Desiring Machine

These are some damn fine lyrics. And given recent events hold a certain timeless quality.

Raise your glass to the hard working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead

Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio

And when I look in the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
Or don’t they look so strange

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

~Salt of the Earth by the Rolling Stones

I try to avoid becoming a misanthrope. I resist the urge. I recognize its corrosive effect on the soul. But it is difficult to keep out the clamor of the world. I read too much Huffington Post which has turned into a remarkably trashy online rag. It infuriates me even as it informs me. Reading it is kind of a bummer because it exposes important political information but there is also a lot of junk as well. For example, reading and watching how the health care debate has become kind of notorious. It saddens me to see the whole media scene reduced to mindless and baseless spectacle of the pseudo-violence of town hall meetings. I hear nothing about how to improve healthcare itself. Just fear mongering, misinformation on one side of the debate, and a sense of entitlement on the other side that seems to only articulate that they want more of the same just cheaper and preferably free. Not much discussion of what we should remain suspicious of in the current healthcare system, and specifically what should be improved. It is difficult to see democracy in a throng of maltempered ennui induced by the indifference of the media to the meaningful concerns. Elsewhere, I read that police in New Jersey picked a suspicious looking Bob Dylan for wandering around a neighborhood. The cops asked him (a 68 year old man) for his ID and even after he mentioned his name they didn’t know who he was. He was escorted back to the venue where he was performing. I think sometimes it is better to force oneself in isolation and just close off the world.

These are moments where we must remain on guard against a will to misanthropy. For it is so easy to fall into the cycle of disgust for the world. But I recognize that unless you separate yourself from time to time it is not always easy to overcome this tendency towards misanthropy. I am reminded of the words of Hunter S. Thompson after the end of his trip with the Hell’s Angels.

It had been a bad trip…fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz’ final words from the heart of darkness: “The horror! The horror!…Exterminate all the brutes!”

Recently watched an interesting documentary on the history of the telescope. One little side comment came from a SETI scientist who described their project as a matter of looking for broadcast signals from space that reflect a comparable intelligence or “cleverness” similar to our own. This lead me to a hypothetical thought. What if eventually we do stumble across such a signal? What meaning do we make of it? Is there any significance of the very fact that we are able to find such a signal? What does it mean to have an “intelligent” signal beamed in our direction? Would this imply some expectation or presumption of a dialog? A two way communication? Assume for a minute that there is in fact a similarly evolved alien intelligence out there, how astronomically unlikely that we would be so fortunate for them to actually beam a comprehensible signal in our very direction? Of course if one understands anything about radio technology, one certainly understands that we as a civilization have been beaming signal indiscriminately into space for well over a century now. TV, radio, various satellite link ups etc. We are a leaky, noisy planet, abundant with signal just waiting to be heard by an extra terrestrial species.

But here is the somewhat wild thought experiment. Now assume that we knew, at least conceptually, of a similar intelligence to our own, and that they lived in a specific corner of the sky, specific coordinates of the universe and our galaxy. Which such knowledge how would we most effectively go about ensuring that they received our signal? We would concentrate our signal in such a way as to maximize its likelihood of being received. We would develop high powered radio transmission and a light emitting signal apparatus. A sufficiently technologically advanced species would perhaps even figure out how to harness a nearby star in the creation of such a signal. Depending on the distance needed to be traversed it would require massive amounts of energy and adept technological capacity. Combine that with the likelihood of knowing where to beam the signal and we can easily surmise the profoundly unlikely nature of such a communicative event happening. Now imagine that such an event does in fact occur in the future. What exactly would this be evidence of? Would it be evidence of a distant alien species knowing of our existence? Or would it be merely evidence of a similarly curious species taking a “shot in the dark”, as it were, and beaming a signal that many, many, light years later happens to fall upon our attentive SETI ears and eyes.

The really, far out thought. If such an event occurred, might it not be evidence of us talking to ourselves? The thought goes as follows:

Some time in the future an advanced, earth bound group of humans figures out a way to travel the far reaches of space. But the technique requires much sacrifice and by its very nature multi-generational existence to cover the distance. Perhaps thousands or millions of generations must live and die on the journey, bound to the spaceship, before we humans could arrive at some distant stellar destination. Assume further that we do in fact possess the means to traverse through space, and through some quirk of space/time our intrepid explorers enter into some time bending mode of travel. And having arrived their destination this group of humans find themselves from our future, now in their past and separated from the home planet by an immense vastness of space and time. After many generations, perhaps thousands of years of parallel development, they have settled a distance planet and are ready to communicate back to us. Wouldn’t it be convenient that such a group would in fact know where home was and therefore able to direct a signal in our precise direction, confident that there was in fact an ancestor species nearly on the verge of being able to detect and make meaning of such a signal? Perhaps, the first signals from SETI, will not be evidence of some cold and distant alien race communicating with us, but rather our other selves communicating back home. A human to human collect call across the vastness of space telling us that we will arrive someday at a distant place, heretofore unknown.

I was born after the 60’s. I didn’t live through the Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention or many of the tumultuous events of the era, or any era previous to that. I did not experience trench warfare in the teen years of the 20th century. I was not present at Marie Antoinette’s beheading. I was not in the crowd when they offered the hemlock to Socrates. I did not witness Beethoven’s 9th symphony the very first time it was performed before a live non studio audience. I didn’t witness the dying gasps of the dinosaurs as they gazed doe-eyed as the meteor came crash landing into their Mesozoic paradise. I was nowhere to experience these events first hand. But I have an imagination and the ability to experience great distance. This is perhaps an under appreciated aspect of our time-bound destiny and finite nature. We have no possible means for direct access. Direct access is for all intents and purposes meaningless. Direct experience is waking up in the morning eating a bowl of cereal and nonchalantly looking out at the sunshine day just past your window. Absolutely immanent and ahistorical immediacy. The here and now. The only experience that we ever really “have” in any truly metaphysical and ontological sense. But we exceed these bounds with thought, we occupy other spaces and other times in our own imagination. It is a very peculiar imaginative experience as well because nobody else has any empirical access to the places and times we visit. The thought, the time travel is truly idiosyncratic and solipsistic. A tableau of past and future, here and there vivified in our minds as the consequence of synaptic firings of neurons in our brain. No admittance to this cosmic ride only a ticket and seating for one, destination anywhere. How much of the disagreement and human conflict can be attributed to this lack of access? A rebellious and clamorous other shrieking at the liminal gates of our psychic life crying “take me with you, it is hell out here”.

Been listening to some vintage Rolling Stones. I never really gave the Stones much credit. I think in my younger years I just never could get over the campiness of Mick Jaggar. And then after the whole Windows 95, Start Me Up thing I probably just tended to understand them for the massively successful commercial hacks that they really are. But all that harsh criticism and the numerous accusations of musical theft they have faced over the years one still has to give them credit for being a force that brought about great songs.

Sister Morphine is one of those moments. Surely Marianne Faithfull’s haunting lyrics, and Ry Cooder’s superb slide guitar work are the soul of the song but there is something to be said for the whole package brought together by the celebrity of the Stones. In that is the essence of the art. The whole atmosphere and delivery of the song transforms the listener and puts one in touch with the experience being presented. Granted I have never had the occasion to experience a massive drug overdose, or some gruesome accident that sent me to the emergency room. But the song puts me there. It reveals the tension that must exist. The yearning for release. A call to sister morphine for relief. Sure perhaps the whole cause for the experience was totally innocent (a tragic car accident) or perhaps more sinisterly the result of some indulgent attempt to have fun with drugs. But in the end it doesn’t matter the experience to the subject is all the same, he or she has arrived at a point totally dependent on the mercy of others.

Ah, come on, sister morphine, you better make up my bed
cause you know and I know in the morning I’ll be dead
Yeah, and you can sit around, yeah and you can watch all the
Clean white sheets stained red.

I find these words very haunting and remarkably honest. The junkies last score or the tragic victim’s writhing last moments, either way the condition of the moment is the same. “You know and I know”, what a indictment those words are. There is nothing we can do, we are at last resort. Think what you will, do what you will with the rest of YOUR life, but for this one moment provide me the mercy of the needle, enable me to endure the final moments of mine.

The lyrics are great, but the religious experience of the song comes from Ry Cooder’s guitar work. The way the slide guitar interrupts the song at various moments. An impending urgency that can’t be escaped. It punctuates anything that is or could be settling. The pain is real, the destruction is real, the moment is nothing if not authentic. The guitar work very much invokes, does not describe, or relate, it simple invokes and puts you there. I would say that the experience of this music for me is Jaques Lacan’s “Real”.

Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality.

Like death none of us have been there, but we are always approaching it in small steps. The guitar work in this song does that for me. It is interruption, par excellence. It provides a radical immediacy to the song. One can contemplate the experience of an overdose, or writhing pain, but what does it means to experience it? Nothing, as far as the innocent know. It is like that Hunter Thompson quote:

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

But the experience of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar in this song does something to me emotionally and spiritually. It puts me in touch with the uneasiness of the moment being expressed in this song. Intellectually one can think whatever they want about drugs, pro, con, indifferent. I guess I really don’t care. The only thought I have is that drug experiences of many of our parent’s past is remarkable for its innocence. I recall recently watching Gus Van Zandt’s Drugstore Cowboy. A movie set in the golden age of junkiedom, the early 70’s and Portland Oregon. An affable band of ne’er-do-wells who’s main occupation is hitting up various drug stores trying to find whatever score they can. What I find fascinating is the self evident innocence of the era. This was long before the war on drugs, long before drugs became big business. I just recently read that we had an $8 billion dollar program to try and pay Colombian farmers to stop them from growing coca plants. There is real innocence in Sister Morphine and Gus Van Zandt’s anti hero of Drugstore Cowboy. The experience of coming to the drugs was new and fresh, someone had to go through it to tell the rest of us about it. The edge, there is no honest way to explain it.

But here we are in a new post (drug) war age, doped up on our internet, twitter, facebook, iPhones and text messages. We have large upscale pushers of caffeine (Starbucks), all kinds of messages about death, destruction and terror. A constant call to us about the danger of drugs. The food and peanut butter we eat is a liability. Cancer and death all around. We have somehow successfully made a major movement against cigarettes. All our old favorite crusty night spots have the faint waft of moldy toilet rooms. The earth, we are told, is on the verge of a environmental catastrophe. The whole nation is awakening from the uncomfortable slumber of an 8 year disaster presidency. The financial system having approached near collapse, is only to be saved by the last minute heroics of funneling trillions into our banking system. I don’t know much, but that we have one hell of an uncertain future. I don’t know what or where the edge is, I am sure I will recognize it when we have crossed it. Perhaps not. When it comes to drugs do we know anything more than our parents? I doubt it. I know I avoided drugs all my life because of what I saw happen to others around me. But when I listen to a song like Sister Morphine I think for a brief shining moment I get it. And a tear comes to my eye for the melancholic sense that we have moved away from a more simple time into the great unknown future. The simple fact is that no matter what lot we have in life most of us are caught in the grips of a relentless pursuit of Ecstasy. And by this I mean the psychological subjective experience.

From wikipedia:

Ecstasy is subjective experience of total involvement of the subject, with an object of his or her awareness. Because total involvement with an object of our interest is not our ordinary experience since we are ordinarily aware also of other objects, the ecstasy is an example of altered state of consciousness characterized by diminished awareness of other objects or total lack of the awareness of surroundings and everything around the object. For instance, if one is concentrating on a physical task, then one might cease to be aware of any intellectual thoughts. On the other hand, making a spirit journey in an ecstatic trance involves the cessation of voluntary bodily movement.

For a few brief moments the Rolling Stone’s Sister Morphine was that for me, a “total involvement with an object of interest”. It evokes, it reveals, and it elevates, and it is, as they say, Art.

The year must have been 1979, sitting in front of one of those cabinet sized record players. A four year old kid fascinated by the cover of “Tea For the Tillerman”. The rich colors of the artwork, the identification with children on the cover. Perhaps a personal identification with the older red bearded gentleman, being a readhead myself.

Tea For The Tillerman

Looking intently at the grooves in the vinyl, my eyes are drawn to a thin innocuous looking track towards the center of the album. Why is that one so small I wonder? Place the record on the player. Move the needle to the thin concentric circle towards the center of the album. Out of the record player comes an agonizingly short piano piece called Tea for the Tillerman. How could something that sounds so good be so short? I want more. Obsessively I keep moving the needle back and forth over that short gap of vinyl grooves, trying to eek out just a little more aural pleasure oozing through the speakers.

And thus begins a life long fascination with parts of songs. Short small segments that captivate the imagination. The closing track from Cat Stevens’ landmark 1970 album is so perfect in it succinctness. Caps off an amazing recording of moving music with a small anthem of good times, a bountiful harvest, peace and harmony. The brevity of the song perhaps an ode to the finitude of good times and how, all to quickly, we must get back to our labors. Because as the “sinners sin, the children play” oblivious of the struggles and trials of the larger world.

One gets the impression that the artwork for the album was created and then the lyrics conceived to match the imagery. I love the little added touch in the upper left corner of the rainmaker woman enchanting the thunder and lightening. The forces of productivity. The Tillerman taking a break from his labors. The children the end result of this collaboration between the man and woman. A division of labor? Perhaps. At the very least a total picture of all the essential qualities of life.

Bring tea for the tillerman
Steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come
Seagulls sing your hearts away
cause while the sinners sin, the children play

Oh lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day

It has been almost 30 years since I have listened to this album. I am listening to it now on my computer. In a new time and place. Not as vinyl, but as an MP3 in my iTunes collection. The force of the album is hitting me like a ton of bricks as it brings back so many memories of early childhood. Even though I have not really maintained a fascination with Cat Stevens over the years, re-listening to this album evokes as much emotional impact now as it did when I was a child. It really is a classic well crafted album. But I can’t get over the brevity the title track. It stuck out it my mind then as it does today. A bittersweet succinctness, that leaves one wishing for more. Such is life.

Addendum: I just learned that Chris Martin from Coldplay did a cover of this album for the end credits of Ricky Gervais “Extras“. Have never seen the show but with a quick youtube search I found the cover here:

What an awful, soulless cover. I never really liked Coldplay, mostly because of the whiny, emo factor. But what Martin does to this song truly is sacrilegious. His rendition is so tonally flat and monotonous. He utterly destroys the crescendo quality of the song. The off key duet after the credits is kind of funny though. At least they have some humor. Did Martin really need to destroy this song Tea for the Tillerman song? For all the millions of dollars he makes he ought to do better.

On the other hand here is an internet dude, Dara Sheahan, who brings much passion and soul to a guitar cover of this song. Perhaps it is because he is performing it in his small laundry room, where the acoustics are good for a shy introvert.

And finally here is another youtube clip that I think evokes the mood of the song fairly well.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

Advice so simple but often unheeded by so many I have known. To this I would only add that one must embrace one’s own mistakes because they are that which define you. Accept the wisdom of others as a guide but also embrace the wisdom that comes from your own mistakes. This leaves time to make grand and novel mistakes of one’s own. An opportunity to set out on the arduous path towards that which is truly undiscovered.

I recently stumbled across a gallery of mugshots of famous people published by the Chicago Tribune.

What immediately caught my eye was a photo of Mickey Rourke, brought in on driving under the influence charges. While I have no sympathy for anyone driving while intoxicated, I do find myself compelled by his enigmatic smile.

It betrays an inner peace. Or perhaps he is just “really, really high”. Who knows. But I do think it is a face of a person in control, master of their immediate domain. As a visual contrast take this photo of Kumari Fulbright, a former beauty queen, brought in on kidnaping charges and assaulting her boyfriend with a handgun.

Now obviously I do not know the precise and specific details of either situation, so I am left to read the photos for any additional meaning. And apart from the apparent nihilism of life what I do read is a deep chasm of difference. In the former we have an image of a man who conveys confidence, in the latter we have the visual of an apparently deeply disturbed individual. As a psychological portrait I don’t know which image of Fulbright I find more disturbing. The deeply troubled and traumatized girl on the left who obviously is under duress, or the gun toting soon to be trainwreck on the right. And I find myself moved to an emotion of pity and simultaneous urge to keep that kind of force away at arms length. As for Mickey Rourke I have always held a certain inexplicable contempt but nonetheless grudging respect for. This is in no small part due to his over the top portrayal in the film Barfly, based on Charles Bukowski’s work. Despite Mickey Rourke’s performance, it was one of the most memorable movies I have ever seen.

So what kind of conclusion does any of this lead to? None really, only a logical nihilism that looking at any photo must provide. Only affect. I am not there, I am not that which I see. A photograph is a hollow kind of being, into which we pour our own meaning. But I am lead to conclusions nonetheless. I am lead to a thought about the fragility of life, and the tenuous psychological fabric that either holds us together or tears us apart. In the two photos I find a most remarkable contrast, I don’t think there could be more opposite responses to having one’s mug shot taken. In one we find life in the other death. One conveys a spirit of affirmation, the other a spirit of total destruction and sense of panic as one confronts the void. Both serve as a model of how one can conduct one’s life and the emotions we may lay bare when we face consequences of our conduct. But the story is universal. Our life is our life and we may some day be held to account for our action. And in that moment we will have a choice. A fleeting moment before the camera or the gaze of others in which we can try to explain who and what we are and what belies our inner nature. And in this moment we can either affirm or negate. Will you greet it with an enigmatic smile or a spectacle of trauma? Strength or weakness? Hope or doubt? For how we make that choice is the key to our redemption. Our life is our life, and what we make of it is ours. We can confront it with an inner laughter or despair. The rest is truly meaningless. Because it is only in our choice that redemption comes forth.

Of course Charles Bukowski put it a little more poetically:

I just bought Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 8 and I must say it was one of those perfect purchases. The music just comes shining through in all its subtle glory. There are many delightful alternate versions of several recent Dylan classics including “Mississippi” and “Most of the Time“. The net effect of this album for me is that it puts me at ease. With the world on fire as it seems to be this not an emotion that is easy to come by. But Dylan delivers and it has been good for my psychological state of mind and my adjustment to the unravelling we are witnessing all around us. At the moment I have a guarded optimism about the future, but also a heavy feeling that it is going to take a lot work to put it all back together.

The end result is that I feel at ease “most of the time”.

Most of the Time
My head is on straight
Most of the Time
I am strong enough not to hate
I got enough faith I got enough strength
I keep it all away way beyond arms length
I can smile in the face of mankind…
Most of the time.

I recently got an iPhone it is probably the single most useful tech device I have ever owned. However blogging with it is a hassle. But now I found wphone, a plugin that optimizes wordpress for the iPhone. This post was created on my iPhone. Expect to see more frequent short posts now that I can blog from my phone.