Documentary on the Aokigahara Suicide Forest

Note: This video is not for the weak of heart. I warn you it will disturb many. It is a documentary on the suicide forest at the base of Mt. Fuji where on average a hundred suicides are discovered a year. It becomes a study in the existential nature of humanity, what Albert Camus considers the ultimate question. The geologist Azusa Hayano provides a deeper insight into this question. Insight that is perhaps more profound than much of western existentialism and the essentially annihilatory core of Being found in thinkers such as Sartre, Camus, and even Heidegger. We are not a singularity. We do not die alone. The act of suicide always brings others into the very act. Even in the depths of a forest. It affects more than just the self. The action is taken against the self in the context of a world of others. Others will always become affected. If care is the core of Being, of Dasein, as Heidegger claims, then Dasein, that is what it means to be human, must experience care as the core of how it interacts with others. Dasein is not a singularity but an ecology. This might take Heidegger out of context, but, I was never one for context. The point is we exist in a world with others. Our given Being is a being-in-the-world with others. We cannot exist apart from others. To exist is to be a part of a world of others. As the video is concluded the deeper question of life often interpreted by existentialists as the question of suicide loses its singularity and gains itself in an ecology of others and care for others. “You think that you die alone, but that’s not true. Nobody is alone in this world. We have to coexist and take care of each other.”

Lacan and other philosophical short-circuits in David Lynch Films.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a profound interest in all things David Lynch. This is evidenced in his filmwork “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”. Watching Lynch’s movies, I have come to agree with Zizek’s premise: cinema is the ultimate pervert art and also David Lynch is perhaps one of cinema’s great perverts, and therefore, perhaps one of the greatest film makers. What I think is most promising about Lynch is that in watching his films you can see the influence of Lacan’s psychology. His films bring Lacan to life. They provide the viewer with a means to see Lacan in artistic practice. Through Lynch’s films we have a system of ready-made examples that allow us to further understand the often difficult relationship between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the Real. Here are three examples that I have pulled from Lynch’s films.

1. The Elaborate Fraud of Emotion and the Real

The moment when our deepest emotions are betrayed and exposed as the imaginary order, where the real creeps in as something ultimately tragic. Tragic because we realize the feelings we were made to endure were the consequence of an elaborate fraud on the part of the other. And we don’t care. Because they were precisely what we wanted to feel, the emotions we were expected to have: which is the goal of any great cinematographic experience.

2. The Transcendent Perversion of the Mystery Man

What happens when the observer lets the inmate know he is interned within the panopticon a la Foucualt? The mystery man isn’t frightening because he is watching, but he is frightening because he is both omnipresent and diabolical, he knows we know and he knows we know he most likely doesn’t have our best interests at heart. He is the ultimate pervert, an represents the base willfulness of a society, such as ours, that likes to watch more than it likes to participate in the act itself.

3. What is in the box: Pain and the imaginary order

“What is in the box?” “Pain.” Real or imagined? Once again: an elaborate fraud. One that the character feels down to the core. It doesn’t matter whether the hand is actually disintegrating. The pain is experienced despite it being revealed as a hoax. The imagined becomes more real than what is actually going on in the box, which, in this instance, is actually mundane, as the hand is removed without a scratch.

Haven’t posted much. Plan on doing more. Haven’t had much to write about since most of my energy has been devoted to my professional writing. Here is a short poem I wrote after spending time reading William Blake. The idea was to get a similar childish musical rhythm like his Songs of Innocence. As with most of my poems, it was written while trying to fall asleep after the ambien wouldn’t kick in.

“There is a wall upon a hill”

There is a wall upon a hill,
With roses, lilacs and daffodil,
Greens seas of grass surround about
This aged granite and stone redoubt.

Upon the wall, first cracks appeared
As rains and snow and ice so sheared
The mason’s work of ages past,
Now faded green with moss at last.

From rock to wall, to pebbled dust,
Time’s hand upon a dagger thrust
Souls of men each come around
To feed the roses, worms, and ground.

Video games and science education

Instead of writing more on the subject here I’ll just provide a link to my recent article in the November 2011 issue of the education magazine Learning and Leading with Technology.

http://tinyurl.com/3d9ffz6

Enjoy

On These Shores

Once these waters
pressed their lips upon the
salt riddled shore-lines.

Now these abused depths
toxic
fluid in form
now viscous with greed
this watered ash as solvent sheen.

Brine-bloated
carcasses of fish and fowl
float as oily ruptures
as waves crest and fall
depositing
our final offering
upon the lap of the salt riddled shore lines.

A turtle-ish subjectivity.

The world is oftentimes weirder than the scientific models we use to explain it. This “weirdness” runs deep and perhaps weirdness itself is the nature of reality.

If the foundation of basic matter is supposedly governed by uncertainty and, at best, is only represented probabilistically by esoteric mathematical models understood by only a handful of theoretical physicists there isn’t much hope for any of us, at least, when it comes to notions of understanding, meaning and knowledge.

But somehow, despite this intrinsic weirdness, I am able to sit my a desk, turn on my computer and type these words, and eventually, I will post this statement on my blog and you, on the receiving end will read it and perhaps like it or perhaps not. Who knows?
I was trained both as mathematician and a scientist. But I never really “bought” the whole scientific apparatus with its intrinsic positivism, faux sense of finality and egoistic certitude. We, as scientists, after all, cannot even reconcile the grand physical theories that supposedly govern our universe. The large scale Einsteinian relativity seems to elude a happy, dignified unification with the subatomic Planck universe.

Our earliest societies explained the world in mythopoeic language, we, on the other hand, in the here and now, describe our reality in notions of the mythomathematic. Solving equations concerning the gauge symmetry of simple lie algebras is the new Promethean myth of stealing fire from the Gods. Perhaps the Higg’s Boson is the only god we deserve? And the Large Hadron Super Collider our modern Tower of Babel? What does it say about us when we machinery predict a reality we can never truly experience on a personal level?

And yet, despite this weirdness, here I am, writing this blog post, which you will read, sounding out each word, phoneme by phoneme, each sound meaningful in its own right. Each word meaningful, in some way or the other, to you, on some level. It all somehow comes together, syllable by syllable, word by word, sentence by sentence until it ends. It will either leave a lasting impression or you’ll simply click on some other link or enter some other URL and let it die a neurological death, each word fading into the unconscious, perhaps to rise, ghostly and ethereal, at the oddest moments, in some fit of deja-vois.

All “-isms” when taken to a global, generalized and metaphysical scale are bullshit. Including my own. The problem occurs when we seek to reconcile the galactic scale with the subatomic. Gravity and quantum theory were never good bed-fellows.

“-isms” are only meaningful locally or individually. In the land of the mythomathematic, the subatomic is king. We have a pocketful of lenses we use to make sense of the world, as each experience becomes presented to us. It was never about “truth” but internal consistency and epistemological self consciousness. Pragmatics dictates some lenses are better than others, and rightfully so. But no lens, given these very human limitations of locality and temporality, can ever account for a “grand unified theory.” No perspective can ever fully account for reality-at-large: “-isms” are pure potentiality, merely probabilistic, subatomic, and uncertain.

Sometimes madness is the only form of sanity we deserve.

And to quote the poet Pessoa, “What’s a man who isn’t mad / But some ruddy beast, / A corpse postponed that breeds?” Madness makes us human. For only the truly mad would ever attempt to make sense out of this chaotic mess we call reality. Only the truly mad would postpone the urges to breed in order to wax philosophic on the nature of the ontic fallibility of human method. And only the truly mad would bother to call themselves scientists.

Sex.
Science.
Madness.
In the end, it is nothing but turtles all the way down.

The Rite of Spring

April pollinates
a sporous mist.

Vegetative fruits
& wind borne aromatics.

Each spring breath
we commune this cloud

Reddened whites of
Oracular ducts
Dropping Teary crystal
Inducing
Sneezing powerful
Irritants
& sickened states.

Hell is other people: On the meaning of marriage

I am currently taking a class in qualitative methods for  research. We are doing a study on graduate students’ conceptions of marriage.  I have interviewed two people and spent time formulating my own answers to the same interview questions. I have taken this data and constructed a poetic response to the interviews. It is mostly tongue and cheek, but I think there is something to the sarcasm. These are my interpretations of the data. I don’t make any claims to the objectivity of the statements.

Hell is other people:

If you ask what makes a good marriage?
The obvious answers come first:

Communication.
Respect.
Selflessness.

We want to keep things simple.

Distill profound essences
into single words.

But these words mean
different things for
different People.

And the reality is:

There is no such thing
as a “good marriage”.
They say divorce
is up to 50%.

All this talk
of eternal love,
devotion and
till death do us part

is over-shadowed
by the cold numerology
of coin flips
and dice rolls.

Do you feel lucky?

So let’s keep it simple:
It’s always the little things,
in the end, that break us down.

Tooth paste not rolled from the bottom of the tube.

Dishes not cleaned after a night’s meal.

He didn’t put his shoes in the closet and left them out in the hallway.
One shoe by the door,
the other by the bathroom.
He’s so disorganized.

She spends to long getting ready in the morning and he’s always late for work.
He hates being late.

He keeps forgetting she doesn’t like cream in her coffee.
And she complains about it
even when he tries to be nice
and surprise her with a cup and pastry at work.

She finds the way he chews his food disgusting and barbaric.
He hates how long it takes her to peck through her food.

He doesn’t fold his clothes the way she learned from her mother.
He likes to bundle his socks in the drawer
without matching them to a pair.

He leaves toilette seats up
and doesn’t clean the urine dribbles
left on the floor.
“It’s just urine,” he says.

She spends too long deciding between
a blue blouse
or a green blouse
and often wonders aloud
“am I too fat”
or “does this make my complexion run?”
When he doesn’t care,
he likes her the way she is.
And both blouses look good on her.
She rolls her eyes when he says,
“yes baby buy the green one, it looks nice.”
But can’t give a reason why “it’s nice”.

She doesn’t like to cook
but she doesn’t like the food he makes either.

He reads too much,
she sleeps too much,
he drinks too much,
she smokes too much,
he likes to play video games,
she likes to watch the Home and Garden network,
he’s  a cat person,
she’s a dog person,
he’s into slasher flicks,
she’s into chick flicks,
he hates going to church,
she’s there every Sunday,
he forgets to take out the trash,
she forgets to throw away her nails when she cuts them,
he forgets to let the dog out,
she forgets to feed the cat,
he hates folding laundry,
she hates washing clothes,
she only eats free-trade chocolate,
he’ll eat whatever is cheapest,
she likes red wine,
he likes white wine.

He never uses lip balm, his lips are always chapped.
She uses it too much and her lips always taste like medication.

He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he works,
she likes to talk while she works.

He likes rainy day,
she likes sunny days.

He likes.
She likes.
He wants.
She wants.

The list could go on and on.

It’s really not about communication,
or respect
or selflessness.

These behaviors are buried deep.
Years and years of psychological baggage and conditioning.

But mostly, it comes down to the tooth paste.

He doesn’t put the cap back on
and the fluoride dries and encrusts the nozzle
and that just disgusts
the living hell
out of her.

An immodest proposal: The cannibalistic core of American public education. A reponse to Tyack’s “The One Best System”.

Collected notes from a paper I wrote last fall. It is a bit “jumpy” thematically.  The core discussion was influenced by Tyack’s and Zimmerman’s work in History of Urban Education.

Of course: the primary influence is directly from Jonathan Swift’s “Immodest Proposal”  a la Adult Swim’s internet flash game “Orphan Feast”. The game can can be found here: http://games.adultswim.com/orphan-feast-adventure-online-game.html.

Despite the figurative language. Swift’s social criticism is mostly spot on.

Introduction: A Best System?

It may be overly obvious to state the following:  public education throughout American history has served a certain Native White Protestant bias and has historically relegated the poor, the immigrant and the emancipated slave to a role of ‘servant’ of this overly powerful minority. But it needs be said, constantly. History has a way of forgetting its past mistakes. Turning the tragedy of history into a farce or at least a passionless comedy.  Urbanization and modernization were used as a tool to ‘intertwine’ corporate-bureaucratic interests with the Native White Protestant ideology to build a foundation for cultural consolidation through education across the entirety of the country. According to Tyack (see Tyacks The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education for an expanded account of the history of “social efficiency” models in urban education) , this ‘one best system’ has ill-served the pluralistic character of America and has failed to systematically reflect the goal of ‘equal education for all’.  But it is not obvious how public education, despite this innate hegemonic bias, has actually and successfully served the polyglot under-privileged or if it has, in fact, served them at all.

Building the Education Meat-grinder

It is hard to imagine  the explosive transformation of a rural and agrarian society to a massive, industrial urban complex would not warrant some sort of educational reform.  The urban environment became a pluralistic archipelago of ideology, religion and morality—most of which were opposed, on some level, to the Native Protestant way of thinking.  Individualistic and independent, the growing American city was fractious and decentralized.  The economic interests of the privileged and powerful fueling the industrial machine required centralized efficiency.  As politics moved the cities away from the pluralistic Ward Archipelago to the central authority of city halls, the same principles of social efficiency were applied to education.  Something, as they say, had to be done with the children.

The general organizational reforms in education were a natural outgrowth of the industrial apparatus and the inherent desire to emphasize efficiency and maximize production. This move to bureaucratize education opposed the local scale with the cosmopolitan, replacing layman educator with the ‘professional’ ruled by progressive administrators, removing the rural social identity with ‘the creeping menace of unification’. The rapid urban growth created a vacuum of insecurity among the middling class and social elite. In order to promote an efficient and well oiled industrial future, steps were taken to use public education to socialize and commodify these poor and wayward youth to newer, more industrial modes of production. Attuning them to the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the goal was to transform students into future cogs of a modernized economy. The public school was used to enculturate children into the ‘factory model’ in order to minimize any class-consciousness or group-think that would pose a threat to the Native Protestant social order.  Therefore, any notion of public education as ‘serving’ the under-privileged should be taken in the literal, Twilight Zone sense of the word.[1] The minority privileged Native White Protestant hegemony used a properly utopian core of ‘American values’ as a meat grinder with education reforms ‘serving’ the now processed poor to the industrialized machine.

Mint Julep Curriculum

Zimmerman (See Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools) suggests the ‘culture wars’ for control of curriculum in public schools is unavoidable, social groups will ‘promote their own opinions rather than a discussion of competing ones’. When a small fraction of a rapidly expanding society controls a preponderance of the political capital and agency, ‘almost always’ they will use such power to ‘serve’ their own ends.

Education became a ‘bland affirmation’ of freedom, democracy and the meritocratic myth of the ‘American Dream’, with any ‘alternative narratives’ tacked-on to save face value. A sort of historical anti-depressant to gloss over the systemic state of exception of actual history: the bitterness, oppression, slavery and violence indicative of the actual Native Protestant narrative.[2] While a mechanism and agency allowed minorities and marginalized under-privileged to obtain some form of control of curriculum, Zimmerman has proposed that this widening of the ethnic lens bred a concomitant narrowing of the critical lens. As long as no violence was done to the ‘core’ history of American democratic destiny, these changes were tolerated.  History wrapped in candy coating serves only those who have something to gain—namely the ruling minority—by denying students and future citizens the mechanisms to wrestle and negotiate with these historical ‘states of exception’.[3] Without the light of criticism to guide our way, the very individualism we may seek to promote and venerate is inhibited, ‘serving’ to protect the ‘pragmatic standards’ of the Native Protestant ideology at the expense of our truly natural resource: our own plurality.

The Cannibalistic Core of American Public Education

The growth of the industrial-economic apparatus was used by those in power as a justification for ‘control’ and ‘management’ of children through public education. Overtly or not, the ruling classes sought to indoctrinate future citizens by stratifying privilege through ability and IQ testing, using these tools to ‘diagnose’ and ‘prescribe’ the most adequate fit for each individual in the massive machinery of industry. Under the aegis of ‘meritocracy’ and suiting the needs of the student for the future,  these high stakes assessments sought only to pigeon hole the under-privileged into education tracts suited for the ‘dirty’ and ‘dead end’ occupations of the factory system. These problems were pronounced among African-Americans who were generally pushed towards unskilled labor in jobs ‘no one else wanted’. Considering this, we cannot ask ‘who does education serve’ without implying the figurative cannibalism inherent with ‘serving’ poor as fodder to future industry. But how do we break this food chain? Zimmerman proposes in order to truly use education as ‘service-for-others’ and not ‘service-of-others’ we need to widen the lens of criticism and challenge these rosy colored narrative ‘myths’, emphasizing inquiry and investigation over ‘efficiency’, ‘control’ and ‘management’.[4] Effective education reform, according to Tyack, will also require a critical reassessment of these ‘cherished convictions’ and the ‘familiar patterns of power and authority’ that have governed the growth and development of the public school. Otherwise, we are all guilty of cultural cannibalism in the name of ‘efficiency’ and the ‘American dream’: a dream that is not truly a dream, but rather a frightful nightmare, a nightmare that will haunt us throughout this rosy colored history.

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[1] Rod Serling. “To Serve Man”, The Twilight Zone. Season 3, Episode 89. Sorry the example is just too evocative to pass up. This notion is not new. Take Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for instance and his tongue and cheek idea that the poor Irish would easily assuage their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the wealthy British gentry.

[2] Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised. Vintage, New York: 1979. This is an apt metaphor, historical inclusion as ‘happy pill’. 

[3] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford University Press: 1998.  Our marginalized voices find themselves submitted to the ‘sovereign’s’ state of exception, and while the marginalized are human and therefore deserving of human rights, they instead are treated as Homo sacer, a human with no political significance.

[4] ‘Service-for-others’ and ‘Service-of-others’ being, of course, my words used to describe the theoretical distinction.

Madness and the Desert of the Real: Quoting The Savage Detectives.

The abyss of madness stalks the deserts of Northern Mexico.  Roberto Bolaño’s The Savages Detectives represents a literary/oedipal quest for the eternal mother.  A vagabond world of poets, pimps and provocateurs . A world where art has been rendered absurd and poetry doubly so.  Bolaño writes with an unhinged insanity that speaks more “truth” than the cold empiricism of the contemporary “scientific moment”.  When the “Real” of human nature unfolds, the only remainder are discarded corpses, wayward hipsters and mumbling sociopaths.  The Savages Detectives, in its round about way, chronicles the end of literature  as a metaphor for the pure apocalyptic moment of “being human”.  Roberto Bolaño’s writing inspires madness and conspiracy while concurrently renewing our position in the precarious incertitude of daily life. We are a fickle, savage species. A wounded species. A fragile species.

There is  beauty in his pages. But with all true works of literature, it requires an investment both mentally and emotionally. A mutual act of diablerie. A blood pact between author and reader, the author bleeds for his art, and the reader feasts at this unholy communion of words. The process of reading Bolaño is a process of morbid change. His writing changes you, the words rupture your sense of space, time, morality. The world of knowing is left a barren and vacuous desert that somehow strengthens our human desire for life. Or at least opens the asylum doors and welcomes the madness, insanity and conspiracy into the day-to-day normalcy of “just being” human.  We are savage. We are fragile.

Notable quotes:

I like to write notable passages down. It exposes my mental state as reader vis-a-vis the act of reading. Why of all the words in a work of this length and substance did these few passages speak to me?

Pg.114: “The problem with literature, like life, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”

Pg. 314: “Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.”

Pg. 355: “Stop moping, all poets get lost at some point or another”

Pg. 400: “Freedom is like a prime number.”

Pg. 420: “…the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less.  If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. “

Pg. 421: “If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it.”

Pg. 451: “Poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth.”

Pg. 466: “Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them.”

Pg. 488: “The search for a place to live and a place to work  [is] the common fate of all mankind”.

Pg. 500: “I felt like the Nude Descending a Staircase, although I wasn’t descending any staircase, not that I recall.”

Pg. 503: “But then I thought that life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.”

Pg. 627: “Measuring time is as meaningless as measuring eternity.”