Notes from midair

Is it possible to do or be anything "by accident" anymore? As someone with an ever accumulating list of birthdays (44 this past month!), it is becoming possible to perceive the assumption on the part of many people nowadays that everything they see around them is almost entirely deliberate or purposeful, as on a movie set. The voice, the hair, the clothes... all precisely manicured and curated for just that carefully considered effect, whatever the context. The reality show has left the studio. How to explain to the young that things were not always like this? That sometimes, things used to just... happen? Can we truly believe in a world at least occasionally unburdened by an intense desire to manipulate or control the reactions of others through artifice?

Eventually you reach a point in life where you realize there is a limit to what can be reasonably planned in advance, and that the whole notion of unconstrained free choice on the part of rational actors - the holy writ undergirding much of late-stage capitalism and a lot else besides - is severely undercut on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis by the slow accumulation of habit, history and inertia. (Not to mention inattention or ignorance). The notion of dependent origination in Buddhism appears at last no mere dogma; that all dharmas rely on the emergence or existence of other dharmas ought to be regarded as empirical a result as any, if we are both honest with ourselves and paying sufficient attention. We continue to believe we are fashioning ourselves, sculpting the content and meaning of our lives through a series of choices, yet year upon year the array of options to choose among seems not to increase - as some once thought inevitable - but to become somehow smaller. The planet perhaps cannot ultimately entertain every one of our heartfelt wishes, unless our wishes be made so mundane as to fly in the face of desire itself.

Having made such hard-won realizations, now with a slightly stooped back, with mysterious and novel pains beginning to spread through fingers, feet and knees, with a glassy, far-off gaze from a few too many sleepless nights, hazy mornings and chemical sunsets, any successful program having at the core of its focus "the ablation of desire", as Leopardi called it, will without any doubt prove its worth many times over to its adherents.

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Moebius, the only name you need to know in topological intimates.

Utopia, again

But is utopia viable or even tolerable for its alleged beneficiaries? Set aside the problem of who actually does the work to keep the whole system running, who makes decisions at which points and so on... If you think you've got everything you've ever wanted and everything you ever will want, then is it too radical to suggest that you may in fact be talking to a robot, or a machine of some persuasion? Could a genuine human being, with anyone's wants, cares, concerns, distractions - warts and all - be convinced of its own timeless perfection? Would we not want something more, something the present Utopia in all its glory cannot yet provide? Dreaming beyond the horizon, we may yet invent fresh needs for ourselves which render the current condition inadequate. Intolerable, even. Would we be persuaded by arguments about built-in correctives? It's easy to see what might be corrected in ourselves, perhaps, on something like a situational basis. Frequently enough it informs the substance of what we might call ethics. But what remains to be corrected that transcends the individual? This is the type of challenge Utopia attempts to address, and about which there is, unfortunately, scant empirical evidence.

Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest

A brief foray into Dutch phonology and grammar led me to the classic Aesop fable extolling the virtues of persuasion over force. Here's a delightful 1972 animated version produced by none other than the NFB. Straight from the horse's mouth, this one!

The North Wind and the Sun: A Fable by Aesop, Rhoda Leyer 

& Les Drew, provided by the National Film Board of Canada