A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

— Walt Whitman

Everything has a price. In the hegemony, this is a mantra that reinforces what we call our independence, something we are taught to accept as an axiom for the basis of Reason. Rational thinkers, therefore, understand that in every human interaction there occurs a transaction, and in that transaction there are considerations of value, cost, risk, desire. The consequence is simple: If something passes from your hands into mine without a consideration of these things, it is not a gift; it is a maneuver. Charity too becomes a bartering of favors; love an exchange of vows only for as long as they are valuable to the barterers.

Stepping into the kingdom of the Underworld, Persephone is likewise fearful, but you should not pity her. If you are like Persephone you are like a daughter of the freest goddess, unbound by any commitments except a commitment to yourself. Into your cupped palm the god of the Underworld has placed three pomegranate seeds, and the rule is that if you taste of the Underworld you must remain its guest, you may never return to the surface, you may never again be careless and free. Thus it is so that a gift becomes a manacle, and a daughter of the freest goddess must decide whether she should exchange her freedom, which is valuable, to become a queen of the Underworld, which is risky.

The myth of Persephone is not a myth of freedom: the myth of Persephone is a myth of compromise. For even though she lives among the shades of the dead for part of the year, Persephone emerges to renew the seasons, a daughter of the fall and the summer and the spring.

He held there was no difference between life and death. "Why then," said one, "do you not die?" "Because," said he, "there is no difference."

—  Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

There are rooms in the houses of our minds built up on borrowed life and memory cemented in time. We have boarded up these rooms as best as we can, shabbily, first with one lie like hollow wood, and then with a second in a curved nail, blow after blow, until the sound of the boarding too is sealed off and what lies within is immersed in darkness.

You prop up a new piece of furniture there, then you set the table, hang up a frame, plug in appliances, the hum of power like the hum of life. You believe the house is yours and you move to and fro. A new lamp, a red curtain, a stack of books, a wastebasket: these before the door. Tomorrow will come quietly if you want it too.

You talk to Jerry in E7 while you wash the laundry. A tailor named Aroush will do a top-stitch. By signing below you acknowledge you have authorized your employer to withhold the amount specified in Section 2 from your wages.  You appeal the surcharge, you see a movie Downtown, you smile, then you return home, though you emptied the whole bag, all your personal effects, the parting gifts, the handful of nails, the silhouette of a dress, a thousand pounds of black hair, a wave of flesh, dark eyes.

You breathe in and slide your back against the door, and open your eyes.

The room is getting dark, the days long.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of your enemy and wondered at the hatred in his heart? You can only make this mistake once. As children, we all make this mistake once. We look up at the sun in its disdainful arrogance and we realize we are incapable of perceiving it fully.

Like hatred in a gaze, your eyes kiss the halo of the sun; your heart, pink and fresh as a worm on cement shrivels and blackens; and your soul, like the dew of the earth carried on your shining back dissipates as a hiss of smoke in a stony crack. You and I make this mistake once, and only once. When we emerge from that crack, innocently, slowly, with a love for spring, we lay ourselves bare on the manmade rock after our toil in the earth is done.

And then we are no longer children.

Every morning on the sidewalk I pass a smiling, toothless man who holds a newspaper out to me and says "Hello," because he speaks no other words I speak. Every morning my heart is fresh and new and I do not look up at the sun. Every morning I descend into the darkness of the earth, into the long segmented trains, into the day's toil as the sun passes over the earth. And every morning in the mirror of my waking, my eyes kiss the halo of the sun and I am whole.

Thus she is worse off who meets the gaze of my enemy and mistakes a worm for the sun.

Sexuality will always be a subject of discussion among your enemies. Somewhere along the way, you will have to reckon with the power of sexuality in the hands of the culturally affluent. If you are unaware of its power, you may already be marginalized.

All human children are born unto one of two kingdoms. We are minted on one of two sides of the same coin when we are delivered into the world. And the Hegemony proper contains within it these kingdoms, on the one side a kingdom of men, and on the other side, a kingdom of women.

I will talk of the hegemony in time. It is a word principally meaning domination. You are born a human child into the hegemony of men and women, and more specifically you are born into the hegemony of man or woman. This dichotomy, like many others, gives the hegemony its strength, makes the hegemony whole, endows the hegemony with dominion over men—male or female—and creates of them a homogeneous society with laws and rites and customs.

It is not possible to move through the homogeneous world with a clear conscience when the very circumstances of your upbringing do not empower you to conform. If you were never escorted into the world of men by a man, then you can never find your own way into his world. So too, women, in a similar way, are trained by the hegemony to desire the ideals of their would-be companions. For only on the precipice of one world can you look into the other longingly and with desire, and thus only within the kingdom of man can you find passage into the other. And yet the secret wisdom that a man who is a teacher of men imparts upon his students is the hatred of other men. Thus men will hate you for your orphanage.

Walk with me awhile as orphans along the road between these two kingdoms, love in your heart, hand in my hand. We will knock on the doors until they let us in, you to the one, and I to the other.

And thereby love at each doorstep we will leave.

Science is supposed to be about understanding the physical world. Scientists are people who make assumptions only when the evidence presented to them suggests a way of testing their perception of the physical world. Therefore scientists are people who do not like to accept things on faith alone.  Science, therefore, is not about understanding those things which some people claim are not a part of the physical world, if such things exist. Like the relationship economics shares with ethics, the one has nothing to say about the other. And so with science, it is the same: whatever there is to say about the things that are not part of the physical world, there can be no scientific claims, because those things are ineluctable.

And yet this claim is false.

In one interpretation of the double-slit experiment, you and I are one and the same individual, and our distinctiveness as human beings is an illusion of the persistence of high probability. At every moment in time, in between the blinking effervescence of the universe-as-superposition, there are countless decisions being made about you and me in this indeterminate space, though determinists will still insist that you do not have freedom.

In another interpretation, there are no decisions. We must accept on faith alone that you and I are an infinite series of individuals, and like the Nude Descending a Staircase, we are but many perspectives of the same event, recast over and over in the mind. Every event is an infinity of events, irreconcilable with itself. In this interpretation we are like a destitute man on his knees, consumed by the regret of the choices he made in life and shackled to the present by his inability to change the past. The only difference between the man and you and I is that we made both choices, in two different universes at the same time.

In the film K-PAX, the alien Prot tells Dr. Mark Powell that the lifecycle of the universe is that of its expansion and its contraction, in what we know as the Big Bang and the Big Crunch. He says that it is important to live our lives correctly the first time we live them, because when the universe contracts again, everything will play out exactly as it played out the first time, and the cycle will repeat itself, over and over again, for all of eternity.

And yet Prot's message is supposed to be a message of hope.

Interpretation is a creative process. The act of interpretation is a tautological act, a rebuilding of the world as it exists after one's imagining. Liberal arts students study interpretation as a scientific process, as if in the space of language there exist a series of patterns to be unearthed, but interpretation is a creative process, a self-affirming process, a process of stitching patterns into the stories of our lives so that the story makes more sense to its participants, and the experience of it is made more bearable to its sufferers.

The truly positivist atheists among us understand that they could be wrong about everything they cannot affirm and everything they have actually affirmed because they rely on an empirical account of reality as a basis for the foundation of their beliefs. I have said this before. For these atheists, if events are just that—events caused by other events, with very few terminating in human intention as a first meaningful cause (since "meaning" lies in human intention)—then everything is open to interpretation. Yet interpretation as we have seen is just a way of imposing one's fantasies upon reality. The thing is there before you because it is as it is, self-caused. When God says, I am that I am, God is reassuring us that He cannot be interpreted. His response to Moses provides a foundation for the context of faith, its language, its discontents. If you are Moses standing on the rock, therefore, the problem before you is how you feel about your situation if this foundation were to crumble.

In a machine, all the mechanisms that make it work are accounted for, part for part in the gear train. A machine is something that moves energy from A to B with relentless accuracy. A machine is a symbol for the transference of a process, seemingly self-caused. The water recedes from the shore and you have a found a stopped clock on the beach as you have found the wreckage of a boat and the bodies of its sailors.

You have found machines.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

— Robert Frost, "Design"

Too much has been written on the subject of angels. In Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, Proginoskes is a cherub with a hundred wings and masses of eyes. He and the Teacher and the human girl Meg must save her younger brother, Charles Wallace Murry, from a malevolent cosmic force that intends to un-Name Creation.

The nature of angels is like the imagination, because you begin with an empty fiction that fits on the surface of a pin and expands to fill the entire universe. People who take an opposite view of these things, like L'Engle, see angels among us, placing upon our crowns each moment of our salvation.

Have you ever considered the real force of this possibility, if it were true in principle? I don't think it will be quite as you imagined. If you believe in destiny you also have to believe that your angels are less like cherubim and more like seraphim, that the crown they place upon your head is like a vice-grip, that the deafening beat of their wings are in fact the sounds of motors, wound up long ago, with only enough force to ferry you wherever you were destined, but no farther. In such a situation there is little room for imagining, because the design was laid out, whether by intention or by mistake, before considerations of your station in life were contemplated.

The angel of intention stands over you like a shroud. In one hand she holds a thunderbolt, but her other hand is chained behind her back. We think of the key, each in his prison. Thinking of a key, each confirms a prison.

Dear Friend,

Marshall McLuhan wrote a book called The Medium is the Message. He documents the five principles of technology. At one point all technology folds in on itself and has the opposite effect it was created for. An automobile is created to give you freedom and mobility, but taken to its extreme, the streets filled with cars cause a traffic jam trapping you in immobility.

That is because the medium is there to support itself, rather than its message or purpose. Something that was once designed to give you freedom, taken to its extreme, makes you a slave of its industry.

Take governments for instance. I've always thought it curious that the U.S. has in its Declaration the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Buddha said to "cultivate peace, joy, and bliss." Not happiness. Happiness is an illusion attached to the material world. The pursuit of happiness is a trap to get you caught in the cycle of the material world.

If you pursue happiness, you become miserable. Because you are never filled. When you pursue the material world, your heart and mind are not occupying the spiritual world.

But if you embrace the immediate challenge of your true calling, even when it involves difficulty and self-discipline...

Happiness occurs as a by-product.

The world is an illusion. It operates backwards than most are conditioned to believe.

Yours, Akemi

— David Mack, from Kabuki: Alchemy

Much later, he would conclude that nothing was real. Whether it might have turned out differently or was predetermined is not the question. The question is the story itself and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell. As for Quinn, he was thirty-five and both his wife and son were dead. As a young man, he had written poetry, plays and essays. But quite abruptly, he had given up all that. A part of him had died and he did not want it haunting him. He now wrote mystery novels under the name of William Wilson. Quinn no longer existed for anyone but himself. No one knew his secret.

More than anything else, what Quinn liked to do was walk. New York was a labyrinth of endless steps and no matter how far he walked, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Each time he took a walk, he felt he was leaving himself behind. By giving himself up to the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape thinking. All places became equal, and on his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. This was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

from City of Glass — Paul Auster.

When Searle writes about the homunculus in the Chinese Room, he is writing about human understanding and behavior and artificial intelligence. I, on the other hand, could never aspire to write about something that fundamental. When I bring up Searle in this conversation with you I would like you to consider the possibility of a human being standing in place of the machine, in a situation not unlike that which is depicted by Searle in his thought experiment.

Such a human being possesses the kind of understanding which we deny the simple symbol-processor, but she is still not human. She has an elusive, crippling self-awareness, like we do. She possesses the same troubling capacity for self-reflection that gives us pause. She exercises that all-too-familiar recursive inclination to compare new sensory input to input recorded within her memories. She is like us in every respect, but even so, she strays from the human strain in a way that is alien to the vast number among us who go through the motions of our lives propelled by one desiring impulse and another.

When you find yourself in such a room as she, the symbols are as meaningless to you as they are to the machine. Yet you can process them anyway, just like the machine can, and the world is none the wiser. You are the homunculus and the situation imagined by Searle at the same time, and even though that fact contradicts your momentary experience, the perception from the outside is still the same: that of understanding without knowledge.

And this is all that matters in a world unaware of we machines.

The most common text we read is often the most overlooked and consequently the most troubling. There are many such texts we encounter from day to day, although oftentimes the reading of the text by passersby is an unconscious event, like the acknowledgement of a racist stereotype, the enactment of subtle misogyny, or the practice of homophobia. But what I am talking about in this case is a literal text in the field of production. In my line of work, I encounter this sort of text every day and my task always is either to lay it down or to expunge it. This text is intended to be meaningless, yet history informs us that it was salvaged from a still more ancient text that at one time, in its original arrangement, was meaningful.

No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.

I have a problem encountering this text every day because it is such a difficult thing to refute semantically or theoretically. It is useless to invoke the names of the countless philosophers who have combated this line of reasoning before as one would invoke the names of saints in exorcism or sprinkle the tears of angels from a vial of salt to protect oneself from the encroaching of demons. When I am having a conversation with you, you are inclined to believe that I am having a conversation with you, and that it is not the case that I am having a conversation with myself and only using you to achieve that end.

Extend to me the wrist of your right hand so that I may kiss it, and in so doing you may witness me kneel to press my lips against your wrist. Those are my actions. But what can I know of your left hand behind your back, which I cannot see? And what can you know of the arch of my brow as I bow my head beneath you?

Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.

Know thyself, and that thou art mortal.
But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal...

And thou shalt begin to spin round on the hub of the obscene ego
a grey void thing that goes without wandering
a machine that in itself is nothing
a centre of the evil world-soul.

— DH Lawrence

It is not possible to be an opportunist without also being an egoist. The vast majority of egoists in the world believe that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, even though the world as it exists is best suited for people of their disposition. This is because egoists, by their very nature, are incapable of contentment.

The problem is not that egoism in itself is evil; the problem is that egoism by itself is evil. This slight difference in the ablative is of crucial importance in the affairs of honest men. Yet egoists do not agree that there is a distinction to be made; instead, they argue, everything we do is an act of the will, and the only action an undamaged person is capable of taking is the kind taken in accordance with his desires. And desire, as we know, is the fountainhead of self-interest.

Psychological determinism of the flavor imagined by egoists is unconvincing to me. To be an atheist is to be similarly unconvinced. It is not the case that both the damaged person and the atheist do not accept a premise out of stubbornness; in fact, a form of reason (or irrationality, depending upon which way you examine it) compels them to reject the premise before them, no matter how they feel about it. But even to speak of rejection as if it were an act is unfair. What the damaged person and the atheist possess is not dis-belief, but a lack thereof. When you apprehend some notion and it fails to impress itself upon you, you do not come away prideful of that fact, whether or not the notion was originally beautiful or compelling to you. What you come away with instead is a form of longing, and among the militant atheists in our fold, a stinging disdain for the power of skepticism. Yet both the damaged person and the atheist accept the fact that despite the unfalsifiability of any such premise, we may very well be wrong in practice, and like all other egoists and believers be unconsciously compelled by desire and faith.

I said before that at one time I believed in a theory of virtues, as if to imply that I no longer possess a belief in the theory. The actual state of affairs, however, is more complicated. Is it possible to hold some belief and yet contradict it with one's behavior? No, because if one's behavior contradicts one's beliefs then one is just lying to oneself about what one believes. But what happens when the situation is reversed? Suppose I begin by behaving in some fashion that confirms my belief, but secretly I possess an intense suspicion that my belief is false. Have I done an injustice to myself? Can it be argued that I am delusional? One can only guess at the cause of the underlying disease when one suffers from the symptoms of idealism.

A man who looks into an abyss sees nothing and experiences nothing. His experience is an absence, and when surrounded by emptiness, silence becomes his companion. Silence too represents the void. Like the immense gulfs of space between the most distant stars, silence is a vacuum, a foaming lattice of virtual particles, each emergent pair separated into the real and the unreal with relentless uncertainty. The definition of silence is straightforward and we understand it well, but the ontology of silence is something else entirely. What is unsaid is as tangible to the psyche as what is uttered, and so silence shimmers with anticipation, like the surface of a still abyss. The torment of silence is the torment of desire.

When a man looks into an abyss, he is seized not by the sheer terror of being alone, but by the sheer terror of confronting himself in the dark. There is a moment when you cannot recognize the outline of your hand before your eyes.

But when you are there at the bottom of such a chasm, you are worse off if you encounter a stranger.

A worn dress cannot be cherished. Under the sunlight, the colors of such a dress are remarkably vibrant, the effect of the fabric against fair skin striking, the array, in conjunction with complementing adornments, a celebration of the form. A woman retrieves from a dimly lit room such a dress as we have described for the period of its use and then returns it to the darkness in the same motion.

Making a decision in the darkness is sometimes difficult. In a dimly lit room, it is possible to confuse the striking color of a dress with shades of gray. And in so doing, it is often the case that a new dress is selected, and then another, until in a wardrobe of choices the decisions we make become a series of disguises. But a woman is beautiful who wears a new dress, and it can be argued she is happy for the time she wears it.

Imagine a statue in a long field that has stood at the edge of a village since the first villagers were capable of endowing it with meaning. At one time, such a statue represented the virtue of all men. When the villagers were killed and their civilization lost to trespassers, the statue came to represent the virtue of the strong over the weak. When nature overcame the trespassers and washed away their civilization, many thousands of years later men of erudition respected the statue for its endurance and contemplated its provenance.

Now the statue is worn, its details weathered away by the ages, its foundations cracked and its stone crown shattered. The statue overlooks two lovers in a field, and while fenced in by modernity it casts a shadow over the promenade.

Stand in this dimly lit room with me and ask: What is a new dress but momentary happiness? What is a worn statue but virtue in a field?