Really, I digress - Keith Adams' author's blog.

Does it Have a Pulse

2012-01-18T20:23:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit of a Mahler nut, to put it mildly. I know all of his symphonies, most of them intimately, particularly the 1st three, then 5th, 7th and 9th. I've seen them all live several times each, particularly the 1st and the 5th which are the most frequently performed. But I've never had the opportunity to get all the Mahler I can eat. Yet over the next five weeks, Gustavo Dudamel will lead the LA Phil and a visiting orchestra through all ten symphonies, and I've tickets to my six favorites, and will be accompanied by Ben, and, for some of them, a couple of friends.

The question is, will I feel anything. Or is even live Mahler not enough to put some velocity into my sodden neurons?

I was tempted just to end this blog right there, but that would be a little self-indulgent. The reason I haven't been writing my blog is because I'm flat out of inspiration and motivation. I'm still in the long depression that began .. let's see .. about 30 months ago. It cycles up and down, over six week periods, give or take, and I've been on a down draft since mid December. I get on with my life, I work, I read, I force myself to go to the gym, I read the New York Times, I meet with friends, I eat chocolate. I even laugh sometimes. The first new episode of Absolutely Fabulous got me going, the other day, particularly when Edina was dreaming about the original Danish version of AMC's The Killing, and burbling made-up Danish.

But overall, this depression thing is getting old. Really, really, really, really old.

Happy Holidays from Keith and Ben in Hollywood

2011-12-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

Do you Hear Voices: Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind Revisited

2011-12-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

What I like most about reading stimulating books like Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness:Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, is that they're ... well ... stimulating. They make you explore ideas, and come to your own conclusions and flights of fancy. If you're a writer, they also make for great ideas on which to base a story. Unfortunately, I'm not that kind of writer. I have a ton of ideas that I think would make great novels, but I don't appear to have what it takes to write creative literature. Believe me. I've tried. The closest I came to writing anything viable was a screenplay which took the idea of a man conceiving a baby seriously. I just reread it recently, and it was the sort of thing that if I saw it on screen I'd be complaining to Ben about absurd coincidences, and ripe melodrama.

What I don't like about this book is the cheesy cover. If I saw somebody reading a book with a cover like this I'd think they were gullible fantasists whose next read would be about crop circles.

But at least it was based on ideas. The minute you start taking a concept like that seriously, all kind of interesting things pop out. I had the affair brew into a massive religious conflict, with the Christian Right calling it an abomination and being in the unusual situation of calling for a forced abortion. As the plot approaches the climax, everything hangs on whether Congress will pass an act outlawing men from giving birth. Exciting stuff, huh?

Well maybe not, but finishing the "Reflections" book, a belated follow-up to Jayne's notorious 1976 The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, I'm happy to tell you that I came away with more ideas for screenplays.

It's difficult to sum up Jayne's arguments in anything other than a full book review, because of the breadth of scope both of what he's trying to prove, and the subject matter from which he draws his arguments. There are excruciating chapters on the importance of the development of metaphors to language, a rather irritating chapter in which he shows why consciousness isn't necessary for learning, speech or even thought, then hundreds of pages of anthropological analysis of the role of statues and God images in early early civilizations up to around 2000 B.C.

But the gist of it is that consciousness - when defined narrowly to mean awareness of yourself as a free actor in mind and physical space, able to self assemble your life into a narrative - is a recent development, not much more than 4,000 years old; and that the ancient Egyptians, for instance, managed to build the pyramids without being what we would call conscious.He draws together a lot of evidence that, in place of consciousness, the people of early civilizations depended on voices in their head coming from the right-hand side of the brain, to make decisions for them; and that these voices were very real to them, and were associated with the God statues and figurines that were dominant features of these early societies. He believed schizophrenics were throwbacks to the "bicameral" mind.

I don't want to dwell too much on his arguments because it wouldn't leave any space for my own diversions. The thing that people find hardest to accept about Jaynes' theory is that if consciousness is only 4,000 years old, then how can it be an evolutionary trait? There just hasn't been enough time for such a phenomenon to evolve. Which means that consciousness is learned. He shows convincingly that very young children are clearly not conscious (by the narrow definition), but that parents unknowingly (and often imperfectly) teach their children how to be consciousness.

This got me to thinking about how you could attempt to prove this, which led in turn to my science-fiction fantasies of a horribly unethical experiment. On a remote island, completely cut off from human activity, human babies would be raised by trained workers who behaved like unconscious robots. The culture in which the children grew up would be made to resemble small, early societies based on idol worship; they'd be given a rudimentary language. Once the children were old enough to fend for themselves, the workers would withdraw to become hidden observers, the goal being to see what kind of society they developed. Over generations, we'd see how they grew into decision-making; would they hear voices in their heads; would somebody invent consciousness eventually? Their brains would be remotely imaged in real time (by some technology as yet to be invented), and monitored for activities that indicated the sort of free associations that take place in modern minds.

But then you start to think that it would actually be pretty cool to do the experiment in reality, and forget about science fiction. Of course, it's not possible to do it with babies, but could we develop the minds of, say, Orangutans, by breeding them for ever larger brain mass? Could their minds reach a point where they'd have the capacity to develop true language? If so, then, could you then run your experiment on the desert island? Or is even that unethical? Perhaps in giving apes language we'd really be turning them into persons; is it our humanity that makes the real experiment with human babies unethical; or is it that we;d perhaps be limiting their opportunities to develop into persons?

This naturally gets you going back to your screenplay: the scientists had indeed used Orangutans, not babies, but news somehow gets out that sentient apes had been developed, and - ignoring the possibility of Planet of the Apes scenarios - you could have your huge religious controversy again, with the religious nuts calling the conscious apes abominations, la di da.

It's hard to say which screenplay idea is the most far-fetched; men bearing children, or apes writing a book review of Julian Jaynes.

Yearning and Memories in Washington DC

2011-12-03T12:13:00.001-08:00

It's the first time I've been in a conservative sex shop, I thought to myself. But that's Washington.

I've been once again in Raleigh, on business, for two weeks. On Friday morning, I was working out in my hotel gym, listening to one of my all time favorite songs, Left to my Own Devices, by the Pet Shop Boys. As music is wont to do, it whipped me through a time wormhole, taking me back to the summer of 1989. I'm on a gay dance club on a Sunday afternoon; the daylight is streaming in from open doors, and I'm lost in the music - the long remixed version of "Devices". Half of my heart though is wrapped up in the man beside me, Shaun, my first love - the man I'd abruptly fallen for the previous year, at the tender age of twenty three. Unlike me, he's a great dancer, and he's hunky. He has his shirt off, and I stare greedily at his torso on each revolution of the dance floor. I'm far too skinny to take my shirt off, and am probably wearing a paisley shirt (my memory isn't clear on this important point.) But it's a shaft of light in my memories that always sinks me into tenderness when I recall it.

Lord, I'd forgotten how handsome Shaun was. Oh ... and still is! I'm 23, and Shaun 27. I think the look on my face speaks volumes.

Ultimately, our relationship never worked out. I was too young and unformed to have enough self-respect to be loved (at least, this is my subsequent analysis); I couldn't be myself with Shaun, and I don't blame him that he never truly shared my feelings for him. We both really enjoyed our couple of years together, but it was always in imbalance because of the density of my need for him.

Shaun lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania about two hours away by Amtrak from my apartment in Center City, Philadelphia. One of us would make that trip most weekends. On my turns, each time I settled into my seat on the Keystone line out of 30th Street Station, with a hot chicken-breast croissant and a cheese danish (both surprisingly and consistently good) from the restaurant car, I'd be in a state of anticipation not unlike what I used to feel on the night of Christmas Eve as a kid, when my brother Neil and I would lie awake, breathlessly, late at night, hearing my dad getting our Christmas presents out of his wardrobe and arraying them (always unwrapped) in the living room. (I'd better state for the benefit of Americans that my dad was not plucking toys from his sports coat: a wardrobe in England is a big, free-standing closet for clothes. I'd use the word "armoir", but my spell- checker insists on saying there's no such word, even if I add an "e" at the end.)

Shaun worked on an army base as a helicopter technician, and would frequently have to work for part of the weekend. I'd stay in his apartment and listen to music. Then, when it was time for him to come home, I'd go "take a nap". I was so in need of affection, that I'd strip naked, bury myself in his bed, and pretend to be asleep, waiting for the sound of the front-door unlocking, and the feel of Shaun creeping on top of me in bed, wrapping me in his long, muscular arms, kissing me on the back of my neck. He's actually the only person who's ever been able to cocoon me in that way. At the time, although I was 6'6, I was painfully - concentration camp like - skinny (see photo). Since starting to work out in my late twenties, it's gradually become infeasible for me to be anything other than the cocooner rather than cocoonee. Now, at 225 lbs, it's me that wraps Ben protectively in my arms. It subtly changes the nature of your relationships. But you know, us big guys sometimes want to be protected too, sigh.

The next summer, we took our first weekend away together, in Rehoboth Beach, Maryland, the 3rd most popular gay beach destination in the North East, after Provincetown and Fire Island. Actually, I suppose it was really the gay destination for people from secondary cities who didn't feel they measured up to the tonier destinations of the more chic urbanites from New York and Boston. And this is where that moment occurred in the dance club, the moment that I was now reliving, in the month where I'm turning 47, in the basement of a Raleigh Marriott hotel in 2011. I look at myself in the gym mirror and smile remembering how young I was. The face that stares back at me is no longer young. But the naive, romantic young man of deep feelings is still deep inside, and unashamed.

Why not, I suddenly thought to myself, thinking of Shaun? The prospect of another weekend in sleepy Raleigh offers little excitement. What if I can get to DC for the weekend, and see Shaun (who moved to Maryland many years ago now.) I immediately texted him to find out if he was around this weekend. This was probably my first communication with Shaun in two years. But it never matters how rarely we speak. Ever since I "grew up", and dispensed with my intense neediness, I've been able to relax into myself, be myself with Shaun, and he and I have become very close friends over the years. We both acknowledge having a special and rare affection for each other (a feeling different, obviously, than what I feel for Ben, but still different from how I feel about anyone else), and I smile again, as I write this blog, sitting in a Starbucks in Dupont Circle, knowing that I'll be seeing him in a couple of hours.

Because: on Friday morning, after texting him, I realized that - Shaun being Shaun - I was unlikely to hear from him in time to book travel. So I decided, what the hell, I'll escape to DC anyway, even if I don't get to see Shaun. I got a steal on hotel, airfare, and rental car, packed light, and headed to Raleigh-Durham airport early Friday evening with such a feeling of freedom and adventure. I've not been able to do spontaneous travel by myself much in the last few years.

Everything worked like a dream. I'd planned on spending a couple of hours in the Admirals Club waiting for my flight around 9.00 when I noticed there was a 7.45 flight boarding immediately. I've never flown standby before, because there's no guarantee I'll get a seat I can fit my enormous frame into. But I literally waltzed on board, and got the only comfortable seat in the tiny plane - the front row single seat abaft the entry door. In the terminal's book store, I'd bought this great new book on dark matter and energy which, according to the sales clerk, they'd put on the shelves for the first time not half an hour ago. On the flight, the Nigerian stewardess was sociability and smiles, the flight took off on time, landing at Reagan 43 minutes later, an airport which is amongst the most convenient of any large city anywhere in its proximity to the center. Everything seemed to be going perfectly.

I said I traveled light. And my tough, carbon fiber rolling mini suit-case was indeed lacking in heft, and eminently stowable as carry-on. But I had way too many fluids for that to be possible; not just the array of sprays and gels to keep "the hair" respectable, but also my medium-sized travel night medicine (otherwise known as a bottle of vodka.) Having never traveled standby before, the thought that "hey, my checked baggage will not accompany me" on the flight I'd so airily boarded after arriving at the airport, had never occurred to me. So it was after 10.00 before I finally left the airport with my luggage, in a huge, surprisingly ancient, black Grand Victoria - which looked like a senior police detective's wagon from 00's - from Avis. (Still, with my Priceline deal, it was only $20 a night.) My good spirits returned, though, as I coasted to the immaculate, stylish Washington Hilton, just a few blocks up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle. I'd gotten my room, at the same time as the car, for $79 a night, and it turned out to be classy, luxurious even, especially compared to the bland, identical Marriotts I've been used to in the last few years on business trips.

I'd finally heard from Shaun, in the afternoon, and it looked like we'd be able to get together for a few hours either Saturday or Sunday to catch up. He invited me to a piano recital of a friend of a friend, no doubt in one of the beautiful restored mansions in the Dupont neighborhood. I was very disappointed that I'd not be able to go, because of the timing of my return flight. But it got me thinking about how much had changed in Shaun's life since his days in Harrisburg. When we knew each other back then, I had the more culture-filled life, and was more experienced in high art and music. But Shaun took up acting a few years ago, and is becoming quite successful at it. Every time I see postings of his on Facebook, it sounds like he's hanging out with arty types, in the sort of cultural milieu I've always longed to be a part of. Once again, not for the first time in recent months, I thought sadly of Los Angeles. There, everything revolves so much around "the industry", that there's really very little in the way of high culture that isn't based on the ambition to ascend into the realm of klieg lights, rather than in the love of the life of the mind. I'm beginning to feel, with increasing fervour, a distaste for my adopted home, and a desire to get the hell out of there.

This feeling was confirmed today, as I walked about the neighborhood, or listened to conversations in Starbucks. So close to Embassy Row, you see and hear people from all over the world; they're far less concerned about their appearances, and they're having conversation - real conversation. You get the vivid sense of being amongst curious minds, something that's next to impossible to imagining sensing in Los Angeles.

Every city has its oddities, though, and this is the city which is so starchily conservative that many of the things you wouldn't even cast a second eye at in cities like San Francisco, and, yes, Los Angeles, raise eyebrows of surprise and disdain here. You see scarcely a single person who's prepared to stand out with iconoclasm of dress. However, you do see people who've taken conservatism to such a surprisingly determined length that they really would stand out, and draw comment even in Los Angeles. For instance, a man in his mid-thirties I saw last night, in a long belted rain-coat, gloves, scarf and trilby. And he clearly wasn't so dressed in an attempt at irony. (The man seated next to me in Starbucks is wearing felt wing-tips.)

It was on my way down Connecticut Avenue to this Starbucks, earlier, that I stepped into the sex shop. No, I wasn't looking for dildos. I have an affectation for a big leather watch-strap with metal studs. The one I stole from Ben years ago, finally wore out a few months ago, and I recently bought another one on Melrose Avenue (a street which at least has the merit of being funky.) But it's quirky. It's this very long thing you sort of have to double wrap about your wrist and secure with a stud. And it's driving me crazy because it keeps coming unraveled.

The sex shop looked like the sort of store you see on Hollywood Boulevard which might sell things like studded watch straps, along with lace panties, and sequined halter tops. So I stepped in, and asked the dignified, stiff postured,, black owner if he sold watch straps. He pointed me across the street to a jeweler's store. So I showed him my problematic watch strap as an example of what I was looking for, and asked if he knew where I could get something like that. His lips pursed, and he shook his head. saying "Not around here". I asked him if there was anywhere in DC where I could get something like that, and before I'd even finished asking, he was shaking his head again, this time dismissively.

I'm positive the guy in the sex shop was wrong: even here, there must be a "funky" neighborhood; but that a guy working in a sex shop couldn't imagine it, speaks a lot. In this city, you're just not encouraged to stand out. I thought of the John Galliano shirt I'd brought with me that I was going to wear if I went clubbing tonight, and realized I'd probably look like a freak in the eyes of the locals. Not that I care, but it just feels odd that something that would be seen as fun and adventurous in LA would be a black mark here. (Incidentally, I just asked the young Starbucks barista, who looked vaguely "alternative", if there was a funky neighborhood, and he came up blank too.)

I realize, of course, that my seven years in Los Angeles have changed me. I've seen this in myself on many occasions when I've traveled. My style of dress, the concern for superficialities like what kind of car you drive, the brash self-assertiveness, even flogging my book on this blog: things that seem like virtues in LA, just don't fit in elsewhere. My blond highlights probably don't help either. Now I wonder how much Shaun has changed since his life took a diversion into art and theater, in the penumbra of Washington. He was always somebody who determinedly had his own look (even if it included a Grace Jones flattop haircut in the 80s.) The single quality of his that always most endeared him to me was an unaffected air of innocence and wonder at anything that was new or different to him. I hope he hasn't lost that, and gone all conservative on me. I'll find out in an hour or so when we meet at JRs, and old-time gay bar in Dupont. (He's off to rehearsals right after that.)

The Set of the Shoulders

2011-11-26T18:52:00.001-08:00

Do you strut, or do you slink? Do you smirk, or slump? Do you occupy the sidewalk, or hide in the trees?

How you present yourself in public - how you carry yourself: this, to me, is a fascinating question, capable of telling you a lot about yourself just as easily leading you into making terribly wrong assumptions about others. In this area, my primary pondering has been about men (since I'm pathologically homosexual, you know); but there's a definite corollary between the way some man hold themselves and the female gait and self-representation - and I'm not specifically talking about effeminacy here.

(That WeHo pose. Although I must confess I actually took this photo in San Francisco recently.)

Living and working in Hollywood, and its western sister (otherwise known as "WeHo"), I'm accustomed to count to possibly the highest possible average score (outside of Brazil) on the hotmeter when rating the men I see around me. Spend a half afternoon at WeHo Starbucks Central, and you'll see up to 50 model-quality young (mostly gay) men stream in or past. The thing is, though: a large percentage of them are not only streaming, they're also strutting or smirking (with a tiny minority merely steaming.) And it's a real turn-off.

In my (admittedly tiny) research of Cosmopolitan Magazine surveys, women seem to like their men self-confident and even borderline cocky. (However, it's possible that only the women who read Cosmo feel this way.) Is it only me, though, or is cockiness mostly obnoxious, self-involved, and, ultimately, a harbinger of insecurity? If a man is truly confident in who he is, then why would he have the need to demonstrate it by his posture, affect, and stance? If a man is very goodlooking, then surely his nobler response is to be grateful, rather than to exist to be looked at?

I may be being unfair, but this is what I see: very goodlooking young men carrying themselves in such a way that projects "I'm constantly aware of how goodlooking I am and I just know that everybody is staring at me." It can get even worse: I know several such men by site, from the gym and elsewhere, that are never seen without a self-satisfied smirk. And I kid you not: there are even a few who actually, physically walk along with their nose in the air. It's absolutely true.

Apart from this being not sexy, it makes me wonder many things. I've often been tempted to plan a blog based on interviewing men that I see behaving this way. The thing is, I'm not quite sure how to couch the questions in such a way that they'll get honest responses, and won't cause offense. "Are you constantly aware of how goodlooking you are?" "Are you really as self-confident as you look?" "Gosh, what's it like being you?"

Amongst all men, I believe, there's something else going on which makes it almost impossible to walk past another man, along on the street, without feeling some sort of discomfort, and finding it almost impossible to know what to do with your eyes. I know it's not just me. I've recently begun to steel myself into not doing this. But it's difficult. It seems a little rude and invasive to make eye contact with everybody, and you run the risk - at my age at least - of being thought of as a pervert, at least in WeHo.

I do believe that there are people who measure low on the consciousness scale and don't worry about these sort of things, because there's precious little introspection going on in there. Perhaps they're lucky souls.

Inevitably, I'm going to bring this back to myself. As a preface, let me say I'm just finishing David Deutsch's impressive recent book, The Beginning of Infinity, about the nature, meaning and purpose of knowledge, and I've found it heavily influencing my thought processes. One thing that took easy root was his condemnation of taboo, and his explanation for this attitude, through incredibly lucid prose based on innovative thinking. Here's the sequence of ideas, greatly simplified:

Knowledge cannot help but be infinite, since humans are inherently creative. Knowledge growth is therefore limitless, bound only by the laws of physics.
This will lead to an ever more perfect society (that will never be perfect, obviously.) You can see this in the inevitable stretching of what a full human being is. Gays are beginning to be included; in the future (or so I believe), those with serious mental illness will be drawn in too.
Knowledge advances in the same way as science: an explanation for something is posed, and that explanation is exposed to critique; eventually one explanation wins out (e.g. gay relationships are every bit as valid as straight ones.)
There are obstacles to knowledge growth, however, and these include taboos. A taboo is effectively a constraint upon what is exposed to critical thinking. This is most obvious in religion, where, for instance, some Fundamentalist Christians believe the earth is 6,000 years old not because this explanation has survived critique, but, instead, because they were told so by an inviolable source: the supposed word of God. This is exactly the same as a parent telling a child to do something because "I say so."

A bit of a diversion, granted, but it's all leading up to justifying what I'm about to say: there's a taboo about honestly appraising your virtues and physical attributes. This taboo is crouched in the form of a virtue: modesty. But it's nevertheless a limit on what can be discussed, and therefore explained. So I'm going to temporarily move past this taboo. (This is all a very long-winded way of saying "... leaving modesty aside ...")

I'm goodlooking. There is such a taboo about saying that. You may think that it instantly ranks me amongst those I was criticising earlier: good-looking gay guys in WeHo with their nose in the air. Now, I don't normally see this "goodlookingness" with my own eyes. I look in the mirror and I see the blue rings under my eyes, the deep clefts beside my mouth; a somber face, an incipient double-chin. But I've been told it so frequently, and continue to be told, and have had so much independent evidence that didn't require speech, that I've accepted it, grudgingly. I am, or was at least, even striking. I'm 6'6, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, muscular with full head of non-greying hair. People notice me as I walk into a room.

So how do I carry myself, and why? I wouldn't be able to add this bit of knowledge to this essay if I hadn't just broken the taboo. I think that I carry myself with modesty, mostly a lack of sense that people are finding me attractive, and I think that I fall into projecting so effectively the exact opposite of feeling full of yourself, that it works against me. I see this in clubs. When I'm feeling great; self-confident, uninhibited, and full of bonhomie, I get a lot of attention, even now, three years short of being 50. It continues to baffle me, but there it is. Yet I can be wearing exactly the same clothing, and feel invisible. It's all about what I'm projecting. You see, I'm SO concerned with not assuming I'm goodlooking, and SO concerned with not appearing full-of-myself, that I go out of my way to make myself look diffident. And it doesn't serve. What I most enjoy about being in a public environment where people are having fun, is to have fun myself, and meet interesting and fun people. Moping around with my poker face will not encourage that to happen. So why do I do it?

I turn to David Deutsch again. I place constraints upon my behavior, and this inhibits the full flow of knowledge, creativity and life. And these constraints are voluntary, and are partly associated with my distaste at seeing those WeHo guys smirking their way along Santa Monica Boulevard. But more than anything, this comes from an unshakable self-doubt in my kernel of kernels. I'm still a 155 lb, lanky, skinny, gap-toothed, basin haircutted, shy teenager with huge feet, and ill-fitting clothes.

So this is what I'd really like to ask if I ever did my blog interviews with WeHo guys: don't you have any doubt?

Duke Campus in the Fall - North Carolina photographs.

2011-11-06T18:09:00.000-08:00

Mottled leaves on gray gravel, study. No. 2644.

Monstrous water lilly type thing.

Post touch football. Wish I'd made that pass. Ardent follower searches for something to say to make it feel better.

A pretty collection of leaves that just happened to be lying around atop a pillar.

Last chance to be green, fellas.

Maple leaves, says Keith, authoratatively. (?)

Ancient tribal interpretive dance masquerading as touch football.

Duke Chapel masquerading as Duke Chapel

All photos copyright Keith Adams, 2011

Gurumarka meet Sehnsucht

2011-10-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

Where should I begin? With Gurumarka, or Sehnsucht? My late "Blues Spring" (that is a short-lived but exciting break from a two-year-old depression), or my recent accidental destruction of a two terabyte database at one of the largest companies in Brazil (and one of our most important customers)?

(Image manipulation, Keith Adams)

Let's start with sparkly eyes and iconoclasm. Frequently, when I'm let out in public, I notice, in particular, people who are bravely but oddly dressed, pierced or pigmented; stylishly dressed older women, and ... errm ... hot guys, in no particular order. Of course, when I'm in North Carolina on business (as I will be for the next two weeks), all three of these types are in sadly short supply; but going there and back I run into a few examples of all of them.

My interest was tickled, during my eight hour layover at DFW today, by a graybeard hippie sitting, on an armchair across from me at the Admirals Club, Apple MacBook Air in his lap, his legs coiled into the classic Baddha Koṇāsana posture. He had both both the crinkly eyes of a soulful man, and the unconventional appearance of an iconoclast, both qualities amongst those which attract my attention in strangers.

His earbuds prevented any obvious mode of interaction, but the synchronized descent then rapid reactionary climb of the blinds fronting the airline club provided a means of making amused eye contact; and when he pointed out that my backpack was likely the offending object causing the blinds to bounce open again, contact was established; and his yoga position - which would be agonising to me - provided a ready rejoinder, and we were soon in conversation.

Unsurprisingly, he was a yoga Guru and teacher, obviously relatively advanced judging by the number of hits I got afterwards when Googling his moniker Gurumarka, more surprisingly, for an American, living in Germany. We talked about many things, but I'm afraid he must have thought me terribly close-minded (despite what I modestly describe as crinkly eyes of my own) at my complete resistance to trying yoga. (I have very good reasons, but not ones you'd go into with a stranger, however crinkly his eyes.)

Interestingly, however, for a man whom I assumed had a marked intellectual curiosity, his German was no better than your average Englishman, even though he'd lived in Heidelberg for over fifteen years. The German language came into the picture when he talked about living for your passion, as he says he does, and implicitly compared his lifestyle to my own, circumscribed, as it is, by a challenging corporate job, and a double mortgage. It was odd and timely that this came up because Sehnsucht has been raising its head again, very recently. (I suppose I must be the word's most ardent adherent because nobody - not even the Germans of my acquaintance - seems to know it, despite its wonderful and untranslatable meaning of an ineffable yearning.)

I've been aware once again that there's a vacancy to be filled in my life; things are insufficient, and not just because of this goddamned depression I've been trying to shake since June 2009, the cursed spawn of a bipolar mind. I'm working so hard (in part because of the recent two terabyte disaster in Brazil I hinted at earlier), which is surely part of it. And, as it happens, I am working at what I'm passionate about: like it or not, I was born to code software. And it's not that my life lacks creative outlets like photography, or intellectual stimulation, what with Henry James, David Deutsch and my partner Benhur (who's no intellectual slowcoach himself) keeping me company at bedtime (we have a big bed.) Oh, Ben and I have a great emotional bond, we have a great circle of friends, we've got the dogs, the books, the house, all that you know. Yet there's something still missing.

And no, it's not God, before you start. (My guru companion in the Admirals Club brought up "the creator" pretty quickly, so I suppressed telling him about my most recent blog entry whose first few words are "I'd like to state, in all humility, that there is no God.") Color, depth, and resonance are amongst the things I can discern in this vast sphere of oppressive Sehnsucht hanging over my head.

This blog is already getting too long, so I'll be less airy-fairy, and nail down one missing article: socializing in a world of ideas. Not that I expect life to be a perpetual salon, but I see myself, in my mind's eye, at a dinner table in something like Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sister; no, not trying to steal my best friend's wife, a la Michael Caine, or getting into an argument with my alcoholic, ex-vaudevillian parents; more trying to pierce Max von Sydow's pomposity with sidebars on the nature of knowledge, and debating the narrator's point-of-view in the novels of Edith Wharton with Mia Farrow while flashing my crinklies at her. Oh, I probably sound pretentious, I know. And it's true that maybe I'm yearning for the unattainable not the ineffable.

Ben and I had lunch, this spring, in Philadelphia, with an academic colleague who'd supervised me doing research in public policy at U. Penn in the late 80's and early 90's. Aileen is a prime example of the sort of person I'm talking about: liberal minded, inquisitive, good company. We hadn't seen each other in years, although I'd often talked about her influence on me with Ben, and we talked at lunch about how not to miss opportunities. She'd begun to follow the practice of always following up with interesting people she'd either just met, or lost touch with, and we talked about how our meeting with her for lunch was a good example.

The truth is though, that we rarely do follow up. Maybe it's happened too often that you meet somebody who shares a lot of your interests, and who stimulated your mind, and you'd felt the possibility of friendship, and yet nothing had come of it. And, in my case, there's always the handy explanation I excuse myself with for my inertia: that depression inhibits you from social risk. And Los Angeles seems particularly difficult: there are very few personal encounters in the routine world, to begin with, since everybody drives. Career seems to be king, and the biggest game in town is the one that's given LA it's reputation of shallowness.

I'd thought that after my book had been published, I'd begin to meet literate people, and, for a while, it seemed that was a possibility. I was interviewed a few times, and met other authors at book readings and fairs. I'd had this idea that I'd encounter a literary set, who lived and breathed artistic expression. Instead, I mostly met women who wrote potboiler, and guys who wrote fishing manuals. There are a lot of authors in the world, but very few Henry James'.

About a year ago, a friend of my brother, Louis, who works in "the industry", was in town, and a friend of his hosted a large dinner party up in one of the canyons beneath the Hollywood Hills, to which I was invited (Ben was out of town.) It was the first time I'd been to a party of what I felt might be like-minded people, in my then six years in LA; there was a woman strumming a guitar - which was promising, several bookish looking men in beards, and petite boyish girls in tshirts and dorky thick framed glasses.

But the first man who spoke to me as I entered asked me if I had a big appendage. I kid you not. He turned out to be this incredible bore, much like Max von Sydow in Hannah and her Sisters, come to think of it: overly fascinated by himself, and confident his lustrous eccentricity justified his lude conversational passes. There was an English documentary film-maker, very sharply dressed and accomplished looking, who monopolized any conversation with his tales of success at film-festivals. There was a beautiful, painfully thin, young actress - she of the guitar, with an air of being perpetually terrified someone would expect her to say something clever. A spunky black girl with ravishing eyes who swept you into discussions about getting the right P.R. person. And so on. I'm not exaggerating.

The only conclusions I can come to are that either I don't belong here (something I often think), or that I'm going to be still saying things like this in ten years without having done anything about it. I don't want it to be that way. So the only way around it is to persist: instead of Ben and I talking about having that interesting young guy I met in New York around for brunch, along with a small and diverse selection of other friends, we should be out shopping for salmon and French bread, and sending out invitations. And I'll keep on doing what I do occasionally: chat with crinkly eyed guys at the airport, exchange contact information, email them, as I will soon do with Gurumarka, and hope that this time they'll write back. I guess everybody else is as busy, and scared as I am.

Sorry to break it to you, but ...

2011-10-29T18:19:00.000-07:00

I'd like to state, in all humility, that there is no God.

("Rosary on a Fluffy Pillow Surrounded by Pink Balloons No. 311" - Keith Adams, 2005)

Hang on, before you get all up in arms, let me explain what I mean. Using the scientific method, we say, for example, that the earth goes round the sun; we say it's a scientific fact, but that's really just shorthand for saying that the current best theory holds that the earth goes round the sun. All scientific theories are subject to change given new data. All of a sudden, if we woke up one morning and found the sun going round the earth, not only would we have severe changes in climate that very morning, but the theory would now be broken. We'd have to come up with a new theory saying that the earth goes round the sun EXCEPT for... In other words, scientific theories are only as good as the observed data to date.

So when I say I know there is no God, it's just a statement of scientific fact in the same way I might say I know that when I drop my coffee cup onto the ground it will break. You might be surprised to know that quantum theory states that there is a tiny (yet finite) possibility that the broken copy cup might subsequently reassemble itself and rematerialize on top of your head. The probability of this happening is admittedly so small that you'd have to hang around for many times the life of the Universe to observe it, but it's there even so.

The same goes with God. There has never been a shred of proof of the existence of any God. Your own first-hand experience with God is subjective and cannot be shared with anybody else, so it proves nothing except that you're having, perhaps , a transcendent experience. And there is abundant evidence that people can experience transcendence without faith. The descriptions of miracles ascribed to prophets come to us second or third hand, at best. There is certainly no scientific evidence for God, nor have any miracles been indisputably caught on tape, even in this YouTube era.

You'll say that God isn't subject to scientific analysis. (Try telling that to the proponents of intelligent design.) Okay, that's a premise that you can't prove, so. I think then we both have to admit that your belief in God is based on faith. You're brought up in a culture which promulgates belief in this entity which we can't sense, yet which, in most established religions, is deeply involved in both our life and after-life. I'd say that since there is no evidence to demonstrate the existence of this entity, then the onus is on you to prove that believing in God merits consideration.

Put another way, if I say that the star Alpha Centauri is made of cheese, you'll say prove it. If I can't prove it, I might say "Ah, but can you disprove it!" The number of suppositions that fall into this category of being something that can neither be proved nor disproved vastly outnumbers the facts (or near certain facts, as proven scientifically) that we can prove; actually there is an infinity of such non-facts. So belief in any one of them (say a particular variant of the God artifact) has the same validity or non-validity as the belief that there's ten trillion pounds of cheddar cheese about five light years away masquerading as a star. For myself, I'd rather believe in the cheese; at least it's something we might be able to disprove one day.

It's so difficult for most people to step outside their whole cultural milieu to see, even if just for a second, how religious belief is something that's been superimposed on human society by the ceaseless advocacy of extreme thinkers and people of power. For instance, if I'd been born on a desert island, how likely is it that I'd have made up any existing religion? It's almost impossibly unlikely. The religions that succeed are those that take root in an environment most likely to feed and sustain them. They're superimposed by men.

I'm not arguing that you shouldn't believe in God; not at all. I don't look down on people who believe in God, and I am actually developing a curious affinity for both reading about spiritual belief systems, as well as empathy for religious people who put their faith to active use in doing good (so long as they're doing it from their heart and not out of fear of punishment in the after-life.) I'm just saying that when I say there is no God, I shouldn't be dismissed as being overly dogmatic. I'm merely stepping outside the Shibboleth otherwise known as the vast religious conspiracy and saying that my beliefs ares at least as logical as your saying you have faith there is a God.

Gallery of Portraits, over the Years

2011-10-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

These were all taken at low resolution, years ago, so I had to work on them in Photoshop to make them presentable, hence the blurred, painterly effect.

Cecilia in my aerie overlook of San Francisco Bay, 2001

A waif

An old friend Davis suffers my documenting another day in my life, circa 2001 online photo-journal era.

Another waif, this time in Montreal

This cop was made to direct traffic. U. Penn, 34th and Walnut, Philadelphia

Being dated by Murr the Cat: Middlemarch by George Elliot

2011-10-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

You don't ordinarily think of the prose of Henry James (yes, him again) as being synonymous with flow and transparent clarity. Yet that's what I was beginning to think as I tackled George Eliot's masterpiece Middlemarch, last night.

My reading tends to go in cycles. There'll be a couple of months where all I read is science or philosophy, then weeks and weeks in historical fiction of the Napoleonic wars, closely followed by a series of novels set in "the Shatnerverse". It's not necessarily planned that way. A few months ago, for instance, I discovered this wonderful book store (used books) in Santa Monica, and picked up a few pounds of 18th and 19th century novels; so now I suppose I'm in my heavy literature phase.

It's possibly unfair to judge Elliot's work too harshly directly after reading four early novels by Henry James. But, honestly, it's been hard going so far. Not that I'm not interested in the characters. So far, the lead character appears to be Dorothea Brooks, a young lady who lives with her uncle, and her sister, in the same setting in which Jane Austin flourished: the country drawing room. She's unworldly, intellectual, and has the very essence of spiritual longing for she knows not what. She appears to be about to be married to Rev. Causabon, who's been portrayed so far as a learned, devout man of Godly letters, on the near side of fifty years old with white hairs growing out of a prominent pimple. Dorothea is in awe of Causabon, seeing in him the spiritual father she needs in order to fully express and inhabit her goals on this side of heaven.

If I hadn't read the back cover of the 800 page book last night, I'd not have had any idea where Elliot was taking Miss Brooke. But since Causabon is there described as a "futile and pathetic scholar", I'm expecting immense tragedy as idealistic Dorothea's eyes are gradually opened to the vastness of her failure to apprehend Causabon's character, and the prospect is exciting. In allowing complicated individuals to create a compelling story out of their personal characteristics, set loose on a colorful stage, Elliot joins Henry James in fulfilling your best expectations of literature.

But.

She's hard to read. The work is dated. She makes many of her points with exotic, contemporary cultural references to things like the Thirty Nine Articles, Milton's "affable archangel" (Elliot's quotation marks), and, of course Murr the Cat:

Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation? (Middlemarch, page 42.)

Such allusions - no doubt familiar to readers of the times - bring you to a full stop; I find myself having to spend a couple of minutes trying to understand - usually futilely - what she's getting at. I think the novel is probably best appreciated either in English Lit. class, or if you've the Encyclopedia Britannica at hand.

In comparison, the James novels I've just read are models of translucent prose. Sentence structure can be complex at times, but this slows you down just enough to appreciate the ingenious expressions of human nature that fill the books. And I find myself wondering if James himself had noted in his own reading of the classics that referring to cultural phenomenon which have currency at the time of writing is not the best way to immunize your work against being badly dated to future readers.

I don't find Henry James at all dated. It is true, however, that the James novels I just read were reprints of the original manuscripts, unadulterated with the more sophisticated literary mind which later wrote imponderable novels such as The Ambassadors, and went back to his early novels to bowdlerize them of what he might have seen as a young man's naivety.

Gosh, maybe I need to think about my own writing. Not that I at all expect that the person reading this line is doing so in the second half of the 21st century, but, even so, I should cut down on flip references that will be stale in five years. The thing is, though, that you can often derive humor with such quick and knowing allusions, so they're difficult to resist. But I'm fairly confident that my huge ignorance of popular culture will automatically shield me from this habit.

Henry James: the American

2011-10-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

While the brilliance of Roderick Hudson is still fading from my mind, I've just finished Henry James' third novel, The American, another tour de force, in which a product of the new Western frontier in San Francisco, Christopher Newman, having made his millions, encounters the rigidity and pride of Parisian high society, in the era of Napoleon III, while seeking to broaden his mind after an adulthood of toil.

Newman is most definitely an American archetype: the self-made man who, while not of good family nor possessing high intellect, is at home anywhere not because he fits anywhere, but because it never occurs to him to think otherwise. It's the less offensive version of the sort of person I myself noticed on my own first visit to Paris, as a shy twenty-five year old feeling at home scarcely anywhere. I was on a crowded Metro train, and a young American business man in a putty colored London-Fog raincoat (which I thought the height of fashion and subsequently purchased for myself in the Galleries Lafayette) got in, and, finding no room for his personage asked everyone, loudly, in English, to move further into the carriage in order to accommodate him.

Newman is impressively self-sufficient, and generally in a happy state of bonhomie both with himself and the world, without being complaisant. He is introduced into society by fellow Americans, and encounters the beautiful, noble, Claire, Comtesse de Cintre, widowed daughter of the late Marquis de Bellegarde, a pillar of the lately guillotined French aristocracy. Claire lives with her mother, the Madame de Bellegarde, her stuffed, inscrutable brother, Urbaine de Bellegarde (the new Marquis), Urbaine's wife, also - confusingly - called Madame de Bellegarde, and her younger, highly intelligent black sheep of a brother, the Comte Valentin, in a huge hotel (the French word for mansion) of fading magnificence in the best part of Paris.

The de Bellegardes have the highest place in society, but are somewhat short of cash, which can be the only reason why the old family accept, with relatively little struggle, and alarmingly insufficiently swallowed pride, Newman as a suitor for the hand of the Comtesse. After six months, he proposes, and is accepted - by the de Bellegards, of course, since the Comtesse cannot accept without her mother's authority. While Claire's mother and brother Urbaine clearly state that they don't like Newman, but will not oppose him, her younger brother Valentin becomes firm friends with Newman, since the former apparently lacks the stuffy manners of the old regime.

Newman, in his happy belief and lack of surprise that he now has gained exactly what he set out for, is consequently dashed against the unbreakable wall of French pride when he's informed, without any forewarning, that the Comtesse has broken off the wedding. Newman, in disbelief, confronts the de Bellegardes, whose haughtiness and sense of entitlement are every bit as acute as Newman's own feeling that he is out of place nowhere, and is told that Madame de Bellegarde had ordered the Comtesse to drop him. Madame de B tells him that the family had tried - harder than Newman could ever appreciate - to accustom themselves to the marriage, but, in the end could not see Claire marrying a "man of commerce".

The family immediately withdraws to the countryside, leaving Newman, for the first time in his life, with an angry sense of having been defeated. And this is the point I think James is trying to make: that Newman is as proud, in his own way, as the de Bellegardes: his feelings of loss are overwhelmed by the bitter sense of failure, and the recognition that his will is not sufficient to overcome the mores of high Parisian society.

In my own little way, I'm feeling a minor bit of pride of my own by being able to laugh affectionately at a convention that James, the great "Master" of the novel, has been overusing in his first three novels, that of creating characters' names to indicate their role and qualities. "Newman" as the man from the new frontier, Urbaine as the quintessential man of refinement and polish, and, even more obviously, Mallet, in Roderick Hudson, as the first name of the protagonist, a young man of culture who takes an even younger, unformed sculptor under his wing as his protege. It's a device used in much broader works of classic fiction, most obviously in the works of Charles Dickins, which seems out of place in the much more finely toned novels of James, and observing it here feels like hearing your favorite, nice old Grandmother unexpectedly swear uncouthly.

There, as a good critic, I've found my negative thing to say. Everything else about these books is flawless.

What Henry James Wouldn't Do

2011-09-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

What if you're the only one who thinks something is remarkable?

Critical consensus in art is a mighty thing. To a large extent, in my experience, it's valid in classical music, modern art, and classic literature; less so in contemporary art, music and fiction, and least of all in film. Within the range of what's accepted as great art, you can have your own preferences, and personal tastes, of course. Mozart, for instance, leaves me cold, yet I can acknowledge the composer's mastery of form, and brilliance of expression. Mahler, in contrast, speaks to me like no other composer, and I'm not alone in that cultivation.

I just finished Henry James' 2nd novel, Roderick Hudson, and, like I intimated in my previous blog, consider it one of the best novels I've ever read (and I've read a fair number of the "great" books of dead white men, and others.) I've been contemplating for the last few days on how to write about it; on how to get across why I think the book is so astounding. Yet I wonder. I'd never heard of the book before I found this fine, printing of his first five novels in one volume at a used bookstore in Santa Monica. I'm worried that I may be almost alone in my judgment of the novel, and, in fact, I'm almost scared to explore critical appraisals online.

I have another fear too: that if I attempt to explain my views on the book, I'll be wholly unable to get them across adequately in print. And this is an odd development, since my feelings after reading the preceding novel in the collection, James' first, Watch and Ward, were comprised of a hopeless yearning to be able to write like James connected to the frustration of knowing I've had little prior success at imagining characters. I feel that I have a fund of unique subject matter to embody in fiction (since I think I've had a large variety of unusual experiences in my life, and have a lot to say on subjects many people never encounter in fiction, such as how our conscious selves are structured), but lack the ability to construct the characters to convey what I want to express.

Although I think it would be honest to say that part of what's holding me back is the lack of free-time I have to do research and write a thorough study of the novel, there's no doubt that, much as I did in my last blog, I'm also waffling around in reflection and introspection as an excuse for not getting started on appraising it. In the end, I suppose, I'm merely using my drive to explain the novel to foster some paragraphs in Jamesian style. Sigh. Maybe I should leave it at that for now.

Roderick Hudson

2011-09-26T23:57:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Henry James - his first five novels. I make no bones about admitting this, even though it won't earn my any brownie points in the same world where Snooky holds her existence.

I'm currently on James' second, Roderick Hudson, about the attempt of a cool connoisseur of men, Rowland Mallet, to interrupt the channel circumstance had led the young sculptor the eponymous Hudson along, and divert it from 19th century Northhampton (in Massachussetts) to the Roman Campagna, home to American intellectual wanders like James himself. And this, I've decided, is the right time and set of texts in which to encounter James: it's in the "Library of America" series, where James' original documentation of his mid-twenties unsentimental accession to the modes of intellectual upheaval in post Civil-War America are undiluted by his later, more self-conscious revisions, in which he attempted to graft in his then immeasurably greater literary sophistication.

I have been wanting to blog about James ever since starting the book, and I was sure that James would offer an "in", which came at 6.22 a.m. this morning, after I awoke from a dissolute night at the club event Real Bad, part and parcel of the bigger intrusion in culture, the Folsom Street Fair. Rowland Mallet is interviewing Miss Light, this fearsomely dangerous beauty cast into the Roman Scene by a hapless mother whose sole guiding light is the hope of a brilliant marriage with the second sub-tier of European royalty. The interest in the story comes from the prospect of Mr. Mallet and Mrs Light's collaboration in an unstated and unlikely venture to throw up a dam to carry Roderick safely around the dangerous shoals of Miss Light and the intellectual dissolution in the 19th century Roman equivalent to the Folsom Street Fair/American reality TV culturplex, to their hoped for harbor filled with the blinding light of great achievement.

I'm also writing with the memory of chatting with another man of great promise last night - an acquaintance from LA - at the Real Bad party last night. G is this rare superluminary in the world of gay party culture, a man of undeniable beauty and personal magnetism who is comfortable both walking naked down Folsom Street in the daylight, his member boxed in for display in some sort of metal contraption while his beguiling face and penetrating, soulful eyes are concealed behind a gas-mask (one has to understand the cross-currents at a great, gay leather fair to understand why this is comprehensible behavior), and coordinating a multidisciplinary center of quantum physics exploration at NASA Ames.

In the same way Roderick Hudson may have to contend with the current of genius sweeping through dangerous and unproductive waters, G too must swim in the eminently lucid waters of cutting-edge physics research while gay the rapids of gay party culture try to drag him under and dash him against the great rocks underlying the water. (Let's also dash this river metaphor against the great rocks before it does any more harm.)

At any rate, I found my pedagogical moment this early morning when reading of Rowland's portentous encounter with Miss Light at the Colosseum, and ... and ... I'm becoming uncomfortably aware, at this point that I'm beginning to ape James himself in my style here, when what I really want to write about is how much I long to be able to do what James does. He'll spend two pages describing a character he's introducing, and it will seem at the outset not like a dash of this and a little bit of that, but a set of inward and outward characteristics that seem organic. And as you see this newly created being enter the world fully realized you begin to suspect that James is merely describing someone who's long been fully alive in his imagination, and what he's doing at creation time is setting him loose and observing and noting, rather than directing. And because these people are complex, they have complex interactions, and the story tells itself.

It is now 11.30 pm on the same day, and in the intervening hours I've read most of the rest of the book, and have come away convinced that this is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. And it is so cinematic, I'm just astounded that nobody has filmed it. I'm not going to read it when I go to bed just now, because it's going to keep me up.

Funnily enough, as I came off my flight home from San Francisco today, I happened to notice a man who'd been just ahead of me in the plane, who'd also been near me in American's Admiral Club. The reason I'd noted him was because his voice was a dead ringer for one of my favorite actors, Tom Wilkinson. I knew he was a screenwriter, as he was working on something on the plane, but I actually see people working on screenplays almost every day, at Starbucks in West Hollywood. You know, writing is not a lucrative profession, but something told me this was probably not one the hopeful writers I see at Starbucks, since he was flying first class. I went up to him and said that I'd thought he was Wilkinson until I turned to look at him at the airport, and then something didn't stop me from gushing out, with a sheepish I-know-people-must-do-this-to-you-all-the-time smile an idea for his next book, and I told him about ... no, not my memoir silly ... Roderick Hudson.

He seemed a very nice gentleman, and I think he asked me if I was a writer - I'm not sure if that was how it happened. My mind was still running hot on the novel I'd been consuming right up until we positively had to deplane, so I wasn't in full possession of myself. But I told him yes, and that I'd written a memoir last year, which had been published. He asked if I'd tried writing it as a screenplay, and I told him that several people had suggested that, but I think I'm probably too close to it, even after five years. But then he surprised me by pulling a new copy of his own book on screenwriting out of his carry-on and pressing it into my hand.

You know, when something happens to you like that, and you live in Hollywood, a part of you can't help saying, however silly it sounds, could this be a sign. Regular readers of my blog will know that I don't believe in signs, fate, and do not think God plays dice with the universe. But I will read Mr. (Pen) Densham's book Riding the Aligator, since ... well ... you never know.. I will of course let you know if I see any more signs.

My recent resolution to write shorter blogs is forcing me to end this before I even get into Roderick Hudson. Next time. And I can't even read more of it before I fall asleep, darn it.

Muscles, Mahler and Memory

2011-09-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

I've a feeling I'm not in WeHo any more.

I knew I was home when I rounded the corner of Market and Castro and saw completely naked old men standing around in the slight drizzle. I'd flown into San Francisco a couple of hours earlier to come for the huge annual gay leather festival, Folsom Street Fair, which happily coincides - this year - with the very rare performance of my all-time favorite symphony, Mahler's Third, at the SFO tonight, and now I was on my ritual perambulation of the Castro, a place so redolent of memories from my fifteen years living in San Francisco, most of them here in the Castro.

The Castro is the polar opposite of West Hollywood ("WeHo"): in WeHo, particularly on a weekend evening, you see men of preternatural beauty and/or muscular perfection along with a seemingly endless supply of skinny multi-ethnic omnisexual kids. The Castro, on the other hand, particularly on this weekend, is populated with either the grizzled but chiseled, or more sedate but still bearded men who could be your accountant: the former trying to outdo each other in looking like working-class toughs (an image which falls apart as soon as they open their mouths), the latter in the same competition to perfect their German lesbian look (think REI.) (Oh, and not forgetting the nude men. They should really put signs up in the stores: NO PANTS, NO UNDERWEAR, NO SERVICE.) Wearing my usual crisp white button-up shirt, I felt distinctly so not San Francisco anymore.

Almost every time I come here, I notice a new store or restaurant, and sadly notice the demise of another long-term business. But Helen was still in her salon "Perfection for Hair", on Market Street, and I popped in hoping to see her. I wasn't sure she'd remember me, since I haven't seen her in years. I used to get my hair cut in her tiny old salon across the street, and when me and my friends Greg and Steve were looking for a place to film a little short movie called "Rico is Back", I naturally thought of Helen. She graciously gave up her salon to us for a day, and we moved in.

The auters of Rick is Back

I'd made a couple of other short movies (still up on my old website), in the early 00's, and this was to be my biggest, and - hopefully - most professional yet. We had real actors, and casting calls; we had crew of seven, and we even had a dolly for the camera. Greg was the "Director of Photography", Steve the writer and producer, while I played at being director.

The first, and most blindingly obvious thing that came up was how small it was, and - big problem - every single wall was lined floor to ceiling with mirrors, making it extraordinarily for cast and crew, in the tiny, triangular space, to conceal themselves from reflections while the camera was rolling.

Although I'd made the two earlier films, this was my first time directing actors, and it only occurred to me in the days after that I hadn't actually directed the actors. I'd been so concerned with cramming in the overly ambitious series of shots Greg and I had painstakingly planned out without thinking about the mirror problem, that I never took much notice of what was actually getting captured on film. As a result, the movie, even with its picturesque and original film-score, was horrible, with completely fake performances, and cringingly sentimental climaxes. There's a reason it's not on my film website.

A couple of months ago I ran into someone very familiar-looking in WeHo, a muscular Asian guy, and he recognized me too. I think he was actually my stylist when I used to go to Helen's salon. We got chatting, and updating, and reminiscing, and he told me something appalling. I'm going to admit something that I probably oughtn't here for the first time, and that is that in the late 90's to early 00's, I had a popular gay webcam, with a moneymaking private membership. I have probably mentioned this before, but what I'm sure I haven't is that I actually developed my interest in film-making by making a couple of ... errm ... videos of a certain type, which I retailed to my, errm, fans.

Okay, admission over, now comes the appalling part. Although the movie was so bad, I felt I owed it to Helen to send her a copy on CD. But somehow, the CD I sent her was the wrong one, and I think you can imagine what was on it. Helen got to see a lot more of me than she'd ever expected.

When I went into the salon today, to see if I could find Helen, there she was, as beautiful and stately as ever, and it took a few moments for her mind to get into gear (although, no doubt, her lingering shock at the CD helped), but recognition dawned on her face along with a big smile, and we chatted for a while. I asked her about the CD and she was, apparently, gentlewomanly enough to not proceed beyond the opening credits of Ripped Jeans, Baby Oil and Videotape.

Whenever I come here by myself, I'm torn between overbooking myself with friends and feeling flighty, or not prealerting any of them and left hanging. This time I chose the middle path. I'll see the Mahler tonight with one of my closest friends, Steve, who's also visiting for the weekend, go to brunch with my old office mate Heike tomorrow, and hang out at the fair and the dance party (one of my favorites, a charitable vent called "Real Bad") with my best buddies, Randy, Kean, Mike and James.

At Folsom, 2006. An example of something I won't be wearing this year.

I spent a while, last night, sorting through my wardrobe for something to wear to the fair, and to the club. Things that looked sexy before I had hairs sprouting from my ears somehow no longer look quite the thing, so I'll forswear even attempting to look sexy. It helps that it will be a cool 62 degrees at the fair. Maybe I'll wear my Gucci leather jacket, and be even more so not San Francisco.

Spock's Brain

2011-09-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

INT. STARBUCKS WEST HOLLYWOOD - DAY

KEITH sits at the window, pounding away on his laptop letting his CHOS (Cute Homosexual Observation System) set to automatic. Steve creeps (literally) up behind him with the intention of surprising him.

KEITH

Hi Steve, how are you?

STEVE

(popping around to face Keith as he turns sideways)

You must have eyes in the back of your head!

KEITH

I do!

(Pulls aside strands of hair in the back of his head.)

STEVE

(retching)

Oh my God! That's gross! And creepy!

KEITH

Had them implanted along with a splitter in front of the optic nerve. Got it done the same time I had my amygdalae transplanted.

STEVE

Your amygdalae ... ?

KEITH

You don't know what an amygdala is, do you.

(in sing-song voice)

The amygdalae; singular: amygdala; also corpus amygdaloideum; Latin, from Greek aµ??da??, amygdale, 'almond', 'tonsil', listed in the Gray's Anatomy as the nucleus amygdalæ, are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions.

STEVE
Clear as mud. You're saying you had a part of your brain transplanted. Who was the donor?

KEITH
Oh, it was a clone.

STEVE
(disbelieving)
Interesting ... Why did you do it?

KEITH
Well, amongst other things, amygdalae hold emotional memories which, in most cases, you're not even aware of. And they form the basis of how you react to various types of events. Say you're scared of spiders. You might have no idea why, but the amgydalae do, and they generate emotions that bypass your reason.

For someone as messed up as me, the amygdalae are pretty nasty, convoluted fellas, doing more harm than good. So I had the idea that putting a fresh, blank canvas in there would make an enormous difference. You know, depression and stuff.

STEVE
(nodding)
Hmmm.

KEITH
Got the idea from watching Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home. You remember when Whale Girl asks Spock "Are you sure you won't change your mind?" and Spock responds "Is there something wrong with the one I've got"?
(looking at Steve, expecting a laugh)

STEVE
Frankly....No.

KEITH
Well, anyway, that's where I got the idea.

STEVE
So what was it like when you first woke up with a fresh amygdala?

KEITH
(correcting)
A bunch of fresh amygdalae, actually
.
STEVE
Whatever.

KEITH
(pausing to think)
Well, it was scary at first. Not only had I lost those nasty, stupid emotional reactions, but I couldn't feel anything at all. It wasn't like my memory was missing or anything, I just didn't know how to react to people. But gradually it all came back, and it's been just great. As you must have noticed, I have absolutely no hang-up, issues, insecurities or anything.

STEVE
(long pause)
Right.

Whatever Goes

2011-09-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

This is scary but immediately unsurprising. Influential conservative commentator David Brooks wrote in the New York Times today about a study of moral relativism amongst young adults. The story - called "If it Feels Right ..." - highlights the conclusion of the study that young adults in the US have little concept of right-and-wrong - they seem to really believe that moral decisions are made with the heart, according to how you feel just then. The title of the story was a perfect fit in that as soon as I read that conclusion it felt completely accurate to my own experiences and observations about how young adults behave in this country. More than anything, it explains the overwhelmingly nasty, mean-spirited comments monopolizing the thought sphere wherever people can vent anonymously.

Brooks is the only right-wing commentator I can stomach, and not just because he's conservative with a small "c", but also because he's extremely widely read, and razor smart. I frequently disagree with his conclusions, sometimes even finding them a little naive, but far better that than the self-righteous dogma that passes for most commentary from the right. He has an unparalleled ability to sample the Zeitgeist and keep it in context with sociological history, against which most of his opinions are framed.

It doesn't take many quotes from the study to understand Brooks' concerns:

"I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often..."
“It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
“I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel."

Brooks is not saying that these young people live immoral lives, but that they are completely unaware of the moral stakes in living. They really don't seem to get that there is any such thing as a real right or wrong.

As I read through the column, I began to wonder how and when he'd tie in religion. It's accepted wisdom that the diminishment of religion as an authority serves to weaken the foundation for morality, but I know Brooks is too smart to blame it all on losing Jesus.

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines.

I like that he's merely pointing out the vacuum formed by the absence of the role religion formerly played in society, instead of implying or stating that religion is the fount of morality. It would be interesting to read the book that's derived from this study, Lost in Transition: the Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, and try to correlate viewpoints with their religious background. My bet is that there'd be little correlation. In fact, I'd even go so far as to expect that kids who were raised by adults who were expressly humanistic would probably have a much greater grasp of morality than otherwise.

You have to wonder what forces are at work here, beyond the lack of moral structure entrenched in society. If you think back to how you learned moral values yourself - well, I can't speak for anybody else (and I'm aware that almost sounds like moral relativism), but I'm sure my own sense of wrong and right come from my parents. Although both of my parents held quiet Christian beliefs, they believed in giving their children the right to choose their own. Not once, while I was growing up, did they go to church, mention God or Jesus, or make any reference to heavens. Instead we absorbed the way they lived: courtesy, consideration of others, following through on your word. And since we respected them, we did as they did until morality became ingrained.

But this generation learned their way to live in other ways: much less contact with parents who, I suspect, were too focused on their own fulfilment and achievement to realize that kids won't magically, by osmosis, learn moral values. Increasingly, since the PC revolution, people spend more time alone, interacting with computers, or watching television in their own room. There's less opportunity for a constant source of quietly moral behavior to influence them. To make matters worse, television has, over the last ten years or so, been taken over by reality television, where the prevailing ethos is to be as loud and self-assertive as possible. Kids are passively learning the lesson that everything is okay so long as I feel good about it. And that's scary.

The Escape: Photo Gallery of Landscapes

2011-09-05T23:24:00.000-07:00

An occasional series of galleries.

I'm not Feeling Very Free Willy

2011-09-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

You can't read a book like the excellent Conversations on Consciousness (interviews with experts in the field of consciousness), by Susan Blackmore (not pictured above), without having some pretty wild conversations with your own consciousness. Unless you're a philosophical zombie, of course. A philosophical zombie is not, as one might think, a zombie who spends a lot of time in serious intellectual questioning about the nature of reality, it's a zombie who exists merely as a philosophical concept: a sort of litmus test of where you sit on the whole issue of dualism (that mind and matter are distinct forms of their own) and monism (that mind consists of matter.) The idea is: could there be another being who looks, sounds and behaves like Keith, but actually not have any internal experience of self: i.e. no consciousness. The idea of such beings, to me, makes an encounter with a garden variety walking-dead zombie feel like watching a Disney movie. If they could truly exist, then I would have no way of knowing that everybody else I ever encountered was not really a zombie.

One of the other difficult concepts in the study of consciousness is that of free will: is it an illusion, do we have it, or is it something we use as a crutch to give our lives meaning? Most philosophers and scientist in the field, I think, come down on the side of our living in a deterministic universe, where every conscious act has a preceding cause, and the causal chain, in principle, extends back to the beginning of time, and across the cosmos (compounded by "spooky action at a distance".) The whole a butterfly flaps its wings, and there's a tidal wave on the other side of the world thing.

Other researchers state that it doesn't matter whether free will exists or not: we experience ourselves as being able to chose, and therefore, within the realm of consciousness - which is the only realm that can ever be real to us - that we can ever proves exist - we have free will by very definition.

In the final chapter of Conversations, the book's editor chats with a scientist named Daniel Wegner who has a slightly different, but intriguing take on the deterministic view. The experience of free-will is actually a construction, he says: our body does something, and we introspect on it almost simultaneously, and this creates the illusion that we decided upon the action of the body. Wegner has backed this up with tests that show how easy it is to engender the belief in somebody that they consciously chose to do something over which they had no agency at all. A subject has hold of a board, which rests above a computer mouse, and he can move the pointer over the screen. He wears a headphone and he's told to move the mouse cursor around to different objects whenever music plays. At the same time, an experimenter has control of the same mouse cursor at another workstation. It's been shown that he can force the mouse cursor to a point of his choice while the subject believes he made the choice himself.

As I write this, I'm on the flight home to LA after two weeks in North Carolina, and I went to the bathroom just now, having finished the book. Sitting on the toilet, I tried to experiment with this sense of whether I was in control of my actions or not (and I'm not talking about bowel movements.) I thought up a little experiment you can do at home (when nobody's watching, if you're interested in avoiding being labeled an eccentric.) Sit at a table, and put a graspable object in front of you, say a pen. Tell yourself that sometime in the next few seconds you're going to pick up the pen, and that you're going to try to catch yourself in the act of volition. If you do this often enough, you'll start to question how the decision to move was made. Without having moved, it seems fairly easy to feel that you're going to be making a choice. But the split-second after you've moved, you can almost see that it happened on its own. However much you try to control it, say, by telling yourself: "Okay, I'm going to pick it up .....now!" - the actual second at which the "now" gets implemented can feel completely spontaneous and unwilled.

Of course, you could also make the argument that the pen only got picked up because you decided to go along with my experiment instead of staying in your comfy chair, or wherever you're reading this blog (if you're even actually having the experience of reading it and aren't a philosophical zombie.) But cast your mind back over the previous few minutes: can you spot a moment where you made the decision to do the experiment?

For me, though, this argument falls apart a little when you see that you can make plans for the future: even with the little experiment I posed: you decide that in a while you're going to grab the pen. The body can't then grab the pen solely on its own: it had to be preceded by the thought from the mind that at some point you were going to grab it. I mean, you could have this thought a whole year earlier, and put a reminder in your calendar. Using Wegner's argument, the hand grabs the pen, then the mind becomes aware of it. He may very well be right that the actual moment of grabbing is dictated by the body, not the mind, and, in that sense, the mind did not have free will. But it's impossible for the body to know that the mind intended to do this, and planned it one year ago, and has even forgotten it, and needed a reminder to do it. So that act of deciding had to be the moment of free will.

Some people with agile minds might say: ah, but maybe the body remembered it, even if the mind didn't. Or go further and say that the mind is the body, and just because the conscious mind didn't remember, it doesn't mean that the body didn't remember. But that seems a little far-fetched. We don't even really know how the body stores memory, and now we're postulating that the body can have two separate ways of recalling that memory? This argument takes you into the land where Occam's razor rules.

I've noticed that thinkers like Wegner who introduce complex scientific and philosophical concepts to a lay public, tend to glide gently over missing pieces of their arguments assuming the audience won't notice. His argument makes perfect sense if you assume every thought produces an action. But most thoughts do no such thing. (Perhaps I'm being unfair to Wegner, since I'm arguing solely on the basis of the interview with Blackmore, and, if so, apologies.) Of course you can get infinitely more complex about this and say that the original action was to put the reminder in your calendar, and it was your body that did that.

In practice, much as with the decision about choosing your real self I wrote about recently, you have to make the choice (or at least experience the illusion of choice) for yourself that whether or not you have free will isn't important: if we functioned as if we didn't have free will, then there'd be no moral responsibilities, and human society would decay into savage anarchy.

Interesting: if everybody gave up on free will, then this descent into every-man-for-himself would give everybody the experience of what it's like to live in LA in 2011. What was I smoking when I "chose" to move here? It's enough to turn a man into a zombie, philosophical or flesh-eating.

Coda, Nada, Yadda Yadda.

2011-09-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

I've done some terrible things. Okay - and before you start calling me Muriel - maybe not so much terrible as crazy. My defense is that I was manic when I did them; but as I talked about in my recent series of blogs on consciousness and personality, the person who did those things was a recognizable extension of myself. It was me, in other words, who tried to get myself released from jail by convincing two cops that I was the Anti-Christ. It was me who poured a stolen bottle of tequila over the counter-top at a 7/11 on Sunset Boulevard to try to force the sales clerk to call the police. (It was also me who bought an Alexander West key chain with a six-inch, articulated, gold-plated skeleton hanging off it, but that's a different form of terrible.)

(Photo, Istanbul Museum of Archeology, 2008, Keith Adams)

To me this begs a question I omitted to cover in my blog series. Okay, so my conclusion was that it was up to me to choose the version of myself that's the real thing, and I elected to chose the person I was last week: cheerful, outgoing, light-hearted. But suppose I'd been hypomanic last week? What would have stopped me from writing the same blog and choosing that elevated Keith as the real one?

This might seem a straightforward question, but not so. The most obvious change in your conscious experience when you're at either extreme of the bipolar spectrum is a radically shifted perspective on the rest of your life. Or rather, on the present and future parts of it. When you go through the worst parts of sustained depression, you cease to notice - except in a vague and sterile intellectual sense - the fixed positive realities: that, on balance, you may have lived a full and successful life; that the future looks sustainable, with every potential for fulfilment and contentment. That there are things to be interested in and excited about. Instead, everything just seems like make work: you're just living because you don't have any real choice; but there's little reason for it. (This is only the extreme state, which I've endured for maybe a total of ten weeks over the last two years.)

Conversely, when you're hypomanic, you see an immense world of opportunity. Your inner vitality overflows and you feel you can have a meaningful connection to everybody else. Ideas flow, and the future seems exciting and adventurous. You can easily envision doing great things. (Hypomania is not dangerous, unlike mania. Of the latter, I've only had the one severe episode; of the former, maybe one or two in the last three years, but only for a couple of days at most. Sometimes I wish it would happen more frequently. Maybe the infrequency of this experience is why this paragraph - without this aside - is so much shorter than the previous.)

A good analogy is a wave cycle: when you're on top of the wave, your panorama is extended, and full of sunlight; when you're in the trough, it's dark, and forbidding and you feel blocked in. There's not much else to see but the walls around you. The point is, though, that your perspective is false; when you're depressed, you can't magically see things as you would if you feeling normal; the same applies if you're manic. So your judgement of the richness and opportunity of both present and future is incorrect. This means that if I were hypomanic, it would be possible for me to feel as if that were my true self: that this should be the still point I'm aiming for.

But this is the whole point I was trying to make in those blogs: that it's my choice to identify with the most fundamental version of myself. If I can't trust myself to make that choice, then I might as well give up and go back to the roller coaster. And I've made that choice now. And I think I've earned the right to that self-knowledge; and I trust it to stick because I've seen that I'm adequately talented at self-monitoring.
This doesn't mean I'm going to be that self every day, and the past week since I wrote that series (last Sunday) has shown me that you can do precious little to control your experience of self. Self is a decision, not a state of being. I wrote in my blogs that it was inevitable that I'd sooner or later slip out of the "real" Keith experienced last week, most likely into depression. And I was completely correct. All day Monday and Tuesday, the heaviness of depression was with me. It's really quite astonishing the changes it brings. Last week spending time with colleagues, I was witty, gregarious, and, I hope, good company. But that person seemed beyond recall on Monday or Tuesday. I went for lunch with the same people, and it was an effort to think of even one interesting thing to say: I felt listless. The good stuff had been shifted out of me by this physical stuff going on inside me. Since I've concluded that consciousness is just physics in the brain anyway, it's not surprising that the physics can go wrong, and the subjective experience of consciousness changes.

Through the rest of the week, it's been more up and down, with both sorts of experiences scattered through the day in a seemingly random pattern. I could let myself feel really sour at the lack of control I have over this. But I just keep telling myself, all appearances to the contrary, that the dull Keith sitting as if a piece of wood over the lunch-table isn't the real me. My conscious self has been hijacked by the mystery of physics, but he still exists in a platonic sense. Maybe I'm turning into a closet Buddhist, now I think about it, where consciousness becomes an observation.

Making Sense of a World without Consciousness - Part 5.

2011-09-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

(Continuation from yesterday.)
Will the real Keith Adams please step forward? So during this week in North Carolina, which has has been so enjoyable, in which I've had so many great interpersonal encounters, in which I've known very little depression, I've inevitably had to ask myself if I'm slightly hypomanic? Some of it gives me a distant reminder of mania. I see how easy it is for me to talk with people, and how comfortably others respond and even warm to me. My wit darts delightfully, and I have fresh creative insights. I'm excited to be alive. But, like in earlier years since my manic episode, I've begun to question two things: is this the real me; and should I hold myself back?

(Self portrait, 2005)

Yet there are none of the other signatures of hypomania: I don’t feel like running around the mall across from my hotel credit-cards gripped in my sweaty hands; I’m decided not full of energy, and have no desire to stay up late; and I’ve no temptation to latch on to the smallest invitation to start talking to complete strangers. Do you think I can allow myself to think that I’m just being myself this week? What a loaded question.

A few months ago, Ben told me something that I hadn't realised was so important for me to hear. That he was proud of me for finding a way to cope so ably with my illness: to live a normal, fulfilling, active, productive life; to take care of myself and our relationship. And I don't take that for granted. I'd say that easily more than half of people with bipolar disorder don't even take their medication regularly, and probably only a fraction of the rest live in a way where the violent half of the disorder is so fully at bay.

I think I know why I've been able to accomplish this. The self-analysis and morbid introspection that was for so long a constant source of pensivity, and which used to drag me regularly down into self-consciousness and insecurity, has left me with an unusually strong ability to self-monitor. And, strangely enough, my height, my homosexuality, and my English upbringing have played a role too, I think. With the ingrained obligation to control your emotions common to most Brits of my generation, and the self-consciousness of yourself - during adolescence - as this tall, gangly, skinny, broad-shouldered monster with dangerously flinging limbs; a creature who draws eyes just by entering a room because of its unusual height; and with the withdrawing into an inner harbor that comes with knowing, from an early age, that you're gay and that you can never express it; with all of this, you learn self-control.

I found this out with even stronger self-knowledge during the hours of hallucination in Paris: I desperately wanted to be free of the immediate pain and terror, by switching off my consciousness. I would have begged the nurses to put me under had I been capable of staying rational for long enough periods at a time to figure out how to say it in French. But at the same time as I wanted so desperately wanted to lose consciousness, I clung to it with every last bit of rational power. As my senses drew in, I scrambled frantically, again and again, for the smallest physical clues that reality was real: my eyes sought endlessly for something new - say a rusty screw in the bed rail to my left - which I knew I hadn't seen before, and which reassured me temporarily I was still aware; I scratched myself madly, gouging my legs with my nails, to experience physical pain which would tell me I was still alive; I screamed and bellowed as I writhed in the bonds holding me to the bed, and tried to throw myself bodily to the ground. The reason for all of this was that I wanted to be in control. I couldn't let that go. I knew even as I was doing all this that it was not in my interest: that unconsciousness might be healing, and that it might allow me to live through this. But I just couldn't give myself up to surrendering awareness.

It's this unwillingness to lose self-control, and the introspection to observe when I might be in danger of it, alongside the awareness of how much I have to lose should I give into it, that allows me to live a balanced life. Of course, the one medication that keeps the mad man at bay - the mood-stabilizer, Lamictal, is the foundation of this stability. (And doesn't the fact that it's a single medication that keeps me tethered to the ground tell you an awful lot about consciousness?)

But faced with the shifting sands, what are you to conclude? Will the real Keith Adams please step-forward? I want - so badly - for that person to be the one that's exhibited itself this week. The prospect of going back into depression - as will surely happen any day now - is ugly. But if I could know, for sure, that the real, likable, funny me of this moment will still be waiting for me when I emerge again, maybe it would be more bearable. The thing is, though: I've also learned, intellectually, as I've tried to explain here, that the "real me" is no less of an illusion for me than it is for all other people. The only difference is that I've had the rare experiences that have taught me this in a way from which there is no retreat.

I realized the other day, in a flash of insight, that all I can do is put a stake in the sand and say that I don't care that consciousness is an illusion; I don't care that this sense of self I call my personality does not truly know the frequency at which it is meant to hum - that indeed, there is no such thing as the real Keith: there's just whoever I happen to be at the moment, and the memory of who I've been at other moments. So it's up to me to decide for myself - in an act of will, if you like - that this is indeed the real me. This is my gold standard. I ought not need to self-reflect when I feel this way: nor question that I'm entering a manic state. For I've decided, come what may, this is the real me, and I'm happy to meet myself.

Making Sense of a World without Consciousness - Part 4.

2011-08-31T16:35:00.000-07:00

(Continuation from yesterday.)
The Greatest Illusion How could you not go through something like what I described last time - the extreme hallucinatory episode in Paris - and not be drastically altered? Yet in the days and weeks afterwards, as I inventoried my mind for damage, I felt surprisingly normal. It had seemingly had no long-lasting effects. And we were even able to enjoy the rest of our vacation.

(Ben, the day we arrived in London from Paris, July, 2010)

But the truth is that of course it changed me. I'd seen with even clearer eyes that this thing we call consciousness is something we assemble for ourselves. It's something that can be temporarily and effortlessly removed. It's even something that can be replaced, as it was during the early part of those hours on the ER bed in Paris, where the same freakish scene of a group of nurses leaning over me and laughing at me played on for what felt like hours of repetition (I was observing in real times things that had indisputably occurred twenty minutes earlier.)

If I needed further evidence, it has been supplied in the many books on consciousness I've read in the last five years. I've let go of the belief that there's a rational agent in my head watching the theater of my life as if played out on an internal movie screen. I know there's nothing but "wet" machinery in my head: clever, unbelievably complex machinery, but machinery even so. Neuronal activity, electrical impulses from the sense organs, proteins folding, chemicals pumping through cells, all conniving to present me with a sense that I'm somehow atop all of that, in control. I believe there's no there, there.

But, of course, I continue to live as if there really is a supernatural "I" in there: something that is more than electrical impulses: the self-referential Keith who's writing these sentences, sipping coffee, looking around occasionally, listening to the man behind me who I heard claiming to be the actor from "Mr. Ed." (He's not - I looked him up on Wikipedia. But maybe that's his reality.) I may not have free will, but I feel that I do, and that's good enough.

This sense of self has become vital to the survival and propagation of our species. It evolved to allow an increasingly complex brain deal with eventualities beyond the mere need to meet basic instincts. And medical evidence gives us some clues about how we construct this thing. Take cases where the links between the two hemispheres of the brain have been severed. Studies of such people have shown that the two halves of the brain can be aware of different things at the same time, and that each of them believes they're "the one" in touch with reality. It seems likely there are, in those brains, two "centers of consciousness". Then there's the evidence from states of altered mind, out-of-body experiences, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder. I've deduced, from reading those books, that this magnificent bundle of nerves, neurons, and nanoparticles that we call a person, has assembled for itself this interior sense of an inner life. It's the greatest illusion of all.

(Continued tomorrow.)

Making Sense of a World without Consciousness - Part 3.

2011-08-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

(Continuation from yesterday.)

What I Learned from Insanity As I completed my book, I wrote about what I'd learned that summer: that the boundary between sanity and "normality" was not hard-and-fast, and that reality was a state of mind. I wrote about the return of depression in Paris, that fall: it came on in a matter of seconds. I fell into a yawning, black chasm, and, in a matter of minutes, I saw all my hopes and dreams flee as I realized, with shocked insight, that I could no longer count on the self-confidence I'd seen as the long-lasting product of the single episode of mania. I wrote in my journal, minutes after this, that I was breathlessly scared. I no longer knew where stability lay.

(Budapest, 2008. Keith Adams)

Over the next year or so, fully medicated (a medical regimen I've not once deviated from), although I learned, once again, to come to terms with depression, I cycled into weeks of low-grade hypomania, and came to the conclusion that in order to avoid the chaos of mania, I couldn't pursue big things; I had to avoid intense situations. Even singing along to music in the car, or deep conversation with Ben was enough to get my mind wading back into that flowing mania which was so difficult to control.

I felt bitter. I knew, now, what I was capable of. That the charming, humorous, intellectually questing person I'd long identified as the kernel of self, even in the depressive years, could come to the fore, if I left him unchained. Other people can be in a fine mood, enter a period of great creativity, express their self-comfort in engagement with others: why couldn't I trust myself to do so? Depression was so limiting, while periods of bonhomie were beguilingly attractive. But I constantly put breaks on myself. I knew I could never again risk myself, my sanity, my financial health, and my relationship with Ben to explore the limits of what I might do with myself.

I haven't had a hypomanic experience in three years. I don't think I'll ever have another manic episode. I trust myself to manage my symptoms. In other words, I'd describe myself as stable. The only problem is that it's a stability made up mostly of mild depression, with the good days and hours, and occasional weeks and months speckled meanly through the years.

But my worst challenge to reality occurred only last year. Like the horrible plunge into depression after mania, it happened in Paris. Somebody spiked my drink in a club, and, bit by bit, I entered a hallucinatory state which, at its worst, left me pleading for death. I begged a nurse in the emergency room (where I was once again strapped to a gurney) to cut my head off. All of my external connections to the world, both through my senses, and my rational interpretation, were severed one by one. I understood what hell could be like, and thought I might actually be in it when I hallucinated that I was permanently unconscious in a state that external watchers could not perceive. And with panic that's difficult to understate, I inevitably hallucinated yet worse things: that I was already dead, and, finally, that the universe didn't exist.

It lasted a matter of hours, after I was sedated. I never left consciousness, in truth, and, when I started to become once again aware of my surroundings, I saw myself babbling things that made no sense: I was in there watching all this. I remember saying things like "There are 1,000 Mr. Spocks dancing on my toe nails", and other sentences so coarse that I'd never write them here. I was trying to communicate, yet nonsense was coming out.

After a while, I detected a nurse hovering nearby and used all my rationality to pull the threads together to grate out "I'm okay now." From there, it was literally a matter of minutes before I was sitting up, Ben and my friend Jean-Marc looking at me with acute care written on their faces, while I came to the realization that my life could go on, and that, unlike during the worst moments of the night, where I'd believed it impossible, I could live through this, I'd get to go back to our hotel with Ben, and be "normal" again. I'd thought I'd never see Ben again. Heading home to Jean-Marc's apartment, in the early hours of that morning, I wondered what this would do to me.

(Continued tomorrow.)

Here are links to the two follow-on blogs:

Making Sense of a World without Consciousness - Part 2.

2011-08-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

(Continuation from yesterday)
Experiencing the Extremes of Self I've been privileged (if that's the word) to have had four experiences - three of them a matter of hours, the other a period of some weeks - which left me with the clear evidence that the person is fungible. That we're only just holding on to things. That - to use a fairly clichéd but nonetheless accurate metaphor - we think we're living on a relatively placid, and seemingly safe earth which seems likely to go on, if not for ever, than at least for the duration of our stay here when, in fact we're clinging to the surface of a planet hurtling around a star of unbelievable explosive power at 100,000 km/hr; a planet spinning on its axis so that its circumference - at our latitudes - rotates at 1,000 miles an hour; in a solar system running through a freezing vacuum at 500,000 mph around the galaxy - a galaxy that is, itself, in rapid motion away from most other galaxies. We ignore all that because it's not in our daily experience, yet it's as real as walking down the street.

(Photo by Keith Adams, 2007)

In case I'm not making myself clear, let me simply say I've learned that our illusion of reality, while well maintained, is just a hair's breadth distance from chaos. The word "chaos" made its way into the title of the book I had published in early 2010: Broken Whole, a California Tale of Chaos, Creativity and Craziness, and did so by virtue of the huge manic episode I went through across a couple of months in the summer of 2006. Without rehashing my whole memoir, I just want to delineate the person I thought I was during those months where I saw myself as blazing like the sun. Early on, I told Ben that I thought I was probably the most intelligent person who'd ever lived. Later I thought that future generations might look back at me as having been a second Messiah (though I didn't actually believe I was a supernatural being - I did draw the line at that.)

In those rapidly passing weeks, I had immense energy, an almost preternatural self-confidence, global ambitions, and the sense that my powers of emotional intelligence were liable to make people putty in my hands had I wanted to misuse them. In my quest for magnificent destiny, I burned through $80,000 of credit-card money in a month.

During this period, I also had a short and very scary, direct encounter with insanity. I'd reached a peak of intellectual and creative intensity, and thoughts and ideas were passing through my mind with inconceivable rapidity. I wondered why I'd expanded in all directions but the spiritual, and within seconds, that realm opened up to me and I understood the whole phenomenon of Jesus. I felt like Spock in Star Trek the Motion Picture, mind-melding with the immense machine intelligence, Vejur, and literally blowing his mind with the throughput of concepts flowing from the entity.

My own personal encounter with massive information overload came when Ben called me in tears wondering why I wasn't at our scheduled meeting with our couples therapist. Over a period of just half an hour, the insane pressure I placed upon myself to make that meeting, running through the streets of Hollywood, clashed with the flooding river of thoughts through my brain, and I felt my sanity slipping away, unable to reconcile mundane priorities with cosmic thoughts that could not be blocked. The last threads of my rationality told me that I had to save myself rather than worry about Ben's anxieties that I was missing counseling, and I forcibly took a bottle of tequila from a bar, and drank half of it to put the fire out in my brain. Half an hour later, Ben picked me up in a parking lot, exhausted, and spent. I was just at the beginning.

Although hence forward no longer in danger of a psychological break like that, I was otherwise unstoppable, impatient of obstacles, and scared of nothing. I didn't know when not to make a stand. It was this combination of qualities that resulted in the five nights of hell that ensued from a violent confrontation with three security guards in a luxury hotel lobby: arrest; gaol; strapped into a gurney; psychiatric ER lock-up; four days on suicide watch in a locked psych ward; then the slow acceptance that I was very ill in the head. If I hadn't been locked up like that, I might never have had a sufficiently early period of calm to come to the realization that I needed help. A few weeks later, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 1.

The odd thing - the very odd thing - is that, apart from the half hour on Hollywood Boulevard when I almost lost my mind - at no time during those weeks did I feel I wasn't being myself. The gleaming person I saw myself as back then, was somebody with not just a clear continuity of personhood to the past, but, looking back now, a soul on an unbroken journey to this moment, as I sit in a Starbucks in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, attempting to put on paper an analysis of where this enjoyable, pleasant week of good humor (as I wrote in yesterday's blog) sits in the grand scheme of things.

Although I have that continuity, there are still several things I completely fail to understand: how this person - this person here now - could spend so much money knowing there was next to nothing in the bank; how I could not see that the dramatic development of self over those weeks was not a trifle odd given the preceding years of intermittent depression; how I imagined I could build a gay superclub in Hollywood from the ground up having no experience in either entertainment or business. (Of course, at the time, a lot of my friends and family wondered exactly the same thing!)

The struggle that followed all of this was to attempt to make some sense of it, and writing the book played a big part in that search. In the next blog, I'll try to explain some of what I learned.

(Continued tomorrow.)

Here are links to the three follow-on blogs:

What I Learned from Insanity
The Greatest Illusion
Will the real Keith Adams please step forward?

Making Sense of a World without Consciousness - Part 1.

2011-08-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

This is the first part of a long essay I wrote in Raleigh, NC, today. When I began it, I thought it was just a blog entry, though likely to be a long one. But after finishing it, I realized I can't subject ANY reader to such an immensity of bloviation at one sitting. So I've broken it up into bite-size bits (remember I'm 6'6, so the bites are relatively large), and will parcel those out over the next week, by scheduling each entry in advance.) I didn't write it that way, so I've tried to come up with natural break points, and blog headings that seem appropriate to each stage of the essay.

(Self-portrait, Chicaco, 2008)

On Feeling Good Feeling good is dangerous, not to mention addictive. I'm venturing onto treacherous territory here. (Since Ben is liable to read this at some point, I just want to say immediately not to worry: I'm not manic. Really!)

For most people, feeling good is like riding a bike. It's "Hey, I feel good today", and all's right with the world. No further cogitation is required, no self-analysis, no careful poking around the psyche. You feel comfortable in your shell; in fact, there's no shell: there's just a firmly consistent, porous sense of self, bounded by a permeable sensory layer amiably taking in the world around, and the settled state within. Happiness comes easily to many.

I've counted myself amongst that lucky circle, this week. It has not been difficult to exist. Interactions flow easily and with humor. There's no oddness in the way people react to me. A sunny smile has been easy to find, and doggone it people like me - or seem to. Why is this so difficult, you're asking? Just accept it, and enjoy it. The truth is that I've done just that, but it's impossible for me to experience a week like this and not self-reflect. You see, it's the first time I've felt this way, so consistently, for two years. And bearing a disease like bipolar disorder, you can't take mood for granted. In fact, there's a lot more than that you can't take for granted, as I'll explain.

I'd like to think this week has been the real me. But I've abundant reason to know there is no such thing. The self is a construct we use to bind ourselves into a manageable whole. It's a survival instinct generating a field of consciousness and personality we cling to as we navigate our life. We want to believe it's stable, so we ignore the evident signs of deviance. We were having a bad day; "that was so not like me", "I didn't even recognize myself."

So in the coming four blogs, I'll explore what this means to me.

(Continued tomorrow.)

Here are links to the four follow-on blogs:

Got me mah Silverado, Yee Haa!

2011-08-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

I went to goddarn National Rental Rental, and got me one of those that there Silverados off of the lot, yessir. Now I just gotta get Ben to let me get one back there in ol' Hillbilly Hollywood.

Remember, I'm not a small man.

If I really flew home from my two week business trip to North Carolina insisting on getting a monster truck, I'm not sure who would disaprove more: Ben (general disapproval), my neighbors (blocking traffic), or my friends (for stylistic reasons.) But from the moment I chose it off the Emerald Aisle at National (you get to pick your car, if you're in the Emerald Club), I knew it was right. Ignoring the pained looks of four big fellas who clearly thought they belonged in it and had to settle for a minivan, I revved up, backed up over a Prius, squashing it to the ground, and bulldozed the exit gate on my way to my hotel. I actually fit in a car, for once. My knees are not touching the dashboard, my arms are not tucked into my side, and my hair is not brushing the ceiling.

Another thing: we had an earthquake here this week (and I seem to have been the only one who didn't feel it), and we're getting a hurricane this weekend, and what safer place to be than in my Silverado if the world comes to an end?

Mind, if we moved to North Carolina, and bought this truck, nobody would blink an eyelid. And, for the first time, I've let the idea of living here rest in my mind for more than a millisecond, and not just because of the truck. In fact, it's been a bit of a revelation, this week. I'm here for training - three courses on the product of which I'm a co-developer. You might wonder why I'm not teaching it, but it's a huge product, and I still don't know it all, despite having worked full-time on it for two years. But, in fact, I am indeed teaching today and tomorrow for the part of the product I develop.

It's a very small class of about eight people, and we're all colleagues. The product is to undergo a transition into our R&D division (it was developed in the field by my current division, Global Marketing.) So my classmates are all in R&D, and I've already been working with them on my field. For the first time in a long, long time, I feel like I'm a member of a team, and it's done wonders for my mental health.

I've known for a few years that, in theory, if I could change my job so that I was interacting a lot more with people, rather than communing with my laptop, depression would have less opportunity to bite into me. But this is the first time I've really seen that happen in action. I also had a chat with my boss, the other day, about my roles in the team, and it became obvious to me that my career is suffering from being remote. I can be invited into teleconferences all you like, but if you're not there, you're never fully participating in things.

All of this gave me food for thought. I can't really imagine that I'd ever want to leave espresso-land and move here to the Chevy-driven baby factory region. I've a lot to lose: friends, gay culture, the weather, the arts. But what price can you put on mental health?

Of course, the question is mostly moot, since Ben is on tenure at UCLA, and I imagine he might have a thing or two to say about moving here. But I've thought that sometime in the future, when Ben and I are hopefully better off, we could maybe buy a small condo here, and I could come up for weeks at a time. Only thing is, I'd only do it if I could get me a Silverado, too, though.

The Route Taken by the Mind

2011-08-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

Travel is a good measure of the self. From my own experience in recent years, I see that if I’m in a depression (which has been the case for most of the time during the last two years), then I feel a bit soggy: not that interested in what’s going on around me; my thoughts are not as fleeting and insightful; there’s little scope for creativity; and I’m not even sure that I like myself that much.

Man touching God as observed from space, over South America

I should say that I’m on an American Airlines flight to DFW, from where – after a break of some three hours, I’ll fly to RDU for a week spent at our corporate headquarters. I’ve completed this sort of travel (in fact this exact trip) countless times. So when I describe a sort of travel where you’re constantly thrust up against new, or rare experiences, and which stimulates your mind in new directions, in a sort of Sehnsucht (my favorite German word, meaning an ineffable yearning for you know what not), this current trip is not of that nature.

Usually, when I come back from a trip to Europe, for instance, I’m buzzing with conceptions of how I might live my life differently, including, usually, the idea that I should move back there permanently (after somehow persuading Ben – unlikely – to give up his tenure at UCLA.)

On the other hand, the coincidence of work travel, with its monotony of externally stimulating perceptions and observations, doesn’t automatically correlate with the sort of experience I described in the first paragraph. In fact I know intimately that there is scarcely any correlation at all, since I remember pleasure trips as being accompanied with depression with the same frequency I remember work trips where my mind was both at peace with itself as well as questioning new ideas and pursuing creativity.

So far, at this admittedly very early stage of this trip, I’m in the latter type of phase. It’s the sort of air-flight where I go to the bathroom, struggle for many minutes with peeing (pee shyness is my way of life), but then stand up (have you tried peeing standing-up on an airplane while you’re 6’6?), and catch sight of myself in the mirror. I see an attractive face, suitably wizened for my age, with a vital spark of intelligence and bonhommie in my eyes, and I like both what I see, and the way I feel.

I go back to my seat and pick up the book I’ve chosen as my travel companion, in this case “Conversations on Consciousness”, a compendium of discussions between Susan Blackmore, and other philosophers, neurologist, psychologists, and neo-Darwinian neurophsychophilosophers (the latter term will become minted in a matter of time at the rate these various specialties are linking up.)

I can’t deny that I like this image of myself as that of a renaissance man who knows how to play. Nor can I deny that there’s some truth in it. My last five blogs have been variously an attempted humorous piece about dog poop avoidance in animals and what it says about a dog’s inner representation of itself; the problems in David Deutsch’s recent book on the limits and consequences of human knowledge; a wild weekend I had going to parties at San Diego gay pride; an imaginary televised speech from David Cameron to the English rioters; and a story about the heroism of a guy who’s learned to live a meaningful, productive life despite having been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was going to add that In the meantime, I’d also been reading Henry James, but then I thought that might sound too boastful.

I’m not writing this as an exercise in self-aggrandizement (although I clearly like to have my cake and eat it), but to show how travel can bring out many different sides of the self, and how it can illuminate the journey through life as well.

The way I feel today is the side of myself I enjoy the most. On many occasions, while traveling on exactly the same trip as now, I’ve also opened my computer, but not to write a blog: instead, to bury myself in work. Yet, when I’m in the mood I’m in now, I look smugly at the other men in business-class, most of whom are pounding away at spreadsheets.

So what are the consequences of all of this circumspection: a revival of the old fantasy that maybe I can do something different. I’ve long had the idea that I could somehow arrange my life to allow pursuit of an advanced degree in one of the two areas that most fascinate me: the origins of the universe; and the existence and meaning of consciousness. They’re the two greatest problems left unsolved. So I fantasize about doing a Ph.D. in one area or the other, despite my occupation of the second half the decade between 40 and 50 years old – (it’s well known that scientists unearth very little in the way of groundbreaking research past the age of 45, no disrespect intended to Ben who's rapidly approaching that dividing line.)

To be honest with myself, I’ve had thoughts of this nature since at least the age of 18. In my teens, I knew I wanted to be a scientist; yet at the same time, I was fascinated by the arts. I had to make a choice, and since my interest in astronomy was the strongest, I fell upon that as the direction to take, albeit that I hedged my future employment prospects by making it a minor to a degree in physics.

In practice, the study of the stars brought with it some disillusionment. It wasn’t fashionable then to consider cosmology as a practice for a grown man, so we studied the physics of stars, we discriminated different sorts of galaxies on photographic plates, and we calculated the distances to the various types of novae. It was mechanical, and robbed of wonder. As for astronomy itself, one freezing night in the University College London’s observatory at Mill Hill (hopelessly situated in the commuter belt around London), cured me of the desire to be hands-on.

I left college clueless about where to go next, and the main factor leading me in one direction, as opposed to another, was my embarrassingly devout encounter with evangelical Christianity at the age of 20. I felt God wanted me to use my scientific background to the betterment of society, and I pursued a Ph. D. in alternative energy. Once again, though, it was a hedge. By the time I flew to Philadelphia to begin my studies, I’d become a dead-again atheist, and I very soon lost interest in my degree program: I'm afraid proofreading a series of books for my charismatic advisor, Dick Hosier, on the subject of the energy economy of Senegal - wood burning stoves et al - quickly cured me of that. (You know, I sought to find a link to that series, but apparently it's not available at Amazon.)
No doubt there’d been behind my choice of college (i.e. in the USA) some unconscious awareness of the same things that caused me to quit my Ph.D. program two years later: the burning desires to both confront my sexuality, and figure out who I was. By then I’d developed a strong interest in writing: so I figured I’d graduate with a Masters, take a research job at the university, come out of the closet, get a new haircut, and give myself some time to “find myself”.

That was in 1988. I’m still on that journey, apparently. I started work, at the age of 23, with the idea that a nine-to-five job was an abhorrent and current necessity, but not one that would in any way define my long-term existence. Yet here I am on this plane today. And it’s only mood that’s stopping me from pounding away at spreadsheets like my businessmen peers around me. And I can look back at many other periods, long and short, over the years, where the vague sense that I should be doing something more meaningful has risen to the surface once again.

If I was to reread all of my blog, including my earlier photo-journal, there’d be the recurring motif of rebellion against the corporate strait-jacket I’ve been in since my late twenties. Oh, I’m lucky: I’ve always enjoyed my work, at the three jobs I’ve held since I left Philadelphia in 1996; and, mostly, I’ve been intellectually stimulated by it, and have been given the reigns to my own creative impulses. Yet during those times of questioning – frequently brought on by travel – it’s never felt as if it’s enough.

I’ve even tried to branch out now and then, the latest example being writing a book and seeing it published. Yet I’ve never really shown the likelihood to make a complete break and pursue one of my heart’s deepest desires. Oh, you can say that there are systemic obstacles to it: debt, for instance; a double mortgage now, and the inability of one income to sustain both of us when one of us is in full-time education.

But maybe an even greater obstacle is fear. What if I took the risk, and, say, started a Ph.D. in the philosophy of consciousness at UCLA? Would I find myself any more fulfilled than I am now? Would I realize that the motivating factor all along was a sense of what I saw my rightful place in society should be – i.e. an academic researcher with a doctorate – rather than the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake? Or, even worse, would I reach the final years of my studies unable to come up with a meaningful contribution? I might gain a much greater understanding of the field, but no longer have the agility of mind to build something in the gaps.

There are just too many questions here to fruitfully confront. The truth is that it’s the intellectual journey that is what ultimately matters, and which is the most meaningful. Getting a Ph.D., taking my place amongst the gallery of human beings who’ve been publically known to have contributed to knowledge: these are both bright and shiny goals. But life is about the art of being, not about the mere getting from one place to another. That I have a 9-5 job I enjoy, and live a rich and happy emotional and intellectual life (leaving aside depression and bipolar disorder, for the moment – how I wish I could): this is enough. More than enough. I have the luxury of time to think about many subjects, and form my own conjectures; to read for the love of acquiring knowledge, or for understanding my fellow man better; maybe even to contribute in small ways, as with my book and this blog.

So today the destination is not beguiling Paris, fascinating Istanbul, or the beautiful and bucolic Lake District in my home country of England; it’s much more mundane: an office park in suburban North Carolina. But the very fact I’m writing this particular blog entry as I fly there is proof that the destination is immaterial to how deeply you engage the fundamental questions that confront us all.

Some Remarks on Dog Poop as it Pertains to Canine Motor Function and the Doggy Homunculus

2011-08-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

Dogs may not have foresight (especially when it comes to pooping), but they certainly have pretty good forepawsight (not to mention backpawsight.)

This insight came to me while running in Runyon Canyon the other day. I run on some pretty treacherous trails, with rocks sticking out, and the surfaces being very uneven. You really have to watch your feet. But it occurred to me, while I was walking up a particularly steep, dangerous track, that I was not actually watching my feet: I was watching about five feet forward of my feet.

This is all, usually, unconscious: your autonomic systems take care of it by sending to the brain visual information gained by scanning the path ahead. The brain puts this together with other information - the representation of your body in the mind (the "homunculus"), and the speed with which you're walking - and then shoots out nerve impulses to direct the muscles in your legs and feet.

You may have noticed that I only have two feet. This is not true of our big St. Bernard, Indira "Ghandi" Adams-Lee. As with most dogs, she has four feet to worry about.

She's a big lass and a bonny lass, and she likes hor beer, and they call her Cushy Butterfield, and I wish she was here.

Now, Indira does not have a lot of foresight when it comes to choosing places to poop, while in public. First, it's a bit distasteful that she even does it in public, but it's not clear why she has to do it right in the middle of a busy intersection on Santa Monica Boulevard.

But she's quite clever in other ways. I'd earlier noticed that she never walks over her own poop or pee. When we let her out in the back yard, her path back to the house often takes her right across where she did her whatsits, and yet her back paws just seem to always avoid stepping in it.

So, putting two and two together, while I was on my run, I realized that Indira's doing something even more advanced than we do when "watching" our feet: the doggy version of her homunculus has to plan where to put both sets of paws.

Our other dog, D'artagnan "All for One" Adams-Lee, although he's much smaller, doesn't seem to be as accurate in planting his feet. It's true that he's awfully long, for the size of his brain, being a long-haired miniature dachshund, and maybe that explains why he doesn't seem to mind stepping in his pee. Or Indira's, even.

The little fella.

While putting all of this together in my mind, by the way, I lost the ball and stepped in some dog poop. Apparently my homunculus is easily distracted.

The End of Infinity: a Review of the latest David Deutsch Book

2011-08-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

Let me see if I’m up for this. My mental acuity is dimmed from last night’s carousing on Santa Monica Boulevard, and you have to be at your best to take on a scientist like David Deutsch.

Deutsch is probably my favorite science writer. Not only does he have insatiable curiosity, but he has the ability to pursue his insights outside of the bounds of conventional thinking, in a way that makes Brian Greene (probably the most successful writer in the fields of high-energy physics and cosmology) seem almost parochial. But what truly distinguishes him in a field of great writers is his uncanny and consistent ability to write about the most difficult concepts in a way that neither insults your intelligence nor prevents understanding. As a contrast, I’m frequently completely lost in Brian Greene’s fascinating slabs of cosmological explication.

Although Deutsch is very discursive, his core arguments have such an inevitability about them, that when you reach the destination it’s with the same feeling of having completed a Henry James novel where the outcome is entirely and unavoidably dictated by the characteristics of the people he constructs in the theater of the mind, not by a story imposed upon characters.

His book “The Fabric of Reality” is one of the few popular books I’ve seen that deviates convincingly from the most common interpretations of quantum physics, and does so in a way that leaves you, if not a complete believer, unable to see the flaws in his arguments.

The way he writes, in “Fabric”, is to start from some very simple, well-known experiments that expose the wave-particle duality of light (and other forms of electromagnetic radiation), and, ultimately, the quantum probabilistic nature of matter. Every step of logic that he develops from those simple experiments is easy to follow, and seem so obvious – because of the clarity of his writing – that you almost wonder why you’d never figured it out by yourself. But almost without knowing it, simply by following his seemingly flawless construction of idea upon idea, you find yourself a stranger in a very strange land, where famous thought experiments like Schroedinger’s Cat are explicable not by probabilistic collapse of wave functions, when observed, but by the faintest possible interference of “shadow” particles from an infinity of parallel universes, occupying locations in other dimensions, but right next to our own.

And you want to believe, if only because the alternative, accepted explanations are so unsatisfactory, and don’t bear the whiff of truth.

(Confession: in rereading this blog entry before posting it, I realized nobody will ever have the patience to get to the end of it. But hey, I wrote it, and my dusty drawers are already full, so here it is.)

I recently started reading Deutsch's new book, The End of Infinity, which Ben picked up at an airport a few weeks ago, and which was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review this morning. In this book, he starts off again with relatively simple arguments about what constitutes a good explanation of a phenomenon, how you define something as being a problem, and what conditions are necessary for the creation of new knowledge, and builds towards the idea that knowledge creation by people (human or not) is one of the basic physical processes of the universe, and will ultimately play as great a role in fashioning the large-scale fabric of the universe as supernovae and dark matter.

It’s all fascinating, thought-provoking stuff, and you should not be surprised if reading it gives you some ideas of your own. But I’m finding myself wondering about what motivates him to write these books, and my tentative conclusion is that he writes primarily out of the joy of satisfying his own curiosity in a forum which exposes his ideas and thought process, and only secondarily out of the opportunity to impart his ideas to excite others into following the same trends of thought.

In my way of thinking, he’s the sort of person whose mind is constantly generating new explanations for everything around him, and then he happily devotes his time to unraveling and extending these germs of ideas to see where they lead. But I think that this tension within him – to come up with narrations that help explain the universe – sometimes blinds him to leaps of logic that aren’t necessarily strong enough to support the additional explanations he remorselessly piles on top of the original ideas. This doesn’t make him a less fascinating writer. In fact, almost the opposite is true, for it’s in these gaps that the reader can build his or her own narration.

(I get fanciful ideas now and then, usually when I’m out running in the sunshine, and my mind takes off, extrapolating these ideas into far-fetched abstractions. Sometimes I even write blogs about them. And I won’t deny that the flaw I see in one of his arguments was not also a product of the free roaming of the mind allowed by running.)

Deutsch argues early in the book about what conditions are needed for knowledge creation. He states that you need nothing more than matter, energy (or the ability to convert one from the other), and what he calls “evidence: the information needed to test scientific theories.” As an example of my own, consider a free-floating mind in extragalactic space so remote from all visible matter that the sky was not only unrelievedly black but that the laws of physics made observation of large-scale structures impossible, since they’d all red-shifted beyond the perimeter available to an observer, taking into account the age of the universe. How could such a person construct a theory of gravity? There’d be no “evidence” to even suggest gravity might exist.

Implicit in Deutsch's argument at this stage (although it’s been stated explicitly earlier) is that there is a fourth requirement: the existence of people. We - and beings like us - alone, in all creation, can create advanced knowledge (as opposed to information, or anthropological/animal culture.) His later conclusions – that the environments in which knowledge can be created overwhelmingly outnumber those where it cannot – depend upon the requirements he earlier established as being necessary for knowledge creation. But the route he takes from those requirements to the conclusion about the universality of knowledge creation environments requires a suspension of belief.

To build his argument, he postulates a cube of intergalactic “vacuum” in which the solar system could comfortably fit. Since space is overwhelmingly empty – matter structures as we know them are extreme outliers – , if he can prove that knowledge creation in that solar-system sized cube is possible, and even probable, given sufficient cosmological time, then he can validate his conclusion about the ubiquity of places where knowledge can be created.

As Deutsch says, although this cube of space is empty, cold and entirely black, there is actually no such place as a perfect vacuum in intergalactic space. Even a cube as remote as this one will contain over a billion tons of matter, mostly in the form of ionized hydrogen, and “this is more than enough mass to build, say, a space station and a colony of scientists creating an open-ended stream of knowledge – if (his italics) anyone were present who knew how to do that.”

Fine, so he seems to be saying that, given unlimited technology (and, by this time, I’ve already accepted his conclusion that even the most outlandish forms of technical know-how must surely exist in cosmological time scales), humans could prosper in this infinitely inhospitable place, and create new knowledge. I can more or less buy that. And he argues from this that “a typical location in the universe is amenable to the open-ended creation of knowledge. And therefore so are almost all other kinds of environment…” And here’s where starts to use some sleight of hand. He says “in the universe at large, knowledge-friendliness is the rule, not the exception.”

His argument depends on showing that the conditions of matter, light and evidence can exist even in this remote location. I won’t go into his proof, because it’s not really relevant, but I can accept the truths of this argument. But what he completely side-steps is how those people – without whom knowledge creation is, as he earlier showed, impossible – got to that remote cube of space to create knowledge out of matter, light and evidence; and, moreover, why they did so. He never even explicitly states that people traveled to this far away cube, set up shop, and started creating knowledge (once they’d built their space station.) He just talks about how these people, however they originated, could use whatever evidence was available, to construct and test our present-day theories of cosmology. To paraphrase him: using super powerful telescopes beyond our imagination, they could see far enough away, and in great enough detail, to observe planets with tilted axes, and therefore conclude, without ever having seen a tulip, that those planets have seasons. All of that would be based entirely on an understanding of planetary motion, etc.

The fact that he never brings up in this argument how people would get there, or why they’d go there in the first place, seems to imply that he means that these people originated within the cube. But that’s clearly impossible. In intergalactic space, all you’ve got, for the most part, is ionized hydrogen. Complex molecules cannot exist (since supernovae would be too distant), or self-construct themselves; and so replicating units such as RNA can never develop. This, in turn means, large scale structure is impossible. Even if you could conceive the idea of a formless intelligence in the cube, how could it construct the tools it would need to gather evidence and create knowledge, when the kind of matter you’d need to build those tools cannot, by its very nature, ever exist in that cube in the absence of colonization from outside.

So, although he doesn’t say so expressly, we have to believe he means that these far distant knowledge cubes get colonized by space-faring races. But this thought brings with it issues of its own. The first question is “why?” Why would any race set up a space station meant for knowledge gathering in such an inimical place, when there are vastly more places much friendlier to their endeavors? For instance, those that are anywhere reasonably close to one of the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated – and it’s a low estimate – stars in the reachable universe.

You might say that there are special conditions this far away from other dense conglomerations of matter; conditions, say, of cold and vacuum that allow special experiments. But we believe we can already make cold and vacuum here on earth even more extreme than that found in the darkest areas of space. What about stray radiation? We know it’s next to impossible to entirely shield any equipment anywhere in the vicinity of the solar system from cosmic rays, for example. So we go way out there to do our experiments. But even this doesn’t hold water: with even the level of shielding we can manufacture here now, we can easily postulate future technology building it in a region of space remote enough from major galaxies to make it effective in blocking cosmic rays (leaving aside, for the moment, how we’d get there), but not so far away as the cold dark regions Deutsch describes. But that’s beside the point, because Deutsch himself would demolish that argument with his belief that there is no knowledge we can’t eventually acquire that’s not forbidden by the laws of physics. So, in the vast future, we’d have such infinitely better shielding that we could do this experiment also, on earth.

Yet even if you allow that there might be some scientific reason that made building a knowledge gathering community in these cold, dark, empty cubes of space, we surely wouldn’t need many of them. And there are a lot of cubes to fill.

I think Deutsch would probably argue here that he’s talking about things in principle. In principle, he’d argue, that those distant cubes are knowledge-friendly, even if we wouldn’t ever likely want to colonize more than an infinitesimal quantity of them in reality. But he elevates knowledge, created by people, to being a fundamental principal of the cosmos. And that leaves room for the truly enormous hole in this argument. For most of the universe to be knowledge friendly, going by Deutsch's ideas, it has to be reachable, even if only in principle, by the only one of the four required ingredients (including matter, energy and evidence) that is capable of volition: people. And, unfortunately, it's not true that people can reach all over the universe, without breaking the laws of physics.

It takes a little bit of background to state why this is not the case. Our best theory of the origin of the universe is the big-bang. But it’s no longer your grandfather’s big bang. In fact, it’s no longer even your father’s big bang. My undergraduate degree was at the University College, London, in physics and astronomy. I’m only 46 now, and yet neither dark matter nor dark energy where even on the horizon then, and they make up the vast majority of matter in the universe. Fifty percent of what I learned is now invalid. The same is true of the big-bang. The more we learn, the more complicated the theory has to become to account for our observations.

The most significant feature that’s been added on to the theory is the so-called "expansion". The universe we see around us can only have arisen if there’d been a very early phase of super-massive expansion, which was then switched off somehow (we’re not exactly sure how.) This all begins to sound a little like Ptolomy’s Epicycles, but if we accept it, then one of the logical conclusions is that there are infinitely larger parts of the universe than what we can see.

So there are places we can never see. And not just because we don’t have powerful telescopes. Those parts of the universe are receding away from us effectively faster than the speed of light. I know that sounds impossible, but what’s not often made clear in the expansion of the universe is that it’s the very fabric of the universe itself which is expanding, and the limitations of the speed of light hold true against our local fabric, and the distant fabric accelerated away from us when the universe was a fraction of its current site. Most of the universe will be forever out of our reach, because the laws of physics forbid us from ever seeing light from those distant places.

This initial superfast period of the expansion of the fabric of space means that the majority of places in the universe are so far distant from one another that information can never reach them, let alone people. And this is even without bringing in the now de-rigueur view that one or more multiverses exist (the subject of Brian Greene’s recent bestseller, "The Hidden Reality") leaving us with yet greater regions where it’s impossible to create knowledge, even in principle. (And Deutsch himself wrote "The Fabric of the Cosmos", the book I referred to near the beginning of this overlong essay, on this exact same subject.)

And there's another more practical problem: it would be, in any case, impossible to posit a sufficient number of cubes of this nature with people in them, because the laws of physics (by which Deutsch expressly binds all of his statements of the possible achievements of technology) mean that it would be completely impractical to reach enough of them. If these cubes are so remote that the universe appears dark, then it would require travel of billions and billions of light years at "sub-warp" speeds. Even if we are to suppose that to be possible, to do so on any appreciably large scale would require a vast number of starfaring civilizations with the ability to travel as fast as a reasonable fraction of the speed of light, and an amount of time that would surely exceed the time left on the clock until the heat death of the universe.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Deutsch doesn’t know the key fact about most of space being beyond the reach of information, and I think it’s unlikely it didn’t occur to him that this idea lays waste to his conclusion that the majority of the universe is friendly to knowledge. So you can only presume that he deliberately left this out, and hoped we wouldn’t notice. He has some gall, but I can hardly blame him. After all, if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have this wonderful book to inspire us to think, and commentate upon.

The joy of reading something like this is not just that it sets you thinking, constantly, but that it allows you to speculate what might be, if things were different. I read it in the same spirit as I did Julian Jaynes’ infamous “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” The late Jaynes put up a convincing case that consciousness, as we know it, didn’t arise until the more complex civilizations came together, say, around 4,000 BC. The detailed anthropological argument is fascinating in itself, and can be used to explain modern-day features of religion such as praying at grave stones. What’s even more intriguing is how he uses the physiological underpinnings of his theory to explain phenomena as varied as hypnotism and schizophrenia. Ideas from that book still stay with me now, even though I don’t believe the central idea for a second.

Deutsch’s book is by no means as way out as Jaynes’, and the vast majority is made up of solid, inspiring, insightful, creative thinking. But, in a way, reading books like Jaynes', and – less so – like Deutsch’s, is similar to watching a great science fiction movie: you can’t truly enjoy it unless you either willingly suspend a little bit of your belief, or you use the gaps to dream up your own stories. With Deutsch, I go the latter way, and enjoy the heck out of it.

What I'd Say to the "Best Buy" Revolutionaries if I were P.M.

2011-08-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

One of the saddest commentaries I’ve read on the British riots was in today’s New York Times, where an onlooker commented on the looting of a shopping mall. The only store left untouched was a bookstore. I’d like to think that it’s because book readers don’t go looting, but however you interpret it, it speaks volumes (accidental pun) about this “Best-Buy” revolution in England; I’m sure there wasn’t an X-Box left standing in that mall once the rioters were through.

I’m constantly struck by the lack of imagination wielded in politics. Start with the debt debacle, and Obama’s pussy-footed unwillingness to publicly assign blame. It’s not for lack of advice. If Obama had read the indictment of his failed presidency by commentator Drew Westen in last week’s New York Times Magazine, it surely would have prompted some reflection leading, hopefully, to a call for action. Yet nothing. I was a huge, early supporter of Obama, now I just want him out of office. (But not at the cost of Rick Perry's prayerful presidency!)

The same is true in Britain. Politicians rarely if ever speak from the heart, and the “teaching moments” pass silently. So I got to thinking the other day, when I was out running in beautiful Runyon Canyon. (Having taken up running again, I’d forgotten how freely your mind can roam when running.) What would I say if I was David Cameron. What follows is a fictional speech. Unfortunately, as with the book store in the mall, this sort of fiction will also likely go untouched. Still it’s nice to fantasize.

We were recently witness to a revolt in the streets. People claimed their long-term grievances and were moved to action. I refer, of course, to the semi-quiet revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a brutal state, the likelihood of state violence, and the risk of their lives, the people demonstrated amazing restraint. After early bouts of looting, neighborhoods organized their own peace-keeping missions. Christians stood with Muslims, even guarding each other’s ceremonies of worship. They had a cause, and it was a noble one; something they could articulate. I was continually moved when I read the stories in the papers. A soldier stood on his tank, holding a flower to show his solidarity with the people; tears were streaming down his face; people kissed his feet, equally moved.

(It’s true that the aftermath is not proving so inspiring, but things have yet to work themselves out fully.)

Now think of the hooligans tearing neighborhoods to pieces in this country. One claim is that it was inspired by the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan. Yet I can guarantee you if you asked a room full of arrested rioters about Duggan, they’d yell back “Mark Who?”

The other claim is of social deprivation, and that’s a legitimate complaint. But is that what’s motivating the rioters? In Egypt, people lived in a police state, where dissidents could vanish without trace. The obstacles to overcome were formidable: Mubarak had not just the power of the government and the army behind him, but also the powerhouses of the economy – those with the most to lose should revolution win out. Yet we live here in a free society. Any man can stand on a milk crate at Hyde Park Corner and denounce the government without fear of a raid of his home in the dark hours of the night. People here have the power to effect change without guns and rocks. With so much against them, the Egyptians chose peaceful protest, while over here, in our civil society, people’s just claims of poverty were swiftly left behind in the wake of pure greed laced with unfocused anger. It’s both pathetic and embarrassing, and leaves me wondering what kind of England have we wrought.

My reason for speaking today is now, however, to lambaste the rioters. Really, they’re too easy a target. Instead, it’s to challenge them. You say you have grievances. So I say to you, come talk to me. If you can prove that you were one of the ring-leaders, inciting others electronically, come and debate me on national television. You say you want change. Well prove it.

Here are the conditions. You have to show unequivocally that you played an organizing role in the riots, whether that be sent text messages on your Blackberry, or the evidence of others, isn’t important, so long as you’re somebody who should be able to speak for the ideas behind the violence. You will not be prosecuted. Your identity need not be revealed, even to the police or the crown. We can digitally mask your face digitally. Just show up, and begin the process of asking for what you want. And my government, and my fellow legislators, and council men and women across the country: we’ll begin the listening process. I can’t promise you that change will immediately follow. But you have to understand this one crucial aspect of the way civilized people live together: true, lasting change cannot come from violence; it can only come from dialog.

(Editor's note to British readers: that's how people spell "dialogue" over here.)

If nobody takes me up on this offer, then we know where we stand. We can only conclude you’re a cancer in our society, and therefore take the appropriate steps. So I’m speaking now to you as one individual to another. I’m speaking to that person who’s hearing these words and bravely toying with the idea of taking me up on this offer. It lies in your hands to change your future: are you going to take that opportunity, or are you going to seclude yourself in back rooms with your stolen X-Box, venturing out now and then only to burn your neighbor’s homes, beat up a member of another minority, and steal the latest video game? The choice is yours.

The Quiet Heroism of Joe Holt

2011-08-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

(Picture of Joe Holt, New York Times, Aug 7th, 2011)

Our sure-footedness in the world is based on the intimate conception that our senses are relaying truth to the inner mind. We hear somebody speak, and it doesn't occur to us that the voice is not real. We're walking down a crowded street, and make eye contact with a stranger; we know that if we break with convention and smile, there's an even chance they'll smile back (unless you're in Manhattan or Beverly Hills.)

We may have fantasies that the world has been playing us all along: that it's all been a huge mind trick where you're the only one not in on it; or that what we perceive as reality may just be a projection from a vast supercomputer. But, in either of those cases, the trick is so complete, and so consistent that even were it true, we could continue to live our lives with the expectation that sensation A would lead to conclusion B.

But what if you learned one day that decades of sensation had been partly only in your head, bereft of external causes? This is what Joe Holt faced when it finally dawned on him, in a singular moment of insight, years after his original diagnosis of schizophrenia, that the evil insults he'd experienced daily from friends and strangers had all been an illusion. Can you imagine how that would feel?

In today's Sunday New York Times, reporter Tara Parker-Pope recounts Joe Holt's story with a level of understanding and empathy rarely seen in mainstream writing on mental illness. We, ourselves, are accustomed to seeing angry, "crazy" guys on the street, railing at unseen things; we do our best to ignore them, we may even feel angry at them; we do not see their full humanity; we'd never consider trying to understand them. They're irrational, we tell ourselves; it would be impossible to break through. But Parker-Pope goes beyond the externals to find the rational being at the center of chaos, and understands the heroism it takes for one man to figure out, using only the strength of his intellect, the real from the unreal.

Joe Holt, married now, and with a house full of foster kids, grew up in the harshest of circumstances. His parents moved across the country, when he was sixteen, and made it clear that Joe wasn't invited. He drifted for years, in and out of odd-jobs, the home of fellow journeyers, and the street, in a world that seemed increasingly cruel. He'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia, but hadn't made the connection that it might explain why he constantly experienced angry, verbal, insulting attacks from everybody around him.

The moment of insight came during one of his calmer periods, where he was holding down a job that actually seemed as if it might lead somewhere. His boss took him out for lunch, and Joe feared the worse: that he was to be canned again. But it was quite the reverse: he was getting promoted. The lunch was light-hearted, and cheerful, and it was only near the end, where his supervisor excused herself to go to the bathroom, the the scathing insults erupted, casually from her lips. Joe was stunned. It didn't make any sense that she'd say such things after what had come before. So when she returned, all light-hearted again, he asked her, as casually as he could, whether she'd heard ... and repeated the insults he'd heard. The supervisor was mystified, which contributed to Joe's initial confusion.

Then there was the reaction:

By the time he climbed back into his car, he was short of breath. Could it be that all those nasty remarks over the years, those biting insults from out of nowhere, did not exist, except in his own head?

How many times had he falsely accused people, Patsy especially? Hundreds? Thousands? Called her a liar. Made a scene. Erupted, for no reason at all.

It struck him with increasing conviction that much of his experience over the previous couple of decades had not been real. It was devastating, as he realized the lost opportunities, destroyed by his reactions to things that never happened. Yet Joe's story goes on to show that it's possible to control what you deduce from your senses, if not to actually control what you perceive from them. Learning from his experience with his supervisor, he was able to develop - painfully - strategies for coping with his perceptions; to distinguish, as best he could, the real from the unreal; and to be able to lead a fulfilling, useful life.

Joe Holt was saved by his intellect. It's obviously a lot harder for those who lack Joe's spark of intelligence. Yet, when I see a deranged man on the boulevards of Los Angeles screaming at the passing cars, his mouth full of obscenities, his eyes staring wildly - almost the only visibly human element in a face covered with years of beard growth, I try my hardest to go through in my head what I know to be true: that here is a human being, reacting in the most rational way he's capable of, to what his senses are telling him. The only difference between him and I are that my senses are telling me the truth (mostly.) Beyond that, he's as human as any of us. Joe's story is important.