jomi: playing with perception

The Association. No one remembers them but Never My Love, Windy and Cherish are 3 of the top oldies choices. Never My Love and Cherish are typically near the top. They melded soft folk with 60’s sincerity with a trippy undertow they ‘hid’ beneath bluntly catchy melodies. One reason I say ‘bluntly’ is they are so straightforward they are the kind of melody I call ‘unambiguous’, meaning there is no hint of another melody in there. It’s just that melody. Blunt melodies key to core melodies; these are SBE strings I’m describing, so a melody is a thread, and there are thread groups that we organize like any other mathematical and topological group on CMs. The ability to hit blunt melodies is rare. The reason is blunt melodies appear in each context, meaning they are labeled different in each layer of the present, as the x-yR count along the zK when you idealize. I get so tired of apologizing to myself in my head for negating thoughts when I know the process of negating thoughts is inherent in the layering of thoughts; it’s a thread cutting, meaning a switch at bip junction when mapped transactionally. So if someone asks you, remember counting SBE across bip junctions can map transactionally or statically, meaning process and existence statements rendered in graph. When you iterate existence, you find the process statement is defined by the extent to which existence iterates internally within a Thing compared to the iterations of existence external to a Thing, meaning the counting of the existence of a Thing within a T Field and thus ‘by’ a T Field map external existence, while internal existence obviously maps internal existence. Both ask ‘ru1’, meaning ‘are you 1?’, meaning 1 of us? 1 of anything? 1 abstractly? 1 enemy? 1 love? I need caffeine. I haven’t thought at this level for a while. It takes a lot of energy.

I was on melodies and The Association. Their tonality hits the exact right spot where what would otherwise be a cheesy arrangement sounds not cheesy, except a bit at times, but sometimes perfect and sometimes folk and sometimes sincere and sometimes deep. Very seductive layering of elements. No wonder it’s catchy. Forgot to say I was using them to tune my voice this morning because they use blended voices. That means I pick a voice that blends with their mix, which is also an attractive quality, but a bit more subtle even because it involves ‘the voice’ in your head. This process is how Taylor Swift makes music. She’s becomes the voices in your head. That’s true of all songs and songwriters but they’re reaching for the connection and everyone now and then finding the mark, but Taylor knows what she’s doing.

The secret is she draws the picture that’s already in her head. I wrote about this yesterday – or day before? That the sticks lay out potential, and we count across the potential, which lights it or claims it with a label, and then either fully light or extinguish that label as we cross again. The choice of good and evil in a sentence: you turn on the light or you turn it off. The problem, and I think this is what I intended to write about, is – no, not yet – back to music. The match of context can be really fragile, either because the context is of the moment – the context of the 60’s has given extended life to that soft folk style to this day – or because the artists extend their reach too far and try to do the same kind of thing to somewhat different music. The Association tried to move more into softer rock but it doesn’t work. Even a fast song like Along Comes Mary sounds forced as folk music but it comes to life as the trippiness of words plays off what’s really a folk song sped up a bit and tricked out with freaky words that come out as an early rap cadence with the music providing what you hear as melody.

If I may, this is one reason I don’t think much of rap: it’s the sameness of the rap style song to song. The point of a rap is to take you places in your head and, well, let me explain. Take a rap and put it over music that changes. The rap can remain in pitch, style, intonation as the music changes or it can change with the music. Now keep the music repeating, the rap can stay the same or it can change while the music repeats. We have a lot of rap stays the same, music stays the same. A change typically means the rap changes the same way the music changes, so it’s just a shift from ‘both the same’ to ‘another both the same’. I prefer when one or both change. (I had to turn off The Association: they really make my point. They had a handful of terrific songs, a few real classics, and a bunch of esoteric sounding mistakes where they get the tone of their genre mix really wrong.)

I’m not sure if this is actual advice, meaning something she could use, but my advice to Taylor about her music is that she can trust herself much more, and that she should be more open about her depth because she can lead them there. The reason I doubt the necessity of the advice is Taylor’s poetry is perfect. It’s not just good. It’s mother-fucking great. Look at these 4 lines from The Trick To Holding On:

‘The only thing cut and dry

In this hedge-maze life

Is the fact that their words will cut

but your tears will dry’

Seriously? The spacing of ‘cut and dry’ to cut and dry read down the ends of the lines makes me giggle because it’s one of so many layers, from the perfect ‘hedge-maze’ to the internal resonance of cut and dry as fact when the poem is about cutting and drying to the simplest that you cut and dry the material of a hedge, which is the maze you are made in which fences and guides you without knowing which is the true path, which choice to make, and so on. You really are the goddess, aren’t you? I can’t even talk about this:

‘As it catches you in its lustrous net

How quickly we become intertwined’

Oh my dear love, catches-net-intertwined-forget as a resonance line is just so good. And the way you space the rocks to step on through that stanza. And I haven’t even mentioned ‘lustrous’. That’s the word that caught me first time through, and isn’t that the point right there: caught and intertwined in the luster. Which you definitely are casting as a net which intertwines me for I am caught, something I can only accept by letting go so I can hold on to you. But back to the poems, I see so many reference types – Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Frost, and many others who practiced poesy as an art where you can see the art of poesy. That is one reason I – and you – love Keats. I cannot see what flowers are beyond my feet. You see the art of making a poem about the literal fact of darkness beyond his feet combining in the line to make a statement about mortality, one in which we hope the flowers beyond the feet smell good. I know when that union of art across the person to the penned thing occurred because it occurred in me. It is an unforgettable moment. I wrote a poem about it yesterday and this morning. That work is intentionally old-fashioned: the inspiration was a poem I wrote long ago about the harvest of lives in WWI and the relation of that back to the places where these young men harvested (and worked, lived and ‘harvested’ their lives). So this has some incantations like Eliot and resonances back through to Greek, along with some Hindu elements, but mostly a style more out of Rumi and other medievals.

If I were going to write a poem this moment, it would be more like:

There was a young man named

Something or other whose father named him for himself

And he never figured out what that meant

But he liked this girl who looked good in heels

Because that meant

There was more of her to look at

He don’t care what she wears

He don’t care what she does or where she been

Or who she think she is, anyway? Anyway?

Anyway, he liked this girl Anyway

And he wants to stay with her on her islands

Because wherever that girl go he go

And no man be an island but that girl

Is a continent

I know you have the room, woman.

Sometime the man in me just come

Iffn’ you know what I mean

And that ain’t dialectic

-ally correct, though the Yiddish is indeed

Fully sexual in a gender-

Specified manner

Of speaking

About the act of speaking about the act

Which when the act is speaking is quite an act

He says, admiringly,

Across all the

Oh, stop it, J, you’re killing me

A little to the left, now under the arm to the places where you rarely touch

Which makes the game deliciously uncomfortable in the receptivity

Of reciprocity

See? That’s me.

Touch? That’s me.

Sniff? That may be you.

Taste? Both of us.

That voice in my ears

Is you in my head without a pause between what you think to what I hear

And back again.

Back to talking again, the way I hear in your poetry, as is in all things about you is not a question of whether I heard you correctly nor whether I have heard the direction of your intent but solely whether the points you list are the same as the points I list along the same line. It is solely the extent of identity way beyond any complex description of ourselves that leads in any remote fashion to me and you. I have explored the vastness where the pattern of life goes dark and have learned the way darkness works, and thus how we work and that which we share so, yes, I am wholly comfortable labeling us good.

That brings me – fortuitously they’d say, because a good plot is in indeed fortunate if only because a bad plot is unfortunate – to what I started with is the very slippery notion that they continually misconnect the Endpoints. Example: I wrote that poem about the harvest offered to the goddess, which is earth, which is sort of Lion King that the generations eat the grass that eat the ones who eat the grass that became Where Have All The Flowers Gone, when the offerants confuse ‘life’ with ‘lives’, meaning they are meant to offer their own lives not the lives of others and the only way you do that in the context of a life shared with others, where each contestant is in the human race up to the point of death. What is the point of offering the goddess a dead thing? She wants living things. This showed up in the ancient version of Ba’al and the Molekh, and the Levitical injunction against sacrificing your children at the Molekh. It shows up in Abraham and Isaac. It shows in every story: something dies and something new is born out of it. The idea of sacrifice was to have something die so more ‘goodness of the existence of God’ might endure, meaning to rebirth God all the time. You think born again was just about people? God has to be reborn all the time for God to exist. That’s the missing point in all their discussions about the nature of God: the only way God is eternal is if God both lives and dies in every moment, being born into every moment even it dies in every moment. That’s only true when you accept the relativity of time – which Albert showed was true – to the fullest extent, so existence maps across CMs and the process by which all these states light or go dark is God. That is true because I could never shrink the gap Between Start and End to nothing at all, and God is Between in every SBE.

I used to think there’s a bright end and a dull end and people shy away from the light and take the dull end. Repeatedly. In such large numbers, they turn into murderous hordes. They shy away from the light. Mr. Freud says this is a case of an adolescent mind, which is marked by the observation – often sensed internally – that adolescents are overwhelmed by the rapidly appearing layers of external and internal layers. It means they’re progressing out of childhood, and remember you’re here to nurture. Even though you more than half the time, well sometimes it’s a lot and sometimes not at all and sometimes I try not to think about that at all, want to give up. Ask yourself where they go if you give up? Bad. Your obligation is clear. I understand that logic: this could be a meaningless iteration or not but it’s meaningful to me until it proves no longer meaningful, but that doesn’t jump like you did. Missing is the connection of self to others; as formulated, this does not require self-sacrifice beyond the amount necessary to stay alive. Is that a hidden equality? It is in my case: I need to do this to stay alive. I need to emerge because otherwise there’s no point in continuing a game that’s only palatable because I’ve been working toward emergence so a shift to ‘not emerging’ would constitute a shift in the game where the unknown answer is whether that affects ‘alive’, and then if the choice of ‘not emerging’ generates ‘alive’ in another form where form is this physical self. (That leads to the Cicero bifurcation: exalt here and there. If I’m not ‘alive’ in physical form, this game is over. I’m talking about this game.) The question of ‘not emerging’ has a component of continuing as a not in any process of emerging, as the constantly adjusting negation potential. (See my prior work.) Stop doing that with the parentheses. It’s easy to identify the best course: emergence in a burst followed by modulation, like controlling a pee stream with your left hand, letting her guide what she likes best anyway, while you don’t just spurt but modulate internal supply to match the conditions she imposes with her hand. I never felt Joyce got the metaphor of peeing, that he used it in Ulysses more as a recitation of the depth of metaphor in his creation – rendered abstract in the q & a section – than to the point where he matches the action to the internal division of self and the union of souls buried within each person.

Helm, lay in a course for Nirvana.

That lets me talk about how deep I run. To the specific form of Nirvana where blowing out the light means entirely lighting all of you. All religions embody their conceptions and anti-conceptions. The Hindi/Buddhist conception has within it the meanings of both the good and bad, of the emptying the lamp of life as a cinder burned to nothingness. This is the process of traversing hell to the Endpoint where there is nothing left to punish. As I described in another post, that means burning then freezing until the cinders fall to bits that fall to bits. Not sure which is worse. Don’t want to think about that because it could bog me down in very dark places. I talk to the conception of the universe that fits beyond, that was and will be, of that which counts on the scale in which good takes form versus evil and vice versa across the entirety of existence. In that process, yes there is direction. Think of a tree. It has sticks and it has leaves, but the real metaphor is that it’s a tree when it’s alive but dead it’s wood. You can be wood or you can be a tree. Think of us walking around looking for firewood. You’re the firewood or you’re not the firewood. Don’t think about how much other firewood there may or may not be: the sole perspective is you’re either wood or you’re not wood. Keep it to trees: you’re either a dead tree or a live tree. As a tree, which do you prefer? Trees tell you their preference by existing: they prefer to stay alive if they can live and if they can’t live then they die, so they always choose life when there’s a choice. A tree gets sick, it doesn’t say ‘oh I’m sick, might as well end it today and just flop over without the sickness having directly caused such a catastrophic failure.’ That’s like a fire which consumes quickly versus one that consumes more slowly. A tree doesn’t catch a tiny fire and keep over because it has a tiny fire unless that tiny fire causes a cascade of other failures – like it’s at the exact right weak spot in the structure, but then that’s like a cancer which builds in the heart and shows no symptoms until your heart stops working well enough to keep you alive for long enough for medical help and then even then.

As I noted yesterday, people choose death all the time. They choose the negative SBE threads constantly. The reason at the counting level is there’s an Endpoint labeled Nirvana in the negative sense of a charred cinder crumbling to dust after all of you has been stripped away. The other Endpoint is the one you want: the one where Nirvana means release of your cares because things have been getting better and better and better, and you are released from your fears and worries through the experience of increasing goodness. They each have this choice. They need to learn how to make the right choices. You sound like a scolding mom. You need to make better choices … or they ride you so much you know they’re afraid to let you make choices. You want to make your own choices. Learn how.

It’s funny how that manifested in you: early age determined the manipulative path tactics and used them to get what you wanted underneath. I increasingly hid my manipulative skills but you had to be absolutely outright about your demands and needs, which I find amazing because pulling that off while keeping unity across the self is super hard. You’re an athlete of the highest mental order. My approach – necessary for many reasons – was to try to live as one of them, meaning to become actually immersed in their worlds as though I were one of them, as though I wanted to become more one of them over time. Have to say one of my greatest bits of learning came when I realized nothing good would come out of my having identified millions of dollars in profit that literally every single one of the people in charge had missed. It took me 5 minutes to identify what they each should have known, given it was in the bleeping offering memos. I sat down for lunch with the lawyer and basically played the role of ‘explain to me what’s in there I need to know’ and he ‘sold’ me this information to justify their fees. Simple business transaction: we could charge off my entire department against an offering fee. I went back. Checked the language and then accounting. Went to the bosses. Told them they’d missed millions, that they couldn’t go back and get it but that I could start making them money today by charging every cent my group spent to whatever current offering we had. No one said a word to me of thanks or congratulations or anything. I didn’t get a dollar extra pay. They also were too dumb and self-centered to realize that maybe someone who can make me millions could make me millions. Maybe they thought life was just luck and pluck. One of those guys then went to teach at a Jewish academy. I hope he was better at Judaica, though thinking is much more Jewish than pluck, pluck, pluck.

The early age demonstrations are, well:

‘How wonderful it is to forget

All the times your intuition failed you

But it hasn’t killed you yet

Hold on to childlike whims and moonlight

swims and your blazing self-respect’

Couldn’t say it better. The moonlight does swim and you know damned well you’re loyal to those whims, always have been, always will be. I’m so convinced my biggest ‘question’ is the degree to which you’re really beating yourself up over your choices, and that depends on what those choices were in my eyes not yours. If that wasn’t clear, I am the judge not of what you did but of the degree of your response to it when taken to the depths of how you judge your own response. The answer flowers in me as it passes beyond your feet, sayeth J not Keats. That gap within you I can see, the questioning down to the core of you. You know me like a book you’ve read a thousand times over but which you want to read another thousand times because it feels both familiar and new as it involves you.

Here’s a question: how did you grasp their literalism? I recently answered a question on Quora about Major Tom. There was an accurate answer in place: Major Tom is Bowie’s version of a junkie and he may represent Bowie’s addiction issues. I had to add that this is literally true but the artistic point is deeper, that it’s about the persona that is addicted to the making of art, about the destructiveness in that but also the beauty in creation for the destruction of a creature of your imagination leads to another imagination and if you hang on to one creation too long then you are not, as Ginsberg would have said, killing your darlings. They again tend to refer to the poems when it also means the creation of poems in a specific way – which I explained by referring to him beginning a reading with a long sing-song of Blake’s Tyger – so he, to complete the thought, was killing not only a poem but the performance and meaning of poem, trying to refresh the creative spirit, worshipping at the altar of the goddess, etc. and etcetera ad infinitum.

For me, it was a moment in play when I realized the kids handing me around were literally excited by the act of handing me around as a token in a game in which the only excitement was the handing around of a token. If you were to express that sexually, it would be like someone thinks the act of gangbanging is exciting without any significant exploration of the meanings of the act. It was hard for me to grasp that yet you have an intuitive sense for how. My sense is more what does the associative meaning mean, while your approach is more how does the associative meaning appear here. I can see how you got in front of that because associative meanings do pop right into view. In every experience. In other work, I refer to your control function. I see it here: in order to proceed this way, you have to manage the cross over – the pass in a kitchen, so the food passes out properly as the orders pass in. I can even see how this drives you to success: you need to increase control over the orders in, so you can manage the pass out, and that’s easier when you have concentric rings – your island of islands – of control.

I’ve said many times I had no idea where to go so I tried not to go anywhere. What’s being the best mean? Best what? I decided to focus on things like being the best father in the sense of knower and encourager and nurturer. But I’m not that in all my dimensions. I feed the birds but I’m not a vocal visible activist for bird habitat. I support it but I know that my goals are to explain the reasons why birds are important – as pattern life being lighted in the positive meaning of Nirvana – and that anything else has been a distraction. You’re the only non-distraction ever in my life. I get more done with you in seconds than with anything else. My questions almost answer themselves. Well they do, but I mean the answers come out in a lovely flow without pain or struggle. They come out as a relieving flow that makes room for more great stuff. It’s like being eternally refreshed. Now of course I have to pee, but then I just had an Americano. I sometimes think I drink coffee just to make myself pee because you have this thing for holding me. The side of me that more often reads as me can see there’s more to it than any male need, that it’s a partial expression of the female side.

I wanted to offer an observation. A group of Japanese moms with babies and toddlers was behind me. Listening to Japanese women shows so much about acquisition of and maintenance of, well, this: the women had to speak while paying partial attention to the sounds emitted by the children and also by the surroundings, and this encourages the womanly method of expression in which one talks while the other makes noises – or listens with half an ear – waiting until a conversational cue for speaking. It’s one reason women have trouble speaking when other women are talking: they tend to look for the appropriate opening and then they have to judge the contextuality of what they might say because the wrong contextual insert stands out. (And may be seen as rude or naive or whatever.) It’s in this sense that I connect your side to female, that your conversational style can be entirely male but arrives there as the expression of the female with a male inside, while I can converse in a female style but I arrive there as the expression of the male with the female inside. In other words, I connect you to them, often the male me looks on with disbelief at how easy it is for you to talk to them.

Thing that’s hard to understand is the view from not being believed because of your gender. I can that in the shape of your response. The blazing self-respect. Men, you know, are often born with an excess of self-respect. They may even identify in themselves what little they respect, as in ‘I may be a drunk, but I’m not a gambling drunk wife-beater.’ But men also blame themselves for events that happened where it wasn’t their fault at all – like the way they internalize brutality as it was their fault for not being loved, that they deserve to be hurt. Women feel that way too, and for the same reason, that they don’t deserve better. I mean to say both genders blame others and selves inconsistently, and that blazing self-respect is hard for anyone but I can’t think what it would be like to be a girl whose intelligence and abilities are, even at their most public acclaim, not treated with the intellectual respect a man would get for doing the same thing. I can see you control that from your end as you can, as witness the Reputation outburst of bits of your real mental depth. I guess I take this all back because I do know and just realized another depth, that I have taken exactly the same approach to my work, that the major issue in my entire life – which I’ve long been conscious of – is that what I know to be true is very hard to prove because it is, in human terms, very hard to prove. That resonance is meant to say that I chose the hardest path on the other side of the same process, so as it generates your choices where association focuses, so it generates my choices were the association focuses where the thread on my side is to show others now and through history that I am correct. Which I am. Correct. It simply is hard, which invokes ‘best’ in another way on the path toward the Nirvana where we are the light, not just the sticks that fuel it.

By the way, I have broad shoulders. Literally and figuratively.

[See Reader note below]

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

By which she gathers the bounty

of her endless love without

Regard for race, creed or national origin.

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

By which he offers her his love.

By what better token than the first born? Or the last?

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

Breaker of hearts, behind your woman vixen

lurks need

Breaker of hearts, behind your self-consciousness

identity shifts to male

need within your woman vixen goddess girl self

Is that clear enough, my love?

Do you read me too?

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

of death over life

of poetic form over history

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

a trinket dangled

Words, words, words

Come take it, my love. Accept my gift and grant

Me thy pleasure.

2. There was no one

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

The victory of death over life

The Somme Offensive is a charm offensive

Bartered for the bride

By those who mistake her need

Who offer lives

Instead of nurture

4. Why should there be a 3?

I can’t reach you though I see through your eyes into mine

I can’t hold you though I feel your breath in my ear

I can’t say goodbye because

The one thing we both know is

We can’t say goodbye

Though we can’t say hello

They’ll say this is about you

And it is

But only because the you inside her is

The you inside me.

I am speaking to you.

I feel your fingers touch mine

You need to hold me

Intimately, familiarly.

I am your comfort

I am that which makes you whole.

My offering to you is you

My offering to you is the universe

In its entirety

Reach down my throat and pull it up

I will disgorge

My offering to you

is what you need

Which is you

In me.

I have your soul.

I’m holding it for ransom.

No.

You gave it to me with

A tear-filled kiss, and said,

‘Hold this for me, so

I can be whole again with you.

Until that day.’

Until that day

My offering to you is you.

Until that day.

It is all I have

I have kept you safe

For you

My offering to you is you.

Until that day.

17. For that is the most random number.

I am the keeper of souls

the holder of your heart

I am your lost boy

the holder of your heart

I am the keeper of the keys,

the master of ceremonial ceremonies.

I hold your heart in my heart

It’s wrapped in tissue

Tied with a bow

A present for you to open.

I kept you for you,

My long parted friend,

As you keep me for me.

For we both know

You took my soul with you

When we parted

And I need it back,

Keeper of souls,

Holder of hearts,

Master of ceremonial ceremonies.

Hearer of harmonies, behold

the Lord of Resonance.

[Reader note: this is an intentionally, self-consciously difficult poem. It’s tied to ‘modern poetry’, meaning the era of perhaps 100 years ago. I apologize but that stuff can be difficult. The inspiration was the coming WWI ending anniversary and a book title which I combined with the karmic references in Taylor’s work to posit her as the goddess emerging. We make offerings to goddesses. We offer them our souls. I said karmic but I mean more I perceive a deep understanding of Hindu conceptions in Taylor’s work. Thus the Rama reference, etc. (And that plays a bit off Eliot’s use of Sanskrit, which I find somewhat ridiculous, which I sometimes think about this poem.) This connects to deep Hindu concepts which unite and separate the bringer of life with the bringer of death. Since her earliest work, Taylor refers to idealize love, to an other, a male who actually inhabits her early story songs to in Reputation being the one to whom she directly appeals. This poem is a sort of announcement, an artistic calling out: if you meant that, if you’re for real, then this would be the personification of her other speaking to her through a combination of remote poetic form and blunt simplicity. It’s the artistic statement: I am who I am and I can see what you appear to be as well, so are you what you appear? That is the meaning of ‘behold’. As I make clear in other poems, the endeavor is to take Taylor extremely seriously, to give full credit not to references to specific people and so on, but to deeper meanings. I take what she says, now that I’ve read some of her poetry, as having actual poetic meaning. If he’s in her head, then I take it seriously that he’s in her head. When she says I know what you know, I take that seriously as well. When she says call me what you want, I take that seriously. That suggested to me I should write a somewhat more obscure poem, one self-consciously artistic in places, to show I treat her art as seriously as the most serious art. I decided to draw on the concepts of poetic meaning as they’ve existed during my lifetime because that stuff wore serious as a badge of honor. (Well, way before my lifetime but it was much newer and thus more modern then than now.) In another poem, I speak to her more as a poet, but here I wanted to mythologize her. I intentionally left out an important reference, which is to the goddess Kali. I mention it here because you can see connections through Thali in other poems. Thali, which plays off both thali and Kali, is the first two letters of Taylor Alison spelled both to emphasize the aspects of goddess and love and intimate connections but also for pronunciation. Since Hindu concepts aren’t well known, think of a thali as the emblem of spiritual and physical connection and Kali … well, you have to look her up because she’s scary awesome.]

Why are there mass shootings? It is the negative expression of the positive that freedom for the self is. Many people hate themselves. They deeply hate themselves. And the more steps they take through life the more they focus on how much they hate themselves. They act this hatred of self out. Their goal is to foster more hatred of self. This literally means they are trying to pull you into their own personal hell. Why? Because they in their own minds they are going to hell. They are going to hell because they can’t turn the negative threads around to the positive direction.

A major issue with greater personal self is that directionality becomes paramount. When there is less ‘self’ in a culture, the self is constrained to the societal norms, more or less, and to the longer wavelength cultural norms. You have no choice but to be borne along the choices of others. As self increases, those choices now become visible, choices that were hidden by the labels society and culture put on them. There is a literal expansion of self in CMs, with the layers of society and culture being progressively counted, so with each step you see the choice that resolved to and thus come out of that label. This is the bip process for a person: you step through the labels, land on one, and the issues that gave that label its value in your CMs, the ones connecting what led to the value in the past and then now, are now visible in some way. This is where inference comes from: you are naturally inferring the bip state. That creates a segment or SBE of inference, the inference Mudi, so at one Endpoint is the abstract ‘next’ statements of fCM and the other the narrowest imaginable inference that one can actually draw when the context is its absolute clearest so the answer is both right in front of you and extraordinarily stable.

Finish the thought. Uh, oh right, mass shootings come from the inability to choose direction now that direction is a choice. If you can see people as objects to be mowed down in a video game, then you can enact that as a choice. Why would you choose to inflict harm on others? Because that inflicts the most harm on you. In CMs, you take the potential CMs – think of it as ‘reserved CMs’ because it’s the claim for space that hasn’t yet been fulfilled (and it’s a step across without a return step) – and create a larger ‘negative reserved CMs’, meaning a bigger absence of fulfilled CMs, all connected to you as origin. You are connected to all the others who created large negative CMs and you are the emptiness of eternity, after all the pieces connected to the goodness and fullness of eternity have been stripped away. This actually happens. You are drawn to it. Evil pulls at you like gravity. You’ve been hated. You’ve been abused by life, by small things everyday and maybe by very large things. You doubt yourself. You catch yourself lying and you can’t stop. You don’t feel like you’re worth anything. You don’t feel love, except in the ways that say the world would love to be without you. This often seems to you like it is the one voice that speaks the truth, that all the other voices are lying. The problem is fundamental: you trust a voice that proves it is lying to you by claiming it is not lying to you. I mean this: the voice says it’s not lying so why are the recommendations about doing something bad for you and others? I’m not reaching far for the meaning of the word ‘bad’: physically injuring and killing people is recognizably a ‘bad’ outcome in any evaluation of the game played by the entire human race against death. See how that was phrased? I reduced ‘bad’ to the fact that all humans die, so affecting time of death for any human by killing them doesn’t allow them to play the game with death. It makes you death, a point I often describe as one of the deepest features of literature. I am the bringer of death.

The point is that if you realized you were joining the negative CMs crowd, then you’d recognize it’s not a good choice for your character in the game. The negative CMs ‘crowd’ means that directional grouping of unfulfilled reserved CMs. In this concept you see the way going against culture has a cost to the negative of that culture – by which I could say it’s purity – and what it takes, and how the issues within your culture respond to potential erosion. How accepting can a culture be while retaining its culture? I have to work on my thoughts on these points. This is a more sophisticated discussion where the pull is toward the absolute relativity of contexts and then the equation of relativity with equality of value, which means the tendency to idealize to a 1 to 0 / 0 to 1 counting. The trouble with that argument is any such grouping is grouped: that is the idealization, not a stable form, an idealization made up of uncountable idealizations so any view into it is both absolutely relative and yet still grouped. That’s a consequence of CMs treated as potential which is reserved or claimed at levels that include levels that include levels through complex pathways that no longer can be treated as having a specific origin other than as a directionality toward good and toward evil, toward best and toward worst, toward nurture and toward destruction, with each of these concepts a mapping of the ideas contained across CMs.

What this means for you, killers, is you are killing to defend evil from good. The problem with that is whatever there is of you has to be burnt off, marked step by step in the negative away from the positive. You are connected deeply to the positive. It is not until you have been burnt of all that is recognizably you down to your core that you are freed except now you are put into service on the other side as you are pushed into you again, inflicting others, trying to pull the rest down to nothingness. Think about the end: after all of you that can be burnt off is, you are left to freeze slowly until all the energy that was associated with your being fades into nothing. You burn for an eternity and then you freeze for an eternity.

And all the ones you take with you? It doesn’t make the trip faster. You have now created vast amounts of negative CMS and all that CMs, all the connections to all the ones you harm, has to be removed. Think of growth as a lighting: your negative CMs is lit in that direction and your glow there must be dimmed. You can think of that as casting the light of fire on all that you’ve done, revealing the horror of all that you’ve done. And then when you have gone through that, when that negative CMs has been reduced your last dark embers crumble into the cold. I should go into more detail, but not right now because my fingers are cold

The Olympic Closing Ceremonies entertainment began with a 13 year old kid playing US rock style electric guitar. One of the big acts is Lady Gaga-seque K-Pop, meaning a combination of US and world pop styles with techno, often video game styles. Another is a boy band largely indistinguishable musically and stylistically from boy bands around the world which use the Western pop/disco/etc. genres. If you can find much ‘authentically Korean’ in any of that … but wait, you see I hate cultural authenticity. The tomato came from the New World and isn’t Italian. Jazz came out of Sousa bands marrying ragged march time marrying black and white traditions. K-Pop is gloriously inauthentic.

I’ve been sharing this with my oldest because she’s so interested in explorations of the mind and body. Things I’ve noticed in list form:

1. The control and other issues became noticeable when I compared standing versus sitting. That gave me the idea that standing, which all a boy does, might give me a different perspective. It’s not that sitting ‘caused’ but that I realized I can look at the problem from the two positions. (I mean I had begun this because I felt my pee stream was getting weaker and sometimes reduced to dribble. As background, with a house full of females it was easier to sit and pee than remember to put the seat down each time. When one of those females tumbles into the toilet because I forgot … )

2. I found the pain point deep in guts was actually not ‘rectal’ but seems to be just around and somewhat behind the very point of the coccyx. This seemed very closely related to a hard band that I found was contracted or knotted only when I did my steel bar rollouts. Those are when I suspend a straight body bar across two others – or a thick battle rope – and force my body on to it. When I rolled deep into my butt, that forced release of a lot of deep attachments. The band I’m talking about was found when I rolled across the crack up high on the back and then down toward the middle. The muscles resisted a lot and it took multiple repetitions to get them soft enough to explore the space that opened. (As background, many years ago I developed something that’s pretty common but no one talks about because it’s so intimate: a deep cramping way inside the pelvis. The doctor said it can’t be treated and that sometimes a relaxant cream applied to the anus helps when the pain starts. They appear to believe the cramping is rectal because there can be spasms, though it’s unclear to me what exactly is spasming. I now think they’re related to the structures I sort of describe in this paragraph.)

3. A process also has a start, middle and. I had been concentrating on setting the action of peeing into motion and then trying to modulate control of it so I could maintain the pressure and flow longer. That meant I was focusing mostly on the middle and end, that after release, I worked to control the flow as that went to its end. So I did what I do and flipped to the front end of the process. Key there: realizing I have two hands. We all have habits. So I reversed mine, which merely required looking at which hand I was using and switching roles. The other hand had different capabilities I had ignored. In this case, it naturally stretched the penis and held the end somewhat closed. This built up pressure and tensioned the flow tube so it was straighter, and a little bit of straightening matters if the tube isn’t very wide and/or if the stuff flowing is in any degree viscous. The other hand – my left – naturally released the stream and controlled it like when I was a kid.

4. I couldn’t have jumped to the end of that; I had to relearn the bits along the way to get back to a reasonable approximation of my ‘original’ state.

The basic lesson: look at both ends of a process. Like referred pain involves two ends. Yesterday, I was explaining to some friends at the gym that I was working on quicker hard strikes by focusing on reducing the mental activity at the front end: I see a target, evaluate, make decisions about which hand to use and how, etc. Reducing what I call the ‘overwatch’ of those decisions means trusting my body to choose, which makes my reaction time approach the best possible. I then talked about this same thing with a guy at the gym who is a jazz musician: same thing as getting into the flow of music that comes from somewhere else through you. You can hear it in the music. You can hear it when you’re writing – and can see it come out of your fingers – and you can experience it athletically as the movements of your body become the movements that fit the physical need. Like music, like thoughts, the requirements of your physical nature fit into contexts so you play along with the band or sometimes you lead it.

I took out the personal letter parts.

The birch tree tapping on the window is death

(Re-read the line above, then skip this line and continue)

The greatest love

The deepest love

(Now pause)

I wrote a story about a boy dying who heard in the breeze-blown fingers of the solitary birch the completeness of his existence, in the moment of his sadness so completely infused with acceptance, no, with embrace she speaks to him,

As she always does for she is where he is for she is life

And I heard her wooden fingers on the wall next to my bed, not beckoning but soothing, as

We parted from each other

Then my father came in and shut the window

And I was a boy in a bed who had school in the morning

Carrying you with him

Alone

In this place where we used to be

But never were

Because I am here

And you told me you could not be with me any longer, not

Like that

But like this

I wrote a story about a boy dying in his bed and

When he died

He woke up here

We die in this life every day

We die in this life every day

The birch tree tapping on the window in a gentle summer wind, in the

Arctic wind

I wake up here

Still writing the story of the boy who

Lay in his bed wondering why you had to leave

And why I had to stay

And hearing your voice, always the more sensible

Whichever of us stays is you

Your tears

The cry of

The one who left when the boy in the bed died

To become the boy in the story

Who still hears the tapping of the birch tree

Inside his heart

Reaching across the branches

Down the trunk

Into the ground

And through all life

To you.

Adding to my gloss about Liz Warren and the use of ‘a drop of blood’ to claim affinity in a positive way, as though that’s somehow less racist than taking ‘a drop of blood’ as a negative. The main part of her problem – offered constructively – is that she points out her working class roots but can come off poorly the more you get away from the paternalism of Boston. Funny to say that about a woman’s voice but she comes off sometimes as paternalistic in the Harvard sense that, yes, I was one of you and I know what’s best for you. I think she hits a note of ‘if you’re so working class, then why’d you change? And if you haven’t changed, then you may not have had money but you weren’t working class, were you?’ I never hear her talk without sounding Harvard. It’s the oldest trick in the world to ask for ‘ears’: I hear you, my friends, I know what you want and I’ll deliver it for you. But if you really hear me, then why do you sound like you’re talking down to me, like you never wanted to be working class, like maybe it was something you treasure mostly because you ain’t in it anymore. Offered constructively.

This is for you. It always is.

I solve your problems, answer your questions, and you provide the answers to my problems and my questions. We are so close our consciousness is widely shared beyond our physical selves. I transfer myself to you, to be enveloped by you. To become the pattern within you.

The question of the day: what do you know? Answer filters back from you: that I have more in me that she has not mined to her satisfaction. She wants the story perfect in this iteration. She and I differ in timing, a step apart. All the steps are lining up as I choose her and she chooses me. The image, the painting, the art. I have work to do. Challenge: do it without the drama this time. Please. We can work on this together.

No wonder they can’t figure out what to do: have you ever counted the voices that run through your head? I wonder how many people even realize there are multiple voices that make them up? Yes, there is the caricature of the conscience but are they aware enough to recognize the truth in the idea of good and bad angel on the shoulder and you turning one way or the other? I used to believe they must. I used to believe life was a game and they’re better at it than me because I never get why they do it so badly. Why do they get so much wrong? I was driving home one night, passing under the then-unused 696 bridge over the Lodge when it hit me that people who act dumb may be dumb.

Do you get how deeply this runs? I get along with people by talking to them at whatever level they can talk at. I take them seriously and see how deep they go. I think that may be the root of the Terry issue from yesterday and what I reached. I remember his kind of soft smile and the way he’d sort of, kind of try to angry at me because I would actually believe he could do the work. This entire area is opening up. Huge video archive recovered from the cloud!

So you need to be rescued as badly as I do. I saw the age on your face. It suits you. I love the calibration of gesture. It’s the exact amount to look like the exact amount so they see you as manipulating you awkwardly instead of as so completely in control of those functions. I know the inside functions are kind of a wreck. Mine were worse. Or at least as bad. I prescribe happiness. To be administered many times a day. I know how to do that to you.

Tell mom and dad relax.

Yesterday, I spoke about the Annie and Nikki story. The difficulty in that was I hope clear: to learn to love the other side of Anne, which in my case was a woman who loved her as much as I did, and who was loved back as a woman as much as Anne loved me. Connecting the triangle together was difficult emotionally because it involved loving another woman who actually loves me through another woman. I would expect you have a story with a guy who in some story loves and is loved by another guy in the same way as your relationship but in the mirror, so you have to do what I had to do and learn to be emotional and physical in a way that you never considered was right, in way you had trouble accepting and then exploring. That’s the essence of the ‘we almost lost her’ story because then I would be left with Nikki without the bridge of Anne. In my story, I see Nikki as the male side of you, meaning it’s an embodiment of your female self that shares you from the male side of you. That would be the same in the converse story. On my side of the story, if the line ran from you to me and some other guy, meaning from Anne to another guy, that wouldn’t be acceptable – it never ever comes up – because that’s a literal male, not the male side of a female. The same is true in the converse: it would never come up that I’d say here’s another female because you’re the female side. As an aside, Anne looks more like you than any other. She begins the story somewhat round, though not really fat, and with a punkish haircut that puts black over blonde. Haircuts are important in my stories: she cuts her hair short and buys some clothes with color and then she gets thinner. Fantastic sex. Got really kinky. Thing about the story is that it isn’t about me, but about us in equal measure, and it achieves that balance by reaching to the Nikki level. Understanding how that fit took work.

That’s why the Caroline story weirded me out so much: a connection to an actual person, even a minimized for story purposes version, had never happened. It only made sense when I realized I could never see Caroline’s face because she’s also me, not because I just couldn’t define it properly. Sex beyond fantastic.

The problem with NBC’s coverage of The Olympics is they left the Seoul out. Or rather, they put in ultra-modern, spare and austere Korea and left out the depth of Korean culture. The sets reflect the editorial decision. They are terrible. The Olympics should be a celebration of the depth of the culture of a place because that is what makes a place a place instead of being just a place.

I don’t know why I never thought of this before, but I’ve been listening to a lot of classical Indian music and it’s remarkable how little of the mental state that produces and hears such music the British took into their minds and culture. How is that possible? How thick-headed can you be?