an apophaticist (God is wholly beyond the pertinence of any created concept).

The more I reflect the more convinced I am that the best preparation for philosophy is listening to and playing music--as many kinds of music as possible.