by Roger Elwood
We possess an unlimited fund of euphemisms with which to filter out the observation that it is fellow humans upon whom we perform our resonating atrocities.
Many clues to the filter systems provided us by Reality remain in our symbols—in euphemisms, in verb constructions, in gestures and other actions, in unexamined assumptions behind some of our more commonly accepted terms.
Take the word knowing for example. Here’s a remarkable filter. When I know a thing, I am efficiently insulated from any disturbing questions which might throw doubt upon my position. Knowing creates a “bound state” like a satellite tied to its parent body by mechanical forces. The operation of knowing can be seen in the ways we create specializations and other compartmentalizing techniques (such as education confined to pre-selected categories) which turn more and more of our destiny over to fewer and fewer experts.
Take the concept of guilt.
One of my black brothers recently accused me of oppressing him “for more than 400 years.” The accusation was based on the observable fact that my skin is white.
Now, I haven’t been around for 400 years, worse luck, but I have been around long enough to research this question farther back than 400 years. I have news for my black brother. Whites have been oppressing blacks and blacks oppressing whites for a helluva lot longer than 400 years.
And do my researches turn up a load of guilt for him!
The elite black troops brought into Spain by the Moors used to ride into a Spanish village, tie up all of the inhabitants, slaughter the children in front of their parents, rape all of the women, then wipe out the survivors by slow torture.
The trouble with this knowledge applied as a guilt-weapon is that a little additional research into ancestral probabilities reveals the disturbing item that my black brother and I each had ancestors on both sides of those atrocities.
If you can trace any ancestors back to the Mediterranean littoral (placing absolute confidence in the breeding habits of your great grandmothers and their progenitors), then it is a high likelihood that you have a mixture of black, white and Semitic ancestry no matter the present shape of your nose or color of your skin. While you're tracing, don't forget that the Phoenicians traded far and wide from their Mediterranean bases, that the Hanseatic merchants brought back more than merchandise, and that some survivors of the Spanish Armada lived long enough in Ireland to leave genetic tracks.
Like good dolls, we’re still playing the dichotomy games, choosing sides, resonating. One of our weapons-filters is guilt; another is knowing.
What do I really know?
What are the visible consequences of past “good works'? (How did we come by that pejorative label: “do-gooder ? What did someone say the road to hell was paved with?) Isn't it possible for us to laugh at ourselves even a little bit when our own best efforts go awry? Having laughed at ourselves, isn't it then possible to answer the demands for change? Haven’t we learned yet that extended “stability” represents a lethal form of existence?
In a possible universe with multilevel systems, influences of and consequences of our actions can be deceptive, and the scientist who says the simpler of available answers always is to be preferred may be misleading himself and us. Operational evidence which is not subject to continual monitoring and projection of consequences can lead us into lethal cul-de-sacs. Trying to control the future in absolute terms “for all time” tends to make any future at all less and less likely for humans. Absolutist logic based on determinism fails when confronted by Infinity.
A reading of our present condition indicates that our reality factory is profoundly out of step with our universe. Perhaps the human mind isn’t well adapted (or conditioned, or aimed, or channelled, etc.) to view its own involvement in the systems which influence (resonate) it— including the system represented by the language with which I articulate such ideas. Perhaps our concept of knowing, of control and power, needs to be modified by a concept of mutual influences and fluid consequences. The ancient Greeks may have been correct when they spoke of humours. They meant wet or flowing by the term. It signified movement and change.
Let’s try another postulate:
Postulate VI: Simplistic, stabilized, absolute and fixed views of reality (frames of reference) always interfere with our view of the future.
Everything we do can be traced to microscopic events. The deeper we probe into that microscopic universe, the more and more difficulty we encounter in predicting the future of isolated phenomena. One of our problems in developing an Infinity Logic is the inescapable conclusion that, in an infinite framework, we are microscopic events. Our problem can be stated this way: To develop sufficiently extended mass-time-energy frameworks it is necessary that we become macroscopic and thus subject to probability patterns.
When we come in big enough packages, you can predict our behavior.
We appear to occupy a potentially definable spectrum in an infinite system where the potential and the definitions change as we expand the limits of our view.
It is only in the macroscopic world that we have found future behavior of probability systems to be determined by their past. Only when we get a big enough view of the dynamics of a system have we been able to tell how it performs.
Then how is our reality factory out of step? We have stored data for centuries. We have accumulations of observations which span thousands of years. We are making our first toddler’s steps toward world government. We have large associations and corporations.
But no one is putting it all together.
The creative genesis of new and larger frames of reference has been sidetracked while we devote greater and greater energy to specializations of narrower and narrower focus. Academic research is dominated by the “bit which I can encompass in my lifetime.” Research in other areas is dominated by corporate security of various denominations from Merck & Co., Inc., to the State of France. Each seeks that transient myth, the competitive edge. And every competitive edge (based as they are on the inevitable contradictions of dichotomy) dissolves in disaster. The stirrup escalates cavalry until it encounters a see-saw standoff against armor and castles until these dissolve before logical developments along the gunpowder line until all are crushed by the energy within the atom.
Finally, no piece of real estate can be defended with absolute security. (There never was such a defense anyway.) We have awakened to a new age in which chemical and bacteriological warfare put mass murder into the hands of small groups operating with a few thousand dollars from basement laboratories. There exists a sufficient number of psychotic frames of reference in our world to insure that such operations already are under way. And the high probabilities in technological research promise us even greater horrors for as long as we operate from a reality which assumes the absolute reliability of narrowing dichotomies as a way of life.
It appears that any path which continues to narrow our possibilities represents a lethal trap. The model of a humankind which threads its nervous way through an infinite maze can be the dominant aspect of our universe only for creatures with noses to the ground, following a simplistic track. Physics, mathematics and philosophy over the past two decades have shot this view of an either/or universe so full of contradictions that it now presents us with the appearance of a swiss cheese. No matter how you cut it, the slices contain holes.
In such a universe, specialists continue to stake out their exclusive slices (holes and all) from which to say: "You cannot discuss my specialty unless you come up the same track I did.”
Attempts to create interdisciplinary bridges between existing specialties tend to stir up specialists the way a shovel stirs up an ant hill. Of the many U.S. university attempts to set up interdisciplinary systems over the past twelve years, the only doctoral level effort to survive, that at Syracuse in Humanities, remains under continuing attack. All of the others, beset by severely limiting restrictions and constant efforts to eliminate them, have produced little impact upon academia. Renewed interdisciplinar
y efforts in higher education, dating back some three years and aimed at extensive reforms with greater impact, must pass through an administrative gantlet which is essentially unchanged from twelve years ago.
(While you re contemplating this state of affairs, please note the dichotomies awaiting the unwary in inter disciplinary and in bridge.) The behavior of many specialists at interdisciplinary conferences is particularly revealing. They tend to gravitate toward their own kind. They tend to show up only for the readings of those papers which “relate to my field.” They tend to behave in microscopic ways against a macroscopic background. And every one of these actions can be defended with sound logic from a consistent frame of reference.
It is this very consistency and any frame of reference (reality) which it supports that I am holding up for questioning and suspicion. It isn’t so much the either/or approach which traps us as it is the way we hold on to our discoveries.
On a human-crowded world where our own population represents a high energy system, the life expectancy of any consistent position can be expected to grow shorter and shorter. Quantum leaps in energy predict this. Remember that it is large numbers of events which give us probable results. It is with large enough numbers that we have developed a degree of accuracy in predicting the future. We may not be dolls, but we occupy the land of Probable. Our insurance statisticians tell us: “I can’t say whether you’re going to have an accident next year, but I can predict how many people of your age and income will have accidents.”
The time has come for us to suspect simplistic dichotomies to which we have clung for long periods. (Crime prevention has created increases in crime; medicine has increased sickness, and religions of peace have fostered violence.) This is a time for courageous movement and a profound change in our attitude toward the overview, that it too represents process and movement.
We have more than enough data to describe existing conditions. We understand our problems all too well. It is time now to recognize that a full description of all those disconnected, short-term responses we are making to our problems is also a description of how we maintain our problems. Indeed, to make our problems worse, we need only continue present response patterns.
Our consensus reality is demonstrably unreal; it isn’t working. We have not developed an operationally reliable logic for Infinity. We are afraid of Infinity in its rawest form because even to think about it takes us through a period when each of us is no longer here. In a sense, most humans peer outward through the overwhelming dichotomy of their own mortal existence and scream: “If I have to go, I don’t care who I take with me!”
A “budding intelligence” (after Piaget) constructs its external world of causal relationships and permanent objects through such a filtering system and out of a demand for the comforting reassurance that “I can stave off disaster.”
Out of this narrowing view, I believe we have developed a world society which fulfills the essential requirements for a psychotic organism, including transference relationships (unconscious mutual support of destructive behavior) with those who say they are solving our problems.
Explosive disorientation describes a dominant condition already at work in our world, not from the actions of “guilty people,” but from systems which we accept as our limits. We stumble from psychotic break to psychotic break within these unworkable systems, and each break is larger, more violent and more degrading than the one before it.
Thomas More, who put the word Utopia into our language by attaching that label to his literary perfect island, died of a disease called man. (He refused to agree with a psychotic tyrant and was executed.) We still are trying to play More’s game by his rules and under conditions where the disease which killed him is even more virulent.
If I am to talk about utopian futurism (my avowed purpose here) then I must begin by explaining why I believe we have set up lethal systems of resonance which, if they continue undamped, make it highly probable that we soon will destroy this planet and every living thing on it. In the land of Probable, the resolution of this dichotomy is our primary problem because a failure to solve for extinction negates all other problems. Given the survival of our species as the issue at stake, if we then play idle word games around improbable consequences which ignore this stake, that clearly describes a symptom of the insane fragmentation which we have identified as schizophrenia.
My first requirement for a sane futurism begins with the simple statement: I am not here to participate in the destruction of a world where I have (or hope to have) descendants. When I raise my gaze to Infinity, I see that a species which incorporates consciousness need not be mortal, need not die.
From this beginning, simplicity evaporates. All of us may not be fertile, but descendant already has broad meaning and infinite implications.
If we are surfboard riders on an infinite sea, then when the waves change we adjust our balance. The most dangerous condition is that of imbalance. In the midst of infinite waves, we must gauge as many of them as we can detect and influence them for species survival wherever we can. For a species balancing in such a universe, unanswerable questions which perpetuate self-limiting systems represent lethal danger. We know how we blind ourselves—by fixed roles, by dropping filters over our senses and forgetting them, by locking ourselves into tighter and tighter orbits, by turning our gaze away from creative interaction with an infinite playground which offers itself for our most artistic expressions. The demand of this dichotomy is loud and clear. That human Phoenix Ezra Pound said it: “Make it new.”
Those Wonderful Years
BARRY N. MALZBERG
I
Listening to the great sounds of ’63, pouring like fruit from the transistors, the engine on high, pulling me irresistibly toward that simpler and more reasonable time of my life. All is love/stars above/know the tune/I lost so soon, Cosmo and the Pearls, got it together in ’61, got the sounds right the following year, hit it to the top with MOONSONG in that golden year of the assassination and then it all fell apart as so many lives have fallen apart during the GO’s: drugs, divorce, abandonment, flight, hatred and Cosmo himself died in a fountain in Las Vegas or was it a pool in ’69, must have been around that time, maybe a year later. Does not matter. Old Cosmo was finished by the mid-sixties, the whole sound that he exemplified, the tender lyric which he probed overtaken by harsher jolts but ramming the Buick at high speed down the expressway it is ’63 again and Cosmo is young, all of us are younger and I let the apples and oranges of that music bounce over me, humming only a little at the rhythm parts. On the expressway I whir past other aspects of the past: cars from the early sixties assault me from oncoming lanes, yield to me on the right and in the chrome, the strange, bent archaic shapes of the 60’s I know my history again and again revealed. MOONSONG ends on a diminished seventh or maybe it is merely a hanging chord (I know absolutely nothing about music other than how it affects me) and the radio is still, then there is a commercial for the Wonder Wheel chain of superior foodstuffs in the metropolitan area and without transition from ’66 comes the sound of the TROOPERS singing Darkness of Love. '
'66 was a good year too although not as critical in many aspects as ’63, still it is a period worth remembering. The TROOPERS help me remember. Locked to the sound, a little pivot wheel of memory I soar through all the spaces of the Expressway and into the impenetrable but to-be-known future. The vaginal canal of the future, parting its thick lips for me gently as I snaffle along in pursuit of my destiny.
II
Outside the building containing Elvira’s single-girl’s apartment I wedge the car into a space, remove the key (cutting off Tom and the Four Gees in SWEET DELIGHT, a pure pear plucked from the tree of ’54, a little before my time but no matter) and sit behind the wheel for a moment, meditating. I am a little early for our date which happens quite often but then too I am in no hurry to see Elvira, preferring always to cherish the memories gathered through our times together than to go into the difficult business of creating n
ew ones. (The past is fixed, the present incomprehensible, the future without control; I must remember this.) Already Elvira is an artifact to me; her breasts already seem to have the glaze of embalming fluid, her mouth tastes like mucilage, it is not Elvira which I am kissing so much as the Elvira which I will remember. It is difficult to explain this. It is difficult to explain this but I will try: Elvira and our relationship are to be a golden oldie of the early eighties. Thinking this and other muddled thoughts I step briskly from the car, move through stones and into the lobby of the building where I see she has already come down to wait for me, a handbag slung over her shoulder, a tight and aggressive expression across her eyes and cheeks. I know that I will have to suppress memories of Elvira’s aggression in order to be truly moved by her years hence. “We must make a decision,” she says, grasping my arm between wrist and elbow, in the vicinity of the ulna, and applying modest pressure. “We cannot go on this way. Tonight we must resolve our relationship.”
“I am not prepared to make any decisions, Elvira,” I say, submitting to her grasp. In ordinary life I am a claims examiner for a large insurance company which has, partly because of me, one of the lowest payout rates in the business, a statistic which they do not advertise. In that capacity I must do a great deal of writing and checking but fortunately this is with the right hand and not with the left which feels Elvira’s pressure. Resultantly I do not protest at being greeted by her in this way but try to take a lower key. Cosmo and the Pearls, according to the newspaper stories at the time of their success, are supposed to have met on an unemployment line in the Bronx, New York, but I do not believe this. I discard most public biographies as lies and, trusting nothing, believe that the truth can only be found in what Cosmo does to me. A little snatch of MOONSONG buzzes through my head like an indolent fly and I do not slap at it; I listen. Lost so soon/all I loved/like the stars above. Above, above. “We will have to take it as it comes, Elvira,” I add liking the sound of her name. El-vi-ra; it carries within it the characteristic sound of the seventies, posturing and yet somehow childlike, which will surely characterize this decade in the years which lie ahead.