Creative Tidbits

So here are a couple of things I have been working on. A piece of flash fiction, a poem and a bit of creative non-fiction. There far from polished, just some little things I have been tinkering with. Enjoy! (?)

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Lie

Her eyes widened with surprise, and perhaps anger. He watched her mouth move in repetitious patterns, wet lips contracting and breathing, with meaning.

“What do you want me to say? What? What can I say?”

 He himself did not know how this started. A frozen blank expression was all he could muster. The Truth? Was that what he wanted? He might prefer a well-crafted lie. Nothing preserves a person’s feelings like a good lie.

Her brow fixed her face into a stern expression. “I swear you’re making mountains out of mole hills. You know this can’t be healthy for our relationship. How can you love me and not trust me?” Cocking her head and folding her arms she locked eyes with him, demanding an answer; his paralysis proved to be a partial one, as he stammered out a response.

“I know….” He struggled to control the shaking in his hands and voice. A rehearsed speech comes in bits and pieces to his mind. She doesn't even blink.

Her words cut apart his stammering accusation. “What do you know....? That I was out with Tom last night? Tom LIKES men.” Something popped in his mind. This might be plausible. Suddenly he felt like he needed to apologize, to make this better. A panic swept over him. “You always do this!” Her words were confident and assured and fanned the growing fires of his fears. 

“Wait. Just wait. I’m sorry, I just… Its…” His voice was noticeably shaky. This is all wrong. Wasn't he the one who had been wronged? Just run away, run and pretend this never happened. Pathetic.

“He needed someone to talk too, and I didn't want you to tell you because I knew you’d get like this.” Her face was flushed red. Her lips seemed to move faster and faster. “I think I need some time to myself to think about things.” She started to turn.

He grabbed her hand. What could keep her here? “Please… Just wait. I didn't know where you were. I was worried; your roommate said you were at his place, I just… I’m sorry.” A lie. He was wrong, he was always wrong.  The trembling had left his voice, but was replaced by a clumsy pleading tone.

She turned. For an instant he saw surprise, maybe even panic on her face, and then it passed. Those lips were angrily pursed, her eyes stern and disappointed. “Let me go. Maybe we can talk about it later.”

He needed to say something. Anything to make this stop, how can he fix this?  What does she want to hear? Desperation filled his heart. “I can’t lose you. I was stupid, I’m sorry.” And then it dawned on him. Just tell the truth. Just own up. “I went through your texts. I’m sorry, he just sounded like he had a thing for you. I didn't mean too, your phone was just out and I… it…”

A silent glare stabbed into him. “I’ll call you later.” He let go. Then she was gone. He sunk. The curb is a comfort to a man dashed in the road. Cold asphalt did not loosen the knot in his gut.

 This didn't go according to plan.  How could he fix this?

What happened?

Was a lie what he really wanted to here?

Was the truth more consoling?

Why couldn't he tell the difference?

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Glance

Across a room. 

                Magnetic,

A course assumes,

                between eyes.

Apologetic,

                A beholder gazed.

Stunned and undisguised,

too long, and abased,

                he withdrew from her'

Fierce and Beautiful

                Eyes. 

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Toy Soldiers and Boy Generals

                Standing with complete confidence over-viewing the miniaturized world laid out, my hand strokes unkempt facial hair.

Four, twenty-something-year-old boys, stand around a table playing with toy soldiers. The dirty basement littered with paint, plastic and garbage fade from our perception as we contemplate the game at hand.  Between us is a carefully crafted table, green flock intermingles with sand to form a mock terrain of grass and dirt. The image is completed with the scattering of meticulously miniature ruins, forests, craters and trenches to create the illusion of a grand battlefield.  Paint fumes fumigate from a corner where one of these grown children works with dedication on coloring a freshly built model tank.

                My focus concentrates on one point of the table, a battle line arrayed with similar completed tanks, surrounded by individual model soldiers, each built, painted and customized with care. Reaching for a tape-measure, I move the pieces the allocated distance with the precision of a general.  Satisfied with the movement of my troops I flip through one of the dozens of rule books involved in this gratuitously over-complicated game of chess. My opponent gathers together a handful of dice and carefully rolls them in a clear region of the battlefield.  With the odds in his favor I grimly remove several of my own models who have just died in a well-placed explosion. Cotton patches, painted to appear as smoke and fire replace a model tank with another well rolled bunch of dice. All goes according to plan. Odds determine the winner of this game, every time a dice is rolled it is supposed to simulate another battlefield action. A solider throwing a grenade, a man sprinting, a tank breaking down, the courage of man standing alone as his comrades are killed, all are taken into account with hundreds of pages of rules. The amount of time it takes to learn this game keeps its enthusiast to an eccentric and dedicated few.

                The battle has reached a critical point, tensely, the mock generals convene. Murmurings are passed from ally to ally; subtle pointing to rules on page and table areas keep concealed the plans from the enemy. As a consensus is reached troops are boldly re-positioned  I look over to a comrade to gauge his reaction, nodding reassuringly. Resting my hand on the fuzz of the fake grass, I try and blot out the noise of my family upstairs. Analyzing the odds of our success, I order an unexpected counter attack moving from cover into flanking positions. With the rolling of the dice, my opponent’s squirm in the angst of anticipation. The risks paid off as my men storm into position.

                Complete concentration is shattered as my phone sounds from across the clutter of the unfinished basement. With the flipping open of the phone and a quick glance at the caller, work, responsibility and reality flood back into my awareness. No longer the general of the grand army before him, I realize I will likely be late to work if I am to finish this 3 hour game.

                But victory is so close at hand….

And I close the phone, and with it the rest of the real world; At least for the next hour.

Really Real Reality?

Image by: http://deathbytrolley.wordpress.com

                I remember seeing The Matrix when I was eleven or so and being blown away by the idea that this could all be an illusion.  That possibility seems laughable and easily discarded in the light of our own personal experiences, science, common sense and all sorts of other seemingly concrete facets of life.  While I still think the possibility that we are all trapped in some computer program is laughable, the nature of reality itself to me is on much more shaky grounds.

                When I was sixteen I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. This first person narrative written in present tense has a nonlinear timetable, jumping from flashback to future back to the scene at hand within the space of a few pages. This style leads the reader, first by the hand, and then by the scruff of the neck down the rabbit hole of personal insanity. For those who don’t know the story, the psychological twist is hiding in plain sight but invisible for so long. I remember thinking that possessed insanity would be very hard to recognize.

A few years later I read Philip K Dick’s VALIS and then again my view on the nature of thought was flipped around. The story essentially follows Horselover Fat who is a schizophrenic version of Philip K Dick himself, as he tries to rationalize his own situation in the universe.

                “Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, [one] ... slipped by degrees into madness.” - Philip K Dick’s VALIS

                What have these types of stories taught us? Well nothing really. There isn't any reliable way to verify how the nature of reality is to specific people. That’s the point though. There are several preexisting premises in which much of humanities collective knowledge rest, that really are quite unstable.

                Now indulge me as I delve into a little philosophy. Going back all the way to Aristotle, western philosophy has moved in such a way to try and understand the world in an objective sense. That is to say “Yes” to the question “If a tree fell in the woods would it make a sound?”  Today most people would say: “Of course it does!” the physics behind the crash are the same, so there would likely be a large crash.

                Now when a whistle blows at 40,000 Hz. and the dog starts squealing does the whistle make a sound? The dog certainly thinks so. But us lame humans wouldn't hear jack shit. I know, I know. You’re just rolling your eyes and saying “But that’s just semantics!” Well fuck sometimes semantics are important. If you quantify sound as the perceptual experience than all those mechanical wavelengths traveling through matter that we can’t hear aren't sound. Now what about people that can hear more sounds than others? Wait this is getting stupid. Right?

                But just stay with me for a bit longer. Thomas Nagel (every materialist in the room groans) is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University who wrote an essay called “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” The essay itself talks a lot about Qualia: the “what its like-ness.” On the level of biology and physics we can very accurately understand how a bats echolocation works, even down to very minute details. However, there is still a type of knowledge that is completely out of our grasp in the equation, that of Qualia. We have absolutely no idea, not even an inkling of how it would Feel, or what it would be Like.

Image by: 9GAG

                Alright, so maybe we can’t KNOW what a bat feels Like. So the fuck what?

                What if I told you that when I look at a box of dildos and you look at a box of dildos we are likely not experiencing the exact same perception (besides maybe the smell…). Well it’s true; so far we have been very unsuccessful with matching Surface Spectral Reflectance’s (SSRs) with accurate color matching. This phenomenon, called metamerism, has baffled many reductionist color scientists.

Image by: http://www.gigwise.com

 I am not trying to make the argument that when I see red, you see blue (that argument has met with little success). The point is that our perceptions are NOT in fact very accurate and NOT homogeneous  And that it seems very unlikely that, just like the Bat, I will ever know what it is Like, to see through your eyes.

                Now where has all this rambling been going? Well, right back to the good grey mushy sack of ideas sloshing around in your skull. If the sound wave isn't the same thing as feeling of sound and the SSR isn't the same thing as the perception of color, what about the neurochemical synapse and the thought? An old French guy named Descartes said they most certainly weren't the same stuff, that Mind and Matter were completely different shit and that our thoughts were in some immaterial, untouchable, float-y spot above your heads or some crap (I’m paraphrasing a little). But there’s no real evidence, and the apparent connection with the brain and mind seem a little too convincing. This is referred to as the mind-body problem, and there are a lot of angry philosophers yelling at each other about it somewhere right now.

                Two schools of thought dominate the approach to this problem: materialism and dualism. Dualism maintains that mind is distinct from the physical world essentially that “no mental state is a material state, no mental state is entirely constituted by material states, no mental state has only material states as parts.” (Carroll and Markosian) Materialism, in contrast, affirms that there are only material states and that when one refers to a mental state they are just referring to a material state.

                Materialism has been very unsuccessful in dealing with our subjective experience; it can’t deal with what its likeness. It seems very difficult to say that all my hopes, dreams, free will, experiences and memories are just neurochemical activities which exist only in the casually closed physical domain. To do so strengthens the claims to determinism (free will is an illusion) and nihilism (everything is meaningless).  

On the other hand dualism has the trouble of butting against our empiricism by relying on completely untestable claims. Just so you know those who try to make reasonable logical arguments against empiricism have a very poor track record.

Without boring you more than I already have the problem, as I see it, boils down to this.

Our scientific society tries to boil everything down to an objective level. However everything we do is filtered through a flawed subjective lens (i.e. our experience).  There is an inherent contradiction in this. I am not saying “WHOA IS ME! SCIENCE HAS FAILED!!!!” No in fact this type of problem should make the hard sciences strive all the harder.

The general trend has been to ignore these types of problems and when someone like Steven Hawking declares that “Philosophy is dead,” I have to scratch my head.

Just some word vomit.

                 
Readings:

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ahyvarin/teaching/niseminar4/Nagel_WhatIsItLikeToBeABat.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Metaphysics-Cambridge-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/0521533686
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Meditations-Philosophy-Selections-Objections/dp/0521558182/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104709&sr=1-3&keywords=Descartes
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Ontology-Science-Life-Mind/dp/0262513757/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104816&sr=1-1&keywords=color+ontology+and+color+science
http://www.amazon.com/VALIS-Philip-K-Dick/dp/0547572417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104851&sr=1-1&keywords=VALIS
http://www.amazon.com/Fight-Club-Novel-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0393327345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358104872&sr=1-1&keywords=Fight+club

Eavesdropping on the delirious

Welcome all. This is my first attempt at sharing the rambling thoughts and one-sided conversations that linger within me with the world. I intend to use this space to do a lot of cussing, cursing, wining, musing and emptying of the thought vat. I apologize in advance for offending you, it is not my intention. Honesty is very rarely polite.

 I am a student of history, philosophy, literature, art and science. The only thing I am sure of is that I know nothing and even that I scammed off an unemployed Athenian. For the past few years I have struggled with serious physical health problems, and may well share with you the gruesome details of shitting rivers of blood. I am a writer that has a hard time finishing anything so I am using this public space as an incentive to make myself more productive.

Sometimes you really just need to get shit out in the open, on the page, on the bathroom wall, to a complete stranger.

Everything above being said, this place will likely be filled with little drivels about books, politics, games, stupid cat pictures, and maybe some fiction and poetry.

oh and this.