Oyster

photo of oyster (David Monniaux)

Imagine Elon Musk returning from Outer Space. He’s planning a layover on one of his 4500 plus Starlink satellites. He approaches the Solar System from The Milky Way. Neptune appears first. Pluto was essentially excommunicated by the IAU (International Astronomical Association) in 2006. The rings of Saturn and Mars are all signposts. Musk is now offering the equivalent of the self-driving car in rocketry. You just enter the title of that famous Alfred Bester novel The Stars My Destination and the universe is your oyster. Now coming back Musk is wistful. He still calls the earth home, yet it seems puny considering that he's now successfully monetizing black holes--which will be billed as the ultimate tourist destination for the elite business traveler.

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Does It Matter?

The complexity of everyday reality belies the need for transcendence. Take for instance CRISPR which challenges the adage that you get what you get in terms of the hand you’re dealt. Of course not everyone is born with a full deck, but that’s another matter. Or take the question of other life forms. Kepler planets 1200 light years from earth show the presence of carbon which is one of the basic ingredients of life. String theory accounts for dimensionality and quanta with the small world. Dark Matter explains the right stuff and Dark Energy the endless expansion which increases the distance of celestial objects from each other thusly the inevitable darkening of Outer Space. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” might be rephrased “you don’t need philosophy when you have heaven and earth."

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Emile

Man is a social animal. Even hermits like the Unabomber issue broadsheets. Their recusal is, in fact, the message. People find many ways to join and one of them is standing apart. Proust retired to his cork-lined room. For Emily Dickinson it was Amherst. In fact her soubriquet does little justice to the complexities of her negotiation with reality. Emile, or On Education is the title of a work by Rousseau dealing with the individual's tortured relationship with so called civilization. The  first sentence reads "Everything is good as it leaves the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man." Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents addresses the price humans must pay and what they have to forgo in order to live in society. Apparently, humanity must jump through hoops to commune with with itself. 

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Is Ronan Farrow a Ninja?

sketch by Hokusai

Ronan Farrow sticks his investigative paring knife into Elon Musk in the current New Yorker ("Elon Musk's Shadow Rule," 8/28/23). Parenthetically it’s always amusing when gladiators at this level ie a journalist who's toppled the likes of Harvey Weinstein meets his match. Actually in terms of size and strength Musk would win. The jury is out in terms of cleverness and cunning. Ronan is the kind of fight name you give a Ninja or superhero. The question is whose genes did he inherit? Is he a Sinatra? But imagine Musk setting his sights in a different direction than the 4500 plus satellites of Starlink, the self-driving and self-doubting Tesla (that only stops as an after thought)? What about the kamikaze antics with Peter Thiel? Lo what if Elon Musk lowered his sights and acquired all the Dollar Stores? What if he went after Roto-Rooter, Meineke, what Trump calls "the failing New York Times" or the bankrupt Friendly’s? Remember that scene in The Great Dictator where Charlie Chaplin bounces his world up and down like a rubber ball? 

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Orpheus in Fulton County

Fulton Country Courthouse

Remember the explosive scene in Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus (1959) where the director brilliantly replays the original myth against the floats and garishly lewd masks and puppets of the Rio's Carnival. Orpheus frantically tries to find his love who disappears into frivolity. Fellini used a similar backdrop in 81/2, Roma, La Dolce Vita and many other movies where childhood memories of carnival interweave with the pageants themselves. Little Fugitive uses Coney Island as the nightmarish background in which a runaway finds himself. The theme in all of this is the funhouse, the hall of mirrors where the parade of life in its most distorted forms constitutes a reality all its own.The sight of MAGA luminaries including a former president and his chief of staff turning themselves in to be arrested, fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot is a carnival scene even Fellini couldn't have devised.

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Clockwork

Chlorpromazine or Thorazine is a powerful tranquilizer used on horses. Besides being barbaric, prisons are like nuclear reactors that like Chernobyl can melt down and poison the environment. Incarceration is also incredibly expensive. What if the Clinton Correctional Facility or Dannemora, as it’s called, were closed and all the inmates released—on one condition, they were all put on horse tranquilizer? Finland has a highly advanced criminal justice system. The word penitentiary connotes a place where one pays penance, but it can also point to a place of thinking. Rehabilitation rather than punishment is the Finnish ideal. But let’s get back to the idea of drugs a la Anthony  Burgess’s crew of Droogs in Clockwork Orange. Brainwashing? Lobotomization? But shouldn’t some criminal brains be washed? 

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Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl (1910)

In Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology {bracketed} items are those objects about which one maintains preconceptions. The bracketing is also known as epoche. But are there any people places or things about which an initial sighting hasn't created a tattoo? On a more practical everyday level, it’s what people complain about in relationships when they accuse the other of being intransigent. Is it they or them? Isn't is it, by definition, one's own perception that's unchanging? Another essential tenet of phenomenology (propounded by Heidegger) is that subjectivity cannot be created by inanimate objects. You see the {table} in a multiplicity of ways but a table can’t return the favor. Whoever said life was fair? Everybody is dealt a different hand but that poor table is never going to get lucky.

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