probabilityfields

The major newspapers around the world had all covered the story, but it had barely earned a slot in the bottom half of the front page and some papers had relegated it to the fourth or fifth pages. On television the story was given even less coverage. The local network news stations had all waited until the end of their broadcasts and announced it the same way they had years before announced the outrageous accusations that the 1969 moon landing was faked. Cable news had first ran the story in segments that were always named something like “Health Watch”, but after the first day you could only find it in the scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen: “Sweedish scientists annunce that dead bodies still feel pain”. Typographical errors were common in these scrolling marquees whose content had to be changed by the minute by an over-worked intern.

Instead, the news of the week had been mostly devoted to the leak of a White House Memo that hinted at the disdain of a junior senator by a senior staff member on the eve of important legislation with international impact. The cartoons and editorials reflected the story’s prominence with one cartoon depicting the White House staffer sweating and nervously attempting to hide a giant elephant from the entire Senate whose members looked on, angrily tapping their feet. Throughout the week there were no cartoons about the scientific breakthrough from Sweden.

National Public Radio had a penchant for such stories and did not hesitate to assign its best audio essayists to the story. But for the first few days they only focused on how the scientists came to their conclusions, how the experiments had gone on for twenty years and how the scientists, still uneasy with their findings, had secretly enlisted other scientists all over the globe to corroborate the results before they were ever published.

Dr. Ingrid Lennartsson said in her speech at Linkoping University, “We feel at this time that is in the best interests of humanity that this discovery be announced to the world and that our society must accept this knowledge and reflect it in all of our customs and rituals surrounding the event of death.”

On Sunday morning most church sermons ignored the discovery. But that afternoon on NPR the first thoughtful commentary on the subject was broadcast. Dr. Hermann Lizst of the Cornell University Department of Religious Studies had recorded an essay that did not give the discovery full credit, but treated it merely as a “what if?”.

“If our bodies could remain conscious of sensations for hours or even days after the moment of death,” he said, “then we would have a moral obligation to drastically alter the way we handle our dead. Autopsies, embalmings, perhaps even burials and cremation would be out of the question. But how would we treat the deceased? How could we ensure a painless afterdeath? How could we know how long a person will be able to feel pain after death?”

…to be continued.

I got off work and went home, got in a tiff about dishes and food taking up space in the fridge with my roommate so I really needed that cigarette on the way into Austin. I was going to a party at a friend’s new duplex. There were sure to be many people there I didn’t know, but it wasn’t my only option for the night.

Every year my fraternity throws its invitation-only bacchanal called Masquerade. The doors are locked at midnight and no one else allowed in. Then the guests are divided into groups that move from room to room, each featuring a different theme and a drink, but the party eventually dissolves into chaos, divided into those that are puking and those that are getting laid.

At my first two Masquerades I wavered between the distinctions, but my last two were disasters. I spent both nights taking care of freshman girls whom I knew only barely as much as they knew their limits. Two years of getting vomited on was enough to scare me away.

By contrast, the party in Austin was small. The UT game was over and people were thinning out. Old people. I managed a few decent conversations, mostly about sports, the Astros, Vince Young. But when you’ve got a six-pack of Negra Modelos and eighteen Camel Lights (I gave two to a homeless man on the way), you don’t need people to talk to you so much as look at you.

After the better part of that six-pack, things went more smooth. A couple tequila shots, a glass of Taittinger Champagne, many more cigarettes and everyone is your best friend or worse enemy all at the turn of a phrase.

Our hosts kicked us out at one and we were debating a trip to a bar when we remembered to set our clocks back. We had an extra hour of drinking. We jumped in the car and at the behest of Chrispy from the back seat turned up the confused imagery of Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova”. As we turned to roar out of the neighborhood I kindly reminded a couple of pedestrian costume-clad girls to set their clocks back. “Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball…”

The Gingerman was the obvious choice. Laid-back environment, good music, and a wall of taps that spewed forth the one thing that either proves God’s existence or man’s triumph over him. Unfortunately, the bar tender informed us that they would be closing at the “old two” not the “new two”. But we ordered drinks and Tony and Chrispy sparked up a discussion of the movie “Saw” with an older gentleman at the bar, while Jennifer and I went for a smoke.

I turned around to the bar’s customers and asked them all to come with us which drew strange looks from the hipsters at the pool table, but the couple on the couch agreed to join us if I’d provide the smokes. It turned out that these folks, Amanda and Jeff, were quite nice and we all agreed to move on to the next bar shortly after settling Tony and Chrispy’s argument, which had now escalated into “Saw” versus “Seven”.

“We’re going to drink somewhere until ‘new two’ even if it’s at Oil Can Harry’s,” a gay bar. But I was informed that they even had a line to get in. Once we left though we realized that Fado, the rowdier neighbor of the Gingerman was in full swing. It was Guinness for the rest of the night.

Their patio was packed with costumed lushes and the music was loud enough to give us drunks excuse for yelling at each other. I had no costume but while I watched Tony climb up between two stone walls with a leg on each one in the back alley I noticed a ball of tinsel which I quickly placed on my head and fashioned into a wig. I danced around and sloshed my beer and ended up getting close with a few girls who took my tinsel and wrapped it around themselves. I flung a long strand around a guy who seemed to be with the girls but he was having none of me.

The music stopped and a voice told us to finish our beers. We left but the tinsel stayed on the ground in big mess. I shouldn’t have been driving, but I made it back. I was so drunk that I knew trying to sleep would be sickening so I walked laps around my house, up and down stairs, drinking water and eating a hot dog bun. I cleaned dishes, emptied the garbage, scrubbed the counters, anything to keep my blood running and keep me awake. After I pissed twice I figured I was good. I felt excellent today.

Who’da thought they’d lead ya, back here where we need ya! You can now (once again) access this site at probabilityfields.com. If this surprises and confuses you then you must not have paid attention to my last post and I’ve got no time here to explain. But just in case I’ll have tautologist.com redirect back here so either way you won’t be able to escape my site.

And now, Deep Thoughts…
So I’ve been reading tons of Freud lately for my Psychoanalysis: Desire and Domination course. Our culture is submersed in Freud, we quote him, call out people for their “Freudian slips”, and even analyze each other and ourselves using ersatz psychoanalysis. In psychology and psychiatry though, he’s more known for how wrong he was about so many things. Still, Freud’s notion of the unconscious may be the most important discovery of the 20th Century, and I think it has a lot to say to us now.

In this “third blow” to “human megalomania” he puts all our desires in the unconscious, from the lowest parts of the ego to the highest. Even morality and the search for truth all find their roots in the unconscious. Ever since Descartes we’ve thought of ourselves as ego cogitos for whom free will and access to truth through reason are vouchsafed. But Freud disabuses us of all that.

Before Freud, Nietzsche denied the existence of capital-T-Truth. For him, it was all interpretation. Nietzsche’s future artist-philosophers would one day create truth, knowing that it was not necessarily true for anyone else. Freud forces us to acknowledge that we only find something true because we have an unconscious cathexis, or focus of psychic energy, to it that rewards us with pleasure when we think it, see it, or act on it. Meanwhile, the conscious ego insists that it is in control.

Morality too comes into question. What is moral for me may not be moral for you and there is no chance for appeal to God or transcendental moral laws. This is the way Nietzsche wanted it. For him, it was the slave morality that had named everything that was not a slave “evil”, making morality artificially universal, i.e. everyone is subject to the same rules that define good as weak, suffering, slave-like.

In The Sense of Beauty George Santayana attempts to correct the universalization of beauty. For Santayana, beauty is a feeling of pleasure within a subject, that occurs in the presence of an object. The subject objectifies its pleasure and projects it onto the object. This objectification of beauty has led to the idea that beauty exists as an entity within objects. It follows that beauty is mistaken as universal. But beauty does not arise out of the object, it occurs within the subject as an experience of pleasure. Universal concepts of beauty work only as normative concepts that constrain beauty and delegitimize a plurality of accounts of what is actually a deeply personal experience. Beauty is not capital-T-Truth, but my beauty is my lower-case-t-truth.

With Freud and Nietzsche, morality and truth can be plugged into Santayana’s beauty. A deeply personal experience that should not be constrained by universal, rational, and normative claims. But how much agency can we hope to have in creating truth, as Nietzsche wants, if the psychic structure of truth is unconscious, as Freud insists? The job of psychoanalysis is to enable the conscious ego to gain more control over the unconscious, and perhaps it will be the only tool that can achieve Nietzsche’s dream.

This also gives us new ways of thinking about something like racism. It’s hard to think about it consciously and pin-point exactly how it works. Thus people deny that they are racist or even that racism exists in places where it obviously does. Recognizing that racism is ultimately unconscious can lead to a new method of analyzing and “treating” society.

Psychoanalysis could thusly be applied in numerous ways, but the most immanently pragmatic action would be to come to terms with the fact that your conscious ego is not “master of its own house”. By admitting this first fact already the veil of repression is ruffled. Freud may have shown us how little control we have, but his project was always the ego’s freedom within a healthy society. Perhaps a new reading of psychoanalysis can finally provide us with an invaluable tool for reconciling society with the individual.

Music?
I’ve been downloading tons of free music over the last couple of days, and most of it was legal. I’ve been hovering vulture-like over these sites:

• Better Propaganda
• Salon.com’s Audiofile
• Insound
• 3Hive

I just download everything and throw it on my iPod, pronounced [eye-pud], with the first syllable taking slightly longer than the last, much like David Cross saying robot [roe-but]. No, I don’t walk around wearing my iPod with a smile that says to everyone else, “I’m experiencing a completely different environmental reality than you, no honking horns, engines revving, brakes squeeling, or even birds chirping, streams flowing, leaves rustling, breeze gently moving the tiny hairs in my ear, simply because I’m hip and had the disposable income to prove it,” though I’d really like to. I only use it in my car. Unconscious guilt.

My Music?
Some freshman kid has been hanging around the Sigma house and bringing an accordion and violin with him. I talked to Jarred, a drummer, about putting together a band that mixes Texas music (Tejano, country, blues, Czech, German, Zydeco) with the Velvet Underground. He told the accordion kid and I finally talked to him this weekend. His name is Jeff. We might get together this Sunday to play some music. Honestly though, I’d like more than anything to be able to just drive around and listen and talk about music with some people who want to make it. I’ve missed that since my high school band days. I’ve really got to start playing in a band again.

probabilityfields.com?
For those of you who remember, I used to have a site at that address. I really liked that address and had it for two years. Those were good years too. Unfortunately I neglected the site and the domain expired and was offered back to me at no less than $100. I got tautologist.com instead. It’s not that I don’t like this address, I just really miss the old one (Jeff James does too). But today, by virtue of the absurd, my faithful patience was rewarded with the return of probabilityfields.com to my open arms…at a reasonable price. I guess I’ll just have both addresses direct here. Ah, more confusion for you little people.

Coming Soon! Snakes On A Plane

Apparently this is a serious movie in which Samuel L. Jackson foils the plot of an assassin who tries to kill a witness by letting deadly snakes loose on a plane. The name of the movie is the best part. And of course fucking Keenan is in it. I guess Kel’s been getting the shit-end of the stick since the Goodburger days.

For screencaps go here.
And my caption for each screencap at the above link:

1)
Flight Attendants: SNAKES?!
SLJ: That’s right. Big fuckin’ snakes.
Flight Attendants: Ooh…

2)
White Dude 1: Gee, first class sure is awesome! I like this tingley water.
Flight Attendant: There are better things than the sparkling water; free coke, no snakes, and for a dollar you can fuck me!

3)
Keenan: Aw, hell no, is that a scratch on my bling bli–MOTHERFUCKIN’ SNAKE!

4)
White Dude 2: Sn-sn-sn-sn-snake…
SLJ: Relax, that’s just a hard-on. Here, let me taze it and see if it feels good.

5)
White Dude 2: MOTHERFUCKIN’ SNAKE!