Lyrics: Science-Fiction Double Feature

Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.

I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills
And I really got hot when I saw Janet Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes
And passing them used lots of skills
But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride
I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.
I wanna go, oh-oh, to the late night double feature picture show.
By RKO, oh-oh, at the late night double feature picture show.
In the back row at the late night double feature picture show.

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source: lyrics

film: imdb

Book Review: What is Intelligence? — Douglas Hofstader's Book Godêl, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

   

The Constellation Orion

In Douglas Hofstader's book about music, mathematics and artificial intelligence, Godêl, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, he mentions briefly some requirements for intelligence: learning, creativity, emotional response, sense of beauty and sense of self. Hofstader argues that if indeed this is intelligence then a computer would have to be able to do more than play chess or compute π x many times after the decimal point in order to be considered intelligent.
Are Intelligent Machines A Possible Reality  

    I must say, I am intrigued that one day intelligent machines will be a reality, whether or not my hopes are my own idealistic flights of fancy, or the influence of too many Phillip K. Dick novels and Ridley Scott movies has had on my adolescent mind is hard to tell. I am still fascinated sometimes by the prospect of artificial intelligence: a sentient duplicate of a human being that can indeed be intelligent — it is a long way in coming, but my sci-fi mind is nevertheless intrigued by it, even though the massive work that will have to be done to even get to that stage is immense. Some even doubt it is even possible. On one side there is the argument that it is possible, the ability to reproduce human natural intelligence, whereas on the other side of the argument is the contention that machine learning is not the same as how human beings learn. While I wait for the day we can unlock the minute, complicated structures of the brain and apply them to artificial structures, I am more intrigued by the requirements themselves — for humans.  Each one poses a unique set of questions in of itself, not only in its reference to artificial intelligence but the question of human potential itself, how we possess and reflect the myriad facets of what it means to be human.  It seems we have not exhausted the possibilities of human intelligence, let alone an intelligent machine.
How Can You Measure Intelligence?

    Take learning, for example, the first on Hofstader's list.  Learning seems to be an obvious component of intelligence.  Usually, it is learning that we use to gauge human intelligence.  We measure people up by the scores they make on their GED's and SAT's.  Our schools are super-charged with advanced placement courses and gifted classes; schools have quiz bowls and Jeopardy! is a popular show, not to mention Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble.  In fact, a machine beat humans in a recent bout of the minds in Jeopardy! last year.

     The human lost at that game. The computer had been able to mimic natural intelligence to such an extent it beat out the human brain. The human mind is incredible. It can know so much / and in many ways is superior. The machine beats us in sheer computational power. But the human brain knows short cuts. But sometimes we short circuit (excuse the pun). My godmother marveled to me on the phone how she has been hooked on Jeopardy!, canceling dinner plans to watch the "Human Encyclopedia" respond to every answer correctly.  She lauded the "Human Encyclopedia" who swept Jeopardy! for six months straight with his correct answers, only to lose to a Final Jeopardy! question about H & R Block.  Although we marvel at this man's learning achievements, secretly we are convinced that it is merely a ploy to bolster ratings and that perhaps Mr. Jeopardy! winner was happy with his taxable 2.5 million dollars and decided to go home, content.

    A computer can store Jeopardy! data too — easily spit it out when appropriate.  Have you ever tried to beat the computer on an electronic quiz game?  It's not easy.  I still haven't been able to beat the computer at checkers, let alone chess.  But, computer learning is different than a human's capacity to learn.  A computer can only store a string of data as a series of 0's and 1's.  It cannot learn anything that has not deliberately been stored into its hardware.  This was the limitation of the Jeopardy! computer. It was only able to cull from date stored in its database and it was not connected to the internet. A computer dictionary cannot come up with an adjectival form of the word moon, for example, if it isn't already stored there.  A human can.  We can surmise that the word lunar means "similar to the moon" or "referring to the moon." The ability to take what she knows to form new ideas and concepts.  Lunar.  A human can stumble upon lunar and possibly derive its meaning just from the word itself, based on what she has already learned.  A human possesses creativity.  It may be silly to think we thought the moon was made of green cheese but it is this erroneous thinking that built our imaginations to know for sure. Galileo was wrong — the moon is not made up of larges seas as he had thought the dark spots on the moon were, but that insistence to know is the catalyst that eventually spurred scientists to build more and more powerful telescopes.

    A computer can mimic learning.  For example, Amazon.com seems to learn what kind of books you like, the music you listen to, the magazines you buy.  How does it do that?  I can tell my word processing program to learn a new word, or to even forget a word. But, this is all mimicry.  There is something different about a person learning a new word and a computer's storage of an electronic lexicon. The human capacity to know words, for example, to know a vocabulary is not based on a repository of knowledge stored in the brain. We are both open to the world and at the same time have the ability to process what we learn through our involvement with others through language that does not correspond to the way a search engine query works. It is not like I hear the word "lunar" and then my brain searches for the keywords and then finds it and links it to its definition stored in my brain. How we actually have the ability to think through language is still somewhat of a mystery. To think it is done the same was as a computer is facile thinking.

On Writing: Late Night Post On Practice Makes Perfect

On writing, and why practice makes perfect.

A joy wall we made at school.

Developmental argument: Practice makes perfect. I look at stuff I wrote when I was thirteen and think, "who was that?"

My friend Glenn and I ate lunch in the 
museum café and then saw the exhibit Lifelike.

Retrospect argument: I look at the stuff I wrote yesterday and think, "ain't perfect but better."

Words I tell myself: Experience contributes to the adage practice makes perfect.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Or maybe writing is simply creating several versions of oneself.

Psychopathology of Everyday Life: It is spooky to find something in a discarded notebook with your name inscribed at the top but the contents are alien to your very sense of being.

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Quotation: Lucretius On Childish Fear

"Our life is one long struggle in the darkness; and as children in a dark room are terrified of everything, so we in broad daylight are sometimes afraid of things that are no more to be feared than the imaginary horrors that scare children in the dark."

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Liber Secondus
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Why Public Transit Must Be Integrated in New Orleans

There is no public transportation across one of the longest causeways in the world
source: googlemaps

The Airport is an Island   

   Last Spring I came home to visit New Orleans to attend a friend's wedding. At the airport, I had to rely on my friend to pick me up. There is no viable public transportation link from the airport to the Garden District of New Orleans. It is technically possible but I could not comprehend the bus schedules. Later I learned the E2 — the Airport Express — leaves the airport but takes commuters to the parish line — where Jefferson Parish and Orleans parish meet. From there an Orleans bus goes downtown, but not after 7:00 and not on weekends. I needed to go Uptown, not Downtown. And it was Easter weekend. When I lived in New Orleans I had an apartment next to the Saint Charles Streetcar line. I boasted to my family that I would buy a monthly pass and go to work on the streetcar. While this is technically possible — and my boast was simply because I thought it so green to take the streetcar -- the reality is the wait is long even during rush hours. The car stops every four blocks. While managing the center strip of the street, the streetcar has to manage intersections and very often the conductor would get off to buy a cup of coffee at the corner store. I think every time I did take the streetcar to work I was never late, but the commute usually included me walking to school until I saw a streetcar puff-puff puffing and I ran to catch it — which amounted to me walking ten blocks or more. Once on the car, I saw a student whom I taught, a wiry kid with a penchant for snoozing in my class. I was a high school teacher at the time. I saw him seated on the car bench and asked him if he lived near. He said no. He took the bus from Saint Rose and connected to the streetcar. His route is possible. But it is a rather long ride. He said it took him an hour and a half to get to school. Now I realized why he was snoozing during first period.

The Improvements of the RTA

   Transit in New Orleans is improving. The bus stations now have glossy signage and the bus and streetcar lines have new number indicators showing their routes. The RTA, which is the transit authority that operates New Orleans buses and streetcars, has recently received new management and public monies after Katrina have boosted its ridership and capital improvements. If only the good things that were happening to RTA buses could happen to the rest of the region. I was also happy to see that the city was awarded Federal funds for an extension of the streetcar line to connect the Union Passenger Terminal to Canal Street. It is easy to see how much greater the city would be if it were to continue with such stimulating transit links.
    Transport for New Orleans, a local transit advocacy blog, imagines a city of New Orleans with amazing public transit service. I reproduce the fantasy map here.

This is the City Imagined As it Should Be: Connected!

It depicts a high speed rail connecting the city to the airport as well as a public transit link connecting the northshore to the southshore. Wow. If only this map were reality. While most of the improvements on this map are a far fantasy, it seems to me that there is a surging interest in the city to improve public transportation. First things first. While it may be years before a light rail system is built in the city, it seems to me that there should be at least a comprehensive bus system linking all of the parishes.

North and South Remain Divided

    It is an egregious oversight in public planning that there is no public transit link between urban New Orleans to the south and the suburban parish of Saint Tammany to the north. And as I mentioned above, the region's two urban parishes, Jefferson and Orleans, are linked at only anemic waypoints. I was reminded of this serious missing link during the evacuation of Hurricane Isaac that hit Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in September. An NBC news article reported that middle-class residents have the mobility and the extra income to evacuate on their own while the city's poorer residents must rely on public transit and public shelter to seek refuge. With the economic downturn nationwide, it seems to me that people in times of emergency look to public services like buses to get them to safety.
     The city lacks fundamental transit links between its major population hubs. In 2011 it is estimated that 236,000 people live in Saint Tammany Parish while a combined total of 793,380 people live in Orleans and Jefferson Parish. Not only is there no link between New Orleans and its northern suburbs, there is also no public link connecting the State's capital, Baton Rouge, to either New Orleans or Saint Tammany -- or anywhere else. It is bad enough that during hurricane season there is a major disparity in who can evacuate and who can't -- it is also mind-boggling that the civil parishes totaling the bulk of Louisiana's population cannot make a more concerted effort to link its quickly growing northern parishes with those south of the lake.
   A major reason for the gap is the large estuary, Lake Pontchartrain. The lake is traversable in two spots, one a twenty-four mile causeway linking the city of Metairie to the quaint lake town of Mandeville. Both cities are huge residential areas. The other link is an interstate highway that links Slidell to the eastern side of New Orleans. What this means is if I live in Saint Tammany Parish, stretched out across the shores of the lake, and I wish to commute to New Orleans, I have to either own a car or hail a cab. Most people who commute own their own car. 42,000 cars cross over the double-span bridge each weekday.

The Bubble Effect

     The problem stems from each parish acting as its own bubble. The New Orleans metro area is serviced by six parishes that have no clear public interconnectivity whatsoever. The bubble effect reaches the level of absurdity, for example, when shortly after Katrina, it was discovered that the man-made levees that act as the city's primary flood defense system, are often gerrymandered. On one side of the 17th street canal is in New Orleans and on the other is in Jefferson Parish. Two different entities of the levee board that oversees the system, control what is in effect one levee, but since it comprises two civil parishes the oversight of the levee suffers from severe redundancy. Each civil parish has its own public transportation system, its own levee board, its own public schools, and public library systems. Orleans and its neighbor Jefferson share linking transit lines at few junctions, but for the most part the city is a divided transit and public services nightmare. If I live in Lake View, a neighborhood of New Orleans, I have to take two different parish buses just to get to the mall. None of the parishes connect. Saint Tammany does not have a public transportation system at all. The parish website indicates that there is a transit system it calls goSTAT. But there are no dedicated lines. There is no timetable. Residents have to call ahead of time to request a line. The costs are reasonable. For three dollars (roundtrip) a commuter can go up to ten miles, but over that the price jumps to five dollars, and for trips over twenty-six miles, the cost is eight. But this is only within the parish lines. A commuter living in Slidell, for example, who calls goSTAT cannot call for a roundtrip ticket to the Algiers Ferry or the Union Passenger Terminal in downtown New Orleans. The system is two-tiered, one for rural residents and the other for the parish's urban areas. If I call for a ride, it is a first-come-first-served basis, and I cannot expect transit will be expedited in the case of an emergency.
     A dedicated bus line over the bridge connecting the state's populated northern parishes to the city of New Orleans and its urban cluster seems to me a no-brainer. Never in the history of the state has there been one single public bus that has traversed the twenty-four mile causeway since its first span was built in 1956. To take a taxi from the airport to any city north of the lake costs one hundred dollars. From the airport to downtown is thirty-three dollars.
    It may seem that what I am arguing for is a rather easy problem to fix. A dedicated bus route would boost the interconnectivity of the region. Call it the Lake Pontchartrain Express. It would go from the Lakeside Mall in Metairie to the courthouse in Covington. That's one possible route. A car garage could be built for commuters to park-and-ride. One has already been built next to Macy's, so it seems a no-brainer.
    I think the city has to allow for more inter-parish transit links. It is insane that a trip that would take me twenty minutes in a car would take over an hour by bus. By car, it takes roughly twenty-five minutes to cross the causeway bridge. Thousands of people every day rely on the bridge to allow easy access to work and an easy return to the suburbs. But this option is for those with cars.

White Flight: the Red and Blue represent White/Black, respectively

   White flight is partly to blame. In the 1950s middle-class white people moved from the city to the northern suburbs. Houses were built rapidly, first in Metairie, which was once a flat piece of farmland and swamp, and then crept upwards to the lake towns of Mandeville, Madisonville, Slidell, Covington, and Abita Springs.
    The Not In My Backyard approach prevails. A bus link? No way. The reason given: it will bring riff-raff and crime to the suburbs. This is code. Beneath the fear of crime is the fear of integration.
    New Orleans remains strangely segregated -- but not in ways at first obvious. Public services are funded mostly by property taxes. So areas with more expensive properties bring in more cash which includes more areas outside of the city center than within it. Public libraries are more visible in every parish except New Orleans. Transit is shut off from the rest of the state. It is a miracle that the streetcars are getting re-introduced. But this is mostly because it will boost tourism. When it comes to the people, the reality is the city is left behind.
    The hypocrisy is that on a public level people say they want to rebuild New Orleans. But when it comes to basic public services, the city is cut off. I think creating a transit link on the Causeway would be a step in the right direction.
    1. This link would serve as a symbolic "first start" to connect the metropolitan region.
    2. It would create more jobs.
    3. Not everyone owns a car. People rely on public transit.
    4. There needs to be a regional transit authority that governs the metro area.
 I don't see how the creation of public transit between New Orleans and the North Shore would cause a rise in crime rates. I think the city will continue to decline if it is not given the opportunity to connect to its surrounding resources. The region cannot exist as a bubble. If the tragedy of the collapse of the levee system in Katrina can serve as a fable, then let us not propagate the tragedy by continuing to limit New Orleans when such a simple way to connect the region is possible.
    If my student can get to his school faster, if an unemployed waiter in the Bywater sees a job opportunity in Mandeville — and can get there! — if a tourist without cash for a cab can get to the Superdome if I can take the ferry, the streetcar, and a bus to my Momma's house — any of these ifs would be realized if we just ifED a little more.

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The B Train Don't Ride to the Beat of the Mardi Gras Mambo

A woman peers out the window

on a subway train (near Coney Island).

To be from the South. It's forever. The South is my ultimate frame of reference.

Some Yankee asks, "Why live down dere where it's below sea level?"

Anger is easy to erupt. But the Yanks don't get it.

Riding the B train I realize my heart beats to the rhythm of the Mardi Gras Mambo. All writers know that. Frank Levy taught me that.

It does not help that I start singing, "Mardi Gras Mambo" — a blonde hipster gives me a dollar. 

I admire her Trader Joe's bag.

Hey, I say. We got Winn-Dixie.

And she thinks I am talking about some fucking children's book.

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Cat Set Against a Moving Background

A cat meme is set against a moving background. Best used when under the influence.

Title: Unknown; Artist: Unknown Re-posted from putaindesatan

Original GIF image

Paul of Tarsus on Childishness

ὅτε ἤμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος: ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου. 

When I was a child — I spoke like a child, had feelings like a child, and I had a mind like a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away those childish things.

Paul of Tarsus, First century A.D.
First Letter to the Church in Corinth, Chapter Thirteen, verse Eleven.

Paul of Tarsus as depicted by a statue of him 

in front of the Church of Saint Paul 

Outside the Walls in Rome, Italy.

Paul in this quote from a letter he wrote to the church at Corinth (circa 56 A.D.) assumes childish things are something to move away from, to discard — and secondly, he assumes he has become a man. All grown up. The Greek word for "man" is ἀνήρ which can also be translated as "gentleman". I can imagine Paul wants us to also shed this notion of Christianity as a baby's religion, as something infants do, crying like children to their grown-up silent gods. Paul is a gentleman and assumes his God responds in kind. Paul loved writing letters — and he loved to extoll his own weaknesses as strength. He was a child! He said childish things! Perhaps he pouted when his mother would not take him to bathe in the salty goodness of the sea — or maybe he prattled on like a child in the way children do? But he is a man, now! Paul surely sees children as mewling, puking, and speaking nonsense, having nothing really important to say — as if faith is something only grown-ups do — what children do is make-believe. To have a mind of a child is in Paul's mind to be imperfect — what we mean when we say childish. But Paul informs us that he has become a man — a full-grown person who has evidently discarded such puerile traits such as insouciant idleness and unabashed temper tantrums. I must agree I prefer the mature man to the mewling babe — but I am somewhat suspicious that in a strident act of becoming all childish things are banished.

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Yes, I'm Ignoring You

Just ignore the math! Photo by Peggy Sirota Copyright 1992 AVANTI

EZ Link to the Image (for printing and downloading)

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On the Double Humiliation of Standing Inside and Outside of the Vernacular

 

It's humiliating to speak only in code, only in a punished, subaltern idiom; but it's humiliating to stand outside that vernacular, too, and not comprehend it, and feel its disrespect.

Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation, pg. 151

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — Quote on Conversation

Kirsten Dunst plays the role of Mary in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

The human race is having this constant conversation with itself. Y'know?

Mary in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Shooting Script)

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"Discovering Columbus": New Nishi Art Installation Above Columbus Circle

Nishi's Design for the Living Room

Today in the New York Times there is an article about the art installation at Columbus Circle by Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi. The project, entitled "Discovering Columbus" is sponsored by the Public Art Fund. The New York Times article is worth reading for it explains the various bureaucratic hoops projects like this must go through in order to get greenlit — a process, the article implies, made easier by Mayor Bloomberg's enthusiasm for public art displays.

Evidently, people will be able to enter a specially made structure built around the statue of Christopher Columbus, completely enclosing it inside of a living room complete with sofas and TV (no wifi).

Nishi had done something similar in Basel, Switzerland. He built a temporary apartment on top of the cathedral church in Basel enclosed around a bronze weather vane of an angel:

I am curious to see what the finished room built above the traffic of Columbus Circle will look like.

A similar idea is mentioned in the aforementioned article but I will repeat it: I think projects like this help us to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way. Is that not what art is?

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Quotation: Socrates On Perplexing Others (And His Own Perplexity)

Socrates with folks in Athens in Raphael's painting "The School of Athens"

A quote from Socrates on perplexing others . . .

For I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. 

οὐ γὰρ εὐπορῶν αὐτὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ποιῶ ἀπορεῖν, ἀλλὰ παντὸς μᾶλλον αὐτὸς ἀπορῶν οὕτως καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους ποιῶ ἀπορεῖν.

Socrates, 5th century B.C.

from the Meno by Plato (section 80c-d)
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The Typewriter Question — Does it Help Writers Write?

Does using a typewriter help writers to write?
A steely resolve to write more came in the form of a Brother SX-4000 typewriter I bought for $115 from Amazon. Yes, Brother makes typewriters, from lower-end models that help office workers address envelopes, to high-end models equipped with a floppy drive.

Of course, I did not write this blog post on the Brother machine but I have been writing more. Lately. The typewriter sits on a plain wooden desk. A sheet of paper is loaded into the slot. The last sentence I forged still lies there. The machine is still. It is not asleep. It awaits.

Jonathan Franzen once said he wrote on a laptop with the Internet disabled so he could write focused. The idea is the same — reduce distraction — commit yourself to write, and write only with a dedicated tool. Heidegger is right - we are the tools we use. If I had two computers I would dub one the writing machine and the other the youtube machine.

Writing Seriously
I use the Brother to write seriously. It is my writing machine. It is not the clackety-clack of the keys that helps to fashion a story, but rather the material immediacy of ink struck on paper -- voila -- it is there on a page as if chiseled from rock. I turn to the Brother to write what I know I want to create. A blog post is ephemera — in a way — I am more playful — and less prone to think of what I write on the internet as serious writing. Maybe this is a false dichotomy — but my view on writing blogs on the Internet is for writers to experiment and show off writing. It is instantaneous. With a manuscript created on a typewriter, it may take months to produce a piece whereas a blog post — at the most — takes three hours from start to finish.

A typewriter will not help you become a better writer. But I do find the typewriter focuses me. Every word is a decision. I find myself planning ahead with a typewriter. How do I want to write this paragraph? And if make a mistake — sure I can use auto-correct — but the roll does not last forever and I have a budget. Every mistake is a penny out of pocket!

Creativity and Typewriters
For some reason on a computer, the art of organizing prose is lost. Writing on a computer presents endless possibilities. No work ever seems finished. I can always edit, delete, move around -- to the point that sometimes I forget where I began. Especially when it comes to long essays, fifteen pages or more, writing on a computer turns a project into mush.

On a computer, correction is free but endless. I have used Google Docs for years. In this format, my writing seems to be in an endless draft stage. I can share a draft with a colleague and she reads it and corrects my errors then I read it and revise. I can track changes and look at previous revisions. A 1200 word essay can quickly morph and grow, bloat and go off into zillions of tangents. I write myself out of writing. I lose what I intentionally hoped to create.

Maybe it is nostalgia. I owned an IBM Wheelwriter I bought for ten dollars at a garage sale. I wrote a short story in sixth grade on that thing.

A typewriter is designed to write stuff. That is what you do when you sit in front of it. You don't check anything else; you don't do anything but put thoughts onto paper.

Recently programmers have attempted to make applications for writers that help to focus attention on the act of writing. The idea is to write in full screen and to eliminate any unnecessary distractions. Those programs work and act as clean alternatives to the clunky Microsoft Word approach to word processing.

If I have to use footnotes — hell, no — I won't use a typewriter.

My fantasy -- or shall I say my motivation — in a typewriter is that it will unleash my creative energy.

Nostalgia for Typewriters
Sitting in front of the new Brother SX-4000 I felt the familiar rush of energy I remember having when I sat down at the IBM Wheelwriter. I typed a test page and remembered the old features I loved with the Wheelwriter work on the Brother. I can set tabs; the typewriter easily loads my sheet of paper; it beeps when a word is spelled incorrectly. Bold, underlining, superscript, subscript — all those fun typewriter additions — are there.

A typewriter is great for a party. Turn it on, type a sentence and people will ineluctably clack away -- collective party art.

In the collective imagination, typewriters are associated with creativity. In a children's library, a typewriter placed on a desk beckons children to fall in love with words. On a typewriter words are physical. Not abstract.

Digital and Analog
Two technologies combine. On the typewriter, a draft is created. I am one with the typewriter. When the manuscript is completed I do a character recognition scan so the manuscript becomes digital and searchable. What was once a unique copy becomes a meme. But it was necessary to begin with the monomaniacal relationship between myself and the machine — to craft a purposeful composition. This is my addiction.

I am unsure why I have quit you for so long, O! Typewriter!

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On Repulsion: A Word Essay

In the following essay, I muse on the meaning of the word repulsion.

On Drinking A Glass of Rancid Milk

Photo by Michu Đăng Quang on Unsplash

I inadvertently poured myself a glass of rancid milk one morning. I didn’t notice the expiration date on the carton. It was too late, though. I had taken a sip. I immediately spit out the contents onto the kitchen table. The milk had begun to curdle. I was instantaneously repulsed. A feeling of aversion to the milk quickly overcame me. I got up and quickly attempted to vigorously rinse my mouth out with water. When I had rid my palette of the fetid milk molecules, I immediately threw the carton away into the trash can. I think my exact words were, “gross, this is disgusting” and wiped the table off with a soft, warm cloth rinsed in soap.
     I ate my cereal dry that morning. And I begin to think, in those early morning hours, about what actually causes an act of repulsion like I had just experienced. The word “repulse,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the Latin verb repeller which we get the English word “repel” which literally means “to drive or beat back.” At first the word, simply meant the original military sense of the word, to drive back an army, or to block an attack from an assailant. Only by the 19^th century did the word come to be associated with a sudden change in feeling or disgust. In current usage, the word has become synonymous with the word “aversion.” Although, “repulse” still retains its original etymology when used in physics to describe the mechanics of engines and the nuclear force atomic particles impose on one another. 

Reflecting On An Autonomic Biological Response
     

Photo by Katie McNabb on Unsplash

I knew the elementals of biology enough to know that at the moment my taste buds encountered the sensation of “foul” my autonomic nervous system sent a message to the muscles in my mouth to eradicate any trace of the tainted milk. There was no thought in this process. It was a complete and instant reaction. I thought about how I had learned in my college biology course about the autonomic nervous system. I think the professor used the example of a hot stove. If a person touches a hot stove, the brain automatically sends a message to your arm to recoil. The cerebral cortex never gets a chance to cogitate on this event. The step that says, “Oh, my hand is resting on the surface of this hot stove. I had better stop and take away my hand so that I can prevent any further melting of my dermis.” No, there is none of that! Thankfully, the autonomic nervous systems bypass any chance to meditate on the process of one’s hand being burned! Only afterward, when all signs of danger have been eliminated does the brain allow the mind to think about what has just transpired. And I am immensely grateful.

Not that I want to think through the process of repulsion as I am swallowing a dose of bad milk, but I could not help thinking about repulsion and its origins. There is the actual, physical repulsion, the sudden and unthought act of spitting out the milk and then there is an aversion, the sudden and intense change in feeling or attitude when you realize the milk is spoiled. Then, you feel repugnance and distaste.

Variations on Repulsion: Repugnance and Distaste     

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Does this repugnance in feeling come from a fear of being tainted? Like the aversion Gregor Samsa’s family tries to suppress when they discover he has turned into a dung beetle overnight in Kafka’s Metamorphosis; Gregor tries to drink a bowl of sweet milk that his sister places before him, but he cannot drink it even though as a human sweet milk was his favorite drink.
     There is an internal — or it could be learned — mechanism inside of us that reacts strongly to anything we deem — whether correctly or not — to be tainted and polluted. Have you ever known anyone who could stomach a Pasolini film without wincing at least once? Mary Douglass, the British anthropologist who studied the cultural definitions of pollution and what we consider to be safe or not, wrote in her book Purity and Danger, “Pollution dangers strike when form has been attacked” (130). Pollution — or dirt — is a deciding cultural factor that humans worry about; dirt makes us anxious — especially if we feel dirty or polluted or made to feel that way, for it threatens our sense of form and, as Douglass puts it, our “unity of experience.”When it is a four month old carton of milk, Mary Douglass makes sense. I consider the milk dangerous to drink. It disrupts my obvious need for form and order in the universe! I can certainly understand the reason why my body would want to get rid of spoiled milk. Or why I would automatically tear my hand away if it brushed against a scalding hot surface. A cat would act similarly with a bowl of curdled milk. Except the cat is probably a little more wary of anything placed before it for breakfast and would probably smell the contents of the bowl before lapping it up. The cat is a more experienced scientist than I am. But once examined, the cat would more than likely turn her nose up to the milk and look at its owner with smug contempt until a fresher, more bacteria-free version was provided.
     My thoughts on repulsion though did not linger long with the carton of spoiled milk. I began to think of what else makes us repulsed. Yes, the list of rotten food is endless: rotten apples, bad bananas, maggot-infested luncheon meat, and ugh — moldy cheese (except, of course, blue cheese, the acquired taste of which rests in fact on its rottenness). But what about other things that turn our stomachs?
     

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     I thought about the day I had been walking in the forest with a friend. We had been hiking along the perimeter of the forest where it meets a sizable horse farm. As we weaved in and out of the forest and the unfenced farm, we came across the rotting carcass of a horse. It had been most likely shot and discarded into an unlandscaped corner of the property for any number of reasons. Maybe it had broken a leg or it had contracted a disease that its owners did not want to spread to the other horses. For whatever reason, the horse’s body lay exposed. The entire inside of its belly was seared open and infested with maggots. I could not tell what was its heart or what was the stomach. The entire belly was a transmogrified mess. At first, I did not notice the smell. In a matter of seconds, though, the smell hit me and I had felt that feeling of repulsion and aversion like I had experienced with the milk.

Thanatopsis
     But, I was also fascinated by the dead horse. Flies by the hundreds hovered above. The flies were busy taking off and landing on the mushy contents of this horse’s insides. Mating and making babies, they went on with their happy lives, making do with what they could — which was an abundance in this case — with the booty of this dead horse. Over time, the tissues and the organs would rot away, slowly but surely, leaving only the skeletal outline of the horse’s body. When the last morsel of meat had finally sloughed off into the soft, mealy soil, the bones would then whiten and harden. Then, crack and crumble. Back into the earth, the clods would go, and I could quote William Cullen Bryant’s poem, “Thanatopsis” here: “Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim / Thy growth, to be resolv'd to earth again.” In a few months the floor of the forest would look like something had been there, where the horse’s “pale form was laid,” which was once alive, but now reclaimed.
     Bryant’s poem gives the rotting corpse a transcendence, though, that I am not really interested in here. I want to get back to the repulsion and the aversion. I want to get back to that visceral moment of immanence. The horse is dead. It no longer exists. When you see a dead horse rotting away in a forest you do not think of the transcendent wish of returning back to the earth whence you came. In the sight of a rotting corpse, it is hard to imagine the horse prancing down a wooded lane without horseshoes in some kind of horse heaven. So, I try to push away any of those transcendent notions. I have to go back to the moment my stomach churned inside of me at the sight of the dead body of the horse. Have you ever read Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H.? It is a kind of inverted Metamorphosis. There is a part in the book where the character G.H. is studying the dead carcass of a squished cockroach. She goes into detail the intricacies of its crushed exoskeleton and the white ooze emitting from its hollowed-out cavity. I want to revisit that lurch of disgust at the gut of me that day. The horrible thought — at a moment like that — unmediated by transcendental spirituality — where you realize without too much cogitation that your body will rot away and fester like the horse’s now rotting flesh. We really don’t like to think about our body in this way, that it will rot away and mold into a greasy stew. And smell bad. 

     We like to think of ourselves as living forever. And as Douglas suggests, we don’t like it when order — in our most basic, cultural assumption of what order is — is ruptured. And even when we do feel this ontological rupture, we quickly marshal the resources to reassure ourselves. If I look in the mirror before I brush my teeth and feel the contours of my face I can feel the skeletal form of my jaw and cheekbones beneath my flesh. And if I pull out my mouth a bit, and peer into the mirror I can see quite clearly the outlines of my jaws beneath the pinkness of my gums. There it is. That is what will rot. No matter how many times I brush these teeth. Or rinse this mouth or remember to wash behind my ears, the rot still remains. I cannot stave off death. Of course, I quickly dismiss this thought and brush my teeth anyway, but if I remember again — say at 3:00 in the morning, when I wake up with a start (and I know you too have experienced this) because of an unsettling dream, I have this sudden, invincible thought, “I am going to die.” It is just a thought. But the certainty of it shocks me. Especially at 3:00 in the morning when I cannot marshall my usual arguments and deferrals. It is just there, hanging in the air.

     The next morning I hardly remember that I had woken up with the thought that I am going to die. It would be too much. I have too much to do. I have to work, eat, feed my family, and do some exercise. I have about sixty more years of life. It would go against my better interest to ponder on the exigency of my own existence. So I keep all that stuff at bay. I defer it to a primitive and locked storage place of my mind. I keep myself steadily repulsed. I imperviously maintain the order and unity of my set of experiences and call them “me.” 

     This is why I spit out the milk so effectively when it is spoiled. This is why I avoid looking at my infected scrape on my knee that I failed to apply topical anti-bacteria cream. This is why I am repulsed at any slight intimation of death or decay. Because I must keep my mortality at bay. I am repulsed at anything that reminds me that I am going to die.

Historical Narratives of Clean and Unclean
     

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     When the Nazis herded hundreds of Jews from the Ghettos into cattle cars to ship them to concentration camps some people protested, “But I am a German! You can’t do this to me!” But no one would listen. Because it didn’t really matter. Even if he was German, a line had been drawn, and the line was irreversible. If you were considered a non-Aryan — which included, Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and any group the Reich outlawed as undesirable — you and your family were thrown into the cattle car with barely enough room to sit, forced to suffer and stew in urine and tears. 

     If you were Aryan you were clean; you did not have to be sent away to the death camps. It would be a fearful thing, a repulsive thought, to have to be thrown into the cattle car with the rest of the tainted, marked ones. So, if you were not one of them, you stepped away from the crowd. Or if you were not Aryan, and you knew a way to avoid being carted off — you most definitely fought ways to keep yourself from being discovered. If you were not marked as tainted by the Nazis, it was in your better interest to stand away and not notice what was going on than to acknowledge the abject horror of what the Nazis called “the Final Solution.”

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee writes about the consequences of the German nation's refusal to acknowledge the grim reality of the “Final Solution.” He imagines a fictional author giving a lecture on animal rights to a group of academics in his novel Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth, the novel’s title character, makes the startling claim that the Germans, living near the Treblinka death camp, were willfully ignorant of the slaughter of millions of human beings. The village of Treblinka was not very far from the concentration camp. How could the residents of the town not know something horrible was happening at the work camp? Did they not notice the arrival of trains filled with prisoners? Could they not smell the putrid smoke of burning flesh that must have blanketed their town, especially when the winds were right. They could have acted, but they went on with their lives, acting otherwise. This willed ignorance, this inability to act, argues Elizabeth, is a mark of the German people's inability to see the Jews as human beings. They saw them as cattle. They saw them as deserving nothing that is not given to a cow. For don't we, in western society, use the cow for food, for skins, for milk? The Germans, according to Elizabeth Costello, were not able to see the Jews as nothing more than providers of soap, as providers of gold — and this marked the Germans — tainted them Costello says — because the Treblinka death camps were merely what we would call today, a factory farm. 

     Of course, they would be repulsed if they had to watch the horrific spectacle of the gas chamber. They removed themselves from the atrocity. And would be repulsed if they had to set foot inside Treblinka's grounds (unless they had to) because it would remind them of what they were doing to millions of human beings. 

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Musing: The Red Wine Freud Da Game

image credit: arpla

Tuesday night I cut my foot. Usually, when I drink with my roommates I keep the glassware downstairs and the conversation confined to the kitchen. Not this time. After the "party" had dispersed I took a tumbler of red wine to my room and no sooner had I sat down to talk to my friend Patrick on the phone had I knocked over the damn tumbler and kablam! — shards of glass everywhere. Not one to do manual labor after the sun goes down, I merely plopped myself on the bed and told Patrick good night.