AEON LOST ME TODAY

Aeon.com lost me today.  I’ve been slipping away for a while. Now to mix the metaphor.

A python does not squeeze its prey to death.  That’s too much of an effort, which means a waste of calories.  It’s all about calories (money).  So the snake waits until the mammal (us) has made itself a bit smaller, maybe by exhaling or maybe stretching longer.  Then the python fits itself to that smaller diameter.  The same thing repeats and repeats until finally the mammal doesn’t have enough room to take a breath.  Then it dies and the snake can eat it without wasting calories on struggle.

This is what Aeon and other websites are doing.  Like Vivaldi.  Tell us what you like!  As a convenience, we will only present what you like so you don’t have to go exploring or think about alternatives.  Pretty soon, that perimeter of “what-you-like” will be all you can get.  You’ll starve your mind and shrivel to blankness, and then you won’t be much trouble to swallow.

The bait on Aeon was the “high quality” BBC tone and the TIME magazine science.  Lurking in the background was the restrictive right-wing philosophy of Templeton.  When I looked him up — and I’ve known about him for more than thirty years but didn’t ask questions — that was one veil of illusion falling away.  What AEON had in the background was “landed gentry” — the King’s Friends, cleverly disguised as a monastery.  It has nothing to do with religion in the sense of sacredness.  It has everything to do with walls, privilege, elitism — the things Christianity has come to represent.

It’s not really about either Christianity or religion.  It’s about empire, siphoning off all profit to the hoarders.  Empire is the formation of institutions that control, protecting and feeding the snake.  When the pundits and surveyors talk about how religion is dying in America, they mean institutions are collapsing.  Protestant denominations are not and never were a religion.  They were splinter groups of institutions, usually dissenting over some slight or dogma or economic force, protecting their icons, going to court to secure their communion silver.  They have nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with the status quo and solidarity, even when they are a splinter group that has drawn their walls in closer and higher.  It’s “Game of Thrones.”  Game of Altars.

I’m not sure Aeon knows what they’re doing.  I was going along until they hooked up with medium.com and immediately went to sequestering:  “My Aeon.”  It’s the same old narcissistic splintering.

Everything people in America know about religion they learned at the movies.  It’s all sci-fi written by a tableful of writers in LA, usually mostly Jewish and bearded.  Maybe some seculars flirting with Zen.  Maybe a few brash and accommodating women.  Their game is the python game:  make a movie that makes money, remake the same movie on a smaller scale (budget), then another a little smaller, until the audience is so conditioned that they never realize there is anything else out there because they can’t get their breath.

Maybe one or two of the people at the table stand up and invent some kind of wall-smasher —Netflix?   And then Netflix becomes the squeezer.  And now the squeeze is on George RR Martin to do more, better, nakeder, bloodier. . . but the “show runners” get antsy and start by-passing the original author, doing the python on him.  Amazon, Amazon.

In past years we’ve seemed to free ourselves from the squeeze by keyboarding past the institutions, but here we are again — lonesome for the Seventies when the “free” weekly newspapers really were “free” — really alternatives instead of just another cartel.  Now I watch one broad institution after another go down, only existing at all on the reputations of the earlier years.  PBS and NPR now charge for a “passport.”  “Sesame Street” has been diverted to profit.

At first TED talks and AEON and all the other trademarked shows had a backlog of rich surprising material that hadn’t had an outlet.  By now we’re down to the reruns and imitations.  Everyone went to business schools or became a techie.  They have nothing in particular to use for content.  Just a Rolodex database and an agenda.

Montana was once dominated by a big squeezer snake: the Anaconda company, based on copper.  We didn’t get rid of them, they just squeezed out all the profit and left.  Missoula was once our literary treasure and moral center but now it’s notorious for rapist athletes and selling its public water. That’s only the local version of a national — no, an extra-national -- phenomenon.  The planet has been Trumped.  Nations are obsolete.

First the corporations convinced the courts they were a “person,” a Christian concept derived from the fantasy that God was flesh, carnal, incarnated, one of us.  Then they convinced the courts that they weren’t here, so therefore needn’t pay taxes.  We’re a nation unfinanced by ghosts.  

What blood was left drained off in the pretense of “contracting out” torture and wars not even waged by people — rather by zombie predator drone machines guided by gullible young people sitting in a trailer in Indiana and developing PTSD when they finally realize what they are doing.  Any citizen who made trouble was criminalized and incarcerated where, for lack of anything better to do, they all infected each other with AIDS: don’t-blame-me capital punishment when there are no drugs or condoms.

The cloud of viruses coming out of the African jungle aren’t teaching us what we should have learned when the sub-saharan people began to die of famine.  Today the newsfeed is saying that young women are having much fewer — like 40% fewer — pregnancies out of wedlock.  The explanation proposed is that they are taking care of their health.  The reality might be more like the sci-fi stories based on near-universal sterility due to environmental pollution.  There is a flood coming.  Not a biblical flood to wipe out the wicked, but a coastal flood around the planet that will wipe out Johnny Depp’s cherished island paradise, along with the sodden peasants of Bangladesh who barely survive, the glass-walled fancy beach houses, and downtown Manhattan.

We see now that our illusory march of progress from blob to fish to gladiator to programmer was wrong all along.  We are a sheet, a web, a vast varying continuum of relationships.  And we’re torn, worn thin.

The anonymous writer on Wikipedia says:  “The word aeon /ˈiːɒn/, also spelled eon and æon (in American English), originally meant "life", "vital force" or "being", "generation" or "a period of time", though it tended to be translated as "age" in the sense of "ages", "forever", "timeless" or "for eternity”.

Nothing is forever.  The website called “Aeon” is not “my aeon.”  It’s a constrictor.  But I grieve.  I thought they were real.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?

AEON magazine is part of my online world, so I check it often.  My biggest problem is that their questions are good ones but the answers and the ordinary essays make me impatient.  There’s so much they don’t seem to see.  Maybe they just don’t have the luxury of time to read that I have.

Nigel Warburton, NOT that red-headed journalist on "House of Cards."

This morning at 3AM, waked up by the cats shifting around which is usual and part of our routine, I went to Aeon and was surprised to see a message from Al Gore.  Yup.  THAT Al Gore.   The question was (generated by Nigel Warburton, the in-house “popular” philosopher) “What is consciousness for?”  I was an early commenter and rather blown away by the idea that my name was close to Gore’s.

Warburton’s blog is http://www.nigelwarburton.typepad.com

Gore’s website is https://www.algore.com/

At the same time, the issue of animal euthanasia came up, framed as the fault of puppy mills, and my email soon got notifications that comments were mounting up.  Pretty predictable.  I commented, but it was useless.  People frame everything in terms of their own experience and since many of the Aeon readers are affluent and educated, there were plenty of tales about thousands of dollars (really!) spent on pet store kittens who were fatally ill.  (I get my cats mostly by accident when they discover the cat flap in the kitchen.)  I got the impression that sick kittens interest “thinkers” far more than the nature of being human. 

Rescuing or capturing?

So I’m not bothering with this question anymore.  When they address Tim’s awareness of what’s happening in the Mediterranean to those made vulnerable by desperate migration (the short answer is that mothers and children are being separated, trafficked, and killed), then I’ll think about sad pet stories again.

https://medium.com/@timbarrus/pimps-and-traffickers-b41be4353048#.5liy6h9ja

I went back to the Al Gore question.  Since no email notifications about it had arrived, I assumed that there were few comments.  Now — 10AM Mountain Standard Time in the US — I see that there are 131 fellow commenters.  I’ll read them.

https://aeon.co/conversations/what-is-consciousness-for?clear_cache=%2Fresponses%2F2864#response_2864

I’m pursuing the issue in several contexts:

1.  That it is an emergent capacity of the human brain related to its role as the dashboard, sorting and remembering qualia (which some propose is the basis of memory, the index, re Proust) and manipulating them as metaphors which underlies all language, written or spoken or just “thought.”

2.  That its evolutionary value lies in the enabling of relationships and the formation of groups that share values and capacities.  The evidence in discussion is the jump to humans with bulging pre-frontal forebrains at the same time as art appears, evidence of larger groups, and what might be a pre-cursor of religion, pre-institutional, like burial.  We are just now beginning to shift emphasis to group, because of empathy, which is consciousness of others.  Groups can be painfully global, full of suffering Others.

At the same time, if one accepts the word “qualia”— which is a little slippery for “five-sense” people — then the door opens to the aesthetics of the transition to metaphor and elaboration which seems to have given today’s human the survival advantage.

3.  Many people seem to think that only what is conscious, which they define in terms of speech and literacy, has any value or existence.  In fact, the brain and its connections throughout the body are always in operation so long as you are alive.  Breathing, heart beat, digestion, and so on, which become a general “mood” report, then subconscious thought and THEN consciousness.  Maybe people are reluctant to lose the line between animals, who can achieve empathy but not verbal communication, and humans.

Will Fraker

When I get to the end of the comments, they have increased to 134, but now I notice the time stamps and realize that comments from months ago, still relevant, have been added by the AEON staff.  In fact, some of them are FROM the AEON staff.  Will Fraker, for instance, is the Social Media and Community Manager for Aeon, so what does it mean when he “likes” my comments?  Does it carry more or less weight, and why should I care anyway?  When I google him, I get Vimeo vids on YouTube.  They are about rock climbing, accompanied by the metaphor of MAC’s new operating systems, Yosemite and El Capitan.  I find them relevant to this discussion.  Qualia.

The other James T. Kirk

I’m thinking that this may be a consciousness project, with AEON trying to find out who’s “out there” and to put us into conscious conversation with each other so that suddenly and briefly I see what Al Gore thinks about this issue — not whether he’s right or wrong, but how he investigates the issue.  (I don’t consider consciousness a “problem.”)  And it may be a surprise to the readership to hear what an old woman in a small high-prairie town has to say.  I only ran across two other females in this morning’s comments so far.  And Gore and I were the only obvious Americans, unless one counts James T. Kirk.  Maybe Gore came along to wake Americans out of their media trance, all of it personal introspection.

Sir John Templeton

Though I sneeze at the tendency to be Brit-centric and class-limited, I certainly welcome this project.  It makes me much happier than the constant pursuit of money over at medium.com and their fantasy that the perfect tech platform will trigger a cascade of saleable content.  That will accumulate over time, but by then someone will invent something totally different and all the writers will migrate over to it, the same as when the “Montana” trope wore out, they all went to Portland.

Most of this kind of conversation is invisible to people who aren’t in big cities or on university campuses.  This is a merchandizing society and it runs along the narrow-gauge railroad of venture capital.  Somehow it is the unpaid commenters who are the fuel for the paid platform managers, though considerable venture capital must have been needed for startup and even for now.

On investigating elements of some issue for posts on my blog, I often discover interesting but semi-relevant things.  One here is that Al Gore was involved in starting up a news network that failed and was sold to Al Jazeera, which I follow.  Or did.  It’s closing down at the end of April.  Kenner’s Question:  “What does this mean?”  Well, that takes us back to consciousness, which Gore defines in terms of Free Will.  But how free is it when the capitalists control the money and money is the key to hard core reality?

AND NOW THE HOLOGENOME . . .

The genome.  Then the connectome.  The epigenome.  And now the hologenome, which is the creature plus all the other microbial life forms that cuddle down with us.  Maybe feed on us.  Insert their genes in among the spirals that we thought were only ours, because they were the plan for us.  We think of them as infections but they are elaborations.  The holobiont is the “whole shebang,”  connected and dynamic.  It’s all ecology: the logic of interactions and fittingness.

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/when-evolution-is-infectious

I suppose we ought to include the molecules we ingest as medicines, escapes, food, and — well, just accidental soak-ups from breathing, bathing, rubbing up against things.  This is an Age of Inclusion despite our complaints and rejections, our attempts to insist on boundaries.

So the docs talk about leverage, probiotic epidemics, niches, dysbiosis, protective commensals, and fecal transplants.  Mucus earns a new respect because it harbors so much.  Then there’s the “envirome” where the creature grapples with and seduces what’s around it on every level, including the emotional.  This is why I’m an “everythingist.”

Dr. Stan Rowe, U of Saskatchewan faculty

In 1988 in Saskatoon, Stan Rowe was one of my heroes.  He was proposing this point of view explored by Max Tegmark, as linked below, one of the constant attempts to unite science, religion, and human experience (philosophy included).  I think a lot of people think this way, quietly in order to avoid the yapping opportunist media.  Stan talked about “slices of space/time” and I tried to pass on his thoughts in Sunday sermons.

I copied and pasted these from amazon.ca, in case the US site doesn’t show them.

Home Place: Essays on Ecology, new revised edition  Oct 16 2002  by Stan Rowe

Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology  Apr 15 2006  by Stan Rowe

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime-rp

Max “the braidman” says, “Some people find it emotionally displeasing to think of themselves as a collection of particles. I got a good laugh back in my 20s when my friend Emil addressed my friend Mats as an “atomhög,” Swedish for “atom heap,” in an attempt to insult him. However, if someone says “I can’t believe I’m just a heap of atoms!’’ I object to the use of the word “just”: the elaborate spacetime braid that corresponds to their mind is hands down the most beautifully complex type of pattern we’ve ever encountered in our universe. The world’s fastest computer, the Grand Canyon or even the Sun—their spacetime patterns are all simple in comparison.”

Articles like these two in nautil.us make me dizzy with the joy of insight.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/science/a-glossy-science-magazine-or-living-fossil.html  Dennis Overbye explains in this linked NY Times article that the ‘zine is a bit of a throwback to a time a few decades ago when there were more magazines like it.

1991

At the time, mostly ’70’s, the one I went absolutely crazy over was “The Sciences” published by The New York Academy of Sciences.  I kept breaking my rule about not hoarding magazines because the issues were both so amazing and so beautiful.  In fact, my use of images on prairiemary is inspired by “The Sciences” though they used contemporary art and abstract impressionist paintings, very sophisticated.  This frame of reference that unites art with science is one of my affinities to Tim Barrus and Aad de Gids. I suppose it’s structuralist and deconstructive at once.  Open to argument and the startling.

Ralph Burhoe, founder of Zygon

These days I admire the online magazine Aeon, which is peripherally connected to Nautil.us through the Templeton Foundation, which gave its very first prize to Ralph Burhoe, then associated with Meadville/Lombard.  We weren’t very appreciative of Burhoe and his magazine.  Maybe because, in Gertrude Stein terms, there was no “there” yet in his attempt to unite science and religion.  In 1980 it was just early "process theology".  My problem was that I never could see the difference between science and religion in the first place and don’t appreciate math at all, but Burhoe loved all that stuff, all the apparatus of thought.

Spencer Burhoe, sexy male model

My complaint about Aeon has been that it’s too Anglican culture-bound.  They’ve never gotten down to the homonin layer because they are always in their pre-frontal cortex hobnobbing with respectable libraries.  I like a little porn in my spirituality.  They manage to talk about generations without ever really getting to full-frontal sex.   Less Buddhism, more Hindu!  More autonomic juice!

This vid is pretty seductive:  http://nautil.us/issue/1/what-makes-you-so-special/what-would-buddha-say    It’s Uma Thurman’s dad.  I love the short vids on Aeon.

In the end, in terms of congregations and the paranoid threat of being “religious”, or “institutional” or “dogmatic,” I think — not to worry — but some kind of “denomination” (group with a name, nomenclature) is forming now with many small starts here and there, maybe not understood as religious and maybe not much more than a “house church” that meets in someone’s home.  

Some will consider it “post-Christian” but that’s just because they are as Christocentric as they are anthropocentric.  They don’t frame life in cosmic terms yet.  Or even consider the planetary.  I think this nascent movement is simply a response to the Kuhnian phenomenon of re-organizing thought and belief because of the need to accommodate new information.  

This time it’s pretty extreme because there is so much knowledge and it’s so counter-intuitive.  But I do not think that anyone will be prepared to torture those who refuse to admit that there is a genome.  Well, maybe if they realize it’s a description of how we evolved from monkeys.

Just now in one of those Sharia nations a man who blogged about atheism has been condemned to decades in prison, 2,000 lashes of flogging and a huge money fine.  The people who have the power to do this are showing that they have no power except the power of fear and paranoia.  Their rifle has a barrel that turns back on their own faces.  I doubt they have enough time left in their regime to carry out the sentence to the end.  

Even if they do, their insane reaction will recruit many others to follow the informed man.  That’s the way human culture works.  You can’t resist the whole planet anymore because you can’t put up walls against ideas when people have smart phones in their pockets.  But I ache for the guy.  Like everything else, we’re connected.  Also to the floggers, of course.

THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTIONS

Since keeping a focus on “deep time” or primal evolution means always working two dimensions against each other (one might say horizontal against vertical), one is forced into different kinds of sequencing.  One is the cause-and-effect of time, one thing emerging from the circumstances of what was just previous. Another is a hierarchy of complexification, simple things co-existing and interpenetrating to create something new, presumably better.  When thinking about the evolution of the brain, one is always conscious of working from earliest to most recent, from simple to complex, and — we hadn’t thought about this in the past — pruning or editing for one reason or another, often imposed by the environment.

So the kiwi devolved from Tyrannosaurus.

What makes an advantage will persist, what makes a disadvantage will disappear, and what is neutral might come along for the ride but maybe not.  The environment might change everything.  Particularly in the case of hominins who have evolved a cultural environment, a social network that can change quickly, a kind of interpersonal neural network now made actual by the internet.

In every hominin’s brain “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in a quick sketch of evolution.  It’s not that we’re descended from apes, but that the development of the individual retraces the evolutionary steps of the species — from its conception to its birth, every animal passes through the evolutionary steps of the species, from one-celled animals to advanced life-forms.  This is true of the human brain:  at 25 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a worm; at 40 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a vertebrate like a fish; at 100 days the embryonic brain resembles a mammalian brain.  At 5 months the embryonic brain resembles the brains of other primates.

In previous posts I’ve talked about the idea of the fourth trimester.  It is not until the end of the first three months after birth that the brain begins to seem like that of a hominin that has a prefrontal cortex, but it still needs to “install” the operations, the operating system, of what that brain can do.  The caretaker (mom) will do this over the next three years.  You could say that cultural apps are being installed.

The personal intrauterine evolution, the construction of that physical brain through its stages and the body in which the brain dwells, may have glitches.  We knew about things like cleft palate, spina bifida, club foot and even intestines that develop outside the body rather than inside, or arms and legs that fail to lengthen.  We have not been able to tell what is going on in the brain as it develops.  Now there are all sorts of theories about what neuron structures and choices during gestation might do.  Some claim it might determine the orientation of desire, for instance, which is always understood as either/or because that’s the way our culture sorts people.  This drastically underestimates the possibilities.

Until recently, many people — philosophers but not just philosophers — achieved their understanding through the contemplation of their belly buttons.  That is, they are attached so thoroughly to their cultures that they cannot step outside the cultural circle except by scientific methods — which are also cultural.  Those who study culture are from a culture, even one that struggles to be objective which they think IS what scientific methods are.  But science is as much subject to evolution as everything else.  

In particular the methods of science have depended upon introspection (belly buttons) and meta-introspection — that is, reflection upon how one is going about gathering evidence and sorting it and what sort of evidence counts as valid, and trying to guess what is shaping one’s ignorance: what one DOES NOT know.  What are we missing?  Could we find clues in the structure of an organ like the brain?  Could we devise experiments that would indicate how people are thinking without slanting the info?

“Science” comes out of a specific culture that evolved on the European continent from a creature structure (with a culture) that evolved on the African continent, but migrated across the world’s continents, always evolving as it went.  Part of European culture is constant sorting to see who is the “best,” the “highest.”  It is quick to use evolution to prove that the best among Europeans is the best kind of human it is possible to be.  Because lesser humans were defined as slaves or even beasts.  "Best" meant high-born and educated as far as was possible.

"The Young Doctor Freud"  PBS

Out of this comes the idea that introspection is a “high” and valuable practice.  And then Freud’s idea (I just watched the movie called “The Young Doctor Freud”) was that if you relaxed and reflected, your core issues would rise to the top where they were visible, like one of those party 8-balls.  Many of the core issues were about sex, the most distortable, tabooed and intense human cultural and physical issues, right at the belly button of the survival of the species.  (The movie about “The Young Chanel” was more fun and just as sexy.  Of course, the plots of both movies are about the evolution of remarkable individuals who did not fear taboos.  At least in their adolescent stage.)

The trouble with introspection is that it only deals with what is “thought” and conscious.  But the evolution of ideas, as individuals and as cultures, is largely UN or SUB conscious and not accessible to introspection.  Even an outside observer would be interpreting through his or her own consciousness.  Much is being left out, without the person realizing it is missing. When I say this on Aeon, the educated Euro men get angry.

It is the advent of metaphor that makes way for writing, in which little marks are metaphors for sounds and sound patterns become words, metaphors for concepts and objects.  This is not objective and rational.  At this point some people begin to hear voices.  Voices are essentially music, which are brain-perceived sequential patterns of sound.

Paul Otteson

I’m going back over this ground in part because Paul Otteson, a musician and romantic quite a bit younger that myself, just now responded to my old comment on Aeon about Julian Jaynes’ book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”  I assigned Jaynes to a social class.  His father was a Unitarian minister, as was I for a while.  The book was an effort to understand the brain, keeping in mind that it’s in two halves.  Jaynes was a psychologist.  His cousin, Nat Lauriat, was the Unitarian minister who supervised me as a student intern.  Clearly, I’m assigning Otteson to a cultural class niche.  

Veronique Greenwood than commented, approving of what I said.  She is a science writer, maybe the same age as Otteson, but not the same style.  Not in the same culture class.  Otteson is a musician.

Veronique Greenwood

Unitarian Universalists at present are like Otteson and Greenwood, partly romantic, wanting to sing to small animals, and partly scientific, wanting scrupulous information.  This is a problem and it is cultural.  All three of us have good minds.  The two sons of Unitarian ministers — from the old days when they were trying to be objective, logical, and superior — have special problems.  I would love to see a comparison of e e cummings (also the son of a Unitarian minister) and Julian Jaynes.  (Nat Lauriat’s father ran a bookstore in Boston.)  In fact, Aeon — the online magazine that proposed this debate of comments — is pretty much in the same split space culturally.

My divergence is because of fifty years of experience with Blackfeet culture, which is not European or African, but a Third Force that I can’t really explain very well so far.  More present than people realize.  It’s phenomenological, oral language-based, HIGHLY metaphorical.  The metaphors are more than rural — land-bound.  Most of the thinking about metaphor has been done by academics like Jaynes and Lauriat.  They discredit experience and trust their belly buttons.  Maybe I’m more aligned with Jared Diamond who spent so many years in New Guinea.  But I think I should catch up with Greenwood. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/veronique-greenwood/

ALL THE BLOG TAP-DANCING

The preoccupation of the week has been writing.  Medium.com is losing its writers very quickly.  The website had proposed to be a clear, artistic, and popular platform for writers who wanted to be part of a sympathetic and helpful group, inviting help for them to grow into the professionals they wanted to be.  But it has blown up in everyone’s faces.  I read but no longer contribute.

It’s clearly a culture problem.  The base is in San Francisco which is now a techie town with a high proportion of code generators  whose “writing” is done within certain bounds according to certain conventions.  They were the ones who had the idea of a brilliant platform attracting writers.  I suppose they were thinking of something like Word Press, but their “guiding genius” is Ev Williams who previously devised Blogspot (the one I use) and Twitter (I’m also there.)  They assumed that he’d wave his magic wand and Medium would pop out of his forehead.

Instead there has been increasing irritation between the difference between the conformist, money-pursuing Ferengi back in the office and the wildly trans-everything raging souls who hark back to the Seventies and who mostly post the writing.  What at first seemed to be the freedom to self-edit, but with community support, pretty soon revealed itself as controlled and edited by invisible people.  Even if you didn’t ask, they were quick to advise a person (me) that I would get more readers if I would post an identifying photo that was smiling.  My fav selfie is in a beret and Harry Potter glasses, which I hoped would suggest a Chinese intellectual.  But the puppet masters clearly want their own vision, which is a blonde suburban teenager from the conformist Fifties -- smiling.  That didn’t work for me the first time around and certainly won’t now.  These techie kids put arbitrary tags on what I write.  Whenever I write about Blackfeet, they tag it “travel.”

My movie this evening was “The Book Thief,” which sort of encapsulates the female myth about writing that serves this approach.  Partly Anne of Green Gables and partly Anne Frank, this beautifully presented film about a girl with a conscience trying to survive in Nazi Germany is focused on her fascination with books.  She steals them out of a rich person’s library and then returns them, so that it’s technically borrowing.  Such a conscience!  It must come from reading!  She tries to save everyone and tells them stories in the bomb shelter so they won’t be afraid.  Alas, everyone dies but her, but after all she is able to immortalize them in her books.  Such power!  She lives to ninety and has a wonderfully elegant apartment with a grand piano, which just shows what a successful writer can achieve.  There’s no sex in this particular version, but boy friends.  NO female friends.

This is so deeply internalized in my generation that few can pull away from it enough to see the reality of compromises, denials, and contingencies that can be folded secretly into such stories.  Pulling them out, like unfolding origami, destroys the metaphor and leaves only paper.  This particular story is narrated by Death, who is not a girl but a Big Primary Male making arbitrary decisions.  He sounds pretty sexy, but that’s been pointed out by other Big Primary Males.

Getting back to the platforms that are e-magazines, they are different from blogs because there are editors and they have a plan and agenda.  Aeon is one based in England, more carefully planned and far more stable than Medium.  They did quite a bit of primary surveying, just asking people for spontaneous comments, and that has continued.  They also include videos, high quality short works from all over the planet.  They continue to allow comment and most of it is pretty decent: educated and thoughtful.  Quite English, actually.  They are mostly male, believe deeply that what separates humans from animals is literacy, and can throw out quotes from classical education.  

They can be intimidating, unless they get onto the subject of what I should probably call something, but I don’t know what:  the new research into biology and cosmology, geology and psychology.  Evidently they don’t read that stuff.  Deep history, before anyone even spoke but used material objects to mark concepts.  The incredible connectedness of life so that a dipper taking up sea water includes viremes (bits of virus), bacteria, plants and animals of only one cell that have aspects of BOTH plant and animal, so which is it?   These are people who learned categories and principles long enough ago that they preceded this paradigm shift.  The pigeon holes are gone and now there are only continuums, whether we’re talking about sex or culture or the names of millennia and aeons.

A hint of post-WWII existentialism when everything seemed to be gone lingers on, but with a determined, even blind, effort to remain Western Civ humanists who know nothing about the indigenous or the Asians.  They assume that everyone is Christian or at least Abrahamic, so their generalizations tend to be like Tom Hanks declaring that “The da Vinci Code” will save the planet because “everyone” knows about the chalice.    Or the Aeon question about whether the smart aleck New Atheists have damaged the faith of believers, without remembering that probably most Asian and indigenous people have never been theists in the first place, much less cared about the niceties of the various “Axial” dogmas of their kingships and immortality.

The contrast between Aeon and Medium is rather enlightening in several ways.  First, the importance of considering the source.  Second, how much money controls print even on the seemingly “free” internet.  Third, a sharp contrast between generations -- the one that is trying to nest in a treeless world, and the one that is rather lost in the tangled forest.   They all praise each other for the courage of their confessions and deplore what they call “listicles” which are articles with titles like “five ways to make a man fall in love with you.” (My advice would be for them to read Eugene Kennedy’s advice column.)

Publishing houses, I mean the print ones, have been using a strategy of creating “imprints” managed by people who declare a style or interest.  They are convinced that research can reveal what people will buy so they are sorting their marbles into various baskets:  witty old women; wise old men; sexy risky boys; immigrants; survivors.  Medium is trying something like that, appointing certain people to manage their named “domains.”  (I’m not sure that’s the right word.)  But then the main managers come in over the top and interfere.  So the person leaves or even gives their named space to someone else, like selling a law practice.  (So far no money has changed hands.)  But it doesn’t take down the whole platform.  All these people still believe a copyright is a real thing and that intellectual property has value.

There are a few highly personal blogs by people who don’t write them and don’t invite others either.  One curated compendium is Brain Pickings Weekly which is very PBS -- inspiring curated quotes to get you reassured.  My cousin loves it.  She also likes the science posts from Nautil.us but reads them secretly so no one will know there is disease in the family.  In the meantime, I realize that every time I talk to anyone about any disease or condition, the bots pick it up and I am deluged with advertising spam about whatever it is.  So she’s right about people prying, but wrong about any ability to keep anything secret.

This IS a smile!

My blog, this one, is edited only by myself and this particular one is written hastily at the end of the day, so it's probably not edited very well.  As a parting thought, I just discovered that if Google gets mad at you, in addition to putting you on the "block list," which means your email provider will refuse any of your messages without you knowing it, Google will tear off all the tags one puts at the end of the posting.  That means it won't be on their "listicle" when people are looking for you.  Of course, people are demanding to be taken off the search engine lists anyway.   This is not so much like the Wild West as like a revolving door.  It can hit you in the butt on the way out.