mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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“But when Rocha returned a few minutes later saying he found no money there, the officer gave the law student ‘the option of going to jail or allowing the cab driver to beat the fare out of him.’”
Beaten student sues cabbie, police, from New Orleans’ Times-Picayune and noted by DHK, vigilant chronicler of all that makes the City that Care Forgot so amazing.
I have a low threshold for pain, but if our economy moved away from currency and towards the bartering of pain (a possibility!), I’d have much nicer things. I would happily take a thrashing, for example, for this stupid and ostentatious vessel.
Love Sickness: Dissect and Discuss
Orwell famously lampooned academic verbiage in Politics and the English Language, a theme of which was that linguistic complexity is an act of obfuscation that has moral and political meanings. In America, we have the habit of validating experiences through the spurious application of medical language; we consider legitimate what can be studied and treated.
So perhaps this Wikipedia article on “love sickness” is an expression of our desire to subordinate pain to reason, although it’s worth noting that Ibn Sena, a Muslim physician in the tenth century, felt that love sickness was a medical problem.
And before I dismiss the whole idea of a dry discourse on the “medical” problems of love, I should also admit that much of the article is quite accurate:
- “People who find the feeling of love too intense may experience “love sickness” with feelings of anxiety, and can have symptoms of mania, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), inflatedself esteem and depression.”
- “According to the author of [a] study, Frank Tallis, “Many people are referred for help who cannot cope with the intensity of love, have been destabilised by falling in love, or suffer on account of their love being unrequited.”“
- “Some of the symptom clusters shared with love sickness include
- mania – abnormally elevated mood, inflated self esteem, extravagant gift giving
- depression – tearfulness, insomnia, loss of concentration
- OCD – preoccupation, constantly checking (e.g. text messages/emails, etc.), and hoarding valueless but superstitiously resonant items
- psychologically created physical symptoms, such as upset stomach, change in appetite, insomnia, dizziness, and confusion.”
So I’ll not mock the champions of a more scientific concept of love sickness; I’m tired of poetry and love songs, anyway. Cheers to the new schema, the new diagrams and models, which indicate I suffer regularly from a disease, one which needs to be respected by my workplace, paid for by my insurer, and hopefully medicated by my friendly pharmaceutical company.
Rory O’Rear found another wonderful piece by Cursive Buildings, and I can’t resist posting it: “Modern Lovers.”
Click here for a larger view, and click here for his Flickr, since I have to stop putting one of these up every other day.
“Maybe what we call consciousness is just the pattern of the interaction between our neurons. Our self-awareness could be nothing more than a beautiful set of pictures of neurological starlings.”
Brigno, in a comment to my reblog of Kateopolis’ starlings. It immediately brought to mind the concept of emergence.
It is a concept which has particularly captivated my dad, who I hope will describe it a bit in a comment below. Its solid Wikipedia article quotes an academic’s description in saying that emergence is
“…the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems… The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro “level” (i.e. there is some property of “wholeness”); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is “ostensive” - it can be perceived. [Another quality is] supervenience — downward causation.”
This may seem utterly pedantic, but emergence is a powerful process that may explain many presently mysterious phenomena, such as the development of consciousness.
The spectacular Errol Morris film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control discusses emergence in at least two of its four threads: the behavior of the naked mole rats (and animals, and humans, in general) and the interconnectivity of the simple robots (their function as a system exceeds their complexity as units, as is true of human civilization).
Indeed, the quality of starlings flocking is exemplary of emergent behavior, as are many insect societies, climate patterns, physical qualities, and more. Perhaps thought, language, culture, and history are as well.
Note: see also Placebo’s excellent post on consciousness and patterns, in which she discusses materialism in neuroscience, divergencies in individuals’ experiences, and some practical applications of these ideas.
FABLE, by Cursive Buildings, who has a whole series of beautifully altered (and well-titled) polaroids.
“I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another ‘Fuck you’ on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn’t come off. It’s hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible.”
Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye (posted by the excellent Bunnynico). If the basic fact of entropy doesn’t upset you, perhaps the inertia of violence and negativity can. I know that I am a uselessly cerebral person by this: that I can sulk over the ubiquity and intractability of the awful, while genuinely decent (perhaps heroic) people labor for good anyway.
I waste time bemoaning the global, while my betters get busy improving the local.
GPOYW: Instantiation Edition
Today, I’d rather be something else. Here are some gratuitous photos of things which share my name and perhaps a few attributes; not included are Mills Lane, former Saints player Sam Mills, or the Mills Corporation, which developed shopping malls.
One:
Mills bomb: ”The Mills was a classic design; a grooved cast iron ‘pineapple’ with a central striker held by a close hand lever and secured with a pin. Although the segmented body helps to create fragments when the grenade explodes, according to Mills’ notes, the casing was grooved to make it easier to grip and not as an aid to fragmentation. The Mills was a defensive grenade: after throwing the user had to take cover immediately. A competent thrower could manage 30 meters with reasonable accuracy, but the grenade could throw lethal fragments further than this.”
Two:
Mills (crater): “Mills is a relatively small crater that lies on the far side of the Moon… This is an undistinguished impact crater that is roughly circular in form, with a slight outward bulge to the northwest. This bulge may be due to the merger of a smaller impact with the rim. The rim edge is somewhat worn, with indistinct features and a few tiny craterlets along the edge.”
Three:
Mills’ constant: “In number theory, Mills’ constant is defined as the smallest positive real number A; such that the integer part of the double exponential function
is a prime number, for all positive integers n… Its value is unknown…”
“Each time you break up with someone, another handful of things that you had enjoyed or even loved become painful reminders of loss and failure.”
Sara Q. McPherson, Baroness of the Internet, breeder of unicorns and robots, sent me a sort of fruit-basket, comprised of
“…lemons and guallavas, carved with my x-acto knife into curmudgeonly facial expressions, in various states of decay. I am convinced that, if my brain (and/or soul/personality/sense of self) were to be represented with a festive, seasonal cornucopia-based holiday centerpiece, it would be overflowing with bountiful heaps of partially rotten fruit-heads. Perhaps you can identify with this? Anyway, the oldest was carved two weeks ago and the most recent was perhaps ten minutes ago.”
In case you’re curious, I can confirm now that rotten fruit is difficult on the stomach whether or not it has been anthropomorphized. Nevertheless, thank you, Sara!
“The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.”
Carl Jung, as quoted by Deegocracy. I suspect we long ago passed a population level at which our evolutionary development suited us well for comprehension, cooperation, empathy, and confidence. We are anthropologically incapable of emotional and cognitive operations involving six billion individuals. The crowd is an ocean.
Tribalism abounds: we break the world into pieces we can process; we partialize it.
In some of the parts I’ve elected to ignore, all Hell has broken loose: earlier this morning, I was looking for a photo of Jung that adorned one of my father’s books. I searched for “Jung” and looking at images produced.
Mixed in with imaged of the psychiatrist were immediately disturbing photos of an older woman with something terribly wrong with her shape:
(I don’t know how long I can bear to have this image up here, incidentally, so gape while you can).
The inevitable life-killing Internet detour eventually yielded some information. Her name is Cathie Jung and she is a 71-year old lifelong aficionado of corsets, who now has a 15-inch waist. If you’re interested, she naturally has all the archetypal qualities of the odd: she maintains that it’s healthy, she is married to an orthopedic surgeon, etc. And of course, she has a web site.
I’m not going to comment on the catastrophe that is our desire to compress, bleach, stretch, inflate, cut, color, laser, or poison ourselves into attractiveness; I have no idea what sort of pathos led Cathie Jung to this. Perhaps she’s an utterly normal woman who merely likes sculpting flesh.
But after seeing her while looking for Carl Jung, it was interesting to read the above quote as though a message from the two of them. In the crowd of contemporary society, the negligible individual will do whatever is needed to avoid negligibility. A distinction of our age is the obsession with fame, as opposed to success. Until recently, one wanted to be famous for something: as a painter, as a statesman, as a hero, as a lover, a success.
Now, our entire popular culture is arranged around the haphazard distribution of fame -non-negligibility- to the detritus of the media-classes. Even they rarely maintain that they posses talent; fame has replaced talent, because it emerges that as we are buried in the crowds not art or skill or bravery is what matters: one must just not be subsumed in anonymity.
It’s likely that these blogs of ours are no different.
Update: The correct attribution of this quote is to Alex Carnevale, of This Recording, who posted it here. I apologize to him (and would delete and reblog were comments not already attached).
“Just because evolution led to intelligence in our case, we shouldn’t assume that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of Darwinian natural selection. It is not clear that intelligence confers a long-term survival advantage. Bacteria and insects will survive quite happily even if our so-called intelligence leads us to destroy ourselves.”
Stephen Hawking, in Cosmos. (From Super Hamburger America, who titled this post “Macrointellectual humility”).
Bunnynico posted Tammy Mercure’s Big Rock Candy Mountain photo series.
I love this photo, and I love the late nineteenth century hobo song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” for which Mercure’s series is named. It makes me happy; it’s the sort of dream I wish I had more often. You can hear the song here.
An anthem for indigent drifters, it describes a paradise of alcohol, impotent law enforcement, never having to change clothes, and trees that produce cigarettes. It’s like some innocent synthesis of the fantasies of the homeless, the adolescent, and the drifting.
Some lyrics:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs
The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay
Oh, I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain’t no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks
I’m a goin to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
(I mean really: why didn’t we hang whomever invented work, and what about side-by-side lakes of whisky and stew?).
“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
David Hume, quoted by the always-fascinating Langer. I think this is one of the most interesting statements I’ve read; it immediately invites a slew of critical questions which, were it not Hume writing, one might assume the author had not considered; since it is Hume, it’s likely he had in mind answers to the following:
What are “errors in religion”?
Do we mean instances in which religion contradicts evident reality, such as counterfactual claims about the history of the physical universe? Or do we mean instances in which a religion is internally inconsistent, in which its own assertions violate one another? Or do we mean errors in interpretation, as when someone suggests that “jihad” means the slaughter of innocents?
Many of these last errors, interpretive errors, result from texts remaining the same as culture evolves through centuries, so that what is reasonable to infer in one century is unacceptable in another; does Hume consider these to be a special class of error? How is one to avoid this sort?
Why religion and philosophy?
Hume was writing before ideology replaced religion as the primary credential system in human life. In more recent history, errors in both religion and philosophy have been dwarfed in impact by “errors” in politics. As politics has replaced religion as the driving ideological force in the world, politics assumes responsibility for world wars and genocide, even when religious pretexts are used.
In Hume’s time, this was not as much the case; perhaps that is the reason he restricts himself to these fields. Nevertheless, it is a hole in his assertion: it seems that it is not errors in “religion” but errors in what we believe, what we hold sacred: that is no longer purely religious for many. Credential errors are the problem.
(And again, Errol Morris is right to say: “Error is the central feature of human existence,” errors in science, in reason, in faith, in love).
Power and danger
Last, is Hume interested in why errors in religion and ideology are dangerous while those in philosophy are not? The answer seems obvious to me: philosophy for some time has been in the habit of trafficking in the arcane and the pedantic, matters of import to few and emotional resonance to fewer. Religion, and now ideology, are where meaning is molded and made manifest in human life; when they are corrupted, as they often are, the consequences are serious.
People live and die and kill and love for their beliefs. Who can seriously imagine dying for Derrida?
