VONNEGUT: “One more optional piece of advice: If you ever have to give a speech, start with a joke, if you know one. For years I have been looking for the best joke in the world. I think I know what it is. I will tell it to you, but you have to help me. You have to say, ‘No,’ when I hold up my hand like this. All right? Don’t let me down.”
“Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?”
[AUDIENCE: “No.”]
VONNEGUT: “It is because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles. “
“That is the best joke I know. One time when I worked for the General Electric Company over in Schenectady, I had to write speeches for company officers. I put that joke about the cows and the little bottles in a speech for a vice-president. He was reading along, and he had never heard the joke before. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he had to be led away from the podium with a nosebleed. I was fired the next day.
“How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. We are such earnest animals. When I asked you about cream, you could not help yourselves. You really tried to think of a sensible answer. Why does a chicken cross the road? Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? Why did they bury George Washington on the side of a hill?
“The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.”
In an important pair of papers, Gend-ler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it “alief.” Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, “Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!” The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination. Those who get pleasure voyeuristically watching real people have sex will enjoy watching actors having sex in a movie. Those who like observing clever people interact in the real world will get the same pleasure observing actors pretend to be such people on television. Imagination is Reality Lite—a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work. Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space.
Listening to the early universe just got harder. A team led by Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today announced the discovery of cosmic radio noise that booms six times louder than expected. The finding comes from a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE, which stands for the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission. In July 2006, the instrument launched from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and flew to an altitude of 120,000 feet, where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.
Rhythm 2, 1974 As an experiment testing whether a state of unconsciousness could be incorporated into a performance, Abramović devised a performance in two parts.
In the first part, she took a pill prescribed for catatonia, a condition in which a person’s muscles are immobilized and remain in a single position for hours at a time. Being completely healthy, Abramović’s body reacted violently to the drug, experiencing seizures and uncontrollable movements for the first half of the performance. While lacking any control over her body movements, her mind was lucid, and she observed what was occurring.
Ten minutes after the effects of that drug had worn off, Abramović ingested another pill – this time one prescribed for aggressive and depressed people - which resulted in general immobility. Bodily she was present, yet mentally she was completely removed. (In fact, she has no memory of the lapsed time.) This project was an early component of her explorations of the connections between body and mind, which later took her to Tibet and the Australian desert. Following Rhythm 2, she set to develop the rest of the series of rhythm projects, continually testing her endurance.
Robert Hunter: I like the “Why do you believe THAT you believe X?” formulation. A fruitful line of inquiry far more invigorating than merely questioning all belief -which gets one an ill deserved reputation as a cynic when only attempting a little recreational glancing behind appearances! I’m certainly more curious about why I believe things than in what I believe, though I hadn’t formulated it.
As a practicing poet, I’ll go the whole distance with metaphor. I believe abstract object substitution is responsible for a great deal more of the human condition than this world dreams of. I’ll go so far as to say it’s the foundation of human consciousness. Why do I believe that I believe that? Because I spend a lot of time acting as though it were so and haven’t found anything to change my mind. Shall I take the plunge and state that everything specifically human is operated by metaphor? Speaking of ET’s, if they have self-reflexive consciousness, they also operate on metaphor. What “is” neither we nor they can know, but we can know what something is like. Buddha is like, you know, three pounds of dried flax. Harumph! That is to say: Buddha is a metaphor. Does that make Buddha less Buddha? Hardly, since anything other than pain is metaphor. Sex is metaphor. Pleasure is metaphor. Love is a shower of stars in a golden bowl. Hunger is a ravenous beast gnawing our entrails. But pain is just ouch! Not a metaphor. That’s why we can’t really remember pain, only, sometimes, that we had some. For real pain, there is no metaphor -and memory retains only metaphor. Were you to say Buddha is pain, you’d be closer by a country mile than saying Buddha is a pile of dried dung. But it would be meaningless unless said at the precise moment of pain, which would be a rarity. From this it seems reasonable to extrapolate that looking for the “real” is looking for pain. There are those who make a practice of this, perhaps believing implicitly that “the real” is somehow senior to metaphor. This is the worst sort of dualistic thinking. A culture that has a problem with rampant unreality is likely to be a culture that embraces pain and its anodynes.
Terence McKenna: I like what you said about metaphor. And I agree with you. But it reminds me of something that happened to me long ago. It was in my early acid days. I had a trip which was all about metaphor and had reached conclusions similar to those you expressed. At a meeting of the experimental college a few days after this trip I proclaimed that “Everything is a metaphor.” Without missing a beat my mentor of that moment, Joseph Tussman, who was a philosophy Prof. at Cal. looked across the room at me and said. “What about articles? And, or and of? Are they metaphors?” I am still mulling that reposte.
A conclusion of that same era was that language is alive. I experienced this very concretely on acid. English as an animal, a kind of amoebae, extending its pseudopodia of description into every look and cranny of reality, a kind of syntactical Los Angeles, ever growing, expanding and including more and more empty or natural territory into its grid of meaning. Wasn’t it Burroughs who observed that “Language is a virus from outer space?” What does it want with us, and how can we tell if it won’t tell us? And then how can we trust its message since even the act of deconstructing it involves a total commitment to it as both means and end? ETs and countless other almost realities or wannabe realities seem to be the minor flora and fauna of a purely linguistic domain. And then there is the ambiguity of memory…It is more and more amazing to me that we can sustain the hallucination of any meaning at all.
From this location, the virus was transmitted to a computer in the scientist’s lab, from where it could have spread in a local network, and then on the Internet.
“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College.
‘“The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”
Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces.
The tools are us.
Lungfish: “Creation Story” (Rainbows From Atoms)
Paranoia warped into a gravity,
which spread a smothering blanket - an evolutionary launch pad
Vision was tested on blank sky, and a voice said
- Let me tell you about the time that something occurred;
Medication caused an ear to hear, and a conflict of interpretation arose;
Landscapes were drawn from a plaque of particles
and the burden was distributed;
The law would return
as inflated skins -
while music initiated architecture.
Animals, living through a velocity of fear
began to modify their behavior
to comply with human observation
Thus dropping the keystone
in the eggshell honeycomb of anthrocentric history sense
as for the plants - they had been with the music
Science procured a steeple shell, dressed for immortality,
hollow to hold the music:
The motion repelled all opinion, and refused to consider its origin
Apples happened - bringing acids and enzymes
The spinning recorder
disguised as an endless bouquet
Things became erotic at the drop of a hat
A tyrant placed an apple on a table and lorded over it
as a fish realized it held a monkey inside itself
and expelled it on the beach
in a larval salamander form.
The voters clamored for more circles, and the whole rig began to rotate
Books were used for fuel and money, and everybody was writing them
The planets turned inside out, to expose their freight
No charges were pressed
because all involved agreed
that they could die;
These are secrets a world sung to me, truer than the truth.
A young order of birds
that eats the eyes of their believers;
science predicted forms of worship, and reveled in them.
An orgy of mutation took place, for many years
between stones, near water, inside clouds
The people bound their feet
with the skins of the animals
to trample their own cities - and each other.
They developed external organs
like guns and television sets
They believed that they own things
One mind in a generation will hear the eternal broadcast,
the voice saying;
- Let me tell about the time;
that something occurred.
That mind’s body will be strapped down
and that body’s mind will be subject -
to testing or electrical currents,
rippled through the brain
But the music pervades
At was music that gave the shove, and resolved in music we shall breathe
It was children that crafted a parent
and resolved in children
we shall live.
