Ken's Blog

I have observed in myself, from time to time, the following two phase phenomenon in my own psyche:

(1) In a stressful situation I will find myself in an unexpected panic, and will act in a way that causes confusion, and sometimes dismay, in the people around me. “Why did he do/say that“, I imagine them thinking. I’m sure you’ve all been there at some point or other.

Of course this sort of thing is worrisome, not to say embarrassing. After such moments I tend to brood, to turn inward for a while, and usually I become more critical of myself. And then, sometimes weeks later, I usually arrive at the next phase:

(2) I remember something that happened years ago, something so traumatic that I had put it completely out of my mind, and which would have prompted my irrational reaction. I’m always surprised when I realized the magnitude of some of the memories I have repressed. In one case it was a teacher in high school who turned out to be a monster (you don’t even want to know). in another, it was the sudden death, over that first Christmas break, of the very first friend I met the year I went away to college.

When such a memory comes flooding back, I realize that my repression of that memory had planted a kind of bomb in my mind, ready to go off later — even many years later.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about this. After all, the thing about a repressed memory is that it is repressed. You are not even consciously aware it is there, let alone what it is. The upside is that once one of these memories has come back, it seems to lose all power to act as an unconscious trigger.

One effect this has had is that I have learned to go easier on myself when I find myself becoming unexpectedly alarmed or upset or panicked. Now I realize it’s not something as simple as a personal failing. Rather, it is real life as a kind of ad hoc therapy, the outward sign of some unconscious trauma from my past working its way up to the surface.

So just remember, the next time somebody you know acts crazy. If they are even a little aware that they just acted crazy, then they have probably just taken a step toward becoming more sane.

I was talking to my good friend and sometime co-author Kaelan, and the conversation meandered, as our discussions are wont to do, toward various topics of largely pataphysical interest.

At one point we alit upon the notion of a “death metal sorority”. Such a thing, which does not show up on the Web (I checked), is a marvelous example of two contradictory thoughts vying to occupy the selfsame space.

No sooner had we stumbled upon this peculiarly scrumptious intellection, than we were hooked. In moments we were well on our way to planning the indie mocumentary, the RomCom sitcom, the sardonic Kevin Spacey flick, the upstart punk musical with a heart as large as its budget is microscopic, and the one man show with Hamish Linklater.

I anticipate that sometime in the next fiscal quarter we will be coming out with (1) the Lego holiday sculpture, (2) the freemium iPad app targeted for acquisition in a bidding war between Facebook and Zynga, (3) the stealth social commentary cleverly disguised as hipster chic, and of course (4) something with cats.

Definitely something with cats.

It was good to see you
In the elevator today.

I almost missed looking up,
So lost was I in my thoughts.

But your eyes, looking into mine,
Brought me back

From my meandering mind,
Just in time to see,

And to measure, the time passed
Since that last time,

Too long ago, that I had seen
Your eyes looking in mine.

I once heard it said that there are only two kinds of Western: (1) We ride into a strange town, and (2) a stranger rides into town.

The dichotomy between vampires and zombies in the popular imagination can be seen as spanning a similar dialectic. In the modern vampire story, a strong part of us identifies with the monster, for s/he is beautiful, irresistible, all-powerful, the monster as poet, or even poetry itself. The vampire is, in essence, the all-devouring life force that we fear within us — Eros as destroyer.

Zombies are quite the opposite. We do not identify with the zombie, but rather with its victims. The zombie is, in essence, the all devouring death force that we fear awaits us — Thanatos as destroyer.

In a ghost story we are neither hunter nor prey. Rather, ghosts represent the third kind of fear. This is neither the fear of being a predator nor the fear of being prey. Rather, it is the fear of loss.

The ghost represents the mystery of lost connections, of words left unsaid to one who is now no longer there to hear us. The failed friendship, the lover become stranger, the secret about ourselves we have buried so deep that it appears to us only in flickering shadows.

The ghost story can be the most frightening of horror stories, for it evokes not the clean decisive kill, nothing so easy as the sudden flash of violence within us or against us, but rather the terrible mystery of loss itself.

Next Sunday many people are going to be writing about the sinking of the Titanic.

I thought it would be nice if at least one person celebrated a somewhat more hopeful moment: Today is the 100th anniversary of that great ship’s maiden voyage out of Southampton on her way across the Atlantic.

This is also an occasion to note the following numerological oddity: The ship sank in the year ’12, on 4/15 (on Sunday, when we commemorate the anniversary of that great tragedy, it will of course also be the year ’12, on 4/15).

And where now lies the wreck of the RMS Titanic? Down under the sea, at a depth of exactly 12,415 feet.

Mere coincidence?

The other day, while lecturing to a class, I wanted to use some well known historical figure within a thought experiment. So in about five seconds I drew something like the following on the blackboard, and then I continued: “Imagine if Abraham Lincoln…”

But then I paused for a moment, looked at the picture, and said “It’s funny. if I just took away the hat, it would be Jesus.”

The class laughed, but the thought stayed with me. How little do you need to draw in order to invoke any given famous person? Perhaps we can rate iconic public figures on a scale — the simpler the drawing required, the more iconic the figure.

What would be the equivalent visual sketch for Elvis or Marilyn, Groucho or Woody, Garland or Sinatra, Nixon or Thatcher, Chaplin or Hitchcock, Lennon or McCartney, Freud or Einstein, Hitler or Gandhi?

In some cases we might get it down to very little indeed, such as John Lennon as a pair of glasses. Perhaps we could apply some sort of information theoretic analysis, in the spirit of Claude Shannon, to rate our historical icons.

I wonder who would come out on top.

We now know for sure that sometime in the near future Google will be coming out with a consumer-wearable heads-up augmented reality display. And simple logic tells us that its major rivals are hard at work on similar competing platforms.

Which means that soon there will be no reason at all for whatever cyber-information you are looking at to require a display screen. Any convenient wall, table, pants leg, your friend’s shirt, or the spaces in between can show the info you need. In the scheme of things, we are rather close now to an eccescopic world.

Which means that the iPad and its many imitators may soon be as out of date as an old 8-track tape player. For all of the current excitement around these tablet devices, they may shortly come to be seen as one of those transitional technologies that seems, in retrospect, oddly quaint.

Leonard Cohen once said “please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.” I suspect the man was being disingenuous. If anybody has a secret chart, Leonard Cohen does.

Today I went back through about the last year or so of my blog, and I realized that I have been compiling my own secret chart. Behind every post — — and every sequence of posts — there is a deeper story, one that is not explicitly revealed on the page. I suppose this is the case for all writers.

In my own case, I can recognize the stretches of time when I was feeling joy or excitement, restlessness or despair. Some posts are painful to read now because they bring me back to a moment in my life when I was dealing with something quite difficult, and others are a delight to read because they take me back to a time when things were flowing, and everything felt deeply right.

In some ways a blog and a journal are precisely opposite forms. In a blog you say only what you are prepared to be heard by the entire world. In a journal you pour out everything that you wish to be heard by your own heart.

Yet in both cases, there is a chart, drawn by your words, tracing out the changing contours of your inner life. There is, most definitely, a chart.

In certain vintage SciFi, the key signifier that you were in a cool futuristic world was the presence of robots. “Metropolis” had its robot Maria, “Forbidden Planet” had Robby the Robot, “Star Wars” had R2D2 and C3PO, and “Lost in Space” had an endearing Class M-3 Model B9, General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot.

But it seems we have moved on, and robots are sooo yesterday’s tomorrow.

Now your future requires a flat rectangular display that floats in midair, as recently seen in “Iron Man”, “Eureka”, “District 9”, “The Hunger Games” and a host of cheesy commercials by everyone from Apple Computer to Microsoft to Corning Glass.

Why these displays need to be rectangular is anybody’s guess. It is one of the eternal mysteries, like the question of why that magical object for instant gratification you are holding in your hand needs to be so artfully rounded (I meant your SmartPhone. Please get your mind out of the gutter).

The change makes sense. In 20th century America, the robot was a signifier of an essentially industrial economy — the “impossible object” that represented the technological aspirations of such an economy.

The magical rectangular display floating in the air is the corresponding impossible object to signify the technical aspirations of an information-based economy.

Once we have moved on, in another twenty years or so, to a nano/neuro-based economy, I wonder what we will choose as our new impossible object.

In response to yesterday’s post, Dagmar said: “A beautiful body doesn’t attract me, only a beautiful mind does.” I think she was referring to the cliché that first impressions are about appearance.

But I don’t think that is true. There are a lot of objectively beautiful people out there, but for the most part we don’t find them compelling. There is actually something off-putting for many people about seeing a vacant soul within a beautiful shell.

The great movie actors capture us not because of their looks — although they generally (though not always) look quite presentable — but because we are drawn in by something about their movement, the way they speak, their facial expression, a light in their eyes.

Then, having seen them perform, we associate the way they look with beauty, and so we come to view their appearance as the epitome of attractiveness.

I think this is also true in our personal lives. We are each far more intelligent than our conscious minds and our cultural limitations generally permit us to be. This intelligence allows us to acquire a vast amount of information about another person’s essential being in the very first moments that we meet them. But we have neither the language nor the skills even to understand that we have acquired that information, let alone to fully process it.

It is this knowledge — derived not from some voodoo magic, but from the full functioning of our own brains — that can cause us to be instantly attracted to another person. It is not their physical appearance that attracts us. Yet we will persist in believing that it is, because the truth seems preposterous.