501. Whacky Gibberish Poem Entitled "The Co-Evolution of Collective Action"

PDF for Poem "Co-Evolution of Collective Action" can be found here:

http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/coevolutionofcollectiveaction.pdf

Epic Tattoo of the Phoenix on the back of my great friend, Lauri Green. The Phoenix is a most appropriate metaphor in terms of exploring the simultaneous feedbacks between constructionism and deconstructionism in the above poem. Candidate for Vispo!

Epic Tattoo of the Phoenix on the back of my great friend, Lauri Green. The Phoenix is a most appropriate metaphor in terms of exploring the simultaneous feedbacks between constructionism and deconstructionism in the above poem. Candidate for Vispo!

Sunday night I was going on this philosophical stream of consciousness and "heading toward the right direction of my powerpoint presentation," and Monday morning, I woke up realizing that my day was going to be chopped up, and I wanted to give myself something to do in Barry's creative writing class (giving myself something--some fiddling project--to do ultimately keeps me more attentive in class for some reason), so I brought these two poems I had concocted, as inspired by readings from Mike Davis, Chapters 15 and 16 of "Dead Cities." Chapter 15 explored the notion of nonlinear contingencies in the history of life on earth, synthesizing some literatures in planetary geology (whoever's responsible for studying asteroids), ecology-evolutionary biology, and some social science sources. I was elated that Davis synthesized the often philosophically disconnected fields of geology and evolutionary biology (very much disconnected in mentalities I had experienced when ploughing through the coursework) in a way that I synthesized the fields, but through independent labors. I would write the chapter with slight differences, and also some additions, but overall I was a very happy, very inspired reader. Chapter 16 entailed "science and imagination," how certain scientists and naturalists envisioned post-disaster cities in "imaginative ecological reconstructions." (And on that note, I wrote Blog 502 on "thought experiments" that can't exactly be tested or replicated, adding to the trail of "Mike Davis" Blogs 482, 475, and 466).So, last quarter, these two chapters were superb, extremely inspirational readings I had spent quite a bit of time with. I was quite intellectually aroused, my entire "oak tree" or "coral reef" inside my head was shaking around, getting stimulated.... So, at one point, I was zooming up to Riverside to attend a Mike Davis-and-Bub-field trip (which was quite a bit of fun!) and I had one-point-five hours in the car to think about whatever the hxll I wanted, and that is the time I devised these two poems.... The Intergalactic Tide of Hyperassociations, featuring my Greek Mother, and The Co-Evolution of Collective Action, which is seen here.

The idea for the poem actually came much, much earlier. At the end of March 2009, I finished CHESS and I'm still trying to find poems to include in the second edition (besides having intentions to illustrate and visualize the set of poems). April of 2009 I went to the Origins Conference and was exposed to the Medea Hypothesis of evolution, in which life itself mass accumulates certain properties and sets up its own "unnatural disaster," or collective suicide, much like humans. In other words, you need to have a mass accumulation in order to create a mass extinction. Medea is "kind of" in opposition of this whole Gaia (pansy-xss) mentality, and what is interesting here is that both theories imply some form of "super-organismic" evolution beyond genes, individual organisms, species.... And then my clever little brain... as I just had taken "environmental institutions" course with Oran Young, I started to think instead of associating these very cool phenomena with "superorganismic bullshxt," that we should borrow the term "collective action" from political science and call these Gaia/Medea/Shiva effects (Shiva is a metaphor that Mike Davis uses and represents as some form of destructive element imposed on a system, like a meteor impact). So, it's not just evolution by natural selection, it's evolution by collective action, but in order to publish such a beautiful idea, I first have to create some bullshxt math model from fake data and then the great idea becomes science. My xss. So, I publish in my blog... and maybe make a film, eh? Or, a nice little poem here. Theorizing with poetry, eh? I also further noticed that there are two modes of thinking in evolution, construction and deconstruction, and they go hand-in-hand, you need both in a dynamic dance, and so my ultimate metaphor for all of this constructive deconstructionism, deconstructive constructionisms is... THE PHOENIX (which is an ultimate tatoo of my friend Lauri)! American interpretations of Darwinian evolution is largely competitive and deconstructivist, whereas Russian and Eastern European interpretations are more constructivist. And of course, somehow capitalism and socialism gets factored into cultural interpretations of Darwinian theories... Bah! (So, all my past references to this past paragraph are in Blog 475 Untended Cemeteries, Blog 425, life-death cycles, Blog 424, Gaia-Medea, Blog 380, Poem, Principles of Scientific and Ecological Inertia).

As you can see, the construction of this poem has a LOT of recent historical baggage, recent evolution, intricate internal neural wiring that lays deep in my head.... So, the issue was... why did I procrastinate in writing this poem last quarter? This quarter is Anti-Procrastination Quarter, just to let you know, it's about Just Do It Now without any questions asked. And I'll be danged if I am going to procrastinate again. To think that I was going to be able to write such a complicated poem, Co-evolution of Collective Action, in a distracting classroom environment? HA! Ya right. Well, I always think I will get a project done in a jiffy, and I end up being a slow poke... oh well.

I was quite amused when I was scribbling chicken scratch on the car on the way to Mike Davis' field trip. I told a very nice Asian student in class that I wrote that poem and she was amused. We exchanged emails, and I am dufous because I did not follow up. *Sigh.* I dont' know where the email is at the moment....

So FINALLY, after a two month lag time, I hammer out this poem, and I take a step back... it's engrossed with alliteration. I am sure Shelly Lowenkopf would say "gibberish." Same for Barry. It would probably drive him crazy in a good way. So, maybe if I email Barry and say, "if you respond to this poem as 'whacky gibberish,' then I think I may have done my job." Because I think it's as far as the poem is going to go in other people's heads.... Besides all this profound underlying meaning... Barry felt the same with my "Whatever's Left of the Wild West" poem. Oh well... and so it goes.

Ooo... blog 501 is a toughy. "01" makes me feel like I'm starting from scrap. The more and more I am blogging, the more I am coming to realize there are "narrative threads" (or more so "vertical stacking" over "horizontal spreading" of mental coral reef growth) in the blogs I write. Blog 52 connects to Blog 101 and the string of Blogs 455-461. Emergent themes, emergent storylines, I suppose? And the other trend I noticed, is the more that I write, the more I am associating. Creativity is a [scary] expansive feedback effect... and my own "recording/writing" head has a hard time keeping up with my right brain and prefrontal cortex. Definitely some internal neurological conflict of rates of processing... *Sigh!*