ALL THE THINGS THAT COULD HAPPEN NEXT:SJ 112
by THB3
Time is a cruel and brutal master. It is a construct, somewhat like a cage from which you cannot escape. Time beats down on your spirit and your body, as it withers your flesh and saps your strength, day by day. It tries to kill your hopes and dreams, often succeeding. It is relentless and unstoppable, moving inexorably slow when you are doing something boring or ordinary, and flying impossibly fast when you’re having a good time, almost as if it wants to steal your good times away before you’ve even realized how happy you were in that moment. It moves along, never stopping, taking us ever-closer to the black door that is death, our ultimate demise. The final mystery, this is where time is always leading us, from the minute we are born. There is truly no escaping this trajectory. We just learn to accept it for what it is, an inevitability. All we can do is try to live outside of time in our minds, to fight every step of the way and still manage to go with the flow, so to speak. Time is a river, they say, and it’s true. Sometimes a calm, placid river, and often a raging torrent. And I’m afraid it ends in a massive waterfall crashing onto jagged rocks far below. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we just flow gently into the ocean. Perhaps it all depends on HOW you live your life along the way. Regardless of all this idle speculation, until that day comes, I shall use my time, always, in the best possible ways that I can…
THB3
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“This above all: to thine own self be true.”
William Shakespeare
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“Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
Robert Henri
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“Nothing in this book is known to be true.
It’s a reflection on what I’ve noticed.
Not facts so much as thoughts.
Some ideas may resonate, others may not.
A few may awaken an inner knowing you forgot you had.
Use what’s helpful.
Let go of the rest.
Each of these moments is an invitation to further inquiry: looking deeper, zooming out, or in.
Opening possibilities for a new way of being.”
Rick Rubin
THE CREATIVE ACT
A Way of Being
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“Some things are too important to be taken seriously.”
Oscar Wilde
The creation of art is one of those things. Don’t force it. Just have fun in the pure joy of creation.
________
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“The best work is the work you are excited about.”
“Taking a wrong turn allows you to see landscapes you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.”
Rick Rubin
THE CREATIVE ACT
A Way of Being
________
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“I won’t come out. You must come into me. Into my womb garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe within the skull to rival the real.”
Jim Morrison
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“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is NOT the path to knowledge. And there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science.”
Carl Sagan
(He was the greatest…)
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“A man searching for lost paradise can seem a fool to those who never sought the other world.”
Jim Morrison
PARIS JOURNAL
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“I RECOGNIZED THAT I MYSELF HAD BECOME PART OF THE CONSPIRACY OF DULLNESS, AND THAT ONLY IN A MOMENT OF LAVISH AWARENESS, WHICH HAD LEFT ME CONFUSED AND EXHAUSTED, HAD I SEEN TRULY. THEY HAD NOT BETRAYED ME: I HAD BETRAYED THEM. I SAW THAT I WAS IN DANGER OF BECOMING ORDINARY, AND I UNDERSTOOD THAT FROM NOW ON I WOULD HAVE TO BE VIGILANT.”
Steven Millhauser
IN THE PENNY ARCADE
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“Will we have computer chips in our heads?
MAYBE.
But only once or twice, and probably not for very long.
The cyberpunk hard guys of science fiction, with their sharp black suits and their surgically implanted silicon chips, already have a certain nostalgic romance about them. Information highwaymen, cousins of the “steam bandits” of Victorian technofiction: so heroically attuned to the new technology that they have laid themselves open to its very cutting edge. They have become it; they have taken it within themselves.
Meanwhile, in case you somehow haven`t noticed, we are all of us becoming it; we seem to have no choice but to take it within ourselves.
In hindsight, the most memorable images of science fiction often have more to do with our anxieties in the past (the writer`s present) than with those singular and ongoing scenarios that make up our life as a species: our real futures, our ongoing present.
Many of us, even today, or most particularly today, must feel as though we have silicon chips embedded in our brains. Some of us, certainly, are not entirely happy with that feeling. Some of us must wish that ubiquitous computating would simply go away and leave us alone, a prospect that seems increasingly unlikely.
But that does not, I think, mean that we will one day, as a species, submit to the indignity of the chip. If only because the chip will almost certainly be as quaint an object as the vacuum tube or the slide rule.
From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It`s scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing?
I suspect that medicine and the military will both find reasons for attempting such a thing, at least in the short run, and that medicine’s reasons may at least serve to counter someone’s acquired or inherited disability. If I were to lose my eyes, I would quite eagerly submit to some sort of surgery promising a video link to the optic nerves (and once there, why not insist on full-channel cable and a web-browser?). The military`s reasons for insertion would likely have something to do with what I suspect is the increasingly archaic job description of “fighter pilot,” or with some other aspect of telepresent combat, in which weapons in the field are remotely controlled by distant operators. At least there’s still a certain macho frisson to be had in the idea of deliberately embedding a tactical shard of glass in one’s head, and surely crazier things have been done in the name of king and country.
But if we do do it, I doubt we’ll be doing it for very long, as various models of biological and nanomolecular computing are looming rapidly into view. Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain is supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky twentieth-century hardware thing. You really don`t need complicated glass to crunch numbers, and computing goo probably won’t be all that difficult to build. (The more tricky aspect here may be turning data into something that brain cells understand. If you knew how to make brain cells understand pull-down menus, you’d probably know everything you needed to know about brain cells, period. But we are coming to know, relatively, an awful lot about brain cells.
Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor.
But there is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It’s a very simple one, so simple that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic distinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and “the world.” Between, if you like, the virtual and the real.
I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t.
Or, to put it another way, they will not know “computers” as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The idea of a device that “only” computes will perhaps be the ultimate archaism in a world in which the fridge or the toothbrush are potentially as smart as any other object, including you. A world in which intelligent objects communicate, routinely and constantly, with each other and with us. In this world, there will be no need for the physical augmentation of the human brain, as the most significant, and quite unthinkably powerful, augmentation will have already taken place postgeographically, via distributed processing.
You won’t need smart goo in your brain, because your fridge and your toothbrush will be very smart indeed, enormously smart, and they will be there for you, constantly and always.
So it won’t, I don’t think, be a matter of computers crawling bug-like down into the most intimate chasms of our being, but of humanity crawling bug-like out into the dappled light and shadow of the presence of that which we will have created, which we are creating now, and which seems to me to already be in the process of re-creating us.”
William Gibson
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“My father was shot and killed the day after I was born. He was in St. Louis, Missouri, at the time and I am forced to assume that things did not go well for him there. I am forced to assume a great deal about my father: that he was tall, that he shaved against the grain, or that his death was tragic and undeserved–and while I have never been one to give in to superstitions, I am also forced to assume that somehow he knew he would never live long enough to see me alive.
For instance, he took me to a baseball game when I was still in the womb. There is a photograph of my mother leaning back uncomfortably in Tiger Stadium, a baseball cap propped at a careful angle on her stomach. This seems, to me, the act of a man who had serious doubts concerning his ability to survive the nine months it would take for his son to be born.
My mother never explained why my father had been shot or by whom, which even as a child I regarded as strange–a strangeness which was complicated by the fact that when I was thirteen years old my mother was abducted on an unannounced, impromptu trip to Niagara Falls and was never seen again.
My family was full of stories like that: dubious suicides, sudden disappearances, the police always suspecting foul play. An uncle would vanish only to be found mangled in farm equipment miles from home, a cousin would run away, turning up weeks later with her wrists slit in the cargo hull of a ship bound for South America. It was as if our family tree had been written in invisible ink, names and branches disappearing as quickly as they were written.
Even things that were attached to our family by the simple means of possession seemed doomed; pets would burst into flames, appliances, fresh out of the box, would eerily fail to work.
I remember watching my Aunt Loyola one summer afternoon as she plugged a brand-new blender into the wall of her cream-colored kitchen and held down the button marked pulse. She listened intently to the unnatural whirrs and clicks as the blades refused to spin and then, suddenly, as if the hum of the blender’s failing was the sound that marked all our dooms, she burst into tears.
Six months later she was struck and killed by a rust-colored Buick in the parking lot of Blessed Sacrament Church after Saturday night mass.
These deaths, of course, were difficult to grow up around and to this day when I leave my apartment it is not without a certain amount of consternation. I see vans with tinted windows, crop threshers and wood chippers placed inexplicably in the middle of busy streets; there are suspicious sounds, angry looking strangers, reckless people everywhere, all bent toward some yet-unknown harm–and at these times, when I see the moment coming, streetlights flickering out the second I step under
them, the moment of my certain, untimely death, I tend to think of my mother and father in terms of fate and possibilities.
I think about the possibility of a foul ball hitting my mother in the stomach that day at Tiger Stadium and subsequent miscarriage. I think about my father dodging the bullet meant for him in St. Louis and beating his assailant within an inch of his life. I think about my mother going over the Falls in a barrel, narrowly escaping abduction and explaining her story to rescuers after being fished out of the foaming waters and pried out of the barrel; I see her, standing on the deck of a stunned ferry, damp and breathless.
My mind drifts and the moment passes and then I`m never dead–and all at once the idea that the world is a history of sad and preposterous deaths seems almost comforting.
What happens after that can be different. Sometimes afterward the moon looks big or there’s the faraway sound of a train or I might hear a dog bark or locusts so loud it hurts.”
Seth Fried
LIE DOWN AND DIE
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“…like all artists they live so profoundly in illusion that gradually their lives grow illusory.”
Steven Millhauser
CATHAY
________
“I’ll tell you this;
no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”
Jim Morrison
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“Technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.”
Joseph Campbell
THE POWER OF MYTH
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“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
Marcus Aurelius
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“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
William Blake
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“He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.”
TAO TE CHING
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“Poetry is a metaphorical language. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.”
Joseph Campbell
THE POWER OF MYTH
________
“I think I missed something, but I’m not sure what…”
Thom Yorke
DAWN CHORUS
________
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“But this is an age that judges everybody so harshly through the lens of identity politics that if you resist the threatening group-think of ‘progressive ideology,” which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, you’re somehow fucked. Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.”
“Here’s the dead end of social media: after you’ve created your own bubble that reflects ONLY what YOU relate to or what YOU identify with, after you’ve blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you’ve created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture. Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else’s shoes— to view life differently from how you yourself experience it— is the first step towards being NOT empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they’re resisting.”
Bret Easton Ellis
WHITE
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“The only person who never makes a mistake is someone who does nothing.”
Albert Einstein
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“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
Raymond Chandler
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Donald fucking Trump:
Hate him or love him…
there has NEVER been anyone or anything in global popular culture as divisive as that man’s scowling orange face.
Just mention his name and light the fuse-BOOM! – TNT
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“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
Ernest Hemingway
THE SUN ALSO RISES
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“New York is a city that will be replaced by another city.”
Rem Koolhaas
DELIRIOUS NEW YORK (1978)
*and from what I hear about NYC nowadays compared to when I lived there circa 2004-2007, it has been replaced…
_________
“I is somebody else.”
Arthur Rimbaud
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“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”
William Gibson
NEUROMANCER
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“Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself.”
Bob Dylan
ROLLING THUNDER REVUE (film)
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RESIST
CULTURAL
HOMOGENIZATION
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“The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.”
ALTERED CARBON
Richard K. Morgan
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Vast open rice fields
An immense sea of deep green
Wind song and silence
(From the Japan Haiku series) THB3
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“Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further…”
JOB 38:11
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“Take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough.”
Richard K. Morgan
ALTERED CARBON
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“I don’t want more than I have-therefore I have everything. It’s the economy of enough.”
Paul Theroux
UNDER THE WAVE AT WAIMEA
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“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
ULYSSES
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“ ‘ I’m a foreigner, you know. ‘
‘ This city is full of us, isn’t it? I’m one myself. ‘
‘ Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind. ‘
‘ Maybe with good luck, we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home. ‘ “
Wes Anderson
THE FRENCH DISPATCH
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“Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?”
Stanley Kubrick
EYES WIDE SHUT
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You can’t win an argument when there’s no logic whatsoever. And when you think about it, you can’t really “win” an argument in any sense, because by its very definition, any argument is just plain stupid and a colossal waste of time and energy. A clash of differing opinions that will likely never properly blend. He says/she says—-we say/they say….oh, who fucking cares?!? Life is too short for that shit…
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“How many times do you have to be burned before you respect fire?”
Nikita Khrushchev
(Speaking of Germany after two world wars)
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“The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first, and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.”
Charles Bukowski
POLITICS IS LIKE TRYING TO SCREW A CAT IN THE ASS
_________
“A good death only comes after a good life.”
Hiroyuki Sanada
(playing the role of Shimazu Koji in
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4)
_________
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(The following are all haiku by me; Basho has got nothing on me, HA!)
SEASONS OF CHANGE
Bright winter morning
A cold breeze blows through bamboo
Music of the wind
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Blue sky and white clouds
And cherry blossoms falling
Spring is upon us
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Green summer rice field
Blue river reflects the sky
A perfect picture
_________
Vast colorful land
Trees of red, yellow and brown
Feelings of sadness
THB3
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_________
It’s always the same
If you let them, they’ll kill you
A slow death inside
_________
I am a bad sheep
Different from the big crowd
They cannot change me
THB3
(About corporate culture in today’s pathetic & homogenized world)
_________
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Seriously, there are so many things that could happen next. Your guess is as good as mine. Or is it?
………………………….
Tom Henry Brooks 3
THB3
Japan
February 3rd, 2024
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