513. Revisiting Theme of Winter Quarter: Is Life, Space, and Time a Cyclical or a Spiral? A Belljar or an Hourglass? Vic's Crusade to Break Repetition

Oh dear, here we go again... Victoria getting all "deep" on people.... Oh dear, but oh it's what she does.... So, yes, what is the nature of reality? Space and time? Past, present and future?
Is it a circle or a spiral?
Like the Third Law of Dialectics?
Is it a Closed or Open System?
Is it Linear or Non-linear?
Is it a Myth of Sisyphus
Part 1 or Part 2? B roll or A roll?
Is it endlessly repetitive
or patterns with outgrowths
of novelty and innovation?
As a fisherman says,
"Everyday's different,
and today's no different.
It's a variation of
similar themes."
Couldn't life just be
a nonlinear ferris wheel?
This theme keeps coming back to haunt me, and I'm just trying to let all these random data points of experience in my life just aggregate right here.

Take for example, a conversation with a UC Irvine computer science major, Matt Olsowski (mispelled?). He argued that everything in the universe is to some degree pre-determined given that we have a fixed amount of materials--A FIXED PALATE--at hand as to which the universe was made of. But the question is, do we actually have a finite set of materials? A finite, fixed periodic table of elements with fixed properties? A fixed set of laws of physics? A fixed compendium of organisms on planet Earth? Uh, NO! We are still discovering the elements of the PALATE that would allow humans to paint and repaint an individual and collective reality. Given the unknown and open-endedness of things, pre-destination is not a possible view of life.

I started off my Winter Quarter in lively conversation with Dr. Art Sylvester (Geologist at UC Santa Barbara), and we ended up discussing issues in science communication. He told me that every day he checks out the news headlines and 90-something percent of the time he is not surprised or amused.... The topics are redundant, repetitive.... If people had any form of long-term memory, they would know that the new news is recycling old news. But every once in a while, Dr. Sylvester finds an article that is unexpected and unusual. He showed me some really cool articles on (1) why students in grade school are no longer learning cursive and nice hand writing and (2) an unusual study showing how hospitals that don't overuse antibiotics have less incidents of the staff bacteria when more sanitized hospitals have higher incidents of staff. Which is weird to wrap my head around, as it seems to be some form of arms race between the bacterial and the presence of medicine. Staffilococus is a bacteria that we are always exposed to and the body is most of the time able to keep under complete control, and every once in a while, especially when the patient's immune system is really low, then a bloom of staff may happen in your body, and my friend Ben survived being a month in the hospital because staff actually got into his heart. It's amazing to see he is alive! Shannon and Ben are going to Mammoth this weekend! How fun!

I then told Dr. Sylvester how I received a tour from my friend Oscar Flores of the KEYT newsroom and underground workflow operation and I was personally shocked by two elements (1) the incredible speed and deadline-oriented environment of live broadcasted news and (2) how most of the room was filled with B-roll and a small fragment of the tapes was A-roll. I moaned to Dr. Sylvester, "It's so horrible! Does life mostly consist of repetition, with only slight sprits and slivers of true novelty?" He ended up laughing.... But no, I'm serious. I became very depressed... thinking that this might be the case. At least 2/3 of my life is repetitive and 1/3 is open to novelty (a rough estimate of course).

The circle and the spiral also became a crucial topic in my Environmental History course with Dr. Peter Alagona. In retrospect, I was addicted to the environmental history course. I said in the end of the class, "This course was great because it's nice to find citations for a bunch of things that I already thought about in my own terms. Now I can cite my independently evolved head." It's true that our class had the opportunity to discuss issues that I usually fancied over with a few existentialist buddies over the years, philosophisizing over beer and coffee or something... but to think that now this was front-table discussion in a class? Yes, it's a dream!

The first book we read Something New Under the Sun started with a biblical quote (and this is the second time I am using a quote from the Bible or from a religious source, taken to be applied in secular meaning, the first quote being the Serenity Prayer):

What has been is what will be,
and what is done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
"See, this is new?"
It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to happen.
(Ecclestiastes 1:9-11)

This quote assumes there's NOTHING new under the sun and that people will endlessly repeat their mistakes because they have forgotten their history (hence, an appreciation for the SHIFTING BASELINE SYNDROME in BIBLICAL TIMES), but the author argued in his book that the novelty of today is the SCALE-MAGNITUDE of HUMAN IMPACT on BIOTIC and ABIOTIC SPHERES of Planet Earth. This quote above also made me think of one of the lyrics of Nick Drake in his song "Things Behind the Sun." At one point, Drake makes us wonder whether it's worth singing or doing anything because everything's already been done, everything's already been said. My father was appalled by the idea--it's depressing, but overall partly TRUE. As I griped to him for two weeks how I was pissed off writing my scholarly paper on marine environmental history because in order to get to my three new ideas I have to recycle 99 other ideas about "what everyone else already said." Which is partly unfulfilling, because now I think scholarly writing is largely a game of he-said-she-said-and-you-have-to-honor-what-they-said-to-join-the-club-unless-the-dude-you-cite-is-dead. Scholarly work is a cross-generational gossip mill, attempting to find your own twist to it.

Here's a segment of Nick Drake's Things Behind the Sun:

Open up the broken cup
Let goodly sin and sunshine in
Yes that's today.
And open wide the hymns you hide
Youn find reknown while people frown
At the things you say
But say what you'll say
About the farmers and the fun
And the things behind the sun
And the people round your head
Who say everything's been said
And the movement in your brain
Send you out into the rain.

In the context of environmental history, upon reading Cronon's 1993 article on the role of narrative in environmental history, the question came up: "What is history? An endless cycle of repetitive themes, or novel variations of existing themes? Novelty feeding off of repetitive, staple, biological material?"

Of course, history is nonlinear with backbones of similar themes. My father at one point claimed that ecology was endlessly spinning in a fashion show of ideas. After reading Worster's Economy of Nature (1994), I had come to realize that the fashion parade is not exactly true. Granted there are cycles of reductionism and synthesis, but each round, new ideas come up and there is a higher resolution of knowledge and understanding, which fades out mythos, religion, into more secular views of the environment.

In the middle of the quarter, I had a civil debate with my roomie Jay about the concept of repetition and novelty in life, presenting the case with my friend Oscar's extensive collection of editorial B-roll. Jay was being a devil's advocate with me, stating most of life was repetitive, after all "humans are creatures of habit," but those repetitive elements are driven forward through innovation. I told Jay I can't work at Del Taco for longer than a month unless I want to kill myself. Repetition can kill me, mentally and physically. I told him after these initial McDonald's hamburger flipping jobs, whether Del Taco or the Ivory Towers, that my whole crusade in life was to avoid, escape, and break all seemingly endless patterns of repetition, always escape and expand the box that I am presently in. Because if I don't, I'm bound to self-destruct.

What is Stravinski's Rite of Spring all about anyway? How does he tell a dramatic story through music? It's all about establishing patterns, in beat and melody, and then breaking them, establishing new patterns, and breaking those... then more patterns, but it's the cumulative making breaking and remaking of patterns that generates the dramatic build up of a Rite of Spring story!

Jay and I elaborated on the job as editorial for a television news crew. I said I couldn't do it because the pace of workflow would not allow me to dig deep to any story in particular, and see the uniqueness of a story, and that life would be one repetitive, homogenous blur of the same headlines that Dr. Art Sylvester was complaining about. Same thing when you have a job where you fly all over the world doing jobs, the whole world may seem like a blur through this repetitive motion. I am trying to prevent that from happening to me. I need to experience life in a state of consciousness. On the other hand, Jay said it would be a challenging job.... Yes, it would be a challenging job for a while... but once the learning curve is over... then... my brain starts to go crazy... because I took control of that rock... and then after that... the rock started to take control over me.... Jay was a good devil's advocate, but I don't buy his point of view. The internal wiring of my mind doesn't allow it. Allow repetition... I already know I'm very prone to OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And so now... I'm in the business of drawing cartoons... the quest of Terra and Buz to always escape repetition, run with themselves by running away from themselves....

I'm sure I'll find more metaphors for this circle-spiral perception....

441. "Round and Round" Ditty / Song / "Wannabe Poem" Related to Blog #427

Round and Round Poem written in a magical week of music production in February of 2009. PDF File can be viewed here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/roundandround1.pdf.
Associated poems can be found in Blog #427.

It's funny how ideas work. Perhaps a couple of years ago I noted the origins of the notion of spinning my wheels or feeling like a repetitious broken record. This theme had been manifested in several of my poems, but then there is a magical person and or place--which happened to be in February of 2009 who places this frequently revisited theme into a nontraditional context and the most optimal of stories--optimal meaning "short, to the point, but very artful." Aka conforming to the "Barry Spacks Theory of Poetry." Barry told me that Pascale said that "It takes a long time to write a short letter," and it seems that always at first that all of my ideas emerge in an uncontained flurry of thoughts, but over time they become widdled down to utmost simplicity. I belch out this simplicity, and then I'm calm, and I move forward.

During that "magical" week in February, amidst all the conflicting demands for school, my mind spontaneously made at least 5 songs, belched out, right there. Now, I am revisiting that time of insane creativity.

114. The Stigma of Yahoo Personals, Data Collection for N = 7/11 and the Science of Dating

http://stokastika.googlepages.com/yahoopersonals.pdf

Above is data for the future manuscript N = 7/11.

One thing I hate doing is repeating myself. Lately, since life has been going by so fast, I have come to lose track of what I have said to whom. But if I talk about the newest and latest intellectual drama in my life, then there are good chances I am not repeating myself, but engaging a specific audience in new variations of the same underlying inter-related themes of being a human being on planet Earth. Since I have largely figured out these main themes, I decided that science fiction can foreseeably play a huge role in my future life, simply because I am fascinated by and interested in discovering/creating mechanisms and matrices (structures of knowledge) rather than figuring out the Jeopardy details that get classified within these frameworks.

Another reason why I need science fiction in my life is so that I can engage in a series of thought experiments that I could not feasibly implement on human beings and human society, simply because it would be deemed "unethical." As a science fiction writer, I would have the ability to play the role of "alien" and attempt to objectively experiment with human/environmental behavior and processes and dream of outcomes of such experiments. It would be wonderful. I think we need some serious science fiction to progress humanity to "the next step" of self-system sufficiency. But this whole science fiction is an aside. Back to the point.

Five Points.

#1. I just looked up whether I discussed on this blog my primal mammalian condition. Apparently I have not done a very thorough job. So, I have a bit of a license to discuss this issue a bit here.

#2. This is in part an embarassing blog (partly yes, partly no). The above pdf is something I wrote a while ago (2003?). Yahoo personals profile with no image (thank goodness), and I do admit it's highly out of date, but captures my mentality at a given point in space and time.

#3. Date for book / script N = 7/11. One day Vic will write an essay in which a female protagonist treats dating as a series of scientific experiments. I am considering that there might be two parallel universes in which the female has a chip inserted in her mind by an alien species that objectively studies human behavior. Maybe this alien species will have three sexes, two sexes can symbiotically combine in a mutualistic physiology, and only on this condition of symbiosis, can there be genetic exchange with the third sex. Hmmm, wow, I'm trying to focus here. Seriously. So, the female human would go through a certain set of interpretational responses to her dating experiments, the alien would document all physical and mental responses of the female human, but would also go through its own set of interpretations of the experiment. Which would be utterly fascinating sci fi experiment on human behavior. I think the ending would be ultimately dark.

#4. What is my recent trial of N = 7/11. A lame one, I'd say. Never done Craigslist before, but met a UCSB Media Arts Technology (MAT) graduate student through Craigslist. It was so comedy. I read the geeky profile and emailed the random guy: "Do you go to UCSB? By any chance, are you affiliated with the MAT department?" And out of all randomness, these questions were answered as yes both times. So this mysterious male specimen, by the name of Charlie, sounded good on paper and well... a bit dull and apathetic in person. No emotional and crazy energetic enthusiasm that I have. Though this is just one trial on Craigslist, I am already establishing phobia of deriving sample specimens from the internet. "On-line mate shopping" is just a bit disturbing for me, as this American culture stigmatizes any individual who remains single and uninvolved in a meaningless, waste-of-time relationship. Not the cool thing to do for gringos. So, I'm uncool.

#5. I discovered recently that I could be classified as "quirky-alone" but I think this label is negative and unrepresentative of my condition. So, I invented a new label called ISI, or Intellectually Self Indulgent. Which can partially mean "I am the slave to my own ideas, otherwise I would be the slave to others." My brain self-employs itself. My brain it its own boss of other parts of my brain. ISI is also known as the Jim Carrey Syndrome, which is defined by this approximate quote, "How can anyone be involved in a relationship when he or she is so in love with his/her own ideas?" Amen to that. At first ISI meant Intellectually Self Infatuated. But, uh, that sounds... uh... something that would go on a self-inflicting porn site, so we must change the lingo here. Intellectually Self Indulgent versus Quirky Alone is white versus black. "Quirky alone" is an "externalized label" / exterior perception of a "single" person. Intellectually Self Indulgent is an "interalized label" such that the person who is his/her sole piece is indulged in his her own scientific/artistic/infinitely creative construction of reality, and that it's a very colorful, fulfilling life. Quirky-alones seem to stand for socially dysfunctional homeless people off the streets of downtown San Francisco. If the inventor of Quirky-alone terminology is so adamant to create a singles-lifestyle-culture, she better make a more "positive and uplifting" label for her cult, not some stigmatic tone of psychological disorder. Sorry for being so opinionated, but it's just me :-)

Run-off points, as usual.

#6. Back to this Charlie guy off of Craigslist. I thought his name would bring good luck because I named my camera (Sony DVX 2100) Charlie (there's actually twins, one Charlie is camera D at the Film and Media Studies Department, and I have this Charlie at home). Charlie the camera is named after this plant I bought at the 99 cent store during my senior year at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. I placed a tape on the plant pot that said "Charlie" and it also said "a metapopulation of independent apices" (quoting Bruce Tiffney). The thing that is so special about Charlie the Plant is that no matter how much I neglected it (which included low sun and close to no water), Charlie still managed to survive throughout the entire year. I am not going to ask how or why. I was actually pissed it would never die, becuase I don't like taking care of other living organisms. I actually chucked Charlie out in the front of my university apartment area... and I bet Charlie is so determined to survive he probably took root there, even though I made no efforts to dig a hole for him in the ground. So, yes, Charlie is a good luck name in its own absurd ways. Charlie off of Craigslist met me at a state of emotional uproar. I just found out I received two Cs for Blue Horizons film program and I lost 1450 on Craigslist for trying to buy a macbook pro computer. Charlie was so placid while I was bipolarly rambling, it was in part disturbing. Charlie said he was six feet tall. He lied. I am taller than him and I am 5'11.5" or maybe even shorter (gravity takes it toll over time, even on twenty-something-year-olds). I even felt GUILTY for lying to the DMV, that I was six feet tall. They even advocated that I do this for logistical purposes. They don't have enough place holders on the card for "5'11.5."" I have encountered several guys who have lied about their height and it drives me off the wall in a subliminal way. I am asking "why"? What's the point? What are you trying to prove? To whom? It seems like male-overestimation of height is just another chest-beating, ape-like, alpha-male practice. Sheesh.

#7. Dxmmit. I'm human and I need a hug sometimes, okay? Maybe that's why I look up Craigslist. I teased my dad one time, "How much do you charge for a hug?" Hugs are rare in my life. At one point at UCLA I went 6 months without a hug from anyone, and then I got hugs from my mom and my dad and I felt this strange tingled sensation all over my body, an immense release of built-up stress and anxiety I didn't know that otherwise existed. Primitive mammalian needs are just built into my system. Dxmmit. Then again, maybe that's why I love Mini, Lisa's and Kyle's new dog. I get hugs and licks from Mini once a day or once every other day, and it satisfies that stupid requirement of my primitive brain needing hugs to relieve anxiety. I hate being a mammal sometimes. Those stupid biological prerequisites for sanity....

#8. Internet and Dating. Hot topic in the news, eh? Hot topic for new movie twists, eh? Eventually, time must be devoted to an essay on the Philosophy of Human Communication and the Philosophy of Technology-Mediated Human Communication: Relationships in Altered Space and Time. There needs to be an extensive matrix comparing the different modes of communication (person to person, snail mail, email, phone call, internet chatrooms, etcetera), neutrally, positively, negatively, and why humans have a tendency to resort to certain modes of communication over other modes. Advantages and disadvantages of certain modes of communication. In this essay, I must not forget to mention about this new disease (which I partly possess) called ECP or ElectronoCommunicatiPhobia. And there needs to be some type of column or short paper on why I am anti-one-laptop-per-child, this imperialistic "non-profit" effort at MIT in which the leader feels that every child on this planet needs a laptop. To me, this is a chauvinistic effort to impose American lifestyle and culture onto the lives and cultures of other countries, which alters human communication regimes, maybe not necessarily for the net-good of anything. Studying human behavior to me is like studying how leaf cutter ants communicate. Simple as that. Ever since my own psychological disorder, I have been establishing a way on how to systematically deconstruct and reconstruct humans from an alien point of view.

Key Words: stigma, yahoo personals, N = 7, repetition, science fiction, mammal, Charlie, quirky alone, intellectually self indulgent, ISI, Jim Carrey Syndrome, lying about height, mini DV tapes, technology-mediated communication, electronocommunicatiphobia, ECP