Peter's Blog

The butterfly’s life span is about 2 weeks

Its sexual intercourse lasts 1 second.

A human’s average life span is 65 years

Human intercourse (Kinsey) pleasurable for males, so-so for females: 5 minutes

The ratio of a butterfly’s life span to a human life span is 1 to 1,755

It follows that the butterfly’s intercourse is equivalent to 1,755 seconds in human terms, or 29 minutes and 15 seconds, a very respectable, and presumably pleasurable, sex life.

Word association puzzles

“Wordlings” is a mental game of word associations in which certain pre-defined words get connected through an association string. For instance, in the puzzle “from Toe to Garage” we can create the following solution (association string): “Toe, tow, -truck, Garage”.

The usual format for the puzzle is:

From (word) ______ to (word)  ______ via (word) _______ and (word) _______

The object of the puzzle is to complete the association chain in as few intermediate words as possible, while observing the following rules:

• The first and last words (From-To) must remain the first and last word of the solution, but the other words (Via-And) can be arranged in any order.
• No more than two successive words can be used from the same topic or from an existing expression. For instance, after Sun and Light you cannot use Rays, but could use Brigade.
• Word associations can be synonyms (Sun-Orb), homonyms (Sun-Son), expressions (Sun-Dried, Sun-King), proper names (Sunkist), or any word that reminds us by its sound or meaning of the previous word.
• Only whole words or names are permitted. Two words may be combines, e.g. Good-as (gold). The association can also be to part of a word, e.g. Good-as – Gold-water

Though any word or name can be used, it makes for a more interesting puzzle (and elegant solution) if words that usually go together are given as the From and To, e.g. “from Bad to Worse”, and then acquire unconventional associations in the solution, for instance, from Apples to Oranges could yield: Apples, Macs, Mac-Carthy, Pinko, grapefruits, Oranges.

Examples:

1. SICK to TIRED, via BEAR and GRIN

SICK joke laugh GRIN,

green forest

BEAR hug, pug

dog- TIRED.

2 LENOX to MONTREAL via CAR, FOOD and CUSTOMS

LENOX china Chinese food fast CAR -port

CUSTOMS export Expos MONTREAL.

A newspaper folded 100 times is thicker than the known universe (over 2.6 billion light years).

The thickness of a single newspaper page is only 0.0000001233 miles, yet by the time you make your 100th fold the paper’s thickness will be:

(5.87849981 × 10¹² miles) x 2.6 billion

As I lose my eyesight

I learn to see,

As I lose my hearing

I learn to hear,

As my memory starts failing

I notice what’s happening around me,

And as my fingers lose the nimbleness they once had

My mind conjures up its own fingers,

Nimbler than the ones I once had.

I can’t run as fast,

(I can’t run at all),

But slowness gives me time.

I shed the crust of old labels of things

And the things themselves emerge

This is the gift of old age -

Permission to leave the familiar and safe

Behind.

As my clock runs down

And the inevitable looms bigger

Every day

To keep doing what I have already done,

To keep thinking what I already know,

To keep walking in my own footsteps,

Bent and regretful,

Is a crime I will never have a chance

To regret.

Santa Barbara 2/15/10

Alice Keck Park, sunset.

As a music student long ago I learned a basic truth about change. The first steps in any gradual change tend to look like the opposite of their destination. We were working on playing a crescendo, a gradual increase from very soft to very loud, and like all students, as soon as I saw the sign for “crescendo” I immediately got louder. “Do the opposite” suggested my teacher, “When you see the word crescendo think soft”. It seemed paradoxical but it worked.

I believe that the human race is in the first phases of an epochal crescendo, an “Ascent of Man”, to paraphrase Darwin, that will eventually lead to our transformation into a much more ethical and cooperative species. We turned a corner, unexpectedly, a few hundred years ago, after a continuum of horror that lasted unbroken from the earliest dawn of our species, some 100,000 years ago. A few hundred years on such a time scale may truly be referred to as “in the last few minutes”, and the changes as “baby steps”. But small as they are, these steps are irreversible, and as such signify a sea change in the course of our cultural evolution.

When a fundamental shift on a very large time scale occurs it is easy to miss it. Things tend to continue in their familiar patterns for a long time. Consider the generations upon generations of hunter-gatherers that continued to live as before, side by side with the nascent farmers near them. Had anyone suggested to these hunters a world without wandering, in which they would own land, value money, and wage war with a professional army, they would have thought the idea ridiculous. Likewise, we are too transfixed by the familiar unfolding of human barbarism around us to notice subtle changes that point in an opposite direction. Plotting the trajectory of these changes can tell us where they and we are headed.

Consider the abolition of slavery. Slavery is as old as humanity. The practice of enslaving members of rival tribes as the legitimate spoils of war, goes back to the dawn of humanity. The New Testament condoned slavery and slaves were the bedrock of the economies of the Greek and Roman Empires, and, until recently, the American South. Here was the clearest expression of a belief that held that some people are not fully human and therefore could be deprived of the basic rights and dignity we expect for ourselves. The almost universal abolition of slavery in a relatively short time is one of the first global shifts in belief systems ever. It is a significant first step in accepting humanness, regardless of race or origin, as a fundamental criterion in our morality. The racial genocides of the 20th Century can be seen as a reaction to this trend, a desperate last gasp of the old trying to fend off the new.

The demise of slavery coincided with another, even more significant, demise, that of superstition. Superstition, that virus that has infected the human spirit since humans walked the earth is finally dying. You may have missed the vital clues by focusing on Christian zealots waiting for their Messiah to appear, or on the Muslim fanatic who can’t wait to  meet some heavenly virgins by blowing himself up, but the signs for the beginning of the end of superstition are there for all to see.

Consider the following.

When the Tsunami recently hit an Indonesian island. The victims did not offer sacrifices to their angry God, but pleaded for international aid. They did not blame the catastrophe on their sins, as their ancestors would have, but instead berated their government for not providing adequate detection systems to warn of imminent maritime earthquakes. When a mother in the poorest African country has a choice between the local witch doctor or a UN Aid agency’s clinic, it is the clinic that wins every time. Most people on earth have accepted the notion that diseases are caused by germs, not by God’s punishment for some sin (a notable exception is Pat Robertson, who still believes that AIDS is Jesus Christ’s response to immorality). No one on our planet believes anymore that slaughtering some cow would affect the weather, and fewer people dance naked under the full moon to improve the harvest.

Of course superstition is very much alive in the world. We are talking here about the initial steps of a trend that may take centuries to reach its full potential. Humans are innately fearful, and because they are conscious of the fragility of their existence, superstitions continue to thrive. But the dramatic decrease in superstition, especially as it relates to acute survival issues, is the crucial step of no return. Once a rational explanation for a natural phenomenon has been accepted and a technological solution for it adopted there is no gain in returning to a superstition that is less effective. It serves as an example for other long held beliefs. It may not immediately erode the power of the local Shaman, priest, or Ayatollah, those traditional peddlers in human fears, but given time, and as the examples of rational solutions multiply, the decline of superstition is inevitable. When “What works and what doesn’t” eventually replaces “What would Jesus do”, the human race will have finally, and for the first time, deserved the term civilized.

A third aspect of the dramatic shift I see in the world is the very rapid destruction of tribalism. The xenophobia that has been the hallmark of clans, tribes, and nations, is another of the ills that has always plagued humans, and it often went hand in hand with  dehumanizing and superstition. One of the ways in which tribes have always ratcheted up the fear and hatred of others was by creating myths and ceremonies, bonding mechanisms, intended to distinguish the members of the tribe from the “other”, the enemy. One of the most reassuring features of the new global economy is the rapid destruction of these separative local folklores. This last statement is deliberately intended to raise the blood pressure of most people in the arts and humanities, who instinctively abhor the replacement of quaint local cultures with the monolithic, impersonal, and crassly commercial non-culture of MacDonalds, Levis, and Starbucks. I disagree. At the core of each indigenous folklore is the separative statement: “I am like the rest of my group, and you are different. You don’t belong!”. It is the foundation of the kind of hostility, competition, and continuous warfare, that has been the dominant feature of the human race since it started. Tribalism may be cute and good for tourism, but it is deadly.

Now consider as a contrast the statement behind MacDonald’s slogan “100 billion Sold”. It’s the most inclusive egalitarian statement imaginable. It says: “Whatever your color, creed, or national identity, step right up. We want your money!”. It is crass. It is ugly. It is unimaginative. But it does not necessarily lead to tribal war. In fact quite the contrary. As people start seeing themselves as the same as everyone else, as the tribesman in Outer Mongolia recognizes the Levis on a visiting Chinese as the very same as in his own local Wal-Mart (yes, they have one in Outer Mongolia), the two of them have something in common. If people look alike, they’ll start thinking alike, and a less divisive world may be taking its baby steps on the most trivial and mundane aspects of life.

I will be the first to admit that the “global culture” envisaged by the executives of the multi-national corporations, who are the prime movers of globalization, is bleak. It is a flat, homogenized, soulless world. But when you want to eradicated a disease, and tribalism is a disease, you may perhaps have to go through a period of ugliness. Art and beauty may have to wait a while. When they finally emerge they will be the expression of what links us as humans, not what separates us as members of this or that exclusive club.

As for the lost cultural treasures of the ethnic diversity of the past, their place is in the Anthropology departments of the world’s museums, along with the tools of killing and destruction that they generated.

So in closing, The world as we witness it today is no better on the whole than it was yesterday. But the seeds of a more humane, a more compassionate and cooperative, and a more civilized place have been sawn. It is for us to recognize these seeds wherever they show up, and to nurture them by applying rational solutions to people’s problems wherever we can. If we are patient and diligent, our descendants at some distant point in the future may temper their pity for us with some gratitude.

Technology, Meditation, and the Future of Human Evolution

Man-made technologies and tools, from the wheel to the cell phone, are extensions of our sensory and motor organs. Because they develop and get assimilated so rapidly, their effect on human development far exceeds Natural Selection as the driving force of our species’ evolution. This “Directed Evolution” differs in many ways from the biological process of mutation through procreation. For one, it is intentional. We know the desired result before we know how to achieve it. This is quite different from the natural process in which mutations are random and their usefulness determined only after they’ve come into being. Secondly, it propagates through the species by learning, not procreation, and can therefore be assimilated instantly by the species as a whole. The third, and biggest, difference lies in the fact that while Natural Selection is a competitive process between members of a species, Directed Evolution is the exact opposite. It is a process of species-wide cooperation. Each scientific or technological advance in human history is based on many previous explorations and discoveries.

It is important to bear in mind that this artificial “Directed Evolution” does not completely replace natural evolution. It replaces only the creative aspect of it, the process of coming up with new features. The other, far more crucial aspect of  Natural Selection, which determines the usefulness of mutations for the survivability of a species, is still wholly in the hands of Nature.

The laws of Nature are unambiguous when it comes to new features. The laws make you either more successful or extinct. Success or failure are measured by primarily three considerations:

-       Does your newly acquired feature give you an edge over adversity,

-       Does it maintain or disrupt the delicate balance of the system in which you happen to live,

-       Is your new feature economical, the minimum needed, not an extravagance.

[Nature abhors frills. If a Robin needs for its survival to be able to fly away from a predator to a nearby tree it will not develop a capability to soar like a hawk. If it did, that trait would not be passed on. But if for some reason it was passed on and adopted by the entire species of Robins, Robins would probably go quickly extinct.]

Here in a nutshell is the problem with Directed Evolution: How do you ensure that each new artificial evolutionary step continues to comply with the laws of Nature? Humans have wrested from Nature the power to create evolutionary mutations and quickly disseminate them across the entire species. But we do not possess the power to determine which artificial extensions of our senses and limbs are necessary improvements and which are extravagant frills, which new capabilities maintain the balance of the system within which we operate and which disrupt it. In other words, we lack the framework that will guide the process of our mutations and ensure our survival.

What we need is a way to second-guess Nature’s verdict before it is handed down.

Directed Evolution is an artificial process born in the human mind. It therefore makes sense that the framework of assessment and control over the desirability of each and every “mutation” would also reside in the human mind. Unfortunately, the human mind has not been part of the Directed Evolution of our senses and muscles. It is practically unchanged since our Neolithic past. We may have to wait millions of years for Natural Selection to catch up. Although we have computers to assist our brains in their processing capabilities, and digital storage devices to enhance the memory and retrieval ability of our minds, the ability of our consciousness to perceive the “bigger picture” of our place in the cosmic scheme of things is no better than that of our cave dwelling ancestors’.

The result is a vast discrepancy between capability and control. We are a species with enormously evolved capabilities controlled by a mind of a Neolithic hunter.

The big question then is how can the mind artificially evolve itself to bring it into alignment with the other artificial “mutations” of Directed Evolution, and thus become the guide, the overseer, of continued technological developments. It is a little like attempting to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.

Fortunately, there exists a body of research and development of just such a process of the mind evolving itself. It has been cultivated over millennia by various Eastern meditative practices. This valuable body of knowledge is hobbled however by the fact that it comes to us entangled in religious and superstitious belief systems that make it both suspect and not useful to Western science and technology. We do no better on the Western end of the story. Our own Cartesian mechanistic world-view has relegated consciousness to the sphere of spirituality where it can safely be ignored by science and technology.

The Dalai Lama in his book “The Universe in a Single Atom” raises this problem, and has suggested the need for a hybrid science that would involve expert meditators from the Buddhist tradition working together with scientists, engineers, and psychologists from the West. He views both disciplines as incomplete without each other.

I believe that such collaboration would yield several far-reaching evolutionary results for the human species:

-       It would create technologies designed to improve human consciousness

-       It would raise the average human brainpower considerably

-       It would provide useful mechanisms that would turn the human mind into an effective guidance system for our future technology-based evolution

-       It would blur the distinction between what is scientific and what is spiritual and further reduce superstition as a force in human behavior.

It is important to remember that to qualify as an evolutionary leap, and advance should occur in all members of the species, not just in a selected few. Is such an evolutionary leap in human consciousness even possible, and is it realistic to expect it to occur within a short span of time?

I believe it is. Rapid almost instantaneous species-wide adaptation is the hallmark of Directed Evolution. In less than ten years the entire human population of the planet has been transformed through the use of cell phones for example. You could say that the communicative range of human vocal chords has been extended umpteen fold within less than a decade.

There is no reason why a similar evolutionary leap in our consciousness could not occur, provided that we discover how consciousness works. This would require a new breed of meditator-researchers who through a mix of practice and observation would map out the effects of meditation “from within”. What exactly happens in the brain during meditation? How does one part of our mind influence other parts and produce the clarity, heightened perception, and sense of well being, meditators call “enlightenment”?  Once we understand how the mind can control itself, once we have quantified “enlightenment”, engineers will have the data they need to simulate these processes. Techniques which took decades to master could then be artificially induced instantly, and effects that benefited just a few exceptional people could be readily available for everyone.

I envisage a small portable neural sensor/disruptor, about the size of a cell phone. Let’s call it an “N-Light”. The N-Light would simulate the function of the “observer” mind, the part of our consciousness that watches itself during meditation. The device would be sensitive to changes in our consciousness, especially states of mind that interfere with clear thinking (such as anger, fear, desire, or daydreaming). Using algorithms derived from the analysis of the experience of expert meditators, it would intervene to disrupt these habitual mind patterns, essentially “clearing” the mind, and allowing it to operate on a higher, more effective, level of consciousness. The effect will be seamless, probably unnoticed by the user. What will be noticed though will be the side effects that naturally accompany this mind-clearing process, a sense of contentment and equanimity. The user will in essence enjoy the benefits of a meditative state without having to meditate.

But would people buy such a device? More importantly, would all people want to buy it?

It depends. Most people probably don’t care about equanimity or even improved brainpower. What people want is to get rid of their afflictions and to be as happy as they can. Any device that promised to alleviate pain and induce happiness would be successful. So it’s the side effects of the process that will sell the idea. Here is a “happiness drug” that operates externally, an electronic device that doesn’t need to be regulated by the FDA, that’s legal, and cheap. If it’s proven to work, who could resist it? Think of the cell phone. It’s the same story.

And the human brain? Well, once the habitual Neolithic responses are continuously interrupted and replaced by states of mind that are clearer and more pleasant, the human brain will start to adapt. New habits will be forming, new ways of thinking. And new thinking patterns quickly influence behavior. Within less than a generation the human race will have found the guiding mechanism for its Directed Evolution. The gap between what we can do and what we should do, will have narrowed.

Those fleeting glimpses that some people get while meditating, of the unity of all things, the sense of belonging, the freedom from fear and aggression, will gradually become commonplace. Those engaged in the inventing and development of new features for our species will gain a better capacity to see the bigger picture, and choose their projects accordingly.

The next generation of artificial mutations will be guided not by a desire to compete or destroy. Neither will it spring from the impulse to do something just because we can. But rather it will be guided by the simple question: “Will this improve our odds against adversity without disrupting the system we live in?” If the answer is “No”, no matter how brilliant the concept, the idea will be simply abandoned. Just like the Robin’s ability to soar.

And our survival as a species will have just gained a leg up in the ongoing battle against looming extinction.

Lenox, 5/23/07

“Use up your talent with no regard to outcomes

Feel your passions fully even if they are never fulfilled”

Talent is what you are good at. Passion is what you love. You may be good at something but not particularly passionate about it, or you may have a passion for which you are ill suited.

A talent gets expressed in action. Don’t act on it and it shrivels and dies, and with it dies part of your creative spirit.

A passion, on the other hand, requires no action. It is all about feeling something fully and presently whether acted upon or not. All too often though we stifle our passions when we can’t act on them. A faithful husband may have a passion for another woman and out of loyalty to his wife, or fear, or obedience to a moral or a religious code, kills his passion. Not acting is fine, but killing your passion so you won’t act isn’t. It kills part of your spirit. And when you do it repeatedly, gradually there is no passion left in your heart. Without passion there is no vitality, no ability to immerse, to let go, to be willing to be swallowed up and swept away by something greater than us.

Keep your passions intact even if you can’t act on them, and you got a key to the secret of eternal youth.

Talents are different. Often we are not even aware we have them. In fact our best talents come so easily to us we don’t even notice them. Conversely, we may spend most of our lives engaged in activities for which we have little or no talent. An artist friend of mine, a truly exceptional talent, spends most of her days promoting her art, an activity for which she lacks even the most basic skills, needless to say with little results.

There is however a built-in risk in putting our talents into action. No sooner do we act on a talent, that we also  start attaching goals to it. A goal could be intrinsic to the work (“I want it to be better. I want to create a masterpiece”), or it could focus on some reward that will be derived from the talent (“I am decorating my house so it’ll appreciate in value, not because I am good at decorating”).

Setting goals for our talents actually limits them by undermining our creative spirit. Goals tend to restrict the free flow of ideas, the risk taking and spontaneity without which there is no discovery. Ultimately they choke off our imagination. Setting goals will also foster feelings of inadequacy (“I’m no good”), guilt (“I should work harder”), and despair (“I am wasting my time, I’ll never make it”).

Any time you tie your talent to an objective you diminish it. A talent is an end in itself, not a means to an end. A talent is a deep expression of your creative spirit.

I once knew a retired accountant with a terrific talent for money, numbers, and organization. He told me that on the day he retired he vowed never again to set eye on a spreadsheet or a ledger, thus banishing his best set of talents to a dark and distant basement. He was a wealthy Floridian, with a condo in Miami and a summer home in the Berkshires. Other than for his daily golf game and the occasional concert, he spent most of his time in front of the TV munching pretzels. He struck me as a bitter, lifeless man, simply twiddling his thumbs waiting for death. With talents deactivated, all creativity and vitality were gone from him. A far better strategy would have been for him to acknowledge his talents (even if he hated his accounting job), and go and apply them elsewhere, say mentoring a kid with math, or speculating on real estate, even gambling in Vegas would have been better than vegetating in front of the TV

Talent and passion are expressions of the deepest core of our spirit – our creativity and vitality. If you need money go get yourself a job, any job, but never sell your talent and your passion. You may even find a job that uses your talent. That could be a bonus. If it lights up your passion, all the better.

But you may not be so lucky. If all you can find is a dreary, meaningless job, it’s no big deal. Consider everything you do outside that job as your real life. Consider your job as a few hours a day you must take out of life to make a few bucks.

Next time someone asks you what you do for a living, answer: “I follow my spirit, I act out my talents, I feel my passions as deeply as I can, and oh, yes… in my spare time I do this job that pays my bills”.

That’s how I’d like to live my life.

October 14, 2007

There’s something delicious in swimming against the current, in doing things the hard way, in reinventing the wheel. I can’t help it. That’s the way I’ve been ever since I can remember myself. I remember my piano teacher writing out clever fingerings in one of my pieces that she knew from experience would make the playing easier. What did I do when I got home? Tried every conceivable other fingering I could think of, including some preposterously ridiculous ones, only to return, defeated, to the fingering she suggested in the first place.

In Maurice Maeterlinck’s fairy play The Blue Bird, the children travel all over the world looking for the magical blue bird that would fulfill all their wishes, only to return to their bedroom and realize that the blue bird was in its cage in their room all along. Was it a wasted journey? A Yoga guru I knew once said that you can never return exactly to the same spot no matter how hard you try, because by the time you returned the spot will have changed, the time will have changed, and you will have changed. The moral in Maeterlinck’s story is that it is precisely the seemingly futile journeys we take with all their attendant experiences that allow us to come back to the same spot and see it in a new light.

Taking unnecessary trips, going over the same territory again and again, not minding blind alleys, are not things we look forward to in our business-centered culture. Looked at from the MBA perspective chasing a blue bird is silly enough. Doing it while the bird was in your room all along would be downright idiotic.

And yet by the time I finished my futile exploration of all the fingerings my piano teacher didn’t recommend, I had gained a much deeper understanding of the one she did. Not only that. In the process I became the “owner” of the solution. It was no longer received wisdom, which as we know is no wisdom at all. It was a discovery.

Obviously reinventing the wheel is not something you’d do indiscriminately. You don’t need to replicate the travails of the Wright brothers before boarding a commuter plane to Cleveland, or discover from scratch the process of bread making from the domestication of grasses to the invention of the French Baguette’s hard crust and soft inside. But I have always disregarded the axiom that if someone has already figured out something it’s a waste of time to figure it out again. Wasting time is what I do best. It’s my specialty. And over the years it has yielded not only oodles of pleasure but also quite tangible benefits. Wasting time is anathema to a business culture. Business says: The best route between any two points is the shortest. Right? Wrong, even if everyone agrees.

Next to received knowledge majority opinion is the greatest enemy of thought. There is something fundamentally screwy about trusting people’s judgment based on statistics. We all know how unreliable our judgment can be. But put together millions of the same flawed judgments and suddenly you have proof that something is right, or good, or desirable? It is this kind of loopy logic that tries to convince us to but “best sellers” or watch high rated TV shows and movies. It’s also the logic behind the justification of exterminating Jews in Nazi Germany (which most Germans agreed on), or the rightness of eating hamburgers at MacDonald’s (which billions of people also agree on). All people not only can be wrong, they are most of the time.

We avoid scrutinizing that which is “known”, that which has already been proven, so as to save time. Businessmen love efficiency, and in one way or another we are all businessmen. We are taught early on that results are all that matters. Living life with as little reevaluation, reinvention, trial and error, and going down blind alleys is the goal. It is a life with as little thought as possible. It is the life of cows — chew the cud and wait for the milking (or the slaughterhouse).

We are a practical people. We are rational and efficient people, or at least we tell ourselves that we could be. The old Hippy adage “Stop and smell the roses” has long fallen into disrepute as the kind of juvenile naiveté we have all outgrown. But even those who agree to succumb here and there to a weekend of rose smelling would never condone such wasteful pursuit for precious workday hours. Workday hours are for productive activities, things people are willing to pay money for. Nobody will pay you for smelling roses.

OK, maybe smelling roses all week is something for nursing home residents. But what about equally futile and unproductive pursuits like writing music no one wants or painting canvases no one will ever buy, or sitting in a cave and meditating for 12 years?  I could go on. What if you decided to reinvent the transistor (from scratch), or make a life’s work of copying Cezanne, or (as I am doing now) write articles which try to figure out the validity of doing such useless things as writing articles that try to figure out the usefulness of useless things, as if no one has ever entertained such an idea, and I was the first to make these observations.

These are the kind of useless and harebrained things that artists tend to engage in. Not artists that sell canvases for 3 million dollars mind you. Those are artists by name only. In fact they are purveyors of investment opportunities, who should rightly be listed on the NASDC in the commodities (or futures) section. No, I am talking here about the 99.9% of artists and inventors and street philosopher-writers and self-published poets and YouTube video troubadours (all no-good shits as one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters called them) who will be lucky to make $300 on any of their work. It is these “useless” artists that inspire me, because I feel a deep kinship to their total disregard to the tyranny of efficiency and the other edicts of our marketplace dictatorship.

[Digression:

By the way, if you find the convoluted and drawn out structure of my writing annoying, please accept my apologies. It is the residue of having had German as one of my childhood languages. German is notorious for stringing together verbs, nouns, and adjectives into monster length words, and has a way to put sentences within sentences with the noun only hinted at and not revealed until some half dozen lines have gone by. German is not an efficient language. You need a lot of patience to read German. It is a language that can exasperate English speakers used to our telegraphic and purposeful English construction. As I said, we are a practical people.]

When you spend months and years tinkering away with some quest, some inquiry that may help you find beauty, maybe truth, maybe just a solution to a nagging question or puzzle, and when you stay up nights figuring out the best way to communicate what you have found to other people, you are engaged in the most meaningful useless endeavor there is.

Art is useless. Being useless is subversive in a utilitarian culture like ours. Useless must be discarded as quickly as we can and stowed as remotely as possible. That is why artists are dangerous rebels even if their work is not rebellious. It’s being an artist which is both a threat and an inspiration to a utilitarian society like ours. Art is useless because it can not be used for anything else. Useful art, art that can sell clothes, or sweeten TV commercials, or make investors rich, is not really art but a commercial product. I have no problem with artistic products, I just leave discussing them to economists.

Art is useless because its only usefulness is in its own existence. Just like us. You could say that human beings (and any living being, or for that matter non-living beings) are also useless works of art. Our existence is our purpose. We are all beautiful, profound, exasperating, amazing, awe-inspiring, disgusting, revelatory, scary, hilariously useless works of art. Abstract art.

Whatever else we are, we are not efficient. Every moment of our lives is the result of a succession of trials and errors (often more errors than trial), blind alleys, detours, and endless repetitions of the same deeds, words, and thoughts. We spend most of our lives backtracking, retesting, reinventing, and discovering anew marvels or horrors in old patterns. Yet when we come to define how we should be, what the ideals of our culture are, it’s all about taking the straightest shortest b-line to thoughtless goals and objectives. The way we want to see ourselves is the polar opposite of the way we actually are. You could say that we are works of art being mangled by some crazy MBA Frankenstein, who is trying, unsuccessfully, to streamline and rationalize us in his efficiency machine.

The fact that art today attracts more interest and participation than ever before is a symptom of a deep-seated knowledge that there are values other than the ones we live by. Art and artists are symbols. They represent a possibility of valuing things differently, of giving ourselves permission to run free, to make mistakes on purpose, to follow wrong turns with a glee, to be curious about silly things, to venture into dark unknowns for no reason, and mostly to chase blue birds.

None of which will garner you a corporate job (or any job for that matter) or get you elected for office no matter how insignificant. But in some hidden corner of our soul we know that given half a chance we too would love to chase blue birds.

My friend Kent, a sculptor, has been painstakingly carving a giant tree trunk only to find out that he may have wasted three months on something a new computerized machine could crank out in an hour. I asked him if he felt foolish? “Not really” he said, “That machine would’ve learned nothing in that hour”. We are attracted to artists like Kent because even if we ourselves don’t seem to have the courage, or as some would call it, stupidity, to do things the hard way, the long and inefficient way, we know that there is a forgotten truth in what he does. I believe that even those generally think of artists like Kent as “flaky” or impractical, are just voicing their unconscious jealousy of people who access so easily what the rest of us have buried so deep.

To me “useless” is a badge of honor. It indicates the willingness to go against received wisdom, against the tyranny of efficiency. It is a call to go down well trodden paths for the millionth time and discover them anew, to spend your time on pursuits whose rewards may not be monetary or even rational. Useless is the ultimate rebellion against consumer culture. Reinventing the wheel is the ultimate avant-garde.

Santa Barbara 3/21/09

Welcome. If you’ve wandered in here by mistake hit that Back button on your browser and spend your precious life doing something more useful than reading my scribblings.

I have not the foggiest idea why I write, why I upload it here, or for whom. I guess it’s like a dog peeing. I am marking my virtual territory.