1.
- Those Starbucks you go to in Beverly Hills, I think they belong on the list of the craziest places on Earth. What about the guy who has no place to live who comes in early in the morning pulling a trolley holding that day's change of clothes, from hat to shoes a different out every day from different high fashion designers. In Starbucks bathroom he washes and perfumes himself and does what's needful to maintain his smooth bald head and then spends the day prancing around the cafe making small talk with the real wealthy of Beverly Hills, his poverty masquerading as wealth appreciated as picturesque eccentricity.
- The clothes are donations to the church he gets first crack at by volunteering there. He had on a new all white outfit this morning. The hotel maids were as usual at the long table, screaming gossip to each other I guess wanting to enjoy Beverly Hills while they can before the new president deports them. There were, yes, a couple of conversations yesterday we might find some interest in.
- I'm listening.
- They were with cafe customers who take to the table with them bags holding all their worldly goods. The first, a talk in passing as I left the cafe, with middle-aged man sitting outside. He wore a cap with the name of a retired US Navy ship embroidered in front. The second, with the young woman who another time told me she worked for the police and had knowledge of my stolen bike.**
The first conversation:
- I read this description of our new president: He is
reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans.He is
patriarchy unbuttoned, paunchy, in a baggy suit, with his hair oozing and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation.*- I don't see the point in name calling.
- You know, I've been wanting to talk with someone like you for a long time. I overhear talk from those camped out on the street when I'm on my bike late at night waiting at a corner for a light to change. You like our new president, though he would call you the losers of all losers.
- That's your opinion.
- You think he likes people like you, who have nothing but what they carry on their backs, sleep on the street, are hunted by the police?- He's on the side of my people.
- Who are your people?
- White people. He's going to do something about immigration, jobs.
- You expect one day to go back to some sort of more normal life?
- I do.
- Why do you think the new president will do anything he says, or that he cares about you, when in the past he's made it clear that he doesn't?
- That's your opinion, what you read in the liberal press.
- Do you think court documents are faked that report the new president paying settlements for numerous cases in which he was accused of fraud?
- I haven't seen any documents. You say they exist. I don't have to believe you.
- Have you looked?
- Looked where?
- The liberal press, or the internet. Courts have their own websites. Do you think they are faked too?
- I don't know of such things. I'm not from crazy California, I'm from one of the "fly over" states in the middle of the country. We there see the world more simple.
- "We need a guy who talks tough who doesn't care what anyone thinks. Who is not afraid of violence to stop other people from taking away our country." Evidently you're not aware beliefs like that authorize a would-be dictator to remove all legal protections? That you'll lose your country because of your fear of losing it?
- That's your California paranoia.
- It's not California but the rest of the country lives in fear. New lives are tried out here and that looks crazy because most of them are idiotic.
- So then you admit it.
The second conversation:
- What are you listening to?
- Bob Dylan.
- He won the Nobel prize.
- I heard.
- I'm nominated for two Nobel prizes.
- At Starbucks past midnight you meet very influential people.
- You're influential too.
- It would be nice if that were true. What are you nominated for?
- The peace prize. And literature.
- I see you writing here some nights. What do you write?
- An unauthorized biography is coming out in the spring about me.
- What's your name?
- You'll know the book when you see it.
- Will your picture be on the cover?
- Probably. Don't you want to be published too? I can help. Many famous people are my patrons, even movie stars. Casey Affleck wanted me to go to the Golden Globe Awards with him.
- Did you go?
- No. You see me here, they're going on tonight. I told him wait and I'd go with him to the Academy Awards. I can ask the Afflecks to help you too.
- Why not?
- What's the connection between conversations?
- Two extreme cases of our human ability to imagine different lives for ourselves. Put virtual reality goggles on rats, and do you know what happens?
- Has somebody done that?
- Yes, a UCLA Professor of Neuro-Physics. He developed needles ten times thinner than a human hair to record the firing of individual neurons.
- And?
- With the VR goggles on, the rat brains' visual centers showed totally anomalous results: forty percent of measured neurons stopped firing completely, the rest of the neurons measured went haywire, as he put it.
- Why?
- These are new results, the neuro-physicist says he isn't ready to offer any explanation.
- But you're ready.
- We've talked about *** how we humans are able to identify with actors in a theater performance, while we sit passively in the audience, how we are similarly able to pacify our own desires, while we submit to those in others who we must serve in our specialized roles in society, as we learn how to give them what we want rather than do what we ourselves want. We have been entering virtual realities for as long as we have been civilized, whether in a drawing or a movie or three dimensional VR. We somehow deal with the disconnection between our own lack of sense of physical motion, and what we witness in made worlds. We can even imagine ourselves in altered worlds, while we feel ourselves remaining inactive in our own. Rats can't do this.
- So in the confusion between what they see and what they fail to feel in their body, their brains shut down or go crazy.
- Here are the lyrics to the Bob Dylan song Things Have Changed I was listening to when my friend, who saw herself his potential successor in the prize, sat down with me:
Further Reading:
My Wife Who Throws Me Out
________________
* Rebecca Solnit, The London Review Of Books
** More Adventures In Trumpland
*** The Show
2.
- You're leaving it there?
- Why not?
- When the neuro-physicist takes the virtual reality goggles off the rats and again sticks needles in their brains, do the rats see a thing called "reality"?
- They don't?
- No.
- Why not?
- Dylan said, about hearing Weill/Brecht's Pirate Jenny at the beginning of his song writing career,
- Two extreme cases of our human ability to imagine different lives for ourselves. Put virtual reality goggles on rats, and do you know what happens?
- Has somebody done that?
- Yes, a UCLA Professor of Neuro-Physics. He developed needles ten times thinner than a human hair to record the firing of individual neurons.
- And?
- With the VR goggles on, the rat brains' visual centers showed totally anomalous results: forty percent of measured neurons stopped firing completely, the rest of the neurons measured went haywire, as he put it.
- Why?
- These are new results, the neuro-physicist says he isn't ready to offer any explanation.
- But you're ready.
- We've talked about *** how we humans are able to identify with actors in a theater performance, while we sit passively in the audience, how we are similarly able to pacify our own desires, while we submit to those in others who we must serve in our specialized roles in society, as we learn how to give them what we want rather than do what we ourselves want. We have been entering virtual realities for as long as we have been civilized, whether in a drawing or a movie or three dimensional VR. We somehow deal with the disconnection between our own lack of sense of physical motion, and what we witness in made worlds. We can even imagine ourselves in altered worlds, while we feel ourselves remaining inactive in our own. Rats can't do this.
- So in the confusion between what they see and what they fail to feel in their body, their brains shut down or go crazy.
- Here are the lyrics to the Bob Dylan song Things Have Changed I was listening to when my friend, who saw herself his potential successor in the prize, sat down with me:
A worried man with a worried mindAnd here are the lyrics to the Dylan song I was listening to before, Tight Connection to My Heart:
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train
Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
This place ain't doing me any good
I'm in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood
Just for a second there I thought I saw something move
Gonna take dancing lessons do the jitterbug rag
Ain't no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag
Only a fool in here would think he's got anything to prove
Lotta water under the bridge, lotta other stuff too
Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only passing through
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
I've been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losing hand
Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
I hurt easy, I just don't show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity
Gonna get lowdown, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
I'm in love with a woman who don't even appeal to me
Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I'm not that eager to make a mistake
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed.
Well, I had to move fastDylan sings in the first song of feelings like we might imagine the virtual reality rat as having: things have changed, the world is strange and there's nothing he can do. He's found himself in a world, he sings in Dark Eyes, he can't accept:
And I couldn't with you around my neck.
I said I'd send for you and I did
What did you expect?
My hands are sweating
And we haven't even started yet.
I'll go along with the charade
Until I can think my way out.
I know it was all a big joke
Whatever it was about.
Someday maybe
I'll remember to forget.
I'm gonna get my coat,
I feel the breath of a storm.
There's something I've got to do tonight,
You go inside and stay warm.
Has anybody seen my love,
Has anybody seen my love,
Has anybody seen my love.
I don't know,
Has anybody seen my love?
You want to talk to me,
Go ahead and talk.
Whatever you got to say to me
Won't come as any shock.
I must be guilty of something,
You just whisper it into my ear.
Madame Butterfly
She lulled me to sleep,
In a town without pity
Where the water runs deep.
She said, "Be easy, baby,
There ain't nothin' worth stealin' in here."
You're the one I've been looking for,
You're the one that's got the key.
But I can't figure out whether I'm too good for you
Or you're too good for me.
Has anybody seen my love,
Has anybody seen my love,
Has anybody seen my love.
I don't know,
Has anybody seen my love?
Well, they're not showing any lights tonight
And there's no moon.
There's just a hot-blooded singer
Singing "Memphis in June, "
While they're beatin' the devil out of a guy
Who's wearing a powder-blue wig.
Later he'll be shot
For resisting arrest,
I can still hear his voice crying
In the wilderness.
What looks large from a distance,
Close up ain't never that big.
Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine,
Never could learn to hold you, love,
And call you mine.
Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside- But in Tight Connection To My Heart our laureate is willing to take on the strange world of the other songs, the imagined world become real and a trap, he stops being passive to "their game where beauty goes unrecognized", and goes out and sees what he can do. He asks, Has anybody seen my love? knowing he still has a tight connection to her heart: he can leave her behind in the audience tied to her by his love, and move with the actors on the stage, but do this in his real life creating real worlds as he goes.
They're drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lover's pearls and all I see are dark eyes.
A cock is crowing far away and another soldier's deep in prayer
Some mother's child has gone astray, she can't find him anywhere
But I hear another drum beating for the dead that rise
Whom nature's beast fear as they come and all I see are dark eyes.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet, I'm sure it is
But I feel nothing for their game, where beauty goes unrecognized
All I feel is heat and flame, and all I see are dark eyes.
Oh, the French girl, she's in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy prize to the falling god of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.
Further Reading:
My Wife Who Throws Me Out
________________
* Rebecca Solnit, The London Review Of Books
** More Adventures In Trumpland
*** The Show
2.
- You're leaving it there?
- Why not?
- When the neuro-physicist takes the virtual reality goggles off the rats and again sticks needles in their brains, do the rats see a thing called "reality"?
- They don't?
- No.
- Why not?
- Dylan said, about hearing Weill/Brecht's Pirate Jenny at the beginning of his song writing career,
It was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also has the ideal chorus for the lyrics. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form... I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn’t exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it — trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and plot.The songs, he said, came to him in a vision with a kind of mathematical inevitability.
- Doesn't reality contain visions?
- Not the neuro-physicist's kind of reality that leaves out emotion, instead merely relates things, and pleasurable or painful states of body parts, to locations in the brain.
- Some neuro-physicists contend that pleasurable or painful states of body in fact are themselves emotion.
- They are wrong.
- How do you know?
- Human emotion, like a mathematical vision, is spread out across time and space. It is impossible to relate it to location in the brain. Play requires that in the past and in the future life is lived according to different rules, otherwise it is indistinguishable from real life. How do you locate in the brain play's relation of past and future to the present? How do you locate beauty and love?
- Neuro-physicists would say that virtual reality and song writing and being in love are hard cases. In simple perception things in the world link up with brain states.
- Well, yes, they link up, but only after you do to yourself what the neuro-physicists do.
- Which is?
- Sticking needles in rat brains they perform a sort of voodoo on themselves, reducing their awareness to brain states by hypnotic suggestion.
- Taking up suggestion is another way of saying playing a role. If role playing is what happens in perception of reality, reality too is not "real".
- It's a mistake. It's the result of perception done wrong.
- Only play and love and beauty are real, are perception done right.
