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Carlo Parcelli
“ ...[N]o one... eludes the double postulation of YHWH.”
–Jacques Derrida
Deconstructing the Demiurge:
The First Postulate; Stay awake. Esto vigilans!
WAKE UP! You pungent Dog.
Sniff for the Flood
In your “ecumenism of sources.”
Just remember, there is no high ground
When the idea of a thing has proved
More fungible than the thing itself.
This poem celebrates
“[T]he most grave and ancient of things...,”
Matricide, the “decoherence”...[that is] complete
Only when the measurement is complete;
The incised crenature of Jone’s centurions
Ruined in you.
“...[W]hat are poets for in a destitute time”
But “Differentiation, Paradox, and Ruse”?
When Bruno’s MWI gave way to escapist science
You knelt in the ash,
Excoriating the sloppy seconds
Of the earthly apocalypse,
Unacknowledged legislator to the Second Coming,
Deus absconditus
Maligning the long awaited felicity of reason;
Sampling monuments
Which through you
Are made intolerable.
Even with GATT, pollution credits and the Weather Channel,
No one confesses the End Time is
For all its tales and telos, Mercurial.
That ship has sailed, right Tiphys.
The weal is broken and “reason inexorably unfolds its purposes
Within the phenomenal world.”
And, make no mistake, God “will see to it,”
Which by the way is “the second postulate.” And now,
Cassandra, the hottest seats in the house
Are in an amphitheater gone dark.”
Hermes has stripped Demeter scienter,
And now, by some accounts, we
Can go out in a hail of extinction
Muddled up with all of god’s creatures.
But enough about me.
This morning Greece burns with a new light.
The birthplace of Reason immolates itself
And any Phoenix accelerates the denouement.
The Enlightenment has had its 15 cosmological minutes.
“[A]s soon as one no longer knows
Who speaks or who writes,
The text becomes apocalyptic.”
What better omen.
Believers abound,
But with belief in the wrong eschatology,
Executed by the wrong agent,
Once the sucker punch of Sophocles and high drama,
But now just a biblical hot foot for the hoi polloi,
The audience a profane afterthought.
The Enlightenment has proved most efficient
At firing up Man’s inner meteor,
Dazing Nature with a rock to the dome.
Beyond imagination after Jornada del Muerte;
The Eucharist of fission; the critical Mass.
Into the Valley of Death
Rides the six billion.
“As Godel showed, a time that is relative or
Static is no time at all.”
Yet Wheeler, who knew “Godel
Had made discoveries about a rotating universe,”
Entitled his chapter “The End of Time”
Preferring to amortize the apocalypse over
Billions of years
Rather than deal with the ‘dark matter’
Of the present planetary paradox.
Wovoka was more prescient, but
What in his experience made him think
The ‘white man’ didn’t intend to take
Everyone and everything with him?
His genes harboring his many "epidemics,
Environmental catastrophes and genocide"?
The Enlightenment remarkable for its mass petulance
Determined to see its failure through to the end.
In ubiquity resides End Time’s anonymity. Not
With those who desire to be
Asphyxiated by their own bodies
But with those who “say which
And build up the machine.”
Wiener said
“Thus the machine may generate the message,
And the message may generate another machine...”
“Rapid cloning of an arbitrary piece of DNA...
Coupled with transmission of sequence data
By electronic mail.”
“[T]hat it is conceptually possible for a human being”
--The in between machine--
“To be sent over a telegraph line...
“[I]mpracticable, but...not...inconceivable,”
Unlike the underlying quantum formalisms.
And the senses disconnected as Aristotle said,
‘As our eyes see them.’
And Pascal, “One must say roughly:
[T]his is made by shape and motion.”
And Kant and later Bohr: by the constraints of our minds,
Noumena, things in themselves, are inaccessible.
And Wiener’s fantasies are ‘not inconceivable’
When the senses are disengaged
That the mathematics might fit;
That a machine might issue from another machine.
“Sir,
The Committee
for the relief of the Poor
meet on Wednesday night at 8 ‘o’Clock
when the case of the woman who lives
on Bulwell Common –
will be taken into consideration
Bulwell Sep 13th 1812 Yours &c”
Whose to say
If the Luddites had succeeded
In burning down another dozen manufactories
The planet wouldn’t be spared a fortnight.
The apoplexy in the American press over
Hugo Chavez seeking to aid victims in New Orleans
While the kleptocracy uses the hurricane
To gerrymander congressional districts,
Eminent domain and other refinements of Manifest Destiny.
Thus “[L]and sanctifies many a political initiative.”
Cheney warning the Persians not to get too comfortable
At their own hearths,
While the old fat dying kleptocrat sits sclerotic
On a warship in the Persian Gulf as though what’s in a name.
Scraps of the Axumite Empire
Turned into an oil vanguard of hired thugs.
And the rockers from the Cradle of Civilization
In a glass case in Tommy Franks’ den.
All the daily murderous, humorless asides of capital, the grotesques,
Not the least of which the Science of Conservation,
That tooled medium of justification.
“Mr lud,
I ham going to inform you that there is Six Thousand man Coming to
you in Apral and then We Will go and blow Parlement house up and Blow
up all afour hus labrin Peple Cant Stand it No longer, dam all Such Roges as
England governs but Never mind Nead lud When generel nody and his harmy
Comes We Will Soon bring about the greate Revelution then all these greate
mans heads gose of”
What chump is surprised when loves desperation
Comes to blows with capital?
Bruno’s “mixing what prudent nature separated” evident in
Locke & Adam & John Smith
Set loose like alien vermin in the Amazon rain forest—
“Every foot of land....should be improved
That is capable of improvement.”
“Land that is left wholly to nature,
That hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting,
Is called, as indeed it is, waste.”
And Bolingbroke--- Britons “busy to improve their private property
And public stock.... carrying assistance
And terror abroad....”
From an ecological perspective
Islam represents the last
Best hope for the planet:
Material restraint incident to proscription.
“The fact that debt burden deprive[d] its poorest citizens
Of health, education and other social services...
Was never considered.”
Well, sure it was.
It was considered highly desirable.
The one, two of U.S. foreign policy.
Three if you count the CIA.
“We’d cut them in half and give them a band aid.
It was a lie, and the more I saw...
The more I hated lies.”
‘Forgiveness’ as unforgiving, Bono,
As your ignorance:
“In lieu of over a million pounds sterling
In overdue debt and interest payments, the government of Ecuador
Had granted to English bondholders 4 1/2 million acres of land,
So constituting the Ecuador Land Company.”
And quinine, priceless to Her Majesty’s tropical empire
“Upheld by the bayonet, the arm that wields the weapon
Would be nerveless,
But for Cinchona bark and its active principles.”
‘As our eyes see them,’ said Aristotle to the epistemology of
The robotic arm on the empire’s assembly line.
The confluence of slavery, science and Frederick Winslow Taylor.
“[T]he early Oskar Morgenstern looked more or less
Like a typical Austrian economist...,
Intent upon projecting the archetypal Austrian concerns
About knowledge and time
And the meaning of science
Against the backdrop of neo-classical theory.”
“We too are also studying mathematics
Although we grow more and more skeptical about its use,
The main objections coming from the fact
That time cannot be dealt with adequately.”
“But I should try to bring about a reconciliation between
The mathematical school of Lausanne and other groups...”
The “presumption that methodological fiat could solve
Substantive problems in economic theory
Assumed the format of a belief that formal logic
And metamathematics had something to offer economics.”
The economics of self-replication where again as Wiener,
Our technological Candide said
“[T]he machine may generate the message,
And the message may generate another machine...”
“[T]hat it is conceptually possible for a human being
To be sent over a telegraph line...
“[I]mpracticable, but...not...inconceivable,”
Unlike the underlying quantum formalisms.
And ‘not inconceivable’ because of the sense’s
Disconnect to make those formalisms fit.
“The correct model is that of stochastic processes;”
“Systems strongly constrained by the experimental setting
So that they give more predictable results. ”
Lies, damned lies and statistical mechanics.
“Physics and the Social Sciences,” the Arts and Religion,
“Differ only in the size of the noise
Relative to the signal.”
And “you can ignore the noise
And treat any system as deterministic”
When observed data is applied like experimental data.
Against “[T]he stochastic character of quantum mechanics.
“Probabilistic Logics Meet Automata Theory”
In a matinee double-feature with ‘Dracula Meets The Bride of Frankenstein’
Both cut from the same puerile epistemology,
The coming attraction, ‘The Mutant Parasite Transmitter.’
“[A]nd the progeny is the Turing Machine
Made flesh” and blood.
And Alan gave his only begotten son.
That “a new species would bless me as creator...”
And like self-reproducing automata
“[Many] happy and excellent natures
Would owe their being to me.”
But as Mozer said of his own CONCERT system
“The outputs are often ‘compositions
That only their mother could love.’”
So “Game theory per se
Might not have continued to play
A major role in this program,
Unless someone could come along
And convince von Neumann
That this very same machine-rationality
Dominated some distinct area of social life—
Say, for instance, the economy.”
And that man was Morgenstern.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches” from Bletchley Park “towards”
Slumbering “Bethlehem to be born?”
Ammons’ Turing Tape for the Turn of the Year—
Blinded by jealousy unable to “wait without hope”
Ignoring this simple Kantian program;
Hoping for the wrong thing in trite conformist “mechanistic” similes,
“[I]n the green becoming the lichen.”
An epistemology utterly ill-suited to life,
Contradicting its own precepts
While denying the contradictions
And those who would live otherwise.
Recall the lesson of Quantum, that
When you radically alter an environment
Prediction becomes impossible.
With Godel’s Second Theorem,
As devout as Descartes,
Allows for agency beyond stochastic models.
Yet there’s always Casti setting a bad example,
The way his “chancy affair” of “harsh words and threats
To bombs and bullets” becomes
Over the span of two paragraphs
“A matter of chance or accidental factors,
Such as a leader’s having a headache
Or a garbled message.”
Simple approximations “la diffusion process”
“When a natural physical model is quite complex”
Converging “to a Markov diffusion or jump process.”
Not a ‘quantum leap’ except idiomatically,
Ahistorical as all discrete Markov chains are and
Based on a mock up of the natural world.
Bohr saw the paradoxes generating
Waves of mathematicians eyeless in Gaza, scienter
Resentful of Nature’s head start
Must by necessity destroy themselves.
When does the agent become a primitive caricature
Of the primitive caricature
Of his own reality?
And once global, the observer becomes
An object out of all proportion, a Behemoth
Heralding Positivist limits upon Heisenberg’s Matrix Mechanics;
The more ethanol produced the more people starve;
Yet more corn production accelerates global warming.
And more people starve.
Reason’s glossolalia for quantum paradox
Emptying out into economic stochastic farce.
Or the Russian and Eel Rivers diverted
To farms in the Klamath Basin
In turn paid by the Feds not to grow
Selling their credits to nearby municipalities
While the basin’s namesake saw the salmon rot
Along with both the natural order
And the traditional order
Which had re-organized themselves into a modern industry
Thereby forfeiting their heritage to “a complex of dams
And canals built almost a century ago”
And a few votes for the Republican Party,
The whole short-sighted maneuver
Going back at least a hundred years and
Predicated on theft.
Godel “Asked for a legal analysis of his incompleteness theorem”
Commented“that a country that depended entirely
Upon the formal letter of its laws, might
Find itself defenseless against a crisis that had not, and could not,
Have been foreseen in its legal code.”
Money requires laws themselves reflect stochastic processes
And mathematicians are the barristers of the sciences.
Doesn’t Godel’s “legal analysis”
Apply a broader metaphysical application to the Second Theorem?
And, so with global climate change,
Formal systems and laws of the natural sciences
Preclude any relation..
So is it any wonder when the add read
“How do you deal
With an enemy
That has no government, no
Money trail and
No qualms about
Killing women and children?”
And that enemy is a hurricane.
We’ve tried Reason with Nature
And that hasn’t worked.
The ‘general circulation model’
A three dimensional grid
Sutured with a set of mathematical relations.
A fully discrete system
That nowhere abides its object within it.
“...[C]ommon sense cannot be extended
To a ...quantum system.”
Anymore than due process to a ‘terrorist’.
A terra-ist alert.
Global warming a fury out of Aeschylus,
Projected, anthropomorphized and scapegoated;
Dispossessed, an armed resistance
Against an epistemology that buys full-page ads to declare,
Ab reductio its foreign policy, that
It is at war with the natural world yet
Lays sole claim to be Nature’s savior.
The pathology, “[T]he formalism does not permit
A well- defined classical state...”
The clock work universe
Of weather prediction;
The same fait accompli
As observed in the experimental method,
A short step from the preordained
To resignation.
A system by nature is a subterfuge,
“And the system is by definition legitimate.”
The satellite dish
Has choked Democritus’s ‘abyss’
With infantilized rubbish.
With mathematics, physicists have no explaining
Worth doing. Quality is countermanded in quantity.
No “clear image” culturally communicable
“Created in another human mind using words.”
And again the dissolution of a convenient quantum metaphor
“[T]hat genes are [not] discrete packets”
“[B]ut overlap one another and share
Stretches of molecular code.”
And “junk code” sounds like the “dark matter” of astrophysics;
“That if one takes the notion of a genetic program literally...
One has a program that needs its own product
In order to be executed.” The idiomatic loops,
“[T]he meaning and value of science...to...
Elaborate a worldview
That can accommodate our knowledge
About natural phenomena,”
Denoted appropriately by A. Shimony
As ‘closing the circle’, the Uroboros,
The constrictor of our annihilating epistemology.
Simply “that in the end
It will have consumed everything in sight
And will be left with no choice
But to devour itself.”
Little outbreaks of an apocalypse in “Empirical ‘evidence’...
Created by a procedure
Which quotes as its justification
The very same evidence it has produced.”
Most foreign aid money “never leaves the United States;
It is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington
To engineering offices in New York, Houston and San Francisco.”
The scienter of the economist.
In 1958, enamored of Algerian natural gas,
The U.S. cut off the supply of 7.62s to the French.
Not so much ‘from a tiny seed’
But a single lens of an insect’s eye,
An episteme of calibration where
Belgium’s cut was the FN,
Crowned NATO’s standard.
The eschatology of observation.
“The Inquisitors were the first to formalize
The idea that to every question
There is a right answer.”
“...[V]astly simplified formalisms.”
Scholasticism cobbling an episteme for the scientific method;
Re: Gilson to Elsasser;
“[P]ut in some physical facts
Follow the rules for obtaining the needed results,
And almost always get what we want.”
False confessions
From the rack of formal methods.
Nature is not exact
Because mathematics calculates with precision;
That’s mathematic’s affair.
Whereas the world must of necessity be inexact...
To remain rigorous.
The Inquisitors and Madison Avenue
Spring from the same epistemology,
Aristotle’s empeiria, Roger Bacon’s argumentum ex re,
Then Newton, Boyle and Ed Witten
In rapid succession
In the de-instrumentation of an eye
The “space-time description of natural processes” is sacrificed
And ‘seeing’ no longer conflates
With the angstroms of belief.
What doubled as subset for Nature’s ontology
Could not avoid dominion and survive.
Like capital insecure in its hegemony.
“Natural history... nothing more than the nomination of the visible.”
The retreat to nanometers;
Where only “logical formalisms... allow the mastering
Of the new domains of experience.”
“The technological mentality designs standardized means
To achieve predetermined results”
From quantum to accounting
“The message is clear. First, you...belong
To an organization...which possesses a method.
Entry...will be limited by the method;
Its members a trained elite.
Its power...precision, research, movement...”
The atomic teleology of Torquemada.
“[I]mpatient with intuition, experience, and judgment.
With “...an irresistible tilt toward mathematical conclusions.”
... “[I]mmune to charm...[S]ober, tireless and irresistible.”
“The technological mentality designs standardized means
To achieve predetermined results”
Because “[I]f it doesn’t have a solution
It isn’t a problem.”
The brass ring in the muzzle of Taurus
Materializes at each rotation of the Earth.
Always there needling.
The ubiquitous democratizing effect of gravity,
Once observed became just
One more outmaneuvered proletariat.
In principle, the human observer does not give
Classical theory any trouble.
“Due to the specific peculiarities of the formalism”
“[T]he situation is” so different in quantum theory
Schrodinger panicked and “tried to interpret
the square modulus of the wave function
As describing the charge density”
“For we cannot really alter our manner of thinking
In space and time, and what we cannot comprehend
Within it we cannot understand at all.”
Terrified before the final refinements
Into mathematical glossolalia.
“Authority...located in the process itself.”
Evolutionary, as Ryskamp, Godel’s Second Theorem is
“...[N]othing more than a retelling
Of Einstein’s train experiment;”
“A point series connectable by time-like lines...
And...the series is closed in itself;”
Dissolving the narrator in omniscience
Using parables of “natural” mathematics,
The desire to ‘avoid’ or ‘solve’ paradoxes
With Euclid’s Old Testament phantasms
And Cantor’s Set Theoretical neuroses
Relying on 19th century instrumentation to track
“The progressivism of Nature which is the continuum
Encompassing all the disciplines.”
“...And that if it became Euclidian,
This is because it allows itself
To be oriented to the system.”
And systems by nature
Are a subterfuge.
The SOS of black body radiation; for lack of the thing in itself.
That Goethe, in advance of Husserl, carefully cultivated his conscious_ness
And could see through the habitual,
Surface aspects of phenomena
And capture more their being, their ding an sich.
The formative as the time-lapse of human imagination
That Bohr, Bruno, Kant, Ihde
And the tiller of the Argo captured
As a world dissolved.
That Voltaire saw “as the art of numbering
And measuring exactly a thing
Whose existence [then] cannot be conceived,”
Resenting the non-commutative nature of the dialectic,
That the actual may be said
To include the “world”of mathematics,
But not vice-versa.
The insulation from guilt.
Now on a permanent war footing with existence
Since a “spectrum of physical science
Was first ‘mathematized’.”
Tiphys and Bruno, Adorno, Wittgenstein, even Godel
Whose favorite movie was ‘Snow White’
Priming all return as nostalgic fantasy
Against Einstein who would raise the dead
As a function of space.
Zombies as Christ’s stunt doubles aside,
And the Eucharist of human flesh.
Even though Einstein wrote, “Kurt Godels essay constitutes, in my opinion,
An important contribution to the general theory of relativity
Especially to the analysis of the concept of time,”
Surely Ryskamp is right, Yournau.
How could a limp, sentimentalist such as Godel,
Fathom that
Time does not go by,
And, relativity speaking, a kiss
Is not a kiss?
And applied, a sigh is just a psi;
But where pure, a psi is just a psi.. The ubiquity
Of Schrodinger’s wave mechanics.
A subatomic tzunami.
Not Hollywood’s erotic/necrotic infantilizations but
An epistemology that only randy Einstein bridged
Using Euclidean geometry straight to the source,
Straight into the pudenda of space/time.
With thousands of songs
Reinforcing the erroneous notion of tempus fugit,
How could so much love and love lost
Be occluded in the wrong paradigm?
“With one foot on the platform,
And the other foot on the train”,
The Standard Model has no expectations
To pass the way
Of the golden oldies again?
And Hupfeld troubles with this “cause for apprehension”
With “Things like the fourth dimension”...
Growing “[A] trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein’s Theory.”
...”[W]e must get down to earth at times,
Relax relieve the tension...”
“The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.”
So what has it cost to trade in so much cinematic ignorance?
Or Yournau, how can Hupfeld’s sop to Ptolemy
And the Kanon’s coexist?
How does the world cohere
When its either our science
Or our songs that are alternately lost, wave to particle,
Or the desire to “relieve” not relive “the tension,”
Much less a contest between the Good Book
Or the Destroyer of Worlds?
For Livingstone contended “before commerce came exploration,
And only when ‘the last abode
Of savage man shall be discovered’
Would the real age of Evangelism begin.”
What happened to that happy commerce
Between Christ and killing?
Between religion and science.
Religion fumbled its
Dominion over the Apocalypse
By challenging the End Times obvious agency.
But the Enlightenment’s on a short fuse.
A series of explosive charges could bring down
The Andes like an old Woolworth’s;
The Great Flood of Grand Coulie to an apocalyptic water park.
The several million wonders of the world
Available at reduced rates, $1400.00,
Where the holy family unit stays
In vitro-,
Complementary breakfast, 5 nights, 6 days.
Cornell’s ‘molecubes’ pilfering the epistemology of procreation.
First, you admit that the variables are infinite;
Then you attempt to account for two or three more
And assume the result is thorough enough to exploit.
Weaver’s “organized complexity”,
Cybernetics “extending the regime of wartime power,
Of command-control-communication...”and
Mixed-team operations analysis.
Importing “teleological notions”
Of pre-complexity biological systems
To “The application of mathematical methods
To military affairs”
And voila, the Air Defense System
Becomes an organism
“[P]artly animate...which involve[s] animals
Together with inanimate devices
Such as is the ADS...
Possessing in common: sensory components, communication facilities,
Data analyzing devices, centers of judgement,
Directors of action, and effectors, or executing agencies.”
Organisms “comprised of animals and groups of animals, including men.”
The living made a subset of itself.
Quantifying the unquantifiable with such zeal
That you quantify yourself right out of the lexicon.
The affinity between systems and organisms:
“[F]unction, coordination, interdependence, and purpose.”
The paper was called “What Crises Could Teach Us About
Complexity and Systemic Management
The Case of the Nestucca Oil Spill;
It’s purpose, its Telos “is to propose some systemic principles
For better managing our organizations
In an ethical fashion...”
A calling canceled out by mathematics and systems of quantification;
That do not acknowledge their role in a bad outcome
But cry abuse.
Statistics exposes the canard;
The approximation of anything
Where even bad applications
And their applicators are absolved
In a nano-fog of subjectivity.
Conflicting resolutions mathematically confirmed.
Errors in calculations.
Locusts ate the earth and made a car;
And cars shit plagues.
Von Neumann pondered “How is the absolutely selfish ‘homo economicus’
Going to act under given external circumstances?”
“The United States made no secret of its desire
To have the House of Saud bankroll Osama bin Laden’s
Afghan war against the Soviets...”
“Saudi Arabia had...become...the epicenter of terrorist financing...”
With “billions of dollars” going “to a broad range
Of U.S. officials: ambassadors,
CIA station chiefs, ...cabinet secretaries...”
Imagine a stuccoed von Neumann
Perched in a public rotunda,
A secular Sistine Chapel
At the AEC,
Stripped to his boxers and garters. Not our father,
But with his left hand groping
For the ‘rigid member’
Of a self-reproducing automata,
Having gambled away the world
In games of chance; “The problems of probability and analysis
That one might raise concerning the art of war
Or of economic and financial speculation” are
The same as roulette, baccarat and black jack
Except for “a much higher degree of complexity.”
Greed’s mathematical canard.
“The Markov method of econometric modeling;”
“A tool that scientifically ‘proved’
We were doing countries a favor
By helping them incur debts
They would never be able to pay...”
“The more complicated and precise
The social, economic, and scientific apparatus
With whose service the production system
Has harmonized the body,
The more impoverished the experiences it can offer.”
Markov Chains–forging the links of an ‘ahistorical rationalism,’
The nomadic monad tailed in a Brownian vapor.
“Discrete-time stochastic” processes, ‘memoryless’;
Intentionality’s head in the oven of intention for
“For enlightenment the process is always
Decided from the start...[I]n mathematical procedure
The unknown becomes the unknown quantity of an equation...
Well-known even before any value is inserted.”
“Adapting the homogeneous to the radically heterogenous”
By inputing in some facts
That follow a set of rules
Needed for the intended result,
“And almost always you get what you want.”
“What is the place of the Enlightenment in this Pattern?”
“Mauvelain’s clients did not want
Abstract or theoretical works”
Though the comparison between the theoretical
And experimental “rarely disappointed.”
“They did not order a single book
By the four great philosophes,
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau...
They favored the popularizers and vulgarizers...:
Raynal, Mercier, Mirabeau...and the hacks”
Except for d’Holbach and
La Mettrie, L’Homme Machine, among the usual pornography,
A cybernetics to make Norbert blush.
“The point is” says Darnton, “trade in hard core prohibited books
Favored the most extreme, Holbac[c]hean
Version of Enlightenment...”
With god stripped of his role in the Apocalypse
Like a dethroned functionary sacrificed
At the twilight of empire.
And progress is a separate issue,
Anterior, holding a central position
Reflected in reading tastes
That would come to end reading for all time.
Progress charts its own eschatology.
Diderot “already propounded the idea
That discovery might be grinding to a halt...”
And Kant’s position in the Critique is that
“Logic, arithmetic, and geometry
Have effectively attained” a state of finality
With physics and astronomy
“Virtually brought to the same condition...”
And Peirce saw “the sciences progressing
Through two stages: [a]...preliminary phase of groping
For the general structure of qualitative relations...
And a secondary phase of quantitative refinement.”
And Spengler “If we observe how rapidly card-houses
of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being
Immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis;
If we reflect”-- ala Bohr and ‘vizualisation’ in quantum--
“on how little heed is paid to the fact
That these images contradict one another
and the “classical” baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize
That the great style of ideation is at an end...”
And “Only our extreme mastery in experimental technique...
Hides the collapse of the symbolism.”
“Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword.”
But “[T]he modern scientist looks upon science
As a great building erected stone by stone...”
Of Cartesian accumulation and discrete monadology;
Of calculus and quantification whose “most notable spokesman”
“In the wake of the extremely successful wartime application of science”
Was Vannevar Bush Chairman of the National Defense Committee.
The scientific application of contradiction and myopia
To advance the end of the world.
“The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.”
Divorced “from the sensuous experience
In order to subjugate it” as Barbara Hayle meant to say. Experiment,
“The more complicated and precise
The social, economic, and scientific apparatus
With whose service the production system
Has long harmonized the body, the more impoverished
The experiences it can offer.”
The more the surroundings are sewn
With trial and manufacture
The more infantilized the stock.
The master who has interposed his servant
Between ‘das ding’ and himself. “The master regresses.”
The servant is number, literally,
What better to affirm the rule of the few
With the irony of the many.
“The elimination of qualities,
Their conversion into functions,
Is translated from science by means of rationalized modes
Of labor to the experiential world of” Vannevar Bush and “nations,
And tends to approximate [them] once more to the world of” reptiles.
Speaking to the appetites, what of “the regression of the masses...;”
“The oarsmen...cannot speak to one another,
Because “each of them [is] yoked in the same rhythm...”
A cog in the machine requires ‘L’homme Machine’,
A superficially requited belief in an ulterior system.
In hindsight, it would have been wise to embrace
The most extreme prohibitions
Of Bruno & Whorf, Sapir & Feyerabend
And Bernard Fall against imperial entanglements like
A “land war in South-east Asia.”
And even the DoD to the degree possible:
“Do not assume that they want to be like you.”
“The ‘abstraction’ of higher mathematics is a consequence
Of the systematic layering of metaphor upon metaphor.”
Of fog upon fog, of myth meandering into delusion.
The phenomena of institutionalizing
And compounding false numbers;
The CIA set the total cadre at 271,000...
The slaughter aside “such a low figure that
According to official body counts,
The Viet Cong should already [have] be[en] decimated,”
The sophisticated methods of calculation
Allowing for competing fantasies.
Not the belief that American superstition would conquer
Southeast Asian superstition,
But that mathematical methods automatically rendered
All superstition universally accessible to exploitation.
Lansdale’s psyops and sabotage as COIN of the realm,
Arrived in Saigon as “grossly ignorant of the Vietnamese
And their culture as Taft had been of the Filipinos
Or McKenney of the Ojibwa,”
Some of “the more spectacular casualties
Of that national habit of self-deception,”
“Anglo-Americans” “substituting abstractions for realities,”
Disguising “national interventions
As exercises in international spiritual leadership.”
“The secret agent and his erstwhile superior, Robert Kennedy
Who claimed for his countrymen...
‘Our right to the spiritual direction of the planet.’”
And Giap though “The ultimate goal of the French colonialists
Was to grab our land. Faced with our opposition,
They had to scatter their forces
And set up thousands of military posts...
To protect what they had seized.”
“Thus the more the French Expeditionary Force was scattered
The better” to destroy it bit by bit.
“Dozens of American outposts in Baghdad
Were established around the city,”
Followed by the twin delusions of preeminence and telos
The glossolalia of “...[A]n outpost in the Gazalia neighborhood
[Where] some 200 U.S. soldiers protect 50,000 residents.”
The norm in Vietnam being ten enemy killed
For every one American.
“Science...believ[ing] it is working out its own self-preservation
And its own private interest” when it “is, in point of fact,
Doing the very opposite,
Is doing what brings about its own dissolution
And makes itself a moment in the whole.”
“The evidence peculiar to this defective way of knowing--...
Rests solely on the poverty of its purpose
And defectiveness of its material.”
Von Neumann’s quantum mechanics where “the theory
Becomes a veritable monster of rigor
And precision”
While its relation to experience is more obscure than ever.
Hardy’s metaphor, “Rigor is what Littlewood and I call gas.”
Ubiquitous, but with little weight.
There is no consensus--
“The relativistic n-body problem has as yet withstood solution.”
“And the approximations made are not
A result of relativistic calculations,
They are introduced in order to make relativity
Fit the case”
“All contact with the world has been lost and...
The semblance of absolute truth
Is nothing but the result of an absolute conformism.”
“Professional propagandists...would be more helpful
In gratifying hopes for recognition
Than these emotional patriots
With their pedantic literature.”
And Wisehart remembered Bernays “surrounded by the
‘Heavy drapes of a Paris apartment
With exotic Oriental atmosphere,...” and
“By result of the subletting owner’s special taste,
A devoted middle-aged peasant woman attendant,
Alert to every eyelash of a gesture
Betokening need.”
Bernays wrote, “Arbenz claimed the invasion had been launched
By his neighbors and the U.S.” but no one starved
Buying ‘my’lies.
Why pimp your product with torture
If not for the eroticism?
“Every eyelash of a gesture betokening need.”
“‘Alerted’ when “the Iranian government
Expropriated the...Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.”
More soulless than any “commie”, repeatedly
Misspelling President Arevalo-- ‘Arevolo’,
What the Shark is to the Sardine,
Multiple errors the editor ignored
Sensing the whole bullshit enterprise.
The truth insignificant in the muck of sainted vanity;
Immaterial to “the vastly simplified formalism”of
Eliminating all those “alert to every eyelash of a gesture betokening” the needy.
Sometimes you just have to step outside the poem
And call a prick a prick
And give the other pricks an excuse to stop reading.
Maoist, Leninist, Marxist, Stalinist, Fascist.
Just make it stop.
The “Greatest Generation” so conferred by their betters
Because they were remarkably obedient,
Stunning the plutocracy into backhanded admiration.
“Measures we were prepared to take.”
Old Glory’s feedback in flashbacks,
Drew’s ‘lions’ lugging around so much dirty laundry as to render
The rhetoric inoperable without FOX’s hemorrhagic amplification.
And who in their imperial stupor
Is going to turn the world on a dime?
Electricity and the popular arts fulfil their destiny
As torture.
Hiroshima as much aspiration, as much predilection
As prediction.
And the inefficiencies of the markets are modeled.
Quants deny melodrama to our greed.
Bystanders to a shadow existence,
A pixilated puzzle of gross approximations.
And don’t give me your chicken & egg symbiosis.
If not for von Neumann, Morgenstern would have been
Just another Austrian economist.
“The common individual, whose behavior one wants to describe
Does not measure his utilities exactly but rather
Conducts his economic activities
In a sphere of considerable haziness.” The same being true
“For much of his conduct regarding light, heat, muscular effort etc.
But in order to build a science of physics
These phenomena had to be measured.”
The mathematician and physicist as the source of the textual error,
Exposed by imperial attempts to expand the franchise
And the collapse of the Empire
As the ice sloughs off and slouches toward
Nash’s Equilibrium.
No need to reassess your place further inland.
Go on faith. Turing’s tape is infinite
But for Nikolayev: for “In [his] world 1+1 =2"
Even with little Sophia,
Proof biologically that 1+1= 3;
Even while booting his ‘ego’, his binary tool in Boole.
For “The only way that Boole could
Preserve his first-stage metaphor
Was by limiting his numbers to 1 and 0,
And by inventing a new addition table for his ‘arithmetic’--
A table in which 1 + 1 is not 2, but 1.”
“There is no scientifically valid reason
To believe that the physical entities in the universe
Form a subclass
Of an objectively existing universal class.”
Yet things are always as they seem?
And Casti writes ala Muth, “Let’s suppose [an economic] system
Behaves in some stochastic fashion
That can be described only in a probabilistic sense...”
And that the “probability distribution governing these doings
Definitely exist[s] and is fixed...”
But when Von Neumann was off Buddhafying quantum,
Morgenstern said “This is an exceedingly difficult task,
And we can safely say that it has not been accomplished
In the extensive literature about the topic.”
Nor is Casti saying it has, but just imagine;
“It would...be necessary to formulate them in quantitative terms
So that all the elements of the qualitative description
Are taken into consideration.”
Such that Godels Second Theorem
Becomes the sling
For everything.
Today the birthplace of Reason immolates itself
While any Phoenix accelerates the denouement.
“So many fires breaking out in so many parts of the country
Cannot be a coincidence,” says Karamanlis.
“The state will do everything it can
To find those responsible and punish them,”
Starting with the academies of science.
Human agency by virtue of magnitude.
Arson’s a scapegoat indicative of a far greater crime.
Those who subscribe are “all sons of bitches now” said Oppie.
Greed wrapped in greed; the sling of everything.
A country burning like a Buddhist monk
Topped off with Occidental.
Diem’s terrorist when there was
The fear of the fiery sway of another way.
Roosevelt felt compelled to provoke
An actual Japanese attack. But by Johnson, making up
A provocation worked equally as well.
Nixon had his secret plan, Reagan his Harlingen, Clinton his Bosnia.
In America the truth was never credible,
So only liars reject the Iraq canards
A Cartesian accretion of self-delusion
That has at purchase all efforts to quantify.
That’s not a hair slouching toward my soup.
It’s a parabola of light
Reflected off the book jacket’s laminate.
Sorry, Bly I’m still flogging those Latinates.
I suppose it’s the Campbell’s Soup poem coming back
As the stone soup of Saxony.
My daughter was delighted if not the critics
Of the war failing to see the poem’s utility.
The “Qualitative Discussion of the Problem of Rational Behavior”
For Von Neumann and Morgenstern becomes
The Problem of Quality in the Discussion of Rational Behavior.
“A valuable qualitative preliminary description of the behavior
Of the individual is offered by the Austrian School, particularly,
In analyzing the economy of the isolated (the discrete) “Robinson Crusoe.”
The quantitative lack of connection;
The “altogether different angle”
Of the “game of strategy.”
Quality, an open ended nuisance to the rational behavior of game theory.
“Theories...qualitatively incompetent to a surprising degree.”
And Science...believes it is working out its own self-preservation
And its own private interest” when it “is, in point of fact,
Doing the very opposite,
Is doing what brings about its own dissolution
And makes itself a moment in the whole;”
Its 15 geological minutes.
As von Neumann told Shannon when he and Weaver
“Didn’t know what to call their new mathematical measure of messages,”
“Call it entropy,
No one knows what entropy really is,
So in a debate
You will always have the advantage.”
The game; an emptied qualifier adding to confusion in the ‘exact sciences.’
And so Schneider and Sagan, “In information theory entropy
Describes the uncertainties associated with the utilization
Of characters in sending and receiving messages.”
Entropy, wave packets, uncertainty, from quantum and shaping the noise
Optimizing the balance between position and momentum
Through a feedback matrix.
And the isolated system where “a common past reduces noise.”
When you record you reduce
Unlimited wordlength (an analog signal) to 16 bits.
So we “dither...We trade a little low_level hiss
For a big reduction in distortion...a good trade,
And one that our ears like.” The pleasure principle.
Quantity masking “noise in your recording chain...
Adequate to perform the dithering!”
And something approximating quality reemerges
From “quantization distortion,”
A wafer where Miles’ Lonely Fire is burned.
The evolutionary altruism of analog, of the organism, that says
A system no matter how discrete, however lonely, however Berkowitz,
Is never alone.
An extraordinary charity considering, “The standards of consumer goods
Are the basis upon which the right to existence
Of the work of art
Is determined;” & “this standard
Is regarded as the absolute criterion for social truth.”
“A technological rationale”...as
“[T]he rationale of domination itself.”
Imperial, paternalistic; rigid in its implementation.
“The...price of a highly structured compositional system.”
The unexamined “cost of creating the right structure.”
To “specify fully the rules involved” using “algorithmic composition”
“That many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.”
With a novelty and the brutal anxiety
Of a misplaced certainty
“The mathematician...pushes his
symbolic language higher and higher
To try to grasp through measure
And number the immeasurable world.
And everything appears to him
Reachable, graspable, and mechanical...”
Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.
A language “so arcane, those who understand it
Assume authority and are believed.”
Goethe’s challenge to Newton giving way to
Husserl’s stoicism faced
With “the cultural results”
Of science’s mathesis universalis.
Carefully cultivated consciousness penetrating
“the habitual, surface aspects of phenomena.”
“The life-world as taken for granted.”
Milled and shaped to include a handle;
To accommodate a throttle.
A palimpsest of utility sense and objectivity,
Shedding in increments “the human being,
With this vitality, in these activities
And creations within the common life-world
...[A]lways the presupposition
For all...objective-scientific lines of inquiry...”
We can bound high on the numbers
But scarcely walk
Until we don’t notice that amputees hop or
Until we do that final Brownian bounce
Onto the surface of Mars
Into the interstellar corner of fight or flight.
“We say that people are behaving intelligently
When they choose courses of action
That are relevant to achieving their goals,
(No matter what the goal?)
When they reply coherently and appropriately
To questions that are put to them,
(Discounting different cultural norms?)
When they solve problems
Of lesser or greater difficulty,
(The superiority of the mathesis?) or
(And here comes the liberal sop to sentiment)
When they create or design something useful or beautiful or novel.”
But cognitive science butchers and refrigerates
With “systems” and “computation.”
“...[A]ll professional ideologies are high-minded.
Hunters...would not dream of calling themselves
The butchers of the woods...and
The god that thieves...
Taken for their own
Is the business men’s god,
That distinguished promoter of international concord, Mercury.
So not much importance need be attached
To the way an activity is mirrored
In the consciousness of those who practice it.”
Where the sirens are just shills
And the observer can’t recuse himself.
At the end time science is more than
A voyeur’s fresco of obsessive clippings.
It is the eschatology of reason;
The archaeology of extinction.
The doctoral thesis
For some alien nano-bot.
The strata where ‘intelligent life’
Can be seen backing off its claims.
Contorted vehicles suspended in amber
Sliced into opaque windows, examined as closely
As though brains that had “stored” them can.
On the betrayal of the Kurds,
Kissinger told the Pike Committee,
“Covert action should not be confused with Missionary work,”
Henry missing the common telos, his own market kerygma;
As we are told ad nauseam
The whole fucking epistemology of the matter.
All the shades of wrong where self-interest can take him;
All the shades in Hell;
The gospel of the way the object is confounded.
“All contact with the world...lost and...
The semblance of absolute truth
Is nothing but the result of an absolute conformism---”“Systems
Strongly constrained by the experimental setting
So that they give...predictable results. ”
“[P]ut in some physical facts
Follow the rules for obtaining the needed results,
And almost always get what [you] want.”
“The technological mentality... standardized means
To achieve predetermined results”
“And the approximations made are not
A result of relativistic calculations,
They are introduced in order to make relativity
Fit the case;”
The epistemology of science is common
To both the missionary and the mass murderer,
The missionary long subsumed in the murderer while
“[O]ur clients fought on sustaining thousands of casualties
And 200,000 refugees.”
An epistemology where you can equate
Any kiss with Gethsemine.
The dark face of power turns
Toward the exasperated heckler
Who means to say,
“The connection between historical theories,” and
“Technological determinism...predates Marx.”
Turgot, right out the ass of Popper’s Enlightenment,
“Discours sur progres successifs de l’esprit humain”
“For Turgot, history is by definition global,”
“[H]ow groups of human beings have become
More enlightened in direct proportion
To the frequency and intensity of their contacts.”
For example, language overcame historical entropy
Only to result in numbers of the world’s languages
Undergoing ‘entropy’ of historic proportions,
Literally at the invisible, unmerciful, incumbent short hand for being.
To paraphrase Turgot: “‘The eye of the philosopher’”
Appears as “‘one vast’” hole.
“No one knows what entropy really is,
So in a debate
You will always have the advantage.”
And other such “universally valid truths”
Coming into being free of competing epistemologies,
Free of competing languages;
Indeed free of language altogether.
Where you end up with the prophet Jesus
Taking an outsourced IBIZ carpentry workshop,
Just another scab working for a Bechtel subcontractor
On the Baghdad Citibank.
“Bad art is better than good art
Because it documents human failure.”
But great art! great art documents the failure of others.
“‘O Frati,’” “dissi,” “‘che per cento milia
Perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,
A questa tanto picciola vigilia
D’i nostri sensi ch’e del rimanente
Non vogliate negar l’esperianza
Di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.”
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age;
Assume a proof, proof of purchase,
By Old Testament blood and treasure
“An immanent final goal of history,
Then those who believe they know it
And claim to promote its attainment
[Are] legitimized in using all the others
Who do not know it and
Cannot promote it as mere means.”
But Messrs. Friedman and Fukuyama, “Infinite progress;”
Technological progress, your core imperial idiom,
Renders every absolute claim untenable,
Even Popper hedged that
This imperfect messianism
Harbors an object eschatology.
Yet progress untethers “world incinerations” from cycle,
From “cosmic process”;
Whipped out of orbit
To trouble some other world.
To jism back some gellatoed asteroid.
“A whirlwind struck the ship and three times whirled her round.
And the fourth lifted the stern aloft and plunged the prow below,
As pleased an Other.”
“The idea of ownership of what one has...produced, thought
And created [being] a modern, (largely untried) idea”
That “[e]ven the justification of Divine Right...
Is not so self-evident as it seems to those who [draw]
‘Natural-law’...from it.”
The secular paternalism of what Comte programmatically calls
“Organizing providence”
Stripped of the New Testament caveats
Of charity and sacrifice
Best both parodied and ridiculed by self-interest
E.g. NATO bombing, IMF and Structural Adjustment Loans.
“The Danube where it flows in Austria,
The Don beneath its frozen sky,” and yet also through Serbia
Where three sunken spans yet lie.
In dribs and drabs, secularization mimes the Incarnation.
“Secularization does not transform; it only conceals”
That which it will not tolerate.
No Bultmann, progress has executed the fiat
Of eschatological fulfillment with
Kant and Hegel mere brakes, shorings,
With their “moralistic secularization of the Christian teleology
Of history and its eschatology,” and
“Secularizing of Christian faith...consciously and consistently.”
And here too, this preaching. This kerygma.
And technologies’s transformation of it
Into an ‘immediate expectation’
“Radicalizes both the exhortative
And the normative urgency of the doctrine.”
“‘Immediate expectation’
Negates every type of durability,
Not only the world’s
But also its own...”
“Self-assertion becomes the epitome of senselessness.”
Until now “There [was] no concept of history
That [could] claim identity of ‘substance’
With immediate expectation.”
Not the “historicization of eschatology,” ‘the pro mora finis’,
But its self-conscious ‘naturalization;’ The free bolt
Freezing up the turbine.
“Certainly, it can be said that the embarrassing situation of
[Christian] eschatological disappointment,”
The repeated caveats and postponements, “allowed claims
‘Of this world’ to come into play.”
But “There are forms of expropriation
In which the surrender of substance,
In anticipation of its removal,
Takes on the appearance of a free decision.”
As physics takes on “the framework of the salvation story,
With Creation at one end and Judgment at the other.”
Explanatory accomplishments that exceed
“The powers of its characteristic rationality”
And not without eschatological consequences.
“[T]he limiting case of an accelerated running out of history
That [effaces] the difference between the idea of progress
And eschatology...”
A secularized millennarianism;
What gigantism of the Four Elements?
What perverse and repulsive anomaly,
Was “the first instance” of this ‘apocalyptic category’?
Is that one cannot say, the promise of history as usual;
Not the shortened interval of the Last Judgment
But of any judgment at all?
Bruno’s burning stake was not
“[T]he widely visible beacon of the Copernican truth.”
“...[I]n questo libro la mia intentione
E stata solamente di burlarmi di quei medici
E dell’ opinion loro intorno queste materie.”
“The rationality of the modern age...obtains its counterpoint
From the formal remainder of faith...
The possibility of an absolute epochal threshold.”
“[S]tepping out of the sequence of finite formations of history...”
Braking the orbits to compute them and
In short order, torching the world in its sprockets
So that Greece burns with a new light.
Whether “God could create something he neither has created
Nor will create,” and Ockham replied yes.
And through His agency came transuranium elements
And “much that he does not want to create,”
Like fissionable syntheses, the dawn of judgment
Or the new light of lasers reading
Carole King, source of billions of petroleum based compact disks;
And by simple default, Adorno proves the true ecologist.
“The exhaustion of the totality of what is possible
Would qualify the Creator as a mere natural cause.”
Scholasticism said that “God had given away much of his treasure,”
But had not intended to divest himself of everything,
The transfer of power from Cusan to Copernicus.
“It was only because a God could not come into being
That something came into being
That could become even more similar to God.”
“[A] conception in which the world was represented as
[A]bsolute power’s self-restriction
To an arbitrary ‘particle’
Of what was possible for it,
And thus drew upon it the rationally intolerable imputation
Of unfathomable facticity and contingency;”
“The transfer of infinity from divinity to the universe...”,
“[A] resolute contradiction of one consequence of absolute power
That was developed and thought through
More and more radically by the Middle Ages”
But for the irredeemable seduction of omnipotence
With the incidental success of its instruments.
“That omnipotence could become absolute
Precisely by being able to posit its equivalent,
By reproducing itself”: La Mettrie, Turing machines, nanobots,
Von Neumann self-reproducing automata,
Minsky, Newell, McCarthy & Simon.
“What have I become?” Rousseau’s Pygmalion?
“What strange revolution is in me?”
“Intelligence is as intelligence does?”
“But if,...’ the absolute self-realization of divine omnipotence
Is the world...then the character of personhood must...be
Denied to the ground that reproduces it.”
“Yes, expensive and charming object,...,
It is you and you alone that I have given all my being.
I do not live but by you.”
Divinities as these are measured by such laurels.
This impish lie of classlessness
Among all the gloating professional omnipotence.
Descartes’ God “who has only to supply
The ‘maitre et possesseur de la nature’
With his license.”
The simplest theory, a species driven truth.
Bruno and Hoelderlin preserved the “self-sufficiency of divinity,”
Excluding the Will as predicate,
Better to accommodate Matrix Mechanics
The matrices of ‘pure mathematics.’
Do we “live in a description...compatible with our own existence”,
As pitched by the Anthropic Principle,
Or do we assume we live an existence
Compatible with our description?--
By “explicitly assum[ing] the validity of the Anthropic Principle,”
After we “Assume that the generally accepted axioms of
Set theory and probability theory hold”
By assum[ing] “a fact normally assumed
As an axiom in conventional treatments of Quantum Mechanics.”
That “Assumes that Eq. (8) also holds...”
And, of course, “assumes that time is continuous.”
Thus from our latter day Occams positivist physics emerge,
Distance d as far as it goes
Assuming we’ve gone the distance.
As we tick toward the providential denouement
Of the old clockwork future,
The first thing we’re sold is our determinative;
The serpent with its head up its ass.
There is Uroboros in Everett’s MWI measurement theory
Since Heisenberg, after a collaboration with Kramers, understood
That the transition probabilities were not classical quantities;
Not to be precipitated from “more
Fundamental physical principles;
That, “all other things being equal, the simplest theory
Was [not] the most likely to be true.”
Yet the collapse of the wave-function had gone
Undetected for some time,
And gave way to Many Worlds because
Of nothing more than “The behavior of
MEASUREMENT could be understood
From more fundamental physical principles...”
Not of the phenomena.
But Ockham had promised that “the exhaustion of the totality
Of what is possible
Qualified the Creator as a mere natural cause.”
And Descartes assured God that he “would see to it,”
Make all the arrangements,
Notify the family, pick a stone and then return to
The simple maintenance of ‘a single mechanical cause.’
And “Those who imitate Descartes,” said D’Alembert,
“Run the risk of deceiving themselves as he did,
Or of giving a general principle
Which is only true in certain cases,
Or of regarding it as a primitive law of nature
When it is only a purely mathematical consequence of several formulae.”
But by 1950 the French were defeated in Indochina,
Instruments of American foreign policy
With the Marshall Plan proxy for providing funding
For the re-establishment of colonial power.
“And some French officers saw the exchange of blood for money.”
“Oh, well,” the colonel told Fall,
Two centuries down Henri Rousseau’s jungle trail of philosophes,
Painted from photographs.
“They believe they are doing the right thing...
If they knew they were dying uselessly here,
It would be like shooting them in the belly
And kicking them in the butt at the same time.
And when my aide eventually fries in a tank,
I want him to believe that
He’s frying for the good of [France].
That’s the least I can do for him.”
The Colonel was paid in dollars,
A thousand a month. For his sector about a buck a dead red.
The world is not a communication...
It is not the ‘book of nature.’
“It is not order...to be made binding for another will.”
Yet, the Navarre Plan re-conceptualized “the Viet Minh
In the image of the French”
“By virtue of technological superiority.”
“But [the world] is acentric, indifferent in each of its forms
With respect to every other...”
Not enlightenment cocksure in “radical opposition” to Leibniz.
And ruled by the ‘principle of insufficient reason.’
“The consciousness of contingency
That man has with respect to himself and the world,
His suffering of finitude
In the presence of the idea of infinity...
While he is what he can be,
He is not everything that can be;
While he is the actualization of the Eidos, he is, at the same time
The exclusion of every other eidetically definable thing.”
“All objects [being] mere appearances
And not given us as things in themselves.”
“Finite time excludes the individual entity
From the abundance of possibilities...
The concrete being within the limits of its nature...”
Concepts derived from the object,
Are merely empirical and derived from the self
With no character “distinct from our representations.”
Not merely Blavatsky’s mysticism or
Whitman’s hash of sensibility
But “Verbum...propter carnem factum est caro...”
Barrow & Tipler and constraints designed
By the “individual entity
Within the limits of its nature,”
As though there is no confusion of subject with object,
Or no constraints on the designer while in character,
As though no harm exists in contracts and mortal fiats
About what constraints might be.
“For since
A mere modification of our sensibility
Can never be met with outside us,
The objects, as appearances, constitute an object
Which is merely within us.”
But paying this simple debt to Kant
Would require a massive epistemological mea culpa;
And as Bainbridge to Oppie,
''We're all sons of bitches now.”
A mind is a terrible thing;
And if Hell were Wall Street it would freeze over,
And the prophecy, self-fulfilling,
“That our existence” does not just indicate but “necessarily puts
Some constraints on the evolution of the universe”
Might also apply to absolute constraints on us.
From our latter-day Swedenborgs and their companies of angels:
An “angel” being a “superprogram[] of the universal mind...,
One with a Turing-passing subprogram.”
Tipler’s “Omega Point...more than a mathematical artifact...”
“‘Experienc[ing]’ the whole of universal history
All at once.”
“Omega Point will resurrect us” and, of course,
“Far-future immanent Personal aspects,”
Of the “The Omega Point love[] us,” so according to Tipler
We’ve “been looking for love in all the wrong places,”
All those countrified saw dust angel eyes
Seared to angel dust;
All those speed-ball Capitol Hill policy maker wonky-tonks.
The light rays of our immortal beloved’s face having long ago
Fled the solar system,
With the romanticized sustain of Andromeda
A cameo of radiation in a locket,
The ghost of a menorah
Burning across a baby grand,
Obscured by “the loss of coherence” that attends the light,
Mere music, sound, more difficult to account for.
For “I am Alpha and Omega,
The beginning and the ending,” reminded the Lord.
And Paul glimpsed the Apocalypse
And took “Fat Man” for God.
“The totality of being...conceived as finite sphere could not, says the Cusan,
Fulfill the requirement of absolute homogeneity...,”
As Godels’ Second Theorem insists
That a system cannot be both consistent and closed.
“That infinity and the form of a sphere do not exclude one another...”
Every point the center of the sphere,
The mathematically egalitarian Omega Point,
But applied where the simultaneity of Kurt and Cusa
Appears a poem’s conceit;
A metaphor for Bruno’s principle of indifference;
Coleridge’s brute honest “Blank accident! Nothing’s anomaly.”
But “theological anthropology’s unique predicate”
Of the “image and likeness,”
The three dimensional analogue of a sphere.
That Tipler seeks “To remove from the identical substratum
Of the unceasing change of form,
The metaphysical odium of the mere negation of definiteness,”
“Though life will have to change its form
To survive the ever increasing temperature
Near the Omega Point.”
Ovid too erroneously thought people change, even Medea,
And with far greater alacrity than mere evolution,
Not necessarily peaking in an ironic intergalactic mono-species,
A lonely, singular automata like a Pobeda,
But who’s counting?
“Yet...no world moves in relation to the universe itself...
A higher level truth that made [Copernican] truth possible.”
The accounts for “the drive of the world stuff
Toward ever new realization.”
No foreknowledge of the “subtler ‘imprecisions’”
Behind “the eidetic firmness” to “abstract constants
That the modern age” pledges into magnitudes;
“Man...directed to isolate and assert himself
And to seek his” damnation “outside it”
In the Armageddon of analytical imagining.
The lesson of the last century--
A mortality that won’t be denied suzerainty
Its protocols clued in
That won’t neglect its destiny to
Prepare to do nothing methodologically
But bring about its denouement.
No one counted on the suicide morph.
Not Bruno with his “dio del a terra; Not Hegel’s “moving soul;”
Not Kant’s limitations on the finite
Much less the canon of Descartes, Leibniz,
Weiner, Teller or Tipler et al.
Not the Cusan in the Anthropic,
“[E]verything according to the measure of man.”
But the light Rousseau glimpsed in which
Lucretius will not be denied.
As negative dialectics applied to Tipler or Witten or Parkes
Demonstrates, domed and flat may have been the last
Delusion reason could sustain.
The rest slip out to the sea
And like the aether into
The entropy of recorded history
On a first name basis
Among the myriad encoders of ‘immortality’--
De Gray, Tipler, Zubrin, Von Neumann, St. Paul,
Shirley McClane, Dick Clark, Turing, Wiener, Minsky et al.
De Gray’s “engineered negligible senescence,”
The shine that the slave outlasts his pyramid,
And every shriveled patriarch becomes a nation-builder
Along with the other obscene inquiries that empire fosters.
That given current technology, the climate of Mars
Is just a shade more hostile than Hispanola,
And an easier grift because there’s no indigene to molly-coddle;
NASA our deus est machina,
Our last best hope.
We terrorize to terraform.
“Reason,” that “absolute and constant ‘optimization.’”
Look at the rack on that Condillac.
That automaton is ‘sweet.’
Western culture is the wolf whistle of science and “[T]oday
We live out the major results of these wolfish actions.
For the ‘I,’ who played out the role of the lamb” in the mini-max...
Is the wolf,
The maxi to its mini complicit in ordering space.
Descartes’ “The reason of the strongest is always the best.”
The Prisoner’s Dilemma where
The innocent only get three years--Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo.
And still the imperialist bets on his desires
Even as his method batters against his last impulse.
Science’s martingale exponent;
“The game space” frozen “in a single pattern of order and hierarchy.”
The Titan’s chain of “certitudes or precisions,”
That in the beginning are conceived
“As the end of the prior game,” tighten.
Immortality’s scramble to defer senescence sells being out;
Your body is not work enough and profane,
Unless theoretical, like “Science,” an automata, its “[A] game,
An infinite game, in which we always win.”
What does that say about who’s in?
As soon as new parameters are discovered “one can say: always.
And it is always the time of the wolf.”
One cannot destroy the world “without Reason’s verdicts.”
“[O]ne no longer hesitates to invoke science
In the realm of law, power, and politics...
Because science has pointed the way
To the winning strategy.”
“The payoff in economics is money, and
In evolutionary biology gene transmission...”
And “[A]gents that fail to maximize these
For whatever reason
Will be competed out of the market or environment.”
“The demonstrative order,” as Serres notes in Descartes’ ‘Regulae’;
“A series of relationships and analogies” which
“[Q]uantify very different things.” Like de Gray, the sleeping slave
Who dreams of being free
Of the game-space of Reason with
Its transitive, irreflexive antisymmetry.
A “ubiquitous will-to-power whose” totems
“Are ‘reason,’ ‘enlightenment,’ and ‘truth.’”
The spectacle of “a regulated global strategy.”
‘So life is just a game is all you’re saying,’
Nash’s Equilibrium at Reason’s Heart.
“Western man the wolf of science.”
“Killing inside the species” “a martial art.”
A strategem. And “[T]hese epistemologies are not innocent.”
“To know is to kill.”
So the proper study of eschatology isn’t religion,
But Enlightenment science where
“The best reason always
Permits a winning game.”
Nuclear annihilation a mere caricature
Of the depth of the problem,
Reason’s passions having long outstripped
The Baconian accommodation with Nature–
Methodologically.
So when potable water gets so scarce
Oral sex grants a by to hygiene,
I’ll throw in my towel
And go down
To town.
And maybe Shirley and Frank can ouija back Achilles’ chariot
So Murdoch can kick the tires,
And the Greek can chauffeur his by-product around.
The Enlightenment Sausages, from factory to olfactory, eh Bloom,
That help us chart our way.
Pulsing wiener schnitzels,
Prohibition of the natural world
Stuffed with offal that Allah hates.
Gross and Levitt in that furrowed Lennie Small duh
Of techno-epistemology:
“We woulda never knowd I strangled Momma
If I hadn’a discovered the murder weapon.”
"Crimes of Passion"
The poet's comments on his growing poem:
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