DAVID EAGLEMAN SUPPORTS THIS BEATNIK'S IDEAS

David Eagleman

Absolutely nothing to report. Nothing. Last two weeks has been busy with non-writing tasks and around the house duties. We are looking into reflooring the condo, but laminated flooring may be not possible due to Condo Community Regulations. I finished another short story, "The Feels Of Homer". Like it. Recent reading has been Incognito by David Eagleman, an update on neuroscience that supports the theory we humans are as much robots as gorillas are. I accept that I'm a robot. It's that or evolution is a lie, and I know that's not true. Thus the human species has gone from believing it's the center of the solar system and in command of its own behavior to being just another instinct driven animal in the vast Cosmos. I find that an intriguing proposition. Nothing to fear. Now reading Rather Outspoken by Dan Rather.

BEATNIK BASHED ON THE INNER EAR ROCKS

Facebook tells me on an irritatingly regular basis that readers of this blog are craving to hear from me. The memoir is coming along very slowly, nearly not at all. I have far too many dizzy days, and when those days are upon me, not a creative spark appears in my synaptic self, and he's the self who writes for me and which my conscious self recognizes after the fact. As no doubt you all know by now, if you keep up with evolutionary biology, the conscious self exists as about five or six constantly changing pieces of data which is all the human animal can retain in its consciousness at any one time. Consciousness is a flickering moment to moment existence at best, and when one is dizzy on a regular basis, consciousness becomes an even more fractured phenomenon.

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Why am I dizzy and what can be done about it? Decades ago, I consulted an eye ear nose guy, and he said the little hairs in my inner ear, awash in and reacting to the fluid sloshing around in there are getting flattened and worn down with age and inactivity. He said it would only get worse. He was right. 

I continue to send out pieces of writing and get regular rejections. I fear my work is out of date. I truly like my 8 line poetry, specially the simplest clearest expression of my thinking, but clarity is not in fashion. And that's okay. 

BEATNIKING A PATH TO SUCKCESS

My oft stated goal in writing the futuristic novel Manning (working title) is to see if before I die I can get someone other than myself to publish a book I've written. I'm talking success, here, with a capital, SUCK! For publisher, film maker and for me.

In The Moral Animal, author Robert Wright uses Charles Darwin's life to demonstrate that human animals share values with other species. He points out that good monkey Darwin, for all that his ideas shocked the world, was very careful about his approach to relationships and to expressing his ideas. Darwin held back for 20 years announcing the facts he'd gathered because he didn't want to destroy his wife's faith, and he was choosy about his friends. As Darwin's influence and friendships grew among the intellects of his time, he slowly dropped friendships with people who were not as well known as he. Darwin did not consciously reject them. It just happened. The more he was caught up in success, the less time he had for many old friends. (Recall Woody Allen's Stardust Memories when an old neighborhood pal comes up to Sandy Bates and asks Bates if Bates remembers him? Pow!) 

On occasion, I've been in the presence of writers of distinction and have felt out of place with them. It's as if their experiences with financial success put them automatically into an experiential realm I'm not acclimated to. My reticence created my half of those situations. Let me tell you, if I hadn't had to deal with my personal issues before I could tackle the world of success, my life would have gone swimmingly different. I can see the experience for writing a successful book getting strong in me just as age is slowing my mental reflexes and memory. Will I reach the other side or fall through a crack in time?

BEATNICK WRITER QUIBBLES WITH THE GENIUS OF TOLSTOY or THE MYTHOLOGY OF FEELINGS

I was innocently reading War and Peace when I came across the following:

It seemed to her [Natasha] that everybody knew about her disappointment, was laughing at her, and pitied her. With all the strength of her inner grief, this grief of vanity intensified her unhappiness. 

[Natasha loves Prince Andrei and can't understand why he hasn't visited in three weeks. Andrei is talking with his disapproving father about proposing to Natasha.]

Tolstoy labels the poor girl's anguish as "grief of vanity". In that passage, he reveals why everything we know about human behavior and how we moralize about it is obsolete. Take away language, strip Natasha's feelings free of the moral epithet, vanity, place the poor girl in a troop of monkeys where we all came from and, then, understand the truth of her grief, or what Tolstoy labels as grief. 

Natasha's feelings, her pain, and her imagination about what others think of her is the evolved process by which all animals in our human troop find our places in society, either low down or high up or somewhere in the middle. Emotions, beyond our control, are mechanisms which move us to find and accept our places in the human monkey troop. Nothing noble about her feelings or reprehensible. Emotions just are. Tolstoy's moralizing is his monkey brain justifying his own processes of finding where he belonged in the human troop, and, interestingly enough, look how his feelings of "shame" caused Tolstoy to free his peasants and to unsuccessfully try and be like them, but he couldn't escape his own genius. Fortunately for me, I've got no genius to deal with. Only endless shame. Good movie to watch about Tolstoy is The Last Station.

PPS: For all my understanding of the human condition, I continue to write as of old, too old to change my ways, all the while asking, "How will any of us write if we no longer mythologize our feelings?" Perhaps we won't.